Seattle School Board Work Session - Jan 6, 2021

Director Rankin I am calling the board special meeting to order at 430 p.m.

Please note that this meeting is being recorded.

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

For the record I will call the roll.

Director Mack is unavailable today and Director Harris I have been told will be joining us shortly.

Director DeWolf are you on.

Director Hampson.

Here.

Director Hersey.

Here.

Director Mack oh sorry she's not I already said she's not going to be here.

Director Rivera-Smith.

Present.

And Director DeWolf do we have you on.

All right.

We will.

Oh Director DeWolf is having technical issues but he is here.

And this is Director Rankin.

Director Rankin Director Rankin Director DeWolf here was able to get on.

Thank you.

Great.

Thank you.

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

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

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

Hello to everyone who is joining us today.

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

There will not be a public comment opportunity.

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

We will begin with an oversight work session on technology services today followed by an operations committee of the whole meeting which will be chaired by Director DeWolf.

Just briefly directors I spoke with Chief Financial Officer JoLynn Berge right before we started this call and we decided to move through the entire presentations and hold all questions for the end.

So just I just want to encourage you to maybe grab a pencil and paper to jot any thoughts you might have as the presentation goes so that we can get to you your questions at the end.

So moving into our oversight work session I will hand it over now to Chief Financial Officer JoLynn Berge to begin the staff presentation.

JoLynn go ahead.

Good afternoon directors.

Thank you Director Rankin.

So this is a little unusual.

We're doing this remotely.

I am going to ask all of DOT's staff DOT's managers who are on to go ahead and turn their cameras on as I introduce them.

They will introduce themselves actually.

I'll call their names.

They will introduce themselves.

So go ahead and turn your cameras on DOT's management staff.

And just as a reminder the agenda for an oversight work session does follow a strict outline in Policy 1010. So that's how we go ahead and put this together.

All right.

I Leah can you take the PowerPoint down.

There we go.

All right.

Let me get to my.

So first up Carlos.

Please introduce yourself.

Carlos Del Valle I'm the Executive Director of Technology Services.

I've been with the district for about a little bit over a year.

Thank you.

Judy.

Hi I'm Judy Jaeger Director of Information Systems and Business Intelligence.

I've been with Seattle Schools for 13 years and I oversee all of the data systems.

Judy.

Anna.

Hi I'm Anna Cruz.

I manage the Business Intelligence Atlas Data Warehouse team.

We do data and I've been with the district for almost six years.

Thank you.

Alexis.

Hi I'm Alexis Jude Marshall and I'm the Business Systems Manager.

I manage the team for our operating system which is SAP.

I've been with the district for about four and a half years.

Thanks.

William.

You're on mute William.

I would be the one right.

Yes.

So I'm William Drake.

I'm the manager for student systems.

Our team supports the school-based applications.

You're probably familiar with PowerSchool.

We provide a lot of the roster data for dozens of other classroom-based systems and we customize and build from scratch a lot of the operational systems like truancy and transportation and a variety of other systems.

I've been with the district about six years now coming up on in a week or two.

Thanks William.

Nancy.

Hi I'm Nancy Peterson.

I'm the Director of the Technology Infrastructure and I've been here about 11 years.

Thank you.

April.

Hi I'm April Mordoch.

I'm the Cybersecurity and Operations Manager My team deals with both digital forensics and cybersecurity issues as well as we manage the network the data center telecommunications phones all of that kind of basic nuts and bolts.

And I've been with the district off and on since 1999. Thank you April.

Colleen.

Hi my name is Colleen Haverson and I manage the technology support services team.

And our technicians and system engineers ensure that the technology used by our students teachers and staff is supported.

And I've been here about six years now.

Thanks.

Thanks Colleen.

David.

David Hawley you're on mute.

Thank you and my camera's coming on.

Yeah I don't know.

Yes here we go.

So I am David Hawley.

I'm the manager of the tech line.

I have 5 people that work for me that are all fantastic.

If any of you have called in and talked to him he will be overjoyed I hope.

And and I've been with the district for about 12 years and I love it here.

I love all my co-workers and I actually enjoy coming into work which is why I'm here right now.

That's actually not why.

But and I also want to say and these these people work poor Colleen but the technical support specialists that have been helping out with the student tech line and have been doing that.

And a special shout to Ryan Yeh who have done an amazing job and put in so much work and so much time.

And I just want to make sure that they're recognized too.

Thank you.

Thanks David.

Aisha.

Hi everyone.

My name's Aisha Bhamani.

I'm the new Digital Equity Program Manager for SPS.

about a month now but this is my third year with SPS and I'm really excited to have joined the DOTS team.

Thank you.

And wrapping up with Tim.

No not wrapping up.

We have one more after Tim.

Tim.

Hi I'm Tim McNeil.

I'm the senior admin for DOTS and I handle all the administrative stuff.

It'll be a year tomorrow I'll be with SPS so it'll be a year.

Thanks Tim.

Raphael.

Hello good afternoon everyone.

My name is Rafael Gallardo.

I am the Digital Learning Manager managing a strong team of 8 supporting all educators in schools with their digital learning needs.

And I just want to say Rafael you don't report directly to DAS but we work super closely with you and we consider you part of our management team.

so that we don't have silos between what CAI is doing and and what we're doing in DOTS technically.

So thank you for coming and joining us today.

So with that I will turn it over to Carlos.

We will turn on our cameras when we're speaking otherwise we'll turn them off now.

And over to you Carlos.

All right.

Slides up.

Can you guys hear me.

Good evening.

Good evening.

I'm going to be walking you through the overview of the Department of Technology Services.

What is how are we composed and what kind of operations and tools and assistance that we have in-house.

These are items in the agenda for tonight.

We will be talking a little bit about the department functions.

What makes DOTS a professional organization as we explore the SWOT analysis our accomplishments The organization's composition the internal processes systems budgets and our vision of where we're going in the future.

Slides.

As we can see the department's functions is to provide a centralized IT serving the districts and ensuring students and educators and staff have the appropriate access to technology and digital resources.

As we can see this range from a rate of system support and services described right here on this list from business systems data mining and student information systems maintaining the network telecommunications infrastructure down to ensuring the safety of our students and integrity and reliable access of our digital resources through cybersecurity policies and governance etc.

Slide please.

Again our vision is to deliver the appropriate technology and access to resources ensuring that we provide world-winning solutions that help advance the quality of our education and ready access to quality digital resources in our ecosystem.

DOTS believes and it's our mission to ensure solutions we implement bring value to our ecosystem and provide the necessary tools for student success And the flourishing of enhancement solutions for the improved business processes that support Seattle Excellence Strategic Plan.

So we we take care of both.

You know the side of the academic and the business.

We want to improve processes within both.

Slide please.

So how do we do it.

Let's take a look at the SWOT analysis here.

Takeaway points here.

In my professional opinion you know being new to to SPS and and seeing how DOTS operate internally as a mature organization.

I will say DOTS it is a mature IT organization with the right processes and controls to deliver on these tasks.

Yes we have areas that need a little bit of improvement and yes we need to concentrate in reaching those and improving those areas.

Although I might say these team strengths are priceless.

Especially this past year you know it was evident that we have outstanding professionals.

This department is composed of an exceptional dedicated and experienced experts that very proficiently operate in collaboration across all the departments and understand what it takes to deliver systems efficiently and safely for the students.

Now we have some witnesses.

We believe that there is room for improvement in some areas of witness such as enhancing the professional development and put in place a process that can help project interim prioritization.

We've done a little bit of work on that and we're just trying to improve it.

COVID this surprises with an exponential increase in work for staff with minimal increase in capital.

So we it's a lot of sacrifice that went in there.

As we tried to be more efficient we have looked at improving processes such as the little project that we started last February I believe.

There was a process re-engineering for software development lifecycle.

And that allowed us to have very clarity and work together across departments and bring a little bit more improvement enhanced improvements process wise.

We have the door for opportunities.

I believe that we have a door for vast opportunities as we move forward for this past year.

COVID forced us to accelerate and implement a digital learning ecosystem you know the one-to-one.

Now we got we have to improve our networks.

We have we did a lot of lift and insurance a lot of investment on what's had happened this past year.

And we have improved you know way of doing business as well by going digital.

With this technology this is basically a baseline.

With this technology baseline we have an excellent opportunity to lead the way on using technology in the classroom.

to achieve district academic goals and beyond.

Think of it as the classroom of the future.

We can do this by bringing stakeholders and community together to better understand the needs and maturity in our internal IT engineer processes with users' involvement and feedback.

That way everybody stakeholders students community they all they all are part of the development processes that we bring new solutions on play.

Everybody understands the roadmap.

Everybody understands what what tools are coming and what timelines.

There are some hurdles describing the threats and risks.

Still I will say by normalizing our internal processes such as the project intake improving communications across functional departments and the community and involving the stakeholders early and throughout the development cycle while ensuring the right governments and controls are in place.

I believe we can realize solutions that will bring value to our district.

There's a little bit of a change that will have to happen culturally.

It's a must when we change directions but you know it has to happen as we move through this dynamic and digital way of doing business that we have entered.

Slide please.

So the accomplishments.

You know I take my hat to DOTS.

You know it's been incredible year this past year.

You guys can see we work on COVID responses.

We did process and re-engineering while in COVID.

And then we did address some of the systems student systems as we went into COVID.

We needed to put the platforms that will support students.

We needed to do rastering.

We needed to do a lot of internal.

You guys heard William talking.

There was a lot of lift and a lot of.

from scratch programming that had to be done to to ensure student systems.

As far as the the covered response the implementation of this magnitude will take years of planning and development.

So there is a so there is a systematic approach to deliver the right solutions to the right problems efficiently and safely for students and staff.

The team of a very dedicated professionals have accomplished all of these and many other efforts And I might say that they have sacrificed much of their own personal and family lives to ensure provide these services to the community.

One of these professionals many of these professionals are parents of students of this community themselves and their sacrifices are are greatly appreciated.

They are the ones that deserve the credit for this exceptional job.

I mean I literally I noted in here sort of a miracle of standard effort and performance throughout the year.

exceptional team I will say.

Slide please.

So this is how we organize.

This is a high level.

We have Chief Jolene Berge Berge sorry on top that she's dual-hatted.

I'm right under her as the Senior Technical Advisor and the Secretary Director of Technology for two directorates the Business Intelligence and the Enterprise Applications.

Overall it's about 126 members and let's move to the next slide where we can see that actually the bigger picture.

And over here I'm going to pass it to both Judy and Nancy so they can speak to their areas.

Go ahead Judy.

Thank you Carlos.

We are the Information Systems and Business Intelligence Directorate.

It's a little bit hard to read, but it's sort of the section that's off to the left.

So that includes me at the top.

And then you'll see three distinct teams, platform managers.

And so we've already been introduced to Anna, William and Alexis.

And you'll see their teams there and their teams are comprised of a mix of analysts, architects, and developers that help maintain, support, and enhance all of our systems.

And then off to the far left are the project managers.

I've got a small grouping of project managers that work very, very closely with the platform teams to ensure successful delivery of projects.

So with that overview, I will turn it over to Nancy.

Thank you.

Hi, I'm Nancy Peterson, and I have the technology infrastructure, which is on the right side of that page.

Have a number of groups, some that you've already heard from.

April Mardock has all of the infrastructure, the network and systems, the operations services, telecom, and also has folks in cybersecurity.

And then next to that is Colleen Halverson who has all of the technologists in the schools.

These are the folks that help at the Stanford Center as well as at the schools.

They are currently populating the resource centers that we have eight of across the district.

They help both students and staff with their hardware and software.

And a number of them are also helping out on the student tech line that David talked about early earlier on.

Both David and Colleen have worked together to provide the tech line support phone support to our families and staff so that everyone can get the support that they need.

For the tech lines, that has been a different kind of experience and for the tech leads as well during COVID because we are also supporting families at home and staff on computers and internet at home.

And so that's added a little bit of complexity and a lot of interesting things.

So that's a lot of Kaleen's group She also has a client management team who is responsible for managing all of the software and browsers and operating systems all the versions that are installed on all the district laptops.

So that's a huge job that that group provides.

And then she also oversees the project manager that does capital projects and gets the technology for those.

as well as the printing services group.

And then in addition to those folks, I have a project manager who does capital projects for oversight of equipment networks and that kind of installation, as well as I have a project manager, that's Eric Kinzel, and I also have Joanne Cobb, who's a project manager for the rest of our projects and that has included she managed the one-to-one computing project as we started adding student computers for the high schools last fall last the 2019 year.

And then she also helped coordinate all of the distributions that we had for student laptops throughout COVID and into the fall.

She just completed the web platform managing that project with the web team that resides in the communications department as we moved MySPS to a new platform and she's also leading that project that will convert the main websites also to the new platform.

And then I'll hand that back over to Carlos.

Thank you Nancy.

Slide please.

So we strive to to to do our best you know to to bring services and maintain the service at a high quality.

So these department goals and objectives that we have set for our major services we started with the successful enterprise applications as we develop applications and we go through the development lifecycle.

When we started implemented the software development lifecycle last year it wasn't in place.

We brought a contractor, we implemented the process, everybody got trained across departments and it's paying off.

I mean, we have a list of projects and we're doing fairly well, 90.1% within scope and performance and cost.

It's a good point.

High level of security, we haven't had serial data breaches, which is Exceptional.

We take this very seriously.

Make sure that ransomware and any viruses that might take over our network, open a hole in the network and then data breaches might happen.

We are on top of it.

April, our security manager, she's a top cybersecurity professional that looks after these things.

Tech support and systems operations.

We used to have a survey on the last system They asked these customers after they had their problems resolved whether they thought about it.

And we had a pretty good response, 90% positive responses in that survey.

The system is changing.

We're actually upgrading the customer support ticketing system, and we're upgrading that survey.

So a new survey question is coming online pretty soon.

Systems data and support that's just how do we keep the systems up running.

We I think it's a good percentage 99.8 percent you know uptime.

Student digital access this is in reference to bringing computers the one-to-one computers to to members and anyone that basically anything that when they said you know staff as well.

I think we're we're we're reaching a 98 percent which is a good rate.

And also during summer during summer as we were faced with with COVID there was a lot of confusion in communications and people couldn't understand why things were not being deployed or developed or brought forward.

And you know development takes process.

So we realized that there is a lot of there was a lot of communications across the community the functional departments.

So we started to be more proficient at this area and ensuring that everybody got the necessary information through various means.

You know the FAQ the LLC the tech line the school beat for both the educators staff community to make sure they understand that what was coming what is being implemented and how it's being implemented.

And I think we I will call it 100 percent because we went from zero to to literally just do this constantly.

Slide please.

Once again, the uptime, overall systems, this is the actual systems, each of the servers, I will say, we got a pretty good rate in 99.9.

That's excellent.

We bring it down a little bit.

That's what is, you know, it's about 80%, I mean, 80.80 down is because we bring the systems down for maintenance and updates of their software.

So, it's just a little bit, but overall, it's a good rate.

The overall win in network, this is just the networks as well.

good rating.

When it comes to the the the the tech line we had the first resolutions service now it's our system.

And in past year we've been about 61 percent this year.

I will say it's okay compared to past year.

It's better if it's the higher that is the better.

The same with our call abandonment during summer we couldn't you know there was a lot of calls we got inundated.

with calls because of the situation we got put in there.

People receiving devices, hotspots, not knowing how to use the hotspot or not knowing how to use the software.

So the tickets went pretty high up I will say.

But so we couldn't tell the abandonment rate of the calls.

I will say that it's probably about last year it was probably about 6.8 percent.

6.9 doesn't seem as bad.

Slide please.

When it comes to funding we we get we get sourced from from Tucson so the general fund and the levies.

On the tech service and these items are here we set it up within buckets.

This is mainly operations the general funds information systems business intelligence that's mainly people software training technology infrastructure this bills that we have like telephones you know operating operations type of bills.

We were very blessed this year with grants for buying hotspots Internet access and digital equity grants as well which allow us to to bring Aisha on board to take care of our digital equity issues across the community.

And then there is the capital transfer tech support.

There's a lot of bills that we pay with with with general funds because of operations.

So there's a capital transfer that gets done between levy money to this and it's allowed by law that allows to pays for operations in this bucket.

Go next please.

This one's the levy of funds.

And there's three buckets and this mainly addresses the areas that pretty much the directors Judy's area Nancy's area.

Under the student learning support we basically have that's what we pay here for people student devices technical support the TSS's digital learning support software laptops and stuff like that.

District systems data.

It's also people, it pays more from the business side of the house and financial systems, the SAP, the learning management systems, student information systems, you know, the licenses, the contracts, consultants that provide through that.

So you're thinking about Microsoft Teams or NeoGov, the Schoology, you know, those type of licenses, those type of systems falls in this bucket.

Infrastructure and security and this is just mainly the management of the data center people data center the cybersecurity teams the tools that they use.

The student tech line falls in here.

Server licenses that we have at the data center.

Software licenses as well from the data center.

And the other operations and equipment maintenance connectivity.

Slide please.

Now let me pass this to Director to our Director of Technology Infrastructure Nancy Peterson.

She'll speak a bit about the benchmarking the governance and the controls that we adhere to as a professional organization so we can develop things and get solutions that bring value to our organization.

Go ahead Nancy.

Thank you Carlos.

So on this slide the benchmarks that we have, you'll see quite a few asterisks.

And that's mainly because this year COVID really changed everything for us.

As you know, if we start at the top with the technology support specialists and the computer support specialists, those first two lines, those are under Colleen Halverson's organization and the technical support specialists are the main folks that are out in the schools and at the resource centers.

They are full time employees who do support for both staff members and students and are also doing the student tech line that is supporting families as well.

So you'll see that we have 37 of those currently.

The benchmark is 52 and so we're below that benchmark.

The CSS is on the next line.

We have 19. The benchmark would be 36. So we're below that as well.

Now the benchmark that we're using here is what was published by OSPI and OSPI in general looks at the districts across the state to be able to come up with some reasonable benchmarks for us to compare to.

However very few of the districts across the state have had one-to-one computing at all levels.

All of the districts now are working to get one-to-one computing at all levels of students.

But that is new this year for others as well as as for us.

And so these benchmarks may not be accurate for what we really need for our one-to-one computing now with students.

That's something that all of the districts are experiencing now and we will be working with the districts to try and come up with some some better benchmarking even when we're back in the schools.

I know I've had folks say well won't we take the laptops back from students when we're done with our school closures.

And we really do not expect to.

That's kind of one of those things that Once the genie's out of the bottle that's pretty hard to put it back in.

We also have a number of teachers bless the teachers for coming up with all new curriculum and managing to get all of their lessons plans into remote learning to figure out how to use the new technology to help their students using technology.

They've just done a huge lift.

And once they get through this remote part Many of them are actually pretty excited about being able to use more of the computers in the class as well and make better use of Teams and the Internet for all of their student learning.

So this isn't something that will necessarily go away when we open schools.

In fact we hope it will be helpful in all of our our classrooms as well.

And so we will work with the other schools in the state and across the country to do new benchmarking.

For the last three lines on this slide you'll see the help desk staff.

We have five currently.

The old benchmark that we had was eight.

Technology training staff we had zero still and the benchmark before was four for a district of our size.

And then the digital learning specialists we currently have eight.

And quite some time ago the benchmark for our size would have been 16. These benchmarks are from the Council of Great City Schools as well as an organization that a few years ago did an audit of Seattle Schools and our Department of Technology Services.

Clearly we were not one-to-one organization then.

Computing has changed a lot.

And not just being one-to-one but also being remote.

As I mentioned that's brought up just a whole new range of support issues that we've needed to help our families and students and teachers through.

So as we look at benchmarks going forward we will want to compare to other similar districts.

We'll look at other districts that have their own self-hosted student systems and business applications like our Power School and Schoology or Power School anyway and also the SAP applications.

Some districts use especially in the state of Washington the smaller districts use a product called Skyward which is managed out of the Wasipsi Consortium.

And that is sort of a lighter weight set of tools that is very difficult for a district our size to be able to use effectively and efficiently.

So we need to make sure that we're comparing apples to apples when we compare to benchmark with other districts.

We'll also look at other districts of our size and similar demographics makeup.

And we'll want to look at districts whose technology shops have comparable functions especially when we compare to other districts across the United States.

There are quite a bit of differences between districts and so it gets to be very interesting to compare functions and staffing levels.

Other districts have more standardized applications across their districts.

They some of them have application support out in the departments for systems like SAP and all of the modules in SAP.

Some of the departments will do their own support and so that will not be in the technology departments.

A lot of districts have business intelligence and compliance reporting like Judy's group covers but that is also in a different department.

And so we need to make sure that we're comparing similar functions to our our DOTS our DOTS benchmarks.

Next slide please.

This is a slide that shows all of the policies the board policies and superintendent procedures that we specifically focus on when we are looking at our Department of Technology work.

It relates to the work that our infrastructure groups do when we're designing systems and internal controls when we're reviewing vendor apps and software to onboard into the district.

And Judy's groups also pay attention to these in creating the data and reporting and doing software development and support in those groups.

So in general.

We look at the network and internet use policies and actually provide much of that content.

We manage the data and records privacy very closely.

All of the 5,000 and 6,000 series policies pretty much are supported by the SAP system and that group because SAP is really how we implement many of those policies.

The series those two series are the personnel and management support areas.

That includes financial systems HR payroll marketing everything else that's in SAP.

So it really is up to us in technology to figure out how to implement systems that will comply with all of those policies and superintendent procedures.

Next slide, please.

So in addition to those, we have other key internal and external controls that we need to comply with and to follow.

This again, these apply to our software development and software selection and deployment.

They relate to the contracts that we enter into, They guide our Internet usage and how we structure our websites.

One of the first ones that's talked about here is the Accessibility Consent Decree.

That has expired technically but we are of course still under the same federal laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and so forth.

And we've worked very hard in this district The web teams are very versed in Internet accessibility and have done a lot of work on our platforms our current ones and our new ones to make sure that those are accessible to all of our families and the public as well as internally.

And we also have a full process for reviewing software requests that teachers and principals make and departments.

for bringing in software to the district that's going to be exposed to students and or families in the public.

And we review all of those for ADA accessibility compliance as well as for data privacy.

So you'll also see here that we are we need to comply with FERPA of course as well as with SIPA and COPPA.

as we're setting up our internet usage and our student policies and access.

We are bound by Washington state laws for safeguarding student user and data privacy.

This comes into effect particularly when we're reviewing vendor software and applications.

We are very careful to.

review the kind of data that we share and we have comprehensive data sharing agreements and non-disclosure agreements that we've worked with legal to set up.

And so we require all of those for any new vendor applications that we bring in or any new modules that we may adopt for our existing vendors.

The I will just make a note here that All of the schools in Washington or a number of the districts have banded together and come up with a statewide district or data sharing agreement that we use and this allows us to work with vendors to say if you sign this state data sharing agreement with us then any district in the state of Washington can also honor that same thing without having every vendor sign a different agreement with every single school district.

There is also a national version of this that we are working to as a state to come in line with.

So then we'll be able to take advantage of a lot more software without so much review in many cases.

And then finally the internally down at the bottom the audit and review efforts that we have internally.

Cybersecurity roadmap and controls we're constantly looking at and refining and implementing.

We have comprehensive disaster recovery plans and a roadmap and we continue to chip away at that.

And then the SAP system is doing a full systems assessment and roadmap under Judy's work.

So that takes care of my slides and I'll turn it over now to Judy Jager to talk about the next slides.

Nancy, I think you either you or Carlos may have one more with the outside service contracts.

I'm sorry, that might be mine as well.

No problem.

We kind of share these really.

Yeah, so some of them are mine.

Some of them are Judy's or or our teams rather, but.

These are all the larger contracts that we have.

So you'll see many on these that have come before the board as we've renewed their subscriptions or our licensing for those.

Enterprise Microsoft last licensing of course is a very large one because it covers all of the software for every student and teacher and staff member across the district.

And then there are a number of these others you'll recognize Schoology Naviance is the college and career readiness platform.

SAP has a lot of modules many of which we take advantage of.

You'll see in here the Verizon and Mobile Beacon and T-Mobile.

Those are new ones that were not on these slides in previous work sessions because of course we just started adding in hotspots for those students who have no Internet access at home.

And then let's see the other one that may not be real familiar is Jamf.

That's an application that we use to manage all of the Apple devices.

And since we now have iPads for all of our K-2 students and teachers that's become especially important this year.

Judy anything to add.

I think you covered it beautifully.

Thank you Nancy.

So as I stated before, with my directorate, information systems and business intelligence area, our primary function really is to ensure the care and feeding of our critical IT systems.

We need them to be fairly easy to use, definitely reliable and modern and up to date.

And that includes both system maintenance and also provision of data.

And I'll talk a little bit more about that.

So I'll be covering the next three slides.

Key information systems on both the student information side of the house as well as business systems.

And then I'll touch briefly also on some of the IT admin tools that the infrastructure team uses to keep things running smoothly.

So I'll start by saying just at the highest level one of our goals is to build systems that talk to each other.

So we heard numerous times from the board over the years that we need to be adding systems that integrate easily.

So no custom integrations whenever possible.

And so we're looking to do that as we can.

And also we went through a period of time where there were some sort of pet systems and we ended up with sort of a huge huge volume of applications.

And so we're trying to be very strategic and over time, look at some of those systems and identify where there could be duplication of functionality and that sort of thing.

And so over time, we're going to be looking to consolidate where possible.

So again, that's not going to be able to happen overnight, but we definitely have our eye on that and we're making progress as we can.

Let's see here.

So for our key student information systems you can see on the slide we have many many applications.

We also have lots of services and interfaces.

The primary platform that you would be familiar with is definitely PowerSchool for student data.

And as you know PowerSchool stores and tracks all of the important student information that demographics grades attendance behavior things of that nature.

And there's a number of complementary applications and add-ons that use that source data and rely on it.

One example of that just to illustrate is you've got PowerSchools you know the system of record for student data and that feeds the 504 module that's within PowerSchool and also online registration.

So that's just one example to share.

In addition to the 70 extracts and integrations that feed downstream systems.

We also have student data that's being sent to Homeroom and there's a list of students attendance behavior and other data points.

So it's really important to keep the data in sync and accurate.

So those integrations and interfaces really help enable that.

I also wanted to highlight our ATLAS data warehouse and ATLAS report center.

So the teams have done phenomenal work over the years in building a data warehouse.

And it's unusual for K-12 to have such a data warehouse that we have or we have the student data and then we also have staff data.

And so we can do some interesting correlations there to have the data model all built to do some comparisons.

So, great work on all of that.

We also have a whole suite of reports that we've been building out.

So, a lot of really cool stuff to come from the Atlas team as well.

Next slide, please.

Okay, for our business information systems, again, you know, primary platform that you're familiar with is going to be SAP, which incorporates key business functions, so like HR, payroll, finance, and procurement.

And you can think of it in a way that it supports both kind of like the employee processes like hiring, benefits administration, firing or retiring, that sort of thing.

And then also some of our end-to-end business operations processes.

So like procure to pay would be just one example of that.

In addition to SAP, you can see that we have a wide variety of side systems and specialized tools Of course there are scenarios where SAP doesn't offer something that's really K-12 specific.

And so you know like the substitute system frontline is just one example where we built an integration so we can you know manage our substitutes and make sure we assign them to the right teachers.

So one thing that I'll share about SAP is the integration that standard within the platform is both an advantage and a challenge.

So it's advantageous because we don't have to build these expensive error-prone interfaces.

So there's an efficiency gain there as well, but it's also a challenge because the data is so tightly integrated between the different components, there are downstream impacts if there's like a data quality problem.

So just one hypothetical example, like let's say you're entering a new hire in HR and then you have a typo and there's a mistake.

that data is going to flow all the way down to payroll and you may end up with incorrect pay or some other issue.

So again, just a hypothetical, just one example that shows the tight integration that's both a benefit and can be a challenge for sure.

Next slide, please.

So for this slide, you'll notice we don't have any application names called out.

So we keep those fairly under wraps, like within DOTS.

We don't want hackers or anybody nefarious knowing exactly what we're using and what tools we're using to do monitoring.

But we use some of these internal tools to do recovery backup, to monitor performance of our network, to do certain data mining and forensics with cybersecurity, And then also our ticketing system, that one's not confidential, but when we have our users that have like an issue, they can create a ticket and then we have a process for tracking and assigning and closing out those tickets.

So with that, I will turn it back over to Carlos.

Thank you, Judy.

So where are we going?

The next steps.

Board policies to be reviewed as you guys heard in a couple of minutes past when I gave my report to the to the board.

We have the information technology planning policy that was requested by the board 6902 ready for introduction so it's going to be coming your way here pretty soon.

The students records policy is actually one that needs to be is planned to be reviewed.

I believe it's about four years old.

April do you could you.

span on this one?

We, it was recently updated, but only for a very minor piece of information, which was the way that we manage immunization records.

It needs an overhaul.

It really hasn't had an overhaul in six years.

Six years.

That's what it was.

Thank you.

And then focus areas that we're concentrating, technology governance.

This policy, we opened the door and it actually calls out for a technology master plan to be developed.

We are actually engaging with ITAC and internally to DOTS and starting to develop this this this product and I believe based on the schedule that I've shown last meeting it'll be ready for introduction to you guys by September next year.

Also the we're working with Dylan Jabe right now on the development of the BTA BTA V levy funds.

District hardware and software standardization like Judy was saying you know there's a request.

During the summer we heard it a lot from the communities like hey there's there's too many platforms.

We need to standardize these platforms.

We need to like Judy was saying there's there's a lot of integration.

Which tools the duplication what tools are duplicated.

Why have them.

You know why pay for those.

Let's let's minimize those platforms.

Let's concentrate them and really bring some efficiencies to the to the environment.

Enhance the digital experience by leveraging the community.

Once again you know we learn a lot during summer by communicating with the community with CBO's with students with with educators and really trying to understand what was the needs that were required and how those translated into technology.

We will ensure that we continue doing that work.

Then the end-user teacher and principals and data information access is what Anna was talking about as far as the BI analysis of this data on the Atlas.

We're going to be putting some dashboards that we are working right now to complement the use of these data by educators.

Improving the integration of all enterprise and academic applications and services.

Once again we is every process, it takes quite a bit of time to take a system from cradle to operations.

You know, you got RSPs, you got a collection of requirements, you have prototyping, you have a development environment where you test the prototyping, then you bring users as a pilot to ensure that they verify that what they have requested, that's what they're receiving and making familiar and the communications that go along with that.

Quick example of that is Microsoft Teams for Education which we are I believe today we roll out a pilot with a set of schools where we're going to be teaching testing these tools that were requested over the summer.

And some also that there were some rastering the integration piece and some rastering that have to happen between PowerSchool and Teams.

Trying to make the environment more efficient more dynamic would improve the business processes internally for us.

That's the business side and for the educators for the teachers to to manage their classrooms a little bit better.

Self-service support and tools.

I would say we are upgrading the the the ticketing system.

And also have you guys seen you have the tech resource centers out there and the family tech line.

very important work.

And then at the ERP, the SAP feasibility study for business systems, we have an RFP going out to request a feasibility study to see where is the best business systems we can have in place, whether it is SAP or some other tool that will be to be defined on RFP and then move forward from that point.

Emerging trends, you know, we're in a digital age.

We need to figure out how to, merge both the mortar and the digital classroom as we move forward.

Digital equity.

You guys met Aisha Bohami Bohami.

She she will be reaching out.

When it comes when it comes to technology and we saw this over the the the summer as we were doing one-to-ones and we're trying to address all the issues about hotspots.

People didn't have Internet.

Okay now everybody has Internet.

Now we started school at the beginning in September.

And we started realizing through the tech checks, started realizing that technology is not, doesn't fix all the problems.

And there's other problems beyond technology out there that we need to start understanding so we can find some solutions for it.

Ayesha will be working in that area as the digital equity manager ensuring that, okay, is technology missing in the community?

Is there other issues that they're missing that we can move forward and find solutions for it.

The one-to-one student device.

Well now we bought everybody a computer.

Now we have operations and maintenance for these devices.

So there's a cycle replenishing refreshing cycle that we have to make sure that it's put in place.

It is in place just to continue to operate on this massive amount of computers that we have now.

Internet access, a need.

And then cloud services, we see that some of the efficiencies that we have internally to collapse platforms and systems and integrate a little bit better, the use of cloud services have seen an improvement in some of our business areas.

Not all systems, they're able to provide that capability in cloud services.

There's some systems that we have to maintain within our data center that controls the management of the networks and the Internet and resources.

So it's a balance between both of them.

But we'll continue to see where we can have some improvements in those areas.

With that I'll pass it back to Chief Berge for closing statements.

Thank you Carlos.

I'll just add my thanks and recognition to the DOTS team and to Carlos.

It's been you know they've done a great job this last year.

Really just unprecedented times.

Obviously we've heard that several times with COVID but just hundreds and hundreds of extra hours on nights and weekends trying to stand up the one-to-one and the resource centers and all of the outreach programs that they volunteered for.

We had a lot of staff that would volunteer.

their nights and weekends to go out and do outreach programs with other agencies.

So just a wonderful job by the management team of DOTS led by Carlos.

So thank you.

With that Director Rankin we're ready for questions.

Okay.

Thank you.

That was a.

of information.

But thank you all so much.

And it was great to see your your faces and well here I'll show you my face.

Great to see your faces for just a moment.

I wish that we were meeting in you know actually face-to-face but I appreciate having the opportunity just to see all the people doing all this great work.

So I will now move on to questions.

I'll start at the top of the alphabet with Director DeWolf.

Do you have any questions or comments at this time.

Yes.

Thank you so much Director Rankin.

And I just want to underscore the gratitude that Chief Berge was expressing and express that from myself as well.

Just thank you so much for Technology Services DOTS for really stepping up in our time of need particularly over the last 10 months as we're dealing with COVID and remote learning.

So I just thank you all for the work you've done to support students in the work.

I wanted to just a couple questions I had.

Can you clarify I heard the timeline for the technology plan you said next September.

Is that September 2022. That it is this year.

September this year.

Okay.

Thank you.

I think you know while I think that's better than what I thought I heard you say which was September 2022 I still think I feel like we've been talking about this technology plan for a long time and so I'm really concerned about the timing of that particularly as we're as we're talking about the levy BTA and how much of this technology plan conversation actually would have benefited us right now.

And so I just just want to name that I think Thank you for your service.

I recognize that you're you're doing a ton of work and trying to get this out to us by September 2021 but I just do not think that that is the right timing just given our BTA levy conversations that we're having.

The other thing can you clarify you were is Microsoft Teams for Education just now being rolled out and piloted so January 2021.

Nancy Nancy can you bring us on that in this one.

Yes.

Yes.

Director DeWolf Teams for Education is now being rolled out in a pilot right now.

We waited till now because the Teams for Education platform did not have breakout rooms which our teachers told us were critical.

And so we stayed with the regular Teams platform that we've had all along that we have in the business side as well and waited until that functionality was added before we introduced Teams for Education.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Very helpful.

And then my just final question here is around as we are in the middle of our conversations around BTA V Do you have any suggestions or recommendations for important priorities that we should be aware of as the board as we are planning for this levy.

So I think one of the big changes for us Director DeWolf is really the movement to one-to-one and how are we going to support that going going forward.

That's our biggest concern right now.

Carlos are there are there others that you'd like to add.

I think Nancy Nancy will you drive us through this one.

I know you had some ideas you wanted to bring forward.

Well I think JoLynn's right.

The the one-to-one computing is a huge part of what we need to do going forward.

You know we scrambled for to get enough laptops out to our students our teach our instructional assistants our substitutes and we ended up needing to reuse a lot of equipment.

We will need to to replenish in fact all of the laptops that we have purchased because that will be four years out is the rotation that we're trying to get to for that cycle of replacement.

And so that is it within the BTA V time frame.

So we will need to really prepare carefully to make sure that we can replenish those.

I think another thing we need to look out for is cybersecurity.

That is huge anyway.

It is even more important with one to one computing for our students.

But everyone is aware of all of the ransomware attacks and very large cyber or cyber attacks out there.

We have two people working in cybersecurity currently.

They do an amazing job.

We use an outside firm to help us so that our folks can get some sleep nights.

And and so they watch for alerts and and alert us if they see any concerns.

And so.

But but information security is one of those things that you can do a huge amount of of prevention and all it takes is one.

And so we're constantly on alert.

We will need to be vigilant on that for the next many years.

Thank you so much for those.

I appreciate you.

Director DeWolf did you have anything else.

Sorry.

No I'm all good.

Thank you so much.

Okay great.

Thank you.

President Hampson.

Hi.

Thank you.

Can you hear me.

Yep.

Great.

So I think my primary question is just in the interest of time I'll keep it to one.

You showed kind of the benchmarking in terms of staffing.

I'm interested in.

knowing what the monetary investment expectation would be if we were to hit benchmarks.

Are we looking to kind of ramp up to that over some period of time.

How do we advocate for that in terms of student cost and or you know the in terms of how we talk to the state about the cost per student knowing that we are going to need to have a continue to have this this digital learning option in for the foreseeable future.

And also what's the breakdown.

It looked to me like the we're about two-thirds in terms of student teacher support and a third in terms of overall overall operational systems in DOTS.

I don't know if that's the right breakdown but I'm interested in that kind of the bigger staffing picture.

Thank you President Hampson.

I think that the overall contemplation of the funding formula by the legislature in certain components like tech is still 20 years behind and the governor's budget did do a little bit.

They put some more money in for some technology pieces but there's just they just are so far behind that I don't think that they're going to catch up realistically.

I think it'll fall to us.

wanting to carefully consider that as part of our levy ask.

That's how we're funding it.

That's how other districts are funding their technology through technology levies.

We roll ours into capital but most districts run a separate tech levy.

That is how the majority of technology staffing costs are covered right now.

And so that's part of our consideration and it'll be part of what we bring forward as far as the BTA V ask.

in mind have you all as a team planned out the ramp up or the stair step up to to try to get to a fuller service model as either a cost per student or in total dollar amounts you know over a period of time if we were to be successful in gaining that through our levy dollars.

Yeah that's part of what we're working on as far as What is that additional staffing that we need to move to.

So when we went to one-to-one early on you know we had conversations with the board about we are going to need some more staffing when you put the computers out there.

And we've started that work.

We've started increasing staffing.

So we'll continue we'll bring that forward as part of our BTA V request and it'll be defined as far as a total dollar increase in the overall staffing and what those positions might look like.

And then is that is it about right that it's about two-thirds student and teaching staff and the rest is operational or is that am I incorrect.

Are you dividing it up kind of between Judy and Nancy on the org chart.

Kind of.

Yeah that's where I was.

I think.

That's kind of what I was using.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think so I'll let them answer if that's not correct.

Carlos, do you think that that's probably about right?

I will say so, yeah, I mean.

And as we grow with that, go to more like three quarters to one quarter.

Do you think or?

Actually, I think the increases are going to be needed across technology.

OK, so it would stay the same proportionately.

Yes, because as we add more tools, the support for that grows.

I know Judy's teams have been supporting families on Schoology as well as students and teachers.

I think the digital learning specialists will need to add there too because we've added so much technology and for all of our teachers and subs as well.

And so yeah I think it's going to be across the board.

Okay.

All right.

I will.

That's good for me.

Thank you so much for all of that.

And I'll pass it along to the next director.

Oh I'm sorry was somebody else going to say something.

Judy were you going to say something.

Oh I was just agreeing with Nancy and just saying thank you.

You know Schoology and also Seesaw and other platforms and tools being used and I just echo the sentiment that we just need to look carefully at support support models and staffing.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you Director Hampson.

Director Harris do we have you.

You have had me since 437. Thank you.

Okay great.

I mean I figured as much but I just thought I would double check before I you know called in.

No problem.

So first of all.

Go ahead.

Beyond props to the DOT staff I think each and every one of you could be working for Big Tech for probably two or three times.

The salaries that we pay you and you're here for heart and soul and for our students and it's recognized and appreciated beyond.

I have several questions and I don't expect answers this evening but if someone could go back and look at the minutes or the recording and perhaps do a Friday memo so we're all on the same page.

And I'll just start reading them off and then I'll stand down.

One did the ITAC committee review your board slide deck and assist you in your presentation.

Two you talked about a survey that you had 90 percent return and satisfaction.

I don't know what the numerator is on that.

How many folks and who are those folks that we surveyed.

And we're getting ready to do another survey.

Who are we going to survey and were there any other additional stakeholders that we want to focus on.

Three.

This one's really clear to my heart.

I I love you all very much but I don't need to know your middle name and your middle initial.

And it's my understanding we can do first name dot last name at SeattleSchools.org.

It's my extreme belief that that would assist in transparency.

I think I'm on 4 or 5. Digital equity grants.

When does that expire.

I'm beyond thrilled to see it but what is the sustainability of that position.

The tech plan.

I will echo the comments of my colleague DeWolf that The tech plan perhaps should be moved up higher on the priority list because of Deck 5. And with a reminder and a comment that the tech plan was never approved by the board.

It just became part of the urban legend and referred to.

And I and a number of colleagues have had issues with that.

That's not policy.

Appreciate very much the benchmark conversation and appreciate that in the middle of COVID benchmarking districts of same size and demographics throughout the country was probably impossible.

But but I do look forward to seeing such an update.

I am Beyond curious about the OSPI direction here.

Are we reading that.

Are we following.

How did we get there from here.

I I heard from slide 14 about personnel and SAP.

I want to know again do we have an HR docketing system for employee issues.

This is an issue that has festered that the board several years ago of which I was one advocated strongly for a docketing system so we don't find ourselves in the personnel trouble that we do find ourselves in.

And I I have not heard an update from the time that we had a work session where we were told that the 1.3 million dollars that were allocated were not spent on a docketing system.

And I truly want an explanation for that and how HR and DOTS is working together for that.

Also heard Atlas Data Systems reference for HR and does that fold into a docketing system.

I also am very concerned about the fact that we have so many students falling behind and whether or not we will be able to lift up some kind of an online learning platform for K-12 for backfilling some of the things that our extraordinary teachers have not been able to teach given COVID-19 and the worldwide pandemic.

And if we do such an academy for catch-up how are we going to select said academy so that it is not part of the corporate deformed educational revolving door.

There there are a great many folks that would very much like to to minimize the role of our extraordinary teachers and I am very concerned because I think that that is ramping up and coming our way in a very big fashion.

Last is a personal comment.

In the past I have asked whether or not we need a standalone CIO as opposed to tasking CFO Berge with two completely separate huge bandwidth department.

And I understand from CFO Berge that that comment or question was met with fear from DOT and or that I thought that somehow y'all weren't doing your job and nothing could be further from the truth.

I would like to see and I want to know whether or not we have put out a job description for a separate Standalone CIO Chief.

And again I'm happy to wait until a Friday memo as long as you hit all these lovely points.

And and I think DOTS are heroes.

Without question.

And I thank you so very much.

Pass to the next director.

All right.

Thank you Director Harris.

Director Hersey you are up.

Yeah thanks.

Can you all hear me all right.

Yeah.

Okay fantastic.

My questions really did focus squarely on how we can incorporate some of our ongoing technology needs into the next levy which Director DeWolf already brought up.

I guess my only other question is and forgive me if I miss this at one part in this very thorough presentation.

As we are thinking about you know continuing our one-to-one allocation of devices.

Are we what work is DOTS doing with potentially curriculum and instruction around courses on digital citizenship.

And where do we see the work of the department in alignment with that.

Because as we you know continue one-to-one devices.

I can already hear the complaints about screen time going up very very quickly.

And I think that we're going to miss an opportunity if we are not actively engaging in developing a digital citizenship curriculum that's required as we continue to build out our technology offerings as a district.

Thank you Director Hersey.

Whenever the word curriculum is brought up obviously we're going to partner with CAI.

They're going to lead through the curriculum piece.

We will support them as far as their curriculum plans.

So I believe that Raphael is still on and has heard your comment and has made a note about about that request.

Yeah I think if we're going to ask especially in our next levy for support with technology We need to just you know make sure that we have our bases covered that we're not just asking for technology on our end but we are also developing developing a plan to ensure that kids are safe online not only with one another but as they access you know the entire world at their fingertips.

So yeah just would really love to see this plan come through in tandem.

I know that we might not necessarily have been thinking about this in a robust way as of yet but just want to make my request for that clear.

Yeah I'll just make one other note.

One of the things when you said that kind of triggered for me is one of the ideas that we'll have and you know we have a budget work session tomorrow night so all of this kind of is weighing on my mind about the levy and the budget and everything as we've been working on that is my wonder is is maybe we need to ask for a legislative change to expand the uses so that we can buy the curriculum out of levy dollars.

And is that something that we want to think about.

that ask because I don't know of another way that's going to get that's going to get delivered to us unless we identify a funding source for it.

And you know it always is a pressure right.

Yeah I totally agree.

I actually like that idea a lot.

And you know whenever we can you know I think the legislature will be pretty amenable to helping us free up dollars as long as we're not asking them for it.

And that's all I got.

Thanks.

Okay.

Thanks Director Hersey.

Director Rivera-Smith.

Evening.

Thank you.

I'll follow up really fast just because Director Hersey's last point there made me think of something and that's because regarding just digital citizenship and safety.

And I already did speak.

I know it has come up before and I spoke to Chief Berge earlier about just our safety as far as our student our devices with students right now.

Parents don't have controls over they don't have parent controls available to them so students can access sites that some parents would rather them not.

And I know that's something that is on on the agenda for your department.

I understand Chief Berge that you guys are looking into that and trying to figure out a solution there.

So thank you for that.

I just wanted to get that on the record for parents listening who might be concerned because it has been a concern raised in community.

that inability to sort of keep their students away from sites that are distracting and or dangerous.

So I appreciate that it is something we are exploring a solution to that and some sort of ability for parents to protect their students with our devices.

But my questions my first one is actually an observation and this is actually this goes for not just this department but all departments as they make these presentations is be really sensitive acronym use because there's a whole lot of acronyms in the slides presentation and I know these make sense to you guys but for our Directors and just general public we know sometimes we don't know what these acronyms all are.

So anyways just just just an overall comment there.

I'm wondering I'm because I know this and I'm wondering if maybe this might be a CAI responsibility versus a DOTS one but how much are we using you know an equity lens as we as we choose you know our learning management systems our platforms all those things like that.

I know this has come up too in conversations I think in committee.

But one I don't I didn't see much of that in this.

I know we have our new digital equity.

I don't know the official name director I guess and I really appreciate that and looking forward to seeing more of how we use that equity lens in this department because you know that is really and that's part of just connects then also to you know 0730 was trying to find ways in this where that was being used as we have selected our platforms in our you know all of our systems that we're using because there's so many.

And I know it gets a little gray because these are internal kind of systems a lot of these are business side.

But these are still our values and we want to make sure that we're being consistent with our with our evaluation and selection of things we're spending our time and money on.

So is that something that's more CAI or DOTS.

Again I wanted to you know I'm trying to get sort of clarity there.

Yes I think that the the tool itself and is it equitable would maybe be more of a CAI in the lead on that.

We would come back around with the ADA and what we call the VPAT so making sure it's ADA accessible and the student privacy piece is the piece that DOTS would make sure that they analyze once something is selected.

Yeah because I saw I saw that in there you have the process for evaluating software requests directly from schools and teachers so and in that I didn't see anything about evaluating them based on you know a racial equity lens.

It was you got the ADA kind of look at that and everything else.

But I want to just make sure that we that is something that we are also doing because teachers want to do those sorts of things and that's great.

And as you evaluate them I'm just hopeful that we are using that lens to make sure that these are not not harming students in some way that is not obvious.

My questions regarding I have things are on the slides.

I think we're closing on time here.

But I see you guys in your department as a whole you have upwards of like at least nine vacancies.

Is that typical or should we be worried about that.

Is it something that we're looking to fill.

Carlos and Nancy and Judy.

I mean I think that we typically do have some vacancies with that number of staff at all times.

I guess I would let them respond.

So for the vacancies that I have I know that we have filled some of those and we've also made decisions to kind of repurpose some of those as we've needed to change our focus.

And so I think we're nearly filled on our vacancies.

Okay yeah the org chart just the one you in this in the presentation has there's I believe nine vacancies in there and I wasn't sure if that's something we should be worried about.

Otherwise I think I'm good.

I had a question about the department goals and objectives just as far as student digital access.

Clearly the target is 100 percent.

Our performance is 98 which sounds really good but I'm wondering I guess you know we still hear about students having problems and trouble accessing their classrooms and the programs.

I'm wondering is 100 percent even possible because clearly a lot of excess access sorry a lot of access is more you know sometimes a connection.

But I want to know if that's how or how are we judging digital access.

Is it based on our making it available or their actual ability to connect.

Go ahead.

Yeah we actually have a look at both attendance and engagement.

And that's data that we've been pulling from the from the Atlas.

Anna you want to talk a little bit about this.

Yes we are pulling usage data from the main like student systems that they're using.

So we have that data available.

I believe some of that has been sent to the to the board.

We are hovering high 90s.

I just want to bring something up that on a typical kind of day Pre-COVID our attendance rate is about 95 percent.

So 5 percent of students are typically absent on any given day.

So with the move to online learning we've actually bumped that up a couple of percentage points.

Now we're about 97 98 percent is what we're seeing.

I'm not sure it's realistic from the data perspective that we would get to 100. There's always exceptions.

I understand.

And yeah and I'm wondering again like so we're we're basing it on our our making it available but of course sometimes it sounds like an access is judged on they checked in somehow and I mean I don't know I'm just trying because you are equating that to there being in-person and which I think is a good comparison.

At the same time when you're in-person they're usually there for like you know the school day whereas if someone checks in for just a minute we're calling that access when really that's very minimal.

Not really speaking to our students getting the full benefit of a school day or learning.

So I know it's hard to parse down but I just wanted to raise that.

But yeah that was all of my questions I think.

Thank you so much for the information presentation and I will pass to the next director.

Thank you.

I have a couple of quick things that I'm happy to get the answers to at another time and some overlaps with what directors have already said and I see that it's 6 o'clock so I'm going to quickly get through and hand over to Director DeWolf.

But I just quickly the tech support specialists that were listed that are full-time is that they are I know that there are some staff member SEA staff members that are designated as like a tech lead in their building but they have another role in the building.

So the tech support specialist is that a full-time person that all that they're doing for the building is technology or is there something else.

What's the overlap there or what's the title.

Nancy.

The technology support specialist is in technology services.

And they do support the buildings of the students and staff for their technology needs.

The educational technologists are actual teachers in the buildings who are paid a stipend to help other teachers in their building with instructional suggestions and help.

They are not to do technology support although many of them are are quite versed.

But they're more to help teachers in the instructional standpoint.

Our TSS's are full-time in DOTS and then the CSS's that are on that same chart are hourly employees that we fill in.

Gotcha.

Okay thank you.

And then overlapping with I think Director DeWolf and Director Hersey in terms of the levy.

I am also really interested in the conversation about you know what the ask is for technology and how what the interaction is with CAI because you know I obviously we had to move to one-to-one devices very quickly for the current remote situation and I imagine that remote learning in some form distance learning in some form will be with us for I mean hopefully in some form may be made available to students in perpetuity.

But I am wondering if how we can have the conversation about you know that refresh that happens in four years.

Do we do we want to continue to be a one-to-one 100 percent of the time for all you know everybody or is there where's the opportunity to have a conversation about what role we want technology to play in the classroom.

I I really want to involve educators and families in that and some of that has to do with screen time and and digital citizenship that Director Hersey was talking about.

But I'm also interested in making sure that educators are part of that conversation so that we have technology that meets education needs as opposed to technology becoming available and driving driving education if that makes sense.

So I'm definitely interested in continuing on in that that type of conversation for just what what kind of education do we want and what kind of usage do we want in the classrooms.

And and then actually related to what Director Rivera-Smith asked about the software review.

You know I also kind of perked up at the software review for ADA compliance and data security and that type of thing.

When there's a request that comes from an educator for certain software what's the review process and this actually probably isn't for DOTS but what's the review process for the for equity for the educational appropriateness even of the app.

Like if we as a district think it you know it meets our values and the needs and etc.

So I'm interested in that what the review is on that end.

Really excited about the digital equity manager.

I think as I think Carlos noted you know what seems like a technical technological access issue there might be other things going on.

And so I'm just really appreciate that we're recognizing that need and have somebody who is kind of tasked with figuring out what's keeping what is keeping this student from being able to access technology and how can we help them.

And then the last thing is I would also be interested in the HR and DOTS relationship in terms of you know we're really we're really right on tracking student behavior and adult behavior and not as much.

So it would be I think worth looking into that relationship between DOTS and HR.

That is kind of all of my questions and really appreciate the hard work and the incredible body of work.

Just the list of different softwares and programs that are going on and how much how furiously I know you must all be working at this time is appreciated and necessary now more than ever.

And so thank you for the presentation and really excited to hear about teams for education rolling out starting today.

I know it won't you know magically solve everyone's problems but the classroom management tools and such for teachers I think we're going to be huge.

So thank you so much for that.

And so at 606 I will conclude our oversight work session and hand it over to our Operations Committee Chair Director DeWolf to chair our Operations Committee of the Whole.

Thank you.

Thank you Director Rankin.

Would directors like just about four minutes for just kind of stretch bio break to just get themselves situated before this next conversation.

Yes please.

Yes.

Okay cool.

I will I will see you at 610. We'll just take a really brief stretch bio break.

Thank you.

We're working on presentation so I just want to make sure we have directors back so we'll just do a quick roll call.

Director Hampson excuse me President Hampson Director Harris Director Hersey here.

Director Rankin Director Rivera-Smith present.

Director Hampson and Director Harris.

Director Hampson's here.

Awesome.

Okay.

Will the Director excuse me President Hampson Vice President Hersey Director Rivera-Smith and myself.

That's a quorum so we'll just get started and we'll we'll welcome back Directors Rankin and Harris when they are ready.

Thank you so much for for the presentation and facilitation Directors Rankin and Chief Berge.

We will now move into the Operations Committee of the Whole and we are holding tonight's meeting to consider two board action reports today.

The first board action report relates to Southeast Middle School attendance area boundaries and the second is for next year's Student Assignment Transition Plan.

All directors have been invited to participate in the discussion but when we reach the time to vote the voting directors today will be the members of the Operations Committee consistent with board policy 1240. We had last time I think we had this was in December of 2019 when the executive committee took up the TAF partnership.

And just one note Director Mack is unable to attend tonight's meeting and has requested that Director Hersey serve as the voting as the voting member in her place.

So I know we are waiting for the presentation to show up on the screen.

Ms. Wilson-Jones.

Director DeWolf can I ask all people who may be looking at tonight's materials on the website to go ahead and refresh your browsers.

We did have one document that was attached to the BAR and it was just it was the wrong document.

So I apologize for that.

But we have got the correct one there now.

And Ashley might I don't know if she'll be speaking to it but she could explain the update to you all.

And it looks like Davies' computer is over has the presentation up on the screen.

So with that are Directors Rankin or Harris here.

Director Harris is here I think.

I am here.

Sorry I didn't know you called roll.

Sorry I'm here.

Yes.

Thank you.

Okay cool.

All the directors are here.

So I will now hand it over to Director of Enrollment Planning Ashley Davies to begin the presentation.

on today's action items.

We will have an opportunity for discussion and then we'll move to the vote.

So I'll turn it over to you Ashley.

Thank you so much.

Excellent.

Thank you.

And just want to make sure that everyone can see the screen the presentation large.

Yes people can see.

Yes we can.

Yes we can.

Excellent.

Excellent.

Great so thank you again.

My name is Ashley Davies.

I'm the Director of Enrollment Planning here at Seattle Public Schools.

And today I'm here to talk about two board action reports.

We are going to spend the majority of our time today talking about Southeast boundary changes for the 21-22 school year.

Over our 90 minutes I anticipate that this discussion will probably need 70 of those 90. And then we'll spend some time talking about the student assignment transition plan changes for 21-22.

And there's just a small amount of changes.

So again want to make sure we have enough time for discussion on this topic.

And so I have a presentation just for us to go over some information and background.

This is described within the board action report.

It also highlights the different engagements that we've had share some data as it relates to our equity considerations.

And then I will transition from the presentation to show the maps so that we can take a look at that and discuss the two options that we're presenting today.

And so I want to be clear that after I do go through some of the introductory materials the process we have two scenarios for consideration this evening.

And we are asking the board to choose one of those scenarios to move forward.

for introduction next Wednesday the 13th.

So — I'm sorry I have a quick question just to clarify.

Sorry to interrupt.

Only the Operations Committee is voting tonight correct.

I want to make that clear in case I was wrong.

That is correct.

Gotcha.

Great.

You want to make sure I shouldn't be preparing to vote.

I have an opinion but I yeah.

Okay.

Thank you.

Yes yes we definitely want to hear all opinions for sure.

Thank you.

Great.

So the first is just identifying the problem and talking a little bit about the data.

And so as we've talked about over the course of the at this point it's been several years talked about the overcrowding at Mercer Middle School has almost 1,200 students and the current conditions are inequitable for learning for students.

And so there will be a replacement for Mercer that is scheduled to open in September 2025. That building though only has a capacity for a thousand students and that's consistent with our ed specs for a middle school.

That has been a common question that we've got from families as we've talked through some of the data and some of the issue is why can't we build Mercer over a thousand seats.

And so that is not consistent with again our our ed spec or a learning environment that allows for proper relationship and administrative oversight.

So.

And before 2025 Mercer will go to original Ben Asselt for two years beginning in 2023 which will be two years from the fall.

And that temporary site really has no flex space.

So that a thousand seats on that campus is really all that there is.

So it's it's super important that we not only right-size Mercer but that we start that process immediately so that we aren't in a bind once we get to original Van Asselt in the temporary space.

And then just also highlighting that several years ago back in 2013 there was a boundary change approved for Mercer to provide relief acknowledging that Mercer was already overcrowded.

As I mentioned it's been overcrowded for years.

Once we transitioned to the new student assignment plan which went to neighborhood schools.

Mercer quick most immediately came overcrowded.

And so below just highlight some of the capacity and enrollment data.

Mercer's current rice size capacity is about 800. Aki's is about 870 and Washington right around 900. And so Aki and Washington both border Mercer and have space for more students.

Aki is also scheduled for a remodel as well.

And so I believe that is scheduled for completion in 2027 and that building would also be consistent with the thousand student ed spec.

Next is just highlighting both the capital and enrollment solutions that we look at as we talk about reducing overcrowding.

You know boundary changes we understand are difficult.

They involve a lot of change for families.

And so you know before we get to that point we look at our other options especially if there are other solutions that we can take on instead of having to change those boundaries.

And so we've exhausted all of our capital planning options which are on the left side.

And then we've looked at other enrollment options that aren't quite as impactful from an enrollment change perspective.

That also includes the emergency cap on enrollment that we did with the school board in June essentially stating that no new students to the Mercer attendance area would be enrolled at Mercer.

And so that was something knew that we've done, it's definitely not a long-term solution or something we would want to do consistently.

And so, you know, after we've assessed all of our options and heard feedback, we're moving to a boundary change recommendation.

And so typically, as I highlight the process that we've used here in a little bit of, you know, what we've done in the past, and, you know, so typically we like, take this process on over the course of a longer timeline.

You know we would have started this work last spring but given school closures with the pandemic we took a pause on that so that we could think about how we would move forward with engagement.

But again given the timing and the real urgent need to make a change resume that conversation and put together Basically you know a virtual engagement strategy.

And so in October of this year is when we first shared the issue and began collecting feedback.

So information was sent to all families in grades K-8.

So all the elementary schools that are within the Mercer attendance area and then all the current Mercer middle school students.

And then we translated a video that talked about the issue into our top languages that are offered in that area.

And then as of today we actually have over 250 Let's Talk responses.

November December continued to collect feedback and develop proposals.

We attended a total of 10 school and community-based meetings to share information and collect feedback.

My team gave presentations such as this presentation that I'm giving today.

Talked with families about the issue about the ways we look at solving the issue.

And then you know families gave us different solutions that they've come up with which I'll highlight in a little bit as well as just talked about some of their concerns that they want us to consider as we move forward.

And then we created potential solutions and we shared those right before the break with families.

And so here we are at the Operations Committee of the whole.

And then we will have school board introduction and approval of changes.

That should be 2021 there.

But as I mentioned next Wednesday we'll bring forward one scenario and then on the 27th the board will make a vote.

And so the next few slides I'm just going to give a little bit more background information and share what we've heard so far as and then talk about the scenarios.

So one thing to just kind of ground everyone in understanding what we're talking about in front of you is a map of the southeast region that includes both Washington Mercer and Aki.

And so Mercer has 6 elementaries that feed into it and those elementaries are larger than the 6 elementaries that feed into Aki.

And so the issue of overcrowding is partly an issue of there are just too many residents that live in that area and that's why we're looking to redistribute that.

What you can also see from this map from a distance perspective the light red line highlights the walk zone for Mercer.

And so all of the elementaries that currently feed into Mercer have a lot of overlap in the walk zone.

So that was a consistent theme that we've heard from families.

And then highlighted this in a table that kind of shows from a distance perspective how everything ranks.

And so Maple's the closest to Mercer then Kimball then Dearborn Park Beacon Hill Hawthorne and Rising Star.

So I'll show some data as well that shows distance to the other two middle schools.

But you know this was important for us as we were looking at additional information as it relates to potential changes.

So I wanted to highlight with the board the boundary principles that are last approved in 2013. We'll also say that we have an opportunity to reevaluate these especially given that our district has changed so much since then.

Also you know we weren't consistently applying and using our racial equity analysis at this time.

And so there's definitely more alignment with policy 0030 that we can do to these principles and You know that is work that our capacity enrollment and facilities master planning committee as well as some potential other groups should tap into as we move forward.

But these are the current ones that exist.

And so those are the ones that will guide us.

One thing to note with these principals is they are not ranked.

So as we'll see as we go through the scenarios oftentimes principals conflict with each other.

But you know it's a matter of thinking about how we prioritize these different principles as we work to a solution.

I'll just give one example.

So you know one example is you know being mindful of fiscal impact.

And so that may conflict with being responsive to family input and creating boundaries that reflect equitable access to services and programs.

Same thing with walkability.

And again we'll see how some of these principles interact in the scenarios.

Next I want to highlight the community engagement.

We'll just share here again.

You know we've had 10 community-based meetings and we'll have some additional meetings up until the 27th for us to be able to share some more feedback.

from these from this discussion as well as get feedback from families.

Even once we identify a solution one of the things that's really important to hear from families is you know mitigations or other things that we can do to make the transition as smooth as possible for families.

So want to make sure that is brought to the table before the 27th so we can have that as part of our discussion.

But you know another thing here just highlighting that You know one of the one of the things at least with being virtual is that we had the opportunity to attend a lot of different meetings and to accommodate the time in which families were needing to meet.

We also had several meetings that were ELL focused or specific community group focused.

So next is what we heard.

And so some of the big things that we heard from families in this process was using a racial equity lens in decision making.

Using data in decision making and being clear about how equity equity is being considered.

Again reiteration that the current overcrowding is inequitable.

And so you know doing nothing is also inequitable despite the fact that this Work is challenging and change is difficult.

You know we can't keep what we currently have.

Prioritize prioritize keeping current school and neighborhoods together.

Prioritize continuity of dual-language immersion programs and access to international schools for current and future families.

And then maximize walkability and minimize transportation needs.

A little bit as it relates to boundary programs and then other considerations.

We had suggestions from families around all different types of boundary changes except for Maple.

Maple as I showed in that other chart is the closest school to Mercer and it also doesn't border Aki or Washington.

There were some suggestions to change the grades at some of the other schools so that we could reconfigure But you know we do have a need for all the elementary seats that we have in the area so it would be difficult for us to lose some of those seats and not create additional capacity challenges.

Other suggestions to continue remote learning.

Staggering class sizes.

And then we had both suggestions for keeping the current dual-language pathway and then also suggestions for changing the pathway.

And again as I talk about one of the recommend solutions in particular there would be some implications as it relates to changes in the pathway.

Other considerations I talked about building Mercer larger than a thousand seats and why we can't do that.

You know families asked about understanding and evaluating why Mercer's been so attractive and what can we do and replicate at other schools that that might make that might make other schools as attractive.

And then also have really heard from families that grandfathering is important to keep current students at their school.

And so we'll share some data as it relates to some of the the top principles that we've heard.

And so ultimately as we went through all the feedback as we went through our data analysis As we talked with families as we talked to staff there were three big buckets you know that we heard were important that also aligned with our commitments as a district.

And the first one was using data in a racial equity lens.

And so here I've highlighted all the schools that are with currently within the Mercer attendance area.

Their equity tier as of 2019. We don't have a more recent one.

One thing to note Rising Star is a tier 1 school and that is as a result of the students served there.

And so you know we took Rising Star off the table for a potential change because it was a tier 1 school and Rising Star is closest to Aki Kurose which is also a tier 1 school.

And so we did not want to send another tier 1 school into another tier 1 school.

And then I also talked about Maple and the fact that it wasn't didn't border Washington or or Aki and so we also took that off the table for consideration and so that left Kimball, Hawthorne, Dearborn Park and Beacon Hill.

And so again equity tiers in this first column equity index free and reduced Price Lunch enrolled at the school.

And so you can see some differences in some of these schools.

African-American male percentage percent not non-White percent ELL and then percent SPED.

Special percent of students who are receiving special education services.

The next big priority was maintaining walkability.

And so I showed the chart for Mercer.

But understanding that we are having to make a change and you know we need at least two schools to move from Mercer into another attendance area.

Middle school have highlighted on the left side the proximity to Washington.

So Beacon Hill would be the closest followed by Kimball Maple Hawthorne Dearborn Park and Rising Star.

And then also have highlighted distance from from Aki.

So Dearborn Park is the closest.

Then Hawthorne Rising Star Maple Kimball and Beacon Hill.

And so I will just acknowledge that this is average distance.

And so what that actually means from the perspective of transportation for an individual student is not captured in these numbers.

Some of what we've heard from families as they gave us their feedback was about the transportation concern of having to get on a bus and the bus routes that are accessible in certain instances.

So you know we would likely have to with any scenario that we choose think about how we would manage the transportation needs for students in the new school that they would be assigned to.

And then the last one was supporting dual-language immersion programs and ELL students has been a consistent priority for families and SPS.

And so just a review that Beacon Hill and Dearborn Park currently offer Spanish and Mandarin and feed into Mercer and then also that then would feed into Rainier Beach.

You know we've talked about the fact that families are not attending Rainier Beach despite the fact that that is the pathway.

So as we've talked about dual-language immersion changes with families you know they have articulated that you know overall the continuity to high school hasn't seemed you know well-planned well-thought-out.

And so you know it's important as we think about any type of change that we're that we're also really thoughtful about the impact that it has on dual-language immersion particularly as it serves as a support to ELL students and access to students of color.

And so also just highlighting that this was the very first year that Dearborn Park was that Dearborn Park students were in dual-language at Mercer because that program had been phasing in.

And then again I just talked about how in line with our strategic plan we are wanting to support ELL students as well as Native speakers within our planning and programming for dual-language.

So that leads me to our scenarios.

And so at least two schools need to change treater patterns to right-size Mercer.

We have two scenarios that are presented in the BAR.

One the first one is Scenario 1A which is which moves Hawthorne to Aki Kurose and then Kimball to Washington.

And then the next scenario A2 which moves oops which which moves Hawthorne to Washington and which moves Dearborn Park to Aki.

So with that I just I'm going to close this and show the maps real quick and then.

Alright.

Well, this is the first map.

which I mentioned was a change of Kimball to Washington and then a change of Hawthorne to Aki.

And so within this map just wanted to highlight if I scroll a little bit closer you can see some of the data points here.

Amongst these two scenarios that I've shared from a size perspective There's a slight difference in the overall number of students who would be who are within those schools who would be impacted in the future.

But the number is not super significant.

So between if we look at Kimball and Hawthorne there's a total of 391. students who are in grades 6-8 who attend Mercer.

And then in the other scenario there's a total of 359. And so some of the things just wanted to highlight here in terms of those priorities that I talked about.

Within here you can see that currently 100 percent of the Kimball students are within the walk zone for Mercer.

And if we did make that change there would only be a small number of students who would be in the walk zone for Washington.

If you look at Hawthorne though there's still many of these families are still very close to Aki.

If you see down here where Aki is located in in relation to Hawthorne.

You know as we looked at the demographics across all of the elementary schools that currently feed into Mercer you know thinking about our our guide in minimizing impact to students for educational justice Hawthorne would be one of the schools that would be included in any in any scenario.

And so that's why it's in both.

And again, Hawthorne is close to Aki in this one.

And so the next one I wanted to share, and so this one I want to highlight has no immediate change on the dual language immersion pathway.

Not to say that there aren't discussions that we are having just about the current structure of the pathway, and the sustainability of it you know because we do have some concerns outside of this conversation just about ensuring that there's enough students to support the the pathway.

So then as we think about this next scenario which is Hawthorne to Washington and Dearborn Park to Aki this would mean that we would have to look at changes to the dual-language pathway because there already is a small smaller number of students who are within some of the languages within Mercer.

If we moved out Dearborn Park that would mean we would likely have to consider a single-language track at Mercer and then a single-language track at Dearborn Park and then likely a single-language track at Beacon Hill.

And so just for us to have sustainable cohorts and classes within the languages that are offered.

That does though present us the opportunity to have the conversation about that.

And Dearborn Park currently offers Spanish and Mandarin and English but English is not offered consistently and part of that is because of the overall enrollment at the school.

And so you know again there does need to be a conversation about how we create sustainable language offerings within the schools as they currently exist.

And then if we were to make any changes.

So if we were to look at a scenario that moved one of the dual-language schools out of its current pathway we would have to evaluate then what does get offered at Mercer and then what gets offered at Aki from a language perspective to as those as we make those changes.

Ms. Davies I wonder if we are at the point for questions and discussion for this portion of the conversation.

Yes.

Okay.

Very cool.

Thank you so much Miss Davies for all of your work.

I will turn it over to directors for comments and questions before we move into a vote here.

So we'll begin with Director Hampson.

Thank you.

Can you hear me okay Ashley.

Yes.

Okay.

So I think the question I want to ask right now is about one specific.

Can you go back to scenario 1 with that map.

Yeah.

And yeah.

Thank you.

The one of the things I'm wondering about is there's a there's a BOC which stands for what does it stand for.

Bilingual Orientation Center.

Okay thank you.

At Hawthorne and and that was one of the engagement pieces that I saw.

We you know we're getting a decent amount of feedback from families that are heavily invested in the Chinese language program at Dearborn Park you know which would is one of the ones that's up for consideration.

But less so with Spanish programming.

And one of the I'm just curious to hear a little bit more about what you heard from from those families and is there if Hawthorne goes to Aki is there an opportunity to move that BOC over to one of the other schools that is in the Mercer pathway.

Why is it at Hawthorne.

So I will share what I know at this point about the BOC and then I might have to connect with some of my colleagues to get a little bit more information on some of the history.

But in talking with some of the Dearborn Park community as well as just looking at the data that we have on the BOC at Hawthorne, The demographics of at Hawthorne have really changed over time.

And so of all the 6 schools that we looked at within the Mercer boundary I had highlighted the fact that Hawthorne has the lowest percentage of students of color.

The lowest free and reduced price lunch.

And so Hawthorne at one point had a larger percentage and number of students who are utilizing the bilingual orientation center.

But currently we have a very small population at Hawthorne that that is there in that capacity.

And so you know this did come up in a conversation you know that we have with some staff about could there be an opportunity to move the BOC to one of the dual-language schools.

Because that could also be a natural fit again in terms of what we've identified as our goals for you know language acquisition and using language to be able to support students especially if it's their native language.

So I think that's definitely a conversation I can have with my colleague in ELL.

And then you know also you know you know that I've been in close communication with our international schools administrator throughout all this process.

But I would say that there is an opportunity for that conversation and that is one that you know could make sense.

Director Hampson did that answer your question.

I'm sorry I was talking on mute.

Okay.

Yes.

Thank you.

I guess the the other piece that that remains missing for me here we have kind of African-American males represented in terms of numbers but I didn't get as much of a sense from the community engagement around Black and African families that are at Dearborn Park or Hawthorne that would be impacted by this.

And what are you know They're not necessarily benefiting from a dual-language program at Dearborn Park if they're particularly if they're have a home language that is an African language.

But what is do we have a sense of what that community perspective is.

You know obviously it's not monolithic but can I hear a little bit about any feedback you had from from the Black or any of the East African community members.

Yeah so I will say at this point and I actually have another engagement tomorrow with the Hawthorne community to go through these to go through this scenario with them and kind of talk through because they were included in both of these.

But as it relates to one just the overall feedback that we've got from families we had a I would say as you know a small percentage of our Black families participate in the Let's Talk.

And as far as it relates to you know the feedback that we've heard from Hawthorne at this point you know we haven't heard necessarily specifically from those who identify as Black.

Some of what we have heard though from the feedback from Hawthorne families is that they are closer to Aki.

And so some families did prefer the idea of being reassigned to Aki if that was where they were going to be reassigned.

And then we also did hear another sign from some other families that The TAF the STEM by TAF model at Washington seemed attractive to them and so that was something that they were interested in.

So you know heard both perspectives from families as it relates to that.

In terms of the question about Aki and so you know we had a community meeting that was both Sorry Dearborn Park.

We had a community meeting that was Dearborn Park and Beacon Hill.

And you know the majority of the families that attended that meeting were probably from Beacon Hill.

And then in following up with the school you know they said honestly that one families at Dearborn Park were just fatigued by the conversation.

You know we had them involved in the last conversation we had about Maple.

So they went through you know that round of conversation there.

And they you know preferred not to have a community meeting.

They're on the screen all day.

And you know some of the feedback that we had heard was you know not wanting to you know have a meeting and go through this in that capacity.

So I did connect with the principal around getting some feedback directly from the from families at the school and from staff at the school.

And so you know in in talking with you know and getting some feedback from in that way.

You know the feedback that we had heard is that you know families at Dearborn want to stay at Mercer.

I will say though you know that's what we heard from almost all families.

The other thing that we have seen from you know some of the data as well as at the school level and I think you know I shared a little bit about this with you is that you know we've probably have at Dearborn Park more white families within Spanish.

And then we have our East African families that are in English.

And then we have Chinese families who are in the Mandarin.

And so especially as we think about what that can mean in the future in terms of who is wanting to access language offerings there's definitely more opportunity there.

Thank you.

And I guess I would just say that thanks to a community member who did a little bit of analysis and you can probably confirm this that the relative the transportation cost impact is neutral between the two options correct.

Correct.

And so so that's helpful for us to know.

That you know I think in the future and I hope that we will be there very soon in the future we need to be offering these dual-language opportunities within the school communities where the linguistically home language base is.

And so having you know Spanish in a place like Dearborn Park that doesn't have a large Spanish-speaking home language population taking advantage of that makes me think that you know we're not we're not targeting the right language for that school.

And so whether we are looking to funnel for middle school students from dual-language our few dual-language pathways into that same school I hope that in future years we won't have this That being a factor that that kind of mitigates our flexibility because we will in fact have a more robust dual-language support system for all of our communities and are truly investing in those individual communities and their home languages.

So with that I'll pass it to the next director.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you Director Rivera-Smith.

Director Rivera-Smith.

Can I just.

Excuse me.

Sorry.

Yep.

Go ahead.

Go ahead.

Yeah this is Chief Pedroza.

I just wanted to add one thing to answer the question that Director Hampson posed about locations and pathways.

That is a topic I just want to make sure the committee knew before it got asked again.

That is something that we're going to redo and re-look at not redo but re-look at.

We're going to bring together some of the members from the ELL department dual language advanced learning special education together with the enrollment planning team to look at the whole district and look at our program services and pathways.

to really think about recommendations moving forward that we would work through with operations committee.

So I just wanted to share that that's and that's a plan that we have to look at this spring.

And thank you so much for doing that.

And I know you all are are very interested in that work and I'm super grateful.

Thank you.

Okay we need to move to the next director so Director Harris.

Okay Chief Pedroza thank you for that input because I'm most disturbed that we have been careening along with our dual-language pathway and we have a whole lot of history to overcome.

You're going to look at it this spring.

Do we have a work plan at this point with some with some benchmarks and dates to meet.

Was one of the things we're working on.

We're just it was it came out of when we can't add all the community engagement sessions that became really clear as a need that we needed a whole systems approach to this work.

So after this process is completed Ash Director Davies and I will be coming together with a work plan that we'll be presenting to the board at some point through the operations committee to move forward to conduct some of these of these do some research and analysis of all of our pathways in our system.

Appreciate that and I would suggest that it belongs in two committees.

S.S.D. and I I think is the correct acronym now.

Because the dual-language pathways has been clear as mud for years and I am so extraordinarily hesitant to break trust with Beacon Hill and Dearborn Park.

And I would like a great deal more robust information about the community engagement.

How many people attended.

What are the demographics.

What was the takeaway from it.

And I well appreciate that y'all are really really working hard.

But that data since we're a data-driven district is hugely important to me and I'm hoping that we can get a couple of memos out in the interim to give us a better sense of what was said.

Who was in attendance.

The highlights if you will and the numbers and the demographics.

I appreciate the transportation costs being purportedly neutral.

But part of my concern is that Metro doesn't even have routes between some of the these proposals.

If we're doing the ORCA card and if we're not doing that then what are the yellow bus numbers.

And I absolutely agree and we'll take some ownership of the Rainier Beach International High School pathway that was determined after one dual-language student enrolled at Chief Sealth and we were hoping that because of light rail that would be a carrot.

Apparently it is not.

And at that time it was determined Franklin's leadership wanted no part of dual-language pathways.

But I guess part of my bigger issue and my concern is we're talking about backing out dual-language pathways under a boundary change and that seems back asswards to me.

It I I have significant problems with breaking trust on a program where we've led people to believe that their children have a pathway because of boundaries.

I I'm confused and I'm distressed that we don't have a deep dive in what community engagement has been done and I would so very much appreciate being learned up.

And I'll pass to the next director.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Director Hersey.

Hey can y'all hear me okay.

Yes we can.

Okay perfect.

Thank you.

I've got a few questions.

Some are from community some are my own.

Some might be for the record so just you know bear with me here.

My first question is how many kids are in I mean at Dearborn Park in the DLI pathway.

Can we get a number on that.

So I don't have that number offhand but I can get that number and get it to you know definitely by tomorrow.

That'd be great.

And then I guess one of my next questions would be does do the languages that are offered at Mercer match the ones at the Dearborn Park International School.

Yes they do.

So they both offer Mandarin and Spanish.

Okay fantastic.

The next question I have is around our equity scoring.

I have some major concerns.

And so I just want to for folks on the call just remind or just really I want to know who at the district do I need to talk to about how equity and this isn't necessarily a question for you solely Director Davies but who do I need to talk to about how the equity scores were determined.

Because I'm sure we all remember the lawsuit that was brought forth by Michael Wadey from Kimball around the inaccuracy of his equity or excuse me of Kimball's equity score.

And I think we need to do an audit and make sure that we are actually using correct data for some of these decisions especially if you know we have a very active PTA at a place like Kimball who can advocate versus maybe a different school where the PTA is less active or They don't have as many advocates.

I just want to know what are our plans with ensuring especially as our communities change and as especially the South End continues to grow and as we make these changes how often are we updating our equity scores.

Again not a question directly for Ashley.

So if anyone else can answer that on the call that'd be greatly appreciated.

I wondered.

Go ahead.

I can save that question.

I can save that question for later if I could get an update on that.

Director Hersey we update the equity scores every year.

Okay.

Fantastic.

Thank you.

We also we look at the equity factors every year.

Okay.

Great.

And so how do we communicate just really quickly how do we communicate if an equity score changes.

Is it just on the website.

Yes yes it's on the website and we did I think there was some maybe materials in a budget work session that I would point us to as well from last time.

Sure.

Okay.

Fantastic.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

I guess for me as I think about this particular decision as the Southeast Board Director for the past year we have had to deal with two major boundary changes and moving forward And it's no surprise to me quite frankly that these boundary changes are predominantly taking place in the part of the city where we have the highest concentration of students furthest away from educational justice particularly Black students.

And this is continually disruptive to the families in my district.

So much so that in no in no intentional way I will say by anybody who is on this call at this moment We are essentially pitting families against each other and quite frankly families of color when we are continually having these types of discussions.

And what I would really like to see us do is to get to a place to where we have a very clear metric for how we make these decisions.

Again I cannot be more thankful to Ashley and Dr. Pedroza.

for the community engagement and the modeling that they have been doing just you know in my experience with the Maple boundary changes and now this one I think that they are doing a great job and the rest of our district could really you know take a lesson from the example that they're setting.

But again this is this is at some phase got to stop to the point to where I feel as though previous boards have been kicking this can due to you know being responsive to the loudest voices.

to to create political cover in a lot of respects.

And what I really want to see as Concie you were talking to earlier is a clear decision-making model when it comes to these types of things.

Because the last thing that we need are schools with high concentrations of Black students and other students of color essentially competing in terms of their advocacy to.

maintain their interests for their children.

I think another thing that we need to also be cognizant of is even post this discussion we need to be very clear about the conversation that needs to be had is why are less of our families excited about attending Washington and Aki.

What are we as a district not doing to support those school communities to make them just as appealing as Mercer.

I think that's the real conversation that we need to be having because the alternative to that is we are going to have a lot of families who have traditionally had access to our system continue to send us e-mails and quite frankly for lack of a better word pervert the word equity to to protect the interest of their children.

So I think that we need to do our part as the tops of this system.

to ensure that we have a very clear metric going forward.

And I know that that is of interest to a lot of folks on this call so I just want to make that very clear that that is a big expectation from me.

I guess the last thing that I will say is if we after this decision I really want to know what is the game plan for us to get to that place.

And I and when I say game plan I mean timetables Like what staff are going to be allocated to working on those metrics and really being very clear in our communication out to families so that we are not causing this type of anxiety when we're making these types of decisions about where kids will end up.

And I'll end it at that.

Thank you Director Hersey.

Dropped a lot of truth there.

Appreciate you tonight.

Next we'll move on to Director Rankin.

Thanks.

Yeah I kind of echoing what Director Hersey said about kicking the can I totally agree.

I had written down you know this needed to happen 7 years ago.

Board the district and the board knew that Mercer was overcrowded and people dug into their or emotional emotional pleas or you know whatever what have you.

And instead of making a decision to alleviate overcrowding they just didn't make a decision.

And now we have families now who have to deal with it.

And as as it was said too by community members the overcrowding itself is an equity issue.

So this has not putting that decision off has not served served our families very well.

I want to say thank you to Ashley and team for the engagement that happened.

I mean a lot of times in these types of situations I think you know one one school community will sort of organize the fastest and make their voice heard and have the most access to information.

And make it seem like that's sort of the right or only opinion.

And we've for better or for worse heard from a lot of different families from from many of these schools that all are a lot of them are asking for different things which is on the one hand you know we want to make the decision that families want and that's hard when they're all different.

But on the other hand I think a testament to effective outreach because we are you know we I got at least in my year as a board my first email in written in Chinese.

So just so just kudos to that to just helping helping families understand what's coming and how to prepare and how to make their voice heard.

This one question I have might not have any have enough significant impact on numbers but I'm curious about the highly capable cohort at Thurgood Marshall.

If there are students who in the past or are still currently because technically the HC cohort goes to Washington but if there are numbers at all from their from the cohort the elementary cohort that would be going to schools other than Washington for middle school and if that has any impact.

That might choose choose to go there instead of instead of Washington if if their attendance area in middle school is different.

Is that question making sense.

This is Ashley.

Oh Kelsey you can go if you wanted to.

I was just going to say.

Go Ashley.

Sorry.

Okay.

So Director Rankin I think your question is if we have a change in the service delivery model for Advanced Learning given that we have cohorts right now in Washington is a school that is a site for students who are eligible who come from other attendance area middle schools.

If we make a change to the service delivery will that impact other middle schools.

And so the answer is yes.

You know we do have a large portion of Washington students who are currently attending Washington who come from other middle schools.

So you know many come from Meany.

We have others that come from Mercer and then others that come from Aki.

And so if there is a change then you know they would likely go to their neighborhood middle school or they'd apply to attend another middle school.

Okay.

But those those numbers are not significant enough to factor into all of this.

So they I mean they are fairly significant in terms of I would say probably close to half of Washington's enrollment comes from outside of comes from advanced learning students.

And then you know a large portion of that half are students who come from outside of the Washington attendance area.

So.

You know that's part of the reason you know why it's important that we move at least two schools now.

But to the concept of a pathway change or service delivery model change that is you know coming based off what we've discussed.

You know that's a larger conversation that we're going to have because it would have impacts across the system.

And so.

There would definitely be an opportunity for us to look at that and we wouldn't want to isolate that to just this area.

It would be one that we have to have across the whole district.

Okay.

So connected to that I'm thinking about you know future impacts of the moves that that we make this month.

I wish we could have the pathway conversation programs pathways conversation with dual language first and then the boundary conversation but I mean I recognize that that's not where we're at.

Because just you know purely numbers wise and distance and proximity to schools wise you know it it might make more sense to move Beacon Hill to Washington.

But if that's not where the dual language pathway is that doesn't make any sense at all.

So in the like in the.

I guess do we anticipate that these same schools might be looking at another middle school boundary change in the next couple of years.

Or like how.

Yeah so in terms of the so there's a few you know you bring up a great point about other district conversations.

and other capacity enrollment impacts that we may anticipate as we try to ensure that all the services and opportunities that students need are available close to home.

And so with that in particular you know as I was was talking about the fact that a change in the HC service delivery HC meaning highly capable service delivery model would mean that we're looking at changes across the system.

And that also the way anything gets rolled out, it wouldn't be immediate, right?

So we've also identified the fact that we have to have conversations about our dual language pathways.

And the language that are offered and making sure that each school has a sustainable program that meets the needs of our students and what we've committed to as a district.

And so you know I see us being able to as we talked about how that start that conversation now map that out.

And then you know any changes as a result of advanced learning changes wouldn't start really affecting enrollment for a few years.

Okay.

Okay thanks.

And then another question I had was with the distance you had you said that was an average distance.

Is that like average distance of how far away students live in the attendance area or is that like As the crow flies or what does that average distance mean.

Yeah the average distance is as the crow flies.

So you know it doesn't take into consideration you know where streets are where hills are.

It's just you know a metric for us to be able to use.

So it's like from one corner of the attendance area to the school and another corner to the school and then the difference between the two.

Yes.

Okay.

Any final questions Director Rankin.

I mean a lot but yeah.

Oh one more question about transportation.

And I think Director Harris asked this as well.

Do we currently bus do we currently do busing for students in the John Muir attendance area to Washington or how do those students get to their middle school.

I don't know that offhand but I can check.

I know that Washington does have a significant number of buses that go to it because of the fact that many students come from outside the attendance area.

So I think based off of what we were looking at from this data Washington had like 9 buses which is not typical for a middle school.

Okay.

So I guess I mean I'm asking because you know Kimball and John Muir are relatively close to each other and you know about the same distance away from Washington as each other.

So I was just wondering what the John Muir student experience is in getting to Washington since obviously it happens.

Got it.

Yeah.

So the I can I can definitely follow up on that.

The one thing I can just share though as it relates to that.

So I was highlighting before some of the transportation data.

But so currently all of the Kimball students live within the walk zone.

And so in the other scenario in scenario A-1 we would have 135 students who would need a bus.

82 that would need an ORCA card and then there would be about a little less than 6 students who would be in the walk zone for Washington.

And so based off of our transportation service standards that's 2 buses.

for Kimball students.

To go to Washington.

Correct.

Okay.

And sorry but we don't normally do yellow buses for middle school except for special education or do we do.

No we we do.

We do if they live with without within a with outside a certain distance.

So.

Oh yes.

Okay sorry that was a total brain.

No that's that's a that's a great question.

That's okay.

Okay.

And no I don't think I'll have any more questions without taking us into forever.

Thank you Director Rankin.

Director Rivera-Smith.

Hi.

Sorry I'm here.

I thank you for all the information.

Following up.

Actually and I this information was probably on the sides and I'm trying to decipher from it but could you just tell me which scenario between scenario 1 and scenario 2 Which one moves the most students out of Mercer.

So that was would be scenario 1. That was a total of 391 compared to 359. Okay.

Which scenario displaces the fewest number of students of color.

So from a percentage standpoint that's going to be Scenario 1. Do you know what the percentages are.

I miss that last.

It's quite I'm the tiny print here and I was looking at things.

I'm just asking if you know what the percentages are.

So I don't have it combined.

But so what we've shown on the map here that's part of the packet is these are so each of these boxes represents the students who are in those particular areas.

So you can see both the raw number and the percentage.

Okay.

And so yeah and then I'm wondering we had a parent emailed in noting the noting the integration numbers as far as like which which pathway would or sorry which scenario would would increase the diversity or recreate an integration of Aki.

So I'm wondering does that do we have does Seattle Public Schools have sort of a magic number for regarding integrated schools or where we want to see schools because you know apparently last year Aki was was you know 93.5 percent students of color.

And even Dearborn Park was you know 97 percent.

I'm wondering We want diversity but at the same time we want integration.

We want integrated schools I think.

So do we have sort of a benchmark of what we want to be or would we try to get schools more integrated.

Do we you know just trying to figure out what our goals are.

You know I'm going to add that I'm just going to speak for this moment.

This is a conversation we've had and that's what I think the work that we have to do in the springtime.

And I think also the the CMPF committee needs to be really focused on when they make their recommendations about what is it that we want to do when we especially when we revise our principles for our schools.

Is the goal I want to say is the goal about integration.

Is it neighborhood schools.

Those are really good questions.

Right.

And I think we have to still ponder some of those questions because I think like we've said so much has changed since the last principles were adopted.

We are now a district about really promoting and supporting racial identity and accepting all of our families and students exactly as they are.

Right.

So I think that's the question that's the tension we have to ask ourselves and I don't think we've fully answered that yet.

And I appreciate that.

I think it's it's definitely in the eye of maybe you know current board or current staff and the communities altogether.

I'm just I'll just say I know we're short on time already.

Given the data that is available I myself I know I'm not voting tonight but I myself would lean towards scenario 1 for the reasons the numbers you were able to give me of you're moving the most students out displacing the fewest students of color.

And just as Director Harris you know mentioned I am too very concerned with the breaking of trust for our our dual-language populations at Dearborn Park.

It's no small feat to be part of a dual-language program.

I have two schools in my district and I I've seen First 10 the family the work it takes to just to you know help your student through those years.

And it's a blessing for these families to get to you know follow through with their their heritage language.

So anyhow I know I got to move on but that's where I am in following and giving information.

Thank you.

Thank you Director Rivera-Smith.

Okay.

We do have a whole discussion on Daniel Bagley so I want to make sure we can get to that before the vote.

So I'll just about five more minutes for this discussion so I know Director Harris and then Director Hersey if you could give about two minutes each that'd be really great so we can move to the vote.

So I'll go to Director Harris first and then Director Hersey.

Appreciate that Director DeWolf very much.

Question.

Were the dual-language folks working with The folks that are presenting tonight in part and parcel and are they on the line this evening is my first question.

And my second frankly comment would be I well appreciate that Mercer has been packed solid for years and years and years but I don't know that it's previous boards that didn't move the can or kicked it down the road because with all due respect We did not have assistance from staff.

And Director DeWolf I believe that you were with me asking those questions for at least two years in the past.

Thank you.

I'm going to be really brief just quickly because I know you need to go to the vote.

But yes Thad Williams Dr. Williams has been part and a partner with us through all every step of the way.

And we're really excited about his vision for dual language which we're still working with.

He's met with all the principals in all of the schools.

I will I don't know if this committee knows but I was actually on the original dual language committee that brought John Stanford National School to the district.

Back then the languages were chosen on a business model on what businesses told us they needed for language.

The shift around dual language is now supporting and directly the model what do our students need.

So that's a shift that sort of the district sort of has to bring on is how do we shift from the business model to the student to the to what our students need because that will actually drive the business model.

So I just want to show that that is something that he's in discussion with with us and it's part of the instructional discussion we need to have.

So yes agreed on that.

And then yes I just believe that he's not I don't believe he's on the line here but it'll be part of a bigger discussion as I mentioned before.

So he actually is on the line now.

Great.

Thank you.

Sorry I just wanted to reiterate that and just to echo Concie's point about dad working so closely with us in all of this but has attended community engagement meetings with myself to hear from families attending principal conversations.

And so you know excited for us to continue that work together.

And I will add that actually Thad and Ashley co-presented at CSECT around this topic and I will send that video to all of you.

Thank you.

Okay next we'll move to Director Hersey.

Hey thanks so much.

Just for clarity I was referring to board directors in 2013 so no slights to any of my colleagues.

Much appreciate your work.

The questions that I have.

Yeah.

So the questions that I have.

The first one is concerning for Rising Star one of the questions that came from community.

Just clarifying they are not being considered because of their distance and their equity score is that correct.

That is correct.

Okay fantastic.

The last question that I have is concerning given that you know the south end is growing at an exponential rate there are new condos that are popping up every single month it seems like.

I'm wondering, as we move into this new season of gentrification for our part of the city, I'm very concerned that we are going to be in this position again quite often.

And I'm wondering what are we doing now to work with and I asked this question during the Maple Boundary discussions as well.

What are our metrics for predicting enrollment predicting family move in.

Are we working with the city.

Are we working.

with any other government agencies to kind of get a leg up on the changes that are happening in terms of housing in specific areas to make sure that we are being or at least using a level of foresight to determine where we think hotspots are going to be for new families new kids.

And adjust accordingly earlier than we have in the past.

Great question.

So we we do work closely with the with the city.

And so my staff has a demographer and the city has a demographer as well.

And so you know we meet with the city regularly to just talk about changes across the city.

Our demographers meet to talk about changes that are happening.

And then we actually also have an education and housing manager who is within another division but we work closely with that role to look at new housing and particularly housing for low-income families and families at different income levels because those tend to have the biggest impact on student enrollment.

And so you know I'm happy to sit down to either share with you or sit down and kind of talk you through the way we monitor that.

There's a way that we can kind of forecast based off of what type of housing it is.

How many units.

Sometimes we go visit some of these units.

But you know we work closely internally and externally to look at what are some of those additional developments that are happening.

And to see you know what impact that may have.

You know even I remember probably five years ago at this point going out to Sandpoint and probably my first interaction with Director Hampson talking about some housing that was happening out there.

So you know we do that constantly throughout the year.

And so that does help us think about where growth is happening and what impact that may have on schools as it relates to our our forecast for the future.

Thank you very much.

I would love to have that conversation.

Yeah.

Great.

Thank you.

One other quick point that I just wanted to clarify because it came up Director Hersey mentioned asked this in terms of Dearborn Park.

So about 80 percent of the students there are in dual-language immersion.

Thank you.

I really appreciate that.

Well it is 7-28.

I really appreciate this discussion and as always Miss Davies your work is so appreciated here and we are so grateful for all that you do for our schools.

So I would ask for a motion now to move this item forward to the board for approval.

Do I have a motion from one of the directors on the Operations Committee.

I can make the motion in the BAR there are is a blank line so I need to motion an option correct.

Correct.

I mean based on what it sounds like people are are more supportive of I will move that we put this BAR forward with option 1 to the full board.

So wouldn't it be 1A.

Oh sorry this is for players too so I was confused.

1A.

Scenario A A1 yes.

Do I have a second.

Second.

Thank you directors.

I I have a motion for approval of option scenario A1 which is as described in this meeting today and it was moved by Director Rankin and seconded by Director Hersey.

So I'll now ask for a vote of the operations committee members.

All those in favor please signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Aye.

With clarification is that for approval and consideration Mr. excuse me Director DeWolf.

Yes I I I ask for this to move forward for approval.

Thank you sir.

Thank you.

All.

I don't think I heard any opposition so I believe this motion has passed unanimously.

Thank you directors.

Miss Wilson-Jones can you just confirm that we had all three on the yes or on the aye.

Apologies Director DeWolf I missed the question.

That's cool.

I was just I was just saying can you confirm that we did the three ayes for the motion.

Yes I did hear three ayes from yourself Director Rankin and Director Hersey.

Okay thank you.

Sorry I just I wanted to make sure I got the question for Director Harris and I just want to make sure I heard three.

Okay so Ms. Davies first of all thank you for the first presentation.

Thank you to directors for the incredibly insightful conversation.

and feedback and certainly much much work ahead of us.

Miss Davis I know you have an update for us on student assignment transition plan so I would love you to be able to provide that.

I don't know if 10 minutes feels like a good enough amount of time.

Does that does that feel appropriate.

You may be muted.

Yes I was muted sorry.

I think my finish should be should be just fine.

I had my I had the presentation up and I was muted.

I couldn't couldn't do all the things.

So I'm going to.

I'm going to talk briefly about the student assignment transition plan and some of the updates that we're looking at for this year.

I will just highlight.

We have one that's the more substantial update, and I'll kind of spend most of the time talking about that.

And then two updates that are really just language updates.

It doesn't make any change to any of the meeting or the offerings.

It just clarifies what's there.

So the first is removing the separate Montessori and contemporary programs at Daniel Bagley.

And moving to one single program for all students.

And then the other two updates that are smaller.

Clarifying language about International Baccalaureate Program to more accurately describe the program.

It's currently listed only as being at Ingram and it's also at Rainier Beach and Chief Sealth so that needed to be updated.

And the last was just about updating the name change for South Lake to Alceguiama High School.

Again just making sure that our documents reflect school updates.

And so I only have a slide to share on Daniel Bagley Montessori again because those other two are just you know language updates.

But Daniel Bagley has identified that there are demographic differences between who is in their Montessori and their contemporary programs.

And so Daniel Bagley is actually the last Montessori school that we have in the district.

Leschi and Graham Hill were formerly Montessori schools offering a Montessori section and a contemporary section which would just be traditional classroom.

And so Over the past few years those communities have come forward in wanting to make those changes because they have also identified that there are equity issues in the way that that was playing out in their school.

And so school leadership and staff identified that this was a problem as part of some of the race and equity work that they were doing as staff.

And so I would say You know a huge shout out to our district staff who facilitate that work and that leadership and that training for staff to be able to work amongst themselves and identify things that they see as issues in their building that they want to tackle.

And so after identifying this as an issue they created a Race and Equity Instructional Design Committee that consists of school leaders teachers and parents.

to talk about what these changes would look like in terms of if we were going to transition out of a separate Montessori program what is on the other side of this.

And so they've been meeting they were planning to start meeting last spring but then again with school closure they started meeting this fall identifying that you know we would be in this virtual space for a while and this work couldn't wait.

Um, you know, essentially what they, um, uh, have identified as a collective was that moving to a single program, um, would, um, allow them to be able to blend the best practices from Montessori and contemporary, um, while creating, um, a more inclusive and equitable community again, such that there are not big demographic differences between the two groups and such that, um, there are perceptions of differences amongst students.

And so within this work they've also been doing focus groups with students with families with BIPOC families in particular.

And so ultimately the change that would be reflected in the student assignment transition plan would be that we would remove the Montessori element such that right now in the plan it There's a specific tiebreakers if you are trying to apply to a Montessori program.

And so we would just take out that language.

And if families were interested in applying to Daniel Bagley, they would just apply directly to the school using the same enrollment processes that we use for any other school or program.

And that's it.

Okay well thank you very much.

Miss Davies I believe this concludes our presentation from you tonight is that correct.

That is correct.

I guess there actually is one other thing that I did want to mention.

So we I did not include this in the presentation because I didn't want to confuse you or families but we did I did just want to circle back on conversations that we had previously about the Native Heritage speaker set aside at McDonald John Stanford.

And so we had had that conversation earlier about the fact that we really wanted those 20 percent of seats to be for families who identified that as a Native language.

And so in working in conjunction with the schools we've identified a protocol at the school level that they would use to essentially work with families who identify that they're Native.

And so that isn't a change to the student assignment transition plan because there's no language in the plan that speaks to that.

But it does continue to align with You know the work that we've been talking about and also what we've committed to within our strategic plan.

So just wanted to make sure I circled back on that.

And that's why you don't see it in this presentation because there is not specific language in the student assignment transition plan around that.

And now I'm done.

Thank you so much Ms. Davies.

I know we are about 10 minutes over time.

I want to make sure we can get folks to their evening.

So if folks have more questions I would just encourage you to please reach out to Ms. Davies on the updates that she provided around the student assignment transition plan.

Can I just ask a quick clarifying question on that.

It's quick I promise.

So what you just presented on the student assignment transition plan it was just an update.

There's no we're not taking action now and that's something that's coming before the board at some point or it's just an FYI these changes are happening.

So so it is this is a second BAR.

So the updates are actual updates to the plan.

And so we the actual student assignment transition plan we have reflected those three things that I mentioned.

They are redlined updates in the plan.

Okay thank you.

Okay.

Well thank you so much directors.

We appreciate you spending your evening with us.

I know we've been going for about three hours now.

Please have an enjoyable rest of your evening.

Get to your families and your your self-care time.

It's been a very long day.

Really really appreciate you all and your service.

And there being no further business on tonight's agenda this meeting does stand adjourned at 7.

Director DeWolf may I interrupt for just for a second.

I think we are looking for action on this second board action report today too.

Okay.

That's totally cool.

I did not see anything in my target appointment on that.

Sorry I combined them and made a general apologies for that.

That's cool.

I just want to make sure so we you you do need us to take action now on the updates to the student assignment transition plan and I'm not necessarily sure how that is supposed to look.

So we do need we need a motion to move that out of committee.

That is correct Director Rankin.

I I move to I move to do that.

What should the motion be to move the approval of the redlining.

There was a second board action report.

So it'd be moving either for approval or consideration the board action report for next year's student assignment transition plan.

Thank you.

I. Making a motion to for approval on this BAR.

Which seconds the approval of the student assignment assignment transition plan for 2021 through 2022. This was moved by Director Rankin and seconded by Director Hersey.

Would you two on the operations committee need any further discussion on this BAR.

Or should we move to a vote.

I am ready to vote.

couple minor questions that I feel comfortable asking over email and then talking about an introduction.

Of course yes and we will have time at the January 13th and January 22nd.

So hearing no objections to moving forward to a vote.

All those in favor of approval of the Student Assignment Transition Plan for 2021-2022 as described moved by Director Rankin and seconded by Director Hersey please signify by saying aye.

All those opposed.

Okay this motion has passed unanimously.

Thank you Miss Wilson-Jones apologies for the the confusion there and thank you directors for sticking with us through this Committee of the Whole.

We don't do these often.

With that there being no further business on tonight's agenda this meeting does stand adjourned at 743 p.m.

Thank you all so much.

Thank you.