Seattle Schools Board Meeting Sept 28, 2022

Mic's are live.

Here.

Director Harris has not joined us yet.

Director Rankin.

Here.

Director Rivera-Smith.

Present.

Director Sarju.

Present.

Director Song-Moritz.

Present.

President Hersey.

Here.

and I do not yet see Director Harris online.

I will make sure to notify the public when she arrives.

I would like to welcome school board student member Luna Cromberon to tonight's meeting.

During these meetings we will be addressing the student members as directors.

Thank you for joining us.

Director Cromberon.

I will now turn it over to Superintendent Jones for his comments including a proclamation for Indigenous Peoples Day and a summative data review.

Superintendent Jones.

Thank you President Hersey and board members.

As we acknowledge at the opening of our meetings here in Seattle Public Schools we work and live on the unceded ancestral lands of the Coast Salish people.

With gratitude and respect, we recommit to centering the sovereignty and voices of indigenous communities in our work.

In honor of Indigenous People Day, on October 10th, we offer a proclamation.

Director Crone-Barone will read the proclamation, please.

A proclamation of Seattle school district number one King County Seattle Washington reaffirming the district's commitment to promote the well-being and growth of every district student especially of Seattle's American Indian Alaskan Native and indigenous students.

Whereas the Seattle Public Schools recognizes that the indigenous peoples of the land that would later become known as the Americas have occupied these lands since time immemorial.

And whereas the Seattle Public Schools recognizes the fact that Seattle is built upon the homelands and villages of the Coast Salish peoples of this region, without whom the building of the city would not have been possible.

And whereas, The Seattle Public Schools values the many contributions made to our community through indigenous peoples knowledge, labor, technology, science, philosophy, arts, and the deep cultural contribution that has substantially shaped the charter of the city of Seattle.

And whereas the Seattle Public Schools has a responsibility to oppose the systemic racism towards indigenous people in the United States, which perpetuates high rates of poverty and income inequality, exacerbating disproportionate health, education and social crises.

And whereas the Seattle Public Schools seeks to combat prejudice and eliminate discrimination stemming from colonization and to promote awareness, understanding and good relations among indigenous peoples and all other segments of our district.

And whereas the Seattle Public Schools promotes educational excellence for indigenous peoples through policies and practices that reflect the experience of indigenous peoples ensure greater access and opportunity and honor our nation's indigenous roots history and contributions.

And whereas SB 5 4 3 3 requires the teaching of the history government and contemporary issues of the 29 federally recognized tribes of Washington State and whereas the School Board of Directors has mandated through policy number 2336 required observances to observe the second Monday of October as Indigenous Peoples Day.

Therefore all schools are encouraged to support the well-being and growth of American Indian Alaskan Native and Indigenous students and recognize the contributions of Native peoples on October 11th Indigenous Peoples Day.

On October 10th 2022 is hereby proclaimed as Indigenous Peoples Day and celebrated across Seattle Public Schools.

All right, thank you so much.

We will transition to talking about academic progress.

The school board adopted a progress monitoring calendar this summer that begins with looking at student outcomes from the 21-22 school year.

My team will present results from the Smarter Balanced assessment that students took in the spring.

They will give us some baseline data we can use to track our progress of third grade reading and seventh grade math goals.

It will show us how the whole system is functioning in terms of achieving our outcomes for students.

This summative data review allows us to become more familiar with the data before we begin our formal progress monitoring in December.

So without further ado, I'll turn it over to Dr. Keisha Scarlett, Assistant Superintendent of Academics.

Thank you.

Afternoon, Dr. Keisha Scarlett, Assistant Superintendent of Academics.

Thank you so much for this great opportunity to provide an update to our Board of Directors with our Smarter Balanced data from spring 2022. Our hope is that it gives you information to support both your individual and public engagement and to help build readiness for our regular progress monitoring work through student outcomes focused governance process.

So this short presentation is intentionally shared at a high level and will be presented by me rather than Superintendent Jones this time.

Consider me as the appetizer and that he'll be the full meal in the upcoming progress monitoring session within that.

And also see this as an opportunity to jot down some questions to give us sufficient time to really respond to the questions that you may have.

And we look forward to hearing from the ad hoc committee's recommendations on the calendar as far as progress monitoring as it comes up.

So, we'll move the slide too.

So, before we look at the data, I want to note that we recognize that the data we are about to review is only one measure of student outcomes and that student success encompasses multiple pathways and opportunities.

As the district engages in a more thoughtful assessment system and equity focused data analysis the SBA student achievement levels no longer live in isolation.

SPS is committed to working toward embracing the usage of leading indicators and actionable data to ensure adults in our system both educators and staff can react in real time to provide our students the instruction and resources they need now.

Earlier this month state and national leaders provided districts and schools with guidance about how to use the spring state assessment data after a two-year interruption due to global pandemic.

When you look at this slide here you note from Superintendent Reykdal I won't read it all the way aloud but speaks about how broad scale test scores how they can influence investment and policy priorities So looking at the scores from the Smarter Balanced Assessment are designed to really indicate whether a student's on track for college level learning.

There are other aspects like engagement, attendance and grades and classroom based assessments that we can use to really give the real time information about what's happening for students as it unfolds.

So we'll move to the next slide.

So just to reorient you and remind you of work that we've done before as we've oriented you around this portfolio of measures and how we are invested in a portfolio measures.

So when you look at this portfolio measures you can see along the left side that that we have different measures there with some examples, the purpose for that, and then what they can be used for.

So that is just a rehashing of that.

If you move to the next slide, we have the actual example of the third grade reading goal assessment portfolio, where you can see the indicator of the literacy skills, perception indicators, and enrollment.

So it gives an opportunity to see how we're using

Dr. Scarlett, I just want board members to know this is in the superintendent comments if you click on that on the agenda.

All right.

So let's let's go back one one slide and give them a chance to catch up.

OK.

Great.

And they remind me to take off my glasses so I can read the screen.

So this is this this one minute one minute pause.

OK.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Superintendent Jones.

Superintendent Jones is modeling good teaching and learning practice right now making sure that everyone has the materials.

Dr. Scarlett, I don't want to throw you off, but if you would make the comment now about how this is one measure of multiple measures, then they can see it in context.

I think that's really important.

Absolutely.

So the SBA assessment data is one measure of student achievement.

And this portfolio measures gives an opportunity for us to think about how we're looking at a number of different measures.

So you see at the top of the chart, it has standardized summative assessments.

So you can see where the SBA lies in this portfolio measures.

But also combining that and triangulating, we say with standardized interim measurements, having formative diagnostic benchmarks and assessments, formative curriculum embedded assessments, also our perceptual measures like our climate data which we'll talk about a little bit today, and then other data like course enrollment and passage rate as well that are aligned to our strategic plan goals.

Thank you.

And so the next slide shows just the example of third grade and our portfolio measures that we have for our reading goal assessment portfolio that you can see we have indicator types that both shares our literacy skills, our perception indicators, and also enrollment that we're tracking through that.

Thank you.

So let's go ahead and dig in and get started in this for looking at slide five and six.

So in this first view of student achievement, we're looking at the percentage of students in grades three through eight and also grade 10 who received a level three and level four.

Level three is considered proficient, level four is above proficient.

English language arts or literacy student achievement is represented in the green color.

Mathematics student achievement is represented by the color blue.

You'll notice that certain grade bands within the achievement levels highlighting African-American males outcomes have a red star above it.

This data is connected to strategic goals.

That red star denotes that.

So third grade literacy, seventh grade mathematics as a benchmark area, and also at 10th grade.

For our student outcomes focus governance progress monitoring memos, we shared a disaggregation of African-American male students based on multilingual students, African-American male students with IEPs and other categories.

We plan to share this breakdown.

Since you probably have questions about the end size, I want to provide one illustrative example.

So for instance, in terms of the end size, we should note that, for example, at the third grade, there are 4,020 total third graders in Seattle Public Schools.

1,640 of those total grade third graders are students of color furthest from educational justice and that's also denoted down at the bottom the asterisk at the bottom elaborates on what that means around students of color furthest from educational justice.

And of that 467 students are third grade students are African-American male students.

So our students are multidimensional and will attempt to continue to share data and measures that are disaggregated so that we can really show the complexities and the multiple identities of our students.

Please move on to slide seven.

Thank you.

So in this second view of student achievement, we're looking at the same data set as the first view, but it's just a different layout.

This slide shows two distinct graphs disaggregated by English language arts and literacy and mathematics.

Each graph shows grades 3 through 8 and 10th grade, who are also at level 3 and level 4. All student achievement is represented by the color gray.

Students of color furthest from educational justice are represented by the color blue.

African-American males are represented by the color green.

If you move to the next slide, you're able to see how we further shared that multilingual learners are the color yellow, and then special education or IEP services are denoted by the color red.

Also noting that that star refers to strategic initiative areas or strategic plan goals.

We'll move to the next slide.

Now we're very aware of the effect of COVID-19 as this and this data really shows our results before the pandemic compared to now.

While there are differences in the assessments we therefore need to be cautious of drawing too many sweeping conclusions when we look at this data as trend data.

We're going to look at student achievement data from 2019 on this slide in 2022. As you know, two of our strategic goals are focused on English Language Arts and Literacy at grade 3 and Mathematics at grade 7. For each of these respective content goals is African American male achievement to be at 70% by 2024 for English Language Arts and 70% in 2026 for Mathematics.

Now if you notice, each graph shows grades 3 through 8 and grades 10 who are levels 3 and 4. Students in grades 3 through 8 are represented by the solid lines.

Students in grades 10 are represented by broken lines.

The first row represents 2022 student outcomes and the number of students who had level 3 and level 4 achievement levels.

The second row represents 2019 student outcomes and the number of students who had level 3 and level 4 achievement levels.

Lastly, this table showcased African-American male students that have been highlighted in gray bands that are part of our strategic goals.

You can move to the next slide.

And that's where you can see the yellow color for multilingual students and also red for students served with IEPs.

Next slide.

So before we move into the next segment of data, I want to contextualize just the previous data.

Now, at the same time, we note that State Superintendent Reykdal had an interesting perspective on this data as he began to review the fall 2021 SBA data and noted this on September 9th, that these data are encouraging.

There is no question that COVID-19 significantly impacted the learning environment.

Disruptions of remote learning, quarantine, and isolation and transitioning back in person after periods of learning remotely are evident in the decrease in proficiency from spring 2019 to spring 2022. However, the incredible work of our educators and families to support students is evident in the recovery we are seeing across grade levels and subjects.

Seattle Public Schools is being studied for the outcomes that we have that have exceeded even the state outcomes.

As we move to the next slide, and as I shared earlier, now this is just a preview of an abundance of data for you all, and it will take us time to really unpack this and to be able to provide the level of detail.

So as you look at this data here, if you're more curious about some more of the end sizes, please note that this data shows the data from spring 2022 for all students, students of color furthest from educational justice.

And also you can see African-American males and it's highlighted at those investment areas.

They were red stars before we highlighted it yellow within these tables.

And then you're able to look at the comparison for spring 2019 across all students, students of color furthest from educational justice and African-American male students.

Next slide.

Again, the data shared with multilingual consistent as yellow and then also students receiving IEP supports notice the same data that we have there.

Thank you.

We'll move to student climate.

All right, so student climate survey data.

As my staff and I were preparing for this presentation, we felt it very important not just to showcase SBA outcomes from spring 2022. We also wanted to highlight our students and their thoughts about belonging, school, and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their development as individuals.

We must also remember that behind every number is a student with goals and hopes and dreams.

And I believe the best way to showcase their stories is to highlight outcomes from our climate survey at this point.

This survey is administered twice a year and is created and managed by our research and evaluation team.

So the last two slides give all of the slide, all of the survey items.

So if you wanted to see what they all are, but I'll just highlight a few ones that are salient, I think for illustrative purposes.

So in this next slide, Yeah.

Oh sorry, excuse me I got off script a little bit.

So if you go to the previous slide, my apologies, you can see in this slide that we have a 25 item survey that is translated in the district's top five home languages, Spanish, Somali, simplified Chinese, Vietnamese, and Amharic and it really leans toward our core commitments around targeting universalism.

I shared before that it's administered two times during the year.

The survey covers topics on sense of belonging, safety and identity, culturally responsive teaching, relationships, social emotional learning, student voice and leadership.

But as we move to the next slide and think about this and compare it to our new academic goals, we also added survey topics across these four areas, college and career readiness, math, literacy, and then also the impacts of COVID.

Next slide.

So in this first slide, we asked students a question.

The query was, I feel like people accept me for who I am as a person.

Now, the reason why we start with this data point is because of the central role of identity and the affirmation of identity is closely connected to achievement.

There's a close connection between a person's personal identity and their academic identity as well.

So this is just one example of a question related to identity to get a clear sense of how identity matters and how we need to really look at it across questions and different metrics we use.

In addition I should note that we've been refining the climate survey questions to align more closely with our strategic plan goals and I know that Director Harris always asks if we're changing the survey every year then how do we compare it but there are refinements.

that that we're trying to move forward with within this as we get really connected to our strategic plan goals.

I read your mind director Harris.

OK.

So in the next slide we ask the question.

My teacher has high expectations of me.

So you can see how that data is disaggregated across with the different color references around that.

Again, identity in culturally responsive teaching, identity is co-created between a student, their educator team, their teachers, and their family.

And so that identity and it being a form of identity development as part of culturally responsive teaching, do my teachers have high expectations?

I mean, you can see the data from that.

The next slide, slide 20, in these next two slides, we're going to look at student responses with correlations to our strategic goals for reading and mathematics.

So the first slide reads, I expect to do fairly well in the math class I take.

So what are those expectations around mathematics identity, in particular in this one, about my expectations for myself?

This connects to the critical point about how identity connects to math achievement.

And then in the next slide we have two questions that we highlight.

One is I enjoy reading and when I'm reading by myself I understand almost everything I read.

This is about the joy of reading as well as comprehension.

This data could be used to guide our system and our individual educators on what support students need.

For example, we start we've just started learning improvement networks around third grade reading goal and we'll be looking at this data with educators across schools.

So how do we look at practices in small ways but then think about how do we scale them across the entire system.

So the final survey slide data highlights the impact of the pandemic on students social emotional health and learning.

So the questions that are asked on this is over the past year how much of an impact that COVID have on your social emotional well-being and then over the past year how much of an impact that COVID have on your learning.

And so um We will continue to look at this data in a coordinated way as we improve our support systems for students in service of educators, students, and their families as well.

So as I shared, the last two data slides are of the survey items, if you just want to be refreshed on what those survey items looked like before.

And so in summary, I know we reviewed a whole lot of data.

And it will take some time for us to really unpack the information that was presented tonight.

To return to an earlier point, I hope that this presentation provides a thoughtful segue into our student outcomes focus governance updates and the work ahead.

And we know that Superintendent Jones will do a great job of sharing that information as we move into progress monitoring.

So we want to give you this information so that you can share your questions ahead of time and we can really take full advantage of our next upcoming session.

So if there are any questions, thank you.

Okay.

Fantastic.

Thank you, Dr. Scarlett.

Do you have something you'd like to share?

No.

I was going to see if we had five to ten minutes for questions, and then we'll set it up later for work session, perhaps after you all digest this.

But this is really a snapshot of where we are.

Yes, absolutely.

And I was just going to say as we open for director questions, I would like to ask directors to focus on clarifying questions regarding the data.

Like we just mentioned, we'll have an opportunity to have a deeper conversation with Dr. Jones on strategy and the progress monitoring sessions this winter.

Today is obviously just a brief opportunity for directors to engage with student outcome data and get a sense of where we are and where we were rather at the end of the 21-22 school year.

So with that in mind, Director Harris, take it away.

Thank you.

You mentioned students receiving special education services with an IEP our 5 0 4 plan students included students that have a 5 0 4 plan included under the orange

area.

You know what I did not ask that question is a really great question so I'll follow up with my staff.

My representation of this when I read it was with students with IEPs.

So we did we do need to follow up with 504s and I'll make sure I follow up with that.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Director Rivera-Smith.

Thank you.

Thank you for all these wonderful colorful graphs we have here.

My question is what is the participation?

Are we do we have participation by all students in these or do people do we know what the opt out rate is or how many we might be missing?

Are you speaking about the survey?

Yes.

Let's see.

I heard this data yesterday.

I believe that our previous participation rate because, you know, before COVID was around 70 something percent, 75 percent or so.

The participation rate did drop down into the low 60s, maybe 61 percent participation.

So there were some different barriers you know last year but we would expect it to move to pre-pandemic rates and even higher hopefully as people see more and more value in the data as well.

So yes there has been there has there was a drop during pandemic of participation.

Do we know if the participation with their drop rate was by demographic?

You know I will follow it with my team on that to see if there's a demographic breakdown that could be shared about that.

That's a great question.

Thank you.

I'll make a note about that.

And last question is regarding I say that the climate survey was translated the top five languages but we have many more than that in our district.

So students who are not in those top five how are they able to take was is where they did they have accommodations to take the survey.

Yeah I'm not absolutely sure about those accommodations.

I do know about those languages that I shared there and about of course our English version of the surveys as well.

Thank you.

So that might be an impact on participation but we can follow up.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much.

Director Harris.

Thank you.

I have two observations and I'm hoping that we will have opportunity at a later point to do a deeper dive.

I'm looking at the the student climate survey.

My teachers have high expectations of me and there's a real drop off between elementary school and middle school and I'm sure that's probably just because there are a lot more teachers.

I would like to have a better understanding of what is the sentiment behind our middle school and high school students behind that.

And then the next question in this climate survey, I expect to do fairly well in any math class I take.

I think I was personally kind of surprised by the relative confidence of our students compared to looking at the performance on the standardized test scores.

And so I just have a general wondering about that.

Thank you.

Go ahead director Hampson.

First of all thank you for this excellent preview and I'm just super excited to be talking about student data because it's been a while and I think that you know coming on to the school board that's what I thought we were going to be doing and it feels like it's been quite some time since we've had data.

COVID was a big part of that.

And so and this is just a fantastic preview and in part because it does bring up so many excellent questions.

And not to say that that my question is going to be excellent but my fellow directors questions have been excellent.

I was noticing on the percent of students meeting standard and on the smarter balance assessment.

Let's see what's probably better.

I don't know what slide this is.

The first the blue graph percent of students meeting standard levels 3 and 4 percent of students meeting standard that was on.

Now what is the difference between these two.

Does it have the red stars on it?

No it's the actual graphs the line graphs from 2018-19 to 2022. I think one is slide nine I believe.

Okay so what I notice is that on the the next slide so go to 10 yeah that there's not much there's less of a drop among multilingual special education learners in particular.

That's true to some that's also true on math in the prior slide for African-American males.

And my question about this is and possibly to be answered at a later time is is the lack of additional drop just simply that the bar was already so low, right?

We were already underperforming to such an extent that it didn't get appreciably worse because we were doing so poorly and what that tells us, right?

That even during COVID, we didn't have as much of a drop, whereas we had a much more significant drop overall with all students.

Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, these are different tests and different students.

And so while it looks like a drop, this is almost hard to make this comparison because we're apples and screwdrivers almost.

OK.

Well I mean yeah.

So I mean the question is just what do we learn about how our students furthest from educational justice and African-American males performed during COVID relative to other to the to the broader group.

And if there really isn't anything then what are we meant to glean from this particular set of data points.

Yeah, it's just an opportunity to look at.

I mean, even though the assessments, you know, we say we're different assessments.

It's an opportunity to look at with soft eyes, you know, a trend of data, but also like the recovery.

So 2020 there are 2022 data becomes our like new baseline by which we can compare, you know, over other years, but we're not comparing, of course, the same students.

It's always a different group of students, but to just think about, okay, what is it overall, just like us using SV as our top line measure, we're looking at sort of the overall of what's happening for our students, but understanding that any of this data is being looked at through that portfolio measures of other, you know, data that is more predictive, that can help us, that'll be part of the progress monitoring.

And then the other question I had thank you for that was the was about the extent to which we exceeded.

other parts of the state in terms of what were those kind of general areas where we outperformed.

Or is that.

Or.

I don't really have that you know at that level of data but there you know we're explorations and I mean you know we can maybe take a little bit of soft eyes to the Seattle Times also right and their feature about what's happening with test scores.

But I don't have like specific data about all the different areas at this point of that.

But I think it's important for us to keep exploring this data and looking at sort of the causal impacts within that.

But also looking at our dynamic more predictive data you know throughout the year that will be collected as far as our progress monitoring.

So this gives like a really high level sort of snapshot of like what is our sort of trajectory look like you know over time with new baselines for 2022.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Go ahead director Rankin.

Thank you.

For.

Thank you by the way for all of this.

For students who.

Who more than one category applies to them.

So say an African-American male who receives special education services would that student be counted once in each category.

Yeah.

So yeah exactly.

And so we do recognize the intersectionality of our students.

They could be multilingual.

have IEP supports and also, you know, be African-American male, you know, and even multiracial.

And so to that degree that that is how we're trying to like really think about how can we disaggregate the data that give sort of the full dimensions of, you know, who our students represent and the families and communities that come from as well.

So I think that's helpful and I think rather than going by student and and counting them only once in one category it makes sense to count them in more but I wonder if at some point it would be useful or possible to look at The impact of intersectionality within the data, I don't know if that's something we're thinking about for going into more depth.

I would say in our inclusionary practices work, I mean one of the things that we are all setting goals to look at targeting universalism, right?

And so looking at the achievement of African American males who are served with IEPs and Like what are the programs that they are you know being supported in.

What does the academic achievement look like within that.

So you're spot on about sort of that intersectional approach and thinking about you know the work that we're doing ongoing.

So absolutely.

OK great.

Yeah but I think it is helpful to know and helpful in this context to know that each student is counted.

for the percentages of every category in which they qualify.

My well I have a noticing that I'm not going to go too much into but that students receiving special education services have the lowest feeling of acceptance and high expectations by their teacher.

Especially at that 10th grade level that's kind of a punch in the gut to be quite honest.

The question around.

The COVID impact.

Can you help me understand what the percentages represent.

So over the past year how much of an impact did it have and then there's percentages or the percentage like Do the percentages represent students who reported it had a big impact.

Yeah or do they represent the sort of like reference of amount of impact.

If you look at the top I don't know if you can see it on there.

I should have shared.

Oh who responded often or always.

Yeah.

Responded often or always.

Thank you.

I know that was I didn't read on the document.

So thank you.

That was I just went right past that.

Thank you.

OK.

And then I guess a clarifying.

Director Harris asked about students with 504s.

So I think it's critical that however we're looking at this data that we're being very consistent about.

which students we're talking about because students with disabilities students who qualify for IEP services and students who have a 504 may or may not be you know there are students with disabilities who don't don't have any any of those supports.

And then I think our number of students who have a 504 is actually really pretty small.

Not insignificant but that's a different.

So I guess I'm just saying for for me for my personal view on the academic data I would.

support or or or I guess I'm asking when we talk about students receiving special education services in this context are we talking about students who qualify for an IEP or does it encompass any other of those categories.

My preference would be to stay specifically to students who qualify for IEP services because that is a federal.

level of qualification and that also determines services that are provided at the district and classroom level in a more distinct way than other groups of students.

I think if we are you know depending on the context if we're talking about you know the overall sense of self or acceptance of students with disabilities that's a different question to me than looking at.

impact specifically for students who have an IEP.

And that also goes into when you graduate having a modified diploma or a standard diploma that would only apply to students who have an IEP.

So I just want to make sure that we're really super duper clear and I'm kind of looking to my colleagues also for consensus or understanding that really really clear about when we're talking about any student with any disability.

or a student who qualifies for services through the federal definition of the 13 categories of disability that entitle you to IEP services or if you qualify for an accommodation based on Section 504. So I think it's super important that we're just very consistent about which students we're talking about every time we talk about that.

That's all.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Director Cronenberg.

Oh there we go.

Thank you.

Thank you for this presentation.

And I was just wondering well firstly for my fellow directors and Superintendent Jones I do think I would really appreciate and I believe that Nasira and Jenna would also really appreciate if we could have a work session surrounding how we structure these climate surveys.

I think specifically with this as a climate survey when we're surveying student climate students should be central to creating these kind of survey.

If we're asking students how they feel I think students are going to know best how to ask other students how they're feeling.

And then my question was just I was looking at on the last two slides the all the questions that are asked by topic and for middle and for middle and high school students.

And then I scrolled past that and I see with the elementary school items we have the questions for college and career readiness.

We have the questions for math literacy COVID.

But I was wondering do we have the same kind of identity and culturally responsive teaching safety bias and anti-racism positive behavior and safety questions framed for younger students?

Are those existent and just not included here or are those something that aren't here at the moment?

Thank you for that's a great question.

On the slide before it reads up at the top that the items were worded for middle and high school students and so I'm not absolutely sure if there's another set of items that are for elementary you know within this.

So based upon the information I have here I'd have to infer that what you see as the difference you know in the last slide for elementary school items and middle school items is listed there.

that are connected to the strategic plan goal areas.

So I can check in with our team our research and evaluation team to find out exactly which ones were the elementary ones and we can add that information in as well.

Yeah I would appreciate that just considering that.

I mean elementary school students do deserve a chance to speak up about the safety and positiveness of their learning environment just as much as middle and high school students.

So thank you.

Thank you so much.

Fantastic.

Great question.

I have one question of my own.

And it's less of a question and more of a request.

As we are looking through some of this data, especially at a high level in the climate survey portion, I think one of the most poignant ones is the question around the drop off from, I feel as though my teachers have high expectations of me.

When we are putting our narrative together and how we talk about this, I just want to make sure that our educators are included in the process of determining what does that look like, right?

And why that data is what it is.

I think it would be really easy for a community member to look at this with very little context or even a district official to look at this with very little context around the perspective of the folks who are actually working with our students in classrooms on a day-to-day basis.

And so I just want to make sure that that voice is captured in some way as we approach the progress monitoring as well as how we determine what is our plan moving forward to address this and what that looks like.

So if we could find a way to ensure that as much educator voice is captured in the narrative piece of that, that would be of a high priority to me.

Thank you so much.

I made that note.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Thank you, Dr. Scarlett.

I think that concludes this portion of today's agenda.

We appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

Okay.

Yay, student outcomes.

OK, I would like to again welcome our student board member Luna Cromberon to the meeting tonight.

Director Cromberon began her junior year at the center school a few weeks ago and will be serving on the board's Audit and Finance Committee.

Our student members have had the opportunity to provide comments as we begin each meeting.

And like other directors, I also welcome our student board members to ask questions as they have so eloquently done already.

and input as we move through the remainder of tonight's meeting agenda.

I will now turn it over to Director Crone-Barone for her comments.

Thank you President Hersey and I will keep this brief but hello.

My name is Luna Cromborone.

I use she her pronouns and I am a junior here in our school district.

I would like to recognize with my time tonight as a proud first generation U.S. citizen of a Colombian father that we are here in this space during Hispanic Latina Heritage Month which is recognized Heck yeah, which is recognized from September 15th through October 15th each year.

I am proud to be representing my community at a district level as we speak, and I am proud to be one of the roughly 13% of our students who are Hispanic identifying.

As we recognize the rich and beautiful history of Latina cultures and peoples, it is important that we act to uproot the systemic colonial violence that Latina young people are forced to grow up with each and every day.

Specifically, from an education standpoint, we must make sure our curriculums are created with a decolonized perspective and informed heavily by indigenous folks, especially, specifically when we are talking about history.

I'm looking at you textbooks written by racist old white men.

To conclude, to conclude, la latina en mi es una brasa que arde para siempre.

Muchisimas gracias.

I yield my time.

Okay before we move into public testimony today I want to take an opportunity for our board to recognize and hear from a Seattle Public Schools parent for her advocacy.

Ms. Clista Cole serves on the Seattle Public Schools Indian Parent Committee and is a parent of four current SPS students.

After three long years of Ms. Cole leading and advocating for Senate Bill 5498 known as Evington's Law was successfully enacted earlier this year.

Under Evington's Law, Seattle Public Schools and districts across the state are now able to issue diplomas for high school students whose lives have ended while still on track to graduate.

Ms. Cole, welcome.

Thank you for being here today to address the school board and share your story.

I invite you to do so now.

The floor is yours.

Thank you.

It is an honor to be here and I wish I could say a privilege but it's not a privilege because I shouldn't have to speak on this.

I am aware that Seattle Public Schools does allow honorary diplomas for their students.

However across Washington our school districts pick and choose which students get an honorary diploma.

My son Everton was a Seattle Public School student from kindergarten to ninth grade.

He attended Rainier View Elementary, Stevens Elementary, Aki Kurose and Roosevelt High School.

He went on to go to treatment for mental health and substance abuse because he was a student with disabilities.

He was a student with an IEP.

He was a student with undiagnosed mental health issues.

He was also an indigenous student.

He went to go live with his father when he was 16 and he attended school in the Highline School District.

He didn't stay in contact because of his mental health issues.

He came home when he was about 18, and today, September 28th, four years ago, it's the last day I saw him alive.

It was the last time I heard his voice, and his words were, I will be back.

In that moment, I didn't realize what an impact him coming back would make.

That he wasn't going to come back physically, that he was going to come back spiritually and emotionally and helping me to be stronger than ever.

When he attended school in Highline, he struggled to stay in school.

He was in and out of school.

His last high school credit was earned in August 2008. Upon his death he thought he had over five high school credits to graduate.

When I went to Highline School District because I have heard of honorary diplomas being given to students they said he had to have reached full high school credits before receiving an honorary diploma and they gave me a certificate of something and I can't even remember because I've been so focused on getting what he deserved and they gave me his high school transcript.

Upon receiving his high school transcript I realized he had a high school missing.

Which meant from the ninth grade he was missing high school credits.

He was only 2.38 high school credits away from graduating and they responded with that's a clerical error and we're sorry.

I know for a fact because I'm a mother of another high school senior she will graduate 2023 that if you ask any student who had high school credits missing from the ninth grade if that would be acceptable as a clerical error I guarantee you not one of them would say oh yeah that's fine that's great.

Because of this clerical error I know that my son would have graduated but they said we have no way of knowing he would have graduated and I know that's a lie.

I know for a fact because he was in his sixth year of high school He struggled with mental health.

He was in and out of school but he wanted that graduation certificate.

He wanted that.

He wanted that because his mother me I got my GED and his father got his GED and he wanted a high school diploma.

He wanted to be better than his parents.

And that is my goal for my my children in life to be better than me because I come from so much trauma.

I come from struggling.

I come from intergenerational trauma and that is a part of the reason why I'm standing here telling parts of his story because it is all connected.

Even I was a Seattle Public School student and in the seventh grade I in the seventh grade I sat on the stairs early in the morning at South Shore Middle School looking into the door.

A foster child.

And I decided that was my last day attending school.

and I ran away from my foster home because I did not feel wanted or loved but there were a handful of teachers along the way that loved me and cared for me and I know that they tried really hard because they knew I was smart.

Straight A student.

And I know in Seattle Public Schools there were a handful of teachers like Mia Williams who knew my son and Miss Gilligan Miller at Aki Kurose who knew my son and Miss Carter who knew my son.

and they all loved him and they all knew his spirit.

When Highline School District said that they cannot give me an honorary diploma because it the law says that is for those who dropped out of school or left high school I won't say dropped out of school but they left high school to serve in the war that doesn't pertain to our students now.

especially our students of color who die at a higher rate of homicide and suicide.

Unfortunately, those are just the facts.

And that's how my son left, was homicide.

And the truth behind that is he was shot by a 16-year-old who I hope graduated high school, who I hope has made a better life for himself.

That's the thing, is that he gets that chance and my son doesn't.

My son, who had an IEP, who had a right to a fair education, who was failed by the state.

My son, who had a right to walk with his graduating class in his graduating year, who never did.

My son, who was failed by the state of Washington because they misreported his high school credits and called it a clerical error.

My daughter came home at the end of the school year at Rainier Beach high school this summer and let me know that they honored a young woman who had been killed who attended their school.

I thought that was so beautiful.

But because this law, I'm still waiting for my son's diploma.

Highline school district has it.

And they asked if I wanted them to send it to me and I said no. because they need to hand it to me.

I am a parent of four more children, a high school senior and two sixth graders and a third grader.

And this has an impact on them too.

And we need to realize and understand that every child matters in life and in death because We, the parents, the family, we're still here in community.

We are the bank tellers, and we are the bus drivers, and we are the teachers, and we are the community.

And how our districts treat us and hold us in that has an impact on us.

Because I could have given up, and I could have created more trauma for my children.

which would have created more problems for the Seattle Public School District because they'd be in school with those problems.

And that trauma.

Instead like I said my son came back.

And helped me to be stronger than ever to recognize and identify that intergenerational trauma is real.

And we need to address it.

And on that note I want to say Sandra Hampson has heard me talk about these things.

Because my daughter was in school and she was having a hard time and staff looks at our children like you know they're just starting fights.

But my daughter was processing that trauma that pain Mr. Hersey I've reached out to you and I've spoken with you on the phone and I've had emails with you but I have not heard anything about how we're going to fix the trauma awareness in our schools.

And it took me having to be here.

It took me having to change a law to be recognized and heard.

That has an impact on me.

And so I changed one law and I'm not done.

This isn't it for me.

It's not over because we have children that are still here.

Thank you.

I just want to acknowledge the courage that that took to come here and share The stories that so many of our families experience, but never get the opportunity to actually say it to somebody that has the power to do something about it.

So very moving.

Let's just sit with that for a moment.

Let's take 60 seconds and just let the gravity of what was just shared with us settle.

Okay, thank you Ms. Cole for joining us tonight and for your advocacy and much more.

We will next go to public testimony.

We will be taking public testimony by phone and in person as stated on the agenda.

Board procedure 1430 BP provides the rules for testimony and I ask that speakers are respectful of these rules.

I will summarize some important parts of this procedure.

First, testimony will be taken today from those individuals called from our public testimony list and if applicable, the waiting list.

which are included in today's agenda posting on the school board website.

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

Speakers from the list may cede their time to another person, Ah, OK.

Then it's fine.

When listed to the speaker's name is called.

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

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

Those who do not wish to have their time ceded to them may decline and retain their place on the testimony or wait list.

The majority of the speaker's time should be spent on the topic they have indicated they wish to speak about.

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

Ms. Koo will read the testimony speakers.

Thank you, President Hersey.

Speakers joining us via phone, please remain muted until your name is called to provide testimony.

When your name is called, please be sure you have unmuted on the device you are calling from and also press star six to unmute yourself on the conference call line.

Each speaker will have a two minute speaking time.

You will hear a beep when your time is exhausted and the next speaker will be called.

The first speaker on the list is Najima Abadir.

Hi everyone.

Good afternoon.

My name is Najuma.

My name is Najuma and I'm a senior at Nathan Hale.

All right.

Okay my name is Ajuma Bhattar and I am a senior at Nathan Hale.

Being a leadership student has made me appreciate how Hale is a student-led school.

At my school I feel heard and I feel valued.

And as students we can do all kinds of things like planning events, holding student forums and we are able to speak to our school admin.

But I know that this isn't district wide.

Students should all be a part of the decision making in every school, especially in places like our school newspapers, hiring committees, school senate, and anywhere students can make an impact in and out of the classroom.

I also want to bring up students' mental health and well-being.

New students don't have the same relationship with teachers and staff that they need.

They need to feel protected and every student needs to have a staff member or an adult at their school that they can trust.

Coming back from the pandemic, the people who helped me feel comfortable were people who I already connected with online and during my time as a freshman.

That includes my friends and staff and teachers.

But as a leadership student who works with underclassmen I don't see these connections anymore.

And I know this causes students to feel less interested in school and I even see them disrespecting teachers.

And I know this isn't just a problem at my school.

I think we should be the ones reaching out to them and showing them how communities work.

We should make our district inviting and comfortable and give all of our students a chance to succeed.

I see teachers trying but I don't think they have enough support or resources to fully engage all of their students.

I think all of this district solutions to help students mental health are piled onto the work teachers are already doing to care for their students.

I want to end with some questions.

If you really want to hear your students you need to listen.

So do you actively reach out to students for opinions that don't always agree with yours.

Do your students feel respected and heard.

Thank you.

The next speaker on the list is Chris Jackins.

My name is Chris Jackins Box 84063 Seattle 98124. On the SEA contract the district has stated that it is uncertain about paying for years two and three of the contract.

Was a one year contract considered?

On the indigenous people's day proclamation, the proclamation does not mention the Duwamish tribe.

School board resolution 2016 17-1 supports treaty rights and benefits for the Duwamish tribe.

On the construction projects at Alki, John Rogers and Montlake.

For points number one the budget transfers are $15 million for Montlake, $3 million for John Rogers and $8.7 million for Alki.

Number two, the report states that $2 million is being saved by moving surplus soil from Montlake to John Rogers.

Tying these two projects together complicates both projects.

Number three, at Montlake the playground will shrink to half its current size.

At John Rogers it will shrink by a third.

At Alki the project is way too large for the site.

Number four the environmental review is not yet complete on these projects.

Please vote no.

On the naming of the records and archive center in honor of Eleanor Taves.

Two points.

Number one recognizing a talented person who looked after the history of the district is nice.

Number two also please stop bulldozing important history at school site after school site.

On the Madison field project please do not replace natural grass with artificial turf and do not have tall light poles for night field use.

Thank you very much.

The next speaker on the list is Alex Zimmerman.

Alex Zimmerman.

The next speaker on the list is Sherilyn Crowther.

Sherilyn Crowther.

Hello I'm Sherilyn Crowther president of the Seattle Special Education Parent Teacher Student Association.

And there is nothing that I can say.

No testimony that I have in front of me that can better tell the story of students with disabilities than what that grieving and powerful mother just shared.

I will just say when I have testified about the system is not broken.

The system is working as designed.

What she said about intergenerational trauma is part of the system.

I will save the rest of my time.

I would actually like 30 seconds at least to just again think about that incredibly powerful testimony.

Thank you.

The next speaker on the list is Catherine George.

Catherine George.

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

The next speaker on the list is UT Hawkins.

Hello thank you very much for having me.

It's nice to be here.

I have been.

My name is UT Hawkins.

I am Muskogee Creek and Kiowa Nations.

I'm a mother.

I'm an educator Seattle's public school parent now.

I'm also here representing and speaking as Seattle Education Association's vice president and lead negotiator.

I know that you are here today going to look and speak to the contract that was recently brought forward to this board.

I wanted to speak to say that a contract is a commitment as a community.

So this contract is only as quality as the commitment brought forward by both parties to ensure its actions.

That begins with a lot of trust.

What I know from my experience in this negotiations is that 6,000 educators stood behind every word within this contract in support of students, staff, and the communities they serve.

55000 families stayed out of school buildings insisting that we do the work that needed and necessary and that we insist within our contract the advocacy of their voices as well through this process.

And they saw that.

I wanted to speak to inclusionary practice because one thing that I've heard repeatedly is that Seattle Public Schools and us are 44th in the nation.

I want to be very clear as a state We are 44th in the nation.

But OSPI when you look at Seattle Public Schools we meet with 70 percent of students with IEPs.

They are within our classrooms in general education practice 80 to 90 percent of their time currently.

Our dedication as educators to that work and within this contract is evident and I want you to know there is a dedication of that work already happening and moving forward.

When you look at this contract look to the fact that special education multilingual education all have task force and community inclusion involvement and that inclusionary practice goes beyond that.

It goes to informed family decisions where staff and students and educators are all involved in that process.

And then there's also religious accommodations counselors family support workers and social workers.

You heard the community speak to all of these things as a necessary.

Classified staff as well are the integral parts of those supports.

And I want us to understand the dedication and improvements in our system are about holistically meeting children's needs.

There's more to do to make this contract evident and to make Seattle Public Schools ready for the work of inclusion.

And that is what this contract brings forward as a commitment of my educators to this work and the students and families who stood on those lines with them.

My daughter was thrilled to start school.

And every student that stood on those lines every family that looked into the contract every educator who looked into that contract saw that this is about dedication and trust within us all to do this work because a contract is only as good as the people who actualize it in process.

And that's what we need to do moving forward.

That means a commitment to our classified educators who have asked specifically for investments not only in them as.

Respect for their skills, respect for them being included in the system, and respect for them as professionals who would rather do this than go work somewhere else.

So please take that readiness seriously.

Know that we are prepared to respond.

We need to be prepared to respond when staff and students ask for help.

That students and staff are demanding involvement, and we've heard it here multiple ways and different ways and times.

and that our process of collaboration is embedded in this contract.

So please look for that accountability.

It would be remiss of me not to take a moment right now to acknowledge that I'm a black and indigenous woman.

I take very seriously that commitment within my work.

And I wanted to bring forward and mention a continued conversation with the school board that I will need to have and thank you for the extra time.

There's been a recent change outside of this contract that will need to be a continued conversation around the civility policy.

Today I'm here as an indigenous person to speak to this and my community as a whole will speak to it as well with you ongoing.

Civility policies have roots in chattel slavery.

They have roots in misogyny.

And staff have now had their right to the HIB process eliminated.

This needs to be a continued conversation because there will never be a conversation that I will be able to have as a black indigenous person about how civil I am supposed to be.

Yet now there is no way for me to have that nuanced conversation.

And so we need to do more if we are committed to racial equity not just for our students but for the staff and people within the school district who are committed to this contract committed to the ways we work together and committed to that collaboration.

Because right now we've stepped back.

from that work with the civility policy that has not have the barriers and boundaries around it to provide the support needed because the work that we want to do is in that contract.

And I hope you see it because we are dedicated to that work and that work is complicated.

But we are here to do it and I hope that you see that dedication and the hours and months spent sitting in the room together to get school open.

Thank you so much.

The next speaker on the list is Thomas Heller.

Thomas Heller.

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

The next speaker on the list is Joanna Cullen.

Joanna Cullen.

Before we end today's testimony I want to go back and check on those who may have missed their turn.

The first is Alex Zimmerman.

The next is Catherine George.

And the last is or the next is Thomas Heller.

And the last is Joanna Cullen.

This concludes today's testimony.

Thank you, Miss Kuh.

That concludes public testimony for the meeting.

Thank you for comments.

Before we move on, I'll note that board directors, I'm not going to say that part, sorry.

We have now come to the board committee reports section of the agenda.

We'll hear briefly now from the chairs of the board's committees and our legislative liaison.

We will begin first with the Audit and Finance Committee, Vice President Hampson.

Sorry, can you come back to me?

You are also next for the Ad Hoc Governance Committee.

Will you need time for both?

Happy to cycle back.

Yes, please do.

All right.

So next up is the executive committee, which is your boy, me.

We had a riveting discussion specifically around the adoption of the 2022 school board director redistricting plan.

Folks have been doing a great job of submitting various points of feedback via our online opportunities.

And so if you're at home and you're watching this and you're like, what redistricting plan?

Please check your email.

There should be something there.

And if not, feel free to email your favorite board director and we will be more than happy to get you the information that you're looking for, or even the board office staff or the Office of Public Affairs.

There's so many people that you can reach out to to get that information.

The next thing that we discussed in committee was the discussion of our October retreat agenda.

So, board directors, again, here's an opportunity.

If you have something that you would like to discuss at the retreat, please feel free to tell me about it so that I can make sure that we try our best to incorporate it into the agenda.

And if anybody out there doesn't have anything to do on one of our beautiful Saturdays coming up in October, those meetings are public, so you could come and hang out with us if you so choose.

But other than that, those were the big topics from the executive committee.

Our next meetings are scheduled for October the 19th, November the 16th, and December the 7th.

And there will likely be a little bit of a change in calendar, considering that many of our board directors will be attending a conference on student outcomes focused governance in Orlando, Florida, the week of October the 19th.

So stay tuned.

If there are changes, we will be sure to let you know.

All right.

Moving on to our next committee, the Operations Committee, which is led by Director Rivera-Smith.

Are you prepared at this time to give comments?

Yeah?

All right.

So, Director Hanson, looping back, will you be beginning with Audit and Finance or Ad Hoc Governance?

So there's actually three there's finance we also had an audit meeting and then ad hoc.

The finance meeting was on audit and finance committee meeting as it's called was on September 19th and not a whole lot to report quarterly listing of contracts and modifications exceeding two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and ramping up towards the state auditor's office contract.

In case folks have forgotten, we do get audited every year by the state and that information and prior audits is available.

This is the time when they come in and prep and we have an opportunity to talk about any concerns we have.

And our next meeting for audit and finance is on October 17th.

And for audit we met on September 13th.

and went through an update on our implementation of the internal audit high functioning internal audit implementation plan which is well underway and as well as an ethics update and then went through audit response and we'll have some notable audit response items coming to The coming up when we meet again in December on the 5th, these meetings are now at 4 p.m.

instead of at 8 a.m.

as they once were.

And one of those will be we'll have an update on a previous I believe from 2019 transportation services plan.

And then the other notable thing that is underway now is an internal and external communications audit that I know both board and staff are excited about seeing that move through.

Again next meeting is on December 5th.

The ad hoc committee met yesterday and meets again tomorrow morning.

We are quickly approaching our deadline to have all of our recommendations regarding the final implementation calendar and action items for bringing student outcomes focused governance fully online.

The committee's been very hard at work.

Lots and lots of papers and if anybody has really wanted to torture themselves by sitting through one of our meetings we appreciate you because as I reminded Superintendent Jones today imagine if the only time you could work was in public meetings.

And that's what we do.

Ugly as it may be, we have spent since June working together, doing our best just to capture.

We're not allowed to talk with each other about these items when we're not in that public setting.

I don't think people realize that.

So all the work that we do is messily done in real time during that meeting.

And we're It's coming together.

I'm really grateful to my fellow ad hoc committee members and the superintendent and particularly the board office staff who's been doing some incredible work and research.

I know we terrify them every single time but I know that we are all really interested in getting to a place of much greater efficiency and much greater focus on student outcomes.

And also.

At the other piece of that and this is a component of that is the capacity to do be much more proactive in our community engagement and our community outreach as board members.

So hopefully good things to come including trainings that we'll be doing in public to your point director.

Chrome but on we do will be needing to not only with our student school board members but doing public trainings on student outcome focused governance and what it means to have public conversations two way conversations with our community about how our goals represent the vision of our community in terms of the outcomes that we want for students.

So we have a very busy 24 hours ahead of us and look forward to being able to have those greater discussions with the board.

Thank you, Director Hersey.

President Hersey.

You can call me Brandon.

Okay, Director Rivera-Smith, are you prepared at this time?

Take it away.

Thank you.

We had our last operations committee meeting on September 19th.

Many of the bars we saw there will be covered today in introduction so I will not go over those now but we also did have a transportation update from our new transportation manager Joe Hebert who comes to us from community transit in Everett.

We welcome him and he's already hard at work as many of us have heard and if you haven't you would be happy to know that we are doing really good with our bus service this year as far as serving all routes.

So that is a testament to the work that's been happening in that department.

We also heard from our new interim.

executive director of operations Marnie Campbell as long as welcome our new enrollment planning and enrollment services interim director Fahu Manu.

They are both with us to give us an update on the work they're doing there.

And it's really just ongoing work.

We don't expect to have any major boundary changes this year as far as the student assignment transition plan goes.

So everybody can kind of rest easy knowing that there won't be any Upcoming disruptions as far as those movements go in this next school year or in really it's kind of planning for the next year.

But it's still that's work that is ongoing.

So as they get into their roles and the year progresses there will be more to come on conversations if there needs to be any regarding needed changes there.

So lots of happen.

We don't actually have our current October meeting scheduled yet.

I think as President Hersey mentioned those were going to be out of town a lot of us for the week that they would normally be held.

So we'll just keep an eye out for when if and when our October is held and if not we will just meet again in November.

Thank you.

You Director Rankin.

Thank you.

Student services curriculum instruction committee met last week and we had I think I flagged it for you on email even though you know we all get all the materials but I kind of did a special special attention to my colleagues to check out the research and evaluation projects presentation.

There were some slides that provided some really helpful context about how they view their work.

that we all found very interesting and helpful.

I also we had a special education update about some work coming through related to inclusion and culturally responsive practices and just general special education best practices that I noted but I can't now remember what the outcome was that it would extremely helpful update that should be coming to more people than just the committee.

And so one thing I will note about that too is that in kind of in response to that and in preparation for future conversations I resent you all an email.

One of the reports that we were given as part of the SPS SEA task force on inclusionary practices last year there was a particularly comprehensive one that came to all of us.

And I can't remember what month it was but I pulled pulled that memo out of the committee meeting packets which you would have gotten at the time but and sent it to you all again a few days ago.

So please look back at that if you are having questions or getting questions about what work is happening.

has been happening and continues to happen and we have been provided with several meaningful updates throughout the course of the last year.

And those can be found in materials that you have.

We skipped the work plan because moving into our recommendations from the ad hoc committee that's likely going to change some things.

So and then as director Hersey said.

We're all in a conference next month, so future announcements about SSC&I is majorly TBD right now.

On the legislative liaison side, this Friday is the WASDA, the Washington State School Directors Association General Assembly.

where school boards from all 295 school districts in Washington State have representative votes in the General Assembly on priorities preparing for the 2023 legislative session.

And so I will be representing Our board and voting.

It's just a simple up or down.

And then I can't remember the deadline I gave you all but I have not received responses yet about priorities.

So be sure to get those to me if you have any burning things you think that you don't want me to miss.

Although I feel pretty solid going in about any of our previously stated priorities and I will vote in alignment with with what we have already said is important as a board.

And then the next thing that happens after that will be once the votes have been compiled from General Assembly, WASDA will re-put out their legislative priorities as voted upon by membership, and then they will develop a top 10. So we will have the opportunity as a board to submit our personal top 10 issues.

to for legislative advocacy through WASDA and so the public will see you know how we weigh in on what those are we will be able to use that for in our advocacy efforts as board members and then we will also have opportunity to discuss together our own Legislative priorities, if they are different, I imagine they will greatly overlap.

And then even more future is I'm working to implement a timeline and process for the legislative position submitting process.

which Seattle Public Schools board has really participated more on an individual basis in the past and I would like us to get that embedded into our process as a board so that we can especially as the largest district in the state make sure that we're prepared to if we see holes in the legislative platform.

We can be a position submitter and get something in front of you know the rest of the boards of the state for that collective advocacy since we know that is so important and influential and getting what the resources and from the legislature and getting their priorities aligned with ours and what our schools and students and teachers need.

So.

That's on Friday.

I'll be sitting for eight hours or something just I think just clicking yes or no on things.

So that'll be fun.

And anybody else who wants to can any board directors who are interested can pop you can pop in and out if you want and listen.

And I will let you all know how it goes.

I just want to say thank you for doing that Liza.

Oh thanks.

Hands up for Director Rankin.

We have now reached the consent portion You're good.

Just want to make sure that your mic is on.

You're good.

All right.

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

May I have a motion for the consent agenda?

I move approval of the consent agenda.

Second.

Approval of the consent agenda has been moved by Vice President Hampson and seconded by Director Rivera-Smith.

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

All right.

Seeing none.

All those in favor of the agenda please signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Those opposed.

All right.

The consent agenda has passed unanimously.

OK.

We will now move to the action items for today's agenda.

Let's take a look here.

We only have one major action item for today's agenda if I'm not mistaken.

Happy to offer a motion.

Yes Vice President Hampson the motion please.

I move that the school board approve the 2022 to 2025 collective bargaining agreement for the SEA certificated non-supervisory employees, the professional staff and the Seattle Association of Educational Office Personnel and authorize the superintendent on behalf of the board of directors To execute the agreements in the form attached to the school board action report with any minor additions deletions and modifications deemed necessary by the superintendent and to take any necessary actions to implement the terms of these agreements.

Immediate action is in the best interest of the district.

Second.

OK, this has been moved and properly seconded.

Dr. Pritchett, if you would join us at the podium.

Directors, if you have any questions before, or actually, Dr. Pritchett, are there remarks that you'd like to share with us?

I did have remarks.

Oh, then please take it away.

All right.

Forgive me.

Thank you.

Good evening.

Dr. Sarah Pritchett, interim assistant superintendent for human resources.

The board action report being presented tonight for introduction and action.

would be to approve the collective bargaining agreements negotiated between representatives of Seattle Education Association and the Seattle School District.

The three separate agreements are for a three-year commitment, a three-year period commencing September 1st, 2022 and ending August 31st, 2025. We believe this agreement represents elements of our district's values and beliefs centered on providing the best possible working conditions for our staff by enhancing and modifying the working conditions of our educators in support of our students staff and schools.

This agreement would provide all 5,586 SCA represented educators increases in wages to maintain a competitive wage with a 7% increase in salary inclusive of IPD in the first year.

followed by a guarantee of at least a 4% raise in the year 2023-24 and a guarantee of at least 3% raise in 2024-25.

Additionally this agreement provides all 1,700 SEOPs and paraprofessionals classified staff with a one-time incentive of $1,500 in the 22-23 school year.

I'd like to continue with just a few comments and highlights for folks regarding the highlights of this contract.

I'll begin with the cost of this agreement and as it's outlined in the bar, the total cost of this agreement over a three-year period is $231,183,529 million over the three years.

And while we have done preliminary proactive budgeting in anticipation of this agreement.

The net cost increase to our general funds in year one would be an additional $12,526,380 million.

The net cost increase to our general funds in year two would be an additional $33,521,531 million.

And finally, the net cost increase to our general funds in year three would be an additional $48,021,836.

million dollars.

This agreement includes additional supports for students and educators for our buildings.

It includes mental health supports for secondary students by adding an additional .5 social worker at all K-8 comprehensive middle and high schools for this school year and continuing on for the life of the contract.

It would add five certificated nurses in the 23-24 school year, support workload relief and additional supports by lowering the counselor to student ratios at our highest need secondary schools from one counselor for every 375 students to one counselor for every 350 students.

We support workload relief by lowering the staff to student ratios for speech and language specialists to one specialist for every 46 students this school year and one specialist for every 44 students in the following two years.

This agreement also adds an additional race and equity advancement specialist in the 23-24 school year to support school based race and equity teams.

Additionally as a learning organization we value the attainment and encourage the pursuit of additional education and to that end this agreement offers incentives for continued learning including the addition of one time incentive for teachers earning or holding an English language or dual language endorsements within the life of the contract, an increase to clock hour incentives for paraeducators, and we've added an additional day of district directed professional development.

This agreement also provides increased funding to buildings and support to buildings, including extra time for office professionals to support the work that they do associated with the operation of school buildings.

A $50,000 one-time library fund to support our highest needs schools.

Additional funding equivalent to $9 per student of dedicated library funding at each school to purchase culturally responsive library materials and collections.

It adds additional extra time for each building's family-based support worker to support students and their families throughout the year and throughout the life of the contract.

It continues our building safety team stipends of $2,000 per year for each school building.

There are systemic changes that are included within this agreement.

We have the addition of mediation services available to staff to resolve disputes.

We have for all substitute educators mandatory pay for mandatory safety trainings as well as de-escalation trainings and finally I'd like to highlight that this agreement supports the initial steps into a more inclusive environment for our students receiving special education services and additional supports for our educators making changes to their instructional practice including additional staffing added to resource services starting in 2022-23 school year in order to support the elimination of satellite and continuum designations by the 24-25 school year.

Access services for students with moderate to intensive needs will merge with social emotional learning services in the 23-24 school year and the new services will be called extended resource.

I would like to note that this represents a huge move towards inclusive practices and a necessary step to desegregate our special education programs.

Students receiving extended resource instruction including instruction to develop social emotional skills and social understanding will spend the majority of their time in a general education classroom with a full range of supports needed.

This agreement guarantees students receiving special education services have access to general education teachers, curricular materials and instruction.

Additionally this agreement provides for professional development for all 5000 plus educators to support inclusive instructional practices in serving students individual learning needs.

It allows for flexible staffing to allow school level teams to determine how to best use staff to service students needs.

And finally, central office supports for scheduling to maximize inclusion in general education classrooms to the greatest extent possible for all students.

This agreement also has systemic improvements related to special education including a recommitment to a joint special education task force with members of the Seattle education Association, special education central office staff and family representatives to plan for transition to more inclusive practices throughout the system.

This task force will also work collaboratively to develop a workload calculator to support individual student needs while attending to the workload considerations for educators.

Additionally IEP teams considering moving students to a different school must include department specialists or supervisors before that move can be made.

Those are just brief highlights to this three year agreement.

If there are any questions I'd be happy to answer those at this time.

Noting that I will have some of my colleagues come if there are particular questions that need to be answered more specifically.

Thank you.

Thank you Dr. Pritchett.

Do we have any questions from directors.

Go ahead Director Rivera-Smith.

Hi thank you Dr. Pritchett.

And first I can't obviously start without saying thank you to all of our negotiators SPS and SEAs who worked tremendously hard on this on this agreement.

And I don't think that can be.

that can be overlooked at all because it was it's a lot of hours and a lot of rooms late nights I understand and and we appreciate you guys being there to do this for everybody.

I have a couple of questions.

I'll start with maybe an easier one.

Are our educators pay being retroactive back to the September 1st start date of this contract?

That is correct.

Okay.

And then as far as making up the days lost for the strike do we know how those we may well they be made up according to the CBA where it's a couple different ways it could be done so I'll ask you just easy.

I'll go ahead and elaborate on that.

There is new language in the contract, but that would be reflective of as school boards negotiate or approve an entire school contract.

So the addition of community input would be reflective of the next school year's contract, because this contract has already been approved.

We've entered into negotiations with SEA and spoke with our other labor partners.

And we would be proposing to come forward with the board at the next board meeting to propose a new calendar with the adjustments to this to the makeup days for the board's approval.

That's great.

Thank you.

And my last question and I.

There's a lot in this this is a really robust contract clearly so many places to touch on.

I try to look at it through the lens of where our students represented in this and I know I mean we think we all know the students were not involved in the negotiations.

They're only maybe tangentially involved involved in that we represent our communities include students and we guide the district.

But I think it's kind of a longer segue here but.

Article two partnerships for ensuring educational racial equity under number four building leadership team program leadership teams under bullet E it states one of the shared beliefs is that those impacted by decisions must be given an opportunity to be involved in the decision making.

And it's talking about paras and seops but it does later then state that the building leadership teams and building program committees will include parents, guardians, students and community representatives as appropriate.

And I would question and counter that it's always appropriate for students to be involved in their building decision-making.

And I don't know that this needed to be in the CBA because I understand this is about the staff and maybe on our side is where I'd like us to be more intentional about how our students are involved in these decision-making processes and outlining it because I know right now in policy we don't say they must be or they shall be or will be it's they may be and so we don't see it a lot in some of our schools.

Some do some don't.

Anyhow I just really appreciate our student speaker earlier and Director Cron-Baron speaking on that themselves about the importance of having student voice in all these things that we do and this is a really big one where we didn't really see it and I would love us to find ways to make that happen.

I guess even I would say in three years but obviously there are going to be maybe reopeners and other opportunities of negotiation going on in this contract over the next three years and Hopefully we can get to a place where that is something that is the norm and not the exception.

So thank you.

Any other questions from directors.

Go ahead Director Harris.

Thank you so much.

We had a work session on this that was recorded and talked a great deal about the costs of this.

And I'm hoping that Deputy Superintendent Gannon can come up and talk about what our deficits are for years two and three.

And I want to preface this that I believe that we reached a good collective bargaining agreement but that it comes at a price with extraordinary deficits.

And I will say yet again for the record this district our labor partners other districts Need to file McCleary 2 because McCleary 1 is fake news and the legislature has not in any way shape or form done right by the school districts.

The school district staffs and most importantly the students in Washington state public schools K through 12. And frankly I don't see that changing anytime soon unless we get together and leverage.

But these are very very dark days ahead.

And I think that we need to be very very clear on that.

And I want to be a member of a board that pays our classified staff.

more than you can make at Dick's drive in.

I am distressed appalled not new news whatsoever.

And if our children are not that important then what the heck are we doing.

Anyway I would I would like those numbers on the record if Deputy Gannon can put them there.

And I invite people who subscribe to blogs and social media and who fill a vacuum that we do not put out good communication with all kinds of crazy and apparently crazy is the wrong word tinfoil hat conspiracy theories incorrect information.

I invite them to take the time to get on YouTube and take a look at the work sessions where we're doing really good work and everybody here is busting their chops and here as well.

And frankly some of the negativity that's thrown back our way is is most not appreciated.

Thank you.

Director Harris trying to respond to your questions briefly.

In our work session two weeks ago I forecasted a net deficit in fiscal year 23 24 of approximately 47.5 million dollars.

for fiscal year 24-25, the subsequent year I forecasted a shortfall of about $139.4 million.

I gave those figures to the board in the work session verbally and I just want to let you all know that we have a more detailed presentation on the out year implications for the budget broadly and some of the implications of the contract specifically.

Prepare to come to the board.

in the next regular meeting where President Hersey has approved a work session within the context of the full board meeting.

So we'll be able to brief the board in full at their next meeting on the out-year implications.

All right, any other questions from directors?

Director Rankin, and then we will go to Director Luna-Cronenberg.

Not a question, but I just wanted to put it on the record that all encompassing statements made about the directors from other directors with negativity towards Seattle Education Association teacher unions student unions anything like that I do not endorse or condone as a student board member.

I do not consider myself educated enough on all of these issues to have an identified opinion that I would state on public record.

But I just wanted to say that I know that my teachers my educators my community cares about me as a student and loves our students and wants what's best for our students.

And I would like to recognize that.

And again I do not associate myself with any comments of negativity made towards teacher or student unions.

Thank you.

Director Rankin.

Thank you.

I have a lot of comments questions concerns reflections that I'm going to save for another time because I'm well aware that what we are being asked to consider right now is the acceptance of this exact contract.

But I do have the great desire for a postmortem of sorts reflection about processes going forward.

Now is not the time which I totally understand.

So specific to this, the adjustments that were made to social, emotional, physical health that corresponded with staffing increases in those areas that somewhat corresponded with state law that passed increasing those allocations.

but we are still staffing above those allocations.

Can you tell me what the difference is if there was any of the staffing numbers that were landed at in the contract as compared to what was approved and directed by the board as part of the budget process at the end of last year?

Can you ask that in perhaps a different way?

Sorry, yes.

In conversation on budget development over last year, last school year, excuse me, in preparation for approval of the budget in July for this year, there was priority placed on, and I can't remember what month work session we talked about it, but budget work session about increasing staffing in the areas of physical, social, and emotional health, psychologists, nurses, social workers, counselors.

So we had talked about that as a budget priority, increasing allocations within SPS.

And then, or I can't remember, in tandem with that, the state also passed legislation to increase allocations in the prototypical school model for nurses counselors counselors social workers.

And the legislation is still under what we as Seattle Public Schools staff.

But my question is the increase the projected increase over several years that we discussed in budget development.

How does that increase align with the increase in those resources in this contract?

Did this contract see an increase in that staffing as compared to what was approved by the board in the budget?

Is it the same?

Where did we end up compared to what was prioritized and approved by the board and what we landed on?

I would say that the additional staffing is an increase to what was approved.

So it goes above and beyond what the what was approved.

And is that across all those areas that specifically the point five social workers.

the 0.5 social workers, the five certificated nurses and by the fact when you lower the ratios of staff so like if you look at speech and language folks and you lower the ratio over the life of the contract you will add more staff.

Well speech and language I don't think was included in that.

But those are just the ones that are are actually the things that we've added.

But specifically your social the point five social workers and the nurses are an increase.

OK.

And so the kind of projected increase that we had done in our budget development.

I'm trying to ask are we basically implementing some of those things sooner.

Or will we continue to increase those in our budget development?

And I know I'm asking questions from when you were in a different position than you're in now and that we don't have our budget and finance person who who led that conversation.

But I'm trying to figure out in our budget projections and staffing projections We had authorized an increase or prioritize an increase in some of those positions.

And so will we continue to see over the next several years increase every year as we had already directed or where.

I'm sure I'm asking this in a more complicated way than necessary but looking for the intersection between those those two things.

Good evening Linda Sebring budget director.

So I understand the question you're asking is the state has increased the prototypical school model for social emotional positions and we had had some conversation back after the legislative session ended as to what our strategy might be recognizing that at the time we are about 100 FTE above what the state funds in that area.

So as Dr. Pritchard mentioned the contract While we are all recognizing like the legislature that we need more social emotional supports was not tied in any way to additional resources from the state.

And as you know the state prototypical model is based on enrollment.

So we're still you know it's going to depend on what our future outlook is for enrollment.

We have not made any decisions.

As Dr. Pritchard mentioned this is kind of a additional early payment on those staff that we're hoping to get.

But part of our conversation with the state has been we have put these resources out there and we need you to help us pay for them.

And this is what's caused a lot of our structural deficit is we've been in front of the state even though we strongly recognize we need more supports.

So hopefully that answers your question.

Again no no decisions yet on what might happen in the future.

Our financial planning is including estimates for those revenues to come in but we have not made decisions to continue to expand above what we've already described.

OK.

And those the increases are in are all in year one or are they over the life of the three years of the CBA?

The increases on the CBA as noted vary.

So there's point five social workers going in place into secondary comprehensive secondary schools this school year.

So if the board votes to approve this tonight we will be working very hard to get the FTE loaded so that human resources could start recruiting for those positions in this school year.

Additional five certificated nurses would be in next school year.

OK.

Thank you.

I'll have to look back and see what we said compared to that.

And my other question is also super specific.

It has to do with the task forces.

So what I have brought up in other meetings.

I think I want some clarity on the commitment of the outcome of the task forces because we saw confusion in part of this bargain as to previously agreed upon task force work and then what that actually meant in context for implementation in terms of it being a a labor pre-agreement or you know what I mean.

Basically what I'm getting at is I don't want to see the rights of kids be up for public negotiation again.

And if all parties are agreed to something I would like to see us do it.

And then and then the other thing is that I know that the task forces in the Currently in the 2019-2022 collective bargaining agreement had parent representation on it which is great except for that parents are not a partner in a labor negotiation.

So that was confusing for me.

And also that in those task forces that the representatives from both sides of the table from SEA and SPS were doing that as part of their paid work.

which makes sense, it should be, but that parents were asked to give their time for free.

And that just seems kind of setting up not the best mutually understood outcome for all parties.

So I just want to make sure that we are being really, really clear in setting up a task force and a bargaining agreement that that's about labor and that if we want community input and discussion around outcomes for students, that that needs to be in a setting where parents and students can participate in those in the same way that district and SEA representatives are participating as opposed to being sort of unpaid add-ons if that makes sense.

And I'm not trying to disparage the work that was done it just sort of to me set up a really kind of odd dynamic that played out in ways that I really don't want to see happen again.

So I want to make sure that the commitment that we're making going forward on task forces is more clear.

Can you address that at all?

I can have Dr. Perjolza or Dr. Torres come up and talk about specifically what the task force was designed or what it's designed to do in this particular contract or what we've agreed to in this particular contract.

That would be really helpful, thank you.

Good evening and thank you for the question Director Rankin.

So I just want to put a little bit of clarity that when we did the special education task force between SEA Vice President UT Hawkins and myself we were really really really clear with the task force that we were bringing these forward as recommendations for both the SPS management side and the SCA labor side, but that the actual bargaining would happen between those two sides at the table.

And so while they were recommendations, there was never a guarantee that everything that was in the recommendations would be making it into the agreement, but that there was shared interest in these being the topics that would be discussed or brought into the special education portion.

As far as the task force it's written in the tentative agreement moving forward there was a shared commitment and it is written in there that we will share out a reporting by the last day of school at the end of the 22-23 school year.

Did that help address your question?

Are parents being, so in a contract agreement between SPS and SEA, making a parent commitment when parents are not part of that agreement, I'm just wondering what that involvement is expected to be from parents?

As far as on the task force?

If that same expectation is there?

So as with the way the tentative agreement reads there is it does read that we will involve parents in the task force.

The purpose of involving parents of course is because that is one of the important people at the table when you think about special education servicing.

However since it is a labor agreement between SPS and our labor partners it would not dictate or delineate anything regarding compensation or any such things for parents as this is more dealing with educators and the management side of the team.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you.

OK.

Any other questions from our directors before we move on to the vote.

OK.

Seeing none.

Thank you Dr. Pritchett.

Thank you all who were able to provide context in that discussion.

Miss Wilson Jones the roll call please.

Director Rivera-Smith.

Aye.

Was that an aye.

It was aye.

Director Sarju.

Aye.

Director Song-Moritz.

Aye.

Vice President Hampson.

Aye.

Director Harris.

Aye.

Director Rankin.

Aye.

President Hersey.

Aye.

This motion has passed unanimously.

Before we move on to the next item in today's agenda, I just wanted to take the chair's privilege to thank everybody who participated in what was quite literally a Herculean effort.

Thank you to our educators.

I see we have President Monner in the back.

Appreciate you being here with us.

Obviously, Vice President Hawkins spoke earlier, but also to SPS staff who spent countless hours at the bargaining table with our education association.

trying to get a contract that really represents the needs of our students, their families, our community in an educational environment.

What I will just say is many things can be true at the same time.

Do our educators deserve to have a living wage and to be able to afford to live in the city where they teach?

Hell, yes.

Do we currently know the best strategies to figure out how to accommodate that within our subsequent budgets?

We made it very clear that the answer to that question is no.

I think that what this does highlight is an opportunity for a collaborative approach to not only advocacy to the legislature but also in many ways how we fund schools not only in the city of Seattle but also across our district because I know for a fact that we are not the only ones in this situation.

I think that it speaks volumes to the fact that our state currently does spend over 50% of its budget on K-12 education, and that's clearly not enough.

Coming from the great state of Mississippi, which is oftentimes regarded in the bottom of 50 states as it pertains to education, Washington is not that far above, but we are probably 10 times more wealthy in many respects.

Over the longevity of however long we occupy these seats here, there is a lot to be learned from how do we do these processes more effectively, but even more so, how do we convince our entire community as a whole that education is not something that you only experience from the ages to 5 to 18, that everybody benefits from a strong, healthy, and thriving public school system.

And we have to be able to fund that system as things like demand for wages, resources, become more and more expensive.

And so what I just want folks to understand is that while we agree that there are lots of things that we could be funding, we as a school board, as an education association, as senior staff, do not hold the purse strings in this particular instance.

So in order for us to figure out how do we generate more funding, a big part of that is going to be conversations with our legislative partners, with our other governments and communities and things like that, to really think holistically about where do we see ourselves reflected, not only in the betterment of our schools, but also how do we fund those schools appropriately.

So with that being said, there's been a request that we take a short break before we move into the next section of today's agenda.

I'm going to give I am going to give us a five, six minute recess.

Please be back promptly at 630. Thank you so much.

We will see you very soon.

We received a presentation on the process of redistricting and analysis of our existing director districts.

Last week, the executive committee then received a board action report for this draft redistricting plan with three potential redistricting scenarios developed by Flow Analytics for the committee's consideration.

The executive committee voted to move forward the bar with a recommendation for approval of Scenario 1 as our redistricting plan.

Tonight, you have that recommendation before you for introduction, and the alternative scenarios considered are also provided for your reference.

Flow Analytics will be presenting the scenarios with supporting analysis tonight.

Directors are invited to ask questions and share feedback for potential iteration on the draft redistricting plan, which is Scenario 1. If we have interest in potential revisions to the draft redistricting plan, then I will schedule an additional session on the draft redistricting plan on October 12th, and we'll ask directors to be prepared to offer any suggested changes at that time.

This will then allow us to prepare and republish revised draft redistricting plans if necessary, in time for further public review and comment and action during our October 26th regular board meeting.

While we do plan to complete this work on October 26th, our statutory deadline is November the 15th.

I will pass it to General Counsel Narver to begin the presentation.

Thank you, President Hersey.

Greg Narver, General Counsel.

I'm going to just make a few brief comments and then turn the presentation over to our consultants from Flow Analytics, who will be doing a presentation virtually.

And then Assistant Superintendent Redmond will come up and talk about the public engagement process here.

One point I want to just illustrate a little bit that President Hersey made is that Our usual process, as you are aware, is that we introduce an item, staff makes the introduction at one board meeting, and then at a later board meeting, the board takes final action on that matter.

And it's at that time, usually, that amendments to the board action are considered.

There's a bit of a wrinkle on this one though we can't wait until the 26th to take up amendments because as we've discussed both in the prior work session and also at the executive committee last week we have statutory criteria that we have to meet for the director districts, one of which is to try and get the population within each district as equal as possible.

And so if amendments are being offered, we need time to get the proposed revisions to Flow Analytics, who can crunch the census data and produce maps that continue to comply with those statutory criteria.

We also need to leave time for a technical review by King County Elections, which looks at those boundaries to make sure that in laying our boundaries over existing boundaries for the state legislature, for city council, congressional districts.

We're not inadvertently creating precincts that have no voters in them.

So King County Elections does a quick technical review and maybe nudges the lines a block or two to make sure that we haven't done that.

So what we're gonna do, if there, and as President Hersey said, there's one scenario that was the preferred scenario by Executive Committee, but there are two alternatives.

We're now, as Assistant Superintendent Redmond will tell you, receiving a lot of public comment about them.

I believe we've already received over 100 comments.

That's the way this is supposed to work.

We're gonna have in-person public comment from people who wish to address it.

And so all of that's gonna be taken into consideration.

but that if there are amendments that the board wants to put forward to move the lines around, we really kind of need to get those resolved at the next board meeting.

And so in addition to it being an additional introduction opportunity, it's really at the next board meeting that we'll have to have the board be prepared to act on any amendments it wants to bring for action so that we do give time for that review to take place.

So that's the difference in this process.

We really can't do amendments on the 26th without pushing the deadline for action back even further.

With that, I'm going to introduce Ken and Gavin from FLOW.

You've met them before.

They were here in the meeting on the 31st.

They're going to walk through a PowerPoint that focuses mostly on scenario one that was approved by the executive committee, but they'll also be prepared to answer questions about the other scenarios and answer any questions you have about the process.

And then Assistant Superintendent Redmond will talk about the public engagement, and then we'll turn it over for public comment.

I'll answer any questions you have of me, but other than that, we'll turn it over to the consultants.

Thank you.

All right, well, good evening President Hersey, members of the Board, and Superintendent Jones.

Yeah, we appreciate the opportunity to present to you again.

Well, first off, let's look at the timeline, and Mr. Narver did a nice job of explaining kind of the back end of this timeline.

And so we did have an initial workshop with that executive committee on the 13th to present some initial scenarios, three in total.

One of those was brought forward tonight for your consideration as a draft map.

And we do have time in this process, though, for some revisions.

And so, as Mr. Narver stated, we've received quite a bit of public comment.

What we need, however, is some action determinations through the board.

via the Executive Committee so that we can provide some possible amendments to this recommended scenario if indeed the Board wants to continue moving in the direction with this scenario.

So we have some time in there.

I didn't put the October 12th in there yet, but we are prepared to bring some amendments forward on the 12th.

And or simply hear some suggested amendments from the board as well after this public hearing tonight.

So we're prepared for that.

And then we do have the October 26 meeting as 1, where we can show those adjustments to the preferred scenario from the board.

So next slide.

Just a reminder about the process.

We do need to follow these guidelines.

They are in Washington law as you can see.

Need to really work to make each board district nearly as equal in total population not school population as possible.

Each district needs to be compact.

contiguous and then should not be used for the purposes of favoring or disfavoring any racial group or political party.

We do try to maintain communities of interest.

A lot of the input that we're receiving now is around communities of interest and some suggestions from patrons as to how to preserve those in certain areas that this scenario we're going to present tonight perhaps might Split in some manner.

And so those are some some points that we really need some direction moving forward in order to make modifications to this scenario.

The next slide shows once again, just the existing conditions so.

from remember every 10 years this needs to occur with the release of the census data and so from 10 years past in 2010 census what has happened over time is there's some been some uneven growth in the district and so if you look The ideal population, once again, it's just calculated by taking the total population within the district.

And in this case, there's 7 school board districts.

We take that total and divide it by 7 and we get to that ideal population of 105,322.

So as you can see, there is some overall deviation from that.

It's at 29% currently.

So our work is to get that under 5%.

Ideally, in a large district, we can often approach 1% or lower.

And so that's really what our task was.

The next slide just shows another factor that we take a look at based on redistricting guidelines, and that's the Census, excuse me, the Citizen Voting Age Population Survey.

And so that information from 2019 was the last time it was published.

And we take a look at that information with every scenario that we create as well.

So this shows the current breakdown from that CVAP from 2019. And for each of our scenarios, you'll see an updated version of this for each scenario.

So I'm going to pass it over to Gavin.

Gavin will review, once again, the preferred scenario from the Executive Committee, which is Scenario 1. And then he'll also just toggle over to an interactive map that he can kind of move in and out of, and he'll show you the current boundaries in relation to Scenario 1's modified boundaries.

So I'm going to pass it over to Gavin for the next few slides and for that interactive map demo.

Okay, so again, this is scenario one, the preferred draft map.

We were actually able to get that overall deviation to 0.2%.

So that being none of the districts will deviate from the ideal population more than 0.1%.

I'm going to the CVAP or the citizen voting age population breakdown.

That's kind of how this looks like right here.

We're going to, again, circle back to an interactive map of Scenario 1 so we can get a closer look at the changes.

We do want to put some eyes on Scenario 2 and 3. Scenario 2's intent being to keep neighborhoods together as much as possible, but in doing so, that overall deviation increases to 0.5% and kind of see where that happens in District 7, Districts 1, Districts 2, and District 4. And the Citizen Voting Age Population Breakdown, it's relatively similar to Scenario 1. At the most, there's single digit changes.

Moving on to Scenario 3, this was drawn with emphasis on having boundaries aligned in voter precincts.

So the overall deviation is gonna be higher than Scenario 1 and 2 at 3.4%.

It's notable in that District 3 is 1.5%.

DBA is 1.5% from that ideal, whereas DBA is 1.9%.

Here's that citizen voting age population breakdown again.

If I could add one thing to this, as Gavin brings up the interactive map to show you scenario one in a little more detail.

One thing that we notice in our work, and we work with districts that are very large, districts that are very small, as well as municipalities for their, say, their city council.

We've worked with counties for their commissioner districts.

And the higher the population in a certain area, so in this case, you know, over 700,000 population in Seattle Public School District, really that overall deviation, we try to get lower and lower.

It's just more defensible when you're in a larger area with a much higher population.

If we're in a city that has or a county, in fact, that has maybe 10,000 residents, it's really hard to get that overall deviation down to a number that's much lower than 10%.

And so when we're looking at these scenarios, we see some scenarios we can create that are 0.1 and 0.2% versus one that's 3.4%.

Generally, in a large district, as I said, the lower number will be more defensible.

Now, with that said, we also want to make sure that there's input from the community and from the board in terms of those communities of interest, because if it looks like we may, you know, might be able to get by with a higher deviation, I'd still like to keep it under 3% for a for Seattle Public Schools because of the size.

But we could approach that more even approach you know 1% a little over 1% if we're maintaining some communities of interest.

And so that's just something to think about as we move through this process.

So this is that interactive map that Kent was referring to earlier.

Right now, we have Scenario 1's boundaries pulled up.

I'm going to go ahead and turn on the existing Director District boundaries so you can kind of get a visual of how those changes look like.

I'm also going to overlay school locations as well.

And then, yeah, I'm just going to kind of get into the changes that we made and why we made them.

So again, we're focused on getting that total overall deviation as low as possible.

Districts 6 and 7 were pretty well under the ideal population.

So we had to reach up into District 5 to get them closer to it.

And in order to maintain contiguity, District 6 had to push east.

And then the portions that District 6 and 7 would pull from District 5, even though District 5 is a little bit over that ideal, it would end up being under.

So as a result, District 5 will move up into District 4. And then between District 3 and 5, there's going to be a little bit of a give and take.

This is in order to meet that criteria of compactness, kind of having to smooth out and flatten this area right here.

And then between the remaining districts, there's quite a bit of shifting around.

It's worth noting that Districts 3 and Districts 4 are both connected.

They're connected via, not to themselves, but they're connected to different areas within their districts via bridge.

And then, so the areas south of those bridges, the only changes will be the ones that I just noted between Districts 3, the top boundary of Districts 5, and then the southern boundaries of 3 and 4. And then, yeah, coming up here, a lot of focus was given towards reducing District 4's population, which was considerably over the ideal, and then increasing Districts 1's, which was pretty under the ideal.

So to start off, we had District 2 reach out west into District 4, but in doing so, this would put District 2 over, so we had District 1 reached down south to put two closer back to that ideal.

But at this point now, one is over and four slightly under.

But what I also want to mention is that three with the changes made here is also under.

So as such, we balance out all the remaining districts by having three and four take from one and which also serve to make one more compact.

Yeah, so.

Let's just pause for a minute.

Can you pull up District 1, make it kind of fill the screen as much as you can.

So this is a good example of the term compactness that's used.

And so there's actually some calculations that can be run on compactness and there's different scales.

of that actually verify compactness for different geographies.

We like to also use the eye test.

So if you look at the current district one, and that's the district within the pink outline, that's the current district one.

You can see that it looks like kind of a crescent moon shape, kind of upside down moon shape.

It's kind of longer and thinner a little bit on the ends.

What this does in this scenario, you can see it makes it more box-like.

So this scenario is everything in that light blue is now District 1, and it's a little more box-like.

And the more boxy that you can get, or I would say the more circulant you could get, is really the best, but something that looks more uniform.

that's a measure of compactness.

And so the compactness scales would now say that District 1 is more compact than it was before.

And so that's just a visual representation of that idea of compactness I wanted to share tonight.

Yeah, so as we go back, we can pause now for questions from the board or we can continue.

I think there is another slide that we were going to ask Ms. Redmond to relay back to the board in terms of the communications plan and what's been received so far and what the plans are moving forward.

So maybe let's go back to that and then we can pause for any questions from the board.

And actually before I turn it over to Assistant Superintendent Redmond, I wanted to make one comment to the board.

All the public input we've been receiving is being provided to the board and to flow analytics.

Some of it's kind of general, some of it's very specific.

I urge the board to look carefully at those comments to see if they resonate with you about changes that maybe ought to be made.

And then we can work to make sure that any ideas you have about suggestions you'd like to make go to flow so that they can run the census data and see if there's a doable map that complies with that.

And then those can all be talked through when we have the meeting on the 12th.

So I think the time right now is just to make sure that we receive all the public comment, that the board has a chance to consider it, to see if any of it suggests to you changes that you'd like to make.

Then we can take those to flow to make sure that we can produce a map that's statutory compliant that will come back to the board and then at the meeting on the 12th the board can if Directors feel it appropriate suggest amendments to the scenario that the executive committee Proposed so that that's what I'm going to suggest on because I know you've already seen some of it and you're gonna hear more tonight I want to make sure it all gets considered and then the board has a chance to publicly advocate for changes that they may feel are appropriate once it's had a chance to be vetted.

Does that make sense?

All right.

Yes.

Director Summers.

Summers Confirmed that any suggested amendments we want to make we should give on the 12th and not tonight.

Yes right now we're still in the intake process and there's still more to hear.

And I'd like that that opportunity to take place.

So the board has a chance to review all of that public input and then see if there are amendments you wish to take place.

We've built in extra time.

Nothing needs to be proposed and there's no action item tonight.

As I said on the 12th it's going to going to kind of be a hybrid reintroduction if there's a new scenario but also decisions to be made by the board about what's going to go forward to decision on the 26th since we can't introduce new things on the 26th.

So there will there will absolutely be time to for directors to propose amendments.

I think tonight's not the right night to talk those through.

What we should be doing is still listening to the public engagement that's going on.

There will absolutely be an opportunity to propose changes.

Thank you.

Good evening to the board.

Hold on one second.

I think that there might be a couple of questions before we move on to the next section.

So if we could get those addressed, that would be great.

We can do it.

Thank you.

A couple of questions here.

One given the fact that we have the same population for the school board director redistricting as the Seattle City Council has.

Are we going to see transparent maps laid on top of each other and might we be since they have to follow the same rules contiguous communities of interest yada yada yada yada.

Are we reinventing the wheel here is part of my question.

And at what cost both time money etc.

My second question is is flow going to be vetting the numbers with their interactive map because if if for instance making Chinatown International District one district as opposed to being split between three as the community has very eloquently stated their position personal pre that recently.

So that would necessarily change the other districts.

So are we going to have that kind of real time technical assistance.

It's going to be like sausage making we might need to bring our pillows and sleeping bags.

I'll address both those.

First of all thank you.

We're not reinventing the wheel.

The boundaries of Seattle Public Schools are very similar to the city of Seattle.

They are not identical.

There are portions of Seattle Public Schools that are not that lie outside the boundaries of the city of Seattle and vice versa.

There are portions of the city of Seattle that are in the Highline School District.

It's not identical.

It's very very close but it's not identical.

We are charged by statute with running our own process, receiving our own input from the public, and the analysis of what constitutes a community of interest may be different if you're talking about city representation as opposed to who you vote for for the school board.

So we are charged with running our own process.

We have to do it every 10 years, and we have to run it separately from the city.

They are the same standards, the maps may look similar, but we run our own analysis and we do our own vote.

As to number two, yes, that's the process I perhaps inelegantly described before.

Any changes directors want to see as a result of public comment including perhaps the international district or other things that you're hearing.

Those all need to go to flow so that they're the they're the masters of the numbers and they can run they can move a map and tell you based on the census data what effect did that have on the deviation from the ideal population.

And if it's too much you've got to find some territory somewhere else.

That's what they do.

They need time to do that.

And so if there is public input that is persuasive to you and you would like to develop an amendment to propose a change to scenario one, they need time to run those numbers.

We need time to get it to King County.

They need about a day or two to do a double check.

That's why we've built in all this extra time.

So yes, absolutely they can do it.

Ideally, we get that to them pretty soon so they have time to run those numbers and we're not laying out bedrolls and pillows here and keeping them up all night.

So does that information then go to you kind sir?

And or what about again the unintended consequences if we've got a problem with one boundary then how do we know in our amendment whether or not at that point before they do the calculations?

I would like to spare Flo from getting 300 separate emails asking them to run numbers.

I think if you can communicate with me and with the board office, we're in touch with Flo a lot.

We can help funnel that and so that we can focus their work on coming up with some alternatives.

make sure that what comes back to you as something you might propose as an amendment has gone through the process and been vetted and that we can have confidence when the board votes on the 26th that what we're voting on is going to be compliant with statute.

Director Sargent.

So I have two questions.

One is a yes, no.

And then the second one is a why.

At the onset of this, when you drew the initial map, did you overlay it with the redlining maps?

That's for Flo to answer.

They created the maps.

Yeah, we do.

But we take the existing boundaries and then we ship them.

So we have the overlay so that we can see what our changes are.

And then we catalog each scenario.

So the scenarios that we brought forward, the three scenarios that you've seen, we have a catalog of those against against the existing boundaries.

The reason that we don't always present the existing boundaries with the new boundary at the same time is it can get very cluttered within the map.

And so it's very difficult to see.

And so I believe in this process, they were kept separate when they were put on the district website, which is practice that we've seen.

But when we do the modeling, we most certainly not only know exactly where those boundaries differ from the current or from an existing scenario boundary, we can run those statistical calculations so that we can see every single statistic for each of the modified districts and then we get the same output that you've seen in terms of the ethnicity, race and ethnicity tables as well.

I'm not sure you understood my question.

Specifically, the redlining map.

Did you overlay that?

Can you explain what you mean by redlining map?

In the city of Seattle, I live in a redlined neighborhood, for example.

And that was an intentional racist process to prohibit specifically African-Americans and Jews And I think they maybe had one other disparaging Asians, the continent, right, because it's a continent.

So it was a map that was specifically drawn where we could not buy outside of that.

There were racial covenants.

So it is important to understand the history of why we are where we are.

And so my question was specifically, did you utilize the redlining maps as you began to consider the work?

No, I misunderstood your question entirely.

I was referring to that pink outline that we showed you on the interactive map of the current boundaries.

So we did not look at any maps that you're describing that would have any sort of traditional neighborhoods in that.

We looked at, you know, just really almost kind of common maps that you would find, like on Google and that sort of thing that would just show kind of a general area where a neighborhood is.

But we don't know where neighborhoods start and necessarily.

So I totally misunderstood your question.

We don't We haven't looked at the type of map you're describing when we do our work.

And I just would like to propose that.

That's important.

At least it's important for the black folks in who are left here.

I'm trying to compose myself.

I'm just going to stop.

Yeah, I apologize for misunderstanding your question at the outset.

Go ahead, Director Hampson, and then we will go to.

Better.

I don't know if it got sent along to you, but one of the things that I found after getting some questions from constituents was the proposed map for the city by the Washington Redistricting Council, which seemed to be a pretty reputable group of individuals trying to provide an anticipation of redistricting some ideas around potential lines for city districts.

They in many ways look fine to me as does the in terms of the makeup in the neighborhoods that are represented in that district.

if all things were equal, the populations and the demographics remained the same, that we weren't disenfranchising or breaking up neighborhoods, it seemed to be a good option.

And it would, I don't know what the city is gonna do, but it is something that's been recommended to the city.

And I'm wondering if we've taken that, that this community group did this work to put together some recommendations and whether or not that's something that we've considered.

Did we look to any of those outside suggestions?

We've not looked at the City Council maps.

We have different boundaries in our own process.

No and I recognize that.

And we don't have nobody's advocating specifically for you know school board districts and I do want to say that I think it.

And this is really to.

Assistant Superintendent Superintendent Redmond.

Is that the title.

That.

there's not a clear understanding that we're actually elected by the entire city.

So these director districts are kind of a false notion of representation and that the top two advance in the district and then the entire city decides who's on the school board.

And we are a body of seven who vote together not as individual people.

I mean, we take a vote, but the intent and best governance practice is that we are one team, and we all represent every single constituent throughout the entire city, not just in our districts.

At the same time, looking that there have been some ways to divide the city up into seven parts that seem potentially relevant, whether or not there's anything we can learn from that relative to our districts.

I, again, would imagine creating massive change would be also difficult but if there are there are when I look at the district in which I was elected what's proposed looks like the neighborhood as it looks like the overall neighborhood as I know and use it right like the whole area and so I can see how that ended up being that that district.

I also want to acknowledge that The objective review is also really important because the city is changing really quickly.

And I think that's evidenced in some of the other data that we see in the one, two, and three scenarios.

But was just wanting to ask that we look at some of these scenarios that have been presented by outside entities who are trying to advocate for voters who have been historically disenfranchised.

I'm glad you raised the point about, we have tried to say it as many times as we can, this really impacts one thing, who people vote for in the primary.

I had a long conversation with a member of the media the other day who kept asking me questions about how this would affect funding for schools and resources and attendance zones.

And I kept saying, not at all, not at all.

Affects one thing, who's on the ballot for the primary election, then in the general, everybody votes, the seven of you are all elected citywide.

That's it, but I think despite, we've run out of words to say that's all this affects, but somehow something's not connecting.

And I'm gonna let the communications expert take it from there.

As far as more closely modeling the city maps, we can propose anything, they just need time to make sure that we can make it district compliant.

And it's a tricky thing.

It's got to be contiguous, got to be compact, et cetera.

Understood.

Yeah.

I mean, I think the, this board is very open, um, at the same time, the impact, the outcome, I think that's one thing that we are not necessarily hearing is what is the outcome that we seek from the changes that we make?

Because, uh, the redistricting process is not necessarily one in which we're that equips us to make decisions that have an outcome that we might think that we seek.

if in fact we're all based on districts when in fact we're actually elected as the city.

In terms of the city changing, obviously the disparity and for example in District 4 shows how the population patterns are changing and the need to shift District 6 and 7 farther north to accommodate more people.

The law requires us to use the census numbers.

We're not allowed to forecast what we think the growth patterns will be over the next 10 years.

Whoever is standing at this podium 10 years from now is probably presenting a very different picture.

But what we have to use is what the census data produced.

So can we have your commitment that you will send to.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

then is do we have your commitment that you will send the historic redlining maps to the flow group so they can see what our historical issues have been to the extent that there are questions about where to cut those lines and they have any leeway.

If somebody can I don't know where to find that map.

It's absolutely not part of what the statute asks us to consider.

It doesn't preclude people from looking at it.

Does it preclude flow from using it when there is scooch room and communities and contiguous areas and communities

Any map that complies with those five statutory criteria that the board wants to approve is fine.

I've got a follow-up question to that.

And I just want to ask my colleagues.

So there are two conversations that are happening here.

There's the acknowledgment that Seattle is built on a very racist and discriminatory structure that likely impacts everybody up on this dais in some way, shape, or form.

There's the other piece in what I'm struggling to understand, acknowledging that to be true, and what I'm asking for help in understanding, and what I think our colleagues at FLO and General Counsel Narver would appreciate as well, is what do we hope what is the intended outcome of utilizing those maps?

Because there is things that we can acknowledge are problems, and then there are also the avenues that we have to address those problems.

I don't see the connection between what we can do here and addressing those problems, especially given that the school board has nothing to do with restructuring where people live.

So I'm really, and this is me coming from a place of humble naivete.

Please, somebody explain to me very clearly what that desired outcome is.

Can either of my colleagues that are advocating for that do that for me?

I'd like to take a shot at it if I might please.

I think that it goes to sensitivity and respect and a whole lot of what we do in this city how we zone how we sell real estate where we put single family homes where we put multifamily homes where we put All kinds of services are historically based on the redlining maps and we're still stuck with them.

And to the extent that we have scooch room on the edges in terms of numbers and the overlay of that map that sensitivity and respect needs to be taken into account.

I hear you.

I am still struggling to see like how that is directly related to what we are trying to accomplish here, which is balancing the voting districts.

And I want to give it to Director Stardew.

And then I really want to hear from our student director.

So if we could expedite that process, that would be good.

We cannot deny that the reason why we're even having this conversation is because of history.

And either by acts of commission or omission or silence, we send a message to particularly the black folks that representation doesn't matter.

Whether or not that's your intent, I'm not talking about anybody's intent.

I'm talking about impact.

And this is not a criticism of flow, but because these types of policies and situations are deliberately left out of our historical psyche, we end up exacerbating.

I shouldn't even be talking about redlining at this point.

And when I saw the first map, I was like, I had just done the redlining walk.

If you overlay it, it's stunning.

and I reached out to a couple of my board members, because I actually couldn't believe what I was seeing, and I wanted to ensure that I wasn't misinterpreting what I was seeing.

It was so stunning, I couldn't believe my eyes.

So at this point, I'm pointing out that either by acts of silence, omission, or commission, we need to understand the long-term impact for particularly black folks and other people of color.

It may not matter to most of you, it matters to me and it matters to the people I represent.

I am neither hopeful nor am I optimistic that it will change anything, but I will not be silent ever.

in situations where racism and marginalization is perpetuated in this district.

That doesn't mean I expect anybody to do anything about it, but I'm not going to be silent.

That is my purpose.

I will state it again.

I'm neither hopeful nor optimistic.

That this important historical fact will actually change anything in this process.

Student Director Cromborough.

Thank you and thank you Director Sardieu for that.

So first of all to the question of where can we find these maps because Mr. Narver I think you said something along the lines of like it was hard to find or you hadn't seen them.

In about like the 30 seconds when that conversation was going on, I opened up my computer.

I went to this fantastic, fabulous place called Google.

And I looked up Seattle redlining map.

And the first image result that you'll find is from the University of Washington.

And it shows a map of Seattle.

historical redlining.

And secondly, to paint a little picture of when we talk about history, when we talk about historical racism, you might remember earlier this evening we had a conversation and we listened to a story about intergenerational trauma.

When we talk about intergenerational trauma, we see how one event in Generation A can still have massive effects on the health and well-being of a person in Generation Z, right?

When we talk about history, and specifically when we talk about the history of the city, the infrastructure of the city, and how it is rooted in racism, When you chop down a tree, the roots don't go away.

Those roots are still there.

This infrastructure generation A, which is this redlining map, is still there.

It just goes by a different name.

We chopped it off.

And I just think it's frankly ridiculous and offensive to me.

And I'm not a black person.

I'm not an African-American person in this space.

And even I can recognize that, hey, this is an important historical fact and an important historical an event that still has really, really great and really visible effects on our city today.

And to blatantly ignore it is, quite frankly, ridiculous and offensive to me.

Furthermore, I think to the question of what correlation does this have when it comes to respecting historical facts, I think that, to me, redlining here in Seattle is not just a thing of history.

Redlining here in Seattle, going by a different name of like, you could even say not in this terms of redistricting because you know in this terms of redistricting we are just talking about that one thing as you said it's all about just like who you vote for in the primaries.

When We work on redistricting our city when our city when like the whole idea of districting our city was this redlining map.

It just doesn't make any sense to me how that wouldn't even be considered.

I mean I understand that the initial thought is well it has no effect.

effects can be tricky to root out and hide.

Like if you see a tree that's been chopped down to the root and the roots are still in the ground you're going to have to dig for it.

And that's important work to be done.

So I just want to say thank you Director Sardieu.

And yeah you you frankly need to be digging out those roots.

And I don't really mind if I'm seen as ridiculous for this, but the roots of racism in our city are real and are showing up today in the way that a black woman who sits on our school board was kind of immediately shut down and silenced when she brought up an important historical fact.

And I just want everybody to sit with that for a moment.

Thank you.

All right.

I believe that there is more in this particular presentation.

Am I correct or has this concluded?

Ms. Redmond, by all means.

Good evening to the board and to our community.

Want to just draw attention to the communications portion of this particular plan.

Certainly the state, and we've already gone over it, has a prescriptive framework for how to publish, how to go about gathering public comment.

But I do want to add where public affairs has come alongside to help support.

And to know that we have lifted up a web hub, which is attached to our website.

And when you're on the school board members page, you can go directly there.

We can also harvest that direct link and then share it.

And the way that we have shared would be to go through some traditional means and then some unconventional means.

One would be a flat email that goes out through our school messenger system that went to staff as well as to our families.

The other would be our School Beat newsletter.

So that is also circulated amongst staff, again, and also our families.

We also have our website, so traditional means there.

But we've also shared with our local media.

We have released press releases.

And I would say we've done so with some pretty good success.

We have had it picked up several times.

And I think one of the results that you can see is through our Let's Talk infrastructure.

that we have received over 120 comments thus far and I fully expect that there will be more just tonight.

I also want to give a shout out to not only mainstream media but our community-based media when we're talking about where people live, how they get their news, whether it be blog, whether it be through the medium, various other community, grassroots community systems, we put that information out and they were so gracious to run it.

So we've heard it, again, not only on mainstream media, but also in those community spaces.

we appreciate that partnership and lifting that up.

So those are the traditional means and of course we are going to be hearing from some public comment tonight as well as at the end of October.

So those are the means in which we've been able to support and looking forward to hearing those comments, reading those comments, and making sure that Flo gets that information.

Any questions?

Hi Beverly, thank you for all this.

I'm glad to see these websites up and I really look forward to receiving all the information that's brought in there.

I look at the registration webpage and it's a lot of words.

And I know Flo had like a little graphic of the timeline.

you know something that maybe people can look at at first glance and kind of get that picture without reading a lot of reading here.

Because you know people don't always have time to do all their reading.

So if we can incorporate any kind of something a little more graphic and interactive that might just to reach people a little better.

And I'm assuming this page is translated?

Yes indeed.

I will speak to your suggestion which is a good one necessarily going to graphics but one of the pieces that the public affairs team is lifting up is a video on how to get to the information, how to use that information, just another way that we can reach the community and as you mentioned not everyone is reading, we are a generation of scanners now and also at various reading levels so we want to make sure that we are reaching as many people as possible.

Thank you.

And is the redistricting draft plan itself translated?

The draft plan I would have to check but I don't believe so.

But we can go back and look at it.

We need to do that if it's not.

Yeah.

I think I know you understand.

Thank you.

OK.

No problem.

Yes.

So one thing that I have heard from community is actually about the quality and excuse me sorry it's trying to adjust this at the same time.

Does somebody else have a microphone on?

OK.

All right.

So one of the things that I have consistently heard from community is about the resolution of the maps.

When you zoom in to try to identify where the actual boundaries in the streets are, it gets really blurry.

So I'm wondering if we could get a higher resolution version that is shared, and then on top of that, being able to annotate, if this is possible, the boundaries that are cut.

If we could get those annotated on those boundary lines, what is that street name, that would be super helpful for community as well to be able to determine where exactly do those boundaries lie.

So higher resolution and an actual street name for the cut would be super helpful as folks are like, pinching in most of the time on a cell phone to see exactly where those boundaries are.

Director Harris.

Assistant Superintendent Redmond, much appreciate the feedback.

Will we get a printout of the the computer program that folks type into?

Let's talk.

Let's talk.

I think we've had it for five years.

I've asked many many times prior to your time for the printouts of that and I believe that all I've ever heard is crickets.

Has anybody else on the board ever gotten a printout?

I want it on the email that shows me.

Is it there?

Okay.

And is that then been sent to us and or has it been made clear that it's there?

Because I try real hard to keep up.

I don't mean to feel stupid here.

Anyway, if you could highlight that, ever so appreciative.

Thank you.

President Hersey, Ellie Wilson-Jones director of policy and board relations.

I can get to both those technical questions that you both just raised real quickly.

That'd be great thank you.

Then if there's additional and follow-up if this isn't responsive just let me know but first on our redistricting page there is a link to the scenario viewer that Gavin was demonstrating today and in that tool you can drill down all the way to the street names.

It kind of requires that interactivity in order to get to that detail.

There's also an option kind of at the top left top right of the screen for you to search by address if you wanted to see where you would where you would show up in the map and then you can filter for different levels of information on the map.

So that is probably the best resource we have, have that on the redistricting webpage, it's the online scenario viewer.

And then to Director Harris' question about let's talk, we're using it, we've developed a landing page and you kind of have two choices right now when you get to that landing page through the redistricting website.

One is to send sending questions and we have been responding to those in the board office.

They're for process questions.

So I'm having trouble with this link.

We respond with the link.

What's the supporting analysis for this map?

We refer to the right documents in the bar packet to make sure people have that.

The other one is to submit feedback and that's getting directly inputted into the form that was emailed to you today.

So you have all of the feedback content.

Did that fully answer your question?

Both of you.

I have a request for a flow.

I'm in the various scenarios that has the CBAP by race and ethnicity per district.

Could you add a line that shows what the overall racial breakdown is for the entire city so we can do the relative comparisons and kind of gauge if there is any voter dilution happening?

But just to clarify, would you like that for each of the city districts or just the total breakdown for the city?

Our current board packet has it by the seven.

It has it broken down for each of the districts for each of the three scenarios.

And my request is just to add a overall total city.

What is that demographic background so we can compare it each district relative to the city overall.

OK, well, we can we can look for that and see what we can do that.

OK, thank you.

Go ahead, Director Hampson.

Okay, bear with me.

I'm going to try to make some connections, and it is communications related, Bev, I swear.

So I just want to address the – we did actually talk about redlining specifically in committee, one of my topics that's new and dear to my heart as a former banker.

specifically went into banking to combat the negative impacts of redlining, which is the industry that created redlining and the home mortgage industry.

throughout this country, particularly in Chicago.

I could start a whole history lesson, but I'm not going to do that, except that it is a piece of education that's really important.

And I think that's what I'm hearing from my fellow directors.

And so while we did bring it up and said, there's no opportunity for us within this process to combat the impacts of redlining in terms of how we redraw our boundaries.

I think maybe what we're missing is a level of acknowledgement at the impact of redlining.

And I say redlining, it was a very specific racist tactics used to make sure that particularly black Americans did not get access to home loans, even when they had the money to make that work.

All kinds of horrible, horrible tactics to even take advantage of them, making them believe that they could get a loan when they couldn't.

So there's also a whole other series of layers.

So it's actually, you can Google it, but the maps are not, it's maps, plural, right?

Because there are also covenants that were and have remained part of the city since until very recently until, especially if it's a neighborhood association, people have to get together and actually vote to take those things out.

So my question is, I haven't heard anything that says, is there something that we need to do to make sure that we are not yet perpetuating this when in fact actually we're also in this process of trying to maintain communities.

And they came from, you know, it was really like racist economic practices, which are still very prevalent today.

And so in terms of the outcome that we seek, my question is, is it really about making sure that we talk about that, that it's traumatic to look at this map and actually be able to visualize, oh, we still have districts in terms of when we draw these populations or these maps that are connected to voter precincts as well that remind us of how segregated our city is and how how much the historic practices have played into how we even vote today.

And we also had conversations in committee.

Another reason why we should be having these conversations as a whole board and not in committee, because we lose some really important pieces that we did talk about and that, well, I lost the thread there.

So that's my question is, it is a really good opportunity remind our community that what the city is built on because by the way the first people that were outlawed from the city of Seattle were native people who were So yeah.

And and the school district was created in that same period.

So we're part of that history right.

And so that's kind of my question back to directors is maybe it's part of the communication that we link up to a reputable source that talks about the impacts and that was one of the reasons I brought up the recommissioning.

I mean the redistricting commission because it's an outside entity that's trying to take into consideration some of those things and I can't tell all that went into that.

But you know it feels like a more 360 review of the history of all those practices.

I don't know if that helps but that's that's my my attempt.

Director Sarchu.

So the reason why I brought it up, I'm going to be real clear.

I wasn't seeking a change.

There is no possibility for change at this point.

If we are truly walking the walk of anti-racism, this is where you would have started, period.

In the future, now that you know better, do better.

In this type of work, it is important to understand the historical context of how things came to be in an effort to not perpetuate those racist practices and outcomes and experiences and just fill in the blank.

I have no delusion and I'm using the word delusion.

I'm not deluded that my comments or my bringing up this topic is going to change anything.

The train left the station a long time ago.

But if we're going to walk the talk of anti-racism and doing better, particularly for black boys, the conversation has to start at the beginning, not an afterthought.

I hope that going forward, that it's not an afterthought, that I don't have to ask the question, did you?

That it will be apparent.

So I'm letting this go.

There is no opportunity for change at this point.

I don't expect it.

But what I do expect in the future is that these types of considerations are the first and not because a board member has brought it up and then a student board member says in 30 seconds, you can find it on Google.

Okay.

I've got one just last crystallization before we move on from this topic, and I think that this highlights something that this board particularly and other boards throughout Seattle, whether it be the school board, city council, X, Y, and Z.

So everything that everybody has said up here in some way, shape, or form is correct.

What I want to challenge us to do is to make the link between the frustration for not starting in this process to the structural decision that exists at the other end.

because there is a danger, in my opinion, when we have these types of conversations up here as a group, and then we start to bring in language around, like, this board member was, you know, potentially silenced, or, like, when we start thinking about how do we incorporate these maps into, or when I say these maps, redlining maps into a situation or into a process that, quite frankly, is focused around voting districts and things like that.

The issue there is that unless we are adequately prepared to have that conversation really clearly, folks who are going to watch this tape back, I can guarantee you, are going to be very confused.

And I think that it diminishes our ability to be experts on anti-racist policy and how we incorporate that into the work that we do unless we get really, really, really, really good at having those conversations.

And so this is an opportunity, because it's not just on Flow Analytics, right?

This is on us as a board, too, because when we have these conversations in a public forum, for example, that are going to live on in various means of media, I want to be able to sleep at night knowing that the community is better for that conversation, right?

And unless we do a really, really good job of explaining what our points are, which is why I asked back to Director Harris and Director Sardieu, help me understand what it is you are advocating for in this particular instance, and we eventually got there.

But had we been, I believe, more prepared in how we want to have those conversations, what our points are being made.

And sometimes it's going to be an instance where something pops into our head and we want to share it and whatnot.

But as a black man looking and listening to this conversation, I as an individual, as president of this board, am very confused about where folks stand and what the real issue is.

And very technically, we have big problems within these maps that community have communicated to us that we can communicate back to flow, right?

Because at the end of the day, we want to make sure that the structural issues are addressed.

I 100% concur with Director Sardieu that there are opportunities in this for not only education, but to also ensure that we are not perpetuating already very broken systems.

At the same time, unless we are effective and credible messengers to that, those advocacy points will fall on deaf ears, which makes us less effective elected officials in our jobs.

So what I am asking, as an individual, as president of the board, when we position ourselves to have these conversations, let's take a minute.

make sure that we're making the link between what we are sharing as a historical trauma that has really impeded upon Native folks and Black folks in this city, and what the board actually has the power to do about it, and where those opportunities for process might lie.

And be really honest that it's probably not this particular instance, right?

Because we can have this conversation up here and go back and forth.

But like Michelle said, at the end of the day, it's effectively not going to change anything because these two instances are very loosely linked when there could very well be an opportunity for us to have real advocacy to the districts and bodies that actually have power over what redlining looks like, right?

So that's my only concern.

I want to make sure that everybody is super clear on what it is that they are advocating for so that we can be effective and credible messengers to the folks that put us in these seats.

With that being said, I would like to move on to the next introduction item, unless there is anything else that we have on this particular piece.

OK.

Thank you.

Robust discussion.

Looking forward to continuing it.

Thank you very much to our partners at FLOW, General Counsel Narver, and Assistant Superintendent Redmond.

Oh, we do have public comment.

I'm sorry.

Please, by all means.

Ms. Wilson-Jones, I'll turn it over to you.

Yes, for today's public hearing, this is going to be regarding the draft redistricting plan that the board has had introduced and that comments have been focusing so far today.

We had public testimony signups for those wishing to speak remotely online and we did not have any signups.

for that portion, but we do have one sign up for in-person.

If there's anybody additional in the room that wishes to add your name to the list, come find me.

But with no further ado, we'll move into public testimony from Chris Jackins, and there's a two-minute speaking time for today's public hearing.

Nice to see you again tonight.

My name is Chris Jackins Box 84063 Seattle 98124. On the draft school board director district redistricting plans.

Eight points.

Number one each of three scenarios narrows the population difference between director districts.

Number two the board is recommending scenario number one.

Is this because scenario number one has the smallest population gaps between director districts.

Number three for each scenario the report does not provide a complete printed list of census blocks and precincts with population counts.

Number four is any school attendance area split between director districts.

Number five at my request a court reviewed the 2012 board redistricting.

The size gap between districts was 10.6 percent.

This means that for the last 10 years the voters the votes of director district number seven residents have counted 10 percent more than those of director district number four.

Number six each new scenario splits some precincts.

It is more difficult for voters in split precincts to know who their board director is.

Number seven do the new scenarios include the district precincts which lie outside the city of Seattle.

Number eight the entire district population for each new scenario is seven hundred and thirty seven thousand seven hundred and sixty three.

However the consultants report lists a different value of seven hundred and thirty seven thousand two hundred and fifty five for the current district director districts.

The numbers should match but they do not match.

See pages four and six which I have included in my written statement to you.

Thank you very much.

Geez, that was the only testimony for tonight.

All good.

OK, we have received public testimony.

Thank you, Mr. Jackins.

We greatly appreciate it.

Are we now prepared to move on to the rest of today's introduction items?

Do you have everything you need from us at this point, Director Narve, I mean, General Counsel Narve?

You ready for number two?

My only role on introduction item number two will be to, I'm delighted to turn the podium over to Melinda Goodleaf who is the Director of Records and Archives to present this item.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to talk about this proposal.

I am the manager of Records and Archives, but I would love the promotion, so apparently it's in the works.

I hope to make this quick.

The Records and Archives Center is a 7,000 square foot facility on the north end of the second floor.

If you have not visited I highly recommend visiting.

I love giving tours so definitely stop by and we are proposing to rename the facility.

So right now it's just called the records and archives center or the archives and records management center and we would like to name it after Eleanor Toves who is the first district archivist.

She worked for the district for over 30 years.

She retired in 2011 and she still volunteers in the archives.

She's still on the scholarship committee for the the scholarship funds.

We'll just leave it there.

And she's on the building for learning book.

So we are in the process of rewriting that book and she is on that committee.

So she is very involved in the district very involved in the archival community.

And I think it would be a great honor and we're just so happy to offer this to her to rename our facility after her.

It really would not exist without her.

So I hope you consider it.

Thank you.

Any questions from directors?

Oh I just I would love a tour.

Yeah.

No definitely stop by.

OK.

Like can I just drop in or should I email you or.

Emailing is probably better but you can drop by Monday through Friday usually between 7 and 3 30.

OK.

And then also if you haven't seen it the SPS archives has an awesome Instagram feed.

It's like one of my favorite Instagram pictures of historical buildings and students and it's very very cool.

So just plugging that.

Thank you Director Rankin.

Director Harris.

It's been my privilege for the last seven years to serve on the scholarship committee with Eleanor and she's just the best of the best.

And I think I've mentioned a few times recently about how it feels sometimes like we're losing our soul here.

Eleanor is the embodiment of soul and recognizing that kind of excellence and dedication is absolutely and I did send the bar out to the scholarship committee.

as soon as it was printed and they are more than unanimous and really excited about this.

Thank you.

That's great to hear.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you.

We appreciate it.

Okay, thanks.

All right.

We will now be moving to number three, approval of revised board policy number 4218, Speakers of Diverse Languages in Renaming Policy Language Access.

I see Dr. Torres is approaching the podium, so I will wait.

And then just for clarification, we will be going to Director Rankin first for questions.

And so I'll do it in English for everybody.

I just want to take a quick assistant superintendent moment to say thank you to Director Luna Crombaron, for her comments earlier, particularly around Latinx Heritage Month, and also for her comments around Native heritage.

As someone of Native Taino descent, I am very proud and happy for her comments today as one of our students.

I wanted to take that moment in privilege.

Now to the work at hand.

Good evening I'm here this evening to present the board action report for the revision of board policy number 4218 speakers of diverse languages.

Additionally Michelle Oda director of multilingual and international programs is available virtually to assist with questions.

This action report concerns a policy that ensures the district provides interpretation and translation services according to our students and families civil rights.

In 2022 the Washington state legislature passed house bill 1153 which created new legal requirements relating to language access in public schools.

The new law requires school districts to adopt a language access policy and procedure that adheres to the principles of an effective language access program and incorporates the model policy and procedures adopted by the Washington State School Directors Association, also known as WSSDA.

House Bill 1153 was the outcome of statewide language access workgroup created by the legislature in 2019 and reconvened in 2021. The Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction and the Office of Education Ombuds convened this workgroup for the purpose of advising OSPI WSSDA and the legislature on specific strategies meant to improve meaningful equitable access for public school students and their family members who have language access barriers.

The specific proposed revisions to board policy number 4218 are as follows.

One title, a change to the title of policy from speakers of diverse languages to language access to provide clarity on the purpose of the policy.

four principles of an effective language access policy.

The amended policy includes the four principles of the effective access language program.

Board review.

The board will periodically review pertinent data collected according to the accompanying procedure and review spending on language access services as part of the annual budget process.

The amended policy deletes sections on parent guardian identification, interpretation, translation and staff guidance and moves those sections to superintendent procedure number 4218 SP which will be amended this fall.

It should also be noted that the district collects parent family spoken correspondence languages, provides in-house translation and interpretation in the district's top five languages other than English ASL, which is American Sign Language, interpreters upon request, access to over the phone interpretation in over 350 languages, and other tools accessible to staff and families.

Thank you for your time and I'm open for questions.

Thank you.

As a reminder, refresher for my fellow board members and committee members, this was the board action report that would have come through committee last week, but it wasn't quite done routing.

But we did have just as a reminder, we did have it as a special attention item as a sort of preview in August.

So this is hopefully a surprise to no one.

And as Dr. Torres said, This is a policy that we already had but given the passage of the law at the state level we're required by WASDA to update to align the language.

And I'll just say thank you to Dr. Torres and language access staff for the opportunity to connect on separating policy from procedure.

And to give some feedback on that I appreciated that and I think it's much more clear about what the aim of this is.

And my only question is about.

Well maybe it'll be you know what I'm going to wait because you said the procedures are being updated.

Yes.

OK.

So my question actually has to do with that.

So I'll just wait till we do that.

Thank you.

Thank you President Hersey.

Three questions.

One.

Two questions one comment.

Thanks very much to Director Oda as well.

Recognizing her hard work over the years is critical I think.

Two when the fine folks in the legislature passed this House bill did they give us any additional money or is this yet another unfunded mandate?

to my understanding there was no funding that accompanied the legislation but I can follow up for that if you would like confirmation.

Harris I very much would like that.

And last my question is with respect to the superintendent procedures will those be done when we are supposed to vote on this in two weeks?

Devils in the details.

Director Oda is available virtually.

If you can unmute and address the question, if not, what I would be able to do is meet with Director Oda and then we can get that response to you all as a board via email.

Thank you very much.

Director Torres, can you guys hear me?

Yes, thank you.

So thanks, thank you for allowing me to attend virtually.

The question around the funding, there was no funding attached to this legislation.

And then the second question is we are working hard and hopefully we'll get the procedures done to you on time.

That has been our goal.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you, Dr. Torres.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Of course.

We will now be moving on to introduction item number four.

Good evening Fred Podesta assistant superintendent of operations if the board will allow it.

I have three actions that are nearly identical so I'm going to describe them in general terms and then they accomplish virtually the same thing for three different construction projects.

and I'll describe how they work and then we can talk about those projects specifically.

What they do is approve an alternative public works process which allows us to use the general contractor construction management form of a public works project as opposed to the traditional design bid build.

This allows us to engage a general contractor and construction manager at the beginning of the project to help us manage the project while it's still in design.

To utilize this form of construction delivery we need approval from the state, the state has approved that for all three projects.

And we need to have the board adopt a resolution affirming our use of this process.

These actions also award contracts to the respective general contractors and construction managers.

and they all each include a budget addition and a transfer from reserves that we have in the BEX V funding all from underspend on previous projects.

The reason for the increase in budget in all of these projects is escalating construction costs.

We, when the district planned the BEX V levy that we had what's known as escalation built into those project estimates of 4%, I think you've all seen over the last year that inflation is running much higher than 4% and these bids have come in higher than we originally planned for, fortunately in the earlier part of the levy program.

There were savings that we can draw on to fund these budget increases for these three projects.

Also, it's worth noting that these are the last large construction projects in the BEX V levy, so we're still expecting to land within our budgeted expenses between this and our program contingency.

We still have other projects to do, but they're relatively small in nature.

So I don't think this is a general concern.

And again the three projects in question are the replacement of Alki Elementary and awarding a contract to Cornerstone.

The scope of that project is to demolish the main part of the existing building and build up with all new construction.

The second project is again similar, it does all the same things that I just described.

It approves GCCM project delivery and awards a contract to Leidig for John Rogers Elementary School again demolishing most of the building and replacing with all new construction.

And then the third in this series is the same set of steps for Montlake elementary modernization in addition.

It approves the alternate public works process and awards a contract to Skanska and then again augments the budget with a budget transfer from savings on earlier projects.

So I hope that's okay that I bundled those together to try to save a little time and I would be happy to take any questions about any of the three.

get this audio system figured out.

Any questions from directors on those three items?

Director Rivera-Smith, take it away.

Thank you.

And thank you for your summary of those three projects.

They are all very similar.

We went through them in operations committee.

And I will draw just briefly attention to Mr. Jackins gave us a summary of some questions regarding these projects.

I don't know if you had a chance to look at that.

But if you could, I won't go through all of them right now because it's kind of a long list but you just let us know perhaps when you bring this back if we can talk offline.

Herndon Sure I heard the verbal testimony if the board has received a written document I don't have it.

Oh I can get that to you then.

Just to check and see if there's anything on there that we should be more aware of or considering.

You know some of the things like we're increasing the size and not increasing the parking and I know that's sort of the way the city is going with you know hoping to be able to use more public transportation.

and where you're trying to make use of a small space, especially for Alki.

So I don't know if that's to me a deal breaker at all, but I think that some other questions regarding cultural resources that are at risk and I guess it's kind of long here.

But I just wanted to make sure you know that these things are community concerns are I know there's a lot of planning into this and we obviously had the SDAT and these things have been through the process.

Just wanted before we you know I don't want to discount anyone's concerns.

So if there's anything there to talk about let's do that maybe offline.

Otherwise these are all move forward for approval out of committee.

and just as he presented.

Thank you.

Any other questions from directors?

Okay.

Seeing none, help me if I miscounted, but we still need to do number eight.

Yeah.

We still have two more items.

I have five altogether.

We got three done.

So we're at intro item seven.

which is the approval of the site specific educational specifications for the Mercer middle school replacement project.

So educational specifications are a narrative document that describes space planning for our school buildings and for each type of school, elementary, middle schools, high schools there is a baseline district specification which is then tailored for each project, it's required that the board, there is state funding in this project, it's required that the board approve our site specific specification for Mercer replacement.

The changes from the baseline are relatively modest, there is reconfiguration of a couple of learning spaces and then the rest is mostly about operational spaces Excellent.

I'm glad I put everyone to sleep.

And so this action approves our refinement of the spec for Mercer and gives us approval to move forward, which again is needed for state funding.

And I'm happy to take any questions you might have.

Any questions?

This also was moved forward for approval out of committee.

I'm trying to recall if we had any big questions about it and Director Somerworth maybe can remind me.

Otherwise yeah we appreciate the work that's done to make these specific to our schools.

We have a blanket middle school ed specs but you know we do.

It's great that we're able to.

The SDAT includes school staff and school community we made some again some operational changes, how break room works for the custodial team, how some community spaces were set up in the school because our requirements is that they're within sight lines and some of these wouldn't have been so those spaces were reconfigured.

But again overall fairly modest changes to the baseline.

Thank you.

Let's do it.

Great and so the last one is a transaction I brought many times to the board again the project, the projects that have state funding again Mercer requires to do an analysis of enrollment at the school and how it might be affected by the project itself.

instructions are very specific about how we do what the state terms racial imbalance gives us very specific parameters to study enrollment historic enrollment at the school.

We've done the analysis and this action just adopts a resolution where the board asserts that we've done the analysis and this will not create or exacerbate racial imbalance per those definitions that are in state law.

And again, this is required to secure the funding.

Any questions?

Thank you, Mr. Podesta.

We are all wide awake because of your reports.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I know it saved the best for last.

Hey, absolutely.

Yeah.

Give it up for Fred, everybody.

He's here, hopefully, all year and many years to come.

With that being said, we have now come to the board comments section of tonight's agenda.

Who got stuff to say?

Anybody?

Any takers?

Go ahead.

OK a couple of things one Sunday October 16 2 to 430 Southwest library community meeting district 6 Southwest library is on 35th Avenue Southwest and Henderson Street.

It is the rebuilt library where I grew up and the bridge is open.

And I owe Dina Morris 30 bucks.

I gave her double odds that it wouldn't happen on time.

Give it to her in ones.

You probably have a good chance of lasagna and I would invite at least two of my fellow board directors to come and senior staff and other folks.

I told you it was Sunday, October 16, 2 to 430. Well we'll have to report back to you and show you pictures of the lasagna if we have it.

Make you jealous.

I hesitate to bring this up but I'm going to go for it anyway.

We received significant comments from Mr. Jackins who provides a important role to this district that were dated August 29. We did not receive them until today because of the work stoppage.

Our mail got corked.

With respect to Alki elementary I know that place like the back of my hand.

I have roller skated there on Friday nights.

I have played on that parks field and that building is not worthy of our students.

And I guess I'm having trouble sometimes Chris.

And you know I care about you and care for you.

I want to know what you do support.

I really truly do want to know that from my heart to yours.

Because all we hear is what you don't like.

And we've come a long way on things like field lighting that is not as nasty and obnoxious as it used to be in the old days.

You talk tonight about the Madison playground and fields.

their mud pits half the year.

Is that good for our students?

And thank the goodness that we don't have crumb rubber anymore on our fields.

You got to give us that.

That was a good good save.

And our students can continue to play all year long.

and athletics and outdoor recreation have to be important to us.

I don't get it.

It's always negative.

And and I'm not quite sure I understand why a school rebuild and noise is somehow different than all the construction going on in this city.

And moreover the neighbors tax their assessments are going to go up with a really lovely building not one that is not suited for education.

And the fact that we share with the Seattle Parks Department, we just talked about that two weeks ago.

That's a good thing.

But I want to get a letter like this sometime about what we're doing right.

Truly I would.

Appreciate it immensely.

Thank you.

Thanks, Director Harris.

Director Sardieu.

So first to my new board member, Director Luna, I just want to declare that you don't just get one month.

Every month is Black History Month.

Every month is Latinx History Month.

We cannot buy into that nonsense.

If I had known we were going to talk about this tonight, I would have worn my T-shirt, because I have a T-shirt that says, every month is Black History Month, and I don't play.

So what you saw tonight, Director Hersey, was I don't play.

In the early 2000s, which you were likely in elementary school or middle school, I had a conversation with Director Mary Bass.

about a specific area, and we will have an off-the-line conversation.

So tonight, I just want to state, and one of my constituents, who is an ally, texted me and said she fully understood my point.

And my point was not that I thought we were going to bring about change, but we have to do better from the very beginning.

We need to model for our children that matters of racism, marginalization, whether it's of black and brown people or special ed kids, is not a second thought.

It's the first thought.

So this process was already in motion.

I don't expect to change because we didn't do what we needed to do from the very beginning.

That was solely my point.

I was hopeful that they were going to tell me something different and that I would be wrong.

I wanted to be wrong so badly.

And I have at least two board directors who know that I really did want to be wrong on this.

So sometimes somebody has to be brave enough and step out of the common pretending that these things don't matter, because they do.

And they will matter for generations to come.

Not necessarily that my comments were going to bring about change, but I can't be silent.

I cannot be silent.

And so if I confused people, I will directly apologize on tape.

But this is going to be what you see me do for the next three years and three months, is I will call out things that are not okay, not necessarily expecting a change, because if I don't do it, Silence is complicity every single time.

When those students came up and spoke about sexual assault and harassment, they were not silent, and we should not be either.

The same goes for this.

So again, I do apologize if I confused anybody, but there was a purpose to my madness.

It was a righteous anger, and I'm still angry.

I'm still angry.

Nothing's going to change, but I can still be angry.

I will get over it because I have to.

But again, I just want to commend my board director, Director Luna Cron-Baron.

Okay, I have a little tiny bit of accent.

People used to tell me it was good, but I've lost it.

I appreciate your comments tonight and I am really looking forward to working with you on your tenure on this board.

Thank you, Director Sargio.

Any other comments?

Go ahead, Director Rankin.

It's the quickest of quick.

Just Shana Tova, Happy New Year.

I'll believe it when I see it.

Shana Tova, Happy New Year to you.

My fellow Jews.

There's no meeting scheduled next week on Wednesday or work session because it is Yom Kippur which is the most important holiday in the Jewish calendar so you may notice that you have students or educators who are not in school that day and that is because it is the day of atonement.

when we consider things we may have done to wrong others in the past and commit to doing better in the future.

And and then and then folks break their fast together after sundown.

So that is why there's nothing on the calendar next week.

And thank you for that.

And that's all.

I am thoroughly impressed.

Good job.

Yes, consider me gotten.

Any other comments before we close out tonight?

All right.

Thank you very much.

There being no business before the board, this meeting stands adjourned at 8.11.

Appreciate it.