Well, good evening, and thank you for joining the Board of Education. Please go ahead and mute your cell phones as we begin this meeting. Today is Tuesday, November 18, and this meeting is now called to order at 05:37PM. For those attending this meeting in person, live captions are available on the TV in the boardroom and in the lobby. To access the live captions in a language other than English on your own device, please scan the QR code on the screen or on the table near the entrance and select the language of your choice. The live stream of this meeting is also available in English and Spanish on YouTube. For links to these live streams, please visit the Board of Education page at the
PSD website or PSD TV on demand on YouTube. And, would any board members like to make changes to the agenda? Okay. Seeing none, we'll move on to, action item, resolution in support of National American Indian Heritage Month month. Can I get a a motion, please? I move that the board approve a resolution in support of Native American Indian Heritage Month, November 2025. Can I get a second? Thank you, Andrew. And, we have a special guest for this. Right? Yes. Good evening, everybody.
Joining us this evening to speak to National American Indian Heritage Month is Clarissa Hernandez, an instructional coach at Irish Elementary. Welcome, Clarissa. Hi, everyone. Thank you for being here. My name is Clarice Hernandez, and I serve as an instructional coach at Irish Escuela Bilingue. We're so excited and proud to be here tonight in honor of Native American Heritage Month. This year is especially meaningful because PSD has received its first ever Title VI grant, which will help us better support our Native American students and their families. And tonight, we're honored to have one of our own Irish students here to share
the celebration. She is truly a light in our community, and I'll let her introduce herself. Hi. My name is Trisha May Lucero. I am in third grade at Irish Elementary Bilingual. I am happy to be here today and talk about my culture. My family is indigenous and proud. At home, we speak English, Spanish, and a little bit of Karen and the mapazon.
I love the water and the land and the animals. One tradition in my family is we pray before we eat. My favorite holiday or my favorite holiday is feast day, and we celebrate by inviting people, being with our family. A food was special in my culture. Tamales and salad. I love the music dancing from my culture, especially the butterfly dance.
It's dancing for tradition. We dance at pow wows someone from my culture. What inspires me is my family. What I love the most about my culture is dancing. I am proud to be indigenous because I speak my language. One thing in my one thing I want my friends to know about my culture is boys wear long hair. Happy indigenous mom.
Thank you so much. Great job. And, Darcea, thank you so much for sharing that with us. And, I would love to if if there's any dancing ever, you gotta let us know and see when we can come to the dancing. Oh, did you wanna do a dance right now? No pressure. Next time. Next time. Does anybody else have anything they'd like to say? Oh, are we gonna get it? Oh, I thought maybe we're getting the dance. Jill, can you call the vote? Jim Brokish. Aye. Kristen Draper. Aye. Connor Duffy. Aye. Kevin Havela? Aye. Scott Schoenbauer? Aye. Andrew Spain? Aye.
Jessica Zamora? Aye. Motion passes seven zero. Thank you so much. Next, we have a resolution in support of the anniversary of the Individuals with Disabilities Act. Can I get a motion? I move that the board approve a resolution in support of the anniversary of the Individuals with Disabilities Act. Can I get a second? Thank you. We'll go with Scott. Alright. And we have a special guest on this one too. Yes. Tonight, we look forward to hearing about a resolution in support of the anniversary of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act from Devin Bure, the parent of a Bowdder Elementary
School student. Welcome, Devin. Might be a little too tall for that one. Alright. Well, thank you for the introduction and for the invitation to speak tonight. Some of you might know me, but my name is Devin Bure and I'm the parent of a fourth grader at Bowdder Elementary. I also serve as a member on the policy review and special education advisory committees here at PSD. We moved to Fort Collins in 2020 specifically to enroll our son in this school district's early childhood program. Thanks to IDEA's mandates, an individualized education plan, or IEP, to those of us in the know, was created for him on his third birthday and he was therefore entitled
to free early intervention services in a public school setting. His IEP was generated in California, but because IDA is a federal law, we were able to seamlessly transition his care to Colorado. We were lucky enough that the integrated services program at our neighborhood school was an appropriate match for our son's academic needs. In the last five years, he has progressed significantly due to living in an environment where he can learn skills required for educational success, while building meaningful relationships with his peers, which at the end of the day is really just what matters to him.
Having an IEP in place means that there is a blueprint for his support team to work in tandem without having to sacrifice one priority over another. He participates in social groups, has access to the academic resources he needs, and is surrounded by extremely dedicated caregivers and educators. Most of these experience are experiences are given for a typical child, but they're all things that we weren't sure if he would ever have. The fact that he has all of them is a blessing we do not take for granted, and we owe that primarily to the incredible staff members who have watched
over him in and outside the classroom. This level of care has been life changing for our entire family. We live in a world that has historically made people with disabilities invisible, and certain groups have even tried to erase people like my son from history and attempted to prevent their existence. IDEA was passed with the intent of protecting children with disabilities and their families so that they might experience the world in all the ways they want to and to provide a learning environment for the these children to take up the space they need to. The message it sent to this country is that these children are important and they belong at school with their peers.
They are part of the fabric of this nation as much as anyone else. We are grateful that PSD and the state of Colorado understand that, and we are hopeful that our neighbors here will continue to value having families like ours in their community and students like my son in their classrooms. Thank you. Devon, thank you so much for sharing your story with us, and just I hope things go as well in the future as they have been for you. So it's yeah. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being in a part of our community.
We appreciate it. Anyone else? Jill, can you call the vote, please? Jim Brokesh. Hi. Kristen Draper. Aye. Connor Duffy. Aye. Kevin Havela. Aye. Scott Schoenbauer. Aye. Andrew Spain. Aye. Jessica Zamora. Aye. Motion passes seven zero. Yes. Can if we could do a picture, that would be wonderful. So with both groups. Yeah, let's do it up front here. So if we could get everybody, Darcy, Darcy could you. Thank you all for that. We will move to four point o superintendent report. So superintendent Kingston will now make remarks to the Board of of Education and to
the community. Thank you. Thank you, president Draper. Good evening, everybody. I look forward to a fantastic meeting. And I'm also excited that we have the opportunity to engage, with some very special guests this evening, as well as content experts to have a robust conversation a little bit later on everything that involves public education these days. So to take time and energy out of your day to be here in partnership with us and the partnership that you show us at the capitol and the state boards just continues to be, really nothing short of tremendous, and I just wanna say
thank you for being here. I I know we we really, really greatly appreciate that. A significant focus of our discussion tonight will be on special education and how we best support our students who have individual education plans or IEPs. So on the heels of the anniversary of IDEA, it just feels really appropriate that we're having that conversation this evening. Later this evening, we'll also, the Board of Education will hear the first reading of the twenty twenty six, twenty twenty seven school year calendar. I wanted to just give a special thank you to the calendar committee for their work, to respond to the feedback that we've heard from the community about starting the
school year later to mitigate the impact of heat in our buildings. What you will see tonight is a calendar that has been creatively adjusted to move the start date as late as possible for the year ahead. The twenty twenty six twenty twenty seven school year was originally slated to start on August 13, and tonight you will see a calendar that starts on August 19 with a transition day on August 18. And I'm hopeful that this board sees that as very responsive to the feedback that you have provided staff in the committee. We have a lot of committees that take a deep sense of pride in their
work. The calendar committee is definitely one of them. So while they did have to pause their work as we were tending to other, important areas where there's intersections of their work, again, I just want to send a very special thank you for their commitment to creating efficiencies and opportunities for teachers, students, and families alike. Each and every board meeting, we have an opportunity to highlight something that's going on really positively in the district. This board meeting will be no different. Our quick win video of this week will be a celebration of our school district's foundation and the support that it's provided our district over the last twenty five years
through their impact grant program. The foundation recently held its annual fundraiser. I wanna thank many members of the community and board who were there that night. You may not know, but the ignite, the impact evening, just that night alone, we were able to able to fundraise over $22,000, which is just incredible and shows the amazing support that our community has, not only for our foundation, but advancing the work of our district, our students, as well as our families and teachers. We're so grateful for our partnership and hope that you enjoy this highlight video. For twenty five years, the Poudre School District Foundation has ignited powerful learning opportunities for
students, for educators, and for our entire community. Born from a belief that every student deserves access to exceptional learning, the foundation fills funding gaps, supporting programs and projects that might otherwise never happen. Through inspiring community investments, we celebrate quality teachers, spark innovation, and create lifelong learning opportunities that prepare every student for success in an ever changing world. For twenty five years, we've built partnerships that demonstrate what's possible when a community stands behind its public schools.
Together, we've made a lasting impact, and the next two five years are beginning. Yeah. Huge thanks for all that's involved, the foundation. It was twenty five years ago. It was 25 members of our community, who started the foundation. And to know that its legacy is gonna continue to advance for another twenty five years plus is really great to be proud of. My closing remarks this evening are gonna be met with a bit of emotion because I do wanna publicly recognize that president Draper and Jim Brokesh, another one of our directors, this will be, your last livestream board meeting tonight.
And I'll address you individually if it's okay, with members of the community. And, Kristen, I wanna start with you. I wanna thank you so much for not only being a part of the board that chose to hire me, but to believe in this system. What I learned about you early on is in 2016, probably even earlier than that, when in the midst of many things that were happening in our country, our state, and our local community, you realize that you had an obligation to act and lead through local leadership and local government. And the legacy that you're leaving, not just as a board member, but as a
human being who brings dignity each and every time you show up in these public spaces is nothing short of tremendous. I and the team have deep respect for you, what you brought. You've left a legacy of advancing the outcomes for all of our students in an incredible way. We will continue to prioritize human rights and center ourselves with dignity and mental health and belonging as a result of your shared leadership with this board and prior boards. And I just wanna say thank you for just wearing your heart on your sleeve
and bringing so much love into all these spaces. We care for you deeply, and we're grateful for your leadership. Can we give her a round of applause, please? Jim, I wanna thank you for being you too. While I wish I had another opportunity to work with you for four more years, the four years that I have had a chance to work with you, you've approached the role of the director of board of education like a seasoned statesman. You are calm. You are measured. And you're gentle but relentless in advancing the work of our districts, but not losing sight that it's about people and relationships.
Because you are a fellow, you know, neighbor and leader of this community, I've worked in HP, I've learned so much from you, and you have left a legacy of not only improving outcomes for some students, but all students, as well as making sure that our leadership as a governance team and as a cabinet team continues to be as measured. We aspire to be as measured and as calm as you. We don't always get there, but you've made us better. Many ways, and I just can't thank you and your family for sharing your time, energy, and talent with us for the last several years. Our system is better because of both of you, and I know I'm a better
leader because of both of you too. So, again, can we celebrate Jim Brokesh? That concludes my comments for this evening. Thank you. All right- thank you. We'll go on to board topics and committee reports- this agenda item is an opportunity for board members to provide an update on committee work or to speak to board topics. Do any board members have something to report? Okay, go ahead, Jess. So fortunately or unfortunately, unfortunately, we had an opportunity this weekend to really support our, youth with the Rocky Mountain Equality Group, and we were able to raise a thousand
dollars in your name Because of the amount of work and compassion you have for our community, you have made our district better. You have made our community better, and you have made us a beacon of hope for so many. And we love you so much, and we will always forever be better because of your contribution for our kids in our community. So I we did not have the opportunity to give it to you on Sunday, but we have flowers and I have a Please, anybody else?
Go ahead, Scott. First off, I wanna thank, Christian and Jim for everything you've done, during your time here. You taught me and the other board members a lot about how how to be great board directors. So, really appreciate everything you put into into your years here. So thank you. I did wanna, you know, jump back into current events. We do have and and Brian mentioned this at the last meeting. We do have a screenagers, showing this is, to, you know, talk about cell phones
and and their use in schools and how to manage that and that type of thing. So anybody who's interested in finding ways to help your children and yourselves manage your cell phone use, there is a viewing of a great documentary tomorrow night at the Poudre High School auditorium at 06:00. So, it's about an hour long movie, and then we'll have a q and a afterwards, with, different stakeholders in in that conversation. So I really encourage everybody to come out.
Thank you. Anyone else? Go ahead. Andrew, go ahead. I just wanted to to perhaps I haven't paid enough attention with not being on the board before, but the number of schools that have activities, collecting food and gifts and everything else, the with the upcoming holiday season, I just that's awesome to see. You can't go into a grocery store without some you know, one of the schools being there saying, hey. We're we're doing something for the community. And I just think that's worth a big call out.
And to quickly tack onto that, if you would like to donate a turkey, the Tour de Turkey is happening this Thursday. So the food bank is collecting turkeys there, and we'll be distributing them to, PSD schools on Friday. So, yeah. Anyone else? Go ahead, Kevin. Before I start with my I do have some business. Before I do that, I also wanna extend my own gratitude towards you, President Draper. As a brand newbie on the board of education, I don't know if you remember this, but this is a great Kristen story. While we were in the room celebrating our our wins that night, kind of lost
in in all the emotions, Kristen pulled me aside and asked me if I would be comfortable nominating her to be president after, Rob Pedersen left. And I thought, wow. The honor. I didn't understand what it all meant. And then when that meeting came about, I was also when you're up there on the dais for the first time, you kinda lose consciousness. You don't really know exactly what's happening. I don't know if it happened to you. It definitely happened to me. So then I remember, oh, it's my turn to nominate you. So I did. And then as soon as you became president, I had personally a a breathless sigh of relief, and I was like, oh, it's gonna be okay.
So I wanna thank you for being the head and the heart for the board the last couple years in getting us through and to where we are today. I really appreciate your leadership. And, Jim, I also wanna thank you for your service and your time and how you go about examining problems. When we were in the throes of our school consolidation talks last year, Jim offered to come to my law office and brought lunch. And, you remember this? And they asked for my order, and so we shared a it was like a corporate picnic. And, we were in a conference room for hour, hour and a half just slogging
through data and numbers and the problem, and I always loved being you're such a good thought partner is what I I I you command respect, but you also have such a grace about listening to people kind of articulate their own thinking. And so that's going to be sorely missed and, will never be replaced. But I will I will miss examining our big problems together, and I may give you a cold call in the middle of the year and ask for insights. So I wanna thank you both for your for your leadership. As far as the topic, this is kind of an ongoing topic and something we discussed is to get into the cadence of during this segment of our agenda, talking
about some big issues, that seem like sometimes when they appear on our agenda, they're in isolation, and then we don't give them as much, bandwidth. So this one is a big one, and I just wanna kind of talk through my own thinking very briefly about, our instructional minutes conversations that we've been having. And to frame this this little update, what I'd like to say is that I'm I'm thinking the theme here is voices versus perspectives. And so I think as we broach this conversation with, what do we do with the instructional minutes? Are we gonna augment our day? Or, you know, how are we gonna address that?
We're now getting a lot of voices, which I appreciate, into our discussion as we ought. It's a huge decision to make. It has a ripple effect that goes to bell schedules. It will go to lengthening the day. It will make our system potentially more aligned or not. It'll make, give some alleviation for our bell schedules and our bus drivers and transportation. It'll have ripple ripple effect. So it's a tremendous, opportunity to examine a a pretty sizable problem and try to make some good decisions. So on that, no decision has been made, just so we're all clear, because I think we're getting a lot of, input from our community about where things stand.
Nothing is being decided yet. We're in the process now of getting input. And so what I'd what I'd like to encourage us and challenge us is that even those that are examining the problem in our community is to maybe not rush to judgment on where they think they stand right now because facts change and perspectives change. And so, perspectives change. And so, too, when your facts and perspectives change, that ought to be how your decisions sometimes change. I don't I speak for myself. We don't do this decision in isolation. In our in our city, county, and and PSD liaison meeting, I got a really good nugget.
I'm not gonna take credit for it. I'm not gonna reveal my source either. It's that a lot of times, we examine some of these problems with a middle class or upper middle class lens. And so it's it's sometimes easy to examine a problem, presuming everyone's watching the news, everyone's dialed into these board meetings, and everyone's gonna watch it on YouTube, all 10 people. That's not the case. And so I think as we're considering this as a board, we need to really push ourselves to examine all perspectives and what, you know, what are the perspectives of folks that are gonna be beneficiaries or not based on these decisions that may not
be here to advocate for themselves in the boardroom and what their lives are really like. And so what lengthening the day will actually mean to some of our families and some of our students that may get lost in the shuffle, I know I'll be committed to that. And then the last thing I'll say is that there is a process for additional engagement from our community. Come speak at community comments about your perspectives on it. There's multitudes of perspectives on lengthening instructional minutes and what that could mean, and we really ought to hear from as many voices as possible so we can make an informed decision. Email us, show up to our board of engagement, and and listening sessions, go to
the superintendent engagement sessions, talk to your principals, talk to your ARs if you're in, one of our association groups, and keep the conversation alive. So as long as we're talking and we're not talking at each other, I think we're gonna make significant progress in the the months and weeks to come. Thank you. Go ahead, Connor. Very quickly, I have a few things to say. But first, PSD Foundation, I was at their board meeting today. The work continues. Ignite the Impact was a great event. And they're going forward and continuing to help the community members and kids in our
schools who are struggling with food insecurity. They approved, today to, work with David Autunry to make sure that, you know, our our kids, are taken care of. It's really important work and it's really encouraging. On a personal note, a lot of people in here, probably don't think it, because Jim does not talk much during meetings. However, when we have executive sessions and when we are discussing very important issues, he is by far the voice of reason. And thank you very much for that, Jim.
I really appreciate it because there's been times that, you have made me switch my position, so convincingly and diplomatically. It's very good. You will be sorely missed. And for fair jay Draper, what can I say? I think the one thing that impresses me the most is how much you show up every day and fight for the causes that you believe in. It's easy to fold, and you never do. So thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate that. Anyone else? Jim? I guess I should go ahead.
So I've got a set of thank yous to to lay out also. First, I wanna say thanks to my wife, Marsha, for putting up with me being away a lot and and also for all of those Earth to Jim moments when I'm sort of thinking about district problems instead of being present with her. So I wanna start with thanks there. Second is, to my fellow board members and especially to Kristen, our fearless leader. Thank you for everything you've done over the last four years since I've been here
and really to all the board members. It's just been a joy to serve with each of you and, you're all my friends even though we don't agree with everything, which is exactly how a board should be. So I really value that about, and how we work on hard problems. But working on hard problems with smart people, there's a real joy in that. So, thank you for the last four years, two years, whatever it's been for each of you. I wanna say thanks to Brian. We actually came in about the same time, and you beat me by a few
months. But, there's been just a dramatic change, I think, in the district since you've been here, and I attribute that to your leadership. You know, when when the boss is so dedicated and works so hard and doesn't sleep and is just there every moment, It's just, I think it sets a tone for the district, for the administration, all of that. And so, thank you for all your contributions you've had. Really appreciate it. On to cabinet.
Thank you, cabinet. I've had a chance to work closely with each of you. And, you know, some sometimes people talk about, oh, we should cut central office. We should get rid of more cabinet. We should cut their salaries. You earn every penny, and it's just been a joy working with each one of you. So thank you. Onto principals, teachers, classified staff. You know, these folks work day in and day out in support of our kids, and, you know, they're they're also part of the heroes of of our district.
So thanks also for everything that you do. That's it. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jim. I've been a little something as well, and I'm gonna try and keep it short. One, because there are just too many people to say thank you to and goodbye to. We don't wanna be here all night. And two, because I'm just gonna try not to cry. But I think of all those with whom I've worked with in PSD, whether it's staff or teachers, directors, administrators, cabinet members, board members. And we often question ourselves, right? Did I or am I making a difference for our students?
And I know when I questioned that, did I do enough for in my eight years, I had a wise friend to give me some homework, that helped me answer this question. So as my final act of president, I'm gonna give you all one last homework assignment, and that is to write down what you have accomplished in PSD, whether you've been here for two weeks or twenty years. Some things may be small, some things may be really complicated, and others may be just beginning. And then when you get stuck, ask your coworkers, ask your family, ask your friends,
and please ask me because I'm happy to tell you about all the important impact, the important things and the impact that you've had on our students, on what you've done and what you are continuing to do. Y'all have huge hearts. You move mountains for the betterment of our students, and you wanna make sure that our students are more than okay, that they feel welcome, that they belong, and that they are thriving. And person on a personal note, on academics and socially, this is what drives PSD,
and I could not be prouder of the work you are all accomplishing. So I will miss working alongside of you all, and I know that the students are in extremely capable and caring hands. So thank you. Okay. Moving on to consent agenda, would any board members like to pull anything from consent? Okay. Seeing none, can I get a motion? I can do it on the fly. I move that the board approve and adopt the items on the consent agenda. Can I get a second? Thank you, Jess. And then can we call the vote? Jim Brokish. Aye. Kristen Draper. Aye. Connor Duffy. Aye. Kevin Havelda. Aye.
Scott Schoenbauer. Aye. Andrew Spain. Aye. Jessica Zamora. Aye. Motion passes seven zero. Thank you. Okay. Moving on to informational reports and discussion items. 07/2627 school year calendar, our first reading. And we have some special guests. Yeah. We sure do. So tonight, we look forward to the first reading of the twenty twenty six twenty twenty seven school year calendar. Joining us this evening for a brief presentation is our Poudre School District calendar committee co chairs, Cheryl Day and Brian Kiel.
Cheryl and Brian, welcome both. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being here. We're gonna go through a presentation. There'll be time at the end there for questions. So we can go to the next slide here, please. Oh, there's a Oh, I'm getting a while. Thanks. There we go. Alright. So the calendar committee. Our purpose is to develop, the year long school calendar, as a group with vested partners, and we have to adhere to the Colorado Department of Education, school funding and instructional hours per day laws as well as the Poudre School District employee agreement, specifically
ICICA. Some of those parameters, are a 160 minimum student days, and one thousand eighty total hours in the school year, in order to be in compliance. Along with that, we also, are required to have three hundred and sixty hours in the first semester. Okay? And we also have to adhere to the district, policy, ICICA, and the timeline for the approval, by you all. In addition, there are some aspects to the employee agreement that, influence the designation of
days that are non student contact days. And so you can see on the screen, the various days that are non student contact and the allocation of those. One thing that you'll notice is that elementary has three additional days when compared to secondary. And so when we create the calendar, there are three days where elementary students are not in session and secondary, students are. And so in creating the calendar, that's just one of the factors that we have
to take into account. And I believe at the end, if there's questions about what the designation of any of these days are, we can answer that. I think people are fairly familiar, with what those are. In addition to those parameters, some other things that our committee talked about and took into account, as far as considerations and context for this year, early childhood also has minimum funding requirements. And so early childhood is actually required to have more hours per year than elementary,
and early childhood programs are housed in our elementaries. So when we're considering the elementary schedule, we do have to make sure that we go enough beyond the elementary minimum to meet early childhood. When we look at the high school or the secondary parameters, as long as we're in alignment with those, that will meet early childhood. In terms of the calendar committee where we're primarily looking at days, not minutes, it has less of an impact on early childhood. But again, there are some parameters there with their funding where when they have more
minutes with students, they potentially can qualify for additional funding. So we just that's a piece of the puzzle that we're looking at. As, superintendent Kingsley mentioned, our committee was on a pause from June until October, and that was because of the information we received from CDE, in regards to instructional minutes. And there were some things that needed to be discussed and thought about in terms of instructional minutes, that felt like a separate piece from the calendar.
For our work, we did have to go with the assumption that there would not be a change to instructional minutes since that is something that has not yet been decided. So when we were calculating minutes and hours, it's based on current minutes and hours within the school day. In October, the board asked us to reconvene in response to the heat release days and some of the impacts of those. And so asking, could we develop a calendar that without upsetting all of the systems that are in place in terms of having consistency between elementary and secondary, meeting the
concurrent enrollment requirements, we were asked what we could do in terms of moving our start date a little bit later. And we were able to do that, although you're not going to see major changes in the format of the calendar for the coming year. With those changes, we also did not do a survey, which typically the calendar committee does a biannual survey. And so the most recent information we have from our vested partners is 2023. We had some new members, this year, and I'm not gonna read them all, but
this was our group. We were really thankful to have everybody, and the opinions and the thoughts and ideas, that were presented in order to make the calendar work for all school levels. We, as a calendar committee, created three separate calendars. So as you can see, we played with states, both for staff and for students. But the further we pushed the start date back, the more we had to take
away from some of our, breaks. Right? So Thanksgiving break has become, very, you know, appreciated that it's five days, instead of three. So the committee felt as if that was a big driver, for the calendar. So we landed on version one, which we'll show you here in a second. And we think it it it's a good proposal, and it meets all the requirements, that both you asked us to look at, and the state require.
As Brian said, the calendar committee spent some time looking at three different possible versions, and we did land on version one. And, a little bit later in the presentation, we'll talk about what some of the factors that influenced that decision were. But first, we wanted to show you what version one of the calendar actually looks like and just call out some key dates with it. So under this proposed and recommended calendar, staff will start back on August 10. There is a transition day on August 18, and so for, rising sixth and ninth
graders, they would be doing their transition days. Some elementaries use that for some kindergarten work. Otherwise, it is a work day for staff. Students would not all start until August 19, which again is, just less way less than a week later than what it would have been had we not made some adjustments. So we were able to gain about six days that way. We were able to maintain a five day fall break and two week winter break with this proposed calendar. The first semester ends right before winter break on December 18, and the last day
of school is May 28. And when we talked to cabinet, cabinet was so impressed that we were able to end the school year before, Memorial Day because that's been a strong desire, and it actually has absolutely nothing to do with what we did because if you look, there are five weeks in May, and so it just happens to be where Memorial Day falls. So that is nice, but it is an incidental bonus to the calendar rather than something that we're able to solve. Take credit. I mean, then I'm gonna set the bar that you will expect that every year.
Right? So some of the factors, that we felt needed to be considered was to keep, like I said, that five day fall break, You know, to balance a a later start with concurrent enrollment, we, as a a high school, need to follow, Front Range's, schedule and expectations as well as Aims, Community College, and some of the schools have, CU and CSU, classes that they offer. So we have to meet all of the collegiate requirements if they are being taught
within the high school level. So the other one is we have to meet that, three hundred and sixty hours in that first semester. And we if we start on the nineteenth, and the semester gets over on the eighteenth, we cannot lose any additional days. We are right at that three hundred and sixty, mark. The committee felt that clustering non student contact days, is a way to ease childcare. And we understand that this is just one perspective. We know and understand that it's not the same for all families.
So this can be looked at. And then some exchange days for elementary and secondary, need to be on the same day so that classified staff, have the ability to attend professional development. That's a very important aspect of the calendar. Okay. So that was, some of the rationale for selecting the calendar, and then we wanted to share the rationale for the placement of the non student contact days. As Brian mentioned, we're we were limited in how many non student contact days we
could fit into the first semester and still meet that three sixty hour requirement. And so once we had set those dates, the only place you could take from if you were going to try to add more non student contact days would be that fall break. And, again, based on the input from the community, we did not wanna take from that fall break. So a lot of the building workdays are front loaded in August. Part of the adjustment is because of the heat.
The heat's less impactful when you don't have hundreds of students in the building. Swamp coolers and things that we have, it's a little easier to run those when we're not worried about the noise that they create without having students in the building. It's also really important that staff have time to collaborate and plan for the year. And so having multiple days upfront, I know from the admin perspective, we often have lots of things that we wanna share with staff and collaborate on, and so it is helpful to have those days. We have some new curriculum that are being adopted.
And so it's important to have those professional learning days early in the year. And so we have people starting the year in their building and then immediately having our professional development days so that there is also time to collaborate and work on that new learning after those occur. And we did pair those, as much as possible. Other than those three excess elementary days, we always try to align an an elementary and a secondary day because we are aware that many of our secondary students are caring for younger siblings.
And so not having different days off helps with secondary students not having to miss to care for siblings. So when elementary is in professional learning, secondary is on a building work day, and then that reverses. Elementary, one of the bonus work days that were added for work relief, we placed in late September as prep time for October conferences. The October conferences and exchange days are placed to be the middle of the semester as well as breaking up first and second quarter for secondary.
And then, again, those two week fall and winter breaks were continually coming back to because they were a high priority based on the latest survey data we had. For second semester, we'll start off, back with a workday. This allows teachers, an opportunity to have some prep time for the beginning of second semester. We do have additional, district professional development days in February. We wanted to have them early enough, so that, again, teachers and staff have, the
ability to, implement and collaborate on the the professional development that we get. We have president's day off because the community is accustomed, to having that, weekend. Again, days are clustered, and we pair the building workdays, for that consistency, so that flip flop that Cheryl was just talking about. We have an exchange day in April, and we spaced that out because the beginning
of the year in January, there were lots of four day weeks, and we didn't wanna continue that. That is difficult for all levels, to have short weeks over and over again. And then at the end of the year in May, there's another elementary work day, and this is to allow our elementary teachers, to create lists, prep report cards, and get the the end of the year, things done. Hey. So, timeline and next steps.
Obviously tonight is the first board reading and presentation of the calendar. I know that in December the board will be, taking another look and that date, that final date is to be determined. And at that point the calendar will be approved. Then it moves to communications. Communications puts together the adopted calendar and communicates that out on the website. And then we have lots of different staff specific calendars, people with different lengths of contracts. And so throughout the spring, HR works on developing those specific calendars for each group.
Any questions? Thank you so much. Looks like we do have a couple of questions. Go ahead, Kevin. I just wanted to say this is a highly constrained problem and you really delivered beautifully. Thank you. Thank you, Angela. Well said. Okay, Kevin. My question was on the discussion around early childhood. Mhmm. So I I think I heard you right when you said that, there are benefits to lengthening to increase the length of day, but not to the length of the calendar year. Did I get that right? Let me see how I wanna say. Because we could only address the number of days, I would say we were more
constrained in what we could do in terms of early childhood minutes. Yeah. That's correct. Did I answer that? And I Well, the answer part of the other part was I thought you mentioned something I thought you mentioned something about how they receive funding. Could you say more about that? Sure. How what late thing of the day has with impact on that? Mhmm. So early childhood with universal pre k receives reimbursement through the Larimer County Child Care Coalition. And they receive different amounts of reimbursement when they can offer a ten hour program
versus a fifteen hour program, this is per week, versus a thirty hour program. So half day can be ten hours or half day can be fifteen hours. Currently we offer a ten hour program because of the amount of time that's available within the day and within the number of days within the year. The funding difference on that is roughly $1,200 per pupil. And we're really not looking at full day just because there's not, I think, the
capacity in terms of classrooms currently for that. Sure. Other questions? Go ahead, Andrew. Do you have any items based on what you've created that you're concerned about that would be a risk. I look at the three sixty hours in the first semester and you mentioned we can't lose a day. If we have a snow day, does that fit that or is that just one of those that's the kind of thing I just wanna make sure if there's anything that we need to be aware of that you're concerned about. I don't think so. You know, second semester is different.
Second semester is longer. We have more wiggle rooms there, which is really where we would lose more of those days. If we do lose days at the end of first semester, we should be, still fit within the parameter. Yeah. And and there is a built in buffer. So the minimum number of hours, designated by CDE includes a buffer for things like heat release or snow days. The three sixty hours is actually separate.
It has to do with the funding that's received, and that is, Bud, jump in please here from IT's perspective if I'm not saying this quite right. But the hour calculation that IT does is based on the scheduled calendar. And so even, like, with that buffer for heat release days with what CDE, requires with a built in buffer, I believe we would still be okay on the three sixty hours for the funding, but that's IT specialty.
Am I Is that Okay. Thumbs up. Seeing no date. Other questions? Just one more. Is there anything you need from us to act on over the next few months that will make your job easier next year? And you can bring that to us later. You don't have to have the answer now. Okay. Yeah. I would say we had developed some different calendar scenarios last year. And with the pause on the calendar committee to address instructional minutes, we weren't able to pursue some of those options that were some out of the box, proposals that
the committee had come up with. And so I think getting back to looking at those with enough time, I feel like there's been a little bit of a pattern the last couple years where we have an idea and because of factors that are not necessarily within any of our control, things get delayed, and then we have to tell the community, well, we were thinking about doing this, but time wise, it couldn't happen. So I think trying to work on things in the spring so we have more of a buffer for things that could arise would be helpful to us to be
able to bring some of those more novel ideas forward. Great. Head, Scott. I just had a quick question. Cheryl, you're part of, you're a principal at one of the schools. Brian is as well. Oh, I'm sorry. Brian. System. System. System. That's right. I just wanted to know, like, with the, kind of consolidating the staff days, do you think that's still gonna be effective, versus having, like, a staff day mid I'm assuming you still will have some days in the middle of the semester, but grouping
them all at the beginning of the year, is that gonna affect how things go? Do you is it less effective for staff, or do you are you pretty confident it's gonna still be, effective? I feel like it will still be effective because because so much of what happens is kind of front loaded at the beginning of the year, and we do have here and there throughout. We also have other opportunities for collaboration outside of the building workdays. So our staff meetings, our impact teams and PLC teams are other opportunities to collaborate
and work that are outside of the designated days. Other questions? Alright. Thank you so much. This was fantastic. Really great work. Really appreciate it. Okay. Thank you all. And now we will go to seven point two discussion with legislators. And Brian would like to do some introductions. Yeah. So this evening we look forward to engaging in really important discussion with not only, elected leaders from across the state and locally, but also with some subject matter experts specific to things that are intersecting with public education, in Colorado. So I just wanna start off one by just saying welcome.
Knowing that there are some familiar faces and some new faces, I wondered if it would be okay as a point of privilege, President Draper, for us to go around to let everybody know who's at the table. And then maybe we can start off by doing some framing, specific around special education in our integrated services division where there are some things that are going really well. But as we get ready to continue to move forward and closer into this, legislative season, we're also very clear as staff members understanding the the deficit and the financial challenges that we're under. So the spirit in which we want to collaborate with you today is more around
looking for areas where we want to protect our most marginalized, which are values that we know that we all collectively share, while also trying to continue to figure out ways to collaborate with you and understand what you are hearing and thinking as we get closer to the season. So hopefully that, feels like the right space for our heads and hearts to be in this evening. Would it be okay with you, President Draper, if you started with the introductions and we kinda just went around? Absolutely. So welcome, everyone. Really Really appreciate the time you are are taking here and apologies for the later start. But just thank you so much for being here.
I'm Kristen Draper, sheher pronouns and, president of the board until further notice at this point. So, moving on. Jessica Zamora, vice president, sheher pronouns. I'm Scott Schonbauer. I'm, one of the directors. Andrew Spain. I guess I'm currently the newest director, but that will be shortly changing. Connor Duffy, Board of Education. Hi. I'm Lisa Hernandez. I'm a autism coach in the district. My name's doctor Jody Rommel. I'm the director of integrated services. So happy you're here today. Andy Bay Snicker, House District 53.
That's West And North Fort Collins. State Senator Kathy Kipp, most of Fort Collins. Hi. James excuse me. James Thompson, Senator Michael Bennetts, regional director for Northern And Northeastern Colorado. I cover, 15 counties out of the Fort Collins office, and and all, four major school districts are Poudre, Saint Vrain, Boulder Valley. Well, I guess, Thompson. Many school districts. But this is the only one that invites us to come and and speak directly to you. So thank you. I'm Cathy Gephart.
I'm on the State Board of Education for CD 2. And for those of you who don't know where that is, think Joe Neguse's district. And I'm serving in my first year on the state board of education. Happy to be here. Thank you. I'm Laurie Garcia Sanders, state representative for House District 65, which is Larimer and Weld Counties and a former elementary principal. So I'm really glad about the heat day delay calendar. Thank you. K. Let's see if that works. There we go. Hi. Yara Zokai, a representative for House District 52, which is South And East Fort Collins. Anne Barkas, I'm the contract lobbyist for Poudre School District.
Kevin DeVilda on the board of education. Jim Brokis, board of education. And I'm Brian Kingsley. I'm the proud superintendent for PST. Again, welcome to all of you. President Drake Brown, I don't know if this would be okay with you and our, distinguished guest, but I'd love to turn it over to doctor Jody Rommel to kinda just set the tone for some of our conversations, specifically special education. We know that we'll veer off into other things that are important to us as a governance team. But doctor Rommel, in in partnership with, autism coaches like Lisa Hernandez, are doing, an incredible amount of work that is making us the destination districts in many instances for
families who have students with special needs. But we also know that we have areas where we're still continuing to grow and need improvements. And it's going to take our collective efforts, both from a policy lens as well as a resource lens, to think outside of the box to make sure that we can continue to grow in that area. So, Doctor. Rama, I'd love to turn it over to you, if that's okay. Thanks, Brian. So I'm very fortunate to lead the special ed department in PSD. This is definitely a district that makes improving outcomes for students on IUPs a top priority. So I just want to thank you for being here tonight, and I'm looking forward
to the collaboration. It's perfect timing as we have the anniversary of IDEA. Across our district we've been, celebrating neurodiversity and inclusion this week through messages and different lessons, specific spirit days, even in our parent newsletter educating parents on their rights under IDEA and what that means for them and their students. I'd like to introduce my colleague Lisa Hernandez. She's been she's grown up here in PSD. She's only I said, how long have you been here? She said, I've only been here. So she's been here her whole career, in many capacities, but the majority of it
has been as an autism coach. And I don't know if you all know this, but it's a Flagstaff program. People move here from all over the country to join our our autism program like our speaker tonight, spoke of. And so I just wanted, Lisa to be able she's boots on the ground. I thought it'd be great for her to share a little bit about our program with you all tonight. So, yes, this is my twenty eighth year in Pewter School District and spent my entire career, here. I don't check my pair on a weekly basis at this point at all.
So, I have been in autism programming all twenty eight years. I started my career as a speech language pathologist, and, autism has been one of those things that, as I went through grad school, just hooked me in. And I I really wanted to be able to support the families that I met and, the students that I met as well. And so in 2000 I always have to think back. 2010, I, became a board certified behavior analyst, and I was asked at that time
to become the district autism coach. Since 2020, we have more than doubled in the size of our autism program. So we are providing services, specialized services, to well over, 200 students in our center based autism program. In the last five years, we have placed over 25 students each into kindergarten each year. So in five years times 25, you can see where some of that growth is coming. I think one of the things about the autism program is that, we have really
dedicated staff who've tried really hard to, look at evidence based practices, across the board. And and part of that is we were able to come up with, what we call core values. I think any good organization, and we are a subset of an organization, has core values that they adhere to and they they lean into in hopes of creating, a system of fidelity, and integrity. As you grow larger, that becomes a harder thing to do. Right? And so it was really important for us to establish those core values.
And so I'm just gonna kinda read, part of those, for you so that you you can understand a little bit about who we are. We've established these core values and key components for our autism center based programs to maximize growth and create fidelity across programs within the context of an educational setting and multidisciplinary team. We believe in robust language instruction, strong academic curriculum with a foundational understanding that all students are capable of learning, and we should meet them where they are. We use research based behavioral and emotional supports, relevant social skills instruction, programming, but I
certainly don't do it by myself. There are other autism coaches. There are registered behavior technicians that support us, not even mentioning all of the teachers and paraprofessionals that we have as well as speech language pathologists and occupational therapists. We serve some of the most, as you mentioned, marginalized individuals with some of the highest needs, and those needs are ever expanding. I, every year, think I've seen it all until I haven't, and then I have to figure it out again.
And so it does take and require a great deal of resources in order to be able to provide high quality educational services and supports, for the students that are within our center based autism program. Jody asked me to describe a day in the life of a student, and I've been pondering that question for a couple of weeks now because there's no such thing. Because we provide services to kids all across the spectrum, and we meet them where they are every single day. And some days that means they need a lot of regulation support, and some days that means they're clicking along.
So we're tracking as much academic instruction and language instruction as we possibly can. But what I would say is every day, my hope would be, as somebody who's lived and breathed this for a lot of years, is that we are providing really high quality education and helping them access whatever they're able to access at that particular point in their day. So I don't know if that answers a day in the life, but that's that's the best they could come up with. Thanks, Lisa. Are there any questions about our center based autism program? Okay.
Well, I wanted to, take this opportunity to share kind of what's top of my mind as far as some, somewhat budget neutral, asks. Workforce readiness and retention and recruitment is top of the mind. As we know, educator workforce issues remain across The US, but especially in special education. So continuation of educator funding opportunities including the educator recruitment and retention program would help address that current, and future need, when it comes to educator shortages.
So that funding is most effective because the vast majority of those funds go directly to the teachers who are candidates in those licensure programs. This has been instrumental in expanding our become a teacher program in PSD. These funds help us with our braided funding model that continues to produce highly trained special educators while removing some of those financial barriers they would otherwise face. Currently we have 18 candidates in our current cohort and out of that eighteen, twelve
of them are paraprofessionals in our district. Another thing I wanted to highlight was, you know, this is a very popular destination for people to move. Colorado is beautiful. And so decreasing state licensure barriers out of state when people are moving from out of state without lowering any of those standards would be a huge that would be lifting a huge barrier. And finally, a guaranteed statewide supported IEP platform would help reduce redundancy and it would bring to you. Thanks, doctor Romelott. And I wanna reinforce the the last, you know, suggestion for a statewide IEP platform.
We do believe it can address a lot of workload issues, but that one is free, like free like a puppy, which means it's not free at all. Right? So I just wanna be really clear in terms of the financial burden of investing in a statewide system. There would be a lot of efficiencies with IP development, consistency across the state. And I see the CDE under our current commissioner really moving towards more systemness, in a lot of different ways, which is really great in partnership with the State Board of Education, of course. But that is an area that, as I have an opportunity to collaborate with other
superintendents across the front range, is a really, really big one to create just more efficiencies with the people who are certain we want people serving their children rather than some of the paperwork and the redundancy that comes out of the fact that we don't have a statewide system. And as doctor Jody Rommel, mentioned too, the reciprocity around certification, as I speak with other, again, other school districts, it's really clear that we wanna send a message of not lowering our standards. But if we know that there are states that are around us that have at least the same bar or higher, being able to have, some efficiency where we can,
you know, really kind of rapidly accept them into our systems and programs would be really ideal and hopefully something that would be considered low hanging fruit. Just curious if any reaction, response, or rethinking in alignment with what you're hearing from other constituents? Yep, please go ahead. Yeah, Representative Sanders. Thank you, President Draper. Oh, I have thoughts on this. But actually, one of the small rural districts that I also represent, brought up the same thing about special ed like, program, a platform. Are you still using Enrich?
Yes. Do you know how many districts across the state are using Enrich and are are what are the other platforms that are being used? I would say the majority of them use Enrich and I couldn't tell you what the other names are. Yeah. Go ahead, Senator Kim. Yeah. So sorry. Like workforce development and retention and recruitment, yeah, that's very important. We are doing everything we can. We have done everything probably can within budgetary needs. Last this earlier this year, the twenty twenty five legislative session, I did have a
bill where I explained to all of my stakeholders, who are generally in, education preparation programs. They run them at various colleges and universities across Colorado. They're like, well we wanna, you know, basically reduce barriers. So we actually were able to come to an agreement with the State Board of Education on some of that and we were also able to work with, the Colorado Education Association and remove some barriers. And basically my criteria was we have no money.
I mean, that's a really, really big deal and we can talk about that later, but the state has no money. So tell me what we can do by tweaking existing law to make to remove barriers to people who want to become educators. Speaking of the out of state licensure on barriers, Colorado has entered the interstate compact. So there are the number of interstate licensure compacts where I think we have joined everyone that has been brought to us in the last well since I've been in
the legislature, so the last seven years. What these are is they're basically agreements between states, a certain number of states generally have to join, and we say okay, everybody who joins has to meet the SPAR. So we have done that, so there should be some reciprocity between states. In addition to that, and I'm sure Kathy Gephardt could speak more extensively to the number of programs that we've created to try and remove barriers to becoming educators. We now have I know Senator Marchman who couldn't be here tonight and I were
on a teacher apprenticeship bill a few years ago, right? Because being a teacher is now a federally recognized apprenticeship program so we can take advantage of that. My understanding is there might be something in the works to even allow us to potentially pull down some federal level dollars which I don't know how that works with getting rid of the Department of Education, but we can, I don't know, maybe James can answer that for us? Sorry, James. And, yeah. I don't know much about the statewide IEP platform, but I will just say once
again the state has like zero money, so let me just put this a little bit in perspective. Last year The state had to cut $1,200,000,000 from our budget. Right? I mean and people are saying, oh, it's just because you guys are spending too much. That is frankly not the case. We are in a situation where TABOR was elected, was voted in by the voters in 1992, stands for the Taxpayers Bill of Rights. Sounds really great. People think it's awesome because sometimes they get money back, but here's what that's doing. Because of the artificial constraints puts on all of our budgetary activities at the state
level, it is achieving its purpose of making government so small that it can be drowned in a bathtub. That was the goal of the person who created it. I did pull this up earlier just because I saw this headline. If you looked at the Colorado Sunday every day the other day, it says, even worse than we thought, Colorado is stuck in a cycle of annual 1,000,000,000 state budget shortfalls. So, in addition to the $1,200,000,000 we cut last year when the HR one was signed into law at the federal level in July, we had a balanced budget before
then. We were immediately another $1,200,000,000 out of budget, so we had to go into special session to try and save revenue. Those budget cuts will be haunting us going in through next year. In addition to that, we're probably looking at like another billion dollars. Here's the deal. I mean, if our general fund has about $16,000,000,000 in it, if you're reducing that by a billion dollars a year, how many years does it take for us to get to zero? Any guesses? Anybody good at math here? So I don't think it's a hard equation.
This is something that we are going to have to go to our voters to solve because it's not going to improve. This is not a situation that we are overspending. If we were allowed, for instance, rainy day, such as a pandemic or other things where we, again, had to make enormous budget cuts and do all kinds of gymnastics in order to get through that back in 2020, and so, and from there.
I'll be quiet about that, but I just want to let you know if you guys have ideas on things that are legislative barriers that are that that we can remove, we are happy to do that. But when you look at creating new programs, new anything, it's just gonna be financially infeasible until we get past the cycle of $1,000,000,000 a year off of every single
flip and budget that we have. Last year, there was some low hanging fruit, some cash funds that could be swept. We were able to do it without too much damage. We've been able to save the growth in K-twelve education. That is unlikely to continue for long unless we take action. So sorry gloom and doom done, but thank you. Maybe the other Kathy has better news. I don't think I have better news, but, it's interest interesting that we are talking you're talking about the educator recruitment and retention because we just were talking about that
at our board meeting last week and it's on our priorities. I I I don't wanna say this because of my colleague to the left, but what I was advocating, it's a $10,000,000 budget and we haven't even inflated it. I would love to see us inflate it, we can't. We had to have the really hard conversation about can we redistribute that money so we pick up more people with less money. That's the conversations that we're having right now, that break my heart. And we need actually we need legislation to be able to do that. But to have that conversation when we know what the need is to say, well,
do we pick up and then do we lose people because the amount of money that we're able to give doesn't really help meet the need that they have? We don't know the answer to that yet, but we are having that conversation. If there's pennies in the couch to increase us at all, even by inflation, we'll be looking for that, I think. On the licensure barriers, we're happy to work with you wherever, CDE can help, and I'm really intrigued by the idea of a statewide IEP platform. I'm meeting with doctor Foster in the next week or two, so I'm happy to bring that to him and to work as a partner because I don't have much
more to offer other than anything we can do to reduce the paperwork and the administrative barriers so that you can actually focus on kids, I think we're all in for. So let us know how we can be partners on that because that makes a whole lot of sense to me. So thank you. Go ahead, Yara. Thank you, chair Draper. I just wanna echo, my colleague, senator Kipp here about just how dire of a situation we are looking at. And when she says we were able to make these cuts without having major damage
and preserving k 12 funding, it still was very painful cuts. And it nothing that our state state budget funds because we have to have a balanced budget and we have, such a tight budget. Everything we fund is important and means a lot to the people getting those resources. So these are very painful decisions, and they're just going to get harder. One thing that I like to focus on is tax policy, is my background. I'm a tax attorney, and served as your deputy assessor, but don't hold that one against me. And what I have looked at in my last year is where we can take
a stab at Tabor to be able to keep some of our money, to be able to close corporate tax loopholes, and see what we can do to retain some of the funds we have. I will tell you that that is not, money that I've been able to use to fund new programs or, any new resources. It is simply to soften the blow of that billion dollar hole saying, can we create another $300,000,000 in revenue here from closing loopholes just to to to make such
that we can, preserve k 12 funding. And so we're I'm going to keep doing that work. That is another tax package I am working on for this next legislative session. But, again, it's going to be the with that same lens of can we just retain some of the funding we have and cut less. But it's not, it still is going to be a cut and it still hurts. Other thoughts on that? Because it's such wonderful news. And we know not to shoot the messenger, you know, because that you we know
that this is, you know, this is something that has been coming for quite some time, with Taber. And we also, you know, look at what our budgets are doing and what our needs you know, with our budget shrinking and our needs growing, we're trying to figure out the best way to approach this and make sure that, all of our students are getting what they need. So thank you for for sharing all of those perspectives. Really appreciate it. Were there other questions, other thoughts? Scott, go ahead. Yeah. This is for Laurie. You had mentioned earlier the Enrich.
You had asked if we use Enrich. Forgive my, you know, not knowing a lot about this stuff. But if a lot of the school districts are using Enrich, is that a possibility for the state platform that, like, if those are all connected, is there a way to connect all that? I guess that's that's what I'd like to investigate is how many districts how many districts are using it because you have to pay for a platform. I think there might be some districts that are using Infinite Campus or, you know, whenever there are other SIS, that integrate IEPs.
But, I'm curious how many are using Enrich and if that's something that can be integrated across other platforms, student information system, platforms. It as we might think because they're paying for something anyway for for an IEP, platform. And like I said, a a small rural district to the east is having the same they have the exact same question because we're all moving students between our districts. And to have a portable IEP that talks that that we can, you know I
I think about how we have information in, in CDE's website that district to district to district, we can get information from where is a student coming from and what's their background. But having an IEP that would transfer, that you would you would have information and CDE or however that platform gets transferred between districts, if it's Thompson to Pooter, Pooter to Greeley, Greeley to Cherry Creek, it would be really nice to not have to track down that student's records. It would be you know, Lisa could get a student in and say, okay.
I've got this student's IEP. I know exactly where to hit the ground running. I'm not trying to catch up before the student gets here or the student just showed up and I gotta figure out if I'm gonna have a a para available or what's going on, that it it would save so much stress on on schools. So, I'm hopeful that, you know, if we can find out if some majority of districts, you know, it's kinda like with our read plan, you know, when we have three, four, five different, assessments that we need to use for students, you know, maybe
maybe we can get to more of a common platform like Enrich. I I don't know if there's another one out there that's bigger than Enrich but it would be really helpful for for our schools, I know, and for our districts, to manage that, so. Other questions, thoughts? Thank you, sorry. Okay. I I had leaned over and asked, Kathy if it's possible, like, some of this might be just rule making within the CDE, within the State Board of Education. I'm not sure if it needs a legislative action.
It might be rule making, so which we're happy to look at. So just out of curiosity, forgive my my questioning on this, but is there something that, like, the CDE could be, bulk purchasing for school districts that's and then districts, you know, like like Enrich. So the state of Colorado purchases Enrich for all districts to then participate in. Is that something that would be possible, and especially if it's I understand the money issue, but if there's, a way to pay into that.
So I'm I'm thinking there are, you know, databases that the the, Colorado libraries will purchase and then you issue, people access to that and you charge them per how many students or how many, you know, people can access that. Is that something that would be possible to be looking into? If it had a zero fiscal note. I mean, I'm happy to you're right. If if maybe districts could pay in to something more centralized as opposed to individualized, we're certainly happy to look at that.
But I don't wanna be the one that walked across the street and asked for money from my colleagues, at least not right yet. But I'm happy to look into anything that helps relieve administrative burdens, and helps focus where our focus needs to be. So absolutely happy to have that conversation. Okay. Makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah. Thank and I'm just wondering if that if it could work for something like that, other other places in which, you know, the CDE could make the initial purchase, as And doing so as a state, have that be, purchasing at a discount essentially, and
then having people pay into that per pupil or something to that effect. So And we could certainly look and see what other states are doing. If other states have a similar model that we might be able to replicate, that's something we can absolutely do. Okay. Yes, I was right. Sorry, Andrew, go ahead. No, thank you. Just a thought on that. I think you'd wanna make sure or at least run some traps on whether or not that revenue, coming into the state would then be subject to TABOR, which would push out things above the TABOR cap as a result. So depending upon how that is structured, it could even be double counted, as a
result of TABOR. And so, essentially, while it would be an offset, you would be treated as revenue in the state and would that amount of revenue would then need to be offset above the TABOR capture to push that amount above it. So I think it's just something to think about as you think through different ways to pay for services that are desperately needed and would reduce administrative burden on our district. Sorry about the bad news. Thanks. So I I do have a question that is sort of not all education related, but we've talked about Tabor a number of times now.
Is there a plan out there to remove Tabor? Is there something out there that yeah. Go ahead. Yeah. So I think that there are always efforts to find, workarounds around TABOR or ways that we can dismantle pieces of TABOR as needed to make it so we have things like school funding. An outright appeal of TABOR, I'm just politically speaking, is difficult because very few people understand what it is and how it actually impacts their day to day lives, how
it impacts their school funding. And for most folks, when I talk to them, TABOR means a refund check. Now those are getting smaller, so I think that maybe it gets less popular. But, I I think that there is a real education component that's needed about what taper actually is and how it does put a choke hold on the state, and our ability to fund things. With that said, I think that there are efforts to look at pieces of taper that maybe are easier to explain. So I know that there for one, I would say the piece of tabor that
I personally feel most frustrated by is the fact that it is a flat tax. That somebody who is a billionaire is paying it at the same tax rate as someone living in poverty. To me that that's, easier to explain and it's something that I find morally reprehensible. So I'm hopeful that that's a piece that voters could look at. And I think that that might be the best approach and, you know, piecemeal explaining how Tabor impacts people. So I think that that's where I've hearing efforts go. Until then, I think we're just trying to do our best to make sure we
preserve funding for crucial services with with that choke hold in place. And we really appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah. Go ahead. Maybe just a a logistic clarification as well. Because Tabor is indeed a constitutional measure, it would require, if the state legislature were to refer something, it would require a two thirds vote out of both chambers. And so at this point, I do not believe that is possible, which means that if there are efforts to reform TABOR in some regard, that would need to be a citizen led initiative process and not something that you should expect to see out
of the state legislature as I think acutely aware aware as we all are of the impacts of TABOR on our ability to fund not just education, but quite frankly health care in our state, transportation, environmental policy. I mean, you can go through the list higher education. You know, you can go through the list of coequal, priorities, I think, for folks across our state and and understand the pinch, and impact that TABOR has. But I do think it's important just to level set in terms of where you could expect to see some of those conversations happening as important as they are to us at the state level, certainly.
Go ahead, Senator Kim. Thank you. And I just wanted to add, I don't know how many of you are aware, but the state did, do these things called adequacy studies. I think it was from the 2024, maybe it was the 2023, School Finance Act. It commissioned two adequacy studies so that, you know, you didn't have to rely on one or the other. Basically, the results of those, those were comprehensive evaluations of all the education in our
state to say what would it cost if we were to provide every K through 12 kid an adequate education here in Colorado? How much would it cost? And basically what it came back and told us is that we're 3 and a half to $4,000,000,000 short. Now there is a good measure that some folks are looking at for next year that I along with represent as a CHI like. However, that measure I believe would ring in maybe 2 and a half billion dollars
and it wouldn't just be focusing all that money on education. So think about that. It's like we're 3 and a half to $4,000,000,000 short. We could get some additional revenue. This doesn't solve the problem. It's but people also don't want to spend the time and the money to run ballot measures that are not going to pass. People want to run something that's viable. So, yeah, I think we have much longer I have a longer term goal of of getting rid of TAVR, but it's probably gonna take a while and it is
very difficult to educate 6,000,000 people that we have in Colorado on tax policy. It's a challenging thing because you know most people if I go knock on their door when I'm running for election or trying to help somebody else, they barely have time to keep their dog from escaping and have like a ten second conversation, right? Getting people's attention to have these conversations is a challenging thing. There is a there's movement to try to look at doing a graduated income tax. It has to get past the title board and it did not make it past
the title board yet. They just try to do the most simple strike through some language in Tabor, and it was found to not be single subject. I know they're still trying to work on that. And there's also a measure to debruce funding just for k 12. So there's several efforts out there to try to address the issues. And I think, for the first time that I can think of, all of the Millevie overrides that were out there all passed, but we still can't get there by doing that through Millevie overrides and trying to burden our locals. Locals. And as we all know, there's many districts that don't have enough revenue base to
even be able to pass a meaningful mill levy override. And I would be remiss if I didn't talk about the fact that we did have the adequacy studies, which are based on our actual standards, but we also have a huge facilities problem out there. And while we didn't cut operations for K-twelve last year, we did cut the funding for BEST and we have a $20,000,000,000 deficit when it comes to our facilities. And so we have a lot of issues out there and we have not been able to actually meet even anywhere close to we had $1,000,000,000 in request last year, for best programs and I think we had a couple $100,000,000 is all we had
to try to meet that need. So it's, it's a problem out there. So but I'm optimistic that one or if not or both of these ballot measures will get across. They'll there's a huge citizen push out there to try to get the signatures and to get this on the ballot for next year. So that's actually is encouraging. I mean, who knows? We can't read the tea leaves, but I'm actually encouraged in the efforts that I see starting so early. Thank you so much for that. I do appreciate, learning about all of that. Are there other other questions? Go ahead, Jess.
Since we're talking about Tabery and there are so many initiatives, is there something that from your lens would be helpful for the board to do? Even I mean, I understand walking, talking, educating, but is there anything specific that we should be thinking about doing and contributing to this cause? Go ahead. Yeah, at the point where we get something that is going out to get on the ballot, so it's been approved by the title board, it is going to or something that's gonna be on the ballot if something were to be referred, if there
was something that was referable. It really helps if we can get all of the school boards that are willing to take a stand, right, pass a resolution saying, hey, we support this because X, Y, and Z, right? Tell people what you need and why, you would support that effort. And I know, you know, it's resolution. You know, it's not like a binding thing but it's also, it also speaks to when there's a campaign out there that we can point to school districts and say, look, you know, 95% of the school districts in the state are behind this.
Really, really need to get this behind this because this will help our kids. Other thoughts? Questions? Go ahead, Kevin. Are we sticking with the beginning of the agenda? Are we freestyling a bit because I've got some things? Okay. And I'm going to invite superintendent Kingsley to help set some context for this conversation too. But in this conversation about a shrinking pot, I want to be mindful, too, of measures that appear to be a golden lifeboat. And since you'd made the ask of school boards to take a stance, I think
as we're looking at the national landscape and what may be coming down the pike, I think we'll have reciprocal ask to once we get our ducks in a row, maybe as a board. I'm not speaking for the board. But, there's some of the measures that we're leery of now are, there's a new push for, a federal voucher program, in which Colorado can avail itself of some money, federally to, propagate a voucher type program in our in our communities. I just because it was prescient, I pulled up the results from the Colorado Amendment
80, measure that failed last year. And this was to enshrine or to to amend our constitution here to allow for school choice to include, private schools, home schools, innovations of future. So broadening the choice but enshrining it in a constitutional amendment, which I think and this is what I was gonna look into you, Andy. I think it required a 55% voter approval in order to be amended in the con I think that's 55%. Once it gets out two thirds, it wants to come ballot. It it depends on how it was voted in. So the same threshold that votes it in votes it out.
Okay. I believe is the Right. So if it was a 55 that voted it in, it would require a 55 to vote it out. Right. But it never got in. Right. So so let me do this. Superintendent King's, like, you wouldn't mind just giving us a little bit of land in the land as far as the context? Because this also came up in our city county PSD liaison, and then I've got a couple of thoughts as far as how to connect it more granularly to what we're confronting in our in our local community. I think it would be helpful to have just a brief conversation on that, if that's okay. Yeah. Thanks, director Hovelda. Context that I think all of you are probably more aware of than I am
as a relatively new resident to the City Of Fort Collins is the Chamber of Commerce in our community works really closely, as you know, with the Weld County Chamber. And they just put out a workforce development report within the last month and a half. It's been really kind of eye opening for us as our members of our community, members of our board. And looking at, like, the Northern Colorado region, it was interesting to note that Fort Collins has the fewest married households of any of the communities, within that region. And of our households that are in our local region specific to PSD, those households
are yielding less than 23% of them, children into our schools. And so when I collaborate with other school districts across up and down the front range and across the state of Colorado, we're dealing with the declining revenue scenario similar to you're declining dealing with lots of compression and deficit issues too. Ours is being accelerated by, a loss of students, on a lot of different fronts. It could be declining birth rates. It could be a lack of affordable housing. It could be that, choice, is deeply embedded into culture or the culture of our
state in and our local community. You know, in PST alone, we have five of our own district sponsored charter schools. I'm really proud to report that eight out of 10 families in PST choose a traditional public school. The other 10% are in one of our five district sponsored charter schools. And the other 10% are sprinkled between homeschool and some other charter school institute options. But as our I don't wanna refer to human beings as market share, but as the number of students who are in our community is decreasing and our needs are
increasing, what we're watching across the country, in many instances, who are already participating in some type of voucher program, whether it's at the state level or a federal level, it's serving as an accelerant to that decline in enrollment, both to homeschooling, sometimes to charter, and then obviously a private ecosystem begins to evolve. And so I'm interested in partnership with our board of, like, what are you learning about right now at about the Educational Choice for Children Act?
And are you hearing anything in terms of where our governor may be positioning on ourselves? And is there anything that you think we can do from a legislative standpoint to protect the integrity of our public schools, in this region? Go ahead, director Gephardt. Been working on this for months. So for those of you who don't know what this is, this is the bill that came out of the I can't say it without choking a little one big beautiful bill act, and it's the scholarship granting organizations. I've been working with senator Kipp and others around this. I think, a couple just salient points.
It is a gubernatorial decision, but it could be renewed from year to year, so we'll have to see who our next governor is. I think there's a a false sense that and this will date myself. I think of dire straits when I say this. It's money for nothing, and it's not. I think the the concern is that we're still waiting for Treasury to come up with regulations, and we're waiting to see how strict those regulations are because if they are so strict that we aren't able to actually use the money for all children, I would hope that our governor would say no.
There are three states where governors have already said no to this, and there's a kind of a push out there to and they're blue states, so not surprising. And the rumors are that our governor may say yes, but I think, waiting to see what treasury does might be a smart way to go. We are trying to figure out if we can have legislation kind of in the wings that would allow that money to go to all students, so that it's not just narrowly tailored. So I think that's kind of we're looking at, a couple strategies, Right? One is hoping that they say no, but if they don't say no, figuring out
if there's legislation that might be able to counteract what treasury does so that that money actually goes to all students. It's a $1,700 tax credit per person, and and you don't even have to itemize that. And then it goes to what's called a scholarship granting organization, and then those have to be five zero one c threes that are approved. And so there's a lot of, kind of steps before we get to that, but it is really a concern that the effort was to, encourage states that haven't had vouchers to have vouchers is the nicest way I can put it.
And we've seen we have there's a lot of data if anybody ever wants it on what vouchers have done to public education. You don't need to look much further than Arizona and Florida to see what it's done to those those states, and it isn't a very good situation as far as public education for all kids goes. So I guess that's what I would say. And I just wanna say thanks to senator Kipp for helping me think through some of this, while we try to figure out what to do. Go ahead, Senator Kipp. And I think, Kathy mostly said it all. I will just add that, I think in the group that we've been talking with,
we have core values. Those core values are that the money, if it goes to places here in Colorado, should be absolutely not go to organizations that discriminate against children or organizations that accept all children, a lot of inclusivity there, and then also to ensure that that money is accountable, right, that there's transparency in its use. We know that down in Arizona, there are stories of like homeschool parents using like
that voucher money to take their kids to Disneyland, right. That's probably not a good educational reason, to be to be using money. So there's, we are we are awaiting that rulemaking to see what we might be able to do to make sure that, our our core values and making sure that money goes is spent in the best way possible if it if our governor does make the choice to opt in. Just thank you for your support and being on top of this really pressing situation.
I would respectfully invite all of us to be vigilant and on guard with the intersection that sometimes these movements are having with our our land and our buildings, which are our assets in our district. My career started 28 ago in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and I worked there as a teacher, as a principal, chief academic officer for seventeen years prior to to to moving to a different state to advance my career. And as I'm seeing how the voucher system is playing out in in Florida right
now, initially, it led to a migration of students away from traditional public school options to other options as the ecosystem shifted. But what's happening in present day is different policy shifts that are allowing charter and private schools to cohabitate and run separate schools under the same roof as a traditional public school, further pushing out traditional public schools from their existence. It's it's a very messy process as you can imagine. I think right now embedded into state law, there is some already existing coupling between
our lease and land assets with the charter school network. And I know charters are different than private, but sometimes there are some intersections that I think we need to be mindful of. But as we have opportunities to kinda continue to pursue how to promote k 12 public education, I think we as a community, as we're grappling with declining enrollment, would really like to think and imagine see this as an opportunity to reimagine what's possible in our district. Could our schools potentially in the future be used as affordable housing? Could we be thinking about reimagining schools and and building and developing trade schools in
partnership with private industry, chambers of commerce, and higher ed. There's could they be early childhood centers? I mean, we have lots of big robust ideas for our community, but there is some legal worry, that we may have some obligations to have offerings to some of our competitors that would only further exacerbate the enrollment challenges we're already facing and not elevate our community. We are an aging in place community, and we need to think differently about the assets that are available to our neighbors and our community members. And so I just respectfully ask us to continue to be vigilant as you already
are, but really need your thought partnership on this, not just about our land and our real estate, but most importantly, our children. So Go ahead, Senator Kippen then Kathy then Kathy. Thanks. And I would ask, PSTD to your point because frankly, our district is probably the only district in the entire state of Colorado that has not had what we call exclusive chartering authority for over twenty years. That means that you do not have control over the schools that are coming into your district.
Why don't you at minimum apply to get that back? I've been begging some of you guys on this for years. It is truly unacceptable in a world of declining enrollment that you guys, as our publicly elected board, will not take the opportunity to, at minimum, apply to get that back. I have had a bill drafted, which I will not bring until you guys at least apply to help solve this problem. But if you guys won't even apply, it's not, you know, you're asking us for help, but you're refusing to do your part.
And so I'm sorry, but this is something you guys need to do. Go ahead, Kathy. Well, I was just gonna say thank you for bringing up Florida. I think we have some real lessons to learn watching around what's going on in the country. A statistic I heard, so don't quote me on this, but that only 51% of students in Florida are in traditional public schools now because of that. And this was something that just flew under the radar. And you're right, charters and private schools are able to coexist in declining enrollment schools with, I think, without paying rent. And the money that's being made is all in real estate.
And so I appreciate you bringing that up so that we can we wanna live well with our neighbors, but I think we also need to pay attention to what's going on. So thank you for bringing that up. Go ahead, Kevin. Couple of points. One, I agree with you on exclusive chartering. I think we've had conversations. I think the last time was that the district went for it remind me, someone smarter than me is at least over ten years ago, I think, at this point. I thought it was ten or 15. I'll I'll take your word for it. So what I want to shift is a little bit of locus of control because
I agree with the sentiment you said as PSD needs to do our part. So and I also want to echo something Superintendent Kingsley said because I think this is important as far as not stepping on each other. Again, I don't have to remind most people in this room where we were about a year and half ago having some really tough conversations in this boardroom about shrinking enrollment, having a large footprint of assets and what to do with the system that was felt like it was being compressed. And we were, I mean, torturously, agonizingly going through discussions about consolidation and closure based on numbers and where things were landing.
So our community responded and then some, and we passed a local measure in 4A. And then we have a incredible wellspring of local resources that are helping to prop up the system and to do its part. I agree, though. The numbers still aren't great. We're down another 500 kids this year. And I don't think of it as a shrinking market share. I think of it as a system that is now being pulled at the seams, and we're doing everything we can to put it on life support. With what you just said about Tabor and losing a billion dollar a year and they're don't look at us for any more money. I understand that concept.
But our community resoundingly responded to this encroaching and this declining enrollment saying, let's hold the line. So I think we've done a lot of our part at PSD. I think we there's more there's more things we can do, like going for exclusive charter authorizing, but in a thoughtful, respectful way. I mean, not to antagonize the charter schools that are in our footprint, but I am concerned. And I looked at the I looked at the statute just today, and I'm not gonna tell you why. But I looked at the statute today. While charter schools, are not allowed to pay rent, there is a lot of discretion,
at least from my my read of the statute, about what, schools can do within the contracts existing with charter schools. So I think charter schools was a part of the voucher program I'm concerned with. What I'm concerned with is that and even in that statute, there is local control up to the school board about what's best for the the uses of the assets for our community, which makes sense. We're the conduit for our our community here. What I'm what I'm worried about, I think my ask is when I think you said it was a gubernatorial decision. That frightens me. But because for all of the good things that we've done in our community and
all the the rolling up our sleeves and what we've done to try to help ourselves, it could be up to one person to decide, we're gonna avail ourselves of this, which will have ripple effects, the unforeseen consequences that will not only undo all the work that we've done, but it will absolutely disrupt specifically our title one schools, which is not okay with me. And so that is outside of my locus of control as a school board director. And so I just wanna put that in the room and say there has to be an exchange of knowing what you guys are doing, knowing what we're doing, and the the conversations we have to have. Because one of the things I said earlier today is that we are approaching this
as if everyone is looking at ballot Ballopedia and looking at the times. They're not. A lot of the folks that we represent are not gonna be paying attention to this conversation, and so we have to advocate for those that are not in this room that understand the complexity of this. So I'm off my soapbox. But I agree with what your your comment, though, because that was rousing to me, and I appreciate it. Go ahead. I just think we need to start educating as much as we can so that our current governor understands the implications because I don't think there's very much information out there about the potential pitfalls. And I'm gonna risk seeing something very political, which is maybe we need to also
ask the two candidates, all the candidates that are running for governor to take a position on this because it might be something that only lasts. I don't know how long it'll be, but this is a really important issue and it's not on many people's radar. But to the extent that we can actually start to help people understand this, the pitfalls, I think that's super important. And so I appreciate your comments on that because people, I don't think, have heard that yet. I think they just keep hearing, we're underfunded. Our schools are underfunded. Why wouldn't we take this money? Right? That's a fifty year budget.
Really quickly to add on to Kevin's position. Senator Kipp, I think that exclusive chartering authority has been something that we've batted around as board for a while, and we are still working on it. We're trying to get our ducks in a row to get that put together. We're going to make a decision on that within the board within the next, I would say, four months. For our in district charters, I want to articulate that exclusive chartering authority isn't some shot across the bow. We have some very high we have the highest performing, charter schools within our district.
We work with them very well. They provide education for a subset of our population that really want that, and it's a part of choice. Choice isn't going anywhere. And we will continue to work with them. As it pertains to opting into vouchers for those in district charters, and I had a conversation with one of the headmasters last week to articulate to him that voucherization is a threat, not just the public schools. Those high performing in district charters that we have, they are under threat for that
as well. There is only a finite amount of people in our community who are going to opt in to charter schools. Alright? And when you have more people going after the same resources, there's more competition and inevitably what ends up happening is your in district charters that are high performing decline as well. You have out of state charters come in who are, private equity backed, going after real estate, and they fight over the same sub subset of kids. So as it pertains to our in district charters and exclusive chartering authority, if we
decide to go for that, what we're we wanna make sure everybody understands is it's not something that is going against the schools that are already in our district. Thank you for that. Yeah. Go ahead, Scott. Yeah. I just had to, kinda was thinking the same way that Kathy was in terms of, you know, we have a gubernatorial race coming up next year. So if governor Polis made this decision, it would be short lived. I don't know if anybody in the room, I'm not looking at you, James, knows
anybody running for governor. But has anybody made a claim or made a taken a stand on on that? Sorry, man. I I'm gonna say a whole lot of nothing. I'm I'm here in my official capacity, with the US Senate. So, happy to to put, folks in touch with someone who might be able to have a bit more, fruitful discussion with you. I do I yeah. I I kinda had a feeling. Sorry, James. I just wanted to get a chance to talk. I, yeah. I think that's really something Cathy, I think you're right.
We need to put pressure on these candidates to take a stand, and to hear from us at the at the district level as to, you know, what our opinion is on this and get people educated on that. So I just want to throw that in the room. It takes effect in '27. So we have some time. So I just wanted to put that out there. The decision can but it the the SGOs don't take place until '27, so just so you have that date. I can say that senator Bennett did vote against that bill. Other questions? Thoughts?
Anyone else wants to get put into the room? Yeah. Go ahead. So if it's the teacher, I mean, I I want I want to shift this to hope and positivity. I think one of the things that all of you collectively do well, and I would just invite us to do more of, is statewide recognition of our teachers, our classified staff, our leaders in our schools. Do not underestimate, the significance of seeing them, celebrating them, whether it's through social media channels, school visits, those types of things that are already in place. But I've participated in the past two years.
There's been more statewide community building around celebration, and I think we have really, as a district, benefited from participating and being recognized in those areas as well as other districts. So the more that you can continue to do that in your official capacities, I just wanna you know, our people who are in the trenches are working really hard in spite of all of these changes that are happening around them that may not be in their sphere of control. And just seeing them and elevating who they are and what they're doing in public service, I just think, is low hanging fruit for all of us to be reminded of. And I just wanna say for all the efforts that you're already doing in each
of those areas, thank you very, very, very much. Yeah. I, would love to come and visit whenever. I, have started just shamelessly inviting myself to things, and it's probably a little more comfortable to be invited. So I just wanna make that obvious that I am happy to come and celebrate, because I just think that's so important. I was lucky enough to go to the celebration of the teacher of the year in Greeley, and I still get teary eyed when I think about it. It was so awesome. And that's just just one person. But to see the school come together, and we had more applicants for teacher of
the year than we've ever had. I think we had 400 applicants, all of whom were outstanding teachers, and that's not even the ones who didn't apply. So I have two daughters who are teachers. I understand that. The then they don't even have time to apply for those things, but I would love to help figure out how we can celebrate more what's going on. I think it fits in with what we're talking about, which is there's such a negative under current about public education right now that to the extent that we can actually be out celebrating what's going on. Because as you said, there's very this percentage of families who are actually engaged in
the schools is pretty small, and so people need to be reminded of all the really amazing things that our schools add to our community. So happy to come whenever. That's excellent. And members of the board, 10% of those 400 applicants are teachers from PSD. So we're making we're doing our part to make sure that our district continues to be well represented in those competitive races. I I know, we have a lot of teachers here that are award winning already in a lot of different ways, and we celebrate them in this boardroom all the time. Would it be okay if I elevate one other idea? Oh, I'm so sorry.
I I have No. I just wanna add into, PST celebrates. Do we have the date for that? Because we can invite them right now. We'll get you the Yeah. We'll we'll get you a date for PST celebrates. It's when we celebrate all of our staff altogether. So teachers, yeah, teachers, administrators, paraprofessionals, bus drivers, every Everybody you can imagine, we do it all at once and it is absolutely a phenomenal time. May 4. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead, Andy. Oh, thanks so much. I, I really appreciate the comment. I wanted to just flag two things, because engagement with our educators, I think, is
critical to better understanding just the reality of the issues that are easy to talk about. It's easy to look at a spreadsheet and understand a deficit or a spending cut that we need to make. But when we talk to folks who are doing this work day in and day out, I think it takes a whole another lens and sort of it becomes real for us. But to that end, on Thursday or actually, yes, Thursday of this week, there's a educator for a day event that a lot of us are going to be participating in where we will actually be in, myself and my colleagues at two different PSD
schools throughout that day. That is an incredible opportunity for folks to just be boots on the ground next to folks who are doing this work day in and day out. That's a great opportunity. And I also wanted to just mention that it's not lost, I think, on any of us that on any given week we have teachers from around the state, including teachers from PSD, who come down to the state capitol and share their stories with us. And that is incredibly meaningful, not only because we know what it takes to get down to the state capitol and to be able to take a day away from your family or your work or whatever that is and to brave I-twenty five, which
everybody deserves an award for, but also to just share your experiences and what it means to be an educator, where the pitfalls are, what we need to do better at, what we need to work collaboratively on. Those things are very meaningful to us, and so certainly that's not something I think that gets seen by the public a lot. It's a five minute conversation when we can step out of the chamber and talk to an educator, but for anybody listening or for anybody thinking about advocating, please know it really matters. When folks come to the state capitol and say, I'm from your district. I'm from your community.
Here's what's important to me. Those things have to matter to us. I think they do, and we were really grateful for the opportunity to engage with folks in that way. Thank you for that. Go ahead, Kevin. I just wanted to say thank you for being here. I think it's important that you see the beginning of our meeting too because you get to see some of the magic that we get to celebrate in this room. And I think as in recent times, I've, you know, thought about the world falling apart around me nationally, but then we get to come in this room, and we celebrate a student, and we celebrate a parent who came to this this district because
of what we offer for their kids. So there's a lot of celebrations that happen in this room and in our district, and I love getting to celebrate that. But this is now my third time being here with most of you. And I just want to say thank you for coming and engaging in these discussions and having, you know, these issues front of mind, and none of us are soothsayers. I think we all bring a different perspective to this conversation, but I think it's really important that we have a conversation so we can, you know, recognize each other. And I just want to say thank you all for holding the line for public education, and I appreciate the work that you're doing and look forward to the work,
work moving forward. Yeah, wonderful, wonderfully said. Thank you. Kathy, did you have something? Well, I just wanted to say being a past local board member, I understand the challenges that you all face. So I just wanna say thank you for showing up every day for students, because that's super important. The work at the local level is really where it all where the rubber hits the road. So thank you. Thank you for your service. Thank you, chair Draper. I've had the opportunity to work with you some over the years and been really impressed with your leadership. And I just wanna be, open to helping however I can.
The state board has, put out a call to meet with, the legislators who are on the education committees. And I think Representative Garcia Sanders coming I don't know if you've received the invitation yet, Senator Kipp. I'll make sure you get it. It'll be embarrassing if you didn't. But anyway, we're just trying to get out and meet with people. But I I really just wanted to say thank you. I've been impressed with the quality of the conversations here. You have amazing staff, and just let us know how we can be of service to help you in your really, really challenging job. So thank you. And I think that it's it's reciprocal, right?
However we can help each other because when we're when we're helping each other, we're helping the students and that's really the bottom line. So, whatever we can do to make this, and to elevate that. So thank you all for coming this evening. Really appreciate the time that you took to be with us, and sharing your thoughts. Anything else before we close out? Can I can I say one absolutely? Old lady at Kinko's, I made copies of our I think I was so he he was so nervous walk watching me walk in trying to work the copier with one hand. But anyway, I have, copies of our hot off the press legislative prayers.
If I could just leave them with you so that if people want them, I don't wanna put that poor guy who can go through all the work and then take him home with me, so. Yep. That would be great. Thank you so much. I just appreciate the opportunity to be here. I'm mostly here to just listen and learn and, hear what priorities are. My phone is available to any of you, so please reach out. I reached out to, to CEO CFO, Martinez, last year a few times.
How's this gonna affect our district? And doctor Guile also. So I just I really appreciate the opportunity to listen and learn from all of you. Appreciate my years in PSD. I'm an advocate of public education, obviously, product of and a great supporter of. I will always go to the mat for public schools. I I would also just say I also work in the other realm of with the with the homeschool and the private school and the charter school networks, and I would invite you to also make sure that you remember that you represent those parents
too. And what we would love to have those those kids come back to public schools but they made choices to go somewhere else and you still represent them. And, you know, for lack of a better term, the product that we that we provide of public education, needs to be so appealing that people don't wanna leave. But if they have made that choice, we're not enemies. We are all wanting to provide the best education for our kids. And, you know, no matter what that looks like, our kids are gonna be taking
care of us when we're old and we want them to have the best educations possible. So, so please reach out to me with concerns, questions. I'd love to, you know, kind of try and help bridge some of those things. So, again, thanks for the opportunity to be here. Wonderful. Well, thank you all so much. I think we will go ahead and wrap that up and give you your evening back. So, this meeting is now adjourned at 07:43PM. Thank you all.