Seattle Schools Board Special Meeting Aug. 19, 2026 Part 2

All right.

Good afternoon.

The August 19, 2026 special meeting of the board is now called to order at 431 p.m.

Please note that the public portion of today's meeting is being recorded.

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

For the record, I'll call the roll.

Vice President Briggs.

Here.

director Lavallee here director Mizrahi here director Rankin okay we're working on that right now director Smith here director Song

I'm here.

And we're going to go back to Director Rankin.

I'm here.

Thank you.

Great.

And this is President Topp.

Well, we had a sort of pre-program this evening with the all-city band here, which kind of set the mood for this evening.

It was an incredible performance, and they're celebrating their 75th anniversary this year, so 75 years in the books.

And tonight is also our first informational study session.

We've set the calendar for what the study sessions will be for the rest of the year.

Just sort of looking at an overview for the night, we'll start with the informational study session on the way to students weighted staffing standards and then we are going to talk a little bit about our superintendent evaluation and introduce that piece of that tool and then some cleanup from our retreat that we didn't get to we're going to have sort of a committee discussion as well as there is an engagement proposal on the table so some of those final last pieces that we didn't get to in our retreat we'll hopefully be able to wrap those up

but we will start with the informational study session on the weighted staffing standards so i will hand it over to superintendent schuldner thank you so much president top it is always an honor and privilege to be here and just to kind of explain a little bit about what my hope is for today is as a superintendent of school district one of the major jobs is to make sure to communicate with the board of course my seven wonderful bosses as well as the entire community and a lot of times when you have school board meetings they are things like voting on contracts or talking about certain things but there's a need at least once a month to go deep into topics that really matter to the community and to the board and so i really want to thank the board for kind of allowing this conversation of this uh the iss this like study time where we collectively do a presentation but then engage in deep conversation and deep thought around how to move the district forward and I've asked the board and of course we've listened to the community about the type of topics that the community really wants to hear about in a kind of in-depth way and one of the first ones that came to us was can we talk about the WSS can we talk about how we're funding our schools like can we do that stuff and so I think it's a really wonderful idea to start with this but other topics that we would be talking about would be things like our building levy what are we doing with all that money for capital HR how do we do HR who are we hiring the budget how does the budget work grants special populations are we supporting our special ed students are we supporting our ML students so there are lots of great topics that we were kind of do over the year and we're gonna try this out and my hope is that these conversations is sort of kind of watching the sausage get made in the most positive of ways of that where we're gonna do a presentation we're gonna then really open it up to conversation from the board and really dig deep into these really important matters because we are a learning organization we have to be iterative what we've been doing for the last hundred years some of it's worked really well and some of it not so much and so starting with a topic like this I think will hopefully show the community and the board that we're really wanting to engage in the topics the community wants as well as try to change if we need to change so with that I'm always honored to sit at the dais with Dr. Kurt Buddleman and I will kind of let him drive although I do see that I have the little clicker here so I guess I'll start with the first slide is you know again we're gonna try to dig deep into the weighted staffing standards model that is the current model for this district it is our hope that by sharing this by talking about this and by engaging in community that we actually start to think about maybe this might not be the best way or maybe it is perfect who knows so I'll do this slide and then I will hand it over to Kurt So what we are hoping is that as we go through this presentation we'll be able to answer the following questions which is what is the WSS and then how are allocations to schools calculated?

What's in the WSS and what's not because I think there's a lot of confusion and I will take full blame for that in terms of these things are super complicated and I don't think we've done a good job in explaining them as much as we should.

And then, of course, what's actually in the collective bargaining contracts and then what do we have the discretion to do as a district and then what changes might we think about moving forward.

So with that, I will turn it over to Kurt and I will add my commentary as I see fit.

I'm sure you will.

Thank you.

I also want to thank the board for this opportunity just doing this exercise allowed us to try to simplify some of the information So it was a learning opportunity for us as well to try and provide better information on how this the current model works and what's included in it and We're going to go sort of deep into some of the details here before I get started I do want to just ask a couple folks in the back of the room to stand up and raise their hand because they're the brains behind the operation Pat Rowe back over here sort of runs the spreadsheet that does the WSS Linda Sebring who's our executive director of budget has lots of history on this and helps Pat sort of implement the WSS and then on Linda's right is Kathy Copeland our brand new grants director who's on her third day and so some of the title and lab funding

so we will ask her all the questions.

I told her she would get no questions and she would go home untied.

But I just wanted to introduce you to Kathy Copeland.

She's taking over for Dr. Pam Faulkner, who was with the district for 31 years and retired yesterday.

So wish Pam all the best.

As Ben said, the weighted staffing standards model is our current formula for how we staff the schools.

And so I just brought a couple visual aids, and I think you have one as well.

we have the gold book which you don't have which is essentially the instructions for how staffing works for schools if you think of putting together a piece of a key of furniture most people don't really look at this and they just start doing their work which is the purple book this is how the money actually gets into the schools this is the result of that so many of the questions that people have are contained in this gold book but it's not the most user-friendly document for folks and so as we move forward and trying to optimize the way we staff schools and provide information.

Part of the the objective is to be more transparent and so trying to get more of the information that people really need in ways that it's completely accessible for them.

So as Ben said this is our current model the way we choose to provide resources to schools and it's based on the number of kids in school or the average annual full-time equivalent AAFTE you'll see that acronym frequently throughout the model and through this presentation it's not just based on the number of kids in the school but it's also in the types of needs in that school so special education students multilingual students schools with higher poverty levels get different types of resources than schools with lower poverty levels and we get into some of that detail here there is a board policy 6010 which drives sort of the basic information and how we try to put this model together there's also a superintendent procedure which outlines that I can be in a group of principals and labor partners from SEA each fall to make recommendations for changes in the upcoming school year and so that culminates in a recommendation to the superintendent in December for inclusion in any sort of budget conversations internal to the district and with the board for the following school year and then the model has been in place the current model has more or less been in place since 08, 09 and found in the way back documents here sort of a transitional document where the district used to have the weighted staffing standards and it moved to this or no it used to have the weighted student formula and it moved to the weighted staffing standards model so there's been some evolution in the larger way of doing the staffing at schools and then along the way there are tweaks each year some years those tweaks are a little bigger than others as Ben said the labor agreements and the restrictions from the state drive a lot of what goes on in the staffing standards model and then feel free to interject or pause or correct me whenever you want so this is the board policy and I realize that it's very small on the screen there but you can just see it sort of gives the basic outline for what the board expects the model to do so just reading there the provide the basic staffing for the school be transparent again today is a way to try to improve our transparency of how this works provide the core staffing needs for schools to make sure they focus on academic issues provide differential funding sources to schools based on poverty bilingual special ed highly capable and academic performance levels and so it does that currently align resources with all the federal and state requirements allowing staff adjustments was changing student population so that's our June and September adjustment count that we traditionally been doing early learning K3 so there's a board policy it says we should invest more resources in K3 and then just continue to provide some stability in the staffing at schools by providing retaining core staff from year to year.

And again there's a companion superintendent procedure that has some more details on how that group convenes and makes recommendations.

this is just the purple book there's a link to it for those who can link from it with the information and where it's located you all have a copy of that here and it's online so just the basics here is how do we calculate what each school is going to get again it's based mostly based on the number of kids in that school the projection that we get in February from enrollment services so how many kids do we anticipate being in each school in the fall and we base that on that projection we feed it into the spreadsheet based on the formulas that we've established and it spits out what the schools will get as the preliminary projection for what they'll get for the fall the principals traditionally all come down here for a couple weeks digested information work with budget staff work with academic staff work with the CTE staff and how they're going to utilize those resources to best serve kids we'd sort of have another round of that and we finalize that information sometime in March or April and then that's what goes into the budget for the coming year again there are adjustments that may be made in June if those projections weren't exactly right projections may change a little bit in September as well if new kids come to the school or something something has changed in that neighborhood and so we make adjustments as we go forward on that.

This board remembers that the district changed some of the enrollment deadlines last year in an attempt to try and minimize some of those changes that might happen and I think the district will continue to try and minimize those changes back to the board policy around maintaining as much stability in schools as we are possibly can yeah and so I'd like to add and we're gonna of course have a much larger conversation about this is

typically in a school district you do it this way where you're saying look by around February we're gonna get a sense of how many kids are gonna show up next year one of the things that I think we've all experienced or you have in Seattle is that if you do it in February and then you don't do it again until October you have this very large timeframe where things might be changing, but staffing doesn't.

That actually serves a huge problem for our district because you will have parents and principals and teachers saying, but we know that we have more kids or we know that there are less kids.

Look, we have the role.

We know the names.

And so this year, though it was fraught in some respects, I was really proud that we were able to not just have a series of mitigations in March.

We had more mitigations in April and then in May and then we did a whole revamp in June with the whole idea of trying desperately to get to a point where we don't have to move the needle starting in the first school day.

because once you have a teacher in a classroom, once you have a pedagogue making those relationships with families and with kids, the last thing you want is to move that teacher.

And so the hope is by really jumping early and continuously, you're going to get a much fuller answer.

For those of you who remember your calculus, the way that you actually get the area under a curve is that you take an infinite number of cuts to see exactly what the time and the space is.

This is the way to think about the best way to get the area under the curve or the correct number of kids.

is to take continuous slices and looking at the data so that by the time you get to September 1st, you have as close an accurate kind of number as possible.

Now look, a family of 37 move in from Texas, Yeah, that's going to mess things up.

But in general, we feel really comfortable that we're at a place where the numbers going into next year are strong.

The other big change, and I'll certainly defer to Kurt, historically this district has done this two-plus model, which is saying we're only going to really change things if there are two teacher, two FTE changes plus or minus.

That's really unfair to schools because it doesn't understand the reality of what's going on in the schools.

So we've gone back to basically a one FTE which allows us again to have a much clearer understanding of the children and then the teachers and the staff that produces based on these formulas.

Now I'm not saying that the formula is correct in the sense that we could probably change it, but at least the formula we currently have we're using to a more efficient way to better serve children.

So here are the items on the next slide that are in the WSS allocation.

So I want to be careful here and just say these are not all the supports that go to schools, but these are the things that are in the spreadsheet that we use to inform the Purple Book.

And you'll see it's an extensive list, teachers, instructional assistants, but not all instructional assistants.

administrative staff, athletic directors, activity coordinators, interventionists, librarians, counselors, social workers, nurses, international baccalaureate teachers, kind of where the staff that are in the model.

But as part of the complexity here, there's also staff to do some of those roles that are centrally funded and centrally allocated to schools.

and we're not here defending that practice it's just the fact of what it is right now that we aren't completely clean and how all these things are allocated to schools and it's one of the things we'll continue to work on on the right side of this page you'll see the non-staff allocation so every school gets some discretionary funding on a per pupil basis to pay things like the copier library material supplies other things you need to operate a school and there's another category of discretionary funding equity allocation is what it's called and that's another dollar amount that based on the discretionary funding that's based on the poverty rate of that school so it's additional sort of discretionary funding and then you'll see schools with special programs get additional funding for preschool if there's a preschool in your building you get some additional staffing support for that stipends for some of the things in the SCA agreement around building the BLTs and things like that The translation funds aren't explicitly in the labor agreements, but there's reference to providing adequate translation funding at each school first staff and family needs there and Then some unique program needs are in the model.

So this is what's in the purple book by and large That is contained in that and the next slide is what's not in the purple book or in the WSS model?

and you'll see that's an extensive list of things that happen at schools so one of Ben's directives or hopes for us is to move more of this information into a document like this so that we have a full or better representation of what actually is in supporting each school we've gone through this list and there's more as you can see there that didn't make this list for some specific types of programs and services that are offered and tried to figure out where the data live now and how we can transfer it into a way that makes sense for the community in the way that it makes sense that that is something that's tied to that school your security is an example so every elementary school does not have a security officer assigned to them but there is some security presence at every school in certain ways so we're trying to work through different ways how we can demonstrate that schools get security support but they don't have a person assigned to them so there's some complexity in there that we're trying to work through in these next iterations of the model so we can have a better demonstration or illustration of what it really takes to operate a school and I don't know Ben if you want to mention anything here

So you can think of budgets in kind of two ways of funding them One is you take the total dollar figure that you get and then you just divide it up.

That way you're not spending more than you're getting.

That is hopefully how most people do their budgets, right?

My salary is X, maybe I get a dividend check, maybe my mom writes me a present when I'm on my birthday for $25.

Whatever it is, you get money in and then you decide, spend it out.

That way you never go into bankruptcy.

there are many school districts that do that.

This is not one of them.

What this district does is it says we have these multiple very complicated formulas around what we think we need to provide to students.

The problem is that is not tethered to the money we get.

And so what ends up happening is all of these, and think of these as promises, all of these promises cannot be fulfilled.

And when we do fulfill them, that's where we go into bankruptcy.

And so great Dr. Martin Luther King, the check comes back with insufficient funds.

that is this.

And so we have to make sure that when we're thinking about the WSS model, we have to tie it to the actual revenue that's coming in.

Now, there are many ways of thinking about this that actually makes it much better and easier for school districts.

So for instance, you say that you have X amount of children, and there's a number of dollars that you get for each child, and then you can say the numbers actually change based on their needs.

So if there's a special education, ML, whatever.

Whoever the student has, you can create that formula, and then you say, okay, this is what the school gets, and then you've got to figure out or we have to figure out how to fund that.

and so something like security is a good example most school districts in america don't get specific dollars for security what you would say is the price of a security person is x and if you would like to have a kind of piece of the action you have to pay a tithe into the district coffers so that you have that support that way you're never going bankrupt but what's happening here is we've made promises to so many people around so many positions that there's no possible way to actually get out of insolvency and that's when you hear me say things like we're structurally insolvent it's because we are promising and creating a system of funding that is not tied to the amount of dollars that we get but then what's sad is what ends up happening is like some of these folks that are not in the WSS model if they're not in the WSS model and they're not in the CBA they're the ones that get cut first and they might actually be some of the most important people that we want so I think as we move forward when we think about a WSS model or any sort of funding model we need to start to talk about what is the most important for children or do we want to say the school be it the principal the BLT etc should be given the pot of money with some guidelines but not necessarily all of these intricate guidelines per se so it's a way to think about it I'll certainly have more to say but this is the real conundrum that the district has right now so and now you'll see this is a good transition from what Ben was saying so the current model

again, the purple book and the spreadsheet allocates about $650 million for next year.

Of that $650 million, 84% of it approximately is sort of directed by a CBA or another state requirement.

So the large, large majority of the money is tied up in something that is less discretionary than the 16%, which is discretionary.

So just want to make sure that that's sort of the summary here of the next part of these slides we're going to get into a lot of detail here and I just want to highlight here that the 650 million dollar number there doesn't include the title lap and other grants because they're not really on the spreadsheet in the same way here's that broken down so of that 647 million dollars 545 million of it is tied up in a CBA or state requirements.

So we're allocating by and large in line with one of our agreements or one of the requirements that the state or the federal government gives us.

And you'll see about 50% of the total model is in teachers for general education and CTE and the next biggest chunk is about 25% is for special education teachers and instructional assistants and other special education supports.

the multilingual number looks small there.

And the reason for that is this is only the teachers.

So back to the point of there's some complexities in here that may or may not make sense.

So as we kind of evolve with this multilingual teachers run through the model multilingual instructional assistants do not.

They're centrally funded and centrally allocated.

whether that's the best way to do it or not is not sort of up for me to decide but that's the way it's currently happening and so that looks like a smaller number than the actual supports we're giving for multilingual.

Just using that as an example of some of the supports that aren't super clear that schools are getting but that don't show up explicitly in this model.

the next page here starts to go into the detail of the things that are in a CBA or required by the district in some way and so these are just sort of pullouts from the purple book that so what our ratios are and in the first column there the second column technically you'll see what the CBA guideline is within our CBA and and then you'll see what the district is allocating.

So just using third, fourth grade, fourth and fifth grade as an example.

You'll see that the CBA guideline is 28 to one and that's what we're currently allocating for non-high poverty, high poverty and very high poverty.

You'll see in the K through three grades, the CBA says 26 to one.

There's a state law that says you are state recommendation that you want to be around 17 to 1 for K through 3 and so our model the way that we make it work gets us to that 17 to 1 although it's a state restriction our CBA would allow for larger class sizes for K3 we've decided that it makes sense to follow the state rules and use that 17 to 1 as our guideline.

And then you'll see for 6th through 12th grade 32 to 1 or 150 per day Kids are the guidelines in the CBA and that's what we allocate to schools currently for The secondary class sizes the last year we bumped that up from 31 to 32 In the next year's budget proposal.

I don't know Does anyone have questions about this?

Ben, do you want to say anything about this?

This is kind of a big piece of information.

Yeah, so a couple of takeaways from this and then certainly I want to answer as many questions as I can.

So we have a CBA guideline that says 26 to 1 for kindergarten through third grade.

but this district and with some support from the state has said look we really want to lower our class sizes to 17 to 1 for those periods so even though you see these three columns where it goes from 21 to 18 to 17 the district average gets to 16.9 or something which allows us to qualify for the state money But this is a conundrum because our CBA allows us to go to 26 to 1. That's what's in the contract.

That's what we're tied to.

The amount of money that we are subsidizing to go to 17 to 1 is millions and millions and millions of dollars.

We don't have to do this.

This is not a state requirement and this is not a CBA requirement.

This is a decision by the district to focus on getting really small class sizes in K3 and get even smaller class sizes in schools with free and reduced lunch percentages that are different.

So we have a policy, we have an idea, we have a pedagogy around this.

we are structurally insolvent because of decisions like this but we also care deeply about equity and we care deeply about the best research which is smaller class sizes and k3 is what it is and so when you hear of you know decisions that the districts making about let's say cuts here or there this is the most kind of proof i can show that the district is subsidizing to a tremendous impact especially based on most at risk or most in need or most free and reduced lunch.

So you can see that differential, 17 to 1, 26 to 1, that's a lot.

Now, I'm not saying it's wrong, but we need to understand that we've made some decisions historically that get us to the place of where we are today.

Yeah.

Yeah, and I can just take it back to, if you go back to the policy, part of what's driving that is number seven, investing more resources in early learning K3.

I know Director Song in particular was interested in what sort of, how can the board be influential here?

So it's in your policy to drive more resources to early learning in K3.

And so...

to Ben's point this may or may not be the right choice probably is on many levels but there's other complications there as well so just trying to drop back to part of what's driving that is the the board's policy special education is another place where we're following so sorry Joe you were gonna ask something about that question

The slide has the term guideline.

When you were talking about the state, you used the term recommendation.

The CBA guideline is a requirement in the CBA.

It's not a wishful guideline.

We couldn't be at 27 to 1 in kindergarten and still be compliant with the CBA.

Well, we could because we pay overage.

so there is a way of allowing us and i think that's why kurt kind of picked guideline it is it is in the cba that says classes are capped at a certain number however there's a remediation of paying overage so there are some teachers that maybe instead of having the 28 to 1 they have 29 to 1 and then district pays them for that kind of that opportunity but no exactly right so the do we have the number of what the actual like averages of kindergarten like what that is yeah so in practice or in actuality yeah so in practice in actuality it's actually 16.9 and the reason why we know that number i think it's 16.9 is that we get an extra pot of money from the state if we can prove that our K3 is 17 or below.

So we're right up at that line.

Now here's the interesting math problem.

The amount of money that the state gives us to keep us at K to under 17 is not nearly enough to offset the amount that we are losing by going there.

so there is this weird position where this district historically has said we have to do whatever we can to get to under 17 so we can get the x dollars but we're actually spending 3x to get to the x.

But you don't want to be like 17.2 because that's a worst case scenario, right?

The good news, and I'll defer to Kurt, it's not an all or nothing.

It's not binary.

They will kind of take back certain pieces.

But yeah, 17-2 is not the place to be.

You either want to probably be around 19 or 20 and get some of the money or get to 16-9 and get all the money.

and just to sort of say more about this, the 17 to 1 doesn't mean there's 17 kids in that classroom.

So there's this PCP, the gym teacher, the art teacher, the music teacher who is factored into that as well.

And so we give a 12 and a half percent allowance for that within this.

And so back to this is a complex model that's another complication so we're trying to change some of the language and I'm super glad you picked up on the word guideline so we're still trying to nuance how better to communicate that when it says 17 to 1 in this book that doesn't mean your class is going to have 17 kids with certainty it doesn't mean that it means that's what this is giving the school in terms of resources factoring in the the time with the PE teacher, the music teacher, and or the art teacher.

And when we had this conversation when I first got here about moving from 31 to one to 32 to one, it wasn't that class sizes now are automatically at 32. This is a funding formula to give you X amount of dollars for every 32 kids.

So you might have a class of 15 and you might have a class of 35 but what we're saying and this is why this is complicated and why we really need to change this is that everything is based on the teacher FTE is produced by the number of students which isn't really as good as you get X amount of dollar per kid and then that's how you fund the schools so we it's interesting I did not know that in 2007 it was by weighted student formula which is different than the weighted staffing formula that's the way most school districts do it what we do is a whole different story

So here's special education and this is how the this is just straight out of the contract which feeds the model for special education resources for schools and so it's just another example of where the model is just mirroring the contract with SCA in terms of the resources for that This model is Seattle's model.

Other districts have different models.

Ben has more experience with other districts than I do, but I would posit that every district doesn't have 12 category, whatever number of categories that is for special education ratios for teachers and instructional assistants, so.

I could spend a lot of time on this slide, probably more than we have today, but I wanna highlight a lot about this slide and I'll try to be as brief as I can.

We've got time.

Thank you.

And Mr. Jenkins of course brought Twinkies, so maybe I'll have one.

So the thing is, if you really deeply understand special education, we have to understand that special education is a service and not a place.

There is no place called special education.

There are services that children get because of their need.

That's really important as the baseline.

What we've done in Seattle is we've created in essence special education as a place.

the place is resource the place is extended resource the place is focus the place is distinct which by the way this is language that nobody else uses other than Seattle every school district in America that I know of has something called resource Extended resource is something we made up.

Focus, distinct, something we made up.

Medically fragile in some way, shape, or form exists pretty much everywhere.

Deaf and hard of hearing, absolutely.

But the major crux of what's happening in Seattle is that we have created special education as a place and thus we then place these children based on these formulas.

These formulas have nothing to do with their IEP.

There might be a student indistinct at the seven to one to two ratio that has their own one on one para.

In fact, of those seven students, it's possible that every single one of them has their one on one para.

So this means that from seven students, there in fact would be ten adults.

This is not about the actual needs that are in the IEP.

This is by creating a place.

We've now done this in a way that is not as tied to the needs of the children as we need to be.

And by having a formula like this, it is almost preempting us doing what we need to do, what's best for children.

So another example in terms of resource.

So resource, we say, is 22 to 1 to 1. But all resource is not equal.

One child's IEP might say, I just need 30 minutes a week of support.

Another child in resource might need 60 minutes a week of support.

And a third child might need 90 minutes a week of support.

But yet the formula is based on the place and not the service.

And that's one of the real problems that I see in terms of not doing as right as we can by our children because we've created special ed as a place and not a service.

Now, please don't think that this isn't because our people aren't working really hard.

They are.

Our special ed teachers, our paras, all of those folks are doing what they can, but they're working on a structure that isn't actually built for the child, but built on this idea of a collective bargaining agreement and a place.

So I'm happy to go into this much further, but the other thing I wanna stipulate about the way we do it in Seattle is that by having so many different places, we've actually made it almost impossible for some students to go to their neighborhood schools.

that's not good we want to make sure if we truly believe in inclusion and we truly believe in supporting our students that we want to make it so easy for a child to stay in their own school and the way to do that is to not have 13 different topics or whatever it is it's by saying what's the service the child needs at their local school that we could provide so that that child can in fact stay there and not then have to bounce to another building because that building has focus and your building has distinct or vice versa or they only have extended resource and not focus or they have focus and not extended resource you can see how this goes so in a lot of districts what they'll say is we'll have resource and then we'll have kind of more services, maybe whatever that might be.

And again, to use the federal language is in the federal rules, there are three designations and it's all about the least restrictive environment.

So 80 to 100% of your day is spent in a classroom, general ed classroom.

what is it 40 to 79 is the LRE2 and then zero to 39 is basically LRE3.

And so this is about the least restrictive environment for the child and then built on the services that they need.

The concern I have with this is not just these numbers but we've created a system that makes it very difficult for children to stay in their own school and get the services that they need.

So my hope is that we can help move this forward and change this but we certainly are working with all of our partners to do that.

One thing I'll add there is the LRE and the percentages that Ben was talking about we use those in the model to follow so the funding follows the kid so the kid is not in a classroom full-time we've moved that funding out of that general ed classroom and the funding goes towards that special ed need and so you'll hear questions around contact time and AFTE and why this kid isn't getting fully funded the way the model works currently is because the kid is sometimes not in that classroom and so just wanted to sort of pick up on that point and how the spreadsheet handles the fact that kids may or may not be in the classroom full-time in the secondary levels here at Seattle Public Schools it doesn't work that way in elementary that stays with it all stays within that classroom multilingual similarly driven in large part or in part or completely by the contract and with SEA the first column the teacher ratio is part of the model as I said earlier the instructional assistants just are centrally funded and centrally allocated something we're going to continue to work on as we try to be more explicit in what funding and what resources are going to each school so I think that one's fairly self-explanatory those models are based on poverty, those equity tiers in large part, and those within the labor agreement with SEA is how we're driving those, where those ratios come from.

Yeah, and I want to kind of strengthen this as much as I can.

This district has heavily, heavily, heavily invested in equity tiering.

So when we talk about the schools that need the most support and something changes and you hear, oh, how could you do this?

Don't you care about equity?

Our entire structure is built on giving more resources, more money, more FTE already in our formula.

So if things are getting cut, they're still going by the formula, meaning that schools that are in tier three and tier four are getting something very different than tier one and tier two.

So if a cut is occurring because there's less kids, that doesn't mean that they're not still getting a much higher percentage of support.

So I know that we don't do a good enough job explaining this and so there is this perception sometimes in the community that the district might be making cuts in a place that you know folks are like how could you do that like these kids need you know all they you know they need everything and sure they do absolutely that's what we have a formula that actually gives them more support than in other schools but if a cut is happening or an addition is happening it's still based on the formula that is very much an equity tiered formula

Next category is in the sort of restricted or Mandated areas of social workers and counselors So we just allocate in line with the CBA at the bottom of the slide you'll see reference to the OSPI guidance for physical social and emotional support compliance so I think shortly after COVID the OSPI and the legislature provided additional funding for those types of supports and there's a metric that each district has to meet in terms of making sure we're using those funds towards that end and so not only are we making sure we're compliant with the CBA for social workers and counselors they're part of what counts towards this PSES compliance and so we also have to take into account to make sure that we're being compliant with the funding for those types of services.

There's other things that are included in that like security as well but it also sort of touches this and another example of some of the complexities that happen within the staffing of the schools that sample the schools.

Nurses similarly, there's language within the labor agreement and they're also part of that PSES compliance protocol.

So we have to report to the state every year that we've been compliant with our data on nurses, social workers, counselors, security type positions as well.

and then I think this might be nearing the end of the non-discretionary, so stipends, there's some stipends that are required at each school.

The second bullet there outlines those, the BLT stipends, some discretionary funding for schools at say up peak load allocation, IEP writing stipends and WIDA test coordination and we allocate those required things to each school and then the secondary schools get most of their stipends funded out of their per pupil funding and elementary schools have very little left of their discretionary funding for additional stipends above and beyond what is there.

This is the list of things that are discretionary to the district.

So sort of went back and forth on whether office staff principals, assistant principals are truly discretionary but they're not lined up in a CBA agreement.

Of course you can't have a school without a principal.

or some office staff or some of these other categories.

But these are not sort of tied directly to a CBA or to a state rule or regulation.

So the total of those is about $101 million.

And you can see the list there.

Anything you want to say about this, Ben?

Yeah, schools need principals.

i love them i was one for ten years but it is complicating because it's not in the kind of the formula per se and if we do really get to a school-based budget a true school-based budgeting but typically what we would do is take all principles off the top because when you think about the way funding could work is you say, look, 100 kids school gets different than 1,000 kids school and the number of kids will drive the number of teachers, the number of whatever.

but the thing is is a school of a hundred and a school of a thousand still need a principal so what typically you would do is you take the principal and the first secretary kind of the first say up off the table because everybody has to do it and it's not fair to an elementary school to make that principal be a larger part of their staff then you know a larger school like a Lincoln that has you know more than whatever, 1,700 kids.

But it does, you can see $100 million worth of our budget is spent in this kind of district discretion.

But as Kurt said, it's not really discretionary.

You've got to have a principal.

Now APs, that's a different story.

Librarians, per pupil allotment, et cetera, et cetera.

And this is where we would have to look when we're talking about the paucity of money that we have right now.

This next slide is just a chart showing sort of how we allocate those based on school size primarily for the things on the left there and on the right.

This is how we allocate assistant principals and this is a good place to talk about some of the the hard edges that this current model creates for us.

So there are situations with more regularity than any of us would like where one kid who comes to school above and beyond what was there last year or one last kid doesn't go to that school means the formula says you don't have an assistant principal or you do have an assistant principal.

Similarly with some office staff, social workers, nurses, so we're working on sort of in our first phase of this a better way of managing that.

The better way of managing that is just to be more rational about how we're doing it and just use the formula to start the conversation and make the decision based on what's best for that school.

Yeah, and this is where the move from student funding to teacher funding really causes that problem.

So let's do the math in our heads.

If we believe that for every X number of students, you get a teacher.

If one student leaves, you lose that teacher.

That seems absurd.

that's by funding the teacher.

if you reverse it and you say we're funding each kid, if one kid leaves, that just means the budget goes down by $5,000 or $7,000, whatever the number is.

So that way, you're not touching the teacher.

It might mean less copy paper.

It might mean one less stipend, but it doesn't mean one less teacher.

And so Kurt and his team have been thinking about this.

We're nowhere near there yet, because you can see how I wouldn't say complicated how additive this is everybody over the last 100 years got something in the budget one extra dollar here and one extra position here and that ends up creating a system that doesn't really make any sense and then you have these kind of hard edges so if you think kind of rationally which we're trying to do now losing one kid shouldn't mean losing a teacher and gaining one kid shouldn't be gaining a teacher that doesn't make any sense and so we're trying to figure out a way to smooth it to use kind of Kurt's analogy but the dream is that each school gets X amount of dollars per child and then if one or two kids go up or down in a classroom you don't actually lose the whole teacher you just lose a couple of thousand dollars that you can make up in different ways.

So these are the hard edges that Kurt talks about.

The other thing I'm gonna highlight here is the bottom right of this slide and that's the discretionary funding and how it's allocated so just as the first of the types of schools or elementary schools they get $77 per projected headcount and then the equity dollars you can see is a scale there based on the equity of that's the equity score of that school and it goes up as the school's higher poverty These next slides are just sort of similar for K-8, middle school, and high schools.

I won't belabor that, but those hard edges, the way we allocate discretionary funding is similar, just different dollar amounts.

And there's a few different things that happen at high schools that don't happen in elementary schools.

I want to get to this slide.

So our non-traditional schools have their own I'll call it a spreadsheet because it is in Excel, but there isn't really any formulas to it.

It's just the way, I think I'll pick up on the term that Ben just used.

It's just been additive over the years, and probably there's been some tracting over the years, but there's not real documented evidence as to why some of this has evolved the way it has.

And so these are the eight schools that are in the model, sort of the non-traditional area with what we currently allocate to them.

in my couple years of experience here doing this, there are some schools that we're always mitigating, which means we're adding more funding to this model because that's what they need to operate.

There's other schools that are probably overfunded in this model, so one of the things we're doing for next year is trying to look at these more deeply as sort of the first foray into how do we work on making this formula work better for schools?

And these non-traditional schools are where we're gonna start.

So we're really digging into that to see is, and I'll just pick on center schools, center schools really need 4.3, do they need 5.3, do they need 3.3?

What is the real need for that school in core administrative and support staff?

And if you notice, not a single one of this has anything to do with the number of students they serve.

That's a problem.

Center School, we just met the great Dr. Pimpleton, he's gonna be an awesome principal for Center School.

I believed it, and I love Barbara, you know that, but I could imagine half the all city band wants to go to Center School now, right?

How cool would that be?

But none of these numbers would move.

based on the fact that it has nothing to do with student enrollment.

So we have to really think creatively around redoing all of Alt-Ed.

Now the good news of course is we have a new director of Alt-Ed who has some serious chops understanding this stuff.

And so again, we do know that many of the students that are served by Alt-Ed are some of our most in need students.

So we're gonna be really thoughtful about that, but it still doesn't make any sense that the center school would get the same amount of funding if they had one kid versus a thousand kids and so we're gonna have to address that.

and then similarly for the non-traditional schools, the staffing ratios for teachers, the cascade parent partnership is 60 to one.

There's some caveats there because there's some homeschool and virtual programming going on but does that make the most sense at this moment in time for Seattle Public Schools?

That's one of the questions we're gonna try and get to the bottom of as we interrogate the non-traditional model and how it's evolved over time.

Middle college is another one that stands out.

They're 19 to one.

There may be reasons for that.

There may not be reasons for that.

It may have just become that way.

And so working with those principals and with the leadership of those areas with Lynn, who's the executive director over non-traditional schools, to make sure that what we're doing in the non-traditional school space makes sense for those schools and for student outcomes in those schools rather than just here's how this has evolved over time or step back and look at it a little more closely.

Just didn't want to leave out these other funding resources that go to schools.

Our lab funding and our title funding is primarily distributed based on poverty levels of the schools.

The City of Seattle FEPP Levy is another resource that goes to 30, 35 of our schools next year.

And I know the district and the city are looking at how to better orient those resources going forward after this next year's transition year.

And then other grants.

And so if there are specific grants that go to schools, PTA grants, for example, one was approved by the board a month or so ago.

Those are factored into all the resources that go to the schools.

and most of these, some of them not so much, but most of these are sort of forecasted in that March timeframe for principals so they've got a sense of what the funding they have to expect and so they can make good decisions in March as they're staffing their schools for the next year.

There are other things that come up later, some of the PTA grants or some of the more specific grants that are not part of that March process.

The intent is to try and get as many of the details to the principal so they make good decisions.

And just again to reiterate, the district has the equity tiering and the formula tiering and all of the extra money that it's putting into students with different percentages of free and reduced lunch and other needs.

in addition to that, we have Title I and LAP.

So there is a ton of money that's being put specifically into schools that are serving different populations.

So again, we know that there's narratives out there around how the school district does or does not support certain populations.

The funding that we use currently heavily heavily increases the number of dollars that go to certain schools.

And Kurt will happily give you the dollar figure, but the dollars that are given by PTAs pale in comparison probably by an order of magnitude of 10 to what we're talking about when it comes to the funding for Title I and LAP and whatever.

So it does, I think, sometimes on paper feel like, wait, why are these schools getting PTA grants and things like that?

But the dollar figures there are very, very much smaller than the amount of millions of dollars the district gives towards different populations in different schools.

Final slide is sort of our preliminary plan.

I think I shared this with you all at the budget or the retreat you had this summer.

So for year one I think we've talked about most of this is trying to create more transparency.

I think this is a start of that and as I started just developing this presentation helped us sort of think about that a little bit differently.

Try to move towards including all the resources that are known for funding at a school.

We used security as an example of that earlier.

Smooth out some of these hard edges by being more rational in some of that decision making.

Clean up some of the complexities.

So I've highlighted a couple times, multilingual is part of the instructional, the instructional assistants are centrally allocated.

The teachers are not, they're part of this model.

So how do we clean up some of the complexities so it's better, more easily understood.

and then doing those non-traditional schools pilot.

There's been some research the district had engaged in a few years past that will help inform some of that.

So pick that up and work on that with Lynn and those principals to make sure that those schools are getting what they do need going forward.

And then in year two and three has been sort of alluded to working towards those per pupil model starting with elementary schools and then moving towards secondary schools in the future on that.

I think that's up so we just wanted to recap since this is a study session to make sure we met our learning objectives and so we hope that you have better understanding what the WSS is how those schools allocations are allocated what's in and what's not in the WSS what's required by some sort of agreement or state or federal guideline and what's at our discretion and then what changes are being considered so and I wanted to wrap with that.

So I'm sure there are questions or comments that folks want to make.

Hi.

Before the board gets there, I just want to thank Curt and the team.

I know this is something they've been wanting to do for a long time, but I also understand how heavy of a lift it is.

We have to be in a position of questioning everything.

in some respects we have to break it all and start fresh, and in some respects we have to lean on what we already have, especially legally.

But in order for us to really do what's right by kids, we have to know how we spend money currently before we make any decisions moving forward.

And I'm not sure that we were able to really do that.

And so by doing this kind of work, it's starting to get everybody, the board, the superintendent, the staff, and the community on the same page to make some very difficult, but I hope thoughtful decisions.

So thank you, Curt, and thank you, team.

Yeah, I will echo that.

Thank you, Dr. Buddleman, and thank you, team.

So this is our first study session.

I think the goal here is to have a little bit more free-flowing conversation, so I'm not going to go around the U, but I do ask folks to just be respectful of time and allow for all board directors an opportunity.

So anyone want to go first?

Director Lavallee.

I'll go first.

and I'll ask a question and then I have more and I'll let other people jump in with other questions if that sounds alright.

you on slide number eight I think it was of how do we calculate the allocations I had a question that I had it a little bit later as well so hopefully I can sum up both of them together you had both in point number six there had been a mention of September adjustments are we doing this

you know as I said the best thing that a school district can do is to look at everything every day my hope is that we won't have to do September adjustments I think we've made some really great strides in June to get to a place where I feel really really comfortable however as I said if a family of 37 from Texas moves to a school I have to at least have the flexibility to give them a teacher or two

Yeah, there was a few other points in the presentation where there was discussion about either September or October, and that's a big difference when it comes down to a classroom, because doing it in June is ideal, obviously, doing it before anything started, before a teacher has set up their classroom, spent time and energy doing that, which they are currently doing.

but then doing it in September is even better when you wait until four to six weeks into the school year and then get everyone new teachers, new classes, you know, move all these kids around.

It's, you know, you have to reestablish all those habits which can take weeks.

So you've equivocally lost about two months of student learning by doing this in October.

so I just wanted to highlight that I know the state requirement is October but we really need to shift so that these changes are not happening in October agreed and that's why you know I don't want to

say that we're gonna do changes in September, because my hope is that we don't have to do any changes in September or October, but you're 100% right, that's why we did it in, we basically did it every month.

We got the initial numbers in February, we did mitigation in March, then in April, then we did a big look in May, and then we did the huge change in June with the hope that we don't have to do anything, but you're 100% right that in the first week in school, it'd be better to move somebody than in the fourth week of school.

So yeah, our intent is that if we actually have to do anything, we're going to do it as soon as absolutely possible.

Yeah, we just have a history of not moving until October, which is year over year devastating on classrooms.

And then I will hold my other questions for others to join in.

Director Song.

Thank you.

This is a very robust presentation.

I think the weighted staffing standard is really hard to understand and you've done a wonderful job of walking us through it.

I have a comment and then I have a tactical question.

My comment is that this is a financial formula, but I also really to achieve our academic outcomes.

And so as we're thinking about improvements that we want to make to this funding formula, I want to see evidence that this is going to help us make progress on our third grade reading goal, our math goal, the kind of graduation plus, even our operational goals around absenteeism.

So something that I have long wondered about is academic interventionalists.

They're not necessarily staffed in the WSS.

A lot of those are funded by grant positions.

Do we think academic interventionalists are a necessary investment to achieve our academic goals?

Then we should be putting that into our WSS and making sure that all schools have academic interventionalists.

So that's my comment.

My tactical question is, I have trouble understanding the AAFT adjustment for special education students at the secondary level.

So could you just walk us through how does that adjustment work?

What is the impact of that adjustment?

And why do we even do that?

What is the rationale for having that adjustment?

Director Rankin looks like she wants to jump on that question as well.

I'm excited that it was asked.

So the way the current formula works is the funding follows where the student is during the course of the day.

I think is the simplest way that I can explain it.

So if you're in a different, if you're in a focused classroom for 20% of your day, you're not in that general ed classroom.

So we don't fund that 20% of you for that general ed classroom.

The funding follows you into that other classroom.

that's how the model currently works.

Does that get at the question or is there?

So, Dr. Song, I think one of the, again, because we focus on the teacher formula and not the student formula, one of the things that of course gets complicated is if a child is in one setting a let's say self-contained classroom that's where the child is they're not in the general ed class so then that dollar isn't being spent or that time isn't being spent in the general ed class so the formula we currently have which i have serious reservations about but the formula we currently have says well a kid can't be in two places at the same time so if we know the child is going to spend x amount of time here and y here the other here we then split the funding because again a kid can't be at the same place at the same time but that's yeah yeah you look at him follow-up question well the follow-up question I think that's oh sorry Vivian I don't know if you could go ahead sorry I just wanted to respond to that which is that

I think the challenge with that is exactly what you have described about the service models is that it makes a lot of blunt assumptions about the actual services and supports that our special education students need.

So this seems like a very blunt way of like obviously hard edges way of allocating resources in our secondary school.

Absolutely.

And that's hopefully what we're going to try to smooth out.

I do want to make a comment about your comment and not your question is and this is really a kind of a deep philosophical question not to get so deep here, but I very much appreciate the board's desire to say, hey, We believe, and I'm just saying it's possible, we believe that academic interventionists are really, really important.

So we want to create a formula that says there's going to be an academic interventionist for every 400 kids because we believe that that's really important.

I would urge the board and even myself to not think that way what we need to say is hey schools we expect you to have your children reading on grade level we expect you to have your children doing math on grade level here is money for you to spend as you see fit and we will hold you accountable to the outcomes of children.

Rather than to be so prescriptive by saying here's the blanket statement for all 106 schools, what we should say is here's the blanket goal and we're going to help you get there and be able to be flexible enough to allow for the individual schools and the individual principals and the individual staff and families, et cetera, to start to make the right call.

As was mentioned earlier, one of the many, many sad things about Mr. Stanford passing away early, was that when John Stanford came to this district, he talked about the idea of empowering each school to make decisions.

But what he also talked about was having accountability structures tied to that.

The first happened, the second didn't.

And so we've gotta figure out what that means in order to really move forward for our children.

Director Rankin.

Thank you.

I have a comment, but first in response to what Vivian was talking about, the AAFTE.

Your explanation for it, Kurt, is one that make sense to some extent except for the fact that special education funding is additive.

And so all of those students who are by the formula pre-delegated to not the general education setting, which is questionable already, there is a general education allocation being made for those students that is not going to them that's going where that's somehow taken out of the formula so that that is a problem that I have had with that for a long time and so have others.

So I'm also wondering how the change that you were talking about earlier Ben with the programming how if we no longer have those places, we no longer have the supposition that students are going to be spending time, predetermined in violation of faith, to be spending time in those spaces.

And so that in and of itself would force a change in that part of the formula.

Agreed.

And it would actually, in my mind, lead to much better services for children.

Yes.

Because we would actually be able to say, here's this child.

here's the services they need and here's the funding for it, rather than have this kind of contrived methodology of, well, the child's there for 40% of the time and we take it out.

And you're right, special education funding is additive.

We need to make sure that that money actually follows the child and not some kind of weird formula.

And the general education funding allocation also follows.

That student has that funding.

I mean basically it changes the conversation from where is this kid gonna be to what are the supports that the student needs.

um I so my comment is that I could cry and might and have about that in the last 45 minutes or so you have both very clearly and very excessively to my mind although granted I have more maybe more context than some to draw on um the problem that has been brought up for at least 10 years.

And that prior to your arrival, Superintendent Scholdner, there has either been an unwillingness or inability to have this conversation.

It has been, well, but that would require renegotiating.

Well, that's in the CBA.

Well, this is what people are used to.

Well, people are accustomed to the cadence of the October shuffle and I just want to say thank you that over my, this is my seventh year on the board, especially in the last two years there have been times where I've been like what is even the point because nothing is changing.

We're having the same conversations, the same tensions, the same conflicts over and over and over again and this system is refusing to be responsive to them and this is the huge step forward in yes it's hard it's hard i can understand why people didn't maybe want to dig into this um but as i've said many times before everybody in this building makes enough money to be willing to to do that and if they're not they can go work somebody somewhere else because this is about us serving our students and we can't make the excuse that, oh, it's hard, it's complicated, it's whatever.

How you have laid this out, making changes is hard, but it's actually not complicated, especially if we're as a board and leadership team focused on what does it take to best serve children I really believe that you know it's not without conflict or controversy but if we are at the end of the day focused on what does it take to best serve children the solutions become pretty obvious even if they're not easy.

and so I just wanna thank both of you for the time to present this, the ways in which you presented it and I also am wondering if there is thinking about a like maybe webpage or public facing parent friendly community member friendly version of this that somebody could learn just by visiting the website and FAQ kind of thing because this really gets at the crux of, I mean this is 80% of our budget.

We should really have more of a say about how it gets allocated based on what students need.

So just huge, huge thank you.

Thank you.

Director Smith.

I have a question just to clarify my understanding around the special education AFTE.

Is that the right acronym?

But so if you have a student that is receiving special education for 0.2 of their time, then they're only counting as 0.8 in the WSS.

and so to me that would imply that if you have a student start receiving more special education services that could have an impact on the school where the staff allocations in the WSS that includes a librarian so you could say oh the student started receiving more special education services and now our school is going to lose a librarian and

Is that a correct interpretation because it seems very problematic which is like has already been brought up, but The first part of that is the correct interpretation of how the current model works The librarian isn't a good example because it's not driven by the number of kids in the school But there are other things that are so yes your concept is accurate

Yeah, and I think you've highlighted one of the many concerns I have around the current formula because there's all of these weird unintended consequences that happen like a domino set where it's like, oh, well, this happened, oh, this makes sense, but now it hurts this, oh, that doesn't make any sense, and oh, that really doesn't make any sense.

So, yeah, you've highlighted one of the many issues that we struggle with with this.

And to your point, Director Rankin, trying to provide this information so we can have this conversation about whether this is the right thing or the wrong thing to do is...

the reason we're doing this.

So I guess one of my questions are kind of going on to page 25, which is sort of this preliminary planning slide.

I guess there's a lot here.

This feels like a huge lift.

Thank you for recognizing that.

Can you repeat it?

You've given yourself a timeline.

You're not making it all happen by the 27-28 school year, but from our governance perspective, as a year goes by, we check in again in about a year and see how we're coming in progress in preliminary planning type of thing.

Yeah, I would love that, and I would also, not to speak for Kurt here, but because I know that as part of the ISS and as well as other just check-ins, we will have a budget conversation, and if we are making strides on these things, we'll let you know way before a one-year cadence.

depending on how long you would have me as your superintendent.

I think that when we build these kind of year-long ISS calendars, we'll get a re-up exactly this time next year and you'll get a lot of check-ins over the year because we can tie some of this to the budget conversation that we have pretty often.

It just full transparency like the second one there director top improve purple page So I'll show all sources of known funding for the school.

So what we've done thus far as we've identified these would be easy to do These would be hard these be really hard.

So this will be a little bit iterative iterative along the way, so I used security as an example earlier.

We may or may not land on the right way to do that, this first pass at that, but we're working on trying to get towards this as we move forward.

Well, I think one that I think particularly board directors will be interested in is the decision on the K-3 class size as you weigh the amount of money saved or lost and what the cost benefits are there.

Director Lavallee.

I have a follow-up on that.

I'm super excited for these changes.

I know this is something that we all want to see updated because it clearly has a lot of hard edges that don't work in a lot of cases.

within that kind of 84% of it that's outside of our control to a certain extent, how does this work out with this page 25 year to year goals in updating this formula?

What are kind of roadblocks that we're concerned about?

You know I mean you know because so much is of this is driven by the CBA is I mean I think you know and again you know I've got to live a lot of respect and a lot of thanks to the SEA as we're in bargaining and I think they've been very very thoughtful around these things you know I think that we're just gonna have to and be as clear as we possibly can about what we have control over, what we don't have control over, and maybe ways that we can have conversations with all of our bargaining units around what might be best for kids.

So we'll see what comes out of the different collective bargaining agreements that are occurring over the next couple of years, but I think that even within The CBAs and this is all the CBAs right is that there is some Structure in terms of how we do the funding that even though some of it might be dictated by you know these number of ratios we can Fund it differently so that they actually might we might move Large buckets of money from some of that centrally funded stuff that you saw and push it into the schools And then also I think there is that flexibility around this the pre-k to three or the k to three There's also flexibility around title one funding and lap funding and there's also the equity tiering.

There's a lot that we can do that I think if we go to a school-based budgeting formula with students at the center and not the teachers at the center, the CBA becomes less of a hindrance and just a guideline.

I mean, look, as far as I know, and I don't know exactly how it works in certain places in America, but every place I have ever worked, they have classroom maximums.

They always do.

And in fact, in some respects, I'm thrilled that it is guidelines.

In some districts, in some CBAs, there is no overage.

you either do it or you get grieved.

Like there's no middle ground.

And so I think that you can still do school-based budgeting and student formula funding even with class size caps.

Everybody has class size caps.

It's just how we think about it is the problem.

President Briggs and then Director Mizrahi.

that was basically my exact question was just if we are going to to move to a different funding model is there anything that needs to change in either the board policy or the CBA in order to actually make that happen and what I heard you just say is basically no like we can we can shift our funding model and still remain in compliance with the CBA even if the CBA itself doesn't change.

Yeah I mean look if any CBA changes and it gives us more flexibility that's better for the district right and so certainly we're going to be articulating as best as we can to give the district flexibility to serve kids but regardless of where we fall on that spectrum there is still leverage that we can do to change things.

I will say that there are certain board policies or board expectations that we seven plus one could adjust that I think would give us a better flexibility to serve kids.

I'm not at the position right now to ask of the board of anything because Kurt and the team and myself need to have an even better understanding of this before we ask but once we have an ask we can then show that if you do agree to X this is all the great things that can happen for children.

Director Mizrahi.

Okay, so it seems to me like slide 11 and 12 are like the real crux of it.

I just wanted to ask about, well, really less of a question and more of like a thought experiment.

On slide 11, and based on what you just said.

Is that this one?

Yeah, perfect.

Okay.

I think if I were someone who was only half paying attention, which I never would be, my take would be, oh, well, Ben wants larger class sizes, right?

But what I hear you saying is that moving to the per pupil model doesn't mean that at all.

And in some cases, it actually, because of the added flexibility, could actually take away from some of those cliffs that exist in the current model.

Yeah, I mean, when I was in Lansing, and I had promised I would stop saying that as often, which I think I have.

is that we actually reduce class size by changing this because some of the formulas that we use are forcing money outside of the classroom.

We don't want to do that, right?

We want to actually push it inside the classroom.

So it's not, you know, right now the CBA guidelines for kindergarten through sixth to 12th grade We have not talked about moving those like that's not even in a conversation right now and I don't mean in bargaining I just Curt and I have never even had that conversation like we moved at 30 31 to 32 That's it like I we're not looking to change.

I think the Columns 2, 3, and 4 are columns that we're going to have to talk about because the CBA is the CBA.

For this, these are fine.

I mean, honestly, my gut is I always want 25. I like 25 kids a class.

I think 26 is actually possibly too high.

But again, this is a funding formula, not an actual class size thing.

but my hope is that if we start to smooth those edges and we actually give the money to the schools, you're gonna actually see a reduction in actual class size because you're gonna be able to open up more classes because you're not spending money on all these other things that's actually forcing you to have large class sizes.

Talk to some of our elementary school teachers, they're looking at class sizes in fourth and fifth grade in like the 30s.

I don't want that, but that's happening because the money that could be going to lower class size is actually being forced to other places.

One thing that could be, not to suggest that anyone double up on what is probably an immense amount of work to figure out where all the staff is going to be, but it would be interesting to see if you had no guardrails, if we were in a per-pupil model, what would this year's staffing look like at all these different schools?

What would the budgets look like at these different schools?

In the world of Ben and Kurt, thinking about what is best for the schools, what is best for the budget, and that per-people model, how different would it be?

Because I'd imagine that there are a lot of schools where it wouldn't be all that different at all, and then a lot of schools where it might be better, and then some schools where you say, well, this would make more sense to do it this way.

So that would just be an interesting thing to work on one day.

On slide 12, You said earlier that other districts that you've seen don't have this many categories.

do other districts have the ratio part?

Yeah, so it really depends.

A lot of school districts will have ratios based on the type of service a child is getting.

But typically, the way that we're looking at this, it's more classroom-based.

So let's take a high school, for instance.

If I'm a resource room teacher, in a high school, usually I would have a class size cap.

So if I'm teaching resource, a class size cap of, let's say, 15 kids.

So I get 15 kids in my resource class, and it's an hour a day.

And I teach five classes.

Usually if it's a six-period day, you teach five classes, you have a prep, that kind of stuff.

So they don't particularly have a caseload.

They just have a classroom cap.

Here, we're saying that the number of students leads towards the teacher.

Rather than saying, I teach a class, I have a classroom cap, and that's what I do.

The other thing is that typically a resource room teacher's schedule would be based on the services they have to provide.

so it's not a 22 to one to one ratio, it's hey teacher, you only have X amount of minutes in the day.

Here are the kids on your caseload, little Ben needs 30 minutes, little Joe needs an hour, so we're gonna schedule you not based on a teacher formula, we're gonna schedule you based on your IEP need and my IEP need, right, exactly.

so this kind of stuff I understand and I have seen it in some places but this is not the normal and certainly not with all of these different kind of structures so.

Director Lavallee.

I had two more.

just a second ago when answering director Mizrahi's question you were talking about a little bit about kind of the equity tiering and earlier you had said too that you know it's you know we do a lot in terms of equity in this district the frustrating thing is it hasn't created better outcomes for the kids that we really want to make sure are obtaining better outcomes at this point in time so My question kind of, and I know that starts to go into a goals and guardrails too, but as we look at changing this formula, I want to really push us to how we're aligning to those goals of getting to those reading reads, which I heard before from two other directors that echoed.

of making sure that if there's a change in that tiering and stuff is going up for the lowest income schools, that it's still going up in a way that they're really able to support and move the needle on students' learning.

Yeah, so I'm so glad that you brought this up.

The way this district has looked at supporting students is with a cudgel, like just a big stick.

And we're like, here it is.

Rather than saying maybe the idea isn't looking at free and reduced lunch, maybe it's looking at which schools have low proficiency rates.

maybe it's about looking at which schools aren't serving the kids and then when we actually move resources to the classrooms of the kids that need the support things change I mean in my 25 years of school and district leadership the best thing you can do is figure out the classroom where the child is not learning at the pace they would in another classroom and put resources in that class to move those children.

The way that we do our funding here says nothing about that because there are schools that have you know free and reduced lunch uh you know percentages similar to others yet somehow they're knocking it out of the park and there's some schools that aren't why wouldn't we try to focus the support on the schools that need it rather than this like blanket statement of how to do it and and you know i love it here i'm not trying to be critical but like well continuing to support the schools that are not oh 100%, but what I've seen is we just treat everything with this blanket stuff, and rather than using a cudgel, we need to use a scalpel.

We need to be able to put very fine lines, very fine support where they need it, and to your point, not to hurt the other schools, absolutely not, we know that certain schools are doing really well, and this is what they need.

Other schools might need something completely different, but right now the formula is we're treating them all kind of the same based on a data point that has nothing to do with success.

I mean, one of the things I shared with the leadership, what was it, last week at SLI, is let's say a school has a third grade proficiency rate of 50%.

and there are three teachers, we might look and say, well, 50% for third grade, it's not district average, but it's not that far, they're doing okay.

But what if teacher A was at 80% and teacher B was at 50 and teacher C was at, I guess that would be 20?

Where are we supposed to give the support?

Probably to the teacher at the 20%, but right now we would treat that all the same.

So that's the problem we have right now.

Director Rankin I just I'm so excited but I wanted to tie this back to earlier I think Gina you were talking about you know where we would see this in the budget process we're also going to see this in monitoring towards goals because presumably you're going to tell us or tell the board in a year or two, here are the shifts that we made in staffing with the assumption that they would be more aligned to the needs of students, but also with the assumption that they would improve outcomes for students.

And you will be telling us either, you may notice that at these schools this went up, at these schools it didn't, what we thought was going to do this didn't or what we thought was going to do this really did and now we're going to do it at more schools so there's there's also you know you have your your three year rollout plan and there's a there's a budgetary function of that but there's also an impact on student function of that is did making these changes do what we thought we're going to do and we'll be able to see that through progress monitoring and then I would hope and assume that building leaders are also using their CSIPS to say we've identified that we have here's the goals for our building, here's the student populations that need more support, here's the staffing support we wanted to try this year, and then to be able to say the next year, wow, that was exactly what we needed, that worked really well, or we actually think that this year it'd be better to have an additional third grade classroom because this cohort of kids or whatever it is, is going to work better to meet the needs.

To Jen's point and to your point, people worry about neighborhood schools being one size fits all.

And if you've been to more than one neighborhood school, you know that that's not the case.

But what we have in the formula is really one size fits none because it just says, here you go.

figure it out.

And that comes from the state as well.

The funding formula is very much, this feels like it should be enough.

And if you go into an actual classroom of kids, 24 kids versus 26 kids, if you've got five kids with extremely high needs, either because of poverty, behavior, whatever, I don't think those additional two kids are making the difference.

You might have like wow what we really need is not to take out two of the kids that are doing okay but to bring in more services for the kids who aren't.

We also have our free and reduced lunch numbers are really wildly variable depending on where you live in the city every school has kids dealing with poverty and our formulas even though they do acknowledge some differences they don't if you're below a certain level and that's just expected to somehow be okay but we still have kids at you know schools with 8% free and reduced lunch those kids we don't add anything for them and those kids at that school still need support

Yeah and one point I want to make and I was looking over my shoulder just so that if I could give credit to somebody that's actually here I want to give credit to Ted Howard and his team in terms of the CSIP so now all of the CSIPs moving forward are heaven forbid actually tied to the school's goals and the district's goals.

And so now we're actually making sure that that document, which is a very important legal document for the schools, has a math goal, an English goal, a graduation goal if they're high schools, and then tying those things in so that you're 100% right.

When we do progress monitoring, whatever that's going to look like, you're going to be given a heads up on how all of this stuff is working.

some of it's going to be good some of it's going to be a failure but you know you certainly you're going to have uh you know me be able to present that and say look this is with the changes we've done and wow look these schools have really moved these others haven't so all right i'm going to wrap up the conversation there thank you dr buttleman and superintendent schuldner we're going to take a break till 6 15. i've had

I had a request for a longer break.

Yes, that is a longer break.

So we'll come back at 6.15.

Alright, so we have to wrap up today at 7.30, so we're going to get started here join back together um so one of the things that i've been really appreciating about my fellow board directors is we've all sort of been taking different pieces of of work um working on it and then bringing it back to the full board i think that's specifically true for the uh rest of the items on the agenda uh the next one is the introduction of the 26 27 superintendent evaluation tool and I know that Director Rankin, Director Mizrahi and Director Lavallee have all been working on this tool and I'm going to pass it over to Director Lavallee to introduce this item.

Thank you so much, President Topp.

As you mentioned, Director Rankin, Director Mizrahi and I have been working on the Superintendent Evaluation Framework.

The same group of us did the previous framework for the last six months.

of the superintendent's stay here with us and hopefully goes longer.

So the last evaluation framework we ended up creating a much slimmed down version of the WASDA standards based framework.

which has eight standards and we had kind of selected down to two of them per standard.

We have expanded that for this upcoming year to have three or four accomplishments that we want to see under each standard.

and then we have built out kind of what each of those looks like for a distinguished rating, a proficient rating, a basic rating or an unsatisfactory rating.

So I've put together a document which has all of the standards, all of the requirements on it and then you can go in deeper into the documentation as well and look at what those metrics are and how each of those things are measured.

This is a document that we've then gone back and forth with the directors to try to create kind of the most expansive thing that we can that covers all of the factors of the superintendent's job while making sure that it's practical in a way that he can respond to it in a timely manner when this comes back up.

Now the goal being for the following year that we will create a more permanent framework going forward which will have metrics based on the district's goals.

However at this point in time that's not something we can establish as the board has not voted on potentially new goals going forward.

So the next set will hopefully be a list of metrics that measure up to both the goals and the guardrails as well as some of these standards still incorporated within there.

So going through this, I'm gonna kind of just quickly just overview all of them that we have standard one, which is mission, vision, and core values.

Standard two is equity and cultural responsiveness.

Standard three is curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

Standard 4 is community of care and support for students.

Standard 5 is professional capacity of school personnel.

Standard 6 is meaningful engagement of families and community.

Standard 7 is on operations and management.

And Standard 8 is on collaboration with the board.

And then President Topp, at this time, would you like me to go deeper into what all of these are?

Or does any of the board members have questions?

Board Directors, do you want our Director Lavallee to go a little deeper?

Do we want to just open it up for discussion or questions?

I just want to clarify, this is marginally different, right, than what we already talked about?

Yes, this is similar to this last framework that we used.

We've just expanded it a little bit.

Again, we had originally taken the WASDA framework, the WASDA standards-based framework, and pared it down to only what we thought of as the absolutely most vital things to measure the superintendent on within his first six months.

And now for the year, we're going to do a longer like version of that.

So instead of having two for each of these, we have three and some of the times four when we thought it was really important to have more.

So, you know, for a standard one, we have mission, vision, and core values.

We have four that we want to measure within this for the next year.

But yeah, it is very similar.

It just is expanding on what we already had.

Yeah, okay, that's what I thought.

it also the the six month one there was a lot of acknowledgement that like he just got here and couldn't really say like yes I did this and I did that but to say like is building towards or is developing and for this one we would expect that in the look back of the year we would see how the superintendent can demonstrate that over the past year you know here are things that demonstrate that this is happening as opposed to like we're thinking about it happening.

So yeah that is a good point in the previous one we had done a lot of edits that you know within the different categories to be like the superintendent is working towards building a system that and this time it you know it's taken out some of that softer edges that we can't

so my question is for each of the eight standards we had two previous we had two sort of a and b previously did you take out any of the a and b's that we had previously selected no i believe we have yeah we may have had somewhere like an a and b became an a

Yeah, we went through a number of these and we're like, hey, are these substantively different?

Can we combine these in some way?

What would be that?

So there was some, but I think all of the stuff that we previously had is still in there in the core of it.

It might be differently worded.

I would say...

even though this is robust and more robust than we had last time, this is still also pared down from the WASDA model.

So this is still, yeah.

Yeah, it is about half of the WASDA framework.

I mean, the framework, it's basically like this is the job of a superintendent and you know if if a superintendent had been in a role for let's say the university place superintendent they've had two superintendents in the last 25 years I think that superintendent probably could rotate through like pretty quickly and be like, here's the different ways that like I'm meeting these on a day-to-day basis.

That board also knows their superintendent well enough and has a structure throughout their district well enough that they know those things are happening and they're focused strictly on achieving the goal.

Their superintendent evaluation is not, are you doing all these things?

They know their superintendent's doing all these things.

That's just like a standard expectation.

So they're not evaluating on the, do you check all these boxes?

But is the result of all of these things progress for kids?

Similar student demographics, actually.

but much smaller and then a completely different board superintendent relationship.

If I may, I put on my non-superintendent hat, but the person who helped build stuff like this is the WASDA model is really quite robust and I do like it a lot.

Typically, the expectation of a superintendent, you could say, how do you show all of it?

you know me I wrote a 32 page paper on this a lot of times it would be like a 10 page like I'm gonna combine subsection one two and three in a paragraph to show you because I'm new and because certainly I think you deserve it I will try to answer each of those subsections but typically when they give the whole thing like the was the model or the Michigan model is that the superintendent will write like a paragraph explaining the entire section so you know I'm very appreciative that this board is understanding that maybe it doesn't have to be the full one in this like first year but as it is thinking about moving forward that relationship is then built and then I could create a one or two page per section not each subsection

Well and part of the discussion within the group of us who is working on development of this too and I said it again is that in the future we'll have more data driven based on the goals of the district and then some of these to show you know what are the other factors of the job that were also have in there that might not be captured within the goals and the guardrails that the district has but at this point in time this is also a very good understandable thing for our community as well in like what we are expecting from our superintendent and what you can be held accountable to and in some way shape or form and I will answer the last question too Standard 2A under equity and cultural responsiveness is one where we had gone back and forth in some ways because there was a few different things that we wanted to incorporate in here and so this is one that we've combined together to build on diversity within the community to strengthen the district's capacity to address cultural tension or conflicts positively.

and so those were two different points and we were like, we think he can answer this as one thing.

And so we've done work to make sure that as much as can be aligned together is so that it's not the full framework.

Any other questions or follow-up?

Director Rankin?

just one briefly which is shout out to Jen she we you know we work together on the content but Jen I think made it a friendlier late I mean this is sort of like my passion is graphic design but but in all seriousness she took the template which was really just an Excel spreadsheet and I think made it into something a little bit more approachable and user friendly and that doesn't take an insignificant amount of time so I wanted to to shout that out in appreciation and then also add that some of the evolution towards what do we expect from the superintendent and how do we measure it is going to be reflected and work in the policy committee as we look hopefully as we look at our section of policies that have to do with the board superintendent relationship what we have currently and what SPS has had since 2011 or before is just like the WASDA model that's what's in state law and that we can and will be looking at our policy about our relationship with the superintendent and sort of prioritize some of these lay out these expectations and how the board knows whether or not things are happening, whether or not they end up in the final framework.

So we should hopefully be building towards a systemic understanding of not just an agreement between the board and the superintendent about what the expectations are, but developing lots of different iterative ways of expressing to our community really who's doing what and how do we know and why it's important.

I will make one more comment that there was some edits that were sent over to me that I haven't updated in the board office of a few different grammatical errors within the document that I will fix and sent to the board office so the next time we see them it will be corrected

And we will vote on this at our meeting next week Yes, I'm getting head shaking yes, so I just one thing off the to-do list hopefully Next again is one of those items that I feel like we've given to board directors to work on this time.

It was director Smith director Lavallee and myself This is sort of an engagement proposal for us to review as we talk about about how we as a board want to engage.

And I think one of our goals specifically that we talked about at our January retreat after taking the WASDA assessment was trying to figure out how better to do budget engagement.

So not to spoil the presentation, but this is going to be Director Lavallee again.

Thank you so much, President Topp.

so this one again is a proposal for this coming up year and then I will caveat as well that going forward we do need to revisit our policy within the policy committee to really give more structure to board engagement on an ongoing basis so that we know what's expected we know what sort of things are covered and we have a policy that's in place to make sure that it becomes a clear habit and a known thing of what we're offering and how we're doing it.

So I really look forward to the work of directors Smith, Rankin, and Mizrahi on the policy committee, hopefully being able to get to that, although I know you have so much to get to in the next year.

good luck.

Going on with this proposal, it would provide an opportunity for board directors to hear directly from constituents on school board issues.

We are suggesting that we do board engagement twice a year, once in February and once in May. that we would have one session further in the north end and one session further south and a total of four sessions.

So the suggestion was making sure that we kind of do some that are accessible to the city as a whole, making sure that we're kind of doing some north of the cut, doing some south of the cut and that it's not one that's one place and then another one in a completely different time.

So making sure that we're and having some duplication of those and making sure that they're somewhat accessible to different areas.

The structure is we'd like to partner with different regional community-based organizations to host and staff for location, promotion, facilitation, and note-taking.

We would like to make sure that they are in-person options and that two or three directors can attend plus student members.

There was discussion about this as well because that would mean that We need some directors to double up on this and make sure that they're making more than one meeting Which I don't think should be a problem based on what I know of this current board We'd need promotion on the district site through the community-based organizations and looking for partnership with the Alliance for Education as well.

Need translation and ASL and spoken language interpretation to be paid for by the district.

or coordinated through CBOs if preferred interpreters are available.

We need to make sure that there's food included at the event and that similar to the events that the superintendent has been hosting that there is a consistent survey at the end of the event as well.

Superintendent will be invited but attendance is not always required.

The topics in February would be on the budget as that is when the budget comes out and we receive a significant amount of attention on the budget from our community at that point in time and that feedback from our community can be brought into our cycle and into our conversations at an early enough point to be impactful and then in May we would be looking for feedback on board work for the upcoming year especially within planning for the June retreat so we can figure out what other board work we might be our community might feel like we are missing and at this point in time, I'd like to open it up for director questions or feedback.

Did you all talk about maybe adding or replacing with one virtual session for people who may want to attend online and not in person?

I don't remember us talking about a fully virtual session.

We could look to add one if we think there's significant need for it.

or have one of the four be somewhere virtual.

Will the in-person meetings be live-streamed?

It depends on what school that would live I think the tech folks may be able to tell us more but it would depend on the facility and the availability I think I would add though that having an in-person meeting with a virtual option it does make it accessible for community members to listen into the meeting but I think it can still be pretty difficult if you're dialed in virtually and there's a discussion going on in a room it can be very hard to contribute so

You can do breakout rooms in a purely virtual meeting.

Hybrid is always a little tough.

If you have a virtual one, you can use all the...

Everyone's on the same page with it being virtual.

And then I will say it's really hard to do hybrid and give the same access to participation to the people online and would require that one board director or a staff person which is an expense that I don't know if we have at our disposal would have to monitor that.

I also something I think about with board and community engagement is it's not a board meeting.

We're not taking action and there is I know everybody wants to know everywhere we are all the time but there's also something to be said for allowing a space where community members who come in person can participate without feeling that they're being recorded or monitored by people who are not also participating.

This is just over the scope of many years of different engagements that like there's some people won't participate even if they can come in person.

because they're afraid of being watched by other people who don't have the same kind of stakes and who may then take to Facebook and launch into whatever.

I mean, that's just a reality of...

and also people might have reasons for not wanting to be on camera for a lot of different reasons so I would my preference would be to to create a distinct virtual space if that's what we want to offer partly for logistics but partly for those other things is it would not be my expectations that these would be streamed because this is not the board taking action or making decisions this is a chance for our community be heard by us which we are not obligated to broadcast and in some cases maybe shouldn't.

Director Song.

Thank you.

I have two different topics I want to raise.

One, I'm excited about the idea of partnering of community-based organizations.

We have a lot of CBOs that I think do a really good job of recruiting people.

In particular, I'm thinking about the of the Chinese Information Service Center.

They're really good about getting people to come and participate in these kinds of meetings.

That said, I think that it will be important for us to think about having and maybe this is something that the new assistant superintendent for family and student support can help us with, coming up with a comprehensive list of organizations that work in our community and making sure that we have, you know, we're picking different partners to partner with on these events and kind of mixing it up.

My other comment is not specific to the board engagement.

It's kind of a broader question around the timing of May for the board work for the upcoming year.

So I would say that I, as the chair of the finance and audit committee, because we typically elect our officers in December, the president makes a decision about committees and committee chairs in January.

for the board we may want to consider doing some more of our planning for what kind of board work we want to do timed around in December so that when January the committees can kind of get going.

I don't know if people have reaction to that.

that part of it was just we were just standing up the committees, but also we were also trying to figure out what is the work we want to really refine the work that the committees are doing.

And it took a couple of meetings to get there.

Director LaValle, do you want to respond?

We had a little bit of discussion on the May timeline.

Do you want to chat a little bit?

Yeah, and please go ahead and jump in.

I hear what you're saying, Director Song.

I'm also a little bit nervous that pushing it back is going to be a really hard time for us to get people to show up and for us to, you know, get the engagement that we need and that hopefully in that May timeframe will be able to get it and still have it be actionable for going forward.

In the future, again, with a more solid policy on how we do this and kind of a more established routine around this that I think hopefully you're actually right that this would move back into the fall and late fall and early winter.

But I just don't know that we're there yet.

This is actually more of a comment about the timing of the June retreat.

I actually think that a better time for having a retreat could be December where we're really planning the calendar year work of the board.

I think having a May engagement session is fine because we're then giving an update to the community on the work that we're doing.

to date.

And also, I am excited of having an engagement session about the board work because I think a missed opportunity has been public engagement on the policy updates that we've been doing.

So oftentimes, policy is getting onto our board agenda and there's limited opportunity for the public to come and give us feedback.

We were trying to do that with committees that create more of a mechanism for the public to hear how we're thinking about updating our policies, but this would be another good opportunity.

and I think one of the thoughts that we had with May is that it's the end of the school year but then at the start of the school year so there's a whole bunch of planning that kind of happens in the summertime so being able to kind of take a break and get that feedback at that time I think is extremely helpful and I to the sort of policy thing perspective I do think we should have more of an engagement policy around what we want board engagement to look like.

I'm also not sure we figured out exactly what we want it to look like because last year we tried to do, you know, we thought let's try one every month and let's try this structure and I don't think we liked it.

And so I think sort of trying to figure out before we really put something into policy, what is it that we really would like this to look like?

I think is kind of important.

I don't think it's about whether we liked it or not.

I think it's about that it didn't get the community's voice heard in a tangible enough way.

And I think that goes to the second point where you the protocol for the feedback which I think is a really important part of this document which sort of talks about you know the themes discussed at these sessions, really carving out the time at the subsequent board meeting to talk about what was heard, the themes, and what we're going to be doing about those things.

Yeah.

I wanted to respond to Vivian's suggestion that typically, and I think we will be talking about this in the policy committee, that the cadence of the work you're talking about, Vivian, typically boards do use a January retreat to talk about their work for the upcoming year.

and you know Ben coming in in February and us kind of restarting a different committee structure push that out exactly as you noted but it would be my recommendation and preference that a January retreat starts with the elect you know the elected leadership the committee structure having a discussion even way back not way way back but like you know six years ago the we would elect officers in December and then at the retreat in January talk about committee assignments during the retreat.

and then start the work.

And usually the calendar was kind of already set, but it would be what's the content gonna be?

So I think a January retreat is a great time to say, okay, we have our, let's say we use this structure and we have our four tentative dates set.

We would talk in January, what's coming up this year?

What do we think is the most important for us to engage from the board standpoint with our community this year?

And then plug it in, but January, is a great time to plan that out and do that with the reassignment of whoever, as Vivian was talking about.

I just want to kind of thank the board for wanting, of course, to be engaged and just to make sure that we recognize that depending on how this goes, this might be a burden on the staff and so I just wanna make sure that we're being as cognizant as possible around the expectations.

I am your single employee, I just wanna make sure that if what you are doing is directing me to now spend a bunch of staff's time doing stuff, that's a lot.

and so I just want to be thoughtful around what the actual asks of staff is.

I love this idea of partnering with nonprofits because I think that would be a great way for the burden of work to be on somebody else.

But again, we of course, I of course as your employee want to support you as best as I can.

I just want to make sure that if and when any decisions are made that we're well aware of what the expectations of staff are.

Any other comment on sort of what engagement is going to be looking like in the upcoming year?

The only thing I will say is that so based on the outcome of this conversation I want to see what my understanding is and see if I kind of have it right is that it sounds like budget conversation, maybe two different meetings in North and South in February and maybe a virtual we can think about as it gets closer.

And then in May about the upcoming year sounds like what we all think sounds reasonable and that details about staffing and whatnot to be worked out.

And then I would, as a member of the policy committee, think that we would want to take this into advisement as we look at the, take your recommendations on the framework as we look at the policy update and our committee has kind of used this as a

I think yeah I mean it would be absolutely great if this can help you I also don't want it to be prescriptive as this is kind of again I feel like I'm an echo from the last conversation to where this is potentially an interim in getting us to kind of where we're going so if as you're looking at new policy and you're like hey this worked out this didn't work out well and we need to figure out something else then I don't want it to be so prescriptive that this is what you should be doing in policy.

It's trying to get us to a point where these are helpful and move us forward and can help direct us as the board into where our gaps are and what the community is thinking on some of these issues.

I think in terms of policy we also have the 2024 vision and values process and framework that we used and then the superintendent also which obviously those were both more like time intensive and you know I don't think that a regular cadence for board engagement is to do 25 different partner engagements for example as we did in 2024. but looking at how we structured those sessions and how we collected the feedback and then also 2025 and then this and we can then again presumably on the other side of February budget engagement and May kind of up that would be the opportunity for in January 20, 28 for that board to look back at hopefully a written policy and say, what of this do we wanna maintain going forward?

How did that go and be able to build from it?

But mostly I wanted to, you're affirmed what I was asking, so thank you.

And I think just to close this out, I'll wait a second.

Our superintendent still has his monthly engagements and I don't think this precludes us from from attending those and I think we should and I think the board offices is starting to include sort of what making sure that we know who's going to be attending those and keeping us organized there and also just to it's one of the bullet points in the additional engagement.

It doesn't preclude individual directors from holding their own sort of engagement sessions or office hours or meeting with constituents as well.

can I take one quick note on the superintendent engagements that says avoiding quorum I don't know that we have to worry about that so much as long as we just as it's announced that it's a potential quorum just to save on the I mean even if only two directors show up but if four directors show up it's only a problem if if it appears we are doing direct district business without notice so that may just be a shortcut to say it's a potential quorum anything else on engagement

all right we're moving moving along then so the next one is just sort of a cleanup on committees and I think I'll invite Julia to the table as well because she's really been working on the board production calendar so as we've added sort of back committees into the mix and and how all bar reviews and agenda setting happens it's sort of a a jigsaw puzzle, I would say, to put it together.

So part of this discussion is just to confirm the current committee structure is meeting the board's needs and intent.

So I'm just going to kind of read through some of the material and we can have a discussion about it.

So the first part is the first question is you know should every bar be reviewed and voted on by a committee so and I don't want to speak for the superintendent I will let him speak for himself but his expectation that he has said previously unless has changed that all staff bars go through a committee is that correct superintendent shoulder and let's just highlight the word staff bars

yeah we would like to know how the committees are feeling before we take it to the big show as it were so it is certainly our intent however there would might be emergencies there might be specific issues that we would want to go directly to the board but it is certainly our intent to get a pulse and to go through the committee structure

so then board sponsored items can get on the agenda per policy by either going through committee or by request to the president prior to agenda setting and one of the great things about this production calendar is it tells you exactly when agenda setting is so you know when you need to make sure you lobby to get it onto the agenda.

If committees do not wish to review a staff bar, I think they have the ability to have it go straight to the board, and it's the prerogative of that committee.

which bars go to which committee so this has sort of been a structure we've been working out committee chairs discussed capital funded bars go to the operations general funded bars go to finance and audit not all bars have a clear home such as annual plans and as we work through this process and see which doesn't have a clear plan board staff will work with the committees to see which make sense and we can evaluate at our next retreat if there are sort of questions or concerns about where different bars are ending up.

this is a kind of a question we've got do committees want to receive full bars or a bar summary current production timelines and committee schedule don't support full bars but we have modified and aligned for next year which is the important production calendar this document right here which will allow for committees then to see the full bars which is exciting if a bar either staff or board sponsored is not moved forward with a recommendation for approval by the committee what are the next steps and I'm just kind of summarizing what is currently in our policy so board policy states committees will vote to recommend the item for approval or move the item forward with no recommendation committees may not prevent an item from moving forward to consideration for the full board Again superintendent expectation is that if a staff bar is not recommended for approval It will be pulled from the regular meeting agenda revised based on committee feedback and brought back to the committee be going going before the full board and

Again, this is the best laid plans of mice and men.

That is the idea that we would do this, of course, in the event of an emergency or an event of some sort of thing that we need to override.

We would respectfully request the ability to put it on the agenda.

But it is absolutely our intent to go through this process.

Quick question?

No.

OK, then can you wait?

Okay so the again the in our policy the board president could put an item on the agenda during the agenda setting and any director can move to place an item on the agenda during a board meeting and I just want to make clear it's a regular board meeting there are different rules for special board meetings So you can make them you can move something to the agenda during a regular board meeting Yes, yes, you can move to place it on the agenda and then the board votes and it may or may not Yes, actually make it onto the agenda.

Yes.

Yes, but you have the option to try you have the option to try and if you have Three other board directors who also wanted on the agenda then it will go on the agenda board sponsor can determine next steps for bar if it does not receive a recommendation from yeah so then the sort of next step staff will create the updated timelines work calendar to make this possible Julia is going to hopefully run through this production calendar a little bit but I think it provides a lot of clarity for timing so Julia is it more of a discussion question or

Okay.

Great.

Thank you, President Topp.

And I do want to shout out Kiri Marding, who is actually the puzzle master behind the calendar that you see in front of you.

So as President Topp indicated, this production calendar will allow for all staff bars to come to a committee we have noted on here the kind of lime green is when agenda item requests are due so that would be both for staff and for board directors for consideration by the board president and superintendent at agenda setting, which is the black box.

So typically agenda requests would be due on a Friday and then that following Tuesday is when agenda setting would happen.

The committee meetings would be scheduled two weeks before a regular board meeting.

So some time during that week.

We have been working with committee chairs and staff leads to determine some regular days and times of the week that committees will be meeting.

But this would allow for the committees to take action on board action reports that would be coming forward in the regular meeting.

and allow for any necessary changes that would have to happen if there were edits to the bars based on committee feedback to happen that next week so that we can post material seven days before the board meeting.

So it would go committees one week, then posting for the full boarding the next week on that Wednesday, and then the regular board meeting is the following week on that Wednesday.

so kind of a three week cycle there.

You'll also see on here special meetings and those are the kind of darker green just so folks get a sense of where committee meetings and special meetings may be happening.

There are some months that are going to be busier than others.

With that cycle of committees meeting two weeks prior to a regular board meeting, there are also some months where you will actually have two rounds of committee meetings in one month, so September, and April, you have committees at the beginning of the month and at the end of the month because of when the regular board meetings are falling in that month.

So just a flag that there are gonna be some pretty busy months here.

And then also the yellow is when final materials are due to the board office.

Again, this is more for the staff side of things, the staff bars to make sure that we are receiving materials, enough in advance that we can get them to the committee.

So typically the Thursday, the week before the committee meeting would happen is when we would get materials into the board office from staff.

So this is more intended for staff workflows, but also to give the board a sense of how all of the pieces are going to fit together.

and where there's going to be some overlap of meetings for you all during the year.

I think that's the important part because Julie hopefully flagged some of the places where there will be more meetings, specifically committee meetings, you might feel extra workload for board directors with sort of the process and the timing that we have here.

So with that, open it up for discussion.

Director Rankin.

Please nobody take this personally This is a real misalignment of board time and staff time and what our job is and how we wanna spend our time and what committees are for.

Committees are not to review recommended actions that are coming from the superintendent.

Committees are to do the governing work of the board, which sometimes may include some bars, but if we have every bar go through a committee, that is all the committees will do.

I have been here before, it's a waste of time.

And it forces the board to be responsive to what the staff and superintendent have requirements of, not what our direction to the district is.

So instead of like the committees, I understand the need that if something's gonna go through a committee, we need to time it with the regular board meetings.

this sort of a misalignment in tying these together.

The policy committee is doing work on policy to add capacity for the board's work.

Anything that the policy committee finishes and recommends will come to the full board when the policy committee is ready to recommend it, just the next meeting.

If we have the operations committee focusing on facilities and levy and all they're doing is approving, looking over bars, that is when the work has already been done.

that is also the fiduciary responsibility of each and every individual board director.

So a bar by definition is a board action report, which again is something that Seattle's made up.

Other people don't have board action reports.

When the board is required to take action, it is to approve work that the state requires us to oversee that is happening in staff or that we require in our own policy that's brought to the full board.

the committees, the finance committee should not just be reviewing contract expenditures, the finance committee, and we just had a really great meeting this week, is talking about budget development and monitoring the district's behavior in finances and whether or not that aligns to the big picture and it meets the obligations that we expect.

If what we do now is tailor our work to when the superintendent is required to turn into something in OSPI and we get it two weeks before that, that's gonna drive the whole work of the board.

I don't wanna get into a whole thing about the committee structure, but the purpose of committees is to serve the board, not to do much of busy work.

So the reason that the committees and we never have had a time where there have been no committees of the board we did not eliminate committees we have had committees of the board as long as anybody can remember every year forever with the attempt at a governance structure that would focus the board's time more on board work we freed up time in committees by recognizing that most of the work that went through those committees was actually for the full board to approve and didn't need everybody's sitting and picking through each contract.

Some of them do need, my preference would be the assumption that things that are required for board approval mostly go directly to the board, mostly on consent agenda because they're required approvals and it's our responsibility as individual board members to review each of those before we vote on the consent agenda and to pull anything that we might have questions about.

For meatier things like the whole year's budget, obviously we're gonna place that as a discussion and action item.

for other things that are not, you know, oh yes, you said you were gonna spend money on this contract and you did spend money on that contract.

We see it, got it.

Those are going to be bigger conversations.

I would suggest that if there's something that's coming to the board for approval that the superintendent or staff is thinking like we think if this is a good interpretation of what the board is directing in policy, but we have some questions, absolutely work with the board president and the committee chair to bring that through a committee.

But if all we say is that two weeks before the board is going to be asked to rubber stamp something, they'll get a chance to see it in committee when it's too late to do anything about it.

That takes us back to how we got to a dysfunctional place that I hope we are moving out of and not returning to.

And so we have established these new board committees to focus on Expanding and adding capacity for their very critical works of the board Not so that we can spellcheck board actions that the superintendent before anything comes to us for approval, it should receive a recommendation from the superintendent about whether or not we should approve it.

We can disagree.

But like, and a lot of this is on the board.

Part of the reason that it evolved in that way was because the board was not keeping updated with providing its direction to the superintendent and policy so many superintendents have had to say I have no idea what this board thinks about this because the policy is from 2008 and so what I'm going to do and this has been so damaging we have had literally had staff people say well I just hope for people will vote for it.

that's crappy and so what we want is for the superintendent to understand what direction we have given and for us to be able to use committees to go deeper into our role in oversight and and the kind of projects that need more grappling with not to sit and go through things that we have to be required to approve with the individual should be like that's something we this is in addition to we have to do that anyway

I totally hear what you're saying.

I think that there are plenty of things that don't need to go through committee.

Who makes the determination of what is big enough to go to committee and what isn't?

Isn't that the committee right now?

They get to decide how much time they spend on these different bars?

Director Lavallee.

I can answer that, but I also wanna highlight that director Song is also waiting to talk.

And I don't wanna go down a rabbit hole with that either.

Yes, a little bit, but at the same time, there is there has been the pressure to make sure that we are reviewing all of these bars and that if we don't make a decision like if we don't it's not I want to be careful about how I state this if if the committee hasn't recommended it then it goes back to the superintendent and he may or may not bring it to the full board at that point to his own discretion Well, the president would have to agree.

Sure.

So it goes back to that.

Whereas I know there was the vote that we had on the technology expenditure the other month that went to our committee.

It had a robust discussion around it, which centered more on technology policy, which we really were unsure about and how that expenditure happens.

And so we decided to not make a recommendation at that point in time.

It did go back and did come to the full board, but there was a lot of kind of question about whether by not making a recommendation it would be coming to the full board and if it would be coming in a certain timeframe that would make it too late.

And so I will say it put us in a really rough spot to have some pressure to make a decision on something that we didn't feel like we had adequate information for.

so I'm somewhere in between where I don't mind as the chair reviewing some of these bars because I think some of it is beneficial at some point in time to make sure that we have some oversight on some of this however every single bar coming to a committee I don't think is realistic and even within that if we decide to not make a recommendation or something.

You know, I'm not sure we're at a point where it can be everything going through the committee because we do get into a state where Liza's talking about where we get overwhelmed with the amount of bars coming to us.

And especially because some of these meetings aren't set up in a timeframe that we have the actual bar to read.

And Director Song, hopefully I'm not stealing from you here, had some opposition in this past operations committee meeting where she was pointing out and rightly so that she was being asked to vote on something that she hasn't read the full text to.

and so this calendar hopefully changes that.

Hopefully.

The real question here is these are all staff bars, right?

And this is not a rule that we've created.

There are lots of ways we can get bars on the, or things onto the agenda.

This is not a policy we've created to the superintendent that says all bars have to go through the committee.

This is a rule that he's created for staff bars.

So I think that's part, Part of this is a conversation of that.

Then it becomes sort of the committee's responsibility and or the superintendents to say the staff, the committee is not going to take this bar up.

I've got to find a different avenue.

I also want to highlight again that director song is still waiting and might have you had asked me a question.

I was going to hold it until after she had gone.

So I just want to make sure that she gets a chance to weigh in on as well.

Okay.

Thank you.

I kind of have the same reaction as Joe, which is like, how would we I kind of would rather we have more things coming to the committee and the committee can make a decision like if we just want to package batch approve these things to go to the consent agenda.

I think In spirit, I very much agree with you, Liza, because the time is very precious.

We want to be focusing on the things that are really going to have impact.

Approving a final acceptance is not terribly impactful.

That said, I would just say, just from my experience as being a board member, a new board member, you don't get a lot of training.

You're kind of jumping in feet first.

And my observation the last time go around when everything went to the consent agenda, there wasn't a lot of time for learning an observation about how we should be considering and evaluating things that come before the board.

Even something as routine as a final acceptance, when it's on the consent agenda, there's really not an opportunity to talk about, well, what is the final acceptance?

So part of what I liked about as standing up standing committees, in particular the finance and the operations one, we've got evergreen work, that routine work that this district is constantly doing, and it kind of creates this ongoing structure.

Board members are going to be cycling in and out.

We're going to be cycling in and out of committees.

It kind of creates this evergreen structure where we know we're kind of processing and reviewing things.

There's opportunity to ask questions if they're needed.

And that's why I do think that's really important.

We just try to give committees as much opportunity to look at things because there's just, if it's on the consent agenda, it's really too late for that.

But I do want to recognize it's like time is precious And I think it's really incumbent on the committees to come up with how they as a committee Really want to prioritize their time when it comes to the bars that they will be processing Go to superintendent shoulder and then director rankin So, you know, I really appreciate the conversation because the last thing I want to do is give more work to the board for

I mean, hey, if you let me just pass all these things, that's great.

But the problem for me as a superintendent is what I don't...

Hang on just a sec.

Sorry.

We can shut the door.

Thank you.

The reason why I suggested this way is because I want to make sure to protect the district and the board from bringing something to the full board that there are problems with for instance when i sat on the new york city school board there was this big contract about testing and we knew that it was going to be politically fraught but because it went to committee first and we could discuss like are we going to support this or not then it allowed us to go to the full board knowing that there was a support there what i don't want to do is have something that we do need your vote on and it doesn't go to a committee, it goes straight to the large board and we don't even know what the problems are.

We can't even address it, right?

So having these committees, that's where we talk about it and if we say, wow, the board really is pushing back on this, we're gonna not even bring it to the full board, we're gonna redo it, we're gonna restructure it, et cetera, et cetera.

So I think there's a lot of importance of why a committee needs to exist, especially for bars or votes, you can call it whatever you want, that we would want the board to take action on.

However, I certainly hear the fact that I don't want it to be perfunctory.

If there are bars that are always kind of part of a consent agenda, it's just accepting the fact that a building is built and like we're getting the keys, then I would ask that the board figure out what bucket you would just want to put that in and we could have Fred or Richard or somebody just say, well, these things go over here, but at least it goes to the committee that says, yes, it's construction.

We know.

No problem.

It takes five seconds.

That would at least give the district some protection over something that's going to come to the full board without knowing, oh, wow, maybe there's some issues here.

We should have restructured it.

That's kind of where this is coming from.

Director Rankin?

I just wanted to add to Vivian's comments which I really appreciated and I will say that when I saw the agenda for our finance committee this week there were a whole bunch of bars on it and I had this moment of like oh my god here we go and I thought the way that we handled that as a committee, Vivian and you as chair, was I felt like an appropriate and prudent use of time.

So however we can sort of embed that into our practice I think is what, I mean obviously I'm carrying like PTSD of previous practice and I always get nervous that we're just gonna go back to that because you know of the history of all of this but I did think that that was how we how I just experienced that in the Finance Committee was didn't feel like overly burdensome and we you know even made some notes in the in the meeting of hey if these could all be numbered that would allow us really quickly to make a motion saying that we recommend numbers 1 through 14 go to consent agenda that we recommended this so as we're thinking this true what and as we in the policy committee look at our kind of governance structure policies and a board handbook.

I really appreciate how we're able to have this conversation.

I think if we were in a space where we could have had these conversations more productively and collaboratively three years ago, three four years ago we would be in a different place now so i wanted to just appreciate because i came at that a little bit hot just appreciate that we're talking about how do we how do we make this work and my interest too is how do we put some safeguards and process for also future boards to be able to continue to make progress so um but i appreciated your comments vivian thank you director mizrahi yeah i think i'm thinking about this mostly through the lens of the policy committee

and it's hard for me to imagine like what the sort of trivial staff bar would be to go to policy committee, but if there were one, if it was like some new state thing and it was just with some language cleanup that we need to do.

having the ability to either say okay we're going to devote a full four minutes to this at the beginning of our of our policy committee meeting or even like as board as committee chair to be able to say you know what like let's just send this straight to the board you know that and it's going to go on the consent agenda that seems like we do have some that are designated as required approvals that are really like it has to come before the board and we have to vote on it but like

We're not changing anything.

And it's more of an oversight.

It's like the state's requiring it to make sure that the board has eyes on it.

It's not actually saying, hey, board, do you like this?

So I'm wondering, too, with our bar, and we've talked about this a little bit, with the bar process, how we get more refined in our agenda of what type of items different board actions are.

Because our current state treats it as very, like, you have a board action.

and it makes everything just as important as anything else and that's actually not how those items work.

So how we could, there are definitely types of approvals that we could kind of code into the board action report process.

And I think this is true for all the committees, but I'm just thinking about the policy committee.

But like, I think being more planful at the beginning of the year.

Like, okay, this is going to be the cadence of what the policy committee does.

We should know, ideally, well in advance, like, okay, you're going to be bringing us this thing, it's going to be trivial, we're going to spend five minutes on it, and then it's going to go to the consent agenda.

And that's an easy way to handle it, I think.

I would like to go back to something Director Rankin said a few minutes ago as well, that the committee's recommendation of a bar doesn't exclude the fact that members should still be reading over the items on the consent agenda and determining whether they want to pull something still.

I hear you with that and that action should still be an expectation that we have of one another but having some of these go through the committee I think is ultimately a good thing I just don't know that every single bar needs to go through a committee and so I think it's kind of a little bit discretionary being like hey these are a good fit for the committee these are within the scope we'd like these to go through this committee and get this recommendation or hear their feedback on them beforehand and one of the things that I did say in the committee meeting this past month too when we were going through this new format and thank you so much to the staff who have created this new summary format that was used in both committees in this past month I think it went really effectively but within that as well we you know we're looking at it and we should be able to work ahead in the committee so we are kind of looking at a time frame and I'll speak from the operations committee as well that we are kind of going like these are the things that we know are going to be planned ahead of time we know that these sorts of contracts are going to be up for renewal we know that these sorts of things are regular so that we're not getting something that is hitting us that we're just completely surprised by and having to be really reactionary too.

So I hope, because right now I think that's a little bit of the, unease that's going on here is that some of the stuff that's coming up, it's like, okay, well, what is this?

Why are we doing this?

And my hope is that as we get the committees going and as we get to a more effective board governance structure that's working for Seattle Public Schools, that we get to the point where we're working ahead and the Operations Committee and the Finance Committee really has that muscle in there to understand what's going on and be ahead of these issues.

Okay, we'll wrap up committee discussion and we're 10 minutes early.

I'm super excited because next week, please look at there is an earlier board meeting.

We get to swear in our student representatives.

So please make sure you're here on time.

usually there's cake or cupcakes or something I'm shaking of heads yes for celebration so that will be a ton of fun but there being no further business to come before the board the board special meeting is now adjourned at 7 20 p.m.

thank you everyone for board directors we are going to go into closed session so please stay for that