Speaker 1: At 5:33 PM Do I have to hit the hammer? Speaker 2: Sure. You can't do it. Just Speaker 1: Everybody please rise. Speaker 2: Megan, mind leading us? Sure. Speaker 3: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Speaker 2: And since Speaker 1: It's a week memorial day, we'll have a moment of silence. Thank you. Can I get a motion? Are there any changes to the agenda? Can I get a motion to approve the May 27th, 2026 agenda? Speaker 4: I make a motion to approve the
May 27th, 2026 agenda. Speaker 2: I second call you. Aye. Speaker 4: Aye Speaker 2: Kyle? Aye. Jenkins? Aye. Speaker 1: Alright. Public audience Speaker 2: Don't seem to leave Speaker 1: Anybody? Nope. That's Glenwood Insurance. Alright, we're just gonna, we'll touch, we'll touch back at the end of the meeting, see if Speaker 2: They, that might be why she Speaker 1: Might be back onto the consent agenda. Can I get a motion to approve the May 13th, 2026 draft board minutes?
Speaker 5: I make a motion to approve the May 13th, 2026 draft board minutes. Speaker 1: Can I get a second? Speaker 4: I second that Speaker 2: Full you. Aye ask. Speaker 4: Aye. A Speaker 2: Aye. Thank. Aye. Speaker 1: Are there any changes to the consent agenda Speaker 2: At this time? Speaker 1: Can I get a motion to, for the approval of the consent agenda, Speaker 4: I may get a move, a motion to approve the consent agenda. Speaker 1: Thank you. Can I get a second? Speaker 5: I second. Speaker 1: Thank you. Speaker 2: Will you, aye Hasell Speaker 4: Aye. Speaker 2: Aye. Jenkins. Aye. Thank you. Speaker 1: Moving on Mrs. Nipper. Speaker 6: Buckle up because it's a lot. One of the things I wanted to be you to be aware of
that you may or may not be is that in the fall, well, as part of our continuous improvement planning and cycles and UIP, our language learner achievement and growth is a part of our goals to improve. And as a part of our CDE facilitated assessment, we became acquainted with a gal through a company named Seedlets. And her name is Marie Heath. And she has been spending time with Simone during the last few weeks doing an extremely comprehensive
program assessment. And the value in that is going to be, we believe that the net result next year is gonna be improved English language learner education and systems. And so I just wanted you to know that you're gonna be hearing Seedlets or you might hear Marie Heath and she'll be around, she did some PD with our coaches and principals that was very, very well received and we're very excited about it, aren't we? Amen. Very. She is extremely knowledgeable and also extremely practical.
So when you can get both of those, that's awesome. We got to attend senior awards nights at both high schools, which was just pure joy to watch what those kids have achieved and listen to all those scholarships that they've earned. And it, it's just a joy to see. We got to spend a little time at the encourage nurture challenge. Field Day Fathom was there with her family for the day working. And what our special education providers say for them is, this is the best day of the year.
It's just so much joy. And I wanna note that many of our high school students helped with the Encourage, nurture Challenge Field Day. And I said to one girl, you know, what do you think about being out here helping? And she said, any time, any day, I'd like to do this. And we also attended the second mini career fair for fourth graders out at the airport, which was super fun as well. And I also wanna point out that both coleridge and Rifle High school students helped with the career fair. And I'll say something about that in a minute. So as you know, we've attended a lot of things,
but there also is humming along talent shows, carnivals, field days, camping trips, choir programs, band programs, graduations, continuations. And I'm sure I miss something. And there is nothing like may tired for educators. So they are rocking it. And the last thing I wanted to finish with is that something really inspiring and also important I think to keep in mind where you might hear that kids these days are this or that, is that when kids are given the opportunity to help
and contribute in a meaningful way, they want to. And I just, I just don't want us to forget that. I don't want our community, forget it. I don't want the world to forget it because they find meaning in helping. And that is really cool to see because sometimes you think maybe that's disappeared in this day and age, but it hasn't. Yay. So yeah, that's my report. Okay. Speaker 7: Thank you Speaker 8: Kurt Kirk. Speaker 9: Alright, so for my superintendent report, I'm gonna talk a little bit more about
the exciting stuff that's been going on. Jenny got to hit on a lot of the great stuff that's been happening the last month. I think one of the things I'll talk about is that we had two incredible graduations. And so I think they were successful at, at both Rifle High School and at Coleridge. And I think the board for attending those, I think they, they were very successful. I really wanna call out our facilities crew and the staff of both of those high schools. I know the facilities crew worked tirelessly to move thousands up upon thousands of chairs to both of those facilities and maintaining the grounds
and helping parking and those kind of things. So they deserve a, a huge shout out for what they did to make it happen. The staff of both of those buildings did a lot of work to make sure that those ran really smoothly in that process. And so wanna make sure that they, they get the gratitude that they deserve in that process. Some other things that have been going on, Jenny and I and the team have been doing a lot of school financial update meetings. So we've been going around, we've made it to all 10 schools to talk to the staff regarding the financial updates,
where we are with, with finances, with budgeting, also to talk about possible directions for mill and bond if the board so chooses to go that direction. So making sure that the staff is aware of where we are, what that looks like and those things. The other part that's always interesting this time of year is that we have one foot in the 25 26 school year and the other foot in the 26 27 school year. And so we're doing a lot, lot of planning, lot of discussion, lots of things going on. And so one of those big pieces
that we're talking about is really planning for the, the 26 27 school year and focusing on making sure that all the schools are getting ready for this next school year. And one of the major focuses that we'll be focusing in on is really a focus on what we call instructional and behavioral way at each of the schools. So you're gonna hear a lot about that. That's part of our strategic plan and, and the academic component. And so you're gonna hear about that in the upcoming year about what each school is doing around
what is their behavioral way and what is their focus around what is climate and culture for each of their buildings and also instructional way. And so what is, what is instruction looking like at their individual buildings and what does that look like? So you're gonna hear that, that language a lot. And so I wanted to make sure that the board got to hear about that. But as we think about one foot and one year and one foot in the other, what I wanted to to not leave on is that we started this year about continuous improvement cycles and doing that. And so that starts with looking at our data from at the
beginning of the year, reassessing it at the middle of the year, and then coming back to it at the end of the year. And even though we don't have our CMAs and our SAT scores back yet, what we do have is we have our interim assessments that we take internally at the district level. And so those are i-Ready for the elementary through eighth grade and they are progress learning for the ninth through 12th grade. And so we did set goals both on our school performance frameworks and our CMAs and SAT scores, but we set schools at schools at the district level
and at the school level based off of those interim measures as well. And I wanna report out to the board a little bit where we are with that. So in K eight, but in math, we surpassed our goal by 6% in reading we're we surpassed our goal also by 6%. So again, kudos to our elementary and middle school staff for the amazing achievement they did there at the high school who uses progress learning to do that In math, we surpassed our goal by a whopping 8%.
And at reading we perspec we also surpassed our goal and that, and that was by a full percentage point. So we again wanna commend those, those educators for the work they did. The other thing that we did is we, when we were setting goals as a district, we really focused on two subgroups. One of those was our, our multi-language learners or ELL learners and also our special education students, because those were two subgroups that we, when we did our data analysis, if you all remembered, those were two areas that we called out
that we really wanted to focus attention on, make sure that we got extra growth on. And so in reading for our eng our, our multi-language learners, we, we saw an average growth of over 9% in reading Awesome. As a district in the nine through 12 in, in the entire district. So both for elementary through high school we saw that. And so that was way more than we expected in our growth. So very proud of that. And then, and we saw that not just measured through those two assessments, I talked about it,
we also saw it through our ELL assessment that the state, that that state requires us to do that we do have those results back. So we're quite proud of what that, what that meant. And so that really showed what the focus work that we did this year, and we're gonna continue to have that focus. And I think Jenny touched on that with seedlets that we'll be continuing to do for some step systemic work for that. And in special education we saw areas like reading, we saw 3% growth and math, we, we averaged a whopping 13% growth
for our special education students. With that all said, if I see you all are writing it down, you noticed I did not say a drop in any area, right? So these are, we saw growth in every area that we set a goal for. That's amazing as a district overall. And so your educators and the teams that support them did a phenomenal year of meet, not only going after their goals, but meeting and exceeding their goals that they went for. And so I think we feel very optimistic that they'll do that. I think the, the K five teachers, one of the things
that we have to recognize is not only did they meet those goals, but they did that while implementing a new curriculum. And so a lot of this was a lot of work from a lot of hard caring educators who worked incredibly hard this year. And so I just wanted to say that in our continuous improvement process as a district, that work that they're doing is paying off at least in our interim measures. And we hope to see that those same results here when we have our state assessments back. But historically, our interim measures have been pretty well aligned with
what we see with both the, the K eight assessment, which is CMAs and then what we see with SAT for our high school. So we we're feeling pretty good about it. There's always anomalies, there's always change, so we can't guarantee anything, but we're feeling pretty good that, that we we're gonna make the gains that we set out to do, we're asking our building levels to also analyze that. And I'll be working as, as our principals close out the year on what their UIP goals were and whether or not they attained those and do that as part of the continuous improvement process
that we implemented this year. Speaker 4: When you say growth, like a 6% growth in math in ELA or in math For in reading for middle and elementary. Are you talking about a 6% growth from where we were last year or like a base, like what the Colorado standard is? Speaker 9: So it, so for the K eight, what what I was saying is we surpassed our goal. So what the goal we set, we, we were above Speaker 4: And beyond. These are percentages of the goal we Yeah. We were setting. Correct. Speaker 9: Okay. Yes. So those comparative did know those,
these are not normative compared to the state because we won't, we don't have those numbers yet. We know those, Speaker 4: What, where do we know those goals? And Speaker 1: When they did the s pf stuff on very, yeah, when we went through the schools, we, they always talked about the SPF and they, do you remember the process? They'd come in and they would I I'll identify where, you know Yeah. Celebrate and then they'd, they'd really find out where they were lacking. Right. And they honed in. So that, I'm assuming those goals came out of that conversation. Speaker 9: Yes, that's exactly. So every school is different. Yes.
So what I'm reporting on is just the district and I'm happy to email you all those, you had those at the beginning of the school year, but it's, you get a few emails. So I'm happy to follow up. Simone and I will work with, I mean, I can find it, I'm sure think Speaker 1: It's be very interesting to get a breakdown of that same thing just per facility. Speaker 9: Yeah, well that, that's what I'm saying is I don't have those yet. That's fine. When you do, I'll be working with, when you do the principal, do, that'd Speaker 1: Be very interesting. That'd be Speaker 9: Cool. Absolutely. Thank you. That's all. We'll, we'll be doing that. So that was, that was were some of my celebrations that I'm really excited to share and, and,
and pass on to the boards with my report. Part of my, my last part of my report is that I do have a report from the district accountability and Kennan was going to do that, but he passed it on to his trustee assistant, who I'm going to pass it on to my trustee assistant to help me with that. Speaker 6: The, the thing that I really wanna say about DAK is that it has been a real joy to work with such a passionate group of parents who want the best for their kids and for this district.
They have been a joy to work with. They ask great questions, they ask a lot of questions, but they're thoughtful and they, it, it's really just been a pleasure. And every we, every meeting, we now have a community engagement, family engagement, bright spots time, so everybody talks about what's going on at their school. And some of those highlights were the arts and crafts fundraiser at CVE Highland did a field day fundraiser. KSE parents helped overhaul the school garden. ECE third graders were excited about their community. Day.
RMS sixth graders had their Thursday night thriller. Both middle schools were in the process of welcoming their fifth to sixth grade transitions. They were having activities related to that. So it was just, that's been a great part of the meetings this year is, is sharing those at every meeting and talking about ideas and sharing ideas. A d is starting to talk about recruiting new members for next year and the process to do that. They've talked about increasing their visibility like at the community fair and maybe the back to school nights and things like that.
I really wanted to point out that while they expressed that DAC does require a monthly time commitment, they felt that their part participation provided them a voice as well as insight into the operations and processes used by the district, which is the goal of dac. So that was great to hear Mr. Bang Hart has been keeping them updated on all the things we've been talking about financially and had a little q and a around that. And our, the greatest part of our discussion in our final meeting was a little bit of a presentation from our technology department about
where we're gonna, what we're gonna do, what we're not gonna do with ai and the concerns about scaling back screen time that are kind of a national conversation. And that was a very engaged conversation. They had a lot of questions and would like to engage more with that topic because there's just so many questions around it. And so they, part of our AI roadmap is that we do wanna get parent input and they also said that they want resources for parents that are interested in learning about the
impacts of AI and, and what parents can do, and also help in monitoring cell phone apps led into that conversation. So super engaged discussion. That's a big topic. It's really a little scary, I think, for a lot of people. And they're, they're wondering, and so what I love about our tech department is that they are, we have Roger who is deeply involved at the state level and giving input on what policies should be and that our tech department is deeply committed to practices that are really the best for kids.
And so, great meeting and that was the end of a year of what I'd consider to be excellent engagement with our DA committee. So it's been a pleasure. Speaker 1: Well, thank you Jenny Kirk. And then thank you. You delegated so great job. Sorry, I was just taking notes, the celebrations you mentioned, I mean, that's awesome. It's amazing, really. And I'll, I'll, I'll speak more to that on my board report. But moving on, we have board reports. Steve, do you, have you wanna go ahead Speaker 10: Committee? Should we do committees act together or No, committees are
Speaker 1: Next. Committees are next. We'll do that. So yeah, if you just do a board report now and then we'll move to committee reports. Speaker 10: Yeah. Busy time of the year of course for everybody. Graduations were great. I'd love to see one door, you know, that's kind of a special place in my heart for the under privileged and, you know, love that program. Love to see it being successful on lots of different levels. Even I was there in December and it's crazy to see in the last six months. Just, you know, it's evolving faster than I would imagine.
So hopefully we can keep that rolling. That's awesome. Yeah, beyond that, you know, it's, you know, end of the school and kind of crazy. So it's, it is what it is. Live with that teacher. So there's that at home as well. I don't feel it firsthand, but kind of. But yeah, beyond that, I, I don't have a, a whole lot to, and then I've got, we had a financial meeting, so I'll save my words for them. Alright, Megan, you have anything Speaker 5: Really engaged? This is my first year with graduations. Kind of jumped headfirst into that. It was great, great to see how the schools differed,
but also ran so smoothly. So I also have to echo the, the, the praise for facilities who just a phenomenal job. And like, I, I, I think, I think when we look at things, we forget that we are still obviously also in the business of customer service. And I would, I would say they met and exceeded in a lot of areas to provide a service for the community that really highlights all of the work that goes on behind the scenes.
People that came had a great time and there were no issues. So they got, they got to see what their students did and what the district did to make sure those students were able to, Speaker 10: And thank you. Cassie, do you have any? Speaker 4: I do. Thanks for those numbers. I think growth in anything that we do is excellent and I wasn't like, I was just trying to see how much we grow, right? I think it's exciting. And when I see that, I also was thinking about the graduation and the growth of all these kids when
they're up there on the stage, you know, walking across, some of 'em look like they're deer in headlights, right? Like, they're like the one girl, I I, she knew me and I was like, she didn't even know I was standing on stage. I saw her after the graduation. I'm like, you didn't hug me. And she goes, what? I'm hugging you now. And I was like, no, I was on stage. And she goes, you were. So just the growth that we see with these kiddos is just amazing. And I can't imagine being their teachers. I kind of put myself in a teacher spot looking at, you know, I taught preschool for a number of years
and seeing where they come from, right? And they transform so much over these 12 years. And I just wanna give a shout out to all our teachers and staff for all their hard work this year. Everything they've poured into these kiddos from kindergarten or even our preschool team all the way up. It, they've just really done an amazing job. And our numbers are saying it like our, you know, we have proof of what they are doing. On the same note as I read the consent agenda all the time and you see familiar names on there
that have been to the district forever. I do wanna give Dan Larson a shout out. He was the head baseball coach at Cole Ridge last year. They won a state championship and I didn't get to tell him congratulations last year during our board meeting for whatever reason. But I did want to give him a shout out with, well done with the baseball team over the years. I don't know how many years he has been coaching there, but it's been a long time. But he is retiring after this season, so I just wanted to give him a shout out.
And also to our maintenance facilities. They're not here tonight. And I asked them if they would come to our meeting, they're like, oh no, we get a shine the light over the summer. And I was like, oh, okay, but you're not coming to the meeting. Oh no, we have an eighth grade graduation. I'm like, oh. So that's why they're, John's not here is because they're setting up yet again, more chairs and going above and beyond. I like what Megan said about the, you know,
we're in the service industry, right? Serving all these customer service, serving all these people in our community. And I like that because that is really what they do. You know, they, they keep the schools looking good. They make all these events look amazing, making sure that everybody's taken care of and have everything they need to do and shout out to them also the principals at both high schools. I know that's a lot to oversee graduation. So shout out to both of our principals there. And I think that is it.
Speaker 1: Okay, we've covered about everything. Speaker 4: Sorry, couple things Speaker 1: Man, I start off, I I just couldn't be more proud of our district. You got, you guys killed it this year. And I, one thing we may might have overlooked a little bit was our successes and our growth. Yeah. But I mean, Simone, Jacob, you guys, that, that's your leadership. So thank you very much in helping the teachers shout out to our staff, our paras, all the people that allow our teachers to Jason, to succeed Jason, for always making sure we have at least something
Devin for finding people that want to come here and work. It takes a team. And the successes we're seeing now is, is definitely you guys, if you guys know it better than I do, it is definitely a multi-year process. It can be tore down very fast. So it's important to stay diligent, stay focused, never accept mediocrity like we don't now, but I mean, as we stand here today, but guys, I couldn't be more proud of our district. You guys are amazing. So thank you. Graduations are always a fun time of the year. It's probably my favorite time. I am a fan of the evening better than the middle of the day. But nonetheless, it was awesome. Shout out to Jackie Davis her last week this week.
So I wish her well in retirement and wish her all the best in her future endeavors. Also look forward to see what Mick can bring to the table and lead Cole Ridge for the foreseeable future. And one big shout out, Steve Johnson at Rifle High School, he is doing an amazing job up there. Just really just nailing it. You know, this is his second year, so he's going into his third year next year and it's only gonna get better. So I feel really good about it. Again, there's nothing looking at, you know, the, the 13%
that you mentioned in special education, in special in K through 12 ELL math. Okay. I mean people, I i people are probably just thinking, oh, it's only 13%, but to get 13% across that mini coat, like that large of a data set is, is is purely amazing. Simply amazing. And then see the, see the six 8% in math. I mean, it, it's like I said, when, when, when we, when we give our teachers what they need, when we give our administrators what they need, you know,
setting success happens. So that just, I'm, I'm just, like I said, I couldn't be more proud of you guys. So thank you for that and thank you for making this year easy. Yes. Echo that. Everything. That's it for board reports. Moving on to committee reports, you've been waiting nicely. Speaker 10: Yeah. And actually y nette we had a, a finance meeting and you know, it made me think similar on what Chance was saying of like, you know, with what we're facing with national and state funding and the craziness that ensues there, it's amazing how Jason, Kathy
and the team puts together, puts up this wall, right? And we go through our finance and you know, it's like we've been running deficit spending for years now and that gap is closing, right? The plan is working even though the storm outside is is, you know, is brewing right or raging. And the same thing I think happens, you know, in that's, I think the finance is a, an important snippet of that, but it's also an example of what's, you know, the focus is here, right? There's, you know, what happens when you hunker down no
distractions and, and just focus on the details and you know, that's where we're getting the growth, right? You know, we're, it's hard work and boots on the ground and staying focused and you know, we're running lean on a lean budget, we're running lean on people, right? Everybody can use extra time, everybody can use the extra help and we don't have extra time or help and we're getting the job done, right? And you can't do that with distractions and without focusing on details. So same pri you know, proud was the word I was gonna use as well.
So I think it's amazing. Not that there's not challenges both in the finance department and in the classrooms, but, you know, stay focused and diligent and, and the, the mission, you know, happens. So super impressed. I won't, you know, we have a presentation on the details, but you know, that's the one thing that, that just stood out to me, the whole meeting of, you know, the, and it's not, not just the finance team, right? It's the, the, the principles are coming in under budget on their non-salary expenses, the, the, you know, everybody's
hunkering down, sharpening the pencils and it's working, right? And I guess the one piece of that puzzle that for the, you know, people that might not be in the conversations or you know, like every effort is done. Like how do we take this bucket of funds that we have? We, we can't control how much money comes in, right? But we could control what happens to it and there's a tremendous effort to how do we take those funds to help our staff, right? That is primary on the conversations and that's why we're super tight on the
non salary budgets and it's being successful, right? And so all the systems that in place are paying off and you know, relative to, you know, we know next year we're not gonna have a, a giant surprise and we have to close down or do something crazy like we read about in the newspaper, right? It's not perfect, but we're in really good shape. We're generous speaking and that makes me feel fantastic. So we can, means we can stay focused. So thank you. I'm excited to hear the presentation and, alright.
Thank you Steve. Speaker 4: Megan, nada. I have nothing to report. Nothing. Nothing. Many meetings. Cassie boces, we just had our last meeting, it was when I was in Oklahoma, so when I, two weeks ago and we will meet again in August or September, but kind of wrapping up the year and there was a couple of things that we really talked about in our focused on in BOCES is they're redoing an a review process of their CTE programming. And so they're looking into what, and we now have tinker on the board with us as well,
or a part of BOC meetings. She's been coming and so BOCES and CMC are now working together to not overlap CTE programming. So that's really exciting. They're gonna be reviewing that. It's a, it's a pretty long intensive process over the next year to year and a half. So there will be a lot more coming on that. The next thing is we are a part of the administrative unit, right? Of Colorado River boces. We just added Plateau Valley and a Beck School District to our administrative unit.
So those resources that we have or that maybe they had or needed will now be available if we need them in our administrative unit. I saying that correctly. Yep. You learning, there's so much to learn but I thought that was really exciting. You know, I just, those are two very small communities that could benefit from being a part of our administrative unit and also they have some other needs that we will be able to partake in if we need it as a district. So Perfect. Other than that I will report back in fall.
Speaker 10: Exciting. Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 10: Alright. I don't know if it's appropriate. One thing that came up on the New Castle elementaries is the, with some of the downsizing or you know, not filling all the positions. GT program seems to be in both elementary. I wonder if that's something that we can maybe look into getting some BOCES or I guess I don't know how the BOCES resources help or happen, but you know, is that something that we can do to lean Speaker 9: On them? Actually GT is through our, our BO Cs. Yeah. Speaker 10: So it was already part of it. So Speaker 9: Continue to be supported by our BO Cs regardless
of staffing of the, so the oversight of that is through our BO Cs sweet and through our admin administrative unit. Speaker 10: Okay. So that wouldn't be too much of a stretch then. Yeah, perfect. There's support there. Alright. Do we have anything for advocacy? Sharon, do you have anything? Speaker 9: The only thing that I, I'd like to point out, I mean it is the, the legislative session did end and so I'm not gonna steal any of Jason's thunder, but he's got a lot to talk about with that for his overview. But I do want to get on everyone's calendar that the next
community meeting that we're gonna have around finance is going to be June 25th at 6:00 PM And so all are invited to be that, that'll be a, a really good meeting. It'll be here in the district office. We will be having results from our polling and, and information back from the community and so would definitely invite all folks to be there on the 25th at six o'clock if people are interested in, in coming. Speaker 4: Can we get that meeting noticed? Yes.
Because I feel like, yep, Speaker 9: I think we will have Speaker 4: Shared most of less board members are really gonna try to come to that because of that survey. I would Speaker 1: Be out of town, but yes, I agree. Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a important one 'cause it'll be Speaker 1: Okay. Cool. Speaker 4: Thank you. Speaker 9: Okay, good. That's all I have for advocacy. Speaker 1: Thank you Kirk. Moving on to governance discussion items and I see them waiting, so assuming it's Glenwood Insurance. Yes, it's, so you are up. Speaker 11: Alright, thank you. Yeah, great.
That would be great. So we're here a month early. Normally we're right up against our July renewal, so I'm really happy that we pushed and we got some results for you guys. We, you guys, I, first of all, let me just say I'm Netty with Glenwood Insurance Agency. We've been a partner with re two for many years. I've been the insurance broker assisting with all of the insurance policies, most of the property and casualty insurance policies for the past four years.
Prior to that, we had a relationship with Jack Sauers at Rifle Insurance and Glenwood Insurance bought his book of business. And so we took over your account and have had enjoyed our partnership. I really am very proud also to see how far you guys have come. I am, I mean, I feel like I've got a top badge on your Facebook and I'm always cheering for you and I love what I'm seeing, not just the pictures and the fun and all of that, but really the learning and the growth that's happened. So I'll let Tom introduce himself.
Speaker 12: Tom Jensen. I'm the loss control advisor with Glenwood Insurance. My role is, is trying to help reduce the likelihood that you have a claim on any of your policies, supporting the district, supporting the district's staff, really a proactive role. And then when you do have claims, we try to support you through that claims process. Act as intermediate intermediaries with your insurance carriers to streamline the process, help answer questions, help support your staff, and ultimately get to a good resolution. Speaker 11: So tonight we're gonna give you an overview. We have an agenda there. Are you trying?
Yeah, yeah, I've got it. Okay, here it goes. Okay, so we're gonna give you an overview. Let's go to the next page. State of the insurance industry. This is a review last year. We were here in July and then October and then we met with staff in December Besides walkthroughs and other things, and we'll get into detail of the other things that we've done with the re two team. But, but we've, we've seen a lot of growth. We're gonna give you the state of the industry, kind of what
is putting pressure, why is insurance rising? What are we seeing? Why are, why are premiums increasing? Then we're gonna go over the claims and loss control services that we've done with it, with the staff. Then I'll kind of walk us through the policy changes and updates that we're seeing at renewal. What we need to be aware of. It's an overview tonight because we just really, we partner with gladfelter Insurance on the package. They specialize in school districts. They write many, many school districts. Everybody renews July 1st. And so they are just backed up, pumping out quotes.
We literally got your packet today at one. Our team was able to put together some comparisons for you. There are a couple of mistakes in there, but we'll clarify those. But then I, I would invite us to do a deeper dive, look through the information, take some time to look through the information, bring your questions up if we need to do an executive session, a, a, a work session on it and better understand your particular needs. We're happy to do that. We just don't feel like it's appropriate though in a public session because some of the information is sensitive. So, and I don't know if that would involve you as a board
or the leadership team at re two that could report back or whatever. But we'll come back for your vote tonight is an overview of what we're seeing. And then in your packet, we'll, after we go over the changes to the renewal, we will go through the insurance renewal offers that we, that we have on the table. Okay, with that, I'll let Tom go. Speaker 12: Sure. So some of these will look familiar if you were here last October, but some of the data's been updated. So first off, just looking at what are the building blocks of our rising insurance costs across the board and these, these really are what's causing
increases for the district. This is also the same story for your personal insurance. If you're wondering, why is my homeowner's insurance going up? Why is my auto insurance going up? A lot of them, these are foundational things that are happening across our economy and across the insurance industry. So looking at the increases, the number one driver of increased insurance rates is the frequency and severity of catastrophic events across the country. That's about 30, 30%, almost a third of the increases just driven by an increasing cost to the insurance industry of catastrophic events.
And those are primarily weather driven events. You know, wildfire, hurricane, what we call convective storms. The massive thunderstorms and tornadoes that we're seeing come across the, the central part of the US and across areas where we never saw them a generation ago. That's, that's a big piece. And then tied to the frequency of, of those is the severity. One things are more expensive, but more so these events are happening in more heavily populated areas. So when a tornado a, you know, a monster tornado goes across the plains, it used
to go across a million acres of grassland and now it crosses 20 subdivisions full of, you know, a hundred half, $500,000 homes. Huge, much, much different impact even though the weather is the same or kind of building infrastructure where catastrophes happen. So a third of it almost is catastrophic events. The next one is social inflation. We'll dig a little more deeply into this. Social inflation is the increase in cost of litigation and the awards that are being given out through court cases. Then the next one, economic inflation.
This is just our CPI, this is the cost of everything around us. And when insurance has to replace something, the price of inflation goes into the new thing that they're replacing. So everything's more expensive, therefore the insurance premiums have to rise to support that. And then the two smaller ones here, cyber risk. And that's, that's a developing risk that isn't fully understood. And so there's catch up in the insurance industry. And then supply supply chain disruptions and supply chain disruptions really show up in a few of these categories. But this 10% is really tied to
supply chain disruptions make claims longer, it takes longer to fix something that's broken. And so the time factor of a claim is growing because an HVAC system isn't available. Roofing materials take longer labor, your skilled trades take longer. So you, there, there was a time maybe you could have a catastrophic loss of a building and it could be back up and going in in 24 months and now maybe it's 36 months because of just all of those disruptions in our supply chains.
Things take longer so the time factors add up. So if you wanna go to the next slide, we'll talk about each of these components. So first one is economic ila inflation. We were, we had a nice little pause when we were getting together last year to talk. We were thinking, hey inflation's, it's coming down close to the fed's, 2% target. It was a little higher, but we had a little, a little pause there. And then we had an uptick in the fall, a little bit calming. And now for the first quarter of this year we're, we're back off and running up to just about 4% inflation.
The, the may number was, was last one there was march, last March number hit four and it was 4%. Something that's a little bit different is the light blue number is our core, is our core inflation. Purple is, sorry, purple's core blue is everything. They're now running parallel to each other. And that's because energy inflation has been so high and energy is set aside from core inflation. So when they roll energy back in, we're, we're up there. So 4% ish inflation. So everything is 4% more expensive kind of across the board.
So that's a good part of the lift that we see in rates. If we go to the next, this is the catastrophic catastrophic loss trends. So the columns are annual cost of insured catastrophic losses in billions of dollars. You can see since about 2020 we've been hovering around a billion. Do a hundred billion dollars a year of insured losses. This looks like it's pretty actually relatively stable. What we don't see is through the two thousands and 2000, early 2000 teens, we were averaging about 40. And then we really had a, a ratcheting up
and now we're saying staying sustained up around a hundred billion dollars. The insurance industry is relatively slow to react. These are very large organizations with very large reserves. They're paying out claims and they're taking in a premium. And when claim costs get ahead of premium, they start to raise premiums to rebuild reserves. They'll spend out of their reserves while they're in arrears and then they get back neutral and then try to get ahead of, to get the reserves where they need to be. What we've seen for the last several years is the loss rates have been stable,
but it's been expensive to build their reserves back up as they catch up. 'cause they don't make these changes, you know, in a year. The other factor here that, that this ties into is reinsurance costs. So insurance companies have insurance when catastrophic claims become a larger part of what they're paying out, that's often coming out of their reinsurance policies. So the reinsurance market has had a major readjustment over the last four or five years and that takes time. But that's another thing that's causing this increase in premium is the reinsurance market realigning
because the reinsurance market's kicking in more often than it has in the past. So that's our, that's our catastrophic and that's, like I said, that's a third nearly of the cost social inflation. So social inflation is that increase of, of payouts that are due to non-economic factors on litigated liability cases. This is what we call the nuclear verdicts. That's where, you know, there may be an a liability case where there's a million dollars of economic loss and then the jury decides, well we think, we think that the,
the defendant is a really bad actor and we need to, you know, teach them a lesson and so we're gonna give them a billion dollars. That happens, that is expensive. And insurance companies ultimately bear the defense and increase cost of defending those and then they're more often having to pay to the limits of the policies. So this is a big impact on the insurance companies. What's driving the nuclear verdicts? Several things. Third party litigation funding. So there are private equity groups, many of them are foreign that come in and identify types of court cases
that they think they can win in certain regions, certain areas, certain types of industries. And they dump money. They go out and basically buy those cases and they dump money into law firms to go out, find those cases, litigate those cases, they front all the costs of the case and then they take recovery on the backend. And it's a large portion of what is recovered. Think about contingency fee and just ratcheting it up to a whole nother level where, you know, litigants, the, the plaintiffs may walk away with only, you know, 10, 15, 20% of the payout
and then you get all the money that goes to the attorneys. And then beyond that, the company that backed it takes 30%, 40% for themselves. They're using big data to really find these opportunities to back these cases and then find jurisdictions where they find friendly juries. They find court structure that allows rules of evidence that make it maybe harder to defend or easier to win. They're making it very, very challenging for the insurance companies and for businesses. Colorado has taken one step in trying to address this.
They're kind of leading in, in some ways a lot of states have done nothing but these, these cases are all fought at the state level. These are state cases, state by state. The state of Colorado has come out and put legislation and they passed it last year. That requires some disclosure. When there's third party financing and there's registration required for third party financing, it's still not making a big impact, but it's a first step in saying, hey, we need to understand what's going on here. They don't wanna go so far as to shut it off because there can be benefit to underserved or, you know, to individuals who, plaintiffs
who have no other way to bring a case forward. So it's not that they wanna shut it off, but we need to control and we need to understand where it's, where the money's coming from and where it's going. So another driving factor are the changing social attitudes. So individuals and juries are more and more often to see large corporations, large entities as enemies. Like there, there's a a a social factor here where they say, you know, you're the bad guys and you're taking advantage of us as consumers and as you know, as as citizens. And so when given the opportunity juries like we can make,
we can make things right, we can fight against this. So that's a social attitude that's out there and it's hard to fight against. The nuclear verdicts are defined as as verdicts at this point of $10 million or more. So those are the causes. It really ties into almost all lines of coverage. But commercial auto general liability, excess liability and umbrella are especially affected because those are usually what are picking up those top levels of those catastrophic claims. That's that that layer over and above all the other policies. I just made some notes just for the first quarter of 2026
of the nuclear verdicts have been handed out so far this year there was a $1.6 billion verdict against a business that had an explosion that killed several employees, $181 million verdict against a trucking company in Utah for a fatality of an individual on a crosswalk. So that was almost all punitive damage. There was 52 million for in a California employment lawsuit, 50 million against the trucking company in Texas for an accident. 25 million out of asbestos case and then 15 million against Topgolf for a liability event at one
of their, one of their operations. So these are adding up. So that is social inflation and that's about a quarter of why we're seeing Speaker 4: Did the caverns affect, I mean surely the caverns lawsuit Speaker 12: With that, that's one that registers on that. I'm Speaker 4: Sure it has to, it was like 54 million Speaker 11: And, and it shows that we're not immune to it, right? Yeah. You kind of think that we're in western Colorado, we're in our little bubble, but then then we see that Yeah. And we know it's out there. Yeah, Speaker 12: It's crazy. The costs of these end up getting spread across everybody and everything, right? Because they can never be recovered from one premium payer,
from one entity, from one business. So this is, these are losses that a large portion of it just gets spread across really the whole population. Social inflation. So just a, a chart that shows there are cycles and we've seen social spikes of social inflation in the fast in the past. Usually social inflation is, has been spurred by some court decision that changes the way the courts approach something. One of the big spikes was tied to rules of evidence and what is admissible and what's not admissible and who can be brought to the, to the court
as an expert witness changing who's can be brought as an expert witness or how you can cross examine an expert witness changes perceptions of juries and your ability to put hard scientific facts forward. So what's happened in the past is we've seen spikes in social inflation and then very quickly legislation that addressed it that brought things back to kind of a normal considering the really the needs of both sides, the plaintiffs and the defendants. But the courts have, or the legislature has found ways to, to neutralize it this time it's going on for longer than I think anyone expected it to go on.
It is, hasn't been quite as severe, but it's more drawn out. I think a good part of that's tied to just the inability to really get legislation done right there. There's a lot of, you know, stalemate right at that level. So we're kind of where we are, there are a lot of parties that benefit from stalemate status quo. So yeah, the unit party. Yeah. So social. Yeah, social social inflation. That one was about 25% going on to the next. We have economic, yeah we already did economic inflation.
Yeah. So that's what's really lifting premiums across the board. There are factors that are unique to industries, to regions, to specific policy holders that also then layer on top of that. But this is really a national picture. Recapping what, do you have any questions I guess on that? Any thoughts? Any observations? Okay, another piece just to that I, that didn't make it into the presentation, but really we should mention is the state of Colorado has a governmental immunity act that sets a statutory limit on how much a governmental entity can be,
can be assessed a liability claim for you. Any governmental entity is protected under the sovereign immunity. There are some exceptions, some certain types of losses that have, that are have higher caps or at least our higher caps. It's been four, the limit has been $424,000 for the last four years. The state operates on four year cycles. They lock that number in for four years. We're in a year where that number goes up. So on January 1st of 26, it went from 424,000 to 505,000. So the exposure of the insurance carriers that work with public entities has ratcheted up
by almost 20% this year. Now it's been, it, it now is locked in for four more years, but that is, is impactful. So it's, it's now 505,000 per individual and up to 1.4 million and change 1.5 million total for a claim. So if there were multiple parties involved, it could go as high as 1.5. So that's an increase that we're seeing this year for public entities in Colorado. That impact. So looking at the work that we've done as an agency supporting the district,
we really working together with the district, a few categories here. First one, wildfire mitigation and response program. So we built wildfire response mitigation and response plans for each of the buildings about 18 months ago, two years ago. There's ongoing work doing property walks, capturing new documentation for the insurance company to show them the work you're doing and you're doing a lot of great work. I know a lot of people don't love the loss of trees and vegetation around the buildings. It's a hard message to deliver, but it's the right thing to do really to harden your buildings, provide defensible space
ultimately, you know, hopefully prevent a loss or minimize it if there is one. And the insurance carrier sees that and they've been very, very impressed with the work that you've done. I'll say that. So, and then along with wildfire, you know, supporting the district when a wildfire event happens with that risk assessment and decision making of what do we do? You know, is it when do, do we wanna open school, do we not open school? What, what are the air quality implications of fires? So we provide ongoing support for that as needed. I mentioned we do claims management program support. So we have a claims liaison who's assisting with the filing
of claims and then communicating with, with all the, in all the parties, with the district, with the carrier, facilitating that communication, answering the technical questions, acting, you know, really helping your staff understand what things mean when claims are being adjudicated. Edu ongoing education and of the staff on your insurance programs, meetings with your leadership to help them understand how different policies tie into either ongoing claims or looking at risks across the district and saying, is this covered with this not being covered? Is their coverage appropriate? How would something play out if you had a claim
doing the best we can to help you with that. And then interfacing with the insurance company on their risk assessments. So the carriers do really annual risk assessments, looking at different components of the district and maybe their property walks some years, some years an in-depth wildfire assessment. Some years they're looking at liability exposures and looking at your policies and procedures to make sure that you're in line with their expectations and with statute. So we're interfacing with those, we're helping prepare for those assessments. We can prescreen pre walk and then helping through the assessment and helping with any recommendations that come out of it.
All of your assessments have really been very positive. I think that, you know, the carriers who see a lot of school districts have commented how, you know, policy out this year there was a pretty big policy review looking at your programs and your policies and they had no recommendations. Speaker 11: Right. I was gonna say that, just a shout out to Devin and her team and I mean they was, they, he was like, wow, everything, I mean, there was no real recommendation from it. It was amazing just to hear everything, all the right answers not stage,
just had it all under control. I was like, that was fantastic. Same with John on and his team on the wildfire. We had some pictures in the past that we had to go take new pictures and I thought, oh dear, I'm just gonna go drive down. It was clean, it was, it was cut back, it was trimmed up and as soon as I submitted the pictures, everything was cleared up. So I really, and you know, I know Devin's staff just on staying on top of some of those work comp claims and getting 'em closed and getting people back to work, work
and making sure that it's fair and equitable. So I feel like you guys have really done a, a lot of great work. Speaker 12: And then the last one, and we'll continue, we've done some site walkthroughs this year. We'll continue to walk through the buildings, just looking at risks, looking at both the, the infrastructure and also at the, the risks of the spaces, the slips, trip and fall hazards and you know, where chemicals are stored. And you know, a lot of these are defined by statute, but these are big organic beasts. Your, your schools are living, breathing operations and they're constantly in flux.
And so coming in and bringing fresh eyes and looking, and I love doing them here because the district is so responsive. You know, we don't feel like, like it's in vain risk. That's a, that's a, a common comment in the risk world is I, I point this out and I point this out and we just pointed out year after year and nothing changes. Stuff changes here, stuff changes quickly. And that's always been the case. Yeah, I've worked with the district since 2017 and in this role and my previous role and it's always been a district that takes action, Speaker 11: It's been so great. We spring break, we got to walk through Grimley Pierce building and it was amazing.
I loved it because I grew up here and so it was kind of fun to just go back and go, oh man. Anyway, thanks to Devin. She gave us a tour. Speaker 12: And then the last one is ongoing support for your workers' compensation cost containment program. This is a state program that the district participates in. By maintaining six elements of a work comp and safety program, you receive a 5% discount on your work comp premium. This district's up for renewal. Again, it's a three year cycle. So in the spring of 27 we'll be submitting a new application and, but we stay on top of that. So there are no surprises when that renewal comes around.
So, Andrew, off to Netty here. Speaker 11: Alright, so we are still happy to provide the property and casualty auto crime coverage through Gladfelter Insurance. Again, they specialize in it. They know what they're doing. If we have a claim, they understand school districts, if they understand the nuances. So here are the, some changes that are coming down. Property deductible is going from 25,000 to 50,000. That's probably the biggest thing that we're seeing. Roofs at the middle school,
although I think we're getting a new roof at the middle school. So I think that one will go, will go back to replacement cost. Highland Rifle High School and Coal Ridge are all going to actual cash value. So that definition is really replacement. Cost minus depreciation is what you're gonna get from from the roof. We're seeing it all over the board. This is, roofs are a lot of time being replaced at actual cash value. That's, you may see that on your own insurance policy, but, but that's pretty common there and it just maybe helps you when you're doing your capital budget, there are things that need your attention
and sometimes, you know, know, you just have to prioritize and we understand you have a limited amount of money. So just being aware of the changes is what we're after. General liability, there is a firearm exclusion that's being implemented this year and that is coverage. But coverage is still afforded if a law enforcement wrongful act occurs and you get sued because of it. And it's, I think we have resource officers in four schools. Is that right? Two, two. We also, there's an a availability to buy firearm
liability back so we can buy it back per person. I'll get you a quote on that. So again, high overview today, we just got these quotes, but there are some buybacks that, that are pretty inexpensive where you can get that liability purchase back. So sometimes again, these insurance companies, they, they're gonna push you to have more skin in the game or they're gonna want you to buy another policy to better protect yourself. Again, more skin in the game. One Speaker 5: Quick question on that, if you don't mind. Sure. We have a few schools
where we don't have dedicated law enforcement assigned to them, but we have frequent law enforcement presence. How would that impact our liability if we don't actually have an assigned law enforcement officer? Speaker 11: Yeah, I know. I think that we need to deep dive on the contract between, is it the town of rifle? The city of rifle? That's, no, Speaker 5: I'm, I'm thinking specifically Newcastle and silt. We don't have assigned presence, but we have a pretty, we we have great law enforcement relationships and partners that will respond. The schools Speaker 11: Respond and be Speaker 5: There, but not a a specific law
enforcement officer that is assigned. Yeah. Speaker 11: Let me get some clarity on that. So as I respond, as I take your questions, I'll respond back probably through Devon since she's my main contact or, or whatever. And we can get you these answers 'cause this is something we need to talk about. I feel like, and again, for not a lot of premium, we can get you the coverage. And so I think that that's something to at least to have the board consider. Speaker 5: Can you explain this a little, a little bit differently so that we can understand what this is, why it's needed,
Speaker 11: Where it can, you know what I think it is and then I'll let Tom chime in. I think it, as a question came up to Devin over the policies and procedures from when a IG had a teams call with her. They don't want teachers that are concealed carry having a situation and having a liability claim because it's a teacher. They're okay if it's a law enforcement officer and the law enforcement officer's trained on it and knows what they're doing and has, you know what I mean? I'm not saying that concealed carry doesn't have that training, but they asked Devin if that was allowed,
if teachers could bring guns and she said no. There is a policy out there that says no. What would you add? Speaker 12: No, I think that that's it. This is looking at the insurance company just is not providing coverage for random people who have firearms in district facilities and take action and, and then, and then some sues Speaker 11: The district because of it. Then you get sued because of somebody else. Speaker 12: And there are districts that are choosing to allow staff to concealed carry and the insurance companies see that exposure because those are not trained law enforcement officers.
And if you, if you follow what law enforcement training is, it's a lot different. Right. There's a lot that goes into helping law enforcement officers develop the skills to respond under extreme levels of stress. Insurance companies willing to accept and defend that liability when a law enforcement officer makes a mistake. That's what they're saying. But they're not ha they don't want to be on the hook if some random member of the public or staff takes action with a firearm in the, in the district property Speaker 11: And then you get Speaker 12: Sued because it, and then you're sued because of it for a wrongful act. Speaker 5: Thanks for explaining that. I'm happy
Speaker 11: To, and then when we circle back and give you the premium, this is an exclusion. So if you would like to at least have defense and, and some defense coverage on it and have some liability available for you, then we would add law enforcement liability Speaker 13: And we remove and we, compared to the MOUs that we have of the city are RIFLE and the sheriff's department and that's why we said no because their MOUs stated that they are the liable party for their officers. And so when we circle back around, we'll give you that option if that, if you chose
to wanting to add it back on. Speaker 11: Yep. That sounds great. Okay, moving on to the business auto Speaker 1: Hold, hold on one second, Eddie. Yes. Do you have a question, Megan? Speaker 5: Yes. Our MOUs, are they specific enough, for example, with the sheriff's office that it would cover any of their law enforcement officers in another school? Because our sheriff's department as well as state patrol makes frequent visits. I, I mean I obviously don't know those numbers, but I would guarantee we've got state patrol and sheriff, sheriff sheriff's office in,
well even though let's, we have an MOU with sheriff's office, but if they're outside of Coleridge and you know, dad decides to go visit his kiddo at Riverside and there's an officer involved shooting there, we now are not covered is is by the MOU. So we, we do need to consider stuff like that. Yeah, Speaker 13: That's what we would be doing when we start the background is we, Speaker 11: And we'll clarify that because I don't think it's gonna say specifically that somebody that's hired at your school only, you know what I mean? It is law enforcement and they're not defining that to a point. Got
Speaker 12: It. Speaker 1: It's very important specification though because forgive me, they will use whatever lev whatever, whatever mechanisms are available to them to Yep. Not pay. So Speaker 12: We, we'll clarify that. We'll clarify. I suspect in a world of mutual aid where all, all law enforcement are responding to a lot of these events, the insurance industry understands that it, it can't just be tied to contractual. Speaker 1: Right? I mean, especially in this area, God forbid, but I mean you'd probably have every law enforcement agency in three counties. Yeah, Speaker 11: Yeah, yeah.
And I've seen that definition and it, it's, it's not that specific. And I'll sh I'm able to share that definition with you too. Yeah, but that's a good question and that's a good thought. Okay. Business auto uninsured motorist liability. So that's kind of what we've seen as a pain point for Gladfelter, is that uninsured motorist or be, this is an award, the 4 24, you know, it's reduced from the governmental immunity limit. They're capping this uninsured motorist now nationwide to a hundred thousand.
They're not going to pay the full 424,000, they're only gonna pay a hundred thousand. They're capping that. Speaker 1: What is, what is the reasoning behind that? Speaker 11: I think they've paid too much Speaker 12: If they're paying too much, Speaker 1: Too many uninsured drivers. There Speaker 12: Are too many uninsured drivers. And this is another statutory issue that Speaker 11: Impacting everyone. Sometimes you get an attorney that knows that he can take it and get it and then we see a few of 'em. Speaker 1: I never thought I'd hear the term predatory litigation. I Speaker 11: Know, I know. One enhancement that you guys do have that's being modified a little bit is buses that are 10 years
and newer get replaced at replacement costs. So there's no depreciation. So I know that sometimes if you have an auto accident with your own vehicle, you are getting actual cash value or Kelley Blue Book or whatever that is. Right? They're depreciating it out. Well, for your buses that are 10 years and newer, you get full replacement cost on those. And then there's also the implementation of an auto liability deductible per per claim. Right Of it. You used to not have a deductible if, if you caused damage with one of your autos
or one of your buses to a third party, there was no deductible. Now there's a $10,000 per claim deductible. So what I'd like for us to do at Glenwood Insurance is to come back and look at your p prior claims that we know and show you what you maybe need to put away in a budget for deductibles that may occur either on property or auto liability or the crime deductible went from a thousand to 2,500 per client. So we will maybe work with your team on that and come back with what we had seen in the past
and what you would've paid out of pocket and what we can see maybe going forward. So that's the commercial package through cloud filter. We go to the next one. Cyber liability. I shared this with Roger. I was pretty excited that we had this, you're currently with Tokyo Marine Houston Casualty, you have a $3 million limit on your cyber and a $25,000 deductible. That pricing had been stabilizing at renewal. Tokyo Marine offered a renewal at 42,000.
However, Gladfelter A IGI feel like could see that the cyber liability in like was stabilizing the, that whole climate was stabilizing. And I think that they thought, I think we can get into this and make some money. And they had enough data points. So they are now offering cyber liability. We took a quote from them. $3 million subject to the $25,000 deductible is down to 30,000. So even less than you're currently paying. That's good. And not nearly the 42.
Roger did come back with some questions and said, is this exactly what we have? And I will be spreadsheeting that. I just didn't have time 'cause we just got those quotes. So that's a takeaway for me too to do. Because here's the thing with the cyber liability policy, they don't all call it the same thing. An auto li an auto policy, that terminology is across the board, across the nation. The same terminology with cyber. You may have reputation harm, but they might call it brand guard. Okay, so this guy calls it brand guard and this one says it's reputation harm.
It's the same thing. But you gotta dig into it and kind of understand what they're referencing and what the coverage is and what the limits are. And it's gonna take spreadsheet. There's probably, oh gosh, I wanna say 12 to 15 different normal lines of coverage that all policies should have. And I'm happy to, to do that for you guys and, and take it down. But good news is we can maybe save some money there if everything looks good. When I send that spreadsheet back through workers' compensation through Pinnacle, we currently have estimated payroll sitting there.
We have an experience mod and an experienced mod looks at the past three full years, looks at expected claims for school districts, and then your actual claim claims for those three years and says, are you doing better than other school districts or worse. And then every year they apply a factor. There is, there is like a stabilizing factor in the experience mod calculation that helps you if you have a big swing, it doesn't swing so far at any rate, your experience mod is currently a 1.2.
It's going to a 1.21, your payroll is going up just a hair, the premium is going up a bit. And I've got that spread spread a bit. Speaker 12: It is, Speaker 11: That's the biggest increase. So what, what are we doing? Glenwood Insurance is not just sitting here saying, oh yeah, okay, that sounds good. We're gonna take it. We've approached six companies and asked them for quotes. So right now I've got three that have declined. One that said, I'll take a look, send me a submission, and I haven't heard from the other two.
So I'm gonna circle back and we're gonna make sure that we're at least approaching every market available to us to see if we can help you on that end. Speaker 1: Just for reference, that mod experience mod, what is a good number Speaker 11: Points? Speaker 12: Well, neutral is one. Speaker 11: Neutral is one. Okay. Good number. Maybe Speaker 12: The best you could do, I think is in the point sixes. Okay. If you had, if you went three full years with no nothing, literally no claims. Speaker 11: Yeah. And that, and you know what, we can also show you that in a work session or in our email back that if you went from a 1.21 to a 0.6
or to a lower what the savings would be. It's, it's a lot. Speaker 12: And, and there is work that the district is doing to manage that mod. Oh yeah. The main thing is the, the using a deductible on your work comp policy. And the district does have a, a small deductible on the work comp policy. The way the MOD is calculated in Colorado, any amount of a claim that's paid by the district through a deductible is not reported to the rating agency. And so you're lowering one the cost of all your claims by the amount of your deductible, the $2,500
and two, your, for any claim that's under $2,500, which is probably half your claims. They don't know that they live, they don't get reported at all. They don't even know. And the way the, the EMO is calculated, the frequency of claims is a larger impact than the cost of the claims. And so by making those small claims go away, it has an impact that it's greater than the cost of the deductible. And we do an analysis each year where we look at how your deductible is performing and determining is this the sweet spot or should we, should it go up or should it go down to manage your, your both, your emod
and also the carriers provide a discount for you having a deductible as well. And so looking at how all those factors tie in to get you the right, the best option over a course of a long period of time. Speaker 11: So we'll be back to report on that, what we find and if we can find a, another carrier, Speaker 10: Some semblance of how many, like, or an es like how often do we have these type of claims? Is that a lot a hundred claims? Like Yeah. Like is this how many we Speaker 1: Have lives? Speaker 11: I think annually, what are we seeing Tom? 20, 30, 40, 30 annually.
30 to 40 claims annually. And again, half of those are probably under the $2,500 Speaker 12: Deductible. Yeah, a large portion are, and school districts are very unique in that you have a lot of what we call report only claims. School districts are very typically very forthcoming with potential injuries. So claims are filed even though someone isn't going to, you know, on their way to urgent care, Hey, let's file a claim when a staff member comes and says, Hey, you know, I, I slipped and I fell and I I'm okay, but I just want you to know about it. Go ahead and file a claim and there's no penalty in filing that claim.
Right. So looking at the number of claims versus the number of claims that turn into an actual loss, they're, they're two different things. Yeah. The other thing that's very unique about school districts, and we, we remind, it's why it's nice to work with carriers that work with districts. School districts have a lot of small claims that arise out of staff interactions with kids and the frequency of claims that a school district is far different than almost any other type of employer, other than healthcare, that they, they mirror each other pretty closely. So the number of claims is, is higher than you, than you might think because of how
proactive school districts typically are at reporting, managing Right. Staying on top of their claims. A lot of employers operate from a different perspective of we'll file it when we know Yeah. That it's, that it's really a claim. Right. Speaker 1: So can you, you clarify something for me real quick? Sure. There's, we talking about the experience model a few minutes ago you mentioned the quantity of claims and the frequency of claims went into that number. Yes. And then just in that last one you mentioned filing a claim, there's no no penalty. So can you rec Speaker 12: Those? So, so filing a claim where there is no
actual treatment is the dollars are zero. So because the dollars are zero, it doesn't get reported Speaker 1: To experience. Does that go into your experience? Speaker 12: Your It does not go into your experience mod and it, so it it's not, it doesn't, it, a claim doesn't impact your experience mod until the cost of the claim exceeds your deductible. Okay. Well is 2,500. Yeah. Which is 2,500. And so that's why the deductible is really valuable because you manage that Emad and the way that, the way that the Emad is calculated, the first dollars of a claim are far more impactful than the higher dollars.
So there's a split point below which the dollars are counted directly and above, which just a tiny fraction of the expenses is, is used in the formula. And that goes to the, the statistical reality that small claims lead to big. There's, so they want the, the, the formula needs to address the frequency of claims because that's a good indicator of overall cost. The catastrophic claims, the great big work comp claims are actually quite random in how they become big claims. And, and I think you can see this, if three teachers slip
and fall on a playground, one of them gets up, brushes their stuff and walks away, it's like it didn't happen. One of them might get up and be like, oh, I'm gonna feel that in the morning. And the other one is in an ambulance on the way to the, to the hospital because of the way they landed. Three things, three risks, the exact same, almost exact same exposure, the same event happened. And the outcomes are drastically different. As claims get bigger and bigger, they become more and more of a statistical outlier. And so the insurance industry doesn't put as much weight on those. Even something as simple as two people go in for a procedure, one of 'em gets a staph infection
and is in the hospital for 60 days. And the same person, you know, another person who had the same procedure in the same hospital, you know, is in and out and back, back to a hundred percent in a week. The, the insurance industry sees that. You can't penalize on that, that outlier. So that emod calculation is essentially sets the outliers aside and we can do a deep dive into that formula if you'd like, if you're No, no, I Speaker 4: Just, but yeah, well just so you, Speaker 12: I think we should, we're looking over your shoulder, like understanding how these things are playing out to a drive at the right deductible. Speaker 4: Well, just so you guys know, as a board, I looked back
through my notes, but in June of 24 our emod was 1.5 and then last year was 1.2 and then now 1.21. So like we are better than we used to be in 24. Absolutely. Speaker 1: You just made all of us look horrible for having your notes handy for Speaker 4: I do take notes, I don't just sit up Speaker 10: That mud is compared to other districts too. So that's apples to apples. Right. Speaker 12: So, so it's it's other school. It's other school districts within Colorado in a premium band that aligns with yours. So it's similar size. So your Emad is not calculated under the same fa, same basis
that like Denver Public schools. Right. Would be, so you're really looking at similar industry locations, Speaker 10: But a one is not necessarily average, one is a wash as far as the cost goes, right? Or is it, well, okay, so Speaker 12: What one really says is your losses are what would be expected for an entity of your size in your region, in your industry. Got it. They're looking at statistical analysis of if you just went to an underwriter and said, Hey, what would you expect a school district of this size in Colorado to have for losses?
That number is a, is a 1.0. So everyone then has scored across that. And then when they're calculating your premium, they take your payroll and the rate for each class of employee you have because different classes have different rates assigned because of the risk of the role. Okay. They multiply the premium, or sorry, the rate by the payroll and then they multiply it by the od. So kind of a quick and easy of how they arrive at a premium. So right now your mod is causing a 20% increase. Got it. If you got below one, then it would start taking money off. Got it. There are other factors that go into play.
Other dis other discounts and other credits. Credits and debits that are, that are in the formula. Yeah, those are the biggest impacts. Speaker 11: Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And then the last line of coverage that we have is we've all, we've been offering that student voluntary accident policy through K and K where the district pays $50 for administrative costs and then families can choose to go enroll in this student accident policy and they can choose what level of coverage they want, what if they want coverage 24 hours, if they want it,
just while they're at school, while they're just participating, if they're in football, if they're not, they can choose to purchase this policy which is excess above any other collectible insurance policy across the nation. No one is really participating in this. Right. So companies are pulling back and they're saying, in order for us to offer this accident policy to your students, we must write your catastrophic insurance policy. And right now you guys, it to my understanding have a cat policy through Gerber Life
at a New Mexico agent and he controls that. So my suggestion, and I'll follow up in an email, would be to see if the New Mexico agent can do it, can add, offer this student accident policy or that we would give you a quote on a CAT policy and the student accident policy. I think that renews in August because it takes August, September, maybe it takes your number of students. It's really based on the number of students in each grade and who's participating in what. So at any rate, we can probably wrap around
and find something for you to offer to your students. It's just a matter of saying if New Mexico can do it or if you want us to do it. But that's where we are now. And Speaker 4: You're saying school districts are stopping that? Well, Speaker 11: No, no. It's, it's the parents who aren't enrolling parents are not, Speaker 4: But we have to offer it as a Speaker 11: Student don sponsor. Don't you know what you don't, honestly, I don't think you have to offer that. I think you have to have cat. You have to have a cat catastrophe. Speaker 4: Catastrophic. Yeah. Speaker 11: Let's see. But you don't have to offer the student accident. I think it's a nice perk because so many times students get hurt
and if they had this excess med, you know, but it's, everybody's strapped. It's expensive to live here and so I can understand why people don't participate. Yeah. But it is a nice option and I also like to, you know, when you're having your spring and your fall sports meetings to offer that and say, Hey, just remember if your kid is participating, you could get some excess medical and have some flyers for them. Speaker 1: Okay. Yeah. Speaker 11: Okay. Thank you Lots for you guys to look at. I'm not gonna go through your packet. One side, your main side, your right hand side is the gladfelter,
the left hand side is the cyber and the work comp behind everything is a sheet comparing last year to this Speaker 1: Year. Perfect. Okay. Thank you. Alright, thank you. Speaker 11: You're welcome. I'll get you an email and then wait for your response. Speaker 1: Thanks. Thank you. Thank you Netty. Thank you. Risk and risk. Tom? Tom. Tom, Devin, do we have one? Tom and Netty? Yep. I give one to Sharon. Great, thank you. Can we take a five minute break? Thank you. Yeah. Yes, thank you. Okay, give five minutes.
I'm back at 7 0 5. Be back here. We're tardy XPath program. Jacob. It's all yours. Speaker 12: Well thank you for inviting me back and I brought a few guests, so as you all know Jacob Pingle. I am our secondary curriculum director here in Garfield re two. I also have Amanda Vaughn, our family resource coordinator and she has an integral part of this FlexPath program. And so I wanted her to be able to share her experience of, of of the impact that it's had on the work that she's done
and on the kids that she works so, so hand in hand with. And then we also have, I, I remember from my last presentation, which was just the last board meeting, how much you appreciated having in hearing student perspectives on the work that we're doing. Oftentimes we come in and report as adults and it's great to hear student perspectives. So we have Xavier Anderson current false path student. He's also gonna help co-present a little bit here. And so that is, that is our team. That's who you have before us today. Perfect.
Side note on Xavier. Xavier is the son of Wendy Anderson. Wendy Anderson works here in our district office. She is our events coordinator for the downstairs part of our building. And so she's financial secretary for myself, Simone and Roger. So what a great connection that we have. So let's get started with our presentation. So The first slide I have is titled The Initial Lift.
When it came to the initial lift of this, we weren't sure exactly what we were building. The problem that we saw on the horizon was that we, we had a lot of students that were leaving us for alternative programming elsewhere. And so one of the things that we noticed was a number of our students were leaving to go to full-time online programs, goal Academy, Penn Foster, Colorado Connections online. And we didn't offer a similar pathway or program or alternative for all of these kids that were leaving.
So one of our initial lifts was to say, what could we create that were not offering these kids that they're leaving for and getting somewhere else. So our initial call of the program was full-time online program and we saw a natural connection to work that Amanda and Chelsea were already doing last year that you heard about in down at the one door. And that was an alternative to expulsion or expulsion academic educational services for our students that were at risk.
So Amanda and Chelsea had already started that work and we saw a potential partnership to the work that they were doing and the work that we were exploring in a time online option. Theresa really liked the, the acronym FO and for full-time online program, CDLS, Colorado Distant Learning Solutions was our, they are a company that is operated by our boces, Colorado River boces and they provide online programming
for districts all across the state of Colorado. And we saw some of what they had and we liked that platform. So we utilized Colorado Distant Learning Solutions, CDLS to provide online classes for our kids that wanted to explore. Were working with Amanda and that also wanted to explore a full-time online program. So that is CDLS was one component of it. And our first semester enrollment was 13 kids and we had the two different formats.
We had kids that were showing up on a regular basis to the one door facility. Their academic programming was run through CDLS online so they could access classes at home, but they were coming in on a regular basis to receive wraparound supports with Amanda and her team. That consisted of about five kids. And then we had another eight kids referred to us by the school who were interested in an alternative to in-person programming and wanted to see what this full-time online program had to offer. So we, that's where our 13 kids came from first semester.
Xavier was not a part of that 13 group. Xavier joined us in second semester and I wanted Xavier to take a second and share what he was doing first semester. Speaker 14: So first semester I went to Grand Valley in Parachute and yeah, I spent the first semester there. Speaker 12: And what was your experience at Grand Valley by the way? Wendy and her family bought a home in Quebec and they live in Quebec. Oh, wow. Hence why you were going to Grand Valley High School, right?
Yeah. And what was your experience in going from Debe to Grand Valley first semester Speaker 14: From Debe Grand Valley? Speaker 12: Well you were Dr. You were you, you were living in Que and then you Grand Speaker 14: Valley. Oh yeah. I would just, I I would go to school with a, well, my mom would drop me off in parachute 'cause she works here in Rifle and it, it was, yeah, I, I would go there super early and yeah, that just didn't work very well. So, Speaker 12: So we had this program that we had started
and Wendy had asked me about it and that we were crafting and building and Savior showed interest in what it is that we were building and crafting. So I asked you that, I asked you another question of what was it about what we were doing that interested you, that made you want to explore this as opposed to what you were doing in traveling from Quebec to go to Grand Valley High School every day? Speaker 14: Well, initially it was because of the distance from Quebec to parachute or get back to rifle.
But I also really like, I liked a few things about it. I liked that I could do my classes quicker. Like I'm able to finish a class that would, or an assignment that would normally take me like an hour in class and I can finish in half the time. So that's very helpful. Speaker 12: We took a lot of learning from first semester and saw and tried to implement a lot of that going into second semester. And that's why you saw you see a little bit of adjustment from first semester to second semester,
particularly in enrollment. The next slide, I'll go over some of the things that we really learned, but from first semester to second semester, we went from 13 students to a total of 21 students, eight of those. So we had five kids. We had five kids that did not return into the program. One of those students actually, as it says right there, transitioned back into Rifle High School. They were a part of Amanda's cohort. We were working with them to get back to a, a place where they could be, they could really access in-person learning in an effective way and we're successful in that.
The other four transitioned out, a few of them moved out of Garfield, RE two moved to different things and some of them found some other paths to go. And then we brought in 13 new students that semester. So that's, that was our, our enrollment numbers. Part of the reason why we saw a jump from first semester to second semester was we adapted to what we learned first semester. So on the next slide, before I get into it, I'll let Amanda lead in. What were some of the things that you felt like you, you and your team learned from first semester, second semester?
Speaker 11: Well, this whole year, as you guys know, we've been really building a whole program from my perspective, really looking at the, the expelled, the truant students and really looking at how we can tighten up supports for them. And so what I loved about the CDLS program was that, so last year, last semester or spring semester is whenever Chelsea and I started the wraparound in these small cohorts and we had to create everything. Chelsea worked really, really closely with every student, their, their homeschool and created their academic program. We had eight students and she was doing that for each one. And then when we moved the students to one door, we realized
that's gonna be, if we wanted to expand that, there's no way that we could do that for every single kiddo. And so utilizing CDLS gave us a whole platform or we could really look at semester long classes. We could start really giving the students what they needed and we can monitor credits. 'cause most of the students in our program were high school age students. And so now we have this, this program, it's just been amazing to be able to watch. There were some, you know, we, we just jumped in and in August and said, sure, Jacob, we're gonna do this. We don't really know what we're doing. Chelsea and Dana, I really just, I need to praise them.
I think they really, really strongly need to be recognized. Dana, as the, the online coach, she really figured out the CDLS system. She worked closely with the CDLS staff trying to figure out what it looks like. How do we take all that information and put it into PowerSchool. So we have grades that, you know, we can compete or we can, we can mark in there. And so Chelsea and Dana really have done a huge lift. And so I just, I want to make sure that they get recognized for the work that they put into this. Because without them, Jacob and I would probably not know what we're doing with all the,
the spec flex path, how it really, really worked because they were the ones doing the, you know, the dirty details and making sure it flowed. But, but being able to see what we did, we had some kinks, you know, like, well maybe it doesn't work. We can't put a kiddo on in the middle of a semester. 'cause as we, as you know, with our ISP path kids, kids flow into us at all different times. And so we've been really creative and had to learn different ways to meet the students. We also had students that want to be at their home school. They want to do classes and they want, they didn't want to just necessarily leave their home school. They want to do both. And so taking everything that we know
how we could apply it to second semester and work closer with Coleridge High School and Rifle High School to support that flex path for those kiddos has been pretty cool too. So I, I'm just, I think it's an amazing program for us. Speaker 12: Some of my, my biggest takeaways from first semester and going into second semester and guiding this, this moving forward. One we needed to do better than just replicate what Goal Academy Penn Foster, what they were offering because the data is showing that what they're offering
is not really meeting the needs of kids, right. And kids and families that are interested in a full-time online program. They're not interested in getting away from school and it's not good for them to get behind a closed door in front of a computer all day accessing their classes. Xavier just spoke to a little bit, he can get classes done quicker. It's self-paced, it's on his time and that frees him up to do other things. Alright. It frees him up to be able to go out. He's also participated in our work study program.
And so that's, that's one of the things that we saw that some kids are really interested in getting out there and working and learning from work and how do we incorporate that and, and tap into that interest. That was one of the big draws that we saw. One of the other things that we saw is really students and families are interested in taking some more ownership and participating more in what their educational pathway looks like. Sometimes they just feel like it's just being forced upon them. This is what I have to do. And so this allows those students
and families that are really interested in taking more ownership of that pathway, the ability to do that. And that's what they were craving. The one door wraparound services is huge. Some of our kids are interested in the FlexPath program or what we're trying to offer, but they also benefit from the services that we can provide by connecting them with one door, keeping them close. The other big thing is that we did see that this is not just a high school only opportunity that, that we some good work and some thinking we can potentially expand this out into
the middle school, into middle school students. So those were some of the things that we've been trying to adapt to in second semester. That's why you saw an initial jump and you're gonna see here in a little bit that things have begun to, that are gonna continue to grow in and build. The last I I asked Xavier to, I gave him some questions ahead of time that I was gonna lead in and ask him the last two questions that I wanted was, I want, I wanted Xavier to be able to share what his experience was. I asked him to share with you guys what, what are some of the classes you took, what were some of the things you liked about this semester?
Was there anything that surprised you about this semester and about the program that you didn't anticipate coming in? Speaker 14: So yeah, some of the classes I took were, I took Mandarin, US history, English. Yeah, those are just some, I took six classes though and I don't know, I just really liked it. I felt like I was in control of how much work I wanted to do one week or how much work I could put in into another class or, yeah,
it was just really helpful. Speaker 12: Anything that surprised you? Speaker 14: I the pacing, like I, I can pace myself. Yeah, that was a really nice surprise. Speaker 12: Is it, it is different because you do have the ability then all of a sudden to not be bound by the limitations of I start class and then I end class an hour later and then I have to start this class and in this class an hour later and a half to start this class now. We provide a lot of support to be able to, to to, to manage that because that's not a skill that kids naturally have
and that's where one of what we're trying to craft really came into play. So I told Xavier he didn't have to sit up here for the entire, I appreciate so much that he came and sat with us and I told him he didn't have to sit up here the entire time. So I promise Xavier that I would excuse him about halfway through the presentation and we're at that point. But if you wanted to ask any questions to Xavier, I think he'd be willing to. Speaker 1: I do have a question. So it sounds like you Xavier you, you really liked the ownership you you had of the program. Is that right? Yeah. So take me through just, just general, like take me
through a day regular normal school day with you. Like what would, what, like what would you, how would you prioritize your goals and then prioritize your schedule? Speaker 14: So I had a, I would have assignments that were due for the week, but I was able to do them other weeks if I wasn't com able to complete them in other weeks or complete them early even. So I would aim to complete the assignment that was due for that week, by the end of that week or you know, before that. Okay.
Speaker 12: Did you create your own schedule when you woke up Monday? You tell yourself, I'm gonna work on this or this or would you kind of assess it on Monday and say no? Did you have one that you're like, I'm gonna work English on Monday, Chinese on Tuesday? Or did you make it variable and you decide no, today I feel like I'm gonna get ahead on math or Speaker 14: I would, yeah, I would, I didn't really have a specific, I guess lineup of classes. I would have certain assignments in which I could do,
which I would do and yeah, I would, I would choose when to do them throughout the week and that was really helpful. So Speaker 1: When, when, when and if you, you encountered questions in the assignment because that's gonna happen, was it easy to find resources to help you to find answers to those? Speaker 14: Absolutely. All the teachers had provided their emails and some even provided their phone numbers. So it was very easy to like ask questions
Speaker 12: And that was one of the reasons why we went with CDLS when Xavier refers to his teachers CDLS contracts with licensed teachers all over the United States and actually I think some don't even live in the United States, but they're certified but Colorado teachers that provides support for every single one of the classes. So he had actual certified teachers that's, that's who shared their emails and who were able, he was able to go to. Speaker 1: I think it's awesome and thank you for coming and talking to us about it.
Yeah. You guys have any questions for him? Speaker 4: I do. I, well maybe a question for you or your mom, I don't know who wants to answer it, but how much parent support did you have to have with this online learning platform? Speaker 14: Not much. I was pretty independent when it came to it. Pretty Speaker 4: Independent. And what grade are you Speaker 14: Or 11th? 11th. Now he's Speaker 4: Going, going into 11th now. Okay, that's great. Well thank you for coming. I'm glad you tried it out and you're enjoying it. And we look to have you under this Garfield re two
graduation rate next year. Hopefully. Yeah, think about Speaker 11: Like just Xavier's just an amazing student. You know, he has a social circle. I told him I wasn't gonna call him out 'cause we know each other outside of school and so, but he still has come, he has the opportunity as well. All the, all of the FlexPath students have an online coach. And so Dana Way was the coach this year and Chelsea would check in with them as well. And so if at any time they're monitoring their academics and so the second that any of the students started to fall behind or started to even look like they're missing assignments,
Dana was right there saying, okay, where are you at? How are we gonna get this? Let's start doing plans. She will talk to the teachers in that CDLS system and say, okay, what, you know, we, we've realized this is probably a little bit higher for this student. Can we lower some of this? Can we put some of this, you know, just scaffold a little bit different. And so the online coaches are amazing for this or the FlexPath, the FlexPath coaches now is the official title, but we'll have two of them next year to be able to really look closely and work with the students. And so I guess maybe Xavier, my question would be is how approachable and then how often do you access one door
and did you have to access Dana and Chelsea quite often to help you with, with those Speaker 14: Things? Early on when I first started the program, I would go to the one door just about weekly. I, I stopped going as much since I was doing so well. Yep. So Speaker 6: I just had one question. Several of the kids expressed that I've talked to that they appreciate the very large environment that is in some of our schools, right? Is is noisy and chaotic and several kids have ex I mean,
and some kids love that some kids have expressed appreciation for it being in a quieter environment in order to complete their work. Would you, does that work for you? Speaker 14: I would say yeah. Yeah. It's definitely easier to get work done more efficiently in a quieter environment. Okay. But yeah. Thank you. Speaker 12: I am extremely proud of this young man and I know his mother is as well and his and his father. Speaker 14: Yeah, go Speaker 15: Ahead. I just wanted to say with the parent, they would also send me emails so we can monitor,
but he has been in control of his learning and so yeah, I'm really proud of how he took control of it. This experience. Speaker 4: Well I asked that question just because I mean, a lot of parents are like, you know, they work a full-time job and they're like, oh, my kid wants to do this flex path because they also wanna work and do the flex path, but how am I going to be supportive in this role as a parent and I can't give them extra time. I'm so busy. You know, and just really seeing if it was a burden
that aspect to the parent role as also slash teacher, like, you know, homeschool parents, they have to homeschool and, you know, be mom and work and do whatever, but this sounds like, you know, it's a real teacher and all the supports you need and want. And I I just love that. Speaker 15: Yeah. And they've made it easy so that we can check in and, and I was able to check in with Xavier and I was like, if you need help, let me know. Yeah. Because they'll actually put it here
and it's like, okay, if he's falling behind, I know what to help with. Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 15: So, Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. But you weren't actually having to do the teacher workload. Exactly. Speaker 15: Which is actually a really cool balance if we Yeah, I love this program. Yeah. Speaker 11: Great. I also just wanna recognize Wendy is an re two alumni and she is a proud parent of everything and I just, I just think that she does a phenomenal job. So yeah. I just wanna recognize her for, for being a long time re two person. Yeah. Speaker 12: Any other questions for Xavier? I gotta keep my promise.
Speaker 11: No thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Speaker 12: Okay. You can stay up here if you, if you really want, but promise you sit back by your mind. You don't have to be in the spotlight. Speaker 11: Thanks David. Speaker 12: You know, going back to going back to the other page of the learnings, two big things. One, we mentioned we, we needed to make sure that we were still connected to the schools. We did not, we, we learned really quickly that that was important to us. That kids were rifle high school students, Coleridge high school students,
if they were in the middle school, Riverside or Rifle Middle school students, they weren't, they were the, they were a rifle high school student doing the FlexPath program. They were not a FlexPath student. They were not different than their, they were doing a different program, but they were not different than every other rifle high school student. They're all working towards a traditional high school diploma. They're just doing it in a different way. And that was important to us. Now we knew that that was important. Something we really wanted to craft right from the get go. That was, that was important. And then going back to successes,
it's not on there, but you saw it. If you, if you saw the slideshow down at the one door, we, we learned really quickly that we had to leverage whether a student initially thought they needed it or not. We had to leverage the coaching support that Dana and Chelsea were providing because there was something special about that, that was gonna help kids succeed. Because all kids were not like Xavier. They had, they have varying different circumstances and varying different needs.
And we had to create an option that was going to be able to flex, hence the flex path name that was gonna be able to flex to their different situations and their different needs. And that's, that to me is one of the biggest successes is that we're on the path to creating that, that reaches way more students and meets the needs of way more students. We, we, we feel like we're doing a really good job of figuring out how to reengage at risk students through this program. We feel like we're creating a superior option over our competitors. This isn't something that Goal Academy's doing. This isn't something that Career Connections is doing.
This is something unique to Garfield RE two and we're setting the standard for what this should look like for kids. You look at goals, graduation rate, the best, the best data I have is that they're hitting at 49%. CDLS by themselves as A-C-D-L-S program is touting an 88% graduation rate in semester one. And I don't anticipate we'll keep this forever, but a hundred percent graduation rate. And we had five seniors that graduated in this program coming outta that program, one
of the biggest highlights, and you saw this at the one door presentation, two, one of our students graduated. We, we engaged her into this and then we, the individualized attention that we were able to do and to figure out her unique circumstances and what was gonna get her across the finish line, got her there through an engagement with our preschool. That was where she was finding success. That young lady did not, was a sixth year senior. She went through four years of the traditional high school experience
and couldn't make it across the finish line. Tried again through some programming that we offer Credit recovery program. Still trying to engage her in her fifth year after, after that still was unsuccessful but still wanted to work with us and still wanted to get to the finish line. We engaged her first semester through a slew of CDLS classes. And it still was unsuccessful. That wasn't the right method for her. But through the work that Dana and Chelsea did and the conversations that they had and the work, the flexibility that we had in figuring out
what was the right situation for her, we were able to get her across the finish line. And, and to, to have that accomplishment. And what a great, what a great thing for Garfield RE two, now we really are working for the benefit of all of our kids. And then the other success is we have engaged a couple of middle school students in second semester and we're creating the template and the blueprint for what this looks like at the middle school. 'cause it looks different. High school students are about credit attainment. They're about, you know, they're, they're working towards getting the credits they need to get
that traditional high school diploma. Middle school students are not attaining credits. They're learning, they're growing and they're in a transitionary period. And so we need to make sure we understand what that looks like for a middle school kid. 'cause it does, it looks unique. But we've had a couple of students that have engaged with us and are kind of our Guinea pigs and are helping us to write the template for what this looks like to expand down into middle school and have our middle school students engage in this that are looking for this type of an option as well. So what do you do if you're interested? This was our big push, this was our big push too. Now that we knew what we were building,
we had to go out and advertise it. And so we did. And a big kudos to Theresa and Chelsea and their team. We did a big, we did a, we, we created a big communication plan. We did a big website blitz. If you've gone onto our website at all in the past two months, the first thing you see is whatever page you click on is about the flex path. That's true. And giving people an opportunity to learn more about it and express their interest and communicates us that they were interested. We also created mailers. There's Xavier again. He got to be on our mailer itself to go out to students that we have lost that are, you know, we,
we track when students leave us, they let us know where they're going. A number of, if they go to Goal Academy, goal Academy has to request their records from us. So we put in those notes. And so we sent out mailers to over a hundred students and families that have left us to let 'em know that this is something that we offer if they're interested in, in, in potentially exploring that with us. News articles. I was with my, after this communication blitz, I was with my family at a restaurant in Grand Junction at Roosters
and we're sitting there eating dinner and they have the TVs on. And I look up and on the tv, on the news, KJCT was a story about FlexPath. And I'm sitting there like, sweet look, that's us. That's us. And then we've also worked with our counselors so that they have the information so that they can start making recommendations to kids that they think might be a good fit internally to transition into this program could benefit from it. So that was our real big communication plan to get people
to communicate with us if they were interested in this. So then what did we do if they were interested? We really need to create a streamlined process. How do we go from somebody expresses interest to getting them into the program and making sure they're the right fit. So the interest phase, we really worked with our schools to nail this down. That when somebody lets us know, lets a counselor know lets, the school personnel know or fills out our, you know, our form online that they're interested, then we wanna make initial contact with them. The schools are responsible for really connecting with them, letting them know, Hey, we know you're interested
and we will be connecting with you to go over what the process looks like. Then we go out and we find the information on the kiddo if they're one of ours or we request the information from them so that we can understand their situation because we just mentioned that every situation is unique and we gather all of the information and we transfer that to their online coach. The online coach then sets up an interview with the student and family to go over what the program is, what it isn't to spell any myths that they may have. Help them understand what it is
that they're planning on engaging in. What does this program look like? What are your commitments as a student? What are the supports that potentially the parents may need? They're also continuing to gather even more information on whether or not this could be a good fit. Whether or not there might be insurmountable challenges to enrolling a kiddo into the program. Because as much as we want, we want this to work for every kid. It may not work for every kid and we wanna be judicious about that. We don't wanna put a kid into a situation where they're really gonna flounder.
That being said, the intimate environment that it provides, we think is really beneficial. And we think that even if we misjudge whether or not this is the right circumstance for a kid, we have the right connections to be able to find out what is the next step for them. And then the school itself has to take ownership of saying, yep, we are comfortable with enrolling this kid into the program and we are gonna support this kid through this program. Or, you know, what, we're just not comfortable just yet. And what it might, what might need to happen. Maybe they need to stay, maybe we want to try and still engage them in in-person learning.
Or maybe we, maybe whatever other options are out there are more important or beneficial for them. So then once the school accepts a kit, then we go through an enrollment process where we create an individualized academic plan for the kid, figure out what courses they're taking, what supports they need, all of those things. How often they should come into the one door, the online learning lab to take advantage of those supports. They sign a contract, the school signs the contract, and then we sign 'em up for their classes through CDLS. And then we do an orientation at the one door. And that's our, our enrollment process from when a kid says,
or family says they're interested or to getting them launched into the program. And this is our forecast for what next semester's gonna look like. We haven't even left school already. We went from 13 kids first semester, 21 kids this semester. And I can only imagine what the first few weeks of school, when everybody is registering for classes and stuff anyways, or registering to what school they're gonna go to, what that's gonna bring. But already we have 10 students that have gone through the interest phase and the schools have accepted, we have eight returning students that we just need to go
through and connect with them to make sure that this is something they want to continue on. And then 13 that are in the interest phase of things that have already expressed to us and they're somewhere in that process of interest to enrollment. So potentially we're already sitting on 31 students before we even leave for the summer. So that's kind of, that's, that's where we're at for looking at 26, 27. That's kind of the basic overview we wanted to provide for you. So what questions do you guys have for me and Amanda? Speaker 4: Here we go. Do you have a question? Okay, so I have a few questions.
Oh, lemme get something to drink for this. With this initial forecast enrollment, and I know that not all the kids are coming in at once, but how are you gonna handle that with the space that you guys have with limited space? Speaker 12: That's where, that's where we've been in, in discussions about, we've got, we've got some staff that we have that are interested. We didn't wanna make commitments to adding staff into the space. And the limitations, obviously the ISP program itself requires students to come in on a regular basis. The vast majority of people that are enrolling right now
that are expressing interest don't need to be, or initially aren't, aren't, we're not asking them to come in on a regular basis. We're asking them to check in with their online mentors weekly, as you saw with Xavier. So I think that the vast majority of growth that you're gonna see is not students that were referring to the ISP because that's gonna be in and out. That's a, that's a population that's coming going that we're working to transition in and out. The vast majority are gonna be kids that are accessing the actual facility on a very infrequent basis.
Okay. Plus we have the ability with an online to have virtual meetings with our kids if space is limited within the building itself. So we can connect with them not just in person or potentially mo going and meeting the kids where they're at. You know, we've often thought about the fact that our location is in rifle and that's not always as accommodating to our students in Syl, Newcastle. And talked about what could it look like for potentially our online coach to maybe meet up with kids up closer up valley with them as well. Speaker 11: So, okay. I can, I can also speak to the learning center just because that kind of falls into my world.
We do, we can have six students at a time in the classrooms. Right. And so we have set or set cohorts for the morning and afternoon and we, we put kids in where they need, like who needs to be, where, how long, how many kids actually need to be at one door throughout the whole day. And so we can, we have spots and time available, just as Jacob was saying about having more flexibility with the online coaches, with having the kids up in New Castle. We also wanna make sure that the coach is available to them so they don't necessarily have to drive. And so Dana and I have, we've talked about spots at the library.
We have the opportunity to go to Coleridge and she can actually meet with students at Coleridge, you know, if she needed to and check in. And so we are really creative. And so what I really do appreciate is also that the high school administrative staff too are also willing just to help support. Like I said, Dana can go to Coleridge, she can check in. They know that she's there. Our libraries are also willing to help support. 'cause sometimes it's easier for kids to get to the libraries and so we'll meet them where they're at. Okay. Speaker 12: I will say, Cassie, if you would've asked me what on day one, what this was gonna look like today,
I would not, in my wildest of dreams have said, this is what it looks like. I just, we couldn't imagine it. And I'll be honest, going into next year, I, I cannot even speculate what this, what this is gonna look like at the end of next year. But it's gonna look really, really great. Speaker 4: Well, and that kind of leads me into my next question is we're just focusing on high school and entering with middle school. Has there ever been any talk about doing elementary? Speaker 12: There has been. And I think that taking our time is the, is the best route and, and really learning from what, what high school is doing.
We've talked also about, you know, the appeal to providing this as a, as an alternate option or a way to engage our homeschool population with us. Right? Our homeschool population is engaging with some kind of academic content and academic material. They're doing it at, at their homes under the supervision of their parents. This provides an opportunity for us to learn and say, Hey, you can still stay connected to Garfield re two and potentially access academic programming through us in a partnership.
Take advantage of all the supports that we have, but still have that traditional supervision and homeschool experience that you're craving. And so that's an area that we're, we're curious to see what that's gonna look like. And so those are conversations that we're definitely having of what is the connection and how could we potentially build something that could accommodate those kids as well. Speaker 11: What I love about, we have the opportunity with the, the ISP kiddos to really actually dive in and we have kids from elementary, middle school and high school who need to come and like, have extra support.
And so we, last year we had one element elementary student who couldn't go to school for whatever reasons. And so we pushed in and we wrapped supports around him and we created an elementary program specific, Dana was his coach and was working with him and meeting with him this year. We don't have any elementary students on our radars this year, but we have had middle school students who, you know, they've got expelled and done some naughty things and we've seen some things. And so they've, they are receiving expulsion services. And so we've been able to pilot what does it look like for a middle school student to who's gonna be out
for a semester, needs support for a semester online, what would that look like? And so we have this cool opportunity to really like see what does it look like, baby step into it. Going slow is probably the most important thing, especially for middle school and elementary. What, what I think about with elementary is there is a lot of time kids, we have one door, but kids are not there necessarily all day long. And it's not their necessarily peers. If I have an elementary student coming to one door for a check-in, I have high school students who also come in for check-ins. And so what I see is that maybe online isn't necessarily the best way
for elementary students because they're gonna be, that social development is so crucial at that age and even at middle school. But we will find ways to ensure that, you know, if kiddos do move into that at an elementary level and that's a, a pathway that we give to elementary, how do we keep social connection? Because that social connection is huge for middle school and elementary students. And so, so really being thoughtful and planning around that so we can keep kids connected. Speaker 4: Couldn't agree more. As Xavier was talking, I was thinking, can kids finish early high school students? Can they accelerate and graduate early?
Speaker 12: That is Xavier's goal. And his plan, as he's expressed to me, he is intrigued by that opportunity. And we have other students that are intrigued by the potential to do that because of the work study program that we have really launched. We had, we had Ashley who was completing credits through work, our senior that graduated, we had a different senior that also worked full-time, was working between 40 and 60 hours a week all of second semester. And we, we have worked to compliment academic coursework
and supplement elective coursework with their work learning that they're doing on the job as an employee. So instead of taking a Chinese class as your elective, this student was able to use that elective credit, earn credit by working a job. And so that is one of the things that we've really explored doing. It can accelerate then your ability to accumulate those credits quicker. So yep, this does afford us the opportunity. And depending on how engaged you are with the classes, you can finish them. You know, again, you're not time bound.
Usually a kid who spends two hours consecutive, think of it this way, if I'm in class for an hour and I just started getting rolling by the end of the hour and then the bell rings, I cut off all of that momentum and then I switch to the next class and then I come back the next day, but my momentum was shot. This provides you an opportunity. If you are, if you've built momentum over the first hour, you just keep rolling and you can get through and move through classes and curriculum a little bit quicker. So. Yep. Speaker 4: My next question is testing. Do they, do i-Ready testing PSAT, does that go
to our test scores? How does that all work? Speaker 12: Yes, they're all part of the school and we've been working on figuring out that and, and that the ability for kids to come in, because some kids just, they don't, their, their schedules don't align to be able to come into the in-person setting to do the testing. But what that's, that's part of the connection with the school, right? We're working with the school and school testing coordinators to make sure that these kids can also have the opportunity to get that testing the schools are interested in, in those testing results to see how we can provide additional layers of support.
What is the academic achievement look like in these classes as compared to, you know, our other traditional classes as well. And so are they staying on par? Yes, they may be passing their CDLS online classes, but are they still growing at the same rate academically as all of our students? And we wanna make sure that that's Speaker 4: Happening. And my final question, you have to ask funding, how is it covering the cost of this program? Do we get funding for these kids that are enrolling? And is it covering the cost of the staff? Speaker 12: The, the P The PPOR? So one students that are enrolled in the program are counted
as Rifle high school, Coleridge High School, Garfield R two students. So they hit our October count numbers. So just like any other student, we receive the same per pupil funding for these students, the CDLS classes themselves. We do have to pay for each class that a student takes, that those classes run at a rate of $250 per class. You think a traditional Coleridge high school student takes seven classes. Rifle high school student takes eight classes. So let's say they take a maximum of eight classes through CDLS. That is a grand total of $4,000.
We receive approximately 11, $12,000 per student. So there is just that cost. And then we're able to use the rest of that funding to help support the staff that we have available down at the one door as well as the support services from the school. So the school, you know, utilizes their, the personnel cost the rest of that. So right now it is a, you know, it is, it's lucrative. Yeah. I I would say I, we're not, we're, we're wanting to use the money that we bring in, you know,
for every student to provide the supports and educational services that they need. It doesn't feel like it is a cost deficit program to us right now. Speaker 4: Okay. Good. Thank you. You're welcome. Those are all my questions. Yep. Speaker 12: Megan, Speaker 5: You had mentioned a bit earlier kind of investigating the possibility of encouraging some of our homeschool population and, and we know families are pulling kids for a variety of reasons. It used to be just like religious exemptions, maybe severe medical issues.
But we're seeing families increasingly look for tho those homeschool options for a variety of different reasons. Not just those two. But if, if a family wanted to choose the homeschool path and maybe supplement with some of those classes, are there, are there options for that? Because technically they're not still a, a district student. Speaker 12: If they're accessing through us, the CDLS classes, we can, we can count them. As long as their programming rises to the level of full-time status, then they,
they would be considered our student. Okay. I mean, we would receive funding for them. Any kid that wants to take advantage of A-C-D-L-S class has to register with Garfield R two. Take for example, our homeschool students who access our band classes or our ag classes or classes that they can't get at home, they register and they are registered Garfield re two students, but their course load doesn't reach the level of full-time status for us to receive funding. But if they were taking a full course load of academic classes with us, then they would rise
to the level of academic programming that could, that could get them, that could get us funding for the student itself. It just depends on how much, how many classes they would be taking with us. Speaker 5: Really. That seems like a win-win in a pretty significant number of those, you know, that, that circle. Yeah. And I, I trust that you're, you're looking into how to, how to work that, that angle. Speaker 12: We, that's, that's a part of our discussion so that, Speaker 1: So that we're, Speaker 12: We're trying to figure out what is, what is the right connection piece to all of these families.
Speaker 1: So really that was the impetus of this entire thing, was we looked last year that there was X amount of students that living within our boundaries that were not enrolled with Garfield Re two. There's a variety of reasons why, like you mentioned some go to re one 'cause their parents work there, a lot of homeschoolers. And since COVID, that number has risen. It's since plateaued, I think statewide and starting to just kind of be stagnate. There's still people leaving. But that was 'cause it was, it was a large number of students, right? And one of our, one of my first conversations with Mr.
Bangert was how do we get these students back? I think even this was a, this was something back that even previous board President Bri Fletcher and I, and Fathom and Cassie discussed about how to get these kids back into our schools, back into our, our facilities. And to Kirk's credit, I mean, he was hired in July, June one, and this was his very first initiative. And I, I believe I had a conversation with him and I think Fathom and he stood it up in a month with, you know, of course Jacob and Amanda's help.
And we didn't know what we were getting. Like, you know, it was like, whoa. And then to see this again, I mean, I just can't tell you how proud of you guys I am. Yeah, you're doing great. I mean, you guys doing great. Guys are killing it because this, this is just the reason why, because I, people get frustrated with bureaucracy and they look at school districts as bureaucracies because they're inefficient, they're slow, they're very, you know, clumsy. That's just the perception there. There's, you look at public perception in any of our public institutions that's falling stuff like this makes people believe in public institutions.
Again, when we see real results, when we see people, you know, get, when we see students progressing at thir, growing at 13%, when we see a pilot program that started with four, now it's was that, what do you think, you said 13 and now we're at 31 for next year. I mean, that's, those are numbers that people can get behind. And so you guys have killed it again, in, in my opinion, and I'm excited to see there are, of course, we don't even know what the world's gonna look like next week, right? So if, if, if in in business there's this, this,
this mantra, you adapt or die just the way it is, public school, whether people want to think of it this way or not, is a business. It takes resources. IE money to run. If we are not competing for the same bundle of money and, and drawing customers into, into our district, we will not be around. So this is just, I think that's, this is an example of that. And I, I can't wait to see what next year brings. Thank you. I, sorry, I do have one couple questions. Is there another district doing this anywhere near us?
Speaker 12: I mean, there are school districts are all going after the same. You mentioned it. Everybody is, is seeing the potential that lies within there and school districts are all trying to figure it out. I would say nobody is doing what we are doing. Okay. I, I, I firmly believe nobody is going after it the way that we are going after it. However, I get constant emails saying, you know, Durango school district has started their online program. Well this point re one, re one started an online program. They were investigating it. They were investigating it. And so
Speaker 1: They're too late. They're all, Speaker 12: Everybody's kind of, everybody's kind of exploring it. And so I think that, again, I don't models, I I would venture to say that people are gonna start asking us about what it is Speaker 4: That we're Yeah. Can we charge them for that Speaker 12: Consulting proprietary rights? I I, Speaker 4: Right. Can we, can we get a patent on this? Speaker 1: I think that we've seen that a couple times through some of the initiatives we've led in the last few years. Right? I think, what was the one other one I was thinking of the state. The state was asking us attendance. Speaker 4: Oh, attendance. Speaker 1: Attendance. Our attendance, right.
That was another huge initiative that was, we focus in on it and, you know, knocked outta the park. So, which Amanda, how many was part of Speaker 4: That too? Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly man. I mean it's, I so thank you. How many, many of those 31 students for next year are, were, if any, were not enrolled in district and how are there any coming back? 'cause that's, I mean, I'll be honest with you, that's the number that I'm looking at. I know I want to, I wanna get recaptures like those kiddos, right? I know we get 'em back into our system. Speaker 12: One, one of the things that, that we've had a,
a conversation about kids that have left us and coming back, because initially that was really very much the big push is to say, okay, you left us, come back to us. And I think that the overall number of kids is gonna be more minimal than I think we had hoped. You know, Xavier's an example of a kid that was not enrolled in our district in this now enrolled in our district. The bigger, the bigger thing that you're gonna see is over the last so many years, go back to our records, we are looking at a loss rate of so many kids
and the reduction in loss is where we're gonna see the biggest gains. Yeah, Speaker 1: Yeah. Makes Speaker 12: Sense. It's not necessarily kids. These are all, these are, chances are these are kids that were gonna leave us anyway because we didn't offer something that someone else did. And so if we didn't, if we didn't create this program, we were gonna see kids. I think we were gonna see kids that that loss rate increase exponentially. Yeah. And so it is just, just the fact Durango's creating a program, re one's creating a program. They're already program, you see goal on city market
carts, right? Everybody else is enticing them to leave us and go to them. I I think that some of our students that have left us are gonna come back. I think that some students that were never ours to begin with are gonna be disillusioned with what they're getting and then they're gonna see and hear by word of mouth. Families that are a part of this program are gonna share the successes that we're having. And I think that is gonna help us capture students that weren't initially our students that come in. But I think that the biggest gains we're gonna see is that
that rate of loss of our students is gonna drop drastically. Speaker 1: I think your, your biggest, I guess positive to regaining students and word of mouth is attaching this program to the different facilities. So if you're a rifle kid, you're a rifle high school student. Yep. It's not the ambiguity of just some Yeah. Large. Like you're part of a community. You go to a rifle high school game, you sit in the, you sit in the student section, you know, you go to a cool ridge game. It's, that's, that's what we're all after. Speaker 12: But 20, 30 years later, after you've graduated high school, the pride that comes with saying, yeah, I'm a rifle high school graduate
as opposed to a goal academy. What's that? People know what rifle high school is. Right. Or they know what Coleridge High School is and that to, to have that I is important to kids and families. Speaker 11: From my perspective, I see a lot of, we, we are a very unique program. I have the ability, I've worked with a lot of partners across the state. I've been highlighted about the family resource program. Our McKinney-Vento, the highly mobile youth people from CDE were really spotlighting us and talking about how we have moved mountains to support
our most vulnerable populations. And so knowing that we have a model that's being spoken about, then we have the flex path that we've just kind of parted side by side. We have families and kids who are super interested just because of the word of mouth. They're hearing about one door. Oh this is a one door program. And so we have the, through the ISP and through what Chelsea's created with some of the wraparound stuff, we have kids who are very system involved with the ninth Judicial district, with community partners that have worked with families for years and years and years. And they have not seen any success.
And now for the first time, families are moving out of systems. Kids are completing completion or their, their treatment plans. And we are being recognized Chief, the chief judge Neely last year at a court hearing when I was standing next to a kiddo and we gave him his treatment plan and said, this is what we're doing. We're really trying to help support this kiddo. He commended us and he said, I have never seen a juvenile treatment plan. We call 'em treatment plans, that's the word. But it was academic mental health. I've never seen something so comprehensive in all my time working in the judicial district here. And he committed Garfield re two for this one student.
And we were just like, wow, thank you. You know, it was just a really cool honor. And so we have the ninth judicial probation department, U Sona is working really closely with us. All of the different people are hearing the successes and then they want to know how do we get their kids. We had, I called Kirk a few months ago and said, Hey, there was a Roaring Fork student who was expelled and they want to know if they can put 'em down here under our ISP program because they saw they would, they want to keep him connected and they wanna put him on some academics. We didn't accept him 'cause he didn't move and he was expelled. There were some other things, but, but word is spreading.
We are, this is a phenomenal thing. Not just at necessarily the wraparound stuff. Having alternative options that families have control over and we can demonstrate success. We have, I mean, five students graduating from a first year program, that's pretty frigging huge when we didn't even know what we were doing. Jacob is amazing. And so, you know, so I I feel really confident that we are gonna see some huge increases in people wanting to participate and then the excitement about being tied to their homeschool, the kids in the program, you know,
like the, for whatever reasons in our ISP, the kids that are at one door, they don't go in person all the time or they don't go at all. And now we're hearing like, well, I, I wanna go take this class now. I think I wanna be here. I think I can do it. I think I can do a weightlifting class. And they are making change. And that is the coolest thing. And as you guys saw today, you know, as we had the, you saw the kids, you saw the rooms, you saw the stuff. And this is different. This is very unique and it, I think we have, we're gonna have a lot of eyes on us as we start rolling this out because it is very competitive to goal this,
their families aren't getting what, what we offer Garfield R two community. So that's great. So thank you guys for supporting this. I think it's Speaker 1: Pretty, pretty obvious that when, if you keep your eye on the ball, like with all through all your partners and your, your, I guess motives might not always be exactly a hundred percent the same, but we're all there for the kids, right? And if we keep our eye on the ball, cool things happen. Speaker 12: So again, the biggest shout out and the biggest drivers couldn't, couldn't even imagine we wouldn't be where we are if it weren't for Chelsea Pros and Dana Way.
And I, I failed to mention this as part of one of our responses to the growing demand. Joining the, joining that team as online flex pa Well, FlexPath coach, long time re two teacher Chris Fallback is gonna be joining. That team is excited about the work and, and, and passionate for to engage in, in, in this, in this work with us. Awesome. Speaker 4: Be a good fit. Speaker 12: Okay. Speaker 4: Woohoo. Hey Mr. James. Thank you. Thank you. Thank Speaker 1: You. And we go from celebrations to Jason. Speaker 4: Jason, something good.
Where's the walkup theme song? Money. Money, money. Speaker 1: You need that stone cold Austin walk in class Speaker 4: Breaking it aint Yeah, we need, I'm good. Thank you. Speaker 1: No, thank you. Speaker 16: We good? You need a break, Speaker 4: Popcorn? No. Sorry, this is a really long meeting, but I had so many questions. Not that long. So exciting. I'm gonna Speaker 16: Give you a huge screen of numbers you could ask. Speaker 4: I know. I'm gonna write 'em down. I'm gonna go back to my notes. I Speaker 1: Heard you're losing your touch. We're here fast eight. Speaker 4: It's always insurance. Ask questions. I know. Speaker 1: She's like, oh, question 47.
Speaker 4: Back in 1932. Yeah, hold on. Speaker 1: When I was 12 they said this. I found Speaker 4: It in my notebook. Speaker 1: All right, you have the floor Speaker 16: Please. All right. Good evening. I had planned on giving tonight's presentation in Mandarin and I was gonna have Xavier translate, but he left. So I'll stick with English. Never see every, every time I hear about cool stuff, our kids are good. I did not take Mandarin in high school. I can tell you that. I wanted to open with my favorite thing of the last month. I got invited to the fourth grade job fair. Jacob had a cancellation and he was kind enough to ask me.
I was so honored. I said, I can't wait to teach the kids about finance. I didn't realize fourth graders interested in that. And he said, oh no, I I I don't want you to talk about that. I want you to talk about being a lawyer. It was, it was the most fun day of, of the month for sure. We're gonna open tonight. Let me, let me get you the agenda. We're gonna talk about the last month or so of Colorado Educational Finance. Then we're gonna show you the year end projections. I gave you those six weeks ago. Usually you wouldn't get kind of a mid-quarter section, but I just think it's fair for you guys to see exactly where we're trending.
And then finally, I'll give you the proposed budget and we'll go through how, how we created that. So the next slide is what has happened since the last time we met. I think I've given this speech four times now to four different groups. So forgive me if I've told some of you this. In a normal year, the governor puts out a budget in November and in January the legislature runs it, they call it the run. And we have a pretty good idea of how much money every district's gonna get. You can see that in a big spreadsheet and then in May they tweak it a little bit and you get the final numbers. That's a very calm year. That's what's supposed to happen.
This year was a little different. We took quite a little curvy path in November. We got the proposed budget that came out from the governor. It looked like we were gonna have an increase over this year. So for next year of $2.7 million, that's a good year for us. That's a good, a good piece of growth for us since I've been here. That would be about an average year. But, but not too bad. By January the CDE put out their run and they changed that from 2.7 million for us to 2.1. What happened? Well as we talked about in the last couple times
that economic forecast had come out in March. The state was somewhere between 1.5 billion and 1 billion in the whole, as I've said in my last speeches, what's $500 million amongst friends? But they put this, this very, very dire economic report out that began a discussion statewide about how are we gonna balance this budget and what's gonna shrink. The main proposal that came out was they were gonna eliminate the, the specific ownership tax for us. That's about a $1.2 million loss right off the top. They were gonna take what our
local people pay in specific ownership tax and give it to the state as a credit for what they give us. So they were directly trading local dollars for state that was fairly unpopular. So then they said, well let's bring back the BS factor for us. That's probably three quarter million dollars. So they were talking about pulling almost a million bucks, maybe up to 1,000,002 away from us. We are starting our budget process at this time. We are starting, we're discussing with our schools staffing models. We're trying to figure out how to go forward with that crazy economic news. By, by April the,
the CDE put out a report for the cost of living. Now back in November, Kirk, we were given an another speech somewhere and somebody said, why is our cost of living factor in the formula so low when everyone knows it's expensive here? And my answer to that was always very bland that, you know, they haven't changed this thing in 10 years. And Kirk said, why not? And I told him, I just got here Texas. And so we started looking into that and actually ranking, taking the state's data that ranks districts against
where the rank is in the formula. And we found there was a pretty big discrepancy. He got ahold of the people that put that report out and whispered gently in their ear until they said maybe we should look at this community one more time. And they did that. And that came out and we moved up nine spots, which is a big move for reasons I'll show you in a second. So we started behind the scenes kind of celebrating that there was a potential for $650,000 maybe more in that, in that formula move.
By April the legislature came out and said, Hey, education is saved. Okay, we're gonna make most of our cuts in Medicaid and we've saved education. And we talked about how they did that. It's it to me, it appears to be a can kicking kicked it down the road. But we we're all saved for now. So we're thinking great, we've seen the cola adjustment, we know, we know what our number was, we know what that could do for us. So we start working through our, our data by May, the set by May 7th, the state puts out a run
that has our cola in it. I have a screenshot of it if you wanna see it. And it's got that, it's got that additional funds in it. And so such we're, we're pretty excited. I think that was a, I think it came out on a Wednesday night at 7:00 PM and I saw it at 3:00 AM that morning. I was up just checking an email 'cause I don't sleep. And I was, I run over and I think I sent Kirk an email at like four in the morning. Like, check out the cold. So we, we saw that by the next morning, particularly by Friday, we start getting word from statewide friends that everybody just saw cola.
And what happens when you re-rank districts, somebody moves up and somebody moves down. And so the people that moved down hadn't been expecting that. And they were starting, they were seeing reductions in their funding and they were crying and I told them, Hey, if you'd like to sit down with me and discuss how to live under that cola, I'd be happy to share with you how we've done it for the last few years. But rumors start spreading that they, they were gonna take that cola away. That prompted a, a phone call from Kirk to case he,
he called Case. And I think if you are a, a parent, a student or a staff member, you'd have been proud of that phone call. 'cause that that was, that was a fight for our, for what our people deserve. Speaker 17: I heard it through the door and I was very proud. Speaker 16: Our, our our our community deserves that fight. And it, the question was why are we, why are we not getting what the state has commissioned? And the answer back basically was, well other districts don't want this Speaker 1: Are bigger, but they already started their budget. Speaker 16: They're big. And some of them had already done some of their budgeting. That's Speaker 1: That's too bad.
Unfortunate. Speaker 16: Your your, your response, which is more measured in here is probably the same that we had, which was basically 40 districts were favored over the other 130 in our humble opinion. Yep. By the 13th. We, we had a, a legislative deadline. I think it was the day before we found out that the legislature was going to pause the cola. So that factor has been paused. I had never used that term before, but I called Xcel Energy, let them know I was pausing my electric bill.
They still simple. Speaker 1: Quick, quick question. Speaker 16: Yes. Speaker 1: Our move up nine spots was paused not cola itself. Yeah. We still get a cost of living adjustment. Speaker 16: We, we get our old cost of living adjustment previous. Yeah. And so that's paused. So you can use that if you want. So May 14th the run comes out. We did not have that call. We had our old 0.209, which instead of a 0.221, which is a big difference when you multiply it times the PPR and the number of students. And so anyway, the next page will tell you kind of what has changed since we talked last.
Good news is our student count is very stable. We've talked about that compared to our surrounding districts. We are very stable student population specific ownership tax and the budget stabilization we're not implemented. That's great that that would've been a million dollar hit. And our co factor was adjusted when I can prove it. The next slide, I'll give you a QR code and you can scan it. You can see where we rank the bad news. We did lose about 60 kids. Yes. Speaker 1: It was adjusted back to the new one. Speaker 16: Back to the old, sorry. Okay, I'll show you. Alright, so our funding count fell by about 60 students.
That's, that's not great. We'd love to have an increasing student count, but compared to the rest of the valley, we're pretty stable averaging, student averaging move to three years. That means our funding fluctuates a little quicker. Makes it a little harder to budget. The state gave us numbers last Thursday, I wrote this last week, so it was the Thursday before knowing that the cola adjustment had been suspended and that was, that was heartbreaking for us. So we re rebalanced the next slide will show you the, Speaker 1: They had to pass a bill to suspend our cola.
Correct. They had to make a law. Correct. They had to actually take action instead of inaction. It's Speaker 16: Amazing what they can do when they want to. So this is, this is an actual clip from the cost of living report put out by the CDE. And if you, if you want, you can scan this QR code and it can get the whole 120 pages. Took me hours to draw this. So this is my first QR code 53. And here we are. This is us. We're pink. We used to be light green. So that's our little difference. But you can see, oh man, it's right behind there. I promise.
This says we're the 23rd most expensive district in the States. It Speaker 4: Yes, it's right Speaker 16: There. Behind 20. Speaker 4: It's on this. Speaker 16: Yeah, there you go. So we're the 23rd most expensive district and at the last role we were the hundred 51st funded. So if anybody doesn't believe we're expensive, it, it's, it's a expensive place to live. I think this new run will scoot us up a few spots, but I haven't done that yet because we just put it out Anyway, scan that if you wanna see the whole report and that's what's happened. That was a very exciting month.
Made budgeting extremely difficult as as your revenues bounced around and as our expectations changed, you Speaker 4: Should have went on vacation and like did something while they tried to figure this out. It would've, it would've been great if I'd just started at the end. Speaker 16: So, yikes. What I'm giving you here is basically the revenue and expenses of the general fund up through May 15th. I've got 'em run out through today if anybody wants them. We, we, we built out some new formulas where we can run our financial statements up to any day. The problem with cutting a mid month is sometimes some
of the revenues aren't quite in. It's better to get a picture at the end of the month, but what the heck, we got six weeks left. I thought you guys deserve to see it. This is the main reason I ran it out. You know, we've had like $3 million as our local, as our local revenues forever. I kept promising you guys, it comes in May, it comes in May. We got 7.7 million in on the 10th and another million and a half in like two days ago. So this is actually now 14 and a half I think. So that money's rolling in the final stuff. The final taxes will roll in in June. And so we'll see that fill up. But no big surprises here.
Just wanted you guys to have where we are currently. We have six weeks to go. We have one payroll left. If you look at the next page, which is the expenses, the big thing probably to look at here in expenses is, and this is some math you have to do in your head, but if you add salaries and benefits on support and instruction, it comes to six and a half million dollars left in the budget. As you guys know, we really run about a $5 million payroll. If you, if you follow those monthly reports, generally June will have a little bit of a bump in it, but I don't think we're gonna see a six, six
and a half million dollar month. And so the other thing that happens, the final paycheck that our teachers get when they get that paycheck in July, we've started a new year. So we take all of their paychecks and shove 'em back into the year before. It's called the accrual. It's the most boring thing you can talk about as an accountant. But we shove basically three fourths of our salaries backwards and we used a placeholder for them in the year before. And so there's a little bit of an adjustment in June, sorry,
in July, sorry June. That basically takes in the raises that the staff would've gotten over the course of that year. So I've been very, very conservative in my estimates for how big that will be. In fact, I made it probably four times what it will be. So just trying to be safe. But here's our expenses. The other thing to notice is supplies and purchase services. Supplies and purchase services schools use their purchase services at the end of the year and their supplies at the beginning we're, we're a little more steady in support,
but Kathy won't let me say this, but they are running, they are running quite a bit behind percentage wise where they were last year, which is great. They're spending less to this point of the year than they were last year. So I haven't budgeted or forecasted any savings in those two areas. Schools can spend their money with their budgets, but we'll see. I think there's gonna be a little bit there too. I'll show you the next screen is the forecast. I gave y'all this, I think it was about a month ago. It's basically the same. I added some specific ownership tax. There's two payments left coming to us.
It comes in the second half of the month. And so I I, I bumped that just a little bit and I cut back the Medicaid discussions that we were having a month ago. Medicaid said that they didn't have enough money to pay us last year and they needed to pay it back. So we're about a hundred thousand dollars that we're working through with Medicaid over the last two years. So that's our, basically the same revenue projection that we were looking at about a month ago. And our expenses are the next page. I trued the salaries up a little bit, but as you can see that's, that's trending at about six
to $700,000 under budget I've put in there. I think enough to take care of that accrual and I think enough to take care of our retirements and terminations usually in June as people retire. There's payouts associated with that. So June's usually a larger payroll. Last year it was a five and a half million dollar payroll. We had a lot of payouts last year. I don't think it'll come in quite at that rate. But essentially that's my expectation and I've put in no savings for any of the non salaries yet, which I still think there might be.
So if that happens then this year's deficit spending would be 1.3 million instead of the 2.1. And we talked about, I think it was back in February about maybe hoping we could get this to one six. And so this is, this is good news. If it holds, if it doesn't hold, I'll look stupid next month and can tell you that that's, that's where we forecasting right now. So any questions about that? And then we'll get into next year's budget's. A lot of numbers, Cassie. Yeah, no. Comparing it to last. She'll keep them for, alright, let me show you the budget.
This is so me, so me killing her drink is I $5 Speaker 18: $71 million budget. Speaker 16: We met yesterday and I was, I was trying to explain this, this looks like essentially this is your budget for next year. These white columns and I don't know what that is, 25 something numbers that is 14,000 lines of budget code. Wow. It's, it's, it's so many people working so hard to get these numbers together that it's kind of overwhelming. And so that's kind of what I wanted to talk about.
When we looked at, I'll go to expenses first. When we looked at salaries, coming up with salaries for next year, those meetings started in February with schools. There was some rebalancing of staff, there was some creative ideas on how to keep services high to our students. We had people who are retiring, people that are filling in. Anytime you get new teachers and, and teachers that have been here a long time, you pick up little savings in that. And so we had all these pieces of the puzzle. If Jamie were here from hr, she, you could ask her any question about
any school by any position. She can tell you who, who, who's been hired or whether it's vacant or when they were hired, when they're leaving. So it's amazing. But we had so many people involved in figuring out exactly what next year was gonna look like. Then HR takes the entire staff from, from this current year and we call it rolling it into the future. So if you are coming back, you, you are now built into the system in the future. To do that, Kathy has to open the new year early. So we've, in the past, we've not been able to do this.
This is, we're, we're two and a half months ahead of anywhere we've ever been. So Kathy got the new year open, she got the new account strings built, the, the HR got the staff built, they got them entered and rolled into next year. Her's walked in on two salary roles or staff roles. Like when he first got here, he walked in and he walked in like two weeks ago when we were doing it. And I think both times he said, what are y'all doing? It's just chaos. There's 22 different calendars, 38 different salary schedules and people have to roll and fit into all their positions.
That is a lot of work to come up with. How much will next year cost? How, so then you get this number and it's super low and you say, what? Why is it low? We gotta go figure out all the vacancies and we gotta build out those vacancies with a reasonable fill number. Then you gotta go say, okay wait, we have staff that work overtime. We have bus drivers that drive all night. We, we, where do we put the overtime? Where do we put our substitutes? Where do we put overage for people that work 32 hours but they, you know, they work two extra hours a week. That's not overtime, but they still get paid.
Where is our athletic coaches? Where are those vacancies? Filling all that in and freezing it in time so that we can come up with a real number. Benefits. We just finished our open enrollment. I got the benefit selections for the staff yesterday. Came in super low, sit down with Krista, our benefits specialist. Said, what's going on? She said, well that's just for the people that rolled all those vacancies and all those spots that are gonna fill in the next three months. That'll fill this up. So this number is an estimate based on the increases we saw
based off of last year. These two numbers are Kathy's specialty, 17 different departments, 17 meetings, everything from the superintendent to HR to tech to every single school to finance whittling down exactly to the penny. What they need. This is 2,700 different accounts, I think. So you see one number here, but it's so much work to go into that. And then ultimately our, our revenues the same way. We sit down and we say, what did the state give us? We get these numbers from the state. Then we go through every single revenue stream, figure out
exactly how much do we think we're gonna get. This is our best bet. This is our, this is a lot of work by a lot of people. It's our best, best guess. We have 30 days now to bring this back to you and make changes. So every day till from now till June 26th when we meet, I'm gonna come walk into work and say, what did we forget? What did we forget? What, what needs to be changed? What happened? What insurance information changed in the last two weeks? So we'll change these numbers if we need to and bring 'em back. Food service. We met with Mary and Sherry to come up with these numbers.
I'm a little bit worried about this number. It has to do with how many meals we serve and the state's piece to, to supplement that. When you drop student count even by 60 kids, let's say half of those eat that. That could be a breakfast and a lunch times four for, you know, a week times four for a month times 10 for a school year. That, that actually adds up quite a bit. But she grabbed a couple grants that we think are gonna hold that number straight. So that number could change. But we'll be meeting with them over the next month. These are our grants. This is the number
that Heather and Simone sat down with and we went through every single grant, every single award we think we're gonna get. Simone told me this morning, I think I thought of one another one, so I'm gonna kill her. But we we're gonna change that. We'll, good job Simone. But the expenses down here are difficult. We don't know exactly where we're gonna spend that grant money. So this will be allocated differently. These are placeholders because we have to spend exactly what we actually, we spend it and we get it back most of the time. So those numbers have to manage. I'm on our other funds. I'm not gonna walk you through that 'cause I just did.
If you'll go down two more slides, these are our last three funds. These are a little bit easier. This is the money that our schools collect in that, in student fees. We're seeing an upward trend. I think it has to do with success fund. It's just easier to pay. People can come pay, pay their fees. So that's a trended number. It's a guess if it's off, we'll true it up in, in January, this is our, this is our bonds. This is what we owe this year in the bonds. This is what we think will mill next December to collect next year. So those numbers are usually pretty, pretty static. And this is John's fund.
The capital projects committee comes up with how much John's gonna spend and they nailed it. It was 1.2, which is what we transfer in. This spending number will change if John has projects that aren't completed by the end of the year, that roll in the next year. Right now he has about $400,000 of projects still outstanding. It's impossible to make all your projects end on the school year. So if that rolls in, we'll move his fund balance essentially his, his, his forward expenses into here that we'll give
to you in June. After today. We'll put an ad in the newspaper, tell people if they want to come look at this, they can, I'll put a nominated copy at both doors. We generally don't have takers on that, but then we'll make any changes. I'll come back in a month and whatever changes we think we made, I'll try to highlight for you. It'll be a little faster and then we'll ask the board to approve those changes. This is our fund balance since 2020. This is the current year. You can see that we thought we were gonna be down at this 18.6 by the end of the year. That was at 2.2 deficit.
This is where we're trending right now is 19 five. And because that budget I just showed you has about a $500,000 deficit, then we think that next year will be 19. So this is starting to look very much more stable compared to where it was when we were trending this direction, which is great news. This is when the board gave the 6% raise. You can see we've essentially worked $3 million through the system, extracted it from fund balance, moved it essentially into salary and, and stabilized and leveled off.
That's the plan. If you tap into fund balance with recurring costs, and we had a three year plan, we kept getting kicked in the teeth insurance went way up. All these things kept happening. And so I think I told Steve this. I I feel like this is a miracle. I mean we've, if, if we get to this point and if these forecasts are correct, and if that budget holds, then I feel like what the board wanted three years ago has been accomplished. That that's, that's the way I feel. The other thing I'll say about these little bumps, do you guys remember Eser? Yeah.
Speaker 4: There's Speaker 16: About $5 million floating through here. That was money we don't have anymore, so. Right. Yeah. That's why those look a little better. So Speaker 4: We're back to pre 2020. Speaker 16: Pretty close. Pretty Speaker 4: Close. Pretty close. Pretty close. Speaker 16: Any questions? Y'all had a long Speaker 4: Night. I I'm just so proud of you that you did a lesser spending deficit. Speaker 16: Well, I wanted chances, Hays Speaker 4: Problem. I am so proud of you. I wanted to beat him into that. Speaker 1: I'm proud, proud of Kathy Speaker 4: And Kathy. But Kathy, when do you leave?
Speaker 16: She got a, i I finished the year. Speaker 4: Okay. Speaker 1: All joking aside, Jason, you're Speaker 4: Finished the year as in Oh, June 30. Speaker 1: December 31. Speaker 4: Oh, December. No, that Speaker 16: Was cool. June 30th. Speaker 4: My, oh, December fiscal Speaker 1: Year. Speaker 16: June Speaker 4: I got, I got, got you. No fiscal year. No, I'm saying not fiscal year. I'm saying school like year calendar. Get her another six months. Speaker 1: Great job, Jason. Speaker 4: Sure. Yes, thank you. Oh, I wanted Speaker 16: To just repeat Jacob, if you look that fund balance,
our loss of reduction will be our greatest gain. That was a phrase he said. I was like, that sounds like a finance phrase. Speaker 1: He was a pretty good one. Speaker 16: He can work in our department Speaker 1: Somehow in that, in that context. It works. Speaker 16: Yeah, it did work. Speaker 4: Somehow it worked. Speaker 16: Thank you. Speaker 1: Thank you. Good job, Jason. Speaker 4: Thanks Jason. We'll see you next month. Speaker 1: Just, just move. I mean it's gonna be pretty quiet now in the world of legislative and finance, right? Yeah, Speaker 16: We're, we'll be, we'll be truing up those budget. Speaker 4: So what did that really cost us? I did have that. If we would've stayed up the nine spots
or whatever, how much did that really cost us? Speaker 16: The, if you click, if you, well there's another report I'll, I'll put in the Speaker 1: In QR code so Speaker 4: You can see, I didn't wanna go through 500 pages. Speaker 16: 675,000 is the Total Cola adjustment. Now the state is claiming they wanna phase that in at 30% rates. So directly this year, two 50, 300,000. Speaker 1: So that's what it cost us. Okay. Is that like a, they suspended that cola change until they indefinitely? Well, they, Speaker 9: I think minimum of one year this year. So
Speaker 1: They minimum correct. A minimum of one year. That's all it says. Ah, it's great. Great law. Well, it's all, they Speaker 16: Sell just a minimum of Speaker 1: One minute. Do they realize there's people on the west side of the divide? Yeah, seriously do. Now you Speaker 9: Had that discussion Speaker 1: So much we could say about that, but we won't. So, back to my litigation question. Can we sue somebody? I'm just playing, I'm just blank. Speaker 9: 42 districts went down. They have more legislators. Speaker 1: Oh. Or they're, Speaker 9: You can imagine that which 42 went down Speaker 1: Or, or they're, or they're gonna connect to a lobbying group that Yeah,
Speaker 9: They had more legislators. Perfect. I looked at the 42. Speaker 1: Okay, well, moving on to policy. Hold on. I gotta find my, here we go. I got a lot of notes. They didn't gimme any governance action items in my tenure as president, but policy focus 13 one oh first reading for section B, BB to BDFB. This, are we bringing up the ones we brought? Speaker 9: So these are all the ones in, in the, in your Google policy review section.
We made comments for all of those. I'm happy to address any comments that we made in the far left column that we, we can do for first reading. So we made the, the clerical changes and then I made any legal comments are in there. And so if there's any of those that you'd like me to address or more clarify, I'm happy to go through those at this time with the board that we can talk about. Speaker 2: I, Speaker 1: Cassie,
get you outta the way I went through 'em today. I didn't have any, any, didn't have anything. Significant concerns. Do you have anything? I don't have any concerns, Speaker 9: So I, I appreciate, Speaker 1: I'm just double checking the Speaker 9: Comments work that, that the board did. It was very helpful. I, I think we spent a great deal of time working with CASB and went, went through it. And I think there is a couple policies, and I think this is the only comment that I would say is to the board is that this is why we're doing this because it actually surfaced, and you'll see in my comments a couple places that
through transition, there's a couple places that in fact that's why we do this, is that we have places where the policy has not, because of transition isn't being, is isn't being implemented. And for the 26, 27, we will make sure that it is being implemented. I think it's also really helpful because there are places where it's, I think it'll be helpful in clar the clarity to the board and for me as superintendent to say, well, you read this policy and we had to go back to CS B
and say, well wait, if it says that why? And then they go, well read C because C then tells you it isn't this. So there's a lot of places where there's policy just works that way. That it's redundant and yes, that it's tells you to do it in B, but then in this one it, you give, you give me the superintendent authority to do that. And so chance, I think to some of your comments where you said, well wait, I've never done it this way. And the answer is yes, because later on in the policy book, it says you give the authority to the superintendent
to do things like evaluation. Yeah, yeah. That those kind of things. So I think that's part of this process, I think is why this is making sense and it's helpful to go through it. But I will say, and you'll see that, that there is a couple places that it is absolutely surfacing a couple policies that through, through change in law, change in, in, in superintendents changing boards, they were like, oh, that committee isn't happening. Right. We're gonna, we're gonna make it happen.
So it'll happen. I'll, I'll be transparent. I'm not gonna make it happen in one day left of school. No, we will get it happening for the 26 27 school year. Hundred percent. We'll get it up and going. But you'll see those in my comments. Speaker 4: Yes. Just read that. BDFD Speaker 1: Real well what Speaker 4: BDFD is it? 20, 26, 27 school year. Yeah. I think that's all reasonable. Speaker 1: Yeah. I I think it's, it's just when taking individually, some policies don't make a lot of sense. Yes, Speaker 9: Right. Speaker 4: True statement. Speaker 1: They're like,
Speaker 9: Yeah, Speaker 1: Wait a minute. Speaker 5: Is there a possibility to reference the supporting documentation so you know where to go? I mean, I know that that's a lot of extra work, but I, I wonder if that clarifies some things too. Speaker 1: Put a hot link in it. Speaker 4: Some of the, well, no, I'm being serious. No object do have that. It, some of them say like in a parentheses like Speaker 9: Reference many times. Many times it does. I I think many times when we found the confusion and we had to dive deeper, it was, Theresa, Speaker 1: Can you bring that policy Speaker 9: Back up please? Sub paragraph. Speaker 1: Any of them. I want to go to the bottom of it to Speaker 9: Say, well why, why does that have it in policy?
Speaker 1: Because sometimes they have like the reference policy. Speaker 9: Reference it, right? Yeah. Speaker 1: Depending on which one. Oh, Speaker 5: There's cross refs. Okay. Speaker 1: Yeah. At the very bottom of it, it gives you the date review and then ref referring policies. Okay. Speaker 5: That's, that's on me. Speaker 4: Just on some of them. Some of them, but it's not on all of them. Speaker 1: Like right here. Legal reference. Yeah. Right here. Yeah. Cross refs. Speaker 9: So my recommendation to the board is please review your policy review section B if you haven't already. If there's anything in that that you have questions,
please contact me before we get, we get to second reading and we will be doing that. Which brings up that. Help me, Sharon, are we, are we planning on doing that in July or June? Are we gonna do it in August? Yes. What did we discuss? Doesn't work. Speaker 3: If there's changes that need to be made, I'd like to make them before Friday so that you guys will have this all cleaned, Speaker 9: But we're not gonna adopt them until August. Speaker 3: If you wanna wait, we can do that. These ones, they're ready for a second reading if they don't want any more changes. Speaker 9: Okay. Speaker 3: And then we can,
they can take action on it next week. And then when I come back, it won't be until we won't start anything. Okay. So Speaker 9: Probably September. Thank you. So the, the, because as you, just as, as a reminder to the board share, this is Sharon's last week before she has to take a month off. So Sharon will be stepping out for the month of June. So she will not be here for our June board meetings. We'll have Lisa, we'll we'll step in and Emily will be helping support for that. So we're, we're trying to get everything lined out as much
as possible so that we don't have any oversight changes. So if you have any, please review that. If you have any concerns, let us know with what we've done and we'll try to make those changes as soon as possible. If not, we're gonna put off any full adoptions on policy until Sharon returns. And then we'll pick up this process again in August and we'll, we'll start that again. And by then, we'll also have the new CASB legal changes and we'll, we'll start with, with those and then pick this process up again as we do it.
But I think these were a good, good first run at a big section to do that. Okay. Does that work for everybody? Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 9: Awesome. I love the method. Speaker 1: Any future requests going once, going twice. Speaker 5: I think of a darn thing. I think we've nailed it all. Speaker 4: Does the embargo lift? Speaker 1: When Speaker 4: Does embargo lift or the embargo? When does that lift? Speaker 1: Oh, on the Speaker 4: July test scores. Speaker 9: Yeah. They, it sounds like we will be getting test scores a little bit earlier this year. They sped it up and so when I know more,
I will be getting i'll, I'll let you guys know. Speaker 4: Is that usually July? It's Speaker 9: Usually, it's at usually the end of July, 1st of August. We have those. Okay. But like I said, Simone let me know that we might be getting them earlier this year, but I don't have official dates yet. Speaker 4: Okay. You couldn't remember. Speaker 1: Alright. Meeting debrief. Be sure to put in there how great a job I did Speaker 2: As Speaker 4: You did a fantastic job. Speaker 2: Get you a mug. Speaker 5: As a reminder, I'm not gonna be here for the next meeting.
I'll be absent. Speaker 4: Yes. Speaker 2: Thank you. Speaker 4: Right. Speaker 1: Do we have a meeting the end of June? Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 4: Two meetings in June. Two Speaker 2: June. They'll just be the 1st of July. Speaker 1: July what? Speaker 9: July 15th. Speaker 1: Okay. I make that one the 15th because I'll be gone the last week of June into the 4th of July. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 4: Yeah. It's the 24th and the 10th, correct. Or 24th Speaker 1: I'll Speaker 5: Be gone. No, 15th. Yeah. June 10th and 24th. Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. Chance? I think your board report. Yeah. Okay.
I usually remind of them to start. Speaker 1: I remember, well I didn't remember but I remembered if we talked about it last time, that's why I had to make the shine the light this time. I miss the health clerks. Speaker 4: Yes. Speaker 1: Alright. I'm gonna quietly fill mine out. Amazing Speaker 2: Chair Speaker 1: Has meeting ever has provided Speaker 4: Amazing data. Speaker 1: I told you I'd circle back, we guess. Jamie Hay, our public speaker is not showing up tonight, so we'll wait till next time Speaker 2: I think. Yeah, that must What was, yeah, that must be what she did. Speaker 1: That's pretty, pretty safe to assume at this point, I'd imagine.
Yeah. Speaker 2: Who is it? Yeah, like, wait, who is it Speaker 1: Not? That's Speaker 5: Public comment. Speaker 1: Yeah. Alright. I, oh wait. I get to do this at eight forty five. I call meeting adjourned.