SPEAKER_20

This board meeting will be called to order in a moment.

SPEAKER_24

Ms. Wilson-Jones.

Just let me know when I can go ahead again.

OK, great.

Good afternoon again.

This is President Rankin.

I am now calling the January 17, 2024 regular board meeting to order at 4.22 PM.

This meeting is being recorded.

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

Miss Wilson-Jones, the roll call, please.

Director Briggs.

SPEAKER_30

Present.

Director Hersey.

SPEAKER_06

Here.

SPEAKER_30

Director Rivera.

Present.

Vice President Sarju.

SPEAKER_14

Present.

SPEAKER_30

Director Song.

Here.

Director Topp.

Here.

Student member Vandernute.

And President Rankin.

SPEAKER_24

Here.

Thank you.

Director Rivera.

SPEAKER_16

That wasn't me.

I don't know where that came from.

SPEAKER_24

It was a very delayed echo.

Well, good afternoon, everybody.

Welcome to the first meeting of the board of 2024. I am now going to turn it over to our superintendent.

SPEAKER_39

Thank you, President Rankin, and thank you all for being here today.

Again, thank you for being here for the first meeting of the year.

Before we dive into our agenda, let us take a moment to recognize and honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Day.

We had that on the 15th on his birthday this year.

There were a lot of events that happened across the city and we really want to make sure we embody the beloved community that he spoke so eloquently about.

Our deliberations and our thinking and our actions should be consistent with what he talked about and so I'm imploring all of us to really embody the spirit, and the technical things that Dr. Martin Luther King talked about as we grow and evolve together.

And it's a day to reflect on the contributions of a leader who dedicated his life to the pursuit of justice, equality, and civil rights.

And I believe some people in the audience want to talk about justice and civil rights today.

So let's make sure that we make space for that as we go forward.

We also have an opportunity for progress monitoring tonight, and that's where we take the opportunity to explore data that highlights the progress made toward reaching our college and career readiness goal.

The latest update will allow us to evaluate our accomplishments, pinpoint areas for improvement and growth, and propose strategic adjustments.

And so we don't want to stay still, we always want to be in a continuous improvement state.

Also today, we will have a budget work session.

Later in the evening, my team will provide an update on where we currently stand in our budget development process.

We are on track to present a final plan in May to actualize a vision of a system of well-resourced schools.

This update will provide a glimpse at the considerations being made as we develop that plan, and it includes a review of the 23-24 annual fiscal report.

That will also have updates from the governor's budget, the status of our advocacy in the 24 legislative session, and the results of our staff engagement survey.

So I just want to thank you all for being here today.

I'm ready to roll up my sleeves in 2024. I believe we're off to a good start and I just want to have a special thank you for all the snow team.

Did you know there was a snow team that's out at two o'clock in the morning making sure our roads are safe for travel to and fro our schools in the district.

So why don't you all give them a hand real quick the snow team.

With that I'll hand it over to you President Rankin.

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_24

Thank you Superintendent.

I will now turn the floor over to Director Vandernute for student member comments if you have any.

OK.

Thank you.

I'm going to switch up the agenda just a tiny bit with your all's permission.

We're going to have.

We have a lot of folks signed up for testimony.

We have two pretty conversation heavy work sessions coming up that I want to make sure that we have time for.

So what I would like to do is give a brief legislative update right now and then we'll hold other board comments until a little bit later in the meeting.

We'll go to public testimony and then we'll circle back to the business items of the consent agenda and other board comments after between the progress monitoring and budget work session.

Good.

So very quick legislative liaison update.

It's we're in the second week of the 2024 Washington state legislative session.

There is a record number of bills this session so things are moving pretty fast and furious and as we are watching the sort of first round of hearings we're getting a better sense of what's really going to move and what's not going to move.

You can find our legislative priorities as adopted by the board for SPS on the SPS website.

and directors will have them too to share with community members as they would like.

There are, although it's not a budget session, we have significant interests in bills that have the potential to impact our budget, hopefully positively.

So we're watching a number of different bills signing in in support.

Actually Director Hersey was signed in to support a African-American curriculum bill that unfortunately he didn't.

They ran out of time before he was able to testify but we were signed in on that from us being in support of it was very much aligned with our strategic or excuse me our legislative priorities.

And so yeah we will just continue watching talking with our partners.

WSSDA also advocates on our behalf as members of WSSDA the Washington School Director Association based on our adopted priorities as a body that consists of every single board director in Washington state.

And we have a lot our our priorities in SPS have very many very many things that are aligned.

So lots of conversation with different districts about you know how one funding bill versus another funding bill may impact Seattle may impact other districts how we can work together in alignment to support our students and help all districts across the state navigate the budget crisis that we're almost all finding ourselves in.

And it is going to continue to move.

pretty fast and furious and I will provide updates as I can.

So it I'm going to see we have it's it's 429. So public testimony can begin at 430. So I'm going to go ahead and transition us to that.

We will now go to.

Public testimony board procedure 1430 BP provides rules for testimony and I ask speakers to be respectful of these rules.

In summary some of from some of the important parts of this procedure are that testimony will be taken today from individuals called from our list and if if applicable the waiting list which are included on today's agenda posting on the school board website.

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

Listed speakers may cede their time to another person when the listed speaker's name is called.

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

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

Those who do not wish to have time ceded to them may decline and retain their place on the testimony and wait list if they are already on it.

The majority of the speaker's time should be spent on the topic you have indicated when signing up.

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

As board president, I have the right to and will interrupt any speaker who fails to observe standards required by board procedure 1430BP.

speaker who refuses or fails to comply with these guidelines or who otherwise substantially disrupts the orderly operation of this meeting may be asked to leave the meeting.

We do have a full testimony list and we really want to be able to take the time to hear from everyone.

We also have significant other items to get to so my request to all speakers is that in the interest of Time and allowing us to move quickly to please honor as much as you can that two-minute mark I don't want to cut you off, but I will So that we can give everybody their time at the at the microphone thank you, and we look forward to Hearing from you staff.

Please go ahead

SPEAKER_30

The first speaker tonight will be Isabel Ender our invited student speaker for tonight.

Isabel will be followed by Anya Sousa Ponce and then Janice White.

SPEAKER_31

All right.

Hi my name is Isabel Enders.

My pronouns are she her.

I'm a senior at Nathan Hale and I attend the manufacturing class at the Wood Technology Center.

After high school I hope to study something in the realm of plant sciences maybe agriculture or horticulture.

I'm not sure where yet.

The manufacturing class has been an amazing class for me.

School for me in the past hasn't been the most engaging and more of a big source of stress, so having this opportunity to go to the class has been a huge relief mentally as well as just communally.

I'm learning so much in this non-traditional learning environment.

I get to learn practical and engaging skills that I'll be able to use after I graduate in the real world.

It's really a great outlet to explore my interests and learn more about opportunities in trade.

The class itself, like the people and environment is really cool.

I'd say it's like another group of friends that I have.

We're all really close enough to encourage each other to learn and experiment because we all share a common interest in the class.

An important thing I thought of that the class isn't for everyone, I think that the skill center does a really good job of creating, you know, the different opportunities, the different classes for different interests that kids might have that don't necessarily like want or just want a different opportunity outside of college.

Yeah.

That's all.

SPEAKER_19

Thank you so much Isabel.

SPEAKER_24

Thank you for taking the time to come down and share with us.

And as a proud Hale parent.

Go Raiders.

Typically I won't respond.

I know I have.

I got the mic.

Go Raiders.

We typically don't respond to comment but since Isabel was our invited guest speaker I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you so much for coming down.

Staff please continue with the list.

SPEAKER_30

The next speaker tonight is Anya Sousa-Ponce.

Anya Sousa-Ponce will be followed by Janice White and for all those on the phone when your name is called please press star 6 to unmute.

And as you start your testimony please feel encouraged to reintroduce yourselves if I have mispronounced your name.

Anya Sousa-Ponce.

I'm going to move to the next speaker which is Janice White.

Janice if you're on the line please press star six to unmute.

Move to the next speaker Chris Jackins.

Following Chris will be James Parker and then Elizabeth Moore Simpson.

SPEAKER_41

My name is Chris Jackins box 8 4 0 6 3 Seattle 9 8 1 2 4. Happy New Year.

On the personnel report under separations the report lists longtime director of accounting and procurement Amy Fleming.

I wish to thank Miss Fleming for her service to the district.

On the Alki and Montlake school construction projects five points.

Number one the district previously claimed that it was impossible to provide any on-site ADA parking or any parking at all at Alki or Montlake.

Number two but the city has ruled against the district Alki plans.

Number three, now the district magically says that it can provide on-site ADA and some other parking.

Number four, the project is still way too big for the site.

Number five, the board also needs to fix Montlake, shrink the project, provide on-site ADA parking, and provide a larger playground.

On the district policy on cell phones in school, does the district have a policy?

On forever chemicals and artificial turf two points.

Number one the Children's Environmental Health Center at Mount Sinai recommends against the installation of artificial turf due to the uncertainties surrounding the safety of these products and the potential for dangerous chemical exposures.

Number two at Maple and John Muir the district is using artificial turf that contains harmful forever chemicals known as BFAS.

The board needs to quickly stop this.

On school closures please drop school closures as a topic for the May 8th plan.

Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_30

Next is James Parker.

SPEAKER_01

Hi, my name is James Parker, but everyone calls me Whitney.

I'm a proud Jewish paraeducator at Franklin High School, and I got doxed and harassed last week by right-wing extremists for my participation in a peaceful protest advocating for a ceasefire to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

When teachers are getting doxxed, the students and staff see how the school district responds, and I'm so privileged to have a union and a contract that protects my First Amendment rights.

But this isn't about me.

We have had so far three incidents at Franklin between students that almost broke out into physical fights.

It's just a matter of time.

When we don't provide constructive avenues for conversation, we make unproductive avenues for conflict inevitable.

As strongly as I feel about stopping this genocide, which is fueled by our tax money, I'm not here asking you to pick a side.

I'm asking you to empower educators and students to create spaces, learning, and discussion.

We cannot bury our heads in the sand and hope that this blows over.

We need to lift the silence and bring all points of views together.

We don't have to be experts, but we can create brave spaces for us to learn together.

I'm probably going to be targeted more for speaking out today.

But I accept that because not speaking out endangers our students.

Educators are worried that if they try to navigate these spaces, they will face reprisals.

We need your affirmative support.

I'm asking, I'm pleading today for you to take action on three things.

One, to let educators know that you have our backs and there will be no reprisals if we engage in these brave conversations in classes.

around the conflict in Gaza to to work on creating curriculum and resources to help us navigate and teach the history and three to pass a resolution reaffirming our commitment to black lives matter at schools week.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_30

The next speaker is Elizabeth Elizabeth Moore Simpson.

Elizabeth Moore Simpson.

Elizabeth will be followed by Claire Abe or Abe and then Josh Simpson.

SPEAKER_32

Hi, my name is Elizabeth and I'm a Jewish parent.

As a Jewish person, I want the history of my people organizing and resisting oppression honored alongside the movement of black lives in civil rights history, alongside the history of the Arab Spring, the Land Back movement, and that of migrant farm worker organizing.

The Jewish people have a rich history of joining hands in support of our comrades, from Ferguson to the Civil Rights Movement, and reducing the history of Jewish people to the monolithic voice of a state, the State of Israel, is reductionist and harmful.

I hope that the district understands and efforts towards a curriculum that does not equate Judaism with the state of Israel, which is a government worthy of critique like any other.

My concern about rising anti-Semitism run parallel to that of my concern of rising Islamophobia and anti-black racism.

There is enough freedom and safety for us all.

we must interrogate the claim that speaking in support of, or even of, Palestinian freedom and safety is an attack on the freedom and safety of Jews.

Those rights, freedom and safety, are not finite.

The illusion of Jewish safety is predicated on the notion that Jews are only safe because of the ongoing colonization in Palestine.

Our safety should not be at the expense of Palestinians' lives, access to their homes, or to freedom.

As a district committed to anti-racism, we must question how can one person's freedom explicitly rely on the erasure and silence of another.

While I reject the undeserved value, or rather audience, my Jewish voice has over that of my Palestinian peers, I honor my family's lineage of solidarity for the civil rights movement and that of Jewish organizing in solidarity of ending South African apartheid.

I will not allow my name to be used to silence a long history of black and Jewish solidarity.

I want my children to learn both at home and in school that all of our humanity is interconnected.

SPEAKER_30

The next speaker is Claire Abe.

Claire Abe.

And Claire will be followed by Josh Simpson and then Rachel Edelman.

SPEAKER_00

Hi my name is Claire Abe and I'm a school counselor at Cleveland High School.

I'm here to uplift the amazing advocacy work by SPS students in the Seattle Student Union so that it's not overlooked.

These students successfully advocated the Seattle City Council to increase tax on large businesses like Amazon and 20 million dollars was approved to go towards mental health support in SPS schools.

Our students and their advocacy specifically asked for the funding to pay for school counselors to have a 1 to 250 student ratio at least one full time social worker and one full time mental health therapist in every school building.

As a parent of two children in Kimball Elementary School in South Seattle I want to reiterate the urgent need for more social emotional mental health support for our students post pandemic.

My children are lucky to have Mr. Blanton as their school counselor, as he does an amazing job in providing a comprehensive school counseling program and goes above and beyond in creating strong relationships and supporting our most marginalized students furthest from educational justice.

However, with 436 students, Mr. Blanton is the only school counselor and there is more need than support available.

Students have experienced a lot of trauma and distress during the pandemic which comes out in the form of behavioral concerns in the classroom.

School counselors like Mr. Blanton are having to spend more time addressing extreme behavioral needs and mental health crises and are being stretched too thin.

Most elementary K-8 schools are only funded at a .5 FTE to have either a counselor or a social worker when really we need both positions full time In order to work full time many counselors must work at two different schools serving as many as a thousand students.

This is an unreasonable workload and as a parent and educator I'm seriously concerned about how my children and other students are not being sufficiently supported with their social emotional needs and that it took a group of SPS students who recognize this critical and met need to go to Seattle City Council and advocate on their own behalf for more mental support.

The funding is now there thanks to our SPS students so please listen to their demands and allocate it towards supporting our students mental health and ensure that the budget includes school counselors at a 1 to 250 student ratio and at least one full time social worker and one full time mental therapist in every building.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_30

Next is Josh Simpson after Josh will be Rachel and then Jen Greenstein Greenstein.

SPEAKER_34

Hello, my name is Josh.

I'm a history teacher and a parent of two Jewish children.

As educators, we have ethical responsibility to teach the truth and support students in thinking critically about the world around them.

Removing curriculum or even flagging it because it includes resources about Palestinian existence and its ongoing struggle for liberation contributes to the erasure of Palestinian narrative from the curriculum.

As someone who teaches about colonialism and resistance to military occupation throughout history, it would make little sense to exclude modern examples of Palestinian resistance.

SPS has historically aligned itself with Black Lives Matter without apology.

The Black Lives Matter National Organization has always supported the Palestinian people as part of its platform.

Civil rights legend Angela Davis has said that Palestine is the moral litmus test for our time, and I hope that SPS does not fail that test.

We trust that SPS will be making the right decision in endorsing Black Lives Matter at school moving forward.

However, given the current climate and silencing of educational institutions that uplift marginalized histories and identities, we feel that it's necessary that we draw attention and raise our voices about this silence.

This is the moment for SPS to embrace the power of education and its potential to combat anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti-blackness, all of which are interconnected.

This is not a moment to shy away from difficult conversation, nor is it the time to withdraw support from movements that fight for racial equity and justice, the very outcomes that SPS reportedly strives for.

If we stop doing racial justice work because it's hard, what kind of message are we sending to our students?

And what does that say about the mission of SPS.

Thank you for your time.

SPEAKER_30

Next is Rachel Edelman.

Rachel Edelman.

Hi.

Go ahead we can hear you.

SPEAKER_27

My name is Rachel and I am a Jewish teacher in SPS.

And I'm here on the phone to ask that SPS issue the proclamation in support of Black Lives Matter at school week with all possible speed.

In my language arts classes students engage in deep analyses of narratives of oppression seeking the threads of resistance that will weave a more just world.

We study stories of Vietnamese refugees forced from their homes due to war, stories of black families driven into housing insecurity by racism, stories of disabled children denied the education and care they deserve.

And we study how these stories resist systems of domination and teach us how to do the same.

In our reading, speaking, and writing, my students and I work in pursuit of liberation for all people.

And because my students are perceptive and insightful, they are connecting the systems of oppression we study to the genocide happening in Palestine right now.

And they crave their educators' guidance in learning about Israel's ongoing apartheid and occupation.

They want to know how Palestinian resistance dovetails with the movement for Black lives.

It is our job as educators, not to shy away from difficult conversations, but to support our students as they learn to harness their own power.

They know, as we do, that education has the power to combat anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Blackness, all of which are intimately interconnected.

It is essential that we celebrate the lineages of Black, Palestinian, and Jewish resistance together as part of a wider tapestry that will lead us closer to justice.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_30

The next speaker is Jen Greenstein.

SPEAKER_09

Good evening and thank you for your time and service.

Seattle Public Schools board admin and educators have put a lot of time resources and focus on issues of race and equity with the strategic plan racial equity policy 0 0 3 0 and unapologetic teaching of the BLM in schools curriculum.

All students do their best learning when educators teach the truth recognize injustice and respect students enough to be real.

I speak today as a Jewish school social worker who has worked in this district for 23 years.

I am one of a number of Jews and allies requesting tonight that the district issue the official proclamation in support of Black Lives Matter at school week.

Senior leadership should engage with educators, students and the Department of Libertary Ed about why this curriculum has been flagged and delayed.

The Black Lives Matter movement asserts that racism, colonialism, and occupation oppress Palestinian lives in similar ways to that of black lives, and that this needs to be recognized and affirmed.

As a Jew, I know that criticism of the Israeli government is not anti-Semitism.

My ancestors were brutalized and murdered due to anti-Semitism.

How dare anyone weaponize that trauma and grief to try to justify doing similar to other members of my human family.

As a school social worker I teach children to resolve conflict through communication with honesty trust safety and empathy.

We need to engage and work through things not avoid them.

BLM organizers are focused on solidarity with Palestine for a reason.

We need to accept direction from black leaders, not insult them, and trash years of work in SPS by allowing pervasive colonialist ideologies to silence them.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_30

The next speaker is Leanne Hust followed by Dana Barnett and then Kat Behrendt.

SPEAKER_25

Hello my name is Leanne Hust and I am a school counselor at Ingleham High School.

I just want to first say off first say thank you to all the school board members and Seattle school leaders and especially my union leaders and school counselors before me and school counselors present for working on these issues all are very valid and important.

Two years ago a student was murdered an African-American student was murdered at Ingram High School.

This is very important work for all of our students to have mental health supports in every single building.

I am asking the school district and the City of Seattle to use that 20 million in funds from the City of Seattle towards funding school counselors at at least one to 250 ratio at at least one social worker in every building and at least one mental health therapist in every building as well.

And this is specifically requested by the Seattle Student Union's work.

Our students our Seattle Public School students.

Thank you.

And I cede the rest of my time.

SPEAKER_30

The next speaker is Dana Barnett.

Dana Barnett.

SPEAKER_17

Good evening.

I'm very concerned as many of us are about the attacks on DEI and anti-racist programs and education throughout the country.

As an SPS parent I've been proud of our school's commitment to Black Lives Matter at school week and for bravely encouraging discussions about the past and hard looks at ongoing forms of impacts and impacts of racism.

However as a Jewish parent I'm particularly concerned about the rise in opportunistic groups using false definitions and claims of anti-Semitism to discredit these programs and to smear groups like Black Lives Matter movement who we should continue to look to as leaders in dismantling all forms of oppression.

Claims that supporting Palestinian rights or criticizing the actions of the country of Israel is somehow anti-Semitic towards Jewish people are false and dangerous for all of us including Jews.

I hope that Seattle Public Schools will be vigilant and stand strong in its commitment to Black Lives Matter movement And we'll extend that commitment to anti-racism and inclusion to Palestinian students and families, as well as educate and combat actual anti-Semitism where it arises.

Since it's actually solidarity and accountability that creates true inclusion and collective liberation, not censorship and conflict avoidance.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_30

The next speaker is Kat Behrendt.

SPEAKER_29

Hi my name is Pat.

I'm a Jewish SPS educator and a parent of an SPS student.

Tonight I'm urging the school board to take a firm stance on supporting Black Lives Matter at School Week as it's done for the past three years.

I bring this to your attention today because Seattle Public School educators have recently learned that the release of the Black Lives Matter at School curriculum has been flagged and delayed.

by SPS senior leadership this year due to BLM National Organization support for the people of Palestine.

Personally this really concerns me.

As an educator I'm counting on the district to provide me with curricular materials that help students learn to navigate navigate difficult topics with care curiosity and respect for one another as opposed to limiting these conversations or silencing entire groups of students.

Black Lives Matter at School Week provides these critical supports in the form of toolkits, videos, articles, activities, and lesson plans.

As educators, we really need the district to stand behind us as we teach Black Lives Matter and Palestine in ways that promote dialogue and help students think critically about our world.

But most necessary in this moment is to build multi-ethnic solidarity.

As colleagues we pledge to using a racial equity tool and we've agreed to supporting one another in recognizing when decisions impede our collective anti-racist goal.

Depriving all students especially Black students of the chance to learn about the movement for Black lives will not build school communities where all students feel welcome and thrive.

I believe our district should continue to proudly celebrate the teaching and learning of Black history culture and brilliance and embrace curriculum that moves racial and social justice work in our schools forward.

So I leave you tonight with the ask to issue the official proclamation for BLM at school week as well as to provide educators with curriculum that teaches Palestine.

Our students deserve it.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_30

Next is Sam Friedman.

Sam Friedman after Sam will be Daniel Lee and then Emma Klein.

SPEAKER_40

We are here at an important time in history.

It's really difficult to engage with what's with the genocide in Gaza but we must we must engage with this event with our whole hearts and minds and as educators this means creating space for our students to understand why this is happening.

We are always repeating the phrase that students must see themselves in their schools and in their classrooms.

This includes our Palestinian students.

Just as we teach about other important justice movements, like Black Lives Matter, the movement for Palestinian freedom deserves its place in our classrooms if we want to give students the skills and knowledge they really need to make this world a better place.

I'm Jewish.

We have a phrase, a sort of moral tenet, tikkun olam, which means fixing the world.

Our world holds so many oppressions that we all try to struggle against, and I understand that there is pressure to construe support for Palestine as an attack on the security of Jews around the world, especially in Israel.

And I'm here to say that I know our oppressions, as Jews, Palestinians, and so many others are inextricably tied together.

We can only be liberated together, or not at all.

I would like the school board to vocally support educators who speak out about the inherent interconnectedness of anti-Semitism Islamophobia and anti-blackness and the necessity of a multi-ethnic struggle in this solidarity in the struggle for Tukun Olam.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_30

Next is Daniel Lee following Daniel will be Emma Klein and then Janet Miller.

SPEAKER_23

Hello, my name is Daniel Lee, and I just want to first off thank the school board for the important work that you do.

I really appreciate it, and especially I want to thank Liza Rankin for joining our counseling meetings that we had, for listening, and for just being present, and I really appreciate that.

I am here to advocate for as other counselors have mentioned the 20 million dollars in funding that the city approved to support student mental health.

It's been a really interesting process to see the students voices really being lifted up and the courage of students to stand up and advocate for For their own mental health and I think it's pretty clear that we have a pretty incredible opportunity To support our students.

I'm also a proud SPS parent for two students that attend Hawthorne Elementary School and I You know one thing I want to highlight is that there is a halftime counselor for over 400 students and as we know early education is so critical to the development of our students and And it's a time where we can really impact the future path of our young learners.

And so I really want to advocate for at least one full-time school counselor in every elementary school.

I think that's something that is well within our reach.

I'm also a school counselor at Garfield High School.

If you know anything about Garfield High School, it's it's a legacy school.

It's a school that has so much history And I'm proud to be there, but we also have about 400 students for every counselor Which is not enough and so if we can get that down to anywhere close to 250 to 1 I think that would be a tremendous support for our students lastly I I want to invite any of the board members who would like to learn more about what counselors do.

Please join one of our counseling meetings, come out to Garfield, and I'd be happy to discuss in further conversations around this important topic.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_30

Next is Emma Klein.

SPEAKER_18

Hello, my name is Emma Klein, and I'm a Jewish SPS educator and the parent of a Jewish student at Hawthorne as well.

I'm deeply concerned that SPS is potentially abandoning Black Lives Matter at school messaging due to the BLM National Organization's longstanding support of Palestinians and all marginalized people.

As a parent, I want my child's Jewish heritage and culture to be taught and honored alongside the movement for black lives, as well as that of Arab, Palestinian, indigenous, Latinx, and other marginalized groups.

This is the kind of pluralistic, inclusive, educational environment that I believe supports my child's academic, social, and emotional development, and one that prepares them to be engaged with the complex and dynamic realities of our world.

By continuing our longstanding support as a district of the Black Lives Matter National Organization, which has always been grounded in collective liberation framework, SPS has the opportunity to make good on our strategic plan, focusing on black students by supporting the broader SPS community and understanding how an equity approach improves the health, well-being, and belonging of all SPS students.

As educators, we have an ethical responsibility to teach the truth and engage students to think critically about the world around them.

Removing curriculum or even flagging it because it includes resources about Palestinian existence and its ongoing struggle for liberation contributes to the erasure of a Palestinian narrative from curriculum.

Please do not delay any longer.

Proclaim support for BLM at School Week 2024. Support educators who teach about the interconnectedness of the liberation of all people, including Palestinians and their struggle for freedom from Israeli occupation and apartheid.

I, like many Jews, do not share the perspective of the State of Israel, and that does not make me any less Jewish.

It is not anti-Semitic to affirm the values of Palestinian life.

In fact, it is one of the key tenets of Jewishness to hold all life as equally precious and worthy of freedom and liberation from oppression and hate.

SPEAKER_30

Next is Janet Miller.

Janet Miller.

Janet will be followed by Oliver Miska and then Steven Cecil.

SPEAKER_26

Hello can you hear me.

SPEAKER_28

Just a second we have multiple people unmuted.

I am in.

SPEAKER_30

We can hear you now Janet.

SPEAKER_28

Hello I am in.

Oh thank you.

Thank you.

I couldn't tell.

My name is Janet and I am a Jewish F.P.S. parent and teacher for F.P.S. And tonight I'm asking the school board to unapologetically promote Black Lives Matter at school week which includes solidarity with Palestinians as part of its platform.

F.P.S. can use education to combat anti-Blackness anti-Semitism and Islamophobia which are all interconnected.

This morning I asked students what they wanted to tell Seattle Public Schools about Black Lives Matter at school week and why it is important to them.

They had a lot to say.

Student one shared as a person of color I've seen many white students try to show that they're not racist through weird comments without actually acknowledging their privilege.

They don't know how to do that.

It's because they're learning to be performative.

We need more ethnic studies classes more Black Lives Matter curriculum.

and more quality anti-racism education.

Student 2 said please talk about Gaza.

Seattle Public Schools silence about genocide is teaching kids that it's okay to just shut off in the face of genocide.

Student 3 said silence is compliance.

Don't be afraid to speak out about injustices that are happening right now including in Palestine.

Student 4 said speak out against Israel's actions.

Black Lives Matter at school should be a time to learn from the struggles for liberation by people of color all around the world including Palestinians.

Student 5 shared we need Holocaust education.

It's critical for recognizing and preventing modern genocide including the current genocide in Gaza that's happening right now.

Finally student 6 said we need more meaningful Black Lives Matter curriculum.

We don't want shallow curriculum.

We want to learn about real current racial justice struggles.

In honor of these students and so many more I ask Seattle Public Schools to be bold in its anti-racism by fully promoting Black Lives Matter at school week which includes solidarity with the Palestinian people.

I just want to add that as a Jewish teacher and parent I also hope the district knows that it's not anti-Semitic to affirm the value of Palestinian life or to criticize the actions of the state of Israel.

Our Jewish values hold that every life is precious.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_11

Hello my name is Oliver Miska.

Thank you for hearing me today.

Hi.

I'm not as well prepared as other folks but I am a board member of the Washington Ethnic Studies Now a local nonprofit do a lot of work to train teachers and ethnic studies do a lot of legislative work at the Capitol.

I'm also a substitute teacher in SPS and lifelong Seattleite.

So.

SPEAKER_20

Oliver, I'm sorry, can you lean a little bit?

I want to make sure that we catch every word.

SPEAKER_11

I'll try to yell.

I'll use my big boy voice today.

I'm here speaking about a couple of issues, and most of that is around, so many of others have said this already, so I don't need to repeat the points that they've made, and they made it better than I would anyway.

But the question of teaching the truth is in front of us right now.

And there's a lot of institutional work that's already being done and made.

And y'all have supported Black Lives Matter for the past three years.

And we'd love to keep you all supporting that moving forward.

But at the state level, I was just testifying yesterday, for example, about what does it mean to teach the truth.

And we have a genocide and Holocaust bill, Senate Bill 5851, And as an ethnic studies teacher and educator, when we think about focusing on genocide and the Holocaust, we don't think that's focusing on the whole person that's in front of us.

Just like we hear a lot of white liberals in Seattle talk about BLM shouldn't focus on oppression, we're here thinking about we want to include and think about Jewish studies as a holistic person as well.

And so when we talk about teaching the truth, It's important that we think about that.

And when we do curriculum, when we work on curriculum in Black Lives Matter this next upcoming weeks, we'd love to see the support from the district, which looks like they've been pulling out of the support of that week.

So that's been really difficult to see.

It's been really difficult to see my friends experience threats to their lives.

And most of these people have been pushed out, mostly black fems and women of color.

that aren't even here today.

So I'm here for them and I just hope we can protect our teachers and our educators.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_30

The next speaker is Stephen Cecil.

Stephen Cecil.

Following Stephen will be Jen Lovelly.

SPEAKER_38

Good evening.

I'm a resident of Belltown, an architect and a landscape architect, and for several years I've been working with our neighborhood to accomplish a long-held community vision.

to convert the Belltown battery parcel into a park, providing much needed open space in what's a really dense downtown district.

Now, that parcel was originally planned to be a public park after the removal of Alaskan Way.

It would be the last segment in the continuous sequence of parks, starting at that site and continuing all the way to Pioneer Square.

That's the new central waterfront park that's almost completed.

But I was, and it made a lot of sense then and it makes a lot of sense now as a park.

But several years ago I was amazed when news surfaced about a possible trade for this parcel with the city.

This trade would cede control or sell the school's Memorial Stadium parking, which is a revenue producing parking lot, in exchange for the battery portal site for a school.

Now, that's a school for which there's no current or any projected need, including a verified lack of students living in the core of our city.

It would be prohibitively expensive to build on what is a substantially constrained site.

It's extremely steep, and the remnants of the Alaskan Way concrete infrastructure remain below the surface.

So neither side of this trade made any sense from a school department perspective and it would have been an indefensibly bad business decision.

But in the original trade proposal, the school district had a year to consider swapping properties, giving up what it needed, the parking lot revenues, for the portal site, which did not.

Well, wisely, the district let this lapse in 2021, years ago now, but it left a cloud of confusion about this parcel.

And so we'd like you to direct Superintendent Jones and the staff to not pursue any more deals on that site.

Thank you.

And I have a version of this in writing if that would be helpful.

SPEAKER_24

Thank you.

Yes.

If you want to hand that to Miss Wilson-Jones she can distribute that to us.

SPEAKER_30

The next speaker is Jen Lovely.

We can hear you Jen.

Can you hear me on the phone?

SPEAKER_26

Yes, we can.

Okay, thank you.

Hi, I'm Jen LaVallee.

I'm calling as a volunteer with All Together for Seattle Schools.

I wanted to discuss some of the things that we're working on.

We wanted to try to request that SPS should provide accessible opportunities for meaningful input from students, parents, and school communities.

in the light of the current budget shortfalls that we're looking at.

Partnering with parents and school communities by providing opportunities for input will help ensure a path forward through the budget crisis.

We would like the school board and the district to provide more transparent and timely communication to the community on the budget and the work that's going on.

Providing this information to the public builds trust among uncertain times.

We do not believe that we can close our way to well-resourced schools.

All schools need more funding.

We know that there's some hard decisions up ahead, but we believe that a well-resourced school is one that can comprehensively and equitably support all students.

That in the past, school closures in other districts have not led to better outcomes for students.

We would like the board and the district to review this openly and discuss with parents, community members, students, and teachers.

We would like SPS to advocate for more state funding.

We know that the current legislative session is probably not going to be the largest win, but we want to use the power that the district has, that the advocates for the district have to look for more funding options, not only this session, but in future sessions as well.

Taking these to avoid major budget cuts and help the shortfalls in the future is valuable.

At this point, I would like to go ahead and give back the rest of my time.

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_30

There were two speakers we didn't hear from earlier.

I'm not seeing them on the line, but I'll give a quick check for Anya Sousa-Ponce.

Anya if you're on the line please press star 6 to unmute.

Going to move on to our next speaker we also missed was Janice White.

Janice if you're on the line please press star 6 to unmute.

Not seeing either of them on the line.

So moving to our wait list we have Lauren Holloway.

SPEAKER_08

Hello, my name is Lauren Holloway and I am a proud ancestral Jewish educator at Franklin High School.

Like my colleague Whitney who spoke earlier, I too was doxed by the same cyber bullies for participating in a recent pro-Palestinian protest resulting in viral slander, False accusations of being anti-Semitic, hate mails, calls to have me unjustly fired, and anonymous threats to my personal safety.

To my knowledge, there are at least five other educators in our district, including myself, who have been doxed and targeted since October 7th for our personal and political stances on the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

I'm here to piggyback on the sentiments my colleague Whitney articulated by sharing a story with you about an interaction between two students I observed during a class in December.

One student is Muslim, the other Jewish.

Both students sit at the same table every class.

One student made a comment about a sticker in a notebook resting on the table that says free Palestine.

The Muslim student made a comment about the sticker echoing the sentiments for free Palestine, which offended the Jewish student who interpreted the statement as anti-Semitic.

Both students got into an argument, both reducing the ongoing genocide in Gaza to a religious war that neither could agree on.

And from that day forward, one of the students chose to put a backpack on the table to act as a wall between them so they wouldn't have to look at each other or speak to each other.

Our kids are hurting over what is currently happening between Israelis and Palestinians between each other.

The walls of division on a macro level are manifesting on a micro level in our classrooms and these walls of division and misunderstanding are hurting our students.

As Seattle Public Schools continues to remain silent over this conflict, offering no support for our students to help navigate confusion, myths, misinformation, biased news sources, bias-fueled bullying, and how to have brave conversations around the ongoing violence happening in Gaza, our students continue to suffer in that silence.

And it's time for the silence to be broken.

And that's what I have to say to stand before you today.

SPEAKER_30

The next speaker is Lena Jones.

Lena Jones.

SPEAKER_10

Hello and thanks to everyone for your time today.

My name is Lena Jones.

I am a black Jewish teacher of language arts and ethnic studies at Seattle Public Schools.

In 2016 we were one of the first districts in the country to support Black Lives Matter at school.

Every year since we've proudly stood in solidarity unapologetically aligning ourselves with the principles of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Resolutions of past years have shown Seattle is not merely talking the talk but is getting better taking practical steps to learning more embodying the dedication growth mindset rigorous critical thinking and empathy that we ask of the young people in our classrooms every single day.

This year the board's silence on BLM at school has spoken volumes.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.' 's words get bandied around a lot this month and he says that in the end we will not remember the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.

I urge the board to not be a silent friend.

I ask that a resolution be passed immediately to renew our commitment to BLM at school and its values.

The Black Lives Matter movement echoes a broad history of global intersectional liberation movements that rest on the foundational idea of collective liberation.

Our silence creates more space for the spread of false binaries and attempts to pit marginalized communities against each other.

These attempts are rooted in white supremacy and harken back to the same Southern strategy our nation's civil rights advocates have worked so hard to overcome.

Our district's silence in support of Black Lives Matter at school week due to BLM national solidarity with Palestine Palestinian liberation undermines the long history in Seattle and in the U.S. more broadly of solidarity across lines of ethnic and religious difference in an era of escalating global conflicts deepening ideological divides and an increasingly siloed online echo chambers.

Our schools must remain dedicated.

We must continue to show with our actions, our dollars, as well as our words, that we abide by students' right to express their opinions without personal prejudice or discrimination.

Thank you for your time.

SPEAKER_30

And that was our final speaker, the 20th speaker for tonight, President Rankin.

That concludes today tonight's testimony.

SPEAKER_24

Thank you.

Thank you everybody so much for taking the time to come here to speak and for staying within time.

I'm very impressed and I also feel compelled to probably going to give legal counsel a Well just don't worry about it Greg.

So I'm a Jewish board director and I'm also the author of the first Black Lives Matter at school resolution in Seattle.

And so it I do not have a problem unequivocally saying that we do believe Black Lives Matter at school.

That's not a that's actually imperative thing for me to say not a frightening thing to say.

I'm the granddaughter of two individuals who fled Nazi Germany.

And have a lot of complicated personal feelings tied up in what is going on and what you are probably facing in classrooms.

And so I'm going to.

You know keep it to that.

But thank you for bringing these concerns forward.

We really you know I have Jewish children in Seattle Public Schools and I want them protected and safe and I want to know that.

You all as educators have the tools and support that you need to ensure that you're supporting Healthy safe conversations in our classrooms, so I did not know about this issue and so Yeah, we will more to come we will be looking into it and see Yeah what we can do about that So thank you.

So that concludes our public testimony and thank you again so much.

Directors we're going to move now into progress monitoring.

Does anybody need a quick break before we transition or do you want to just go right into it.

SPEAKER_99

Yeah.

SPEAKER_24

Yeah.

Let's take a seat.

It's 519 at 525. Let us resume the meeting with a progress monitoring session down at the tables.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_20

absolutely welcome and encourage you to stay and listen in on our progress monitoring session.

But if you are having conversations, I'd ask you to please take those out into the lobby so that we can proceed through our agenda.

SPEAKER_24

Thank you so much.

So, We have a progress monitoring session today on the board's goal three, which is college and career readiness.

This is our first.

Our first progress monitoring session of the year with our new board members.

And this is also a training opportunity with our coach, AJ Cribble, with the Council of Great City Schools.

I just talked to him in the break in the interest of time and because we do have new directors haven't participated in this.

I've asked him to be a passive observer and to take notes and he and I will touch base afterwards rather than I have a feeling we're going to need our dedicated time to actually do the progress monitoring and talk about.

are how we do at another time because we've got two pretty pretty meaty topics here.

So I will now hand it over to Superintendent Jones to begin the session and thank you AJ for being on the line.

SPEAKER_39

Thank you, President Rankin.

As part of our regular meeting today, I want to have us pivot to progress monitoring conversation as we take another step in implementing student outcome-focused governance.

We're grateful for the time that we have to discuss this important work that we're doing to promote college and career readiness.

This is our fourth formal opportunity to review the progress we're making in this area of student outcome-focused governance.

This evening we'll be focusing on what we can learn from our top-line measure, our graduation data, and advanced coursework completion data for the class of 2023, and how this relates to our larger goals for college and career readiness.

I want to remind us that college and career readiness connects to our other two goals around reading and math, and that's an important nexus between what is the progression for what we're trying to get accomplished.

So I'm joined by four key leaders of this work, or two today, and it's going to be Dr. Mike Starosky, Assistant Superintendent, Academics, and Dr. Caleb Perkins, Executive Director for College and Career Readiness.

Before we engage in our conversation on strategic questions, they're going to help us provide, and those will help us provide a clear response for key questions.

And those key questions are, what is the current state?

What is the desired state?

And what are we doing to get there?

And as always, we're grateful to have AJ Crabill with us to give us feedback on our progress.

And in fact, hopefully AJ will maybe start by giving us some framing or pass on that.

So we'll spend the first few minutes reorienting ourselves to this important memo on college and career readiness and make sure we're all coming into this discussion with the same information.

So as a reminder, we also sent out some appendices related to the memo that's in front of you.

And so the board had additional questions on this work, and hopefully we answered those in advance.

So if there are not any questions, let's take just a few brief moments to review the memo just to get reoriented, and then we'll move on.

And Director Briggs and Topps, please ask questions along the way.

The rest of the directors can ask questions along the way, but you all can't.

We'll take just two minutes for you all to reorient.

Okay.

Now that you've had time to conclude reviewing the memo, I want to take a few minutes to orient you to our conversation on the data.

So as you saw on the top of the first page, I want to share that recent data on the class of 2023 indicate that we are meeting the targets for what we have set for African American male students graduating on time, having completed at least one advanced course.

So these efforts to expand access to advanced coursework have had a positive effect on these results, but we still have work to do to ensure these opportunities are accessible to all students and we are ready for helping all students graduate on time without the need for waivers.

So based on this latest data, we've identified several next steps in five strategic areas, including continuing to examine what's working well for our ninth grade African-American students and students of color furthest from educational justice.

And therefore we must remain focused and committed to these strategic areas beyond 2024. Dr. Strosky will take it from here and we'll provide an overview on our strategy to improve our CCR outcomes.

SPEAKER_37

Thank you Dr. Jones.

Before we get started also I want to thank board members for prioritizing this in the agenda and having it so early in the evening is much appreciated and signals the importance of this work.

As stated in the memo, for all of our students to graduate and succeed in a variety of pathways, we're really focused on our African-American young men and our boys and students furthest from educational justice on post-secondary pathways and careers.

To that end, our African American boys and our teens, we want them to have access to very specific things.

And those specific things are core courses, advanced courses, graduation pathways, high school and beyond planning, work-based learning, college and career access financial aid and post-secondary degree completion by removing systemic barriers and leveraging Seattle Public Schools and Seattle's many assets.

So specifically our CCR work our college and career readiness work is focusing on five specific areas.

One and the most important one is excellent teaching first and foremost.

Second is strong relationships in service of that strong teaching and leading and learning.

Three is equitable measures.

Four is opportunity pathways.

And finally expanded learning.

Now, this has all been happening over the last three years.

And more importantly, we have focused on the following six specific levers to improve CCR-related student outcomes.

And as I say these tonight, we're trying to be precise in our language in that when we're talking about a specific strategy or we're talking about something specific, we're saying so that afterwards, so that we can be specific about what we're trying to serve here.

And so the first one is aligned use of data so that staff can help students stay on track to graduate and be ready for post-secondary opportunities.

Second, our CSIPs, our continuous school improvement plans, are aligned to school strategies so that school leaders, our principals and assistant principals, use data tools to focus on the most important student CCR-related outcomes.

Three, grading for equity so that students and families can get clear feedback on how well they are making progress towards meeting this standard.

Four, post-secondary pathway exploration so that students have regular opportunities to explore career and college options so that they know what post-secondary opportunities they want to pursue.

Five, inclusionary practices so that students can succeed in advanced courses and be prepared for a variety of post-secondary opportunities.

And finally, high school and beyond planning, so that students have hope and goals for their future and regular opportunities to develop plans to reach these goals.

So that's a brief summary of the strategies and where we're headed and have been using in the levers to achieve those strategies.

And with that, I'll turn it over to Dr. Perkins, who will update us on the current state

SPEAKER_12

Going to the next slide just as an orientation to the targets we set back in 2019 where again we chose this top line measure of graduating on time having completed one advanced course given the research that shows having completed advanced courses is directly correlated with more success in postsecondary opportunities.

So if we can go to the next slide.

We will see that we are excited to share that we have significant progress since 2019, including from last year, where we have for the African American male students, the class of 2023, graduating in four years, successfully completing advanced coursework, increased by four points and is now 14 points over the target that we had set initially.

And while there's a lot of work to be done, I think we should take a moment to thank and show appreciation for all of our school-based staff and the counselors who talked tonight in particular, who I know did heroic work to try to help all the students and both get access to advanced courses as well as graduate, given the many, many things and the challenges over the last number of years.

So I just want to give a shout out to that.

So including the positive news on African-American male students, which is captured by the blue line, the orange line represents our students of color furthest from educational justice, which is also trending up, and is also above the target that we set back in 2019, given, again, the hard work of our school staff.

If we can move to the next slide.

That we also want to share that on for graduation overall we continue to the graduation rate has gone up quite tremendously over the last 10 15 years in Seattle Public Schools and we're pleased to share that we're continuing to maintain that.

There's still more work to be done.

There's a lot of really important conversations in Olympia that I bet some of you are a part of in terms of some of those options.

But I do want to take a moment again to say thank you for all the hard work that has gone in.

In addition, as we look forward, we know that there are a number of things that some of you asked about in your questions about how are we going to transition away from additional waivers and other pieces connected to support for students during the pandemic.

And we'd love to get into that conversation because it is an important one.

Students need to graduate and also need to graduate ready.

So if we can move on to the next slide.

I do want to build off of just the things that Dr. Sharosky shared.

So these are much better and much easier to see in the memo itself.

But we want to highlight, especially given recent conversations with the board, that we'd like to be more specific about how we're going to try to continue to make progress.

Because while we are really excited about the expansion at the school level of access to advanced coursework in ELA, up to 71% for African American male students in math, up to 67%, we know we have more work to do.

And so one, I think, common thread that comes back to the question that Dr. Jones started with questions.

Where are we trying to go and how are we going to get there.

So just to further elaborate on what Dr. Stavroski outlined we're looking at the role of CSIPs and really trying to think about how can our high school leaders use the grading data that we have to inform their support for students in grading for equity.

The next step we need to take is to think about our retake policy that we have and how that's supporting not only students getting more opportunities but to truly meet standard which of course is the ultimate goal.

In post-secondary pathways, we have amazing tools for our educators and our staff about how to track whether students are getting access to things like work-based learning, and we want to take more steps in that area.

In inclusionary practices, thanks to the work of Dr. Torres, who's been leading the district, We have these exciting discussions about UDL and how it's supporting advanced coursework access across our schools.

We need to keep going with that work.

And something that this board actually highlighted, we need to better take advantage of our high school and beyond plan process.

There are some middle schools who are doing amazing jobs of giving students really clear orientation to their future, but we have a lot more work to do.

In any case, I appreciate the opportunity to give that orientation, but now we turn to the best part, which is your questions, if we can go to the next slide.

Your questions are captured on this slide and the following slide.

I will just leave this one up.

But you've asked about a number of areas to go deeper on, things related to access to advanced coursework, to the idea of what role does the waivers play, to the connection to how, in fact, have we had the success we've had on dual credits.

I'd love to get into all of that, but let me pause here and turn it to President Rankin to lead the discussion.

SPEAKER_24

Thank you so much.

And just to ground us all a little bit what we're really looking for our role as a board now is that we've we have goals that we have set and approved for the superintendent.

And this is our opportunity to find out is reality matching what we've directed.

Is there progress being made and how do you know.

So with that if I will open it up to any directors that have questions or if we.

Want a touch on the questions that were submitted in advance.

We can do that too.

SPEAKER_19

Anybody anybody.

SPEAKER_12

I can pick my favorite.

SPEAKER_19

Jump right.

SPEAKER_16

I have my hand up.

I don't know if you can see.

SPEAKER_24

Oh sorry.

Thank you Director Rivera.

It's a very tiny on the screen so I missed it.

I'll go to Director Briggs and then come to you OK.

OK.

SPEAKER_13

So I submitted the first question on here and I actually am I would love to just really quickly get a more of an understanding around what the waivers are like.

I'm just not even familiar with that.

What what that mean what they are and what they mean and basically how you know that fits into the larger question that I asked.

SPEAKER_12

Thanks for the question.

So there are effectively two broad categories of waivers.

Local waivers, which are graduation requirements specific to Seattle Public Schools, things like service learning.

And then there's the thing that's getting most attention and the one that I think we should highlight in this conversation are the state waivers that the State Board of Education implemented in response to the pandemic, two in particular.

They allowed students to waive two of their core credits, as well as what's called the graduation pathway, which connects to things like whether they have access to advanced coursework, or CTE, or in some cases the ASVAB exam.

So those are significant pieces.

They're relatively new requirements.

But just to give you an example, 20% of our African American male students accessed the waiver to the pathway requirement last year.

And while most of our educators and staff are very well versed on this and are getting the class of 2024 ready, That's an enormous number.

And so we're going to have to really be careful and consider it in terms of ensuring that we're continuing to make progress.

Since we drafted these talking points in these slides the State Board of Education is actually proposed to extending that waiver to this class and that will be voted on in April.

And again I think many of you are connected to those conversations even more than I am.

I hope that helps.

SPEAKER_20

Director Rivera.

SPEAKER_16

Thank you.

As we think about college career readiness, I want to go back to a public speaker we had at the last meeting regarding preparation for college math classes and how there are many students who are going into college and having to basically retake classes they took in high school and passed in high school because of alignment issues.

I'm guessing between what we're teaching and what the colleges are expecting.

Is that falling to any of these strategies as far as, you know, is there something we're doing that is going to address that?

Or is that something separate altogether?

But I guess, apparently, are we going to be, is there something we're going to do for that?

SPEAKER_12

It's a really important question, and so just to, before I get into some of the details of what you're asking about, we know that the data show, and I think one of the folks who spoke at public testimony at our previous board meeting talked about, if we have students going into remedial classes, not credit earning courses, they're much more likely to drop out and not complete the program.

And with the enormous opportunity we have with Seattle Promise, we have a huge percentage of our graduating students taking advantage of that.

We don't want to miss out on their getting a degree and moving on.

So what are we doing in response to that, Director Rivera?

In particular, one of the things is accessing advanced coursework.

The fact that we've gone from about 40% of African American male students taking and completing an advanced course in math to 67% is increasing their ability to go straight into credit bearing math classes.

So those are the things in terms of getting them ready.

On the flip side there are aspects of the system that need to be improved and I want to praise Seattle Colleges for being open to reflecting on their own processes.

Some of them are just about adult.

frankly bureaucratic rules that need to be changed to ensure students get every opportunity to go right into credit bearing classes.

Highline has provided a really powerful example that Seattle Colleges is learning from where they actually automatically placed students into credit bearing math classes and they had more success even though they effectively lowered the bar if you want to say it that way.

And so we're learning from that.

So I think there's things that the adults can do and we're going to continue to do to coordinate with Seattle Colleges.

SPEAKER_39

That's great to hear.

Thank you so much.

Dr. Perkins you ran by a really important point that you made it but the advanced course taking just taking the course in and of itself.

Can you speak a little deep more deeply about why that's important for college level course taking and maybe just what the what are we seeing with the correlation between the two.

SPEAKER_12

Yeah, so thank you.

Sometimes talk more than get ahead of my skis.

Anyway, so the two things that I'd highlight, one is that there's a number of studies, one that was done by WASDEM, recently quoted in the Seattle Times, that there's a high correlation between dual credit completion, no matter what else happens, and succeeding after you graduate, completing degrees and so forth.

So that's one thing.

I think there's a robust conversation that you all should be part of, which is where do we go from here now that we've exceeded this target?

But this is an important first step and we should celebrate that.

The second piece is that in going to Seattle College, just as an example, if you have an advanced course on your transcript, you are much more likely, and in fact we're creating articulation agreements where you'll be placed directly into the credit bearing class rather than running into a barrier, rather than being required to take an additional test.

All these things that have gotten in the way of students going straight to credit bearing classes.

SPEAKER_24

So my question is it's it's exciting to see progress.

It's exciting to see us exceed expectations.

What I don't see that I would like to see is which of the strategies that have been employed so far.

Do you attribute the success to.

And I don't see, so yeah, I want to know why you think that that is higher than expected.

And I would like to see the strategy next steps.

I would like to understand what this looks like from a data standpoint.

Inclusionary practices, early adopter training, what schools are participating where are schools at in their training and how do we connect that to improved outcomes for students.

How do we know that.

I mean that's a strategy I support but I want to I want to I want to see the work.

I want you to show your work a little bit more and see that we know that this is having a positive impact and we can show you how.

Or of these strategies, this one didn't have the impact we anticipated.

And we can show you how.

And therefore, you will see us sort of abandon that.

And then connected with to the budget work session, Of the strategies that you identify as being influential in this great success, what can we expect to see in terms of budget and investment that reflects alignment with supporting the practices that we have found to be effective?

SPEAKER_39

You know, three words or less.

So there was a statement in what are the, you'd like to see the strategy, the next steps on the strategy.

But I think the presenting question was around what is the highest leverage strategy?

And then will we see these strategies reflected in the budget?

So Dr. Perkins or Dr. Starofsky, will you speak to what is the highest leverage item in here I believe it's advanced course course coursework but if you could elaborate on that to be great.

SPEAKER_12

Yes so.

One of the reasons why we went into these levers that Dr. Starosky outlined was in response to I think you're pushing us to be more specific more concrete more.

And so where I do want to give credit and I'm not just just pandering to the current audience is that the CSIP aligned school based strategies the work that our three IB schools are doing related to access to IB, and I can get into the details on that.

The work that lots of other schools, including Hale and Nova, are doing in providing access to college in the high school.

And then the consistent work that a number of other high schools around AP.

Those three-pronged strategies of getting dual credit.

They have taken advantage of a number of pieces.

So one that's happening this year that we haven't even seen in the data is that the legislature has voted to fund all college and the high school classes.

That's one piece.

The consistent leadership around IB in those three schools that they have unwavered and they've all moved towards increasing the percentage of students who get access to those classes.

So I know that's not necessarily the most satisfying in the sense that it's been a lot of our high school leaders with obviously many high school educators and counselors working together on that piece.

If I had to pick one, it would be those CSIPA line specific work, the plans that they have implemented at the school level.

There's a lot more I could say, but I'll pause there.

SPEAKER_37

A specific strategy I think is worth noting too over a number of years has been the equitable grading practices, the focus on that with our school leaders of trying to learn from one another.

During the pandemic it was something that school leaders had been thinking about and trying to push on individually.

during the pandemic, putting a real focus on it, and then post pandemic, still seeing the need and the focus on their learning and support of trying to better understand what the standards are, how to help students get there just beyond a timeline just beyond inconsistencies that are adult driven and being a system at our individual schools but a large school system that's supporting the learning on time as much as we possibly can but also supporting our students and getting there no matter what.

And so that's again what Dr. Perkins is speaking to is The educators being flexible, many of the people here in this room, having that focus on beyond just having access to advanced coursework, but being successful in those classes once they get there is equally important.

And then the systems and the strategies and the pedagogy that goes along with it to help students be successful, our educators need support in that.

It can't be an individual effort.

And so I think that's an equally strong strategy that's working on, that's been happening over a number of years now, and that we feel very compelled to keep focusing on.

SPEAKER_39

In building off that and in addition this has been evolving for years and so in 2012 Seattle Public Schools was the first with the second district in the country to come up with an educational racial equity policy.

One of the pieces in there that compels us is around educational pathways and being intentional about that.

And so this is the manifestation of an articulation of a pathway to being college and career ready.

And so this this has been building for years but now that we're in the mix and now we're we're seeing how this is playing out from a strategic operational infrastructure perspective that policy was catalytic in trying to make sure that we're focused on outcomes.

And so it was a specifically articulated 0 0 3 0 educational pathway.

So I think this is part of that at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_12

you had a budget question.

SPEAKER_24

Oh well I.

So it's not that I don't believe you what you're saying.

Like I mean I know a lot of this to be true.

But I do I think for our part I just I want to I want to see it a little bit more.

SPEAKER_12

I think what may be helpful is there's data on, somebody asked, one of you asked about the use of reports.

And that we have impressive data, especially from our educators and our counselors using some of the grad tracking data tools that we've used.

And so just the ability to know where students are, how far off track they are, that's a data point that I think could get more concrete.

There's also a number of things, just take one basic idea.

World language competency credits.

where we're helping our multilingual students take advantage of the fact that they have an amazing ability to speak multiple languages and how do we help them earn credits for that.

There's five or six of those specific initiatives that sometimes get lost because they're just one of many, but they're all helping in pushing that direction towards graduating on time.

SPEAKER_24

So the budget question was as you know we're in budget development can we expect to see or what can we expect to see in the budget that shows an alignment with resource allocation to what you are finding to be effective in making progress on our goals.

SPEAKER_12

So noting I.

I'll give a bit of a high-level answer.

I think the six levers that we're sharing here that frankly Dr. Jones has pushed us to be that specific is what we are putting our stakes in and saying this is what we should continue to.

So let me focus on one.

Inclusionary practices.

We, to Dr. Torres' credit, we have a lot of common conversations around UDL now.

I was just at West Seattle High School talking about UDL and the focus areas.

Went to Rainier Beach High School a month ago talking about UDL and the focus areas.

Both of them are having conversations around what does that look like in advanced coursework classes.

So to Dr. Starosky's point, we're trying to make excellent teaching And you'll hear about that with third grade literacy and seventh grade math as well.

So that's one thing I hope we prioritize.

SPEAKER_24

So I know the budget session we have now is already prepared and everything but I would.

Ask for as we're going through the budget process where you can help us understand where you are making budget decisions around investment around for these would be really helpful for us.

I mean there's going to be a lot of very challenging decisions to be made.

The more that we as the board can understand that.

Choices are being made around what you all believe is improving outcomes for students the the the better.

We'll be able to support it So thanks.

SPEAKER_39

I'd like for dr. Starovsky to talk a little bit give a little bit of under the hood insight around your deliberations as the head of academics around, you all are having to do an exercise, Dr. Jones is saying we have to reduce our budgets, we have to make adjustments and all that.

How are you holding these as the priority, if you could kind of speak to that?

And if you are, and you could even give some color commentary around the struggle, the push and pull that's happening within the department, please.

SPEAKER_37

Are you sure about that.

OK.

SPEAKER_20

We want to hear it all because ultimately we're giving directions.

So if you need another push we'll push.

SPEAKER_37

Yeah.

So my my initial thinking director Rankin when you were asking about the priorities within this goal I was immediately going to what we're going to be doing on February 7th with the third grade reading and seventh grade math.

I'm just thinking we need to have this consistent alignment.

So the thing that I'm encouraged about is that as we get more precise and consistent with the strategies that are in service of college and career readiness, because college and career readiness is the ultimate goal.

Third grade reading, seventh grade math is in service of college and career readiness.

We have to be explicit about that.

So when we're talking in third grade reading, seventh grade math, and college and career readiness, specifically about inclusionary practices as being a focus area.

that goes across all three of those major goals that is in service of all three of those major goals that does give the opportunity for when we're having to make decisions around budget, it's always the quality of the teaching.

It's always the quality of the teaching.

And so we need to figure out and be consistent with how we can support our educators at the building level, at the classroom level, to be supported in the things that we are prioritizing.

If it's college and career readiness, being able to know which you got a pathway and you know what that pathway is going to be.

But in order to get there, we're saying we're going to put our people, our will, our skill, and our money on third grade reading.

And that needs to be, we need to be really specific about what are the strategies we're going to continue to do no matter in good times, financial times, bad financial times, it's always about the quality of the teaching, the fidelity of the curriculum.

the consistency of the curriculum, that educators are fully trained and supported and given proper feedback.

So it's if we want high-quality, equity-driven instruction, the teaching that it takes to do that and the leading that it takes to do that, when we're doing our budget, that's where we need to be prioritizing, putting teaching at the center.

And so I see a number of commonalities within all three of those focus areas of third grade reading, seventh grade math, and college and career readiness.

So as we're starting to prioritize, as I'm starting to think about, not starting, have been thinking about, what are the things that we can be consistent about, clear about, precise about?

And there's going to have to be some really difficult decisions that are happening at central office.

And we want our educators to know the things that they can depend on central office to be able to support them and be really clear about what we can and then what we unfortunately won't be able to do.

If we are really clear about that, it will still be difficult, but at least everyone will know what it is that we're prioritizing.

As Dr. Jones is talking about the self-critique, as we're looking at these goals, President Rankin also mentioned about something essentially strategic abandonment.

Within some of these goals, we're going to have to prioritize some strategies, even if they're promising, because we might not have the funds to be able to do it.

We might not be able to have the people to do it, even though we think they're worthy.

But if they get in the way of us being able to accomplish those goals of third grade reading, seventh grade math, and our college and career readiness and our pathways, then we've got bigger issues to focus on.

But for us in academics and with all the other departments, That's where we're headed.

The headline is, what are the things, the people, that allow us to have high-quality, equity-centered teaching and the leading that it takes to support that teaching?

And we can get behind some really precise strategies.

And I think we have some really promising ones that are proving to be important and good and worth supporting financially.

SPEAKER_20

Director Song.

SPEAKER_36

I thank you so much for your response to my lengthy questions.

I try to submit as many of the tactical ones in advance.

I do have one more tactical question and I have two other questions.

The tactical question is are we tracking this are the students taking AP and IB tests and are we tracking how well they are doing on those tests.

SPEAKER_12

The short answer is yes, it's not yet baked into these memos, but it's something that we could add.

I think one thing to note, and I know this because Eric Jackson, our director of assessment, gives me updates all the time.

The number of students taking AP tests, just as an example, at growing exponentially.

It's not quite keeping up with the course taking, the course completion.

So we've met that first mark, but I think it's a worthwhile question of should we go to that next mark of actually ensuring that all students are getting the college credits.

So the great example is that college in the high school, which doesn't require a passing exam and still gives students a chance, is now being funded by the state.

That's helping school leaders make strategic choices about which ones to access.

But long story short, we are tracking.

It is going up.

It's not quite matching the same results as course completion.

SPEAKER_36

My second question is the one on the screen and I know you provided an answer but I thought it would be a good topic of conversation which is absenteeism has been cited as a challenge for goal one and goal two and I was curious why this isn't as much of an issue since we are on target for goal three or do you perceive it to be a risk at a later date?

SPEAKER_12

Well yeah I do not want to minimize the importance of having students be at school for a variety of reasons.

The access to the excellent instruction.

So it hasn't been flagged and then we can we can get into some of the details in terms of on a very positive front.

I do think our educators in the last few years have been making heroic efforts to give students multiple opportunities to catch up to show their meeting standards that's not different than lowering the bar.

They're really trying to give students a number of retakes.

I saw my my child's world history teacher earlier tonight.

I know she has given him a number of retake opportunities.

And so but beyond the anecdote it does seem to be something that has taken hold.

I just want to give.

props to the board.

The board pushed us for to stay consistent on this throughout the pandemic and and so that's one thing that I'd point to is helping mitigate the real issues.

I did check in with Pat Sander today.

Absenteeism is an issue at the high school level.

There are definitely promising practices that school leaders are implementing but there's a lot more work to be done.

SPEAKER_36

Last question is, you alluded to the fact that perhaps we should begin a conversation about updating this goal, and I'm curious to know what your initial thoughts on what that could be.

SPEAKER_12

Thanks for the opportunity.

I think it would be worthwhile to get into the idea of different subject areas and looking at metrics across subject areas.

I think the access to math is often a gatekeeper for students.

And while we've made a lot of progress there to really track that, I think your point about either IB tests or IB diplomas or AP test completion I think is a worthwhile piece.

I mean, there's so many rich CCR metrics, and what I don't want to get lost is there's some other softer ones like work-based learning experiences and post-secondary completion, like Seattle Promise.

But anyway, lots of ideas.

SPEAKER_06

Thank you.

SPEAKER_21

Director Hersey.

SPEAKER_06

Thank you.

So I had the pleasure of meeting with a couple of educators before the break talking specifically about the need to update this goal.

One of the things that they brought to my attention I've been doing a lot of study on is the graduation profile that's been produced by OSPI.

And let me tell you why that's interesting to me.

Just because when we adopt a student outcomes focused governance that was at the same time that a lot of us were having really tough conversations about standardized testing in general and we struggle because there's no really good metric to outside of standardized testing at least that has been like tried by us to identify ways to measure growth and readiness for whatever comes after Seattle Public Schools.

So.

After looking at OSPI's graduation profile I have become incredibly interested in developing something similar for Seattle.

And it might be a good opportunity to do some partnership between educators families to just say like instead of only limiting it to what a child knows like what do we want a functioning member of our city to look like.

And I think that.

Thanks.

Appreciate it.

I'll take all the claps I can get.

And I think that's just super critical, especially as we are in a time of disinformation, a time when advocacy and voter rates are super low.

I think that there's just a bigger picture than what a standardized test can provide.

And I know that there's likely going to be a lot of energy around it and I think we would also create a lot more buy in to student outcomes focused governance in general if we can find a way to create a profile that's more holistic.

So my two cents well educators two cents but also my two cents.

SPEAKER_24

In turn and we do have the current street.

Current strategic plan is sun setting and we do need to look at updating the goals and ultimately ultimately what our role as the board is is to serve as representatives of the community in and pushing the district for based on the value vision and values of the community.

What is it that we want students to know and be able to do.

What do we expect.

What does what does you know Seattle what does Seattle Ready mean to us and what are the different ways that students can can access that.

But I'm going to go back to whatever measure we decide.

I still really want to see how do you know which one of these are the most effective and how do you know.

And and where are there gaps even within our own structure.

So like the this is this is very data light.

So and we're trying to ask information about what we see reflected in data.

So we see really positive progress.

But I also don't see you know what.

What does this look like for English language learners.

What does this look like for students with IEPs who are both both of which groups overlap and intersect with African-American males and students of color from educational justice and who are consistently in the very bottom.

So what does that look like.

Are there things between schools where we know oh this school has implemented inclusive inclusive this school participated in UDL training and we can see that that had a big impact and we can show you that that had a big impact.

And now here's our plan for how we're going to bring that to more schools.

That's I mean this is positive and great and I I want to see I want I want to kind of pop the you know open up the hood a little bit more.

SPEAKER_12

If I could chime in Dr. Jones.

You first.

SPEAKER_39

I'm trying to, I want to kind of push a little bit to reframe that as maybe a strategic question around what you're seeing and then, I mean, you can chime in, but I'm not sure what question you're going to respond to.

So it was an emphatic statement, but if there's a strategic question in there, can you work that?

SPEAKER_24

Well the strategic question really is how do you know which ones are working.

And I know I already asked that already.

But I'm not going to stop asking that.

So the next time we look at the college and career readiness goal I want to be able to see when I look at the memo.

that you can that you are showing this is the strategy that we have been working.

It's going really well.

Look or this strategy that we thought was going to work didn't go as well as we thought.

And here's why.

Or this you know so that's like.

just like one, one level down because as, and I know I've kind of already said this, but we are going to face really, really challenging conversations.

And how do we, how do we navigate that?

And how do we know what to prioritize and what not to prioritize?

We have to be able to see what's having the impact.

SPEAKER_39

So if you could give some insight into some of the strategies we've adopted, some that we've abandoned, some that we've doubled down on, maybe that could, you know, further emphasize, you know, which is the highest leverage strategy.

I know we talked about Advanced course taking as as one but click into that maybe twice and then talk about that particular thing perhaps and what we're doing within that.

So when we bring our new data sets out to be able to speak to the highest leverage item we can maybe highlight that as we produce the next the next memo.

SPEAKER_12

Absolutely.

And what this echoes.

Assume you weren't in the room it seems like you might have been but in December Dr. Jones assistant superintendent Howard and a number of other folks we had a conversation around how each of these need.

What is the current state.

What is the desired state and how are we going to get there in a leading indicator kind of way and a lagging indicator kind of way.

SPEAKER_24

That's what I want to see.

I want to see the leading indicators and the lagging indicators so we can reflect on the lagging indicators and you can preview for us the leading indicators.

SPEAKER_37

Yes.

And that's something that Dr. Jones is pushing us on.

And you're reinforcing for us publicly with Dr. Jones.

SPEAKER_24

Can I just say, I know that historically SPS has come from a place of fear.

Fear of vulnerability.

That it is scary to show our work because this is a public meeting and it's so easy to criticize and slam people.

I know how firmly this board is committed and believes in this work.

And I promise you that if you bring us something if you show us this didn't work how we thought it would we are not going to grind you into the ground for it.

We're going to say well what do you think we need to do better.

What support do you need from us to do better.

So I'm just I'm I just want to affirm like I, this is my fifth year now, this is the start of my fifth year and it was through COVID and I very, like my skin has, you know, the Grinch's heart grew five times or whatever.

Mine has like iced over and my skin has thickened.

And it's so I know that it's scary.

And and I'm just saying we're here in support of our educators our students our whole community to support the success of Seattle Public Schools.

So any way I can keep reemphasizing it like please.

I'm hoping that we as a board can help shift us out of a culture of fear.

to one of support and collaboration.

So do the scary thing and we will not grind you into the ground in public.

SPEAKER_37

No much much appreciated.

The public sharing of this is one that we're learning from to you know we're learning to do this publicly but also internally about some of the the struggles about what to put in what to leave out and why.

And so this clarity is encouraging.

And I think we're very much aligned and whatever it is share what it is and then we can figure it out.

But try to make it something that it's not or to minimize our smokescreen.

We're not about that at all either.

And so appreciate the encouragement and we will we will follow through.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_20

Director Topp.

SPEAKER_33

Oh there we go.

Make sure it's on.

No I appreciate Dr. Perkins.

You're opening up the question of where do we go from here and Director Hersey as well.

You're talking about you know what what could this goal look like now that we you know it's not perfect but we are hitting our target goals.

I have two very hopefully simple clarifying questions.

The first one is on number five in the next step strategies it says we are centralizing high school course registration to ensure students and families blah blah blah.

Can you maybe touch on what that means exactly.

And then question two is you know the list of strategies here you know in order of already underway followed by those that are just getting started.

Can you maybe go through those that are underway and those that are just getting started.

SPEAKER_12

is both the strength and a challenge of Seattle Public Schools is that we have 18 high schools and over the years they have learned lots of different ways to be innovative and connect to their communities.

But in so doing sometimes it's hard for a family to navigate all the different options and all the different ways.

So what we're trying to do is take a step not fully centralized every single aspect of course registration.

but at least provide some common information translated in all of our major languages to all students and families about what do you have access to in your high school.

And over time we would like to make that more consistent.

It's already happening.

So I want to give.

again kudos to the school based staff but that's what that's about.

So one step we're taking this year we have a common document that explains how high school course registration works for all SPS families of rising ninth graders to 12th graders.

And as we go forward my my vision is that we will eventually have a common set of classes that that you know that you can access whether you're at Roosevelt or in another place.

That will still allow for local diversity, but it would provide some consistency and give the power where we want it to be in the hands of students and families advocating for what they want.

So that's that piece.

In terms of the order, I think it's actually something that, again, Dr. Jones pushed for, is can you be more intentional about how you're talking about this.

So in terms of the use of data is it is one of the examples.

And again I'm happy that the number of counselors who are here tonight because they're the ones that have been pushing us to make better data tools.

So it's not all in the back of a piece of paper and all the different things that Excel spreadsheets.

So that's one where we've made a significant amount of progress and helped schools really figure out whether students are on track or off track.

Where we've been transparent with this board before speaking of being vulnerable is our high school and beyond plan data is not where we want it to be.

It is right now more of a compliance exercise than something meaningful where students are really doing reflecting.

So our next steps is to re-engage with our high school leaders.

We've done a whole revamping including thinking about our students with IEPs and how they connect.

But we have a lot of work to do.

I don't want to read the whole memo but that just gives you kind of a sense of the spectrum of things that are on track and things that we're just starting.

Hope that helps.

SPEAKER_24

So I'm just doing a time check.

This session was scheduled for an hour so about you know nine minutes.

We don't have to use it all if if directors feel that their questions have been addressed.

But.

SPEAKER_20

And Director Rivera I have not forgotten that you're there.

If you have any other questions I want to give you a give you the opportunity.

SPEAKER_16

No no.

All right.

SPEAKER_24

Well.

Weird.

OK.

This is.

Dr. Jones anything you want to add before we wrap up and transition to the next the next topic.

SPEAKER_39

Yeah I just wanted to say we're we sound like we're building synergy around your expectations and what we're presenting.

We can go deeper in terms of our data sets and bring out nuances to help illuminate what we're trying to do.

One of the things that we've really been we've really been intentional on is trying to be clear around the current state and the desired state and that gap between what are we doing about it.

I think in probably previous progress monitoring memos you probably had to sift through to find that.

Now we're trying to make sure that that's sequenced appropriately.

Something else that you probably see us do coming forward is really talking about what Dr. Starosky said third grade reading builds upon seventh grade math builds upon college and career readiness.

I also believe that there's a it's going to be tricky to do it but the guardrails have have impact on these as well.

And so the conditions and the climate that we create is really important.

And then the third piece on that is really around when we come before you and asking.

There's a section on here that we'll talk about board support.

I think there's also policy support that we can articulate to advance things whether we're talking about with the legislature or current policy that needs to be revised or changed or added.

But that's what you'll see.

And then the last piece is really around, I want to bring some clarity around what strategies we've abandoned, what strategies we've adopted, and really show the evolution going forward.

So advanced coursework inclusion, work-based learning, and the overall SOFG process is really hopefully what you saw here today, and we're going to continue to have a continuous improvement mindset on this.

I saw Director Sarge who got excited when we started talking about leading leading indicators and lagging indicators.

We're really trying to be extraordinarily intentional with all these steps.

And so I also want to give kudos to our educators and our and our school leaders.

They've really kind of have guided us in the next steps that we're doing.

We're not just making it up downtown where this is actually ethnographic data around how we're how we're making our changes.

So thank you to my colleagues and thank you to the board for allowing us to talk about progress monitoring.

SPEAKER_24

Thank you very much.

Since we do have just a couple of extra minutes.

A.J.

I know I said that you would just be an observer and you and I would catch up later but if you had just a if you have any thoughts you want to share just a couple of minutes guidance reflections we would take it.

Otherwise I will transition us to the next item.

SPEAKER_02

No ma'am you all did a wonderful job this evening and I will check in with you individually but keep up the great work.

Keep up the continuous improvement.

SPEAKER_20

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_24

All right.

We're going to transition now back to the dais if everyone could take your microphone with you.

You can leave the rest you know note stuff if you want because we're going to come back here for the budget work session.

Yeah.

Does anybody need a quick break?

Are we ready to go right to the next thing?

At the request of directors we are going to take a brief five minute bio break and the board meeting will resume at 630. Superintendent Jones.

Starting with the consent agenda.

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

May I have a motion for the consent agenda.

You ready.

SPEAKER_22

I'll make a motion.

No you don't get to.

But you do have to second.

SPEAKER_13

I know I got confused.

SPEAKER_22

I knew I had to do something.

SPEAKER_14

I don't have my talking point.

SPEAKER_33

President Rankin.

Can I pull the review.

SPEAKER_24

We have to have a motion on the floor first which we don't have helping me.

SPEAKER_14

OK.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So many papers.

I move approval of the consent agenda.

SPEAKER_24

You got a second?

I second.

Thank you.

Approval of the consent agenda has been moved by Vice President Sardieu and seconded by Director Briggs.

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

SPEAKER_33

President Rankin, I'd like to remove the review and approval of the 2023-24 career technical education and STEM annual plan from the consent agenda.

SPEAKER_24

Are there any.

No you don't have to say are there any other items.

OK.

So we'll we'll return to that item.

Now I need a revised motion to approve the consent agenda as amended.

If there are no other items to be pulled.

SPEAKER_14

Sorry.

I move for approval of the consent agenda as amended.

SPEAKER_13

I second.

SPEAKER_24

Approval of the consent agenda as amended has been moved by Vice President Sardieu and seconded by Director Briggs.

All those in favor of approval of the consent agenda as amended please signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

I think that was everybody.

Any opposed.

Any abstentions.

Oh I'm sorry Director Rivera.

I'm not sure if I clocked.

I said it.

Yeah.

Okay.

Thank you.

This the consent agenda has passed unanimously.

Thank you.

We will now go to the item that was removed.

Director Topp.

SPEAKER_33

Sure.

I just had a quick remark on this item so I wanted to pull it from the consent agenda.

I think we had a missed opportunity last week to not really have a conversation of a full conversation as a board about this item and I just really want to thank Brian Day our CTE and STEM director and Dr. Perkins for this really amazing work.

We just finished talking about college and career readiness, and this, I think, is part of that.

I want to thank all the educators who do this work every day, who share their passions and their skills with our students.

My dad graduated from Rainier Beach High School.

And it was you know shop and woodworking that kept him in school and he was a carpenter for the rest of his life and so which supported my family.

So I think this is really critical work and just wanted to give a moment and a shout out to all the folks who do this.

So that's that is why I pulled it.

Other than that I'd love to see it move forward.

SPEAKER_24

Great.

Thank you.

And apologies when it was pulled.

I did not ask for a motion.

So so now I will ask for that motion so that we can vote on it.

You do.

You'll need to make a motion to approve the item that was pulled which should be in talking points there.

SPEAKER_14

You'll get it.

It's OK.

I'm learning my role.

This is my first go at it.

SPEAKER_24

This is our our vulnerability and learning.

SPEAKER_14

Yes.

And if I had it my way this is not how we would be doing totally fine.

Nevertheless I move that the board approve the 2023 2024 career and textual education plan as attached to this board action report.

It is in the best interest.

Do we.

Is that the additional thing or no.

OK.

SPEAKER_24

I second the motion.

Thank you.

Ms. Wilson Jones the roll call please.

SPEAKER_30

Director Rivera.

Aye.

Vice President Sarju.

I. Director Song.

Director Top.

I. I don't think it came through on the mic so Director Song did vote yes.

Director Briggs.

I. Director Hersey.

I. And President Rankin.

I. This motion is passed unanimously.

SPEAKER_24

Thank you.

We have now come to the board.

Sorry give me one second.

Board comments.

We haven't had any committee meetings since our last boarding board meeting to report on.

I gave a brief legislative update.

The only thing I will mention right now is a very brief acknowledgment of something that has been in the news which is the question of residency of one of our directors.

State law and board policy have requirements around eligibility to hold positions and it's individual candidates affirm upon filing for election their eligibility and we are responsible for complying with state law and commitments made when we take oath of office.

In terms of consideration or authority to make any kind of determination on membership of the board.

The board does not have the authority or obligation.

Resignation is at the discretion of the individual.

Authority to determine eligibility of elected officials to hold office falls to King County elections.

I wanted to state that just to clarify that I know it's something that is public and that what our role as a board is, which is it's not in our purview to address as a board.

And do we have any other liaison reports.

I'm assuming probably not because we we were on break but if anybody else has a liaison report or any other board business.

SPEAKER_33

Sure.

Real quickly I have a community meeting coming up on January 28th that I want to invite the board and the public to.

It's going to be on January 28th at 1 30 p.m.

at High Point Library.

So please come and join.

That's that's it.

Thank you Madam President.

If you're bringing it.

SPEAKER_20

I have my hand up.

Oh, sorry.

Hi.

Sorry, Director Rivera.

SPEAKER_16

All right.

Sorry.

Thank you.

No.

Yeah, I just wanted to give a very quick report from Head Start.

I'm the Head Start liaison.

I meet with them monthly.

I just get updates on their enrollment and professional development of teachers and all the great stuff they do.

So I just want to let you know that Things are still going very well with them.

They are actually part of one of the news items is that they have discussions with deal and they've got, they're getting funding for expanding to classes into plus, which means it will be inclusive classrooms at two locations in our district.

So that is a goal that they're working towards to make their costumes more inclusive and open spaces for the.

the actually growing number of preschool students who are being evaluated for IEPs and special ed services.

So it's great that we're making rooms and available spaces for those students and making them inclusive classrooms.

Again, they do fantastic work and Head Start in our preschool program.

So I just want to shout out to them.

Also, separately from my own engagement, I've been invited to attend the North Beach PTA membership meeting next month.

And I would invite two other directors if they want to join me there.

They would love hearing from us.

And I just want to know, they want to hear about things that a lot of school families are concerned with right now, what a school is going to look like, you know, how they can have an impact or input on that process.

And obviously the budget that we're looking at.

So message me separately.

And if you want to join me, that'd be great.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_24

Thanks Lisa and thanks for the reminder actually.

I think it's great.

We let each other know when we're going to do that outreach.

So Lisa's going North Beach.

I was asked as legislative liaison to join with Genesee Hill PTA and talk to them about funding and such and so I've of course asked Director Topp to join me as that's in her area.

So that'll be that's I think February 5th.

So that's great.

Director's out and about.

SPEAKER_16

And to me, I want to be fair.

I was also invited to Adam's elementary too, but I unfortunately can't make that date, but I didn't want them.

I think I forgot about them.

I can't make it anyways, but it's great when we get invited to schools for those meetings.

I encourage, you know.

schools to invite us whenever they can.

Yes please.

SPEAKER_24

And we look forward to getting being shared back to you as a board what what you learn and I know Director Topp and I will do the same from Genesee Hill so that we can connect all those points.

So thank you for that reminder and for bringing that up Lisa.

SPEAKER_21

Director Briggs.

SPEAKER_13

So I am meant to report back about my experience at the boot camp for WASDA.

SPEAKER_24

Oh yes, as part of, those of you may or may not remember, when we When WASDA general or annual session meets we as a board authorize those who are elected but have not yet taken office to participate in training and part of the resolution that's required is that those directors provide an update on the experience.

SPEAKER_13

A book report.

I'll keep it really short.

I was really grateful to have the opportunity to go.

It was great to connect with other board directors and superintendents across the state.

Just so you know I was at a table with the Eatonville school district superintendent and new board directors and they have 2000 kids in their school district and I was like wow that's so different.

But yeah.

It was great it was really great to talk to all those folks.

We also a lot of the day was centered around this Washington school board standards a recent research based framework for effective school board governance which really aligns with student outcomes focused governance.

And so it was it was it was.

It was just really reassuring to know that this is sort of evidence based what school districts across the state are doing.

This is this is not a crazy thing that we're doing.

It's very much in line with all the other school districts in our state.

And this book kind of I think also Gina and I were talking Director Topp and I were talking earlier about how.

there's just so much information coming at you all at once, and having a framework is so important for figuring out where do I even put this information and what is my actual role here.

And I found this document to just be really helpful in explaining that.

And it is available as a PDF online at WASDA's website if anybody really would like to delve into it.

So that that basically sums it up for me.

It was a great experience.

And then lastly I will be attending the Sandpoint Elementary School PTA meeting on February 13th and would love any company if anybody would like to join me because it's a great little school and one of my kids goes there.

So thank you.

SPEAKER_19

Thank you.

SPEAKER_24

Any other comments?

I will, if there are no other, oh, sorry.

SPEAKER_14

I'm gonna make a comment.

So my comment is focused on President Rankin, the thing that you just read.

And so what I'm gonna, I'm gonna read this, which is not how I usually do, but I wanna keep it short.

My comments today will focus on two things, doing what is right and a rupture in trust.

Right now, I'd rather be about the business of ensuring we are providing the best possible education to the students of SPS.

Instead, we have a different issue before us.

This situation is not about what is legal or not.

While this situation may compel legal questions, that is not the real issue.

The issue is that a board director is occupying a seat they are no longer eligible to hold.

This is different from something being illegal.

And it's important that we understand this difference.

I'm not going into specifics on this issue.

I believe what is important is that the focus should be on doing what is right.

for my student director board member here today.

This situation represents what we should do when we find ourselves in a situation where our past decisions have created a scenario of unintended consequences.

As leaders, we must focus on what is right for the good of the whole, not as what is best for me or you as an individual.

The other concern here is the reality of broken trust.

Again, I'm not going to talk about specifics.

And nevertheless, the math is not adding up.

We have a lot of work to do, and having broken trust hinders our ability to proceed with our best work in service to students.

I don't want to spend time getting to the bottom of this.

I want to spend the time focusing on the biggest challenges that we face that will impact the students of this district.

I pivot back to a previous statement.

Having the distraction of this unresolved issue will tax our attention.

And it is not for the good of the whole.

Most of the whole being our need to focus on our students.

I encourage all leaders, including myself, to make decisions that are good for the whole.

That is the best good that can come out of a difficult situation.

SPEAKER_24

Thank you.

Seeing no further comments we can move from our business portion back to a work session and gear up for 90 fun minutes of budget talks.

90 90 fun minutes.

It's scheduled for 90 minutes.

on the agenda.

If we get through it faster than that we get through it faster than that.

But it is one of our 11 discussions about the very serious issue of next year's budget.

So let us grab our microphones and head on over to the tables for the work session.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_30

I think we are able to confirm that there is sound in teams that's coming through on the transcript.

So I will work with Director Rivera to troubleshoot.

SPEAKER_19

OK.

Thank you.

All righty.

Let's see.

SPEAKER_20

OK.

SPEAKER_30

Budget work session.

Oh I'm going to pause this just for a real quick tech issue.

I'm going to make it sound terrible in here for a second by unmuting my computer to make sure.

So if you could speak or.

SPEAKER_24

Thank you for the.

Do you want me to talk.

Do you want to hear.

Thank you for your patience.

We are addressing a technical issue.

And I am speaking so that we can determine whether or not the sound issue is being corrected.

Ellie Wilson Jones will let us know.

SPEAKER_30

Thank you.

I think we're good to go.

It seems to be a device issue for Director Rivera.

SPEAKER_24

OK.

All right.

Thank you.

Superintendent Jones please take it away.

SPEAKER_39

Yeah, thank you.

This is budget work session number 5 of 11 that we're hosting.

The ideal scenario is that we are providing enough information for both the board and the public to have some insight into what we are contemplating and what we're thinking about in terms of our process.

Today's session will focus on where we are current state in terms of the next steps that we have in front of us as we prepare for the May 8th ultimate date of providing a budget plan to you.

Next slide.

So we'll be focusing on eight items in this agenda, is to look at the timeline for the 24-25 budget.

We will discuss the budget development goals and principles.

And this is an additional item that we're going to talk about today, but a review of the annual financial report.

We'll have a light touch on the governor's budget update, then the legislative update, update on the overall budget development process, and 25-26, a view into that, and then an update on community engagement.

Next slide, please.

This is in your package you see this is a reminder of the timeline.

We refer to this as the chutes and ladders the snake.

But anyway this is the these are the requisite steps to get to the 11 sessions.

Last board meeting we had approval of a resolution for the fiscal stabilization plan which had some specific items in there that the board authorizes the superintendent and team to start to pursue and analyze.

Today, the 17th, which is starred is the date that we're going to talk about.

Again, just keeping you informed around the budget development process.

Next slide, please.

You've also seen this slide before.

It's worthy to be restated that this goal, one of the goals is to stabilize our financial future to be able to fund our highest priorities.

As we talked about in the progress monitoring, what are we going to do to make sure those highest priorities are funded and we work to stabilize that we can have the resources to allocate appropriately.

We want to also resolve long-term decades of structural deficit spending.

As we can recall, we don't have the levers and the resources that we once had to consistently move forward without a reconciled budget.

Now we have to.

We're at the end of the ability to kick the can, if you will.

And our goal is to display fiscal stewardship and responsibility.

And as why why we do that we want to ensure that we prioritize quality instruction and in learning.

You heard us talk about that in progress monitoring.

We also ascribe to having the presupposition that we have good faith efforts and that we share the same values.

Some of our challenges on how we get there but I think our values are congruent and synonymous.

The teamwork is really important.

The board and superintendent, aka the staff, we're one team aspiring for the same goals.

And then we must be clear on the challenges and opportunities in front of us.

And that's our effort to be transparent.

Next slide, please, and we'll have Dr. Buttleman, our assistant superintendent for finance, speak to us about the 22-23 annual financial report.

SPEAKER_04

Thank you, Dr. Jones.

I want to thank Director Song for prompting some questions in the board questions.

I don't think typically this annual financial report has been presented to the board at a work session.

I think it's a practice that we should start doing going forward.

So today we're going to have a truncated version of the annual financial report to highlight some of the issues that happen in the 22-23 year to help inform decisions for the 24-5 budget process.

This slide is just a snippet from the website where we've reorganized some of the financial information.

So community is always asking where to find the information.

So we put the high level audited financial statements, the F-195, the budget document, and the F-196, which is this annual financial report, all on one page for accessibility and transparency of information.

And then we'll be populating the monthly reports that the board reviews there as well.

So when people are looking for financial information, it's all available in one place.

We can go to the next slide.

This is a high level overview of the revenues that the school district receives.

A couple of things to point out here that are of importance kind of midway or halfway down the federal grants.

You'll see a significant decrease from 127 million to 77 million between those two periods of time.

That's mostly the lapsing of the ESSER funding the COVID funding from the federal government.

And you'll see that it has had an impact on the ability of the district to generate revenue and provide some of those resources that were available through that funding.

The rest of that couple of highlights are the other categories primarily the city's FEPP levy funding that comes to the Seattle Public Schools and then the slight increases in the other categories are typically cost of living adjustments of inflationary increases and some other smaller things that happen with the levy.

how that inflates over time with the CPI.

We can go to the next slide.

This is just a snapshot of how those pieces all fit together on a graph and you'll see that the apportionment section of that the state contribution directly for general education is only about 52 percent of the whole and so significant supplemental revenues coming into the Seattle Public Schools like many school districts across the state of Washington on top of that apportionment amount.

We can go to the next slide.

Here's a piece of the report that's expenditures by the program so highlighting the large majority of the funding expenditures are in the instructional category in one way or another with support services being another one that includes things like busing special education other types of support services for students.

And there's that one billion dollars again.

So we talked about that from time to time that the school district has a significant amount of resources to do our work.

It's just a matter of making the right decisions on how to prioritize those.

Next slide please.

And this is just for board members community members who want to sort of know a little more detail about what each of those program expenditure categories mean.

Wanted to include that in this presentation.

so that folks had a better understanding.

Being new to K-12 funding I've sort of learned that some of the acronyms and things that are assumed that we all know are not as understandable as we might think and so trying to be more transparent about some of that information for folks that don't live and breathe this every day.

Next slide please.

Here's a different way of looking at that expenditure that one point one billion dollars in expenditures and you'll see in this gets talked about quite a bit.

The large majority as is appropriate of expenditures for the public school district are in salaries and wages and benefits and so approximately 82 percent last year was what ended up being spent on personnel expenditures.

You'll see a slight increase there in the purchase services a lot of that is around special Contracts for special education and then you'll see some of the reductions that the district has been making Exemplified there and supplies materials going down and some of the other categories the capital outlay increase was a function of a GASB pronouncement and how we account for some of the longer term software purchases.

And so that's why that looks bigger.

It isn't a significant change in the software that is being purchased, just a way of accounting for it is a little bit different now.

We can go to the next slide.

Here's a way of looking at that graphically.

Again, 82% is in salaries, wages, and benefits.

You'll see some of the other categories and how small they are by comparison.

Something that's important for the school district and the school board to understand is the fund balance.

And here's some details around that.

So you'll see the big takeaway from this slide is that the Seattle Public Schools fund balance decreased by 41 million dollars for the school year 22 23 as compared to 21 22. So this is the structural deficit that we talk about and there's exemplified here in this fund balance slide and we'll get into a little bit more detail on that assigned fund balance.

So the assigned fund balance they're seeing on there that one hundred fifteen million dollars is another way of saying committed fund balance and so.

We're not going to spend the inventory that's on the slide.

We're not going to spend the restricted grant monies on just general general expenditures and assign fund balances what we use to balance the budget the last few years and or have some other things attached to it.

We go to the next slide on that.

SPEAKER_24

Can I quickly add to that that just to put a little bit of a finer point on it that the the fund balance is often what I think is this is true in Seattle public schools by no districts across the state.

It is what starts starts your next school year before revenue comes from the state for that current school year.

So that's what the assigned means is it's not just oh sweet.

We have 10 million dollars left over from this year that we can spend.

It's actually already committed either to back fill for expenditures that have happened and not been.

reconciled or to start the school year with money and be able to pay out salaries contracts whatever that's starting before the next year's revenue comes in from the state.

I just sometimes fund ending fund balance looks like leftover money for whatever but it's it's already committed for.

Usually the following year Knowing that we're gonna have other deficits to make up.

So just in case that was I just wanted to clarify that.

SPEAKER_04

Thank you to piggyback on that the third fourth and fifth lines of this slide are a good illustration of that you'll see the The dedication of the economic stabilization account that happened last year to balance the 23 24 budget.

So that was essentially taking from savings and assigning it to balance and to start the next year's budget.

Similarly that 21 million dollars 21.3 million dollars was used to balance last year's budget.

At the end of the 22 3 year the one that we're currently reviewing the financial statement on right now there was 32.3 million dollars of money that was left over that was under the budget or under the revenue that came in.

And this slide is assigning that as the board potentially to assign to the next budget balancing exercise for 24 5 as was done in 23 24. And so that 32 million dollars is a starting point for consideration and balancing that hundred four million dollar deficit that we face for the 24 5 budget period.

That was a lot on one side.

Does that make sense to folks.

And we'll get a little more in detail about how that thirty two million dollars came about on the next slide.

This is that slide sort of blown up into sort of diving down to the next next level by category here.

So the revenue that we achieved for 22 23 exceeded what was in the budget for 22 23. If you total those top six lines by about 24 million dollars and so the budget for 22 23 anticipated a number of students the number of students that showed up was five hundred and ninety seven more than that for the 22 23. That doesn't mean enrollment went up.

It just means that the number that was assigned in the budget was smaller than what actually happened.

So there was a six million dollar revenue increase that year because of that.

The way that was projected at that time and then you can kind of run down the other items there.

The levy there was it was a high inflation year and so the levy went up accordingly and that was another three point six million dollars that was achieved for the budget.

And then the next one there, the transportation funding model, the next largest number was part of the emerging from COVID and how transportation was going to play out.

And you'll see an offset down below where our costs exceeded what we thought was going to be in the budget.

And so trying to figure out what exactly is going to happen with the revenue coming in for transportation from the state versus what we're actually going to spend as we transition out of COVID with two providers for the first time in the school district's history and so there's some sort of uncertainty that was happening there and those two numbers exemplify that uncertainty with transportation.

The largest number here that was to the good in terms of adding up to that thirty two million dollars at the end of the year was vacant position savings and so school district of about eight hundred million dollars in salary costs is going to have some vacancies.

Seattle Public Schools has put in place some internal processes to review all those vacancies to make sure that is a position that is important to continue while and take advantage of any vacancy savings.

And so this number is higher than typical in part because it was kind of slowed down and each position is being analyzed differently in terms of whether it's something that does continue forward or could be combined with a different department or how we can approach the work differently.

You'll see the next largest number there to the negative.

Can you go back to that slide.

The labor costs increase so we've talked a couple of times since I've been here about the fact when there's an IPD increase for faculty or for back to my college days for teachers and staff.

It isn't always offset completely by the monies that we get from the state.

So we have people on the levy.

We have more teachers or administrators than the prototypical model would assume.

And so there is a cost for each increase we have on IPD to the district.

There was also a couple of labor counts.

SPEAKER_24

Sorry can you define IPD?

SPEAKER_04

Implicit price deflator or it's COLA is how others would refer to it.

It's just the number that's used by the state to increase salaries recently.

And I just want to make sure I don't know.

Keep keep checking me on that as I learn more about them I'm going to be worse at being more clear about continue to check me on that.

You'll see the large negative there is the labor costs.

And so there were a few significant contracts that were negotiated that year.

SEA.

This also includes the sub sub reimbursement practice some sick leave that accrued and was paid out in that year substitute substitutes on contract costs.

And so again it's a large number.

Also it's eight hundred million dollars of the billion dollars and so you'd expect that to be a large number.

As the district that she tries to pay its staff and its teachers what they need to be paid to do this work and to live here in Seattle.

And all that subtract the ones that were sort of negatives and that's thirty two point three million.

That was the leftover for lack of a better way of saying it from the twenty two twenty three budget.

That was a lot of information.

Folks have further questions about that and Fred and Dr. Jones and I can have talked about continue to be continuous improvement on this and have more of this type of information provided to the board on a regular basis.

And so again thank the director Song for raising this as a question and so that it just wasn't the annual financial report at the back of the agenda that people might or might not look at and just give it a little bit more visibility because I think that context is super important right now.

SPEAKER_19

Oh, go ahead.

SPEAKER_36

So much for the work you put into putting slide 14 together, which I think very interesting.

Can you help us just sort of understand as we're preparing that 24, 25 budget of these variances, which are sort of one time and which ones are trends that we can kind of plan ahead?

SPEAKER_04

That is a great question.

I first want to give credit to Linda Sebring who's behind me who put this slide together with her staff.

SPEAKER_36

You may not be able to answer that question now but I think that's an important question we should try to address.

And my second question then is so 20 if I'm understanding this right 22 23's budget came out with 32 million dollars.

SPEAKER_04

Expenditures less than revenue that was right and and the plan is that this will be

SPEAKER_36

assigned to the 24 25 budget.

And so when we're thinking about the hundred million gap that we're trying to close this 32 will go directly to the hundred million.

That's a solution.

SPEAKER_04

I don't want to speak for the superintendent's recommendation but that will be my recommendation to use this as the starting point.

I do want to.

Remind us all that those are red Lego that we would be using.

So it's one time funding that we wouldn't be able to rely on going forward.

But it is something that is available and could be a good start to solving that hundred four million dollar situation.

SPEAKER_36

And right now we're starting with a zero economic stabilization fund.

SPEAKER_04

Right.

SPEAKER_36

OK.

I just want to make sure.

SPEAKER_04

And we'll get into some of the details on that later in the presentation.

SPEAKER_24

I just thank you so far.

This presentation is I just kind of nudged Superintendent Jones and says this is what I'm talking about.

Show your work.

Let us see what you know what these numbers mean and how they are.

I also really appreciate some of the breakdowns on previous pages are moving us towards.

using some of the same language that other districts are using.

So at the at the state level there's a code there's a state code for school budget and finance that's that gets super specific.

There's like a series of numbers and the first one is.

And it gets it gets like there'll be a number for staffing and then for instruction and then for you know NIA whatever that gets more and more specific and It sometimes has been as a legislative liaison it has sometimes been challenging to work with other districts when we're using kind of This is how Seattle is presenting this information and it's actually it's really hard to look apples to apples with even though we're much larger our percentages.

I mean our amounts are going to be larger but you know a lot of times you know we need to look at like last year's legislative session special education funding.

We could see that the percentage of deficit that districts were facing was very much very similar.

And we were able to see that because we're using similar numbers but it honestly took me a little while to get that information out of SPS to be able to even talk to other districts about collective advocacy around that.

And so just thank you for.

laying this out more.

And thank you also I don't know I was on an email chain with Director Topp also asking and that was maybe I don't know two days ago about the finance and then here we have it reflected.

So I just really appreciate us being able to.

look at this together and better understand really where does all the money go.

It's it's extremely extremely helpful.

And maybe you're going to talk about this more but the.

Oh yeah.

You know I'll wait because you're going to talk about the governor's budget.

Never mind.

SPEAKER_03

Thank you.

SPEAKER_33

I guess I have a few questions on if we can get into the details.

And if you don't have answers, please just let me know.

We can follow up later.

The on slide six, the in the other category, the additional sort of 15 million you mentioned city levy.

Can you that that that that additional is from the city levy?

Can you expand on that a little bit?

SPEAKER_04

So the school district, and I'll look to Dr. Jarvis and Jones to fill in some of the instructional or academic parts of this.

The school districts, the beneficiary of the families education preschool and promise levy.

I was the promise person on that in my previous life.

I think I used to put promise first but now it's preschool first.

I think that's the official name that the school district gets to supplement the instruction and supports at a certain number of schools and some preschool funding to provide preschool for some of our families.

And I'll look to Dr. Jones or Jarvis to fill in some of the details around that if you want to.

SPEAKER_39

I'll defer to Dr. Jarvis if there's some specifics you want to talk about in terms of our instructional model but it's it's just very much supplemental.

And going back to the one time funds while these have been ongoing we still don't want to balance the budget with one time funds so I want to go back to the previous couple slides back.

That's going to be critical for us, and we have to be clear-eyed about when we're balancing.

If it's one-time funds, if it's a sale of a property or something like that, we need to be explicit about that and not think that that debt's not going to come back later on.

And so while we're grateful for the levy funds, we're not assuming that they'll always be there.

SPEAKER_24

And the city doesn't just cut us a check.

It's a grant based program so schools have to apply for the grants to fund a certain need and that the requirements of the grants and the priorities of the city have over the life of the levy sometimes changed.

So when it when it way first started it was to fund family support workers and wraparound services for families and it has over the years really strayed from that and become a lot about academic coaching and things that that are you know our students have.

pretty serious needs that that's not necessarily what we would ask for the money for but that's what it was assigned to be for some time.

So that I feel like that is coming back to.

I hope and I and I and I feel that the switch back to the city recognizing that.

That's not just supplemental for our instructional program.

We actually need that money to provide support to students that we can't already provide through basic education.

And this just the the mental health counseling money too that the student Seattle Student Union fought so hard for that is also similarly not coming as one check to Seattle Public Schools to spend how we want that will be granted out from the city to schools.

So that's one example of how we can't necessarily rely on that as part of our operating budget because it's it's it's all grant based.

It's not it's not up to us fully how that gets budgeted.

SPEAKER_04

And that levy is up for renewal in 25 I believe so.

SPEAKER_33

I guess if I can continue on.

Director Song asked a little bit about the school carry forward so on slide 13 and you mentioned I think like 4.9 is the accumulated sub reimbursement fund required to remain at the schools from the CBA.

Can you explain a little bit about what that is or maybe get back to me.

And then I guess second part of that question is has.

in budgeting processes in the past for a school.

Has that school carry forward ever been called back.

SPEAKER_04

The first question I can give the high level answer to I would hesitate to get into a lot of detail but in the CBA there's language around when you have a substitute someone's going to cover that class.

And if you're not paying a sub directly that money accrues to the school to be used for Kind of whatever the school determines is the best use of that paying that teacher who had the extra work to do or Something else for that school.

Is that in line with your understanding?

Dr. Jones and Fred.

Okay your second question

SPEAKER_24

I will say sub reimbursement for subs is something that's being discussed at the legislature this session.

That's an issue that not this specific issue but just the the difference in allocation from the state and the actual cost to districts of funding subs is there's a there's a gulf there.

And so that is something that's substitute compensation is specifically being addressed this year.

SPEAKER_04

Thank you.

There is a.

also called subsidy reimbursement from the state where that amount we get from the state has hasn't been increased for some by something like 30 years and so it's a significant budget impact and not forgetting your second question I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_33

Yeah calling back sort of the school carry forward.

SPEAKER_39

Not not in recent memory.

And so just even bringing that up as a topic is going to make a few folks twitchy but we're we're in kind of scarce times right now.

So we may have to do some of that going forward.

But I don't remember any time in the last decade or so.

Linda probably can help us with that with that historical record but it's rare.

SPEAKER_36

Still on slide 13, so I understand that the legal settlements outside council is not part of the legal department's budget, but how is this estimated in budgets going forward?

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, I think I would defer to Greg to talk about that.

And I would assume since it's legal settlements, that might be an executive session topic that would be useful.

All right.

Can we go to the next slide?

SPEAKER_15

I don't know if you guys can see it.

Can you hear me?

SPEAKER_39

Director Rivera, please.

SPEAKER_15

Thank you.

SPEAKER_16

I don't see the slide now.

Let me see.

On slide 14, and maybe this was discussed, I'm sorry, I had to get a little guy into the bathtub, so I might not have heard it, but under expenditures, I see vacant position savings, A, how is that an expenditure?

And B, are those, you know, positions that we obviously want to fill?

Because I'm worried that we're calling it a savings, but at the same time, you know, we desperately need some of these positions to be filled, especially, I know, like, in one of our special classrooms.

So can you expand upon that?

SPEAKER_04

The way it's displayed on the slide is that it's a source of revenue not revenue but it's a source of income that we didn't anticipate because we had vacancies to the tune of about twenty five million dollars.

And the discussion we had a little bit earlier was the superintendent and his team are looking closely at all the vacancies to make sure that we're not just.

Replacing positions because they've always been there but really looking at them to see if there's some synergy or efficiencies that we can gain by Combining things or looking at things a little bit differently.

And so it's a savings and not an expenditure.

So yes, the The display of that probably could be a little bit clearer.

Thank you

SPEAKER_39

Any more questions about the last eight slides or so?

That was around our annual financial report.

Any commentary around how that's represented?

We want to make sure, again, it's clear and coherent.

SPEAKER_24

Yeah I I don't know.

And this maybe is what Director Slung mentioned.

If if I think this is a great practice to look at the actuals from the year before.

Is this something we can expect to continue and be able to compare year over year to the trend question that was asked.

SPEAKER_04

Yes.

SPEAKER_24

And is that valuable for you as well as.

SPEAKER_04

Absolutely.

Linda and I are very excited about this.

Great.

Great.

SPEAKER_19

Thank you.

SPEAKER_39

All right so the governor released his budget on December 13th and the highlights are focusing on special education and support to school district staff.

However this is a proposal and the House and the Senate will offer their own their own proposals.

So this could be moderately different or radically different so.

We won't know what the final supplemental operating budget is until March 7th, the last day of the legislative session, hopefully.

And so, Director Rankin, do you have any additional statements around the governor's budget?

I know you've been keeping a close watch on it.

You may know more about it than any of us.

SPEAKER_24

I do.

Thank you.

So it's good to remember that the governor's budget is a proposal.

The governor basically presents to the legislature here's what I think we should finalize for the rest of the year.

And then yes the Senate and the House will each make budget proposals and then they'll just like any other bill bring it together and try to hash out some kind of agreement.

So this says per the document that the governor put out with his budget the governor's proposed 2024 supplemental budget prioritizes Washington special education students and provides much needed support to district staff.

These investments will continue to support the growing needs of Washington students and school employees.

Kind of.

So the governor's proposed budget does have in it raising the cap on special education.

The cap is when we evaluate kids for disabilities and the need for special education.

If you qualify you qualify.

Children are evaluated by a psychologist specialist in child development and teach educators and staff.

It's not easy to get an IEP.

You have to meet your child has to meet requirements that are determined at the federal level in 13 different categories of disability.

You also can have a disability and not qualify for an IEP.

So the in the general population people with disabilities are about one in five is an estimate.

Our state provides additional funds to districts on a per pupil basis based on the number of students who are qualified for an IEP.

So every student has a general education allocation.

Then if you qualify for an IEP they also say OK here's this much more allocation.

It doesn't go right to that student.

It goes to the district's general special education fund until.

Our state has a limit on how many kids they think should be disabled basically which is a real civil rights issue as you can imagine.

So it used to be capped at 13.5 percent.

The cap was raised last year to 15 percent.

We by the end of the school year hover I think somewhere closer to 17 percent.

There are some districts across the state that don't identify that many students.

There are some that identify more.

The worry is that oh if we remove the cap districts will just pass out IEPs like confetti and our budget will go through the roof.

That's not true.

You have to.

It's an evaluation for a disability right.

This is a civil rights and access issue for students and there's not a limit to how many children are allowed to be disabled and access education.

But there is in Washington State.

So in terms of the supplemental budget it does prioritize by proposing lifting that again to 17.5 percent point to 5 percent.

There is a bill in the Senate that also is proposing that we have supported it as an increase.

However the elimination of the cap to meet the needs of our students and.

acknowledge their civil rights to access education according to federal law would require that it be eliminated.

17.25 is better than 15. There still will be districts that identify more students.

So the governor's proposed budget does make that investment.

Eliminating it would be better.

So but here's the very kind of tricky thing is that there's a capital gains tax that was voters approved it with the understanding that that would supplement already existing educational investments.

The governor's budget sweeps that into ongoing operating costs and diverts other funds away from K-12.

So it's not actually a net increase.

And it's also not what voters approved when they approved the capital gains tax.

And the problem with that is that the capital gains tax this year has yielded significantly more dollars than anticipated but that won't necessarily do that every year.

So the supplementation of funds is is a problem.

So there are positives there are negatives there are things that we are watching.

And again yeah the governor's budget is a proposal and proposals come from from the other from the legislative bodies as well.

Yes.

SPEAKER_06

Oh sorry Director Hersey.

I just had a quick question on the capital gains tax.

It's my understanding that the vast majority of the capital gains tax we wouldn't have seen anything really in K-12.

Correct.

If I'm not mistaken most of it goes to early learning.

SPEAKER_24

Early learning and the school construction school construction.

SPEAKER_06

So capital.

SPEAKER_24

So the early learning portion of it is is committed.

SPEAKER_06

Yes.

SPEAKER_24

It's the above that.

That was.

More loosely committed but still committed to funding K-12 expenditures across the state.

That money is at risk of supplantation.

SPEAKER_06

OK.

So would with that would even with supplementation is this supplementation supplementation whatever the word is even with the moving of funds would there be less restrictions on the funds that actually came in to where we could use them outside of school construction.

And that doesn't need to be answered right now if I'm super interested.

So if you could find it later.

SPEAKER_24

Basically capital funds are we don't want to replace operating funds with capital funds that may or may not be there in the next year.

So that would be the danger.

SPEAKER_13

And in that case couldn't we then just use the money that was coming in if it was allocated for capital funds then we would we could release money in our budget that we had set aside for capital funds.

SPEAKER_24

No.

OK.

Because we we are capital funding comes from local levies.

and it is legally restricted to that purpose.

You can't you can't swap capital funding over to operating costs so our operating costs general borrow from that right.

No.

SPEAKER_35

Yes.

SPEAKER_24

Oh OK.

OK.

And it's very very limited the time frame that it would have if we were to borrow from that we would be.

It's usually done with a cash flow issue that's going to be reimbursed very quickly.

It has to be approved by the legislature it's very tightly controlled.

We cannot ask our voters to approve a capital levy for capital funds and then say oh actually we're gonna do this other thing with it and that's not only you know violating the trust and the will of the voters but it is highly restricted by the state as an equity issue which it is but also they should fund capital so.

SPEAKER_39

So let's go to the next slide and look at the budget impact right here locally at SPS and Dr. Buddleman will you take it away.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah.

So there are a few areas the governor's budget contemplates that first one we talked a little bit about.

So 3.8 percent COLA for staff.

His budget has 17.2 million dollars to cover that.

But our costs would actually be about twenty five point eight million dollars so about an eight point six million dollar reduction would result from that.

The thing we were just talking about sort of midway down the page there the special ed cap change from 15 percent to 17 and a quarter.

We're currently estimating Seattle to have 15.78 percent of students with IEPs which would result in about four point seven million dollars in additional funding.

SPEAKER_24

Sorry just to add to that our students that are identified that are over the cap.

It doesn't mean that we don't provide services.

I want to be really clear.

We do.

We are ethically legally morally required to provide those services.

They are.

It's again a civil rights issue to allow to provide access to education for students with disabilities.

So even though the state doesn't doesn't fund beyond that cap we still provide services and support and it ends up being supplemented by our local levies which are supposed to be for enrichment.

But so it's basically which do we want to do we want to not fulfill our obligation to students and IDEA and federal law and not fund above 15 percent.

Or do we want to use what's supposed to be enrichment to actually fund basic education.

That is the choice that we have because it is chronically underfunded at the state level and at the federal level actually.

SPEAKER_04

The other thing on this slide is the bottom number there you'll see the planning assumption prior to the governor's budget was about a six point eight million dollar reduction.

So his budget three point seven million dollars more than we anticipated if that were to become the budget law and it won't.

But this is just a projection on what the governor's impact would have been for us.

just for a sense of scale.

I think the next slide is about the legislature.

SPEAKER_39

So just very briefly you all can see the key dates here in the last slide we talked or the governor's update slide we talked about March 7th being the last day for the regular session.

So This is really what it looks like.

We've already started in earnest and now you'll see the corresponding dates here.

So Director Rankin any legislative update comments around where we need to be perhaps and from our legislative agenda.

SPEAKER_24

I gave a very vague brief update, but basically there is potential to make progress monetarily, even though it's not a budget year, but there's a number of things that tend to swing around as tradeoffs are made and bills fall by the wayside.

But we'll continue to you know check on those staff will analyze the impact of different bills as they evolve.

And I sent out an email to directors today of just a reminder of what we do during legislative session.

If you want information contact Bev and Bev will get that from the appropriate staff and then distribute it to everybody.

We are just things move very quickly and we're constant conversation with our lobbyist with other partners advocating for the first similar things.

And you know I talked to board directors from other districts a lot.

I forgot to say in my comments I as a WASDA board member but I would be going anyway as a legislative liaison I will be in Olympia not this weekend but next weekend for like four three three days and where WASDA has legislative conference and any director is welcome to attend.

You can come down for the day you can come down for an afternoon.

But I will be there as a WASDA board member but also representing.

us and we will be meeting with.

We have some some sessions that are just that it's in collaboration with some other state organizations around education.

And then on the Monday I think we have meetings with different committees.

And so I am excited to tell you all about that and actually not to put you on the spot Dr. Jones but if you want to join me for any of that let's coordinate schedules.

SPEAKER_39

We'll make it happen.

Absolutely.

So this next section and this will be the last section we'll talk about the update on the budget development process for 24, 25. Dr. Buttleman will kind of walk us through where we are right now and then what we're referencing as the levers that we're going to pull to really get us into balance.

So, Dr. Buttleman, please.

Can we go?

Yes.

SPEAKER_04

And this is loosely based on the resolution that you all passed in December, sort of the presentation.

This slide is back to our Lego metaphor from previously.

State Superintendent Reykdal has a set of Legos in his office that he uses to show the different sources of funding and how some of them are more sustainable than others and so We've sort of adopted that on some level and those red, the red on the slide, are one-time things that have been used to plug the deficit in previous years.

And so the next two years you see on the slide are the year we're talking about in terms of developing budget and then the following year and the projected deficits at this time and how we fill those in using one-time funds like that $32 million we talked about earlier.

Ongoing funds like reductions or revenue increases or legislation like legislative funds like we've been talking about right now.

So just setting the context here a little bit.

Next slide please.

One of the tools I think to take Dr. Jarvis's words that was in the resolution is reductions and adjustments in central office staffing and expenses.

So an update on where that stands in the 20. three four budget construction.

There was an assumption of an 18 million dollar further reduction at the John Stanford Center and the associated services that come from here.

On top of the 32 million dollars that was reduced out of last year's budget.

So that's where we started in October we sent that information out to leadership said can you get to this 18 million dollars.

And now we're sort of digesting that information trying to start to make decisions around how we can not impact services here or at the schools and continue to do the work that needs to be done in the school district.

And so you'll see there the process of meeting with budget managers has begun this week where the budget team meets with the managers tries to better help everybody better understand the budget and where reductions or resort or synergies or efficiencies could be gained going into the 24 5. One of the areas of recommendation that the superintendent will have will how to approach any reductions here at the central office and what impacts they may or may not have at the schools or otherwise.

Fred you were here last year when this was going on.

Do you have anything you want to add?

SPEAKER_07

Yeah.

So our target for fiscal year.

23-24 had been $36 million, which was a much higher, you know, as a proportion and as an absolute number, much larger reduction and adjustment than the central office had ever experienced before.

And so it aimed high, and 32 was actually an enormous accomplishment on the part of central office leaders.

We are trying to get into kind of multi-year framework of how we think about this.

This is not particularly sophisticated but the 18 million that we modeled for this year was just 50 percent of our target for last year.

That's how we came up with that number.

Not to spoil any punch lines for Dr. Buddleman.

Staff have identified a number in excess of this and Dr. Buddleman's team is working diligently with.

departments to see so what are those you know work harder on risks and the impacts of that.

We're not going to recommend.

I doubt we're going to recommend anywhere near that size of number but a significant piece of it half let's say as you know seems like that's within the realm of possibility.

So I guess I just want to point out that central office departments have really dug deep and worked hard to find this and Again, this is a totally new territory for this district in terms of the amount of collaboration, the amount of creativity, and now we really have to weigh each one, so which of these are theoretically possible and which of these are something that we would recommend to Dr. Jones.

SPEAKER_36

Does the 18 million, or I guess it will be in excess of 18 million, does that include the 5 million from bus transportation?

SPEAKER_07

No.

SPEAKER_36

No.

SPEAKER_07

That's over and above.

That's over and above.

And again, people did a good job of finding that number in excess of 18 million.

Many of those things, we've already identified, oh, the risks of this are too high.

But I... People have come to play that you know we're asking them to do the impossible and they're giving us options which is will be important to the superintendent and the board and then.

SPEAKER_04

There's impacts on how people do work currently that will have to be different in the future if we have two people from different departments approaching the same task separately.

Now one department needs to take that on because the other department has less resources things like that or what are being wrestled with now in terms of how to approach this.

SPEAKER_36

a little bit more detail on the direction that you gave to the departments and what their process was.

SPEAKER_07

We've asked them to identify risk we asked them to make the connection That has been alluded to earlier in this meeting tonight about so how does this relate to our strategic goals?

How would it impact our strategic goals?

Are there embedded equity issues and service delivery issues for students?

You know, where can we maintain students where?

Can we focus on?

sustainable changes that are really related to kind of back office business functions and not direct service to students and not having an impact on educational outcomes.

SPEAKER_24

What's included in risk to who.

SPEAKER_07

risk to those, all risk in our enterprise risk management profile that we are trying to mature are risk to the district's goals which are established by this group.

SPEAKER_24

Thank you.

SPEAKER_39

And I'll add, you know, central office exists to support schools.

And so we look at it through that lens.

What's what's going to lessen our support to schools?

Is there is there a way around that?

By default, we are.

It's this they've represented as as elegant and innovative.

It is it is all that.

But there are real challenges with customer service at the end of the day.

How do we provide the most robust support to schools with less staff.

While I like to say we can do business process redesign and we can find efficiencies and we can get leaner in terms of you know again our process, there are still impacts and we haven't realized all of them but I just want to give the team kudos.

They've been really focused on You know our core mission to provide support to schools and so to the extent that we can prevent that that that's been the prevailing metric or measure that they've used to say what's eligible to be reduced or diminished.

SPEAKER_04

Go to the next slide and category.

Another one of the items in the resolution that's being looked at is school allocations and the funding that goes to schools and here's timeline around that.

In March there's lots of activity around this where schools are finalizing their budget their staffing.

The HR team is very involved in that, trying to get schools all staffed up for the fall start.

And so are there some levers or some changes that could be made to that way we allocate funding, which is the weighted staffing standards model, WSS.

There's a little bit of explanation on that on the next slide, so consideration if there are changes that we can make to school allocations.

is another thing that is being investigated as part of this budget development process.

Can we go to the next slide?

So this is just three bullet points on a very complex process for how staffing is allocated to the schools.

This has been in place for more than a decade I believe with Seattle Public Schools and I think there's folks who have lots of opinions about this but this is the current way that staffing is allocated out to the schools.

There's a committee that's primarily principals some SEA representatives.

budget and HR and instructional staff who meet talk about this make recommendations around how to do the staffing for the schools going forward with what's changing in terms of enrollment and other factors.

So just wanted to highlight that one.

Transportation is another one.

I believe last year and sort of confirmed this year if there was consideration and move towards a three bell schedule that could save about a five million dollars.

I know transportation is exploring other options to see if there's other savings that could be gained with transportation efficiencies or changes to how transportation is delivered to students.

SPEAKER_24

And transportation is also something that is coming.

It came up last session.

There was actually a really solid bill to fully fund out to districts the cost of providing special people transportation which includes students with disabilities who need transportation as connected to their to their IEP.

Homeless.

Foster.

There's some there's some federal categories that we are required to provide transportation.

It's not fully funded.

So that bill got by the end of last session got really.

Hacked away at kind of the special education bills kind of picked up in terms of their energy and investment and the transportation bill got cut down more and more.

So there is a little bit more conversation still happening around transportation in the session this year.

However last session when we looked at special education funding and and worked with partners across the state and saw that we had some some commonalities in our percentage of deficit in doing that same exercise.

For transportation we are not aligned.

We are very much an outlier.

So I'm just I know I don't want everybody to have.

I don't want to repeat the like.

Nobody wants to disrupt schedules.

We don't want to do this.

The fact of the matter is a three bell schedule is something that and I'm not endorsing a three bell schedule just saying the reality is that a three bell schedule is something that almost all other districts use.

It is very unusual that we are the largest district in the state and we do to squim is moving from one tier to two.

And they are delivering students to I think two locations because of congestion.

So this is just in terms of scale up down.

It's it's.

Nobody wants anybody to suffer but I'm just saying are what we are allocated by the state to spend on transportation.

We spend again that amount through levy dollars in SPS.

So going to two vendors has improved service and has added about six million dollars to cost.

Now all these things are trade offs right.

Maybe that improvement to service is is the best and most most worthy area for those six million dollars to go to.

But we can't pretend that it doesn't that these choices don't have an impact.

And so having a two bells to two tiered bell schedule again and this is an issue that I've been heavily involved in with for like a decade.

Going to two tiers allowed for the scientifically and research backed support for later start times for secondary students and allowed us not to have super early and super late bell times for elementary students.

And it comes at a cost.

So I'm just 30. We are allocated about 30 million dollars I think from the state for transportation and we spend 30 million dollars more from other sources meaning local levies to supplement that.

Again maybe that is the best most worthy use of that 30 million dollars.

But this is again a choice.

So and also when we look at it in the state and we're advocating with other districts and we're so far an outlier it's it's.

We actually make it a little bit easier for legislators to say well it doesn't matter how much money we give you.

You guys are all overspending.

So and I'm not that's not an indictment of anybody.

That's not an endorsement of any one choice or another.

I'm just saying that like that's what this that's why we're having these budget conversations because choices that we make and priorities that we fund.

Have an impact in a system where we don't have unlimited access to money for whatever we want.

SPEAKER_07

I Would like to note that we made some changes this year those savings were realized by balancing the number of buses across two tiers which did create scheduled changes for 12 schools, but in in the context of the previous questions about risk You know what was?

We were able to maintain service to everyone and reduce the number of buses we put on the road by about 15%.

A single yellow bus that serves 180 days of schools costs us approaching $150,000 a year.

So reducing 40 buses is significant savings.

If you use each, the math is not that complicated.

If we have the remaining 300 buses we use if we use each one three times a day for that same hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year instead of just twice a day in the morning and twice in the afternoon you can do the math.

SPEAKER_24

We do also have environmental impacts and we have this board has made commitments to resource conservation.

And speaking of which I see Director Rivera's hand up.

SPEAKER_16

Thank you.

Yeah, I know we're not going to have this full conversation right now because it is a big one, but since apparently we will be eventually talking about transportation options, I want to just make a point to think back to when we did last look at moving to three tiers.

It wasn't the idea of going three tiers that caused um the concerns it was that it was the insistence that each tier had to be an hour apart from each other so we were spreading out morning times over a three-hour period which was putting kids on the you know street corner for their bus at near six in the morning so uh moving to three tiers itself is not a horrible idea it was i think with the The straw that broke that one was that, again, they had to be an hour apart.

And so I don't know if that is still the case.

If we can shorten that, I think a lot of people would have been open to it.

But we're looking at really scary early bus times for some kids.

So anyhow, I just want to remind us all what was one of the major issues back then when we looked at it.

But yeah, I'm looking forward to talking about it again.

SPEAKER_20

Thank you.

Director Hersey.

SPEAKER_06

Thanks for that reminder Director Rivera-Smith.

Two things first.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

I've been saying it for two years.

Director Rivera please forgive me.

So that actually is a question that I have is when we were going through it the first time were the calculations in terms of timing and traffic given that we've had such a heavy return to work I think we've all noticed that the traffic has been ridiculous.

Would it even be possible or did we model what it would look like to do anything less than an hour between those tiers.

SPEAKER_07

I think the final proposal was a bit less.

It was more on the order of 50 minutes.

SPEAKER_06

OK.

SPEAKER_07

But we're not saying like 30 is possible.

I don't you know we we do have an hour between our tears right now.

So I think we would certainly put pressure on the system as much to see.

And this is where perhaps having two carriers can also help us on you know what are the size of the routes what is kind of the topography of the district.

SPEAKER_06

Who we offer transportation services to in general.

SPEAKER_07

How.

how close we can have our assignment plan to neighborhood schools.

There's a lot of factors.

We would certainly want to shorten that as well.

Again the risk that we're really with transportation is we.

can't have our transportation system because of poor service lead to absenteeism among students.

So it has to be workable.

Money aside if we're not actually getting students to the buildings in time for instruction we've done so much damage.

SPEAKER_24

Yeah that will definitely impact progress on our goals.

SPEAKER_06

Real quick, one other thing just wanted to say for us and me too.

We are answering questions that nobody is asking.

So in terms of making sure that like the folks who are actually listening can track our conversations as well as like making sure that we're moving through this in a timely fashion, just a reminder about our governance model and how questions are supposed to be delivered and received and all that good stuff.

SPEAKER_24

Thanks Director Hersey.

I was just going to say let's not get too far into only talking about transportation for the rest of the meetings.

We've got a few more slides to go.

SPEAKER_07

I think I can bet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No I and for all sorts of operational agreement reasons I think staff would concur.

SPEAKER_24

Director Song.

SPEAKER_36

My request is part of our deliberation on this potential solution is that we take the time to analyze what were the impacts from changing the start times for the 12 schools, particularly around absenteeism.

So if you can show us evidence of what happened, that would be helpful in making a determination on this solution.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_04

All right, moving on.

We can go to the next challenging tool, fees.

So this is just a little bit of historical background for the board and others that Seattle Public Schools used to charge fees for the period of time from 2007 to 2015. And then a generous donation came in which negated the need for that fee.

That donation has now been spent.

And so there's a little data there on students and participation in athletic programs in both middle and high school and what percentage of those students are considered low income that participate in athletic programs.

Part of the board's questions are around what the student impact on things would be and so Starting to look in and unpeel some of that information on things like fees The other fee that's been talked about a couple times is charging some sort of convenience fee For families who use school pay to pay for things that they need at the school to have done a little bit of polling of other districts in the area and and there's at least a half dozen who do charge some sort of convenience or merchant fee at this time to families who choose to use a credit card online.

SPEAKER_24

My comment about fees is one that I've made before which is that we by state law right now there are certain identified students that should have fees waived and are not.

I know personally of students in the foster system who are still being charged when they show up to support their friends at a basketball game and they should not be charged.

So I don't know where that is in the whole structure but it's I We need to address that before we talk about potentially increasing costs to those students who shouldn't be paying anything who may be asked to pay more for things they're supposed to already have waived.

SPEAKER_99

Thank you.

SPEAKER_04

We can go to the next slide.

I think Chief Podesta addressed this one.

SPEAKER_07

This was called out in the resolution.

This is really a long term strategy.

The district for the last few decades has really maintain kind of a real property management strategy of land banking and that we don't look at some of our assets as potential financial instruments.

And so, you know, given what, so there will be three kind of layers of analysis that we will do more long-range program planning to satisfy ourselves that we don't really have an educational purpose or a district purpose for a piece of property.

And we're going to get some help to get to kind of a long range portfolio management for those assets.

An example would be the district owns a parking lot next to Memorial Stadium at Seattle Center.

We Get revenue from that parking lot.

We don't Have a definite program use for it at uses district.

It's currently delivering about a 3.3 percent yield as an asset, which is not a great return and so that's a Different way.

We want to think about all these properties.

Do they create financial opportunities for us?

And then also we want to think about Work with the community on some of the highest and best uses for some of these property.

That's another example is Surface parking in downtown Seattle the best thing for our community also And what the market is telling us is probably not if this is what you're making on this very valuable asset so there's only I would say there's a handful of properties where this analysis actually makes sense and it is um, this is not a 24 25 strategy is probably not a 25 26 strategy but it's some there somewhere in the future and particularly as we're talking about loans and financing mechanisms and replenishing our economic stabilization account.

It may make sense for the district to swap a real property asset for the cash that we would like to have in our reserves might might make more sense because they're both making about the same amount of revenue on an annual basis so.

This will be something we'll be talking about again, not in the current fiscal year or the next one, but one or two after that.

SPEAKER_04

Fred just touched on this and we talked a little bit about it earlier.

The $104 million deficit projection assumes beginning repayment of the $42 million economic stabilization fund, the savings, the rainy day fund.

One thing the board could decide to do is delay repayment of that that first six point six million dollar payment for the 2425 budget balancing exercise so this is just some language around that pulled from the policies and the resolutions that Were in play as last year's budget process and just highlighting that that's a tool that's something that I We've explored and this is the option that the board can have for the 24-5 budget approval Next one So the district has continued to sort of whittle its contingency balances over the last few years as the budget's gotten more and more tight.

There's approximately 10 million dollars that sort of remains to round out the edges of things that come up in a billion dollar budget.

over the course of a year.

The district's also gotten a little more precise in how it's estimating things and how it's doing business.

And so there's potential to reduce some of that contingency a bit further, limit some of that flexibility and be more precise in operations and how business is conducted.

It's one of the tools that we're kind of diving deeply into to see what the risk trade-offs there in terms of reducing that contingency balance could be.

if there's significant shifts in things in the district around transportation or schools or options or whatever the things may be there may be more risk involved in some of those things and so I want to factor those into the whole picture of the long-term view of how the the budget may be balanced over the next five to ten years.

So just another tool that's in the toolkit that there's some significant savings that could result from that if the risk is deemed tolerable to do that.

The next one I think we talked a little bit about already.

So potentially using some of the one time self-help funds or the school carry forwards as a one time measure to balance the budget.

This is just a snippet from our budget instruction book.

that the school leadership gets every year on how the budget comes together and how the different options available to them.

So just we talked about this one already so I don't want to belabor it unless there's questions about that.

We touched a bit.

Director Briggs asked a couple of questions about the capital fund and how it might participate in this budget balancing.

This is a cut and paste from the RCW related to this notion of potentially borrowing from our capital fund to balance the budget.

So just wanted that language in the presentation We're working with OSPI on how this might work if this is something Seattle decides to pursue Or other districts could pursue this as well.

It was not unique to Seattle so the notion of borrowing temporarily from our capital fund and to do some budget balancing that's not for cash flow reasons but for balancing the budget and how that would work through the different systems and the different regulations that govern K-12 education in the state of Washington.

So working on that, trying to figure out what the The reality of how that would play out will look like with the superintendent of public instructions office.

SPEAKER_07

And if I could add that this is something we considered for the current year and got support from the legislature to amend that language to extend the length of inter fund loans, which typically before really were only for cash flow problems and had to be paid back.

within a fiscal year.

We have a longer period of time now.

So this would be a potential solution to get us to balance again in perhaps by 25-26 to use this temporary authority from the legislature.

SPEAKER_24

But I mean that would essentially be creating a deficit for the future year.

I mean I mean it is money that we have to find twice.

SPEAKER_07

It allows you to look at solutions that you need more than one fiscal year to put in place whether it's restructuring our buildings bigger changes.

And the world we were living before is, well, if you can't realize the savings in a single fiscal year, you can't really do it.

So this is a bridge loan.

It is not advisable if we don't actually have a strategy for we're going to take on this initiative and it will lead to savings.

We just need two years to get there.

Other than if we're not doing that, this doesn't make sense.

You have to, it's financing.

We can't say that's future Fred's problem.

People have said that in the past and that's why we are where we are.

SPEAKER_04

And we're being careful to model at least five years on some of these.

So in this one in particular, it'd be paid back within a couple years.

There'd be an interest component to that, so we'd have to estimate what the interest on that would be to repay the capital fund.

And so trying to take that longer term look at some of these one-time solutions and how we would resolve those over that period of time.

SPEAKER_36

I'm not sure this isn't a fully formed question, but I think my question is related to maybe contingency balances.

What are strategies that we can pursue so that we're leaving ourselves enough give in our budget so that we're not putting ourselves in a similar position to what happened in October where we had to rebalance some of our classrooms?

And I'm also wondering about the timing of us closing our books and when we had information we know actually we ended the previous year with a larger balance than we expected because we had more vacancies and that perhaps we may be able to apply some of that money to soften some of the inevitable rebalancing that we would have to do in October.

So I don't know that's like a fully formed question, but just something that I think is important to understand as we're thinking about the budget.

SPEAKER_04

as the district continues to evolve and in part out of necessity because of the challenges that are happening with the budget with the structural issue.

Both of those things are being hopefully addressed more proactively going forward.

There isn't Sort of time to wait until the end of the year now to see how we ended the year.

And so trying to be more intentional throughout the year and how we're paying the bills on in the way that we're paying them and by the right fund and so that everything is lining up earlier than the very end of the year.

Has it always been necessary at an institution of public education because there are more resources available and so trying to be more precise in some of those operational details around staffing around how we.

Use the grants fully and things like that.

So yes.

Is yes an appropriate answer to the unformed question.

The other way we're thinking that we could potentially leverage the capital fund and other districts do this already is using some of the interest that's generated generated by the capital fund to pay for instructional supplies equipment or capital outlay and so Seattle Public Schools hasn't been doing this previously but there's some potential utilization of some of the capital fund interest making sure not to.

packed the capital program in a negative way of course.

But exploring if that is something that makes sense around how to further leverage the capital fund to help the budget for the short term and potentially for the long term.

Fred do you want to say anything more about that or.

SPEAKER_07

No it covered it well.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_04

So those kind of a summary of the things we're looking at or that's a summary of the things we presented today that we're looking at as part of those nine tools.

The next slide I think is just a reminder of the twenty five six can keep that at least two year look going and I don't know if Dr. Jones you want to speak to this or just.

SPEAKER_39

This is just maybe a reminder, maybe first time realization but 2025-26 we did put an element in the resolution to speak to potential for 2025-26 and the first bullet around school consolidation to be implemented in 2025-26 school year and beyond.

grade-level reorganizations and program adjustments and restructuring.

These are all very much in consideration.

They're in play now in terms of looking at doing the analysis and so when we get ready to do these, it's going to start sooner than later.

It won't be we'll start this in earnest a year from now.

We need to start really looking at these as potential and real possibilities now.

So didn't want to I want to emphasize that this is right around the corner where some decisions are going to be made going forward here.

Dr. Jarvis can you just speak to real quickly what a grade level reorganization might look like and use a really great ninth grade analogy.

So I was the first ninth grade class at Franklin High School so that's a great level reorganization but can you put a finer point on that.

SPEAKER_03

Well some of you may guess I've been around a while.

So I've watched great level reorganizations be used in both facility issues and using the facilities so.

The example of the ninth grade if the high school is getting overcrowded the ninth grade gets moved out to Their own building or nobody wants them But in this case as you'd be looking at the really the small elementary schools You could say which child do you love most?

You move the sixth grade back to the elementaries and increase the size of the elementaries and do something really hard on your middle schools.

But but you could do that in a sense of if you were trying to avoid some of the well you're really trying to buttress the enrollment at a downtime of the elementary.

So it can be used both for the how do we buttress the small schools and avoid the drain on the budget of those.

But you do have to say that student can only be counted in one place.

That means you have to do some you'd have to do some significant work to your middle schools and say what is the seventh and eighth grade program look like.

The high schools right now both in terms of size and enrollment projections are a number of years away from being impacted like the elementaries are right now.

So for all practical purposes they are capable of taking the adjustments in stride without major hits to their programs unlike the elementaries.

The elementaries get to the point of you if you only have 31 kindergartners It's really hard to have one class of 20 and figure out what to do with the others So that puts us into more and more split classrooms that I It's simply there, you're seeing one of the school districts, I think it's Olympia, that is electing to close a middle school and move sixth grade back to elementary because that was their value choice.

If I had to close a school, would I rather close an elementary, a neighborhood elementary, or a middle school?

Some people would argue that middle schools are loved less than elementary schools.

SPEAKER_39

And of course we definitely address and analyze the pedagogical impact.

So some some would say 6 through 8th organization is better than a 7 through 9. I don't know but we'll we would definitely consider that.

Director Rankin you have a question.

SPEAKER_24

Well I just for this part this part cannot come soon enough for me.

We this is.

You know I appreciate what we see here but also we're we're looking at one more year and we already know this but we're looking at one more year of doing things the same as they've been done and just trying to make it cost less.

And we have to actually make changes.

The outcomes of our regardless of the budget situation we know that if we continue as we always are or as we always have the students that have always benefit and benefited and the students that have always been harmed.

are going to continue to be the same.

We're going to have the same outcomes and we're not going to see progress towards our goals.

So if the way things have been being done is producing the outcome that we have had we're not going to get a different outcome by continuing to do things the same.

So I'm I'm Understand that what we see here is is this.

These are these are areas we're looking at decreasing expenditures that are possible to achieve a balanced budget for next year.

What I actually that's very.

Deficit based and doesn't have anything to do with kids.

What I want to see for 2025 26 is a budget centered on meeting the needs of our students.

And that will look very very different for a number of reasons.

But it has to look different.

It can't just be about the number of schools that we have.

So in terms of grade level like is there is there research out there that standalone early learning centers that have preschool through second grade improve literacy like.

Let's do that.

Is there, I mean, some research that I've seen recently says one of the greatest impacts on a student's academic success is being able to have a consistent teacher, have the same teacher, do looping for more than one year.

I mean, there's all these different things that I think instead of looking at it from what do we have to lose, And this is where my designer brain is going to come in.

What is our objective?

What's the thing we're trying to get to?

It's not just a balanced budget.

A balanced budget has to be part of that.

But what we're actually trying to get to is moving the needle and supporting students and meeting our goals for student outcomes.

And we don't have to be locked into what we already have.

In fact we must not maintain what we already have because it has not been yielding the outcomes that we expect.

And it's certainly not going to yield more outcomes when we're spreading everything so thinly and having counselors have to go to three different schools.

So if we have a limit on counselors like say I don't know what it is but say it's 500 students to one they could be going to two schools that each have 498 students to make up a full time job.

That's that's.

That's not that's not sustainable and it's not supporting our kids.

So I would much rather have you know one counselor be able to serve students at one school in one reasonable number instead of getting as close as we can to the most unreasonable number and then doubling it and having them spend half that.

That's just like.

bonkers.

That's just why would we keep doing that.

We can't keep doing that.

So I really I understand that we're up.

You know we only have a few months to resolve next year's budget.

And I understand that that was a decision that was made not to make any drastic changes but like we have to make drastic changes.

We have to align what we do with what we are trying to achieve.

Those cannot be disconnected.

So the 25 26 looking at I just really really urge us all to not lie to ourselves that.

We're screwed and we can't do better for our kids because it's just not true.

We have such a wealth of resources in terms of people in terms of knowledge in terms of love for our children and you know all these things.

We cannot pretend that any change is bad because actually for some kids this change is really necessary.

So I just can't we cannot get to this soon enough even though next year we're sort of doing some some bridge solutions which I which I understand but.

SPEAKER_16

Oh Director Rivera.

Sorry.

Thank you.

I can't tell if there's a line.

No, thank you.

I really appreciate what you just said because I think we all get afraid that we hear from families and people that the disruption these things cause and disruption sounds like a really bad thing, but disruptions actually can be a very good thing, you know, if done, you know, thoughtfully and out of necessity because we do need to disrupt some things and I really appreciate that we shouldn't be afraid of that.

And I know in the vein of other long term thinking that might that will be drastically different but might actually be a really good thing is I will And I heard someone say at a recent meeting I went to, when Dr. Jones had the staff meeting, somebody brought it up there about a modified calendar.

It's a big change, but research shows the benefit to students and outcomes.

And so anyways, that's just something I think we should look at over the next couple of years.

model calendar.

People don't know what that means.

It basically means year round school.

And there are models that districts are doing it in the state and definitely would like to have a conversation about that.

It is again a long term thing because it can't happen overnight at all.

But I want to start out there while I can.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_20

Thank you Lisa.

Director Hersey.

SPEAKER_06

I could not agree with both statements.

I just got made more.

The only thing that I will say is that, like, disruption is good when it's been socialized.

And that's really where, like, let's not pretend that folks in Seattle don't like change.

We are one of the most rapidly growing cities in this country.

There are robots that will give you parking tickets and, like, deliver you food at certain restaurants.

Like, we're obsessed with change.

The problem, though, is, is that, and I've learned this from, you know, visiting a few schools in the South, and especially when those types of changes happen in the middle of a school year when a child has already made a strong relationship with their educator, it makes it way more difficult for folks to trust us in terms of, like, actually having kids in mind instead of just, like, getting to the bottom dollar, right?

And we all know that that's not the case.

But the people who are living with those changes day to day don't so I think that it's just in that's not necessarily even for staff, as much as it is for the board in terms of being more on top of figuring out like how can we be.

the wayfinders the good messengers and like really push to have information so that we can do a better job of socializing uh things that are happening or that are coming down the pipe and i really like the fact that we are doing this longitudinal planning because it's going to have to like put us into a position to where we need to expedite the decisions that we're going to be made.

Right.

So when Superintendent Jones brings us a budget like we need to be sure and clear that it is then on us to go out and let folks know about like how is this going to impact your students.

At the same time, we also need to be in a position to where we have clear information from staff because what we know is that when we make these decisions and they trickle down to buildings, it's not going to be the same thing that we voted on.

It's just not.

And that's going to be the case with any large system that we're trying to shepherd here.

But I did just want to really drive home the fact that like based on the conversations that I've had with folks change is not a bad thing and folks are not afraid of change.

It's change that they haven't had a time to prepare their like five year olds to that can be really disruptive to their educational experience.

SPEAKER_24

Or that feels like change with no context like just just it was like this now it's like this for no reason.

SPEAKER_06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_24

Thank you.

We are.

I'm going to.

There's there's a couple more slides.

I don't know if there's anything that you particularly want to point out about them.

I'm inclined for us to.

SPEAKER_39

I think that last dialogue was a good segue to the survey.

And a survey has illuminated, at least a slice in time, how folks are seeing the world around how we would approach budget balancing.

And so we can see we had a...

December 15th, we had staff respond to survey, and we asked five questions.

Those were rank order.

You all can read those, what the five questions are, but let's go to the next slide.

And so this is data, one through nine.

What we just kind of were alluding to was the number nine, which is the least favorite choice.

And so when we talk about change, we have to be honest with how much change we are ready for.

We know that there's a whole science of change management and getting people ready for change.

And 20% of the people have 80% of the impact because there's that much energy behind what they're thinking about.

And so part of any of our planning has to be bringing people along, has to be providing awareness, and we can't discount the amount of change of management that we need.

We can't discount them.

We typically reference that as engagement, but there's multiple facets to managing change.

And so if we were to go against the grain around what people's desires are because there's a logical reason to do so, we have to double down on the amount of change that we're looking at.

We need to be very clear eyed about changes that we're making.

And just because it makes sense sometimes it doesn't make sense.

And we have to be very realistic realistic about our capacity to our communities capacity internal and external communities capacity to absorb change.

And I don't want us to be underestimating what that may look like.

But nonetheless here here are survey results from staff.

And it's very it's not just interesting data it's data that can that we need to just respect and pay attention to.

Bev I don't know if you want to comment on that I know you're you kind of have the.

the unenviable task of sometimes making what's not pretty pretty and trying to express things that are complex.

So if you have any editorial comments about this, please do.

SPEAKER_05

In terms of community engagement this is just another way a continued way to stay in front of our community through our staff.

We started out or we ended the last portion of the year in December we actually held a staff meeting in this building to talk about what budget looks like and present and following that we released the survey a few more days that it remains open but I suppose if I'm putting Bo or additional words to what Dr. Jones has added, that we can't underestimate what we've learned from the well-resourced schools part one tour, that when we say our schools are our hubs, there's financial, there's social, there's economic impact that goes with whatever decisions that we make.

So it's not just a hub or a place to gather.

Schools are infrastructure.

So whatever we're making decisions on, the double down on how we communicate that, why we came to that decision, and then going back out to have well-resourced schools part two with the levers that we're planning to employ is very, very important.

So that is the portion that I would add.

SPEAKER_39

Thank you.

And I don't have an elegant close to this but we're we're ready to close if you are.

But I think I saw another question comment wisdom.

SPEAKER_36

Was this this list just literally what they were ranking or was there more description about what they were?

SPEAKER_04

They were ranking that list from the resolution.

Yes.

And we've been trying to part of the exercise here is providing more and more information for staff who are dedicated to the schools and their kids.

And so this is first one of the first steps in trying to provide education and context as Dr. Jones and Bev were talking about.

SPEAKER_36

Yeah.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_24

So related to what Director Hersey was saying about socialization I Thank you for sending the survey and for sharing the results for us.

And it feels like a little bit of a setup honestly because now well we said the thing we wanted the least was reductions and adjustments and suppose what you all determine is that the biggest impact on both student outcomes and budget is reductions and adjustments in schools.

So now does this mean well staff said they don't want that.

So when we're socializing and asking questions also this to me indicates something that we should all be super aware of that also relates to what Director Hersey said is is fear.

It's fear of what are you talking about changes.

What does that mean.

Don't do that.

Don't come mess with our school.

And that's an understandable place to be especially given historical patterns and relationships between schools and central office.

That's also something that we really have to work hard to undo and repair because I if I was working in one of our buildings I would rate that as last two because I'd be like are you freaking kidding me after all of.

This year and that year and everything.

Now you're just going to make some changes.

So that's what the combination of the socialization the bringing everybody together and also the it's it's actually we just have to be really careful that we're not just saying what do adults prefer.

And I mean staff and parents what do you prefer.

But in the reality of the constraints that we have and in our collective obligation to our students what changes can we make to best meet the needs of our students and support the entire system and being sustainable in being a great place to work in being a place people want to send their kids.

So I this makes me nervous because it's it honestly it feels like a little bit of a setup.

Well staff asked us and the board doesn't care what we think because they did X Y Z anyway and we said we said we didn't.

We said that was our last choice.

So how can we socialize move this together.

And also we just always have to be talking about.

Like people are going to have preferences and those should be listened to.

But our mission our very reason for existing is to improve outcomes for students.

So those choices shouldn't be made agnostic of that.

So that I'm just that just makes me a little nervous.

And I also want to recognize that I understand why there would be a fear response and I'm not saying oh those people they're just afraid of change.

They're afraid of.

They have trauma from very real consequences from decisions that have been made to them or at them.

So I understand the response of like no no no just just leave us alone.

And that's for us to reflect on.

SPEAKER_13

Yeah Director Briggs.

I'm just I'm confused by the takeaways where it says reduce budget and then consolidate small schools and reduce central office staff when it looks to me like the top two options were lease non-school properties and reduce central office staff.

SPEAKER_04

So that last slide is a qualitative look at the open ended comments that were received.

OK.

So it's not of these nine.

This is just sort of the.

SPEAKER_13

So yeah because I know what the most common because yeah these are cut off or this a couple of these are cut off.

So it's not like reductions and adjustments in school dot dot dot.

So it was unclear what what the actual question was.

And I assumed that that school consolidations was rolled into that option.

But is that is that separate.

So so I guess what you're saying is that people ranked that as their last choice but then in in their written responses they were open to that.

I'm confused.

SPEAKER_39

Yes.

I believe the nine levers, if you will, rank order those nine levers that were in the resolution.

Then we also gave them an opportunity to ask them, what additional ideas do you have?

What are your top concerns?

And the roll-up and the aggregation of those is what you see here.

So in terms of just the levers, that was their rank order.

But in terms of their submittals for their ideas and their thoughts around how we can have the most impact, this was the outcome.

Sophisticated folks are sophisticated.

They can say what they don't like and then they say well this is the reality.

I don't.

So we can dig more into this.

And so President Rankin I think this is a data point and this gives us just some understanding of where folks are right now.

Gives us some understanding of how much awareness and opportunity we need to give folks to maybe talk about impact versus.

intent and I just think it's a one of many times that we'll be in front and working with folks for for solution.

I want to give Dr. Jarvis credit.

He's been invitational to principals to come in and talk to us around what are some of your what are some of your thoughts.

And it's taken some of our some of our school leaders by surprise.

We we don't we're not that intentional about asking their opinion.

And so, and he's also pushed him to say, well, what is the strategy?

Not whether you like or dislike, it was like, what can we do?

We have a challenge in front of us.

And I think he's been invitational to other folks as well, but this is relatively new for us, asking the hard question, even if we get answers like, dang it, that's not what we wanted to hear.

But this is gonna be an ongoing cyclical process.

So while it could feel like, That's not healthy because we're going to do something counter.

I think if we can keep keep folks engaged in a dialogue and you know provide more information and if the pick that the thing they indicated has the least amount of impact on the on the budget then we need to educate folks to say this is you all pick this one but this that means we're going to move this other level further further over.

So I think there's some more back and forth opportunities.

SPEAKER_24

The my interpretation too of the difference between what Director Briggs was just pointing out the difference between this is our last option.

But then also here's a suggestion we have those being the same thing I think where the gap is is in the trust is what's the last option if you're just going to make decisions and tell us what's happening.

But it's actually a more favorable option if we are included and we're part of the conversation.

SPEAKER_39

So I just want to say thank you.

That was number five of 11, and we're going to continue to come in front of you all to get your feedback, your insight, and just provide awareness.

We're thinking about ways on how we can, like I just mentioned, incorporate others in bringing solutions forward.

But we're narrowing it down, and thank you for the resolution.

Now we have nine really legitimate ways that we can get at this balancing process.

So I want to thank the team for your hard work and everybody else that has been supporting us as well.

It's been a lot already, but we're not even halfway yet, but we'll get there.

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_24

Well and I'll make the same commitment that we made to the academic team that we need to be brave and talk about the real issues.

So thank you for bringing this information.

And if we are aligned in support of our students and can trust each other and support each other we will not publicly grind you into the ground.

We don't want to do that.

We want to we want to do really really well for our students.

So the one last thing on the agenda is a time use evaluation.

I'm just noting that I I submitted the for the for the record our time.

There was only one meeting for December.

So that's in there.

We don't have an assignment going forward.

I know some folks are very new to time use evaluation.

We don't have to talk about it now, but I would love to ask for someone who knows how to do it to volunteer to do the January's time use evaluation to submit in February.

You can email me.

President Hersey or I mean I mean Director Hersey or Director Rivera may be looking at you as as folks have done it before.

But that would be great to have somebody who can do it so we can just continue on.

We can also talk at the retreat about if we how we want to make adjustments to that process to make it easier and more consistent for us all to maintain that practice.

So.

That there being no further business to come before the board the regular board meeting is now adjourned at 8 36 p.m..

Thank you very very much everyone.