I would like to call this meeting of 11/05/2025 to order. Roll call, please, miss Harper. Miss Applegate. Here. Miss Kenworthy. Here. Miss Parker. Here. Miss Reed. Doctor Varda. On behalf of the Board of Education, welcome to tonight's meeting. We welcome all attendees, those joining us live in the audience, those connecting virtually and our essential presenters and participants. We also wish to express our appreciation to the live simultaneous Spanish interpreters for facilitating access this evening. Please note that this meeting is also being live streamed.
Please stand and join us this evening in the Pledge of Allegiance. 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. Is there a motion to approve today's meeting agenda? I move to approve today's agenda as presented in BoardDocs. Is there a second? I second. Any discussion? It has been moved and seconded to approve the agenda for today's meeting of 11/05/2025 as presented. Roll call, please, Miss Harper.
Miss Applegate? Yes. Miss Kenworthy? Yes. Miss Parker? Yes. Miss Reed? Doctor. Varda? And the motion passes. We will, be taking a ten minute break at approximately 06:30 this evening. And as a board, we would like to take a moment to congratulate and recognize the newly elected board members. We thank all the candidates for their dedication and desire to serve the entire Jeffco community. We look forward to officially welcoming the new members when they take the oath of office on Wednesday 12/03/2025. We will now move forward with our study session.
On 10/08/2025 the board held a study session that included the following topics. The district unified improvement plan. School priority improvement and turnaround unified improvement plans. An update on the budget reduction blueprint and charter school off cycle district waiver updates. The board held another study session on 10/24/2025 and received an update on monitoring report 1.2. Additionally, in October, the board held a joint meeting with the Jefferson County Commissioners on 10/14/2025, met with the Evergreen PTSA on 10/23/2025, and completed the superintendent annual evaluation on
10/24/2025. I encourage you to watch the recording of these sessions, if available, to learn more about these topics. You can also visit our board page on the GEFCO Public Schools website, where you will find a host of information and links to both board docs and our livestream platforms. Our first agenda item is a presentation from the financial advisory committee where the committee will share some conclusions and recommendations for the board of education to consider. The citizen committee meets monthly to review financial reports forecast analysis, and other relevant financial
information as part of their committee purpose set forth by GP 'seven, the policy establishing advisory committees to the Board of Education. Presenting this evening are Brenna Copeland, Chief Financial Officer, and Gary Colbert, a member of the Financial Advisory Committee. Presenters, we have allotted thirty minutes for this presentation. Please reserve ten minutes of your presentation time for board questions following your remarks. And before I turn the time over to the presenters, superintendent Dorland, is there anything you'd like to add? Thank you, President Parker. Thank you, miss Copeland and mister Colbert for being here today.
I, greatly appreciate mister Colbert's time on the committee and the time, mister Colbert that you're spending here tonight with us, and on the committee's behalf. Thank you. And thanks to the other committee members who volunteer their time to provide guidance and advice to staff and the board on important financial matters. Thank you also to President Parker and Director Varda who serve as liaisons to the financial advisory committee. We appreciate you being there and hearing the context and understand that you may have things you might want to add in as we hear the presentation tonight.
So welcome that for the board as well. Ms. Copeland, let's begin. Wonderful. So good evening board members. I'm gonna turn it over to Mr. Colbert in just a second. The F. A. C. Has met three times so far this year in August, September and October. They set their own agenda and so staff is there to bring them the information that they find most pertinent. And we had actually started a conversation last spring about the budget. And you probably saw that in their memo. So there there were several through lines from last year to this year in terms
of what we were looking at and what the Committee wanted to review. So I think tonight's recommendations really reflect more than just the three meetings so far this year. They reflect, over a year and a half of working with the District and trying to understand our financial situation, and develop some really helpful citizen insights into that. And so with that, I'm gonna give it to mister Colbert. Thank you, Brian. Thank you. Thank you, Brandon. So I'll, I'll follow the, script of the memo more or less please.
First, let me summarize some of the background and conclusions that lead to our recommendations. So the Financial Advisory Committee or FAC previously noted in 2024 and 2025 that using reserves to fund recurring expenses was simply not sustainable to fund recurring operating expenses. And that the committee recommended that the district develop a long term plan to reduce
or avoid certain expenses and, simultaneously evaluate opportunities to increase voter approved revenues. In May 2025, at a public comment session, FAC members also again urged the district, under the direction of the Board, to evaluate and implement, both revenue enhancement and expense
reduction strategies. The FAC commends the district for taking really meaningful steps towards this goal. That is initiating efforts to reduce annual recurring expenditures, preparing to seek new voter approved revenue, and launching the Partnership for Physical Sustainability and creating the Budget Owners Work Group,
both of which represent progress towards sustainable participatory budgeting. This is really a significant undertaking. Additionally, FAC had repeatedly recommended that the district develop cost comparisons with other Colorado peer districts because these could be important tools to help understand GEFCO's financial position.
At our fairly recent 2025 meetings, we had the opportunity to review district commissioned cost and revenue comparison studies. These analyses confirm that local revenue per pupil remains below that of peer districts, primarily due to lower mill levy override revenues and also that local cost comparisons provided specific
valuable insights into staffing and spending patterns that help contextualize efforts that the district may undertake about managing resources going forward. Given all that, we have four specific recommendations for the District. First, regarding community and stakeholder engagement, that you continue engaging with the community and with
budget owners through surveys, community discussions, and in person budget labs. Use these forums to gather input on the budget reduction blueprint, ensuring it continues to increase a balanced mix of expenditure reductions and potential revenue additions. Second, develop a budget excuse me, a budget development and transparency by building on this
community feedback and analytical work. This would be to develop and share detailed plans for departmental budgets, to further analyze the impact and target of targeted expense reductions on student based budgeting framework, and that would ensure that schools are supported and empowered to make informed adjustments within revised funding
levels, and c, to pursue voter approved revenue increases that raise local per pupil funding to the Colorado peer median and consider a separate mill levy to support recurring capital expenditures. Third, we recommend regularly evaluating and updating expense reduction and revenue target assumptions based on
emerging data in the coming year. This would include the final audit twenty four-twenty five expenditures, updated enrollment and demographic data from the October '5 pupil count, state budget developments for fiscal year 'twenty six and the Governor's proposed 'twenty seven fiscal year budget, and changes in state grant allocations or
funding availability. And also, we think that the that there should be a long term fiscal forecasting opportunity for multi year financial projection incorporating expenditure and revenue targets and estimated reserve balances based on these new data. That would then provide for the FAC as next steps to, come back to the
Board in April with our, ability to offer further observations and recommendations, based on the evolving fiscal outlook. Thank you. That was a lot. Thank you very much, mister Colbert. Board members, questions, comments? First, we just wanna say thank you. It's a very the the FAC is a super important committee to us, and it is volunteer. And so thank you for your time and for joining us, this evening.
I really appreciate the recommendations, and I I agree I agree with all of them. One question. When we talk about the monitoring and adjustments, and the the idea of regularly evaluating, miss Copeland comes to us pretty regularly. Do you think that the frequency at which we are doing it now is adequate, or do you think we need to be looking at these on a different frequency? Can you, can you comment or miss Copeland can comment on what that frequency is? I mean, we, you know, we meet monthly. Is this the frequency you're also observing?
At at present, given the budget reduction blueprint, I am connecting with the board every month. Typically, in a regular budget cycle, we provide the board quarterly financial reports. We come back in January with a revised budget, and we present in March, April, May, and June, as part of the budget adoption process. I think that's probably the best expectations under the circumstances. That's really helpful. I appreciate that because it it feels like a lot right now, and it is
largely because of the budget blueprint. But I I do appreciate if there's things that you all think we should be doing differently, that your recommendation really is meaningful. Well, it's certainly also a very fluid environment, right, that, you know, all of these points that we highlighted and perhaps some others that we didn't, we could certainly be surprised by something else. But those are the mileposts that we we think we're going to have to pay
particular attention to. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you. And I assume, Brenna, that the FIC is getting a lot of the same information we see. Yes. Very much so. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much. Sure. Hello. Thanks for being here. Mentioning, item number four, the long term fiscal forecasting. I wanted to ask how helpful it is for us to forecast beyond two years just because there's been shifting patterns and policies recently. And I know that at at a certain point, forecasting out gets less and less
reliable. And so I just wanted to give you an opportunity to speak to that potentially because we have done fiscal forecasting, I think, up to five and and beyond, five years. And I know that those shift that I wanted to ask you about that. Yeah. And I I'll be interested, Gary, if you have thoughts to add. Gary's background is such that he's very familiar with lots of different, educational financial situations, including higher ed and, and now some k 12 work.
So anyway, curious what he thinks on this question. You know, statutorily, when we present the budget, we must present at least three years. And so we present the upcoming year, which is typically the budget the budget under consideration plus two. I find that anything beyond the three year horizon tends to get, you're just taking everything and increasing it by the same percentage. It's very difficult to really have a meaningful change. That being said, and we'll we'll present to the board next week on, our enrollment
forecast. We do actually have nuanced enrollment forecast five years out. And there is some value in looking at patterns and trends over a five year period because, things do start to change. The rate of change changes. And that's always what you're looking for is is something changing other than the same amount per year, and is it different than inflation. Right? And so when our enrollment is declining, but it's dropping, you know, 2% this year, 1% next year, a half percent the following, and a zero the following, it's actually
helpful to see that fourth year following because of that tapering function. So, I I think it's a yes and. I take everything beyond the three year horizon with a grain of salt. And given how much our revenue, at least, is kind of formulaic, if we have meaningful projections around enrollment, it can be useful to look at the particularly the revenue piece, further into the future to help guide board decision making. I I agree, with that perspective that, and and this is this is, not unlike,
you know, what we see in the commercial world or you would see in higher education or or other organizations. As you go forward, there's greater uncertainty, about, about what future states of the world look like. Also, I think that, you know, how how the district found itself in this challenging situation was a multiyear sort of problem, and how it resolves that situation will be
a multiyear resolution, I think, too. And so, I think that's another facet of this, that whatever the Board and the District administration undertakes will not simply be a one year task. And therefore, I think looking at it at least in a two or three year window is quite appropriate. Thank you for saying it. I really appreciate, managing expectations around how quickly a budget of this size can ebb
and flow Yeah. As we make changes. I think that context is really helpful for folks who enter into the conversation with us. So thank you for for explaining that and describing it. My other question is mostly, curiosity about member, members of the FAC and discussions around, maybe data points just that would support our revenue increase efforts, and if there if the committee has any sort of leading pieces of information that they think would be
really persuasive to folks who might not be all the way on board with us running, a mill yet. That's an interesting question. I think that, to me, I think the benchmarking aspect of it was especially, compelling, right, that, we were provided with that data. I think we had some inclination to think that that was the case, but the
data that was provided supported that. And it's also consistent, I think, with the expenditure data, right, that, you know, one of the things in the not for profit world is that you you only spend what you have, right? Well, in the long run, you only spend what you have. And so, I think that, that's the that to me is the important messaging here
is that we have we have that balancing act we're really striving for here is to, we want to spend money on the education of our students, but we have to have money available, appropriate amount of money available to do that. And that's what, what we're, challenged to do today.
I think absolutely. And I think statewide, you know, that our district's not the only one that is struggling with, the limited resources, especially for public education in Colorado. It's a statewide conversation. Yeah. That's right. I I came out of the, thirty odd years with the University of Colorado, and it's a it's a higher ed problem too. It's it's something, and and, of course, it's a it's a national phenomenon to some degree as well, but but, we have our own particular flavor of that in Colorado.
Yeah. I I absolutely agree as somebody who taught in a different state, before I came to Colorado and learned all kinds of new new and different ways, that public education gets funded here. So I wanna thank you for sharing your perspective. I appreciate it, and thanks for taking the time to be here today. Happy to. Yes. So I just wanna thank you very much too. It's been, fun being a part of the committee and listening to you, and I I, mister Colbert, think that you have, given a lot of valuable feedback in those
committees. You're one of the people that, is contributing the most towards our our budget situation, so thank you for that. Really appreciate it. Well, thank you. Alright. So thank you for the presentation, and we will move on now. The next item on the agenda this evening is an update on the budget reduction blueprint. As studied in previous meetings, district staff has developed a budget reduction blueprint for the twenty twenty six, twenty seven school year to proactively respond to the financial realities facing
public education locally in Colorado and across the nation. Declining enrollment, rising costs, and dwindling federal and state funding have intensified financial pressures in GEFCO. These challenges require decisive action to keep our schools strong and sustainable for the students who rely on them now and in the future. Tonight, we'll hear a budget reduction blueprint update from Brenna Copeland, chief financial officer. Miss Copeland, you have some, support. There you'll, introduce. I'm sure we've allotted forty minutes for this presentation.
Please reserve ten minutes of the presentation time for the board questions following your remarks. And before I turn it over to miss Copeland, is there anything you'd like to say, superintendent Dolan? Thank you. Thank you, president Parker. I'm actually gonna begin our presentation this evening. Before I start, I would like to just thank miss Copeland for joining me, miss Perazio, and miss Gleeson, thank you also for joining us this evening. We're excited to have you all be part of the presentation. If you look at the presentation and go to the next slide, you'll see the outline of our presentation this evening, maybe.
It's just not forwarding. True. We plan to recap. Again, this is similar to what we've done with other budget presentations related to the, reduction blueprint, recap recap our last meeting and preview the next upcoming information we're gonna share with the board, report out on stakeholder engagement, study department reduction targets, and the ranges this evening for our department reductions, and then study the support plan that we have in place for impacted employees, which is why we have our human resource friends
and leaders here with us today. So you'll see where we are in the board's study schedule related to the budget reduction blueprint on this next slide. We are at November 5 where, again, the primary, study tonight is the reduction target ranges for departments. Again, the board responsibilities and roles are what we outlined at the beginning of this process, aligned with executive limitations fifteen, sixteen, and 17 to support the work, protecting the district's assets, safeguarding long term financial health, and aligning, the budget with the board ends,
really to have oversight toward the budget deficit resolution that was adopted in June, observe our engagement process and represent the constituency feedback and questions that you're hearing, conduct discussions that will support the board in the budget adoption process in June '26, And, of course, lead municipal elected a national, leader forums in September through November. I know you all had a recent meeting with county commissioners as an example of that. Thank you for spending that time with them, and thank you to president Parker for
the presentation she, made to our county commissioners. Staff roles and responsibilities is to lead the development of the plan, evaluate the trade offs, engage staff, families, and stakeholders in the development and refinement of these options. We're gonna talk a little bit about that tonight and the work we've been doing in that space and what we're hearing. Support our departments and schools in managing the budgets to the targets that we have for their reductions, manage implementation of those reductions once we determine what they're going to be, and, of course, support our impacted staff, through the through the change.
So tonight, we wanna report on the stakeholder input, that we have received since your the board's last meeting. You can see on the next slide a timeline. We have checked off a lot of the events and activities that we had planned for engagement. You can see all of those on the top under completed events. We do have a few upcoming opportunities. Actually, today, in two days, the survey closes. So that's an, continued opportunity for our listening public to participate and give us feedback. And it is in the budget reduction blueprint online budget tool.
What do we call it? Budget lab. The budget lab. It's an online budget lab where you can find the survey. We do we'll have November 13 as a public comment opportunity for our community. And then in the winter, in the in probably January, we will be also our school leaders will be sending out school level surveys, to make sure that at the most local level, our families and staffs can have some input, into the their most local budget decisions.
So those are upcoming opportunities. Shape stakeholders shaping our direction. So, the partnership for fiscal sustainability is an important stakeholder group, that met has been meeting all along the way. You can see the dates there. And the what the activities were on the ninth, the twenty second, and just this week on November 3. The most recent update from the partnership is, really, to listen to how we developed school based target ranges and, provide further details on department reduction ranges and discuss transitioning
the committee's focus really to revenue generation. Since the beginning, this group has had as much interest in talking about generating revenue as they have on reducing, expenditures, which is understandable. And so we have really, made the turn, I think, after this last meeting into creating a committee that's more focused on revenue generation through a mill levy override or other, opportunity, as this group moves forward, which is exciting. And so, again, I think I just said this slide in in a nutshell.
And so in addition to the partnership, we have been we have met with community partners. We had a luncheon for our community partners. Thank you to our friends at the Colorado Gives Foundation for the support and, funding, of that luncheon. It was cohosted by Colorado Gives, and we had 14 community partners join district leaders to build understanding of the budget reduction blueprint and, in addition, our aspirations to raise new revenue. The representatives that attended this luncheon were from nonprofits, public safety partners, religious organizations, etcetera.
So it was a very well attended luncheon, and we were grateful for the their time to come and listen to what we're struggling with this year with our budget and what we hope to do to create some more fiscal sustainability and opportunities for the students we serve going forward. In addition to the partner luncheon, we have conducted the budget labs. For the virtual budget lab, we have had about 4,139 visitors since it opened on October 1. For the in person budget labs, we had 70 participants, which we felt was and
that those were over two budget labs. If you recall, we had planned on four budget labs, but we were delayed. So we ended up having two, and 70 participants attended, which we were a little disappointed there weren't more people who'd showed up. But I will say the people who showed up were from diverse, areas of our district. There were over 14, as you can see there, articulation areas that were represented, in those 70 people. And I will say that the people who joined were very engaged, and we had a lot of off opportunities for them to talk to leaders in our district and
experts across HR, budget, and many other, opportunities for them to engage tech both with technology and in person with, different district staff, which was which was great. You can see some photos in the next slide. I'm I like the fact that they picked the all the ones of everybody smiling. But but, honestly, it was it was a good community conversation about what we're struggling with. And we had everybody from Jeff Gatlin there welcoming people and welcoming and showing them what the different stations were to our CFO answering questions.
And, Mary Parker, you were the one I was at. I think, Erin, you were at, Carmody. So thank you to the board members who were able to attend and be part of the conversations with community members. It was nice to just have authentic conversation with people who just came with their questions. So thanks to those who supported those labs. In terms of the community wide survey, it did open on October 1. It's gonna close on the seventh. We have listed here the number 4654, but I know when we do a presentation, for the board next week, that number will greatly increase because we had another push
this week, to our community to engage with the the online budget lab and take the survey. And so I think I know we have, many more than 4,600. I think it's closer to 7,000, but we'll give you that final number next week. Seventy eight ninety right now. It's live and, yeah, and real time. So you can you can see the results available in real time. And so 7,890, right now, and, it'll close the seventh. So we'll update you on that number next week. It was shared through internal and external newsletters, through newsletters both at the school level
and the district level, direct emails, social media, and this as I mentioned, school communications. So that was that's exciting. I wanna go into the next slide that talks a little bit about what the survey, captured, what what the areas it focused on, and what some of the early trends are. As we've seen, the results come in, these trends have been pretty consistent from the beginning of the survey results till now. We will be analyzing them continuing this week to make sure nothing's changed. But you can see the survey areas that we asked about on the left, and
the early trends, based on the multiple choice questions were that if necessary, responded respondents tend to prefer a new or increased fee over reducing operations or services for students and families, though opinions on the total amount of increased fees varies. Respondents also tended to support offering only two menu options for middle or high school students over other changes to food service. I think there is a strong interest in our community to in addition to reduce
costs, there are under people understanding we need to do that. There's also a real strong interest in us, preserving and not wasting food. And so I think this was also a sustainability interest that we're seeing as part of the survey. Respondents to the survey also tend to support having one to one devices. This was a surprise to me, this this piece. But their opinions vary on when students should receive those devices for the first time. And even even in the last five to seven years, I think we've begun to see a shift in families wanting one to one devices as soon as possible to
families really asking, would it be okay to not have a one to one device until third grade, fourth grade, maybe fifth grade? Not that we wouldn't embrace technology as part of the classroom experience, but maybe a classroom set, that could rotate between classrooms is a better option for our younger children, who might need to be using the pencil a little bit more often and have more tactile learning experiences versus technology. So that was something we are paying close attention to and will continue to analyze
over the next few days here as the survey closes. In terms of the community wide survey, we had a lot of open response questions to gather ideas, feedback, and priorities from respondents, and we have been able to sort through those and find some early themes from those open response comments. There's definitely a desire to protect resources closest to the classroom, like teachers and direct student supports, and request to reduce administrative costs and positions before adjusting school or classroom budgets, which we are currently working on, and we'll be talking a lot more tonight
when we discuss the department reduction targets. There's interest in supporting new revenue, which is great to hear from our community. There are mixed opinions on fees. Most are willing to take them on, but they there's a desire for us to make other changes first. So in combination with other reductions, so to speak, strong support for maintaining athletics, activities, and arts. These are those extraordinary student experiences that are very valuable to our students and families. There's a desire to limit or reimagine elementary one to one devices.
I just talked a little bit about that. That's coming through not only the survey questions themselves, this the multiple choice, but also the the responses. There are some calls to maintain safety and security, which we have, said publicly and have made a commitment that there will be no reductions in our safety and security investments as part of this process. Again, support for limiting food waste at school. So, that's coming through in the comments as well as the, multiple choice. Concerns and questions about the budget reduction process, including what aspect of the budget are
being evaluated and how stakeholder input is being considered. And I think this is this is really fair. One of the conversations I've had multiple times with many stakeholders is we want more say and more input into what gets cut. And one of the ahas that I think many people realized as I was sitting in the budget lab was, there's not a whole lot of fat. You know? And so the areas that are part of the survey up above, really are the areas where we're looking at where where can we do something other than reductions in order to support, saving FTE, and where do we have some creativity and thoughts where
we can really consider some input from our community. And then there are questions in the comments about large structural changes like four day weeks, school closures, or accelerate the sale of properties. There aren't necessarily strong opinions that we should do those things. They're just asking about them. And so that's that's some of the feedback we're getting from the survey. We'll share more next week, after the survey closes about the final results of the survey. I wanna do I wanna just jump into this next slide, and maybe we can just pause for a moment and let the board ask questions if you all feel
the need to about the community input and engagement before we jump into department reduction ranges. The there's been some questions about it's fine to talk about these fees, but what does it really mean dollars and cents wise? That's been feedback we've been given that it would be helpful to know if we raise fees, how much does it really offset the budget. So in some cases, introducing or increasing fees can offset the cost of offering services, and higher fees can help avoid reductions or changes. Some of the things that we've costed out here that are preliminary estimates just based
on our historical data, are listed. So you can see for gate admission to athletics events, for example, if we raised that fee by $1 from 06/25 to $7.25, the potential revenue increase is about 230,000. And it ranges, you know, out of district athletic fee. I'd like to clarify that. An out of district athletic fee isn't for any student who's attending a GEFCO school that lives out of district. It's for any student attending a district school that's not in GEFCO that then plays
a sport for a GEFCO school. This happens in some of our, smaller, participation athletics like hockey. We may have somebody from, say, a school in Adams 12, come over come south a little bit into our district and play on our hockey team. That means that students not attending a Jeffco school but playing on a Jeffco team. So that's where like, that's a minimal amount of increase, but it is an increase, because there's very few students who would be paying that fee. Whereas the transportation fee, as you know, we transport many kids to and from school
every day. And and if we were to bring back a transportation fee, it would really offset a lot of costs in our in our transportation, operations. We did have we have and many districts have had in in their history a transportation fee. We stopped doing other transportation fee in COVID because we were canceling so many routes that we would then refund transportation fees, and the back and forth was so administratively burdensome, that the fee and it was so hard to track, and we didn't wanna be unfair to families who are paying a fee and then having their routes canceled
and then not getting their money back. So we just we didn't we stopped the fee for a few years. We are now considering bringing it back because you can see here the potential revenue increase really would offset a big reduction that we'd have to make and help us save, routes that we know families depend on as well as employees who drive those routes, which is a focus of ours in making sure we can preserve as many, positions as we can for our employees. So that's just a little bit more information that our community has been asking for related to, what what we're thinking about around fees, and we just wanted to be
transparent about that and, put it on a slide for people to be able to see and process. And we'll be talking more about fees as we move this, work forward. So, Mary, I'm gonna look to you to see if you feel like the board would like to pause for a moment or keep going. I just wanna find out the large structural changes that were suggested in the open comment. Is there a way that we can respond and say, yes. We have considered these things these things these things? Yeah. I, I have responded pretty directly to school closures that we are not considering school
closures right now, or any time in the very near future. We closed 21 schools in GEFCO. It was incredibly painful, and I don't believe that we are in a place of tackling that right now, in terms of cost savings. You know, in the closure of the 21 schools, we did save $20,000,000 annually ongoing, so it it was effective. If we had not done that work, you know, we'd be looking at an $80,000,000 deficit of versus a $60,000,000 deficit. So I think it's a fair question, but we are not and especially given the
policy timelines that we now have in place aligned to our choice timelines, we are not in a position to close schools right this moment. When it comes to four day weeks, it's a it's an interesting question. The short answer is and we can do some more analysis on this if we really want to. But the short answer is that unless your employees work four days a week And when I say four days a week, I mean eight hour days and thirty two hours a week. You really don't save that much money because the cost is in if if people
are working that fifth day and kids just aren't there, then you may save some, let's let's say, for example, you may save some transportation fees with fuel, maintenance, but then the real cost savings again is your employees not working that day. And that would be a big burden and challenge for some of our, especially our ESP employees and bus drivers, operations folks who count on five day a week hours to have, you know, a wage that supports them with the lifestyle they live.
And so I think, it would be very difficult for us to consider a four day week without huge and massive impacts to our employees if the effort of a four day work week is to offset, offset our expenditures. So that one's tricky. In accelerating the sale of properties, we have talked with board members about, and we will be, talking more about that because we do have an interest in accelerating the sale of our properties. And many people do this process of as I've talked to them have said to
me, you have all these properties. Why don't you start selling more of them more quickly? At the same time, we do wanna balance, the speed at which we, you know, sell the properties with the importance of us engaging with our municipalities and the county in which the properties exist as well as, the communities that surround those properties and live next door. And so that's a that's a balance that we're continuing to try to get right. Thank you. I think that's, really helpful. Since we don't have any formal way to, like, close the loop on that, it's
nice to have some discussion about it. And the other thing I just wanna ask is that on slide 16 on the bottom, the first start item where it says no fees are charged for students with free and reduced lunch. Can we can we change the language to eligible for free and reduced lunch because of free like, the way that we fund meals for students? I think that's a great suggestion. Thank you. Thank you. And so that is just to clarify, for students who qualify for free and reduced lunch, and or are, considered to have an at risk factor in their life, these
fees the current fee or the potential new fee, would not would not be it would be waived completely for those students and their families. Thank you. Great. I have a I have a few questions, and I will keep it to the this part. So thank you. First, I was surprised to see in the data that 500 people that took the survey didn't live in Jefferson County. And so I'm glad we asked that question because it kinda struck me, like, when I looked at some of the articulation areas that we have more people from outside
of the county that have replied than some of our artic areas. So I thought that was really interesting. I assume we're gonna be able to slice and dice this data when it's all done and look at all the cool stuff that we can yeah. Okay. I do have a question here. Sorry. I also wanna double check. The reason that some of the responses are higher than the number of participants we have in our presentation is because it is live. Right? Oh, if you're looking at it live. Yes. If you're looking at it live right now, it's not aligned to the the numbers that are in the slides because these slides were built several days ago. And That's what I thought.
I just wanted to taking it. I wanted to clarify in case people are digging in and see. Yeah. Okay. I think that's all I had about the the community engagement. I'm glad we're seeing it because I do think it's quite interesting. Bus fees has always been something that has been a thing for me, knowing the history of why we got rid of it and knowing that such a small population of our kids use it, which showed up in the survey. So, and I really appreciate seeing the actual money around what it means for us to increase some of these fees to show that it's not, it's not trivial.
There's real dollars there. So I'll save the rest of my questions for the end. Thanks. Great. Thank you. Alright. Superintendent Dorland, are you okay. Okay. Thank you. Alright. So to reground us in some prior, study session content, the district is recommending a minimum $45,000,000 reduction of recurring expenses and at least 15,000,000 in new revenue. We, debuted that recommendation on September 3. And we also noted that we will strive to preserve resources that are closest to
the classroom, and targets will be lower in budgets, both departmental and school budgets that provide direct classroom instruction. So, a little bit on who decides what around our budgets. Every year, our departmental budgets get built, and our department leaders confirm how they're gonna spend, the money that they are allocated. And and the same is true essentially for 2627. It's just that the amount allocated will be less. Ditto for schools. And we haven't talked as much about the school targets yet, and that's not really
the focus for tonight. But a key thing to to acknowledge publicly repeatedly is our schools are making decisions about their own reductions. We're not attempting to make those centrally or in a top down manner. You all adopt the budget in June, after a number of study sessions where we dialogue and get feedback, so that you're well aware of of what's gonna be presented before, you're asked to vote in June. We've talked a little bit about departmental reductions. So way back in June, we noted that one scenario or one approach to reducing
is to vary the amount or the percentage of a budget that you reduce in different areas of the organization. So even with our departments, again, we have some departments that are very heavily focused on classroom instruction. One of my one of the easiest, most obvious examples is our entire pre k education program as a departmental budget. Those teachers and, paraprofessionals are budgeted from a department directly, not part of the school budget. And yet, obviously, they are providing really essential, student services.
And so their reduction target as a percentage should be much lower, in the in the approach we've taken than, a budget that supports staff and schools more indirectly. So on the range, you see the most direct student facing departmental budgets will see a a value or a target reduction between 24%. Somewhere in the middle is approximately 4.1 to 7.9. And then on the upper end, we do have some departments in the eight to
11% range. There, is a note to just note. Most, but not all, targets do not exceed 11. There are some, target reductions that are even higher than 11%. So we wanted to help, further because some of the feedback we've gotten in the community survey is, well, we don't really understand what you mean when you say that departments fund things directly in schools. So we wanted tonight to just highlight a few examples of where that happens. So our CTE programming, which is our career and technical education programming, for middle and
high schools is part of a departmental budget. Our mental health staff, our social emotional learning specialists that are in schools, supporting both teachers and students, are budgeted centrally. Our special education staff, including five zero one five zero four coordinators, learning specialists, etcetera, lead teachers in our center programs, speech language pathologists. All those really, really essential teachers and professionals are budgeted out of a department even though they are very much in student facing roles. Our health services staff, so our nurses, our vision and hearing screening staff, and a
lot of the medication and first aid equipment we use is funded through a centralized department. Our CLDE or culturally and linguistically diverse education staff, these are staff who support some of our English learners. Our newcomer tutors, our dual language instructional coaches, these folks are departmental staff. Family and community partnership staff, including our bilingual interpreters, translators, and language line support are all paid for out of a department. Our IT is, a large department with a lot of folks in the field who are in our schools and supporting teachers and students.
As you can imagine, trying to run a one to one device program, without folks to help our kiddos with their laptops is sort of a non starter. So we have lots of folks, out in schools supporting. We also have some folks centrally who provide services that are essential to learning. Special education staff, that's a repeat, so I'm not gonna read it again. Food nutrition services staff, are all paid for out of the department, and they're very much student facing, right? They're preparing and serving our meals for our kiddos.
Transportation, I think, folks are aware that our bus drivers are paid out of a department. Custodial staff. So, sometimes I know that students will actually develop good relationships with their custodians and and, our I know our custodians take a lot of care and concern for our school buildings and our kiddos, and so they are paid for out of a centralized staff as is, our building maintenance, site maintenance, field maintenance, all that stuff. Music, PE, theater, and visual arts coordination. So this is an example of where, we do have folks kind of in the
field that are supporting the educators, though these specific educators, a music teacher or a PE teacher, is part of the school budget. But these coordinating folks make sure that those folks have the resources, the curricular materials that they need to do their jobs. All of our substitute teachers are effectively paid out of a departmental budget, but obviously a substitute teacher is working in a school only. We don't have, substitute CFOs, although I think that would be a good investment. Our math and English language arts curriculum materials and licenses, many of these are purchased
centrally, and disseminated to schools. So that, again, that's a direct support. This button dislikes me. And with that I'm gonna transition very ineffectively. Good luck with this. You have strong thumbs. Okay. To supporting staff. And I think once Amanda, gets through her slides, we'll entertain more questions. She she's gonna make me use this. Alright. So, as you heard, Brenna just talked about, several of the, staff who are working most closely with our students. And, certainly, we are going to see impacts both departmentally and, in school based staffing.
And so the timeline that we have established and, previously communicated, remains, pretty consistent. So in September, as you are all aware and have even participated in some of these cost savings measures that were activated for this school year, we do have a hiring chill for some of our positions that, we do not intend to fill. And so we're we intend to use those vacancies in order to absorb some of the budget reduction instead of, impacting people. We're going to impact vacant positions.
Other cost savings measures that have been taken, is external, professional development funding, potentially out of state travel, in some cases reducing that, as well as, reducing the meals that we purchase. You as a board of education have, taken that as a reduction as well. And so, those are ongoing and in place. In December, we do intend to notify our impacted departmental based staff, those who are funded from a department. So even those who are funded from a department who directly survey school would also
be notified in the December timeline. In February or March, around that time, impacted school based staff would be notified. Our schools do a school site based budgeting process that starts, right before winter break and goes through February is when their budgeting happens, and then they start their staffing and hiring season between the February and, through, of course, the remainder of the school year. We have talked about a few other, things that we may put into place such as an internal hiring only window where we, focus on those individuals internally to GEFCO
who may need to be seeking a position in securing mutual consent. And then, of course, as you are aware, June 2026, our reductions would be effective. So some of the supports that our team, in human resources has discussed, in order to support those staff members who have been impacted, include many of the things that you see on the screen. First of all, we do want to acknowledge that this is important to us. We will support all staff members who are impacted who want the support, certainly. There may be some staff members impacted who choose not to remain in GEFCO.
However, we want to retain all of the talent that we possibly can. And so, in collaboration with our associations, we will ensure that these steps and supports are aligned both with our negotiated agreements and, of course, what we believe to be right for our employees. And so, we will also, in in addition to leveraging the skills of our human resources team and our talent acquisition, team within human resources specifically, as well as our human resources partners. We'll partner with the GEFCO Business and Work Center to ensure that we are providing
those supports for our employees to assist them with resume and interview workshops. Many of our employees have not, perhaps interviewed or, rewritten their resume for quite some time. So we wanna ensure that they are prepared both to apply for and be, ready for an interview in GEFCO or beyond. We will ensure that they have support with effective job search techniques, potentially, career coaching, changing careers, learning about what might what else might be out there, what their interest might be leading them to.
We will support an internal hiring internal only hiring window. There are, exceptions to this hiring window every once in a while when we have really hard to fill positions. For example, some of our advanced placement, really high level chemistry and math positions, those are rarely, filled like like a snap. And so we sometimes do have to continue to hold those both internal and external while maintaining the internal only window. For some of our easier to fill positions, such as elementary education, science or excuse
me, social studies, and, English language arts. Education support professional career information session. So as you know, we have a multitude of educational support professional or ESP positions. A lot of them go into those because that is the trade that they are, trained to do. However, there are a lot of different positions moving between a paraprofessional to a secretary, moving, between a from a paraprofessional to a paraeducator, or an independent support para. These are different roles that we want to expose our ESPs to and ensure that
they are aware of what else might be available to them. And then, of course, as usual, our, team will ensure that employees have what they need to know about, benefits, payroll, health insurance, COBRA, unemployment, and, retirement planning all along the way. We have all kinds of sessions that are already scheduled throughout the spring to support our employees in that planning. And then my final slide is, really to ensure that we oh, this slide has not been updated. I will give you a little caveat on this slide.
So our goal is to make sure that we are doing our best to leverage attrition, and turnover, as much as possible. So, in accordance with the two, negotiated agreements, we certainly encourage and expect our staff to apply for positions that they are interested in and qualified for. However, if necessary, we will place them in positions. And if they, hold a role beyond probationary, they are entitled to be placed in a position for which they are qualified for, or go on to a list of,
reemployment that we would then call them back up. So, we did wanna highlight some turnover rates, and I will tell you, that these rates are slightly different than, the rates that are published by the Colorado Department of Education, which we supply the data for. So I just wanna give that caveat. It's our data that CDE is publishing. However, this is our, data for turnover. We use this from, August to August. We use this from employee for employees who have left and then are, their positions are refilled. The CDE data that is currently, published on our, budget reduction blueprint website is actually
in numbers, the numbers of educators, the numbers of administrators, the numbers of ESPs who have either, left the district or have, transferred to a new position. So we believe that attrition is actually you've left the district completely and the position has been either been removed or has been filled by a new person. They include transfers in their data, and so their data looks a little bit different than our data. And so, in updated slides, we actually have matched that, the numbers instead of the
percentages to just kind of help people understand what does 7.66% mean, to help, clarify. So that's, for example, for educators, that's 643 educators, who were hired or transferred last year, is what that data, looks like. So I apologize for that slight change. Amanda, it's been updated in the It has been updated on board docs. Yes. But, whatever is being presented is Presented is not. Yeah. He may just not have refreshed.
So No worries. It we what part of what we heard from the partnership, was employees wanna know how many, like, jobs will be available on average, as compared to how many positions might be going away. And so, you know, 643 teachers hired or transferred each year, which means 643 open positions, and we have approximately 4,000 teachers. Right. So, it just I think with the feedback to us was it'll make us feel
better if there's if we know there's gonna be hundreds of positions available versus dozens. So we wanted to make sure and, share that and just make the statement that we're trying to make sure we can take care of our as many of our employees as possible through attrition across all employee groups. So thank you. But I did want you to know it's in BoardDocs. I didn't know if you knew that. Thank you. And the final slide is for any questions that you might have. Thank you very much. Okay. A few questions. And I recognize some of these might be more school based, so forgive me. These are some questions that I'm getting, and it's just helpful to be able to
get the answers out, to anybody who might be listening. So I'm really happy to see we're thinking about differentiating within departments because it is that's something that I I think has been really confusing to anybody who may not be super close to school budgeting and financing is that we have a lot in the central office that is in our schools. So I'm I'm really happy to see that. Will will we see kind of how departments are falling in those, or is when we approve the budget and reductions, or is that something that we're gonna kinda leave to cabinet? So when we come back next week and forgive me, I feel like I'm living
in three different points in time because I was working on next week's presentation today. When we come back next week, we'll have a grid, that starts to break out a little bit by program focus. Still not exactly naming departments. Some of our departments are super small. So like we have a department with two people in it. Right? And so there's a certain level of granularity we aren't gonna get to, but next week we will have broken out by program a lot more information about how much are we cutting here, how much are we cutting here from departments. And so I think that will help, both allay concerns that people have about our
departments that are very student facing and, and at the same time confirm this board's priority and and which is very much shared with, the superintendent and leadership that we see the biggest cuts in the program of general administration. Right? That's really what people are interested in is please make sure, that, you know, cuts are furthest from the classroom, and we've heard that loud and clear, and we will be able to demonstrate very, very clearly, that general administration is cutting the most.
And then I would just say as we get closer to informing employees, and giving them the opportunity to hear about any impacts that might be, related to their job. As we get closer to that, wanna share more detailed information, with the board related to that. And we honestly just are still in the process of making decisions and going through each cabinet member right now is going through some process with their, departments, to get input, from their teams, prior to making some final decisions.
And so just trying to be really respectful of the process that our leaders are going through with their teams, the employees' opportunity to have some voice in that process, as well as for any impacted employees, you know, not knowing that maybe their position is impacted, through a public meeting, but instead having For sure. A private conversation, appropriately led by HR and their manager, is another value that we're holding close, but we'll share more with the board as we get closer to those deadlines and dates. No. That that makes total sense.
Do we have the ability to offer and, again, pulling from a private sector, so I don't know if this applies in the public sector. Early retirement, I know that affects PERA, so there's there's complications with that. But is that something that we have the ability to offer? What we are offering is a stipend for early notification of retirement. And so, since the ROPS process, we have, identified that has been really helpful for our leaders to know early on when they have vacancies or when they have anticipated vacancies, I should say.
And so, we have communicated to our employees that, we intend to offer a early notification of retirement stipend, $750 stipend for any employee who notifies human resources by December 19 that they intend to retire on or before 06/30/2026. And so it's through the school year and through the fiscal year, of course, and then we do intend to use that as a an additional budget reduction for next year. It has the, amount has varied over the past three years that we've done this.
And so, we anticipate that there will be a, group of individuals, probably, upwards of 250 or more, who do choose this early, notification statement. I have gotten this question in, visits, so bear with me. I've been asked if PTAs can help to fund positions in the schools. We're so grateful for our generous PTAs. And, in so many ways, they provide things that we do need every year in schools, supplies, materials, technology, etcetera.
Because we, always want to be able to the best of our ability to honor, employment promises that we make as a district, we do tend to prefer that the district pays for our employees, because that is such an important part of, creating stability, creating, a trust between employer and employee. So we we hope that PTAs can find lots of ways, to buy things that help our kiddos or buy experiences, because we really value that support.
I can add I need to add on on that. Thank you, Brenna. And I've talked to a lot of principals about this issue. So I just wanna be transparent and share with the board and everybody listening that this is actually a practice that is happening in GEFCO right now. And so, it is, unlike other places I've been where there are policies in place related to this kind of practice, and we don't have that here. It has never been in place in GEFCO to my understanding based on all the conversations I've done and historians I've talked to.
And so our principals are gonna be in a spot where they're having to answer this question. One of the ways we're talking about handling it is to to share with our principals and to build into the turnkey materials that we're creating for them to use with their SAC and their staffs that GEFCO strongly encourages the funds that are raised by PTA and other events at a school be utilized for the things that Brenna just talked about and not staffing. And so we're hoping and many principals have said to me, I do that.
You know? I take the PTA funds and we buy, computers or books or materials, and that offsets the fact that I don't have to do those things with my budget so then I can afford the paraprofessionals or the additional hours for this individual or that individual. So many principals are already doing that. There are places where, I believe PTAs are gonna wanna contribute above and beyond and and continue to contribute to staff. So I have asked, miss Tolleson and her team to begin researching and, pulling together
a stakeholder group to advise on a district policy related to PTA contributions, and trying to get this dialed in in a more formalized way through a policy. And I and we will also be sharing through principals, to their sacks that our strong preference as a district is that these, dollars go towards materials and not people, and that by, probably this time next year, we will have a policy in place that will, help us eliminate the practice of fundraising going towards employees.
I do think it's fair given that the district has never really had this in place for families who are very committed to their school community and doing this this work, and thank you to those people if you're doing it. I think it's really important that we give them a runway to change the practice and not just take it take it away right away. I mean, I think in general, that's how we'd like to change things, is to give people a runway. So that's how we're planning to handle it for for now, and then really continue to make progress in that effort as the, years unfold and we get a policy
in place. I really appreciate that. I think that's very, very helpful for community to hear. Last question. And, again, I recognize this is a little bit further on. Are we thinking about differentiation in a similar way with our school reduction, budget reductions with respect to title or non title and things like that? Yes. Is that good? That's perfect. Okay. Thank you so much. Director Reed has her hand up. Go ahead, director Reed. Hello. Sorry that I'm joining so late. But just so you know, I have been watching since about 05:00, so I've been
able to stay on top of things pretty well. I have two questions. And the first is so we're talking about filling, some of the more central rules through attrition in in a way that's similar to how we did teachers during the ross process. But it just seems like the the roles that people have would be very different. And so I'm wondering if there's really enough cross, cross skill abilities to move from
one position to another. Does that make sense? It does make sense, director Reid. What we hope is that, within each department, there will be, a level of attrition that allows for some some of those, people to be absorbed in a way that, either allows them to transfer their skills into a similar position or even potentially, pursue training in another position. We do have different options for, for folks to be trained, depending on what it is that they're searching for.
So if, for example, a custodial services worker wanted to become a food nutrition services, worker, and there happened to be a position, available. Our food nutrition services team does do an exceptional job of training their employees, even those who aren't necessarily qualified in that space. And so, our hope would be able to provide not only, exposure to what the other options are, but also training, for those folks in order to ensure that they're prepared for other positions they could be interested in. Okay. Great.
And the other one, I'm gonna back track a bit because I wasn't patched in yet. But director Applegate mentioned quite a bit earlier, about the options that people have asked us about. And, superintendent Dorland, you talked about the four day a week option, and you talked about the impact on employees, which is, of course, very important. But it also seems to me that that would have a tremendous impact on instructional time, wouldn't it? I mean, I should think that that would bring us below what's required by the
state and certainly what students need. Does that make sense too? Yes. It does. I mean, we most, the districts who have gone to a four day school week have usually extended the four days to kinda cover the minimum compensatory education minutes that are required. So, director Reed, that's how they've done it in most places. I will say it is also a big a large burden on families, for child care, because if you're not in school for a full day, then you're paying for
those hours in SAE or a different child care option, which is another challenge. One might say that it would be them passing off the budget savings as a cost to our families, honestly, which I think is is a real is real really problematic in terms of what we offer our community. Okay. Thank you. I just I I wanted folks to know it's it you know, like I said, our employees are very, very important, but it has so many impacts beyond that. So I just really want people to to consider all of the ramifications as they
as they ask us to consider things. Thank you very much. I was just wondering if you could just clarify on timing. So, like, on the slide 26 when it has the timeline for personnel impact. So I I guess, what I'm wondering I understand the need to speak to staff before things are public. But, like, when does the board know where these departmental cuts are coming from? At what point in all of this? Because lots of people will say, like, when does when will the board know?
And I'm like, I have no idea. I guess when when the public knows? I don't know. Honestly, I I don't know. So next week, we'll get closer. And again, the level of granularity will be one step shy of saying, in this very specific department, here's the specific target because some of our departments are so small. But we will provide a more detailed grid showing the spread of reduction, percentages by program. And so that again, that's where you'll get to see that the plan is to
cut by a much higher percentage across all of our departments that perform a function related to general admin. And and so that is the first look that helps, I think, the board confirm the priorities, one one of the priorities you set for us, which was, furthest from the classroom. And then as soon as individuals are notified, we're happy to disclose more public specifics about specific positions. But in that presentation next week, I think we'll also allude to some non position
based type reductions as well. Right? We're we're we're at the other goal we have is that it's not all people. And so, so yeah. Does that help? Yeah. And, yeah. And I don't feel like we ever need to know position specific. I just I miss that connection. And then for the principals, when they are getting their new budget numbers, I think we talked about that being based on a reduction in the SBB amount. Mhmm. So when do they get that information? So we've been previewing with Community Soups ranges.
Again, not specific necessarily, but Community Soups are starting to get some proposed target reductions to digest and respond to because their insight and expertise is so important. They will be sharing those with schools in November. Do you want December. Okay. November, December. And that's just the reduction target. You know, there's three other pieces of essential information for a school leader that then ultimately sets their budget. One is their forecasted enrollment. One is their current, at risk count.
Our at risk counts are moving. They they move to 800 kids today. Like, they keep moving quite a bit, and so there's a reason some of this stuff takes a minute to flow through the system. And then also, you know, year over year we're truing up the per student amount to kinda increase it for what increases have we given, employees in the past and or what inflationary increases do we need to pass through for supplies and materials that schools also pay for. So it's a little confusing. There's multiple pieces until they get a budget number, but they will start to hear
their reduction percentages, within, you know, November, December. Okay. Similar to what superintendent just Dorelin just said, I've been to some SAC meetings, and I've heard a few families say that the questions about fees feels like we might be putting it on families is the term that, I've heard a lot of folks use that it you know, why why or this is implying it might be put on us to Mhmm. Make up the difference. So just a comment. And then my last question is, how what's our plan for communicating all this to
the district, to the families and school communities? I mean, I think we were talking a lot about engagement, but then as it's happening, is this, like, gonna go out in weekly letters or, you know, are we gonna like, it just seems like a really critical moment that we need or there I'm thinking of the care that we really need to give to our families and our communities to understand this. I I can answer that. We're spending a lot of time, working with, Drew Coleman and the school leadership team
to really, work with our principals to deliver the the information. So we're working like, right now, what that looks like is working through what their questions are. So we're making sure that they, feel really confident about, understanding what what, what we are putting forward, and we'll continue to do that. In, the communication will pretty closely follow the information that is shared with the board. So as we, share the ranges of what we believe will be the cuts for
schools, those will be shared, with, through our schools because they have way the best way is to communicate with their families to say, the the range, that schools are gonna experience is is from here to here. And, we will know more about our exact budget and that time line. And and schools do do this every single year with their sacks. And so we are really trying to embed within those existing processes and provide support
to our our school leaders, where they they need it and request it, and where our community superintendents believe that that they're going to need it. And like, miss Copeland said, there are many factors and the best number budget numbers are the ones that are gonna be given to schools when they get their allocations in January. And we're trying to work with our principals now on the what is the best way to help a school community understand, the budget the budget impact. Because just sharing a percentage, the they're I don't know that people are really gonna
understand that. They're gonna understand how much the budget is, for next year and how much it was this year, and why is there a difference, and what does that mean, and what are the kinds of decisions that we need to make as school communities. One of the things that, superintendent Dolan and, miss Copeland have done is we have this budget owners work group that includes our principals. And so, for example, as we think about the school based surveys that will go out to families, which sometimes they do, some schools do them every year just to
ask what the priorities are, we are really these principals that we have are in that work group have asked for the ability to customize those surveys themselves. So we will provide some standard, questions that they can use and then they can further customize for their own, what's going on in in their schools. So the answer really is that we we believe that we need to work really closely with our school leaders, and take our cues from them in terms of how and what we communicate and what spaces and how we can, communicate as a district,
but also more effectively, especially when it falls involves school budgets, communicate through our schools. Well, to I would just to add on to that, one of the things that's been successful is some of the video work that we've done where, the last video I did where I just explained the big picture of the budget, and then we embedded that into what we call what we've been calling turnkey materials for our principals. So we're putting it on our website. We're putting it in our district wide newsletters to communicate as a district, but we know our families really listen most closely to their school community and their school leaders.
So we're also embedding those kinds of video messages into the materials we're giving to principals to use with their staff, to use with their staff. And I anticipate as we get closer and closer to making decisions about what does this package of department reductions look like that there could be some sort of video that we do to make sense of that for people. I think it's gonna be really important for people to understand the amount of cuts that we've made in central departments, especially as we begin rolling out school level budgets and targets. So that's another way how we try to strike the balance between principals being able
to communicate, but also trying to have common messages across the district through a 140 different key communicators, which is a hard a hard balance to strike. My question is gonna be about slide 27, supporting impacted staff. The very last bullet says there's there will be provided with detailed information about benefits and includes all the things that are listed there. Is the plan to provide, like, a navigation style where individuals can ask questions about their own specific case, or is it gonna be more general?
So we hope to offer both. So both sessions where, people can come and learn about, retirement. They can come and learn about, different benefits. When we see benefits and payroll, as you as you can imagine, payroll specifically changes between ESP not payroll itself, but your actual wage changes between ESP roles. And so understanding that, is not always easy. It's quite a complicated, matrix that we have to identify your new salary or your new wage if you switch from one role to another.
Additionally, we have, other options for folks who are, endorsed in specific things. So if you are a special educator, for example, you might receive an additional stipend. And so helping people to understand that. So we talked, just this week about offering both, large group sessions, both virtually and in person, and then also offering people one on one sessions if they, choose to, choose that option. That's helpful. I appreciate, the thought going into it's everybody's got different timelines, certifications, and having access
to somebody who can really sit down, who understands how it's going to play out and helps them look at their specific picture, I think, is really supportive. So thank you. You're welcome. My other question is something about, is school budgeted positions will be notified in March. That's a short window to the end of the year, and I'm wondering how we hold space for teachers who are looking at, you know, March to the May, and
then it feels like there's a cliff. So if you can adjust So our hope would be to notify them as soon as we know. Right? So as soon as the school leader knows, they would wanna notify a teacher, that they are potentially, going to be displaced or their position will no longer exist due to reductions, drops in enrollment, or or otherwise. If their teacher is a probationary teacher, meaning in their first three years, they would be non renewed at the end of the year automatically unless they secure a mutual
consent position. They would receive priority hiring, if they were to apply for pools. So we have a little indication inside of our, talent acquisition, tracker that, allows us to indicate that this individual is a priority hire, and we expect our principals to interview, a certain number depending on how many there are, if they're a nonprobationary teacher and they're going to be displaced. So, they have to be notified by contractual agreement, by March 15.
Okay. Oftentimes, our schools do notify them sooner than that, and then what what we do is we encourage, expect, share with them some of the resources, that they try also to secure mutual consent. If they are unable to secure mutual consent, we do place them for one year as part of senate bill one ninety one. That's the expectation is that they receive a placement in a position that is, one for which they are qualified and equivalent to their current role.
And so, Chris and the HR partner team work with the community superintendents to identify positions that are still available that we can place, highly qualified individuals into. It is, a very well oiled machine. We've been doing this for quite a while. And so, any educator who's in that bucket will be placed or at least will be offered a placement, and they can choose to continue searching, or they can choose to decline the position and and, if it's not something they wanna do. Yeah.
Thank you for the clarity. I appreciate that. And then I just I also just wanna add, my concern about PTSA supporting positions. It's really inequitable, and I wanna honor the motivations of the the communities that have the resource to do that because it's a demonstration that they value the relationship and the work that a staff member has done in that community. And it is also hard because there are lots of staff members at other schools where there are not PTSAs who have the same financial resource to support people.
And so I do believe that, I would be very supportive of a district policy to address this, because I think we need to think holistically about our entire system rather than individual pieces of it. And so I but I just wanna honor the motivations of people who want to give. It's because they honor the work and the relationships of the educators and the staff in our buildings, and we need to address it in an equitable way. So thank you. Okay. Thank you very much for that presentation.
You had a lot of good questions there. And, we look forward to the next meeting, get another update. So, after our next presentation, we will be taking a break. So the next item this evening, the board will study the proposed sale of Vivian Elementary School two acres and the Emery Elementary School building and site to the City of Lakewood. Presenting this evening are Jeff Gatlin, Chief Operating Officer and Greg Avedikian, Operations and Strategy Project Manager.
Presenters, we have allotted forty minutes for this presentation. Please reserve ten minutes of your presentation time for questions following your remarks. And before I turn this over, superintendent Dorland, do you have anything to say? Yes, please. Thank you. First, I'd like to thank mister Gatlin and mister Avedikian for their consistent efforts and leadership throughout our property disposition process. As you know, board, it's a lengthy process that takes time, energy, and commitment to community engagement along the way. So thank you both very much for your leadership, related to the disposition of properties.
I'd also like to welcome city manager, Kathy Hodson, who has been you've been a collaborative partner, throughout the process of considering disposition of some of our Lakewood School properties. Thank you for your partnership, and we really appreciate the collaboration and working closely with you. And, mister Gatlin, let's get this show on the road. Sounds good. Thank you. And I apologize for the voice, but bear with me, tonight. So that's not a great start. So our objectives for the evening, really four main portions of this presentation to provide
information about the City of Lakewood's purchase proposal for the two acre park parcel at Vivian, to review our municipal property disposition process and the evaluation criteria that we established to go along with that, And then transition into, information about the City of Lakewood's purchase proposal for the Emery Elementary School and site. And then I just wanted to close the presentation with just some general property valuation, takeaways and information that I think are are helpful.
And so for Vivian, I'm gonna turn it over to mister Avadikian, who will walk us through this Good evening, board. So for Vivian Elementary School, the two acres at that site, you already know some detail about this because you've previously approved the purchase and sale contract for the other portion of that site to Carlson Associates. And so we're here just to talk this evening about Lakewood's acquisition of the two acres that were all part of that, initial plan.
And so just to review, Vivian went through the property disposition process. The site was sold to Carlson and it was, determined kind of in that process, after there was not an initial municipal interest, that there was an opportunity for a two acre parcel and the one acre of dedication required by the development to create a three acre park on the site and address, a need for park area, in that part of the city of Lakewood. And so a reminder that Carlson has purchased is under contract for purchase of the
site with, a minimum of 30 lots on that site and a base price of $2,310,000. And if they can, accommodate a design of up to 33 lots, there would be an additional 77,250 per additional lot up to that 33. So as we went through the disposition process at Vivian, we received feedback from both the community, the greater community, as well as the ad hoc members who came to serve on our property disposition advisory committee, that there was a need and interest in
having park on the site. And that the proposal that came in through Carlson, effectively addressed the need for that and expressed their willingness to work with the city on acquiring the two acre parcel that we're talking about tonight. So the City of Lakewood, has reached terms with the school district to purchase those two acres at a purchase price of $596,720 for those two acres. And again, those would be combined, with the dedication coming from the developer for an approximately three acre, park site on the, southeastern portion of the current Vivian site.
And just a visual, reminder of what that would look like as it's been initially designed and a reminder that this, this site concept will still go through the city of Lakewood's entitlement process, and plat. But as proposed, you can see the location of the park on that southeast corner of the site, and then the identified potential home site lots. And so this is a relatively straightforward transaction for those two acres, that we will be bringing the purchase and sale, contract that, you're able to preview in board docs,
and on will be on consent at the general business meeting. Thank you, mister Abadikian. So before we transition to Emory, I do want to remind the board, that we created this municipal interest process, to support municipalities who expressed an interest. It was a value and a belief of the board and district leadership, that we, consider this. And it was guided, really by the evaluation criteria that you see up here, which I really feel act act like guiding principles in how we review and analyze, proposals.
This is also the first proposal that's come through our municipal interest process also. So just a reminder of that. And certainly, That align to those criteria, are favorable. So the purchase of Emery, the city of Lakewood, desires to purchase, the Emery building and site, which is, approximately 16.61 acres for $4,000,000. And I wanted to turn it over to miss Hodgson who could talk a little bit about, really the City of Lakewood's plans for the field portion of the site
and then also the community service facility or the building portion of the site that they're working in partnership, with the action center on. Thank you. Yeah. I have a lovely voice too, so there's two of us. I'm so glad to be here. Thank you for having me. So this the site will be actually split into two different functions. One will be to maintain the sports element of the site. We've actually, over the years, we have a wonderful relationship with GEFCO Schools. And Lakewood has been maintaining this site since, 1994 because we have adjacent, ball fields
and sports, areas just adjacent. And we thought, why would we have two different maintenance functions, take care of the same area? So Lakewood's been, maintaining this area for a long time. So to continue to maintain and have the ownership won't be much of a change for us. It's as you know, Emery is in a well, let me go back. We also have Link Recreation Center. And did you know that Link Recreation Center used to be O'Connell Middle School years ago?
I still worked for the city back then and, was a part in that transformation from being a school to a rec center. So it's it's kinda cool watching how this this site has continued to evolve. So this almost seven acres will be continued to be maintained as a a sports field area. The facility itself, the structure, our intent is to have a partnership with, the action center. The action center has been in existence for almost sixty years.
And do you know that they serve 300 households a day a day at that center? Years ago, right after COVID, the CEO came to me and said, we have had such increase in demand at the action center that we're gonna have to look for a new site. And I thought, oh, no. You can't leave. You can't leave Lakewood. Such an important, service for our city. And I had had lunch with a brand new superintendent who said, she said, you
know what? Our enrollment's dropping, and we need to talk about our schools and and how we're gonna maintain our budget. And we may be looking at having to, exit some of our schools. So with with, superintendent Dolan's idea, she said, wouldn't it be cool to keep it in the public domain? And that stuck with me. And when the the CEO of Action Center said, oh my gosh. We've the the demand has exceeded our ability to supply. I thought, wow. Maybe there's an opportunity here.
And, took us some time, and we looked at Emory, the Emory site and thought, wow. What a wonderful opportunity. So that started this journey of, exploration. Is this a place where the action center can move to? And I do wanna tell you just anecdotally that when when the CEO of the action center said it's gotten so bad that on Wednesdays when they hand out food to their clients, because the building's so small and the fire department would close them down if there were too many people in the building, that, people waiting for their
food had to wait outside. So imagine a mom and her kids in the snow with cars going by, and the mom trying to protect the kids and trying to keep their dignity while waiting outside for food. That's when I thought we need help, and that's what started this whole conversation. So the action center, their their vision is to continue to provide food, clothing, financial assistance, and pathways to, stability. They also their board is really brave and wants to, increase their vision to a
whole family resource center. So they have a vision to transform the former Emory Elementary School into a vibrant, I'm gonna read this, family friendly community campus that brings together workforce training, local community college classes, early childhood and youth enrichment, senior programs, youth sports programming, school and clothing supplies, and critical family supports under one roof. So that's the concept. We've seen a whole lot of support from, well, the Action Center has from the
fundraising community, and, we're really excited about that. So, so that's the that's our plan for this site. Thank you, miss Hodgson. So, a few considerations with this. First, you know, we see community benefit inequity in this proposal. Using it as a community service facility reflects the values and commitment we have to serving families in our community. Open space. We've heard through our multiple processes of disposition that open space is valued, in our communities. So preservation of that.
And one really important thing that I wanna to point out is, we are putting into place a restrictive covenant and deed restriction with the building portion of of this transaction, that it must be used as a community service facility. And that that definition is included in the the the language in the covenant that's provided in board docs. And basically, that that preserves the district's interests, that it serves that function. And if it if it were ever sold for another purpose other than that function, we would essentially have the option to recoup value of that transaction compared to what
we paid for it, at this point in time. And I do wanna point out, even though it says specifically the City Of Lakewood, it it really is about ownership of that parcel. And so whoever the owner is, at that time would be obligated with this covenant and deed restriction because the deed restriction and covenant is tied to that and recorded against that specific parcel. So I just wanted to go through, information sharing and feedback opportunities, with this proposal, mostly led by the City of Lakewood and Action Center. But you can see there were numerous, meetings, information sessions.
Part of our process is providing us information, getting feedback from the property disposition advisory committee. That's in here as well. And so you can see that there were numerous opportunities for, the community to learn, and to engage in, the use. And so I did wanna turn it back to miss Hodgson to just talk a little bit about some of the feedback that was received in those sessions. Thank you. There's actually a couple additional community meetings that have been held in addition to that list. We've we've also recently had two hearings with the City of Lakewood.
And as of this last Monday, there was a unanimous vote for three different elements. One is the purchase of the of the Emory site, and then the other is to and along with that action was also to turn around and sell that for a million dollars to the action center. Lakewood's intending on purchasing the current Action Center Building, and that and that was a part of that was their second action. And the third action was for us to lease back the current Action Center Building,
so they can continue to use it until they move to the Emory site. Delighted that it, passed unanimously. We during the the second hearing, we got feedback from 63 people, 60 of them in strong support of this particular project. Three were more concerned. As a result of those conversations, we've also agreed not only, obviously, with the covenant that Jeff just described, we're also putting in the authorizing documentation that this site will
not be used for, for homeless services and for overnight shelter. That's very important for our community, so we're we're actually putting that also in the authorizing documents. Really excited about this. Like I said, it was a unanimous vote. Our city council has actually, released a statement of support, and I recently sent that to Jeff if you wanna see that. It's pretty special. Thank you. And and just quickly wanted to note that, we did provide this information to the the PDAC, the Property Dispersion Advisory Committee, and it had strong majority support, from that
group in general. So next steps. At the November 13 meeting next week, you will vote to approve two separate contracts for the two, the two acre parcel Vivian and the the parcel of Emery. Because there's the restricted covenant and deed restriction, it it is gonna require a separate, resolution. It just there's, some specifics about that legally that we, will have in there as well, but I just wanna call that out. That wasn't included in the materials, in board docs tonight, but it will be in the materials, for next week. But you'll be asked to approve both contracts and associated documents that go along with
those and the resolution around the restrictive covenant, Indeed restriction. Okay. So last topic before we open it for questions is I do want to end with some takeaways and information about property valuation as it relates to all the properties we have sold or are currently under contract. The first one, you know, and we hear the term market value. Market value is the amount a real buyer is willing to pay for a property. Sale prices vary greatly, you're going to see this here in the next slide, on
a per acre basis and against appraised value. And even when soliciting offers to create competitive market conditions, we still experience disparities in value. Appraised values and market values vary greatly based on the land's underlying zoning and use restrictions, and we'll talk about that here in a moment. And rezoning a property adds restrictions, and we'll talk about that here in a moment. And rezoning a property adds risk that lengthens or jeopardizes the sale, process, timeline. And the community benefit has value that needs to be considered. So I noticed there's a lot on this slide, but I wanna walk through a
couple things. This chart illustrates some of those takeaways that I just mentioned. And while we receive multiple valuations and appraisals, sale prices have aligned closest to the vacant land as is value and the as is rezone value. And what those two things mean is the vacant land as value is just the value of the land with the current underlying zoning as is. The as if rezoned makes some assumptions about potentially higher density or other use that
might increase that potential value. I wanna talk about that in a moment as well. So I do just wanna walk through a couple of the rows just to make sure, the logic is is understood. Using Allendale as the initial example with a sale price of $3,250,000, the sale price was 87 percent higher than the appraised vacant land as is value of 1,740,000.00, and it was 19% less than the appraised vacant land as if rezone value of 3,990,000.00. Zurger, interestingly enough, the sale price was 1,260,000.00,
which was, 15% less than the 1.48 appraised vacant land as is value and 63% less than the $3,430,000 appraised vacant land as if rezone value. And you can see that logic flows through through the properties. Those are the five properties, that have gone through our regular process and then Emery also that's gone through our municipal process. And we also know that values vary greatly based on those assumptions. For example, Emery as if rezone value is $8,310,000.
That assumes higher density housing up to 22.5 units per acre. For Vivien and Emery, they are the only two on the list where their as is rezone value assumes medium or higher density, housing. So we know when an appraised amount makes this assumption, it becomes harder to move towards that value and greater disparity can exist. And we heard loud and clear from our Vivian ad hoc committee, members that they strongly desired redevelopment that was aligned to existing neighborhood characteristics. And pursuing the higher density value based on our experience with previous properties, can be
disruptive to the community. So that value makes assumptions. Whether or not those assumptions are realistic or attainable is another question, but it certainly carries greater risk. And so with that, I wanna stop and see what questions you have. Well, thank you for this. This is exciting and really exciting to come to see this to fruition. So we really appreciate the partnership with Lakewood. It means a lot. I do have one question. I apologize if my media is just out of date.
The I know there was something in the news about a week ago about the vote for Lakewood being delayed, but you mentioned the vote had happened. So is everything good? Yes. Okay. Yes. We the vote was supposed to be a week ago on Monday, and, there was a lawsuit that the judge imposed an injunction. So it was an interesting meeting where we had testimony from about, like I said, about 60 people. So we took the meeting all the way up to the vote and then stopped
there. I got to testify on Tuesday in District court. That was an interesting experience. Long story short, last month just a couple days ago on Monday at 03:00, the judge lifted the injunction. So that was at three, and we were able to vote at 6PM. Perfect. And that's when we had the unanimous vote. Thank you for clarifying that. Been a journey. Yes. I could only imagine, and thank you for doing that. So I just wanted to clarify that because I had had people ask about it, and I appreciate that.
Thank you. I was wondering on the restricted restrictive covenant when you said it will only say City of Lakewood. But if the plan is to sell it to the action center, why can't we include the action center on the company? Yeah. And I I apologize. It it says City of Lakewood, but it's gonna it's gonna really be tied to whoever the owner is. And so, initially, City of Lakewood. City of Lakewood sells it to the action center, then that responsibility will fall with the action Center or whoever the current owner is.
So I appreciate you calling that out because that is a point of clarity that I wanted to to make sure is in the room. And will that move forward, like, if Action Center sells it to whoever and then whoever and whoever always going to exist that way? If if it's the if it's The u if the use stays as as the appropriate use, that that could happen. And then as soon as that use were to change and a sale were to occur, then that, Anytime. Yep. Okay. Yep. Will it still say City of Lakewood, or will it say owner? Owner. And, actually, the the the, the deed restriction and covenants says owner.
So I apologize for for that's a little confusing. Yep. And then we have the contract to review in here. I I I read lots and lots of contracts, actually. And, I don't know if there's risks in here that you know, what did we have to negotiate? What should we as a board know, that we about this contract? Are there anything that we negotiated or give and take or anything like that? No. You know, I mean, the the the contract is pretty is is pretty self explanatory
and certainly, approved by our land use attorney, who would who work closely, with, the city's, legal legal counsel just to to make sure that it that it met our standards. So there isn't anything extraordinary that, that's included in that. And the contract was originated from Lakewood? I believe it was. Okay. I believe it was. Okay. When the I just have one question on the, appraisals. So when you said it's the as is, that's and and then you said a vacant property, but is as is, sorry.
I lost the words. But is the as is permanent for school? Or you said it it's, appraised as in vacant property Yep. But it's called as is. Isn't the the zoning for it as a school? So what are we or is the appraisal as There there's actually there's actually underlying zoning kind of underneath the school use. Yep. That that's so the so the school the school use kinda trumps whatever the underlying zoning is, but there's underlying zoning that exists, under that parcel that's part of their each of the municipalities, you know, plan.
And that's the that's the zoning that that one that I'm referring to. Okay. So so, I believe the Emery is, like, has an r one six, like, a residential mister Abdi, can you can help me out with Yeah. 6,000 single family 6,000 square foot lot. So so most of our school properties are zoned already, typically matching the the surrounding residential areas that were initially developed when schools were built. So, that that as is current zoning value is typically reflective of a of the
surrounding area residential single family, you know, medium lot. Okay. And the assumptions in some of those as if rezone values, which was the higher value on that chart that we showed, would be if a developer attained a higher, density zoning on that property. That would thus increase the value. But that's, of course, subject to entitlement and to planning commissions and city council approving things like that. And, you know, I've asked this once before, but not not in public, at a
public meeting. But the do we consider a commercial zoning, appraisal in the, potential? I can't think of what that column is called. I need the slide here. In the as if rezoned? As if rezoned. It it really looks at what is the the this is how it was explained to me, and mister Abadie can keep keep me honest here, that it looks at the immediate surrounding, neighborhood and looks at that zoning. Then it takes a little bit of a zoom out and sees, you know, is there a change? And maybe the immediate is single family homes, but a zoom out, you start to
have some, multifamily homes. So it could start to weave in some of the multifamily home, into the into the, assumptions. I meant like commercial property, retail kind of, not that kind of stuff. Yeah. I don't believe we've seen a commercial component. Zoom out at all? Okay. Yeah. So the the appraiser makes assumptions based on, you know, there's there's existing zoning that the appraiser is gonna look at and then zoning in the surrounding, like, quarter mile
of property. And then this, you know, the next level of zooming out would be a city's master plan that's been approved. And so an appraiser is not going to consider things that are completely, out of alignment from a master plan. So while you could theoretically say someone could pursue a commercial development within a residential community, it's very you know, there's very low likelihood of a city contradicting their own master plan to make an exception for something like that. And so Unless the school is near an area.
Yeah. The school would have to be Yeah. I'm talking about adjacent to existing commercial or industrial. Right? Any kind of other zoning. But what the appraiser would go off of in that case would be a city's master plan Okay. Or comprehensive plan. Thanks. Yep. I wanna say thank you for slide number seven about our municipal interest process in this presentation. I wanna lean heavy into it remembering when we started this process that the board had multiple conversations about, community benefits, being considered as proposals are brought forward.
That's been very important to us, and it was one of our values. And so, I just thank you for putting that slide there. And prior to that slide coming into fruition, we had conversations as a board about that being a value of ours. I wanna just ask about the Vivian property. Is Lakewood in communication with the potential adjacent property owners for agreements, or does that happen after the sale is over? So Carlson, I think, is the other is the will be their neighbor, the park
next to the park. And is Lakewood talking with them yet about, like, kind of access points or development? Oh, certainly, they are and have been through this whole development process. Great. Mhmm. That's very routine for us. Awesome. I just wanted to ensure some good neighbor relationship being developed there. And I wanna also say thank you to the council for their unanimous statement. I was able to see it earlier today and, just really grateful for that and for the efforts to clarify, issues where the community has lifted concern.
I think being responsive to the community has also been another value of the school board and of, our Lakewood City Council and of all of our other municipal partners as we walk through this process, and that we have been responsive and open to hearing from what our community desires, what they would like to see. And so we've learned an awful lot of good lessons from working through the Emory and Vivian process. But I I just wanna say thank you to everybody who's been involved in this,
and I am excited for this to move forward. And I'll just add to that Carlson, throughout the process, has been extremely proactive in communicating with neighbors. The ad hoc members of the committee had direct conversations with Carlson about their plans and about their willingness to work with the city on the development of the park concept. And so, you know, the entire Vivian community was was very happy with the level of coordination between the developer, the city, you know, and to our role within making that those connections happen.
Director Reid, did you have any questions for this panel? No. I think I'm good. Thanks. Thanks. All right. Well, thank you very much for this presentation. And we are gonna take a ten minute break. And welcome back. The next study item this evening is for the board to receive information on upcoming charter school renewals that we will vote on at our November 13 board meeting. Presenting tonight is Doctor. Drew Coleman, Chief of Schools and Doctor. Omotayo Adeko, Executive Director of Charter Partnerships. Presenters, we have allotted forty five minutes for this presentation.
Please reserve ten minutes of your presentation time for questions following your remarks. And before I turn it over to doctor Coleman and doctor Adecco, superintendent Dorland, is there anything you'd like to say? Yes. Thank you, president Parker. I I appreciate our presenters, doctor Coleman and doctor Adecco, for your intention, in this process and your time this evening. I also would like to thank the charter school leaders and communities who have put together the materials for renewal consideration. While it serves as an opportunity for our charter schools to showcase the important and
incredible work they do with and for our students and families, it is also a lot of time and commitment to submit the materials in a timely manner with all the information needed. So thank you to our charter partners, for those efforts, And thank you for being here tonight, those of you who were able to attend. It was nice to chat with you for a minute at the break. And with that, I'm gonna hand it over to doctor Coleman to kick us off. Thank you, superintendent Dorland. Board, it's so good to see you this afternoon. We'll go ahead and get started with me, me and doctor Adecco.
And just I'll start with the agenda. Tonight for the presentation, we will, look at our charter renewal process, and also look at the renewal recommendations for Attenborough Classical Academy, Charter Network, Compass Montessori, Wheat Ridge, Compass Montessori Charter Network, and New America School Lakewood. So I'm gonna turn it over to doctor Adecco to, go through our presentation. Thank you, doctor Coleman. Let's begin with our charter renewal processes. It begins in the spring when the district publishes the renewal application template for charters,
and then they use that template to, write craft their renewal application. And in the application, they include information on academic performance, organizational financial health, and compliance, and applications were due October 1. Each school's application has been submitted to, this board docs agenda item for your review. And then, we conduct our staff review where we review the applications against our performance frameworks, and we also seek input from internal departments such as student discipline, student safety,
our finance team. And then the DAC also runs their own parallel review, and they share their input directly with you as directed by, through GP o seven. And that input form has also been uploaded to this board docs agenda item. Then the superintendent reviews the DAC input and the body of evidence gathered by the staff and publishes the recommendations that, that are in front of you. And, we present it here at the November study session. And then the, next step of the process will be the board vote at your
November business meeting. And just a little bit about the policy and regulations that guide the work. This is, straight from Colorado codes and regulation, and it directs authorizers, to make renewal decisions, based on thorough analysis of a comprehensive body of evidence and, what we bolded there on the screen, ensuring that improved academic achievement is the most important factor to consider. And we define that as performance on the SPF. And sometimes the school comes up for renewal and, the authorizer makes a decision to
revoke or non renew that that charter. And, state statute is very clear that that can only happen for one of four reasons or one or more of these four reasons. If the school committed a material violation of their contract, if they fail to meet or make adequate progress toward the achievement of their goals, if they fail to meet generally accepted standards of fiscal management, or if they violated any provision of law that from which they don't have a waiver. Then we also wanted to talk about charter renewal or charter network contracts, which, we haven't we didn't we haven't had come up in the last year or two.
So what is a charter school network? The state statute defines that as a a charter school that operates additional schools. So a network may hold one or more charter contracts and may be governed by a single governing body or board. And that network then is responsible for the governance, oversight, and monitoring of compliance and performance for that school, but they still need to report the performance of each school as a separate school, and each school is held independently accountable for its performance. So we initiated charter network contracts in the 2324 renewal cycle with Jefferson Academy, and
we are proposing to expand that work this year with, our other two charter networks, Attenborough Classical Academy and Compass Montessori. Then after this renewal cycle, all the GEFCO charter network schools will be on this charter contract. New America School Lakewood is part of a network, but, only one of those schools is within GEFCO. So for our purposes, we consider New America School Lakewood to be a single site because they just have one site in GEFCO. But the other two the other networks have multiple schools in GEFCO.
So let's get into the superintendent's recommendations, and we'll start with Addenbrooke. So if you could make your way up here, Addenbrooke, please. And here's a summary of those recommendations, a recommended five year renewal term for Attenborough, Classical Academy Turner Network, a five year recommendation for Compass Montessori Wheat Ridge with a proposed three year contract extension for Compass Montessori Golden, and we'll get into that when we talk about Compass. And then, for New America School Lakewood, the superintendent has recommended three years plus two
years of performance benchmarks are met. But starting with Adambrook. Adambrook, like we shared, is a charter network, and there are two schools, a grammar school and a secondary school. And we'll talk about both, campuses. So both Addenbrooke campuses are located in Lakewood. Their educational model is a classical education, which they discuss in their renewal narrative, what how they define that in their school. The school, has typically performed strongly, in academics.
They were rated both campuses were rated performance on this year's SPF. We also do not have any significant concerns with their, finances. They very recently, within just the past couple months, refinanced their bond for another thirty years. So they're in a strong financial position, and we don't have any, governance concerns as well. This is the historical enrollment for their grammar school. They're currently at 775 students, and you can see their enrollment has steadily increased over the last few years.
And this is the enrollment for their secondary school, which, has traditionally held a 100% graduation rate. So So based on the body of evidence, the superintendent recommends a five year charter renewal for Annanbrook, Grammar as well as Annanbrook Secondary. And if the board approves this recommendation, then both schools will be placed on a single network contract for this next contract term. But as directed by statute, we will continue to hold each school independently accountable for
meeting their performance goals. So, Mary, I think it might make sense to pause after each one and and let board members ask questions if you have them or have discussion with the schools as we go. Yeah. Does that make sense to you? Yeah. Yeah. And, let me just start. I'm just gonna say I had Adenbrooke in my district for a couple of years there and loved coming. I think it's a great school and appreciated being part of the graduating class one year too. So, and before I ask the rest of the board members if they have any
questions, do you have anything you'd like to add to what was just presented? No. I think we're really proud of what we do, and I think you've seen growth, in our processes. I think we had some there you go. Is that better? I think we had there you go. You've seen some growth in what we've done academically. You've seen some growth in our enrollment, certainly. And, you've seen some growth in our financial, ability to do things, which was, witnessed by our refinance of our bond. We became part of the state of Colorado's moral obligation program, which says that we had to meet an investment grade, status on our bond, and so we were able
to do that because of our great finances. Julie, John. Great. Thanks. Board members, questions? Are you all working on growing enrollment and what capacity are you at in your grammar school and secondary school currently? Go ahead. Yes. Absolutely. We're working on growing enrollment, in the high school. We, we have we have some room in the high school to grow. We'd really like to get over 200 in the high school. I think that's kind of the first benchmark we're we're reaching for, and there's parts of the strategic plan from the board, that identify that as a as an area that we wanna grow in as well.
So, yeah, we're actively pursuing that in in a number of ways. Go ahead and speak to it and then I'll add. How's that go? It depends which school you're talking to. Yes, we're growing. Our goal has always been to be a four strand elementary, middle school, meaning that we'll have four at every grade level. Currently, we are, fourth strand up to fourth grade. Next year, we'll be adding fifth grade. And then we had such a wait list for our sixth grade students that we actually added an additional 25 this year, two years ahead of schedule.
What's your capacity? How big can you So that's an issue for us. Right? And we're talking about what what a temporaries would look like and what and what future growth would be. When when when we, first acquired the building where the, K 8 is right now, that was our preschool through twelfth grade program. And I affectionately tell Julie that her elementary school continued to push the high school out, and so we purchased another building five blocks north. I'd love to have you all come visit and we'd love to show you around. So it's an issue for us, but but we think growth is gonna happen because
there's great interest in what we do and in how we teach kids through a classical model. I don't have any questions. I just wanna say I appreciate you all coming out to sit and talk with us, and, we appreciate you going through the process as superintendent Dornan said. I know it's a lot, and so thank you for serving our kids. Thank you, Chris. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks for your time. Thank you, superintendent. So now we will proceed with Compass Montessori, Wheat Ridge. And at the table, we have doctor Cameron Galen, who is the executive director of
Compass Montessori Charter Network, and doctor Amy Flagg, who is the principal at Compass Montessori Wheat Ridge. And the second school in the network is Compass Montessori Golden led by Kim Garcia. So a little bit about Compass Montessori, Wheat Ridge. Their educational model is Montessori, and the campus is ECE through sixth, but all, enrolled sixth graders have a seat at seventh grade at the farm school at Compass Montessori Golden. The school is, traditionally a strong performer academically.
They received a rating of performance on their twenty twenty five SPF. Additionally, we don't have any significant concerns about the finances. The school does not carry, any debt, and they have strong cash reserves. And there's no significant governance concerns as well. As you can see, the they have very steady, enrollment. Part of that is because, the school traditionally has a robust wait waiting list a wait list. So, they're able to keep their enrollment numbers at exactly the school's capacity because of
that. So because of the strong body of evidence, the superintendent recommends a five year charter renewal for Compass Montessori Wheat Ridge. The superintendent is also proposing placing both Compass campuses on a charter network that has the same, expiration date of 2031. So that would require a three year extension for their other campus, Compass Montessori Golden, whose current contract expires June 2028. And so we have, some of the performance data here as well.
It's strong at compass from Compass Montessori Golden. They're a strong academic performer. No finance concerns between both campuses. They both campuses carry approximately 5,000,000 in cash reserves across both of them, so they're strong financial performers, strong academic performers, and then it would streamline renewal, and they would be on the same contract like with our two other charter networks that have same terms. And then their enrollment too at Compass Montessori Gold is also very steady in part
due to the wait list. Great. And, do you ladies have something you'd like to add to that presentation? I think we would echo what Adam Brooks said. We're really proud of our little school and our consistent enrollment, specifically our finances. Not having debt is an incredible, opportunity, and we put a lot of work into that. And it's been just really great for our community, and we really appreciate, the opportunity to become a network. And the extension of the Golden contract is huge. As the executive director, I feel like I'm up for renewal every other year, which,
actually has had some advantages. I was sharing with Amy yesterday that, like, I feel like, you know, I've had a shot at looking at the waivers every other year. And, you know, kind of it having that consistency, it never feels really far away or new or intimidating, but I think that just the confidence in our school to have that extension. And 2031 sounds like a long way away, which feels good because it is a lot to prepare a charter renewal, and so we really appreciate it. Okay. Board director's questions? Yep.
It's not a question, just a comment. It is clear that you have a community that really cares about your school, and I wanna commend you for building community, not just with your students, but with your families. Thank you. Thank you very much. And I'll just add, since this is these are my schools, and I get to visit you guys regularly, I wanna echo the same sentiments. Like, we really appreciate the work that you do. It's really cool to walk through the classrooms and see the kids and learn about the Montessori method and just all the good work that you're doing both in Wheat
Ridge and in Golden. And so, thank you for serving our kids, and thank you for putting the effort and work into this. We're short time up here. You guys are doing great. And I I enjoyed coming out and seeing the do you call it the farm? Is that what it's called? Yeah. That's our school. Yeah. So it's nice. Anyway, thank you, and congratulations for your successes. Thank you. Thank you. The last school we will be reviewing today is New America School Lakewood. And, coming up to the table is New America School's brand new principal, principal Eric
Rowe, and the New America Colorado executive director, Santiago Golopez. No. Oh, it's okay. Thank you for the Yeah. Promotion. So a little bit about, New America School, Lakewood. They are part of a three school, network, but like I shared earlier, there's only one of those sites here in GEFCOM. They serve grades nine, twelve, and their model is is an, AAC, an alternative education campus, English language learner support, engaging students who, typically have not been engaged in traditional
comprehensive high schools. At one point, they had a night school program. So just, different reaching out in different ways to kids who are, traditionally underserved. New America has had some remarkable growth in the last couple years, and so and this was the second year in a row or third year in a row that they were rated performance on the AACSPF, including a rating of exceeds in academic growth. Financially, and and some of this is due to some low enrollment, which we'll look at in the next slide. We do have some concerns regarding their multiyear cash flow.
Our multiyear cash flow looks at three years out, and the school one year out has a positive cash flow, but years two and three, that decreases and becomes a negative cash flow. But and the school also does not carry any debt. And then based on the multiyear cash flow, there are some concerns from our accounting team about the school's ability to meet its TABOR regulations given given what we're seeing in the enrollment forecast. And so looking at that, the the school has experienced some enrollment decline since 2019.
Some of it's due to the changing landscape, the location, the schools in the Belmar neighborhood, which has changed demographically over the last, you know, five to ten years. And so currently, this year, they're at 60 to 65 students depending on the day. And, we also wanted to note, some concerns around the school's completion rate. So, the Colorado School Performance Framework, the SPF, looks at four, five, six, or seven
year completion rate, that's kids getting degrees, and assigns the best of as the rating for completion rate. And so you can see since 2022, that number ranges anywhere between 25 to 33%. And, we're we're not holding New America School to the same standard as we do our traditional comprehensive high schools. We're looking at what the state, defines as meet expectation for AAC completion rates, and that's 49.5%. So currently, the school on their SPF is rated does not meet for, completion rates.
So looking at the body of evidence, particularly, the the what we consider to be low completion rates, the superintendent recommends a three year charter renewal for New America School Lake Wood with an automatic two year extension if performance conditions are met. So that's what we call a three plus two, three year base. And then if in those three years they meet the two performance conditions, they get an automatic two year extension so they wouldn't have to complete a renewal application or anything like that. And these are the the recommended performance conditions.
First, that the school attains a performance of rating on the 2028 AEC SPF, and the school attains a completion rate that meets the state AEC expectations, which is greater than 49.5% during the 2728 school year. So if the school meets both of those conditions, then they would get an automatic two year extension in '20 '8, and then their contract would go through June 2031. But if the school failed to meet either of those benchmarks, then the school would
not be eligible for the extension, and the renewal contract would end in June 2029. I will share that on Monday, the school proposed alternative performance benchmarks. So perhaps, President Parker, you might Yes. Please let us know. Sure. So basically what we, with our data analyst who's been working with the AEC alternative, performance measures with the state of Colorado for many years now. Basically, we looked at these two and we were like, okay. Those are fine.
We also propose adding another, benchmark, which adds graduation rate for alternative ed schools. And we did that with our Thornton campus through Adams twelve over the last couple of years. And on the AEC, that cut point is set for AECs as rated through AEC campuses. And on there, we know that our school is actually meeting that benchmark through the state, requirements in Thornton.
We know that here, they're close to it. It's only three point three percentage points away from having a meets rating on the graduation rate. So the difference is graduation is students finishing with a high school diploma. Completion is anybody that either does that or additional, they go out and get a GED and then they're tracked by the state to meet that requirement or they're not counted as a dropout. They're just completing something. So, those are the that's the additional measure that we would like to do. And then changing the wording to the benchmark saying that we would meet, one of
those three by the dates that are in there. I don't have the dates directly in front of me. I can pull that email up though. Do you have that? Here we go. So one one would remain the same, number one there. Number two would be, the school attains a graduation rate that meets state expectations greater than 33.3%, which represents sixtieth percentile of Colorado AECs during the 2728 school year. And the third one would state the school attains a completion rate that approaches state AEC expectations greater than 40%, which represents fortieth percentile.
So changing the, meets on the completion rate to approaching. So and then meeting one of the one of the three, we can adjust that to two of the three. So just giving us a little bit more time to grow because one of the things that we're proposing in our charter contract is adding a, a diploma type. So we have the traditional diploma now, but adding a competency based diploma, which has been done in other schools throughout the state as well.
So that gives a different opportunity. There's nothing like a eight 17 or 18 year old high school student walking into your doors and you sit down with a counselor and you hear, I'm 18 years old, but you have three more years to complete the credit requirement required by a traditional diploma. And then as an 18 year old, I know when if I was 18 years old back when I was 18 years old and they told me that, I'd be like, see you. At 17, I know I could drop out in Colorado, so that's what I'm gonna do. So we wanna capture them a different way, give them a different opportunity to show
that they have the skills and abilities to move on to post secondary option. So the competency based diploma basically takes credit for some of their existing skill sets, and do they test out? Is that how you you kinda check it instead of, like, credits? It's not really credits. It's all based on the ACT WorkKeys test, which students can do now through postsecondary workforce readiness benchmarks. And so the post the workforce readiness certificate is based on three tests through ACT WorkKeys. The competency based diploma adds more tests and more curriculum to that, So our teachers
teach those. They still have to take the required courses by CDE as far as government, personal finance, those types of things. But we get them set up to be able to go to their next step in education or the workforce if that's what they choose. Doctor Adecco, do you have a recommendation on their counterproposal, or is that something that we can expect to have? I'm gonna jump in and just say that this is news to me. Okay. And I am always open to talking with charter leaders about different approaches. This actually breaks me back to my Adams twelve days Yes.
It does. Working with, your organization and thinking thinking really critically and together about different conditions that we might consider, to give the school the best chance, at make making sure it serves the students in the just right way given the unique students who you serve, as well as making sure that it hits some of the conditions if we have some. So, I mean, my recommendation, Mary, and to the rest of the board is that we have a minute to talk about this offline, so I can better understand what
the schools' ideas are and what they're proposing and probably get, like, doctor Eaton involved as well just because she she understands the AEC school performance frameworks better than anybody around here. Maybe not better than these guys, by the way. But then she can give me and Tayo and, Doctor. Coleman some advice around, what she thinks about some of these ideas. I think that would be helpful for me at least, and then I'll let you take it from here. Superintendent Dorland, does that mean then that we would get more information, not this evening,
but and before our next meeting? Okay. That is helpful, and I support that, but I'm still gonna ask a couple of questions if that's alright. Yeah. First, I'm gonna start out with I enjoyed your graduation last year. I've learned through my time and service on the board just how important our AEC community is. And I think it is interesting the network that we have where we're we have Jeff co represented, but also Adam's twelve and Aurora. So I I think it's an interesting organization.
I'm wondering what your plans are to address the unique challenges that have been lifted up around enrollment, completion rates, and and finances? I'll start and I'm gonna turn it over to our new principal, Eric. So as far as enrollment, we know the students that we serve are out there. I know people are probably I I mean, I get tired at times of people saying, well, COVID hit us hard. COVID well, COVID did hit us hard because our students truly went back to work or into the workforce to help put food on the table and pay the bills.
And so they discovered that that's what they could do. So now what we need to do is we need and what we've been trying to do is show our students how education and life and work could all fit together. Because if you get your diploma, then you're going to get a better job. You're gonna be able to provide better and more as the tough times we are. And then also with the political climate, our students are the ones that are afraid. Mhmm. They're afraid to come out of their homes.
They're afraid to go to anywhere other than work because that's what they do. So we've seen a decline in those our, multilingual population coming to our schools. And so they're out there. We need to get into that community and pivot our marketing and our efforts from really, like social media is great, but majority of what we do is word-of-mouth and getting into the community. And I think the community is starting to come back from some of that and be a little bit more trusting of entities like us.
And so we wanna get them where they are and show them that this is what you can do, but then also providing the opportunities for them in the school that are different than a traditional high school so they see that difference. And that's what our new principal has been doing. You wanna share some of the things that you're here. Hi. Good evening, board. Eric Rowe. This is year 31 in education for me. Ten of those years have been working, in Saint Louis and in Denver, public schools at an AAC campus and leading that.
So part of what, has happened through that word-of-mouth, we started in August with 23 students. October count had us at 62. Did we do visits and go out in in local parades or events? No. The kids experienced a very different, learning experience at our school. First day was at Boondocks. Why don't we start the first day at Boondocks? We had to build trust. So we spent some time bonding, building culture because that's been so forth. That belonging is part of the, TNTP framework for us meant how do we create
a culturally relevant and sustainable culture at our school. So kids going up three stories on their crosswalk out of Boondocks in Westminster who would say there's no way I'm gonna do that at all, paired up with their advisers. Right? Creating trust. The other part is they're thinking about academically in terms of of the coherence and the model, providing sort of elective opportunities for students, post secondary opportunities for students. So right now, we had, we have two, young women who will be completing their
CNA program at Emily Griffith on November 15. One passed the sort of comprehension of literacy exam to to take part in that module. The other scored two twenty on the, reading our fall reading map test. So superintendent, Lopez is correct. Many of our students said, mister, I just wanna graduate. What I need to do to graduate, That's not really sort of a, sustaining idea to have as a 17 and 18 year old. You just wanna get something done. So we had to really walk, our talk about how to work in school combined.
Right? What does it really wanna do in life? How do you walk in the world? We have used that data through empathy interviews, one to ones, just just to say, how do we design a school around our kids and not the other way around? We are both charter and AEC. Right? We we are a charter. Yes. But I would just define us as an alternative education campus. So my experience and my training background says you have to really shape the school around students who've had to meet your mission, who've had major disruptions to the education journey. You have students who've been marginalized by a b c of organizations.
Right? And also have been disengaged and haven't found a connection between those two things. We have students now. We had a a young woman who scored two forty one on her her fall maps. So we do it in a trigonometry class on BYU Independent Studies. So she's gonna earn a college credit, which meets, the power standards and the state graduation requirements. We have, six students that were admitted into Metro because we had our college free app day. Right? So thinking about what those opportunities can be and engage our students in a very
different way. The competencies based diploma is, again, is based on ACT WorkKeys and then personal finance and civics. But you just can't do that could just look like test prep. Right? So you have to think more about what the experience is coming in. So really being intentional about the ICAP and what that looks like and coming up with a personalized learning plan for that student if they're with us for a year or four years with a full education experience, thinking through what are gonna be those work based learning opportunities for them.
We, one of our students today, working with Devin, with Rachel Allman in the CTE department, there's a gentleman who has, Allman on the range. He builds go karts using electric batteries. We have five students who are participating in that program that started today. Right? One of them wants to go to Warren Tech, but it's like a 200 student wait list on there. So we thought, how do we pivot to give him a different opportunity about what he wants to do later on? Right? So today, he went out to Arvada and was working on go karts and electric
batteries. Right? Eventually, he's thinking about Lincoln Tech who came to our college, free app day, and and enrolling in there. So it's it's not just, it's going to take time. We're building mister Beranizzoni was there nineteen years and founded that school. He laid a solid foundation for what we are doing now, but now the work is how do we extend it and build systems? So that's the work. Just a data point from Jennifer Strawbridge is that when Thornton first implemented the competency
based diploma, there was a jump of six to seven percentage points. So if you if you think about that number from the 48.9 and the 33.3, That 6% jump also means that we can meet those expectations, but it also provides an upper opportunity for students who we know are out there, who've had some disruption. And instead of telling the student, you need to do three more years, we can just say, we have a pathway for you that incorporates what you wanna do in
terms of career or college if it's that, and we can do that for you in five to six months if you put the work and effort in. So that's our work. And so to really I'm sorry. Go ahead. Oh, yeah. So to, address the whole the cash flow issue, we understand that. And the drop in enrollment is a large contributor to that. So we need to address that. One way that we're doing that is we're trying we're learning how to operate as a smaller school. So where can we cut not cut personnel because we don't wanna cut the education
of our for our students, our programming. We want to build that, but then also where else can we cut? So we look at our central office. There's two full time employees in our central office, myself and our business manager. And the other ones, we have part time contractors where we have cut a lot. We moved our offices where we cut our overhead in half. So those are the types of things that we're doing to work smarter and be able to put as much money into the education for our students as we can.
But we also know, and I'm gonna say this and people may my friends out there that are probably watching might get me, but I know in that Westwood area in Denver, there's students that need a high school that do not wanna travel the distance it takes to get to one of those high schools, and we're right down the street. So we want we need to get into that neighborhood as well. And those are my people. That's where I went to school. So I appreciate that, and thank you for the, detailed response, and the context.
That's very helpful. Thank you. You're welcome. I just wanna say thank you for the work that you do. I was my question was gonna be, can you talk about your students and and their families? So I really appreciate that. It's it's really made me think my my mother was a a public school math teacher, and in her career, she eventually moved to a rehab facility to teach and then ended in a youth correctional facility. And she talks about, that ex well, she talked about that experience as, like, the most effective that she ever was. She she she would say, I'm teaching them math, but I can also teach them
French, because she she you know, they were just kind of her favorite. So, I'm just so grateful for the work that you are doing. I think if you look at our scores across in our entire district, they're not gonna be that different for the similar types of of population. So I just really appreciate your creativity in the way that you're you're thinking about this and that you are running this school. I am I'm very hopeful that, you get the support that you need and that, you can continue to serve serve these families and meet their kids.
Thank you. And just Erin, you were at our graduation, and that that's why I do what I do and with along Eric, I've been in this business for thirty one years, teaching in Colorado, being a Colorado educator, half of my career in alternative ed campuses. And to hear our graduation speakers, to work with Gold Crown is where we had our graduation, to for to meet with them after our graduation, and then to say, we need to configure it a little bit differently because more people showed up than we expected. So we're gonna use the entire facility next year just to make it more comfortable
for our families because that celebration of students that probably didn't weren't going to finish anywhere else, and they are, and they're probably the first one in their family to do it, is something to celebrate and we wanna be there with them. I I just wanna add to that. How many graduates had other family members that walked with them, specifically young children who were seeing their parent graduate, and that the value of education. It just it was very impactful and powerful to witness the graduation, and the speakers
were fantastic. So, anyway, thank you. So I'm looking forward to it again this year. I want to echo my appreciation, for AEC schools. I think you do amazing work. I do have a question though when we talk about increasing enrollment helping financially. But one of the problems I see with AEC schools is that the enrollment comes in the middle of the year sometimes. I mean, it's not nearly as predictable. So how how can a middle of the year new student help financially? Our data shows that if a student comes to us second semester, usually in the
fourth quarter, then they stay with us. So they experience that. So that's where our goal is. We enroll throughout the entire year. However, we really hit that fourth quarter enrollment hard because we know that if they are with us fourth quarter, they learn what we do, what we can offer, and they feel at home, and then they stay with us until they fin either until they finish or at least until one more semester after that. And by then, we're hoping to get them done, then that competencies based diploma would help as well.
Great. Thank you very much. I just wanna say thank you for coming. Thank you for being here. Alright. Appreciate it. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Just looking at next steps, quickly. Today is the staff presentation of the superintendent's recommendations, and then you'll vote on at your next business meeting. We are currently engaged in contract negotiations with all of the attorneys of, the charters up for renewal. And, so we will present those finalized contracts to you in an upcoming business meeting, and then those new contracts will take effect, 07/01/2026.
And then we also just wanted to give you a preview of, some authorizing decisions you'll make in the spring. If we receive any new school applications, they will be submitted by February 1. We will conduct reviews from February to April, and then the board will vote in May, and then we'll begin contract negotiations. And then any schools that are approved will begin their planning year zero in August. And any school that submits an application February 2026 will open August 2027. And that's all we have for you today. Great.
Thank you. Board members, any questions? Really quick yeah. I do have a question. Is there a point at which we will get an update on Doral? Because I know we were anticipating some documents from them on the October 31, And so I'm just wondering really quick if we know where we are on that. Yeah. Thank you for asking, director Reed. We did provide an update. There was a letter delivered to Doral regarding, their financial conditions recently. And so that that up that was in a board update recently, a weekly board
update. And we can repeat that this week so that you all can see kind of the latest on where we are with with Dorel. And if there are specific questions you have related to Dorel, please send those to miss Harper, and we'll get those to doctor Adecco, and then she can include that in addition to what we've already provided the board. I think it was, like, a week or two ago. Yeah. We got that. That's what I was talking about. It it had an October 31 deadline in that, and so we're past that. So I'm just an update on that would be great.
Yeah. Yep. So we'll, we'll get the latest, when it's ready. Thank you for, reminding us. Great. Thanks. Okay. We'll revisit this next week. Thank you. Next this evening, superintendent Dolan will provide a preview of the items anticipated to appear on the consent agenda at next week's board meeting. Superintendent Dorland? Yes. Thank you. I accidentally hit close on my, board docs. So here we go. And I lost my page. Monthly consent agenda preview.
I think it's fairly straightforward for what the board will see on the consent agenda next week. There'll be the normal things around employment, administrative appointments and resignations, terminations, a supplemental funds notification for the month of November, the approval of board minutes, for the board meetings that you see listed there and the dates. There will be the acceptance of monitoring report 1.2, which the board studied towards the end there of October. And then the board review and approval of policy KB, which is family school community
partnership updates. There will be and I think this one is actually off. The acceptance of the twenty twenty four annual superintendent evaluation, director Parker, I believe you're gonna have as a separate agenda item, not as part of consent. And then you'll see the contract or the charter school renewals, Adenbrooke, Compass and the New America School. We'll be sure to update you on, the conversations that we have around the conditions for New America School and where that lands prior to that, prior to Thursday when you're considering the contract renewal.
There will also be some contract approvals, for one for, Imagine Learning Illustrative Mathematics, which, as you know, is our primary resource for mathematics K-twelve. And that that does it for the November consent. Any comments or questions on that, board members? Oh, you really catch up on the time with that one. Okay. Then our final item on the agenda is board dialogue on current topics. This evening, board members expressed interest in discussing three things. One was school security and SROs second is team enough and the third is team
or excuse me, speed of trust. So we have thirty minutes for this conversation. And as a reminder to the Board, this open dialogue time is for Board members to communicate openly among ourselves regarding the above topics. This time is not intended for Q and As with district staff. If we have questions that require district follow-up, Ms. Harper will take note of our questions and will follow-up with an answer in the weekly update. So board members, the time is now ours. Would anyone like to start? I can start. Two of those items from mine, and I think we can, knock them out pretty
fast. I just wanted to to lift up. I know there was I know we've met with various student groups over time, and, doctor Varda and I had the opportunity to hear from team enough, relatively recently. And so I I know that we're talking about scheduling, perhaps some time for them to come visit with us. Team enough, just to remind, is they're, a group who really works against gun violence and use mental health as supports and and really builds community in that way. They did organize some of the walkouts that we saw after the Evergreen shooting.
And so I I think we're working with them to get some time to come visit with us, but I just wanted to lift it up and make sure that everyone was okay with that. I think it's important as we've heard from our sustainability groups and our JSLB that student voice is really important, and they represent they have organizations at a couple different high schools. So, I know Lisa, I think, is working on scheduling. Yeah. I'm really supportive of that. No. You're I don't I think miss Harper might be able to explain more about the back and forth on trying to schedule the Team Enough group.
Can you just explain a little bit about what happened this week? I know that was something you were working on. Absolutely. So when I originally received the email from, director Applegate and director Varda asking for us to schedule an engagement with team enough, I reached out to the adviser the same day. I did not hear a response from him, so I followed up a few days later asking again if we could schedule an engagement with the board. I did let him know that I would need to hear back by Friday as we always notify our meetings on the Friday before.
He did say that they were going to be meeting Thursday of last week as a group, and he would let me know first thing after their meeting. I didn't hear back again, so I followed up again on Friday, reminding him that the board would love to engage with him, and I would be happy to coordinate a time. He then did reply at the beginning of this week and said that this study session would not have been an option for the group to organize a presentation for the board. I did present him with some other dates, and I'm still waiting to hear back. That's perfect. I think, as long I just thank you for doing all of that.
I know and all the back and forth. I just wanna I don't wanna lose it. And I wanted to make sure since we kind of acted as two of us that the rest of the board was supportive. So, and then anything else on that? Can I go? I'll go on. Okay. This is a little silly, so bear with me, guys. But at work right now, we are doing the speed of trust. And it was it's really, it's pretty eye opening, right, how important that is. And, so I just I wanted to share that.
I thought it was really important to where we are. And they they opened by saying that, like, we can move faster when we trust each other, which is kind of obvious. But he also starts by saying, you know, extending that trust is one of the first things that everyone thinks you earn trust, but you also have to extend it. And so I just, don't know how or when or if, but it was really impactful to me. And I don't know if that's something that, maybe we think about down the road for us as a board. But there were some really powerful things that came out of it.
And I have the book if anyone would like to borrow the book. So easy peasy. I'd be interested in borrowing the book. Did you do that all backwards and they have to catch you? Thank god, no. I trust, but maybe not with my bodily health. Okay. Any yeah. Doctor Kenworthy. I wanna give us an opportunity to talk. This I'm this is not school security and SROs, but I wanna lift up because we have the time. How meaningful the, recent meeting in Evergreen that was facilitated by the PTSA, was for
our community. And I just I wanna thank the PTSA and the Evergreen community for showing up to that conversation and also for the district for engaging. That felt like an authentic dialogue between the district, board members and the community. And, I think it modeled something that our communities across GEFCO have been desiring, when they show up for community engagement. And I just really am grateful for the PTSA, providing that model and that facilitation,
because I I think that event was excellent. And if anybody else was there, I wanna say anything. Go ahead. I do agree it was really a good, successful meeting in many ways. I think the moderator was excellent. She had questions well on hand, and there were was the right representation on the on the panel there to answer the questions. So I was happy about that one. Yeah. I think the question is is how do we how do we take that and spread it out into the community? And what does that look like?
I mean, I know a lot of us have tried to do town halls, but with budget stuff and with SAC meetings and and things like that, my town hall has been pushed. So I wonder, I'm curious as to how we could take that and expand and utilize I mean, the moderator, I believe, is from the Jeffco PTA organization. Right? And I think that's a great organization to utilize maybe in that space, because they do a lot of really good work in the community. And so, I'm excited to explore that. I'll also say that, because I put down the school security and SROs here, that
director Reed's ending comments, were so helpful. As I was meeting with some of my other schools, especially the ones up in the Conifer Evergreen area, It sort of melds in with the talk about the PTAs, the ones who want to do something for their schools. But I heard from several principals that director Reed's mention of, well, what seems like absolutely the right thing to do for some families could be absolutely the wrong thing
for other families. And so the principals were thinking they appreciated that, insight. And I also wanted to say about the SROs. The superintendent and I had the opportunity to meet with, the sheriff, and the there's a lot of good news there. I mean, they are very committed to, training SROs and finding the right SROs as we all agreed. Not every police officer is, inclined to want to be an SRO or is equipped
to do it. So anyway, we and we heard some good news that they are training some new ones and and hope to have more next year. But I just think for the future, I'm looking forward to how we're gonna use r one with the SROs because even when we pay for half of the SROs, they do belong to the sheriff. And, the assignment may be to a school, but as we know, they may not they will not be there twenty four seven or even during the whole school day. So, just figuring out how we can use our own r one resources to, be
more, assigned or or have more time in the school than the SROs may have. Can I add to that really quick? I also am really curious because I I totally agree. Totally, totally agree. It's really cool to see R1 in our schools and the relationships that they build, campus supervisors too. I'm really curious as to the pipeline that we could create. We talk about career pipelines all the time in my industry, and I think there is a career pipeline from r one to s r o and relationships.
You know, I don't know the numbers, but I'm guessing a lot of really good people apply to police academies and police, you know, municipal law enforcement agencies when they might only have a few spots. Well, if there's a really great person that was, like, next in line, do we get them in you know, how do we build that pipeline so that because I know, mister Pearson was here, it might have been a year ago now, talking about how there's vacancies and we're trying to fill r one. And so I'm I'm really curious to be creative about how we create the pipeline
of the right people into our one that can maybe lead to SROs and and create kind of that, ecosystem, if you will. I want to lift up to that. During the forum in Evergreen, I appreciated superintendent Dolan's comments about, leaning into some of the work to help manage expectations and help our larger community understand the different layers of security that, that our one provides, that our SRO SROs provide. I think, yeah, I I just really appreciated the comments and recognizing that that is
something that we need to lean into, and and provides a little bit more clarity on, for families and for the general community, just because I think it's led to some misinformation and misunderstanding. And so I thought that was a wonderful response, and, you know, I'm excited to see our community start to understand a little bit more about what's provided and where those resources come from. And, Michelle and I went to the charters, to talk about budget and, of course,
security came up and SROs. And, this, the principal from, Compass Montessori, one of the ones that was here tonight. This has just stuck with me ever since she said it. She was talking about how she said the the the most aligned that the district and the charters have ever been and traditionally never faltered from was security. And she said that was so comforting, to the charters. So I think it's why it felt alarming when when it felt like that was getting disrupted.
And so but I just loved her talking about this, like, very, like, harmonization between the district and the charters. We don't get to hear that as as much. And, it was just there was just a moment where I was like, oh, it's just amazing to hear that that those words and and her feeling. And so so they long for that. They've longed to feel that again, because it has felt like the best part of the of the relationship for some of them. So director Reed, did you wanna say anything in this session?
No. I I think those are all great topics, and I appreciated the updates on them and and the other folks' thoughts on them. Great. Then I would just like to add, or ask the board, throwing out the idea. We have a, security update study session scheduled for November 21, I think. And and for several reasons, we've been considering moving it. It is around the holiday time, and, also, I think it might be something that
the new board is very much interested in and they would wanna be able to ask questions on it. So that I'm asking in the sense of the board, would you be in favor of moving it to a later month? I I would. I also think that a a topic that important there's a lot of parents that work and having it in a virtual session and during the day. I they could certainly watch it later, but, I just would like to be able to offer it at a time that more people could attend. That's something that's very important to me. And I know I believe director Kenworthy mentioned there is a there's a SAC meeting
and some other things going on in Evergreen that that's, supporting that. So I would personally be in favor of moving it. Okay. We've got four nodding heads here, and I can't see. Director Reid? I certainly think that's reasonable. I think that's reasonable. I think that the new board should be very much a part of that. Okay. Great. Then I would just like to finish this idea on security, and and it seems to me it's pretty obvious that while we're in such a big cutting mode, and yet we want to grow security in many ways, we, again, are gonna have to
find more revenue to be able to do what we wanna do to keep our kids safe. Okay. Are there any other comments? Anyone want to finish up? Nope. Alright. That brings us to the end of today's agenda. Thank you to the presenters who participated in the study session. Our next meeting is a virtual lunch and learn on Friday, 11/07/2025. With that, we stand adjourned. Good night.