Seattle School Board Meeting June 22, 2022

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For those joining by phone please remain muted until we reach the testimony period and your name is called.

This is President Hersey.

I am now calling the June 22nd 2022 Regular Board Meeting to order at 4 15 p.m.

This meeting is being recorded.

We would like to acknowledge that we are on the ancestral lands and traditional territories of the Puget Sound Coast Salish people.

Miss Wilson-Jones the roll call please.

Vice President Hampson.

Here.

Director Harris.

Director Rankin.

Here.

Director Rivera-Smith.

Director Sargent.

In the parking lot.

Here.

Director Song-Red.

and President Hersey.

Good evening.

Thank you very much.

I will now turn it over to Superintendent Jones for his comments which will include a budget work session today.

This work session is scheduled for 90 minutes.

Public testimony is scheduled to begin at 6 p.m.

today for those of you who might be listening.

So Superintendent Jones please take it away.

Thank you President Hersey board members.

I know we have a full agenda this evening but I want to acknowledge the joy and celebration many of us experienced last week at the graduation of the class of 2022. This class completed a markedly unprecedented set of circumstances and challenges and they persevered with grace, fortitude, and we can't wait to see what they do next.

So congratulations again to the class of 2022. Regarding student outcome focused governance, Several of the agenda items that the board will consider tonight are the culmination of months of planning, preparation, and practice.

Thanks to the leadership of this school board, the district is implementing a framework to support the board's focus on accountability for student outcomes.

On the agenda this evening, you will consider introduction of progress monitoring calendar, And this follows progress monitoring training we've done together and lays out the cadence of regular review of our progress towards our academic goals and behavioral guardrails.

I've also recommended that the board approve our district's use of the measurements of academic progress.

This is an assessment tool that will help track our progress toward those student outcomes.

That recommendation will be introduced this evening.

Tomorrow evening we meet again to consider proposed changes to the goals and guardrails.

And once the language in the goals and guardrails is final my leadership team and I will revise the interim metrics to ensure alignment with where we're going and how we're tracking our progress.

Finally I want to acknowledge the time and consideration this board has put into the 2022-23 school year budget.

We spent hours looking at the difficult decisions that go into allocating resources that support academic outcomes and the guidelines that create the environment where students can thrive.

Assistant Superintendent JoLynn Berge and her team are going to have done actually done a phenomenal job of working through each line item to make sure our limited resources are aligned with the goals and guardrails in our in our top priorities.

Thank you to the team and without further ado I'll hand it over to Assistant Berge and her team to walk us through the budget the 22-23 budget.

Superintendent.

JoLynn Berge Assistant Superintendent for Business and Finance and I'm joined by Deputy Superintendent Rob Gannon.

Linda Sebring, Budget Director.

All right.

Much of this information is the culmination of our discussions throughout the year.

So on the next slide, as we move through the agenda, we can see that we'll be talking about our recommended 22-23 budget.

We'll have a summary of that.

We'll have some summary information about the enrollment that plays a critical role on our budget projections.

We'll then talk about the general fund resources and expenditures, some information about our other funds, how we have aligned our budget for student outcome focused governance and our goals and guardrails.

And then the appendix, there's some other information that we'll share with you briefly.

Each board director should have received a hard copy of the budget book that in their mailbox here at the John Stanford Center.

And the budget book is online externally under departments, business and finance and budget.

So with that I'm going to turn it over to Budget Director Linda Sebring.

One moment before we begin I want to acknowledge that Director Rivera-Smith has joined us remotely.

Thank you.

So what you're going to be we're going to be walking through tonight is some excerpts from the budget book.

So as Assistant Superintendent Berge mentioned the district's 22-23 recommended budget book is online for the community to take a chance to go through there.

We've made some expansions to the book that we'll talk about a little bit later.

Part of that is the alignment with the goals and guardrails.

We've also put in additional information on the strategic plan and some more information on our nursing resources at our buildings.

So we're excited that we've got the same detailed content we've had in the past and we've expanded it even further.

So this first slide, is the budgets in a nutshell.

We're bringing to the school board the, there's four budgets that you are voting on.

They all come in a package as the district budget, but there's the general fund, which we think of as the operating budget, the associated student body fund, which is the student's fundraising and is managed at each of our secondary schools, and some elementary schools.

Our debt service fund which payments for bonds go through and we only have one.

We're very fortunate as a district to have very little debt and that's just for this building.

And our capital program fund which is what we use for our major remodeling and activities out in the buildings.

So in total we'll be bringing forward a recommended budget of total expenditures of one point six billion dollars.

you see that on the details here.

So the next slide is we mentioned our enrollment and this is something we've been looking at in the past a couple of times.

We have the blue line is our actual enrollment and the orange line is our budgeted enrollment.

So for those not looking at color the line on the top is the budgeted and the longer line is the actual enrollment.

And it's just demonstrating that we've had a reduction in student actual enrollment.

We've dialed the budget back down for staffing but our actual is continuing to go lower than what we're planning.

So that's something for us to be aware of as we continue to plan going forward.

Next slide is another view of enrollment.

Next slide, please.

Yes, thank you.

All right, so this is a bar chart and to the left is our budgeted enrollment going back to 2015-16 compared to what actually we experienced in those years.

So what this is demonstrating is, you know, it may not always seem like it, but we usually have been budgeting much higher than what's been coming in enrollment, with the exception of the 2019-20 school year, where actual enrollment surprised us and did a big jump up.

So we are at, we have a recommended budget of 48,748 students.

And I know we talked about we do a review in June to see if we're trending on target or if we have more kids coming and need to make adjustments or if we should one way or the other.

And unfortunately our trend right now is still down in kindergarten in particular.

So we are not adjusting any of our staffing at this time and hoping that there's just late enrollment coming forward.

Next slide.

So what you have here is a view of the general fund budget.

So this is the resources and looking at over time between the 20-21 school years the actual revenues we experienced from the state, local taxes, federal, other revenues, other resources and our use of fund balance.

And then this year's budget for 21-22 and the recommended budget we're bringing forward for 22-23.

There's a few changes that we're seeing in particular and state is revenue is down slightly that trends with enrollment.

And it also it goes up with inflationary costs and it goes down with the number of students that we are anticipating to serve.

Our property taxes are up slightly.

They do inflate from year to year.

They're also driven by student enrollment.

Federal funds is the biggest change you see on this screen, and that's mostly a reflection of our anticipated federal ESSER funds, which we'll talk about a little bit later in this presentation.

And this can also be found, for those who would like to, on page 22 of the budget book.

Next slide.

So we get into a little bit more detail here.

The state recommends and actually has us report to the state our budget in different slices of how you look at things.

And one of them is state program.

So what you're seeing here is how the state has us take all of our expenditures and put them into these categories of regular education.

You'll see that Federal Recovery, ESSER, has its own program at the state level now.

special education, vocational education, skill center, and so on.

Transportation has its own category.

Food services has its own category.

All of these slides you're going to be seeing going forward are lined up the way the previous one was, which is you have the 2020-21 actual, and then the adopted budget for this school year, and then the recommended budget for what we're bringing forward for next school year.

And you'll see the changes on this slide.

So you're going to see some themes as we go through the different ways of looking at the budget, the ESSER federal recovery funds.

We plan to spend a significant amount this year because we were heavy into the pandemic and we're dialing that back for our plan for next year as we work through those funds.

So next slide.

This is just a visual presentation of what I just went through of sometimes charts can be very overwhelming because there's a lot of numbers on them.

So what this is showing you is the expenditures by state program showing that 44.7% of our expenditures are in what we call regular education, general education.

Then there's support services or 19.6, special education 17.8, compensatory education 7.8, excuse me, special education 17.8, compensatory education 7.8, and then so on.

There's more detail in the budget book.

This is on page 31, this chart that will go into, you know, what are these different categories when people say, what are support services?

We have charts in there that go into specifically what falls into these different categories.

So next slide, please.

So the next, set of data is expenditures by state activity.

So this is another way the state slices the data, and it's more along the lines of, well, what are we doing?

So there's a program, and we have expenditures that go across the program.

And another way in the dimensions is it's an activity, such as teaching, the principal's office, central administration, and other student supports.

So what you're seeing here is the actuals for 2021. Adopted.

Recommended.

Most of our expenditures are planned to have increases.

The only decrease you're seeing is in the other student supports.

And some of these you'll see there's some anomalies between 2021 and where we're going with 22-23 and I know some board members and questions brought that forward.

2021 was basically our shutdown year.

So a lot of expenses that we would typically incur when we run our program, we didn't do in that school year.

So the 22-23 budget that we're bringing forward is an anticipated return to basically normal operations.

So when you see changes in other support services has one of the biggest changes that's occurring, it jumped up Significantly from 2021 to 2122 and now it's going down slightly 2223 so that.

There's an artificial jump between 2021 actuals and 2122. Because again, for the actual expenditures for 2021, there were a lot of activities that the district just didn't do because it wasn't something during the pandemic that would work.

So the most significant drop down in that other student supports actually is, for lack of a better term, a tech bubble.

When in 21-22, we had budgeted to do a lot of technology investments for laptops for students and staff, and we're going back down to where we are now.

There are other things flowing through there, ups and downs, which is why for more details, I would go to page 34 of the budget book and see that transportation is going up, food services is going down slightly because the federal government is not paying for it at the same level.

So there's a lot of changes in the budget.

So next slide, please.

So again, like the other slide, this is just a follow-up of a visual presentation of what I went through that also gives you some percentages.

And I have, you know, I wander around with both copies of budget books this year and recommended because a lot of questions people ask us is how are we changing?

How are things evolving?

And if you do the similar task, you'll see that our percentages are staying about the same.

I mean, we're very well aligned with, you know, even as the teaching activities are going down slightly because of the enrollment decrease, the total percentages across the system are about where they're at because costs are going up.

compensation issues, benefit issues, well, total FTE is going down in some categories.

Next slide.

And I apologize, this is just a lot of little details, but state activities is one of the areas that people usually have the most questions on.

So what this is helping people see is what are some of the specific things that are in these different categories?

So when people talk about, well, what's teaching?

Well, it's not just teachers.

It's, you know, a whole bunch of other things to provide that support for teachers.

And then there's teaching support.

And it's like, okay, well, you just told me teaching was support.

But this is like the counseling, safety, the nurses, professional development.

So there are layers in these different categories that the state directs us as to how to code this, that help try to provide comparables across districts across the state.

so that we're all reporting in a similar fashion.

Next slide.

So this next data set is expenditures by state object.

So this is the third way the state has us record things, and it's a very simple way in some ways.

It's, you know, how much do we pay for certificated salaries, classified salaries?

Employee benefits being everything from taxes to medical to pension costs.

What do we pay for supplies and materials?

Purchasing, which is contract services.

Our biggest expense there is our bus contract.

Travel, very small amount for the district.

Capital outlay is a category the state uses for what they consider longer term purchases.

So some of the vehicles that we've been slowly replacing for the fleet have gone through that category.

And then debit and credit transfer is what we call, you know, inter-district services, mostly things like copier charges, where the schools pay a copier charge and it goes to pay the publishing services who pay the contract for the copiers out in the schools.

So it's just within the district, certain charges move back and forth.

Next slide is probably the more telling and more interesting one that people really like is this breaks out similar to the other slides.

This is a visual of the expenditures by state object.

But I totaled up on this and put in some text boxes over to the right that show you total compensation costs.

So we talk about how, you know, when we look at the budget, it's people.

And that's what we're doing.

And that's run a people business to support our kids.

But 84.6% of our budget is certificated staff, classified staff, and the benefits related to those staff.

When we overlay on top of that transportation, because a lot of districts have in-house, they do the transportation, they don't outsource it to a contractor.

So they bring their transportation in-house and would have people instead of paying a contractor.

For Seattle, that would bring us up to almost 89% of our budget is people or I'll say people equivalent with the buses in the system.

That's a very large percentage when you start thinking about the budget.

And it's like, now you're down to 11% left.

Well, what's left?

Utilities is our next big expense.

Food services, food for the kids, not the people.

insurance.

These are some of our bigger expenses once you get out of these categories of people.

So next slide, please.

And the next slide is, and this is not, this slide is not in the budget book, but the data is on page 35. And this is showing over time that In our actual expenditures for the 2020-2021 budget, our total salary and benefits were 87.4%.

They added on transportation, recognizing we weren't doing a lot of bus transportation in that year, and we were up to 89.3%.

This year's budget is total salaries of 83.2%, with transportation added on 87%.

and the budget we're bringing forward is 84.6 and 88.9.

So the point of this slide is more to look at in the actuals when the percentage came down to it.

I mean, we kept staff employed during this.

A lot of purchase services stopped, a lot of contracted services stopped because we just weren't doing those activities.

So there's a little anomaly.

the very large anomaly going through the 2020-21 year.

But what we're seeing in the 21-22 to the 22-23 is things are starting to creep up again of what the percentage of our budget is people.

And we'll continue to point that out as we have conversations about looking at how we might restructure things as we continue to move forward.

So next slide.

This is one of the slides we started several years ago, which is helping people understand our budget.

We look at it in so many different ways, but this is a very popular way of looking at it, which is what are our direct services to students?

And when we look at direct services to students, that's an adult in front of the student, whether that's a teacher, a custodian, a food services worker, they're out in the school building, or they're the bus driver riding them to the bus.

Support services are more, as it says here, the running of the district, the management of all these activities, the coordination.

And if you go to page seven in the budget book, it's up very near the front, excuse me, we go into details about how we determine what goes into these categories.

So this isn't a percentage that we just kind of picked up and said, hey, this is a good percentage.

We'll say it's 85.5% direct.

We actually go through a very detailed math process to figure out, okay, what is direct?

What is indirect?

And how does it look from prior years?

So we're still in the same category, which someone once told me that John Stanford said, if we had 80% of our budget going directly to support students, we were doing good.

And I'm like, well, we're doing better than that, which is something to be proud of.

I know we all want more, but when you look at your overhead, And our next slide is, again, just a visual presentation of that, of the 85.5% of the 1.14 billion and the support services.

So I believe there's one more slide for me, and then I will stop talking for a while and let someone else.

So, oops, I lost the presentation.

Sorry, experiencing technical difficulties.

So once we get the presentation back, our next slide is a legislative requirement.

And it's also interesting information, but the state provides us funding through a couple different methodologies.

Well, lots of different methodologies.

One is the prototypical school model where they look at our number of kids.

Next slide, please.

They look at our number of kids and they provide us with staffing units.

where they give us a compensation level for those staffing units and a number of staffing units.

The other way they provide us money is what we're seeing on the slide right now, which is what's called MSOCS, also known as Maintenance Supplies and Operating Cost Funding.

So the technical requirement that we're provided here is the state says, we need you to list how you're getting MSOC funding from the state for the next school year and how you're planning on spending it.

And if you're not spending it, in these categories, or completely, if you don't spend it all, what are you spending it on?

And in the past, we have had situations where it appears the state is giving us more in this area, which is basically helping us in another area where we have shortfalls, some of our programmatic funds.

So what was kind of odd this year is it does line up.

We are planning to receive, based on our current enrollment forecast, 68.9 million, of state funding in these categories, and we have expenditures that are lining up at $68.9 million as well.

There is a little bit of rounding in there, but as you see, the categories don't perfectly line up with the state.

We used to have utilities and insurance used to be a lower cost than what the state's revenue was, and we directed those funds in other places, but now our utilities insurance is exceeding the state's MSOC.

allocation and there's a lot of reasons for that.

But technology is slightly less curriculum and instruction.

We have other ways that we're funding it than through these funds.

So that is MSOCS in a nutshell.

I'm going to take a breath now and I don't know if we want to take questions here or keep going.

We have just a couple more slides and then we would be done and we could take questions at the end.

Is that okay?

Okay.

All right, moving on to the next slide.

The next slide talks about our ESSER expenditures and our budget.

This is a question that we understand that board directors are getting and that we often get.

And so what we've displayed on this chart is we've kind of condensed some of the categories because ESSER 1 and 2 dollars have all been spent.

So now we're in the process of spending ESSER 3 dollars.

So the first column shows The category of spending.

The second column will show the total expenditures prior to this current school year.

So what we spent in 1920 and 2021. And then we have our current expenditures through this school year.

So what we have spent in the 21-22 school year.

And then finally, we've totaled those up and said, here's what we spent today on each of these categories across all years.

And then finally what we're budgeting for each of these line items whether it be the rest of this school year, 22-23 school year, and in a couple cases some dollars remaining in the 23-24 school year.

Now you'll see that our expenditures might look a little bit low.

I will note that we have many expenditures that have not yet been moved over to be put against the ESSER funds.

at this point where we have expenditures that have not yet hit our books.

So those will be coming as we close the year.

And remember, we go all the way through August 31st.

So we are expecting our total expenditures for this school year to significantly increase.

We have had some good news.

You'll notice in the first set, the safe operations of schools, we have maintenance of equity crossed off.

We were very successful in working with the federal government, working that requirement.

so that as long as they were going to direct how we were to spend certain dollars if you did not have an increase in your spending per pupil year over year.

We do have an increase in spending per pupil year over year in this district and most districts across the nation have that as well.

But they were very concerned that if you didn't have those that you needed to put those dollars into certain schools into certain places.

But for us we've met the initial requirement and so we did not have to budget any remaining dollars for maintenance of equity, and we were able to put those in other areas.

Moving on to the next slide.

This is where we go over our other funds.

So as Linda talked about at the beginning, we have the general fund, which she covered in some detail, which is the bulk of our expenditures, but we do have three other funds that we'll just touch on briefly.

We have the ASB fund.

set up the same way as the general fund was, where we show the actual expenditures for 2021, the budget for 21-22 or this current year, and then the proposed budget for 22-23.

This is the account for student support and their extracurricular activities, and students are the ones who vote on how to use these dollars and what they want to budget as far as revenue and expenditures.

On the next slide, we talk about the debt service fund.

And again, this is just breaking those numbers out.

We have one transaction that rolls through this fund every year, and that is the bond payment for the John Stanford Center.

We have that for about another three or four years, and then we'll be done.

Moving on to the next slide, the capital fund.

So again, we have the actual total revenue that we estimate coming in at $348,682,518 for the budget for 2022-23.

And we have expenditures at just not quite $492 million.

So sometimes what happens and what's happened in our capital fund is oftentimes we'll budget for certain activities, but if the project slows down or we have supply issues or whatever, you might see not see all of those expenditure all of the expenditure authority used, but we do budget, hoping that all of our projects are right on track.

But you can see that we're planning a spend down of that fund balance for our projects over time.

And sometimes that has to do also with the size of the project that we're running in those years.

Finally, the next few slides are going to talk about our student outcome focused governance.

So on slide 22 and 23, we've talked about what the goals and the guardrails are that we're working on aligning our budgets to.

And then if we move to slide 24, this is.

On slide 24, this is where we start to provide those specific details in the budget book.

And there's more information about each section.

And these are the major departments or the major function areas of the district.

And so Concie do you want to talk a little bit about the first couple of the schools and continuous improvement slide and the alignment with the goals and guardrails.

Thanks.

So this has been work that we've been working on all year in alignment to this work initiative.

So we've been spending time with all of our departments to ensure that all of the alignment work happens for the goals and guardrails specifically around school improvement processes.

School improvement and the continuous improvement model is what we're utilizing as our through line for the work that we are doing.

And we've had all of the departments actually go through all of their goals and ensuring making sure they crossed out initiatives that aren't aligned with the goals and guardrails work.

And then we've resubmitted that work.

And then we've had sessions with budget to go through that process.

We're also working with our school improvement plans that we have for the fall.

And for this year coming for the fall, a one targeted goal as the headline goal for each school, especially like, for example, when you think of elementary school, of course, that's simple to think about the third grade goal.

But in terms of the guardrail work, we're looking at one specific guardrail that we're going to be targeted for for the fall.

There may be other guardrails listed on the school improvement plans, but that's the work that we are initiating with the school improvement plans and processes, and then also with our departments in alignment to that work.

There's been a lot of meetings and revamping and realigning our plans, but the goal is to be solvent and aligned for the fall, that all the work we're initiating and the money and the budgets that are in our line items are in direct correlation to what we're trying to do in service of schools.

So just under the section that talks about alignment with the goals and guardrails, building off of what Dr. Petrozza had spoken about, We've taken some primary examples, so not every example, not all of the work that aligns in each of these divisions with every goal and guardrail, but some of the primary examples of how their work aligns with the goals and guardrails.

And we've really tried to highlight what those are for each division through that work that Kansi talked about that we've gone through as far as really investing in How does every department's work support goals and guardrails?

Because every component of our work in this district is directed to supporting those goals and guardrails.

These are just specific callouts as examples, and we'll continue to build off of this as we go through time.

So on the next slide, it's really the operations example.

So operations really is foundational to supporting a strategic plan priority area for predictable and consistent operations.

That makes sense.

This is the operations section.

But a couple of specific examples that Assistant Superintendent Podesta had given us were really providing student safety services, which attaches to and supports Guardrails 4 and 5, and then providing clean and fully functioning buildings and food, Guardrail 5. So really, it's about how does every custodian, food service worker, payroll worker, person and budget analyst understand that their work is supporting those goals and guardrails for student-focused outcomes.

Moving on to the next slide, we have student support services.

Again, this is those departments that are providing specific supports to students with IEPs or highly capable students or students in multilingual students.

It's also where we have our emotional support for students, Guardrail 4, and then working on safe and welcoming environments, which speaks to Guardrail 5. Next we have academics.

This is probably the one that most people are familiar with because their work attaches straight on to each of the goals.

Third grade reading, seventh grade math, college and career readiness, much of that centers around academics, the assessments, the curriculum and instruction.

So those are things that everyone is probably more familiar with and it's easier to make that direct connection.

But each of the areas has direct and support has direct support and connection to goals and guardrails throughout.

Finally, district-wide leadership.

This is the area where we have the board of directors, the superintendent's expenditures, the Office of African American Male Achievement, the budgets for equity partnerships and engagement, racial equity advancement, and the strategic goals actually live in this part of the budget.

And so we're more familiar with that as well, funding for AAMA.

which represents and focuses on students at the center of our work.

And then there's major areas of work support on guardrails 1, 2, and 3 to make sure that our initiatives have followed engagement principles, implementation of only programs that prioritize educational and racial equity, and oversight and expectation for adults' behaviors.

That's where this district-wide leadership is attaching to those goals and guardrails and supporting those.

And of course, stakeholder engagement, also Guardrail 1, their work is reflected in this area of the budget as well.

Two more areas, human resources.

Again, this is supporting our expectation for adult behavior in alignment with Guardrail 3. And then the work is foundational to supporting the strategic plan area for culturally responsive workforce.

So HR's work is supporting those initiatives.

And then finally finance.

So similar to the operations division we are supporting consistent and predictable operations.

But we also have budget work and grant work that supports Guardrail 2 of helping to prioritize programming that supports educational and racial equity.

And then as the board is familiar with we have participatory budgeting that's supporting Guardrail 1 regarding engaging students and families furthest from educational justice.

and inviting their voice into our process.

Finally, in conclusion, we have appendix.

We have two things that I'll let you look at at your leisure in the budget book, but we have a district-wide staff FTE summary.

It really breaks down each type of staff.

And that is on page 223 of the budget book.

And then also a big chunk of the budget book is each school's funding allocation.

And those start by school on page 75. And you can look by school at the overtime amounts for those schools, the per pupil amounts, and their staffing levels.

So at this point, that would conclude my remarks.

And we're happy to take questions.

Thank you team for that wonderful presentation.

You know it took a lot of work and we really appreciate you putting it together.

Directors do we have any questions.

I wanted to see if Director Hampson had anything to say before we press on to other directors.

Can we please.

This is completely inappropriate.

Can we please add a better mic system into this budget.

Dr. Jones.

Just quickly.

So the district-wide staff FTE summary online it's on page 223. Is that on 218 in the.

Is that what you're referencing in the hard copy of the budget book.

No it's on page 223 of the budget.

The very very back it will list out how many superintendents we have each year.

How many deputy superintendents.

How many teachers we have.

How many instructional assistants.

I'm just saying it's not on page 223. Oh okay.

217. I think I wrote the wrong number down.

Sorry.

217. Thank you.

At the very very back.

Yeah.

Okay.

So that just that clarification.

I really.

I want to say how much I appreciate the direction that this budget presentation is heading.

The the ending work around student outcomes focus the goals the guardrails staying connected to the strategic plan is in all honesty I think it's the best that you could get to given the amount of guidance and leadership that we've provided as a board to make sure that we're we're getting the information we need to hear how these Expenditures planned expenditures are aligned with the stated goals of the district in the strategic plan.

And so I think it's an excellent step in our progression towards really clear delineation that that demonstrates how it is that our our expenditures are supporting us getting towards outcomes for kids.

And I won't go into any specific questions.

I have one that I neglected to send you in advance that has to do with our enrollment projections but I'll give that to Superintendent Jones off offline.

It's just a notice about our in how our projection enrollment projection has been off over time.

The rate at which it's been off or or you know and then of course during this last couple of years is is not at all able to be projected in any kind of reasonable fashion.

But there's just some interesting trends there that I wanted to point out.

But other than that I don't have any additional questions.

I feel that over the past months we've been had the opportunity to ask a lot of really deep and hard questions and I really appreciate the presentation here and I'm interested to hear what other directors what questions other directors have about the budget.

So go ahead Director Rankin.

Thank you.

I will second the comments from Vice President Hampson on especially the last several pages going item by item and tying it directly to goals and guardrails I find that very very helpful and I hope it will make you know it in addition to laying it out really clearly for us as a board I I really hope that community members who are interested will look at that and see and start to understand more about the power of the goals and guardrails and the importance of having alignment across the system.

So I really thank you for that breakdown.

I have one quick comment and then a question a quick question.

The comment is about enrollment projections that I've you know hearing people talk about kindergarten declining kindergarten enrollment declining because people are not enrolling in SPS and I just I I believe it's not that there are kindergartners out there that aren't enrolling it's that this city is becoming so unaffordable for families that we don't have new young children new young families and new children coming into the system because people are moving leaving Seattle.

And that's the case in a lot of other urban urban districts too.

So I just kind of wanted to say that because I think there's a sense of like oh people are waiting for some magical thing to happen and then they'll come back.

But I think it's actually you know looking at city data and county data people are not having kids here right now because it's so expensive and hard to find a place to live.

My question is very specific about the increase in the special education between 2021-22 adopted and 2022-23 recommended.

My question is if that is due to an anticipated increase in the number of students that will receive services or if there is some other factor that is leading to that increase because I would assume if we're losing enrollment that it's generally proportional as to what services or yeah just so seeing that go up I'm not complaining about that at all.

But I'm curious what the you know what the difference can be attributed to.

I think there's just there's an overall cost increase.

Our teacher salaries did increase by 5 percent in the 21-22 school year so that's reflected there.

The enrollment loss is is not proportional.

So we're not losing children in special education.

The other thing that we know is that children who receive special education services are not the children who go to private school or leave our district.

We have an extraordinarily strong special education program and those children are staying at a higher rate than our general ed students are staying.

To your previous comment The districts around us are not getting our kids.

They are assuring me that they're in the same place as we are, and they do not know where these children are going, but they're not going to those districts around us.

They're not going to Kent.

They're not going to Federal Way.

They're not going to Highline.

No one around us.

And we're all experiencing the same types of issues, and we may have it slightly more magnified because we are Seattle and the cost of living.

But overall, there was an expected decrease in birth rates and those children are now matriculating and should be in the cohort for kindergarten, but those cohorts are just smaller.

We've had our bubble, that's our large classes that are currently going through maybe high school, end of middle school, beginning of high school, but the cohorts that are coming in to replace them are much smaller and that was anticipated.

Thank you.

And I'll just note too that our percentage of total budget for special education projected is 17.8 percent which is 4.8 percent higher than the state cap special education expenses just saying.

Thank you.

I want to echo Vice President Hampson's gratitude because this actually I did read the entire budget book and it was very easy to follow and I did follow up with a lengthy list of questions that were answered in a timely fashion.

I, and this presentation, a lot of the questions that I asked have been incorporated, including the ESSER table.

I do have a couple of follow-up questions.

On page 7, the pupil transportation, what accounts for the $21.8 million increase in the 22-23 recommendation?

Transportation is a really interesting line there because 2020-2021 was when we weren't providing a lot of services.

So the actual expenses are extremely low.

Then in 21-22, we had the benefit of using the federal ESSER funds.

So from a program perspective, you'll see federal recovery ESSER up above the second line down.

When the ESSER funds paid for the transportation the costs move from the transportation program into the ESSER program.

And the anticipation is next year that the bulk of those program costs are coming back into the general fund.

Do you have an overall increase in transportation costs that we anticipate.

At this point our transportation costs have been growing over time.

And just the gap between what the state's spending is and what we're actually spending continues to grow.

As that transportation formula continues to have a larger and larger disconnect for Seattle and for just across the state.

That transportation formula funding formula is broken and it has got to be fixed.

Just a side note.

I share that sentiment.

My second question is so page 18 on the ESSER table.

So.

For the virtual program, is that the full, is that the cost of setting up the virtual program or is that the entire cost of operating the program?

And what is the plan beyond 22-23 school years when we no longer have ESSER money?

So it is partially recognizing staff as we start this up.

It was also recognizing our ingenuity contract costs.

and some of those some of those specific things as we stood up the program.

When it when ESSER is gone we will move it to baseline.

That is the current.

Okay.

Director Rivera-Smith are you back with us.

Okay just as a heads up it looks like we're having some issues with Teams.

I'm not sure if that's on our end or on Director Rivera-Smith's end.

Just keep an eye on it.

So Director Rivera-Smith take it away.

Can you hear me.

Yeah you're choppy but we can hear you.

Okay.

Yeah I don't know what's going on.

But I'm in I think so.

Thank you.

If you can hear me.

First my my first question or observation here is that the on the last slide here the appendix the district-wide stop FTE and the school funding allocations those links don't work.

So I'm not able to view that.

Just FYI.

Did you hear that.

Can you hear me.

And we will we will correct that.

Thank you for that information.

Okay.

Thank you.

And my.

I'm clicking on the links.

Sorry.

those links.

Thank you for clicking on the links.

Okay.

Now I hear you.

Okay.

Yes.

I wanted to see my my other question then was and thank you yes thank you also for getting responses to our questions earlier this week that we had submitted.

I had a follow up to one of those.

My question regarding because I like how again I appreciate like with the directors how you've laid out how the budget is aligned to the goals and guardrails.

And my question, I was trying to get a sense of what did we not do?

Well, not so much what did we not do, what did we cut?

Like, what did we used to do that we're not doing now to make the budget aligned that way?

My question was, what's an investment or area that did not support goals and guardrails that was cut from this budget?

And you're talking about something we didn't do that we were maybe going to do, but you didn't tell me like what was cut that we used to do.

That was my question was more like, what are we not going to keep doing?

to make this more aligned.

Do you have an example for that?

So I think that when we answered the question, or we tried to answer the question, was we did have some adjustments about some things that we didn't feel were aligned to goals and guardrails.

That primarily was the bell time alignment.

But we did get feedback that that needed to stay in.

So there wasn't a large investment area that we amended in this budget.

That didn't happen.

So there wasn't an investment area of the budget that did not support the goals and guardrails that was cut from the proposed budget.

I think that when we brought those proposals forward, those were things that the community was not wanting to support.

and the feedback that we got were to not move those forward.

So those did not happen.

Okay.

Okay.

I just, yeah.

I mean, I just find it like, you know, if everything we were doing before still aligns with the goals and guardrails, that's awesome, I guess.

But I kind of find that a little hard to believe in a way.

And I know it probably gets into the minutiae of like, you know, certain classes and new projects.

I don't know.

As far as you can get really into the weeds, I'm sure.

But I was just trying to, you know, get an idea of how are we really strategically doing away with stuff that was not in line with this to make room for investing in things to align with it.

So I it's a pretty big question I guess but yeah that's what I was trying to make.

Another point I guess I would make Director Rivera-Smith is when when Concie talked about how we've met with our divisions what we've done is we've taken the current resources that we have in our divisions and we've really refocused them specifically on supporting those goals and guardrails.

So much of it was not a budget reduction, but it, well, there was a central office cut, but the rest of it was really a budget realignment.

The work that you're doing has to be supporting goals and guardrails.

That has to be our one main focus of all of our work.

Gotcha.

Okay.

No, thank you for that.

Thank you for the explanation.

And definitely see those links when they're ready.

Thank you.

Thank you Director Rivera-Smith.

Just checking Director Harris have you joined us yet.

I don't see her name but I want to make sure.

Okay.

Great.

Any other questions.

Going once.

Going twice.

Great job.

Thank you very much.

Sincerely appreciate it.

Okay.

They definitely deserve an applause so thank you for that.

Let's see where we are at.

Yep.

We have now reached the consent portion of today's agenda.

May I have a motion for the consent agenda.

I move approval of the consent agenda.

Second.

Thank you.

Approval of the consent agenda has been moved by Vice President Hampson and seconded by Director Rivera-Smith.

Do directors have any items they would like to remove from the consent agenda.

I do.

Go ahead Director Rivera-Smith.

I'd like to remove 6 7 and 8.

Okay fantastic.

Any other items.

All right.

I would move the consent agenda as amended.

I will second.

Okay approval of the consent agenda as amended has been removed or excuse me has been moved by Vice President Hampson and seconded by Director Rivera-Smith.

All those in favor please signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Any opposition.

Abstention.

All right seeing none.

Thank you.

This does pass.

We will now turn our attention to items number six.

I have a motion for item number 6.

I move that the board approve the Highly Capable Program Plan as attached to the Board Action Report for submission to the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction for school year 2021-22 to support Highly Capable Services.

The district's eligibility identification process and development of improved services and that the school board authorize the superintendent to apply for the allocation of funds from The Office of Superintendent of Construction.

We have a different.

No you're good.

That's.

Immediate action is in the best interest of the district.

You're good.

Sorry about that.

She was looking at the wrong page.

Second.

Thank you.

Did I miss anything critical in making that motion.

Does need to be official.

Okay.

Did you get your second.

Yep.

I got the second.

Thank you.

Okay, so Director Rivera-Smith, we'll go to you.

Well, actually, we'll go to the chair of the committee first, Director Rankin, and then we'll go to Director Rivera-Smith.

Sure.

Let's see.

I guess I'll just note that a reminder that this is required to be reimbursed by the state for highly capable services, which is a required service as part of the state's basic education.

And that it's for consideration, not because the committee had any issues with it, but because we moved it forward without discussion, seeing as how we had the chance to review it and it is an annual item and there were no outstanding questions or concerns.

So it's for consideration, not because it was unfavorable to the committee, but because we didn't, we just didn't feel the need to discuss it and wanted to move it forward to the full board.

Thank you.

Director Rivera-Smith.

Thank you.

No and I think that's for one of the big one of the reasons why I pulled it.

I think that I don't.

So 6, 7 and 8 just to be clear are all interaction items which I personally don't feel should go to consent because they have not come to us first for introduction and especially ones like this where the committee is choosing to not really discuss it.

It doesn't get a chance to really be discussed with us because if we go straight to consent you know no discussion.

So anyhow.

I think that we should establish a guideline or rule or whatever you want to call it that we don't put we don't put interaction onto consent.

And I know I mean I think we're going to talk about that more later in exec committee but that's why I took these down.

I appreciate that from Director Rankin.

I don't personally have more questions right now.

I believe that the directors might so I'll move into that now.

Okay, thanks.

Do any directors have questions at this time?

Okay, good.

Thank you, Dr. Pedroza.

Thank you, Dr. Pedroza.

I have a question.

My first question is, How does OSPI determine the funding allocation to SPS?

And is this money intended to support central operations of the Highly Capable Program or is it intended to be spent within the schools?

So I think the intention is both for operational and instructional purposes.

In the past, though, I will state that the previous policy and the requirements for testing that were outlined in the policy, the majority of the funds were spent on identification.

And so we have repurposed some of that money to focus on identification, also on instructional practices.

There is a plan in place to provide stipends to schools so that they can have somebody to coach and support teachers in Neighborhood Programming and also the department staff.

It also supplements the department staff with the program specialists and some of the compliance work so that we are aligned with OSPI guidelines.

So it's a mix of both.

That's helpful.

OK, I think it's my understanding that in previous years that money was largely spent for testing for ID purposes.

The identification.

Yep.

And we've changed how we were doing the ID process now.

So while OSPI is giving us the same amount, is it the case that the new process for identification of students is similar in cost and that is why we're able to free up some of the money for the schools?

We are actually using existing data and actually using our teachers and our students and our profiles of the learner that is part of the identification process.

So it's a more robust process.

It's a multi-service prong.

So we're using a variety of assessments, including the DIBLs, the MAP assessments, SBAC assessments, and there's performance tasks aligned to that.

So we are doing different things.

We're doing it at the school level using a team's approach, a multidisciplinary approach for looking at students.

And so that what we were doing in the previous time is actually having kids come on Saturdays, having to pay extra time, purchasing those tests and then taking them to be screened, which was a huge cost, as you know, with the contractors of work.

So now we're using our own staffing and our own data that we're currently using as part of the profile of the identification process.

I think my understanding is that the amount of money that OSPI gives our district is tied to a certain percentage of our student enrollment.

And how does that percentage compare to our actual identified?

I will.

So I don't have that data for you.

So if that's a more specific information, we can get that for you.

But I will say that's true.

It's not necessary.

We are probably have identified more students typically than what's proportionate and the average of the state.

However, that is why we are really working hard with our general education curriculum and the C&I folks so that they can actually the resources, for example, give an example.

In the past, in addition to this, special education and advanced learning, we're responsible for all of the extracurricular supports and supplements.

And what we've been doing now is with, for example, our math adoption, we've actually carefully chosen math materials that actually have differentiation for students who need extra support and might need some enhanced instructional strategies to support them.

So the central office curriculum and instruction department has been doing a lot of work to ensure that what we purchase and we support students moving forward.

can support the needs of multiple learners in the classroom.

But I understand this is an annual item, but there was a significant program change that I wanted to understand how that would be reflected.

Understandable.

Thank you.

All right, fantastic.

Thank you, Dr. Pedroza.

And thank you, Dr. or excuse me, Director Song-Moritz.

I want to acknowledge that Director Harris has joined us.

Hello, Leslie.

We will now move to number seven, approval.

Oh, we need a vote.

I'm sorry.

Ms. Wilson-Jones, will you please call the roll for item number six?

Director Song-Moritz.

Vice President Hampson aye Director Harris abstain Director Rankin aye Director Rivera-Smith aye.

I just so you know I did not hear Director Samuels' vote.

It was not audible on Teams.

I voted aye.

And Director Rivera-Smith you said aye as well correct.

I did yes.

I said aye.

Director Sargeant.

Aye.

And President Hersey.

Aye.

This motion has passed with a vote of six yes and one abstention.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right.

We will now move to item number seven.

Approval of the Amendment to Community Care Services.

I move that the school board authorize the superintendent to amend the contract with community care and in the additional amount of $2,170,000 for a revised total contract amount of $2,583,000 for placement of approximately 110 students who require recovery services and programming with any minor additions, deletions and modifications deemed necessary by the superintendent.

and to take any necessary actions to implement this contract.

Immediate action is in the best interest of the district.

Great.

Let's go to Director Rankin first.

Do you have anything you want to share on this?

I can share why it's intro and action.

There was a question about alignment between this provider and district policy that we discussed in committee.

And so that's so we didn't have the complete item to vote on in committee, but we did discuss it.

And I'll just note, too, that it is an existing partnership.

And we had a site visit, I believe, and resolved the question and or not a site visit, sorry, because it's a provider, not a site.

But the question was resolved.

And that is the increase is to reflect the need for recovery services from over the pandemic that we don't have staffing capacity for.

And so community care services is somebody that SPS has contracted with in the past.

This is just to approve an increase in that contract to serve students.

And I had a couple of questions from some folks who are really eager to start their kids in accessing this.

And we're concerned that it hadn't been approved yet.

And I said don't worry we're talking about it tonight.

So that's part of also why it's interim action is that there is a timing contingent with a start date for summer services.

Thank you Director Rankin.

We will now go to Executive Director Dr. Torres if directors have any questions.

Anybody phoning it in?

Questions?

I do have questions.

Do you want Dr. Torres to speak first?

No.

You can go ahead.

Okay.

Yeah.

So like, thank you.

Thank you again, Dr. Rankin, for the explanation there.

It's good to know why it was interaction.

And I do have a couple of questions on this for myself.

I was looking at the bar and the bar says in there that the district provides oversight and monitoring of all recovery services.

regular consultation and emergency response protocols including isolation and restraint.

But that is inconsistent with our board policy 3246 that says isolation is prohibited under all circumstances.

So I wanted to clarify do the service providers here use it or do they not to make sure they're in line with our policy.

So from my understanding, no, they do not.

And additionally, in our contract with them under Section 8.7, it specifically notes that they are to follow all of our procedures and policies up to and including our isolation and restraint policy.

OK, yeah, because I did see that later.

I did say they follow our policies and procedures, but then that wasn't there.

So it was kind of contradictory.

But that's good to clarify that they are not using isolation.

There was a question from community about it.

And so we wanted to make sure that it was captured in the BAR as well.

Say again?

Sorry.

that there was a question from community about that.

So we wanted to make sure that it was captured in the bar.

That was the only reason it was noted in there at all, honestly.

Okay, but we could probably take out isolation then, because the bars makes it sound like they do use isolation.

Anyways, neither here nor there at this point, but that's just maybe next time this comes, because it sounds like it's going to probably come again in a year, maybe, or whenever we renew it.

Anyway, also, I was wondering, what are the services?

Nothing in this bar or the attachment really said what the services are.

So, I mean, just as services and programming, recovery services and programming, what is that?

What is that?

So, community care works with some of our students who are most profoundly impacted by their disabilities.

And so they will do pretty much all of the services that we need for students.

And similar to what Director Rankin was saying, we in many ways don't have the capacity to serve all the students that are requiring the recovery services due to the pandemic.

Specifically for this contract, it's 110 students that we're looking at providing the services for, but it would be everything aligned to what the student's IEP was.

So essentially, when we develop the recovery services plan, what happens is there's a data dive based on what those students' goals were, and then there's a plan that's created aligned to what those goals are.

So to say specifically what they're going to do, it depends, it's individualized dependent on the student.

But it could be something up to and including services from a behavior tech to do some behavior at mod work, some academic goals, all those sort of things.

But it is individualized in determination with families and IEP teams as to what those services are going to look like.

Yeah, and I assumed as much.

I just was wondering, like, again, what are some examples of what that means for the students?

Yeah, and you gave a couple there.

So is there anything else to add on to that?

Was that?

That was a question.

Could you ask it again?

Slow down just a little bit.

He gave a couple of examples.

I was looking for examples.

I understand they are very specific to the student.

I was just looking at what some examples were and I think he gave a couple in there.

But was there something more you could say about the examples of what it is?

it would be aligned to the student goal.

So let's say it's an academic goal for reading or the like, those are the services they would provide.

Let's say that a student needs some assistance with behavior modification, would need the assistance of a behavior tech, that is a service that they'd be able to provide as well.

Gotcha.

Okay, and I also saw that this is supposedly one, if not the only agency around that could provide these services.

Who all is there?

It was kind of left open.

One of the few, or maybe only, is it the only, or is there more places?

So we're not doing an RFP for this, we're kind of just adding on to an existing contract.

Is it based purely on the prior relationship, or is there really just nobody else?

It's we're currently contracting with most every provider that's going to be able to do the recovery services just based on the number of students that are requiring recovery services.

So we are also contracting with other providers that are going to do similar things, specifically with community care.

They do some more intense services.

So that's why certain groups of kids have been are going to be getting their services from community care specifically.

No further questions.

Thank you so much.

All right.

We're next going to go to Director Sargiu and Director Harris.

Is your hand up for this item.

It is indeed.

Thank you.

Okay.

Hi.

Good evening.

I apologize if this is a repeat question but I didn't quite catch what Director Rivera-Smith's question was.

And this is related to the isolation and constraint And it's pretty much a yes, no question.

Have you actually had a direct conversation with this entity, Community Care Services, about the inappropriateness of that type of engagement with children?

And have you made it clear that those tactics are not to be used in a conversation?

Thank you for the question.

Me personally, if not, the team has, because just given when they were going into the contracting process, they were sure to make sure that they highlighted that, just given concerns that we've heard from community in general in work with the non-public agencies.

And what are the consequences if they choose to violate that?

So we would have to follow what our procedures are.

They are bound by that.

And we would end up having to cancel our contract with them.

Okay.

I just wanted that clear for the public.

Director Harris.

I'm going to lower my hand because I was asking legal counsel for a point of clarification so I will withdraw my question.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay.

Ms. Wilson-Jones seeing that there are no other questions will you please call the roll on this item.

Vice President Hampson.

Aye.

Director Harris.

Aye.

Director Rankin aye.

Director Rivera-Smith aye.

Director Sarju aye.

Director Song-Moretz aye.

President Hersey aye.

This motion is passed unanimously.

Thank you Ms. Wilson-Jones and thank you Executive Director Dr. Torres.

Okay.

We will now be moving on to item number eight.

May I have a motion for this item.

I move that the school board authorize the superintendent to enter into a project services agreement with the City of Seattle to accept funding of up to $501,775 to provide breakfast lunch and afternoon snacks for the City of Seattle's Summer Food Service Program with any minor additions deletions and modifications deemed necessary by the superintendent and to take any necessary actions to implement the contract.

Immediate action is in the best interest of the district.

Okay we have Assistant Superintendent Podesta at the podium.

Director Rivera-Smith you had questions on this item.

All right.

Thank you.

I did.

And this did go through my committee.

It was through operations.

And so I believe and maybe Assistant Superintendent Podesta can refresh my memory.

This is interaction because of a timely misfactor.

Is that correct Mr. Podesta.

This is a contract where the city engages the district to be the provider of meals for the city's summer meals program.

And it's a timing challenge getting that contract from the city at the start of summer.

Gotcha.

Todd, what I wanted to give the board opportunities to weigh in, have any questions they might have.

I know it's just one question I had still remaining was regarding the, I see that the menus will be agreed upon with the city.

Are there going to be vegan gluten-free options for students who have other dietary restrictions?

Yes.

And then it says that they'll be, they'll come in, what is it called?

I have no idea.

It's like economical packaging.

So like will that still be consistent with our use of combustibles or will that just be like the cheapest process we can find?

That will be as consistent as can be.

A lot of these are grab-and-go meals so the packaging is a bit different.

Okay.

And again I wanted to see if any other directors had questions too.

I'm done.

Thank you.

Any other directors with questions on this item.

All right.

Seeing none.

Thank you Mr. Podesta.

Ms. Wilson-Jones will you please call the roll on this item.

Director Harris.

Director Rankin aye Director Rivera-Smith aye Director Sargeant aye Director Song-Moretz aye Vice President Hampson aye President Hersey aye.

This motion is passed unanimously.

Thank you very much.

Okay, we have now reached the public testimony portion of today's agenda, but we have not yet reached six o'clock.

We could do that.

I'm trying to see what I want to do.

Give me a second to make a decision.

We could do.

Yeah.

Say again.

The committee report.

Oh, the audit committee.

Okay.

Let's go ahead and move on to committee reports and then we will move into introduction items.

How's that sound?

Okay.

Fantastic.

So we will first go to Vice President Hampson.

According to Board Procedure 6550BP, internal audit requires an announcement of completed internal audits.

And as the Audit and Finance Chair, I'm announcing that at the June 7th Quarterly Audit and Finance Committee meeting, the Office of Internal Audit presented the Culinary Services Advisory Engagement Report.

All findings and recommendations are discussed at public audit and finance committee meetings and the completed report is posted for public viewing on the agenda and is available on the internal audit website.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Do we have have committees met since the last time we had.

I don't I don't think so.

So doing committee reports feels unnecessary.

This is related to an item that's up for introduction tonight.

But I just wanted folks to know that regarding the approval of amendment to board policy 0010 instructional philosophy and special education and 504 policy.

We have been trying to figure out timing with a draft of that and getting some community engagement.

And since it's really based on engagement that has taken place.

I'm working with Seattle Council PTSA and the Special Education PTSA to host two kind of quick sort of preview open house engagements which I will be probably next week one during the day and one in the evening.

It's no pressure it's just sort of an opportunity before everybody goes off for the summer to if folks are have questions or are.

wanting to dig into it a little bit more before fall.

I will let you all know when those are happening so that no more than two other directors can can join for those.

But just as an opportunity to just talk about it more what it means.

And I've gotten some really really positive feedback already from some one-on-one engagement and engagement with the Seattle Special Education PTSA board.

So that has come through committee.

We've been talking about it a lot.

It is for intro tonight.

But we'll get those posted on the school board website as soon as possible for folks who may be able to join us.

Great.

Thank you Director Rankin.

Okay let's go ahead and move into introduction items.

Give everybody a second to adjust.

We've got about 25 minutes for this before we move to public comment.

So just an FYI for those who might be listening.

And we will begin with introduction item number one approval of the Student Outcomes Focused Governance Progress Monitoring Calendar.

This came through Exec on June 8th for approval.

Good evening directors.

I am Julia Worth the Director of Board Relations and Strategic Initiatives.

Before you this evening.

for introduction is the approval of the Student Outcomes Focused Governance Progress Monitoring Calendar.

The adoption of this progress monitoring calendar is required under the Student Outcomes Focused Governance model.

The calendar itself provides the dates or rather provides the schedule on which each goal in guardrail will be monitored by the board and data for each of the interim metrics will be discussed.

The calendar attached to the Board Action Report does go through the end of the current strategic plan.

So it includes dates for the upcoming 22-23 school year, the 23-24 school year, and then a final data review in the fall of 2024 at the closeout of our strategic plan.

You will see that there are two types of data presentations in the calendar itself.

There is a summative review.

as well as the progress monitoring sessions.

The summative review will be kind of a high level setting and review of the summative data that is available for the board adopted goals.

So in the fall of 2022, this will be a review of the Smarter Balanced assessment data, as well as graduation plus course completion rates from the end of this current school year.

Then beginning in December, the board will engage in formal progress monitoring sessions and that will be on the interim metrics.

So beginning with looking at the measurements of academic progress data.

The calendar was developed based on the timing of data availability.

So at full implementation, the board will conduct progress monitoring sessions three times a year.

on each of the goals and then once a year on the guardrails.

This will allow the data to be reviewed as close as possible to when it is available.

Given the structure of our interim measures, we're not able to monitor four times a year unless you are looking at data really far out.

So in consultation with Mr. A.J. Crabill from the Council of Great City Schools, it was recommended that we stick with monitoring the goals three times a year.

Also wanted to note that the summative data review in the fall and then the progress monitoring beginning in December allows time for the board to continue to adjust your board meeting structures to make space for the full progress monitoring.

And so that's why the 22-23 school year looks slightly different than full implementation in 23-24.

Also wanted to note that tomorrow evening you all will be discussing potential revisions to the board adopted goals and guardrails.

Depending on what language changes are discussed and decided on in that meeting, it may impact the interim metrics that staff would propose.

If there are needed adjustments to the interim metrics, that may impact data availability.

So, the calendar attached to this bar may be amended depending on that discussion tomorrow prior to approval on July 6th.

And with that, I would be happy to take any questions.

Okay, thank you, Ms. Worth.

Any questions from directors?

Go ahead, Director Rankin.

Thanks.

Yeah, I just had a question about tomorrow's meeting related to this.

So, assuming that there may be some tweaks, whether or not, and this is a technical question, I guess, Whether or not it impacts the interim measures if there are any language changes is it anticipated that we would have this be an individual action item again to go over that or is that not decided.

Or just be updated.

Okay.

That's all.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Director Sommers.

Thank you.

I'm curious if Mr. Crable had any feedback on how we could align the budget process calendar to the progress monitoring calendar so that our departments are using this feedback to give us recommendations how they would like to reallocate resources.

That's an excellent question.

I have not had a specific discussion with him about how we would align the progress monitoring and the data availability with the budget, but staff can certainly follow up on that.

Okay, fantastic.

Thank you, Director Song-Merez.

Any other questions from directors?

All right, seeing none.

Thank you, Ms. Morse.

Thank you.

We will now move on to introduction item number two, approval of the International Union of Operating Engineers, IUOE, Local 302, Unit A salary schedules and Article 15, effective February 1st, 2022. Please take it away.

Good evening.

I'm Lance King, Director of Labor Relations.

I know there's a really full agenda and the bar packet you received has all the details, so I promise I'll be very brief.

I'm here to recommend the board approve the new salary schedule for custodians and changes to Article 15 of the local 302A collective bargaining agreement.

The proposed changes will help solve the problem the district has had for some time now with the recruitment and retention of custodians.

And I know everybody knows through the pandemic how what an important job that was.

By increasing custodian wages significantly and by changing some of the custodial license requirements, that'll help operations fill positions.

I'd also like to point out that I had a lot of help with this.

Fred's group in operations was great and Joanne's group in The budget was great with this.

I'm pretty good with math.

But what we did with salary schedules, which are very concerning salary schedules.

I don't know if you've ever looked at them.

They're very complicated.

We've simplified those.

And Julian's group really gave me a lot of help with this.

I also want to thank the representatives for Local 302, Josh Solorio and Shelly Felipe for their professionalism.

and working with the district to mutually agree on this new provisions.

I know they're coming.

They wanted to speak with the board, but they're coming at six.

Is there any quick questions?

I mean, we're not voting, so if we want to have some, we will make sure that we get back to give them an opportunity to share if they have some things that they want to share to the board.

Do individuals have any questions on this particular item?

Sorry, I do have a question on the fiscal impact.

It says that for the current year, it is the increase would be coming from a combination of ESSER and general fund and then the following year it would be general fund.

So, do we anticipate that going forward that it's just part of the general fund and is sustainable?

Great, great.

Thank you.

Hello, hello.

Looks like we have our reps from 302, so.

Okay, thank you.

Yep.

Hello, members of the school board.

First, I just want to thank you guys for giving us the opportunity to speak here today.

I'm one of the reps with Local 302. Also have a couple of our other reps here and our district rep. Yeah, we just wanted to come and speak on the custodial wage agreement that we made with the district.

Super grateful, right, that, you know, I know we've come here before.

We've spoken about it.

President Hersey, we've met with you personally over this.

happy to say that we reached a deal.

Lance King was very instrumental in this.

The reps at Local 302, super grateful that our custodians are going to get this wage increase.

As I've shared before, some of our custodians range anywhere from 6% to 28% below market in their respective positions.

Disagreement in no way fixes that, but we think it's a very good start, right?

We're super excited about this.

These folks are the definition of essential workers.

They've kept the school district running during one of the worst pandemics we've ever seen.

While most of us got to stay home and work from the comfort of our own homes these people put their lives and the lives of their family in significant danger.

Really respect these guys.

They do a good job.

School district quite frankly wouldn't be able to function without those members doing their job.

Well this is a great start.

There's still much more work to do.

We have three other bargaining units that are also seeing the same discrepancies in their market rate.

So looking forward to finishing up that work with the district and working with you guys collaboratively as we always do.

It's always our goal.

We appreciate the relationships we've built here.

And yeah we're just looking forward to continuing this movement.

So thank you guys very much.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you as well.

Okay.

We will now move on to item number three.

Renewal.

Let's see what time it is.

Time check.

We got.

Renewal of Washington Schools Risk Management Pool Coverage for Fiscal Year 2022-2023.

Can I confirm real fast if you guys can hear me.

Yeah.

Go for it.

You got it.

I saw the question in the last one but you didn't hear me.

So it's okay.

It wasn't a big deal question.

I just want to make sure you guys can hear me at all.

Yep we can hear you.

And if you have an issue you can always message Ellie.

Let us know.

And then we will make sure because we do not want to move ahead without making sure that every director has the opportunity to ask questions.

Okay.

So Ms. Berge.

Good evening Directors.

JoLynn Berge Assistant Superintendent for Business and Finance.

This board action report is for the renewal of the district's property and liability insurance with the Washington Schools Risk Management Pool.

For the third year in a row, they are requiring a substantial increase in the premium for this coverage.

We are looking at alternatives, including direct purchase of insurance or joining the only other pool that serves districts in our state.

However, under the membership agreement that was signed back in 2002, we are required to provide the pool with a three-year notice of our intent to withdraw from the pool.

We have done this already so that the change that we could make would be at September 1, 2023 at the earliest.

We will present the options and have a recommendation for the board, and that's estimated to be available in January of 2023. So, for the 22-23 coverage period, we are contractually bound to continue with the Washington Risk Management Pool.

So, the renewal coverage proposal is what's before you in the current board action report, and I'm happy to take any questions.

Thank you, Ms. Berge.

Any questions on item number three?

I see Director Harris and I see Director Rankin.

So Director Harris go ahead.

Assistant Superintendent Berge can you talk a little bit about where those increases are coming from.

Is it a question of claims made.

Is it a question of inflation.

Is it a question of more complicated litigation.

more expensive outside counsel.

Can you can you give us a nutshell view please.

Sure.

It's I think it's a combination of all of those.

So all the members of the pool are seeing large increases and of course our share is the largest.

We're the largest school district by far in this state.

So it is a question of settled cases specifically around inappropriate employee behavior.

There are some cases like that that they have settled that we have insurance for.

But it also is resulting, remember last year we had to move to a higher self-insurance retention amount, and that's increasing from $250,000 to $500,000.

And they had told us that they had a technical calculation correction.

That's what's driving part of their increase in the coverage rates.

And then just overall inflationary increases in insurance coverage costs.

And if we leveled proportionately claims made, and line them up side by side would Seattle Public Schools have a higher percentage per capita than the other districts.

That's not my understanding but I'd have to get back to you with specifics.

Appreciate that.

Thank you.

Director Rankin.

Actually fine.

I found the answer to my question that I had forgotten.

Thanks.

Nice.

Okay.

Thank you Ms. Berge.

We will now be moving on to number four or excuse me item number four resolution 2021-22 or excuse me slash 22-23 fixing and adopting the 2022-23 budget.

And Ms. Berge is already at the podium.

Take it away.

Thank you.

I'm happy to present the board action report for the 2022-23 recommended budget.

So we went through a lot of the information at the work session just a little bit earlier this evening but I'll note a couple highlights.

The recommended budget before you has four distinct funds.

Our general fund the capital fund the associated student body fund and the debt service fund.

The combined expenditures across all of these funds is planned at one point six billion dollars.

Included in the board action report is an estimated four year outlook required by the state for each fund based on our current programs and legislative funding formulas.

Although the 22-23 budget we are bringing to you is a balanced budget, we continue to be aware of our structural deficit and future challenges.

The recommended budget book is currently online on the district's website.

And in the budget book, you will find expanded details on how our activities align with the district's goals and guardrails.

I want to express my gratitude for my staff who worked so incredibly hard to put the book together and the collaboration that I had across divisions in the district.

That concludes my remarks.

I'm happy to take questions.

Thank you.

Any questions from directors on this item.

Okay.

Director Rivera-Smith.

Hi thank you.

I had a question about the ASB portion of the budget there.

Who oversees that because as I understood it like that's overseen by the students but is there like a certain because it's many schools is there like one student liaison with us?

Is this something that our student board members might have some sort of role in?

Or how does the ASB portion of that work?

There's an elected ASB student body.

Those kids work with the fiscal person at each of the secondary schools to format the budget, balance their budget, generally have some oversight over the technicalities of what they're submitting.

And then those all roll up to the central office where we have two positions And all they do is ASB fiscal work and accounting and and provide guidelines and information to schools.

Okay.

So nothing really happens at the district level with these budgets.

They it's all out of the schools.

It is all out of the schools.

Gotcha.

And do we.

I know I'm trying to ask.

Do we have any requirements of them in that respect or they just kind of get to have however they decide to do it.

There are a lot of rules and regulations surrounding how ASB money must be spent and the proper internal controls.

There's a whole manual that we have on our website about ASB internal control procedures for fundraising and activities and clubs and sports and things like that.

They are to follow those rules along with the guidance of their coach their ASB advisor.

There's a there's a club advisor.

So there's someone there's an adult in the school helping each population of students their class advisor things like that.

So they're working in concert together.

I'll look up that manual.

Thank you very much.

No other questions.

Thank you Ms. Berge and thank you Director Rivera-Smith.

We will now let's see I still got time.

We will now move on to item number five.

Approval of the 2022-23 Student Rights and Responsibilities.

Take it away whenever you're ready Dr. Petrozza.

Hello everybody.

So I'm here to have this motion in front of you to approve the 2022-23 Student Rights and Responsibilities which contains rules and regulations for student conduct.

The Student Rights and Responsibilities is annually brought before the board for approval based upon the Washington Administrative Codes and Policy 32000. And this year's proposed document contains changes that aligns the Seattle Public Schools Behavioral Codes with State Behavioral Codes from OSPI.

And it demonstrates our continued commitment for racial equity, authentic family and student engagement.

and welcoming environment for all students especially Black boys and teens.

Some of the revisions for the 21-22 school year included aligning district codes to state behavior codes to provide transparency in how district maps and reports disciplinary data to the state.

And we've also aligned identified and eliminated behavior codes no longer being used based on district data.

The number of possible behavior violations was reduced from 53 to 47. It makes minor grammatical and formatting changes with hyperlinks updated.

It updates the language around school culture and climate to align with the 2029 2019-24 strategic plan Seattle Excellence and then aligns implementation tools including tiered fidelity inventory which serves as a guiding document to support school teams in establishing safe restorative supportive and welcoming environments.

It also guides secondary school staff to welcome back and help re-engage students who are returning from long-term suspensions and expulsions or expulsions.

Staff from student schools of original work with staff from Interagency Academy and Behavioral Health and Discipline Departments to assess student needs and identify culturally appropriate community-based services to meet those identified needs.

The resource also guides elementary school staff to consider alternative options to short-term suspensions and provides guidance on threat assessment, case management, collaborations between students, parents, guardians, school staff, and central office staff.

The people that have been listed in support of the engagement work are also listed within the document.

Plans for moving forward because as you know this is a document that counts annually but we always come with updates and revisions to keep improving.

We plan to pilot advisory lessons for on the SSNR and basic rules.

Continuing to partner with community in order to share the student's rights and responsibilities with families.

Alighting data review to goals and guardrails of student outcomes focused governance.

Coaching school leaders on with for student and staff supports.

Communicating with the board regarding discipline data and policy and ensuring that a student rights and responsibilities meet state mandated requirements.

And that's all I have.

Thank you Dr. Pedroza.

Do directors have any questions on this particular item.

Director Hampson.

Director Rankin.

Thank you.

This this has come through the SSC&I committee as a special attention item.

And because it has come through iteratively over the past year We decided as a committee that we didn't need to officially vote it vote it through because we had discussed it enough.

One thing I will note that I imagine Director Hampson might have questions about too or is going to bring up is that there's so much packed into this that I understand there are a lot of the legal requirements that have to be there.

But in terms of who it's for it's not very student accessible.

I know this is something we've discussed about in discussed in committee that we've seen really great collaboration between staff and the board on updating language and sort of priorities based on policy changes and things.

But it still is a very cumbersome document.

And so I don't know how we can meet the legal requirements and make it something that's more useful for students.

But that's something that I know we've discussed and that is important.

Yeah I was my questions about this are how do we create the conditions as a board in our whatever it is that we need to approve even if it's just simply the providing the Superintendent the administrative responsibility for working on and approving the student's rights and responsibilities because I wonder if part of the reason why this is a kitchen sink of what of administrative guidelines for students' rights and responsibilities.

It's not a communication to students for their rights and responsibilities.

It's a communication to administrators.

And even then it's mostly about expulsion whether in school or out of school.

And you know I can see where there's some additional work that's gone in and a lot of collaboration.

And I don't think that this document is yet honoring that.

My first thought when I read it this year and this as you know Dr. Pedroza and what's your name again Dr. Jones.

Long COVID.

I'm still coming out of it.

This is actually very near and dear to my heart and and you know I I don't know what your vision is for it Dr. Jones but I I know that we've had conversations or I've heard you both express that you do want this to be a document where students can have it use it to navigate when something comes up and it doesn't feel that way at all right now.

And and so my question is is this what you want to is this really what you want to put forward to students.

And I have not yet met a student advocate throughout the entire school district who actually knows about this and has read it.

And I don't know why we would want them to read it because it needs to be translated first into English.

I mean I know it's in English but it's not actually accessible in any way shape or form.

I'm pretty sure I fell asleep reading it.

And this is no criticism to the fact that that there is this legal requirement that we have to meet but can we make it a document that actually is meaningful to students regarding their rights and responsibilities.

Isn't it that important.

And then I also just as one specific note notice that the sexual assault because at the end thank you for providing the red line version at the end sexual assault.

I only saw one sort of how-to, you know, if you experience sexual assault.

But that wasn't updated based on our new policy updates.

And I mean, that's okay, because I know we're going to have to do another set of updates probably next year.

But my question was just, did it need some updates?

And then why are we only talking about sexual harassment and assault?

I didn't see any and I know there's work that you all have done on trying to create these pathways for for students.

So again I'm it's I don't want to approve this because it feels like it's not what the title is which is Student Rights and Responsibilities.

So the only thing I was going to say when you were speaking about all of that commentary about the student focused and then the student rights or responsibility.

I agree on some level.

And so my wonder is how can we get to yes and.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Versus either or.

So there's there has to be I believe some we can work with legal on some of those pieces but some compliance pieces and some legality pieces I do believe and actually guidance for school leaders in schools.

on students' rights and responsibilities in school.

So that has to be there.

And it has to be really clear.

But then I do wonder, the yes and piece is maybe we need something different for students.

That's a little, and that's going to take more work.

I have Christine Matfield here, who's now taking over that piece of work for Aaron Romanek, who's left.

But I just wonder how we can get to yes and in creating a student you know version that actually makes sense to them so when they're navigating.

Believe me as the principal of Seattle World School right and having students have issues that come up and.

Translating.

And translating it all and making sure that we navigate it.

So I wonder how we can get to yes and.

With the saying this is one step but maybe our project is actually developing that student-centered guidance and using students and maybe the Student Advisory Board as as advisory for that just There's some work that has to be done around it though.

And it is so much an administrative document that can we actually just delegate this to the superintendent annually so that you're not stuck on this board time frame of having to get this approved in June and then you don't really get to do the real work that you need to for students.

You're on this sort of bad cycle.

That's my query.

Director Hampson I'm in agreement with you.

We definitely want to make sure that this is accessible.

We want to make sure that this is student-friendly.

In getting advice actually from the Student Advisory Board they talked about the pathway to clarity around issues like this.

And so if we can make sure that we are able to recognize issues and then subsequently reconcile them through this document then we've achieved our goal.

I'm in agreement with Dr. Pedroza.

I think we can have a both-hand document that's that's really clear but also is comprehensive.

And I also just want to note that in addition to the Student Advisory Board we got three board members that are about to join us in a very short amount of time who I know would likely be chomping at the bit to give input on a document like that.

So just a pin in that.

Any other questions on this item before we move into public testimony.

Okay.

See none.

Thank you Dr. Pedroza.

All right.

We will be taking public.

Okay.

Sorry.

Sorry.

We have now reached the public testimony portion of the agenda.

We will be taking public testimony by phone and in person as stated on the agenda.

Board Procedure 1430BP provides the rules for testimony and I ask that speakers be respectful of these rules.

I will summarize some of the important parts of this procedure.

First testimony will be taken today from those individuals called from our public testimony list and if applicable the waiting list which are included on today's agenda posting on the school board website.

Only those who are called by name should unmute their phones or step forward to the podium and only one person should speak at a time.

Speakers from the list may cede their time to another person when the listed speaker's name is called.

The total amount of time of allowed or excuse me the total amount of time allowed will not exceed two minutes for the combined number of speakers.

Time will not be restarted after the new speaker begins and the new speaker will not be called again later if they are on the testimony list or waiting list.

Those who do not wish to have the time ceded to them may decline and retain their place on the testimony or wait list.

The majority of the speaker's time should be spent on topics that they have indicated they wish to speak about.

Finally the board expects the same standard of civility for those participating in public comment as the board expects of itself.

Ms. Wilson-Jones will read off the testimony speakers.

For those who have joined by phone today when I call your name please press star-6 to unmute and listen for a beep that will sound when your testimony period is over.

The first speaker on today's testimony list is Dana Louie.

Dana Louie.

Good evening.

My name is Dana Louie and I'm currently a junior at Cleveland STEM High School.

I'm the new ASB president.

I'm a student leader who cares about my school and my community.

The Cleveland community is heavily involved in what we want our school to look like and voicing our needs.

My freshman year I felt positive energy around me.

I was confident in my administrators and supported by Cleveland staff.

It was difficult being remote due to COVID during the end of the year and the majority of sophomore year.

I felt disconnected from my school community.

This year my junior year I was my class's ASB president.

It was my goal to help create school events to restore the Cleveland I knew freshman year.

We have experienced many hardships that have had a huge impact on us as a community.

For over half of the school year we didn't have our principal Ms. Brown here to lead us during one of the most difficult school years.

It was unsettling to find out through an email that Ms. Brown will not be able to return to be our principal next year.

On May 20th us students organized a walkout and rally in front of this building.

Students had a space to express their emotions and concerns regarding the change in principals.

It is hard to cope and understand when we don't have full details and transparency of what is happening with Ms. Brown and we're unsure who our next principal will be.

I'm not.

able to feel hopeful for my senior year next year when our school's leadership is uncertain and many staff members are leaving.

These last few days of school have felt confusing not knowing what level of support will be in place next year.

We need a principal who will bring us back together and we need to restore what has been taken away from us.

Cleveland students families and staff request that Superintendent Jones joins us in a restorative circle so that we may communicate directly with you regarding our concerns and the harm that our school's community is experiencing currently.

It is important for us to hear from you directly.

I hope I hope this message and our request is received well.

Thank you for your time.

The next speaker is Chris Jackins.

My name is Chris Jackins Box 84063 Seattle 98124. On three food contracts please provide fresh food products without preservatives.

On the disposal and recycling contract this item was posted without naming the contractor or citing the contract amount.

On the salary schedules agreement with the Operating Engineers 302 union this item was posted for board action on July 7th but the next board meeting is listed for July 6th.

On not demolishing Rainier Beach High School the board should take action to retain some history at the school.

On the Montlake Racial Imbalance Resolution two points.

Number one capacity at the school would more than double 251 to 530. Families can choose to attend a school other than their attendance area school and state law requires certifying that the project will not create or aggravate racial imbalance within the district not just at one school.

Number two the analysis should have included effects from increased capacity and effects on nearby schools.

On the 2022-23 budget five points.

Number one a previous board discussion indicated that families on as many as 50 bus routes would remain unserved next year.

Number two the board should not accept this outcome.

Number three has the board examined using more of the capital fund to cover eligible general fund costs.

Number four has the board looked at using interest earnings from the capital fund.

Number five has the board looked at inter-fund borrowing.

Compliments to the board and staff and all the speakers tonight.

Thank you very much.

about that.

The next speaker is Cheryl Lynn Crowther.

Cheryl Lynn Crowther.

Hello.

The Seattle Special Education PTSA is thrilled to see our district recognize the need for more inclusive classroom and school experiences.

In 2020-2021 our PTSA focused our advocacy work in three areas.

One of which was working to increase inclusionary practices throughout the district.

During Disability History and Awareness Month last October some of you attended our community conversation about inclusion.

Some of you have also attended programs about inclusion we have presented with speakers from the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction the Office of the Education Ombuds the Herring Center at University of Washington the Arc of King County Seattle University Center for Change and Transition Services and more.

Throughout all these conversations and programs we've heard and learned two things.

One it's critical to include and center student voice and student needs in making the kind of system change called for in moving to inclusive classrooms.

Members of our board met last week with Directors Rankin and Rivera-Smith.

We followed up our conversation with proposed language to add to the policy amendments that would make it policy to include student voices.

Second is the need for a shared understanding of the benefits of inclusion for all students.

This shared understanding creating a why to take on this work would involve everyone in the process.

Administrators teachers students and families.

Respectfully we hope that you will create an anti-ableism policy for the district.

An anti-ableism policy that sees the connection between anti-ableism and anti-racism work.

A policy that makes clear the community values behind the push to adopt inclusive educational strategies like universal design for learning and anti-ableism policy to ensure the most marginalized students in the system are fully supported.

Our PTSA hopes to continue collaborating with staff and the school board as this inclusion work continues.

The next speaker is Alex Zimmerman.

Lady, why you move out?

I'm not your husband.

We're not in bedroom.

Each time I come, this woman move out.

We elect her for business, not for pleasure.

The Hive, my dirty damn Nazi fascist mob and bandit psychopath.

I want to speak about something, what is it?

I have number 5207, and I don't know what does this mean.

Because Seattle is the number one fascist city in America, and I live in this city for 35 years.

It's my personal opinion, not because they prosecute me three times, and I have 12 trespasses for 1,200 days.

It's a pure psychopathic Nazi-Gestapo principle.

It's a problem that we have.

Children mentality, and I remember myself, my Soviet Union friends terrorized me from second grade to end of the school.

You know what I mean?

Only because I have different opinion.

I try to understand, guys, what are you doing with us children?

It's a nightmare.

You're more dangerous than Nazis or communists, because it's America.

Everybody have right of different opinion.

You cut this and cut this and cut this.

So we have right now Seattle, number one fascist, almost 100% vote only for Democrat.

It's no analogy in this planet.

This a problem, what is I come?

For this I come to here because I want speak to 55,000 baby.

So their parents stand up, stop and freaking acting like an idiot.

It's America.

Everybody have different opinion.

Seattle not supposed to be a fascist city.

70% educate people with college degree, bring fascism.

It's no analogy in this planet.

So I spoke right now, children before 18 supposed to be treat very gentle.

It's not with political or Nazi Gestapo principle.

Stand up America.

Stand up Seattle.

The next speaker is Claude Laude.

I'll wait for the rest of the board to return before I begin.

Be reasonable in what I.

Yeah.

There's just a level of tolerance for certain things that we will especially set in a space like this that we will not tolerate.

So we need to have a conversation around comments that get made especially when we're referencing things like bedrooms and whatnot.

That's highly inappropriate.

So I don't know if we have a representative from legal counsel here this evening or one can be contacted but I would really appreciate if we could follow up on that.

Anyone else returning.

Yes there is one board director who is still outstanding who will be returning in just a moment.

All right.

Hello my name is Claude Laude.

I use he him pronouns.

I'm a teacher at Cleveland High School for one more day.

Public schools are exhausting places to be so I recently resigned from teaching.

I'm feeling pessimistic in the direction public schooling is headed after these notably challenging two and a half years of pandemic schooling in which we have been grossly under-supported and underfunded.

And beyond COVID the compounded trauma felt with every school shooting occurring nationally and every false alarm causing worry locally is a reminder of how little has changed and how woefully ill-equipped we are in responding to trauma.

Public schooling institutions are far more concerned with meeting compliance than they are with the collective well-being of our school communities.

The interest of our community has not been centered in decision-making.

When our school leader Catherine Brown centered student staff and families by communicating to families that contract tracing basically wasn't happening anymore the district called it insubordination.

Transparency is paramount to building trust with the community.

We need leaders like Catherine Brown who uphold these values.

The burnout right now is tremendous.

Ms. Brown provides a reliable foundation of building level stability amidst rampant systemic instability.

Her 18 years of working at Cleveland positions her as a holder of deep knowledge that can only be attained after engaging with the community over a long period of time.

But as this school year closes We have around 30 staff members leaving Cleveland and many have credited the firing of Ms. Brown as a major reason why.

Trust has been broken and the pillars of our community are effectively being displaced.

Dr. Jones start rebuilding trust by engaging in a restorative circle that's been proposed by Cleveland students.

And I know all the district bureaucrats don't want to call it firing because Ms. Brown's situation isn't technically firing but we all see through the bureaucratic jargon.

Ms. Brown.

Ms. Brown's firing reflects the value of the carceral state that prioritizes punishment over safety.

I have little faith that these conditions will improve given the unjust treatment of one of the most well-respected and qualified administrators this district has ever seen.

Rude State, Ms. Brown.

The next speaker is Claire Sebecki.

Claire Sebecki.

Good evening.

My name is Claire Sebecki and I'm a teacher at Cleveland High School.

I am here today to add my voice to those of my fellow staff members students and families continuing to express frustration with the way the principal situation at Cleveland High School has been handled.

As people who have worked alongside Catherine Brown we know her to be a remarkably deliberate and intentional leader.

She is not prone to rash decision making or hot-headedness.

Catherine is a principal who is unfailing in her dedication to Cleveland students and unafraid to do what is right even when it is hard.

What we know of Catherine makes it very difficult to understand why the superintendent has removed her as the leader of our school.

Removing Catherine Brown as principal of CHS has left us all wondering is this a political move.

Are we as a staff being punished for standing in solidarity with student organizers this year.

Does the superintendent want to fundamentally change the culture of our school and stifle teacher and student activism.

Was the goal in the original appointment of Marty Campbell to get the Cleveland community to fall in line.

If so it is important for Superintendent Jones and the board to understand that at Cleveland our differences are a point of pride.

We will continue to uplift the work of student activists and press for structural changes that make our school the place our students deserve.

The Cleveland community deserves a proper explanation about the removal of Principal Brown.

Staff and students have both requested repeatedly that Superintendent Jones speak to us.

He has ignored these requests.

Faith in district leadership continues to erode.

Superintendent Jones it seems clear that you intend to run out the clock on this school year before assigning an interim principal for next year or responding to our request for a meeting.

Perhaps you think we won't be able to organize as effectively over the summer but we will continue to be vigilant about decisions regarding school leadership.

I'll end with two requests.

Superintendent Jones find the courage to engage in a restorative conversation with the Cleveland community and reinstate Principal Brown.

The next speaker is Paige Wilson.

Good evening.

I'm speaking here today to inform Dr. Jones and the board of how the decisions made around the demotion of Catherine Brown have impacted myself and the Cleveland High School community.

First I'd like to share a little bit about myself as a committed educator at SPS.

This year marks my 13th year in education.

Nine of those years were spent at Barbara Moores Southlake High School and the last four at Cleveland High School.

Due to the treatment of Catherine Brown I am leaving the district.

My resignation may be of no consequence to you but it is of great consequence to the Cleveland community.

For the past 10 years I've volunteered most of my Saturdays to tutor Southlake and Cleveland students at public libraries.

Hundreds of students have benefited from my Saturday math tutorials.

I did this out of my deep commitment to the students.

A former student was incarcerated in Clallam Bay Penitentiary and their mother was unable to drive.

I drove the mother and younger siblings to Clallam from Seattle four hours each way so they could see their loved one.

I visited my students in Juvenile Hall.

I provided emotional and legal support at their court hearings and all of this was done on my own time and at my own expense.

Some years back I completed my admin credentials and had aspirations of someday becoming a leader like Barbara Moore Dr. Keisha Scarlett and Catherine Brown.

I had the opportunity to apply at Southlake but the day of my interview Dr. Laura Davis-Brown informed me that someone was being placed in the position.

This event along with what has happened to Catherine Brown has led me to ask Who makes the ultimate decision for administrative replacement and why have an interview process if SPS does not follow through on the interview team's decision.

I have two requests for your team.

My first is to stop appointing administrators to roles where community voice is not heard.

I have the utmost respect for Dr. Powell at South Lake High School but I would have appreciated the chance to interview.

Let schools and communities choose who their leaders are through a transparent process.

My second request is for SPS to strongly consider the potential impact of removing a building leader who is rooted in the school community.

Please reconsider the process in which SPS selects its school administrators.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Shea Geary.

The next speaker is Shea Geary.

Thanks.

Thank you.

In a recent all-staff meeting led by Dr. Laura Davis-Brown and Rainey Hartford-Swan We learned that while the superintendent has the power to assign or reassign which school an administrator serves at it's the school board that has the power to demote or not demote an administrator.

Our staff were also told that there was only one eligible candidate who applied for the position of principal at Cleveland during the recent job posting.

With such a low turnout for the position I'm surprised the school board can afford to demote such a great school leader with a proven track record for cultivating student success.

Policy Number 5250 Reporting Improper Governmental Action and Protecting Whistleblowers Against Retaliation.

It is the policy of the Seattle School Board to encourage the reporting by its employees of improper governmental action taken by district officers or employees and to protect employees who have reported improper governmental actions in accordance with this policy from retaliation.

It looks like Principal Catherine Brown is being removed and demoted as retaliation for the act of whistleblowing.

Notifying families about misinformation they were receiving from the school district pertaining to contact tracing.

Some might say she should have waited a few more days instead of sending that email to our families.

I'll refrain from telling you how every day matters when lives are at stake.

All this happening against the backdrop of students and staff requesting to go remote out of concerns of their safety similar to how school board meetings and many other positions here at the Stanford Center were remote during the pandemic.

Y'all still have a chance to get on the right side of this.

Please reinstate Catherine Brown and remind our families why they should trust Seattle Public Schools.

The next speaker is Asaura sorry Asaura Jimenez-Guerra.

like to cede my time to Enrico Abadesco.

Hello I'm Enrico Abadesco.

I'm a special education teacher at Cleveland High School.

I think in this past two years I'm a I'm a new educator.

I started in the midst of the pandemic firstly online and then coming back into this year through a really difficult time.

And I think in this learning from students and our leadership One thing that came out is that dedication and care from our community coming together that took years to build.

And I'm thinking now as a new educator and thinking of Catherine Brown spending 18 years in a place and dedicating time and to be easily removed and moved away from a community that is needing leadership needing community in a time where that's really kept us through and really holding people together.

And we're seeing the impact of taking are our key leaders our key community folks in our at Cleveland High School and the impact of many teachers leaving who have stated that they're leaving because of this.

The harm that it causes the hurt that it causes the pain the mistrust everything that's broken.

And so with that I want to highlight and honor the ask of having a restorative circle being highlighted by students.

I want to affirm that ask with Dr. Jones.

And I also 104 and reinstating Catherine.

We we need to have this community stay strong and to keep moving when we're losing so many amazing educators who our students love our families care for.

And we need that leadership.

We need to know that we can stay together.

And so I'm going to leave with that and honor those two asks and to push those forward.

Thank you.

Then the next speaker is Timoni Keegan.

Good evening Dr. Jones President Hersey Vice President Hampson Directors Harris Rankin Sarju Smith Songmaritz and Rivera-Smith.

My name is Timani Keegan.

I was and still am incredibly proud to teach Black Studies at Cleveland STEM an opportunity extended to me specifically by Catherine Brown.

I'm an unapologetically mixed race Black and white queer abolitionist educator and Seattle native.

And as the late great Bell Hooks shared with us in her book Teaching to Transgress for Black folks teaching educating is fundamentally political because it is rooted in anti-racist struggle.

So I'm no stranger to standing up for what I believe is just and right.

I am absolutely floored about a phenomenal and longtime leader being stripped away from a community that has spent countless hours of labor labor and resources cultivating.

However what seems most pertinent to me in this moment is our community's yet to be responded to request to meet with you Dr. Jones.

And anyone else who is willing to honestly address what's happening and genuinely partner with the Cleveland community to repair harm.

Preferably in a way that isn't shielded by bureaucracy.

So I'm here today to share with you a letter from the Cleveland community.

Dear Superintendent Jones.

By now you are well aware of the impact that removing Principal Catherine Brown has had on Cleveland STEM students families and staff.

What you may not be aware of is we are still reeling as a community and we continue to use profound amounts of emotional and intellectual labor as we navigate the feelings and impacts of harm done to our community.

Harm that may not have been intended but is a huge part of our lived experiences.

This year has of course been one for the books.

Many of us has felt challenged since we weren't remote in 2020. We are tired.

We are hurting.

And we want to move forward with dignity.

In order to do that we need access to space where our voices can be heard in ways that we deem meaningful.

We request that you join us in a restorative circle so that we may communicate directly with you regarding our concerns and we look forward to your timely response.

The next speaker is Frances Lynn.

Frances Lynn.

Good evening school board members.

My name is Francis Lin and I'm a science teacher finishing my fourth year at Cleveland High School.

And I'd like to speak to you today on reinstating Katherine Brown as principal of Cleveland STEM High School.

One of my first interactions with Principal Brown was when she voluntarily observed a lesson I was giving as a student teacher.

For a young teacher of color I was so touched that an administrator would take the time to not only come observe me but to give me such generous thoughtful and constructive feedback.

If Principal Brown would offer such kindness to a student teacher with no promise of long-term commitment to the community imagine what sort of ferocity and devotion and love she would give to a school she has been a leader of for 18 years.

SPS gave us copies of Dr. Goldie Mohabit's cultivated genius to every staff member in the district.

In it, she urges educators to teach the skill of criticality to students, meaning not to just passively take in information, but to question what they hear in the news.

Given the terrifyingly high levels of COVID, Principal Brown made the impossibly courageous decision to apply that framework and email a desperate Cleveland community looking for transparency on contact tracing.

For using Dr. Mohabit's teachings, she has been demoted and barred from returning to Cleveland next year.

In looking for a replacement, we have seen an applicant pool crescendo to a paltry four candidates and quickly evaporate to one.

When a search failed to bear fruitful results, we agreed to an interim principal so we may continue our search in earnest next year.

No one has been named to date.

During that time, we have seen tidal waves of disillusionment rapidly erode the long time and beloved staff members from our Cleveland family, many citing the leadership changes at Cleveland as a driving force.

As we face into an abyss of uncertainty with no leader or prospect of one to ferry us through, I believe that Occam's razor is most appropriate here.

The only logical replacement for Principal Catherine Brown is Principal Catherine Brown.

She has charred the course for Cleveland to be a thriving, joy-filled, welcoming learning environment that the mayor and the superintendent saw fit for their children to attend and she can do it again.

Appoint Catherine Brown to be principal of Cleveland High School for the 2022-2023 school year and Dr. Jones please join us at Cleveland for a restorative circle concerning the leadership change process.

I'd like to close with one last anecdote.

After completing my first full year of teaching at Cleveland High School Catherine came up to me and congratulated me and said we're glad you came back here.

You belong here.

I hope to return the favor.

Principal Brown you belong here.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Christy DeVader.

Christy DeVader.

Christy if you're on the phone you need to press star-6 to unmute.

Not seeing that phone number.

Moving on to our next speaker Sabrina Burr.

Good evening.

My name is Sabrina Burr and I am a parent of a Seattle Public School graduate.

I thought being at this point would be a place of celebration.

I literally went back to my school with my daughter from pre-K to 8th grade.

Some weeks I was in the building 60 hours.

Because I wanted to make sure that my daughter's sense of self and love for learning did not die in this institution.

I found too many students that that happened to.

And as you know the first knife that killed my brother came from Seattle Public Schools.

My daughter left out of pre-K-8 fighting for a principal.

to make sure those she left behind had a right leader.

What I know from my experience in Seattle Public Schools two things matter.

The leader who leads a building who engages with students staff and the community and how we authentically engage and partner.

That didn't happen at Cleveland.

And I'm really sad.

because Catherine Brown cared about my life before more than you guys did.

I lost a family member that came from South Shore to COVID.

Christmas Eve I was diagnosed with COVID and the only reason why I didn't go to the hospital is because my doctor let's me have his cell number and called me back 20 minutes later and I was able to get what I needed.

I know Cleveland and Franklin have the highest numbers.

But you care more about what?

We got to start telling the truth.

Cleveland staff have been holding it down.

They've been holding it down with no leadership.

How we do things make a difference and what we've done to Cleveland is wrong.

And I beg you, Dr. Jones, Do the right thing and get some restorative justice.

Bring in some healing.

There are resources there but get with those students and get with that staff.

Bring some healing because whoever you bring in will not get set right until you bring them into an art an environment that will lead them.

And like the other people said the best person is for Cleveland is Catherine Brown.

And I don't know what your policies are but I'm glad she cared about my life more than you did.

The next speaker is Joe Donahoe.

Good evening members of the board.

My name is Joe Donahoe.

I'm a science teacher at Cleveland High School.

I was here a month ago to express to you how much Catherine means to me personally as an educator.

And as you've heard from so many other people already you can see how much she means to everybody in the Cleveland community.

Students family members staff.

She is the the cornerstone of our entire community.

You heard from Paige Wilson on the phone.

a literal superhero of a teacher.

And she's leaving us in big part because of this leadership change.

You heard from Claude another super educator.

He's leaving because of this.

You're about to hear from John Hughes our athletic director who also means so much to our community beyond just education.

He's leaving as well.

I realize that with the pandemic and the burnout in our profession all buildings are losing staff members beloved staff members.

But they're not losing them for this reason.

And these people who are leaving have said specifically that's why.

And I am so sad and worried for our future as a school if we continue to lose these quality educators.

And I'm worried about who will leave next.

if we don't get Catherine back or have a leader we can trust.

So I want to echo the two asks that you've heard time and time again.

The first I couldn't have said it better than Ms. Burr.

We need healing and that healing starts with the restorative practice of direct conversation.

The second is to reinstate Catherine Brown.

Thank you.

The next speaker is John Hughes.

Good evening my name is John Hughes.

I left my law practice over a decade ago to come teach in Seattle Public Schools because I saw the inequities that were happening in the central and south end of Seattle.

I've had the fortune to teach at Madrona South Shore and for the last four years as athletic director at Cleveland High School.

I have two issues for you today.

The first one is the plight of athletic directors.

And I have some exhibits there for you to review.

I don't know if you're aware of this, but athletic directors in Seattle Public Schools are considered just part-time, half-time employees, despite 60 hours plus in work hours.

To make a livable wage, the Seattle Public Schools asks us to take another job.

Maybe it's taking on three classes, which is what happens in Cleveland, so a full half-day of curriculum.

Surrounding public schools do not do this.

Metro League private schools do not do this.

They fully fund their athletic directors.

Because athletics is a huge and important part of high school.

We can all remember our high school experience.

And if you played sports or you went to games you knew about school spirit.

About your community.

Leadership skills.

And some kids in Seattle they come to school for one reason that the athletics keeps them engaged.

Some more affluent schools in Seattle Public Schools have the ability to fund through their booster clubs and their PTSA's leaving a have and have not situation to fill the gap in this area.

Changes needed.

You need to fully fund Seattle Public School athletic directors.

And I again I have more information and job description and details in the handouts.

Next is Cleveland leadership.

You've heard about it all night.

You need to reinstate Ms. Brown.

Let me put it in context.

COVID hit Cleveland hard.

We had two staff members die one on Christmas Day.

during the surge.

Our numbers were so high we had to shut down and go remote.

Many of our families live in multi-generational households.

The fear of grandma dying was real.

As an AD I was required to test athletes three times a week.

Our numbers were off the charts contract contact tracing couldn't keep up.

Ms. Brown did what Seattle Public Schools promised to keep their families safe and informed.

I realized central staff was doing their best but they were remote learning on the Zoom disconnected.

Ms. Brown was in the trenches every day with our families and she knew best.

It's a pandemic.

Show some grace.

Let's make a change here.

Let's fix this problem and reinstate Ms. Brown.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Leigh Simpson.

Leigh Simpson.

Hello my name is Leigh and I'm a parent to two Seattle Public School students.

I'm also a science teacher in our community and we place a lot of value as I know many families do on out-of-school time enrichment opportunities.

When I enrolled my kids in after-school programs at their school I found six crickets.

And since the pandemic I've worked in partnership with Six Crickets.

We help schools and districts connect with community enrichment providers to bring after-school learning opportunities to our SPS campuses.

In our district the work to organize this after-school enrichment effort is done largely by our PTAs.

My concern is that PTAs trying to restart after-school programs for the 2022-23 school year will face challenges.

possibly insurmountable challenges revolving around the district's policies on the need for a COVID site coordinator in after-school time.

I understand the Department of Health won't release final guidelines until early August but that right now it's the responsibility of the group organizing the after-school program so our PTAs to arrange for a site coordinator to monitor and handle any students exhibiting symptoms of COVID in after-school time.

My concern is that this requirement will undermine some schools' ability to have after-school programs at all and this will ultimately widen the opportunity gap we see in student access to out-of-school time enrichment.

The schools that struggle to find The manpower to put together a PTA and an after-school program at all will undoubtedly also struggle to fill this additional requirement of a COVID site coordinator.

I'm asking for the district to recognize this this hardship on the PTAs and consider solutions that don't overtax the PTAs trying to bring these important enrichment programs back to SPS.

Thank you so much.

The next speaker is April sorry April Christiansen.

April Christiansen.

My name is April Christiansen and I'm both an employee of Seattle Public Schools and a parent.

I work as a SPED one-on-one IA and para at Gatewood Elementary and my daughter is a student at Cleveland High School.

I refuse to believe that anyone that works in education does not want for the best of our students and for the broader community.

I refuse to believe and blame all of our problems of the district as our district has a long and complicated history.

I believe we're all actively trying to work to get things right but that does not happen yesterday.

And sometimes we get in our own way.

I'm not perfect and I'm sure none of you are either.

Our family has been deeply affected by the removal of Catherine Brown as principal at Cleveland.

Principal Brown has always been responsive responsible compassionate dedicated and a person of immense trust and leadership we could all count on.

This year was unrelenting and educational staff however for all educational staff however building principals have endured deep sacrifices and stressors even through it all.

Principal Brown through a very tumultuous time when no one got everything right and during a time when sometimes there was no palatable decision or directions laid before us.

This was a year of conflicting messages and competing priorities.

Katherine Brown was simply sharing information not in a manipulative or divisive way but simply as a tool that our community continue could continue to use to protect themselves.

I'm also here for a second reason.

I want to talk briefly about a change at Gatewood Elementary School involving the special education social emotional learning program formerly known as the EBD program at our school that has been run for years.

Due partly to circumstances through the year which our school tried to do but also moving forward our school has been informed that our SPED SEL classrooms K-2 and 3-5 separate classrooms will have be will be combined moving forward.

This is an extreme change from the way these classrooms have been structured for many many years.

We have always had lower and upper elementary classrooms.

I do not work directly with our SEL program.

I do work in SPED but as a parent of this school community for the past 11 years and now for three three years as an SPS employee I have helped in the periphery for dealing with the needs involving these classes.

I do not understand how it is developmentally appropriate endorsed or recommended trauma-informed care or education to put a kindergartner or first grader in the same classroom as a third or fourth grader who may be exhibiting highly escalated behaviors on a daily or sometimes hourly basis.

I'm wondering who the director of the SPED SEL program is and if there is documentation that this is the best path forward and in the best interest of these children who sometimes already have experienced traumas whose families may or may not be in need of high level of support and some of them have either undiagnosed or diagnosed needs that highly trained and very special staff are needed to support.

I've been thankful to SPS and the EBD SEL program for many years.

For some of these families an S- SPED SEL classroom may be their last resource to be served by public schools in this way.

We've personally had neighbors who've children whose children have been in this program and if it were not for Gateway and the thoughtful programming they were out of public schools options.

However serving these students the right way requires a very low to staff to student ratio and special attention to trauma-informed care and education.

and the work is beautiful and life-changing but it's also long and hard every hour every day.

If this is being done for budgetary purposes as truly some of these are our very most vulnerable students in SPS I ask that you please deeply reconsider the configuration of these classrooms where lower elementary and upper elementary have their own spaces until we can be in a world where we have enough staff time and resources to move to a place of true inclusion.

Even in a world of true inclusion first graders would not be placed with fifth graders.

If we were taking general education students from K-1st 2nd 3rd 4th and 5th and combine them into classrooms across the board in a bunch of schools you can guarantee that parents with megahorns would be letting us hear about it.

However in this instance these children and some of these families on some days don't have the energy or time to come to a meeting like this.

I have worked at both the state and federal federal government levels.

This is also a career change for me.

I understand budgets.

However in both of these instances at Gatewood and at Cleveland one is budget neutral and the other is an investment in changing the course of lives for students who truly are in need.

The right thing to do is not always the easiest but by abiding to the others before self we exemplify true leadership.

And if we still tell the truth we cannot lose ourselves in this process.

But this is how we create sustain and better true community.

I believe each one of you makes our communities better and I'd like to thank you for your time.

The next speaker is Samantha Fogg.

Samantha Fogg.

My name is Samantha Fogg and I'm a parent in Seattle Public Schools and I am here to testify on the approval of Amendment to Board Policy 0010 Instructional Philosophy 2161 Special Education and 2162 Education of Students with Disabilities under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. All students have strengths and needs that must be met.

These strengths and needs and differences are what make learning communities vibrant.

Students working together learn that there are different ways to learn to communicate to be in community and to succeed.

In our existing system we segregate students based on the false idea that in order to meet the needs of students some students need to be together in general education and some students need to be elsewhere.

This was done with the best intentions but we now know that segregation causes harm diminishes our communities and worsens outcomes for all students both those removed from the general education classroom and those who have never been removed.

We say when we know better do better.

But it is also true that it is often hard to do better particularly when doing better requires systems change.

I want to thank Dr. Pedroza and Director Rankin for their leadership on this issue.

for looking broadly across policies and removing barriers to inclusion.

I leave you with my enthusiastic support for to quote from the updated language for 0010 quote environments where all students feel seen heard and welcomed in all schools and spaces including general education classrooms regardless of race gender ethnicity disability socioeconomic status religious affiliation LGBTQIA plus sexual orientation and gender identity primary language and any other identifier so that every student is fully included member of their community.

Thank you.

The final speaker on today's testimony list is Cliff Meyer.

Cliff Meyer.

Cliff Meyer you need to press star-6 to unmute if you're on the conference line.

Hello.

I am sorry not to be appearing in person but thank you for listening.

I'm very worried that the board is not spending adequate time overseeing critical areas of the district.

That the highly capable program plan appeared on today's consent agenda is demonstrative of a lack of judgment I think.

First of all the plan should not have been presented to this board at this late date.

It is a plan for 21-22.

It's not an end-of-year report.

The board needed to be aware of this and ask the staff to present this plan much earlier.

Second in the board action report this state-mandated plan is disrespected as being merely a technical step necessary to receive state funding.

Well maybe I'd agree if the district offered accurate and complete explanations of its identification process of highly capable students and also how it's providing the services that they need.

Instead for many families the past year has been one of confusion as the process was vaguely described and delayed to late in the year.

My third concern the errors that are in this plan that you earlier today approved.

Did you realize that it's actually saying that there is a highly capable program parent organization in our district.

The committee that is referred to is not a parent organization.

It's a committee run by staff and it does not have very much parent representation.

In fact about two thirds of the members are not parents and very few people actually attend its meetings at this point.

Have you read the definition of a highly capable student.

In this plan it actually doesn't define a student.

Have you taken a look at the fact that there is supposed to be a documented procedure for delivering services and identifying students.

It's normally called Superintendent's Procedure 2190. However the procedure that's on the website of the district is from 2016 and in no way reflects the realities of how the district is operating.

This is another example of why there was such confusion this year.

There is a lack of documentation that the state's laws require.

Will the state take any action on this.

No.

You're right.

This is a technical step.

The district will get its money and families will continue to feel that the district is not providing services and not being upfront with the way it handles highly capable services.

I urge you to look more closely next year if this plan approved in the beginning of the school year not the end and do your duty to the students who so desperately often need these services.

Thank you very much.

That was the final speaker on today's testimony list.

Thank you very much.

That concludes our public testimony for this meeting.

Thank you for your comments and your time spent with her excuse me here with us tonight.

We sincerely appreciate it.

We will now move to items on our action items agenda tonight.

Our first action item is selection of the school board student members.

May I have a motion for this item.

I move that the board select Luna Crone-Barron Nasira Hassan and Gia Lee Jenna Yuan as the three school board members for the 2022-23 school year.

Immediate action is in the best interest of the district.

Second.

This item has been moved by Vice President Hampson and seconded by Director Rivera-Smith.

This item is on the agenda for introduction and action today and did not move through committee.

As the sponsor I will speak to this item.

Today we have the honor of appointing three students to serve as school board student members in the 2022-23 school year.

This is a culmination of a process started last year led by the NAACP Youth Council former Director Pullen and myself with the passage of Board Policy 1250. We are incredibly grateful to the students that have led in this process from policy development to the selection committee and for contributing their time and their brilliance.

We are also grateful for and in awe of the exceptional students who stepped up to apply to serve as student members and we are thrilled to welcome our three finalists Luna Nasira and Jenna.

We will be voting on this item this evening to confirm their appointment as student members.

I'll now pass it over to our selection committee representatives Tuck Tuck Nguyen and Ryan Buenazade.

Did I pronounce that correctly.

Okay close.

Please correct me.

Thank you for your work and for joining us this evening.

Hi, everyone.

I'm here today with the selection committee.

About two months ago, we saw this opportunity as a chance to grow as a leader, meet different peers, and see the interesting ideas and perspectives our students across the district had.

So we all decided to embark on a long journey that was very new and came with a lot of hurdles.

We also had the opportunity to create something new at the district by designing the process for selecting applicants and including diverse student perspectives into every decision.

Despite our short deadlines, all of us ensured we put in our hard work and prioritized tasks.

Even though it sometimes meant putting hours into our weekends or cramming time we had at school, we stuck together as a team and showed true dedication.

As a team, we know all these seats are important because they give students a seat at the table and decisions that will eventually impact them.

By keeping the significance of these positions in mind, we were motivated and inspired as we envisioned the possibilities these students' impact have on the school board and on student voice on our district.

Thank you for that.

My name is Ryan Moynizad.

Our community or sorry our committee looks for the best fit candidates that are passionate equity focused and committed to community especially ones that had previous experience in leadership advocacy and knew how to both lead and represent the students in this district in a meaningful responsible and level-headed way.

The students that are being represented are just as important as the ones doing the representing.

And our final recommendation came after hours of thoughtful deliberation and application review.

We reviewed Seattle Excellence and Policy Number 1250 so we were aware of what we were working with and what we were looking for.

Our processes for selecting students were very meticulous in the sense that we had multiple gatherings to discuss and thoroughly review any external documents so we knew exactly what was expected not only by staff and district employees but also the 50,000 students across this district who deserve to be heard.

We also took anti-bias training to ensure that there was no advantage no advantage between the students throughout the selection process when and when making our final decisions.

As a selection committee we'd like to extend our gratitude to the board for their commitment to prioritizing student voice at decision making levels as well as for uplifting voices furthest from educational justice.

Part of creating an environment in schools where students feel welcome is creating a system that makes them feel heard.

By giving students positions on the board SPS has not only reaffirmed its commitments to our district when it comes to listening and learning from students but it has also enabled students to engage their peers with the common goal of improving our district.

Student voice was involved in every aspect of this selection process from the NAACP Youth Council's work in crafting the application to the students on this selection committee who reviewed application materials and conducted interviews.

We hope that both the board and Superintendent Jones continue to create more opportunities for student voice at the district level and allow students to be part of the processes that directly impact them.

I'd also like to give a quick shout out to Sabreen Ali one of my fellow committee members who was scheduled to testify but unable to attend this meeting due to an unexpected emergency.

At this time I'd like to yield to our first student board member finalist Luna Crone-Baron.

Thank you so much.

Hello.

Hold on let me move this up a little bit.

Hello.

My name is Luna Cromborone.

I use she her pronouns and I am a rising junior at the Center School here in Seattle Public School District.

I am also a queer trans Latina neurodivergent student here in Seattle Public Schools.

I am proud to not only bring my lived experiences and the unique needs of all my fellow students to action and to listen learn and take action on all the unique individual lived experiences of my peers in the school district.

I am also proud to be in the position to increase accountability of district officials in the creation of an anti-racist anti-ableist decolonized queer and trans-affirming community in our district.

I am thrilled to work with Nasira and Jenna as well as you school board members and Superintendent Jones.

Thank you.

Hello my name is Nasira Hassan and I am an upcoming senior at Chief Sealth International High School and I use she her pronouns.

I applied for this position because as a young woman of color I know how important it is to have diverse perspectives in decision making for our school system in order to help build a system that helps put Seattle Public students of all races all backgrounds and all beliefs on a pathway to success.

I'm excited for this position because being able to have student input on big decisions that impacts us as students within our district is so important as those decisions play a big role in our day-to-day life as students.

I'm also so excited to collaborate with my partners Luna and Jenna and students of our district to build a greater community and more positively impactful system for us all.

Hi everyone.

My name is Jenna Yuen and I'm a rising senior at Franklin High School.

I use she her pronouns.

I applied for this position because I know what it feels like to be unheard.

To clarify by unheard I don't mean ignored but more so the lack of courage to speak up.

I have always been on the quieter side so the people I surround myself with are also similar.

And I've noticed that when you don't advocate for yourself no one will.

So I want to take on this role to not only represent those who are afraid of speaking up but also to represent our entire student body and give every student a voice.

As for what I'm excited for I'm excited to work with the other two student members Luna and Asira and everyone here to put a mark on Seattle Public Schools and make it the best that it can be.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you all very much.

I mean this is just an incredibly proud moment for me and I know the rest of our board members.

When I first transitioned onto the board one of the biggest things that I heard time and time again was the lack of student voice at the tables that matter the most.

I would also be remiss if I did not give a huge shout out to Rita Mateja-Burr, who was one of the few folks who came together as this was just an idea, right?

And working very closely with former Director DeWolf and the amazing staff that we have here, Ms. Worth and many others.

This is something that we are not necessarily piloting, but just doesn't exist.

And you guys started from the beginning, wrote the policy, thought through all the hard questions, and now it's materializing in a way that I don't think a lot of us could have really adequately envisioned this moment until now it is here.

So you should be incredibly proud of yourselves.

Again, You should be incredibly proud of yourselves because you innovated.

You connected two things that were previously disconnected.

Us and true authentic consistent and meaningful student engagement.

So again I'm going to start crying up here if I keep talking.

Thank you for all of the work that y'all have put in.

It is nothing short of incredible.

So with that being said I will now go to directors If they have any comments or questions please know that we will also be taking a short recess so that we can meet our students.

So if you have any personal things stuff like that to say you are more than welcome to do it here but you will also have an opportunity to do that you know a little bit closer than from the dais that we are at right now.

So any questions from directors looking at the screen as well for our two that are joining remotely.

Any questions comments.

No no no specifically on this item.

Yeah.

I see your hand Director Harris.

Go ahead.

Welcome aboard.

I wish I was there to greet you in person.

My office had a COVID outbreak I was advised of at 4 p.m.

today.

You will work with some of the very best people on the planet.

You will stretch your minds.

You will stretch your capabilities.

And we really look forward to you joining us.

Cannot wait.

Thank you so very very much for stepping forward.

Go ahead Director Rivera-Smith.

Thank you.

Likewise I wish I was there to see you guys and be there for this moment tonight but definitely same.

I welcome you guys.

I'm so excited to start working together.

Hopefully we can find a time to connect after the meeting or not tonight after the meeting but sometime soon.

It'd be great to meet you all and to learn more about you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Go ahead Director Rankin.

I have actually a technical question on the item.

Yeah.

Because I do have the benefit of being here and getting to talk to them in a few moments.

Go for it.

I am wondering about kind of how the role how the structure and time will be organized if that's something that's going to develop organically between the board and the students or if we have a framework of kind of you know what the just kind of the functionality of.

Yeah.

The relationship and.

Absolutely.

Clear question.

I think you can go ahead Ms. Worthy you probably got a clearer answer than I do.

Thank you Director Rankin.

Julia Warth Director of Board Relations and Strategic Initiatives.

So to your question the the current structure in the policy is that each of the three members will serve on one of the committees for the board and then there will be a rotation of students that attend the regular board meetings.

So there will be one student assigned to each regular board meeting and then the other students may attend as well.

Given that the board is contemplating additional changes to the committee structure that may change in how the students participate in committees or you know which committees they're actually assigned to.

The other note I would make about the board director student member relationship is that the student members and board directors will have or board directors will serve as mentors to the student members.

And so that will be another structure for interaction.

My question really is related to to that just in terms of like shared expectations for for success for us and and for the students.

Because I could imagine a scenario where oh I thought you were doing that mentoring and I thought you were doing the thing and students going hey nobody's contacted us.

So I just kind of like trying to contextualize it for myself.

I think because I'm very, very, very enthusiastic and excited and can't wait to work with, with all of them.

But yeah, just in terms of like, and maybe I'm jumping ahead, but in kind of like foundational common expectations, understanding what's, you know, I think.

No, your question is clear.

And what I'll just offer is that You know there are some steps that need to happen first.

Right.

So there are some trainings that we're going to be participating in in the coming weeks specifically around because a lot of our board members outside of working with their own children have not worked directly with students before.

Right.

And so there are going to be some opportunities for us to do some level setting and some foundational work.

But then the idea of this while we did put some bones into the policy was we as people me being the youngest person on this board and somebody called me old the other day do not know exactly what the most efficient and effective relationship beside also what they need from us.

Right.

So we wanted to make sure that there was a lot of room for interpretation for us to really allow the students to help create whatever this program will be in terms of the mentorship piece right.

And as Ms. Worth said with the looming changes to many structures how our students fit in and where we can make sure that their voices are at top priority and some of those conversations will obviously change over time.

So I know that that is.

Not the most definite answer but I think that's a really good thing.

That's fine.

And I think it sounds like the expectation is that we would also be sort of in collaboration with students kind of building best practices as we go for future board directors and student members as well.

Would that be accurate.

Absolutely.

Great.

Excellent questions.

Thank you Ms. Worth.

You're good.

Any other questions.

Okay.

Director Rivera-Smith I see your hand is back up.

Go ahead.

Thank you.

I correct me if I'm wrong there Juliette but I thought I said it there in the the policy says that the committee chairs are the mentors.

And then it does also later say someone else could be a mentor too.

But I think it does explicitly say that committee chairs are the mentors.

But may you can correct me if that was that was either the BAR or the policy but I think it was the policy.

Yes and so pending any changes to the committee structure that part of the policy would need to be changed and so that's why it is still kind of TBD who will be serving as the mentors.

And I want to also be clear I see you Director Hampson is that Within the policy yes it says that the chairs are serving as the mentors right.

But all of us will have an opportunity to work directly with our students as they need us and as we see and identify opportunities to plug them in.

So yes that is what the policy says.

In practice it will not be limited just to the chairs of any particular committee and I want to make that very clear that this is an everybody thing right to the fullest extent of the policy.

So Director Hampson.

Welcome and thank you for your willingness to be the guinea.

First of all thank you to NAACP Youth Coalition for sticking with this all this time because that was a true labor of love among the many many other contributions that you all have made throughout the years.

And then the selection committee for putting all that time and effort in when you're not even going to serve is just It's phenomenal.

And your statements tonight were really heartfelt and well-received from from my perspective and I'm tremendously grateful because I know how much time that you had to put in and it was a lot.

And so you know I hope that You at least are able to craft that into a really nice statement for your resume and your college applications at minimum.

And we will do whatever we can to support you in that because it is so you serve such a critical role in working with staff to and Director Hersey President Hersey to make sure that this happened.

And and then I also want to apologize to you new directors that this is as unceremonious as it is right now and I mean we're this is an action item and we're going to vote on this.

And I wish it was a lot sexier because you deserve that.

And it's an improvement area for us.

And I know that you'll be part of that.

Because when we utilize time community time student time we need to do it in a way that really honors those contributions and this district and this board have not yet learned how to do that well.

And while we will be your mentors in many cases because we've been grinding away at this some of us for a few years and but really we have not been doing this all that long.

So we are learning together and we are doing our very best to adhere to best practices and there are tremendous resources both from the Washington State School Directors Association because there's districts that are way ahead of us on student representation.

So you have really great partners out there in the state of Washington who are serving on their school boards.

And then there are also opportunities nationally through Council of Great City Schools because they do they have specialized programs that we would want to get you set up with.

So that you can start meeting students from around the country who are serving particularly in urban school districts which is important because we're about as urban as it gets in the state of Washington.

So and in addition to that because I always want to give people homework is I have a reading list I'm going to ask Julia to give you so that if you want to do some reading about good governance because that's ultimately what the skill that you're going to learn here and it's going to serve you so well for the rest of your lives and you'll be such good contributors to your communities from here on out.

And I just cannot wait to work with you all.

Thank you.

All right let's go.

So any other questions comments before we move to the vote.

All right.

Is it going to be quick.

I hope you stay because I have some comments during the board director comments that I want you to hear.

All right.

Was that quick enough.

That is very quick.

Good job.

Okay.

So Miss Wilson-Jones a roll call please.

Director Rivera-Smith.

Aye.

Director Sarju.

Duly positively yes.

Director Song-Moretz aye.

Vice President Hampson aye.

Director Harris aye.

Director Rankin aye for myself and for former Director DeWolf.

President Hersey proudly proudly proudly proudly aye.

This motion has passed unanimously.

Yes.

Now Superintendent doesn't have a vote but I say aye as well.

And we will have a ceremony for you to make sure we honor this this work.

And this is a monumental opportunity.

I want to say thank you to everyone for being great process stewards to get us to today.

And I want to say thank you in advance for your for your creativity for your authenticity for your focus for your strategy for all the great things you're going to bring to this to this district.

So thank you.

All right so to give our directors an opportunity to meet and visit with our new board members we are going to take a brief 10-minute recess.

And so we will be back at 727 p.m.

Thank you very much.

I don't think...

This item is on the agenda for introduction and action today and did not move through committee as a sponsor I'll speak to this item.

In alignment with the new governance structure I am recommending updates to the previously approved and amended evaluative criteria for the superintendent's performance.

When we approved the original superintendent evaluation documentation in November and amended in and amended them in February we had just begun our implementation of this new governance model.

Since that time we've engaged in coaching and other professional development and we are now in place where we can more clearly discern the roles and responsibilities of the board and the superintendent under the Student Outcomes Focused Governance Model.

In recognition of that progress I am proposing updates to the evaluation criteria that will more accurately reflect the superintendent's responsibilities with three performance goals representing year zero of our implementation monitoring and accountability.

Interim Goals and Guardrails and Implementation.

Okay.

Now to directors for any comments or questions on the item and we will begin.

Feel free to raise your hand either in person or virtually.

All right.

Oh you almost missed it Leslie.

Go ahead.

You're on mute too.

You're killing me.

I'm sorry I had to take an emergency phone call on the COVID office situation.

I vote yes for our student members.

With respect to this action item I believe that I have been quoted a couple of times now saying surviving is winning to the superintendent with respect to his amended goals.

I have often been times been a bit of a pita about some of these checkmark issues.

And I really believe that if we give each other grace given this last year and if we work together it's fine by me.

And I appreciate that some people might be surprised by that perspective.

But you know what we're doing the best we can and we're all working together and I'm okay with it.

And they've been explained to me in executive session and my questions have been answered.

And obviously I can't talk about executive session so this frankly is a trust exercise.

And and and I'll stop there.

But you know these are very interesting times and not the one of us signed up for them.

Thank you very much.

And Dr. Jones I hope you blow each of these goals the heck out of the water.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Thank you Director Harris.

Any other questions on this item.

All right.

Seeing none.

Ms. Wilson-Jones a roll call please.

Director Sargeant Yes.

Director Song-Moretz Aye.

Vice President Hampson aye Director Harris aye Director Rankin aye Director Rivera-Smith aye President Hersey aye.

This motion is passed unanimously.

Thank you directors.

We will now reconvene our introduction items.

I have my agenda right here.

Give me a moment.

I believe we left off on item number 6. So item number 6. Acceptance of the Seattle University grant funding for the 2022-23 school year for the Central and South Seattle School and Neighborhood Network.

All right.

Good afternoon board directors.

I'm James Bush the Assistant Superintendent Equity Partnerships and Engagement here with Cashel Toner.

Hi good evening I'm Cashel Toner Executive Director for Curriculum Assessment and Instruction.

So as shared at the most recent C&I Committee this Board Action Report is for the funding to continue the work of the Learning for Equity Network the network.

The partnership with Seattle University's Sundborg Center for Community Engagement that staffs principals and families at seven schools in Central and South Seattle supported by SPS staff from the math department and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in the amount of $350,000.

This is the final year of a three-year grant originally approved by the board to support five elementary schools in 2021. In 2022-2023 the grant will provide central office and family engagement support to six schools Bailey Gatzert John Muir Leschi Lowell Thurgood Marshall and Rising Star.

The goal of the network is to support the culturally sustainable math instruction Increase positive teacher family communication around math and align efforts with adoption of the EnVision curriculum.

The focus of this initiative aims to use the lens of culturally responsive instruction where teachers are coached to 1 attend to students identities and social emotional growth and 2 engage in learning activities and opportunities that are relevant to how they learn.

This important work can be accomplished by the deep partnerships between EPE Equity Partnerships and Engagement and Curriculum and Instruction.

And thank you Cashel for your partnership.

Gates Foundation.

Seattle University Center for Engagement.

SPS Rivka Burstein-Stern.

Alyssa Farmer.

Sarah Perez-Hamilton.

And a variety of other people that have supported the work through the last few years.

A lot of great work has happened.

Any question.

Any questions.

Director Rankin.

I just wanted to note as SSC&I Chair that this is for consideration not because there were issues in committee but because I requested that we move it forward and hear from Chief Director Bush Dr. Assistant Superintendent James.

Or J.B.

or.

Superintendent James Bush as a as a full board since this is a recurring item.

We were given the chance to review the documents but rather than spend time discussing in committee asked us to come here for presentation to the full board.

So that's why the consideration.

Thanks.

Great.

Thank you.

Any other questions from directors.

Seeing none.

Thank you both.

Thank you.

Yep.

No problem.

All right.

Moving on to Item Number 7. Annual Renewal of the Head Start Grant.

Approval of oh I actually don't need to read that part.

Do I need to read that part.

Do I need to read the whole thing.

No I didn't think so.

All right.

Ms.

Toner.

Good evening.

Cashel Toner Executive Director for Curriculum Assessment and Instruction.

I'm happy to introduce this item to you.

This board action report if approved would support the renewal of the annual Head Start Grant to provide programs and services in 18 preschool classrooms across the district for the 22-23 school years.

In alignment with a strategic plan in Seattle Excellence early learning's priorities include ensuring a safe warm and high quality early learning environments that develop our students' talent identity voice joy and agency.

The program seeks to ensure that students furthest from educational justice specifically African-American boys are kindergarten ready.

We accomplish this through creating individualized goals Talent Development Plans Asset-Based Instruction and Culturally Responsive Family and Student Engagement.

This grant is about I don't know $5.5 million and it's a federal Head Start grant.

And this is an annual activity that we come to the board and ask for approval.

So with that I'll pause for questions.

Miss Toner.

Any questions on this item.

Does somebody else have their microphone on or is it just me.

We really need that new system.

Okay.

Any questions on this item.

I see Director Rivera-Smith.

Yay Head Start.

Go ahead Lisa.

Yes definitely.

Yay Head Start.

That's all I really want to say.

Because I'm always excited for us to be renewing our our funding our commitment to the program that I have the pleasure of meeting with I'm the leaders of monthly and I appreciate Kashaw Heather Brown all the work you guys do and all the staff's work.

I again I don't have any major questions just just want to thank you guys for everything you do.

I hope that we can work towards truly you know finding finding ways we can fold our Head Start and our preschool as a whole into our district.

I know we're a K-12 but.

We have a lot of preschoolers who we definitely need to invest in so they can be successful K-12ers.

And part of that's even like aligning bell times right.

There's all sorts of things we can do and I wish hope we can see us work towards those.

And thank you.

Other questions or comments.

Thank you Director Rivera-Smith.

Okay.

We will now move on to item number 8. Approval of the University of Washington Experimental Education Unit EEU Interagency Agreement to provide special education services to students with individualized education plans or IEP's ages 3 to 6. Okay.

Take it away.

This one's mine as well.

So good evening directors.

I'm pleased to present this item for introduction to you and to our community.

As shared at the June 7th Student Supports and Curriculum and Instruction Committee meeting This board action report if approved would support the yearly renewal of the University of Washington Experimental Education Unit EEU and Seattle Public Schools Interagency Agreement and Professional Development Contract totaling about 1.4 million dollars.

This interagency agreement and contract will provide inclusive programming for 17 kindergarteners and 30 preschoolers at the EEU.

As many of you know the EEU has been a longstanding partner of Seattle Public Schools assisting with creating and implementing our inclusive preschool programming throughout professional development and in support of our programming.

We are fortunate to learn from this national leader in early childhood interventions for students with and without disabilities.

The partnership with EEU has enabled the district to increase our offerings of inclusive programming replicating those same services that you see at EEU across the district.

With that I'll pause and answer any questions.

Thank you.

Do directors have any questions.

Are you motioning towards your microphone because you have a question.

Go ahead Director Rank.

Yeah I just want to note again this is for consideration instead of approval not because we didn't approve of it as a committee but because we didn't we chose to move the time to the full board.

instead of in discussion in committee.

I do have a question that I'm happy to take offline.

That's one of those things I've been meaning to ask and I kind of keep forgetting about it which is about the admissions process and how it has changed from years past to a lottery system instead of it used to be it used to be that the special education team early learning and EEU would sit together and look at all the eligible students and kind of make a determination of best fit for programming.

And now it's an open lottery and my understanding is that because of that change it's actually less racially diverse and less draws a less diverse pool from across the city because it does sort of Like on the one hand you could think like well it's the lottery.

It's open to everybody.

Everybody has a chance.

But you have to know to apply for it and know that it exists and all of these things.

So it's not going to interfere with my vote on this item when it comes up for action.

But it's something I really would like to take another look at or have staff consider about the placement.

And I also wonder how you know potential future changes to our overall thoughts around inclusion might impact that as well.

So there may be other changes coming but it is something I wanted to note that I think is worth taking another look at.

Director Rankin.

I see Director Harris.

Thank you.

I am as big a fan of the EEU as I can be.

I also am wondering about how we are replicating our own services based on the model of the EEOEU and I'm wondering if at some point we could bring in Dr. Schwartz Eileen Schwartz who is is a rock star countrywide for these practices.

But I am hearing from some special ed practitioners that we are not doing PD with EEU etc.

And I'm I'm I'm wondering about that and I'd like a little more information if I can.

Will I vote for this.

I will every time it comes up.

No question about it.

But if the idea is to do targeted universalism and the idea is to replicate then then I hope we have a little deeper discussion.

Thank you very much.

Do you have anything you'd like to say to that Ms.

Stoner.

Yeah sure.

We can add we can provide a more comprehensive response to the full board if that would be helpful.

There's a lot of context and nuance to what Director Harris is asking.

In summary we do have professional development.

That's what this grant funds is professional development from the EEU to Seattle Public Schools.

That's on a limited basis though so there might be a perception or some feedback that that's not you know as large as some folks might like it to be.

We can also talk about the replication of EEU services into SPS but that might take a little bit more time than we have tonight.

So I'd be happy to provide a written response and send it your way.

Does that satisfy Director Harris.

That works for me as long as it's sent to the whole board at the same time and we make it publicly available.

You betcha.

Thanks very much Dr. Toner.

Thanks.

Right on.

Thank you.

Okay.

Moving on to action item number 9. Review and approval of the 2022-23 school year career and technical education CTE plan per board policy 2170. Mr. Perkins take it away.

Thank you very much.

President Hersey.

Caleb Perkins Executive Director for College Career Readiness.

I'm excited to present to you to the BAR for the CTE plan.

Improving our students access to career-connected learning and helping students explore and prepare for careers in high demand high interest high wage areas.

In fact this is my fifth year presenting the CTE plan BAR to the board and I've never been more excited for a number of reasons.

Number one the board's focus on student student outcomes focused governance and the connection to CTE work.

Number two the connection between our CCR goal and the CCR work and in particular the leadership of Brian Day our new CTE and STEM director given his track record in Everett and his Emerging track record here in Seattle.

His commitment to the targeted universalist approach and our work supporting our African-American male students in these areas.

I'll just highlight briefly the plan.

The plan is quite detailed but I'll just highlight a few things.

One the very explicit connection between the Office of African-American Male Achievement and CTE which we're trying to make more explicit.

In particular in the connection to access to internships we're looking to dramatically expand the number of opportunities students have to engage in work-based learning.

And have already started that with partners like Amazon over the summer.

We have also added to the report a heat map of each school to show what progress we're making and where we need to make additional steps and provide better support centrally which Mr. Day is leading.

And we're developing a more easy to use process for partners to engage with Seattle Public Schools in NCTE.

In terms of equity Mr. Day has also with his team provided specific analysis around over and under enrollment to really make sure our pathways match our students' interest and we're ensuring that there's equitable access across all of our pathways.

During the SSC&I presentation I appreciated the strong support that was shared by the committee And the recommendation to make sure we engage in our with our labor partners in particular.

Thank you Director Harris.

And then also that we update our chart to make sure we include our middle schools and our K-8's that a number of members brought which we have done for the introduction.

And with that I'll take your questions.

Thank you very much.

Do we have any questions on this item.

Go ahead Director Rankin.

Where did we find Brian Day and how do we make sure that he wants to stay at SPS.

He was he's had a 20 plus year career in Everett and impressive track record of doing work in Career Connected Learning there.

Thanks to Dr. Scarlett and many others including Dr. Jones.

I think he's enjoying the challenge here so.

He he has come up in conversations at graduations I attended.

I went to the alumni open house for the radio station for C89.5 at Nathan Hale.

And the director there talked about that he had already been working on you know increase.

I just was like he just got here.

How did he do that already.

So yeah we did discuss this in committee and recommended it for approval and we're really excited about the possibilities and also very appreciative of the way that the data was shared like the heat map and It's getting it's getting clearer and easier to see really what we have and where it is and super super helpful.

So thanks for that work.

Thank you.

Any other questions or comments.

All right.

Thank you very much.

Moving on to item number 10. Approval of assessment tool for progress monitoring and continuous improvement in literacy and math.

Take it away.

Hello again.

I'm here to introduce this BAR asking the board for approval to require the use of the math assessments and literacy for grades K-5 and in math grades K-8 for the 22-23 school year.

This BAR is informed specifically by Policy 20-80 which is our board policy on assessment in a couple of very specific ways.

One as you'll see in the engagement section this was connected to our joint assessment steering committee which included SEA leadership and we shared the direct feedback on the various plans for next year's assessments with our SSE&I committee based on that committee including the SEA's input.

Secondly the policy requires that we come before the board and ask for approval of any new district required assessments which is true for these two K-5 literacy and K-8 math.

We want to just highlight four main reasons for asking for this approval.

First and foremost we want to continue the student outcomes focused governance work and respond to the board's call to have interim measures for progress monitoring for our third grade reading goal and seventh grade math goal.

In fact as you may recall we discussed this during the May 11th board work session on interim measures.

Second we want to provide school leaders and educators with tools that they need and want and ask for.

Third in the area of literacy we're glad to share that this approach will actually reduce the amount of instructional time needed for testing in the area of literacy and provide a more reliable assessment than what we currently use.

And finally we want to note we do see this as a transition plan.

that we're transitioning to a better approach for assessment in 23-24 which will take time.

As you have met our Director of Assessment and Structural Improvement Eric Jackson is convening a cross-team effort to really try to rethink the future of assessment to ensure it's as culturally responsive and meets up with our goals and our guardrails.

Unfortunately this BAR was not fully routed for the June 7th SSC&I Committee but that said there was a lengthy discussion on the item as well as assessment in general.

And I just wanted to share that my summary of what we heard was the committee's general support for this BAR itself.

That there was an effort to send this ahead of time and ask for questions and that we have made a commitment to have a future conversation more deeply about assessment that I believe was alluded to earlier this meeting.

So with that we're grateful and we hope that the conversation tonight can be focused on the specifics of this BAR.

Thank you.

And that'll take your questions.

Director Perkins or Dr. Perkins adequately or more than adequately summed up for the conversation that we had in committee.

But yes it's not for approval or consideration because we discussed it as a special attention item and indicated support of moving it moving it to the board even though the BAR wasn't quite ready.

My only question is well I have a few questions but I know that they are tactical in implementation.

So mainly I think.

You know what I've heard from educators in the past and what I know as a parent too is that if we have to have assessments MAP seems to be one of the ones that's the most useful.

You get fairly quick access to results.

It's aligned to what's being taught.

So it's helpful feedback for educators and for us as a district.

So a couple of questions that don't necessarily have to be answered that go to you know speaking about assessment in the future is.

Would this you know because this is aligned to state standards would the state ever is there conversation or would the state consider eliminating the SBAC and using MAP so that we can reduce the number of assessments and and make them very useful to our educators.

So that's you don't have to answer that right now.

And then the other tactical or implementation question is about time like the shift in time and resources about managing the technology because I know that this is on on laptops which we have the one-to-one devices but a lot of schools you know the librarian might be the one kind of managing the use of technology.

So I'm wondering about expectations for educators and how that's clear across you know who's kind of responsible for for this change and this added thing.

That you know overall the time spent eliminating other assessments like Fontas and Pinnell which is not culturally responsive or or a particularly useful tool for educators.

So I'm glad to see that going by the wayside.

But I'm and this is again this is a labor conversation really and a school-based conversation but I do want to.

at some point try to better understand just to make sure that this is something that's practicable that we have that we're not just saying oh we're not doing this anymore we're doing this but that we know who's responsible who's accountable and how we communicate getting it out to all of the buildings in a way that's useful.

Was there a question in there.

Well they can be answered another time.

Okay.

I don't need them to be answered for this specific item.

All good.

All good.

Just trying to make sure that I was tracking.

Director Harris.

Thank you.

I am particularly curious about your transition statement and that we've got cross-working groups together.

My question to you Dr. Perkins is how are we in fact incorporating families And boots on the ground teachers and parents into the whole testing question.

As we I think all could agree testing is a very polarized issue.

It is a Betsy DeVos issue.

And my question is is how are we sending that that that information into the into the stratosphere here.

Or are we holding it tight to ourselves in the John Stanford Center and folks don't know what's going on least of all us.

Help.

Thank you.

I appreciate the question and I would just say that we agree that students and families need to be centered to this conversation.

This is what you know the data needs to be useful for students and families and that's where we're Continuing to rely on things like Our Voice Our Vision the most recent report from the Office of African-American Male Achievement that Director Jackson is definitely consider consulting and considering.

We are working with Dr. Kinoshita as you might recall in also thinking about family and community engagement on this piece.

I would love to share more as we shared at the at the committee meeting.

We'd love to have a longer conversation with the board about the role of assessment.

What actually gets to Director Rankin's point about what is the relationship between SBAC This is something that is important to think about how these all connect.

Because it is — excuse me I'm sorry I don't mean to interrupt you but if I were to go on the web and our website right now what would I find in terms of bringing all those extraordinarily important strands and huge lifts on our staff together.

Would I find something that would bring it together.

Our playbook has a robust assessment page particularly for our educators.

I think in terms of family facing that's something that I need to follow up on.

Appreciate your listening.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Okay.

Moving on to item number 11. Approval of Amendment to Board Policy 0010 Instructional Philosophy.

2161 Special Education and 2162 Education of Students with Disabilities under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Ms. Pedroza take it away.

It's still on.

Great.

So I'm actually very proud to be here standing in front of all of you.

And I also want to share that I'm excited to present this.

Can you hold it just a second.

I just want to get the right one.

I think there's 8 or 9 bars that my team had tonight so I thank you for your patience.

It's a it's a it's a I just want to make sure first because I have some acknowledgement that I want to acknowledge first.

So I just first want to acknowledge Dr. Director Rankin's partnership in all of this.

When I became the Chief of Student Support Services over what two and a half years ago three years ago something like that.

We've been talking about this for a long time and lots of conversations around how do we get here.

How do we get here.

How do we get here.

So I want to acknowledge those conversations.

I also want to acknowledge the conversations with Seattle Council PTSA special education PTSA families of color communities groups.

And then also I also want to acknowledge our staff.

Our staff have been doing deep dives around this work really thinking about all the intersectionality where these these policies intersect with our work in central office.

So I just want to make sure I acknowledge that these are conversations been happening a long time and we are finally here.

The second thing I want to state and when we talk about these policy revisions and I'll pass it on to Director Rankin is that this is not just about special education.

This is a general education initiative.

And I'll say that again.

This is a general education initiative that actually requires instructional and systemic and operational shifts in our system.

So that is a really important piece and it's multi-layered and as we all know this is going to take several years for us to move these shifts in the right way.

So I want to acknowledge that too that this is going to be work.

We have the policy development but there has to be work in lots of areas in the system instructionally operationally to ensure that we continue to improve these processes processes for our students.

I also want to just also give a big shout out to the schools that are already doing this.

We have a lot of schools that are already doing this well and they've been actually some of the people that I've had conversations with some of the star mentors the ones leading co-teaching development some of our SEA folks who've been on the task force.

I also want to acknowledge the SEA task force group that's talking about inclusion in that work as well and the special education task force group along with the district and Also want to thank Dr. Torres for his leadership his co-leadership and development of some key thinking around what does inclusion really look like in our system.

And then I'm just going to personally shout out to two teachers that I love personally Ms. Godanski and Mr. Linney.

So it's the teachers like that that continue to push on inclusion practices in our schools.

And I just think it's really important.

We have so many we've highlighted them in the news brief.

If you haven't checked our news brief There's so many amazing teachers that are really focusing and doing inclusion at Rainier Beach.

We profiled Rainier Beach.

We profiled other schools in our district.

And I just think this is the right thing and the right work we should be doing.

And so with that I'm going to pass it on to Director Rankin because I'm sure she has a few thoughts and wants to share some things as well and then we'll move on to the policy conversation with the entire board.

Thank you.

Thank you Dr. Pedroza.

I don't want to take too much time but I I want to share my immense gratitude to Dr. Pedroza Dr. Torres and Dr. Scarlett for for the first time and Dr. Jones under his leadership for for the first time connecting student services and curriculum and special education that there's there's that it is being seen as a general education initiative.

It's not about it's not the way that it's the way that it's been is is the idea that some students can only be can only learn with some teachers in some places.

And this is really saying this is really rejecting that and saying no.

And.

As you will have read in the BAR and in the policy changes itself there isn't there are not new ideas in this.

This isn't a thing that Concie and Liza just thought of.

This is something that's happening other places and for whatever reason inertia habit contract who knows we have kind of forced a system that has reinforced exclusion instead of inclusion.

Even for people who are trying very hard to be more inclusive there will be systemic barriers that get run up against or the support's not there.

And so my hope with this policy change is again it's not we're not bringing a new idea.

The idea of universal design targeted universalism culturally responsive inclusive is something that we have been talking about as a board and a district and prioritizing and other policy changes and you can see it in our goals and guardrails and the data that we expect to see.

And what's important to me about putting it in our instructional philosophy Instead of like well maybe some of it exists other places in goals and guardrails but those are time limited and so is the strategic plan.

And I think that if we are listening to what community has been begging for for a long long time it's to put this in a place that will live beyond the time limited goals and guardrails and and really say that like this is This is not opt-in.

This is what every this is where we're headed.

This is what we want for the kids in our system and in our communities.

And so I sent the draft speaking of the EEU it's a place that is near and dear to many of our hearts myself very much included.

The first time I walked into the EEU as a parent the smell of the building brought me right back to childhood me going in there with my dad who was a psychologist.

And I hadn't particularly remembered I'd been in the building before but the something about the smell of the building reminded me that I've been going into that part of that community for 40 plus years.

So as as a parent of two children who benefited from that program and as a school board director it feels like an obligation a responsibility to do better for all of our kids.

And it's it's also it's not actually about being groundbreaking earth shattering.

We're actually as a state quite behind where a lot of other states and school districts are in terms of how they provide education to students.

And we can see through our data that that the disproportionality that exists in our least inclusive environment is specifically the most impactful for students of color especially our Black and Native students.

And so this is not this is again not just about general not just about special education.

It's about accepting and teaching all students for who they are and the expectation that they're all everybody's students.

Nobody belongs in a room down the hall.

and isn't part of a community.

So I sent this to the EEU principal and Dr. Eileen Schwartz who was mentioned earlier who again I've known since I was about this tall and just wanted to really briefly read from Principal Matsumoto.

He said as a parent of two children in Seattle schools I want to thank you for your commitment to equity and inclusion.

I feel very proud to have my children in a district where you all are truly planning the path for change.

He says he is so impressed and hopeful and he's fully willing to support our effort any way that he can.

And then Eileen Schwartz says it is exciting to think of all the changes in the lives of children and families that will happen because of this change.

Please know that we are behind you and we're here to help in any way that we can.

So thank you again.

And then on a technical side I think that the policy change that have been proposed can get more focused and more connected to some of our the goals and guardrails and things.

And I've I'm in communication with A.J.

Cravehill about supporting supporting me and making some edits between now and action.

And so I'm happy to take any feedback or and or let you all know as soon as there have been changes made.

Again it's no no no major changes but just to really refine the language and make it very much focused on this instructional philosophy and try to get it just yeah clear.