School Board Work Session - October 28, 2020

order at 331 p.m.

For the record I'll call the roll.

Director DeWolf is unable to attend today's meeting.

Director Harris are you with us.

Director Hersey.

Here.

Director Mack.

Here.

Director Rankin.

Here.

Director Rivera-Smith.

And this is Director Hampson.

The Superintendent is also present as well as staff who will be presenting as we move through the agenda.

This meeting is being held remotely consistent with the governor's proclamation prohibiting meetings such as this one from being held in person.

Public is being provided remote access today by phone and through SPS-TV by broadcast and streaming live on YouTube.

To facilitate this remote meeting I will ask all participants to ensure you are muted when not speaking.

There will not be a public comment opportunity.

Staff will be working to administer the meeting and may be muting participants to address feedback and ensure we can hear from directors and staff.

We have two work sessions today.

The first will be an oversight work session for the Equity Partnerships and Engagement Division.

This will be followed by a budget work session.

I will now hand it over to Chief of Equity Partnerships and Engagement Dr. Keisha Scarlett to begin the oversight work session.

Dr. Scarlett will also be joined by Director of State Stakeholder Engage I'm sorry Engagement Kirk Mead for this presentation.

All right.

Kirk I believe you're hearing me.

All right.

All right.

Good afternoon everyone.

We're super excited and delighted for the opportunity to feature all of the tremendous work of the Equity Partnerships and Engagement Division today.

So we appreciate this opportunity.

You can go ahead and advance the slide.

Like I said before I'm Dr. Keisha Scarlett Chief of Equity Partnerships and Engagement.

So we have an agenda.

Lots of bullet points here and so we'll work ourselves through these multiple different points within the agenda.

And and so how we'll set this up today is there was a special request by our board to feature our family engagement along with equity partnerships and engagement work.

So Mr. Mead and I will toggle back and forth.

So I'll speak about EPE at a high level and then I will pass it to him to speak about the stakeholder engagement and family engagement work.

So we'll toggle back and forth within that.

So we'll be a great duo today.

Thank you.

Please advance the slide.

So as you see we have our division functions and primarily we really focus on leveraging partnerships to build adult capacity to to institutionalize racial equity across the organization.

The EPE division is really charged with leading the way with de-siloing work.

And the newest development of our Office of African-American Male Achievement we work in really close partnership with them in order to ensure that our work is really focused on the strategic plan and that we're de-siloing efforts across the multiple divisions that we have leading the work for the strategic plan across the district.

So as you see our primary division functions is to align our racial equity literacy and equity analysis and stakeholder engagement which includes our family engagement and community engagement and also internal engagement to ensure that we're all uplifting the Seattle Excellence Plan and really implementing the strategic plan priorities.

In order to support our collective efforts to around the strategic plan we do have a really important priority is very important.

Inclusive and authentic engagement is a grounding priority for us and equity partnerships and engagement and we do a lot of work to help support ensuring that underrepresented students and families are represented in district decision-making.

We also really focus on normalizing and operationalizing racial equity and anti-racism as we move forward the Seattle Excellence Strategic Plan.

So there are three departments and also a new program that's been added to to EPE.

And so we have our School and Community Partnerships led by the brilliant Director James Bush.

Our Racial Equity Advancement Department and now including Ethnic Studies Program which is led by Director Manal Al-Ansi.

And then also stakeholder engagement led by Director Kirkmeade who's joining me today.

Please advance the slide.

So as we get started a whole lot of people talk about capacity building but what is capacity building when we say that.

And so when we say we're a capacity building department or division what we mean is we really try to translate district vision and policy into success for students.

But there are multiple steps that need to be enacted to be able to do that.

As we make those shifts from thinking about district vision and policy like our Seattle Excellence Strategic Plan or Policy 0030 our ensuring educational and racial equity policy and other large policies.

We also align that with strategy and implementation where we work on really assessing the conditions to implement into excuse me to implement and drive project management and also stakeholder engagement in the vision.

So if we don't have stakeholders that are engaged in the vision then we don't actually move into implementation and we don't move into capacity building.

That is followed by structures and systems.

And this is a cycle a continuous improvement cycle.

And so it's non-linear so you might need to move back and forth within capacity building in order to build the momentum needed to move into implementation.

But in this sort of linear fashion that is within the cycle next will follow building structures and systems ensuring that you have a purpose support and supervision where you balance the expectations and support and accountability with the support across central office staff.

And then that moves into really supporting and building capacity of classroom teachers.

through school leaders and teachers and other staff so that they grow and develop and shift their practice to meet the whole child academic and social emotional needs of students through a focus on racial equity and anti-racist practice.

And thus we move into successful students.

So there's no miracle within capacity building.

It's how do you align all of these steps in the through line together in order to implement and advance racial equity within the system.

So one of the last things I'd like to say about EPE as far as our capacity building model is that we really set forth a plan to to focus on belonging and how do we support belonging through opportunity structures.

We have identified 3 opportunity structures.

One is institutional.

And so institutional opportunity structures are like the policies that we have in place to ensure that we're all aligned in what our mission and vision is.

But also there's the interpersonal opportunity structures and so EPE we really help to support and work in partnership to ensure that there is belonging across interpersonal both between staff and families staff and community members students and students and students and staff.

So we work in partnership and de-silo those efforts across multiple divisions.

And then lastly instructional belonging.

And we're really excited about our opportunities to be able to work in support of instructional belonging through both ethnic ethnic studies and also Black studies through our division working in partnership with multiple divisions such as Office of African-American Male Achievement and also our Curriculum Assessment and Instruction.

Next slide.

So another way that we're working on building capacity and thinking about how important it is for us to show up is really thinking about the norms and the values that drive our work within our division.

And so what I share with you today is the Black Space Manifesto.

And in this manifesto there are multiple different areas that we're really leaning into to think about how do we both enact our Seattle Excellence Strategic Plan but how do we show up authentically as our whole selves into this work Being mindful of the ways that we interact with each other.

How we interact with systems and really hold up a high level of ideals in our commitment to community and to the families that we serve.

And so here are a few ones around how do we create circles and not lines.

Ensuring that we move at the speed of trust.

Being able to celebrate and catalyze and amplify Black joy.

Centering the lived experiences of those people most impacted by the initiatives and projects and the work that we endeavor to have happen.

Being able to reckon with the past to build the future.

Cultivating wealth.

That's time and talent and treasure so that we can actually be able to have a system that doesn't penalize people for trying to fail forward.

Promoting excellence.

Being humble learners who practice deep listening.

Planning with and designing with.

Seeking people at the margins of the system which is in alignment with our targeted universalism system or initiative.

that really grounds us in our Seattle Excellence Plan.

Being able to protect and strengthen culture.

Fostering personal and communal communal evolution.

Having a manifestation of the future that we have to always lead with futurity no matter what we're experiencing.

And then lastly choosing critical connections over critical masks.

So those are some grounding manifestos that we're using within EPE and also within AAMA in order to really ground us in our work and our commitments to our school district and to each other.

Next slide.

So we have a variety of department functions.

I won't read through all of them but I'll highlight a few.

That racial equity advancement as a department normalizes the focus on racial equity and anti-racism by operationalizing board policy 0030 in partnership with multiple different departments and schools.

Also leading policy development as well.

Building capacity for staff to lead for racial equity through multiple strategies for addressing racialized power such as hiring aligning resource allocation and other aspects of leadership.

Also inducting and supporting coaches and developing our racial equity teams as well in partnership with the Seattle Education Association Center for Racial Equity.

Our school community partnerships as a as a department aligns and integrates our partner services to meet our district goals.

Provides community partnership infrastructure and also builds upon the capacity of schools and partners and organizations to meet the needs of students.

We really try to create seamless opportunities as our students and families navigate school home and community working together.

And then lastly stakeholder engagement which is community engagement and also family partnerships.

To be able to engage community members by organizing opportunities for stakeholders.

That's our families and students community partners and other community members to share their thoughts and provide input and partner with us.

So that's more so two-way communication and building capacity of our school and central office staff to improve engagement in communication strategies.

And then and that is in strong partnership with Public Affairs as we work together to ensure that we're partnering with them around engagement and two-way communication.

And then lastly family partnership.

These are really our school-based strategy.

And while we do not provide direct services to schools we do have mechanisms to provide supports for departments who are looking to provide direct services at schools as well as creating a system of communication for families and other stakeholders and building the capacity of school leaders and school teams to really engage in inclusive and authentic engagement of families.

Next slide.

So this org chart is way too small for me to try and read out to you but I have already talked about our different leaders that we have within that our directors our direct reports to us.

And so we are a small division but we're quickly growing as we're working in partnership.

And so I want to say that we're a big division because we work in really close partnership with other divisions.

So I think we're sort of a uber division when we think about the work that we're doing across other divisions as well.

So you can see there our different staff our growing staff that we have within our organization.

Next slide Kirk.

So we did do some work to think about what our SWOT analysis of EPE and what our strengths are.

So I'll highlight a few things.

That our strengths as a division is that we have a wide range of culturally responsive CBO's that provide interventions to students.

And that's really helped and supported through our school and community partnerships.

We're leading the work to operationalize anti-racism policy and values and practices and outcomes.

We have a brilliant anti-racist diverse and growing BIPOC team.

that's leading anti-racist work across every division of the system in partnership with the Office of African-American Male Achievement.

We have a newly formed partnership with Curriculum Assessment and Instruction EPE and AAMA focused on increased belonging through what I describe as instructional opportunity structures through Ethnic Studies Black Studies Key Makers and Mentorship as well.

And then also established relationships with the coaching model with school leaders and racial equity teams.

Some of the weaknesses as a division is our ability to track and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions.

So that's an area of growth for us.

We have a lot of new staff.

We are a young division that changed and switched over from being strategy partnerships and with Superintendent Juneau coming in making it equity partnerships and engagement.

And so we have a variety of staff with less than two years in SPS.

So 8 staff and then 5 staff with less than one year.

And so we are a young staff and still we're still growing in how we work with each other and how we interact with the rest of the system.

We're still working on our cross-division project management structures and still hiring new staff and coordinating resources to really ramp up implementation across a variety of different projects.

And So but we do have some great opportunities.

We are working through our school and community partnership team on a centralized partner intervention track tracker in progress and that's along with DOTS and also our schools and continuous improvement team.

We have multi-level professional learning structures and new performance management structures that are focused on anti-racism or racial equity leadership and on partnership with human resources.

We've experienced increased collaboration that is really driving institutional clarity and direction on how to take anti-racist work and really scale it but also move deeply into working with community partners and our stakeholders beyond school buildings.

Also just opportunities to really define explicit services and processes to promote consistency and greater accessibility to the expertise that we have within this division.

And then when we think about our threats There's limited collaboration across divisions during development as we're still trying to develop many different roles within the system and just trying to organize those roles.

So we do have some threats in that.

There's also a threat just to our institutes our institution as we're leading this out front leading racial equity work around the institutional discipline that it takes and the capacity to prioritize and persist with anti-racist work.

Even with COVID and just new mandates and new ideas and thoughts about work that we should be doing it's really important for us to exercise institutional discipline so that we can instead of deal with complexity moving

on coalitions and collaboration with key stakeholders in order to move the work forward.

And then also ensuring that we have institutional norms that may lead to resistance to process changes as we're pushing everyone to be racial equity leaders in the system.

We don't have a system that can any longer hire people who don't have racial equity leadership skills.

We don't have time to wait for people to develop those skills if they'll ever develop them at all.

It needs to be part of our processes in our hiring processes as we move forward.

Next slide.

So a few accomplishments.

Creative Advantage is a wonderful partnership that we have under our school community partnerships led by the brilliant Audrey Quirns.

And so you can you see that we launched a regional arts festival within our pathway or Denny Self Pathway distributing 3,500 art kits during school closure.

You can imagine how excited our families and students were to receive these art kits.

and have ways to be able to engage in arts even during school closure.

We were able to connect 61 child sites with meal distribution.

We were able to connect with 18 emergency child care sites during the spring and moved into having 50 during the school year.

We have been able to secure over a hundred million dollars in levy grant funding from the Families and Education Preschool Promise on levy with Department of Education and Early Learning from City of Seattle.

We were able to develop a RFQ process and currently have over 47 qualified CBO's to support community-based organizations serving youth.

You can see that we've hosted convenings across our affordable housing partners.

I want to send a shout out to Kathleen Ponanen who is our housing education manager who's done amazing exceptional work over a number of years and wishing her well as she transitions to do new amazing things in China with her family.

So we'll miss you Kaplan within that work.

And she has been part of a number of different initiatives as we've distributed books and worked with our comms and our excuse me public affairs and curriculum instruction to Distributes Seattle Super Readers books.

Working with the Seattle Public Library to produce books for with the Somali Family Task Force.

A Somali family book.

Alphabet book.

Also providing support in consultation and collaboration across at least half of SPS schools.

expanding our DREA team to allow for more 25 more racial equity teams across our SPS schools.

And now our newest partnerships that we're really excited about is partnering with Curriculum and Instruction as of August 1st to lead and co-lead the Ethnic Studies Program.

And now with Black Studies coming as mandate through board resolution we recently got an allocation of $150,000 to help launch that work.

Next slide Kirk.

So just to give you an idea of the org chart I'm going to actually stop right here because now we're going to talk about family engagement.

So this is the toggle into you Kirk.

So thank you.

So Kirk are you are you here.

Are you on mute Kirk.

Let's try getting off.

Let's do that.

Okay.

Yes.

Thank you so much.

It was a great meeting I promise.

Kirkby Director of Stakeholder Engagement back on live Mike.

Just again wishing Kathleen Ponen well and sort of kudos to the incredible devotion that they have offered in service to our housing partnerships.

It's been a pleasure working with you Kathleen throughout the time I've been here the short time I've been here at Seattle Public Schools.

So we're seeing here on your screen equity partnerships engagement sort of dovetailing down into our stakeholder engagement work, a new body of work stood up by the vision and sort of the leadership of our chief, Dr. Keisha Scarlett.

We're seeing the primaries here around family engagement specifically.

And I think this is what we've really come in to talk about today.

And you see what offers an exceptional amount of experience in the field, a diverse set of talents being brought to bear on the work, and three really exceptional individuals.

Our SWOT analysis in summary is really about how we've arranged for this work.

And ultimately if I could sort of sum up what this is really trying to communicate it's really about thinking as an institution what our fundamental outcomes around family engagement might be.

And I've articulated this before for some of you board members who've spent some time doing deep dives with us in family engagement stakeholder engagement.

sessions and again thank you for your time and offering that for us to give us a chance to get into some of the weeds of the work we do.

But really thinking about the ways in which we articulate this as what should family engagement be.

Where should it reside?

What are the arrangements institutionally that are required to support that?

Then ultimately, what might we do in terms of human capital and financial capital investments to make that work for us?

The SWOT analysis really speaks to the ways in which we support the work currently.

If you look, for instance, in some of our strengths, We research and we develop and disseminate strategies.

Right.

We maintain a portfolio of specific initiatives but we're operating primarily in a consultative and coaching capacity.

Right.

And so we aren't sit we aren't situated necessarily for compliance function but certainly to come alongside divisions and site-based leadership administrators and and practitioners alike to support them in a capacity building coaching and consultative work.

Not a direct services component but certainly something that we can think about as we consider what family engagement family engagement arrangements for develop for delivering the kinds of outcomes we really really crave to see in the district might look like.

Some of the stakeholder engagement which again dovetails into a lot of our family engagement work.

Some of our stakeholder engagement outcomes are here as well.

Again stakeholder engagement family engagement and specifically as Dr. Scarlett articulated community engagement are critical components of our work and in this crisis moment We're seeing a lot of different ways in which stakeholder engagement and of course family engagement has come along between in 2019-2020 school year and even moving into our 2020-2021 school year how we've come together in partnership with the vision.

So what you'll see here in terms of our accomplishments are an articulation and illustration of what our partnerships look like and what our partnerships fundamentally produce.

And that's the power of really strong, sort of efficacious and meaningful partnerships that are leveraged for the right purposes and in service to our families, our communities, our educators, and of course our students furthest from educational justice.

Here we've seen some of our capital expenditures and our investments here, financial and human.

That first one there, ninth grade transition manager, position while it doesn't explicitly roll up under family engagement is a critical component of moving kids from that 8th grade year to that very critical transition into 9th grade.

And Nichelle Page an incredibly enthusiastic individual who is focused very deeply and richly and authentically around supporting African-American boys as they move through this work.

And again this being a specific strategic plan goal funded through our strategic plan budget allocation and I think a critical component of our work moving forward.

And then our community engagement manager Kairama Blackhorn, and our housing education manager, the position, most recently a pending vacation by Kathleen Ponen, and then to be backfilled here soon.

We've got the conversations done, the interviews are done and dusted, the offer is out there, and we're looking to announce very, very soon here.

But again, excited to continue this work with our housing partners.

So again, a critical component of the work around family engagement.

And our family engagement Family Connectors University LEAD again coming alongside parents to really increase their level of capacity competence and confidence around supporting education both on-site in the home and where we offer both compensation financially and then continuing education credits.

And I see a couple other larger investments here but the one I want to focus on is $150,000 to support the family engagement plan and we've drilled down into that a little bit on the next slide here.

I don't want to skim over the $350,000 but I think where we've developed this and we want to focus on today is that $150,000.

And here we see that plan allocation allocation breakdown.

So $50,000 for our family engagement staffing and conversion of a half-FTE to a full-time FTE.

So again increasing capacity and increasing folks' ability to commit to the work in meaningful material ways.

$52,000 for priority and focus schools, so targeted around those schools with the highest proportion of African-American boys, those 13 focus schools, stipends for family connectors being leveraged there through that $150,000 allocation.

Family Engagement 301. This is that high level sort of coaching and capacity building PD that we want to see happen here in the upcoming year.

And then also co-design consultation.

So thinking about how we take that $150,000 leverage the expertise from consultation external consultation and building out a meaningful plan of action that leverages both our middle school and high school partners around this work.

So there's a lot of really strong intellectual horsepower in the work of developing family engagement at Seattle Public Schools.

And what I can say is it's always helpful to certainly have an additional outside perspective that helps us round out what we do and how we do it.

And then lastly here a $48,000 allocation for middle to high school transition success and program priorities.

Again aligning with a lot of what Nichelle Page brings to that work and there's an existing allocation in partnership with Caleb Perkins work as well.

So excited about that.

I think it's meaningful and material and certainly going to advance the work as as we see it.

I think we've got division goals and objectives.

Dr. Schall do you want to hop back in here for some of these items.

Dr. Scarlett are you with us.

Dr. Scarlett are you speaking on mute.

Did we lose her.

We we might have lost her.

It looks like we lost her.

Okay.

Do you want to go ahead.

Absolutely.

I'll I'll I'll I'll I'll I'll I'll press forward.

I'm back.

I'm sorry I got kicked out of Teams so I'm back.

So our division goals and objectives you can see we have some major initiatives and equitable access to curriculum goal that we've been working on that will be connected to strategic plan that will really highlight ethnic studies within that and also Black studies.

I'm training educators on Black Studies.

We have a great opportunity to partner with an organization called the Africana Institute.

Some of you know Brother Delbert Richardson and also he's working in partnership with local educators.

Professor Dr. Latasha Levy who is the head of Africana who is a professor of Africana Studies at University of Washington.

They have a great proposal and so we're looking forward to integrating that into our racial equity Saturday Institute trainings this year.

Also.

Working on the pro-Black and pro-Indigenous anti-racism policy adoption and implementation that we're calling Policy 0040 Anti-Racism Policy.

Expansion of RET's that we are still working to move those to scale.

We're in about half of the schools but still working toward moving those into scale.

And so then you can see the different targets that we have connected to those and also their relationship to the strategic plan across multiple different areas.

You can move to the next slide.

Okay.

Also ensuring students have access to to high-quality interventions and support.

I talked before about our Intervention Tractor Tracker and a pilot across 20 schools.

A combination of Levee and also 13 focus schools.

Being able to align and integrate and partner services to meet school and district goals through training opportunities and feedback opportunities within that.

We had a fall partner kickoff with over 200 attendees within that which is way more than we had before when I've attended and that's been really exciting so that we can keep on building and maintaining partnership tools structures and then capacity building around opportunities for partners.

And then I'm also building affordable housing partnerships.

Continuing to do that work with our housing and education partnerships to support student success.

And so and then As we transition and think about our key performance indicators our KPIs we have a few different goals.

Improving our ability to track interventions offered by CDOs.

So our ability we have set a target to develop and pilot an intervention tracking solution at the 20 schools.

Again around housing partnerships and supporting educational well-being and ensuring that students have the supplies that they need in order to really engage in educational opportunities.

And also have an opportunity to expand staffing for Ethnic Studies Program with we set five positions here and that'll be a combination of what we're doing with Black Studies as well.

So our program manager and also additional staff.

So our division budget you can see here that at the level of the division we have 2.75 FTE and then you can look through stakeholder engagement and see what our FTE looks like across stakeholder engagement and family and partnerships.

So that's really like community engagement and stakeholder engagement.

School community partnerships the FTE and also racial equity advancement.

And then you can see what the budget looks like across that and compare the previous year's budget to the new budget.

You can see there's been Quite a few increases in the stakeholder engagement budget.

Over $200,000 increase in budgeting across that.

And pretty much the other ones have stayed the same except racial equity advancement.

We were able to get extra funding through the contract through the CBO as far as having additional DREA coaches that were bargained within the contract.

So it was a little hard to benchmark because so many school districts do this really differently.

But according to these different cities you can see a little bit of benchmarking as far as the enrollment.

And there is no school district that necessarily has the equity partnerships and engagement like division.

So but when you look at what comparable school districts have in their FTE you can see where Seattle kind of ranks within this benchmarking.

So lastly policies and procedures that really guide our department's work.

0030 again is an umbrella policy.

It's our ensuring educational and racial equity policy.

If you look on the EPE webpage you can see the policy report on there that I mean shows such a tremendous effort by our team to show the de-siloed efforts and to really make them visible.

And so you can actually click on each division and see the work that they've been doing connected to advancing racial equity.

So we're super excited about the report this year and the shifts in that report.

Also 4110 is an important board policy as we And it's also an anti-racist policy because it seeks to ensure that families and students who are on the margins of the system are embedded and pushed into the center of decision-making.

Also 4129 for family engagement.

4130 connected to Title I family and parent engagement.

And then also 4265 which is our Community Partnership Board policy.

And then there are some superintendent procedures.

Kirk if you can go back.

there and there are accompanying superintendent procedures for 3 of those policies that we left listed there before.

Thank you.

So internal controls of course Seattle School Board is an internal control that we have.

Extended cabinet our extended cabinet has really broadened over time to represent the diversity of the number of departments and just new hires and a really reflective and new ways of the work to drive equity in our system.

Racial equity teams are also in internal control that we are accountable to supporting our grassroots education movement toward advancing racial equity at our school teams.

And also on Policy 0030 and the Seattle Excellence Plan.

As far as external I'm always accountable to our community partners.

And we have that sort of a land out in that Black Space Manifesto that we talked about about our norms and our sort of our operating agreements.

The SPS constituency just the broad of that.

And also the Equity and Race Advisory Committee that is the only committee that is codified in contract language.

In Policy 0030 they are named and called out as an advisory committee that remains connected with the superintendent both in procedure development and policy development and working in partnership with them to produce a report each year of what's happening to advance racial equity.

And then lastly our audit and review efforts.

We continue to work to normalize the underpinnings or the premises of a racial equity impact tool and to be able to advance racial equity as well.

So those are different tools that we use in order to really socialize the the need to to center the voices of students and families furthest from educational justice and our efforts to advance racial equity.

We do have a few major outside or other service contract that could be major depending on how much money you have.

But we have a few different service contracts that we are working with.

Some of them are multi-million dollar ones or hundreds of thousands service contracts so.

We are working with Global Citizens to do the data analysis and community engagement analysis for Policy 0040. Of course I talked about the Africana Institute is a new organization that we're working with for professional learning support for Black Studies.

The Seattle University Local Improvement Networks.

Thank you school board for for voting to adopt or approve us having that service agreement and funding agreement.

that's funded by I believe Gates Foundation for this.

We appreciate you implementing that in and are excited about the opportunities.

Also with Gates we have the partnership tracker to develop a CBO intervention and tracking solution.

We're still working on our ongoing contract with Cyborg Mobile.

They helped develop our EOG digital toolkit.

That's our eliminating opportunity gaps digital toolkit.

We need to do some ADA compliance and But we have a variety of different modules through that and we're doing some rebranding and relaunching.

But it's really an exceptional tool to help support our professional learning.

And so next slide is that it.

So then lastly key information and technology systems.

You can see the EOG Digital Toolkit.

Most of these we've repeated over and over.

We do have a really great community partner platform that lists the different a database list and partners.

Next slide.

All right.

That's it.

Okay and now we're going to go to some questions from our board members.

And we're going to start with let's go in reverse alphabetical order to change it up a little bit.

Let's go first to Director Rivera-Smith.

Thank you.

Happy to kick us off.

Thank you Dr. Scarlett and Kirk for all that wonderful information that was very thorough.

I do have there was a couple of slides in there though that were not in the the online board materials.

I'm wondering if we can get those.

They're in the beginning there was two pages about the three the opportunity structures the Black Space Manifesto those two slides.

I don't see them on the online materials so I'd love to have those slides.

If we can get that.

And then also in Kirk's part there was the two investment pages.

I that's all I wrote down.

I wrote a bunch about them but there was some in there like I said that there were not in this packet.

So if we can get those that would be awesome.

Also let me see.

I had a question regarding my packet here.

The well simple question so where Creative Advantage where are those located.

Where are those partnerships.

What sites are those at.

Yeah.

So I'm going to actually ask Director James Bush Community School and Community Partnerships Director he could speak more about that.

James could you share about Creative Advantage.

So Creating Advantage is an integrated arts program that is throughout the district.

It's not in every single school.

We have not made it out to Northwest Seattle yet but we we similar to DREA we we expand to different regions as funding and stuff becomes available.

We were not able to expand and finish out our full expansion district-wide this year because of COVID.

But it is district-wide and it is a model where principals and school leaders they they bring on our coaches that are actually trained in kind of implementation and they have staff that take and maximize the use of the PCP time that happens at each of our schools.

But it's district-wide.

Awesome.

Thank you.

So do you have a listing of what schools it is at right now or is there somewhere you can see that.

I can absolutely get that to you.

Okay.

That'd be great.

Thank you.

Just was curious to see that.

And then I'm just sort of kind of a more overarching question because and I think I mean this is was outlined as as a struggle or weakness but as far as so yeah as you as you work towards your outcomes of engaged students families stakeholders how are you right now measuring and evaluating that success.

What are you what is the tools you're using for that.

Kirk do you want to respond to that.

Yeah absolutely.

And Director Rivera-Smith I apologize.

Could you repeat that question again.

I didn't quite get all of it.

I'm sorry.

Again since your outcomes are you know engaged students families stakeholders how are you measuring that success and progress.

Oh absolutely.

So thank you for repeating the question.

So much of it is measured by the the quantity and frequency of our internal partnerships at this juncture of that work.

So coming alongside really great partners internally like Special Education Working with them across last you know about 6 or 7 weeks where they stood up about 5 direct community listening sessions and focus groups with families and we engaged SPED work IEP's 504 plans et cetera and talking about the ways in which families and communities needed more robust support.

And then also working directly with the superintendent's office around our Community Conversations Initiative.

A superintendent sort of sent out a bit of outreach earlier on this year.

to engage some of our CBO partners.

And that has been a work that has been really, really powerful.

One of the most significant ones and most recent one out of the two we've stood up so far with Chinese Information and Service Center, where we had somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 to maybe upwards of 500 families and children dialing in to engage with us.

So right now, it's really about the frequency of this.

And we're on the first cycle of what I think is a meaningful sort of four-part interaction as we engage with each one of our communities.

where we first sort of connect with them identify needs check in to see that what we've learned in these engagements is accurate and reflective of the concerns that they have.

Identifying internally where those concerns ought to go specifically and again based on a more shared understanding of what the concerns might be and then messaging out to our communities very explicitly where their concerns went to be addressed how long they can expect to before a turnaround and then ultimately projecting out for communities So we can get this virtual cycle going in an authentic way what they might expect to see differently.

So that's essentially how we've been working it as a cycle and both as a measure as qualitative and quantitative practice.

Thank you.

No that sounds that that sounds like a great overview of how you're doing that.

Where where where is that data represented.

Where could we see that represented.

Absolutely.

So we're so here's a really great point.

So with especially with for instance the superintendent's work we're still compiling feedback from like Chinese Information Service Center and Southeast Seattle Education Coalition which was the last two events that we held there.

And certainly in partnership with special education there's a lot of qualitative data and quantitative data.

Now happy to compile that for you in a brief.

We don't have a central location for that for board members to go to but we certainly can report out as we bring that information in-house.

And Director Rivera-Smith if I may add like recently we got some good baseline data from like a school leaders survey that went out across our division and talked about family engagement and community engagement as well.

I mean we do have different metrics that we're setting for different initiatives and projects around you know participation levels and things like that.

But it's really given us an opportunity to think about the strategic plan priority around authentic and inclusive engagement.

and really doing some metric setting.

This is the first time that family engagement is going to be like an a top-line goal that'll be reported to the strategic plan.

I mean sorry reported as part of the strategic plan and to the school board and to community so really excited about sort of the metric setting and development.

Ongoing I think across across like district dashboards and things we've had different types of metrics for family and community engagement but they haven't really captured really what we're trying to represent in this.

And so we've been in ongoing engagement even as a cabinet about what this looks like.

But the whole thing also is about how do we de-silo this that that we don't own necessarily community engagement that we're helping to support that.

And so across different work plans work plans across divisions should reflect their community engagement goals just like our school improvement plans should reflect their family engagement goals.

in in their school improvement plans at the school level.

So that's part of the capacity building approach as well.

And I will offer Director Rivera-Smith I did not I neglected to mention 3 group 3 convenings that happened over the summer.

One State of Black Genius Families of Color Seattle Digital Literacy convening and then also Hodan Mohamed conducted multiple phone interviews and surveys over the summer.

And there is data around that as well.

And there is a report that sort of captures that as well.

So I think I'd be happy to share that with you if you're looking for explicit very clear data that's been aggregated.

Thank you.

Yeah I think we I think we just I think you gave that to us.

That sounds familiar to what we received after the late summer when we were looking at opening But if not if you haven't given that to us sure that'd be awesome to see that.

No I appreciate that.

I'll move on.

I have other questions but I don't want to take all the time up so I can connect with you or some of my fellow board members might ask what I was going to ask anyway.

So here we go.

I'll move on.

Thank you.

Okay.

Thank you.

I can come back around to Director Rivera-Smith as well.

Director Rankin.

Thank you.

Yeah I this is a.

There's a lot of information and work being shown in a condensed amount of time.

I have sort of a I guess a big picture question and a specific question.

So my big picture question is about well kind of a clarification that this is really about family engagement at the with the district not at the school level.

Right.

Because that that's that's different work but there is There's capacity building at the school level.

So I guess I am interested in understanding a little bit more about in the engagement part of your your work how that does get to buildings and students procedurally and kind of specifically.

And if I'm misunderstanding please let me know.

But this is we're really talking about engagement with with the district.

And building level engagement is something altogether different but you do support that.

So I guess that's kind of my big picture question of how where the impact or intersection is of the work of your your all's department how that really shows up in and at school.

That's my like larger question.

And then my very specific question is about the funding for initiating Black Studies and how I'm still having I still have questions around the how your department and Curriculum and Instruction are are working together to bring Ethnic Studies and Black Studies into our buildings.

And I guess what what that funding is attached to I'm wondering and and how we what what steps were taken on that.

That's my yeah that's my specific and I know Dr. Scarlett and I will be talking more about Ethnic Studies and Black Studies as we go and we have a work session and after after the holidays.

But yes those are my kind of main main questions right now.

Thank you Director Rankin.

Dr. Scarlett I'll I'll jump in and then maybe you come on the back end and close it out.

Right.

Wonderful.

So Director Rankin I think you you've got a good handle on it initially right.

So we do operate and this phrase will continue to come up here in a consultative coaching and capacity building function.

So you're absolutely correct.

We come alongside divisions.

We come alongside building leaders.

We come alongside counselors administrators and support their development specifically and I think quantifiably around the CSIP but certainly in other areas of professional development as well.

So you're absolutely correct.

There's this question about how does this reach families directly.

And I think there's it's it is safe to say that so much of this is really going to be contingent on the comfort and clarity that our building administrators school leaders have around the coaching and frameworks that we are supporting and standing up.

The same can be said for our divisional partners in our professional learning partnerships.

The degree to which our our divisional partners have a strong sense of apprehension for the frameworks that are being used like the dual capacity building framework a good sense of how MTSS might be deployed in service to in service to student learning and supporting that.

Those are the ways in which we are currently arranged to funded for and staff to support family engagement.

And again I go back to this question that I've asked you know you you were on one of our deep dive sessions and I will offer again here so that if we really want to think about what direct services of direct services model might look like.

That is a different question around how we might shift our model.

How we might figure out where the site of accountability might reside for that for a shifted model.

And then again how we might in fact resource that model funding it both from a human capital and financial capital standpoint.

Currently as we're arranged we are set up directly to support our divisional partners central office staff and teams school leaders staff and educators as well in a consultative coaching and capacity building role.

Dr. Stroud.

So just in your question about Ethnic Studies and Black Studies and how we're working together I think the first level is you know I think the work of Ethnic Studies you know as of August 1st I said the curriculum assessment instruction that we're working in partnership.

Manal El-Ansi I'll have her share a little bit more but she is our director overseeing our Ethnic Studies program.

We still have to hire an Ethnic Studies program manager.

Reporting to that program manager will be curriculum specialists.

And so those curriculum specialists would work in partnership with the curriculum specialists that we have already in place across the content area in C&I.

And so it really is a joint effort that we're working together.

Diane DeBacker Dr. DeBacker and I partner sort of at every hand and looking at the funding resources the funding allocation meeting with the Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee.

And so we work together in partnership on this as well.

And one of the things that we are really sort of grappling with is the system not grappling with but sort of articulating is that people think that Black Studies is a subsection of Ethnic Studies and it's not.

Black Studies and Ethnic Studies are two different things.

And so so there might be some similarities and commonalities but it's really important for us to tap in with our Black community and really talk to them about the values and interests and priorities that they have for the education around Black education particularly around their students.

And so then there is connection with our Office of African-American Male Achievement within as well as Curriculum Assessment Instruction and then and then our division as well EPE.

So we're all working together on that.

Manal is on the line and Manal Director Rankin shared and asked about sort of the funding that this $150,000 is sort of new that we needed some seed funding to get started with the Black education work and Black Studies work.

Is there anything that you would like to chime in about Ethnic Studies and Black Studies.

Well I thank you all for your contribution.

contributions Dr. Scarlett and Director Kirk.

You covered most of it.

We do want to make sure that we're following the lead of Black CBO's Black community members Black students and families in defining what it's going to be and what it evolves into.

So in terms of the Black Studies program a Black Studies course would be a segment of a greater Black education framework that in curricula that that would be built out.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And Dr. DeBacker I don't know if you had anything that you wanted to add about the partnership that we're just jump-starting together.

Thank you Dr. Scarlett.

I think the the only thing that I can add is that this is a really very strong partnership.

It's something that with an integrated curriculum with an interdisciplinary curriculum you can't do it alone.

And so CA and I were we're excited to partner with AAMA with Equity Partnerships and Engagement with DREA.

to strengthen ethnic studies to strengthen Black studies and to really achieve our goal of having an integrated curriculum K-12 especially in these areas for our BIPOC students.

Thank you Dr. Scarlett.

So that's some helpful context.

But but also even more specifically the $150,000 to to seed the efforts towards Black Studies.

What what what actually is that cost.

Like what's that what is that funding.

Is that a staff person.

Is it resources.

Like I guess what what is this first step.

And what are what is that paying for and how is that amount enough or not enough or helpful or I guess I'm really literally asking like like when that check gets written where's it go.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

So one of the things that we do believe is because the work of Ethnic Studies is pretty expansive that we don't really believe that Ethnic Studies Program Manager would be able to really highlight in well not highlight but really work on really driving the Black Studies or Black Education work that we're doing.

So Black Studies is a part of Black Education work that we're doing in the community-based efforts.

I would say a starting place for us getting started on this is actually we've been working on long-term visioning since July with Department of Equity I'm sorry Department of Education and Early Learning deal and Seattle Parks in order to think about How can we bring up or start some community-based pilots and some they're invested in as well.

So we're looking at identifying a set of pilot schools in order to launch some Black education opportunities.

The facilities that families can opt into with some existing infrastructure.

All of that has not been solidified yet so I'm hesitant to start you know sort of sharing that out broadly.

But we are looking at launching this work in December with some pilots to get started for family and community access to Black education within the group of schools that we've designated.

And I and Director Rankin I know you and I had a conversation before about that and so I just we're still kind of working on all the partnership pieces and agreements.

We do have a really strong basis of community-based organizations.

One of the things that we're really committed to is not doing harm.

And so we have a lot of expertise around Black studies and Black education in community.

That's way more expertise than we actually have internally.

And frankly I'm whole concerned about having over 80 percent White teaching force or so.

just receiving curriculum but not having deep professional learning they can actually do more harm with the curriculum than good within that.

And so I think it's really important for us to build external community coalitions in order to strengthen our opportunities to be able to really support our work with Black education and Black studies.

Well I'm definitely looking forward to our regular meetings.

And and moving moving forward and figuring out the ways that curricularly in my committee we can keep this going.

Likewise.

Yeah.

Thanks.

Director Mack.

Yes thank you.

So much great information presented.

Thank you.

And thank you for the previous questions.

and responses.

I my question is around getting clarity about what the tracking system is actually tracking and trying to understand how we're organizing the information about our partnerships We talk about partnerships but partnership is a really broad word but it can mean a very specific thing.

And we have the Community Alignment Initiative which talks about partners in a and it means a very specific thing.

We have partners in our school buildings different CBO's that are doing great work through family and ed levy dollars.

And so we have all these different partners and Even being on the board for this long and all of these stakeholders I have a hard time understanding the relationships I guess.

Like how many organizations are we in quote partnership with and in what way.

So I'm wondering do we have how do we have that organized.

Do we have spreadsheets.

Do we have is that this tracking system that we're funding.

Is that packing system only focused on those community-based partners that are in our buildings doing work.

If you can help me understand kind of the stakeholder map that we have kind of I don't know documented somewhere or if we're working on documenting that so we can.

So I as a board member and I think the public could understand a little better about you know what our relationship is with various partners.

and how those things play out.

Is that a clear enough question or is that too vague.

James Bush.

Thank you.

Great question.

So we do have a variety of ways that we track.

So the cleanest way to kind of get to the question that you're asking we do have an online portal that does track by school by region all of the different partners that are doing work in the district.

That's an online portal that the community can go to if you're a parent at a school.

You can go to your school and see all the partners at your school.

We do also track some of the external partners that may not be in buildings and that is some of the work that happens in spreadsheets.

So that's more how we get communication or word out about things that are some of our partners that may be in buildings may not be aware of.

We make sure that we want to communicate as much as we can via those Excel spreadsheets kind of what we're up to.

That's the list that's well at this point it's close to 800 people but that's That's more of a communication tool that we can identify and hit a checkbox and get all the organizations that serve African-American males or they serve ELL.

So it's and I have shared that at Friday memo like the when we first talked about partnerships a while ago I can recirculate that in the memo with the other questions that we've gotten if that's helpful.

Yeah I think that that is helpful.

But I think the second part to that is that There are some organizations which are in formal partnership through contract agreements with us and others that are not.

They're potential partners or they're community organizations that don't have a contract or a formal agreement with us.

And so I'm I just it to me I just it's kind of a black hole of information.

I just don't know when we say the word partners Is this an organization that is in a formal partnership with some sort of agreement with us or and secondarily you know to what extent are they in a partnership with us.

Do they actually have a full on contract or do they just have a verbal agreement.

Those sorts of things.

So is that information also tracked in those spreadsheets or or.

So per policy anybody providing services in the schools they have to adhere to policy 4265. So anything happening in the buildings they need to have either an MOU or a personal services contract.

My team monitors and tracks all the MOUs.

Those are zero-dollar contracts.

Anything that's a personal services contract that's actually tracked at the school level.

We have not got to the point where we're tracking that but we've been working with Michael Stone to figure out like all those deal contracts.

How do we better centralize some of those contracts that come through.

That is something that's kind of on our mind for this year as we are moving forward for the next the next round of funding that's going to come through.

But at this point we track the MOU's.

No money changing hands and.

Schools actually tracks their own contracts at this point with Michael Stone.

But Michael and I do work really close together.

And then the third area is the alignment agreements where you were talking about those earlier.

Those are child care providers or school-based health clinics that are providing a service in collaboration with the schools and the district with a codified framework to kind of manage those relationships.

We absolutely have all of those and we can provide that list again as well of the folks that have personal services or not alignment agreement initiative leases and contracts.

Okay so then where does the where do the quote partners fall like the organizations that come forward to donate things to us say Amazon or the CBO recently that donated the monitors to teachers.

Are those partnerships that you're that you also help coordinate or those separate from your.

Those would be separate.

So when we're talking about partnerships for me it's really kind of providing direct services or collaborative services to kids.

So devices and all that that was managed by via JoLynn and the finance team and other people.

I was not involved in those conversations.

Okay.

Thanks very much.

I'll allow someone else to ask some questions and move on this conversation.

Thank you very much.

You're welcome.

Okay.

Director Hersey.

Hey can y'all hear me.

Yep.

Great.

Thank you so much to the entire team that's put this work together.

Dr. Scarlett you and I have been talking for a long time around how do we lift up Black Studies and I'm really excited about the direction that it's headed.

My question really revolves around funding.

That was a piece of your presentation earlier and I just want to have a quick conversation.

If you guys have given any thought or have any hard numbers or estimates around what we as a board need to improve to make your job easier and to get these things delivered in the way that our community deserves.

Yeah that's such a great question.

I think multi-level and I think it goes back to even Director Rankin's question just about the $150,000 and how do we sort of secure seed funding in order to help to support some of the efforts that we're lifting up.

And how do we sort of project the type of funding that we need.

So like currently for Ethnic Studies we have about $500,000 allocated in addition to our program manager and we know that with broad curriculum adoptions there's a lot more resources that are required I'm sure it's upward of two million dollars.

And so the tension that we hold is like okay we could hire all these staff but if we don't have any funding to compensate educators for professional learning then we'll have staff who don't necessarily have sorry a central office staff and curriculum specialists who don't have any sort of avenues for actually doing professional learning work with our with our staff with our educators and school teams unless it's embedded to already allocated professional learning time like on Wednesdays.

So we're trying to be as creative as possible even with Black Studies where we're leveraging funding that already exists for racial equity teams and these are teams of educators who are already deeply interested in being part of ethnic studies or even Black Studies as existing already allocated funding.

I think you know us trying to be as fiscally responsible as possible.

But we also need to have resources that helps us to sort of seed these opportunities as well in working with philanthropy and in partnership with other partners like DEEL in order to think about different type of projects.

So the pilot project you know we put out sort of the pilot project that might cost about two to three hundred thousand dollars honestly with the type of work that we want to do and the frequency of being able to actually pay our community-based organizations to be able to provide services.

And so our CBO's are struggling a little bit.

They need resources in order to provide supports to students and families as well.

And so it's a joint effort.

And then it also depends on so what are we talking about we want.

And I don't know I mean you know for lack of better words it's like the Yugo version and maybe the Pontiac version and maybe the Tesla version or something.

And so it's about our values and our system and ultimately what we believe we want to be able to have as far as the quality of the opportunities for our students as well.

that make some of those different determinations around funding.

And so I know there's been a lot of questions about family engagement and you know to what degree is SPS sort of funded in order to have the connections between central office and what's happening in classrooms.

We are able to partner and we're really smart as a team to partner with other departments who are making in their division work plans ways that they want to do on family engagement.

So Kirk talked before about our family connectors in our project with curriculum assessment instruction that's connected to our our third grade reading goal with Cashel Toner with strategic plan funds.

So we're working alongside them across the 13 schools to have family connectors or navigators a navigation lead and then using additional resources in order to ensure that those staff people aren't just sort of floating along in that school but they have an actual connected family engagement sort of stipended person there that who's really lifting up that effort in addition to the school leader to ensure that the families are having the resources and connections and that we're helping to support our third grade literacy goals particularly for African-American males our boys in our schools.

So I a lot of this is the allocations that we need in our division but also it's a commitment across our different divisions for the work that they are doing to advance many of these areas around family and community engagement and how to work alongside of them for them to also allocate resources toward their work plan and how we can work together with them in order to sort of live out their family engagement and community engagement dreams within their work plan.

So I don't have a hard number about how much money we need but this is what I do know that this work across the country oftentimes is underfunded.

And if we're leading with a strategic plan that we have we need the highest level of funds.

There shouldn't be scarcity around this type of work that we're leading in systems in alignment with the strategic plan.

And so yes we do we do need more resources and we need to have really practical like plans and implementation plans on what are we trying to pursue as a system at every level of the system.

And then how do our allocation of resources align with our pursuits and our values and what we're trying to accomplish in connection with our strategic plan.

That's aligned with the values and interests and priorities of our students and families as well.

Thank you.

That's all for me.

Director Harris.

Okay.

I heard earlier and I'm going to focus on ethnic studies because this one is really personal to me as a personal high-level goal for 3 years and we for various reasons have not braided it into every subject pre-K through 12. I heard that you'd be working with the Ethnic Studies Task Force.

When's the last time that that task force or advisory group met.

Yeah.

So that's a great question.

I'm sorry did I cut you off.

Do you have another question also Director Harris.

Okay.

All right.

I'll get started with that one.

Let me get started with that one.

Or wait.

Okay all right great.

So October 11th we worked to have different representatives of the Ethnic Studies Advisory Group.

Dr. DeBacker and Director El-Ansi joined for that conversation.

I think it was a necessarily as necessary step toward healing.

There's a lot of you know hard hurt feelings around some of the work moving forward.

I think as a show of of intent there are other groups that are meeting together.

We've been invited into some of those spaces as well.

The Ethnic Studies Advisory Group have been sort of reluctant to move forward on some of the work but we have guaranteed our partnership which is why we don't have the position posted yet.

It will be posting really soon.

I believe next week.

for the Ethnic Studies Program Manager because we guarantee that we work in partnership with them.

On Monday November 2nd we're working with the NAACP Youth Council in order to get feedback on the Ethnic Studies Program Manager position and that we're really working in partnership with our community partners and partner organizations most proximal our youth and also our Ethnic Studies Advisory Team in order to make any type of modifications but also have a really collaborative hiring process for the positions for Ethnic Studies.

Okay.

Was that an internal meeting that you had or was it with a number of folks from the Ethnic Studies Advisory Group.

And if so how many.

So I sent out the invitation to every single person.

On the ethnic studies we have an entire spreadsheet.

Not everyone showed up for the meeting but you know I'd have to actually probably go into my Teams chat and sort of quantify how many people.

I'm thinking that there were at least a dozen people.

Somewhere between one dozen and two dozen folks from that spreadsheet that ended up coming in addition to Dr. DeBacker and Director Al-ansi and as well.

Thank you.

And and so we have not been advertised for a new manager.

No we have not.

For the three curriculum specialists because on your on your org chart is different than the one that was Equity Synergy that had three curriculum specialists under it on October 3rd but not now.

So.

I'm I'm beyond frustrated.

And if we as a over a billion dollar organization have a system that is so easily broken down by one or two people for whatever reasons then then something's really wrong here.

This was the highest priority from three years ago and we haven't we haven't moved on.

And I well appreciate that you were just handed the baton I well appreciate the the cross-departmental initiative here.

But this is enough to make my head explode.

Yeah.

I think there's been some ver — I'm embarrassed at best.

Embarrassed at best and heartbroken at worst because these are adult issues not kid issues.

Student issues and our students need this.

Desperately.

Yeah.

Yeah we were it was shared with us on October 8th because I mean I'm pretty ambitious and I brought the job description and I didn't know what to encounter in that space.

And so you know we tried to be able to work on that but we also have needed the yield to the Ethnic Studies Advisory Group in order to talk with them and just sort of talk through things.

We can't.

I think what we did have is an agreement that we cannot spend time in that space.

There were people definitely in the group who were frustrated who want to just move forward and really center kids because we haven't talked about children a whole lot.

It's always it's been about adults and about how adults felt about how they were treated within that.

And so I feel like that is a great step forward within that.

This weekend Manal and I will be joining a Sunday meeting with some folks from the Ethnic Studies Advisory Group on Sunday and then on Monday we're meeting with the NAACP Youth Council to work on the revisions.

You know we were given every indicator that if we were to move forward with posting the position and not getting feedback that it would be another round of broken trust and there be maybe less buy-in than we already have within that.

And so it is a politically fragile situation.

And Director Harris I share your frustration.

I know that Manal and Diane also Director DeBacker as well.

And so I'm sorry Dr. DeBacker would you like to share anything about kind of where we are.

Thanks Dr. Scarlett.

Yeah the I mean it's the group that met back in October and that I was cordially invited to it was it was probably half Director Harris of the Ethnic Study Advisory Group that had been working on the curriculum units and the frameworks.

So they all weren't there but most of them were.

They I I guess I sensed from them at that meeting that they're they sincerely want to work in collaboration.

with Dr. Scarlett and with Manal in getting ethnic studies into Seattle Public Schools.

I think the other thing that is encouraging if you remember we did some cross-crediting of ethnic study classes with social studies and English language arts earlier in the year and we have I don't have the exact numbers in front of me but we have over 600 high school students who are enrolled in classes that they're now being able to to get to get it's ethnic studies related but they get those for graduation requirements.

So we have made progress but certainly not as much as as any of us had hoped.

And I'm not sure that I got a clear answer regarding this free curriculum specialist.

Do we have the funding now.

If not when are we going to get it.

Yeah.

You know I was going to I immediately even I wanted to move past because I think as we have so many people working in collaboration on the slide deck I believe that is erroneous the information that was in the slide even before that had like five curriculum specialists.

That was super ambitious.

We do not have resources for that.

One of the things that we're grappling with again is do we put all of the resource that we have into curriculum specialists and not hold out any money for for professional learning within the $500,000 that we do have allocated.

So I would say at a conservative level we should likely fund 2 which is the newest sort of model that we've been working with.

But these end up being dynamic conversations and even to the point where we needed to turn in the slide deck to you all for you know review and comment things just sort of you know sort of shifting and moving.

So I believe that we will stabilize in between 2 or 3 curriculum specialists within that.

But definitely 2. minimal and then depending on the type of resources that we have that we might be able to move into 3.

Okay I appreciate it immensely.

And I again appreciate that that lots of this stuff you weren't a part of and you have what's the word inherited.

But this this is beyond to me.

This this is a neon flashing light symbol of systems breakdown.

And and I I'm beyond frustrated.

And if there's something that we as a board or me personally can do to help count me in.

One of the things that Director Hersey mentioned was how much money do you need.

And I guess one of the things that would help me immensely is if you had a menu of options.

If I had an additional $350,000 I could purpose it this way.

If I had $450,000 I could purpose it this way.

But but and and I well appreciate all the different moving pieces.

I well appreciate it's hard to make promises you can't keep.

And Lord knows that has harmed us greatly.

But we need to see some numbers and some some org charts and pictures on a paper that that show what we're capable of doing if in fact it's only a resource issue because we can't advocate whether in our budget meeting that's coming up next in Olympia with philanthropy if we don't have the tools to work with.

So I'm begging you for those tools as opposed to edu-speak frankly.

And again I don't mean that as a put-down.

I am a very pragmatic person and and I need to have something tangible to hold on to.

Thank you very much and I appreciate your team's hard work.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And we're working on a budget plan for that like really quickly even for for Black Studies.

And so we're working on that.

My best sensibilities I'm too collaborative in order to just say something you know out loud.

So I don't want to write checks with my mouth.

But I would like to have some practical collaboration with my brilliant colleagues to think about how we can move forward.

But I appreciate the heartfelt thoughts and concerns about that the offer to help and support.

I've dealt it across a number of board members within this and I'm looking forward to get some hard numbers down to you all really quickly.

If not within this Friday memo the next Friday memo we can put that in there.

We'll know that it comes right there at the precipice between horrific disappointment and close to anger on ethnic studies.

This is beyond for me.

I I'm having difficulty defending it.

Thank you.

Okay.

This is Director Hampson and I we don't we're about out of time so I'll just ask one hopefully brief question related to policy.

You mentioned policy 4110 and the superintendent procedure and I know that that's coming up for discussion in executive committee.

in the next couple of months.

And I have actually gotten some questions from community about that mostly about the superintendent procedure because it was revised in June of 2019. And I don't know if anyone who's on the call was part of that revision I mean other than the superintendent.

And the policy itself is from 2011 and we have some pretty critical you know task force and other engagement work going on.

And so I just wanted to see if there were any comments from the department as a whole on kind of how we got to that place with the newer version of the superintendent procedure.

What some of the goals of those revisions were because I don't know that we can see the red lines of those and then what some thoughts are for how we move forward because that is going to I think going to be a pretty critical item for our communities as we as we move forward into this next calendar year.

So Director Hampson I was not part of that revision.

So I'd have to ask some of my cabinet colleagues who might have been part of that maybe to chime in.

Otherwise we might have to get back to you on that question because I really don't know.

Does anybody else want to comment.

Superintendent do you know about the procedure revision for 4110.

I'll have to check into that Director Hampson.

So we nobody was part of it that's on this call that revision.

Okay.

Okay well with that we'll just leave that unanswered I guess and move to a 4-minute bio break before we head into our next work session.

So this meeting is adjourned.

And at 5 o'clock we will begin with our budget oversight work session.

We are first going to begin with a discussion about the draft legislative agenda and community feedback before we move into the staff presentation on the budget.

I'm going to pass it to Director Hersey now to lead the discussion on the legislative agenda.

It looks like we've got Eden.

Can we just confirm we've got our directors back.

Ellie.

Let's see.

Director Hampson did you want me to call through or just kind of name those so I can see here.

Just name those that you can see.

I'm seeing Director Rivera-Smith.

Director Rankin.

Director Mack.

Director Hersey.

That's what I'm seeing so far in the list.

Okay.

Director Mack is here.

Sorry were you.

No no. checking to see that we had the majority of us back.

Just give an extra pause to get back.

Okay.

So let's turn it over to Director Hersey who I know has been doing some heavy lifting on this and take it away Director Hersey.

Yeah absolutely.

So before we even get into this discussion today I just want to say thank you to all of the community partners that have provided input and if you are looking to provide additional input on our legislative agenda it is not too late.

It is still very much in development.

But I do want to say given everything that has transpired especially in the past few months most notably the senseless killings of Breonna Taylor George Floyd and Charlena Lyles We are looking to open this process up to community and specifically focus on the needs and interests of Black students.

And so before we dive in I have invited a few words can't even express the gravity that these individuals bring.

And they've been in spaces with us before and I'm just really thankful that they have come again.

So Emijah and Angelina are y'all on the line.

Yeah.

Hi.

Hi Angelina.

Amijah are you here with us.

Yes I'm here.

Hello everyone.

Fantastic.

So we invited these two individuals specifically because earlier this summer they along with other Black parents educators And community members in partnership with the NAACP Youth Council and King County Equity Now most notably held a Black Education Now rally and they had some very specific demands that aligned very clearly with our legislative agenda and priorities.

And so I just wanted to give them the opportunity to share why this is so important and why we need to be listening directly to our Black community.

So I'm going to turn it over to them.

And again thank you both for being here.

I know that I speak for not only myself when I say that we greatly appreciate it.

Angelina I just want to say something really briefly and then I welcome you to introduce yourself and if you want to read the demands is that okay.

Sure.

Thank you Director Hersey for the time and the introduction.

I just wanted to highlight that this event spread across youth definitely including the youth from the NAACP but there was also youth input from WEAP youth.

There was I wanted to call it Choose 180 but I think it's also called Community Passageways Youth.

went across it also came from our Seattle Public Schools Youth Leadership Council the Kingsmakers.

Also this event and these demands came not only just from King County Equity Now but also I think it's Decriminalize Seattle.

So I just wanted to make sure all the as much credibility that I could share and remember is sought and for anyone that I've forgotten who had hands around this these efforts Make sure that their voices are heard and I apologize if I didn't name them directly.

Thank you.

And Angelina if you just would love to go ahead and introduce yourself and share the demands.

Yeah.

So my name is Angelina.

I use she her pronouns.

I'm the co-president of the NAACP Youth Council.

One of the co-founders of the Black Minds Matter movement and a senior at Rainier Beach High School most importantly.

So I'm just going to go over what our demands the list of demands we had created over the summer for that specific event was one community schools now.

And that demand was looking for for for the King County to cut funding from its criminal legal budget and reallocate those funds to create community schools at every school that served about 70 percent or more of the students on a free and reduced lunch.

I including things like eye care health care social and emotional emotional services.

We also had restorative justice now.

Of course the implementation of restorative justice in every single school.

Making sure we have counselors available.

Trained facilitators for peace circles to mediate conflicts in our schools and review discipline data.

We had.

Black Studies and Ethnic Studies Now which is a which is a really really important demand calling for Black Studies and Ethnic Studies being implemented in schools mandated.

And that also includes financial literacy and life skills being taught in all schools.

All this to empower BIPOC students We had number 4 as Hire Black Teachers Now which was a demand that local colleges and Seattle Public Schools including the Office of Washington State Superintendent for Public Instruction convene a Black Teachers Now task force for the purpose of hiring and retaining more Black teachers.

We also had number 5 Anti-Racist Professional Development Now which was a demand for Seattle Public Schools to implement a robust anti-racist professional development course that all educators were required to attend.

And that's that includes teachers that are our administrators our nurses paraprofessionals librarians etc.

This course should include anti-racist historical lessons pedagogical mythologies assessment strategies and identity self-exploration and in and all this in order to effectively teach Black lives.

We had accountability now which was calling for accountability of educators administrators and security and any staff that has physically or emotionally abused students because oftentimes I know from personal experience these incidents have happened against against students who look like me and other students as well and and have either been covered up or not taken as seriously as they should have.

We had number 7 which was student representation.

Now I know that this this particular demand has been worked on a lot with Director DeWolf and I know Leah from the NAACP Youth Council my co-president in creating a possible seat on on the school board for youth.

We're also just overall calling for represent representatives from local youth organizations to that serve BIPOC students in our school board and just in a higher level in the district.

Another demand was Youth Achievement Center Now which was a demand that the City of Seattle and the King County donate funds to support the creation of a Youth Achievement Center a holistic co-housing complex that is designed to support houseless students students who are historically under-deserved and system-involving youth.

Our ninth demand was community control of schools now.

This talks a lot about the African-American Academy and the Horace Mann Building working with the Black community to develop interventions and programs that specifically address the unique experiences of Black children.

Fulfill the commitment of to Africa Challenge Center for Education and Innovation to return the Horace Mann or to address the ongoing state of emergency for Black students in SPS.

And number 10 was Community School of Education Resources and Levy Funds which is pretty much what we're doing right now.

Just really thank you and I'm super excited to to be involved in this or just to even be here.

And that is a demand that I think resonates with a lot of what's been going on in this country as of late in the community wanting a say on on how how things are budgeted and how different services are funded.

Services that we know will help us thrive not only as a community but as a as a nation overall.

So yeah those were all our demands.

I don't know Miss Emijah if you wanted me to say anything else.

I want to thank you all for letting me be here.

Thank you Angelina.

I just I'm just honored to be in your leadership because you is definitely going far and you're going to continue to be a force to be reckoned with for our communities you know as your life goes on.

So I'm just honored to be here.

I wanted to say thank you to Director Hersey again Director Hamp Hampson please forgive me for messing up names.

And I don't know if someone else that came to the rally to our event in July length of July 30th to show support and I thank you for all the board members who have seen these demands prior and have like taken them serious and particularly enough to keep bringing them back up during a board session.

So I'm very grateful.

Just want to highlight that you know prior to these horrendous events that have been happening nationally but as well as locally that you know our schools play a primary role in what happens to our youth and particularly our Black youth males and females with regard of having a pathway into the juvenile justice system or being kicked out of school or being over-disciplined and being harmed you know from security officers or just adults in general in our schools.

So these demands are coming in a way that we are sharing as a community member and as youth as saying that These are effective ways to rectify and to move forward in a positive manner that benefits all of us if we could focus here.

And with our strategic plan being focused on Black males it's kind of imperative that we listen to the Black community about needs that are that are needed.

And the district Seattle Public Schools has been making some changes with regard to separating itself the contracts from Seattle police department.

And so with this legislative agenda and opportunity both on a local level and the state level we should I encourage you as a parent of Seattle Public Schools students as an education advocate in Seattle Public Schools that we also hold these our government accountable for the resources to serve our community and to serve our Black students and our Black families.

Because we know that historically we know the data that the community is not properly being served to get have effective outcomes that are going to that are making a huge difference and that the burden falls on the community to figure it out with little to no to no resources especially in this time of remote learning.

So thank you for the for folks who are trying to do the best that they can.

And I'm encouraging all of you to push harder and to do more.

and to value our Black voices.

Thank you.

Thank you so much Amijah and Angelina for spending a little time with us and really just highlighting all of the all of the reasons why this work is so critical.

And I think that Angelina said it most eloquently.

If we take a look at number 10 which is community control of education resources and levy funds.

You know that we oftentimes think about you know when we're talking about resources just dollars and things of that nature.

But really we have to think holistically.

You know I spend a lot of time sitting with the idea of targeted universalism and really what that means to me at least is opening up our entire system to achieve a common goal which is to uplift our Black students and our students furthest away from educational justice and and utilizing all the resources including the funding that we put into our lobbyists and the relationship capital that we have in Olympia to advance those goals is just one of many ways that we can change our system to to really make these demands a reality.

So again the the youth in the community especially from the Black community have spoken and it's now up to us as a system to work not only with one another but with all factions of government to really ensure that we are making a world and more specifically a city and community that we can all be proud of and feel safe.

So we have had many discussions around kind of what this looks like and how to move forward.

I do want to be clear there are some aspects that we as a district still need to advocate for that aren't necessarily directly related to the demands but we want to make sure that these demands and advocating for The issues that the community have brought forth really take front and center stage.

So I didn't want there to be any confusion when you know we see things like special education and transportation make it onto our legislative agenda.

But we do want to just be very clear that our system is is has every intent of doing all that we can to advance these causes.

So with that we can go ahead and move forward.

Director Hersey.

I was just going to have Ellie just briefly bring up the demands.

I believe they're consistent from the website.

So that folks who are listening or watching can actually at least briefly look at it and see where it is on the.

Director Hampson.

Did I misunderstand.

Did you want the link or did you want the actual website on the.

Oh yeah I thought you were going to call the demands really quickly.

pull the demands and put them in the chat just the taglines can we also copy and paste it onto that slide.

Is that possible.

I can go ahead and use the link that was provided.

Let's try to not utilize the chat one.

Thank you for being nimble.

Okay great.

There we go.

Thank you.

Go ahead Director Hersey.

And these demands are thank you Director Hampson I really appreciate that that assist.

These demands here are in long form.

And so I highly highly recommend if you have not familiarized yourself with these demands while not all of these pertain directly to the legislative agenda.

Many of these things are in the purview of the school district and can be impacted with action from our system regardless of partnerships with other entities.

So senior staff especially please spend some time with these and take a look through and see how we as a system can really come together to address these things you know.

We I do want to recognize that government and especially school districts often move very slowly.

But some of these things are very much so in our power to do quickly.

And so again just a huge thank you to our community members and our students who have worked so tirelessly to put this together.

And if anyone has any additional questions You can feel free to reach out to either Ms. Emijah or Angelina or representatives from Keene County Equity Now or even myself.

I'd be more than happy to connect you with the right person to get those questions answered especially if you want to be a part of making these demands a reality.

If we could just scroll through really quickly we can see that we have community schools now.

Restorative justice now.

Black studies now.

Hire more Black teachers now.

Anti-racist professional development now.

Accountability now.

Student representation now.

Youth Achievement Center now.

Community control of schools now.

And community control of education resources and levy funds now.

And so really what we are planning to do is to go through and see which ones or rather yet which aspects of these demands can be accomplished through advocacy or at least advanced through advocacy.

at the legislature and kind of distilling those into our legislative agenda.

But again I just want to be very clear this work does not simply live in the legislative agenda.

It does not simply live in the participatory budgeting conversation that will follow this conversation.

This is really an approach that our entire system needs to be very active in recognizing.

So again thank you to everyone who was involved.

We can go ahead and move on to the next few slides unless anyone has any questions concerning the demands while we still have Emijah and Angelina with us.

Did directors have any questions from for our guests.

This is Director Rivera-Smith.

I have a question and it might it's actually for the board.

I was hoping that could one of you refresh my memory what did were these Was support of these demands in the resolution in support of Black students.

Was that where we already resolved for these or where I'm trying to figure out where that was done yet or because I always.

So just to refresh my memory.

Thank you.

Yeah that's a great question.

So if I'm not mistaken we passed our resolution in support of Black students just a few weeks before these demands were released.

I could be I could be off on my timing but I believe that was the sequence.

So no.

So you won't see you will probably see similar language in some of the things that we worked into the resolution.

But this I really largely view this as an opportunity for us to tackle these things now.

So yeah.

Just to answer your question no this was not included in our resolution reaffirming our support for Black students.

Okay so would we have to though officially adopt these this as a resolution or somewhere in.

I mean that's definitely that's definitely an option.

We could have that conversation probably more generally.

I think that might make sense.

I think we have to don't we.

I mean ask Greg or maybe Greg can confirm.

For the purpose of the legislative agenda.

Well just in for the purpose of whenever as a board as a body we support something.

And these are excellent.

This is not arguing the demands themselves.

We're saying in order for us to like legitimately be supporting any platform or any any body of anything we have to actually do it official I think.

We can't.

We will be adopting the legislative agenda as a body.

I understand that much.

So I'm just trying to make sure we're crossing all our T's and everything is.

Director Rivera-Smith.

Again like I said well we you know we whenever we do like how we support you know everything else we do resolution for Black Lives Matter.

We went to affirmation of Black students.

Those things all come through as resolutions.

And this was not part of any of those yet.

So I'm just wondering if we are.

obligated to adopting this in the form of a resolution or in the form of something like in a BAR.

I don't even know what.

That's why I was hoping to get some legal advice.

So yeah Chief Legal Counsel Narver is actually not on the call.

If we can't because we do have a lot to get through budgetarily which is super critical.

So I think it's a really important thing to consider.

And I know that when Director Hersey and I saw this list of demands shortly after we had passed the resolution.

We're really excited at how much crossover we felt there was but then also wanted to make sure that we were still leaning into this work.

And so how we do that I think is is and how we do it effectively so that we actually have action that comes out of it you know I think is is is the conversation that we need to have.

Does anybody have any additional questions for Director Amijah and Angelina quickly before we and thank you so much to both of you for being here.

It's awesome to hear from you and particularly in this context we have some really critical budget work to get to.

So any other questions.

Lassie.

Yeah.

Go ahead.

No I just wanted to say thank you to both Amijah and Angelina and and I was able to meet with the NAACP representatives from the NAACP Youth Council yesterday to talk about the proposal for a student representative on the board.

So that's super exciting and you guys are doing really wonderful work.

And I just wanted to say thank you for sharing your time with us today.

And and also as I can't remember I think Director Hersey was saying you know to asking folks to look over that as a white person in Seattle I'm just going to sort of challenge challenge anybody who has a Black Lives Matter sign or a you know in this house sign in their yard to to realize that supporting demands from community and reading over this list and understanding the priorities from community is the is where we put our money where our mouth is.

So if you've got a yard sign please also read this list.

That's it.

Okay.

So I hope Angelina and Elijah you'll consider sticking around so that we can offline get more input from you on the next part of our well I guess we still have to go through the actual legislative pieces so want to hear your feedback on that.

So I hope you'll stay and and then as we move into the participatory budgeting conversation.

And it sounds like yeah.

So I think we've got yeah we've got a good amount of time.

So I guess Director Hersey's just confirming that I know that we've got plenty of time.

So go ahead and go into the next section Director Hersey.

We're still with you right.

Director Hersey.

Sorry I'm speaking into the mute.

So taking a look at the draft legislative agenda actually JoLynn would you like to go through this you'll probably be able to speak more expertly than I can on this.

But also happy to go through it myself.

No I'm happy to do that.

So the first part of the legislative agenda we're really focusing on those operational or fiscal areas.

A lot of these areas are things that are common on other school district legislative agendas they have to do with funding.

The first component of the requests are stable support.

So really making sure that under the pandemic that we're reimbursed for unfunded costs for any reopening costs past what the CARES Act funded that we are funded for the PPE that we need for students and staff things of that nature.

And then second protecting K-12 funding from any mid-year cuts.

And then we do have issues with both student transportation funding where right now if we were to go back or if we transport special education students the ridership which is the funding driver is very low and disconnected.

So we do need protections so that our transportation funding is not cut next year or this year that we don't take huge reductions in funding in those areas.

And then as you know our enrollment is down about 1,700 students.

It's about 16 million dollars this year due to the pandemic.

And that does impact our revenue.

And so we're asking for some assistance with enrollment stabilizing the funding for enrollment.

And then our enrollment also impacts our levy collections.

So we would like for them to hold us harmless in our enrollment counts so that our levy collections are not impacted later on.

So this can be like a 36-month issue for us or a 3-year issue because a lot of the funding formulas have lookbacks onto prior year numbers or activity or how many kids you had or how many kids rode a bus.

And so all of those factors together need to be considered in the legislative agenda.

And then access to learning.

We need equitable access to resources.

including devices and broadband connectivity and then making sure that we do have resources for the individualized needs of all students.

Those have come front and center for us as we work through hotspots and connection issues for our students.

And then just a footnote that special education while not a main priority for the upcoming legislative session likely is something that continues to remain a priority and we are going to need to get back to that at some point.

So these are the areas that we've spoken with Directors Rankin and Hersey about including on our legislative agenda under the operational fiscal component.

If we move to the next slide these are some of the areas that Director Hersey had had us bring forward from the agenda that you just saw on the screen previously.

So some of those areas for the state legislative agenda.

Director Hersey do you want to speak to these.

Yeah absolutely.

So restorative justice as you previously heard Angelina mention really speaks to the need for having restorative justice personnel in funding.

Really where we we want to be is we could potentially or at least how I envision this from conversations with community members and district staff is potentially having an ecosystem where We have restorative justice personnel counselors and social workers all kind of working in the same ecosystem with the same families.

Some of our buildings might need one of these types of supports but a lot of our buildings especially in District 7 will potentially need all three.

Right.

So making making this a priority in terms of advocating for funding and resources at the legislature is top priority for us.

Counseling supports go hand-in-hand with what we just spoke about.

Community schools really speaks to the idea of having resources like health centers food access just access to things that various communities will need.

What we know is that elementary schools especially really serve as the primary source of resources and various access to goods and things like that for communities everywhere right.

And so what this really looks like is how do we find funding and support to really rethink how can we turn these places of learning into places of more holistic support.

And then family and socio-emotional supports really goes hand-in-hand in those in that need for community schooling.

Additionally.

Again I just want to be very clear that these are just a few of the priorities that we've identified.

Our agenda is still very much so in a draft state.

And once it's finalized and fleshed out from the district perspective we we have every intention of taking it back into communities specifically what the organizers of the Black Education Now Rally and other groups just to get a read on making sure that we're not missing the mark on any of these things so that when we presented to our lobbying team they have a very clear understanding of what these of what these causes really intend to do.

So that kind of gives just a you know a very general overview of just a few of these priorities.

And again this is still being developed.

It's still very much a draft and we are going we have every intention of taking it back out into community so that we can make sure that we're headed in the right direction.

So I believe we wanted to also ask board members for their initial thoughts and reactions to this to these items and was that.

Yes.

Kind of next up.

Yeah.

Let's go since we just heard from Director Hersey let's go ahead and go sorry alphabetically we would go to Director Harris.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

Do I believe in each and all of these things.

Absolutely.

Do I believe that legislators in Olympia who already don't take the Seattle City of Seattle ask and certainly the Seattle Public Schools ask seriously especially in a time when they'll be cutting big swaths of the budget.

And let's all please absolutely remember that McCleary has never been fully funded.

And given the way politics works both in this state with respect to the Cascade Curtain and with respect to the lack of an income tax or a capital gains tax from a very very pragmatic perspective If we ask for everything do we take the risk of getting very little or nothing.

Do do I appreciate the aspirational nature of this.

Do I appreciate that it's decades overdue.

Absolutely I do.

But but having watched education frankly be screwed for the last 30 years in the legislature this makes me very nervous from a very pragmatic standpoint.

And I'm curious as to how we address that.

Thank you.

Yeah.

So at least from my thinking this is Director Hersey.

At least from my thinking I appreciate your concerns Director Harris firstly.

But what I would say is that this has never been done for her from the at least from the legislative perspective of our district.

And I'm a strong believer that closed mouths don't get fed.

And you know we are I think everyone on this call is very aware of the financial situation that not only our district but our state is currently in.

And if these priorities need to continue to roll to Olympia year after year then that's what needs to happen right.

Because these are these are the things that our community is asking for.

And I again I appreciate the pragmatic concerns around are we able to get these things and the risk of not getting you know other things that might be on our agenda.

But I really do strongly believe that this is where change really begins.

And yeah I think that our community is going to walk hand-in-hand with us in advocating for these for these demands.

Thank you.

Of course.

We can move on to the next director.

Director Hampson.

I think Director Hampson just texted me her computer froze.

Oh uh oh.

Okay.

Great.

But.

Let's go alphabetically I believe.

Director Mack next.

Does that mean.

Yep.

Alphabetically the next person would be Director Mack.

Go ahead Director Mack.

Oh great.

Thank you.

Okay.

To JoLynn's question around our perspective and so forth that the engagement around the needs on the funding formulas etc.

I fully agree with and think that it's important that we support the statewide effort from WSSDA's perspective on a hold harmless aspect.

To Director Harris's point about the fact that there is not enough money and it's you know it's it's it's going to be a challenging environment to hold on to what we have now which is already insufficient.

But I would say that we have had some of this not in the not exactly in this form but There are other alignments with the WSSDA legislative platform especially around restorative justice.

There were some language and some new position statements that were adopted this year that we supported.

Counseling supports.

family emotional social and emotional supports.

There's a number of position statements that are broadly supported.

And I think even in the top 15 for WSSDA in which these elements are in fact very much supported.

And I think that it would be it might be helpful to our drafting of our platform to tie some of that language together.

that is in alignment and also leverage those shared perspectives across the WSSDA adopted platform as well.

And I'm happy to help pull those specific position statements and up up for you Director Hersey and and help help support anything that can help these points into the legislative agenda I think it's I think it's incredibly appropriate that we these four bullet points make make so much sense to me.

And I'm I'm happy to support getting the language that might be in alignment with what WSSDA has adopted and therefore is more broadly supported not just by Seattle but school board directors across the state and is a part of that.

And so then we have some We have some strength in numbers if we're all coming with a similar message.

So let me know if I can help with that Director Hersey as the drafting moves forward.

And I do support having all of all of this.

And you know our legislative platform it's difficult to prioritize like which one's first and which one's second.

But I agree with all the things that have been stated on both of these.

to slides the previous ones as well.

Yeah thanks for that Director Mack.

That help would greatly be appreciated.

I do just want to be clear again that ultimately when we take this back to community you know I want to make sure that the language hits for our communities here.

in Seattle especially.

So I would I would greatly appreciate that help.

But then just want to also make sure that I'm very clear with my intention you know as we develop this document to keep community in the driver's seat.

And I know that that's the interest of many of the board directors if not all the board directors here as well.

But I just did want to make that clear.

So thank you very much for that comment.

Yeah I just want to also yeah yeah for sure.

And just for context I mean again for folks who might be listening at home it is often really easy to have a really good idea and then end up with an equity detour because we're trying to change language to get to a specific outcome.

And again I'm not suggesting that anybody is attempting to do that but I did just want to name that in this process.

because it happens quite a bit.

So that that would be my only concern is just making sure that at the end of the day we're taking it back to community and letting community have the final say.

Fantastic.

Again thank you for that offer Director Mack.

It's greatly appreciated.

The next person that we would go to is Director Rankin.

Yeah thanks.

I you know Director Hersey and I have been involved in a lot of these conversations together so I don't have much to add but I did just want to zoom out for a moment and for anyone who might be listening just say that you know this is a different way of doing the legislative priorities for the board.

I think a lot of times it happens with the the legislative liaison and staff sort of you know you know in in small meetings and you know and then it goes through the executive committee and is approved and then and then the board approves it and then it kind of goes down to Olympia and may or may not be seen again by by any anybody else just because it's a lot to track.

So I think it's I just wanted to say it's I'm really excited to be part of this process doing this in a different way and having it really come for community from community.

And I think it's an opportunity both to you know connect our work to directly to priorities coming from the community.

And and also to just sort of open up the legislative process hopefully to to more of the public to understand I mean that really this is how this is how it happens.

This is how you know the the laws and the resources that that impact our daily lives.

This is how it all happens.

Big thank you to everybody who has been willing to shift and try this differently.

And huge thanks of course to community for you know letting us know what's because we're here to represent you.

So I just wanted to add that because I think some people legislative priorities just it becomes this sort of what is that without context.

So anyway.

And oh and concur with what Director Mack said that there's an alignment with some other with WSSDA and it's also in some alignment with Washington State PTA who just passed their legislative priorities.

So I think we have a lot of partners and collaborators who are moving in the same direction which is pretty exciting.

Great.

Thank you Director Rankin.

And last but certainly not least we have Director Rivera-Smith.

Thank you.

I yeah I agree too with all these bullet points these priorities.

These are things I've heard from community myself in the last year or so of being a candidate and now being a board member.

So there's definitely I have nothing but support for these.

I look forward to finding.

I agree that it's not it's not practical to to not try because we haven't achieved it before that we need to I always tell my kids like you need to ask because the worst you'll get is no and you're just where you started.

So you need to definitely we need to make these these asks at the state level.

And I believe that with the community support we will I think we'll be successful.

I think we'll get somewhere.

I'm not maybe I'm overly optimistic but I can I can definitely feel the community power behind these and know that we're all doing our best to harness that and work with it.

So thank you.

Director Hersey.

Yes please.

Director Harris.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Please don't think by some of my colleagues comments that I don't believe we shouldn't try because I absolutely do believe that we should.

I just am being pragmatic and I'm hoping that we can in some fashion prioritize.

I love the idea and I think we need to get our labor partners in here as well.

Because Lord knows they do a great deal of lobbying.

I have another issue with respect to the legislative agenda and I want to put it on the record for I think the third maybe the fourth year in a row.

And that's that the board has not engaged our lobbyists.

And I appreciate the work that our lobbyist has done in the past but I also think that it's worth conversations with board directors especially our liaison and our executive committee to take a look at who is available to lobby for our school district and not just roll over the contract on an annual basis and not make that terribly clear.

I I have very strong feeling about whether or not we're getting the best that our limited money can buy and whether or not we've done a good job of reaching out to communities of color and lobbyists of color to take a look at more effective representation.

And it's my understanding that this next year's agreement was already signed in September and frankly I'm very very disappointed and I'd like to see us add this to the action list to address sooner rather than later.

And if we need a resolution to change the policy it would be my distinct pleasure to write it.

Thank you.

Great.

Thank you.

Apologies I forgot to loop back to Director Hampson.

Please forgive me.

So Director Hampson go for it.

All is forgiven.

Yeah I don't I don't have a whole lot to add other than just I wanted to go on record with my support for these things which I you know believe that I wouldn't be surprised because of other priorities that I've supported in in our resolutions.

And also things I've advocated for historically and then things that we are looking to talk about in our next section.

And I definitely hear the you know the concerns about what can we you know legitimately advocate for.

losing out on potentially not getting the big things that we really need.

But in all honesty I think that that we we can't not advocate for these things at this point.

We're we're it's been that sort of story is the one that's always told and we need a different story about how we we get to these things how we get our state to prioritize these as part of our schooling system that we've it's never been so abundantly clear.

that we are the service point and we can't continue to be everything within our communities without the appropriate levels of funding support whether they're to us to our community partners to our cities where it's mandated for us to be in partnership with them.

But but we will continue to fail our students if we don't have these connections.

And there's a reason why they're asking for them because they are the It's integral to our ability to provide an appropriate culturally responsive and restorative education.

I really do believe our education needs to become a restorative process in and of itself.

So just thank you for doing all this work to put it together and I definitely very strongly support these as legislative priorities.

Thank you Director Hampson.

concludes the portion of our agenda dedicated to the legislative agenda if I'm not mistaken.

JoLynn correct me if I'm wrong.

No I think that that's it.

I think that we will you will kind of maybe draft out a little bit more language around these priorities.

Probably talk with you and Director Rankin about How do we feel about how many we have on the page.

That sort of thing.

Put it back out to community.

And then it is scheduled for board action I believe on December 16th.

Great.

Yeah.

So that gives us about 6 weeks to do some community engagement around this.

And yeah so fantastic.

That's all from me.

Thank you so much to the legislative team that's been meeting.

pretty regularly at this point to get this ball rolling and I look forward to continuing to work through session on hopefully getting a few if not many of these priorities priorities done.

Thank you.

Okay.

So let's head into budget development.

And I believe we are going to we just let me confirm what's on the first slide.

I'm going to turn this over to Chief Financial Officer JoLynn Berge and Budget Director Linda Sebring for the budget presentation and then we'll move into the components about participatory budgeting.

So go ahead.

Take it away.

All right.

Thank you.

So Linda is going to go over slides 7 through 11 and then I'll cover the next 2 slides.

So we would ask for questions after slide 13 just to kind outline run of show.

Linda go ahead.

Thank you.

This is Linda Sebring Budget Director.

And what we are showing on the slide here is the ending fund balance.

You saw a preview of what where we anticipated this looking like at the September budget work session.

And the column for 19-20 is now the actual ending fund balance now that we've finish all of our accounting transactions and have all our revenue and expenditures for last school year recorded.

The bottom line ending fund balance for 19-20 ended about where we thought.

There are some rather significant shifts that happened in restricted carryover of revenues.

Previously we'd called that grants but there's more than just grants in there.

So those are resources that we've receive the revenue for and we still have specific activities that we have to perform for that revenue or the revenue would have to be returned.

That number is significantly higher than it has historically been.

It's historically been in like the $9 million range but $16 million is a little higher than we've seen in the past.

The school carry forward is also about a million dollars higher than we anticipated.

Legal Settlements is a little bit higher and all of this drives our unassigned fund balance which is the number towards the bottom of 22 million about 21.8 and that will be relevant as we work forward in the next couple of slides.

The other thing I would note on this slide before we switch is we have also updated the enrollment funding as Chief Financial Officer Berge pointed out.

We now have two months of enrollment reporting into the state and we are able to calculate what that does to our revenue for this school year which would affect what we might end this year financially if there is no adjustment from the legislators.

So that number changed as well to a 16 million dollar loss after our reserves.

So I'll go to the next slide.

So our early forecast for the next school year fiscal year 21-22 this is how we traditionally build all of our budgets and we learn from the past and continue to refine as we go forward.

But we are currently anticipating a maintenance level budget.

That basically means that from where we're sitting right now we would continue the activities that we're doing in 2021 with the exception of hopefully not COVID related to pandemic activities.

And moving those forward those activities doing the same activities will cost more next year than it does this year.

Some of the main drivers as we get into what the deficit's going to look like is we have this structural deficit we've discussed that we're pushing forward.

So we've been paying our expenditures for the school year based on prior year savings that we've carried forward.

And on the previous slide that we had shown there was about 50 million dollars of savings that we rolled forward to fund 2021 expenditures.

The savings do not recur every year.

Different savings do happen but not at the same level.

That was two years worth of savings that we had brought forward for this year.

So we don't have about 30 million dollars of the savings that we had going into 2021 we won't have that much going into 21-22.

So we have this deficit we know is rolling forward of expenditures funded on one-time savings with a little less money to cover it.

We knew coming into 21-22 that we had some labor contracts that would be spending down fund balance and that is what we are seeing when we ran the numbers and Did our financial projections on what those labor costs would be.

And we all know we we're dealing with a pandemic and the costs that creates as far as cleaning standards PP&E and other building-based safety standards.

This estimate that I'm going to go over in a second here does not include the potential enrollment impact or a transportation revenue loss.

So right now it's assuming in some cases some best-case scenarios of the legislature will give us some adjustments that will protect us from those losses.

So next slide.

So this is a very simplistic view of what we're seeing for 21-22.

The budget office looks at things multiple different ways.

We look at a high-level revenue resources and expenditures.

And we also have a line-by-line multiple Excel workbooks that have about a thousand rows where we deal with individual known items.

So one labor partner would have a different line than another labor partner.

Utility cost increase would have a separate line from insurance.

And we pull those together and we look at it from two different perspectives.

And right now we're seeing a resource gap of basically $70 million.

If we going back to that original ending fund balance slide use our unassigned fund balance that basically brings it down to a $49 million funding gap to solve.

Next slide.

So when we look at that $49 million here's what we look at for some potential options for solving it.

We have an economic stabilization fund the school board's rainy day fund and it is raining right now in a lot of ways.

That is currently sitting at 4 percent of the 19-20 total expenditures or 38.7 million.

So some or a half more potentially of that could be put towards this.

That would work us through one year part of one year's problem.

We could make reductions to district programs.

We could explore capital fund flexibility.

We have a one-time option for this biennium budget from the legislature of moving some costs that traditionally would not move to the capital fund.

We can reimburse them.

And we need to look at the school funding allocations.

It's never a place we like to start with.

But our school funding allocations is over half of the district's resources and excuse me almost half of the district's resources and making reductions may need to make adjustments to the school funding allocations.

And what will probably end up being is some combination of the above for our solution.

So I think next slide.

This is the timeline.

You've seen this slide before as well.

And we just bring it forward to help remind people of where we're at in the process.

And we'll also get into this more as we get into the participatory budgeting process of that being in the November mid-November through mid-December time frame as we come towards how how will we put forward a balanced budget Knowing that we need to make a lot of decisions before the legislative session ends in order to meet our timelines that are required for staffing.

So that's all I have.

All right.

There were a couple other areas that I just wanted to provide some financial information on so that the board is has been provided that information.

We have final numbers for our FEMA and our CARES Act funds.

So for FEMA we have about $192,000 that we're we found eligible expenditures for.

And basically these are pre-vetted by the FEMA staff that come and they work with our grant staff to run through all the expenditures.

There were a lot of very specific tight rules around what we could ask FEMA to pay for.

So the reimbursement the eligible expenditures for reimbursement are pretty low.

And then with the ESSER CARES Act funds we will claim all of those dollars before we start talking to the legislature about other needs.

Looking through all of our dollars that we'd anticipated spending.

When we had initially talked about this in the summer it was with the assumption that we were going back to school at least in hybrid and that we were going to have schools open with a lot of different cleaning and PPE and that's not currently happening.

So we ended up charging technology where we also have great need and spent millions of dollars unanticipated.

So the majority of the dollars will cover our technology costs.

And this really positions us you know we talked a little bit about this with Directors Rankin and Hersey talked about it with Director Hampson.

This really positions us to be in a in a place where we can say to the legislature We have used all of our funding available.

We have spent all of those dollars down.

There is nothing left for us to claim at this point in time.

And so we still need legislative assistance.

That's really the message that this is sending.

If we didn't put technology on there I don't know that we would have spent all of these dollars until very late in the school year.

So one more slide and then we're going to take a round of questions.

So the next slide I just wanted I know that we had a work session recently about BTA V and I just wanted to start the conversation about our enrichment levy which goes with the capital levy every year.

So in February of 2022 we will go out to the voters for both a capital levy which would be BTA V and our enrichment or formerly known as our M&O maintenance and operations levy.

And this levy does support our day-to-day operations for the district.

I just provided some background data.

We'll have more conversation about this as we move along.

But I just wanted to provide some initial information.

You can basically see that in 2020 the year that we're in we have a lot more authority that the voters gave us than the legislature lets us collect.

And that's really that difference between us asking for about $4,000 a student which voters said yes to legislature capped us at $3,500 a student.

And right now the rate per thousand is about 64 cents.

We had advertised a rate of $1.05 and that obviously we're way under what we had gone out to the voters on.

I will say this just as one cautionary note the Assessed valuation is changing in a way that it hasn't in Seattle in many years.

It's dramatically slowed down.

Previously we were seeing assessed valuations increase 6 or 8 percent a year.

Right now I think that Linda we saw about a 0.9 percent increase.

That is correct.

In assessed valuation.

Yeah.

So as assessed valuation goes up your levy rate goes down.

That's really the correlation that we look for.

So again just kind of wanted to provide some initial information to let you know we're thinking about it.

We're starting to model and we'll be working through this over the course of the next year with the board.

So with that Director Hampson I'll turn it back over to you for questions.

Okay let's start with Director Rivera-Smith.

Thank you.

JoLynn could you explain that again as I was listening.

As the assessed valuations go up we our levies go down.

I'm kind of just confused by that right there if you could just.

Yeah it's just the rate per thousand.

So if the assessed so if your house is worth more dollars so if your house goes up $100,000 the levy rate per $1,000 actually goes down.

Does that does that help.

So it's calculated based on and in Seattle A lot of our business corps and our businesses are paying this rate so their assessed valuation is increasing.

So their taxes on what they're paying property taxes on are carrying a lot of the burden let me say of the rate per thousand.

And that helps our our homeowners by having a lower rate per thousand so their tax bill goes down.

You won't see most school districts are probably sitting at at least a dollar fifty.

per thousand versus 64 cents that we're at in 2020.

Thank you.

And then I so I had a community meeting this last weekend and some community members asking about how you know what advocacy they could be you know helping us with.

And it sounds like part of this this going about the forgiveness for transportation and enrollment are two places where we can do that.

And I think we've talked about this before and there are going to be some talking points shared with us that we could then share with community.

Did we get those yet or is there something still coming.

No we put it in the Friday memo.

Linda was that last week.

Yes.

Okay that's I know I know it was talked about and like sorry if I missed that but.

That's okay.

There was some background so some pretty detailed background was shared in the Friday memo.

I would suggest that once we get our legislative agenda finalized that would also be something that they could use.

I can't find my last question so I'll let you guys move on.

But thank you.

Okay Director Mack I'm sorry Director Rankin.

Thanks.

I just hate that it's called an enrichment levy now.

Yeah it doesn't feel so enriching.

I know it's not your your decision Chief Berge.

But but it is frustrating it's called an enrichment levy because it makes it sound like it's just extra stuff for fun.

And really it's it's critical to the operation of our district.

So.

I'll just say I think that was a very political term of art that they used when they passed it right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well because that came in tandem with McCleary right.

That's right.

And saying that you know no McCleary's done so it's fully funded so this isn't basic education this is extra.

And yeah yeah that's a big bummer is my my friendly for public broadcast way of addressing my feelings on that.

I can I can we go to the previous slide really quickly please.

Sure.

Yeah I guess I mean I'm kind of wondering and this might be a question kind of beyond what we could talk about right now but I guess I'm wondering in terms of looking at the you know the the very specific costs that we can have reimbursed through these things and then other needs that may come up is there is there a way to is there any way to creatively mitigate some of our projected deficit with additional reimbursable funds or is this the end of the reimbursement.

This is the end of what we know now.

There may be a second stimulus fund package that comes through.

I think that the county and the city may have some other dollars that can flow through to us.

It just depends on the package that comes out of the federal government.

But I don't know that this is the end-in for us.

This is what we know today.

Okay.

That's it for me for now.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Director Mack.

Yeah a couple of questions.

One is can we can you clarify again what our actual budgetary gap is that we're going to have to solve for.

And what and how how much of a difference is that from what was previously projected.

So slide 9. Leah please.

So we hadn't previously projected 21-22.

This is the first projection that we've done.

This is for next year.

This is not for this year.

That's correct.

Okay.

Yeah this is the first projection that we've done.

You know we have basically on this we we teed up using the unrestricted fund balance and we could we could lift that number Linda to 21.8 million dollars now that we've closed the books.

But we have close to a 50 million dollar gap that we're going to need to try to solve either through spend down of the economic stabilization and or some other creative ways of reducing programming or something.

But in our 4-year forecast didn't we didn't we have some sort of projection because we have to do this 4-year forecast.

We do.

You know the 4-year forecast is developed so far ahead and has so many unknowns it probably I don't recall exactly what it was.

I don't know Linda if you do or not.

We can look in the budget book.

Yeah.

Director Mack when we put together the 4-year forecast as Chief Berge pointed out it's so far in advance we don't have a lot of information.

So typically what we do is we look at historical trends as to how fast our expenses increase and how fast our revenues increase.

And our expenses have basically been increasing at a rough number of 3 percent.

And our revenues have been growing by about 2 percent.

So there's been this 1 percent delta that is typically what we show on the 4-year.

When we get closer as we are now then we go into using real numbers and real contracts and information.

Right.

But what's the delta between what we were thinking before and what the impact of the pandemic and the loss of enrollment is.

And maybe you can get back to me with that number.

It's pretty it's a it's a very different picture.

It's worse than before.

We were always looking at not having enough money in the future.

This is far worse than what we were anticipating.

Part of our challenge of why it's worse is as Chief Berge mentioned we have a structural deficit that we've been pushing forward and the snowball is getting bigger each year basically.

So if you go back to the previous slide slide 7 You can see where the structural deficit is.

It's those items in the middle.

The FY18-19 savings for 2021 and the 19-20 estimated savings.

So that's 50 million dollars 50 million 400 thousand dollars of basically one-time savings that we've used to solve our problem in 2021. And as we pointed out those level of savings and variabilities happening like the medical holiday that we had with the switch to med to the new states program.

We don't anticipate those recurring.

We're we're moving out of the McCleary uncertainty of SEBB into our more normal standard which is our expenditures are growing and our revenues are not always keeping up.

So that that's the biggest challenge that happened of what had not been coming forward is the structural deficit getting bigger each year.

Significantly bigger.

Yeah we're not we're not fully funded.

So it's a problem and it continues to be a problem and I wish legislators could actually understand that.

Regarding the two questions around SAB are we fully funded for SAB or are we actually paying out of our own pockets at this point.

We're paying out of our own pocket for everybody.

So the state gives us medical funding for every one of the employees that they provide funding for.

And then there's this whole bunch of other you know employees that we buy above the state allocation with our levy dollars and anything that we buy above.

So you know 9 nurses we buy about 70 nurses.

We have to pay the medical for that as well.

Okay and then my last and final question around that because that's not fully funded for all of the staff that we require we need to have is about the M&O or the enrichment levy.

Is the legislature did in fact give Seattle a different levy rate the $3,500 I think is actually only to us.

Because we are so large which I understand there's resentment across the state for that and there's a lot of infighting around the idea of a levy cap.

And I'm curious to know because I can't remember and I'd like clarification and maybe you can get back to me on this but is that was that provision where we have the $3,500 is that ongoing or does that have a limit.

Are we looking at potentially losing that next year if they don't update it again.

It's ongoing.

Ongoing.

Okay.

Director Mack.

Sorry.

Yeah please.

I took this opportunity while you were talking to look up our 4-year forecast and we anticipated when we brought the 2021 budget to the board that we would have a 67 million dollar gap for 21-22.

And that for 22-23 it's 83 million point 5 and 23-24 it's 100 million 600 thousand dollars.

So our percentage estimates were very close to where we are.

Okay great.

Thank you.

Yeah Linda can you say the 21-22 gap that we estimated again.

67 million 143 thousand 617 dollars.

I'll just say kudos to Linda and team because that's a darn good close estimate for lots of assumptions we throw in there.

Right.

And then so that's it.

And then but the budget gap that we're looking at is 48 so it's less than what that was.

Am I. Right.

We didn't know what our unrestricted fund balance was.

We have we on this slide we have assumed that the board would like to use our unrestricted fund balance which really represents our underspend from 19-20.

to buy down the problem.

These are not these are funds that are available to be used for whatever purpose.

So the board could decide not to do that of course.

We've just put this on there for some context.

Yeah and I think at another point the conversation about the underspend and where it comes from and why it exists is really useful for us to have because that's what that is.

And but that's a longer conversation.

So I'll defer to the next Board Director for questions.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Well do you want to go back to that prior slide Linda and just briefly discuss that.

I mean you can see the underspend from prior years to some extent that with the 18-19 19-20.

That you can see the underspend but where it comes from or why why it exists where it's you know dollars that aren't spent in service of students in buildings is what's actually happening.

You know we're not actually hiring the staff maybe that's needed or whatever it's underspend it's not it's because we're not actually providing that service.

So anyway.

I mean we can we can definitely have that conversation.

I can tell you this having been at this for several years the savings comes from different places every year because we anytime we have an underspend in an area we go looking for it to automatically reduce it from the next year if there's a reason that we over budget it for some reason.

With a organization as large as we are we do have salary savings as we pointed out which would be vacant positions that may be open for a couple of months while we wait to find a candidate.

So we may have savings for sections of time during the school year and or when we have substitutes in position instead of a more senior teacher there is variability in those costs.

But the other across-the-board costs shift as to where they might be caused.

We might have a very cold winter and overspend utilities.

We might have a less than cold winter and underspend utilities.

Okay thank you.

And and I do think that because I think it's important to understand you know these are these are based on the what's budgeted versus what's actually spent.

And it's you know the it's not necessarily always about not spending.

Not not filling positions.

And there's not necessarily any particular intent around it.

And if we didn't have the underspend then we wouldn't have that to carry forward to address the structural overspend.

Right.

Sorry yes that's correct.

I mean it is natural in a billion dollar organization you are going to have underspend because we have 10,000 people that we hire 10,000 positions constantly in a state of flux.

So while we do our very best and that's one of the measures that I know HR uses and tracks so carefully is do they have every position filled during the school year.

But there's just a lot of variability.

So a 20 million dollar underspend in an organization our size We don't feel is out of the normal outside normal.

And again that's as compared to you know relative to budgeting.

So okay let me go on to the next director.

What direction am I going.

I'm going with Director Hersey correct.

Yep.

Thank you.

I guess my only question at this point is that looking at the transport looking at the transportation funding deficit has there been any talk about potentially finding a fix for this at the legislative level.

Yep.

That's why I thank you for the lead in Director Hersey.

That's definitely part of our legislative agenda right.

To to address that that gap can easily be fixed by legislative action and taken away.

Yeah that's frustrating.

I don't have any other questions.

Could I offer a little bit of information from hearing from my understanding is that Senator Rolfes and others are actually drafting a bill trying to help get at this.

So there is there is movement from my understanding on that effort for the transportation fix.

But it's going to take advocacy and support.

Yeah that's that's true that as long as they continue.

So what we want to have happen this year is we want to have them reimburse us for whatever we are using our buses for or our transportation staff for even if it's not bringing kids to school.

And when we put one child on a on a bus to bring them in for their special education services that deficit there's a deficit between what the state would fund for one child riding a bus versus what it costs us We want them to fill that gap not just through January but through the entire year.

And then again as we move into the 21-22 school year we want them to not have a look back on what we've spent for funding or what we've spent for transportation expenditures in 2021 because that is not a typical year for us and it would result in a vast underfunding situation for districts across the state including us.

So it's a two-part ask and the briefing paper that we put out or the memo we put out in the Friday memo outlines that for you all.

Okay.

Thank you for that.

And now we will go to Director Harris.

Who is too depressed to ask any questions.

No don't say that.

I I. My head is exploding and it makes me ever so sad that we do not put our children first and that we are projecting these kinds of gaps.

Full force and effect we have got to hold hands with our labor partners as well in getting the legislature to move off of these.

I JoLynn I've bugged you about transportation funding but they've always refunded it before from the year before.

That's to say it won't happen again but no one was counting on a worldwide pandemic huh.

That's correct.

That's correct Director Harris.

I think I feel I feel pretty good about the chances for us getting the transportation funding issue fixed this year and next year.

I'm not super positive about the enrollment piece.

I think that the legislature is banking on the 30,000 statewide enrollment loss as a budget savings for themselves.

It's over 300 million dollars that they just saved.

So they budgeted for enrollment 30,000 kids higher than it's come in for 2021 right now.

So there is money available.

We've we've been saying you know we just need stable funding.

School districts need stable funding to make it through this.

Well I hope we use lots of graphics and take it to them because I don't believe the majority of our legislators understand what a pickle we're in.

Thank you Director Harris.

And with that I'll pass.

Thank you.

Yeah and this is Director Hampson.

I don't have any specific questions having gone through this in great detail.

I did want to point out that I I'm grateful to you and your staff for having managed to a budget that allows us to have the the prospect of going into our unassigned fund balance that we do that we have some options because I know other districts are not in that situation.

And it's you know I know we're always striving for greater transparency and I appreciate your your willingness to continue to bring as many numbers forward as we can can handle.

And what is you know the world of governmental accounting it's not meant to be logical.

It's not built that way.

It isn't particularly logical.

It can be pretty pretty overwhelming.

And I think one thing that that is often misunderstood is is not understanding the extent of the volatility that those in your position deal with and how it is that you plan for that volatility and having watched it just in this district to be in the middle of a pandemic and to be I'm trying to put a positive spin on this at the end because I do believe that there's been some pretty good practice in your offices that has gotten us to to be in a relatively good place all things considered.

So I just want to point that out because I do know your collective awareness of the volatility and your planning for that so that we do have something to fall back on.

Director Rivera-Smith you had your hand raised.

I did.

Thank you.

I found my last question that I was just asking.

I was going to ask for clarification on the on the sheet about fiscal year 21-22 potential solutions under the use of capital funding flexibility.

I wanted to just clarify.

You mentioned this or you or Linda said it that we have this one-time opportunity to move costs but we need to reimburse them.

Is that did I hear that correctly.

If we take out of that fund we need to reimburse it in what the next following year or how would that be worked.

with you.

Well I think that what Linda was getting to was they we had legislative language put into the budget that allowed that broadened the allowability of what can we can use a capital fund dollar for.

So before there are certain things that we spend for maintenance that have to be paid for by the general fund.

That language allows districts to use a capital fund dollar for some of those purposes.

And so it wouldn't be paying the capital fund back.

It would be actually the capital fund paying for part of the general fund's costs in a different way.

And that would be part of what we would do in the 2021 school year.

That language expires with the budget.

It may or may not be continued.

It's been in there for a year or two.

We we have not been in a position for needing to use that yet.

Okay.

I mean that didn't sound that's that does so not paying it back but covering something else I guess or how I don't I don't know if I really got clear on that but maybe we can talk about it offline.

Okay.

Yeah.

Did any other directors have questions about that.

Oops.

Yeah.

No.

Okay.

So and I think you know just as a note I appreciate the questions and as long as we have time I think that if we as we answer them publicly to the extent that people may and I know we don't have a lot of people watching now but that they may watch later that this information when we ask questions you know we're highlighting things for for our constituents and so I think those questions are important.

So let's go ahead and move to the next section.

which is participatory budgeting.

Why some may ask why did we enter into a participatory budgeting process in the middle of a pandemic.

I mean I I think it couldn't be more any more important than it is now given what we just saw.

And I think similar to the I really appreciate the presentation provided by community and Director Hersey that The nature of the pressures on our on our families are so great that it that we still need to in fact focus on the the priorities that our communities would see for that we are their elected officials.

These are taxpayer dollars and we are very much focused on serving those that we've failed to serve historically.

And for for those reasons I think it's there is no more important time than to go into a participatory budgeting process so that we are learning as an organization in concert with our our community that deserves and needs to be served.

And at the same time that we are creating greater awareness of what the challenges and the advocacy points are.

And so it's a it's a really good opportunity for us to be having these the advocacy part of the conversation the legislative advocacy and insisting on focusing on equity.

We will the sort of equity detour can can come up and be that you know we can't afford to do equity.

Well we I think we're at a point in time where we know that we can't afford not to focus on equity and we need our community to to help lead us in that.

And so this is our our first attempt at this and I'm grateful to staff for taking this on during this period and grateful that Director Sebring had done some work on the budget that that was allowed us as directors in our Audit and Finance Committee to take a look at what we looked at as a board as a whole and then we looked at it in a little more depth.

We we drilled down and Director Hersey participated as well to get into some perspective priorities and there's some alignment with some of the things that we we've talked about.

Things that we absolutely have to advocate for regardless of where we are as a district in terms of of our our overall fiscal picture that we still have to set certain fiscal priorities that that shouldn't be only with access funding but it should be regardless of funding picture that that we are focusing on on the things that are of greatest concern and prioritization in our community.

So so with that we've this is a preliminary purpose statement around that we're creating opportunities for community participation and prioritizing our flexible budget dollars where we do have a say.

that isn't predetermined by other funds and also fostering greater community understanding as to where we are in our in our funding status and what our our needs are in terms of those budget priority areas.

And then also taking those community recommendations so that that the community actually can see their voice in in their and the dollars that are for their benefit.

reflected in our actual budget.

And then after year 1 you know we'll want to reflect back what worked what didn't work and hopefully expand that into subsequent years and and having those hard conversations.

So do you want me to keep going Director I mean Chief Berge.

Yeah.

So this just kind of outlines the particulars.

We're looking for 5 potential groups.

We're looking at about 2 meetings for each of those groups about 2 hours long.

One held the last 2 weeks in November.

The second meeting the first 2 weeks of December.

We kind of outline and maybe you want to talk about your initial thoughts here on the stakeholder groups.

Yeah so we and we went through a number of different versions of this in terms of how to get good participation.

It's it's an area that I think there's a lot of interest but we won't have kind of people rushing to to participate but we want to make sure that we have a youth-focused group and that we're advertising and trying to get representatives from each of these critical groups.

And feel free to Director Hersey had a lot to do with putting this together as well and he was part of a follow-up meeting to the the Audit and Finance meeting where we kind of came up with the initial structure of this.

And again these are our preliminary thoughts on this and we're bringing this to you all for the first time.

And then focused on organizations that have really been advocating around these things.

We just heard from representatives youth representatives and King County Equity Now.

Those priorities and we're really grateful that they've been putting this together and we're bringing these these issues around having a say in the in the how our funds are spent.

So having representatives from from those group to those groups to to lead in a set of sessions.

And then our family organizations Seattle Council Families of Color Seattle a Native community centered session including with our tribal with our with our tribes on whose whose land whose treaty land we are situated and with whom we have consultation requirements per There are receipt of federal dollars for Native student Native education.

And then community CBO's those organizations that we hear a lot about who provide services to our students but aren't themselves necessarily our families but have a strong stake in our and how we budget our dollars because they provide services where we do not.

So that's do you want to add anything.

Sorry Director Hersey please do you add to that.

Yeah no I don't think I have anything to add.

You're hitting the nail on the head.

And then so those are and what's our next slide.

Oh right.

Okay.

And so then do you want to go ahead and go through that Linda or.

JoLynn.

Yeah.

Do we want to talk about that prior slide first or.

It's really up to you.

Well let's get through this part and then maybe we'll go we'll go back.

Yeah.

So go ahead.

So we talked about just the first meeting we would be discussing the purpose of the meetings.

We would have facilitator facilitating those meetings on our behalf.

And then Linda and I would be staffing those.

We would have a brief overview of the budgeting timeline and kind of process.

And then one of the outcomes from the meeting tonight is to hopefully narrow it down to 3 subject areas that we would be bringing to the community for their review.

And that will give them the opportunity to really focus on 3 areas that we've heard that the community is interested in.

So we provide them some explanation.

Get some questions from them.

What what's currently funded.

What's staffed.

What does that look like.

And then the second meeting we bring them back any additional information that they requested and and then they would tell us what does success look like to the community member for those three areas.

And then that would be synthesized across the five groups.

Back to you Director Hampson.

Okay.

So let's I just want to before we get into this really larger topic I want to get into the Or I want to just anything that we missed or that you want to throw out as far as that those the slide with our group focus.

These aren't this isn't meant to be exhaustive.

It's meant to be kind of the sort of categories wanting to have to heavily reach out to these groups and make sure that you know this is a space in which we'd like to have a set of two meetings.

You know have have folks from your communities your organizations commit to coming twice to participate in this so that that we have the same individuals that are participating each time.

It's meant to be inclusive not exclusive and working through these different groups to get to make sure people understand you know that this is happening.

publicize it.

So let me just start with Director Rivera-Smith.

Did you have any comments questions or concerns about either this slide or even the next slide.

No I did.

Thank you.

And I was I mean you kind of clarified it for me.

This is not an exhaustive list.

So I'm wondering.

Yeah it's not.

So that's good because I'm I'm thinking of a couple of groups that may fall into these categories and I'm wondering would it be then incumbent on board members to invite other groups that aren't already on this list or how I don't I just want to make sure I'm doing the official you know like whatever the process would be for that because I don't know if we're like approving this list necessarily because like you said it's not exhaustive anyways.

I just want to know what the what the flexibility is to invite other groups that fall in these categories.

I mean Director Hersey chime in if you have thoughts about it.

But I had thought that you know like let's just take NAACP Youth Coalition.

I don't think they're all going I know certain students have shown interest in this and that they would kind of you know designate who's going to who's going to come from from their group.

And if we've left somebody off of this if there's somebody else that you know oh you know so-and-so would really want to be a part of this is that that serves you know youth or has a youth group that would want to be participating in this that we would just get them the information and and have them designate someone.

Okay yeah no.

And I would just add to that that again you know on the same tip as our legislative agenda there has been at every intersection where we've had these potential conversations with folks there has been a real ask and push from the organizations that you see on the list before you that if we are bringing people into this conversation that they be unapologetically focused on the needs of Black and Indigenous students.

So that would be that would be my only ask and my only criteria because what we don't want to happen is for you know all opening it up and bringing in multiple additional groups and actually put these communities in conflict which is a worry of mine if we don't do this properly.

So again just we we really need to be very clear and unapologetic that if we are bringing folks in to have conversations about this they are aligned with our strategic plan and they are they are very focused on the needs of Black and Indigenous youth in our system.

Of course of course.

Yeah.

No thank you.

And I'll put it out there I was just considering UNEA as a Native community organization so.

They're on here.

They're on here.

Youth.

Under youth.

Yeah.

Oh thank you.

Okay I was looking under Native community my bad.

And the other one I was wondering about was was and then I don't know because I know they have you know they do focus on communities of color inside themselves but the Seattle Special Education PTSA I know they're not primarily a BIPOC group but they of course they know that they recognize greatly the intersectionalities and many you know that there is that overlap.

So I don't know if that would be a consideration for this or if you think that is not really in line with the groups you're seeing here.

Was somebody going to say something.

No that was my question.

Just would love to get your guys' thoughts on that.

Yeah I mean I think that that's just about having the conversation around you know wanting to make it clear that that that yeah they're not excluded specifically from this.

But just because we know that Families of Color Seattle Seattle Council have worked in that capacity with Seattle Public Schools before.

and providing you know and being able to center those those voices.

So we just need to have that conversation with them.

Okay.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Other.

Oh let's see Director Rankin.

No I was also going to mention the special education PTSA which of course you know any anyone in any of these groups could also have the special education perspective.

But.

Yeah and I think that's you know one of the things that we find in our communities of color is the preponderance of that you know the intersections are so great and students of color make up 65 percent of students receiving special education services.

So there's a lot of crossover in that advocacy as well.

So.

Okay.

So then Director Mack.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Appreciate the question.

A couple organizations come to mind.

Equity in Education is one.

I know they're not completely Seattle-centric but they operate and have had the focus for a very long time.

Another that comes to mind is the Native American PAC that is actually one of our advisory groups or I'm not sure.

It's on here.

Oh it is on here.

Okay.

And oh there was another one.

Oh Roadmap Project which is you know they came and spoke to us recently.

Carlina did.

So that's another even though they're not completely located just in Seattle.

It feels to me that they may have some really meaningful input.

Couple other thoughts.

And for those of you that have already spoken any thoughts on the kind of the process.

Does that sound that was on the other slide.

Does that.

For me this is Director Mack.

For me the process it it.

It seems like a reasonable request of community members.

It's directed pointed and supportive of gathering that input.

And I appreciate the kind of review of the stakeholder groups and ensuring that we're both being inclusive as well as focused as you've been talking about.

So I don't have any additional questions.

It makes sense to me that just a couple other those other groups that I threw out there there may be others that that district staff might have in their list that you might want to just run through that list to make sure we didn't miss anybody.

Thanks.

Yeah.

Staff have been working on that as well so.

So there's some other touch points.

Okay.

And then Director Harris did you have anything.

I did.

What about SBA's Center on Race and Equity.

Yeah I thank you for bringing that up.

I have actually been talking to Marquita about this and so I think there is a role for I would like for them to be part of this and They sit in such a in a such a strange place relative to SEA and the district and so I want to be able to have this conversation with our union partners are critical to this conversation and yet they don't because they have other opportunities to advocate and make decisions through their contracts that have huge budget implications they really don't fall into the same category.

as these these are the.

That's where I narrowed it to the Center for Race and Equity because I see them as sitting in a fairly special place.

Yeah they do.

So I can talk to Marquita about it.

Whether or not SBA leadership is being what's the word I want to say supportive.

I don't know.

The other question that I have is is again nuts and bolts.

Who's who's putting out the ask.

Who's collecting the information.

That's a good heavy lift in the next month.

Public Affairs partnering with audit with the finance department.

We've got a number of other community engagement threads as well before the end of the year and of course the holidays and the the impacts on people's time.

I I'm curious as to who's doing what when work plan technical pragmatic points.

So I think we could there is I'll let Chief Berge speak to that briefly and then maybe we can follow up more offline.

Yes and more to come.

And then I want to move us into the next stage.

Yep.

So Director Harris right now it's Leah Linda and JoLynn who are doing the invitations.

We will have a facilitator who will be helping us plan out the meetings.

We likely can handle sending out the invitations.

We'll work with Directors Hampson and Hersey to kind of craft what those look like and then we'll ask communications to kind of review it for us through their lens.

But they don't have any other ability you know they're maxed out as well.

So this is something that.

The budget office is lifting.

If they have you left.

Thank you.

Okay.

So let's move on to the the big list.

I'm going to let Director Hersey do you mind kind of leading in a little bit about some the place that you left off and why some are in blue and some are in black.

Okay.

Thank you.

Yep.

Okay fantastic.

So yeah when we're taking a look at the things that are in black let me orient myself to the slide really quickly.

Want me to give you some background.

Yeah.

That would be great JoLynn and then I can talk a little bit about why we made the decisions we did.

Sure.

So there were a whole list of things that you had requested go on the list kind of really drawing from the King County the list of demands that they that we just looked at earlier in the first part of the work session.

And then there were some as we talked through it you felt like were more appropriate for this conversation and those items were noted in blue.

So the black indicates things that were initially considered.

I don't believe those are ones that you and Director Hampson necessarily were looking at continuing but you wanted to make sure that you noted that they had been on the list.

And we wanted to get feedback.

And you were going to walk kind of through your perspectives.

Yeah absolutely.

Cool.

So let's talk about the ones that we took off of the list before we get into the justifications and reasoning for the items that you see in blue.

So looking at student supports and continuous improvement that's specifically around McKinney-Vento that was a big a big interest of Director DeWolf's rightfully so.

The reason that you don't see that highlighted in blue is because we have not heard of any of our McKinney-Vento programming being underfunded as opposed to some of the other things that you'll see on this list.

And what could be the solution there is to look at promoting what is available and ensuring that we're utilizing the resources that we have in place with the with the optimal amount of efficacy quite frankly.

If we take a look at human resources HR staff development and staff of color hiring and retention we're already doing a fair amount of work in that regard.

And I do just want to highlight that that is or rather remind folks that that is a demand of the Black Education Now Rally organizers and many other groups in our system.

I think what we really need to do is to just take a look at that work and potentially get a better sense of where that is.

We are producing many educators of color and a lot of which are African-American.

And so I just want to elevate that work that Dr. Codd and her team are doing.

Nutrition services was a big concern.

But we after conversations that we've had we feel that we can utilize and really look at the budget of nutrition services.

and see where there's some opportunity to use resources more effectively.

And then you'll see improved technology utilization inclusive of planning and design.

Again we didn't have full context for kind of what that meant.

So happy to entertain a conversation to get more clarity around that.

Now turning your attention to some of the items in blue.

Academics and Curriculum Assessment Instruction and Ethnic Studies.

That's an obvious one.

You know as this work falls now under Dr. Scarlett I am a strong believer that we need to adequately fund it.

Whether that means taking a look at our social studies curriculum adoption budget or just even you know getting a clear understanding for what type of staff.

How many staff.

What resources need to be put into place.

You know I am.

in the mindset that this is probably going to be a multi-million dollar lift.

And I think that that is that is really kind of where our focus needs to be in getting this across the finish line because as Director Harris so eloquently stated earlier it's been over 3 years and we really need to fund and implement this in the way that our students deserve.

Safe Schools and Restorative Justice and Counseling supports.

Those should look familiar to you based on our conversation around the legislative agenda.

And really what we're looking here is you know we need to be approaching finding solutions to these things in a two-pronged method.

We can't.

As you know was discussed earlier rely on the legislature to fund to fund a lot of these things.

But what we can do is take a look at our own resources and see if we can reallocate funding to support these incredibly important initiatives that our community have been asking for for for decades.

If we take a look at dual-language programs family support and social work those are pretty self-explanatory and things that are incredibly needed in our system.

But then also taking a look at anti-racist and bias PD.

You know for me this is of interest but I really would like to have a conversation about how do we track and how do we prove or at least hold our system accountable to ensuring that the money that we're spending on this professional development is actually being utilized not only equitably but effectively.

Right.

And we've had that conversation before in various spaces.

So for me that one is a little bit lower at the list unless we're having a conversation around how do we track and how do we make sure that it's effective.

But yeah the rest of these are very clear.

And again things that our community have been very loudly asking for for a very long time.

Happy to answer any questions.

Yeah and I won't add a lot you know I will just point out that dual-language programming.

There are some some good things coming around that.

And we do have a pretty significant amount of bilingual funding but one of the things I would like to see us get to eventually and I realize that it may not end up being Top 3 for this year.

It's not among the top demands that we've been we've been hearing.

But for me just having it here and recognizing that that having good solid dual-language programs really is inherent to the identity safety of all of our all of our students really.

But particularly as as it pertains to students immigrant families indigenous families and having their home languages be honored and any languages of origin really in the long run be honored.

And I want to always kind of keep that coming up in the top list.

I think we'll probably be better prepared in a year or so to look at that more closely.

But so that's the only thing that I would add to that is somebody that was is really committed to that work.

But yeah let's go to questions because our task for today is to narrow this down to 3 to take to community.

And the reason for narrowing it down to 3 is that And that doesn't mean that other areas are going to not be funded at all right.

This is because as we know some of these things are already happening.

It's about what do we believe what are 3 things that we can take to the community say you know what do you how would you prioritize and look at these 3 things.

What would it look like for these to really truly be funded in our district.

And then what kind of tradeoffs do we have to make if we want to make that happen.

That's kind of the nature of the conversation.

So I'm going to start with Director Harris and get your feedback on that.

And you can talk about whether you want to eliminate things or whether you want to focus on certain ones or you can give me your top 3. Whatever works for you.

Which one of your kids you like best.

Because these these choices are extraordinarily painful to me.

I would go with and I and I have a question for JoLynn and the rest of the crew here.

When we go out to community we're going to take with our tools things like professional development is a million dollars a day for all of our staff.

We're going to have I hope interactive tools that talk about we have X number of schools that don't have counselors.

In order to fund counselors for the remaining schools it will cost us this much.

Will we have those sorts of tools to use.

We will Director Harris.

We anticipate once we narrow it down to three we'll put together some briefing background information that kind of gives those high-level facts and what we think are the most likely things that they might ask us.

Okay.

And I'm and I'm hoping we could we could even have building blocks that say in order to do this here's your guesstimate estimate not as and to make it simple to understand in the big picture.

If we do this it's going to cost us X amount of dollars.

How much will our money buy.

I would go with academic curriculum assessment and instruction.

for reasons already I think stated over and over and over and over again I would go to counseling support and I'd go to schools and continuous improvement family support.

And then I'll talk myself out of it for the next 2 or 3 days.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Allie can you confirm for me that some I know this is being recorded but is anybody else actually taking notes.

I'm just realizing that I'm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Linda and I are both taking notes.

Okay.

I would like to do so myself as well but I think that would be too slow.

Okay.

So then we'll go to Director Mack.

Hi.

Thank you.

I appreciate that the focus of these bullet points is different than the previous list because it's focusing on what the actual need is not the actual necessary solution and I think that's where community can have some good ideas about how that actually gets operationalized.

Where does where should the dollars go.

And to that end I would think actually that school and continuous improvement counseling support and family support and social work actually are one topic.

Those are focusing on you know mental health and family support and social work counseling.

It's all the similar sort of goal of supporting students and those needs.

And I think that take making them into two is actually that's pitting you know specific solutions against each other.

And I think that the most valuable input from our community will be that yes we think having a family support worker in every school is the most important or we think that having you know additional dollars put towards this specific SEL curriculum whatever that you know wherever they can provide that input I think is going to be really meaningful.

And I think that those two bullets should be combined into one because those are the similar goals of the you know how to adequately institutionalize and support the system in a way that meaningfully supports mental health and family needs.

So that would be my first thing is that those those two counseling supports family support and social work are all one.

And so my selection would be the academics ethnic studies and Black studies the counseling support family support and social work as a second one.

And then the third would be Actually in looking at this combining restorative justice and anti-racist and bias as as one as well because where I think you know we as board directors come up with like policy solutions and say well we think this is what is actually going to do it.

So a counselor is the answer.

Well what I really think the participatory budgeting process will be helpful for is hearing from community Where where they think is that you know where's the biggest bang for the buck.

Do they want us to hire a resort restorative restorative justice trainer for all schools because that would actually implement it.

Would PD for two days a week be.

You know I don't know what the actual solution is but I see restorative justice and anti-racist and biased PD as also going towards the same goal.

So I appreciate that all the work that has gone into this and I would suggest my top 3 actually combine the top all in blue except for the dual-language because safe schools and restorative justice anti-racist and bias those are those are so tied together in terms of what the goal actually is.

I I don't think we should be choosing between the two.

I think we should help get community perspective on that.

Okay.

So just to keep things I'm just going to frame that as Eden wants to have more than three.

So.

No I actually no I I I want to say I just to frame it I mean I appreciate that you're saying that but but I do for the record want to say it a different way.

The importance of having the community participate in the budgeting process is to look at what are the what are the budgeting goals we're trying to meet.

What are we trying to do for students and where should those dollars go.

How do we utilize the dollars most effectively to get the outcome because it's the student outcome and it's a mental health outcome it's the educational outcome that is it's and it's safety.

Like ultimately we want to we want to create a system that is safe for students.

And restorative justice and anti-racist and bias those are different strategies to get there.

The goal is safe schools and anti-racism.

And I don't think you can pull them apart.

I think they actually those are the solutions.

So just to clarify.

I appreciate.

I heard you.

I'm just I'm just saying these exist in different categories for now for a variety of reasons.

Not just budgetarily but also because of different of just what they represent within the educational system and how they're they're they're funded.

So again think of it less about excluding these things and more about the fact that we have a limited amount of time and space within which to have some really detailed conversations with community.

And from the research that Linda was able to do and and I would say from my own experience in working with community It was 2 different 2 sessions of 2 hours each.

Some of these things it may be that we make a mistake and we come back and it's like everybody said no you've got to if we're going to prioritize top 3 you know this has got to be part of the conversation.

But it's it's really about this is step 1 stage 1 getting out the door.

It's a it's a learning process for everyone.

Families and community and students and board and staff alike.

about what it's like to do this participatory process and that we just have a limited amount of time and space to do it in.

Ideally in the future these things would start back in June so that there is actually more time and space to consider more more things.

But you do need that to do that.

So that's it's it's not because I disagree in any way shape or form that these things aren't connected or don't have equal value.

It's about if if we're going to prioritize in a very limited budget environment you know which ones do we want to make sure get the attention.

So but I'm just going to.

Thank you.

I appreciate that Chandra.

I really need to clarify that I think that setting up a situation where we potentially pit both effective solutions against each other is concerning and that's kind of where I'm concerned about whether or not we are coming in to this by pre-describing what the solution is.

And I don't think that's appropriate for us to do that.

If we're going to ask the public to participate in the process what we want is their input on what the solution is.

And the solutions around these things for those topics are restorative justice and anti-racist and biased PD.

Those are two different solutions to the challenges that we're facing and I don't feel it's appropriate for the board to pre-prescribe what solutions they get to debate over.

I'd like to pre-prescribe over the priority that we would like for them to help us decide where dollars for safe schools go.

Where dollars for Ethnic Studies and Black and American Studies go.

and where dollars for counseling families support and social work go.

That's what I'm trying to say is that I don't think we should prescribe to the community the solution and I'm concerned about us setting up a system where they're hitting certain solutions against each other.

So thank you for hearing that.

Appreciate it.

Okay.

Thank you.

I'm going to hear from other directors so I'm going to go now to Director Rankin.

Thank you.

I so I'm I'm having a little bit of a hard time picturing you know so say there's three that go out as activities to different community groups.

I'm having a hard time picturing what that discussion looks like when there's what there would need to be so much information and decision-making about you know so even you know Ethnic Studies Black Studies Native Studies There is you know still some fuzziness around how those actually are implemented and what those costs might be.

So where's the the I guess if it's like let's so let's say that was one of the top three.

What would be the conversation within community to talk around that topic.

Does that make sense.

Not really.

Are you.

So the other thing is there's a there is a capacity constraint in terms of staff are going to put a lot of work into preparing detailed information about these areas.

Things that we often have a lot of questions about but we don't go into that level of detail about these as budgetary items.

And so that's those are the and please jump in JoLynn or Linda if you want to correct me or.

Director Hersey if you have a different perspective on it.

But but that is the the benefit of that process is you know co-investigating these areas in terms of how they're funded for the so that they're funded in the way that that actually meets the need and demand and desire of the community that we're serving.

And whereas we can't do it with all of these things right.

It would be great if everybody could have input into all of these things.

Right.

No no I understand that we can't go into a huge a huge detail but I'm actually thinking about it you know pulling back some is what would it look like to you know for the community conversations to be what we're doing right now which is looking at all of these items and then coming up with the top three for us to look into putting more investments towards.

Yeah I'll weigh in.

Yeah.

So.

Oh sorry.

Go ahead.

Okay.

So the only thing that I want to just make clear for everybody is that if we're looking at how well we do engagement on specific practices it's not necessarily one of our strong suits.

And if we're really thinking about I mean I'm just being real.

And then when we're thinking about a new practice like this we really need to be as targeted and refined as possible just because based on the conversations that Joanne have had or excuse me Joanne and her team have had with other districts who have attempted this.

This is based on the feedback that they have given us on the other end of the process.

So while I am 100 percent here for getting as much community engagement as possible I worry that if we don't follow a similar a similar process to the one that we've outlined based on best practice we we stand to put ourselves in likely a more difficult situation because again what we don't want to happen is that we end up pitting communities against one another by by making the engagement almost you know to a fault too inclusive.

Or or we are thinking about it from a perspective of like we want to put as much control in the community's hands as possible.

But I feel strongly that there need to be some parameters while while we learn how to do this effectively.

And there will be growing pains that are associated with this.

But with the list that you see in front of you I don't think that we're going especially for organizations that are that are truly focused on the needs of Black and Indigenous students.

I don't think that we're going to get very much very much dissent from from what we've got in front of us.

And Joanne if you could just speak a little bit to to the conversations that you've had with others around why we are currently pursuing this model that'd be really helpful.

Yeah I mean Linda talked last time.

She called other districts in California particularly San Francisco and they said you know 3 was hard.

Right.

They started out with a couple more because they couldn't narrow it to 3. It was too overwhelming.

They had to come back and and reduce the list to really try to make it work for them.

So let me give one example and I'll use counseling support because I think that might be the easiest example to use.

So what I envision is that we explain the what currently is.

How we're funded.

What we fund.

What schools get what.

And then we let them hear from then we just let them tell us what is that next step or what is that disconnect that they feel as a community member that they're not getting as far as counseling support.

It could range from oh I didn't know that and maybe my school maybe I'm just not accessing it.

Or maybe it's it completely needs to be redesigned and you need to put another six million dollars into it.

And or it could be along the whole entire spectrum.

Right.

I gotcha.

That's actually incredibly helpful JoLynn.

Thank you.

And maybe it's just more flexibility.

Right.

We just talk about how do I decide as a school what I want these resources to be and what resources do schools have to make these decisions and how to do the do the decisions get made.

And then the board's going to have to take that information synthesize it and decide what pieces can we move forward because I can pretty much guarantee we won't be able to move everything they want forward right away.

There is a plan that we can move on these things and make progress.

And that is the biggest thing is that you know having fidelity process making sure that they feel heard and that we're moving forward where people can see progress.

I got it.

Thank you so so much.

That's really that's extremely helpful.

Now I get it.

I get it.

So given that I would really like to have community input on on budgeting for Ethnic Studies Black Studies American Indian Studies.

That would be one of my items.

Anti-racist and and anti-bias PD.

And the restorative justice or counseling support.

Either one of those I think there would be a lot of valuable input from community on that.

And just to to kind of reflect back based on what JoLynn just said what we're talking about isn't you know should we do these things yes or no.

It's really about taking a deeper dive into some areas that are important to the community and understanding how we might advance that work or expand these areas or get better at doing whatever that thing is.

That in terms of the pitting against each other that's not really like we're not going to we're not going to we're not going to cut family support workers because we're looking at counseling in a participatory budgeting process.

Right.

But that's correct.

Okay.

You know a nod to Director Mack is that a lot of this may be about what flexibility can we provide to schools that we're not providing now to give community in those schools more decisions at the school level or what might that look like.

Right.

Yeah.

Well and it seems a lot too is just saying you know instead of us and central office and whoever else making like a best guess on the information that we have is to actually go to the people impacted and have them say no actually specifically this is what would make this more effective or more impactful for for our school and our students.

So really appreciate the clarification.

Thank you so much and thank you very much to Directors Hampson and Hersey for bringing this this forward and to JoLynn and Linda and everyone else who I know is putting a lot of time into this request and this process.

So.

We'll be expecting all of you to participate in this as well.

Yeah.

No I'm excited.

Now that I get it.

Director Rivera-Smith.

Director Rivera-Smith are you on mute.

There you are.

I'm here.

Thank you.

Yeah this is this is tough.

I like Director Harris said which of your children do you like the most because these are all so these are all so vital and so important and definitely priorities that we hold dearly.

So I and I and I appreciate both Director Mack and Dr. Director Rankin's concerns around not wanting to limit our community but you know and then to Director Harris's point but we want to guide them.

as cohesively as we can so that their time is effective and their input is effective.

I guess I'll start with definitely number two.

Academics Curriculum Assessment and Instruction Ethnic Studies and Black and Black and American Indian Studies for the reasons we've gone over many times and definitely have the inertia behind that one.

I'm Part of me wants to fight for human resources HR staff development hiring staff of color and retention because I know how imperative that is and I understand I agree that we are improving that but it's it's nowhere near anything even earlier in Dr. Scarlett's presentation.

She mentioned having a look towards outside organizations for that sort of mentorship and and leading because we don't have the staff in our own system for it.

But but I but I also understand why that was not maybe a blue one here because because we are doing a lot in that respect.

So I I'm not going to make that one my official pick I guess I just wanted to voice that I do think that is still somewhere we don't lose focus of and But I might actually I think I'm leaning towards the dual-language immersion the dual-language programs.

And because I do see how that does lift our some of our most vulnerable students who are coming in are immigrants and families who and I'll speak very personally.

I mean this was this was me as a child.

I lost my language because I had a school system that didn't support that.

So I you know I Anthony you know I'm not fluent in Spanish even though I'm Mexican-American I'm a Chicana and I I really regret that I didn't have the opportunity to have that connection with my culture and my language because of this just because of time the era and the schools.

And I would hate for us to perpetuate that on future students as we go.

So I I'm going to throw my support behind that one too.

So that's number two.

Number six I numbered them.

I know they're not numbered on the on the overhead here but.

And then gosh and then I think I'm I this is so hard.

This is so hard.

But I think I will go behind counseling support.

I we we've never stopped advocating for that even as a board and individuals the importance of the need for that in our classrooms in our schools sorry in classrooms.

But just because especially where we are And I feel like that is strongly coupled with family support and social work.

So I'm having a really hard time saying just counseling support because I feel like those two do go hand-in-hand in these what they're trying to accomplish and population serving there.

But I'll just I think counseling support is probably I guess if I've got five to pick one I'll just land it there.

So I think that's three for me.

Thank you so much for all the work putting this together.

Director Hersey Hampson and staff.

This is you make you make tough choices for us here.

Thank you.

Well and I just want to give kudos to you and Director Harris because you also did a lift in Audit and Finance as well.

So please give yourselves credit.

So so for me well actually no let me just go to Director Hersey.

Do you want to give like your.

Top 3 or do you want me to give mine.

I'm fine either way.

No I can go ahead.

Again I think that there are some potential other solutions to funding ethnic studies.

And I don't think that we should lift up you know.

Yeah.

So I'll say that.

So a high priority for me would be restorative justice.

Especially considering that you know if we if we don't get that from the legislature which who knows right.

That's something that I would like to see happen.

I would like to lift up dual-language programming and then continuous family support and social work under the caveat that we can we can figure something out for ethnic studies through a through a different funding metric.

So yeah those would be my choices.

Okay.

And I so I'm going to couch my priorities based on what I want to hear from what I want to work with community on this year in terms of this and family support and social work is definitely on there for me.

Restorative justice is on there for me.

And then in terms of picking between I'm really torn because I some of this just has to do with the momentum and where we are with the ethnic studies black and American Indian studies.

I think that I'm probably going to go with restorative justice.

Did I say that already.

Yeah you did.

Yes.

So counseling.

Okay.

Yeah.

So and and I honestly I'm going to be happy working on any of these in detail with community.

And so I think what you know now we'll have to go back and take a look.

I don't know if we have any sort of top 3 if we've only got about 7 minutes left.

Yeah.

Can I just add something really quickly Director Hampson.

Yeah.

I just want to remind folks that like that this doesn't mean that we're not going to figure the rest of this stuff out.

Like we've got.

We've got a few more years together.

So again you know this is just helping us prioritize what we're going to do for this cycle.

And if this process goes really well I mean like I said with the legislative agenda we come back and we revisit and we and we figure out what do we pick up for next year.

So I just want folks to keep that in mind.

It's not like these other topics are going to die if we don't pick up tonight.

You're not.

Yeah this isn't at all.

I mean this is what.

Yeah.

So.

So we'll take that back and see what we we came up with and know that this is this is our first you know it's like our first date with our community doing this work together.

And we're just trying to hone in on and focus on some areas that we know are going to be fruitful in terms of how we evaluate the doing participatory budgeting.

And if and if we remain open and collaborative with community then you know all of these things will arise and as well at the same time.

So.

Okay so what do we have left on our slides.

I know this is one of the big.

Yeah we'll move on to slide 19. So we'll synthesize what was reported out by directors and we'll provide that back to you Director Hampson and then you and Director Hersey can let us let us know the final 3. So the.

Next slide are areas where Directors Hersey and Hampson had disidentified for potential repurposing or finding dollars to repurpose for for the three areas.

Director Hampson or Hersey would you like to speak to this more.

This I mean I think I had talked to I think this came from a combination of of y'all.

I know you know transfers from capital budget reserves we've talked we've talked a lot about that well we've talked about the reserves and we talked about capital budget in prior session at least briefly.

There are there's some differing opinions on the board about which of these things can be cut and which can't but so this is kind of an inclusive list.

And where we think that there's where there's sort of some mostly so there are probably at least half to two-thirds of these areas I think there's alignment around where there's room to to make some cuts.

Though not all of these areas represent large you know budget amounts but if we're if we're having to choose amongst things that we just talked about that we believe are really crucial and then have other things that that maybe we can put off or that were less important for this coming period or that there are simply a reallocation That's what we were we were looking at.

So this is kind of the universe of what we came up with as a board.

Each of you had a couple of things to contribute here.

So I don't know if you want to add anything Director Hersey.

Yeah I just wanted to before you know folks take a look at this list and they're like what are you doing.

A lot of these areas are on the list because they have either a significant amount of underspend or because we have identified them as places where we can still offer services but we are actually spending more than what the state requires us to do.

And so these are just a few of the places that we've begun to look.

And then what I also just want to say is that even if we don't necessarily make it to you know if one of the priorities that we talked about before doesn't make it past you know the gauntlet that will be the community process there there are some there are some actions that we can take as a board regardless and independent of this process that can still get us to the end result at least in the short term.

for a lot of the for a lot of the priorities that we've discussed tonight.

So again we have lots of options at our disposal and I just feel very strongly that this is this is really not a situation where we have to choose.

But I think that if if we're smart about it we can really approach these these topics from a from a position of abundance.

Director Hampson.

Are you looking for questions or comments.

Okay.

One of the biggest issues that I see on these issues for this story budgeting and I'm I I'm loving the courage to take this on.

On the other hand I have to say I am indeed trepidatious.

Director Hersey said something earlier this evening that that I expressed earlier as well.

And that's pitting folks against each other and breaking trust if we don't do this right.

And I think we're seeing some of that with respect to the city and the participatory budgeting and the conflict between the mayor's office and the council.

So Lord knows we need to be holding hands on all of this and I can't thank you enough JoLynn and Linda for your support on this.

But I suspect there are other folks at the John Stanford Center that are shaking right now.

looking at this.

My biggest concern here is sustainability.

We start and stop more stuff in the Seattle Public Schools and we don't keep our promises on the long term.

So are we talking about just next year.

Are we talking about really digging in on some of these things because some of these things will be frankly resolution resolved.

We will have ourselves a tiger by the tail if we start addressing some of the things that the superintendent believes are in her are in her what's the word I want to say in her authority.

And you know in the past we've talked about things like if you're going to re-org and hire more folks and or more chiefs you do a advise and consent with the board etc.

But I want to make sure that if we're going to do this we make sustainable choices so we don't start and stop after all this good effort and community input because our kids are going to need counselors not just one more year from now.

We we need to impact this for much much longer and some of the quote repurposing and I appreciate the choice of that word very very much.

Significant.

My two bets.

I look forward to seeing how this plays out and I'll help in any way I can.

Thank you.

I think I'll just let other directors weigh in here.

I would just say that you know yes these are courageous conversations that we have to have.

We know from the beginning of this budget presentation that we have to have courageous conversations and we need to be able to have them in session with each other because that's what we're allowed and we need to be able to direct staff to help us understand these things better because they these are many things that are topics of conversation all day every day with our constituents and If staff is willing to help us get to you know kind of the bottom of some of these things how much how many dollars do these even represent.

Like we all need to better understand these things rather than just letting kind of rumor and innuendo rule and then not necessarily make strong decisions.

So or give staff the benefit of our guidance on making strong decisions.

So Director Rankin you have your hand up.

Thank you.

Yeah just kind of going along with that as you know in terms Pitting groups against each other and pitting needs against each other I think is what has happened in the past because things are siloed and seen very much as all sort of individual pieces.

And that when we start to involve community and when we start to open up our process to be directly responsive to what community experiences That takes the walls down from around some of these things.

And I think the way that we you know continue to talk about this has we have to be sure that we're not you know that we're kind of reiterating what we've talked about in this session which is we're not choosing between counselors and Ethnic Studies.

We are.

deciding on one of those areas to to bring community into some decision making around around the budget.

And and ultimately the budget is a reflection of our values and we want to be wise about how we spend those dollars.

So you know I I actually put special education and IA's on this list as a place for potential repurposing not which might alarm some people Not because I think oh special education is is all taken care of and everything's great we don't need all these people.

But when you are in community and start to understand more what our structures have been set up to do and to perpetuate you realize that because of the way our service models are set up we have a very disproportionately high number of Black and Native students being taken out of the general education environment and supervised primarily by IA's and their their interaction with education is with general education is extremely limited.

And so by by having a model that is actually the opposite of inclusion we are spending more money on more staff.

to the detriment of in particular students of color and bias goes you know that's we can't see these things all as isolated because if we are talking about anti-bias and anti-racism training then that is going to intersect with special education where we are labeling students and setting them to certain service models based on behavior instead of on need.

And our our interpretation of their behavior is is affected by bias.

So I just I don't I want to just encourage everybody I think to to remember that we're not talking about one thing or the other thing and that as we start to work on you know any one item it is going to impact other things.

So you know I would be alarmed too if if JoLynn said oh Liza we're going to cut 30 percent of our IA's I would be like whoa whoa what why.

How's that going to work.

But once we start to dig into what's really going on with those dollars and our staffing and realize that we can serve students better by changing some things That's really exciting and that's where I'm just thrilled to be able to be in these conversations with with community and and be talking about budget in in that way that nothing is a zero-sum game and all is ultimately to try to figure out the best way to serve students.

And there's a lot of different reasons why different buckets have been purposed to different things and we're used to doing things a certain way and maintaining funding a certain way.

And it's not necessarily what's best for our kids and our system.

So I'm excited.

That's all.

Okay.

Other directors.

Director Mack and Director Rivera-Smith.

Hi.

Can you hear me.

Yep.

Great.

I was trying to I'm looking at this list and I'm looking at the handout well it's in the following pages I guess but you and I aren't showing it but in the flexible it's called the FlexiView.

I was trying to find the numbers that go with these lines here.

I'm like I found strategic plan.

I can't find dollar like you know what the flexible dollar amounts is for these other ones.

I mean I didn't get very far.

I kind of got stuck on number two.

I couldn't find it but I'm I'm Anyway I think it would have been helpful to see that.

Not I mean I don't know how helpful but either way this is a tough one because none of the clearly like like you guys have stated none of these look like things that we want to be cutting for you know just looking at them surface level.

I appreciate though that it takes movement to to make movement.

It takes movement to make progress right to to to realign things for our our values and our vision.

I hard choices will be made.

I appreciate that we have community willing to make those with us and to stand by and offer their their personal property to us their intellectual property of time and and their vantage on our district and what it needs.

So I I guess I don't have anything more to add but I I definitely look forward to seeing what our groups make of all this.

Thank you.

And I think yeah I tried where they were at this at the level of detail that the flex budget provides.

I did provide that line item but where they didn't have that then I just left it to the broader line item.

Meaning that it's not necessarily listed specifically.

So you're correct that you weren't necessarily able to find each of them.

Director Harris.

Oh sorry.

I thought that you had called my name earlier.

Sorry.

No no it is Director Mack is what I meant to say.

Okay.

I don't have any additional comments.

I appreciate the you know the the comments around the concern of pitting things against each other.

And I I am concerned about the you know potential for cuts here repurposing I think that we need to ensure that we do racial equity analysis around that repurposing because I think the unintended consequences actually end up playing out in ways that we don't realize they might play out.

So I'd like to suggest that that you know we somehow build in the racial equity analysis into the process of you know the questions that are a part of that.

I think would be really helpful to ensure that we're not creating unintended consequences and actually inadvertently impacting negatively the students that we want to serve the most.

So I guess that's my only thought here.

And I'm glad that there are these these bullet points actually all make me very nervous because I don't we don't have any place we can cut in this district.

But we also don't have sufficient resources.

So there we go.

Thank you.

Well I want to just express gratitude for us all just being able to have these out there and just hold space to consider them and know that it's a really difficult thing to talk about any of these and that and that they're and yes people's livelihoods and careers and special projects and you know our impacted when we when we look at things like this.

And I know that nobody does it lately but we are we we need to prepare ourselves for the road ahead.

So so thanks for for for going through this this exercise.

Chief Berge Director Sebring do we I know there's mostly references on the ending slides.

What else do you need from us today so that we can wrap up and keep things moving ahead.

Linda I think that we have what we need.

We've emailed you and Director Hersey the compilation already.

We will start working on contacts and drafting the invite letter for your review and continue to make progress next week.

And and just as a reminder you know just as most of us kind of come into this work as as advocates right and your advocacy and your voices not being happy with the prior year budgeting process and bringing in community having community speak up and responding to that that this is an effort for us to land even if it's a difficult place that we land in a an agreed-to place collectively by the time we get to June of next year.

And and the fact that we're starting in is this October still.

Yes Halloween hasn't passed.

I'm sorry I lost it there for a minute.

The fact that we're that we're in October and we're able to have this discussion I'm I'm hopeful and I hope that we'll all dig in and continue to ask those hard questions and push on this so that we can get to a place that we all feel good about in June.

Director Hampson quick quick idea to noodle on for future if I might.

One of the things that has always been so extraordinary to me is with the exception of one year in the last 15 years we've only had two people testify at our so-called budget hearing.

By that time it must have been cooked and put to bed and it's pretty pro forma.

I wonder if after this series of community collaboration we might not think about having a budget hearing And in March maybe you're there's a better time for that potentially and JoLynn can help us find it.

But with that kind of community collaboration one might think we would get a lot more input.

I would certainly hope so.

Anyway something to think about.

What's that.

I said something to think about.

Yeah no I appreciate that.

And I will just where there is a tickler file or a pin that can be put in that I would request that of Ellie and we should all just give Ellie a brief moment of gratitude for for hanging in there as she has for our our our sole support on many of these matters as well as Martina who we're going to miss in supporting us as a board.

So much to do and more to do than ever and less staff than ever.

So I know she's going to have some relief in December but yeah so I think that that is an important.

We'll we'll re-look at that when we look at the calendar and then it'll be incumbent upon Audit and Finance for this next year to make sure that we follow up on that.

So with that.

Hearing no further business on the agenda the meeting stands adjourned 44 minutes late at 744 p.m.

Good night all.

Good night.

Good night.