School Board Meeting February 13, 2018 Part 1

OK welcome to the February 13th 2018 legislative board meeting.

It is 416. The roll call please.

Director Burke.

Director Mack.

Here.

Director Patu.

Here.

Director Pinkham.

Present.

Director Harris.

Here.

Director Geary is home with a sick child.

Director DeWolf is traveling and Director Burke is otherwise engaged with his other real job and will be along shortly.

Now before we go to the Pledge of Allegiance I'm going to take full advantage of the chair's prerogative.

Assistant Superintendent McEvoy front and center please.

Those of us including the entire school district who have been getting your daily updates on the bus strike cannot thank you enough.

for your well above and beyond work and the fact that you do it with a smile on your face.

You truly are flight of the ball and we your board of directors thank you.

And you know that although I'm receiving these and I thank you very much for that it took a team to put that work together and I would be remiss if I didn't talk about our wonderful transportation team that was able to respond to things, legal, communications, our ELL department, special ed, coordinated school health.

Although I wrote the snapshots they were part of the background work of making sure that we were supporting our schools and families.

And I have to say our schools were truly heroes because they really stepped up to the plate to make sure that almost all of our children were able to get to school each and every day.

Thank you.

Delegates please stand.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

Superintendent Nyland we have recognitions.

Take it away sir.

Thank you.

All right thank you.

February is the month we celebrate the value of career and technical education.

And we've been doing a lot in the district trying to figure out how to continue to support and uplift that work.

We do offer five comprehensive pathways for students and we're privileged tonight to have Jane Hendrickson our CTE program manager and Dan Golesman our CTE skills center principal.

to introduce some students to talk a little bit about CTE and the impact it's had on their lives or will have on their life.

Thank you so much Dr. Nyland for your comments.

We are super excited about the work that we are doing in CTE to provide opportunities for students to explore and prepare for their careers.

We look forward to our plan for promoting and expanding this work in the coming year.

As you may know two of the unique characteristics of CTE is the direct career connection including leadership development and work-based learning experiences.

We have invited two of our students to share their personal CTE stories.

The first is Max Graber, he's a sophomore at Ingram high school who demonstrates outstanding leadership as a state officer with FCCLA, one of our career and technical student leadership organizations.

Welcome Max.

Thank you for having me here today.

Hello my name is Maxwell Graber.

I am from Ingham high school and I'm currently serving as the region for vice president for the family career and community leaders of America or FCCLA.

I often say that the best decision I've made so far in high school was during my first week when I changed my schedule to incorporate family health.

My first career in technical education course throughout the first weeks of the class I did my best to keep quiet and let my peers take leadership roles as they were offered.

But it was very difficult for me.

As the autumn months ended and the first freeze of winter came, my true personality appeared.

I soon found myself raising my hand frequently, participating as much as I could, and leading our group projects.

There was one class period that I remember in particular.

We were reviewing an article from the previous evening's homework.

After every paragraph, Ms. Marburg would stop, ask the class for a summary of what was said, then pan the room.

And each time, to her dismay, I was the only student with a hand up.

Now most teachers would have been upset with my constant interest in speaking but Ms. Barber was different.

She accepted that I wasn't trying to be a distraction rather it was my tendency to ask questions to increase my understanding.

Instead of shutting me down blocking my voice out she found a new way for me to speak.

She encouraged me to find ways to be a leader inside and outside of the classroom.

She suggested I try FCCLA along with other leadership organizations at Ingraham high school.

I attended my first FCCLA meeting the following Wednesday.

Through FCCLA star event program I was able to deepen my understanding on CTE.

Last year I participated in the environmental ambassador event.

During this event my partner and I completed a climate change community service project while studying its effects on the environment.

Through this experience I learned the value of teamwork, paying attention to detail and much to my dismay the need to not wait until the last minute.

This year I was a part of the Ingraham high school parliamentary procedure team.

We ran a mock business meeting under Robert's Rules of Order, a skill that will stick with us for life.

With the education of Robert's Rules of Order that I had received from FCCLA, I passed the parliamentarian's test and now proudly serve as a national parliamentarian.

I look forward to attending this year's FCCLA State Leadership Conference in March and running for another state office.

I hope to use the skills I've gained as a parliamentarian to further my understanding of leadership and being a state officer.

Without the first CTE class I would never have attended that first FCCLA meeting.

Since taking family health I have taken several CTE courses and can't imagine my high school career without the valuable real-world experiences I have learned.

I will forever be grateful for the opportunities I've received and cannot wait to see where CTE takes me in the future.

I'm Maxwell Graber and it was an honor today to tell you my CTE story.

Thank you.

Good afternoon school board directors.

Thank you for having us.

Dan Goldsman principal for the skills center.

Today I just want to introduce Malcolm Dunston.

Malcolm graduated from our amazing aerospace manufacturing class at Rainier Beach high school last year.

The skills center there with teacher Chris Names who is also here in the audience today.

Malcolm is going to be, oh and I want to say Malcolm is now working at CSR Marine down in Ballard and he is here to tell us a little bit about his experience and his plans from here.

I just want to thank Mr. Names for the opportunity and one thing I learned was I I'm sorry about this.

One thing I've learned in the aerospace program, the manufacturing class, to help me at CSR right now is probably forklift, using a forklift.

And mechanic work, a lot of mechanic work and glass, taking small part engines and putting them back together.

My future plans right now are thinking about going back to school to become a merchant marine.

Yeah, that's all.

Can I ask you a couple of questions?

Yes.

Thanks.

So how many folks are you working with right now where you're working?

About 30, 30 folks.

What kind of a living wage are you making?

What do you mean by that?

How much per hour are you being paid?

Uh, 17.

Okay.

That's well more than the minimum.

And are you working alongside folks that have been doing this for decades and keeping up?

Yes.

Way to go.

Thank you very very much.

Thank you.

I'll just follow up.

I know from talking with Malcolm earlier and from hearing from his boss Scott down at.

Sorry Scott.

Anderson thank you Scott Anderson who is a great partner with our program.

One thing that Scott has said repeatedly at large group meetings like this is how amazing it is the work ethic that Malcolm brings to the workplace and that students coming out of that class Chris's class our aerospace class know what to do right away don't have to be taught multiple times and Malcolm is a great example of that.

He just gets to work right away.

You may recall too seeing Malcolm he may look familiar.

He was featured in the Como news report last spring and down at Seattle Maritime Academy and even said like this this is something that could be a great fit for him and so I encourage you to go back and look at that news report.

Thanks.

I just want to say thank you to Max and Malcolm.

These are just two of the student voices that make us excited about what we do every day.

We appreciate the opportunity to highlight our programs this evening.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Appreciate the update on current technical education and all the good work to continue moving forward.

And I think somewhere later in my comments I have the announcement with regard to summer internships coming up.

So thank you.

No student comments.

So all right.

So well actually we want to do one more thing.

We wanted to invite the board members down and take a picture with with our students and with our CTE team.

So if we could do that and then I'll continue with the other celebrations.

One, two, three.

One, two, three.

Thank you.

It was really good.

Let the record reflect that director Burke has arrived and we do have our student.

Presenter here this evening.

Welcome.

If you would introduce yourself tell us a little bit about yourself and your school career and point out the things that we as board of directors and senior staff on the wall here should know from your perspective.

Thank you.

Okay.

Hi my name is Young Jang and I am a senior attending Ballard High School.

I am the class vice president of our ASB and I feel like I'm very involved in our school like activities.

I play I've played four years I'm going to play four years for our soccer program.

Hopefully be captain this year.

and other things like lean crew it's a I'm pretty sure a lot of Seattle schools have it but it's where we like upperclassmen are grouped up with 10 or 11 freshmen and we guide them throughout the whole year and I really love doing that because like me interacting with other like underclassmen is a fantastic thing to do so helping them ease their way into high school is a wonderful thing to do and that's various various like clubs of like multicultural club all that stuff is exciting too.

That's that's pretty much about me.

And what was it?

If you were king and you have a pot full of money what would you change about your school career and your school?

Oh more funding for like photography on the arts because I've like experienced like my four years of high school when I'm in photography or like ceramics or drawing and painting they're always like needing money you know so they're always underfunded and they're not really looked gratefully upon so I'd spend it on them.

What are your post high school plans?

If you know.

I've applied to seven colleges and I'm hopefully going to get into one of them and I'm going to be going to college for four years and I want to become a corporate lawyer when I grow up.

So exciting stuff.

Thank you.

Thank you.

February is a month to celebrate many things.

It's Black History Month and we've just had a week of celebrating Black Lives Matter in partnership with SEA and our Seattle Council PTSA and others.

And then this morning had the opportunity to be at South Shore celebrating African-American parent involvement day.

I think it's about 20 years old and South Shore has been participating for the last 12 years so really appreciate the opportunity to draw attention to our students of color and our theme with regard to eliminating opportunity gaps and creating a welcoming opportunity for each and every one of the students that we serve.

February 5th to 9th last week was national school counseling week.

And I think we particularly as we've gone through the last of counselors and at Scott's request appropriately Elizabeth Peratrovich recognition day is an Alaska holiday on February 16th this week.

celebrating a Native American that helped make monumental changes in support for Alaska's indigenous peoples.

And I need to know more about her work.

In my time in Alaska it was Molly Hooch a student that sued the state and was successful in getting equitable schools in all of the rural villages that weren't there when I was there.

So.

Appreciate that suggestion and that recognition.

And Lunar New Year comes on February 16th.

We have several of our schools that will be celebrating various times some have already done that some will be doing I think I got an invitation to a March 1st event.

So we wish our students and families a wonderful and safe Lunar New Year as we enter the year of the dog.

So as I usually do I'll give a brief highlight on some of the on the three strategic planning goals that we have.

First is our educational excellence and equity work.

On Saturday we had all of our race and equity teams together 180 people and Keisha and Concie leading that work.

Thank you to SEA for partnering with us in that work and we continue to learn from and try to how would I describe that.

There's there's many many many things that we wish we could could do in support of equity and at the same time we want to build organically and we want to have teams in each building that Own it, get it and will work within their school building to continue to make good things happen.

So that's challenging work and each school is different but we certainly appreciate the efforts of those teams now in 42 of our schools I think.

Second is improving systems and we normally hire about 400 teachers each year and this year thanks to the increased number of teachers for K-3 we expect to hire 550 teachers so thank you to HR and lots and lots and lots of other people who participated with them.

in a in a hiring fair.

They've already participated in several and I don't think it's in my whether it is 175 teachers signed contracts.

So hiring early as we've said before we want to hire early and we want to have access to the best young talent that's that's out there and so we look forward to welcoming what is that about a third of the new hires that we still need to hire.

I want to pause and introduce Assistant Superintendent JoLynn Berge.

She has a financial report that's required by board policy that she will introduce and if she wants to give us an update on the budget that would be appropriate as well.

Berge assistant superintendent for business and finance.

Luckily I can say that we have talked about most of this.

Talked about most of this in our budget work sessions.

So most of this information will not be new.

This presentation is required by board policy.

It's also required by RCW so that we can say that we have formally in a board meeting talked about the financial year end that just closed so school year 16 17. So what I can say is that we ended the year as expected.

We knew that we were going to have more revenues than expected and expenditures consistently fall under what we budget because we always budget capacity for additional expenditures.

So we've talked about some of these numbers in the work session and specifically we went over the ending fund balance in granular level detail at a work session as well.

So with that I probably won't talk more about this unless you have additional questions.

We just we go over the revenues.

We've talked about the revenues in those work sessions.

We've seen charts like this in the budget work sessions as well that talk about the revenue expenditures by object.

We've talked about those.

And then we go over the fund balance which you'll be more familiar with because we did a lot of work during a work session on the ending fund balance and the different categories of the ending fund balance that made up the difference to total the ninety four million dollars.

Assistant Superintendent Berge a couple of close out questions if we could.

Yes ma'am.

Is it true that the legislature completely funded the McCleary mandate?

No I was going to get to the more exciting part of the budget update.

The.

The legislature has not funded McCleary completely so they came out and for most districts they gave a big increase in the compensation dollars that are coming from the state allocation as an offset to that they reduced our local levy dollars.

For Seattle Public Schools there is still a gap remaining for our classified and our certificated administrative staff.

Certificated administrative staff we fund less units than the state allocates and most of those positions are principals.

Right so we use most of our CAS our certificated administrative positions we fund principals.

The other areas that they have underfunded are special education.

We can quantify that.

Nine nurses.

six and a half family support workers are funded for us.

They fund one and a half social workers, psychologists about the same number.

So there are several areas that we can go down a whole list to talk about where they are still underfunding.

As well as while they've touched and done a good job on K-3 class size funding the rest of grades 4 through 12 have not yet had any reductions in class size and they're still funding a class size of 27 to 1 for grades 4 and 5 in the same buildings in which now they're funding a class size of 17 to 1 staffing units to two kids.

Unless unless there's other questions that would complete my report.

All right thank you.

Closing out the improved systems we do want to give a rousing thank you to our legislative delegation and I guess the legislature for finally moving on the capital budget from last session.

So our legislative delegation has done awesome work partnering with us to identify the needs that we have as a district.

The state formula in construction as in some other areas is not terribly kind to Seattle and so we appreciate the legislature's recognition of the rapid enrollment growth that we've had in Seattle and their extra efforts to help fill some of that gap along with the voter approved taxes by making special allocations for construction.

Most notably coming up soon is the work at Magnolia.

The third goal is school family and community engagement and thank the board for their work session last week.

I had a work session on 24 credits more to come on that.

A little behind on Implementing the state requirement our students current ninth graders this year fall under that 24 credit requirement.

We are providing some additional funding for next year to help any students who lose a credit this year try to catch up so that they can stay on track to graduate.

Heard the report from the ethnic studies group and excited about moving forward with some pilots there and the research that shows that that's one strategy in San Francisco that's working to help close their opportunity gap.

And then the K 5 ELA adoption CCC appreciate the good good work that our staff has been doing along with teachers and principals in the schools to make that happen.

On Friday actually at our last board meeting we handed around the little board book Bara Af Somali alphabet book and James Bush and I and some other staff as well as the mayor for Seattle.

And many of our community partners including parents on the task force had a wonderful celebration recognizing the parent groups that were responsible for helping make that happen.

And talk about touching arrows I mean I can't do this justice I do want to figure out how to write it all down and capture it and there must be At least a half dozen organizations that partnered in this, the library foundation, the city of Seattle, Seattle Public Schools, Seattle Housing Authority, this parent task force and talk about being creative, finding a way to fill a need, helping with identity safety so that students have a book in their library that is in their language.

And I learned something along the way.

So Somali students are third largest language group with 1700 students in Seattle whose home language is Somali.

Topics of board community interest we recognized Peggy and the transportation team and others were certainly very grateful that the school bus services resumed.

We thank the patient for our families for their patience.

We thank you to our parents.

I think 12000 students affected by the by the strike.

And I think that we were down about 250 students year over year from a year earlier.

So Herculean efforts by many many people to make sure that students did get to school and much appreciated.

And then lastly just a few good news item Ballard high school wind ensemble is receiving statewide recognition for their excellent work.

Ballard high school director of choirs Courtney Rowley is being honored with a top award statewide.

I mentioned earlier the summer skill center courses are available online.

Applications are available online for free summer courses.

Online enrollment is open through Friday as parents make their choices for where they'd like to have their students go to school next year.

And we're continuing with dialogue.

You may remember from a year ago with our two tier busing and trying to figure out how to make athletic.

busing work for our teams without impacting lost school time any more than was absolutely essential.

So exploring quite a few creative options to figure out how to get that work done at a reasonable cost and saving school time, class time, seat time for our students.

Lots more in the newsletter in the back table it will be posted in the Friday update on Friday.

I guess one other item that I would mention Mayor Jenny Durkan will be giving her state of the city address at Rainier Beach on the 20th next week which is Midwinter break so we won't have students.

I guess we congratulate our students and families and much of our staff will be taking that week off and we welcome Mayor Jenny Durkan to Rainier Beach to give her a state of the district city.

And all the news media that will be there so they can see the condition of Rainier Beach High School and why it needs to be number one on BEX V. I like how that worked out.

Thank you.

OK we have changed our standard agenda so that we have two minute reports from our standing committee chairs and those would start now.

Who would like to go first?

Director Director Burke C&I.

So since I came to the meeting late sorry I figured I'll take the first pass at committee report.

So again we haven't completely formalized this structure so we're making it up as we go along but I was going to go with kind of a past look back and then a look forward.

So we had a curriculum instruction committee meeting on last week last week on February 6th.

And topics that were covered two of them you'll see today the board action reports on middle school math and the Seattle preschool program service agreement.

Good discussions on both of those.

We got to hear an update on the progress around our MTSS implementation.

And particularly interesting to me was the five year curriculum adoption plan.

Kyle Kinoshita has done a lot of work with his team to develop out a longer term.

We'll.

We'll call it a draft plan recognizing that things can change but at least it provides a vision as to what curriculum adoptions instruction materials adoptions could look like.

For the next five years should there be hopefully there will be budget allocation and it really helps us prioritize it and understand when those fit into our regular work stream.

So that was super interesting and I think the board has been briefed on it also at the beginning of the the English language arts work session.

We also heard about the great work of the research evaluation department and they have a districtwide annual plan for the program reviews that are being carried out.

They presented that information it's aligned to policy 2090 program review and it's summarized the work that's being done for several different areas.

I welcome folks to take a look at that.

And one of the areas that they provided us a really detailed work plan on was the English language arts adoption study.

Our team is going to do a comprehensive evaluation of the implementation of the new ELA curriculum the new instruction materials for that.

And then the probably the most lively as if the whole meeting was lively of course but we had a rich conversation with the science team about the high school science course alignment and instruction materials.

And I think came out of it with a better understanding of the work that's been done by the the teachers to in collating a lot of different instructional resources.

And I think the committee provided guidance around how to braid that work together how to integrate that work together with our policy requirements for instructional materials adoptions.

and came out of that in a better place.

Looking forward at our work plan for March we have a appropriate for this month the career and technical education team is working on the annual plan that is looking to come forward before the committee March possibly April depending on how that goes but it's currently scheduled for March.

We have a standing agenda item for 24 credit updates for the high school implementation.

So we'll hear the progress that's been made there.

And then under instruction materials this is an important one.

We will be presented with the recommended adoptions for this year.

And.

for the committee to evaluate and provide feedback on.

So which which content areas are going to be looked at for the adoption budget for this year.

And then we'll talk a little bit about policy 2090 as well the program evaluation and assessment.

Thank you very much.

Director Mack.

Ops chair.

No sir.

No questions.

This is a report out.

Thank you.

Operation committee meetings are Thursdays either the first or the second last this month it was on the first Thursday February 1st.

We have lots of capital projects moving through the process.

Each capital project tends to have at least five or six times they come through the board for approval at various stages which is a large portion of the work that we do at Ops.

As some of you may have noticed in the last few board meetings a long list of operations.

Board action reports that were coming through.

We only have I think three today so that's light.

We're expecting because of the workflow for capital projects that over the next couple of months it will be a long list each month of.

various BTA, BEX and other projects that we're going to be talking about and approving etc.

One of the things we've talked about is trying to streamline those and kind of bundle some of the things that are going through for example if it's coming through for final acceptance maybe having that all on one board action so that we don't have to spend quite as much time because I'm not even sure exactly how many projects we have going right now.

But we're growing as a city and we're growing as a district and we have more building to do so this is our new normal.

So we also talked about the work plan going forward and it is incredibly full as part of the BEX V planning.

We have to create a facilities master plan so that work has been started and we are going to be talking more about that at the next operations meeting as well as we have a special work session with the full board on the 28th.

to talk about BEX and facilities planning and other pieces that dovetail into that.

So our next operations committee is going to be talking about what that work session is going to entail and looking forward into BEX V which Most people may know but in case you don't it's our next capital levy that will enable us to bring on more capacity and renovate buildings in a six year cycle starting the building would start in 2020 and then go through 2026. Currently we're working on BEX IV on the next one that will come out is BEX V. And that'll be on the ballot in February of next year.

Presumably.

And we also are going to be getting an update from staff around the capacity management solutions that we're having to put in place for next year.

We're overcrowded a number of places and we're having to add portables and move them around or you know do some various things and.

Not all of that planning was finalized when we approved the funding for it.

I think four point three million dollars is going into managing the capacity challenges for next year.

So we'll we'll get a little bit more information about exactly what we had to do and where those portables and so forth ended up.

So lots of planning around buildings and lots of building and approving the funding for it.

Thank you.

Director Pinkham Audit and Finance sir.

Now Qeˀciyéẁyéẁ I wasn't at the last Audit and Finance meeting as I was out sick and Director DeWolf chaired that meeting for me today but I will give an update on how we're progressing.

Well we had Assistant Superintendent Julia Berge come up here and present her annual budget report.

Thank you on that and we're continuing working on the budget.

I am new to auto and finance and it's every month is just check how we do and how's the budget going.

It's almost similar to ops because we also look at the budget and ops as well.

Appreciate all the work that she's doing.

What we have coming up according to our work plan includes looking at the rental lease of our properties, also remind our directors to complete your Head Start training that I think was sent out a while ago.

I still have to do mine so a nice reminder to myself as well.

And reports for any grants that we have that is going to be due.

And I've got to get used to all these different fiscal years, financial years and Let's just go January 1st to December 31st whatever happened to that but there's different calendar years you have to go through.

We do have Wednesday next quarterly report.

I was trying to find the date for it as well.

But we have that on the calendar to come up.

Thank you.

So March 5th the next audit for our quarterly report coming up.

We also had a meeting with the state auditor's office for entrants to do our annual auditing of various programs so they came in and presented to us.

I was just in on the call in for that meeting.

So we do have a list of what they're going to go through.

Meeting with Andrew Medina on a monthly basis to update me on how things are going internally with our schools.

He is short one auditor.

We hopefully we get to fill that soon so we can proceed with things and thank you to Mr. Medina for picking up the slack as we are short one auditor because he said he's picking up what's missing from from that position right now.

Tonight we'll see introduction of repealing some board policies on anti-retaliation as they're also covered in other policies just kind of hopefully reducing what we have on file.

Other than that I don't know what else I can add without going into details that I can't go into.

There you go.

And Andrew Medina is our internal auditor who is a board employee supervised by the chair of Audit and Finance Director Pinkham.

Just for some context.

Director Mack because Director Geary is not here if you could make a short legislative report update please.

Much appreciate.

Thank you President Harris.

So the legislature the state legislature is still in session.

We've passed a number of the bill cutoffs.

Our staff and Director Geary and myself continue to communicate with our delegation about our priorities our legislative agenda is focused on the budget facilities and a number of policy bills.

For example 65 31 is a bill that's focused on the school construction assistance program and fixing some of the formulas there and we're in support of that and we're supporting it moving through.

It's moved out of the Senate Ways and Means and has maybe a little bit more More to go through to be adopted but it's on its way.

We also continue to communicate around the fixes to 2242 in our budget.

This is a statewide issue.

That bill number is 6362 in case you're wondering.

There's a number of other policy bills that we're also monitoring and Director Geary will be going down I think this week to testify on something.

And she'll also be attending the Council of Great City Schools federal legislative conference which is in late March in Washington D.C.

Thank you very much.

So I'm up next with executive committee executive committee consists of myself director Burke as vice president and director Geary as a member at large.

One of the things we did was change the format of this meeting so we can report out our committee reports.

And please understand that our committees are public committees.

Our meetings are held in the back boardroom here.

You are more than welcome to attend.

And frankly that's where some of the nitty gritty and decisions are made and the robust conversation is had.

So you are more than welcome to attend those meetings and it gives you a better sense frankly of the crushing workload that our staff and we as directors get to embrace for all the right reasons.

The exec committee Superintendent Nyland and Deputy Superintendent Nielsen have been meeting in the last month to back map major initiatives.

Lots of calendars.

Lots of punch lists of all the very different things we need to do.

To get those arrows as Superintendent Nyland says to work together as opposed to be going elsewhere.

Also to coordinate our committee structure so that we don't have silos so that we do a better job of communicating with each other.

and designing efficient thoughtful ways to do our work.

We're making progress and frankly it's kind of rowdy and it's a blast in the sense that you can see the fingerprints on your work a month later.

And that's that's very exciting because some of our things obviously have been stuck whether due to lack of money and again the crushing workload.

I also give you an update with respect to the superintendent search.

We have had exceptionally good assistance from Erin Bennett and from Nate Van Duzer and from the communications team.

The announcement for the superintendent search is out.

It will close on February 28th after a competitive bid process.

We hired Ray and associates to assist us.

We expect to interview semifinalists March 22 and 23. We expect to interview finalists Probably and this is still to be determined the 20 excuse me the 29th and 30th of 2018. We are still working through a process for community outreach and engagement.

We we hear you we hear you loud and clear.

We want to have the ability to hear from folks and to get feedback.

But frankly it's a little touchy and dicey given the sensitivity of superintendents that are looking for new positions or executives of the ilk that we need to hire whether or not and how deep that community engagement will go.

But certainly the finalists will be promenaded if you will throughout the city.

We will make arrangements for our labor partners to meet with those folks for the press for city government etc.

This is a heavy lift and we take it exceptionally seriously and frankly hiring a superintendent may well be the most important statutory and fiduciary job that your board of directors have.

And it is my sincere hope that we have a superintendent that will take us from an extraordinarily good foundation of hard work and leverage us for the next 10 years.

And frankly I'm very excited about it but I also appreciate that it is stressful for folks and as do my colleagues.

And with that we are moving to the consent agenda.

Do I have a motion to approve the consent agenda?

I move approval of the consent agenda.

I second the motion.

Do we have no items on the consent agenda Mr. Van Duzer?

The minutes of the meetings.

I thought so.

You're taking me off my feed.

I'll lend you mine.

You can have it.

Would anyone like to take anything off of the consent agenda?

Seeing none.

Those in favor of the consent agenda please say aye.

Aye.

Those opposed nay.

OK.

Time check.

We have 5 0 5. We have now arrived at board comments.

Public testimony starts at 5 30. If we do this right you can even take a break before public testimony.

Who would like to go first.

Director Patu please.

Good evening.

I want to say thank you and congratulations to Max and Malcolm for their success in CTE.

I believe that CTE is a wonderful program to introduce work experience to all our students who actually partake in CTE.

And I appreciate that that we are actually making progress in our CTE programs.

So thank you to our instructors who actually are responsible for promoting our CTE programs and continue to provide those opportunities to our students.

I also wanted to say.

To.

to our student that actually that's here.

Thank you for joining us.

It's always a pleasure to have a student come and share with us what they're doing at their schools and what is your future plans for when you leave high school.

So thank you and we appreciate your presence.

I wanted to also say thank you to the schools that actually were going through some process and had a chance to visit some of those schools and I really was amazed by how calm the administrators in that school and how everybody was working together to make sure that everyone was actually on the same page.

So thank you so much for continuing to provide opportunities and watching over all our students within our schools in the southeast area.

And my meeting my next community meetings will be at the last Saturday of this month.

Which is actually on the 24th of February and my meetings are usually at Rock and Tour in Seward Park and it usually starts at 930.

Thank you.

Next up is Director Burke.

We'll we'll stay with the theme of short and sweet.

So thank you our guests for joining us on the board today.

And you know if you're thinking of pursuing corporate law I suggest you sit down with Director Harris President Harris for a cup of coffee.

She's got all the all the funny stories the good stories the ugly stories be a really interesting conversation.

I'm just saying it would be an interesting conversation.

Around the theme of CTE month and our guests that I missed, Max and Malcolm, I did want to thank them for their enthusiasm and their willingness to share with us what they are experiencing.

I say again that we are a city or region on fire for this concept.

Figuring out how to do it you know we regularly I find myself in rooms with people saying wow how do we do more of this?

How do we fund this?

How do we build these programs?

How do we get students engaged?

How do we remarket it?

How do we find curriculum for it?

How do we get industry partners?

And that's actually where I was before I came here was a meeting with the chancellors of Seattle College and city representatives to try to understand well what are the lines between the city services, how is the city helping the district, how is the district supporting the city, how does the Seattle promise braid in with the work of Seattle colleges and how are we providing all that information to our high school counselors so that when our kids are saying What are my opportunities for my future?

They have clear guidance established pathways robust programs.

So there's a lot of work going on in that.

And it's it's super super exciting which is why again coming back to the CTE annual plan that's coming to the curriculum instruction committee next month.

That's where we'll see some more of that gelling a little bit.

I wanted to congratulate Boren K-8 STEM they just won an award pre-K-8 STEM I believe they've been identified as a lighthouse school.

And I don't have all the talking points that say what that means but they've essentially been selected among the state as you know one of our beacons of science and technology for the program that they've put in place.

I want to put a thank you to the staff for last week's curriculum instruction work sessions.

We had three back to back work sessions that really sort of showcased a lot of the heavy activity that the staff and our teachers have been doing focused around our core mission curriculum instruction.

We had our K5 ELA adoption The ethnic studies report which was just an amazing change of tone from what we've done in the past with the district as far as creating things and giving them to schools.

Now we're co-creating we're in a model where we're engaging with our educators our community and having them help us co-create materials.

It puts us in a really strange place as a school board where we have a policy that governs how we adopt materials.

So it's wonderful that staff, community, board are sort of going hand in hand in that trying to figure out well how do we create it but then how do we vet it and make sure that it has all of the elements of instructional materials that form the foundation of that work.

And then the third work session on secondary revisioning or our high school and 24 credit work.

And what that emphasized for me and I just want to be public about appreciating it is how how much the Seattle Public Schools is embracing the concept of instructional materials as an integral part of our formula for success.

Essentially it's a tool that the students, the educators, the coaches, the people doing professional development, the families can use as a common a common resource and I've been told many times no textbook is perfect.

And I think that's absolutely true.

But recognizing that at least forms the basis of what we're trying to build.

It's that common element that that then our educators can innovate on top of.

I am unfortunately going to have to cancel my community meeting coming up on February 17th because I'm going to be out of town next week.

I had a work commitment that sort of pulling me out of the country unfortunately.

But I have a meeting scheduled for March 17th that will still be in place.

And if I can reschedule the February 17th one before then I will possibly for later in February but March 17th certainly.

And I welcome anybody to come and join and and chat it up.

Thank you Director Burke.

Director Mack or Director Pinkham who's next.

Director Mack.

I think I prefer going after the comments because I get invigorated by hearing what people are bringing to us and have a chance to respond.

It's a little harder to.

You get a second bite of the apple.

OK OK great.

Well then I'll make it really short.

I want to say a really big thank you again to staff for all of the hard work and the board and the community for engaging in the boundaries process around Lincoln.

I'm really grateful for coming to resolution on that and I got a lot of emails and feedback saying thank you for listening.

So I appreciate it sounds like folks feel like we're listening and I.

I'm grateful that I'm hearing that feedback.

And if you don't think I'm listening please email and hopefully we can I can be responsive and that we can be responsive and the district can be responsive.

So I'm just really grateful that we made it through a challenging process and looking forward to next steps on opening Lincoln.

In a couple of years as well as one thing I didn't touch on in the operations committee.

Overview is that another thing that I.

Want to get on our work plan is. getting the timeline set for all the various boundary changes that will have to happen for 2019 based on some capacity issues or for example Magnolia Elementary is going to be opening and so that's going to be impacting folks.

So I'm hoping that in the next couple of months we can have some clear clear timelines for when those community engagement processes will be happening when when those conversations will be happening and what what's what's going on.

I'm not sure anybody mentioned this yet but open enrollment is going on right now.

School choice school choice.

So if you're interested in looking at a school that's not your attendance area school those applications are due by Friday February 16th.

So there's a lot of great option schools and opportunities that that may be a good fit for your family.

And so I encourage you to take a look at those and submit your application.

And I have a community meeting on February 24th as well as Saturday at 1 o'clock.

It's at the Magnolia library.

I have them scheduled out for the next few months are on the website as well.

And I apologize that they're all in Magnolia but that was the only place that they had available.

So I hope to mix it up a bit more in the future.

Thank you.

Director Pinkham you're up.

Katsiau.

Good evening.

In honor of I guess Elizabeth Poratowicz I also want to say and I apologize to those that did the closed captioning because they asked me how to spell Katsiau but this time I'm going to say which is Tlingit for thank you as well.

That's my wife's heritage and she's the one that helped me kind of introduce to who Elizabeth Poratowicz was and the contributions she made.

to help and are to introduce the first comprehensive anti-discrimination bill in the United States and this was up in Alaska in the 1940s.

I also want to thank Maxwell and Malcolm for coming to share their experience with our CTE program in honor of CTE month.

This is a very critical program for us because we do need to understand that we are a high school that is both career and college ready and CTE helps with that career and Getting across the point that this career isn't a terminal thing for our students isn't like they graduate then they go and get a job.

That's just another way also to get access to higher education.

Listening to Malcolm saying hey I'm going to go on.

This isn't just it but I want to go beyond what I have right now and I appreciate our presenters bringing the students here so we get to hear the student voice.

And it's young.

Correct.

Thank you for coming and sharing your story from Ballard High School.

Joining us up here and seeing what it's like.

Seems like this is a very strange one because it's not as crowded as it has been in the past.

But thank you for being here.

I also want to announce that the Urban Native Education Alliance is actually having its 10th anniversary.

They've been around helping support our native youth in our schools here for 10 years and they'll have a celebration on Tuesday February 27th.

I believe it's Robert Eagle Staff Middle School.

Some of the things that they've done and I appreciate what they've done for in particular personally my child, my children, one that's now graduated in college another one is still going through the Seattle school system but other Native students and those that are in our Native community.

Last year they got to learn how to sing at the big drum and actually the instructor gave them a song and now this year they actually made hand drums that will stick with UNEA but the students now get to learn how to play the hand drums and they've had Roger Fernandez come in and help them with designing it.

We've had people come in and help with blessing the drums so students are getting that hands on.

portion of the culture for living here in a big urban city sometimes it's very hard to see that and providing that for them is very crucial.

And also appreciate the work that Gail Morris and her crew does as well.

And we referred people from both our programs back and forth to provide our support.

My next community meeting will be Friday Friday Saturday February 24th from 1 to 2 30 at Northgate library.

So Rick we're kind of close if that's where you want to make it up you're more than welcome to ring the lasagna.

Is that what you suggest?

Because I know sometimes we have some crossover with our community so if you're interested in joining just let me know we can get the word out.

Thank you.

Director Burke.

I realized in my comments that I omitted a really important message that I actually just heard today when I was describing the event that I was at earlier today.

And throughout my soapbox or rant around CTE I did not once mention our commitment to equity and gap closing.

And so I wanted to own that and try to channel somebody who's who does the walks the talk even better than I Sheila Edwards Lange the president of Seattle Central College.

She emphasized this point in reaching out and talking to folks in industry.

The concern in industry is a skills gap.

And so they're saying well how do we train?

How do we provide these particular skills?

You know we have to hire from people outside Seattle to fill the skills gap.

So we have we have our equity gap.

We have our opportunity gap that that we're identifying as our challenge.

And so when when you overlay those two things and the employers are saying well we just need to fill these skills.

And we say well we have this commitment to finding students that are not being reached and bringing them to the table.

It's an interesting dichotomy and so I want I just want everybody to kind of think about that a little bit when we're engaging with with our partners that are thinking about things in terms of a skills gap.

We have to help them make that shift.

Because if they're looking outside Seattle for students if they're if they're investing their resources in in schools higher education in families outside of Seattle it means our students don't have that many opportunities.

They actually miss out on those opportunities.

So I think It's really, it was a really kind of a wake up moment for me to hear the way she said it which was much cleaner than what I just described.

But I wanted to share that with the board and with the world.

Thank you Director Burke.

Perfect segue last but hopefully not least.

Director Burke and I were invitees to a very robust afternoon last Friday at Amazon headquarters.

We sat at the education table.

There were four other tables homelessness business etc etc.

And Sheila Edwards Lange in fact was quite eloquent and vociferous about the equity gap in Seattle.

And it was beyond a pleasure to report out at this meeting with any number of muck mucks.

We had the president of the Seattle Pacific University there.

We had the interim president Peter Lortz of South Seattle College there.

We had folks from Microsoft.

We had folks from the UW computer science etc.

But but the best part was being able to report out that we have a new middle school math curriculum.

They about stood up and clapped.

They really appreciated that responsiveness that we are addressing some of the decades long issues to prepare our students We talked a lot obviously about money.

We talked about things like preschool and investments and how expensive it is now but how expensive is it if we amortize those costs.

Really rich and thoughtful discussion.

Director Burke I wanted to know when you met with the college folks were you able to get a commitment for two to three rooms at South Seattle for middle college high school.

We got to double down and get back up there.

It is unconscionable to me that we're not there.

They are expanding.

They will tell us that they don't have any rooms but our needs really aren't that great given the return on investment and saving lives in that program.

My community meeting is this Saturday.

Three for three.

It's lasagna time.

Three o'clock.

High Point library staff is absolutely welcome to attend.

And if our community members can see that y'all are real live human beings and have senses of humor and understand their plight you're more than welcome to.

And again we'll feed you.

So please do come.

We're pretty rowdy but we treat each other well.

Several things that are causing extreme concern for me.

A child was hurt on South Cloverdale Street going to school at Concord.

We have got to double down with the city much like we did on the horrific Alki intersection to get some more traffic calming devices and or lights and or flashing lights up there.

We cannot afford to lose a child.

And this is a longstanding longstanding program.

And we've shown that we can do it with Alki.

The John Muir alleged sexual assault.

Please hear us extremely clearly.

Everybody on this dais and in this building and throughout our entire school system are devastated by these allegations and we are taking it exceptionally seriously.

We are working with the Seattle Police Department to the extent that folks are irritated they didn't get a list of the schools right away.

Please know that that came at the direction of the Seattle Police Department.

So as not to mess with the investigation.

But everybody is on high alert.

And if you see grooming behavior if you have a gut feeling Please please please report it.

It is unacceptable to look the other way.

And we appreciate everybody's hard work on this.

And please appreciate it comes at quite a psychic price for our staff as well.

We are meeting with Triangle Associates who has been retained by both the city of Seattle and Seattle Public School District to continue working on the memorandum of understanding with the city.

They're good folks and stay tuned probably in 60 days time we will have a joint meeting with the Seattle City Council and the Seattle school board where we can discuss topics of mutual interest.

And we look very much forward into resetting that relationship and building on the memorandum of understanding which is frankly historic after decades in this city.

So that is moving along.

Thank you.

to the Highland Park Elementary School.

They threw one heck of an auction.

And this is a high need school.

And thank you as well to the other West Seattle schools that partnered with them to staff the auction and to assist.

What's going out What's going on out in District 6 with respect to mutual assistance is a really beautiful thing.

And it's beyond wonderful to watch relationships develop.

And I would suggest that this is a model where we can walk our talk.

I'm very concerned about the high school science adoption and look forward to watching that be a lesson learned.

and a leveraging opportunity to work together to understand each other and to give our students the skills that they need.

And Mr. Krull I need to let you know if our staff does not have Adobe Pro in order to do their jobs I don't understand that and I'm hoping for a response to my email on that aspect.

Our staff needs tools to do their job.

And Adobe Pro is used in every business office in this city and in this country.

And I don't get it when we have BTA funds so that one's on my list.

And last we have a Hall of Athletic Hall of Fame celebration on Thursday at the Washington Athletic Club.

It's privately funded but I'm especially excited to go because Pat Bostrom a West Seattle native was a world ranked tennis player a Chief Sealth International High School grad will be inducted into the Hall of Fame.

And I've known her since literally before I was born.

So I can't wait to go clap for that.

Those of you all that are interested in it.

Hall of Fame Thursday February 15th Washington Athletic Club.

Thank you very much.

And we've got a two minute stretch break before we start our public testimony.

Bye!