Seattle Schools Board Special Meeting April 29, 2026

This is Gina Topp.

I am now calling this board special meeting to order at 4.32 PM.

Please note that this meeting is being recorded.

I know that there's quite a bit of conversation going on.

Quiet things down a little bit, hopefully.

I'm looking at staff, and they're not totally understanding.

I'm not their boss, though, so.

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

For the record, I will call the roll.

Vice President Briggs.

Here.

Director LaValley.

Here.

Director Mizrahi.

Here, and I'll be there shortly.

Director Rankin.

Can you hear me?

Yes, we can.

Yay, here.

And I will not be there.

I am driving to another meeting, but I will be with you remotely.

So I won't be able to see anything, but I'm listening.

Director Smith?

Here.

Director Song?

Here.

Representative Yoon?

here.

Perfect.

And this is President Topp.

All right.

Well, thank you, everyone, for being here for our work session this evening.

Just a quick housekeeping flag.

We do have another work session next Wednesday.

It will be very budget-focused.

We will also have a community engagement update from Superintendent Schuldner about his engagement and an engagement moving forward.

There are sort of three items to cover tonight.

The goals and guardrails discussion, a student cell phone usage presentation, and then finally we'll do the introduction item, the approval of foreclosure of middle college instructional site at Seattle Central College.

So with that, we're gonna just sort of dive right into it.

I'm gonna hand it over to Superintendent Schuldner.

Thank you so much.

Good afternoon, good evening.

I really appreciate being here.

We have three, I think, very, very important topics to talk about today, but we're going to start off with the conversation on goals and guardrails.

So for all of you listening at home and in the audience, just as a reminder that one of the important pieces of the superintendent's kind of like expectations are around goals and guardrails.

And so this board has been really thoughtful, allowing me some time to think about what really makes sense for the district vis-a-vis my understanding of it and ways that we can really try to move the district forward.

So what you're going to see today, again, these are draft.

If people remember last month, I shared kind of initial thoughts.

I said I'm going to come back with some more specifics and then want to engage in certain questions.

And then my hope is for us to kind of button this all up pretty soon and be able to move forward.

So the first thing I want to really do is appreciate the board and the community.

I can't tell you how many times people have come up to me to talk about, you know, how much they're really looking forward to the changes that we're doing and seeing some changes that are already happening and this kind of hope for, you know, things to get even better than they are.

And so much of that is around what are we going to hold ourselves accountable to and what are we going to think about as really our North Star as a district.

So we're going to talk about guardrails first, then we're going to go into this framework that we've created I want to really share that with all of you and then open up with questions and conversations.

But before we do that, I'll probably share some of the appendix work so you can see where this data is coming from.

So again, gratitude.

I've been to over 90 schools.

You know, we're really committed to student outcomes.

We love our adults, but we really want to make sure that the focus is on children and about their outcomes and how they're doing.

leadership in certainly raising academic rigor.

We need to hold ourselves accountable to that.

We want to have a clear focus certainly on equity on all of our populations, making sure that we're not, you know, having numbers in one place and not the other.

And then also maybe to my own detriment, asking for strong accountability for me to really hold me accountable to high standards for our children and our community.

So just as a recap, we've had a series of guardrails for many, many years.

And I think that they are really a great idea around where our morals lie, where our ethics lie.

But what I've seen is that sometimes these have been weaponized.

and they've been weaponized in a way because of some of the language that we use rather than the intent and the idea.

And so as I shared last time, here it's a subtle change, but it's one that I really wanna make sure that we discuss or that I share, is that instead of it saying the superintendent shall not, We say the district led by the superintendent shall work towards, because it's really hard to prove a negative.

What would be important is if you look at the work offering equitable access to high quality instruction, programs and supports, regardless of school assignment, family, income, race or ethnicity, need or identity.

Now the board can say, well, Ben, what are you doing to do that?

Rather than say, oh, there's this one thing that happened once, you broke the guardrails, we should fire you.

Now look, the board can fire me whenever they want, that's certainly their prerogative, but we want to make sure that we're setting us all up for success in a positive way so that I can show the work that the district is doing to do this.

So for instance, promoting physical and emotional safety in schools and classrooms.

This way, let's say we build a wonderful school facility that is much safer than some of our other facilities.

That would be the district led by the superintendent shall work towards, or something like emotional safety.

We are working with the city on creating more social work positions, let's say, and trying to support our children.

That would be, hey, the district led by the superintendent shall work towards, and then I could say, look, this is the kinds of things that we're doing.

Because the opposite, if it's the superintendent shall not cause a safety concern, OK, well, so one kid gets hurt on the playground, you could say that we broke the guardrails.

That's not really the intent here.

And again, the history of this, which is very well-meaning, is that there's this idea of that holding the day-to-day leader, the superintendent, is to say, look, don't break the law.

Don't do these kinds of things that are bad.

And then we're going to set up goals about the stuff we want you to do.

But here in education and the way that this has been used historically can be weaponized in a way that's not really helpful for children and actually doesn't help the board hold me accountable.

to proving the good things that we're doing.

So that's this in terms of guardrails, and I'm sure we'll talk about that when we have questions.

Now let's get to the actual goals.

So here's the idea.

I've said really since I've been here, since the moment I was announced, I said our goal is to be the best urban public school district in America.

That is absolutely my dream.

That is, I think, all of our dreams.

And so we have to start to think about, well, what's the definition of that, right?

And so one of the definitions that could be is that we have academic goals, we have organizational goals, but that we're the top five in all of these things, especially in the academic goals.

And so, yeah, we might not be number one in everything, but if we're in the top five in everything, that's pretty amazing.

And I'd be really quite impressed by that.

And so the top five in five, it means in five years.

So in five years, we should be in the top five in all of these things, and we're going to go through them in a second.

So again, what's the one north star?

Make SPS the best urban school system in America where any family can confidently enroll any student and expect the district that is top five in performance within five years with performance visible across every student group.

And so that's really important, right?

That is a good sense of like what our definition around an urban school system is. the best one can be.

So, let's talk about academic goals.

We had a conversation last time about moving from second grade to third grade, and again the rationale here wasn't that we didn't think second grade was important, it was that the baseline, the numbers don't really exist.

If we're gonna try to compare ourselves to other districts to be the top five, we need actual state test scores and they start in third grade, right?

So the ELA, the math, our SBA, the exams we use, we need to make sure that we're using a grade that still the intent is early literacy, but actually have numbers that we know make sense.

So let's start with the third grade ELA.

Our current baseline is 62.6%.

To be in the top five, we would need to be at 67.2%.

That is the current top five of all the school districts, the top 25, the largest, I think 50 school districts, the 50 largest school districts that do the SBA.

And as a reminder, that includes every district in Washington, every district in California, every district in Oregon, and every district in Nevada.

And so that's a lot of school districts.

And so to be the top five among the 50 largest districts that administer SBA would be pretty amazing.

So maybe it's proof that we're the best urban school district on the West Coast, but I would like to think that that would be a proxy certainly for the country.

Now, one, some highlights to do.

We're currently at 62.6.

to get to top five would be 67.2, and our target is 67.5.

The reason for that is we're rounding up to the closest .5 because we do know that over the next five years, there is at least a possibility that the top five metric can move.

But if you do look at test scores kind of writ large over the last however many years, there was a bump back up after COVID, but there hasn't been this continual growth.

So to say that we're going to be in the top five in 2030, we don't know what that looks like, but we have a pretty good indication that for us to be in the top five would be the top five now plus a little bit.

So again, I just want everybody to know the theory of where we're coming with these numbers and why they make a lot of sense.

Because again, we want to be in the top five of all of these things for all of the school districts, the top 50 largest school districts that give SBA.

So that's ELA third grade.

And again, we talked about why early literacy is important.

Now math is a conundrum, and so I'm always going to want my wonderful bosses to weigh in on this and to think about it, but I want you to see what we're doing here.

So clearly we need a math goal, numeracy is very important, and we really have two options.

Option number one is to continue to do what we've been doing, which is sixth grade.

Now sixth grade makes a lot of sense.

It's a way to know how did elementary school work?

Because sixth grade is really your K-5 experience and so that's your score in sixth grade.

What it doesn't really do is show growth from K to eight, or what's going on in middle school.

And so there's a thought that instead of using sixth grade math, we could use eighth grade math.

And the reason for that is really twofold.

One, can we really understand middle school because certainly if we're only doing ELA third grade, that's early literacy, the math score at sixth grade would not really evaluate that full growth from K to eight.

The other thing that it does do is when the state is looking at different school districts around Washington and they are grading them, they look at eighth grade math.

So that's a data point that they use for a lot of things.

Now, again, me holding myself to a harder and higher standard, If you look at the numbers, our proficiency rate right now in sixth grade is 56.8 and the top five is 62. So it wouldn't be as hard as if we held ourselves accountable to the eighth grade.

If you notice, our scores drop pretty precipitously.

They're 50.3 and The opposite happens with all the other school districts.

Their proficiencies actually go up.

They go from 62 to 65.9.

So it's a really interesting data point to look at that we, between sixth grade and eighth grade, go down in proficiency.

The average top five district goes up in proficiency.

Now again, correlation, causation, we can have a whole conversation, but what's really, I think, important for the board to know and all of our wonderful friends watching online and behind me is that that is indicative of one of two things that are probably both true.

One, what do we know about our district in terms of enrollment?

A lot of children leave after fifth grade, and we know that a lot of them go to private school.

Not surprising, those children might in fact be more proficient than the average student in the district.

So if we're losing, let's say, about 10% of our fifth graders going into sixth grade or sixth grade going into seventh grade, it's possible that that differential between 56.8 to 50 might be because we're losing students that had been proficient.

It's a possibility.

I do not know, we did not, we were not able to run that differential.

But what it could also say is that our middle schools in general are not really moving the needle on math the way they should.

So I will say, I think both numbers are important.

A sixth grade math number, Absolutely.

That tells us how we did for elementary.

Very, very important.

It would make my life a little easier, going from 56.8 to 62.5.

But I think if I speak with my heart, eighth grade is probably the better one, even though it's much harder.

That's a 15-point gap.

or actually 16-point gap if we're going to go to the target.

That's a lot of heavy lifting.

But what I think it will say is it will be an investment in middle schools, which I think is something that we have talked about before.

So I'm putting that out there.

Then the last academic goal is graduation.

Now, I want to be really clear here.

Graduation has to be the floor, that is not the ceiling.

But I want to also be transparent that right now our current grad rate is very low compared to other school districts.

We're at 86.1.

Top five, and I want to be, again, very clear, top five for graduation can only be a state metric because different states use different ways to graduate.

To graduate in California is very different than graduating in Washington, which is very different than graduating in Nevada.

So you can't really do an apples-to-apples comparison.

So here, we want to be the top five among Washington State largest districts, the 25 largest districts, and look at their graduation.

So look at that difference.

The top five graduation rate in Washington for the top five districts, it's 94.2.

We're at 86-1.

We have to do better with graduation.

But again, graduation is just the floor.

We should also have what we call a graduation plus metric that says we need to not just expect our students to graduate, we want to expect them to be college or career ready.

And we have a definition for that.

Previously, we've used things like took an AP class or passed an AP class.

We didn't say you have to pass the test.

That's a big difference.

So our graduation plus number is, and the definition is in the small print, I apologize, is pass an AP test, pass an IB test, pass a CIHS, the college and high schools course, so actually get college credit, or a work-based learning certificate, which again, college or career, I'm not trying to value one over the other, in some of our wonderful CTE programs and skills programs, kids are graduating able to go straight into the workforce in an amazing way.

So again, with graduation, we want to look at it in two lenses.

One, just regular graduation.

What is our rate?

It is not we're not serving all of our kids the way the top fives are, and we want to have a plus metric.

And again, because this is a plus metric that's internal, there is no top five benchmark.

So we just picked the number that was quite high, which is 75%, because currently we're at 59.5.

So this is the idea of the kind of academic goals.

But you say, but what about Next.

Let's see.

There we go.

All right.

But what about all of our different groups of students?

I think we have to be very honest around, not that we're ever not honest, but we have to be extraordinarily transparent about the different populations that we serve in Seattle and how we are serving them.

I want to underscore this as clearly as I can.

This is not about our children.

All of our children are amazing and wonderful and brilliant, and they deserve to be able to be at the top five level.

What this is indicative of is a system that is failing our children, failing specific populations.

So I want to be really clear here.

This is not about pitting anybody against each other.

This is not highlighting that one group of kids is not doing.

This is about we as a school district owning the fact that the outcomes for the children that we are supposed to serve are not doing what we need to do to move our children forward.

So let's take a hard look at what this data is telling us.

Right now, the SPS baseline number for free and reduced is 34. Top five is 49.7.

That means we are more than 15 points below where we need to be for a top five designation.

Interestingly enough, students with IEPs in Seattle are currently at the top five.

Now we can talk about why that might be, but a lot of that might be the kinds of IEPs we have here that might be more about different kinds of learning abilities or different kinds of supports that they need.

So I want to take the win, right?

I'm not saying no to this, but it's going to involve us really looking deeply at the type of IEPs that we get in this district and why we are currently already in the top five.

Again, this is for third grade literacy.

ML.

This is actually a really good thing to know that our ML students Third grade literacy, we're actually already in the top 5%.

Again, we're gonna wanna look at who these students are and where they're coming from and how we can support, but at least it's good to know.

Now when you go and you start looking at how we are serving our different racial and ethnic populations, some really just unacceptable data points are being shown.

So I want to explain a little bit about Native American, American Indian.

There's an asterisk there.

The reason why is that The number of students in that category is very low and we want to make sure that we get a kind of a fair value of them.

So what we've done is we use multiple years to create a sample size that was a little bit more kind of real.

It didn't impact the numbers per se.

We were just taking multiple years and creating an average so that the number of students, and we can show you the math, we're always happy to do that, and that, again, it's at 33.3, and then the top five would be 38.85.

Asian population, 68.5, 78.4.

We're almost 10 points below the top five.

Black students, 19-1.

It's just unacceptable.

It's just unacceptable.

And we have to call that out, and we have to help support our families, our students, and our teachers, and our schools to really address this.

Latino, same thing, about negative 11. Multiracial, negative 2-3.

Pacific Islander is 31-6.

Again, that's a very small sample size, but it's real, and we have to own it.

and white students, we are already at the top five.

So I think what we have to think about with that data point is what are we as a school district doing that that is occurring versus what as a school district are we doing with the other numbers.

I think these numbers speak for themselves.

I think we as a district owe it to all of our students to be in the top 5% for everybody and that we need to be really clear about what we have to expect ourselves to do in the next five years.

Okay, organizational goals.

So, I know there's some conversation about, you know, having goals that are always academic, and I totally understand it, and I'm happy to have that conversation.

But as a superintendent, I want to hold myself and I want to hold this district accountable to goals that I think also speak to the health of our wonderful district.

Enrollment.

We're at 48,957 by our October 25 headcount.

I believe that if this district really does its job over the next five years, that we can increase that to 52,500.

It's a big jump.

That's a lot to say in lower...

I mean, across the country, the numbers of students are going down.

Across the country, the number of public school students are going down.

But I know that there are 20,000 plus kids in the Seattle area that could come to us and that many of the reasons why they are not is because families are choosing to go somewhere else because they think that the education is better somewhere else.

and we need to make it very clear that that is not true, that in fact SPS is an amazing and wonderful place for their children.

So that should kind of speak to itself.

Regular attendance.

There's a lot of things here.

One is just again the definition of regular attendance is two full-day absences per the 30 days enrolled.

In essence, there's this concept called chronic absenteeism.

And the definition of chronic absenteeism is if you're absent more than two times per month.

Makes sense, right?

So two times per month, you're chronically absent.

And so right now, our rate of attending regularly, i.e. non-chronically absent, is 76.6.

Now, why did I not have a target here?

I don't have a target here because in true transparency, Ben way, I am not sure that our data around attendance is accurate.

Right now, we do attendance in what some will refer to as negative attendance.

What that means is a teacher has to mark somebody absent for them to be absent.

So if they don't do anything, They're present.

Well, our teachers are great.

I love our teachers.

Sometimes they make mistakes, but also sometimes they're absent.

Sometimes it's a sub.

Sometimes it's something else.

And so if the default is everybody's present, you could imagine that there might be some increase in how kids are being marked present.

Positive attendance, i.e. having to mark somebody present, would help to fix that.

Now, sometimes that actually will reduce your attendance because sometimes humans will make mistakes and forget to mark somebody present.

But I'm much more concerned around inflating numbers.

And so we have to do kind of an attendance audit to really check that the numbers that we're getting from our schools really meet the kind of butts in seats, actual children attendance.

So I'm not gonna give a number yet for target of attendance, but please know that even if it were all 100% accurate, 76.6 is certainly not where we need to be.

But I do wanna be clear that the way we take attendance is open for, now again, I think our teachers are doing their job, but you can imagine what happens if it, you have to mark somebody absent, it's a lot easier to just kind of forget, or like, oh, maybe they're on a trip, who knows, the teacher's doing this.

So I just want to be clear about that.

Now I also will say, it's not here for organizational goals, but I do want us to really think about not just student attendance, but adult attendance.

Having teachers, principals, Everybody, superintendents, being at work when they're supposed to be is so important for the children and for our students that we're also going to want to really think about adult attendance as well, but that's not going to be an organizational goal because that's really about supporting our faculty, supporting our staff, working with our bargaining units to see where we are having those issues.

typically when a bunch of staff are out on a consistent basis that says more that there might be a cultural issue or a tension in the building rather than the flu is coming out all the time at that place, although it might be that too.

And then the last thing is financial stability.

Right now, and you'll see this from Kurt when he presents next time, is that the projection right now is that by the end of fiscal year 31, we're going to be at negative 72. Now, this is the real number.

This isn't the like projection that then impacts and changes based on whatever.

If you take what has actually been happening over the last couple of years, how our fund balance is decreasing, if we don't do anything, we're gonna be at negative 72 million, which of course is impossible, because when we get to negative zero, the game is over, because we cannot not pay our bills.

So right now we are projected at negative 72, and my goal, our goal, is to be at plus 100 million in fund balance by the end of fiscal year 31. So that is the idea there.

Okay, so, questions, conversations, and certainly, you know, again, I just wanted to share this with everybody, but how does the goals framework help us define what it means to be the best urban school district in America?

How will the organizational goals help us track the non-academic indicators that matter most?

sixth grade versus eighth grade math?

And does that kind of equity framework give us a strong foundation to build from as we develop goals?

And then do, you know, and do we need more ambitious goals where we're already top five?

Now, before we get to opening, I just want to show you where this data is coming from, right?

Show your work.

So, I'm sorry the typeface is small, but this is our third grade ELA proficiency.

And so if you are looking at it, you know, on the handout or on a screen that you can make bigger, the first one is all students, the low-income is the second column, students with disabilities is the third column, ELL, ML is the fourth column.

So you could see just how far down we are with free and reduced lunch.

Now remember, you did have a presentation from the Council of Great Schools, was it a year ago, where they talked about how poverty was kind of an indication of, but like, we're not even there with our free and reduced compared to other districts.

So it is true, but we have to do better, we have to do better for everybody, but I wanna highlight that we as a district compared to other districts are not serving our free and reduced lunch kids like other districts are.

This is now by race.

Asian to the left, black second, Hispanic third column, white fourth column.

Again, number one.

What does that say about where we're focusing, where our outcomes are, something that we just have to acknowledge and see.

And then the last is multiracial.

So again, this is just another way of looking at the data.

Blue means we already meet.

Green is that we are less than five points away.

Yellow is we're between five and 10. And red is we're more than 10. So again, the real highlights or lowlights, depending on how you look at it, certainly free and reduced lunch in ELA for third grade, you know, black student, Latino student, Asian student at the high end of yellow, right?

It's 9.9, so they are almost at 10. They would almost be red, almost be red.

So again, so this is math, same thing, very similar numbers.

and then again, this is math, this is this, eighth grade, we get a little bit worse, we drop, I do want to highlight the big drop in eighth grade math is the Asian population goes from in sixth, in kind of middle-ish high to actually much more middle-ish.

It drops back down.

But again, you can see these numbers, right?

We're never gonna hide the facts.

This is the facts, and we just need to deal with it.

And then last, this is graduation.

This I really want people to sit with.

If you look at the 25 largest school districts in Washington, this is where we are across the board.

Not acceptable.

Right?

And that's all the different populations.

And that's a big one to really highlight with our Latino-Hispanic population.

The middle column is Hispanic.

That is a huge, huge issue that we have to recognize.

So there you go.

This is the stuff about Graduation Plus, regular attendance.

Again, this is where we are with attendance.

Same, same.

And then just again, this is our enrollment trend.

So we want to go up there.

And then this is the one that we're going to talk a lot about next week.

Blue line is where we're going.

The orange line is where we would like to be.

And if you cross that zero threshold, the game is over.

So right now, this is where we're heading.

And again, I want to be really thoughtful to all the wonderful people who watch this, who know budgets really well.

Look at the real numbers we're talking about from FY22 and FY23 and FY24 and FY25.

This is the actual fund balance really going down.

This isn't the projection and then the changes.

We're averaging going down by 20 million, sometimes 30 million dollars each year.

Those are the real fund balance numbers from 175 all the way down to 97 and that's If we just continue the trajectory, we're going to be insolvent.

So there you go.

I know that was a little long-winded.

Thank you for kind of staying with me.

But these are really important.

So with that, I turn it over to President Topp for any questions.

Sure.

We're going to go around the U.

Before we do that, just sort of two things to kind of keep in mind.

The goal is to have our goals and guardrails for introduction in May. with a vote in June, which I think sets us up really well for the upcoming school year to have our goals and guardrails in place.

So with that, I'm going to just pass it on to Vice President Briggs and we will go around the U.

Oh, I remember now the other thing.

uh so to cut we've got two other topics they're big topics as well so if we keep our comments to five minutes or less each that gives us 40 minutes here for this conversation before we move on to the next which gives us enough time so when you're hitting about to hit that five minute mark i will sort of nudge you to continue to move on okay vice president briggs

Okay.

So, Ben, would you prefer that I ask my questions one at a time or you want me to dump them all on you at once?

Whatever you'd like.

Dealer's choice.

Okay, I'm going to do it one at a time because I feel like that's easier.

Regarding the guardrails, what kinds of objective measurements of progress do you propose for these?

It's a really good question.

Now, I mean, I don't know because the idea of guardrails is different than goals.

I'm happy to create these.

I am not sure how it works with guardrails here around goals.

So I'm happy to come back around that.

The issue is, if we have goals around guardrails, those are goals.

So I'm worried, these are more like, ethical, moral guidelines as to where we should go.

If we're creating goals around them, then those are supposed to be the goals.

So I'm certainly happy to do what my boss is telling me.

But typically where this goes is if we want goals, we'll put them in the goals.

But if there are specific things around the guardrails, I'm happy to think about that.

But that's just typically not how we've thought about that.

I'm guessing Liza Rankin is going to have something to say about that when it gets to be her turn.

But how would you propose?

I mean, because otherwise, I feel like it just becomes very subjective and sort of like pie in the sky.

So I guess, what would you think as a way to ground that?

No, I appreciate that.

So if we think about the superintendent accountability that you're gonna do for me, that's a narrative, right?

Those are right now, the way that we've agreed to hold me accountable is to look at different topics.

A lot of those are here, right?

And so this is, in some respects, a crosswalk to that document.

And so you all, seven, are holding, no offense, obviously she doesn't get to vote on that one, and so that's a way that you hold me accountable to these things because it's actually in that piece of the evaluation for the superintendent.

Okay, yeah, that totally makes sense.

Okay, and then...

I guess, so...

I don't know why I've never asked this question before, but it just struck me looking at this.

I'm on the three academic goals page.

But how is it that we have kids in eighth grade who are at 50%?

We have 50% of our kids who are at proficiency for math, for example.

And then our graduation rate is 86%.

Are a whole bunch of kids starting to become proficient in math in high school or are we graduating kids who aren't proficient?

It's a great question and is a conundrum that you see throughout the country.

There's two things.

One is proficiency doesn't mean grade level.

And so sometimes you can be grade level and not necessarily proficient.

The other thing is Credits are credits.

So how a teacher grades, how we hold kids accountable is not necessarily the same thing as on an SBA exam proficiency.

Because again, I don't want anybody to be like, oh, SPS is cooking the books.

This is exactly what you would see at any other school district, too.

So if you pick, I swear I'm not calling you, calling Tukwila, let's say, one of the only school districts I actually know, Tacoma, right?

If you look at them, their grad rate, their grad rate is gonna be 20, 30% higher than their proficiency rate.

Now, what does it say?

It says that that's why the grad plus number is so important, because I believe that if you pass an AP test, That's probably proficient in some sort of literacy thing.

But yeah, it is scary to think that eighth grade, our proficiency is 50%.

Okay, yeah, I was wondering if that discrepancy existed across the board.

I've assumed it likely did, but yeah, but also it ties into concerns that have been expressed by many people on the board and in community around lack of rigor and kids getting graduated who actually don't have the skills to be successful in whatever they're going on to next.

Okay, I think I'm finished with my questions, but I did just want to also name that undercounting of Native American students has been flagged multiple times as an issue.

And so I just wanted to reiterate that we have a challenge in documenting how many Native kids we actually have.

No, and thank you for highlighting that.

We need to do a much better job.

And I think we also have to have a conversation about how the federal government, you know, like, there's certain undercounting that we have to try to do internally, and then there's some undercounting we've got to probably work with the state on and things like that.

So, thank you.

Director LaValle?

I'm going to keep my questions short.

So I'd love to just kind of find out from you how, within these goals, we're going to see this information presented to us on a regular cadence.

I know that so much of the time we've seen a graph with very little actual information, or how it got there, or how it's going to get better.

And the graph is just a straight line going forward.

And it's that we're going to get better every month.

And I know within every job that I've ever had, there's a ramp up period and you don't start out going quick.

So I'd love to know a little bit more about how you plan to kind of know whether we're moving the needle, how you plan to represent that to us, how you plan to represent what you're doing to do this to us on a regular basis so that we don't continue to see presentations that has a number and a chart that holds very little value.

Yes, I appreciate that.

Hopefully, in however many presentations I've done so far, we're seeing a pretty big change, right?

And you highlight two of the most important issues.

One is, what are metrics that we're going to use throughout the year and throughout the five years So we're going to look at things like map data.

We're going to look at, I mean, attendance is a daily number.

We can totally look at that.

But then it also has to come tied with, and here's the plan.

Here's what we're doing.

And here's how we're holding ourselves accountable.

So I think once we kind of lock these down, then we're going to talk about like, third-grade ELA.

Well, what's going to be probably the biggest driver?

The curriculum adoption.

So, like, we need to give you a narrative of, like, how is the curriculum adoption going?

What are we doing about the curriculum adoption?

How are we making sure that there's fidelity to the curriculum adoption?

If we have, if we're finding that there's holes, how are we using other things like a UFLY or a Hagerty?

So, the board and the community deserves to see You know, I'm thinking probably quarterly, I'm thinking maybe or every four months, because again, you don't move the ship as quickly as you would like.

I mean, attendance is daily.

I could probably figure out some sort of dashboard for that.

But I also want to highlight what you said about growth.

I want the community to be, or I need to say, the likelihood of how this works is it's a hockey stick.

The first year or two, you don't move that quickly.

And the reason why you don't move that quickly is you're setting up all these things.

You're creating these structures.

There's going to be learning curves.

There's going to be pushback.

There's going to be, but I've been doing it this way.

Or, wow, I've never gotten this kind of support.

What does this mean?

Or, oh, I didn't even think that we were looking at this metric, right?

So the first year or two, you're probably not gonna move that much, but then you've had the stuff in place, and then it's gonna start to shoot up.

And it's the same thing that we did in Lansing, it's the same thing that we've seen in districts where things really move, right?

If you look at Mississippi, if you look at certainly what we did in Lansing, you get about two years of figuring it out, showing, I mean, you'll see some progress, and then you start to see some real changes moving forward.

Yeah, I mean, I think every four months, you know, maybe, you know, I don't want to do it.

Every three might be a lot because you're not going to have data.

But like if we're giving the map, you know, in the fall, in the spring and in the summer or the fall, winter, spring, that probably makes sense, you know, so we'll see.

But that's something we can talk about and we should talk about.

I'm never going to say no to a dashboard.

Sounds good.

Director Song.

I really like the organizational goals.

I would say that from the beginning of my time as a school board director, the kind of numbers that I have been tracking are enrollment and indeed our fund balance.

So I'm really excited to see those because I think they were reflective of the overall health of our district.

I feel like you're regularly reading my mind because when I saw the attendance goal, My wonder was really about adult attendance.

I don't think that's the right term for it, but I understand why we maybe wouldn't identify that as a organizational goal, but I hope that you could do some work around tracking that.

Absolutely.

So my questions.

The sixth grade versus eighth grade math.

I think the discourse in academia around math is really around algebra one.

So I'm not an educator.

What is significant about algebra one?

And which one do you think, if that is significant, which goal do you think will kind of get us there?

If there's one data point that you can look at to see if children are going to graduate high school or not, it's passing algebra.

For whatever reason, it is somehow the key to knowing that if you can do algebra, there's almost a one-for-one correlation.

It's amazing.

Passing ninth grade English, it's important.

Passing algebra is somehow this thing.

Now, there's theories as to why.

It's about conceptual learning.

It's about being able to actually have outcomes.

There's all sorts of stuff.

But we could just take it that it's a big deal.

And so even though it's going to make my life harder and the district's harder, I think eighth grade is probably the right number because, and I'm not saying we're doing this, but I would like, I think we can be a district that believes in algebra for all.

I really do.

And if we can create algebra for all, and we really focus on that for eighth grade, not only will our proficiency levels go up if we do it right, but it allows us to have that focus on getting kids to algebra by eighth grade.

Because if you pass algebra in eighth grade, high school, Again, the research is really clear.

You pass algebra, you get to graduate.

So I think eighth is probably right, and it also probably allows us to focus on getting all of our middle school kids to algebra.

Most, right?

So yeah, I think that's it.

Yeah.

So one of the questions you had posted was, do we need to be more ambitious for the groups where we are already top five?

You may not know this off the top of your head, but is there something in the free reduced lunch number, is there something there is going to be some overlap with our IEP students and MLL students and the free and reduced lunch?

number.

So is there something that we would have a different approach with those students?

Or do we think that a plan around our free and reduced lunch students would improve our numbers?

Yeah.

I mean, my belief is because we've disaggregated the data in so many different sections, if we really are top five in all of them, I mean, we're blowing the top off of everything, right?

Because there are a lot of cross, and there's also cross here too, right?

I mean, everybody that takes third grade English is one of those kids, right?

So I think that if we start to move the needle collectively, it will, but I think that, and I wanna appreciate what this board did a couple years ago, when you highlighted different groups of students, you wanted to make sure that the district's growth couldn't be solely on the shoulders of one group of children, so I think by disaggregating, you're actually gonna be able to move the needle for everybody.

Now, if we hit our goals, I mean, It would be amazing.

If we could do it, yes, absolutely.

The IEP numbers will go up.

The ML numbers will go up.

The white students will go up.

The whole district is going to raise because of that.

So I feel comfortable with keeping it as it is, but I also think that if we're talking about free and reduced, there is overlap.

And so, of course, whatever that is, that 15 and 1 half percent, if those kids are proficient, well, that's also going to impact so many of the other kids down the list.

Yeah.

All right.

Director Rankin.

Thank you.

I dropped for a second, so apologies if I maybe repeat anything.

Can you hear me?

Yes, we can.

Okay, great.

First of all, I just want to say thank you.

I was, you know, I can't see anything, but I looked at the packet ahead of time and while I'm driving out to Maple Valley, I was listening so intently, I just forgot to navigate and drove right past my exit.

I'm being safe, but I was just paying very much...

Yes, I was so focused on the presentation and my enthusiasm for...

what is really our role as the board is talking about how students are doing and asking the superintendent to show us and tell us how students are doing and what the superintendent will do to move the needle that I just forgot that I also needed to navigate myself.

So I think the top three goals, the academic outcome goals make a lot of sense to me.

In terms of the how do we see progress, iteratively, there's two different things I'm interested in us talking about.

That would be what we have referred to in the past as interim goals, and I think we had some challenges with previous conversations prior to your arrival, Ben, around what is a meaningful measure and when do we look at those measures.

But I think we have an opportunity given that we're looking at trying to adopt these in June.

We also, Jen, Joe, and I have been assigned the superintendent evaluation instrument for next year, and we're on a similar timeline.

And there is, I don't know if you had a chance to look at it, but I did email it to you, a WASDA superintendent evaluation framework that's strategic goals aligned, that's very much aligned to having the board have outcome goals that are academic, and then having other kind of look-fors and things for the, that kind of more of the operational things would fall into for the superintendent.

In between those, I think we can talk about, you know, check marks along the way, both for the superintendent's evaluation and for our understanding of how things are going.

Because we don't want to wait, you know, a whole year before we say, okay, how are kids doing?

And, you know, what's moving the needle, what's not?

We want to have that conversation iteratively.

So I think over the next couple of months, we'll be able to kind of tie together this with a superintendent evaluation tool.

And so I don't know if we want to have work session time around that or something, but there's ways for us to do that.

So this is a question for you, Ben.

It's not that I don't care about being the best urban school district in the country, but I want every urban school district to be great, including ours.

And I also want to know that our kids in Seattle have the skills and learning and understanding that they need from us, kind of regardless of how other districts are doing.

Outcomes-wise, in terms of what the measures are, I don't know if it matters if we're looking at our own growth measures against ourselves versus becoming one of the top five.

Do you have a response to that?

Yeah, I mean, I appreciate the question, right?

I mean, you know, in some respects, you would want the superintendent to walk in here and say, our goal is everybody's proficient all the time, every day.

And I understand that.

I think the reason why it's helpful to benchmark against all of the other school districts on the west coast is it gives us something to really shoot for that's based in how we do compared to every other school district uh in in the west coast if we just looked at our numbers and i said okay let's raise by seven percentage points which, again, almost no school district has ever raised by seven points over three, five years.

We're just picking out numbers.

So what I like about this is it's saying, look, we want to be the best.

And we now have an actionable definition of best.

and we have a north star of what we need to get to to hit that definition.

So that's why I think it's really helpful to think this way because I also don't want there to be the negative side where people say, oh, you can't do that.

Nobody does that.

Well, actually, we'd be top five.

for other districts are doing it too.

So we should hold ourselves accountable to that high level of standard, right?

So I think it just gives us a grounding that just picking a random number out of kind of thin air as to where we think we should be, this has a little bit more weight to it.

That's why I did it.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Thank you.

Sure.

With the guardrails, that is something I would like us to talk about more.

I think you're absolutely right.

The weaponization of the thou shalt not, and then if it happens, you get a demerit, was really not the intent.

And many other school districts and many governance frameworks use the concept of executive limitations that are in the kind of thou shalt not, the superintendent will not sort of language.

And the measures for that are all proof of something positive.

They're not a negative.

So I don't actually care about that so much.

But what I care about is how can you show us?

And for me, it's going to be more than a narrative.

So we can talk about this more at another time.

But how can you show us that through your leadership of the district, these very important values are being shared?

That's how you're leading.

So I'm interested in talking about that more.

But overall, I'm just super excited with what's been presented and excited to continue to talk about this and develop further.

Great.

Thank you.

Hello.

Director Smith.

I'm here.

OK.

Hi.

So I just have a couple of things.

The first is more of a comment than a question, but just on the sixth versus eighth grade math.

Last time we talked about the goals and guardrails.

I think Director Briggs had brought up an example of a school or a school district where there was kind of the top level goal around graduating prepared students and how that kind of got reverse engineered to getting all of the things that, you know, all the steps along the way that were needed.

And so I like that framing for eighth grade math, that you're not going to get proficiency in eighth grade if you're not also getting proficiency in sixth grade.

And having those investments, Though I think that also does require some trust in that the goal is being invested in thoughtfully and plans are being made.

And new to the board, I think I probably have a higher level of trust.

But just that's my comment.

And then for the question about do we need to be more ambitious for groups where we are already top five and acknowledge that we have to balance the real numbers that we're seeing with what we would wish for, but it definitely If we have a number where for the third grade literacy IEPs, it's currently at 39%, and that puts us in the top five, it doesn't sit right to say, well, that's good enough.

So I feel like there should be some kind of floor where we say, We're not going to stop working on something just because we've met this baseline compared to other districts.

I appreciate that.

And then I just have one last comment on how we're measuring everything that was brought up for literacy.

There are schools that have high literacy rates, but then when you look, they also maybe have high tutoring rates where parents are accessing resources outside of the school.

I don't think that should be in any way part of a metric, because you wouldn't want to end up incentivizing principals from trying to block access to these resources.

But I think it is something that we should be mindful of, that if our scores are going up, are there any kind of externalities that we're not accounting for in areas?

Yeah, no, I think this is a really good point.

And, you know, look, my job and our job is to try to get as many resources as we possibly can to help, be it internal, external, you know, whatever it is.

But I think we just need to be thoughtful about the schools where there's already high levels of proficiency and, like, what are we supporting them doing?

And then the places that have low levels of proficiency, what are we supporting them to do?

And we have to make sure that we're differentiating so that we can get to the goals that we're setting for the district.

Director Mizrahi.

Yeah, I have four questions.

I think the last one is maybe the most robust, so I'll try and speed around the first three.

So the framework work, I heard you that even though we're talking about top five and five, we're looking at this as a hard number.

In my day job, we said at one point we wanted to be the number one union-dense state in the country, and we ended up achieving that by other states going down.

Even though we lost members, they lost members faster, which is not good.

So even if other...

districts were to go down, we are looking at this as a hard number, even if we make top five by losing.

Okay, got it.

Let me make sure I understood that right.

On the graduation plus, I really like the metrics we have.

I was wondering if you all had discussions or considered things like the stamp test, the seal of biliteracy.

In the feedback, we heard lots of stuff about worldly students and things like that.

So if there were other metrics that you discussed or are open to or what the thinking is there.

Yeah, I mean, I'm always happy to add other definitions of what Grad Plus were.

I think we were using kind of the most generally used data points, like AP is everywhere, IB is everywhere, international, you know, the work-based things.

I would love to do some sort of language, world, whatever, I'm happy to go back to maybe add that as a fifth.

I just, again, you know, in our conversation about cell phones, I want to say the same thing is we also just want it to be like understood and actionable and like, quote, kind of common sense in the sense of like, what I don't want is to promise a data point that I can't get clean data on.

So let me look into it.

I think that some sort of world language proficiency.

Those are kind of cool things.

So yeah, that's great, Stan.

Yeah, that's great.

Yeah, the seal of illiteracy seems like a measurable thing.

Absolutely.

On enrollment, I think it's interesting and I'm wondering the thinking around using a student number rather than a density percentage.

We could grow as a city and this number could mean that our density, our capture rate actually went down.

Or the opposite could happen, we could shrink and being at 48.9 could be a great number in five years depending on what's happening with the population.

Yeah, I think this is really just about, again, a clean data point.

So when we look at those capture rates, it's probably a bad word, the holding rates, I don't know what it is, but they call it capture rates.

So a kid is born in Seattle, but really the data is King County.

And so there's already problems there.

And then so when we've been public about how historically we've gotten about 74%, 75%, and now we're down to like 52%.

So yeah, we could use that number.

it's not the number of kids that we can actually count in our district.

And so, yeah, if somehow the number of people in Seattle drops by 200,000, then if we stayed at 50,000, that'd be like amazing, right?

But I think just in the next five years, being able to really target a hard number that we control, we count, we can see, is probably just the easiest way to make this clean.

Makes sense.

It's about simplicity.

OK, got it.

OK, now my maybe more robust question.

So when we talked about our goals last time, it was really helpful to you.

Oh, and by the way, just to say I do really like having the organizational goals.

So thumbs up for that.

When we talked about the goals last time, it was helpful to think about them also in terms of resources and dollar figure, especially because we are I think President Topps said it, we're asking you to do a lot more with less money.

These are fairly ambitious goals, including to rebuild the fund balance.

So thinking about that, you talk about things like investment in middle school.

I'm wondering at what point we should have the conversation, if it's part of the approval of this, to think about where does that mean What does that mean?

Where are we moving that money from?

Or are we doing strategies that we think don't cost more financial investment, but investment of other things?

I know we don't have all the strategies behind it, but how do we get there?

Where are we moving money from?

I guess it's a big question.

Yeah.

I mean, it's hard.

$1.35 billion question, right?

And I think that we just have to do our job.

You know, I know that sounds kind of flipped, but I don't mean it like that, is we've got to do what we can with the resources we have at our disposal.

And I think the more that we can advocate for better funding, great.

The more that we can advocate for grants and programs, but we also then have to be thoughtful that if money doesn't just come from the heavens, we have to spend the money on what we think is important.

And so, in fact, Representative Yoon said something very eloquent yesterday at the press conference we had, and I will paraphrase, is basically where you spend your money is your ethics.

And so we've just got to figure out that what we're focusing our dollar figures on is the goals that we want to hit.

But I look forward to the next five years figuring that out together.

Representative Yoon.

This might work.

I appreciate all the options for the graduation plus program and the outcomes you all are intending to achieve.

I just want to point out that from the student perspective, AP test doesn't fully capture a student's experience.

There are certain teachers who don't tailor their classroom curriculum to the AP test and therefore some students don't do so well on the AP test but they actually do very well in a college level course when they go on to take running start their senior year if they took like an AP class or junior year because the stuff you learn in an AP class doesn't necessarily equate to something you would do in a actual college class.

And that's why I appreciate all the options.

I just wanted to point that out.

And I guess this kind of leads to my question.

How does the district kind of define college readiness?

I would assume it would mean also kind of the pre-college readiness, like getting ready to apply to college, getting into college.

And unfortunately, SAT testing is coming back.

So I'm wondering why or if the district has thought of SAT as an additional metric and if there will be support for students to do well in them because I know they're coming back and that's just a whole separate thing to study for and very different from AP tests.

Yeah, I think, you know, really point well taken.

So I think that's why the third one about pass the CIHS, so the college and high school's courses, hopefully address some of that.

In terms of SAT, there's two issues.

One is there's no such thing as passing.

So, like, what is the number that we're going to say is the number of college readiness?

And then you're right that, you know, maybe graduating and then being ready for college.

There's maybe other ways to think about it.

I'm happy to be open to that.

I just, we need a number that we can look at repeatedly and throughout the year and throughout the different, you know, making sure that the data is like clear, I guess, is the best way I can say it.

So, you know, we did look at things different programs, different classes, but we didn't necessarily think that they were rigorous enough to kind of be considered college ready.

Now one thing that we had a wonderful meeting actually with the city about was we also want to start to look at data points around what New York called, where are they now?

So if they graduated from high school, how do they do in college?

And that would be a pretty amazing number, right?

That's just really hard to get, right?

And so we could look at probably the, Seattle colleges, because we have a great relationship with them.

We could maybe even get UW and Washington State, but if somebody goes to, I don't know, Claremont McKenna, for instance, it's really hard to get those grades and to know what that looks like, right?

So I really appreciate the point, and happy if there's data points that you think, as a student currently in our district, that we could make actionable and make clean data, I'm happy to add that.

Anything else?

All right.

So I guess I appreciate sort of what I think took us originally like two years to get to our goals in guardrails, took you about two months.

So thank you, and I thank you for that.

I think what we were really missing before is what this sort of north star, the where are we going, what are all of these goals going towards?

And I just think about I used to work at King County.

It was making King County a welcoming community where every person has the opportunity to thrive.

And off of that we built all of our goals.

All the departments knew what our true north was and how we were going to get there.

And I feel now we have sort of this idea of a true north where we're going and then everything cascades up to that.

I really like the organizational goals.

and I know I raised this with you before but I think one of the things that I hear a lot is around safety and I don't know what a goal around safety would be and I know that's a really hard thing to measure but it's something that is so paramount and one of the things I hear as students decide sorry there's a bad feedback not to come to Seattle Public Schools is because of a concern around safety So how do we continue to show progress on that?

I like how the guardrails have been flipped.

I think it shows really truly our values.

It makes a statement of what our values are as a district, and I think that that then can cross-function into some of the evaluation that you talked about of how we evaluate you.

We see those things having progress being made on them.

I think that one of your questions, I think eighth grade makes sense, but otherwise I think this is, I'm excited to sort of move these forward.

Thank you.

The point about safety I really want to underscore, I agree.

I mean, you know, I go to the community every day.

I talk to everybody.

Safety is absolutely a huge concern.

And I would just ask, again, making my life harder, but is that in the superintendent evaluation, we just make sure that there's conversations around safety, you know, in some way, shape, or form, right?

And that way at least you're forcing me to come up with a narrative and possibly, you know, examples of how we have tried to make our district safer.

Director Song, you had one last quick question.

She promised it would be quick.

Yes, it's kind of similar to Joe's question.

So can you prime this board for like now that you've kind of observed us for almost three months now, which of these goals are going to require the greatest change in terms of shifting resources or building capacity?

It's a good question.

I mean, probably eighth grade math, because that's the one that we're the farthest away from.

And the grad plus.

The fact that we're at 59.5 and we kind of get to 75, that's a big deal.

And so I think that's really about investment in our high schools in certain ways.

But I would say probably the eighth grade math one.

That is the most ambitious.

A 16-point jump in five years.

I don't know of many places, if any, have really done something like that.

But I think we can, I really do.

And this is gonna be really about, can we get to algebra for all?

Can we make sure that our students have the ability to move to the level that they're at or able to do?

And then are we wraparound services to students that for whatever reason, they're not getting eighth grade math and what are we doing?

But yeah, I would say Third grade ELA with the new curriculum going up by five points, I have a good feeling about that.

I think the grad rate going from 86.1 to 94, that's gonna be a stretch, but I really believe we can get to 92, 93 pretty quickly.

because some of the numbers that you're going to get on graduation is just cleaning up systems.

Oh, a kid was one credit away.

Well, let's go help that.

Oh, this kid left and we didn't clean up the debt.

OK, great.

So I think 94 is pretty high, but I think we got a really good shot.

Yeah, I'd say eighth grade math.

And we're going to have to think about our middle schools.

That's the game right there.

All right, we're going to take a break till 5.50.

We're going to come back right at 5.50 and start the conversation because it's a cell phone conversation which will have to end at 7 because we all have one more thing at the agenda.

So just so folks are aware.

We're adjourned till 5.50.

Okay, I said we would reconvene at 5.50.

It is 5.50 and we're gonna move into the student cell phone use presentation.

So again, I will pass it over to Superintendent Schuldner.

Wonderful.

Well, good evening again.

I mean, it's almost 6 o'clock, so good evening.

I have been waiting for this day for, honestly, since I got here.

This district needs a cell phone policy.

No question about it.

And, you know, I am just really proud of the work that was done before I got here and then certainly the work that was done, you know, in the less than three months since.

This district deserves a clear, cogent, concise cell phone policy that not everybody's going to love, but at least we think is going to really move the needle towards success.

And before I go into more deeply, I want to thank our two co-presenters with me.

Dr. Rocky Torres Morales.

I want to give him a big special shout out.

This will be either the last or second to last meeting as he goes on to the amazing work that I know he's going to do as the superintendent of Vancouver.

So thank you for all of the work that you've done for us.

And then of course I want to, that does deserve a round of applause.

That is right.

And then of course to Carlos de Vela.

The head of technology is not a pedagogue.

The head of technology is a person that understands technology, but Carlos has been so thoughtful around trying to work with teachers and students and executives to try to get us to a cell phone policy that makes sense, and so I really want to thank him for his work as a technologist, but also recognizing the importance of a cell phone banned cell phone rules for the children.

So thank you, Carlos, for everything you've done.

Yeah, that's right, he deserves a class too.

So, all right, what do we got?

This is it.

We believe that cell phones are addictive.

We believe that cell phones are things that are distracting.

We believe that cell phones are things that really can take away from the instruction of our children.

and so we want to make sure that we have clear guidelines moving forward.

Now I want to thank the schools that already do this.

We know that some of our schools have guidelines, have rules, but what I hear consistently from our principals in our schools is, yeah, but Ben, if we don't have a district policy, what does this really mean for all of our schools?

And so there's been a desire to have just some really thoughtful rules around what we're doing.

And so, you know, to not bury the lead, the first one is away for the day, or as you can see from our wonderful posters, off and away for the entire school day.

It's got a nice rhythm to it, it's very important, and that's for K-8.

The idea is that K-8 students are going to not have their cell phones.

It's going to be off and away for the entire school day.

And we'll talk about where this came from and the ideas.

And also we're going to talk about that different schools do it differently.

We're not going to force them to use a yonder pouch or force them to use a calculator pouch.

But we want to make sure that it is very, very clear that for K-8 students.

So that is our elementary schools, our K-8s, our middle schools, that it is off and away for the entire school day.

The second is no cell bell to bell for high school 9-12.

Now I will say, I too, I've gotten some emails about this, that when people say no cell bell to bell, outside of Seattle, what that's typically meant is from the beginning of the school day to the end of the school day.

But this, in Seattle, as I've been told, for instance, at Cleveland, I know that, again, we've done a lot of work with our community, they use this terminology to mean when the bell rings for the class, and when the bell rings to end the class.

So the idea is, again, no cell bell-to-bell for high schools.

Again, our wonderful posters, no cell bell-to-bell, no cell phones during class time.

Now we're gonna go into why there's a differential between K-8 and 9-12, but again, These are the district procedures that we really want to make sure we're clear, we're concise, we're cogent about where we are.

So again, this is it.

Now, I also want to preface all of this by saying we are having a conversation with the board.

I love this board deeply.

I think that it's been a really wonderful relationship, but This is my call.

And what I mean by that is this is the superintendent's implementation direction around procedure, which is different than policy.

So again, the procedure of having a cell phone rule is on the superintendent's shoulders.

So this is, again, informational.

There's no vote to be taken because this is not a policy change, but this is in fact a procedural change from the superintendent.

So again, if the board would like to have a policy and override or change, that is certainly their prerogative, but for everybody in the room and for those of you watching at home, that the superintendent is authorized to basically do the day-to-day operations and the idea of a cell phone limitation is very, very much part of it.

and so we're gonna go through some more, I'll probably pontificate more about some other things, but I just wanna be clear that the actions we're taking today is the actions of a superintendent making a procedure around cell phone use and it is for K-8, off and away for the entire school day, and for high school, no cell bell to bell, meaning when the bell rings for the class to when the bell ends for the class.

So with that, I wanna turn it over to Carlos to take us from there.

Hello.

All right, let me talk a little bit about the work that we completed.

We started this project about 18 months ago, and we review cell policies, practices across all grade levels, analyze their policies from Washington, neighboring schools, and also the national districts.

We did a district-wide survey of all our 105 schools.

to understand what the policies were and which ones were working, which ones were not.

We also analyzed the policy for the neighbor schools, districts, and the national sense of the policy landscape that we had out there.

Also, we entered into a five-pallet school to identify what worked effectively in those classrooms.

Those were the Hamilton Middle School, Robert Eagle, I believe Zach is over here somewhere, Coy Elementary, Ballard High School, and Rainier Beach High School.

um...

mainly the uh...

the koi elementary had no allowed uh...

hamilton international middle school and uh...

robert eagle have away for the day not allowing the phones at the school all day and then bollard high school there was just a small difference they allowed uh...

uh...

they were away from during class Ballard allowed them with the user permission for instructional purposes.

Rainier didn't, and they're both allowed for lunch passings, lunch and period passings.

We also, we engage students and families, educators, school leaders.

We talked to you guys about a year, no, about six months ago.

We also engaged with the, with ITEC.

We heard our student voices through surveys.

We surveyed the principals.

We surveyed families and educators and students.

And we had a conversation, I believe we had it with the student directors last time, and we had a lot of those comments.

And some of you guys gave us a lot of feedback.

I appreciate that.

So what do we learn?

The bottom line is when phones are away during instruction, schools see better focus, fewer disruptions, and clear expectations.

During iPilots, we heard we needed clear expectation from staff, students, and families.

pilots also showed the standards work best when they are consistent and easy to explain.

And high school flexibility works when phones are away.

By default, it uses only where they were allowed.

Stakeholders consistently shared the simple district-wide rules are easier to enforce and they feel fairer for the students.

Student voices noted that the inconsistent rules feel unfair and they were confusing.

There is a need for fun during lunch and some say that they saw some value on the cells being used during instruction.

There were some comments from the student body that we surveyed and I believe student directors on the last conversation we have here last year mentioned some of that as well.

Board directors, when we had the same conversation, mentioned in our last session that there must be accommodations where needed and that we need avoiding overly punitive and overly complex approaches.

ITAC gave us feedback as well about simple rules, reduce confusion and inequitable enforcement.

And the last one, at the high school level, limited access during lunch and passing periods support student independence in alliance with the district's open campus.

Now, let me say that the earlier version of this briefing, I didn't mean to bring any confusions about the RAND report.

That was my mistake, and I own it.

I want to clarify that my intent was to synthesize the 18 months of research and community engagements in the national policy landscape, and the RAND report was one input among many, not the source of that language that I put in there.

We have since added two proper citations to support that.

I also want to take a moment to acknowledge everyone that contributed to this work.

are student voices, principals, educators, parents, and ITAC members who participated in the surveys, pilots, and conversations.

Your voices shape this policy guidance, and that input is reflected throughout the briefing.

Let me pass it to Dr. Torres Morales.

Good evening, board directors and community.

So I'm gonna talk a little bit about how cell phones impact student learning.

So the Washington State legislature has found that mobile devices are negatively impacting student outcomes.

That was in Senate Bill 5346. Two big things to consider when we think about cell phones in school is the constant distraction.

There is some evidence that shows that the constant distraction leads to lower test performance and also missed instruction.

And there's also potential harm to mental health, for example.

potential for unauthorized recording in schools and also increased cyberbullying.

There are going to be exceptions to this, but to be clear, these are for students who require access to personal devices for medical needs or documented IEP or Section 504 accommodations and their supports.

As you recall, when we brought forth our initial thoughts and briefing, this was some of the things that we were also questioned about.

What if a student needs this?

For example, if we have a diabetic student who's checking their sugar, those sort of things, and so we wanted to make sure that the updated procedure captures that and allows for that.

I'm going to talk us through the implementation approach.

And please, any of my colleagues, stop me, because this is the big part here that Superintendent Sheldoner was hitting at.

Step one is the updated superintendent procedure.

It's 2022 SP.

So as our superintendent was noting, this is a procedural change.

I know I've been hearing from some, well, nothing is really changing.

And the fact is that there is.

We're rewriting a whole procedure for the school district and getting very clear on what's allowed and not allowed, which did not exist before.

So there is a change occurring.

We will allow school leaders flexibility with the practical tools and routines while maintaining district-wide expectations and communicate to staff and families the guidance.

And basically you're seeing it on the posters.

We're gonna try to keep it as simple as possible.

Here are some related links to research and information as well.

And at this point I'm going to turn it back over to Superintendent Schuldiner.

Thank you so much.

So again, I want to thank my two colleagues to my left for all the hard work.

And I just want to encapsulate what happened.

We talked to a lot of people, students, parents, teachers, community members, tried to get all of the data.

and then tie it with research.

And what did we learn?

We know that cell phones are a distraction.

Now, I would say that we probably didn't even need to ask anybody that.

We just kind of knew that.

But it's important to listen to folks and get their opinions, especially those that are getting impacted.

And what we heard time and time again was you need to have a district-wide policy.

And to what Rocky just said, This is a big change because I've now visited over 90 schools.

I will tell you, some schools have policies or procedures, some schools don't.

Some schools have procedures that are not really being followed because there is not a sense that the district has a direction.

And this, in fact, we really believe will make a really, really big difference.

So I do want to highlight a couple of things.

There has been, and I very much appreciate the emails and the correspondence that I've had from some folks around wanting an off and away for the entire school day K-12.

I appreciate that, but again, what I'm trying to do, what we're trying to do, is have a clear, cogent, and common sense and enforceable policy.

The thing is, Almost all of our schools have open campuses for lunch.

To create a rule that says it has to be away for the entire school day when in fact people leave for lunch is going to cause an almost unenforceable thing.

The other thing is I don't want an unintended consequence that if that meant you stayed in campus that you couldn't have access to your phone which then might then say to students don't don't stay for your club, don't stay inside, they're going to want to go out.

So we want to be really clear that we know phones are distractions, but we also want to be able to enforce these rules, we want to be able to hold ourselves accountable to these rules, and especially when we have campuses that have different buildings where they're going outside, they're doing all these things, We really just want to make sure that there is a kind of consistency throughout.

And as Carlos said, there is some research, and again, it's also what the students asked for, and I do want to, I don't mean to want to be flip here, but I really want to point something out, which is we listen to everybody, and we take everybody's opinion, and then we want to do what's right.

If we actually believe in student voice, we have to actually believe in student voice.

We can't believe in student voice when it's convenient.

And so what I mean by that is I want to make sure that, you know, if Adults think one thing, and students think another.

And we find that maybe the students have validity.

We want to make sure that their voice actually matters, rather than only when it aligns with adult voices.

And if it aligns with research, I think that's really important too.

But what I'm concerned about, and I'm not just talking about cell phones, is that we talk a lot about students having a say in things, but then I see those student voices kind of shunted when it's not aligning with what maybe the adults want.

Now, this is different.

If you've ever been on school visits with me, a lot of times students will say, hey, you're the superintendent.

That means you can make school shorter.

And I usually say, that's true.

However, I probably won't, because I think school is important, don't you?

And then I get into a nice conversation with students, and we usually get to a place where I should not just cancel school for the week.

the student voice is actually really important.

And so I really want to thank Sabi and certainly the student directors, representatives, but also all of the students that I think were very thoughtful from the high school level about what actually makes sense, what's real, what's credible, and what's enforceable around what makes sense for not being distracted.

And again, if you just look at the quotes, you know, the distribution of school cell phone policies with different levels of restrictiveness makes some sense at the strictest policies for the youngest students and the policy to become more liberal as the students grow older and gain autonomy, but also bans with less strict in high school when students are obtaining greater independence and many may have greater needs for cell phones.

And we also, not only is it about open campus, but it's also like we have to have students learn how to be able to have access to it, which they will in college or in life, but still be able to focus.

So I think what we are doing today is actually a watershed moment.

Now, no offense to OSPI and to the state, but they know it's a problem too.

And what was the response?

Let's study it until 2030. That's not what we're doing, and that's not the kind of school district that we're gonna have here, is that if we know we've got to do something, we're gonna act, we're gonna be thoughtful, we're gonna listen to folks, and we're gonna do what's right.

And I also know that it's not gonna please everybody, but we really do believe that this is a great way forward, and I do hope that as we make this happen, and I don't know if I like have to sign a document to actually make this happen.

You know, is that starting?

Oh, it's right here.

We could do something like symbolic where I sign this.

Is that starting on Monday?

These are the rules for the district.

And so I'm really proud of that.

I'm really thankful for everybody's hard work.

And I think that this is about us leading by example for the state that we have, in fact, now cell phone procedures for all of our children and all of our schools.

So with that, I look forward to questions, comments.

But I really just want to thank everybody for lending their voice to what I think is a really clear, common sense, thoughtful cell phone policy or procedure.

I love it.

Thank you, Superintendent Schuldner.

We're going to go around the circle the other way this time so I get to start.

You said so first you said this starts on Monday.

These are the rules for the district starting Monday.

That's only today's Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, two days away.

So you have had to have cascaded this down to principals.

What are schools' reactions?

What are they saying?

What are their concerns?

Are they ready to have this in place come Monday?

I mean, I don't want to speak for the principals, and I think there's a couple of principals in the audience.

They've been waiting for this.

I, of course, did have a meeting with all of the principals because I have a phrase which is meeting before memo.

So you always want to have the meeting before.

We actually gathered all the principals together a couple of Fridays ago.

We talked about it.

We had a Q&A.

And my sense was they've been waiting for this for years.

And so in terms of support, we're gonna have the procedures laid out, we're gonna be there to help the schools.

But again, many of our schools have a version of something like this, and now they're gonna have the backing of the school district to make sure that if there are issues, that we can come in and say, no, no, no, that's the district policy.

You can't pit one school against the other.

And so I'm really proud of that.

I don't know if we're gonna make our principals available to talk about it at another time, but they've been waiting for this.

I've gotten emails about this since day one, and so we're just thoughtful and thankful that we're gonna be able to make this happen.

Does this include smartwatches?

So, you know, there is a lot of technology in the world.

We wanted to start with something tangible, something real, and see how it goes, and that's cell phones.

Schools themselves can have rules and regulations around smartwatches, around Garmin, around other technologies about laptops, and that's something that we are going to work on.

But we wanted to, out of the gate, make sure that we had a cell phone policy starting on Monday.

And we do know that there are concerns about all sorts of other technologies and that's going to be a cascading of impact that we're going to be working on moving forward.

But right now, we are talking about a cell phone policy or procedure because we want to make sure that we can do it, do it right, figure out if there's any problems, and then continue on to a much broader technology procedure that might actually be a technology policy because it might be so broad that we want to impact all the technologies moving forward.

And I guess my final question, because I think similar to my fellow board directors and you, we've been getting the, you know, make it away for, often away for the entire day for K through 12. And I was really trying to think about what that enforcement would look like.

I'm thinking like the student who goes off campus, goes home for lunch.

How do we police, like, how do we police that?

And so I guess my question is, My question is, have you thought about sort of what that police, what that enforcement would look like for?

Yeah, I mean, it would be relatively impossible, right?

I mean, if a child goes home for lunch, what could we possibly do, right?

And so I think that, you know, again, this is where student voice, research, and reality have to also cross with what we're able to do.

Because as a superintendent, our words or my words have to be enforceable, and they have to make sense in a way that we can see as a district, we all can follow it.

And sure, I think that we could try to have some sort of off and away all day for high schools, but the practical sense of open campuses make that something that would be virtually impossible to enforce.

and we also want to be thoughtful to the student voice that was overwhelming, that said they would, you know, for lunch, for passing period, and even some students were saying they wanted it for academics, and we said, well, you know what, the research here is that, you know, it's really distracting.

But, you know, I think that we are at a point where we will try it in high school, we're gonna evaluate this, we're gonna always look at do we have to adjust it, But for me right now is we need to have a clear policy or procedure around cell phone usage throughout K8 and then throughout 912. We're going to look at it.

We're going to see how it's working.

And if we see that there are holes, we can reevaluate.

But I don't want to ever create a rule that I can't enforce, because then that makes it seem like we don't know what we're doing, and I don't ever wanna be in that case, and I don't see how we can enforce the students that are off campus, the students that are going from multiple buildings that are far away from each other, and also we wanna be also helping students get ready for when they do have access to their phones in college, in the workforce, how do we kind of work with and, as we say, support student independence and, of course, aligns with the district open campus policy.

All right.

I forgot to mention this.

Roughly five minutes, maybe six minutes according to time and math, but five minutes.

Representative Yoon.

I have a clarifying question.

So on the implementation approach 4.2, it says allow school leaders flexibility with practical tools routine.

So does that mean teachers are allowed to use any enforcement of their own and their own classrooms as long as it follows those expectations?

Yeah, so I want to be clear.

So some schools that we have used something called yonder pouches, right?

Where the kids...

I've talked too much.

That's good.

So some schools use like yonder pouches.

We don't want to mandate that all schools have to use yonder pouches, and we also don't want to mandate that no schools use yonder pouches.

Some schools, a lot of the high schools, use those calculator holders.

Some schools use them, some schools don't.

We don't want to be some overbearing in terms of the ways that people do this, but we do want to make sure that We're not using our cell phones during class and during instruction and for K-8, that it's gotta be away all day.

I mean, I've seen some elementary schools do it one way, I've seen other elementary schools do it another, and I've also seen elementary schools that don't have this, right?

And so we just wanna set the guidelines for the district and then allow for different schools to do it the way they see fit.

But I will say, if any school wants to have models There are many schools that we will show them and share with them that are doing a great job and we can work on professional development to help unroll this in a better way.

Okay, my follow-up question to that is if a student has a phone, like they use their phone during classroom, which is not allowed, like what would happen to them?

Sure, so that's a great question.

So we have specific board policies that talk about that.

In essence, the idea is that we want the teachers to work with the students to you know, put it away, and that what we're going to then say is, depending on the response, then we just use our normal disciplinary response, right?

I mean, the thing is, is using a cell phone when the rule is you can't use the cell phone is indicative of not following any other rule that we have.

And we have a multi-page handbook on how to actually do this.

And so, you know, we're working with the principals around what enforcement looks like and how we can do it.

But, you know, for us, the issue is we didn't even have a district policy that we could point to that then aligns with our student handbook in terms of what disciplinary policies look like.

But, I don't know, Carlos, you were grabbing the mic if you wanted to say something, or Rocky.

Okay, cool.

What?

As part of the communications, the next bullet from that one, we are providing the principles with the guidance on that disciplinary actions as well.

So that is occasion to the principles going to be there as well.

I know like this is kind of the district's first step towards this issue so like I really appreciate all the work but I just know as a student it's hard for teachers to kind of be the police in the classroom and even though we all have the same vision of oh no phones during classroom I feel like the enforcement piece is still a little lacking and I know like you said flexibility is is good for teachers and students in certain situations but also in certain situations it could be harmful because it ends up with a teacher yelling at a student and I don't I'm not sure like I don't know.

We don't really have detention in Seattle Public Schools, so they can't really be sent to the main office.

It just becomes a conversation with the parent, but I don't know.

You're pointing out a really important question that has to do with all sorts of transgressions.

What happens when a student says something mean to the teacher?

What happens when a student throws a book?

There's all sorts of things that we have a policy about, and if enforcement isn't happening, then that's something we need to support the teacher on and support the principal on.

And so I don't want people to think that a cell phone policy or cell phone procedure is somehow inherently different than any other rule that says, this is something you can't do, right?

And so rather than say, oh, well, there have to be all these special rules and regulations around cell phones, it's no.

The rule is you can't have it during academic time.

And so just like the rule is you can't do something else, right?

And so if teachers don't feel like they have the support in enforcing it, well, that's something we need to talk about.

And I will say that the hope is by having an actual district policy, people can now point and say, look, there's a district policy about this.

There is enforcement.

There are ways for us to work on it.

So I know it is...

It's difficult to not just say, like, well, if they don't put it away the first time, it's a demerit.

And if they don't put it away the second time, it's a this, right?

But that's not really how our disciplinary handbook works.

There are ways that we can just support our teachers with supporting the rules of our schools.

So I don't know.

I mean, if there's anything else you can...

I agree, and that's the way that a lot of our schools, we have a lot of schools who are doing this already, and they've been able to work through it with their staff, and it's been productive.

And if you go tour some of the schools, you wouldn't even see the cell phones.

Speaking mostly about some of our middle schools, elementaries, but there is process around this, and even in some of our high schools as well.

Yeah, and I will speak, you know, on behalf of the teachers is I appreciate that this is difficult and I appreciate that it's hard to kind of do this.

And I think the first step of actually having a district policy so they can point to that and the principal can point to that, that actually means a lot.

Because what I've had is some people say, yeah, but, you know, this school, but this school doesn't or this school doesn't enforce it or this.

So there's ways that I think we as a district can be supportive and clear.

But I don't want to say you must use a yonder pouch or you must use a calculator pouch.

Or I don't want to say that if a kid doesn't put it away within five seconds, they go to the principal's office.

There has to be some discretion within the handbook of what we have.

Thank you.

Yeah, I just wanted to clarify, because I feel like a lot of the times policy could be interpreted as just a nice suggestion if there is no accountability in place.

And I'm not saying this to, oh, we need to punish students.

I'm just making sure that all the hard work you put in will actually come to fruition in our high schools.

No, and I appreciate that.

Thank you very much.

Director Mizrahi?

Yeah, Representative Yoon took the words right out of my mouth with her question, because I was really thinking about how this falls on the classroom teacher to do a huge amount of enforcement on this, though that's not so different than how things are right now.

So with at least more clarity from the district, I hope that helps.

But I would just say that, particularly as we're in the home stretch to the end of the school year, that we think about doing whatever campuses need to enforce that rule, whether that's yonder pouches or other technology.

as a parent of a kid at a school with a yonder pouch.

I don't know that they are used all that often, other than I think it is a helpful placebo, sort of, where it's like, because they exist, students can't have it out.

But I don't think my kids have ever put their phone in their yonder pouch once.

But phones are a way.

So it kind of works.

But anyway, I would just say that hopefully we can have the resources to give the schools that they need, whether that's now or over the summer as principals evaluate how to make sure that this actually happens.

Absolutely.

And one of the reasons why we want to start this on Monday is so that at least we have a month and a half of data, right, to see how this is working so that we can iterate.

And we can iterate in real time, too.

But again, I do want to go back to the idea that, yeah, this is on the teacher just like all behavior, right?

Like, we want to make sure that we're supporting our staff and supporting our schools, but there isn't The district isn't going to, nor should it, be in every class enforcing these rules because we have to trust our amazing teachers to do it and our wonderful principals to help support them as well.

And, you know, if we get this started on Monday and we feel that there's big gaps, then we're going to deal with it.

And to your point about the honor pouches is Right.

If the goal is that they don't use their phones, but they don't use the Yonder pouches, we still won, right?

And that's the good point here, is I think that by having a clear and concise policy, we're able to say, look, this is our expectation.

How you get there, that's up to you.

All right.

Director Smith.

Let's see I want to thank Representative Yoon for leaving that conversation around the implementation and support.

That was kind of my top question as well and it has been well addressed.

I do think that the high school question like open campus that is that is a challenge but I think if we can have a culture of not just saying learn how to resist your phone but like build the habit of putting your phone away.

Like I know for myself that's that's what what works.

That's a good goal.

But I appreciate that this is a tangible real first step.

And I hope that I don't know if it will rise to the board level every time but that it is something that is continually revisited and updated and expanded on.

So I guess I'm looking forward to that.

Thank you, yeah.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

You know, we have to continue to iterate, continue to learn, and I think there's always ways that we can get better.

I think this is a really good first step, yeah.

All right, Director Rankin is at our local WASDA meeting, so she is missing this conversation, but she will hop back on around 6.45, so we'll go to Director Song.

Nothing from Director Song, then we'll go to Director Lavalle.

Wow, we might start the next portion a little bit early.

Yeah, I wanted to just ask a few quick questions, hopefully.

You said that you had done a ton of research going into this, Carlos Devalle.

I'd love to know what you saw when researching high schools if some high schools had full bands and how those were operating.

Because I do understand the point of having the availability to have it bell to bell.

But I'm just wondering if you saw any that had full bands and off-campus lunches and made it work in any actual way.

I actually didn't see them.

Some of our guys that did our work did.

And how I mentioned, the two pilots that we did, they actually They said that it was working well when we interviewed the principals.

And the only difference was the one was used for instruction.

That's it.

They had a lunch passing period as well.

Perfect.

Thank you.

The next kind of piggybacks on a previous question that was discussed.

If there is pouches or something that the schools need to buy or would like to buy, all of the school's budgets are so cast-strapped.

Our budget is so limited as well.

if if they do think that they as a school need some additional assistance is this at any point kind of an unfunded mandate to our high schools or to our elementary or middle schools yeah no i think it's a fair question i mean i would say no because there's a lot of schools that don't use the yonder pouches and don't use the the calculators and so the calculator pouches so in no way do i think that this is an unfunded mandate do i think that there's ways that if If we have more money, we can have conversations about using that to support this, sure.

But we see a lot of elementary schools that just have the rule and it works just fine.

And with the high schools, we see it the same way.

A lot of our high schools have the calculator things because of the calculators.

But I do want to be clear that if there does come a time where we think we have the fiscal resources to support, I'm always happy to do that.

I'd love if some school is finding a smart way to deal with some of those things that in those meetings with the principals you're sharing that information broadly as well.

I would love to.

The last question that I have is I know overarchingly within these conversations of technology there's been requests for cell phone bans for a while.

There's also been the needs to address AI and tech, especially in devices, iPads, laptops, especially in younger grades.

And I hear it from parents all the time when an elementary school student was doing research and got onto an AI thing to do some of it.

So there's kind of that, and I'd love to kind of know that that is being worked on in superintendent policy as kind of some next steps to this process as well?

Absolutely.

There's no question.

I mean, I think I wrote about it, is we have an over-reliance on technology in a way that I don't think is helpful for student learning.

Now, of course, I believe that there is a place for technology, right?

I'm not a Luddite but I do think that we have to be very thoughtful about how we use it.

For instance, there's a lot of research around students using pen and paper and how that changes the way that brain functioning happens, which is very different than typing.

typing, it doesn't basically use the brain in the same way or as a full way as writing.

So there's a lot of things we're looking at.

I think, again, we want to start with something like a cell phone procedure and then really start working on the broader things.

But again, talking to the community, talking to parents, talking to students, talking to the staff around what are good uses of technology and what are things that the district has to really rein in.

Thank you.

Vice President Briggs.

Thank you.

Well, first of all, I do really want to thank you all for your work on this and for creating a cell phone policy, because we for sure should have had this yesterday.

So that is a great step in the right direction, and I appreciate all the work and time that's gone into it.

I have some pretty strong feelings about this, so I'm going to be pushing back pretty hard on a number of things that were said.

So, okay, where to start?

OK, so I think, for one, using no cell bell to bell in a different way than it's used everywhere else I think is problematic, just because I think it's really important for us to all be working with the same vocabulary.

I don't think Seattle should have its own special meaning for words that are widely understood to mean something else.

So I would just encourage us to get on the same page about the language that we're using, just for clarity.

I think OA for the day for K-8, excellent, great.

My issue is with high school.

I feel very strongly that this needs to be a district-wide, sorry, K-12 policy.

I think the evidence to support that is really actually overwhelming.

The stricter the cell phone policy, the better the outcomes.

That is very well documented.

I've heard a cell phone, described as having a slot machine in your pocket.

And it is really unfair to put it on children that they need to regulate that impulse when they're sitting in class.

I agree that it's a challenge.

There's no doubt about that.

But if we're going to say that we're not going to do this, I think we need to be honest about we're not going to do it, not because it's not evidence-based to be the best lead to the best outcomes, but we're not gonna do it because it seems too hard.

I think we have to be honest about the reason that we're doing it, or not doing it.

Because I think, you know, there are schools, there are high schools out there, there are school districts out there who do have a full ban, and it is possible, it is possible.

And those do lead to better outcomes for students on a variety of metrics.

So to give an example, these quotes that are included here, the bans were less strict in high schools when students are obtaining greater independence and may have greater need for cell phones.

This is just a report on prevalence, and it wasn't anything about impact or research.

The second sentence, the complete version of that sentence, immediately after this part ends, the part that's included in this presentation, he goes on to say, you pointed out, however, that the loosest policies are at the high school level, which also has the higher rates of depression.

He also said the survey did not probe whether there was an association between mental health and looser policies.

So, Again, this is a survey and it's not research.

So I don't think that these statements are evidence in support of that this is a just as good solution, because I don't think it is.

So again, if we choose it anyway, we have to be honest about that we're choosing it because it's easier to enforce.

I think there's no reason why we can't tell students that they have to put their phones in their locker when they get to school.

That's gonna require staff to be in, I don't know exactly what that looks like, that's not my job, but I know that there are schools who do that.

And if it's very important for kids to get their phone out at lunch, then they can go to their locker before lunch and get their phone and take it to lunch and then put it back.

but to say that it's fine for them to have it in passing period and then in the same presentation talk about how it can take 20 minutes to refocus after each phone distraction, then what are we doing?

I actually just don't understand that.

Because if a kid is walking into class looking on their phone and the bell rings, they put it in their pocket, again, slot machine in their pocket, and it's gonna take them 20 minutes to refocus, I'm skeptical that this is gonna have, that we're gonna see much of a positive outcome.

So I'm gonna really, really strongly, as a mom of two teenagers who fights this battle constantly, I'm gonna really, really push for us to be way more aggressive about this because I genuinely believe that it is absolutely in the best interest of children.

And I think it is shown that schools who have adopted more of a a rigorous stance on this have seen really positive outcomes.

And so I just think our kids deserve us to really step up and do the hard work of figuring out how to protect them from this, honestly.

And to the point about they need to learn how to use, I think they have so many hours outside of school where they're learning that.

They're home in the morning and after school, on weekends, all throughout summer, during all the breaks.

We're literally talking about six hours during the day when we're giving them a break, giving their brains a break so that they can actually be present and focus and interact with each other and learn.

So I just feel very strongly that we need to...

to be way more aggressive about this.

But I also want to say I really appreciate that this is happening right now and it's getting implemented on Monday.

And so I would challenge us to take this step now, it's almost May, and then starting in September, away for the day K through 12. That's my challenge to us.

I think the point is really well taken, although I will say what I'm hearing is there might be a step in between, which is not during passing period, because there was the idea that lunch, if they're leaving the building, they're leaving the building.

But no, I think that's right.

We try something, we see the outcomes, and then we iterate.

There's no question in my mind that having less access to a cell phone is better, but I do think, again, that with open campus policy as well as the idea about student independence and about learning how to deal with it, that we do owe them that ability, but I also want to make sure that there's student voice as well.

I mean, again, we start on Monday.

We have all of May, half of June.

We'll be able to kind of figure this out.

And then if it's working, great.

And if it's not working, we reiterate on it.

I will say the quote around the distraction, it's funny.

We talked about that for about 10 minutes today.

And the consensus or what we were thinking about was that You're going to be distracted during lunch.

You're going to be distracted during the hallways.

If there's something specific about a distraction of a cell phone versus the distraction of something else during lunch, that's something that we really would want to look into.

But I think your points are really well taken.

Is this the strongest possible rule?

No.

It's, I think, the rule that is a really good first step for us to see how the outcomes are and then kind of rethink it over the summer and moving forward.

So I fully admit that this is not as strong as it could be, but I don't think it's about, like, we don't think it's, it's not about hard or easy.

I think it's about the practical nature of how our schools are functioning at this moment and that we should hold ourselves up to a high standard as we put this into place.

So thank you.

All right, thank you so much for this presentation.

Looking to board directors to see if they want a quick five minute break before our next session portion.

Power through.

Knowing that we can't start our executive session until 7.30, but we do have a closed session that we can, that will take a little bit of that time.

You want five minutes?

No, we wanna power through, okay.

Thank you, then we will switch out and Continue on.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

We will now move to the introduction item, and I'm going to turn it over to Superintendent Scholdner, and hopefully he can start with some introductions since we have some new folks up here this evening.

All right.

Now it is definitely good evening, although it's still light out.

Today is a really important day for a beginning of a conversation and a possible action for this district and for decisions that I think, and we'll go into this more in detail around what happens, but I want to introduce the people at the table because I hope this shows how much these conversations are happening before we bring it to the board.

I've been very clear that if any decisions are going to be made or be thought to be made, that we need to talk to people way before we get in front of the cameras, way before we get in front of the board.

So it gives me great privilege to introduce Kevin Weinkoop, who is the current principal of Middle College High School.

And then to my left, we have Tim Moynihan, who is the regional executive director of a part of this district.

I don't know how to describe the region, but Tim has been a really wonderful red for this district.

And you all know the great Dr. Torres, Ross.

Okay, so in front of you you have a school board action report and it is important for me to try to set this up to explain how we got here and then I really want to make sure that Kevin, Tim, and Rocky all have the ability to answer your questions, to speak about it, and I will will say, I really want to thank Kevin for his, oh, sorry.

I'm going to pause you.

So we don't have the documents.

Does anyone want the document in front of them, or are they going to pull it up online?

I don't think it's going to be on the screen.

But you can pull it up.

Folks are pulling it up on their phones.

Do we need it?

Do you think it's important?

Okay.

You have access to it if you need me to wait and make copies, but I'll explain it as much as I can.

Great, thank you.

Sorry.

So I really want to thank Kevin.

Kevin is a really thoughtful, strong, wonderful principal of a very special program.

And, you know, we had talked about him coming today and we had kind of even joked about like, you know, he was like, Ben, you know, what do you want me to say?

And I was like, say the truth.

Like, I want the conversation to be as open and transparent around what we're doing and why we're doing it as possible.

So here's the situation.

We have a really terrific idea of a program called Middle College.

In all of the work that I've done in education leadership from 2003 on, I am a huge fan of the concept of, we call it here, middle college.

Many places in the country call it early college.

Some of them call, there's a program in New York called P-TECH.

The Bard College is really famous for actually across the country having this early college model.

I am a huge fan of it.

The idea that children can go to high school 9th and 10th grade and then be able to take college classes in 11th and 12th grade with many graduating with AAs at 12th grade is something that we should applaud.

I also want to say and take full responsibility that I am not sure that this district has told the story of middle college well enough so that children apply to it.

We have not done a good job with all of our alternative ed programs, but I would say specifically and highlight middle college.

An amazing idea behind getting kids to college early, graduating with an AA, with no debt, with the AA degree, but what makes college, early college or middle college so special is it actually comes with wraparound services.

One of the data points that worries me greatly in this district is of all the students that take running start, we have about a 40% failure rate.

And that is a conversation for another day.

But what I highlight is the middle college model is that they go to college, but they still have high school wraparound services.

That's really powerful and really important.

We have currently two campuses.

We have a campus at North and we have a campus at Central.

Right now, the campus at Central does not have that many students.

It's very limited.

And because of the model, we are only teaching the 9th grade and the 10th grade because the 11th and 12th graders are going to college, hence the whole wonderful project.

So what they're getting for 11th and 12th grade is that wraparound service, that counselor, the great principal, access to us, et cetera.

Currently, the 9th graders become 10th graders and the 10th graders become 11th graders.

So the only students that any sort of change would impact would be rising 9th graders and the 9th graders going into 10th grade.

The number of these students, and I'll defer to Kevin, is very, very small.

And so if the idea is to close that one location down, but not the concept, not the schools, not the way that we're helping, we owe it to all of those students to have a plan for them.

And what we have done is not only spoken to all of the staff, but, and again, I'll defer to Kevin, but we're able to reach out to each and every individual student because it's less than, 10, right?

So we can actually really give them all of the love and support that they need.

And again, these are students who are in eighth grade who have not even yet enrolled in ninth grade.

And these are only the ninth graders who would then enroll in 10th grade because the 11th and 12th graders are going to get the same services by having the counselor and the principal and the support.

The other thing about consolidating the Central and the North is that the North Seattle College is a more robust setting for us.

We have more activity there.

We have a really great relationship.

Not that we don't at Central, but the one at North is really, really strong.

And so when we were looking at what was right for children, what was right for this district, the idea was pretty clear that what we should do is merge the two locations, move everything to the North campus where we have a lot of good stuff going, and then do what we can to promote, promote, promote the wonderful location that is north.

And so what I'm bringing to you and what I'm happy to defer to my colleagues at the dais here is the idea of an action of reducing the number of locations for middle college with the idea that we are going to double down our support of the idea, increase the ways that people know about the program, and really invest in the single location so that our students can do well and our faculty can be supported.

And the last thing I'll say again is we owe everything to the students that have made the decision to go to Central, so speaking to them as well as the students in ninth grade who are rising 10th graders.

But again, I want to thank Kevin and his team.

Individual contact with each child and what we have said to those students is because they've enrolled in a school that will not, action is taken, exists next year, they will have the right to enroll in any high school they want to because we want to give them that opportunity.

They might say, look, I was really hoping to go to Central, but if not Central, I really don't want to go to North.

I want to go to whatever, Garfield.

And we will do that.

And why can we promise it?

Because we're talking about less than 10 children.

And that way we can be really thoughtful about that kind of white glove service that we can give.

So that is the request, is that We would merge Central North, that the program at Central goes to North, and that we double down our support at North, because we really think this is in the best interest of all of our children.

Running a school with less than, you know, 10 kids just doesn't doesn't create the kind of learning environment that we think is right for the children.

And we think that having opportunity to really strengthen one program or one location could be really great.

But I'm happy to defer to if you want to say anything, Kevin or Ted.

I just wanted to set the stage for how we're doing this.

And again, we've already spoken to staff.

I went face to face.

We had a lovely conversation.

Kevin's working with the families and we're able to say that before we ever step one foot in front of the board to have this conversation.

It's bittersweet being here because I don't want the site to close.

I think that there should be more of our middle college sites.

I think that a lot of the data that Ben was talking about, we are beating.

Almost 80% of our student body is one or more of free and reduced lunch, students of color, or first generation college going kids.

And every single one of them is graduating, and every single one of them is graduating with college credit.

And so a lot of the metrics we were talking about are ones that we're helping towards, But like he said, we have a horrible time getting the word out.

I mean, honestly, it starts right from our name.

We have middle, so it feels like middle college or middle school.

We have college, some people think it's college, and we have high school right in our name.

And it's a national brand.

In fact, we're part of a national consortium of middle colleges like he was getting at.

But from the beginning, we have a huge curve of trying to get the word out and get into the right places to take advantage of our program.

complicating that even further is that what I would refer to as our south side, which is now at Seattle Central, has been at three sites in the last three years.

And so what was our stronger, more flourishing site after being at Seattle University for a dozen years, when they wanted their space back, has been on an odyssey that has led to more than having our enrollment there.

And so I hate that we're victim of the circumstance, But I also understand the realities of this.

It is 10 kids that would require at least three teachers to continue that program there at that point.

And fiscally, that doesn't make sense.

And so as much as I want to have more middle college sites, I also understand the decision that's being made.

And what I do appreciate are the steps that Ben has been taking to try and do it as well as he can, to be, my staff was actually shocked that he wanted to come out and talk to them personally, because they didn't feel, with their experience in the district, they didn't feel like that's the sort of thing that has happened in the past when difficult decisions were being made, and so they were grateful for him coming out, and they appreciated that, and they appreciated hearing from him directly about his vision for what he sees going forward, because for the last four years that I've been at Middle College, we've been trying, middle college staff, but also all of the option in the high schools have been trying to gain favor to get help, get assistance in promoting our programs out to the community because they're all different and they're all wonderful, but people just don't know about them.

There's not enough systems in place, there's not enough help in the promotion of our programs for families to know about them.

And what we find is that certain families in our district are more likely to school shop, if you will, and so we can appeal to those families, but that's not who we're trying to serve in this data most of the time.

and so our efforts are often to try and figure out how can we get directly in, you know, two households, get into classrooms in middle school, get into, meet with counselors in middle school that maybe are tapping a kid on the shoulder and saying, you know what, you should really talk to the school, or you should really find out about this school.

But then it's gotta get home from that eighth grader, too, and so how do we get to that parent that is really, you know, a 14-year-old, they wanna go to this high school they see on movies and TV, but it's their parent that then can say, you know, maybe this really is better for you to think about in your future.

And so the commitment that he's making about helping to promote us, you know, to kind of bring us in a smaller place but then to help promote and get the word out, I do really hope that this is what can strengthen us in the long run.

And so I, you know, have every reason to trust Ben and the commitment he's made to that and that I really do hope that this is a very sad transition for us but it's the beginning of something better.

Thank you.

I really appreciate that.

Thank you so much.

And again, I really am so supportive that we can just say it as it is, right?

And look, would I love to have 30 locations?

Absolutely.

But let's strengthen the one that we have that we can really invest in and then get that word out.

Because again, and Kevin and I have talked about this a lot, I have a lot of experience with these kinds of programs.

I love these kinds of programs.

They're really great for kids.

and we just have to do right by the programs we have and then try to expand.

So, thank you.

All right, we're just going to go around the U to see if folks have questions or comments.

Just from a process standpoint, again, tonight's introduction, so that means that this would be on our regular board meeting here, I think it's May 13th.

Yep.

Thank you.

So Representative Yoon.

OK.

Director Mizrahi.

Director Smith.

I have a couple of questions.

There's been the talk about increasing the promotion in order to increase enrollment.

If we close the central location is there a possible path for increasing enrollment and then reopening a new location that would be more accessible to south of Seattle.

Yeah, I mean, the answer is yes.

But as Kevin talked about, what I don't want to do is then place it in a place that then gets kicked out the next day.

And so one of the things that has really hurt the school that is currently at Central is they just got there.

And that they were somewhere else, and they're somewhere else.

And so I think as we strengthen the location that we know really, really has invested in us, we can really expand.

And I think as we start to expand, we should start thinking critically around, is there a place in South Seattle that we know we can stay in for years to come?

The last thing I want to do is give children false hope, or families false hope, where we say, OK, yeah, we opened this up.

Oh, sorry.

next year we got kicked out, right?

So I think we should double down on really making this one in the north work really well, get our ducks in a row, get the word out that middle college is this amazing thing, and then if we do find a location in South Seattle that is connected to a college that does this, that we could get a long-term relationship, that's, I think, the way to go.

And then my next, I don't know, not sure if it will be a question or comment.

I like that the current rising 9th and 10th graders are given the choice of any high school in the district.

But I feel like that still leaves a choice potentially.

You know I don't know exactly what their current commutes would be to Central College but a choice between a commute that is just untenable and the opportunity to earn those college credits and so while giving the choice of any high school is certainly better than just saying, hey, good luck.

There is still some loss there.

So is there anything more we can do to address that?

Well, I can tell you about the pitch that I've been making to the incoming 9th and 10th graders is that if they can get to Seattle Central, it's on the same block as the light rail station for Capitol Hill.

That wonderful new two line means that every four minutes there's a train coming through that is going north to Northgate and our north Seattle is right at the Northgate station.

It's at the bridge connects it.

And so I tell them it's really we're talking about a 10 minute difference and that if you can get to Seattle Central yes it's a little bit longer ride but it's really not that much farther time wise.

And so I'm so far I've been doing pretty well.

I've got some that are still on the fence thinking about it.

A few that have definitely committed that they're going to make the longer trip because they do see the value in the program and what we're able to provide.

Light rail, it's pretty awesome.

I just want to make this a little bit crisper for everybody.

What is the problem that we are trying to solve and why do we think this is the right solution to solve that problem?

Sure.

Thank you.

So I think it's threefold.

One is having a school, a high school with 10 students is not that sound academically.

There's a socialization, there's learning, there's group work, there's all sorts of things that are very difficult to do for literally a high school of 10 children.

Now, could you envision building a high school of 10 kids?

Sure, but it wouldn't look like a middle college model.

So by merging the locations, we're going to be able to strengthen and increase the enrollment at the one place.

That's going to be good.

Two, the relationship that we have at North is longstanding and strong, and we feel confident that we could stay there for a long time.

Now again, Central's been lovely.

We just got there.

They're going through transition.

The person in my seat formerly is now the interim president.

It was great to see him when I visited.

But he's an interim.

They're going to be doing a search.

We don't know what the long-time leadership is going to look like for this program.

We know that North has really accepted it.

And then I think the third, but I want to be really clear here, this is the third of three, not the leader, is that there will be a pretty significant savings that will be helpful for us going forward.

If you look on page two, there is about, I think, like a four-ish FTE.

So you're talking about even at an average of 160 with Benny's, 170 with Benny's, you're talking well over half a million dollars that can go to serving the district writ large in our children.

Director Rankin.

Thank you.

I apologize.

I missed the beginning of this conversation, so I hope I'm not repeating.

But the first time I spoke in front of the Seattle School Board was to advocate against the closure of the middle college location at High Point, and that was in 2015. And what that was was a totally different model, a totally different program than the middle college of today.

And the reason that I want to say that is because this program has evolved.

a lot, and the problems that were true then are still true now that people can't find it.

They don't know about it.

And they don't know why it might be the best place for their child.

So I appreciate the conversation that I did hear between the superintendent and Principal Wincoop about helping people know where to find these programs.

But I think to tie into the goal conversation from earlier, we have an opportunity to talk about who find success in these programs and how we help them find not just middle college but all of our non-traditional high schools and making sure that we as a system can define what those programs are can sustain them fund them i think that will really help us let people know about them why might you want to choose middle college and how do we make sure that all the counselors at all the schools know to say hey this might be a really great option for you so even though the the loss is tough i will say the thoughtfulness which with with which this is being approached compared to the closure of the site in 2015 is quite different and much appreciated.

But the opportunity that we have is to talk about not just middle college but all of our alternative or nontraditional high schools and make sure that they're part of the sort of portfolio of offerings that Seattle Public Schools has and also as a gap-closing measure.

So when we look at that high school plus or graduation plus metric, I would really like to see from you, Ben, in sort of strategic planning, who is struggling to graduate from our comprehensive high schools that could benefit from being in a program like middle college and how do we connect those dots and how do we help them know that it's there?

I would be interested in that larger conversation of how middle college fits into what we do as a system for students to go on to success after graduation.

No, I really appreciate you highlighting that.

And you heard Kevin's numbers, right?

Like this is a great program that we need to make accessible to more children.

And so when we look at what Grad Plus looks like or what just grad looks like, you know, the middle college model is really quite strong.

And so, you know, I think they can serve as a model for others.

And the more that we can even and something Kevin and I have sort of like talked about is, you know, what kind of collaboration could look like so that middle schools know about it, other programs know about it, so that we can really become a feeder program to this really wonderful outcome which is students not just graduating from high school, but graduating with multiple college credits.

That's great.

Yeah.

And what I would like to know is what you need from the board to make sure that we get it into policy, that we get it into codified so that whatever develops can be maintained and continue and have the eyes of the board in the future so that we're not talking about a site closure just because people don't know about something.

Sure.

Will do.

Thank you.

Director LaValley?

I wanted to check as well.

Did you have another question?

Okay.

I had a feeling that she did, but I'd love to know, you covered this a little bit in a previous question, but what was the feedback from students?

You said you were still trying to convince a few, but what was the overarching feedback that you got from them on this when explaining it to them?

Yeah, I think that you know, it's case by case basis.

For some families, the idea of putting a 14 or 15 year old onto the light rail is out of the question.

And so it doesn't matter that I can tell them about the joys of light rail and four minute intervals and things like that.

And so, and also for some, you know, North, Northgate or the North Seattle College is pretty much as far away from a lot of the city as you can get.

And so, you know, I'm thinking of one particular young man who's just phenomenal, goes to Mercer right now, and I'm so hoping that he and his family decide to join us.

But he lives closer to Rainier Beach.

And so, like, even with the light rail, that's a long ride to commit to both directions.

And so the reality is, If all things were equal, I would much rather be at Seattle Central.

You know, it's in the heart of the city.

It's, you know, similar distance to everywhere.

It's closer to the families that we would most want to serve.

But everything that Ben laid out is true.

It was pulling.

I started three years ago trying to get to Seattle Central when I knew we were going to have to leave Seattle University.

And it took years to try and get any foothold in to the school.

And it's because the leadership has continued to turn over repeatedly.

They have a financial crisis that rivals ours.

And so they really needed to scramble for every buck that they could.

And so it's not where I want to be.

I don't want to be isolated.

I want to be elsewhere in the city so that we can serve them.

And that's a big hindrance for talking to families of 14- and 15-year-olds.

Thank you.

Vice President Briggs?

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, everybody.

All right.

So a reminder to folks, we do have a meeting next Wednesday.

Again, the topics will be mainly budget, but we also have a community engagement aspect of it.

We will leave this meeting.

We do have an executive session that will start at 730, but we will start with our closed session.

So we will meet in our conference room for our closed session at 7.15.

As there is no further business on the agenda, the meeting stands adjourned at 7.07.