##VIDEO ID:k1hwlVHJShw## I'd like to call to order the special meeting of the Boulder Valley School District Board of Education for Tuesday January 21st 2025 board members May attend and participate in board meetings by electronic means in accordance with B bbsc policy BME and state law Laura can you please call the rle Chavez here medler here nnick Quin Lin AA here Raj Paul here Sergeant anger here thank you i' now like to turn it over to Jorge Chavez who will be reading her land acknowledgement this morning buo Apache BD IND thank you Jorge I'd like to remind everybody that the mission of the Boulder Valley School District is to provide to create challenging meaningful engaging learning opportunities that alter and Thrive and are prepared for successful civically engaged lives good morning thank you for joining us we're glad to have you here to observe and participate in our meetings at this time I'd like to see if there's a motion to approve our agenda for today move by Beth seconded by Jason Laura can you please call the role Chavez yes medler yes nnick yes Quin linua yes Raj Paul yes anger yes motion passes the first item on our agenda this morning is public participation specifically addressing the Grove Elementary School charter application the board respects the right of the public to speak on matters concerning the operations of the schools the board does not endorse the comments of any speaker and reminds all those who speak that you are responsible for your own speech speakers will each have two minutes to speak they will see a yellow card when they have 30 seconds remaining and an orange card when they have 10 seconds remaining if you run out of time or would like to share additional information you may always email the board board members this morning we have one um individual providing public comment that person is Ben vager vager is it on okay thank you uh thank you uh Boulder Valley School Board uh I'm here to speak in favor of the Grove Elementary being a charter school application and I like to introduce myself as Ben vager I have lived in Broomfield since 1975 moved there um and have been there ever since raised a family there and now I have grandkids all these kids have gone to Bell Swan elementary school so I'm quite familiar with the school and um I've been active with the school uh since 19 2019 I think it was I went on the school board so when I went on the school board I identified right away that we had a school that had some real strong issues as far as the building was concerned we had a lot of work to do on the building it was built back in the 60s and it had some strong issues that was going to cost us a lot of time energy and money and so I promoted let's look at building a new school let's go ahead and tear down what we have and build a new school for the future that started the ball rolling and we started moving that direction and then as we move that direction we started talking about how how uh important it would be to have a grade school so we started introducing the idea of a grade school for all the way up to the fifth grade as you know some of these parents go through a lot of it's very difficult to move from bellan to the next to the next uh school so anyway um I am on the building committee right now and I'm also on the cap cap capital campaign and we're looking forward to building this building for both schools and I want you I um like to have your support so we can go ahead and get this grade school going and basically make it a charter school thank you very much for your time thank you that concludes public comment for this morning on behalf of the board I'd like to thank you for taking the time to to share your thoughts on Grove Elementary we have one information item to discuss board members this morning um is bbd's policy framework and with that I will hand it over to Dr Anderson for introductions thank you board president Raj Paul good morning board members excited to be here with you this morning to discuss our revised and upgraded and updated policy framework uh with me this morning of course Kathleen Sullivan district attorney and Chris bre our director of strategic initiatives Chris if you can go to the next slide board members uh this is a topic that we discussed as we were setting our goals my goals back in the fall uh to create a more systemic um and reliable framework in reviewing policies and so we've been hard at work figuring out what that would look like uh excited to present to you today the plan that we've created uh and with that I will turn the presentation over to Kathleen and Chris good morning board members so um I'm happy to be here with Chris our project manager project extraordinaire strategic guy who's going to make sure this all happens it doesn't fit on a business card but you get the idea um so we really have a couple of ways that policies come before the board first we have the prioritization process which you've now been through twice three times three times twice okay where the board identifies those policies that you wish to review or discuss that happens at the end of every meeting where board members identify policies and then you prioritize them in your twice a year sessions the other uh stream of policy that we need to keep flowing in order to meet Dr Anderson's goal and this board's goal of getting through all the policies every seven years is our maintenance strand so either District leadership can come forward as Rob Price has recently around closings and weather cancellations because there's an update that we need to make that's timely just to make sure it matches our operations or then making sure that we're getting items that might not be identified by the board or staff but are important to review so that we don't have anything left in our manual that says reviewed at the time of manual adoption or prior to 1969 um the board has three possible actions when these policies come forward one would be just repeal or retirement of something that is no longer necessary at the board level that could include a policy it could include your policy regulation or exhibits when we talk about policies for purposes of this review cycle since we would have to address each of those in order to retire review or move them forward I'm using that Term Policy to reference the policy the regulation or the exhibit so there could be repeal retirement we could be revising it to match updates in the law or practice or the board's direction or it could be initial adoption as you've done recently with neurodiversity anytime we're going to be revising or adopting we are typically going through that longer process of making sure that we have internal staff recommendations that we're soliciting Community input that we're really looking to see what our current practices and align that with any of the statutory requirements good morning board members thank you again for having me um excited to take on this work at this is a visual that we prepared to help um demonstrate the project workflow Kathleen mentioned so what you see on the right uh is not new that is the current policy work that the board takes on but what you see on the left is new that is going to be the concurrent workflow that we will follow that to meet the maintenance schedule of a seven-year plan so uh what you see up here is that uh as Kathleen mentioned we're going to go through each of those policies um we're going to identify where we can find some efficiencies looking at what policies are outdated uh referencing the current C ASB sample policies to identify where we can eliminate some redundancies wherever possible uh so that we can create some efficiencies within our current um policy framework which is uh some 380 policies um currently obviously it'll go down through um the same process uh getting all the way into board study where you will be able to take the board action that Kathleen just referenced uh if there's any feedback that needs to happen just as we currently do within the current process uh from the board we come back back we'll make those revisions come back to you again uh so the idea here is that if we feel like we can accomplish this with limited edits if it needs to be updated updated language um that we can move through those maintenance policies at a fairly aggressive Pace obviously this does not impact anything that you would like to prioritize or revise uh so we want to just be able to have two concurrent workflows that you guys can easily see so one of the things that we talked about for quite a while and that we have been able to implement is a more effective way to make the public aware of what policies are going to be updated and to have an opportunity to provide input both on the prioritized policies as well as just the general policy feedback so this is our general form board policy feedback if if the community or really primarily intended for Community has feedback on any policy this is a place that they can go make us aware of their public comments one of the nice things about this process is that this uses a smart sheet which is a way for this input to come in to be put on an Excel spreadsheet with the person their feedback when we received it and it makes it really easy for those more complex policy issues where the board really wants to see all of the public comment and how we've responded to it it really facilitates that process to be much more efficient all right and so the policy maintenance calendar I there's a hard copy in front of each of you board members so you could take a glance at that a couple of things I want to uh bring to your attention as a part of this process um number one the policy review calendar uh the policies are going to be coded by the the policy group itself uh this is just a highlevel timeline to be able to keep us on track uh you'll notice that some of the policy categories that have been more recently updated will be scheduled for later on within that policy calendar it does meet a seven-year timeline um and then the other thing that I want to point out is that the larger uh uh policy groups will span multiple quarters uh as we have upwards of 80 plus within specific or 80 plus policies within specific policy groups um so we do feel like there's going to be opportunities for us to accelerate in here we built in some flexibility for that uh but right now what you'll see in front of you is a seven-year timeline for that the last thing is that I just as an FY this is a calendar it's a draft calendar for us to be able to put policies in front of view board it does not assume that any of those policies are going to be taking action at that time we will obviously be waiting for your direction on that uh so these are goals that we will set to ensure that we can get the policies in front of you within a timely manner and meet those scheduled deadlines as a part of that superintendent goal um Alex and then I have a question yeah I've only been at this a year um can I guess uh one of the things we often do is talk about them in terms of their letters uh and if like a table like this is for anybody outside our team it would be great to do D colon whatever D is um and can you walk us through D A through J yes I can no I'm that point well taken I don't think everybody else speaks in the same um shorthand letter format so we're happy to do that first up for f will be facilities these are really um that we haven't touched anything I think in the policies in a long time so that's facilities and then next up would be Business Services that's the D chapter and E are our Personnel policies that relate to our classified staff and then Chris question here um sometimes we have policies that co-relate and commingle with policies outside of that chapter is your intent to bring like policies together in chunks both to maximize board efficiency and efficiently work through those policies even if the chapters are not the same yes it is that is 100% this is a guidepost for us in order to make sure that we're putting policies in front of apprpriate staff to get input in a timely manner but we will absolutely look at all of the reference policies uh and try to identify any overlap with an urrent policy framework and bring those together um similar to what we would do with prioritization of policies currently so that will that will happen yes great thank you Beth thanks for this presentation I have more of a comment than a than a question I felt like maybe it was more appropriate to throw it in there now I'm excited about the policy feedback form for our public um because I feel like one of the most critical roles we play here is in kind of condition setting right and a lot of that work is set through through policy so I'm excited that we're going to get more feedback from our constituents around that so thanks for doing that that's new correct we've never had this before that's new we we introduced it as part of the neurodiversity work we'd certainly been trying for it but we actually got it accomplished we're now making sure that it works effectively in Spanish it's been up just a couple of weeks but I think that it should as we're transitioning our website a little bit it should present in exactly the same way thank you I really think that makes our role and our job so much easier so appreciate that Jason sorry if I missed this but just on the feedback how how do we see the feedback is that like as it comes in or as we cover those policies typically the way I would present the feedback is we would attach the comments as part of the board item when you're studying so that you can get a sense as to what that feedback is for yeah thank you for the presentation well and I really do like that feedback form website I'm curious kind of um how it's advertised how the public knows about it what the time looks like and and do you get like a large runup say these are coming in next year or what's you I know it's new but kind how what's your thinking around that thank you so um I think that it really needs to be a few months ahead of the board always is my first take on that so we really focused on getting neurodiversity up because we knew we had public input we wanted to capture but my vision is that we would have sort of a three almost on base on deck and what's coming next so that people can anticipate when they would want to engage um what was the rest of your question horam so sorry oh how it's advertised thank you so now that um we've been able to share this presentation with the board we will work with Randy Barber and our amazing Communications team to identify a way to roll it out and make sure it gets the public attention that we need just to add on that I don't know if we mentioned it or not but the form actually does have a um it is currently live within on the policy framework and it the banner is currently on entire policy page so it's it's not just a hidden link it's it's actually front and center on the policy page but that would be obviously an addition to a full communication roll out I know Chris you said you kind of talked about how many policies we have currently you have a result populated that will show like how many we're going through but just roughly for the board it's this is penciling out to be about 20 policies a quarter and so as we think about workflow um I think we need to keep and other things that we're T taking on that um are not just additional things we take on to be mindful of of that and policy is a really big part of our responsibility it's one of the things we're required to do and some of these policies are exceptionally old and um ideally because you use those words that I really like about um making sure we're not having that we're being really concise and we're not having duplicates and we can Whittle away you know some of these policies and resolutions potentially and then the next board will have a much easier go of working with these as we as we create efficiencies within the process and within the policies themselves but I just wanted to let you know that that's really what that's looking like some of these chapters have a lot of very short policies so it's hard to say exactly how much that will count that it'll mean in minutes of our time but that's about the number of policies per quarter we're um anticipating so I just want to be make everybody aware of that I appreciate you putting that in context within all the other important things that need to happen in this room appreciate that J and just a week us per quarter not per syester so yes I just want to make sure I I just want sure I had the right math in my head yeah I'll note that we we will have quarters that have fewer policies that are reviewed we do I have um opportunities within bigger policy coded areas where we feel like we can um have larger groups combined in together uh so if we don't make 20 in a quarter there's likely we're going to make 20 more in in an additional quarter there's definitely opportunities for us to gain traction on that so Alex um given the how long in the tooth some of these are and the likelihood that we're going to hopefully you know take some from policies and turn them into you know lesser levels or some that we'll just get rid of um since we have four years of planning I'm wondering if we might like have a side an additional project that you contract out let's say that doesn't become part of your day work to have somebody go through all 800 of them or whatever and generate the list of obsolete so that someone might come back to us at some point and say here our 120 we're going to take off in one fell swoop they're all obsolete so it doesn't become just a regular thing where you have to spend the time and we could maybe just take a hunk of it off if there's that many that have never been reviewed it's one idea of sort of managing the workflow again to keep us focused on the um substance Dr Anderson first of all I want to thank Chris and Kathleen for organizing this um putting this in a place where it's it's manageable and gives us a path forward appreciate you know their leadership on that and um you know one of the strengths I think of our board work is the way that we prioritize our work right and so to Alex's point to the extent that if there is other priorities where we might want to expand during a certain semester and do less policy we could potentially do some of those things Outsourcing um I would like to to um move forward with this plan as it stands today to see how it works uh and to see um you know to understand how much board work it's going to take to be able to to do this I I we don't know that I mean we've uh you know this is an ambitious schedule uh hopefully you to Nicole's Point uh that you don't have 400 policies to review after you're done with this maybe it's 300 or 200 uh and that a fiveyear cycle is something that's reasonable so um I do think that that is an option I do think that that's something we could certainly consider at this point I would recommend that we go forward with this process and uh and know and understand that um if we feel like it's getting caught up or if for whatever reason it's interfering with other workers aboard that we that that we feel like is important that there are options to accelerate or Outsource or offramp um or slow down uh uh if if if so if we need to do that so board members any other questions or comments this was your last slide I I know we started asking questions before I was sure you were totally done with what you had to say there but yeah uh just want to cut anybody off this cold early morning um I'm excited policy you all know is something that I I really appreciate getting through and I and I like the fact that it's not just Kathleen's responsibility to deal with us I I really appreciate the fact I think to Alex's point about us being efficient and using a race time wisely like having this not just fall on Kathleen will help um and and hopefully that works well so thanks to all the staff for you know being involved in this early process and deciding the order of things um a lot of the early stuff will be things I think that the board and our community are less excited about facilities Business Services I know Bill really likes to talk about that stuff but the policies themselves are a little less exciting so I think um a lot of the policy work we hav't been engaged as a board has really been directly impacting our students in really significant ways and so our Eng with the policies the community engagement policies has been heavier I think for some of these it might be a little bit of a softer touch and um we'll just see how that goes so thank you for that presentation thank you for getting this all teed up and I look forward to you know it's said January through March so the first 20 policies on our plate thank you guys board members that concludes the information item for this morning our next item is executive session as indicated on the agenda today our final order of business of the school board is to discuss issues in executive session may I have a motion Jason I Jason anger make a motion pursuant to CRS 24-6 424b to convene into executive session to receive specific legal advice on the charter school application and renewal process do I have a second seconded by Beth Laura can you please call the RO Chavez yes medler yes nnick yes Quin Lena yes Raj Paul yes anger yes motion passes for members we will convene in the glacier room welcome back to the boardroom board members um as executive session has um ended that is the rest of our business for today so we are adjourned