missing title

There we go, it's 4.30.

Ah, this is Gina Topp.

I am now calling the board special meeting to order at 4.30 p.m.

Please note that this meeting is being recorded.

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

For the record, I'll call the roll Vice President Briggs.

Here.

Director Lavallee.

Here.

Director Mizrahi.

Present.

Director Rankin will be here in about 10 minutes.

Director Smith?

Here.

Director Song?

Here.

And this is President Topp.

So we've got two sections of our work session this evening.

The first is a federal response update and the second is our budget update.

Just three sort of housekeeping items.

Just a few reminders, two of them on our upcoming retreat.

on February 7th.

First, I'm glad we moved it off of February 8th, since that is Super Bowl Sunday.

But a few reminders to directors.

You should have gotten an email with a self-assessment to take.

You should have received it yesterday.

It is due Friday, so the turnaround time is really it'll take about 15 to 20 minutes to complete this self-assessment and this will be used by we'll have the executive director of WASDA they'll compile a report for us really helping to start shape the conversation on sort of the board goals for the year so does anyone have a question about that self-assessment Awesome.

Again, due this Friday.

The other one is an email was sent out from staff.

Please send any questions or comments on the policy 1240 and committee charters to Julia by Wednesday, February 4th.

So that gives us enough time to collect them all before our retreat.

and then the last thing is in our regular board meeting for January, I said that the student assignment transition plan would be introduction and action in February, that is incorrect, it's gonna be introduced in February, voted on in March, so just so folks are aware.

but with that I don't know exactly who I'm handing it off to here.

Superintendent Podesta will start with the federal response update.

Thank you President Taub and thank you also for adding this item to the agenda.

We know there's a lot of interest in this topic as a result of national and local events.

We do want to start a bit more generally with some of the recent interest relates to immigration enforcement but There have been many issues for the district to respond to since the current administration was inaugurated last year, so we want to just give you some background.

I think it's good for the board to know.

I really want to thank our public affairs team who has been leading this work in a cross-disciplinary fashion across the district because it involves many players.

And so we've created a federal response team early last year that included all the departments.

are Julia Worth, who has been doing a great job.

As you know, I'll work with her closely, know how capable she is in really facilitating those conversations and gathering all these departments.

Give Julia a chance to talk about that experience or anything you want to add?

So as Superintendent Podesta mentioned, this team was convened in the winter of 2025 to respond to shifts in the federal landscape, whether it be funding, legal changes, or any other changes that may impact the district.

And the purpose is to really organize our district responses, communicate regularly to staff, and then as needed to the broader community.

And we've set up a couple of infrastructure pieces internally in the district.

Staff have access to a fed response at seattleschools.org where they can submit questions, comments, or to elevate anything that they are hearing that may impact their school students or programs.

The team is made up of almost every division in central office and then also includes individuals from departments that may be particularly impacted by changes at the federal level.

So you'll see health education, special education, grants and partnerships up here as well.

As Superintendent Podesta mentioned, there's a number of areas that we are monitoring shifts in, so federal funding.

This includes changes to title funding under the Elementary Secondary Education Act, so that would be your Title I, Title II, Title III, but also other grants.

We get grants from the CDC, and other federal agencies, so monitoring changes in grant requirements, how we can spend those funds as well.

Also monitoring Title IX, so this has to do with gender equity, gender equality, and there's been a number of different lawsuits in this area, IDEA, Head Start, immigration, which we'll get into in more detail, civil rights enforcement, and then the role of our Federal Department of Education, which is shifting and some of those responsibilities are shifting to other agencies.

So just kind of broad strokes of what the team does, evaluating federal actions that may impact our district operations and our students.

And we evaluate that by looking at student impact, so what may change about a student's academic experience or the learning environment.

We also evaluate any responses when we develop our district responses we evaluate any alignment with our values to make sure that we are continuing to adhere to the values of SPS as articulated by the board in our goals and guardrails and our mission and vision.

Also looking at what the potential equity impacts of any change in course or or staying the course may have, looking at legal compliance and any risk to funding or other system impacts.

So all of that goes into what the district response to a federal action or shift may be, and then the team also works through the communication strategy.

So how are we communicating this back out to school staff, to school leaders, to the board, to the broader community, as needed and as these shifts occur.

Any questions at this point just about general overall federal response and then we'll get more into immigration enforcement.

Great.

So our community, all of us are watching with justifiable great concern, things we're seeing in other communities with respect to immigration enforcement.

We had an event last week that we discussed in the last board meeting and at that time I said we need to commit to supporting school leaders better, staff have worked hard on getting that done and we'll talk about that and then also what existed beforehand.

So again as part of forming this team last winter we revised our superintendent procedure related to policy 4310 which relates to how we interact with law enforcement to make sure there was particular language related to immigration enforcement that appears at our schools.

I think we've given very clear guidelines to schools about how to deal with those issues.

We let the community know that we had done that at that time.

Developed more resources for staff to kind of understand how that works.

That is very clear that that if immigration enforcement appears on our campuses, that school leaders are denying access, that nothing moves forward without a judicial warrant, and advice from our general counsel's office, which is not dissimilar for how we handle law enforcement in general, but we really wanted to put a fine point on it with regard to immigration enforcement know that our school leaders understand it, know that their teams understand it, and that the community understands it.

We had training at that time.

We've communicated a couple times to families about this, but we still get questions, so it's clear we need to do more.

We've been in coordination with our city partners, because beyond just enforcement, there are many questions about access to resources and referrals.

and so we've been working with the city on how they can help us with that and other partners since they have connections that we don't and there was meeting a couple weeks ago about that particular issue.

We met with mayor's office today because I had contacted them after we because of unsubstantiated concerns about immigration enforcement last week.

We talked to the mayor's office and said, can you help us figure out how to get information about rumors because we've long had pretty good relationships with other law enforcement agencies that we kind of know what's going on.

We don't have those kind of contacts with federal agencies in all cases, although we've had in the past for some things, but certainly not.

the Border Patrol or Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

And neither do our local law enforcement agencies.

So we're kind of living in different worlds.

So we've talked about the mayor's office today.

We talked to the police last week.

And while they're clear that they don't get advance notice, it's not necessarily a collaborative relationship, they usually know what's going on because they're in the field.

SPD and other agencies have a lot of situational awareness.

So we're making commitments to partner with them on these issues.

Mayor is working to stand up a weekly check in on these issues that we'll be a part of with other agencies.

We also had representation with the county, the county exec hosted a round table yesterday on some of these issues and we were represented there We'll work with them as well.

The city was there.

The city attorney was there.

So we're really trying to make sure that we have good partnerships with anyone who can help us get facts on these issues.

We revised our web presence on this just to advise the community that I think we just made that revision yesterday.

or today, so there's some new information that we posted, there's a link in this connection, but we'll get it to you as well.

And I've also updated guidance to school leaders about, we've been really clear about what to do if law enforcement agencies show up on your campus, what you do when you're hearing about law enforcement in the area, immigration enforcement, we were less clear about, and so we think we need a more unified, systemic response than a building by building response, which we do in many other cases, and it serves us well.

Again, in most other circumstances, people have facts to work with so we're trying to find ways to support getting facts into our process so we can make a more coordinated decision.

So after this meeting and some work we need to do now, this is in translation now, we will also update the community on the process changes we've made as a result of learning things last week and we're doing some training with school leaders this Friday.

they have the guidance we want to have a discussion with them as well on Friday and then we know it's not just school leaders you know their admin teams and others you know a lot of people particularly when things are circulating social media, or otherwise, the whole school community, our whole district community knows things, so we need to find better ways to train more staff on this, so that is still in the planning stages, how to make sure everybody knows what they need to know, when they need to know it.

and we have these circumstances with other things, monthly drills, we even have other tests.

I think in this case we want to be thoughtful about making sure people know what they need to know versus making people feel like this is a credible threat of something that is going to happen because there really hasn't been contact with this kind of enforcement in our system or in many districts.

Everyone's really heightened sense of awareness sometimes works in our favor, sometimes it can create a lot of concern and anxiety and perhaps can run counter to our message that school is the safest place to be.

If we're a little bit too heavy handed in talking about the threat of this, are people gonna wonder if school is the safest place to be?

So we really, again, we need more facts.

But the whole discussion is kind of traumatic, so we need to figure out how to support families, support students, and then we're getting lots of requests for supports if families are facing their own circumstances, and that's something we're not exactly set up to do, so that's why we wanna work with partners on what can we do to connect people to resources.

again and so that's why partnerships are critically important both of the city and the city's office of immigrant refugee affairs and the police department for situational awareness.

The Puget Sound ESD is also convening districts and so participate with that.

I mentioned that the county executive has also raised a forum and will participate.

We have many community organizations that have offered to help us and are providing resources to schools.

I think we want to catalog that and inventory a little bit better and just get coordinated on who's doing what.

Our labor partners are working on this as well.

And we're working with our contractors.

We've gotten this question several times about yellow school buses.

Both our providers have a protocol that mirrors ours about we're treating access to a bus the same way we're treating access to our buildings.

I think we have continued work to do with program providers that work out of our buildings and other people that rent our spaces.

How do we make sure that they have the resources, they know the district's stance and they at least understand our procedures and understand what their procedures might be.

So, with regard to protocols, well actually, Rocky, you're working with school leaders on this, do you wanna walk through this?

Because the schools division, this is really about issues that are happening in school buildings, so I'll ask Dr. Torres Morales to talk through how we expect this procedure to work.

Thank you.

Good evening, Board Directors.

So this is the portion of the guidance that Superintendent Podesta was referring to that's an update to the original guidance because we had pretty solid information on what happens if someone actually shows up to the building.

One of the issues we're butting up against, and I think many school districts are, is what happens if there are things potentially going on in the neighborhood?

And so that's where, as staff, we came up with this protocol.

So we will be meeting with school leaders on this on Friday to go over this new portion of guidance and also intake questions that they may have.

Some will be able to answer in the moment, some we may not, but be able to at least do an intake.

they've heard a lot from their communities.

But essentially what we're saying is one, notify.

So any staff member observing or receiving a report of immigration enforcement activity near a school on a school day should immediately make a timely report to safety and security and inform the principal.

So this is this is going to be for any staff member I would say even if you're a family member at home and you're hearing it call into the school district call into safety security they have connections with SPD they can do a lot of things to get boots on the ground for us to figure out like what's the threat what's going on so that we can we can respond appropriately versus causing inciting any sort of panic unnecessarily so this is part of that next slide please Here, this is what is our current policy and practice and has been, but we felt it important to bring it forward because we don't know if everybody's been clear as to what actually happened.

So this is more for clarity for the system, this is how this works, but these are the general protocols if immigration enforcement is on our campus.

Let's say they show up to the main office.

So you deny immediate access to the building.

The front office and other staff should ask the person to wait outside of the building while you contact the principal.

Reiterate that you must follow Seattle Public Schools' established process and visitors' policy to ensure a safe and non-disruptive school environment while the request is being evaluated.

They are to be directed to the principal or the designee who's on site.

So immediately contact the principal or designee.

Call for security presence as needed.

Do not share information.

Staff should not share information with this person.

We don't know who it is.

One of the things we have to be aware of is some of the things we're hearing about are people who are doing imposter things.

So we don't even know who people are sometimes.

So people should not share any information.

So do not provide any information about an individual, a student, a staff member, SDS employee.

This is the existing guidance.

Now let's say for example if it does appear to be an ICE official and they have an official warrant, the principal or designee would at that point have all of that information sent to our legal team so our legal team can vet it to determine is this valid legal information or not and then we would take next steps as appropriate in accordance with our procedures.

Next slide please.

contacts that we are working with in our system and some of the referrals we want to make and so I think that is kind of the update of where we are.

We know directors may have a lot of questions so happy to take those.

Thank you, Superintendent Podesta.

I appreciate the amount of details shared in this presentation.

I think the more the communication exists, the better.

I also appreciate the website.

I went on the new website today, did a little exploration.

I think that that will have some hopefully useful details.

And then the last thing I'd say, I think the focus on partnerships is really encouraging.

This is not just us here, it's our community, and so how are we building those partnerships?

But looking to board directors for questions.

Director Rankin.

Thank you and thanks for the swift response to getting this information together for us.

I echo what Gina just said that the partnerships and the community is so important.

That and communication is I think how we to deal with a lot of this.

So a question about coordination with the city and you said, you know, we have protocols with other law enforcement agencies about letting us know when stuff's going on.

So is there like an agreement or understanding now with us and SPD that will SPD let us know if they see something in the area or is that kind of too far removed from

No, I think they definitely will.

It is not a written agreement.

We had a long discussion last Friday.

And that's been their common practice.

We had an issue a few years ago, a school in the south end, that there was activity going on with the sheriff's department, who sometimes is in our city, but not that often, and that protocol went through SPD.

So they generally do, if there's a safety concern, they acknowledge they were having the same problem, the mayor's office and the chief's office said, we were having the same problem you were having, last Tuesday is we were getting lots of calls too and then they skyrocketed after we made announcements and so we really need to talk first before, so I think they have a vested interest in making sure, because our actions, you know, the city, is less likely to do something.

I mean, they might have police around and they might be monitoring things, but they're not likely to close parks or close city hall or do something and then announce it like we did.

So they're very interested in supporting us and helping us.

And again, that's why they're standing up a multi-agency rapid response team and want us to be a part of it.

Everybody we've talked to at other districts, at the ESD, is commiserating with us saying, yeah, we have the same problem.

How do you validate this information?

We have a long history of other social media threats.

So yesterday, a few schools went into shelter in place because there were robocalls that went to schools, threatening violence at the schools.

did.

What we would do in this case, made an assessment, thought of an abundance of caution.

We'll go into shelter in place, particularly for schools with open campuses.

In talking to law enforcement and the ESD, these calls went to schools all over the state.

And so this is not unusual.

I think the circumstances last week and given the really heightened environment that we have right now, people felt they had to act really, really quickly and I think again, since we're trying to substantiate reports and nobody's actually seen anything, we do have time to make a systemic decision and we have practices to do that.

We just need to make it clear that that's what we need you to do in this case.

I know we have, you mentioned the calls going to schools not related to ICE, but we do have a really robust school-based threat assessment policy and procedure.

Do we need to make changes to that to specifically talk about this?

I think in broad strokes it's about the same.

It's the same people that would be gathered.

We lean on safety and security to leverage their operational relationship with the police.

it's hard to build a flowchart for every possible circumstance.

It really comes down to get the usual suspects together inside our organization that know about these things, find out what people know, find out what our partners know, and then decide actually what's appropriate.

If some of this had been substantiated, certainly what's appropriate for an open campus might be different than what's appropriate for an elementary school.

So I think we also need to and think a little bit more clearly.

So what is the problem we're trying to solve exactly?

Certainly if enforcement shows up on our campus, keeping everybody safe and keeping students away for it, shelter in place makes perfect sense.

If there's something happening six blocks away and the students are gonna be on campus anyway, does going into shelter in place what does that actually buy you is not crystal clear.

So that's why I think people need to come together, assess the risk, and assess what is the solution.

If this happens 10 minutes before dismissal, then we have another problem to think about.

So that's why it's not...

at all fair to leave this all in the hands of the building principle to try to figure this out.

Yeah, no, I'm really glad we're thinking about this and I'm really glad that it was, you know, an abundance of caution type situation that is leading us to have this conversation, not there was something really traumatic happened and now we have to figure this out.

One other thing I wanted to ask is Skip Hop Drive and other transportation that kids are in.

I know those are, I have other concerns and questions about contracting with individual drivers, but this mentioned specifically for student and Zoom, are we also, do we have expectations of

We do have those.

I think we need to formalize those a bit more.

And there's, you know, a kind of independent contractor model in some of those business models, so it's a little bit more complex.

But if we're paying them to transport our students, they should keep them safe.

I'm absolutely sure we can get that level of cooperation.

I think the problem is, again, different.

It's not like boarding a vehicle like a bus.

Right.

and so we'll have to work through that.

When you come to approach a school and a school leader, there's a lot of infrastructure there and the transportation system is going to be a different kind of challenge.

Thank you.

Director Lavallee.

Yeah, I'll try to keep my questions minimal although you're very much aware I have many and have emailed you a lot of them before now.

Within your notification step, you have that someone will make a timely report to safety and security and inform the principal if something is seen.

My guess is that something suspicious being seen by one person will probably be seen by more.

And as we saw on Tuesday, that can go very quickly on social media and go very quickly through text message threads and communities and I think the speed of that will actually increase if anything and not decrease.

So my question then is how once we've done that review and assessed everything and decided the threat level and whether or not there's a shelter in place or what the action is from the school community or the area schools, how do people get that loop closed?

So do we discuss with the school what happened and then do they notify families that anything happened?

Because my fear is that the message is going to be out there and someone will have gotten a text being like, ICE is two blocks away from your kid's school.

And they're not gonna hear anything at all from the school even though we've done that work.

We've faced that circumstance many times with social media threats that we've had bomb threats at 915 and it's completely on blast and we have many, many calls and we use the same procedure for that.

So we would provide supports to the school so there's consistent messaging.

That was one of the challenges in messaging that came from a particular building, a phone call from a private school to one of our schools somehow in that communication turned into a credible threat.

there's no evidence that there was a credible threat.

That's part of the issue is we're not seeing things that actually anybody has been able to confirm, so we just need to take a beat, but that message will be out there.

Sometimes in our process, the first messaging is, we are aware of this.

This is what we're doing right now.

Is the district responsible for that messaging back to parents and the school communities or is the principal then responsible for that communication?

That's typically part of the assessment.

We want the principals who have relationships with their community.

So if it's a multi-school affair, I think we would do that out of the central office when we provide supports.

They might, using the various technologies we have, they might come from the building but our public affairs team would help with the language and get a consistent message out.

But we, unfortunately, we live in a world where we are used to reacting to things rapidly and understand that there's social media aspects to it in terms of people hearing things, and then the minute we do things, students, of course, are texting each other, texting their families, and so that's why we typically try to get the word out really quickly if we ever go into shelter in place.

it's just we did it yesterday and for multiple schools it didn't because of this other threat We were disciplined about the communications, so that didn't turn into a thing.

And again, the backdrop, given what's going on in Minneapolis, is a lot different.

So everybody is really wound up.

And so we want to not exacerbate that also.

So we're trying to be measured and just take a breath.

This doesn't take that long.

Unfortunately, we're used to doing things like this.

I do want to have a quick one or two more and following kind of what Director Rankin was saying with the additional vehicles I know you talked about buses and stuff like that as well I'd love to see or get updates at some point into what you know drop-off looks like so not just are they safe on the buses but is there any security that were not security forces but like if if a bus driver sees something suspicious can they keep a kid on the bus and notify the family that they will loop back around when something is sure to be safe is there any planning around different threat levels like that for our contracted services

Well, those aren't our employees.

The same process would apply to them.

That, at that point, becomes a report of potential enforcement, and we would work with our service providers to say, also, we need you to participate in this process if you're seeing something.

Again, it's good for us that we do have those eyes on the street.

And then we do have processes in place if a driver feels it's not safe to release students at a particular stop or whatever.

There's something else going on there.

They always do that.

While this is a unique circumstance, it does have parallels to other risks that we face, so as much as possible, we're not reinventing the wheel here.

We're trying to be clear about when to apply the tools that we already have.

I think we have things to work with, there are differences to this and so we'll have to adjust as needed but that's why we have this team and that's why Julia is faced with herding as many cats as she is to try to make this work.

Alright, thank you.

I don't know who put their card up first, Director Smith.

Thank you.

For the notify, consult, assess, I am curious if during the assessment phase there are any plans to make use of sort of external resources.

I think there's a lot of community organizing.

I'm not sure it could get sticky making decisions based on like social media reports, I'm not saying that, but if there are any ways to leverage some of the organizations that are becoming active in trying to help.

I'm sure there will be and that's why we really appreciate the city and others convening broader groups to see how they're plugging into that.

Typically, when we face these circumstances now, school leaders or other administrators are part of the conversation and they have contacts as well, so what are they hearing?

And again, we've faced many social media threats and have reached out to others in those circumstances.

So yeah, we're gonna need all the help we can get.

And again, trying to calibrate this so it doesn't turn into, do we need a lot of people to approach a school with whistles or something?

because that's its own problem.

But that's why if that conversation could be two-way, that would be really important that, yes, we need your help, or we need everybody to take a beat and just make sure we understand what's going on.

I'll say it is easy to envision a future where we need shifts of parents with whistles, but that hasn't happened yet, doesn't it?

We can be optimistic, maybe it won't.

I would hope for that.

And then for the training for school leaders and school staff, and for the leaders, there's one day, and so I'm curious whether is that anticipated to be sufficient?

There was, I think, during the public testimony last week and then I've heard, had some input since then about the concern over it's dramatic for students to be in the shelter in place situation and so having the teachers and staff in the schools have sort of like training on the language and how to handle that.

Aside from of course reducing instances as much as possible.

Schools do monthly drills on a variety of responses and we've been careful thinking about what involves students.

We need school staff and people to understand how to respond in the case of an active shooter.

We're careful about those types of girls don't necessarily involve students.

I think so we need to do the same in this case.

We want to make sure everyone is ready at this point in time based on the history and it's hard to forecast where this is gonna go.

there really hasn't been much activity, certainly in our schools, in the state, really nationally, enforcement at schools.

We don't want to overstate the risk because we're also just as concerned about people raising concerns about is schools a safe place to be?

We feel that it is, and so we don't want to discourage people by overstating the risk of this, but we also want to be ready, and so that's a balance that we're trying to figure out.

Dr. Torres Morales.

And then in terms of the training piece, I can speak to for the school leaders.

We are doing this Friday.

We did do it, I think it was January of last year, but I think some of the feedback we received and we're aware of, and this relates to some of what Julia was stating earlier about just the federal response piece in general.

We have a meeting with leaders every two weeks.

We bring up operational issues.

So what we have committed to is that we do need to bring federal response issues in general up more into that agenda.

a lot of times it's driven by what their needs are and there's operational things, but this is one of the things that they've also said they wanna make sure makes it to the agenda more often.

And I think it'd be, yes, immigration, but also a little bit more global on some of the other federal response things that are going on.

And I think as part of those discussions, we would be asking school leaders, so what do you need in your building?

What supports can we provide to help make sure you're ready?

Thank you.

And I also want to state just there may be trauma around the district's response to immigration enforcement reports.

We'll do our best to be balancing how much we react and how we react, but ultimately the trauma isn't coming from the district.

It's other source.

Thank you.

Director Mizorahi.

You maybe just spoke to it slightly, but I just want to make sure I understand.

So I see the January 30th training with school leaders.

Some of the protocols on here are for everyone in the building, not just the leaders.

So how's that getting communicated out?

When's that training?

What's the plan to get this out system-wide, not just to the building leaders?

And I think that's a discussion we're starting with leaders.

We roll out many things that they say they can take it from here in how they work with their staff.

We're going to need to talk to them about what supports can we provide for that.

And we're trying to keep these protocols as simple as possible.

because as with other safety-based things, it needs to be something people can keep in their head, not run to a three-ring binder to figure out what to do.

So hopefully this training is not really that exhaustive.

The first step is you're not on your own.

Call safety and security and we'll convene helping you with this assessment unless there's somebody at your door, then we have this other process.

that it, again, mirrors our general approach to law enforcement showing up with a warrant at our school.

So we'll just remind people this might be a different flavor, and we might be in a different time, and some of the challenges we all face about this heighten the emotions, but the procedures are pretty similar to procedures that we have.

So I don't want to say we've got that all figured out, but we understand that it can't be just the principal who knows.

It needs to be administrative staff, needs to be the front office staff, and then teachers need to know what their piece of it is.

So is it the responsibility of the principal to make sure that all those pieces of the puzzle, know what's going on, or is that going to be a centralized district?

Ultimately, it will be.

We'll be asking them, what supports do you need from us to carry that out?

Because we want to do this quickly.

So some of this is going to need to happen at the building, but they'll need to get supports from us.

Got it.

I don't know, Rocky, if you want to add anything.

No, no.

I think that's .

when you think about safety protocols those are things that are trained on and talked about at the building level and partly because all of our buildings and our campuses are different and so how they're actualized is different like a shelter in place at one school is not going to be exactly the same as a shelter in place at another school so that's part of the reason but some of the conversation we're going to have on Friday is to probe at that a bit like what do you need from us to make this happen if there is something that they need that the central office can provide whether it's through webinars or something we would be happy to help as needed so that this This gets over the line.

Building leaders produce emergency response plans annually, they test them monthly, they're building safety teams, so there's some infrastructure in place.

We know some of this is new, so they'll need some help, but building leaders and I think we'll stand ready to work in their buildings but they'll need some help from us because we also want consistency.

The nature of these threats is it's probably not gonna be one building.

It's gonna be multiple buildings and so that's where we're trying to avoid one building reacting one way and another building reacting a different way.

Vice President Briggs.

Yeah, real quick.

Just on the topic of transportation, we talked about our contractors and Skip Hop being one of them.

What about Sound Transit and our kids who ride public buses?

Do we have any communication with them around this and what can we tell parents whose kids ride public transportation to school who may be worried about that being like a like a dead zone, so to speak, of where they're not being protected.

Transportation is reaching out to their metro contacts.

I don't know where we are with Sound Transit as well.

We often work with them on safety issues, typically more related to the stops than the vehicles.

And then we are expecting both the county and the city kind of round table function to pull them into that.

So that's why we're hoping not to do this.

We have to make every contact ourselves, be able to leverage these weekly mayor's calls to get everybody at the table and to know how transit agencies, we talked to them about that specifically today.

Great, yeah, and I think when I said Sound Transit, I meant Metro.

Our students do about Sound Transit, though.

All of the above.

But I guess, yeah, so that totally makes sense.

But just, it's more about the, I guess, maybe what I was asking about more was the communication piece to parents.

So we're trying to understand what their stance is now.

So what are you guys doing if you face enforcement on a bus or link light rail and how can we communicate that?

Or how can we make sure there's an information hub because it's going to be hard to keep tabs on everybody's strategy and are we the authoritative voice for public transit agencies or not, or what's going on in the right-of-way.

That's why we need to all be together and get a common party line, because their world might change and we'll be giving out stale information, but we're definitely reaching out to them.

Okay.

Director Song.

Thank you for answering my original question which was sounded like some of the information was being disseminated principal but there will be opportunity for them to kind of bubble up to you concerns or needs that they have and it sounds like you're taking advantage of the fact that you do have regular meetings of our principals and it will be a recurring kind of agenda topic.

My second question was about what have you been observing around attendance?

Just kind of more recently and over the past year and what should we as a board be aware of in terms of kind of the impact of that on the outcomes of our students?

We've heard it raised as a concern.

I don't think we are able to quantify it or see the changes enough to attribute it to particular concerns.

We're also not interested in gathering a lot of information about concerns students may have.

We don't really want to disaggregate data that way exactly.

But so far, and correct me if you know differently, Rocky, we know people raise it as an issue.

We haven't seen, like, well, this is clearly a problem at this school.

Yeah, no, I agree.

I think one of the issues that we have seen is just the number of families we have arriving from out of country that used to be fairly robust, given that we're the city of Seattle.

I haven't really seen the numbers from this fall yet, but I know through the spring last year, post January, we did see those numbers start to plateau and quickly with obvious reason, so.

Director Lavallee.

Yeah, real quickly, I just wanted to loop back to some of your answers from Director Mizrahi's questions.

When you're meeting with principals, I've been hearing the concern from community that there might be different applications of this in different buildings, quoting that some of it may or may not be needed.

You know, if there's a sign in the window or something that says that they're gonna keep ICE out unless there's a judicial warrant, but it's not in another school's window, does that create confusion for parents who start to think, oh, my kid might be safe at one school, but not another?

So I respect that each building has some differences within them, but what are we going to be providing consistently across these schools as well?

And what There needs to be some more clarification about what things are different about the schools that the principals are deciding and what things are the same that we want parents to know.

So the fact that ICE will not enter our schools without a judicial warrant potentially posted in the very front of the building so that it's very clear to families who are entering to know what is happening.

or that information printed out and translated into appropriate languages.

So I respect what you were saying with that some of these differences are needed based on the schools and left to the principal's discretion.

And how are we balancing that we need consistency as well?

I think our discussion so far with principals is they would appreciate consistency and guidance on this topic.

Yeah, and I wanna clarify, what I was talking about is actual procedures, like structural, physical, building-wise, but part of the conversation that's gonna come Friday is around exactly what you're talking about and what's the district stance, what is it going to be, what do we need to provide, so that it's consistent, too, that it's actually, even with our own logo on it and all those sort of things, so that is gonna be part of our conversation on Friday.

Thank you.

And we'd like to hear from school leaders you know the temperature taking they're doing with their communities because maybe a sign like that is helpful or maybe it somehow we're telegraphing that we think this is a reasonable threat so even though we wouldn't let enforcement into the building without a judicial warrant, that we're really concerned that that's gonna happen and are we creating concerns?

I think I wanna understand what what that messaging does.

And is it helpful?

Certainly people need to know it.

They need to know our stance.

Does every student need a reminder every day that there is a potential threat of enforcement and we haven't seen it.

And so I think we just want to have that conversation.

Is this actually helpful or is it raising concerns that will maybe manifest themselves in these attendance issues that we're worried about?

and so I don't know the answer.

I think school leaders understand their communities and we'd like to hear from them so is this gonna, is this helpful, is it gonna be reassuring or is it gonna create an anxiety and at some point we may absolutely need that but are we ready or how do we temper that message, do we temper that message is something I think we need to think about a little bit but we certainly want the community to know our stance.

Do we need a neon sign every day?

I'm not sure.

I think we wanna be thoughtful about that.

All right, thank you Dr. Torres-Morales, Superintendent Podesta and Ms. Worth.

We're gonna move now or transition now into our budget work session but we're gonna do a sort of staff switch over so we're gonna take a 10 minute break, allow staff to kind of maneuver back and we'll have a lot of staff up here for our budget work session.

So, but let's come back and we're gonna start exactly at 5.30.

As promised, we're starting right at 530. We're gonna reconvene and we're gonna move into the budget work session, but we're missing our superintendent.

I kept him talking for too long.

I kept him talking for too long, and he'll be right back.

Dr. Buddleman, are you gonna kick us off or you wanna wait for Fred here, or for Superintendent Podesta?

There we go, he's back.

It's nice to see all the staff we have here as we kind of move into our first budget work session of the year.

With that, I'm going to pass it over to Superintendent Podesta.

Great, thank you again, President Topp.

As you can see, we've decided to try to outnumber the board as a new strategy on everything.

So we do have a revised format, and I will confess, right at the top of this discussion that this presentation is gonna be a little bit more form than function because of the timing of where we are as an organization right now.

We'll probably talk a bit about process, talk about things that aren't exactly budget numbers, but we really do wanna have a more comprehensive discussion tonight and going forward and hear from my colleagues.

Our past practice, actually since I've been at the district in general, but really as we've been struggling with these structural deficits the last few years, These discussions have been the superintendent and the district's chief financial officer coming and talking about that structural deficit and what we're gonna do about it.

So that ends up we spend 100% of the time talking about 6% of the budget that we're trying to figure out how to solve problems for, and that's critically important.

I don't mean to downplay that, but at our retreat, the retreat the board held last summer, when you took your budget vote, you made it clear that that overall process wasn't necessarily working for you, you wanted to hear more, you wanted more substantive information, Again, at this point in time, we're gonna try to satisfy how we're doing that.

We're gonna focus on how we're trying to align to the community's goals that the board has articulated.

And we'll talk a bit about our structural deficit and what we're thinking about doing it.

We're not presenting a full proposal.

So we can, assuming I can make this thing work.

So again, the three topics we wanna cover is the work we're doing to ensure that Our budget will be aligned to our strategic goals.

Right now we're at a state where we have a draft strategic plan.

Again, that's been very intentional that we want new leadership.

We want new leadership in the board and with an incoming superintendent to finalize that plan.

we want to again this is where we get back to our regularly scheduled program we want to talk about the budget deficit that we've been dealing with and what our current circumstances are and then talk about some of the options that are under consideration and what we know about those so far this is still under development so I probably already buried the lead here, but so again, what we are gonna talk about today is a high-level overview of our process, where we are with the strategic plan, and that's where my colleagues can, particularly on the academic side of the house, can talk about the investments we'd like to make, how we align resources, with our goals and then we'll get into, and if we have to make shifts and adjustments, what those might look like.

We're not, again, bringing a line item.

I mean, in a perfect world, we'd have that all figured out and have a very detailed proposal.

I just don't think that makes sense as we're finalizing a plan.

We want the incoming superintendent to weigh in on it and I just don't think it's helpful for me to write a check that somebody else has to cash.

So this'll be a little bit, not exactly what we might have done normally in January at this time, but I think there'll be some new information here and a different way of presenting it, and we really would like to get feedback if this is at least a step in the right direction.

All right, so we wanna start with an update on the strategic plan, and this isn't meant to be an in-depth discussion of the draft strategic plan, but just kind of where we are in the process, and again, we've completed a draft that will go into that, Superintendent Schuldiner and I will go into it in more detail at the retreat a week from Saturday, but we wanna talk about it a bit with regard to how it affects resource allocation and the analysis we've done about resource allocation and how we're trying to keep our eye on the ball about what the priorities need to be for the budget.

So, I don't need to explain to the board goals and guardrails, but for everyone, as a planning process, mission, vision, and values are usually where you start these plans.

The community has articulated its vision and values, and those have been codified by the board in two policies that represent goals and guardrails, and that was, The North Star for the strategic planning team is, as you think about a strategic planning process and you think about how vision and values fit in, those are documented.

That step had been accomplished by the board, so that was kind of the entree to that.

When you're all told, districts been working on this starting with the board work for well over a year in terms of the engagement that led to those and then in the spring we started working on evaluating our resource allocations and developing strategies to address our goals and so at the retreat last summer and we, the board, we had a lot of discussion about how it's hard for directors to see in budget proposals that were at play as well how do those link to the most important things and I, I think I was honest in saying, well, we wanna live in a world where the budget is a funding plan to achieve our goals, not just, oh, $80 million short, what are we gonna do about that?

And so that's been our process as we're working backwards from our fiscal realities and then that kind of implies a plan and we're trying to move till we have the plan first, figure out what's most important.

So that could create issues that are bigger than, you know, are beyond our structural deficit if we say, well, not only are we X million short, if we do nothing, we don't want to do nothing.

We want to shift resources to something that's more important, so that creates a bigger problem to solve.

That's really not the right way to stay.

We've identified those opportunities, so we need to shift resources.

So we want to do this in a different order, that we have a plan, and we're trying to figure out what we can afford and how we're going to fund that.

not let's try to do least harm to the status quo by prioritizing expenditure reductions and so we want to think about this differently.

Again, we're not ready to articulate all of that yet but we want to make sure you understand how we're doing this and I would like, we'll get to a point where my colleagues can speak for themselves about what they're doing with the money that they are accountable for, not just what they're not gonna do because we're trying to balance budget.

So, you've seen this before many times, I think up to now we can talk about, again as I mentioned, the work the board did to develop goals and guardrails, really informed our planning team on so what are we trying to achieve, what's Seattle Public Schools definition of success.

analyzing so are we even in our current state allocating resources to align with those goals and we learn some things that we are but maybe not to the extent we think we are and then try to understand and are those things working?

What kind of return are we getting on that investment?

and then we've gotten to building a draft plan wherein we again look at those priorities, worked with a very broad interdisciplinary team on what are the specific priorities, strategies and initiatives that would help us address meeting those goals, where do we need to make changes to our current way of doing business and then how do we fund that?

We'll revisit this slide later because we're pretty much done with the first three columns here.

We're entering this last phase now.

And just in time, as we have new leadership joining us, we can kind of finalize, validate some of the strategies that our team has developed proposed and really looking for it for Superintendent Shuldiner to weigh in because the board made a great selection, somebody who's an educational leader who can put his own stamp on this and I think we'll benefit from a fresh perspective and different experiences in other places.

Certainly during the planning process, we benefited from the benchmarking abilities that our partner educational research systems, do I have that acronym correct, helped us because they could, strategies, thank you, they could help us put our work in context of what do our peer districts do, which is really valuable and is difficult for us to do on our own.

So part of this evolution of how we do this I think lately we really talked a lot more about how much.

How much are we gonna spend and really we focused on how much are we not gonna spend to try to balance this budget.

Where are we not gonna spend to try to resolve this deficit we haven't gotten into.

So the other 94% of the budget that we are spending, what kind of value are we getting from that?

And we all know, since our goals have been, at the highest level, been pretty consistent over the last years, our progress has been flat.

So I think we know what the answer is to how well.

We need to do something differently, and that's why we really want to focus on that, to not just think about, well, what and that's really what we've been struggling with the last few years is what can we do really that would do the least harm, not where there are opportunities to really make a difference, not preserve results that aren't meeting the goals that the community has for us.

Again, this is a cascading conversation where the goals and guardrails really tell us where we wanna be, the role for the superintendent and the superintendent's team is how are you gonna get there?

What are the functional areas, the priority areas where you need to focus on?

What are the general strategies?

And then what are the very specific tasks that we need to do to accomplish specific outcomes?

It, you know, I was, trying to think is there an analogy for this?

To me it feels like the goals and guardrails are the saying, you know, I want to be healthier is a goal.

You know, a priority in the way we're doing our work is so what aspect of that that, you know, I want to be more active is, you know, that's the priority is to become more physically active, and potential strategies, well I wanna focus on my heart rate and cardio type activity and the initiatives, well I'm gonna swim, I'm gonna run, I'm gonna do whatever and that's really, we're trying to get from the where do we wanna be to how we get there as specifically as possible because you need specifics to say so this is worth shifting a million dollars to do this.

That can't be vague, you have to get pretty granular when it comes to the budget discussion.

So the priority areas, again, for the, this is the, decided to being active is my priority, you know, belaboring my past analogy.

We really, our priority areas are curriculum and instruction, you know, making sure that we have a qualified, trained, and supported workforce.

that we have aligned leadership, that we're coherent in how we're working as a team.

I think there's a huge opportunity there, and that's where I think new leadership for the district will help us, making sure that each school has what it needs to be successful in each and every building.

And then to keep leveraging our relationship with the public, I always feel that the most important word in Seattle Public Schools is public, that we're a public system.

The more we could, you know, to operate as cooperative and leverage all the resources we have in the community, the more I think we could achieve.

And whatever it is, whether it's funding through taxes or other things, we really need to have trust in the community and build goodwill.

So we have to communicate more and engage better and be clearer.

And so those are, again, broad strategies that we've identified to try to organize this work around.

So we also have a discussion next week on progress monitoring.

We've had baseline progress monitoring on the three high-level goals that we've set.

and we have set our own internal baseline data as part of the strategic planning work.

We also have baseline data related to resources.

So the board has seen in our progress monitoring sessions baseline data on achievement and meeting the goals in the work we did with the strategic plan and the resource study we're seeing.

So are we actually allocating resources to those goals?

Do we think that in places where we're facing challenges is because we're not spending enough or we don't have enough resources or that gets back to the how much and how well.

Because it's not always clear that it's a resource problem, it may be a strategy problem.

And so we wanna keep building that into that progress monitoring culture that what are the results and then when we get into a budget discussion, what are we doing to support those results and support whichever strategies we come up with.

So I am now gonna ask my colleagues to start working through, so how do we make this tangible with regard to other data that you've seen and other discussions we have, and I think I'm turning it over to Dr. Torres Morales.

Good evening, board directors.

So I'm gonna start off, as Superintendent Bendesta was noting, this is a different approach for us.

This isn't just about let's get to a budget balance.

This is about what are we investing in.

So if you look up on the screen, this will look familiar to you.

This is from, we've seen this most recently in our progress monitoring session.

But we're gonna start by talking about the top line measure, five-year target for second grade map, and this was around our reading scores for second graders.

Just as a reminder, we are attempting to and will work towards what would be a 10% increase.

That is also up for discussion once our new superintendent comes in next week.

but related to this, in order to do that, we do need a set of strategies.

So between myself and Dr. Starosky, what we're gonna talk you all through here in the next couple slides is one, what are our targets?

Two, what are some of the strategies that we are considering?

And then three, illustrative investment pictures.

So a couple caveats I want to give.

These are all draft.

It's some solid thinking, but also draft thinking, even the strategies.

And same with the illustrative picture.

The intent of the picture on the investment is to show how we're thinking about this differently and investing in strategies.

not necessarily that every dollar amount that's there is exactly what we'd be spending or that we're going to spend more on math versus ELA but it was to give an idea of how we're thinking about this differently and putting money into pockets because we know for a fact from the board that that was a challenge in the past and getting clear on strategies down to dollar investment.

So I'm going to give it over to Dr. Starosky to talk a little bit about some of the draft strategies.

Good evening, Directors.

Mike Starosky, Assistant Superintendent of Academics.

So we love having this opportunity to be able to share and deprivatize how we're thinking about our planning for the budget and how we do that specifically in CAI.

And so Specifically, all the slides you are seeing now should be things you've already seen before.

What we're seeing here is for early literacy is that our priority area from our proposed strategic plan is centered on rigorous and inclusive academic experiences.

Here are our strategies that we are considering.

Again, it's on high quality tier one instruction and alignment and MTSS, multi-tiered systems of support.

That should be not new information for folks.

Some of the emerging strategies and initiatives that are coming out as a result of that are specifically around adopting a new curriculum for K-5 for ELA.

that is based on a stronger foundational skill building and vocabulary for our students to hit that, excuse me, our second grade goal.

And so for us, being clear is so, we need to build out our data systems, which you see here, our MTSS, Another strategy is developing and recruiting and retaining our educators.

One of the things that is a primary focus for CAI is the professional learning and development and support of our educators at the building level.

That includes our IAs, that includes our teachers, and that includes our school leaders.

and so those are the primary form and function of CAI.

So it's the curriculum, it's the assessment and the instruction and what you should see here on our early literacy is how it's directly connected to developing is really it's providing high quality job embedded professional development to our teachers and our school leaders.

And then also this third area here is unified leadership in a system of accountability is performance management.

And so we've heard clearly from our planning and our discussions with the board and the community about the issue of accountability.

So for our early literacy goal is here are some of the strategies we are considering, here are some of the major initiatives that we are also considering.

Next slide, Dr. Torres.

So if you look at the next slide, I want to reiterate this is an illustrative example.

So this is nothing that is fully baked.

Some of the numbers aren't fully accurate.

But this is an attempt to take the strategies from the previous slide and actually codify them in a way that's going to say, hey, if we're saying a curricular adoption, how much are we intending to spend on that?

What are the activities involved in that?

What are the initiatives involved?

So you'll see, for example, in the middle, the approximate 15 to 20 million dollars, updated K-5 literacy curriculum and support for schools, all K-5 staff, all students.

I wanna take us back to a couple board meetings where we heard specifically from the board around, let's just say, science of reading training, like what grade is this going through?

What this example showing us is that we're hearing the feedback, we're saying this is a K, we wanna think about this K through five, and then trying to put some numbers to it as to what it would cost.

And so these, we have these for each of the goal areas, go back to their illustrative examples and drafts, but directly from feedback that we've received, directly aligned to the goals and guardrails, directly aligned to some of the draft strategies.

So this is an attempt to take what the feedback was previously at how we're doing budget development and actually align it to all the way up through the goals and the guardrails and have a through line.

Next slide, please.

If we look here, similar to our previous benchmark progress monitoring, you will see the grade six SBA goal once again at 10%.

That's gonna be up for a little bit more discussion once our superintendent gets here.

We know that's a very rigorous target, but one that we have at the moment.

And I will turn it back over to Dr. Starosky to discuss what are some of the draft strategies we are considering in order to move us along that goal.

So again, replication of what you're seeing here is rigorous and inclusive academic experiences as being the priority, the strategy, MTSS tier one instruction and alignment of our assessments, so specifically getting into our curriculum embedded assessments as being a priority.

for our strategies and proposed initiatives, reinforcing universal design for learning, so planning for all learners in classrooms and giving our teachers the tools to be able to do that in professional development.

Again, you'll see the MTSS.

What you'll see that's different here for this specific goal is the implementation for the need for consistent school-based implementation of tier two and tier three supports in the classroom, specifically related to math.

And we know one of the areas that we've heard that need for improvement is beyond the tier one, what are we doing for students in the classroom for their specific content area, and this specific content area being math.

The other area, again, just seeing PD for our educators.

for developing, recruiting, retaining, but also providing high quality job embedded professional development, connecting feedback and educator support.

So how are educators experiencing the PD that we're providing and how are we being responsive as a system from the building level to central office to what our educators are saying is working and the things that need improvement based on what we're hearing from specifically around math.

and then again you'll see that performance management is again coming back up.

Once again, caveat around the illustrative example, but to draw the through line through the goals and guardrails, through the strategies, if you look at the box around the 1.07 million, what you're going to see is talking about an investment in mathematics, supplemental curricular tools, curricular embedded assessments, and those sort of things, which align back to the strategies that Dr. Starosky was noting.

Additionally, if you look at the box to the right of the triangle, around the 90 million, really calling out middle school teaching for math, instructional assistants, school leaders, APs, what those roles are gonna be.

And so really painting a picture of how do we think about this differently and invest in the strategies that we think are going to actually get to the outcomes based on the board's goals and guardrails.

Next slide, please.

This slide should look familiar from our most recent progress monitoring where we were talking about the Life Ready goal.

And once again, you'll see what our data and goals are.

And I'm gonna turn it over to Dr. Starassi to get into a little bit about what the draft strategies are.

Again, just last week we spent some time with the Life Ready goal and some of the things that we've already incorporated based on just our meeting last week and the feedback is the high quality tier one instruction in high schools.

And so for us is prioritizing the instructional materials at high schools is a big leap for us and a need for strategic investment.

moving forward and specifically in tier two here is creating district wide expectations and supports that go along with that for tier two supports regarding credit earning opportunities for our students and then also credit recovery which is a big priority for us in this life ready goal.

So having a systemic response, systemic supports, for not only our educators, but most importantly centering students in those supports.

And then also you see the post-secondary planning with the school link, the high school and beyond planning is also being prioritized in not only the strategies, but also our initial proposed initiatives, our emerging initiatives.

and then for us is also again recruiting and developing specifically teachers and educators around CTE.

The college and technical and the career at CTE specifically is a big need and then also what you'll see a little bit later is an investment of what we can afford specifically around CTE that impacts all of our students.

And then again, performance management being the accountability measures that we're doing and implementing embedded in the life ready goal.

So in terms of an illustrative picture for the life free investment, a couple places I want to draw attention to.

If you look at the third box with the one million, you will see clearly that we are intending to invest in high school and beyond planning.

If you recall from our last life-ready progress monitoring presentation, we all had some big noticings around where the completions of high school and beyond planning were.

So this is saying we realize that is a thing and we need to invest in it.

Also right to the left of that you'll see investments in CTE programming, because we understand that that's important, and that's coming straight from some of the strategies that is coming straight from the goals and guardrails we received from the board.

So next slide please.

In terms of the 26-27 strategic initiatives, if we go big picture on the full of the strat plan, once again noting that it is a draft, however, we do want to keep work moving and relevant so that when our incoming superintendent gets here, he's not coming in with nothing ready.

there is a prioritization that needs to occur.

And so what this slide is looking to demonstrate is in terms of the strategic plan, getting all the way to strategic initiatives, what are the things that we should consider prioritizing first?

This is of course up for discussion and some final approvals, but this is our best thinking on what are the things we need to look at first.

So we're talking about for 26, 27 stronger systems and structures for building the multi-tiered systems of support, updating the early literacy curriculum and supports, planning for a revised instructional coaching model across all of our schools, expanding high quality inclusive preschool, and some recommendations to improve student credit earning opportunities and ensure all students have access to and succeed in high quality secondary experiences across the system.

So in terms of having a big body of work, having investment pictures, what are the things that we think we need to start with in those plans and those strategies, this would be the list going into next year for investments.

I'm gonna turn it over to Dr. Bettleman and Superintendent Podesta to walk us a little bit through planning timeline.

So we had this slide earlier and in this presentation we kind of completed the first three parts of this and we're really entering this transition plan.

Our goal was by the time a new superintendent was ready to join us that we had a fully fleshed out draft plan that can be finalized and that that would ultimately inform the budget proposal that that superintendent would bring forward.

So that's exactly where we are now.

Superintendent Scholdiner has gotten deep into our budgeting discussions and our planning discussions.

Dr. Buddleman and I are meeting with him weekly.

Our transition team is also meeting with him weekly, has a lot of questions, some of which we can answer.

These are interesting discussions and it's great to have a new perspective.

that we're not starting in the middle in these discussions, because we've made assumptions where I won't overstate it, that this is a zero-based budget process, but it's kind of close in some respect, because he is really kind of sanding down to the wood on some things and the questions he's having for us.

And it was a very quick study, and as I'm sure the board learned during the selection process, had spent a lot of time studying our existing budget, has been tracking progress we're making, so this is kind of where we are now.

He also wants to do some more engagement with the board and the community.

I think we've all had, questions and I think that'll kick off really well at the retreat about, hey, we set a baseline, we had a plan, that was then, this is now before we just let the concrete dry, is there any adjustments we wanna make and that's the point of getting some new blood in the system, so we should really take advantage of that would be my recommendation.

We also need to look at the whole kind of multi-year approach to this.

One other aspect of the way we've been doing this and just focusing on the structural deficit is we've had a lot of one-time solutions so we keep, it's hard to get stability.

We're really at a point now where we need to say so this is what we're gonna do and we're gonna do it sustainably because otherwise we are kind of swapping out strategies every year and say well this year we could get away with that and this year and we'd like to have more revenue, more, be able to reduce expenditures, but we really need to get to, we're doing things that we're going to live with through the life of this planning horizon, otherwise we won't be able to sustain any of this.

So we wanted to stop here.

Again, it's kind of the first part.

Really wanted to be responsive to concerns from the board is, hey, these discussions get really granular, mechanical very quickly.

You haven't really explained how you're thinking about this in relation to our goals.

And so that was really what we want to accomplish in the first part of the discussion.

if the board would like to entertain questions.

We would like to entertain questions if the board has them at this point.

Do we want to go around the table or do we want to put cards up?

I'll go around the table, so we'll start with Director Song and then we'll go this way.

Something that kind of pops out at me is that a lot of this investment is kind of dependent on city levy money, so kind of, you know, not just the preschool programming part, but I'm looking at the early literacy and the interventionalists, thank you for sending me the data around what positions are funded.

A lot of them were actually interventionalists, so how Has this team started thinking about how it will approach Deal and their team and how you're going to kind of merge what their kind of expectations and goals with the levy are with what we're trying to do here?

Yes, those discussions are ongoing to try to make sure that they're aligned with the broad district goals and how their processes that have been kind of building centric and involve different partners, how we make sure that we're working with with our central office staff and building staff to make sure we're supporting things that have impact.

That's probably, since there's a new work plan and evaluation process going to the council this spring, we're in the thick of those conversations right now and we, and kept them abreast of our kind of planning as we go along.

Dr. Buddleman, Dr. Torres-Morales, or Mr. Howard, if anybody wants to add to how our conversations with dealer going, I'd appreciate it.

Let me start with you, Curt.

I think what you've stated, Kurt Bettleman's assistance here with Ted for Finance is accurate.

We're trying to partner more actively with DEAL.

The FEP levy is turning over.

It's a new levy cycle that's beginning for next academic year.

So trying to, I mean Ted's been leading this conversation for the last year or so to try and figure out how to make this transition.

One of the things that Seattle Public Schools has now is a more clear direction in terms of the strategic plan and how those investments could impact student outcomes, which is what we and D.E.A.L. are all about in terms of those investments.

So the momentum for that is definitely happening right now.

And I know Superintendent Schultner has lots of ideas around how to further refine those investments as D.E.A.L. and the public school partnered together on that.

Yeah, and I think that yes, they do fund a lot of those things that we're talking about, but that's not the only funding that goes to fund those.

Those are quite substantial investments that we make, and some of that does come out of different funding sources as well.

I'm going to head over to Ted.

Good afternoon or good evening.

You're absolutely right.

A lot of these interventions have been kind of one-off and they've been individualized by the building.

I think taking a hard look at what is actually being invested in, how do we lift that up for all schools?

And that's what's being looked at, not just our 30 schools, but how does this intervention that we're doing affect all our elementary, all our middle, and all our high school.

That's a different way of thinking than kind of leaving the academic ideas to the building and personalize it.

How do we say, if I go to Dunlap or Maple or go to McGilbrough, how is that similar, and how do we help all kids?

Because the levy was for all kids, not just 30 schools.

And so we're having that robust conversation.

And then we're also looking at where we that have implemented strategies, how does the city come alongside and help us, actually help us get to more students, not just the students we originally were identifying, but how do we go if we're only supporting 30, how do we get to 90?

So those are the other pieces that we're looking at.

It's still right now, I would say, in a beta system where we're looking at all that, looking at map data, looking at SBA data, looking at all those data points to actually see where those investments have worked and where they haven't worked so we can recalibrate.

At one level, I think What I perceive from our city partners in saying, if you could articulate a more comprehensive plan, that they would welcome that because sometimes they're not sure what our priorities are at the system level.

and start, you know, developing conversations with individual buildings and get whatever results they get, but they're not always scalable for us.

So they have asked us to weigh in, you know, in a more concrete fashion.

And before we get to the follow-up question, Dr. Strauski, you know, in terms of the strategies that you outline, can you give your perspective on, you know, how deal funding and deal interventions fit in?

Yeah, well, I think there's just a tremendous amount of opportunity for alignment between the city investments and Seattle Public Schools.

I think some really good, well-intended things have been happening at buildings in isolation that bring up big issues of sustainability.

Number one, can we afford to keep doing that if it's happening at a specific building?

And then also, is it supported centrally for us for issues of sustainability and can we replicate it?

Should it be going district wide?

And have we been intentional about being able to be partners on potential interventions that could be happening at specific schools that we can learn from as a system, that help us as a system, I think is a big opportunity for engagement and partnership.

Where I think we're getting better, even on this front end, is being very specific in our strategic plan about what we're choosing to invest in.

And I think that can help provide the clarity that our city partners may have been lacking from us as a system in the past.

so if we say second grade reading, we say sixth grade math, we're saying hey, this is the investment that we need for CTE, that we can be very clear about the types of strategies that we want to invest in, I think would provide clarity and support and partnership from the city that they may have not received from us in the past.

and including expanded learning, so summer school, including preschool investments.

And then the other thing that gets complicated, or I don't wanna lose, is that the investments are just from the city, but also we have federal funding, we have grants, we have, you see a lot of the dollars that are assigned there are for FTE, so for employees.

and those employees, Director Song, as you saw from what we sent you, it's just not all coming from Seattle Public Schools, it's coming from other funding sources.

So what we want to be intentional about is that whatever staff are going to be internal to Seattle Public Schools, that we are aligned to our goals, that we're being consistent with our guardrails, and that also that the partners that we bring in in the future are similarly aligned.

And I know that Superintendent Ben has some thoughts on that that will help provide us even more clarity, I believe, moving forward.

We'll do one question first time around because we will want to get out of here at some point tonight.

Director Smith.

Okay.

So just looking at the investment pictures and kind of in combination with the strategic planning priorities, I feel like it still feels a little vague.

I think maybe the one thing I would want to comment on is the district-wide ongoing foundational investments.

It seems like that encapsulates a lot of what we want to do, but for the Life Ready one, for example, the $121 million for general ed teachers, IAs, interventionists, and school leaders, that is for a good part of it determined by the different union contracts.

And so that number doesn't really tell me a lot about what our district will look like with these investments.

And then the same for the CTE and vocational teaching and the counseling.

and I think, so on the one hand, we don't want to be looking at how it has been and then looking at the change from there, but then I also feel like if we're not looking at is this different than what it was before?

Have we changed anything?

I'm just feeling a little uncertainty around that.

So if you could maybe address that a little and maybe just going forward that would be a request for continuing to refine upon how these are presented.

Which I also do want to acknowledge that there is a lot of work that's gone in and I'm not trying to tear it apart or anything.

No, absolutely not.

I think you're .

If we go back to the draft strategic plan development, what we'll see is that there's goals and guardrails, there's priorities, there's strategies, there are initiatives.

So some of what you're hitting on is accurate.

The initiative level, like an initiative map type thing, is something that is a lot more detailed that we'll get into the what's, how's, and why's, which is I think what you're requesting.

And of course, once those are more fleshed out and we have set strategies, that is what would live in there.

These maps are illustrative of the strategies, hence why they're not totally in the weeds or totally fleshed out.

The other thing is, some of this stuff, yes, is going to look like in the illustrative investment maps, is going to look like, yeah, that looks like that's core staffing type stuff, and some of it is, because when we're thinking about a budget, there's the strategies, but there's also, we do need to run the district and we're doing budget creation, we need to account for what is it that we're spending, even to run the district and the strategies in there.

To answer your question, you are accurate, thank you.

And there is more to this that we don't have up here just right now, because we're not all the way through full strategies saying yes with initiatives, if that makes sense.

Director Smith, you're in the fortunate position of not having suffered through these presentations the past number of years, where we're really only talking about the delta.

We're trying to make sure that we say so.

And as we think about our structural deficit, I think this is a little bit like an iceberg analogy.

So what's below the line that we want to preserve?

Where we think we might need to make changes, and where is that going to come from?

And again, these numbers aren't even as solid as they might appear on the page.

And again, I confess, there's a bit more form than substance in this discussion, but we want to talk about how we want to talk about the budget, not exactly what the proposals are, because we want time for Ben to kind of review and weigh in.

And so you will completely cop to that, that yes, this is going to be a little unsatisfying in terms of detail.

And hopefully that's okay, because I think that's rational where we are that if we get too deep into it and then have to walk it back, I don't think that's helpful to anybody.

Yeah, and I also do want to acknowledge your point that I haven't been sitting through these presentations historically.

Consider yourself lucky.

Thank you.

One last thing, too, is I think it's our intention is to be able to, whenever we get there, or whenever we do get there, we can tell you how we arrived at what we're choosing to invest in very clearly.

and what we're choosing not to invest in that were equally clear to you and the public about what we're no longer investing in and why.

So that we don't have just a baseline, this is how many unfilled positions we're not going to fill that we can say, no, this is what we're choosing to invest in.

and why this is what we're choosing not to invest in and why and that it's clear to everyone and it's an alignment to our strategic plan priorities.

Director Rankin.

I'm trying not to jump out of my seat.

This shift in this approach is I'm so excited about, which I'm still going to be picky and critical, but I'm so excited about this shift in this conversation.

Fred, you said something at the beginning about that we've, the last several years, focused on 6% of the budget and doing the least harm to the status quo.

and that is exactly, phrasing it that way is like, I think what we've been trying to get at for a really long time is like, okay, but the baseline foundation doesn't seem to be working.

We're kind of putting lots of things on the surface or we're always talking about things people are gonna lose and we're not talking about 94% of the budget and whether or not it's effective.

And so just like really appreciate the shift in thinking and how much and how well is way more important, especially at the board level, but is way more important than how many FTE and how many this and that and the other when we never even talk about if it worked.

and so I have a bunch more questions but I'm realizing they're actually more to do with some of the strategies and goals that are less about budget and more about CAI stuff so I'm just gonna hold those, I'll write them down, I'll send them in so that I don't take us into a different direction.

So I guess I don't really have a question, but one other thought is that this shift from that 6% and doom and gloom and how are we going to make up this deficit and not ever talking about what is and isn't working also is going to have the impact.

I think the conversation has led to this sense of scarcity and the sense in our community and our schools that quick, everybody, you know, grab and hold on to everything.

What's going to get taken away from us?

And that's really not, like, that's not a healthy place to be, and it's not a healthy, it's not helpful for central office and the board to be perpetuating, like, you better watch out, budget season's coming.

That's just, like, not a good place to be.

And so I think just shifting this away from what might get taken away to actually, what do you have?

What do you want?

Moving kind of from this scarcity mindset to we have so much we can do and could do if we all talk about what we want out of these investments.

We don't get to decide how much money we have to invest.

We're not like, we can't add more taxes and do other to a certain extent without getting permission from the state.

And so the amount of money that we have is not directly within our control.

We have to do the best we can for our students within what we have.

And I think just talking about what can we do instead of, oh my gosh, what's gonna be ripped away is a healthier way to approach it.

and it's realistic too because when we talk about what do we have that's working and then what decisions do we have to make, it's connected to an understanding of what some trade-offs might be as opposed to just feeling like stuff's gonna get taken away and we don't talk about if like maybe some of that's actually okay to let go of.

So I just, I really appreciate this and I have a lot more questions that I will submit by email about some of the other stuff.

Thank you.

Director Mizorahi.

Yeah, I think in line with what we were just talking about, I am interested to see the other side of the coin.

So I was doing like a little bit of just backing up a little math on the intended investments and it's like somewhere between 30 and 40 million, assuming we don't have a new 40 million, like what are the, We don't have to answer this now, but I think it was really interesting when we were doing the goals, thinking about it as a series of choices.

What are you doing?

What does that mean you're not doing?

And how are you really focusing on taking the resources of a building or of a system and really focusing them on second grade reading, for example.

and so I think it will be interesting to see as we go deeper into this, what are the choices that we're making that we're not doing, that we're moving investments away from, and how we think that is like setting up the whole system for success in these three goals.

So I don't think we need an answer to that now, but I am really interested in that conversation.

Not to be deficit minded, I know that it's good that we're talking about the goals, but I think that's an important piece of it.

Vice President Briggs.

Yeah, I wanna echo Liza's appreciation for the new framing and orientation to this.

I really like talking about it as we're making a plan and then we're figuring out how to resource around it instead of, here's our small pile of breadcrumbs and we can sprinkle a few here and here and here.

It just feels way more student-centered to start with the plan.

And so I guess I just have a high level curiosity around something that I think you said earlier, Fred, which was like trying to figure out where in terms of what is holding us back from meeting our goals?

Is it lack of resources being allocated or is it the wrong strategies?

And I'm just curious how close you are getting to determining that.

Is that becoming obvious to you as you look into these various strategies?

This is where we need more money and this is where we need a different strategy or is that still coming into focus?

My high-level perspective of this is we have some insight into what's working, what isn't.

I think we also have some questions about whether that is scalable and when we get to the resource discussion.

Maybe Dr. Starosky, you could weigh in, and Dr. Torres Morales.

Yeah, I can give you one specific example is So last year when we were all working and trying to understand about the direction we wanted to go with the literacy goal in elementary specifically, one of the things that we have been finding about our current curriculum was it was lacking in some spaces.

There are some places for our students that if we were gonna go in the direction of second grade reading for the foundational skills that our current curriculum wasn't matching where we needed to go.

So in anticipation for that we were looking at the curriculum adoption, specifically getting around looking at foundational skills that need to be filled.

but also at the same time, looking at the previous curriculum adoptions that we've had where some have been very successful in the implementation and some have fallen short.

So when we say that we're going to be doing a K-5 curriculum adoption, that means every school, every classroom, and then for us centrally, and I've had this discussion with Ben, so how are we gonna do that?

so how are we gonna do that?

And for us being able to think about some of our strategies of, with our 13 priority schools in the previous strategic plan saying, well that was some really good learning that happened as a result of that and some really good things, but some things that were not scalable.

We can't scale that to all students, excuse me, all schools but the coaching model is something that was, something that came out of that that was worth investing in and figuring out well so how can we use that coaching model in the curriculum adoption to make it successful for schools, for teachers, for our school leaders based on lessons that we learned.

So for us moving forward, is saying, no, if it's second grade reading, it's the curriculum that matters, but also that every single one of our teachers and our school leaders needs a multi-year plan on how to do that is our most pressing example.

and then also for us, why we started so early and I'll be coming back to you to the board and bathing you in information about the process but Ben coming here, we wanna make sure that he's good with the process moving forward so that we're sharing the 31 schools, the 34 teachers that are doing some of the testing of some of the curriculum that's going on so that we can come back with a full curriculum adoption, a process that the board can feel good about and that the community can feel good about, but that is specific lessons that we learned from our previous strategic plan that we can't afford to do.

The 13 schools, there's some really good things, but we can't afford to do that, but there are some really good strategies that came out of there that really benefited our teachers and ultimately benefited our students that we want to and so our expectation is every single teacher who's a K-5 teacher is going to get that support of the curriculum and that every single student gets access to that curriculum that's our commitment and so how do we do that is we're in the process of planning.

So that's just on mind real time example that's happening behind the curtain but also we are gonna start pushing that forward for everyone to hear.

And I think in terms of the funding question, I think that goes to, I mean, we can all answer that, I think, at the table.

Do we feel like we're fully funded in public education right now?

We know the answer to that.

But, and I think Dr. Butterman's gonna hit on that here in a couple minutes.

We talk about what we see as what we should be spending on certain services versus what we get from the state.

There are areas of significant gap.

What we're saying is we unapologetically feel like, no, this is what we need to spend for our kids.

So we do know there's a funding issue.

Regardless, though, I go to a point that Director Rankin made earlier, we still have a finite amount of money we need to do for this school year.

You're in third grade now, so with what we have, what do we need to do, and that relates a lot to what Dr. Starosky's talking about around strategies, but for us to sit here and say, no, we don't have a funding issue, I don't think we would say that, but I do think we would say, given the finite amount of resources we have, what are we going to do about that?

Director Lavallee, did you want to go?

I appreciate what Director Rankin said about not getting too off topic but I did want to point out within some of these strategies that in like the seventh grade math strategy we're talking about stuff but the kids that are going to be tested in 2030 are currently in third grade.

The kids that are, we're looking at high school readiness are currently in fifth grade.

So this is, you know, our life readiness goal when we're talking about that goal in 2030. I think they're, I don't know.

but we're looking at kids that are currently going through the system and so it's not you know we've got to look at it and not just have it be the one factor of only what's going on at high school but what's going on all the way through.

That aside I wanted to get to the actual question and it was going to be a little bit more in the weeds which was When we're looking at different stuff and I know CTE was mentioned, there are a bunch of funding programs that when we classify other classes as CTE and expand that program that we can get federal funding back for at least at this point in time that we are currently not.

So are there additional things like that that we can look into that other school districts are utilizing right now?

that can help us expand these programs that we're looking at that align with our goals and further reduce that budget from what we're getting right now to help us both provide services and increase our direction towards our goals.

We have been exploring that specific issue.

Are we leveraging our CTE funding to its highest value?

Dr. Buddleman or Dr. Strauski want to address at least how we're looking into that?

Yes, just yesterday Kurt and I met with some folks in leadership to speak specifically to that and there's some things that we can be doing and will be coming back and so when Director Smith was asking the question about CTE specifically, that we can say that in order for us to move forward, there's some things that we're going to have to realign and by realigning is how can we recapture some dollars and then how are some of the funding mechanisms over time that we've been using for CTE need to be readjusted and I think there's some significant adjustments that we can be making to exactly what you're talking about but we gotta get specifics and we gotta run some models and then also know that we can change some funding sources or funding streams, but that has a domino impact on how it impacts human resources, staffing, SEA, building master schedules, but for us just trying to focus on the funding stream and how we can maximize resources, we are having those conversations and trying to do some action in a very short amount of time.

Is that accurate?

Okay.

I'll start with a comment.

I think without examining our WSS, in a sense it is maintaining the status quo.

So it feels a little bit like we're kind of nibbling around the edges with these strategies and initiatives.

I think we need to look at how the WSS supports or doesn't support those strategies and issues.

So it was just a comment.

I did see it in kind of this baseline, but I think that work is really, really important.

Relatedly, professional development.

So that is uniformly a very big strategy that you all are pursuing.

An observation that I have made in looking at our budget, professional development is actually a pretty large dollar amount.

and today I kind of learned a little bit about professional development there's like different color days I think it would be helpful if this is a strategic priority for our budget for the board directors to kind of understand like what is the overall strategy around professional development like collectively in all these veins what are perhaps things that we need to make change in our CBA around that.

What are additional investments that we need?

What can we change about the money that we're already spending on professional development?

I would love to have a two by two to just kind of talk about professional development.

What is the universe that we have now and where we would like to go?

Because it is a large dollar amount, but I'd like to see how it matches.

Yeah, not to speak for Dr. Pritchett, but I know that we would love to have those conversations in two by twos to not only talk about what the current state is, but also the complexities of professional development in Seattle Public Schools, because we have some data that ERS has actually shown us that we would love to bring back up, but also to talk about the complexities between those different colored Wednesdays, early release days, and then also we have data that we're generating from CAI about all the subjects that are happening on those specific days, and then how many people are attending those days, and then also where they're currently connected to our strategic plan if they are.

And so we're generating that data and we have a professional development steering committee where we're trying to be very aligned moving forward with all the positions that we have in Seattle Public Schools that are responsible for some form of professional development in our system.

It is a large investment.

and then also moving forward, we wanna make sure that our investments are aligned to our strategic plan, our goals and our guardrails, and then our specific strategies moving forward.

So I am not committing us, but I'd say we're committed to doing it.

to expand the topic a little broader.

We set up one of our priority areas, it's really around workforce and make sure that we can attract and retain qualified teachers and give them the level of supports.

I don't know, Dr. Pritchett, if there's anything you'd like to just add in general.

I think PD is a piece of it, but In the end, educators is what makes this all happen.

So no matter what we do, if we don't provide the supports, and that's how these strategies are going to touch students.

I think it's just critically important.

Thank you.

I think that one of the things that Dr. Starosky hit on was really looking at alignment.

We have a number of folks that provide PD throughout our system that traditionally over the last decade have been siloed and kind of everyone doing their own thing.

One of the things that as I came into human resources was really to look at what are the resources that we have that are focused on PD and how can we start to align those to our strategic goals, to the work that other departments are doing.

So our PD steering committee that Dr. Strotsky talked about is a collaboration between human resources, CA and I, and schools.

And we've had the past year to really start to look at all of our resources.

What are we doing?

what are some of the things that we can be super intentional about that we haven't say in the past.

We have teacher leaders within our buildings.

How are we working and utilizing our teacher leaders that are in our buildings that are specifically set up for professional development and supporting schools?

Have we done direct training with them?

to support what's happening at a district level.

We've also been looking at how do we align what's happening with our principals in the summer in our Summer Leadership Institute.

How is that aligned to what's happening with our tri days?

And then how does that then ultimately align to what you talked about around the early release days?

Particularly, how are we supporting our teachers in developing professional development in our red days and in our yellow days that our teacher directed.

So we really want to support our teachers in that, support our teacher leaders.

Initially when we talked about early release days, the idea of that was really to give more time to our teachers to collaborate.

to work together to improve instruction for our students.

And I think that over the years we've kind of gotten away from that.

And so some of the work that we're thinking about and doing and working together on is really how do we realign all of that work.

So that is exciting.

I'm super excited about that.

committees within our district as well.

Our partnership committee works on tri-days.

How are we aligning the work that they're doing with our district goals, with ongoing training so it doesn't feel like there's a one-off that happens every, you know, in August on a district day and then we don't ever talk about anything again.

So we are looking at all of those.

it is a long process.

Fortunately I have known Dr. Strotsky since 1999 so we're breaking down those silos together and we look forward to continuing to do that work and to maximize our existing resources because I think that's an area that we haven't done in a while and so part of as we've gone through some of these processes is really to look at are we maximizing the resources that we actually have right now.

in 1999.

So let's move on to the update on the current budget situation.

So this is where we usually start and and I'm glad, I hope that background was appreciated, a different way of entering this conversation was appreciated.

I think we have boundless goals for our students, so by definition, resources are always gonna be scarce, whether we have a structural deficit or not.

We're always gonna wish there was more, there's always gonna be new things, so we really need to have a process to make sure wherever that line is drawn that we're making the best use of that and that we're constantly in a continuous improvement mindset and making sure that we're allocating that.

So we'll never be off this treadmill where what will we do with the next dollar but what do we want to make sure and how do we make sure that we're doing the smartest things wherever that baseline is?

And so we have challenges and I'll ask Dr. Buddleman to kind of walk through where we are and let me know if you want to drive.

Thank you, Superintendent.

Before I subject you to suffering, I think was the word you used, or the doob and gloob, I just want to pause.

I meant that with love.

a second and sort of acknowledge the work that not only this team has done, but the education resource strategies team helped instigate to get this sort of what I perceive, having not been here since 1999, but for the last few years is a new focus on what the goals are and how the strategies and the budget can start to inform those and move towards those.

So not only is the ERS partnership been really instrumental in this, this group worked together for a lot of time on trying to coalesce around how we're approaching this discussion and then the details that will follow as we prepare the budget the strategic plan task force community members weighed in.

A lot of their work is evidenced in these documents that you're seeing.

Their survey was sent out yesterday from Chief Redmond and myself around this topic.

How does strategic plan feel to you as a community, the draft strategic plan, and how some resource implications in that.

So just wanted to pause there and just sort of acknowledge that this is a different approach and it's not because Fred is so smart and the rest of us are now just catching up, but because this has been sort of a collective effort of the Seattle Public Schools community and leadership team, so just wanted to pause on that.

onto a little doom and gloom.

So this is just a quick recap of where the district has been.

When we get to the formal presentation of the budget, we'll get into some more detail around this and how it affects where we're at today.

But as many of you know, many one-time strategies were enacted, reductions at schools and central office over the last few years.

and then considerations of larger moves and then a loan was taken out from our capital fund that's being partially repaid this year.

So don't want to belabor this but want to just acknowledge that the work and the intentional work around trying to bridge the budget gap has been extensive and ongoing.

Here's a nod to our ERS work.

Just wanted to highlight a couple things.

Superintendent Podesta said much of this already, Limited state funding, we're not the only school district in the state of Washington experiencing some of these issues.

Many school districts are, many school districts will in the future.

Unique to Seattle, there's some transportation underfunding for what our students are getting currently, some special education underfunding for what the needs are that are significant contributors to this.

And then this revenue isn't sufficient to cover sort of what is required to operate Seattle Public Schools.

So ERS and the collective leadership sort of came up with some policy implications.

Director Sands is talking about revisiting the WSS and how we allocate resources to schools in the context of the way things happen.

So that's work that is going on.

multi-year fiscal strategy, so many of these things, these investments aren't gonna happen overnight, they'll happen over the course of time and now we've got this focus and this direction on how we're gonna use the 1.3 billion dollars to effect change for students at Seattle Public Schools and then of course advocating for additional revenue and exploring efficiency or cost reduction opportunities is something that will be ongoing and important.

I think you've seen this information before, but four of the larger areas where we're underfunded for what Seattle Public Schools students in community are getting now are around special education, multilingual services, transportation, and substitutes.

Just want to highlight the substitute funding from the state of Washington hasn't changed since 2011-2012 for school districts.

There's a significant amount of underfunding that's going on in all of these categories, but that one just feels like a huge outlier in terms of the attention that has not gotten over the last, almost as long as Dr. Pritchett Goodman and Dr. Swarovski have known one another.

You've seen this as well.

Again, one of the things that the district has done the last number of years is relied more heavily on one-time solutions, which is continuing to grow the opportunity for those one-time solutions.

And so we're getting down to the part where we need to make some structural changes, either on the revenue side or on the expenditure side.

And so again, back in line with our strategic objectives that are becoming increasingly more focused.

and then again here you've seen this, Superintendent Podesta alluded to the $80 million or $87 million problem we're trying to solve for next year while we're trying to make sure that the investments that we're prioritizing are as part of that solution.

Just a summary here, so absent any structural changes in revenue or expenditures or both, this will just continue to persist.

We do continue to anticipate increases in operational costs and legal services, utilities, insurance, transportation costs, special education needs.

As schools get smaller there's more mitigation that's happening so there's an enrollment impact there.

highlighted those significant funding gaps from the state, and enrollment has continued to decline, not as significantly as anticipated a couple of years ago, but it is still on a downward trajectory, which has obvious impacts on the financial situation.

We've had a number of fire drills around federal funding recently.

Knock on wood, there'll be a resolution in the next couple of days in D.C.

around that.

We're anticipating currently sort of flat-ish funding for the titles that we get from the federal government, so hopefully that's what the result is, but we've got planning around if the case is different.

Dr. Bridget Goodman's gonna talk a little bit of it later about compensation.

We do have many, almost all, there's a couple that aren't expiring this year, labor agreements, the SEA agreement, the 302, the two bargaining partners are expiring at the end of this year, so that's an opportunity or a challenge.

The district will need to build into next year's budgeting going forward.

And then I mentioned briefly the strategic plan task force community group and the survey.

and how they've been helpful in trying to inform some of this work.

And then opportunity and long term challenge, there's legislation, there's good practice, there's a district policy around having a rainy day economic stabilization account and so trying to rebuild that so that the district is on more stable footing going forward.

Did you want to do this one?

This slide is repeated a little bit later.

All I was gonna say is part of our strategic planning process has identified specific areas of future exploration and map to the goals and guardrails.

I'm gonna circle back to this.

There's a lot here.

not gonna cover every point now or later but just in terms of process that again every step of the way we want to be able to link to our highest level goals the guardrails that represent our vision and then categorize them into actionable categories.

So I'm gonna ask my colleagues to present a little bit about at a very high level, not to present their budget in detail, but some of the high level numbers just so you get a feel for them and then also in our attempt to link this to our goals, what findings we've had in our resource analysis and things that we want to further explore to bring that more detailed budget proposal and I think Dr. Torres Morales kicks this off.

Yep, so good evening.

We're gonna start by talking about teaching and teaching support.

This is a significant, significant part of our budget.

If you look at it as a whole, it is over a billion dollars.

This includes our teaching activities, teaching support and the principal's office.

Just for some context, teaching means basically the expenditures for teachers, educational assistance, extracurriculars and supplies.

Support would include things like our librarians, counselors, psychologists, health services, security officers, et cetera.

This also includes things like textbooks, curriculum, instructional technology, professional development, assessment, et cetera.

and then our principal's office would include our principals, assistant principals, school office support and school office supplies.

So next slide please.

And I'll just add that those are OSPI sort of activity codes.

We're trying to maintain some consistency across the state in terms of how we report those.

And so what we're gonna get into here is a little bit of the diagnostic findings.

So what you would see, this slide basically talks about what do we spend compared to peer districts.

So when ERS did the study for us, you'll see they coded the districts at the bottom, but they looked for districts across the country that have similar demographic profiles to Seattle Public Schools.

and then pegged us against those districts to see are we spending more or are we spending less in Seattle Public Schools?

What they found is that in general, we are spending more than peer districts.

There are some that spend more than us, there are some that spend less, but in general, if you put it at an average or the peer median, I should say, we're 8% higher, around $2,000 more per student is what we're spending in Seattle Public Schools compared to other large urbans that would be considered peers to us based on our demographic enrollment.

Next slide please.

This slide digs a little bit more into what we would call our special ed spend.

So as I noted earlier, as Dr. Bettleman noted earlier, Seattle Public Schools says this is what we feel like special education costs, and then there's a certain amount that we receive from the state, and there is a gap in between those numbers.

For context, to the right, what you'll see is that we actually, in terms of spending on our budget, we are higher than our other peer districts in the state of Washington.

but when you look at actual spending per pupil with students with disabilities what we spend there are some districts that do spend more to more than us or on par with us and some that do not spend as much as we do so to think that we're completely out of line with our peers not not exactly but this is what we think the cost of servicing our students is and I would even say what we hear from community a lot of times is that there actually is need for more support than what we're actually getting so it does beg the question as to what we're doing with the resources but we do know there's a gap between what the state is giving us and what we think is appropriate for funding for special education services.

Next slide please.

This slide gives us a little bit of detail that I want us to dig into.

So one is if we look, this is specifically looking at instructional assistants or instructional aides, paraprofessionals as some would call them.

And what you're going to see is that we do have a larger number of instructional aides when it comes to special education aides.

The data that are not on this slide, there is a difference when we think about what's noted here is the weighted median of national comparison districts in terms of teachers.

And so while we are heavier on the aid side in Seattle Public Schools, we are not as heavy as other districts are on the teacher side.

So when we're thinking about funding and planning and what we're doing, it does beg the question, is there something we may want to do differently in the future?

when we know that we actually staff less teachers for special education but more aids than what other districts do.

The other thing that's, if you can go back, that's very important to note on here is the multilingual instructional assistant piece because if you look to the box at the top that talks about context, We earlier were noting there's a gap in multilingual funding, but one of the important things to think about is in our district we do have instructional aids, multilingual aids, that is not funded from the state.

That's a decision that we make, that we fund, that I think we all agree with.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't do it, but it is not something that we get funded for from the state of Washington.

So it's something that we are footing directly out of our coffers.

I'm gonna turn it over to Dr. Starosky quickly to talk in academics and then I'll be back with you all to talk about schools and services.

So the fortunate thing about this next slide is some of the conversation that we've already had I think will be coming back up again.

You've heard us talk about this in a very specific way.

but just to orient you on this slide is where you see in the upper right hand corner says range of savings zero to $10 million is intentionally ambiguous and intentionally ambiguous because of the decisions and priorities that have yet to be made.

But what I wanted you to know from the CAI curriculum assessment and instruction perspectives here is what I'm working with my team currently and have been working with my team for a number of months now and what we're working through and we will start with that first bullet is refocusing, prioritizing our investments to be in line with our people and to our draft strategic plan.

that will reorganize the CAI structure to reflect those priorities, to reflect those strategies and emerging priorities so it's in an alignment.

Because if we didn't do that, we would be out of alignment.

That'd be what we were discussing earlier as kind of the status quo of just protecting positions not aligned to mission, strategy, and priorities.

So that is the work that me and my team will be doing.

And also that we want to focus our professional development to be very specific on our new curriculum implementation, that we focus our professional development priorities to directly impact and support teaching.

is saying that I know that's important to Superintendent Ben, is keeping the supports as close to the classroom as we can.

And our intention is to do that, but also making sure that we're doing so intentionally in our structure.

and also realignment of our centrally funded programs and positions to focus on the drafted goals and so that was some opportunity what we were talking about which is we know that there's positions that have multi-funding sources but making sure that those are aligned to our strategic goals and that also if they are going to exist, they exist for very intentional reasons, not just historically this is what we've been doing.

The other thing I think is very encouraging about the previous conversation we had is you'll see There is the changes to the way that career, so CTE, Career and Technical Education is organized at the central office to maximize resources, but also that they're offered at our schools regionally, but also every school, and so that's getting back to our guardrails, guardrail one.

of equity, and then also that they're focused on the specific graduation pathways as a commitment.

And so we're trying to build some fences around some of the things that we wanna protect, and CTE being one of them, but also in order for it to be protected, we gotta get clearer about how we're going to do that and what are the opportunities for some alignment and some savings, but also some focus and then finally, how preschool and expanded learning is provided across the district.

We want to, no matter what, we're going to continue the investment.

The investment is how big is it going to be and one of the encouraging things is that we're finding some investment with the Ballmer group who wants to and who is investing in our expanded learning.

So there's some opportunities here for us to work along with outside sources to be funding expanded learning and also our pre-K.

The things that I'm not considering at this time are when you see these, and these will be replicated from my peers coming after me, realignment's not being considered at this time for any number of reasons, that we wanna make sure that the change in leadership is supportive of what we're protecting, but also the efficiencies specifically related to literacy, math, science, and then also I'd say elements of the life ready goal are protected because they're foundational to the strategic plan and our investments.

so as CAI we have 119 people that are in my division, 119 that have multiple positions that are supporting principals and teachers and educators throughout our system.

that we wanna make sure that the good work that they're doing is focused work and aligned work.

And so how academics is choosing to do this should be consistent with how my peers are also looking at this as well.

So what you see and why you see zero to $10 million is because we're gonna have to make some trade-offs and some choices.

and as we do that together as a system, we'll see some of those numbers change, but more information to come on that.

But that's how CAI is choosing to look at this challenge, but that's systemically supported across all areas.

In terms of schools and services, I actually want to start with the things that are not being considered, just to take that off the table, because I know that often becomes one of the questions.

So at this point in time, we're not considering targeted class size increases.

Also, we're not looking at reducing schools' discretionary funding or approaching the portfolio of schools at this time.

Some of the things that we are considering, and this is similar to what Dr. Strauski was just noting, is around how are we getting our staffing priorities more on direct service to students versus indirect service, so really thinking about are we doing, do we have some ability to do some restructuring there that is ultimately also gonna lead to some cost savings?

The other thing is academic interventionists in our high schools.

This is not something that we're saying we're going to do for sure, but something that we need to consider to explore.

In each of our high schools, they do receive a half-time academic intervention specialist.

It's something that everyone receives on top of a WSS model.

That is something we've been talking about for a bit with some of our leaders over the years.

never really explored in earnest and at this time we're saying given the current budget constraints and what we want to do with investments, considering that.

And finally, explore non-comprehensive high school administrative structure.

This does not mean that we're talking about getting rid of non-comprehensive high schools or non-comprehensive high school programs.

that's not what this is saying.

What this is saying is thinking about how we're staffing them at the administrative level and engaging with conversations with principals around what do we think may be most appropriate going forward.

Once again this is nothing that is definitive but this is saying that we're going to be and have started some of those conversations.

So let's keep rolling here.

I'm sure there's going to be lots of questions.

There's a lot more information here.

I think this is again just the beginning and I think let's continue to hear from the experts.

Sorry.

With regard to hearing from the leadership, we really want to divide this into straight support for students and educational activities and then operations and central administration.

So those numbers in terms of budget are significant, $325 million, and again, the other support activities includes many of the things that we consider operations, taking care of buildings, transportation, utilities, all the business kind of side of the house to operate schools, the infrastructure for schools, largely, and kind of the business functions.

Central administration, there are executive positions and administrative positions within other sport activities, and then there's some specific things in central administration with regard to the very senior leadership, legal costs, and those kinds of functions.

all important infrastructure that allows us to operate schools, but not the cost directly associated with educational services, although there are other important supports.

Culinary services, feeding students is part of it.

It's certainly a direct support to student, not necessarily an educational program.

if we could advance the slide again.

ERS just have given us some insights into this.

We wanna leverage the resource analysis as we're making these decisions in broad strokes.

I said that our spending in this area is not necessarily out of line with their benchmarking data.

that there still though may be opportunities to, another finding was about unified leadership and kind of the coherence of our system.

So while at the bottom line it might be all right, but there are places where some of our programs might be in conflict with each other or just may not be as integrated as they could be.

So it's not just an efficiency move.

Sometimes if, and ERS did a great job talking to school leaders about their perception of the central office and is the central office always on the same page.

And beyond efficiency if you're getting there's the efficiency aspect of well I'm getting answers from two people and then if it's well I'm getting answers from two people and it's not the same then there's another cost to try to reconcile that beyond just the fact that it's two people and could we get that same answer from one person?

So there again they didn't advise us well there's a whole lot of there there in terms of how many resources you have, but you could definitely look at how they're organized, and maybe that would lead to efficiencies, maybe it would lead to more effectiveness on the other side of the coin.

Again, they had some specific diagnostic tools that show how we benchmark, again, at the bottom line with costs, and then this was what was really great about working with ERS was they had standardized categories regardless of how Washington State labels things, how we label things, so we could benchmark our percent of spend.

I know it's a bit of an eye chart, but the bar chart on the right describes our spending as a percent of central office spending in particular functional categories relative to their peer-weighted median groups in their benchmark analysis.

They've, and this, particular chart highlights where we spend a much higher percentage than our peers on a particular function, I think just as intriguing a thing is where we're spending low, like at the very top of the chart, student transportation is an area where we have costs, so maybe our staffing, our leadership staffing there, we need to think about is that creating the cost, it might be a function of just we're outsourcing a lot of that, that it shows up in a different, in a different category than staffing per se, but it's really nice to have this diagnostic to say, so where do we want to look?

And again, at the bottom line, it's not so much, oh, we're way out of whack, but it's also, again, since most of these expenditures are not direct educational expenditures, we really want to look at them very hard to see.

So this particular function isn't exactly tied to our goals.

Are we absolutely sure that this is an expenditure we want to make?

Next slide please.

So these are some kind of across the board changes we're making.

A lot of these involve payroll costs.

Again, I mentioned at the top of our discussion that a lot of, and this might be kind of a rabbit hole in percentages, but that our problem for the general fund at the bottom line is roughly 6.2% of our projected expenditures but 78% on average of what we spend is labor.

So trying to find that 6.2% in non-labor cost, the other 22% is really, really difficult.

So it's hard not to find efficiencies without affecting people because that's what this organization mostly is.

And so some of these things will involve numbers of positions and then how we compensate people, which Sarah will speak to as well.

This is an arbitrary number in terms of looking at senior leadership.

This organization has grown a little bit in that rank and this is trying to assign a goal based on well how big is our overall problem and what share of that should come from executive compensation.

This overstates a little bit at 1.5 million is bigger than 6% of the problem.

An example of this is something that we've already done.

Our current structural deficit includes funding for a deputy superintendent and a chief operations officer.

We've certainly collapsed that function in the past into one and that's something we could consider and those are the kinds of things we need to look at.

with new leadership we are gonna be looking at the organization on a functional basis anyway so as part of that we're gonna have to ask ourselves are there opportunities to save costs on executive compensation?

We've had a hiring freeze for non-represented positions I think since 2022 or 2023. It's not a hard and fast freeze, but it has led to savings every year, and we continue to carry that cost in our expenditure forecast.

This could be the year that we finally bite the bullet and say, well, we're never going to fill these positions, so let's just take them out of the out of the budget.

Again, we need to look at every aspect of this.

As I just talked about, we'll continue to look in central offices, in the central office, how we're organized, where there could be potential further savings.

We will see, we are funding, using external funding to fund some things in the central office, so we want to make sure we understand that intersection and see what, what, Both challenges and opportunities there are there.

Again, as I just said, we are gonna make organizational changes, so this is the place to see if we can collapse functions, integrate departments to lead to efficiencies in the management ranks.

And then, We want to, and we have a specific example that has come up year after year related to transportation, we'll get into, but look at specific operational efficiencies that we can find that aren't related to educational programs.

and I'm gonna turn it over to Dr. Pritchett Goodman to talk about some compensation things at this time, and please, Sarah, again, as I said, there's no way we can do this without affecting people, so beyond what's on the slide, if there are other things you wanna say about this, please do.

Sure.

Thank you, Fred.

And I would say that, as Fred indicated, the majority of our funding is based on people.

I think we're actually probably more or a little bit closer to 81 percent of our budget that is actually funding our staff.

and part of that is I think that we all agree that the services that our staff provide every day are central to our students being successful, maintaining safe and well-functioning schools.

So that's not necessarily a question there or a surprise that most of our funding is actually for staff.

That being said, we still have issues with our deficit that we need to look at.

And so as we start to think about how we can save money in compensation, many of the things up there that I'll talk about briefly are centered around our non-represented staff.

Some of the things that we're not considering at this time are looking across the board at salary reductions for every single staff in the district.

Part of the context there is that we currently have six open contracts that are being negotiated or will be negotiated in the spring.

and we know that to unilaterally do a salary reduction would not be consistent with our negotiated contracts.

So that's something that we haven't looked at across the board.

It certainly doesn't mean that we wouldn't negotiate and look at salaries in negotiations.

So that's something that isn't on there at the time, but certainly, like I said, as we negotiate contracts, we certainly would be looking at salaries there.

one of the things that we're considering for our non-represented staff is continuing our furlough days.

And so when we really started talking about what was happening with our budget, our non-represented staff, and those are the staff that are here at John Stanford Center, have been doing furlough days now for three years.

We do two furlough days and so that's something that we're looking at considering to continue.

We also suspended vacation cash out or leave cash out for our non-represented employees and we've been doing that for three years as well.

That is something that we're continuing to consider as one of our ways to save in compensation.

We also are, as we look at efficiencies, we're looking at our year-round employees, so our 260-day positions within departments and asking, are there positions that we can reduce to a 223 day calendar or are there positions that we can just reduce within departments?

Those are things that each department is gonna need to look at.

We've certainly looked at those over the last three years as we've tried to tackle some of our budget constraints.

and it has all of us thinking differently, all of us needing to pull together.

As I joked about how long I've known Dr. Starosky, that relationship has helped to actually think about how we work together.

What are some of the things that we're doing, for instance, in human resources that are either supporting or in contradiction to what CA and I is doing.

So those kinds of conversations have been happening over the last few years.

and we would continue to ask departments to look at that and some of those conversations are hard because it's what are we going to abandon?

What are some of the things that we are no longer going to do?

So those are the types of questions that we're asking departments and we're asking if our district goals are here, what are the things that we're doing within our departments that support that ultimate goal of our student outcomes and how do we get real lean and how do we get really focused on what it is that needs to happen for our schools and for our staff within schools to reach those goals.

So we've asked those questions, that is something that we're looking at.

And then the other piece that we're also looking at is effective IPD for non-represented staff.

and we've talked about that before in other ways.

That concept would be basically the amount of money that we get from the state for what most people refer to as kind of a cost of living.

Of course, they don't give us enough money for all of our non-represented staff and so we compensate that by saying, okay, if we're gonna give a 2.5, for instance, 2.5% cost of living raise or IPD, we make up the difference from what the state actually gives us and so if we were to look at effective IPD, we would take just the money that the state gives us and then we would spread that across our non-represented employees, so that wouldn't equal out to If, for instance, the cost of living or the IPD was at 2.5, you may see non-represented staff looking at a cost of living adjustment of 1.7 or 1.9 because we would be only taking what we've received from the state as opposed to making up for that.

So those are the things that you're seeing there.

Again, these are extremely difficult conversations.

but necessary.

I think that it's led to some really great conversations, as I've said, between departments, within departments, looking at efficiency, looking at what do we really need to do?

How do we become leaner?

We're looking forward to having those discussions also with our incoming superintendent.

It's always great to have fresh eyes because sometimes when you've been in something for so long, you say, well, no, no, no, we have to do it this way.

that's the way we've always done it.

And so this is a wonderful opportunity for us also to have him come in and question, so why is that?

Why do we do that?

And as he comes on and really digs in with us in the central office, we'll be making some adjustments and really thinking through and flushing out what the other compensation savings would be.

Thank you very much.

The last functional area in this part of the conversation I want to talk about is athletics.

And I'll turn it over to Mr. Howard.

And I just really want to thank him for leaning into our athletic program beyond just financial things we're going to talk about.

He's taken that on, and I really appreciate it.

Thank you.

As what you see up here is I'm going to fill in the blanks of what's missing.

So you see in bold changes being considered at this time.

So we're looking at everything.

It's not just one thing but I want to give you a flavor of what athletics is.

So you had a handout and I want to walk through the handout in front of you.

So you have the vision of athletics and I want to say that athletics is an extension of what's actually happening in the classroom.

You have the theory.

already in the classroom and then that is the closest thing that we have from theory into practice.

Our students do day in and day out.

So you have a consideration for pay to play if students actually would have to pay to participate in sports.

On page two, you're getting into what we're looking at, participation and program scope.

So you get a chance to see the benefits of athletics.

At the same time, what you're seeing is student voice that's down below.

What problems do you want to help solve when you grow up and what skills do you need to learn to solve it?

And so those are two I would say instrumental questions that students ask and what we try to provide for them as they go through athletics.

Then you get a chance to see about future skills and skills needed and how athletics develops them.

The cost at elementary, if we were to expand it to elementary, what the costs are currently for middle school and the cost for high school per student.

And then you're getting into Well, how many coaches do we have at middle school?

How many do we have that are paid volunteers?

And how many coaches participate with our students?

So you get a chance to see that breakdown.

Middle school, you see the breakdown for high school.

Going to the next page, I wanted to show you what the GPAs are for our students.

And so you get a chance to students who participate in athletics.

what their GPAs are.

When students don't participate, what the difference is.

And then attendance as well.

And then the last page, you get a chance to see the participation rates of students who actually participate in athletics per school.

And that's at high school.

and then it's a further breakdown at fall, winter and spring.

What's not on here is the consideration of removing middle school sports.

You have a number in there, it's about close to 6,300 and something students who participate in middle school sports.

Those are things that we're considering.

If we were to remove middle school sports, right now we get a lot of that money from from DEAL, DEAL pays for that.

If we were to reduce that and only took the grant that DEAL gave us, we would still have to reduce middle school sports.

And so we know the advantages to mental health, we know the advantages to students socially, emotionally, we know the advantages for students continuing to participate in sports when they actually develop leadership skills.

So we know these are the things that actually go along with it.

So I want you guys to have these other pieces, but we are considering all these pieces to get to a range of 2.6 million savings.

And some of that's coming from athletic fees and some of it's about reducing what we actually offer currently at high school and at middle school.

just wanted to let you know as we look diversely across the system we are looking at everything and I would be remiss if I would tell you that we shouldn't be looking at everything we should look at everything that we're currently offering to see if that's a good investment or not and I know that's what you as board directors would want us to do is look at that so that's what the athletic department is doing right now but I wanted you to have some data in front of you so you would see what we're considering and the impact it would have.

Thank you Mr. Howard.

We've talked about transportation efficiencies many times and also it was highlighted in the ERS study.

This is from the resource study that this is an area where we far outspend our peers in their benchmarking data set and we spend double roughly what we get in state funding for transportation so there's no way to have this conversation with at least saying this is something in consideration.

And this is why understanding the whole budget is so important because some of the proposals here would be very difficult and disruptive, but are they in fact more important to preserve this service model versus some of the investments we're trying to make?

in academic achievement, again, if we only have the discussion about preserving the status quo, you don't get a flavor of that trade-off, even if something is hard, as many of these things would be.

The way our yellow bus system works now, roughly seven or eight years ago, we changed our bell schedule at all schools.

and which requires nearly 50% or a third bigger bus fleet than we would operate if we had a three tier schedule.

It also, we have splitting our service among two providers.

the service level we're able to achieve with that model versus when we had a monopoly on our services for three decades are significantly better.

But it is expensive given that you're creating twice the overhead cost for those vendors by having two operations.

But it's working for us.

Again, that's what we're gonna have to decide is Does this model that's providing the best service levels that we've had in my time at Seattle Public Schools, you know, worth the investment that we're making?

We did it for a reason.

How important is it compared to everything else?

So what is being considered are looking at bell schedules, to see if we can operate a three tier system, changing the mix between two vendors and then try to leverage our, we have a special ed transportation and general ed transportation and try to provide a more, a least restrictive environment by having more students with disabilities on gen ed buses.

Again, the goal is to just put as few yellow buses on the street every day as we can.

Things we are not looking at that we've discussed in the past is any model that would curtail transportation to option schools is not something that we're considering.

And if we did consider it, it would certainly not affect students that were legally required to provide transportation.

and then I would like to talk a little bit about technology efficiencies even though that's capital funded, we need to think about how technology can help us save money and I'll turn it over to Carlos Tovalle to describe that.

From the technologies out of the house, I think I briefed this a couple of months ago about the ERP platform that we are embarking on implementation.

We're into the second year implementation and that's going to bring some sort of savings internally and efficiencies.

As far as the costs and benefits going to the cloud, we did the commission a lot of servers internally that we have in our data center and moving those out to the cloud.

That's going to reduce some of the, there's going to be efficiencies on the energy costs that we have.

As long with the technical debt and risk that comes with it, we're passing all the risk over to the vendor.

And in the past, we have done a lot of coding internally that takes a lot of resources when we're doing the testing.

Not the resources, but accounting resources, HR resources.

That takes a lot of time from their work.

to implement these things.

We're going to be improving that, improving the cycle and lowering the life cycle cost.

Also, the procurement in HR and finance will be streamlining some of the processes.

We have a lot of manual processes in some of those areas.

If we can automate that, we can release those resources for utilizing somewhere else.

As of today or tomorrow, we'll be putting out a, I believe it's going tomorrow, an RFI.

We're going to be revising the cell phone contract.

We haven't revised it in about, gosh, seven years, I believe.

And there's a lot of capability out there that we haven't tapped into it and then looking to reduce the costs.

So we have put the RFI out to the carriers to come back with the best pricing and the basic capabilities that we can secure.

Especially in the security office, the new services that we're looking into is satellite communications, you know, for events that they might require in blackouts.

When everybody's using their phone, nobody can talk, so we have priority access by utilizing the existing prior access and the satellite communications as an addition as well.

So we're looking at that and also the alignment of the e-rake reimbursements that we could receive from the federal government.

Some of these costs, they're eligible for these reimbursements.

And finally, the HVAC, our central data center here, is an old system.

Every summer we're running, looking for parts.

That ties up a lot of our maintenance guys.

That cost comes from the operational money because it's maintenance.

So we're trying to, looking for more efficient systems that we're going to put in place here entering into this year, bringing again some energy cost reductions as far as the electricity.

And also we're getting operational efficiencies in this data center as well by minimizing the footprints of servers and replacing that with virtual machines, virtual servers per se, which still requires hardware, which reduces also the electricity.

So we're looking at what kind of opportunities we can gain from this.

90 million, yeah.

We'll see.

So I hope the board appreciates an opportunity to hear directly from the folks who actually spend the money, then hearing from Dr. Buddleman and I about what we think about how they're spending the money.

And I'm going to make an editorial adjustment here and just get to next steps and then leave it for any questions that you have at this point.

and I'll let Dr. Buddleman talk about the next steps.

So in terms of the board's next steps, there's the transition that's potentially happening with the Ad Hoc Budget Committee to the Standing Committee for Finance and Audit.

So I'm looking forward to having deep conversations with that group as that becomes the process going forward.

The policy number 0060 requires a draft educational program adjustment resolution.

so it anticipates something like that in February or March.

That has happened in December last year and I think February of the prior year or so.

Try and get that to the board around that time.

Continue to update the board as the machine works on the budget process and then importantly because of the transition year, because of all the complexity in the budget, work with the Board President and the Board Office to potentially move the timeline of actual approval of the budget into August, so we have more complete information and a chance to give you more time to digest the details of the budget than we have in the last few years.

So...

I'm kind of wondering, I want to take the temperature here, board directors.

We do have a meeting on February 4th that's going to be on our progress monitoring.

We could kind of wrap this conversation up here, digest some of this information, get questions over to board staff so that they can get some answers or get those to staff, and we could continue this conversation on the 4th and be maybe a little bit more prepared or we can maybe take a five minute break and dive into some discussion now.

Is there sort of a temperature, Director Rankin?

Can you remind me the meeting on the 4th, is that a- It's just a work session and it's just progress monitoring.

Oh, okay.

I like the suggestion of writing down our questions, getting them to staff, and having answers come if we have time during that meeting.

Yeah, I think that there's a shorter...

I'm just making stuff up here at Superintendent Podesta, but...

No, that seems like a very practical suggestion.

It might lead to the shortest honeymoon ever between me and Superintendent Scheldner, but we'll see.

What did you get me into?

But I'm happy to do it that way.

is there any chance that we could ask like one question if people want to right now and then more questions later or not you want i mean i think let's just get it all let's push it all is there like a burning question that you have on no i i can hold it all right i yes always is it thought thoughts from folks Okay.

Then we will be joined also by Superintendent Schuldner on the fourth.

But I have a feeling that- And maybe me, we'll find out.

Yeah, Fred, you're not fully off the hook.

But this was a lot of information.

I appreciate the way in which this was presented.

I'm gonna look to Julia or Carrie.

She will send out an email to board directors to start trying to collect questions, if there are questions, just as a reminder.

we'll use our general form and then we'll continue and we'll add this to the agenda item on the 4th.

Just before we adjourn, okay, progress monitoring is on the 4th and the other reminder is that assessment has to be in by Friday.

So please, please get that in.

But as there's no further business on the agenda, the meeting stands adjourned at 7.33 p.m.

Thank you everyone.