Alright. Good evening. Good evening, and welcome to the Rochester Community Schools Board of Education regular meeting called to order at 06:00. If everyone could please join please rise and join with me in the pledge of allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. This Board of Education regular meeting is a meeting of the Board of Education in public for the purpose of conducting the school district's business and is not a public
community meeting. However, there is a time for public participation during the meeting. General public comment will be heard under agenda item five. If you wish to speak tonight and have not already filled out a yellow card, they're located on a table near the entrance to the media center. Once you've completed the card, please hand it to a shield officer. Please note that the cards must be completed prior to speaking and I'll call the names of those who I have a card for during public comment. I'd like to remind my board colleagues of the norms we've agreed to. These include keeping comments germane to the agenda item that we don't surprise each other
at the Board table, that we have one speaker at a time that's recognized by the Chair before speaking, to be honest, to refrain from attacking others' motives, to uphold the chain of command and to truly listen to each other. To those in attendance this evening, I'd like to remind you that we are here to conduct district business. We request that there not be any outbursts from the audience. Outbursts or any other behavior that disrupts our meetings will be seen as a breach of the peace and those individuals will be escorted from the building. On behalf of my colleagues on the board, we're grateful to be able to serve this community and we appreciate your support.
For roll call, all Board members are present. Moving to our agenda, is there a motion to approve the agenda as presented? Moved by Trustee Gupta. Is there support? Support from trustee Annas. Is there any discussion? Madam president. Trustee Lacui. I move that we add a discussion item about including the student privacy policy to the May 5 work session. There's a motion to amend the agenda to include a discussion about a student privacy privacy policy? Student privacy policy.
Yeah. Okay. That was moved by trustee Lecui. Is there support? Support from trustee Lausanne. Is there any discussion before we vote on this? Yeah. Trustee Lecuye? Okay. Well, many in our community have asked that we adopt a policy to ensure that we're respecting the rights of girls to privacy in their bathrooms and locker rooms from biological boys. And I've been following this process each step of the way. I sent a policy to the full board about this on March 12. And I submitted it to the policy and curriculum committee,
and I heard through trustee Lauzon that this committee wasn't interested in even having our lawyers look at it. So now I'm following the process to bring it before the full board so that I and the public can hear how the full board perceives this issue and whether they find it worth discussion discussing. And I'm suggesting that we add it not to this meeting. I know this meeting is pretty long and some of you might not have looked at this in a while. But I'm I'm suggesting that we add it to our work session so that that way everybody has a chance, plenty of time to just continue looking it over,
getting whatever questions they want answered and digesting it. And before you make a comment about why did I not e mail this request to you with the support of two other board members to put it on the agenda, there are two main reasons for that. Number one is, it's not right to hide from the public what gets dismissed behind closed doors. And number two is, board members are not often responsive to my emails. So this approach still gives board members time to think before we discuss this and also lets the community know who thinks this discussion is even worth having.
All right. Anyone else before we vote to add, Trustee Gupta? Well, I would as a member of the SBCC committee, like to share that this has been brought up multiple times in the past. Those of us who don't agree with moving it forward have shared our rationale multiple times, both over email and in public meetings, many times, multiple times both over email and in public meetings many times in the past. So I will continue to oppose adding this to the agenda, because I do not agree with the proposed policy for reasons that you can refer to in your email. Alright. At this time, Trustee Lacoue. Well, before I speak again,
I noticed Trustee Lausanne had a comment. So I'll let her go first. I'm also a member. I don't know. Am I working? There we go. A member of the SPCC committee and we had great dialogue at the last meeting. It just felt a little bit discouraged. I do agree with CaraBot that this is an important topic that I think that we should at least as a whole board have a discussion regarding it. Seeing that the committee we really can't vote, you know, make decisions at the meetings. We should have it at the table. And then trustee Lucuy, did you have another comment before we vote?
Sure. Yeah. In response to trustee Gupta, I would still suggest that we add this to the next meeting because the public has been very interested in this topic. They don't have access to our emails very easily. And I think it'd be worth having the discussion out in the open because I strongly disagree with the with the few rationales that I've seen put forth, and I think it would be worthwhile to discuss this topic. Trustee Gupta. As previously stated, this debate has already occurred in a previous public meeting. And, let's not overgeneralize our community.
There's a small fraction of the community who has asked for this and and that's their right to do so. And they were heard and, their ideas were considered. However, at this time, I don't see a need to continue rehashing something that has already been debated. Alright. Madam president, I have a question. Has this ever been on an a jet on an agenda that we've had apart from just me trying to amend the agenda to add it? Because I don't believe we've had the discussion because it's never moved past that point. There's been much discussion, but it's never been on the agenda.
It's never been on the agenda. Right. Alright. So at this time, we have motion to amend the agenda to include a discussion about a student privacy policy. All those in favor of adding that to this agenda, please say aye. Aye. I believe that was two. Those opposed, please say no. No, ma'am. No. That's a two five vote. So we currently have the same motion which is to approve the agenda as presented. All of those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, please say no. That's a seven-zero vote. All right. So moving on to agenda item four is communication and this is where we reference
various communications that have been received. Trustee Blake, can you please give us an update about communications received by the Board? Yes. We received five communications, which are all included in the Board packet. Thank you. Next we have our student representatives. And I believe you're gonna be coming up over here on this side. And did you have a specific order that you wanted to come up or? Just gonna say. Okay. Perfect. Come on up. Good evening, everyone. My name is Stephanie Javieras and it is my pleasure to be back with you all this month to report on the recent events at Adams High School.
Adams has been very productive this past month preparing for the end of our year. 41 students from our HOSA club competed at States in Traverse City from April '18. We are proud to announce that we had nine finalists and three students moving forward to the international competition. Our robotics team competed at Worlds in Houston this last week and we congratulate them all on their hard work. Great job, students. Additionally, Adams Student Council hosted our first ever celebrating our world culture night on April 16. Elementary and middle school students were invited to enjoy craft,
food, and informational stands presented by high school students about their cultures. It was a fun night to embrace and celebrate the diversity of our student body. Our cap our AP Capstone students are preparing to deliver their final presentations this week. The Capstone program is a two year course where students earn a separate diploma and are able to conduct their own research on a unique topic they find interesting. Speaking of I'm sorry. Speaking from the perspective of a student in this program, I can testify that while we are a bit nervous,
we are very excited to share our findings and conclude what has been a full year process. Moving on to our sports report, our athletes have been working hard to establish a very strong start to the spring season. Our girls' lacrosse record is seven-zero, girls' tennis is six-one, girls' soccer is six-three and track is two zero for both boys and girls, which is a season first. Keep up the hard work, students. Looking ahead, May 8 marks our annual middle school leadership day event where students from Van Hoesen and West visit Adams for a day filled with leadership activities as an introduction to student council for any
interested students. The next few weeks mark a busy testing period for Adams students. Our AP classes are gearing up preparation for assessments beginning in early May. Additionally, students in all classes are starting to review for upcoming exams. We will in all classes are starting to review for upcoming exams. We wish you all the best of luck. Seniors are eagerly awaiting prom, which is May 1, and are counting down the days until our last day of school, May 20. On this day, we will enjoy a barbecue, color throw celebration, and senior sunset to mark the end of our high school experience. We are excited to graduate on May 29 at the OU Arena and experience our
final high school event at the senior all night party at David Busters. Those are all the updates from Adams. Thank you so much for your time this evening, and I hope you have a great rest of your week. Thank you. Hi. I'm Anna Grunewald, and I am the Rochester Board Representative. Rochester has been up to many fun things over the past month. One of these things is many of our seniors have been awarded with one of Rochester Community School Foundation's scholarships. Rochester also just finished our testing week, which overall went really good. We had our freshmen and sophomores take the PSAT and our juniors take the SAT along with a couple of our other tests.
During this week, our seniors were able to relax and get ready for some of the fun senior events coming up. One of the senior events that we have coming up very fast is prom. Rochester's prom is on April 29, which is next Tuesday. Seniors are also getting ready for some other fun events like honors complication, senior all night party, graduation, and the senior walk. I know that one fun thing that the seniors are really ready for is our last day of school, which is coming up less than a month away on May 20. We also had at Rochester Two of our students earn an award in the Michigan
Art Education Association State Art Show. Congrats to you two. Next, the Rochester theater department is hard at work right now getting ready for our school play coming up this week. Please come see Anna Green Gables this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Also, a big congratulations to all the r c RHS staff who were honored with one of the sparkle awards. Next, Rochester has had some big wins in our spring sports. First, our boys' varsity lacrosse team won 15 to one over Port Huron United,
and also our boys' JV lacrosse team won o sorry, nine to o over Port Huron's JV team. Next, the Rochester track and field team was able to win the Milford Relays. Congrats to all the spring sports who are doing an amazing job right now. Next, our host club just came back from our host state conference. Congrats to all who competed at this event, and a special congratulations to Claire and Maria who received special recognition in their events. Lastly, a big congratulations to everyone a part of the Rochester robotics team who just came
back from our world competition in Houston, Texas. That's all from Rochester this month. Thank you for listening, and can't wait to see you next month. Hello, everyone. I hope you're all having a great day. My name is Emma Chico, and I represent Stoney Creek High School. Over here at Stoney, we have had a busy month with SAT and PSAT testing, M STEP, ACT WorkKeys and, of course, the beginning of fourth quarter. Stony came off spring break ready to work and we did just that. Our spring sports have picked up more than ever. Hopefully, now that Michigan has had a few nice days under its belt,
students will be able to watch and support our teams without freezing in the cold. I'm excited to announce that last week was tech week for our spring musical. Our talented students will be performing Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of eighteen twelve. They will be performing an in school matinee on Wednesday, and then they will show on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. If you have the time, I highly recommend going to one of the shows. I know I will be going. They have worked very long days and nights, and I know it will pay off. As we near the end of the year, especially for our beloved seniors,
there is so much to look forward to in terms of senior events. I can't believe I am saying this, but prom is next week on Wednesday. Also, our senior core leaders are planning Stony's annual senior cookout during fourth hour on Friday, May 2, where students spend the hour in the parking lot in the senior parking lot cooking hot dogs and hamburgers. It is also tradition for seniors to wear college gear showing up where they will be attending college next year if that is their plan. Our last day of school is May 20, which will be a half day. Right after that last class, seniors will head down to the field to participate in the color rush.
There is so much to look forward to in this next month for seniors, and we are taking taking this time to soak up every last bit of high school that we can. This Thursday is Take Your Kid to Work Day, some of our student council's favorite day of the year. Each year, we put on an entire day of events for the children of our wonderful staff, and student council spends the entire day with them. We watch them all day, walk them around through stations we have set up, and ensure they have the best time. Coming up on Friday, we will be having a community day for the school for the school to kick off our Kindness Week next week.
Community Day involves a whole school assembly, guest speakers, courtyard games, and quality time to be spent with just your grade. Additionally, we also put on a rose ceremony at the assembly where we honor students from all sports and clubs that Stony has to offer for their great accomplishments. Throughout Kindness Week, we will have various activities like a spirit week, food auctions, and courtyard games. The money we raise throughout the week will be donated to the Rainbow Connection, which grants wishes for Michigan children battling life threatening medical conditions. We also touch on mental health and spread awareness and resources for people who might
need it. Videos will be in the announcements and on social media for some helpful tips and strategies to reduce stress and anxiety. This week is so much fun being able to spread positivity and kindness. As AP tests are coming up, many of our AP classes have begun prepping for the exams, ensuring success for many students. We wish everyone a good luck on those tests. That is all I have for you today. Thank you, and see you next month. Thank you. Hi. Good evening, board members, educators, and the Rochester community. My name is Galileo Romero, and I'm excited to share with you all the great things happening at ACE. On April,
we had our state testing for our juniors and some of our seniors. Everything went great, and as a singer, I really enjoyed the day off. To celebrate successful students in mister Falsnaugh's forensic class and miss Bedard's mysteries class, students got to go on a field trip to an escape room to put their detective skills to the test. And from what I heard, it was really fun. Last Thursday, we had our Greater Rochester Regional Chamber of Commerce meeting. We got to hear from ATPS, Race, and four of our ACE students spoke about some of the programs we do at ACE, like our Career Readiness Academy program,
and took some of our community members on a tour of Schultz campus. April 24 is gonna be so fun and exciting because it's bring your child to work day, and we're gonna have the opportunity to meet our favorite teacher's kids. On April 30, members of our student council and Career Readiness Academy will visit the VOA, volunteers of America, to help support our veterans. Teacher appreciation week is gonna be May, and although we appreciate our teachers every day we go to school, it's wonderful we have a whole week to show them just how much their hard work means to us. Sadly, seniors' last day will be May 20. And although I'm super excited to start a new chapter in my life,
I'll be sad to leave my small school where I've made wonderful memories and friends. But on a better note, our senior field trip will be at Dave and Buster's, and any senior who does not wish to attend the field trip, can go to the Detroit Zoo along with our juniors on May 1. And finally, Ace will have a Tiger's tailgate on May 21 for where our students will be able to enjoy the baseball game outside the courtyard with some hot dogs and burgers. And we just wanted to say thank you, community schools, again, for supporting us in every way. Thank you. All right.
Good evening, Board. I'm Minjun Kim. And once again, very excited to be here today with some updates from the International Academy. So IAEA has had a couple of fun events in the past month, but most notably, I wanna talk about the International Food Night. So students and parents created dishes from their own culture and brought them to school for a night of musical performances and socializing. We had a total of six continents represented in over 15 countries. Additionally, the Honor Society competition took place last Wednesday, where students were awarded induction into the national French,
Spanish, German, music, and even art honor societies. We're so proud of the seniors who were fitted out in colorful cords that can complement the blue graduation gowns. Now seniors have had a busy few weeks, but it's all wrapping up on the twenty fourth, and, yes, that's this Thursday. So on that day, we're gonna have a celebration clap out followed by some food sponsored by the IA. Unfortunately, that's not the end. Seniors will continue to prepare for the month long IB exams, ranging from history to math to chemistry.
And each subject will undergo around five hours of testing, Guerrillas, competed over the weekend at Worlds in Houston, working long nights to perfect their robot and compete against over 600 teams. So we congratulate them for their hard work. And finally, the Science Olympiad team will be competing at state in MSU this weekend, so we wish them the best of luck. That's all for today. Thank you so much for your time this evening, and I look forward to bringing more updates the next month. Thank you all for those updates. We always look forward to hearing from you and what's going on in the schools.
Agenda item 4.3 is the section where members of the board share communications that were sent directly to them and not to the full board. Did any board member receive communication from the public? Trustee Lausanne? I received just one email on April 19. Andrew Weaver copied me on an email, to Mr. Russo and President Butel regarding the possible Open Meetings Act violation, regarding the process eliminating the DEI position. And that was it. I received emails from Marie Griffith regarding my leadership, Jessica Bucaster and Andrew Weaver Weaver regarding the DEI director position and from Camilla Roda,
Patricia Wilkerson, Jacqueline Cunningham, Leslie Noddle, and Christopher Kreider regarding the sheds impacting the track and field team at Adams High School. I don't think I saw any others at this point. So, Trustee Lecui? I also received the e mail from Andrew Weaver about Open Meetings Act up violation and the elimination of the DEI Director position. Next, we will hear from Jamie Sayak, who will be providing us an update with the PTA Council. Good evening, everyone. Sorry. Good evening, everyone. My name is Jamie Sack. I am the PTA Council vice president. At the recent RCS Foundation scholarship reception,
PTA Council president Jamie Rockcliffe presented a $500 scholarship to two students from Rochester High School, two from Adams, and two from Stoney Creek. Authors in April is just one week away, April 28 to May 2. The AIA banquet kicks off the week on April 28. This year's authors are Deborah Friedman for TK in first grade, Drew Brockington for second and third grade, Kelly J. Baptist for fourth and fifth grade, and Jennifer A. Nielsen from middle school. Drew Brockington will also be presenting an illustrator's workshop with art students at Adams High
School. And Jennifer Nielsen will be presenting on careers in writing and publishing at Rochester and Stony Creek. State Reflections winners were honored on April 12 during the Michigan PTA Convention. Many of our talented RCS students received PTA convention. Many of our talented RCS students received awards and the outstanding interpretation winners have advanced to the National Reflections Contest representing the state of Michigan. National level winners will be announced on May 1. For green schools, recycle bank grants are open. Schools can apply through April 25.
And springtime is always a very busy time for PTA Council and all the school level PTAs. So we have a lot of upcoming events. We are PTA Council is sponsoring an Internet safety presentation, tomorrow, April 22 at 7PM at Adams High School. Career Paths to Public Service will happen on April 23 from 06:30 to 08:30PM via a virtual student workshop. That event is geared for students in grades eight through 12. The Family Health and Wellness Fair is held will be held on May 3 at 9AM to 1PM m.
At Rochester High School. There will be many free activities for all ages. There will be a story time on May 3 at three p. M. At Barnes and Noble in the Village. Superintendent Russo will be our guest the guest reader. There will also be a book fair at both the both of the Rochester Hills Barnes And Noble stores, the one in the village and the one at the Target Plaza. Barnes And Noble will donate a portion of all sales back to Rochester PTA Council and then we will then split the amount among all of our school media centers, to allow them to buy more books. If you participate in the event at checkout,
just mention you're participating in a PTA Council book fair so that we get credit. We are hosting a College one hundred and one event on May 13 at 7PM at West Middle School in their cafeteria. The theme is Everything You Wanted to Know but Didn't Know to Ask. There will be presentations by admissions and financial aid reps from Oakland University. Also an admissions and financial aid reps from Oakland University. Also in attendance will be Zara Tutoring and the Hub of College Consulting. And finally, PTA Council Health and Wellness Committee has started their weekly parent walks, that happen every Thursday morning at 09:30AM at Innovation Hills.
Everyone meets at the Big Chair and those walks will go through June 5. Thank you very much. Thank you. And next, we'll have a pack update from Melissa Hoffman. Good evening. Good evening. I'm Melissa Hoffman, president of the Special Ed Parent Advisory Committee for Rochester Community Schools. Our most recent meeting was held March 18 at Brewster Elementary. One important discussion we opened up was in regards to students with mental health or chronic health conditions in need of support. Advocacy itself can be an equity issue and we often find when a family is experiencing a crisis or having the having the knowledge or ability is not always within
reach. We we never want to be a barrier to a family in need. Rochester has historically made individual concessions on case by case considerations. So our idea is to gather these solutions in partnership with RCS so that these solutions are ready to offer when needs arise. We will continue to work on these goals together as an ongoing process. We also heard from one of our fellow PAC reps at Birmingham Schools in partnership with one of our ADAMS high PAC reps on their presentation to get more inclusive extracurricular activities in our schools,
a presentation known as It Can't Be Zero, which speaks to the number of extracurricular activities in most districts which are specifically designed for categorical special ed students, which is most commonly zero. We agree. Unfortunately, West Middle School ASD teacher Bailey Warren, who is also one of our Adam's swim and dive coaches, had been hoping to start an adaptive swim program. So here on at Stony on May 3, in partnership with Special Ed, we will be offering our first interactive sensory friendly swim program designed specifically for our
categorical students. Mrs. Warren will be inviting high school certified lifeguards to come and interact with the students and also use the time to learn how to better service special needs swimmers just in time for summer. We are also in the process of surveying our pack families to see what interests them the most so that we can offer more adaptive programs going forward. But as we are just getting started, we will begin by prioritizing where families indicate the most interest. We already have 10 families signed up to join us for our first swim program. On April 10, we had our annual IEP training led by special education executive director Tiffany Gauthier.
We had nearly 40 people in attendance, many of whom stayed after to have their questions answered. There are always families just starting their IEP process or web questions and and this topic which we offer annually for many years and find we find that we always need to offer. On April 15, we held our thirty second annual Sparkle Awards where we honored well over 500 staff, students and community members. I say it every year, but I think it's true again. It was a beautiful night and the best one ever. Special congratulations to our $250 classroom grant winners,
Katie Tash from Brewster Elementary Early Childhood and Diana Bader of Stoney Creek High School. I hope those of you who are able to join us found it as fulfilling as we did. This morning, we had the pleasure of hosting coffee and treats for the special education teachers and ancillary staff at Adams for their PD and got one more chance to pop in and say thank you before they got to work learning about better supporting our students and families. Our next public meeting will be tomorrow at Hampton Elementary at 7PM with our meet and greet time to speak with available administrators and PAC board members at 06:30.
Dave Murphy will be joining us to give a report on Special Ed openings and how we are working to fill them and Kimberly Hampton will be giving an update on how Special Ed and General Ed are partnering to give updates to curriculum for all learners. And finally, as I'm sure you know it's Autism Awareness Month and there has been a lot of talk lately about what others have decided that our kids can't or won't do and what autism does to families. I am a proud autism mom. Autism has made me an advocate, a better friend, a better mother,
and a better human. It's our story. We write it and we get to tell it. No one else. Any families in need of any special education support can reach out and let us know how we can help. We can be found on the RCS web page under special education, on our Facebook page or on our website rcspac.com. We'd love to hear from you. Thank you. Thank you. We are now on agenda item five, which is public comment. This provides an opportunity for board members to hear from community members. If you wish to speak and have not already filled out a yellow card,
please do so now. When your name is called, the board, please state your name and your relationship to the district. We ask that you address your comments to the entire Board and not to individual Board members, school district employees or to members of the audience. The Board will not be responding to comments or questions during the meeting. However, someone will follow-up if needed. At this point, I have I'll list a couple of people as we start and we'll have Cheryl Heinegger followed by Shelly Brown and Liz Schreck. Good evening. My name is Cheryl Heinecker, and I'm speaking here tonight as a community stakeholder,
a parent of an RCS graduate and a product of this district myself. I'm voicing my deep disappointment over the recent decision for RCS to eliminate the position of director of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The letter sent to the RCS families offered explanation that our district potentially stands to lose federal monies due to an executive order that is not yet law nor currently enforceable. In the last nine years as a very involved parent helping to improve this district's effort in understanding and embracing diversity,
equity, and inclusion, I've witnessed the creation and subsequent devaluation of the director of DEI position. Under doctor Shaner, the director of DEI position was created and elevated to a cabinet level position because the district need for training and culture change was further driven home by The need for training and culture change was further driven home by the shooting of a young black RCS student by a white man for simply knocking on a door. The community came together at that time and spoke loudly, demanding that this district needed to do better. Our DEI director helped the district take a critical look at areas where we fell
short, hiring practices, inequity in student disciplinary actions, actions, and faculty bias in recommendation for AP placement, just to name a few. However, with every change at the superintendent position, the importance and the respect for the DEI director declined. With the hiring of mister Russo, the DEI position was relegated to essentially a broom closet and is now completely out the door. With every demotion of importance came the subtle message that we speak that we speak that the importance of diversity,
equity, and inclusion, our actions are proving otherwise. Quoting superintendent Russo from his letter, the culture of our community is one that promotes care, inclusion, belonging, and equal access for all. He goes on to say, these cultural elements have been present for decades and will live on in our district no matter what the political landscape presents. Unfortunately, the culture present in this district for decades has been exclusionary in the nature seconds. Unless you are affluent, white, or Christian. In only the last eight years, RCS was starting to make strides towards true equity and belonging.
Now I fear without a dedicated DEI officer to continue to drive meaningful and sustained change, all of our gains will be lost. The message taken by many from this decision and that letter is that dollars speak louder than the minority voices. Mister Russo and the district, you could have been leaders. Now it seems that bullying in the form of financial withholding is literally trump Thank you. DEI or Trump moral character. Shelley Brown followed by Liz Schreck followed by Albert Rush. Hi. I'm Shelley Brown. I'm a resident in the school district and a taxpayer.
On 03/23/2025, I emailed the Board of Education about their need to adopt a student privacy policy. I beg to differ on a lack of community interest. The student privacy policy should specify that restrooms, locker rooms, showers included, would be restricted based on biological sex, which is determined by anatomical structures, body parts at birth. Based on prior meeting comments, your policy should also state that biological boys should not be sharing hotel rooms with
biological girls for overnight field trips. Establishing a student privacy policy as I just described and ensuring actual implementation and consistent practice of policy directives would reflect the board's desire for compliance with president Trump's executive orders on ending radical indoctrination in 12 or k through 12 schooling, which was 01/29/2025, and keeping men out of women's sports,
02/05/2025, and compliance with title nine of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, a federal court ruling, and dear colleague letters that have come from the US Department of Education. The US Attorney General's office announced on 04/16/2025 it will be bringing a civil lawsuit against the state of Maine for failure to restrict female sports teams, locker rooms, and bathrooms to biological girls.
Reportedly, the Trump administration has stripped grants from Maine through other departments and is considering retroactively pulling funding. The AG announced that California and Minnesota are up next. Hopefully, their investigation into Michigan and the Rochester Community School District is not too far down on the list. As a citizen, I will continue to speak out and raise attention to your practices that put biological girls in physical jeopardy and expose the district to the potential for loss of funding.
My comments are directed at the five board members, Butel, Gupta, Alsbach, Blake and Ines, and our superintendent who refused to address the need for a student privacy policy. Thank you. Liz Schreck followed by Albert Rush. Good evening. My name is Liz Schreck and I am the president of the Rochester Education Association. The recent elimination of the DEI director position has understandably generated significant discussion and concern among our members. And I want to share some of their perspectives with you. First and foremost,
the REA wants to assure our parents and community that our commitment to providing a world class education for every student in Rochester remains unwavering. Our members enter this profession because we fundamentally believe in supporting and celebrating the unique identity and potential of every child that walks into our classrooms. For us, fostering diversity, ensuring equity, and cultivating inclusion are not separate initiatives, but rather the very foundation of the work we do. We value the uniqueness each student brings. We recognize that a variety of backgrounds and identities enriches the learning environment for everyone
and deserves our utmost respect and support. We believe in establishing fair and just practices that proactively address individual needs, offering targeted support where it's required to ensure that every student has the opportunity to thrive. We are committed to creating classrooms and schools where every student and every educator feels a profound sense of belonging and where all voices are not only heard but they're actively valued. For the educators of the REA, the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion are not abstract concepts that can be discarded.
They are ingrained in our professional ethics and our daily practice. To suggest that we can disconnect teaching from these core values is, in our view, impossible. You cannot remove what lives in the heart of an educator dedicated to their students. Over the past week I've heard from numerous REA members expressing their profound concern about this decision and their unwavering commitment to their students. They worry that the leadership of Rochester Community Schools may be retreating from the very practices and values that underpin public education and our district's own all means all motto.
We urge you to carefully consider how future decisions will impact the educators and most importantly the students who are engaged in the daily work of learning and growth within our schools. We ask that you explore meaningful ways in which RCS can continue to actively support these values. Finally, I want to share a powerful sentiment from our membership. Despite this change, our teachers pledge to continue doing what they know is best for the students and the community. They pledge to continue to honor each student for who they are and provide them with what they need to succeed without bias or fear.
This is our commitment and we trust that the Board will carefully consider the implications of this decision on our collective ability to fulfill that promise. Thank you. Thank you. Albert Rush? Yeah. My name, Albert Rush. I guess a community involvement person. I've had a daughter that graduated in 02/2009, son that graduated in 02/2025. I have a granddaughter. Another couple of years will be part of this district. And I currently serve as the Rochester High School marching band, band camp DJ, and counselor. So I'm very much into what happens here at Rochester.
However, I'm calling to speak of my dis my pleasure with the displeasure with letting go of the DEI position here at Rochester Community Schools. The main reason being is I look around. I'm one of the I'm one of the few African Americans that are here and have been in this district and be coming to these meetings for over many years. I recall my son was having issues back in 02/1415. I had to go and sit outside the principal's office to get to get a chance to talk to talk about the issues, to figure out what's going on. In 02/2017, we put the position in with miss Robin Carter.
There was a place of parents to go to to talk with and to work with administrators to make sure issues and concerns that happened were followed and taken care of. Then all and then we worked together for so many different years. We had a wonderful, diverse, equity statement that came out. I don't know if that would that mess with the policy that the president has come forward? Do we do abandon that or do we keep that going? The problem is is that administrators, when these situations happen in the classroom, when they happen there, they need to be educated. They need somebody to help talk them through the situations. Is anybody on the board gonna be able to do that?
How many of our administrators have been taught in in in different different areas of, bias to be able to help the the teachers and the administrations work through these these situations? However, in reading mister Russo's note, it said, we are not we're not we're we're complying everything. We've done nothing wrong. And if we've done nothing wrong, why should we be getting rid of position just because there's a risk? There's a possibility that we may lose something. I wanna remind you of a book, a children's book that many of you read to your kids. If you give them also cookie,
they're gonna want a glass of milk. If we do not stand up for our diverse population of people, they're gonna come and take something else. Or maybe you've read Animal Farm when you're there. When you stay when you start taking more away, they're gonna keep asking for more and more and more. When you let a bully take your take your lunch money, he's gonna want your dinner money. He's gonna want your clothing. He's gonna want everything else. Are our diverse population worth standing up for? Can we stand up for that? Now if you say we have no issues here at Rochester, everybody needs to equity, everything is going on,
We've done the work. We're right where we need to be. We have no more issues of this concern. Then you're right to let the person go, but you know that's not true. Think about what you're doing and how it makes people of color, different backgrounds in different areas feel unrepresented that you don't care about them. You only care what somebody in the president's office says. Thank you. Thank you. Moving on to agenda item six, this is the consent agenda. All matters listed under the consent agenda are considered routine in nature by the Board of Education and will be acted upon by one motion. There is no separate discussion of these items.
If any member of the Board requests discussion of an item, that item will be removed. Please note that the items removed will now be discussed separately under the consent agenda and will retain the same number. For instance, if item 6.1 was asked to be removed, we would vote on item six six point two through 6.7 and then come back to 6.1 for a motion, discussion and vote. You may still request just one item in a report to be removed from the consent agenda. If this is the case, we would approve everything else and the item removed from the report would receive a new number. In this case, it would be 6.8, but still under the consent agenda.
Our consent agenda consists of 6.1, current bills payable from 03/01/2025 through 03/31/2025 in the amount of $15,010,516.86 Human resource item 6.2, human resource recommendations item 6.3, Board of Education work session minutes from March '4, Board of Education closed session minutes from March '5, Board of Education regular meeting minutes from 03/17/2025 Item 6.6,
Kelsey Bieswanger as the PAC PAC representative to Oakland Schools and 6.7, CBA Class 103 for Julie Allspa in the amount of $99 Is there a motion to approve the consent agenda as presented? Moved by Trustee Annas with support from Trustee Alsbaugh. Does any member wish to board member wish to remove an item? Trustee Lacoue? Item 6.1. All right. Item 6.1 will be removed. So at this point, those in favor of approving items 6.2
through 6.7, please say, aye. Aye. Opposed, please say, no. That's a seven-zero vote and items 6.2 through 6.7 have been approved. I'd like to congratulate Mike Benyon on his appointment as the principal at Hart Middle School. Mike, are you here? Mike, did you want to say anything at this time? You don't? Yes. So I wasn't prepared for this, but, I just wanna first my family, Tina, MJ, and Brooklyn. Brooklyn is a sixth grader here at Hart, and, I think she likes having me here.
And, it's been a great school year. Wasn't, wasn't planning on being in this role to start. I had a wonderful mentor who's here today. And I just wanna, thank everybody for believing in me and the support that I've had throughout the year has been outstanding. You know, I have been a proud member of Rochester for a lot of years and going through Ruth Brooklands and Ruthor and Rochester High School and being able to give back to the community that I grew up in has been just a dream of mine.
And I, am so, so happy to be in this role. So thank you so much for your support. All the people that have supported me to get to this point and I look forward to serving the Hart community in Rochester Community Schools. Thank you. Thank you. Congratulations. I just also wanted to recognize that we have several retirements listed, but they are all working through the end of the school year and they'll be recognized at our June 9 Board meeting. So at this point then, we have a is there a motion to approve Item 6.1, which is current bills payable for 03/01/2025 through 03/31/2025 in the amount of $15,010,516.86
Moved by, Trustee Annas is there support? Trustee Blake? And then is there any discussion at this point? All right. All of those in favor of of approving item 6.1, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, please say no. No. That's a six one vote and the motion is approved. We are now moving on to reports and we have several this evening and we'll start with the superintendent's update. Mr. Russo? Thank you, Madam President. A few updates today. First,
I would like to address, the the elimination of the DEI position. As the community may know, on April 11, the decision to remove a DEI position from the district was made based on a host of factors. The removal of this position was in response to repeated attempts since January to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion practices. Here are some facts. On April 3, the U. S. Department of Education issued a request for certification to to the Michigan Department of Education requiring them to certify compliance with Title VI and gather certifications from local school districts like Rochester Community Schools.
The US Department of Education continues to litigate its authority to require such certifications. The letter was not an executive order, but was delivered through the Department of Education discussing withholding funding if if our schools were found out of compliance. As I have stated all along, my candidate team and I have been seeking legal advice throughout the Trump administration's many executive orders and now this reminder of legal obligations letter to ensure we remained in compliance while we assessed our risk and exposure. Because of the shifting positions by the U. S. Department of Ed,
we were advised that there was a substantially increased risk of funding loss based on a host of factors which include, but are not limited to, reporting of claims of non compliance related to having the position, the existence of a DEI Director position even though we are in compliance of federal and state laws, and a reasonable belief that litigation and continued attacks by federal government and Secretary McMahon would have continued to increase our risk. For these reasons, our team's decision to eliminate the position was couched in reducing our risk of funding loss and to the best of our ability to protect $10,000,000
annually for all students and staff in our district. For perspective, here are some examples of what could be cut if we had to absorb a $10,000,000 loss annually: District wide transportation services, approximately 77 full time educators, special education subsidized services, athletics and reduction of secondary offerings. The U. S. Department of Education has moved to freeze funding at Cornell, Northwestern and Harvard Universities, not to mention the state of Maine's Department of Education. While those organizations continue to oppose the US Department of Education on these issues, the risk of funding loss is real.
Rochester Community Schools will still do the following: be responsive to student individual needs and those needs demonstrated by data trends, provide a welcoming environment for all students, staff and families, provide our community with opportunities to learn about cultures, embrace diversity in thought, cultures and beliefs, And remain in compliance with state and applicable federal laws. To be fair, our compliance does not necessarily mean we have eliminated the risk. Secretary McMahon and her Department of Education have taken an aggressive approach to enforcement of
Title six. Because of this aggressive approach, rather than subject Rochester Community Schools to the uncertain and unpredictable risk of enforcement, the district's team has chosen to reduce the enforcement risk and focus our attention to educating students. Again, I will state that we have no information to suggest that any violation of applicable law as it relates to those identified in 04/03/2025 certification request. Master property planning. As Mr. Rose gets ready, as mentioned, highly successful and sustainable organizations conduct facility utilization studies periodically to determine their footprint needs
for current demographics and for future considerations. After a bid process to meet our needs, Plant Moran RealPoint was granted the contract to assess our current and future demographics and to compare those projections with our footprint within RCS. We were honored to have a committee comprised of representation from each part of the district, every building was represented, and for students in programs from birth to 26 years of age. The charge of the committee was to evaluate the data presented within the frame of what our community had indicated during the strategic planning process as important factors to consider
as it relates to the facility usage across our district. The committee looked at identified needs and wants as an advisory to prioritize our possibilities. Mr. Paul Wills, a partner at Plant Rand RealPoint, will walk us through the process, data, and convey responses. Alright. Well, next, we are moving on to item 7.2, the master proper property planning update. Good evening, Madam President, Super Tender Restore and Board members. Again, we're very pleased to be here tonight to kind of give a culmination of the efforts through that request for proposals for master property planning. In your board packet,
you've got the slide deck that we'll cover this evening from that perspective. Also with me is Mr. John DePue. He's a senior consultant with us. He's actually going to be taking some of the slides relative to the utilization as well as some of the survey results as we go forward. As we're going through this, we want this kind of be reiterative. So again, as we get to every section, we'll stop and ask if there's any specific questions, thoughts, comments before we proceed in the next one. And so from there, we'll get into the presentation. So real quickly, just what was the master property meeting guidelines? I also think it might be helpful just to talk a little bit about Plant
Moran, RealPoint. I mean, you may be familiar with Plant Moran. But really then we're going to jump into the demographics of Rochester Community Schools. We're going to talk about headcount as well as FTE. And I'm sure if you've been through a recent finance discussion of Ms. McDaniel, you've kind of looked at kind of where the district's been and where it's going. We're going to talk a little bit about the utilization and the grade core considerations. And then the academic programming, again, it does start with the program itself and then ultimately the survey responses and committee recommendations board's considerations. So real quickly, a lot of you have heard of Plante Moran.
So Plante Moran, RealPoint, we're the real estate design and development division of Plante Moran. So the firm as a whole just celebrated our one hundred year anniversary. We were actually just named Fortune one hundred's best company to work for the twenty seventh year in a row. And RealPoint has been around for about twenty five years. So you think a lot of our corporate clients, Delta Dental, Carhartts, Ace Hardware, and then you really start thinking about what we do for education. So we're in the house. We have 135 staff members. Both John and myself have degrees in architecture, registered architects. We also have a lot of great clients, a lot of your peer districts.
So we're gonna kinda just high level, talk a little bit about, you know, everything from large districts such as Detroit schools, Utica schools. You know, this is probably the top 50, so we have about 39 of the top 50. We work with a hundred districts around the around the state. Large districts like I mentioned, Detroit Public Schools, fifty thousand students all the way down to some districts has been as little as 600, seven hundred districts going forward. So really, what is the master property planning process? So the district did go out for request for proposals. And again, very fortunate to provide our scope of services, our ability to actually work with a large group.
I think the group that you had pulled together from a input standpoint was a broad spectrum of community members, and we'll talk a little bit about that here. At the end of the day, this is really about what is the facility footprint for Rochester schools, Where have we been for the last five to ten years enrollment? And where are those opportunities to expand maybe some of the programs we have, early childhood education, special education? What do we want to do potentially at the middle school or high school levels going forward? As Superintendent Russell mentioned, there's over 70 individuals on the Master of Property Planning Advisory Committee.
So again, I just want to say thank you to Trustee Lawson and Trustee Gupta for their participation as Board of Representatives, but also Trustee Lacoue in terms of being able to meet with us I think mid March, just kind of take a look to make sure we're really using data driven information looking at that process going forward. The next is, again, looking at some of the guidelines. So again, not looking at re cohorting the entire district. We have some districts that look at decreased enrollment. They may look at a K-six model, a seven-twelve model. They may look at a K-two, a three-four, a five-seven, eight twelve. We have a lot of different clients looking at that collectively.
So the good news here is this is not about shutting down buildings. This is not about redistricting. As you can imagine, if you've lost three or 4,000 students, similar to your neighbors to the East, they're in a different situation going forward. So from that process, we really want to focus on what are those current programs at early childhood special ed and district wide such as a CT that's part of your strategic plan is what are those potential locations be over the next five years? And so at the end of the day, again, we've had 70 different individuals, very, very professional in terms of being able to come to the meetings prepared.
We actually had several different surveys, which we'll talk about. But more importantly, I also want to thank the administration team for their tireless efforts as well, sometimes working later into the evening in preparation for the next week's presentation going forward. The key dates you have, again, was Wednesday, the nineteenth, all the way through April 9. And tonight is our board update with considerations going forward. So, for any questions on the process or what was included or not included from that perspective? Okay. So let's talk a little bit about demographics. So again, you see a lot of different articles. So one of the things we take a look at is what's happening with the
Pew Research, what's happening with the Department of Community Health. That first slide you see in the right in the middle of the slide deck, the birth rates since 1900 to 2023, these are audited by the Department of Community Health in the state of Michigan. And so if you go back to or I'm sorry, 1957, I'm not going to ask anyone to raise their hands, but if you were born that year, congratulations, you're at the top of the baby boom of over 208,000 live births. We just received the twenty twenty three live births. It's actually under 100,000 for the first time since 1940. So again, how does that impact the State of Michigan?
How does it impact Oakland County? More specifically, how does that impact Rochester schools going forward? So one of the things I know Trustee Nakoo had in terms of from our March meeting was SEMCOG and high school data. So I think there were some worksheets, some opportunities for district board members to kind of do some research. What has happened with the population of Rochester as a total? It's still a destination district. People still like to be in Rochester. So the challenges you have is, you know, obviously, your entry level first time home is not necessarily conducive to younger families.
You'll see that in the presentation where your middle school and high school enrollments are leveling off, but the challenge is is that incoming next zero to five year olds kind of going forward. So from SEMCOG, this was really a look back to 2020 projecting out to 02/1950. So if you take a look in February, there's 931,000 students in Southeast Michigan. Specifically, Oakland County, there's over 225,000 students in the year February. And you kind of see in the 2022 time frame here from SEMCOG, that numbers dipped down to seven forty two from that level at the Southeast Michigan.
More specifically, Oakland County currently has 168,000 K-twelve students. So that's a significant decrease in the last twenty plus years. One of the things you also see is that's starting to level off actually as you start to look out for the next ten years and ultimately up to 2,050. So again, this is SEMCOG. And again, as mentioned, just highly accurate, reputable and conservative relative to the numbers that they project out for municipalities and for school districts. Looking at the same information differently, one of the things you'll see is kind of the Southeast Michigan. So circled in red is Rochester community as a whole.
And if you take a look, they're looking at the decreased birth rate really over the last twenty years. So about a 1.1% to 2% decrease from that perspective. When you take a look at it, out of the two thirty three communities, about 171 had a decrease. So obviously, if you're in green, you have an increase. If you're at zero, it's kind of in the yellow. And then the darker the color, obviously, the larger decrease going forward. Same information looked a little bit differently. Again, this is their 02/1935 projection from SEMCOG. Again, also highlighted in red there is,
again, a projection from today really about another 400 to 500 student loss from where we're currently at. We'll talk a little bit about that in our projections as we go forward. So again, again, one of the things you wanna take a look at is that data driven from SEMCOG. So we thought it was important to share this information so you hear that from those different organizations. A little bit different is actually from my school data. This is Kurt Metzger who is with Data Driven Detroit who's done a lot of work. This is a recent article, actually at the March, that kind of shows what are the other districts in Oakland County as a whole.
So at the top, you have Weld Lake with a loss of over 1,500 students, Oak Park, 14 hundred students, Waterford, 13 80 six. Rochester is kind of the middle of the pack, again, about a six fifty three student decrease in that time period. One of the things we want to keep in mind is we are looking at different datasets. So when we talk about what's included, what's not included, we have Feet, which is full time equivalencies and we also have headcount. When we're talking about the utilization that John will get into, we're really talking about how many students are in that facility from a headcount perspective. But again, what we're trying to do is really try to understand the trends. Again,
using some very reliable data sources with SEMCOG as well as with my school data. So what's happening as a whole? So again, this chart again is audited by the Department of Community Health. If you go to the far, far left, this is Oakland County live births. There's over 17,000 live births. You can see the impact of Gulf War in the mid-90s, a slight dip in 1997. Then you have the y2k.com in 02/2001, '2 thousand and '2. It dipped down below 16,000 to $15,267 You have the Great Recession,
really 02/2008, '2 thousand and '9, '20 '10. The county live birth is down to thirteen thousand three hundred. And then ultimately, the impact of COVID in 2019 of just under thirteen thousand live births. So one of the things we've highlighted here is in red is that's your current ninth through twelfth grade cohorts, your current sixth through eighth cohorts, and ultimately your K through five cohorts. So again, this is based on those live boards that are in Oakland County. We're also gonna talk about people that do move into the district. Again, they do transition to a second home into the Rochester Community Schools, which is great because that helps you try to stay off that top of that
chart where you're losing 1,200, 15 hundred students kind of concurrently. So one of the methodologies that we use is we take a look at community demographics. Again, average house price, average household age of the household owner. Again, one of the things you look at is the average age in Rochester is not necessarily as young as, let's say, in Brighton or South Lyon. So again, that zero to five cohort is oftentimes the challenge. We do take a look at your historical enrollment. Again, this is audited by the state at both your fall count as well as the spring count. And then as I mentioned, the live births which are again audited by the Department of Community Health.
So this chart on Slide 17, what it's showing is really going back over the last ten, eleven years. On the far left, you'll see the birth of 13445. That orange bar that you see with the numbers, that represents what percentage of your incoming kindergarten classes did you pick up from that particular year. And we'll talk a little bit about that. So back in 2014, '20 '15, you see a slight dip down below 7%. This is the transition to full day kindergarten. But if you look historically even through COVID, you've maintained roughly seven point two percent capture rate of those eligible live births.
The only problem is when you go from seventeen thousand live births to sixteen thousand live births to thirteen thousand live births, The incoming kindergarten class is going to be smaller. It's not as drastic again as maybe some of your peer districts who have lost thousands. Again, we can go back and talk some about that. But you should feel really good as a district, as a board administration to have that continual capture rate of approximately seven point two percent. This is the eye chart. Again, I'm not looking to have anyone read that holistically. We actually have a better graph. But what this breaks down from you is really going back to 2018.
Again, this is K-twelve and this is headcount. So this is, I'll call it, basically, the number of kids that you have. This is not a full time equivalency. This does not include, special education, does not include transitional kindergarten, any GSRP classes. This is true. What does that count? Because we're talking about facilities. And we'll talk a little about when Mr. Depew talks about preserving special education, preserving early childhood education at each of the facilities. But one of the things you'll see is the district's enrollment K-twelve went from just over 15,000 in 2018, just over to 14,140.
When you incorporate what SEMCOG is projecting as well as my school data in the next five years, you're going to start to see enrollments dip down about 13,400. Same information looked a different way as we looked at it by cohort. So again, K-five back in 2018, you had 6,500 students. Most recently, we had 6,100 from that perspective. Middle school, again, a slight drop from 3,600 to 3,387. And the high school leveling off at roughly 4,800 down to about 4,600 going forward. Same information presented a different way.
Again, you start to see that decline at the turquoise which is your K5 on the top. But if you look at your middle school and high schools, again, a relatively slight decline. But again, that's just due to strong capture rates of those middle school and high school kids going forward. So kind of the summary from the demographics. So really, as part of the master property planning request for qualifications was take a look to the past, see where we're currently at, where we're currently at. So what you see there is back in 2018, you had 15 just over 15,000 K through 12 enrollment headcount And then most recently,
you had 14,140. So that's eight seventy two students less in that time period. When you look at that breakdown a bit further, almost half of that was at the grades K-five and a little bit, kind of about 25% at six through eight and nine through 12. When you take a look at the same information, if you take a look at the elementary schools, the predominant loss from that perspective was Baldwin, Brewster and University Hills had anywhere from 100 to 125 student loss from that perspective. Hart Middle School, again, we're about 118 student declines since that standpoint.
And then, Stone Creek had about 150 students collectively. But the other good news is you do have, I'll call it, equitable kind of distribution of enrollment. So some of your older buildings, they have about 400 students in them. Some of your new buildings have as high as six twenty five students. When you start having elementary schools less than 300 and you have some that are over 600 and you have that disparity, it often creates problems from a programmatic standpoint of how to create equitable with electives with offerings for the students. So at the elementary level, again, 400 to six twenty five is what we normally see for peer districts.
Middle school ranges from 700 to 1,000. And at the high school level, about 1,500 to 1,700 from that perspective. So with that, I'm gonna stop for any questions on demographics, trends and any information, based on enrollment. So Well, I'll ask one. I'm curious when you were doing all the research for this, did you find that, the district is having more a larger percentage of students who aren't going to private school or outside of our district? We did see a slight tip, up from where it was. Let's say we were fortunate to work with the district in 2016,
obviously before COVID. We saw a slight increase, those attending private and or homeschool. That's not uncommon with some of your other peer districts where students have taken a look at a homeschool or a private. But when you look at a loss of, you know, 2,000 or 3,000 students every year, while the enrollment still may be up at private, it's still less of a population if that makes sense. So at the end of the day, I think that's one of the things we've talked about is where those program offerings, early childhood, childcare, things of that nature, help bring students into age three, age four, to kind of get them into the RCS system because what we have found is,
based on your historical moments, once they're in these programs, they like to stay and continue to grow with the district. Do you have any you said a slight uptick. I mean, I don't know what that means. About 1.5% to 2%. So, the state average for private versus public is about 90%, 10%. Oakland County is, 16% private and then I think you're just about 18% from that perspective. Some of the other districts we work with, Bloomfield Birmingham, those are as high as 20 three-twenty 5%. Smaller districts where there's not a lot of competition, private school, that could be as low as eight or 9%. So We kind of put you in line with Forest Hills,
trying to think of smaller districts. They're kinda the same well, it's just slightly less than that, but something similar to that. Yes. I'm sorry. Go ahead, trustee Gupta. Do we have any way to factor in, kind of anticipated or projected impact on enrollment from, say, immigration, you know, so students who who are immigrating here, from out of the country or something like that? Yeah. So we actually have a very diverse portfolio of clients. So you can imagine, Dearborn, Hamtramck, even the city of Detroit where there's a larger immigration population. Again, it goes back to what is the housing stock,
in terms of single family residences versus multifamily residents. We do take that into consideration, so we look at the housing portfolio and say, Okay, what are those that are specifically kind of in various ranges of, affordability? I would assume that Rochester is not necessarily, the most cost effective from a rental perspective. But again, we do take that into consideration again not just at the state level or the county level but also what's happening in Rochester, what's happening with your neighbors both East and West, North and South. So again, I know there's an uptick of immigration. I think that's helping Oakland County population, increase. But again,
for Rochester specifically, we're not gonna see a huge spike at that level. Should there be an increase? Yeah, but the question is can it grow faster than the offset of the declining birth rate, I think, would be the question, so. Trustee Licui? I'm just kind of curious about the slide 17 where you say the RCS k percent capture rate based on Oakland County live births. I'm wondering why it's based on Oakland County live births because we don't draw kindergartners from all of Oakland County. So Yes. What happens is those get audited by the county. So let's say my wife and I, our child is born outside of that county,
but then we come to reside here for that particular year. That's just one of the benchmarks. And again, it's really based on what is your audited kindergarten enrollment. So we're trying to parlay that exactly with the live birth. And again, it's a trend model. And so where live births be in 2025? We're not sure. But we know it's probably not going to be 16,000. We know it's not dropping to 10,000. But again, to be at 7.2 consistently for the early last ten years, I think it's very simple, plausible for the district to be, thinking of, from that perspective. But are we ultimately talking about people who do live in Rochester? Or does is this taking into account people all over It's those that actually specifically
live in Rochester within that age group. And so that's why I think if you look at the zero to four year old, live births, that's kind of the telling sign of, again, creating some financial models. And so I always tell everyone, you know, these are trends. So I guarantee our enrollment is going to be off next week, next year. So the lab risk go up or down. Are there is there four fourth, pre k for all four year olds? Is there a new charter school? Did someone eliminate a program, neighboring district? Like, how does that all impact? So really what we're trying to focus on is you used to have 15,000, just over 15,000, now we have 14,140. We know you have capacity roughly less than 800,
you know, student capacity. That's really, I think, the focus of the master property plan was to study that. And I can appreciate it from a financial modeling standpoint because, again, as a board, every June 30, you have to have a balanced budget. So where's our enrollment? Where's our funding balance? And that's often the challenge with a lot of our clients. But from a master property planning standpoint, we know we have some capacities. I think when Mr. Depew kind of talks about the utilization is you're not maxed out, which is awesome, but also not falling off where you have to look at closing a school or redistricting. It's really how can you grow some of those programs that parents and community members
want that aren't even in the system yet. So early childhood special education is part of your strategic plan, how you wanna handle CTE. So I think that's really a good point, to really focus on that. So In your projections at all, because it appears, at least for the most part, that our incoming kindergarten class is much smaller than our seniors that are graduating. So at what point do we get to a place where we would need to potentially, if we don't do anything different, to close a building or something like that?
I mean, how far out are we looking? Yeah. So the good news is that live birth is actually steadied off, kind of leveled off at 13,000. So we know the next zero to five years, you should anticipate about 900 to nine fifty incoming kindergarten classes. When I'm back to 2012, you used to bring in 1,100 kindergarten students and you're graduating 1,300. So now the new reality for Rochester is nine fifty ish, but you're still going to graduate 1,100, 11 50 because again, people are moving into the district at that middle school, high school level to keep that. So I would say the next five years, like we don't anticipate you closing any facilities.
I think you have some great opportunities here to grow some programs to help increase that utilization. Sometimes we have clients that, again, they've lost a thousand students and they're like, I can't have a high school with 900 kids in it. Like, that's tough. You know, I can't offer electives and AP classes. Again, Rochester has been very fortunate to have that 400 to 600 range at the elementary. If we saw 25% of your schools at, like, three twenty five, three 50 and, like, yeah, you may wanna consider something. But to be at 85, 90 percent, you guys are in a very fortunate position to be in,
in terms of not having to do, I think, for the next five years, like closing a building or redistricting or things of that nature. So at this point, I'm gonna turn over mister Depew who's gonna walk through the, utilization. Thank you, mister Wills. Again, just so everyone, just a little kind of refresher. So, I'm a a licensed architect in the state of Michigan, and I've had the opportunity to work with a few of the other folks on the Plant Moran Real Point team to walk all the facilities here. So there were 22 facilities here listed, of course, that are part of the instructional buildings for this district. We walked every single one of them,
and, we kinda have a tally of the results here on the next couple of slides. Currently, right now, I am working, primarily with a district that has over a hundred, active schools and currently is working on a $700,000,000, capital improvement program just to give a little bit of my background. Alright. So in looking at the way that we calculate the utilization process, one of the things that we, have to look at and determine through our our facilities, walkthroughs is looking at the number of general education classrooms. We also take into consideration the number of special purpose classrooms.
We take a look at the art, music, all the composition labs, the number of, pre k classrooms, and the number of vacant classrooms. And so one of the things that we'll end up seeing in the numbers is there is a pretty strong equity between the facilities, which is, which is great to have. In terms of a utilization, the benchmark that the Treasury has developed is 85% is, is really the kind of the target number that you wanna see as a district. And so we're gonna go into each of the different, ranges here of cohorts to take a look at what those numbers are. So from the elementary school level, we have 361 total full sized classrooms.
Of those, 287 are for general education purposes. There are 24 dedicated classrooms, 50 special purpose classrooms, and in our findings, we only, identified two vacant classrooms. So one of the things that's, important to note though is that while we only found two classrooms, the each of the rooms that are occupied are not at a %, which of course is not the standard or the the average. Again, 85% is, really the baseline. And we found in the elementary, schools, we found an 88% across all of the aggregate.
So, really, that's a great percentage to be at. And what that means is that there's about 990 students that right now are not currently enrolled and are not occupying a space within the elementary. But, what that does mean is that there's some capacity for some potential, additional programs or some other kinds of, possibilities that we had the advisory committee take a take a look at. So, we're going to do the same process now, and we're gonna take a look at the middle school. There are a 70 total full sized classrooms. Of those, a 30 are, dedicated for the general education,
24 for art, music, computer, or other dedicated classrooms. There are 11 special purpose classrooms, and we found five vacant classrooms across the middle school buildings. So what that means is that out of a a, total capacity of 4,080 students, there are 3,387 students, which puts the middle school range at 83%. While that is under the 85%, it is very close to that point. And so it's not of, any concern in regards to what that percentage range is, which leaves 693,
you know, potential, capacity for those students. At the high school level, there are 214 total full size classrooms. Of those 201 are for the general education purposes. There were 12 special purpose classrooms that we found, and there were only two vacant classrooms across all of the classrooms. So what that means is that out of 5,136, potential, capacity of the high school classrooms, we found that there's 4,628 students. That puts the utilization of these spaces at 90%, which is, again, fantastic. It's above the 85% threshold,
leaving 508, percent, capacity of potential options, in terms of the spaces. And there's gonna be a summary in just a moment, but I just wanted to express that the elementary range, we're kind of looking at, 22 ramping up to around 25 average is the number of students per classroom. That's kind of the target. In the middle school level, we're looking at around 28, students per classroom. And then in the high school level, we're looking about a target of 32 students per classroom. Just so that way, that gets back to the potential capacity that we have here with the number of
the classrooms. So again, taking a look at the the key takeaways just of this utilization information, 88% at the elementary school level, 83% at the middle school level, and 90% at the high school level. You know, all three of those are either above or very close to the 85%, which is the sector industry, standard for education. And so the best outcome of this is that at this time, no boundary revisions are being, required or even, recommended at this time. You know, the schools in general are being fairly well utilized in terms of the number of
occupants with the available spacing in that. So at this point, I'm gonna pause here and I'm gonna give an opportunity here if there's any questions about how we look at utilization. Trustee Blake? Yeah. I have a few questions on this. So first of all, when you're talking about the capacity and you're saying that we have all of this capacity excess, you're meaning by space, right, but not by staffing. Because if we got 1,000 new elementary students tomorrow, we wouldn't have we don't have the room to just drop them all in currently existing classrooms, right? That's correct. Teachers, right? Okay. And when you said 22 to 25 in elementary or 28 middle and 32 high
school, are you saying that's what we currently have or that's what the ideal should be? That's what the ideal utilization target is. That's kind of the educational sector practice of those ranges for each of those groups. So based on each of the, utilization numbers, you're looking at basically at the elementary, you're averaging about twenty, twenty one students a classroom. You're looking at about, 23, 20 four for middle school and then you're probably around 28, 20 nine for the high school level. That that's what I'm sorry. That's what we are right now? That's what you're you're averaging.
Correct. I find that so hard to believe. That does not jive with what I've observed at all. No. I think another way to look at it, if you go back to 2012, '20 '13, you had just under 16,000 students. And right now, you're at the fifth you know, just over 14,140. So if you look at the capacity, and again, they they don't come in neat little, you know, classrooms of 25. You may have 32. At an AP math class, you may have 18 at a foreign language class. So again, when we look at the utilization, it's really geared towards what is the current square footage, what is the general size of educational classrooms.
And then again, kind of based on the number of gen ed classrooms, we're not including special ed, we're not including art, music, STEM labs, we're preserving those if you will. And again, kind of based on educational approach, now you also have what may be reality where your teachers' contracts are significantly higher than where you're at and some of them maybe because of budget issues, it might be space issues. So the purpose of the utilization was what are those facilities that, let's say for instance, saw a significant decrease from 2017 to 2024? So as I mentioned,
you've got, Brewster and Baldwin. You know, these are a hundred and a 25 decrease in the last five years. So when you start walking through, do you need four sections of third grade or do you need three sections? Or do you have five sections, you may need three? So that's kind of the exercise that we've kind of presented the information for the administration team to say, if the board says, yes, we really should expand early childhood, where could it be, how many classrooms? We'll get into a little bit about kind of what that looks like. But you're right. I mean, there's going to be some buildings, Delta Kelly, like, you can't fit any more kids to that building. And so you're at 101%.
Great. But you don't have every single building in the entire district at 101%. You want some flexibility where you may need a fifth cohort of special or a third classroom for special ed or a fourth cohort of something, from that perspective. So, you know, that's what I think is important, like, being between about 85% is ideal. Now again, you've got a handful that are well above 95% from that perspective. But you also have somewhere in the eight like low eighties. So we're gonna average those out. But you're not at a point, I think to my president's question is you're not at a point you have to close anything down.
Really, it says how do you best utilize some of that underutilized space at the elementary for a handful of classrooms? You got a middle school that's underutilized about 150 students less than where it was five years ago. You've got Stony Creek, and we'll talk a little bit about that. But really, the purpose of utilization is what is our current enrollment, what's our projected enrollment and then where do we have opportunity to, I think, grow some programs. And again, it's not going to be every single building, but it will be maybe some very specific buildings for consideration. Before we move on, just could you go back and tell me one more time what our average what you're saying our average,
in class sizes? So one of the things that we have is, we took a look at, the general education classrooms. And then what we looked at is, as Mr. Hapu mentioned, you've got some targeted class sizes from elementary level. Kindergarten, 24 kids, all the way up to 28 kids maybe at fourth grade. That's how we kinda run our projections. You also have teacher contracts. But projections or what our current class sizes are? What I I because I thought I heard you say 21, 20 two was our average class size. So that's that's I need you to repeat that for me to understand that because
that has not been my experience or what I hear from others. So Yeah. So we'd say probably at the elementary level, you're in that 26 to 28 per classroom. Again, you have some that are gonna be much higher. So we're very confused. I don't think I'm the only one who's very confused up here. How can we say 21, 20 two and then no, it's really 26, 20 eight? So again, we found some classrooms that did have 18 to 22 kids in them from that perspective. But we ran our analysis for what is the utilization. We looked at 24 at the kindergarten, all the way up to 28.
And then once you get to middle school, it goes up to 29 and then 32. Okay. So if I I want to repeat this because I'm still not sure. So the average class size in our schools right now is 24 to 28 at kindergarten at elementary. It's 29 at middle school. And then it's what did you say at the high school? Up to 32 is kind of the average. 32 at high school. Okay. So then can you go back and tell me what you were saying about '21,
'20 '2? Yeah. So again, that was more of a observation. Just that there are some classes that have 30 kids at the high school. There's I mean, we found two classrooms with 18 kids in. But Right. But but that's not an average. Correct. And that's definitely what I heard you say. Correct. So, okay. So 24 to 28 is the average at elementary, 29 at middle school, 32 at high school. Correct. Okay. Thank you. What that does is it then produces those amounts that you see up on your screen in terms of our utilization. And so that's why it's important. We have some districts that are, you know, deficit elimination.
So just to give the community and, again, maybe a reminder for the board, like your teachers' contracts are 25 at kindergarten, 32 up through fifth grade, and then it goes to 34. So we could run analysis that way as well. But again, you're not in a necessary dose of elimination. So again, we do have some clients that are, hey, I'm at 3% fund balance. I need to run the analysis this way. We ran it more as an academic lens, which again is kind of that 26, 20 8, up to 32, but not over not to the max as teacher contracts would allow, but it's kind of educational approach.
Did you have a follow-up on this or a new question? Okay. And then we'll go to Trustee It's hard for me to understand. If you're saying we have 24% to 28% average in our elementary and then that's an 88% utilization and we only have two vacant classrooms in the whole class, how would we get to 100% without cramming like 35 kids in these classes? Yeah. So give me an example. If I go to Baldwin back in 2017, there was six fifty six students in that building. Now they have, five twenty eight. So that's a 128 student decrease.
The building's still the same size. You still have the same number of classrooms. You take a look at Delta Kelly, like, they're actually larger than they were in 2017, upwards of 626 students. It's a newer building. It's larger. So you've got some buildings built in the fifties, sixties, and seventies that are smaller. They don't have the capacity. Again, most of our clients don't try to get to a % because you need some flexibility of programming at the elementary and middle school levels. High school, a little more you know, I got a 30 AP class in another foreign language. That's a little more malleable than I need an entire section for, let's say, 24, 20 eight kids.
So again, one of the things we did was looked at your 2024 enrollment, again, audited by the state. And, you know, you had 14,401 students and then we divided by the number of classrooms by that grade level, which kind of produces the averages, if you will. But again, we're not trying to get Rochester schools to 100% where every single classroom has, you know, 20 to 32 kids. This was really an exercise of we know you've gone from five hundred and five hundred five hundred or 15,500 to 14. You got roughly a 800 student decrease. We know there's some spots in the district that you can consider some program expansion.
Okay. Trustee Lecui? Well, like my board colleagues, I've been having trouble wrapping my mind around this to some extent too because on the one hand, it sounds like you're saying we do have a lot of extra space. But I'm trying to figure out where that space is. So, like, based on this presentation, we've lost 872 students since 2018. And in our super superintendent cabinet notes recently, the forecast suggests it might continue to to decline another 146 students for the 2526 school year. So since 2018, by the end of next year,
we will have lost over a thousand students. So if you average it out and say we've got 25 students per classroom, that would be 40 classrooms of students. But then on this same report, we're saying we only have nine empty classrooms total. And I'm just wondering how that's possible. Yeah. So what you find is, you know, you will spread out, to principals and teachers will spread out and that's okay. You may have a secondary support classroom that maybe only require a smaller classroom. At the end of the day, it's not uncommon to be I'll call it utilize using every space but not being
at capacity, if that makes sense. So one of the things that we've kind of worked with the administration team and also with the advisory committee is you've got three or four elementary schools that have experienced more than 100 kids loss in the last five years. You got Hart Middle School about 118 kids less and then Stony Creek about 150 less. So those are really the primary schools where you'd want to consider potential program expansion. Some of your schools where, you know, I'm looking at the Delta Kellys, the Hamels, etcetera, you're almost like equal enrollment where you were five years ago. So there's not a lot of capacity, maybe there's none. So again, it's kind of a by building. I think the real purpose of master property planning was you've got a strategic plan
that wants to talk about expanding programs. We worked with the seventy plus committee to really focus on these three or four components. The recommendations I think considerations are answering that question for you is like, in the next five years, can we find eight to 10 classrooms for special ed? And the answer is going to be yes. Even if your enrollment stayed exactly the same, you'll have no students for the next five years, you still have an 800 student decrease from the last five years. So again, working with Ms. Gauthier, she'd work with administration team, come back to the board and say, hey, in 2026 or 2027, we'll have three more special ed and here's the type of programs we'll be and
here's where they could go. That was our understanding of the Master Property Planning was to look at the trends, look at enrollment capacities and then really try to figure out working with the 70 plus person committees. Where those programs are probably highest and best priority and ultimately, you know, where could they potentially go? Okay. I have another question. Trustee Ospa. Is it a follow-up? It kind of is. Yeah. It is a follow-up. All right. If it's directly related, not an additional question because I think Trustee Blake had a number of questions as well. And he got to follow-up as well. All right.
So my other question is, in addition to these buildings, did we also factor in Caring Steps and the Schultz Building? And what do we make of those buildings and their utilization? Because they seem like they're big buildings. They are. Usually Schultz. And again, one of the things you look at is, and I know the use of Caring Steps, kind of changed during the process, which is okay. Obviously, the utilization would, you know, go down if you decide to relocate some programs elsewhere. We did that building. I think that was kind of outside the purview. But we did take a look at the Schultz Educational Campus and caring steps and
kind of walk with the community like here is could you expand X, Y and Z? Yes. Okay. Where could that potentially be? And you'll see in the survey results like there may not be a lot of support for Building A, Building B, but maybe Building C as we get into that. I'm sorry, could you just say what was outside of the purview? I think like any non educational space, we did include 501 as a conversation and we'll talk about that. But obviously maintenance operations, administration buildings, we're really focusing on current educational facilities, current educational programs with consideration of maybe magnet program or expanded CT as part of
the strategic plan. Madam President, as a point of clarification there though, aren't the Schultz Building and the Cairns Steps, those are educational buildings too, right? Yes. And they were included. Correct. They were oh, so they are not outside the purview? Correct. They're included in the study. Yep. That was what I thought. That was part of the 22. That's what I thought he said as well. That's why I followed up on what was not included. Okay. Can I can I offer, I think, a middle ground? I think what mister was saying, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that the change in programming that happened during the process was out of the
purview. Like, if they were gonna add different programs or we were gonna pose that to the community, I've I'm seeing the hands the head shaking. Yes. In terms of caring stuff. Yeah. We tried to provide a snapshot of basically first quarter of this year. Like, what was it currently used for? How many classrooms there are? And then again, what's that utilization and potential expansion, so Trustee Alsbaugh? So I've worked in a lot of buildings, and I know we tend to grow out into the amount of space we have. And I'm trying to square, you said we have two vacant classrooms across the elementaries. But you said if in the future we need eight to 10 more special ed
classrooms, there is an opportunity to find that. So two could become eight. So what I'm wondering is when you did the survey of the buildings, if you found something that was, according to blueprint, set up to be a classroom, but now let's say, some person has decided, well, I need an office or I need a space for a small group, did that come out of the total classroom? And is that how you get back to there could be eight classrooms available when on this slide, it only says two? So I'm wondering, like, when you walked into a space that, on a blueprint could be a classroom but was not being used as a classroom,
how was it treated in this survey? So in this scenario, it would be basically be able to be repurposed as an occupied but gen ed space. So when we say only vacant, like really there's only two that had no name on it, no furniture, it was literally storage. But as you go through and work with the administration team is, here's our core K-five. Okay, great. We have special education early childhood at this facility. You start looking at, okay, I've got 72 students and I've got five classrooms for fifth grade, let's call it. Well, if you're at 28 kids in a classroom, you really should have three sections, not five, and that's how you open up two.
Correct. So we walked through all 22 buildings with administration team, kind of based on our walk through and did the same exercise. When you look at, your kindergarten level, again, Rochester's new reality is like nine fifty students. It's not 1,100 where it was, let's say, in 2015. So Like, I guess that doesn't quite I mean, so you said if I've got I could move around and use my existing classrooms differently. My question is, let's say you did a building survey and there is a building that could be a there's a room. It could be a classroom, but, you know, I don't wanna pick on any positions, but my learning consultant has decided this needs to be her entire office because,
you know, rightfully so, she's got a managed curriculum and she needs this whole space. So on the blueprint, that could be a classroom. But now, it is not used as a classroom. It's used as somebody's office. How was that room reconciled? Yeah. So it actually be coded green as available for gen ed. And so that's part of the planning exercise. You have to meet with the individual principals saying, hey, we're going to expand two more special education classrooms here. We know the building has lost 135 kids in the last five years. Is this the right location? Is this the right cohorts? And then you start to literally go back to those observations to say,
I need three sections of K through five not four sections based on where we're at both current enrollment as well as projected. So in that scenario, if there was a did not use for a K-twelve program, we did identify that as an optional for that classroom for Gen Ed. So, yes. Trustee Annas? So along those lines, did you find that, because you mentioned the decrease in population at Baldwin, Brewster and U Hills, And, did you find that there was a correlation in the classroom utilization in those communities,
based on that decline? So those would be the three buildings at a K-five level that would have the most capacity for growth? Correct. Okay. Thank you. You started talking to 100 student classes, maybe three to four classrooms. But again it goes back to is there another program that potentially should be there that's not there currently. So that's it's kind of moving the puzzle pieces, if you will. But those are the facilities that we'd look at from that capacity standpoint. I guess I asked that question because I would like to see a breakdown, and you mentioned, middle school and high school too of, you know, what those areas were,
so that, you know, for future planning, if, superintendent Russo and his administrators come to us and say we're we're we're targeting on this building because of this data, that would be helpful to know. Yeah. Actually, one of the, nice things is we have associated walk throughs with those floor plans that are marked up. So green's gen ed, I believe yellow's special education, orange is support services. We're only told we had an hour to present that no. But you have all 22 floor plans with the analysis. And again, it's a live document. So as you get the 'twenty five, 'twenty six enrollment, you McDavid can like McDavid can update that and say,
okay, here's where our utilization is. So it's a living document that the district used for planning to implement. Just as a follow-up, madam president, I I would say that it would be helpful, maybe it's an annual review. Superintendent Russo, you come to the table and, you know, you share based on that enrollment, you know, if you're seeing any shifts that kind of deviate from what initially was was determined. Can I respond to that just for I think there's there's a there's a couple of things at play too when we look at and I don't know how far, if that how much longer? I'm not trying to extend the presentation, but to say that if we have a need for for example,
you know, there's a need for increased special education classrooms. That's a need, not a want. Right? That we wanna make sure that we're putting those classrooms in spaces where not only we we we we might have to shift some things around so that we don't have, a categorical classroom on on its own, for lack of better words. We we like to call it an on an island, you know, as best as possible. So there is some shifting that goes on for utilization of what is considered Gen Ed rooms. But I mean, to your point, Trustee Annas, to come back annually to discuss,
you know, what does it look like in terms of utilization every year, year, that's fine. It would just we wouldn't be comparing apples to apples necessarily annually. Trustee Lozan? I just had a question about the need to expand. You said one high school, Stony. So if you were to expand programs in, say, Stony, would we be able to offer it to all high school students? Like, would they be bused to Stony? Or That's a great question. So I yeah. Actually, I mean, I think, mister Cuisinella did a great job, like and actually, I'm actually kind of getting the next one which is actually talking specifically to three programs.
Those are really included like if I have program A and it's at high school C, do you offer transportation? Is there kids students drive themselves? How does that impact their day? That's obviously that implementation phase. We do have some districts where they have the three to four high schools where there may be program A over here and program B over here and they figured out. So I think that's a great question in terms of how now is the implementation of where that should be, could be and then ultimately how you support that operationally from that perspective. And I guess I just want to go back to how you did talk about
that if we had more wanted some additional programming or something that we had space in our school. I guess I don't I don't think it's as easy as that. I think it's a complex, situation, right? Because you may have, you know, three first grade classes and or you may have sixty first graders. Right? Well, are you gonna do two thirty kids in each? One or are you gonna break it up and do three classes of 20? And unless we got into you know, you said no need for redistricting, but unless you get into a redistricting situation where you're almost doing it every year
to maximize classrooms, it's not that easy. I guess that's the point, unless there's some way you can tell me that it's that easy. It's not easy. That you're always going to have, some spaces available. And, because it fluctuates from year to year, and you may have sixty first graders this year, but you may have 90 next year, or you may have 50. So you've got to have some space to be able to play with to some degree. Otherwise, that's how we ended up with portables and, you know, that type of thing at our schools.
And that's why I think a lot of districts shoot for that 85% to give them that flexibility of programming. So again, if you've got a facility that has 20, you know, gen ed classrooms, but maybe you have 27 total, you know, 25 kids in the classroom, you should have five fifty students in that building. If you're running at 30, now it's 600. By the way, if you're at 20, it's only 400. So you can kind of see it's going to change every year. And I think the really the purpose of this was, when we get into the program offerings, you're going to see it's a very controlled growth. We're not looking for an entire way to go place 200 students. This is a lot more, I'll call it strategic,
kind of in line with your strategic plan of how you want to handle some of that underutilized space. And it's not easy. Like I said, it takes time to really plan it, what does the community want, the parents want, how do you finance it, how do you operate it to make sure that you can support the programs in perpetuity. And I'll just make one other comment just that we have had an increase in categorical classrooms in the district as well. And those traditionally have are much smaller than a traditional classroom. And so when we talk about we've had a population
we have fewer students, but we're still utilizing classrooms. I mean, I think that has a lot to do with it as well. Yes. I think as Mr. Dupee mentioned, right now at the elementary, about 50 special purpose type classrooms. And again, if you're looking at a controlled growth of, let's say, eight to 10 more in the next five years, where could that potentially be? Same thing with the middle school. And so if I may, I'm going to kind of dovetail into the program overview, if you will. So again, thank you so much, for Ms. Gauthier, Mr. Cruzmotto and Ms. Hampton for their presentation.
So we start off actually our second meeting, really talk about what are those programs that RCS does offer. So currently, this is a snapshot or dashboard of the early childhood program from that perspective. Again, you take a look at who's enrolled. So right now there's about 13 classrooms and four elementary schools that are utilized, for early childhood services. In the upper right, you kind of see the breakdown of GSRP, which is the Great Start Readiness Programs, total number of students, total number of classrooms. But one of the things you'll see on the very bottom of that chart there that, is plant growth of roughly nine to 12 additional classrooms over the next five years.
And so again, taking a hard look at year by year enrollment, capacity utilization by buildings, where could potentially that early As I mentioned, this was what was presented at March 6. I know I think subcu right after that, the Board changed some operations with carrying steps. So again, how does it impact utilization and capacity going forward from that perspective? So from the two different committee meetings that we had, we then ran into the questions of, okay, what other information is needed, from that perspective? So again, should RCS review expanding early childhood by roughly nine to 12 additional classrooms?
Mr. DePuy will kind of go through some of the survey results here. We also asked, if yes, then where could those potential locations be? So again, we've, took a look at the current elementary schools, other existing elementary schools, Caring Staffs, the Schultz campus, and then also five one University. Next, we looked at special education, again, presented at 03/06/2025. The best news is thank you. It's currently offered at every single 22 facilities. And again, I think as Ms. Gautreaux mentioned, you really want to have some course collaborating together, like how does it tie in with the early education?
So I think having that combined lens was going to be beneficial to the students. So I think the staff, when you're looking at expanding those programs, one of the things you'll look at is again, plan growth of eight to 10 classrooms, from that perspective over the next five years. And it's important to note that RCS actually provides services from birth all the way to age 26. And so we're focusing on the K-twelve population. It's important also to say, Okay, who's our special education students eighteen to 26? Who are those you know, two, three year old two, three year olds that need some services, and where could those potentially be?
And then lastly, same questions we did with the, early childhood is, again, looking at expanding those programs. We talked a little bit about relining the cohort alignment. So not getting too much of the details, but having those students as they enter elementary, go to middle school, and ultimately to high school. So they're staying with their cohorts of their friends and families as they go through the system. And then again, where should those facilities be located from that perspective? And lastly, we had the specialized programs. Again, we talked a lot about the International Academy and some of the opportunities and challenges there. We did focus a lot on CT. So as part of your strategic plan is how can you grow some of those
CT programs that maybe aren't currently offered at OTEC or currently not offered? Again, how do you collaborate with the universities, the community colleges, the business partners? We're seeing a huge growth in this area as you can imagine with some initiatives at the state level, for CTE going forward. From that perspective, again, looking at one or two additional CTE spaces. So I think, to Trustee Anderson's question like, you know, would this program be offered at every high school? Not sure. But we do know that you have some capacity of one to two classrooms, at the high school level that you can potentially consider that. And then last, we also,
talked about maybe growing some additional programs. So, STEAM, STEM, maybe a potential magnet program at the elementary, middle school, or high school. And in the same fashion, we asked the same questions, kind of the three separates of, you know, what the committee would recommend and again, locations for that. So at this point, I'm going to stop and ask and offer up any questions on relative to programming. And obviously, we have Ms. Hempton, Mr. Cusmano and Ms. Scott here to answer any questions on the dashboard specifically. Any questions or okay to move on? I think this was just kind of laying the groundwork.
We're waiting to hear about the recommendations. So I'm just going to run through a real quick survey results with Mr. DePere. So John? Thank you, Mr. Wills. So the first survey results that we obtained from, the group, again, as Mr. Wills mentioned, over 70, diverse persons that represent different areas within Rochester Community Schools. The first question that was asked was whether or not the, district should look at expand looking at expanding early childhood programs. And so it was pretty resounding,
yes, almost 87%, in the results to this question here. So there was a pretty resounding desire to do so. Expanding on that further, if yes, we ended up looking at which of the specific types of programs should be expanded. And so based off the results, we saw a very strong desire to look at expanding them through other existing elementary schools. Second in the results was the current elementary school, which is housed just under 70% and then followed by Caring Steps as the third
place, in this survey result. Just definitionally, when you're talking early childhood, is there a definition? Is there an age? Is it three and four? Is it younger than that? Yes. So from a programmatic standpoint, if you're looking at these programs up here. So again, three floors, it'd be GSRP, and then those types of programs from my perspective. So kindergarten would stay transitional kindergarten would stay at the at the current schools, but this is really that early childhood. So three, fours primarily. Trustee LeCouille? I guess to follow-up on Trustee Blake's question. Was there any kind of discussion about what type of program for the 3s and
the 4s? Are we continuing with the paid pre K program, the GSRP and the K prep that we're offering? Or are we specializing or? No discussion? Mhmm. Okay. Good evening. But to that point, the conversation, captured early childhood so that we can be sure to encompass care for students who are not kindergarten eligible. So our transition kindergarten students are kindergarten eligible by the definition of the state. And then care prior to that, we wanted to think, openly about whether those were students that were currently in a tuition program, students who may be interested or families who may be interested in a GSRP kind
of classroom place. Kimberly, I'm going to ask you to borrow someone else's. I don't think it's picking up your voice at all. Okay. She's green. Better? Oh, now I can hear you. And now I can hear myself. Sorry about that. I'll start again. We actually use the umbrella early childhood very intentionally because some of the various programs across Rochester Community Schools have had a different nomenclature over the years. We wanted to make sure that the group that we were working with was understanding that we were really seeking input, for care for four year olds and three year olds. And then in the current caring steps model, this had been shared,
even younger than that. But to get some inputs around, the community's preferences in terms of care locations and it would include anyone not kindergarten eligible. So our transition kindergarten students are kindergarten eligible by the state of Michigan's definition. And then also recognizing that, the state of Michigan and Oakland Schools supports two programs like Great Start Readiness and or Head Start for districts that offer such a program, is a moving target, in terms of eligibility that is often bound by facilities, ability to accommodate the number of children within.
So we're working right now through how those eligibility factors adjust in concert with the available classrooms and spaces that we have. Okay. So just just make sure I'm understanding, you were just talking in general about early childhood for three and four year olds. You weren't talking about what specifically we might offer. It was just a general broad early childhood for three and four year olds. Absolutely. Absolutely. Got it. Thank you. Okay. We did find, nearly 100% of the respondents, agreed that, RCS should look at reviewing the cohort alignment for the special education programs as they're
currently offered. And then, if yes, this is, the results I'm looking at which specific program or where the program should be going. So we saw it was pretty close between, looking at at relocating or expanding those programs in the existing middle school and the existing high school, and then followed closely by the existing elementary school. There was not, nearly as much desire at Schultz or the five zero one. And then looking at the specialized program spaces, we again saw almost 95, yes of the respondents in terms of should, Rochester look at expanding,
specialized program spaces. Among these, the question was the CTE, looking at the STEAM and STEM, there was a resounding, about 94%, yes to the respondents of the question, looking at, if this would be, one of the desired avenues. And then, looking at specifically magnet programs, there was a little lower, desire, but it was still about 78% of the respondents, looking at these programs. Before you go on, was there any specific magnet programs identified or talked about during that time or just just in general any magnet program?
Correct. Just in general. Yep. Okay. And were they ever asked to prioritize? Okay. Okay. Yeah. All And then, following, the yes, these in terms of the specialized programs, the, respondents saw that over 98%, prefer that to happen at an existing high school. We see about 81% or 82% at the existing middle school level and then, at the existing elementary school at about 73%. So let me transition. So, we understand that every district has limited resources. So again, we wanted to ask the advisory committee, what is the prioritization of that? So,
right now, the number one priority would be the special education followed very shortly with early childhood. You see a third priority would be CTE programs. And then kind of at that halfway point, if you will, is the magnet program. So from that perspective, special ed early childhood would be the first priority 1A, 1B, and then obviously CTE would be the second priority. Can you just, talk to me a little bit more about what realigning the special ed cohorts means? Are you talking about keeping the ASD kids all moving together in a certain program or are you talking about keeping them with the kids in their neighborhood and creating
multiple strengths. Ms. Scott here. Thank you. That is a wonderful question. And I'll try to be really mindful on time because I can talk about this for a long time. So when we're when we're looking and talking about cohort alignment, first we go back to what our federal and state law is, and talking about the least restrictive environment. And that typically is in the, in the neighborhood, in the the school, which is closest to where the child resides. Sometimes that's not possible, and that specialty program such as an autism, classroom may not be available in that nearest elementary school.
And so then we try to find one that's the closest for the next. So when we were talking about cohort alignment, we were really looking at how can we try to keep, all of our students, first of all, as close to their home, schools as possible. And then second, and equally important, how do we, have those students follow with their same peer group from elementary to middle school to high school? And in some cases that happens, other cases, you know, there may not be a clear alignment, throughout that K-twelve continuum. So looking, how can we improve that?
Trustee Lacoue? I was also wondering, okay, earlier when you were asking about should we review early childhood, should we review special ed, should we review magnet programs, were respondents able to just say yes to every single category on those questions or did they have to be selective? They had to be ranked. So like for instance, the first survey was really about should we do these three items or these three initiatives? And then the second one is, okay, if yes, then what is the priority? And that's really the aspect of the second survey was understanding, yeah, of course everyone wants to expand program X A,
B, C, D, and A. But we understand that student enrollment, foundational allowance equals your budget. And again, so we have to help them get the information from the advisory committee, like what is that number one priority? And I think what you're seeing on the screen there is really the first priority is going to be special education, early childhood. Again, those kind of get dovetailed together and then CT. So again, magnet kind of was the fourth priority, which, you know, again, I if you had 35%, forty % phone, I'm not like Microsoft Excel. But at the end of the day, they thought the CT program at the high school would probably be the kind of
the preferred priority. And then I think subsequent results, one of the things you'll see here is where is those locations? So again, caring steps wasn't necessarily a priority. It was really more of existing locations and other elementary locations. You start getting more into, again, special education prioritization. I'm looking at other locations. So again, trying to get from one special education, maybe you have two or three that are kind of cohorted together from that perspective. And then also, the magnet programs. So again, it was a fourth priority. But as you can see, if there was a potential or a desire from the administration of the board,
the high schools would be the first priority of where that program would go. And then same thing with the CTE programs. Overwhelmingly, they should be at the high schools from that perspective going forward. So go ahead, Trustee Lizotte. I just want to make a couple of comments as I was on the committee answering these questions as well as, miss Gupta. It was kind of hard to answer these questions because we didn't know what the district was looking for, kind of what we were answering. And in a sense, I don't think it was fair that special education was on there because we legally have to provide special education.
So, yes, we have to grow the program if the population is growing. So comparing that to like a magnet school, hands down, it doesn't even matter what the answers are gonna be. We have to provide special education. But with the the the basis of, you know, would you like to expend expand early childhood? Sure. But how? The knowing why we were choosing that would be very helpful, what the plans would be for choosing that. So it wasn't like we had to answer questions too. We couldn't really leave anything blank. So it was just the question that we were asked literally were these questions with
these boxes. There was nothing else to add to it. There was I mean, there were a couple questions asked in the audience, but there were not a lot of questions. So I wouldn't a % take all this data to heart because some people may have just been picking as well. Especially, I don't know, like, magnet falls last. I know there's a lot of people that would like to have magnet and everything else, but everyone knows that special education has to take place first. Yes. I think, so kind of the takeaways that we found again from the survey was we had the initial survey of religious programs.
And again, I want to commend, the three presentations we spent nearly almost an hour and a half basically talking about those three specific programs. The second survey is really again, the prioritization. And again, we've done this for over 100 districts. You'd be surprised what comes out of these committee meetings. And the format was, you know, we had breakouts. We had four to six person tabletops. So Ms. Hampton would present on early childhood. They spend ten, fifteen, twenty minutes talking about it, then we'd have the survey. Ms. Gauther talked about special education over two meetings and we talked about the prioritizations. And so again, the master property planning advisory is more of we want to,
the next step is how do you implement it? And so some of our takeaways or findings were, again, the priority, yes, special education is guided by the law. We actually have some districts that don't offer special education. They actually send it to other districts and other ISDs. So, I know Ms. Scott, you can probably get all the but the question is, can we grow it? And people wanna choose Rochester because you do have a robust special education. So I think it was important to prioritize it. Yes, it's you're guided by the state law, but they're not the state doesn't tell you, you have to give 45 classrooms for special ed. You just have to simply provide those that are enrolled to your district going forward.
The good thing is that the seventy plus committee says, yes, we support growing nine to 10 classrooms over the current facilities you have. And by the way, we think early childhood should be dovetailed to that. So again, how can you grade that cohort going forward? And again, the eight to 10 classrooms, again, it's not going to be every single building. That is part of that, Trustee LaSondre, your point is that implementation stage of what does it look like financially? What does it look like operationally? What does it mean from a facilities and transportation perspective? And then ultimately, CTE, again, had very strong support. And again,
there was other, you know, discussions that were had that kind of fell off to the wayside, you know, relative to some programming. So, well, that was kind of the major focuses of education. Lastly, again, the priorities again were that special ed, early child and CTE. And I think some other questions that were answered that there's really not a programmatic need for five zero one for early childhood special ed or CTE. From that perspective, I think that was another question that was kind of raised to the the comments themselves. And so at the end of the day, the good the good news is you have some capacities. Really, you kind of get the priorities priorities.
There may be another priority that comes in next year because of something else. But the fact is you do have an ability to expand some programs from that perspective. Trustee Gupta? Yes. I just want to go back a little bit to some of the kind of comments about about how the meetings went in the surveys. I I think I agree it makes sense that we asked about special education. Not and and we have to do it. We want to do it, of course, but, like, how and where. Right? And so getting that input and also, to just remember that these priorities emerge from a,
what are the things we know we have to do as a district that we can predict? And b, what were the themes of interest from our community through the strategic planning process, which informed where where we started the baseline of ideas? And then what I will say though about the magnet program discussion, is, that from my perspective, it it was very generalized. And I think that was made it difficult to have an informed decision because of how generalized it is. Like, if I knew, I'm I'm saying yes or no to an IB program in the district that's a
standalone building or an IB program that is integrated into an existing high school or, I don't know. I'm just, you know, make a gifted program somewhere. Right? Then I might have made been able to make a more informed decision about it, but being that was just this generalized kinda STEM magnet program, yes or no? And where? Like, that made that hard, honestly, to to give a a a good answer. But, so I wonder if that, resonates with anybody else who pulled out the survey. But, overall, I did appreciate the ranking system,
so that we could see that prioritization. And I understand that it's this is about utilization and space. So we wanna know from our community what the input is on, these are the priorities identified in the strategic plan. Where can we put them? Where's our capacity for space? Yes. So I just have a few comments on the results here. So you basically asked about four different things and then you ended up recommending that we do three of the four things. And 100% on special education line, we have legal moral obligation to do that.
Early childhood, I can understand doing that. That makes a lot of sense. And CTE, I can understand. But if you look at them, I'm I'm kind of a magnet school proponent. So, when you look at that asking people do they want to do it, 80% of the people said yes. So it's not like it was unpopular. And if you look at this, this graph, I mean, they're all fairly close together as far as what people want to do. So I just am putting it out there that I'm not giving up on that idea. I think it's something that we still can do. And that's why I appreciate the district kind of doing a five year lens,
right? I mean, that's ultimately it's going to take some time to validate the programming and again, where's enrollment, where's funding and so but I'm I'm curious because I know that at I think at the end it was open ended, right, that people could list suggestions, comments, that type of thing. And I didn't see any of that in here. And I'm wondering when we might get something on that or hear about that part. Yes. Very rarely you get 70 plus person committee. And again, it was community members, parents, retirees, elected officials, people that just moved into Michigan from other parts of the state, other parts of the world. So I really commend the variety of different voices.
And so the last meeting, there was actually kind of an open ended, it was more about like how's the district doing? Like what do you think is going well at elementary? What do you think could be improved? First thing we heard is drop offs, we hear that a lot, right? So, the second question is, what's going on in the middle school, what can be improved? They talk about what are their programs. So I think that's part of a larger strategic, planned discussion. We did ask some pretty pointed questions about five zero one, relative to, you know, obviously, there's no, support or programized programs identified for early childhood special education or CTE, but maybe there is something else that came out of the survey.
So Supercell Russo, you wanna kind of opine a little bit about that and talk about that. It's more it's more of a open ended yeah. A little bit of master probably play. It was more like how we like a pulse check, if you will. Yeah. I think in the question was madam president was asking when can we see that information. Right? Yeah. We can get that from, the survey results and and get it shared. We what I wanna come back to just a few things. I know that you had your hand up, doctor. But I just wanna I wanna say a couple of things. One of one of the things that you said, trust me, Blake, that's really important that there's a there's a few slides in there.
Not that we have to go back to them directly. I know we all have them in front of us. But our early childhood, where to put early childhood programs was very close in nature in terms of results. Right? The idea of a magnet school this is really loud. The magnet school, whether it be preferred at the elementary, the middle, or the high school, bless you, those are very close as well. And I wanna acknowledge the fact that, Trustee Gupta and Trustee Lozan said, it was probably it was very difficult to talk about the magnet program in detail because, quite frankly, I was I was a proponent of saying of leaving it general because we didn't
want to pigeonhole the the committee of 77 people to thinking that IB was something that I was pitching out or that STEM was something that I was pitching out. We wanted to talk about magnets in general, and is it and and so I I acknowledge a % that was a difficult program thing to to to ask. Because if we started talking about, let's just say, that that's a specific brand, right, that we don't want to attach ourselves to at any at any point until you decide to. Right? And that was kind of was cart for the horse, or the chicken,
or the egg. So, I I just wanted to put that out there. So, Plain Maria and Ripley could share that data because it was all open ended. So to go through something like this, which we can do it publicly, I'm just saying to us that tonight, it would have been another two, three hours because we had 77 people answering, like, 10 questions that were open ended. So it wasn't a Likert scale. It wasn't put this in an order. Right? It was a lot of information to digest. Trustee Osmo. So I just wanna circle back to when we're talking about, well, special ed, of course, it's legal. We have of course, it's number one. There's a way the way I take this feedback is that the community values special
ed, not just in making it minimally compliant. Because just like miss Gauthier said, you know, we could just say everyone who has this stability, I don't care where you live. I don't care what neighborhood you're in. We're gonna throw you in the North corner, and this is gonna be your corner, and it's gonna disconnect you from your neighborhood. So I I what I hear, you know, is the special ed is yes. We have to do it, but I just I find it a little problematic that we are accounting the fact that it was number one just because legally we have to. I take this data to mean that there's a priority for the community to do
it more than a minimally compliant way to really root those people in their community. And I'm happy I like to see that we value those people. So thank you. Trustee Lacouille? Well, first of all, I appreciate Trustee Lawson explaining a little bit what this process was like for people taking the survey. The fact that it was you know, pretty it was laid out in a really vague kind of way would make it very difficult to answer the questions and have everybody know exactly what we were all talking about. I don't think that she meant to suggest that we were minimally compliant that we
want to be minimally compliant with special ed in any kind of way. She's just saying, look, everyone's gonna say special ed. No one's going to be wanting to go against that. And some of these other things are more like, well, maybe we're making choices here or there. And I think that was her main point in bringing that up. When I look at, this presentation as a whole and the recommendations, to me, I don't necessarily see this looking like growth. It looks more like we're just kind of shifting the mix of students that we have in the schools and we're shifting that more towards special ed and early childhood,
for the most part. And RCS, provided all this information to Plante Moran. These meetings were had. And the question that I just keep asking myself is, what have we learned here now that is new that we didn't know before? Because when it comes to the 501 Building, we actually knew about five years ago that that building wasn't gonna be able to be used for much because the board at the time said that it was gonna cost over 30,000,000 to fix up, and we can't use it. So I'm not really sure why we're still asking that question five years later.
We still don't know what to do with the Caring Steps Building or the Schultz Building. We weren't really talking about that very much. I would be interested to see that utilization data, although we can tell from our community, they're they're not super interested in those buildings either. They would like to use our existing, schools to do some of the early childhood and special ed, and it looks like there's space to do that. So I can understand that. I've been sort of, advocating the same thing. So I guess I just left wondering I I feel like we're kind of in the same position, you know, dollars 60,000 later, we're still asking ourselves a lot of the same questions.
I also noticed I guess another question I have is on the survey, the total here says 40, even though I know we had 77 in the advisory committee. So I'm wondering if only a subset of the advisory committee took the survey perhaps because out of a district with over 14,000 students, 40 is definitely still a very small sample size. So I suppose these are all things for us to consider now, moving forward. Trustee Elspa? So first of all, all, I wasn't characterizing, Trustee Lozano, what you had said. That was just kind of one of my feelings about the data in general.
But I definitely would be interested in the open ended questions. Also, I don't know what type of tool you use, but if you're using something like Thought Exchange, that AI capacity to get the bigger trends and even create word clouds is right built into your tool. If not, you know, ChatGPT is still a thing. So I mean, I understand it's a lot of things to go through. But when we have AI, it's really not that hard to get open ended data, at least to trends and reoccurring level. Specifically, going back to our point about 05/2001, yes, what does the community want done with 05/2001?
What was the feedback about that? Because as we saw, it didn't rise to the level of being a priority of one of these things. So I definitely would like the open ended information. Trustee Gupta? So just to respond a little bit to some of the questions that have been put out there, I do see in this in these recommendations a potential for growth or recommended recommendation for growth. It's proposing the addition of 22 new classrooms over the last over the next five years in a variety of areas. So what we've learned new is what our our the members of this committee's input
is on these various, you know, options. And we're asking these questions because we value our community's input. And, yes, you have a committee of 75 people in the community. You can't force people to attend and and get to every meeting, but 40 out of 75 is actually a pretty good response rate in general, typically, for something like that. So, it is certainly not a representative sample of our community, but it builds off of the representative sample of information we already have in our strategic plan surveys. I guess, mister Russo,
I think the question is what are the next steps here? You know, how is the district going to take this information and, make recommendations or, you know, to the board, to the to the community so we know where we're headed next? It's a great question. So I think some of the things we learned not only through the through the committee's responses, but what the data was presented from preliminary real point was what enrollment projections are, and those are from multiple sources. Right? I think you noted you noted five or six sources, that you gather your data from. So looking at what our projections are for the next five years gives us kind
of a not kind of a a flat out foundation for what we're going to do in terms of strategic plan. Right? We take the survey results from strategic plan. We look at what year two through five could look like. The fact that the fact that, our we have a caring steps. We have a building that we provided, a lot of different levels of care that we are going to move forward. That's been decided. So we have space there. We have, we've learned that we have space if we wanted to do some type of magnet program at at a high school. We have the space at Stoney to do so. We don't have it at Rochester High. We don't have it at Adams.
So I think we have to then come back to a work session where we say, when we lay out the strategic plan for years two, three, and four, is it a magnet program that the board is interested in doing? Is it expanding CTE, and what do those CTE programs look like? We will have recommendations in terms of CTE, you know, the, and they don't have to be housed here. We could have we have CTE programs where students go out into at at Henry Ford Rochester or to, different different nursing homes where they're where they're doing practice of their med careers, which is a very popular situation right now.
Kids are very interested in that. And so having that with we combine that with Xello and the different things we we elicit from student input. Right? Xello is a program that students say, this is what I'm interested in. Right? This is it's career ed getting kids involved and answering questions about careers. So there's a lot here to process and take that information that's open ended to say, Do we need five zero one? We have that kind of set up already. You You wanna answer for me about what we're gonna do with that by September 30. We have, what are we gonna do with with,
the Caring Steps facility by May 19? We have these steps in place, but without having some of this information, knowing that we we are growing, something we learned also is that we're growing in terms of special education categorical programs, but we're being reduced in general education, just general population, that that gives us space to grow certain things. So I think that then it's incumbent upon us together as a team to decide what are we gonna do with the strategic plan to to see some of these get realized,
like a magnet program if you want it, Like, CTE at the middle school or high school, etcetera. So I think we have to set up some future dates to to have I mean, we already have a couple of those in play, meaning Carrie Stebbs and and five zero one, but I think we have and our date and our timeline for strategic plan year two to lay out for the board. So I think all these will coincide together. I don't think it's as linear as it is dimensional. We have to put all this together to produce what the district is going to look like over the course of the two to five years. Trustee Lecui? Well, right now, it looks like we know we have nine vacant classrooms.
And we've learned that vacant means that it's not there's no names on it. It's just storage. It's not being used for anything. But there are other classrooms that could potentially be repurposed, but I don't know if we know exactly how many of those we have. Is there gonna be a way for us to get that information? Or how many how many classrooms are actually available that could be re repurposed if we wanted to? Yeah. I think I'm sorry. No problem. The the I think that's a little bit nuanced is because because we don't know by grade level at the elementary what it looks like until September, late August. So we plan for the best in terms of getting our special education programs in
spaces where we know we can move if we have to move programs and students, then we set for what we think. We roll up our kindergarten first, second, third, fourth, our and our fifth grade to sixth, etcetera. But our kindergarten, our incoming kindergarten is a little bit of a question mark. Right? We we we see that kind of come to fruition mid to late August in this district where we can say, Okay. I know I have how many classrooms across the district. So to say how many how many available classrooms really does depend on how many are needed first. We can we can coordinate those efforts when we look at our our our enrollment
trends for the next five years to say, we don't think that at for I'm gonna use an example. Baldwin continues to be, declining over the course of the last five years. There's no reason to think that would change now when homes are more expensive, and the birth rates are down. So that would be a fair assumption. And so we we would say, okay, do we have extra classrooms at Baldwin? And I'm using that as a general example, please, to see, you know, where where could these programs or whatever we're gonna do, be housed. My other question was, are we able to accept special education students from outside our district? Because I was hearing about growth with the special education programs and,
I I just wasn't sure about that because I know we're not typically an open enrollment district. How does that relate to special ed? Miss Scott here? There are times in which we do cooperative agreements, with other school districts. Typically, that's something that we consider, but historically, we haven't done always in the past. All right. Well, thank you very much for coming and answering our questions and, going through the process. And so thank you for that. And before we move on to the strategic plan, mister Russo, did you have another item under your update? Yes. I do.
So mister Vinkovic, I'm gonna ask him up here. I I'm gonna apologize. As part of my superintendent update, I I missed a whole little, I have missed a topic. And so I'm gonna turn it over to doctor DeLuca to present what this classroom technology refresh looks like. Mr. Russo, if I may present strategic plan number 11 that would dovetail into Mr. Franckovic's presentation for the Board? I think if that's what if you think the Board is good for the Board, it's probably a good thing to do. I think it will help answer a lot of questions too for everyone. Good evening,
everyone, members of the Board of Education and the community for strategic plan number 11 as I'm moving ahead in the agenda. The vision statement for strategic plan number 11 was Rochester Community Schools will provide technologies and support needed to deliver engaging, real world connected learning, providing also professional development opportunities and access to resources, recognize recognition for contributions and enhanced learning experiences aimed at fostering engagement and alignment with fostering engagement and alignment with more direct support from technology and teaching and learning staff. The deliverable was develop processes to assess and align IT department structures. And the success criteria was by 05/01/2025.
We will have a document showcasing the comparison between the current technology structure and support with the current teaching and learning needs. This will be measured by presenting our findings to the district leadership. So last April, we started our strategic plan and we started the group off with a, team. The team was developed to include members of the technology department, the curriculum team, and their their focus was to see let's let's see how we're gonna engage stakeholders from the community. So they have students, teachers, staff, community members come around and start looking at, ways that we would engage them.
That was through many different ways of surveys, needs assessments, and I'll talk a little about that in in my report here. The the team defined, investigated, and held dialogue to understand what current technology structures and supports, that were available in Rochester Community Schools. So in the specific plan number 11, the team conducted surveys, with the curriculum department and they first came across saying that we needed to do a needs assessment. The needs assessment across technology within our instructional spaces, which will lead me into Jeff's presentation here in a second.
The team also reviewed focused group data, with our department leaders, principals, and some teacher staff that was in the Curriculum Department as well. At this time, the team from Strategic Plan Number 11 is working on a document that they're going to present to the Board of Education, after May 1 when the requirement is done. But the reason why I wanted to present this was Mr. Van Kroviak is going to present a sinking fund presentation to the Board today to notify the Board of a purchase that we're making. But I wanted the Board to understand that the purchase didn't just happen in Mr.
Frank Koviak's office. It was a whole group of team of educators, support staff and learning representatives that were part of this focus group that did go through a needs assessment that did come out with a plan of implementation for IFPs, which is interactive flat panel displays. Mr. Franckovic, I'll turn it over to you. Well, before we do that, I mean, since we touched on if any did anyone have any questions about strategic plan number 11 before we go on? And you said I mean, is there any highlights you can give us about needs other than these flat panels
or I will say a highlight of the group's work that they've done. This is this is going to live on for many years. So having a needs assessment and looking at, providing stakeholder feedback was important. And I hate to mention it didn't happen in his office alone. Not that was that was the the common practice of our district prior to this plan. But we're going to be using this format to move on to different plans and different initiatives, that could be used for facilities, could be used for seeking funds for technology. And I'm really impressed with what the team came up with, because it's providing stakeholder feedback, but also looking at what are the needs of our stakeholders,
from students and staff. And can you just talk a little bit about that and, you know, who completed that? Was that was it all students? Was it all staff? Was it a focus group from each school? Or or how how did we gather that information? I'm going to let Jeff chime in on that one because he led the group and he'll know in-depth of like exactly the data points that he gathered. Thank you, Doctor. DeLuca. I know, Ms. Grant is going to be queuing up the little presentation. But the other thing too, with the strategic plan, we have a pretty robust set of goals and outcomes.
And plan 11 is what doctor DeLuca just talked about, but plan 10 actually specifically also identifies setting up a five year technology refresh cycle. And so many of these plans kind of, like, intertwine together, and so you'll hear a little bit both. Plan 10 really talks about life cycles, and that's gonna lead into what he just described as well because technology becomes obsolete. It has a shelf life, and we know that in this day and age, it is a critical part of our instructional environment. So, if there's anything that you want me to, like, zoom in on, but this is a pretty wide topic that I'm gonna go over.
The first thing is our current class I'm sorry. Before you could do it Yeah. Yeah. You you were probably focused on what you're doing. No. No. Please. The question was when you got the fee when you gathered the feedback, who was involved in it? Was it all students, all staff? Did you have a, you know, a a focus groups that did it? Or who who gave that feedback on what the needs were? So if I can you give me, like, just a little rope and I'm gonna get to it? Didn't question it seemed like we we missed it. No. No. No. Your question we're on the same page. And, actually, you'll find that in these slides,
you can lay them out in a couple different ways. But I I just I wanna set the context because what you're saying, madam president, actually is very, very, very important when it comes to a department like ours when we do not wanna make decisions in silo because the end users are everything. When I say end users, it's the people who are actually interfacing with it. Right? And I think so often, there's a pitfall where people can get disconnected where the magic happens in the classroom. And those are those safeguards that allow us to make sure that, one, we're being great stewards with the resources and the precious sinking fund we do have. But on top of it, we're hitting the mark the best we can.
So, I promise. And if I don't get to it in two minutes, I want you to just give me the look. So our current classroom technology model, there's a lot of things that intertwine, but the the main pillars are, the interactive flat panel, which we're borrowing every time we have a board meeting. Those are these big displays that we see in front of us. They are about eight years old. All of our staff, have a laptop, which many of you have your district issued laptop in front of you. It's a Windows based device. We use Windows for our staff. It does play nice with Google, which I'm gonna talk about for students, but it also allows us more operational controls with many of the other interfaces that
our operational departments use as well as professional learning, resources that are often better in a Microsoft environment. The students, we're also very proud as we're a one to one district that students are issued Chromebooks. So our instructional model, what we have found, is that teachers and and students and and and the level of engagement has been exponentially increased because of the the tools that we have and what we're able to offer our students. So to to answer your question, it's hard to do one catch all on all things tech because I'm just talking about what's in the classroom. Nothing like wireless, nothing like applications,
nothing like the software programs, and and and more the things that support our pedagogies. So the feedback I'm gonna talk about is specific to the IFPs right now, how we did it with focus groups and who was involved with it. But then the bigger scope is, doctor DeLuca said, it's a framework that we can use by making our thinking visible, which is this process right here. So in technology, this was adopted by the Stanford, school design thinking process. And really what it is, it's a cycle. And the reason why it's a cycle, especially with technology, it's the easiest and most intuitive way to apply it because technology has an end cycle. Right? We know it goes obsolete. Our biggest thing right now is we have laptops that will not jump to Windows
11, and we have to make that jump in the fall. Right? And and just so for the folks, joining us at home or whatnot or listening, our sinking fund was a gift our community gave us, but it's a very finite amount of resources. Right? So we have to be strategic in how we use it. A lot of our our technology was purchased with ESSER funds, if you remember those, the the cup with overfloweth during COVID. Right? But now we're at the point where we have to sustain some of these things running to the end of life. So So I'm gonna go really quick on this, but please let us know. And this is, germane to your your question. The first thing is you wanna set a purpose, problem of practice, and the strategic plan gives us a ton of them at this point.
Right? You've set a lot of targets, so the purpose often is defined. You wanna research and you wanna you wanna pick out quite a bit when it comes to, especially with technology, what's out there. You wanna go to and and do your best due diligence to see what is there, what are our partners using, what are, you know, matching our friends in curriculum for instructional pedagogies, and what's there. Three, you wanna explore, especially this is where, like, pilots will come in and you wanna start doing soft testing. But the explore and the research and vision is where the focus groups pop in. And so while we're doing that, you're also bringing home bringing along vested parties and people who are gonna be joining
the journey. So in this case, and I'm gonna go through the focus groups, we knew the IFPs are about eight years old and they're starting to fail. We have an active survey right now. We do one annually for technology. It uses a lot of Likert scale, you know, like one, two, three, four. Fours and threes are positive. Two and ones are negatives. Right? And we're seeing a lot of issues with our IFPs. We're also seeing some of their staff laptops. That's another kettle of fish, but we know we have to address that too because they're out there about four years now, four or five years in batteries and stuff. So So what happens is you get that feedback on a more, macro scale.
But then the micro scale, you want to make sure you have a very cross section of people to participate in focus groups. So I'm going to dive into that. But we're actually in this cycle if we make our thinking visible in the budgetthe communication piece. And so, the sinking fund, like we said, where it's a big gift from our community, but at the same time, too, we have needs that expand the amount of resources that are available. So, just with the IFPs, and this is gonna lead into focus groups, these were installed in 2017. We've already done one, like, set of upgrades in 2021, but we're at the point where these are starting to show signs of end of
life. They're not responsive. Our current survey from the teachers that have already responded, that's active right now. We've had a couple hundred, teachers already respond about 65 to 70%, so they're having issues. They are taking away from the instructional time because they're either having to reboot, pens aren't working, or the software applications we want to use, they're just getting old. Many people, when they have a laptop that's eight years old, realize it starts acting up a little bit, right? And we know for technology, that's an eternity at some times. So it's nothing wrong with the smart boards. It's just we have to look at it because of their age. Incident IQ, we do a ticketing system.
So this is another data point that we look at. The ticketing system allows us to be very efficient in technology. And so staff members, when they have a problem, they submit a ticket, and then we can deploy resources and streamline it. It also allows us to track what are we doing maintenance on. Wow. We're fixing a lot of them. So you can see, tickets since January 2023. We're already up to about 600 IFP tickets for issues. Some of them could be small, but many of them are very large and, again, showing signs of end of life. We have about eight twenty three deployed system wide, which means, almost all of them have been touched since January 2023 with some maintenance or one
reason or another. Another piece that we look at, with the focus groups is just what are the anecdotal stories. So these were the the the vested parties. These are the representatives. We ran five of them. And so, madam president, if this, if this doesn't answer your question, please let me know. But we wanted to get elementary educators, secondary educators. We wanna have technology folks because this has to play nice to our other systems. Special educators, those are folks that, do anything to support students with disabilities or any type of, five zero four natures. We we try to find anyone that's got a specialty with education, and then we add community representatives. There's a lot of research out there about what's the magic size of focus group.
Honestly, we find it to be like 10 to 12. Besides, if you get bigger than that, you start losing the, you know, the conversation because it's just become such a big group to to discuss some of these things with. And so what we did was there were eight kind of like guiding, like, concepts that we did for the focus groups. The focus groups were recorded because then they were transcribed. We look for emerging themes, which I'm gonna share out with you. But then we also looked at the macro data from surveys. We did talk to students, informally. We haven't formalized that in the process, but we know that the IFP is needed. It was just kind of what IFP is out there.
So, we landed Smart Spend a really good, partner for us. We did look at other makes out there. I'm always hesitant to mention the names because we didn't go without them, and some of our, other districts may have. But for our needs in Rochester, SMART continue to be a partner. One, because it's already integrated. There's a familiarity and they have been reliable. In the eight years, we have not seen an issue with them. Also, based on the, third party vendors and whatnot, SMART is very held in high regard. So the big thing that we saw was in the focus groups, they got a one hour overview of the smart boards, but then we did a half hour processing session in a very structured environment,
made sure we got everyone's thought and feedback, but then also synthesized it to develop these kind of recurring themes. So we knew our current smart boards were, showing the liability issues, so devices aren't breaking, like we said, end of life. We're talking about accessibility. Our current smart boards, if you're a secondary, instructor, the speakers are in the back. We don't have a sound solution in secondary classrooms. So, from an accessibility point and from an equity point, students cannot hear a lot of the multimedia. Teachers either create their own solutions, which is not equitable, or two, they just weren't designed to broadcast. The new smart boards that we are looking at right now and recommending is that
they have a smart or a soundbar built in. One of those would fill this space comfortably. And on top of it, if you know our elementary model, a lot of them are microphones. We don't have amplified solutions for secondary. There's ways we can potentially expand that if resources become available to integrate with those sound bars for another accessibility piece too. I know a lot of times you have large groups and they're like, I don't need the mic, but often the Sometimes participants need the mic. Right? And so it's something that the, accessibility came through. Professional development and training, definitely wanna work and partner with to make sure that we're building capacity, but then the usability and and and having the opportunity to have the device grow.
So the new devices, interface with Google very intuitively. They're basically big Android tablets, and the teachers can have access to all their instructional tools right there. So all of this was, kind of the themes that came up with the focus group, but it's not our voice in technology. It's our voice as an RCS. And so just kinda reinforcing why we won't miss SMART. Last things, I'm just gonna go quick on this, but please let me know if you wanna talk. Couple extra features we don't have right now. Multiple students can interact concurrently, so they can share the pen. We can make sure that, you know, not just the teachers up there, but you can have multiple students come up. There's also different manipulatives too.
If there's any type of mobility or fine motor skill issues, there's some other tools that could be integrated. The instructional tools, you know, we want to make sure we're condensing our learning environment. So when we onboard staff and whatnot, they're not learning 40 or 50 new programs. So this allows us to have a very intuitive, like, environment that they can live in. Cool thing about it on this is, multiples Chromebooks can share at the same time. Currently, a kid cannot broadcast to our screens. These new ones, they can. Actually, they can multiple at a time. So you could have group one, group two, group three, group four, whatever, and you can have it all up there and the teacher can highlight. Last thing,
you know, the the the screen share. But the cool thing too is the teacher can be recording their screen, and it's also got a microphone built in where, basically, this came through the focus groups. I can record my lesson and post it for anyone who's not there. So that was a big win. And then lastly, we're, doing a lot of safety security things. I know I've come before you some big ticket things, for communication and security devices. These play very nice with other systems that we're integrating. So, all in all, the sinking fund has to be used for operational type things that, basically replace things. And, the smart boards we felt, we know we're getting collective pricing.
And through the vendor too, we know that the price that we negotiated with, the vendor that has been chosen through the collective process, meets all the requirements for our internal controls. So Can you just recap like how many we're purchasing, when we're purchasing and what the dollar amount would be? So we'll be purchasing seven twenty three of them. The total would be $2,821,507 That includes the installation and then the removal of the current, IFP or then we will auction them off. If we can't auction them off or we have excess ones,
we're going to basically, pardon the expression, but cannibalize the ones we can't because we're going to keep about 100 on our mobile carts. So we'll keep those going as things break. There's a bulb that if you have an older like DLP TV, there's a bulb in the back. Once they burn out, it's end of life for the entire device. So we're going to keep them going as long as we can. But we all have about 100 we'll still have to replace over time. And then the last thing is that would mean the scope of work would take care of secondary over the summer, and then we would finish elementary by early fall. So for our Board members, now you can see why I was trying to dovetail number 11 with Jeff's presentation
as a decision like a purchase like this and the size and impact in our organization. I did want the Board to understand that we did get stakeholder feedback utilizing the new tools that we've kind of researched throughout the beginning of the year, with this team. And I do want to put this on the map too, is that, this resource is probably the primary it is the primary instructional resource our teachers are using today based on the bond that we passed in 02/2015. Trustee Annas? So, this sounds great. Obviously, the need is there. Just my concern is, volatile market,
and I just wanna make sure that the the issue with tariffs and so forth would not impact this purchase. And then also to, that they have the capacity to meet our needs in the timeframe that you just talked about rolling it out. Excellent, excellent question. And so the tech sector is getting very hit hard with the supply chain concerns right now, right? So the short answer is yes, Smart has procured the inventory for us. We have a very small window and so I think, our partners are watching this meeting right now for this to see if make sure the will of the community is there.
But yes, we have them. So what we're going to be doing in full disclosure is the RX model, has a business equivalent, it's exact same thing and we're going to have seven twenty three of these locked in the price pre tariff, pre any type of things that were going on with international trade. I know this can be a polarizing topic to talk about, but I also will say that the anticipation that these things will be about 25% more, I think, is highly likely for future customers even within the next couple of weeks. But we do have it locked in, and this is what the collectives negotiated in good faith almost a year ago.
And so So you said you have 128 business models? How is it No. So we have some business versions and some education versions. They're all going to be flashed. They all work the same. But it was a creative way to hit that inventory. Basically, the the the inventory is not coming in stateside right now. It's all been frozen. And so we have it. It's local. And and teachers can expect to have these devices, the standard we identified, installed with that timeline that I mentioned. And honestly, I do want to attribute that Smart as a great partner. And then if a warden, like I said, it meets all of our internal controls,
VSC would be the installing group. Sure. And I know I don't have to tell you this, but have a plan B. 100%. No, that's I love these questions because you're absolutely right. And it's a hard thing to convey, but you get it. Can you talk about if this $2,800,000 was planned to be used for the sinking fund this year or if this is was unexpected? Great question. So this is I'm hitting almost the annual thing in my current role and the charge was to create a refresh plan, which this is one part I did not inherit. Inherit. So we created this and spent about a year working.
As Doctor. DeLuca said, I wanted to make sure we had a transparent process where we make our thinking visible. We want to make sure that folks understand why we're making these decisions. So to what was just mentioned, we've already procured 4,000 Chromebooks as well because we know those are about to spike because we want to make sure we sustain our student models. So those are already in our warehouse. We just finished those. And so this part, we knew they're coming end of life and we figured out we know we have staff laptops coming end of life. We have a plan for that as well. We knew that the IFPs were we have wireless infrastructure things. We have back end things too,
like something like when we had a power outage at a building, you blow servers and whatnot. So we have redundancies built in to to stretch those dollars as much as possible. But when we listen to the the focus groups, we knew the IFPs priority wise jumped to the top. And, yeah, they've been flickering. They've been dying. We knew it was coming up. We just didn't know what order the folks wanted to. Can you speak to the allocation from the sinking fund that you that it's allocated with yearly? 100%. So the district brings in a certain amount of dollars for the sinking fund.
Facilities, obviously, with so many things, HVAC systems and whatnot gets quite a bit. Technology, it was always earmarked about $1,500,000 annually. We have yet to spend any years of our sinking fund. One year did go to support a facilities initiative, so technology did not claim it. But so far, our sinking fund has been built up. And so what we're doing is we're stretching those dollars as much as we can. As anyone would know, when we negotiate with vendors, I'm pretty ruthless on RCS' behalf. And, I feel like we're getting a very fair price in this case. Trustee Gupta? So just to clarify,
so did I hear you correctly saying so after this $2,800,000 worth, there'll be a need down the line shortly here for another hundred, I a new, IFPs? So the IFPs we'll be replacing is all the buildings. We'll continue to have a few of the new ones that are on mobile carts. But when IFEs are used primarily from things like this where they're just meant to be a display screen, we we can use the current models as long as we can. And if something breaks, we'll have enough, like, in the stash from the replacement ones. But the ones that will touch, like, children in terms of the instructional system will all be replaced.
You know, I have a bunch of music teachers begging because the amount of stuff you can do with music software in these news things are are like phenomenal art, same thing, because of the way you can manipulate it. So when we say all, special education classrooms. Anything where kids are learning in will get replaced, and then we'll put a few mobile ones as well. Trustee Osmo? So I think I heard you say in the sinking funds that technology was allocated $1,500,000 annually and that you haven't used that in the past. Well, this year, you're going to use more than your $1,500,000
So what are we taking and it's a fixed amount. So what where are we getting that extra money? What budget shift are we making? Great question. So we it actually has built up in anticipation for kind of what a lot of people say like the Big Bang Theory, right? We have to replace quite a bit at the same time. When we had a tech bond about ten years ago, we put a lot of stuff in. So a lot of things are starting to come to end of life. These access points, our Internet is extremely reliable in this district, right? And in a lot of the things that keeps our network secure, cybersecurity stuff, our camera systems,
all of that was put in around the same time. So we're stretching those dollars as much as possible. But the ESSER done, it cost us about $1,200,000 for student Chromebooks every year in our current model. And we're looking at already how do we repair them at a cheaper economy of scale, how do we get the life of those a little bit longer as well. And so, all of that is kind of like bigger picture. And when we get the focus group data and we get survey data, it allows us to say if we have to make a choice, what is the priority from like our groups. But so far, we have creative ways for every hurdle about a forecast of about three years. And then when we get to three years,
we figure it out again. Okay. I mean, great. I'm sorry. Help me understand. I feel like that didn't answer my question, but I know you're really doing a good job and you're giving us a lot of information. So are we taking away from something else? Or are you saying in the past unused allocations have rolled into the next budget year? Yes. We really we've spent so if you have, like, say, five years of sinking fund built up, that'll be $7,500,000 we spent $300,000 on a firewall, initiative we had to do. The rest has been basically there as we look at the bigger picture thing.
So nothing is getting cut. Nothing is getting shifted. These dollars are also earmarked for this purpose. So it's not like it's touching staffing or anything. So, we So you've had a surplus that you've been rolling over and you're now just going to tap into that a little bit more than the annual amount? We extend in technology. We put duct tape behind the scenes as long as we can. And now it's at the point where it's like, unfortunately, it's like, gosh, we got to dip into the war chest. But I appreciate you asking that. Okay. Any other questions? Why don't we cover just the other strategic plan and then we can take a break before we move on to new business?
Sure. Strategic plan number five. Miss Anne? Strategic plan number five. Thank you too for coming, Mr. Frinkowiak. So strategic, plan number five is in the, vision area of learning. And the vision statement reads that RCS will empower students to be owners of their learning by engaging them as co creators of their experiences and action plans. The deliverable is to design systems for regular student input and feedback. And the goal within was student informed decisions allow us to bolster, the level of engagement, deepening, and connecting the learning that students experience across RCS.
The success criteria by June 6, at least eighty percent of students in identified cohorts will participate in student to teacher feedback structures. And this work group, has launched with three administrators, four curriculum leads, representation from counseling, from our learning consultant group, as well as some partners within Oakland Schools. And then as we move, I'll also share some connections that have been made with other strategic plans, much like Doctor. DeLuca shared, with Plan 11. The work group, has been celebrating and sharing successes across, their various roles that they serve with some of our current structures like advisory in
the middle school or in the high school, as well as, some of the vertical groupings that don't have a name as clean as advisory. For example, at Brooklands we have something called bare dens where students meet in groups, that are vertical, so that a staff member is connected with those children across their entire elementary trajectory. Mustn't pride. Each of our schools has, as an element of that and the frequency might vary, by location, but that idea that students are engaging, beyond their classroom, beyond their grade level in ways that, not only draw them into a part of the school community,
but also give their, a space for regular voice and feedback and input into, the programming, quite frankly, of the school. And so this group has, thought a lot about some of those existing structures and then, began to to shift a bit as as their work has, proceeded to think about the ways that this will also infuse, and strengthen the voice within instruction, as compared to what a student might see as a more event based. Like, oh, that happens in advisory. Oh, we do this in dense. How in regular math instruction,
how in the chemistry classroom might that student voice and feedback loop also be present? And so the group at that time began to connect quite regularly with folks from, strategic plan group six, three, and thirteen, which are touching on an innovative educator network, as well as differentiated learning strategies and Core one instructional practices. And as a result of that, the groups have, created an opportunity to, make a working definition for student voice and they've garnered that input from a variety of staff outside of their core leadership group with learning labs,
with coaching cycles, grade level collaborations, and district professional learning. Most recently, survey administered to the entire staff on November 4, I believe it was or fifth during our asynchronous PD. A lot of information was garnered from educators across RCS in these areas, to kind of drive the work of the group in ways that we may not have face to face access, with those folks. And so they're thinking about that working definition for student voice in the construction of, the portrait of or profile of a learner and the profile of an educator and
thinking about how can this, really begin to inform the way that assessments are designed, the way that, feedback loops in classrooms become a regular cadence. And, at this time they're working with a cohort, to develop what that may look like embedded within, again, those assessment and instructional programming areas. That's the update I have for you this evening. What questions might you have? Trustee Gupta? So, a couple things I wondered about is if I don't know if everybody here knows what advisory means, but so that might be helpful to explain for the people at home too,
a little bit. And I hear you I hear that, students participate in advisory and other vertical groupings like BearDant at, Brooklands and and and whatnot. I guess what I I'm wondering about in all the rest of what you described is, like, where does the student voice come into that? That? Yeah. I appreciate that question very much. And so what when the group launched last spring, garnering voice from those existing groups was their launching point. And so, that was, I believe, captured in a much more anecdotal way,
from each of the roles that the participants served in within that committee group. They went out to their various stakeholders within those areas, spoke with students, got information about how those areas are meeting student needs and to what degree. And it was that calibration point that had them come back together to say, Yes, this is a very beneficial and helpful structure. We're not, sure that we're really hitting at what we'd like to be focusing on in relation to the way adults across the organization, for example, in District PD, are, learning about and or considering that role that the student holds in co constructing their
learning, in showing their demonstrations of understanding, which is what led to the drafting of this, sort of working draft, if you will, of what RCS means by student voice and engagement within the classroom. I think there's a concern that we may be speaking past one another or in different descriptors or or definitions when we say that, even among educators. And so, that was where the group elected to dig in as it was dovetailing very closely with some of the work of those other plan areas that I was describing. We've got a lot of folks that are working to,
create greater synergy and integration among these plans as compared to, you know, feeling as if they're working just in a single lane. Trustee Annas? So, you know the success criteria has, that at least 80% of students in identified cohorts will participate. And, you mentioned some that are already established at elementary schools like the Bear Den at Brooklands and other school buildings have particular, populations of students maybe that are more involved. My question is more how are you identifying the students who,
aren't necessarily the voices that are always heard at the table? I appreciate that question and I think that correlates very strongly with why bringing this conversation into the instructional arena was really important for the group. Rather than this goal being seen as an advisory board or as a, you know, a superintendent's council or cabinet, let's say, or a principal's advisory team that may meet with less regularity across the school year, knowing that our students in our classrooms alongside their teachers every day have that opportune
moment, and thinking about some formalized structures that may bring that closer to light, I think is where the group would like their success criteria ultimately to end. And so as I work with the leads of this team, Mike Gitner and Sarah Crowley, very much on their minds are how we can, systematize something as a result of those structures that are currently in place without, creating a one way formula, right? We don't want to provide a prompt for students to be completing that becomes performative or not authentic to the way that their their instruction and assessment is moving.
I think the the idea behind that portrait or profile of a learner and an educator, may very well inform, the way that something that's capturing the voice of the student that may otherwise be, quiet or less heard or less sought out, has not only anonymity thank you, but also, a frequency that feels like it's not, hinged in a high stakes way on a given day in a classroom but more, a part of the everyday fabric of instruction. We know, for example, in the areas of belonging, many of our classrooms are thinking about their zones of regulation,
thinking about those check ins at morning meetings and the way they think about, how are you today from an affective sense, we'd like that to also connect with how are you in a cognitive sense, right? How is this learning moving for you? Sure. Yeah. One just one follow-up. I think what's what's challenging about this is that, is it is it always quantifiable, you know? I mean, you're not gonna be able to come back to us as a board and say, you know, 60% of the students at, you know, at XYZ Elementary have felt this and that put us on this path because it's
tangible, right? And not everything in teaching and educating at least in terms of connecting with students on a level where you need to make that connection before you can actually teach. That's not necessarily, measurable. So I appreciate what I'm hearing, but in my head I'm still going to, well, are you gonna survey students and then come back and show us the survey results? You know? Mhmm. And I know in many instances that's that might not be feasible, for what the goal is. So just just a statement.
Thank you. Any other questions? I think mine's more for Mr. Russo, just in regard to the strategic plan as a whole as we approach June and that's when most of our strategic plan items are what really came out of these, right? Like, I'd like to hear what is the student voice, what is the was it teacher voice that was said for this one, and what are what's the game plan? Like, what do we think tangibly? What are we doing with those kids? And how is that going to make a difference moving forward?
So just to think about how we're going to hear about that and celebrate it too, right, to everyone has been working very diligently all year on a number of projects. And, I think we want to make sure that the community knows what we've actually accomplished and the impact we hope that those things have going forward and how we're going to continue to evaluate those. So all right. Well, at this point, I'd like to take a quick five minute break or so so that we can all get up and stretch our legs and be back here at 09:08,
please. All right. Well, we will continue on with new business. The first Item 8.1 is the first reading of an updates to policy 02/2001, '4 thousand and '3, '6 thousand and '2, '6 thousand and '3 and 06/2004. Mr. Murphy? Thank you. Good evening, President Butel, members of the Board, community. I've got five recommendations for policy updates this evening. The last three are a package of safety and security updates. The first, I'll go in order. 02/2001 is a slight update to admission and enrollment policy.
This was updated late in the day today. I realize there was a typo in it. It was initially an underlined red sentence, which would usually indicate a new, entry. And what it should have been, and this was my mistake, is is that last sentence should be struck. So that was changed today. So essentially, what you have in your packet is a sentence at the end of the children of nonresident employees paragraph that states, an employee is eligible for this benefit at the start of the next school term or semester. The intent of this change is to strike that sentence.
The reason, that's being recommended in coordination with the enrollment department is that when we have a new employee, these days, it's not so often at the beginning of the school year. It can be all throughout the school year and there are times at which we would not want to make that person wait sometimes months to enroll their child if they'd like to bring them to school. So we'd like the flexibility to not have that sentence be a part of this policy. Not a recommendation from our, policy advisers. This is an operational recommendation based on what we've seen in the District.
President Butel, would you like me to cover all five or pause after each for any questions? I guess let's pause. Does anyone have a question about 2,000? I'm just curious how many, students we have in the District that are through this policy. I would have to get back with you on that, Trustee Blake. Okay. Next is 4,003 conditions of employment paragraph. This policy simply reflects the law change that changed the term paid medical leave to earn sick time. This legislation was passed back in the fall. If you recall the drama in Lansing,
there was then a two month window at which there was sort of a debate on whether there'd be last minute changes to this act. There was. So we I didn't take the fall recommendation to update this language when it came in November. I held off on that until we saw what took place in February. After that, those last minute updates took place, our policy advisers advised that their November updates still applied. So I'm bringing that forth to you now. This simply changes paid medical leave or PML to earn sick time or EST in
the policy paragraph. You'll then see in the coming, weeks basically the details of this coming in the administrative regulation update. So this would be a first reading, second reading a month from now, get you the administrative regulation update which coincides with this over the next few weeks too so they can take effect potentially together. Any questions on earned sick time language? Okay. Moving right along, we have a series of three safety and security updates. Each one has an intro paragraph in italics which sort of describes the legislation that
has changed and the mandate that the first one is 06/2002 Safety and Security changing some verbiage and mandating that schools develop a behavior threat assessment and management team, often called the BTAM team. This is a requirement that needs to be in place by October one of twenty twenty six. We are in good position for this now. Doctor DeLuca's led this work in our district this year.
We are secure to have these teams in place and call them by this name currently so we're a good year ahead of schedule here. Obviously, if there are any changes in legislation or things we need to adjust between now and the implementation date, we can do so. But we're comfortable, putting this language in place now even though it's not yet required because it's already in place. So again, it changes, threat assessment and suicide intervention to behavior threat assessment and management team. And then it references the current law, and changes that those Trustee Blake? This is just me being a nitpicker,
but it says in here, the goal of the behavior threat in assessment and management oh, yeah. I'm sorry. Prior to that, pose a threat to the health, safety, and welfare of themselves or this goal committee. But who's the themselves? Because the only it's either the superintendent or the management team. Isn't that supposed to be to a student? Could you point me to where you're reading from? It's only one part of it. Yeah. It's you know, it says the superintendent will develop a behavior threat assessment and management team, including duties aimed at addressing situations which may pose a threat to the health,
safety, and welfare of themselves or the school community. But they never you never put student in there. So Right. So who's the themselves that I see. Good answer. Yeah. Cut and paste. We can fix that to make it make more sense. I think it's still intended to cover what it was previously titled as. So self harm situation or a more threatening situation. So, we can get that corrected and resubmitted for you. Sorry to be picky, but No. We want it to read accurately. Thank you. Because you could really just make that students,
right? Yep. Any other questions on 6,002? Okay. 6,003 is the firearms and other weapons policy. There's been recent legislation signed aimed to protect students from gun violence that mandates information on safe storage be distributed to parents, by districts beginning by 10/01/2025 and then every October thereafter. So there is language associated with that that's being added to this, language which describes that.
I believe we're in good shape because the board, if I recall, passed a board resolution, which reflects this as well. I I don't know. Probably a year ago or half a year ago. I'm not sure. So it's just adding the, what's required to be in the policy that we do this annually. Any questions on 06/2003? Okay. 06/2004 is the final one. This is the policy around school crisis response and closure. There's also been legislation or similar same legislation which requires a standardized terminology in emergency
response. That terminology will be finalized developed and finalized by the Department of State Police by July one of twenty twenty six. The district then must implement that standardized, response terminology beginning with the 2627 school year. I don't know if we're certain, but we're we're we have good indications that what we've already adopted is our standard response protocols are what the state police may be heading toward. That's based on the advice of the committees that doctor DeLuca runs as well as our police liaison officers.
That is the I I love you guys protocol, which is kinda spreading nationally as well. So we have adopted that. Now by adopting this policy, if that were to change and not become true and what is recommended by '26, the policy is simply saying we'll follow the lead of the state police. So we think we're in good shape, already. But if that changes along the way, the policy will be in place, which is just mandate us to adopt whatever it is the state police goes with. Does that make sense? So we're ahead of the game there a little bit too.
It does, but I guess I'm I'm questioning why we're putting something in that won't occur till 2627. And at that time, I mean, you'd remove it because policies don't normally identify beginning timeframes, right? Don't policies just normally say we're going to do it? I guess we don't understand why we're doing it if it's not available yet and why wouldn't we just wait till when the information is there? You certainly could. I mean, you could wait. I think there is value. Just personal opinion, this is a number one, this is a recommendation of our policy advisor to add this,
now because it's saying we're going to follow the law that just passed even though the law that just passed gives the state two years to adhere to it. It's basically putting into policy that we are going to follow the law that just passed. Number two, I think we found value even in the district from an operational sense of making sure we're on the same page and using the appropriate language across buildings regardless of waiting for the State of Michigan. So there's two different answers to that. And I suppose it's I don't think you're in violation of anything if you wait two years. But I also think this is what our advisers are recommending us and the law
has passed. So it's essentially promising to follow it. Any other questions? So, trustee Blake, I will get a correction to the board. The board can then advise whether they want a whole another first reading of that one or whether we go to a second reading next time, and these will come back. I think it's I was gonna say, I think it's minor for just replacing themselves with students or something along those lines. Nothing has changed in the meaning of it. So I think it could still be a second reading. Okay. Trustee Gupta? In the arena of nitpicking, there appears to be a like a fragment sentence there at the end under the
where we are Yes. The last one, I noticed that too. It's just like a reprint. So that won't be included in the submission. Got you. Okay. Thank you. Okay. I think that's it for that one. All right. So since that was a first reading, we don't need to do anything at this point. And then we're moving on to Item 8.2, which is a second reading of Policy 5,003 for purchasing. Yes. So bringing this back from a month ago when the first reading was, was read, and I haven't received any other specific questions on this. So it's bringing forth the second reading of the addition of two sentences to the
purchasing policy 5,003. The first in yellow in the second paragraph, the Board of Education will approve all construction bid awards. And the second edition under the Real Property and Structures paragraph, which adds board approve approval is required for all purchases or acquisitions that exceed the bid threshold and all other purchases required by Michigan or federal law. And I'll note one more time that the bid threshold will be a a link, an active link, which would could change, year over year if that bid threshold changes. Anyone have any questions or comments?
Trustee Alsba? So I have two questions. The bid threshold right now is $3,000 or is $30,521 Is that right? Around there. Around that's on in the ballpark? I'm looking at Mr. McDaniel on that one. 30 thousand five hundred and 12 dollars Okay. And my second question is, can you talk about what the term real property means? Because I was at a training last week where we talked about, taxes and levies, and they talked a lot about real property and personal property. And I'm tying that to the $2,000,002,800,000
that came before us tonight that was just a notification. It wasn't something we were voting on. So can you talk anyone talk a little bit about that? Would you like me to take that, Mr. Murphy? Yes, please. Feel free. Real property is typically land and buildings. Okay. So something like the Smart Board then comes under what? Like personal property or equipment. Okay. So if this said because this says real property, it doesn't cover things like the Smart Board. But if it said personal and real property or if it just said property, it would cover those things?
Correct. I guess that's where I'm struggling a little bit. I agree with that purchase. I understand why you did that. I'm just I struggle with the fact that we can spend almost $3,000,000 and it's just, hey, by the wayboard, we're doing this. But again, I'm not questioning the purpose the purchase, and I understand, especially with tariffs, why it's a good move. I just struggle with that expenditure of that large. Trustee Blake? If I can ask Trustee Alspa. So are you thinking we need something like this for Beyond Real Property too then? Yes. I mean,
I would I'm not sure exactly the words that would capture personal property then too. Maybe it would need to say personal, real and structures or maybe we just need to say property. I don't know what the exact wording is. But like I said, I just struggle with the fact that large purchases can still be made. And again, don't disagree with it, don't have any issues, but I struggle with the fact that very large purchases can still be made without board input. And I'll just say I have sent several suggestions over the last year plus to the SPCC and
prior superintendent, mister Russo, regarding changes to this as well. And I alluded to that at the last meeting too, that I hope that they're still working on those and considering those. So the question just is whether we approve this and then have them come back or if we ask this to go back to SPCC to, you know, review and recommend any other updates. Trustee Blake? I guess I would vote to keep this as it is and if you think we need additional policy work on that, but I wouldn't send I wouldn't put it all in one.
Will it all be part of this? I mean, the change would be under 5,003? Yes, because it's purchasing. Trustee Gupta? I'm wondering, Madam President, would you be willing to share a little bit about your ideas, how you want it to be changed? I I did not specifically bring that with me. I know that, part of it was having if the board had specific items from, for instance, the sinking fund of what was going to be covered, so we knew that that was something that was coming out or even out of the general fund. If we had those specifics ahead of time, then the only thing we would need to vote on would be items that you know, raises to me the concern about from a oversight perspective.
We don't have to we didn't have to approve $3,000,000 in purchases. Trustee Lecui? Are members of the SPCC Committee able to share what was discussed regarding those changes or if they've been sent to our lawyers for review or what's come of that suggestion? Trustee Gupta? So while we did, in SPCC, discuss, some all of, president Butel's ideas, I I realized today in conversation, with president Butel that, I I definitely missed in my just in my interpretation of things.
I missed what she what it was she was getting at and did not fully bring that to the table. So I would be in support of taking it back to SBCC so we could have that discussion. I can add a little bit to that too. I've had a few discussions with, Council about this just general idea what a Board approves and what a Board doesn't approve. The question that the council would often ask back is simply, in order to advise, I would need to know what the board's, preference is. What types of things are they looking for?
When I've talked to mister Blaylock, he used to work in my job. He gave some examples from his, experience. Right? Certain boards come up with a number. Right? Any purchase above a number. He said there's just always things to be careful of because anything in board policy could relate to personnel also. Right? Does a certain number relate to personnel? Does that mean that, we couldn't actually bring someone on before a, board approves them? Right? So there are things to consider. Many boards do it differently. You could review some other language as well, but it's hard for them to give an opinion or him even to give a
specific opinion to a general idea. He would he he would wanna know sort of what are what's the goal, what are some of the ideas, what are they after, before giving, like, a firm. This is a these are the pitfalls to that. These are the pros and cons. So we could continue the conversation. We could pass this this and then continue the conversation that's the will of the board as to how you'd like to proceed, on the whole topic. Also, just so 05/2003, another portion of that is the ongoing discussion in SPCC about whether to add, or enhance the conflict of interest, which is contained later in 05/2003.
So the whole topic has been an ongoing discussion and will continue to be also. So I don't know if that's helpful or not, but that's a little bit additional perspective. So this is not all of 05/2003 that we're seeing in the board packet right now. It does continue. Right. Okay. Yeah. Alright. Sort of the beginning about where this started the advice or clarifying consistent purchasing guidelines, it's that section, but there's another section when we talked about the way back when the nepotism policy
and whether that should expand to conflict of interest in this realm is a whole sort of corollary discussion to another section of this policy. Well, I guess what we can do is, determine if there is a motion to approve the second reading of policy. If we had someone who moved it and supported it, then we would vote on it. If we don't have that, then we would send it back to SPCC right now to review it. So is there a motion to approve the second reading of Policy 5,003?
Okay. So Trustee Blake did move that. Is there support for that? And Trustee Annis did support it. Is there any other discussion at this point then? The only thing I would just say is I think this is a good policy and whether we need other policies or not, we can continue on with that. But I don't I personally don't think we need to wait until we have every single thing perfect before we vote on it. Trustee Locuis? I would vote yes on this motion with the understanding that we are still moving forward to better reframe what we're going to actually be approving in terms of property,
too. When it comes to personnel, I do believe we also approve new hires as a board, too. So I don't think we have to worry about that and with the understanding that we're continuing to move forward on the conflict of interest policy, too. I would just say that new hires though, technically, they often have already started before we're approving them. Right. We approve, but we still approve them. Right. But I think the question there is that there's other language that gives permission for them to start. You might have a competing policies then which one takes precedent over the other maybe
that's easily answered I'm not sure it's just an additional question to figure out because this policy if it changed to let's say, dollars 50,000 or over and there was an employee which had a higher salary than that, I'm not sure which policy takes the day, right? I would need more guidance on that. Well, if I'm hearing that we're talking about categories like personal property and equipment, for instance, like what was mentioned, if we're adding something like that, that it it really might not be an issue anyways. Sure. Yep. So maybe if every if the lawyers could look at all of those things together, that might be helpful since it's all under the purchasing section.
All right. Well, all of Trustee Alsba? Again, while I think there is no misuse and I approve of the information and the expenses that have been happening, I just really do struggle with the fact that this policy isn't where we want it to be, and we've been struggling with this policy for a long time. So I'd like to get it in a place where we want it to be. I totally understand Mr. Murphy's comment about like we need to put a specific like suggestion out there to get a legal opinion about it. But I still struggle with passing something and then, oh, we'll get back to it,
we'll promise because I know how our board meetings get very busy and our agendas get very full. When is SBC meeting next? To be determined, because we're trying to coordinate schedules. That's May. Most likely May. Because as I had said the last time, I mean, I don't object to the additions that are here. My issue is just that I think there needs to be additional items that are added for clarification. So, I'm okay voting for it at this point, but I completely understand your perspective as well, Trustee Alspa.
So all right, at this point, all of those in favor of approving the second reading of Policy 5,003, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, please say no. Okay, that was a seven-zero vote. So at this point, that policy 5,003 has been adopted as presented. But I think we all heard clearly to for SBCC to continue reviewing that to, create some more clarity there for all of us. All right. Thank you. Next, we have the annual reaffirmation of the parental and family engagement policy.
And I think, Mr. Murphy, you said you would take this one? Yes. Mr. Lardy is here as well. This is an annual, affirmation of a of a policy that's already in place. This is an annual requirement of Title one that the school board reaffirm. This policy, so you have it in front of you. Miss Gilardi is here if you have any questions on it, but we're asking for your reaffirmation of this, parental and family engagement policy for the 2425 school year. Alright. So is there a motion to reaffirm policy 03/2002,
parent and family engagement? Moved by, I see, trustee Blake and support from trustee Gupta. Is there any discussion on this? All right. All of those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Those opposed, please say no. That's a seven-zero vote and policy 3,002 is reaffirmed. Moving on to agenda item 8.4, this is a request for 33 AEDs and storage cabinets. Mr. McDaniel, is this you? Thank you, madam president. Well, I'm going to just refer you to the memo rather than read the,
specs. There were a number of different, responses, and the district is recommending, a purchase, from Aventric Technologies in the amount of $65,890 for AED equipment and AED storage cabinets. All right. Well, then I'm going to ask, is there a motion to approve the purchase and installation of 33 ZOLL 3 AEDs for $65,890 using funding from the security grant? Moved by Trustee Annis. Is there support? From Trustee Gupta. Is there any discussion on this? Trustee Alspar?
I just have a question about which grant this is coming from and life of these devices. And if it's a grant funded and I know this isn't the case, but let's say they have life of six months. How will we pay for them in the future? Yes. That's a great question. We're using 31AA funding to acquire these. These are, supplemental, right? These are more AEDs than we've ever had, so we're able to do that. Mr. Musio is here. And I think he can speak to, the life of the AEDs. I know that we've used the ZOLL, AEDs for many years now. But Pete,
would you like to join me at the table or do you want to go to the mic? Good evening. Yes, we standardized on Zoloft 3s, I would say, about four, five years ago. We had different ones, they would expire and then we would buy different types, but then we decided standard on one type of unit, the ZOLL3. So that's kind of why the RFP was built around the ZOLL3 model. And what's the life of the device? Depending five to seven years they last. Okay. And in five to seven years, if we don't have 31AA, how would we fund this? I mean, it would have to be the general fund. I believe there's some changes in law of how accessible AEDs need to be.
So certain time frames that we have to meet for accessibility. So if not for 31AA, it would have to be a general fund purchase. And how many AEDs do we have in the district as it is right now? We have 64 existing, so this would be 33 new. Okay. And have we attempted then to alternate every three or four years? Is that how we do it? Or Well, we monitor them. They're on a program of software that monitors the battery life and the pad life and if there's any recalls and things like that. And then they're inspected. We have a preventive maintenance program that inspects them and tests them twice a year.
And then we have our vendor come in and inspect them as well. So Okay. And then I have a question for you, Mr. McDaniel. Do we need to is it sufficient to say using funding from the security grant or do we need to specifically say 31 grant is fine. Okay. Any other questions? All right. All of those in favor of approving the purchase and installation of 33 ZOLL three AEDs for 65,890 using funding from the security grant, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, please say no. That's a seven-zero vote, and the motion to purchase the AEDs is approved.
Next, we have a request to approve Lewis and Knapp for our financial audit services. Mr. McDaniel? Yeah. So again, I'll refer you to the memo, but I'm going to speak a little bit longer on this one. This was a I think the board resolves to have us, go out for an RFP process for our financial audit. These proposals were evaluated by myself, our Director of Financial Services, Beth Perera, and RCS accountant, Lydia Doca. We received responses from CBIZ, Clark, Schaefer, Hackett, Lewis and Knopf, Manor Kesterason,
Raymond and Yo and Yo. Our decision matrix, scoring is there. There are many state and federal standards that all audit firms have to abide by. So a lot of these we ranked very similar as far as qualifications of staff. We're getting CPAs from all of those organizations. Obviously, there's some partners, some more tenured staff, some junior staff. There's kind of a variance. Quality control program, sorry, can you hear me all right? It sounds like there's some quality control program.
While there's nuances between each organization, there's still the state and federal mandates of what's at minimum required. Licensing, independence and record of substandard work, these are all pretty knowledgeable firms. You know, I have had experience either being audited or know people that have worked for essentially all of them except for Clark, Schafer and Hackett. So when you look at the scoring on the decision matrix, you'll see three categories that pretty much everybody's tied: independence and licensing, that first category, qualifications of staff and the quality control program.
If we go to that second category, responsiveness, we really graded this based on the quality of the actual response documents. So threes met our expectations. Those were, responses that essentially had no errors. If you had errors, then we marked you down. And those errors could be simple, spelling gram grammatical errors. There was one that we we scored at two and a half because, there was some maybe differing information on who was actually going to be responsible for the audit. There was a a name and then different pictures and, things like that. So that's why they were marked down a little bit.
Technical experience, one of the firms, is more based in Ohio and doesn't audit very many Michigan school districts. So we, scored them lower. And then, there was another firm that, typically audits charter schools rather than large traditional districts like Rochester schools. So we scored them a little bit lower as well. And then, pretty much all the firms on the timing piece, could work with our typical schedule which is, a September for the actual audit field work to visits where they come out. And then, cost, You'll see on that second page there how the cost broke down.
So based on this information, we are recommending that the district award, the Financial Audit Services contract to Lewis and Knoth in the amount of $55,000 plus, additional fees for any applicable gas fees. I'm not aware of any gas fees, for the upcoming year that would require that $1,500 fee. All right. Is there a motion to approve Lewis enough for our Financial Audit Services? Moved by Trustee Annis. Is there support? Trustee Gupta, any discussion? Trustee Liqui? Well, I definitely won't be able to approve continuing to use this auditing firm.
Our financial controls were violated and we brought it to this firm's attention during the year when we know that it happened. And they continued to ignore it and gave us a clean audit. Last June, the board agreed that we should seek proposals for a new auditor. Long term familiarity is not good for financial relationships and it can undermine accountability. And now, unfortunately, the administration has issued an RFP and the top recommendation is once again the same firm, Lewis and Knopf. I haven't forgotten about what what has happened and I believe we owe it to
the public to take our financial oversight role seriously and remember the real reason we issued them to send out an RFP in the first place. Anyone else have any comments at this time? Trustee Alsbaugh? So a question for Trustee Lecuy. Does that mean that the process of going out for an RFP, you could not approve it even if through the decision making matrix, it comes out with this candidate being the best. So you just no matter what, you can approve the same firm no matter that's just your line in the sand? Trustee Liqui, you can answer or you can add.
That's up to you. I'm fine with answering that. This firm ignored that our financial controls were violated when it was brought to their attention and they were giving us an audit. As a board, we need to think about that. I would recommend we maybe go with the number two choice because the whole point was not to stick with the same firm that ignored a violation to our financial controls. I can go into what that story was if you'd like, if you've forgotten what that what actually happened. But I don't actually want to. I would like to just choose an auditing firm that can instill some trust.
Madam President, because the record, the number two choice is Yo and Yo. Well, that's what I was just going to say. That's also a firm that you feel hasn't done a good job. So should we go to number three? Madam President, to answer that, I would what happened with Yoh and Yoh when a previous superintendent hired them to, conduct a procedures engagement has nothing to do with it wasn't the firm's fault. The firm did actually exactly what they were asked to do. The fact that they were given information that wasn't pertinent to the question is not the fault of the firm. So I I don't have a huge issue with Yoh and Yoh.
And, Mr. McDaniel, how long has Louis and Nuff been, auditing the District's books? I believe they've done eight audits for us. I'd have to double check that, but I think it dates back to 1718, '16 '17, somewhere in there. Alright. Any anyone else? Any thoughts? Alright. Well, we have a Alright. Madam president, how would if you wanted if one wanted to go about making a motion to suggest that we use a different firm than what is being suggested here, how How would a board member go about that process? You could make a replacement. You could say I move to replace the motion with whatever you would wanna
use, and then it would need to be supported and discussed. And then it's actually voted on twice, once to approve the replacement and then once to re to approve the actual motion. In order to do my due diligence as a board member, I move to replace this motion. And I move that we designate the number two choice, Yo and Yo, to conduct the district's audit for, for the upcoming year. Okay. So I have, a motion to replace the current one to approve Yoh and Yoh for our financial
service financial audit services. Is there, support for that? So I have, supported by Trustee Lawson. So any, additional discussion on replacing it with yo and yo? Mister McDaniel, I guess I'd ask you, do you see in here I mean, they were very close. Do you see, much difference between using one service over the other? It was a couple thousand dollars difference, but not didn't seem like it was much different. No. I mean, we've I've personally been,
audited with Yo and Yo when I've worked in other school districts. So I have a relationship with Yo and Yo. Mike Roca was the one who came out and performed the agreed upon procedures engagement. That was one of the questions that we weren't sure on. We I think we had a picture of, or a name of Mike Roca and a picture of somebody else or vice versa. So that's why, they were marked down a little bit lower. But when it comes to costs, it's fairly similar, dollars 51,800. They charge $7,000 for the single audit, which, we'll have, so slightly more. We're looking at $58,000
versus $55,000 And I don't believe there's any, I know you mentioned you asked earlier, President Butel, about travel expenses. I don't think there's anything reimbursable for Yoyo either. I mean, I guess personally, I don't really care which one we go with. I understand, Trustee Lecuy's her concern. I don't think that I necessarily had a concern with, Lewis and Knopf. So I'm personally a minimal to either one. But any other comments from the board? Trustee Gupta? I'm kind of in the same boat. I'm not, I mean, I I'm not attached to one over the other.
I do think there's probably some healthy benefit to the organization by not going with the same company eight years in a row. So I'm open to trying something different. Trustee Ospa? I'm not tied to either one. I do see the point in not going with the same person. Where I struggle with this is we have a process in place, and now we are arbitrarily averting our process to go with a press. So that's where I'm struggling with this that we're violating our own process. And I struggle with that because there might be a time where
I might like a textbook company better than the rest of you. And if my choice comes out as number two, then I could lobby and make a motion to violate our process. That's where I struggle with this. But I've worked with both of them, and I've worked with Yoh and Yoh, and I know they're both good firms. Madam President? Trustee Liqui? Well, just to clarify, my reasoning here is not arbitrary. It's because the previous firm ignored a violation to our financial controls, and I do find that important. And it's all it's also not because Yo and Yo is some kind of personal
choice of mine. I would choose any of the other choices above Lewis and Nob, which has ignored the violation of our financial controls. I'm just choosing that because it was the number two choice. That's literally the only reason. It still violates our process, and you've just specified a personal bias towards a person that through the organization, through the process, that has been the first choice. So again, I don't have a preference either way, but I struggle with one of us expressing a personal bias and then stepping outside of the process. I guess the only thing I would ask is,
mister McDaniel, was anything any way, because it doesn't appear it's on here as a criteria at all, to, weigh others that were different from the company we've been using for eight years? Is there a standard in the industry too for how often you should change who your auditing company is? Yes. I mean, I think that's completely up to the board's purview. Will the audit be markedly different by any of these firms? I don't expect it to be much different. They all have to follow the same standards. There's a peer review process that they all have to undergo.
So I don't know exactly who, does a peer review process with Yo and Yo or Lewis and O. It could be each other, right, that they have to do that every every few years. So, you know, I have worked with pretty much each of these firms other than Clarks, Schaefer, Hackett. CBIZ is formerly Markham, which is formerly Cross Kehlani, who does the foundations audit. So we have a relationship with them. Maynard Kesterason from another life as well. And Raymond, one of the partners there is a former partner at Lewis and Hoff. So, you know, CPAs are CPAs. We can work with any of them.
It's, you know, I think to Trustee Alspa's point, there was a process, clearly lack of trust with the administration and the board. So it's the board's purview as to who they wanna choose. Trustee, Annas and then Trustee Gupta. Yeah. I would, agree with Trustee Allspa in that, you know, at this board table we have a tendency to, ignore norms, and obviously want to ignore processes. And I feel strongly that we should have faith in our administration in, what we ask them to do and the fact that there was,
you know, they have a process, they have a matrix in which they determine, what is the best value for taxpayer dollars. And I'll agree with the recommendation of the administration. Trustee Gupta? I guess I'm struggling with, the idea that we're not somehow following the process. My my understanding of what our process is is that the administration follows their protocol to, you know, to put it out for bid, use their matrix to assess the bids, and then based on that, provide the board a recommendation at which time the board considers that,
as well as our other fiduciary responsibility to make an informed decision and vote on which way we wanna go. So to me, this is a part of the process. And I think it it's certainly unusual that a recommendation come before us, and maybe we choose something else. But I don't think that means it's not the process, if you have a good reason for it, if there's a rationale. And I apologize. I have not been keeping track. It seems like we've had a lot of discussion, but, Trustee Alspar, go ahead. I just want to say I really appreciate you saying that and framing it that
way. That does help whether I'm struggling with this. So I greatly appreciate that. Thank you. All right. So we have a motion to replace the original one, which is to approve Yoh and Yoh for our financial audit services. So what we would do is we would vote on this first. If it passes, then we would vote on this again as the actual motion. If it does not, we would return to the original motion. Alright. So all of those in favor of replacing the motion to read to approve Yo and Yo for financial audit services,
please say aye. Aye. Can I see hands? Okay. That is five. Those opposed, please say no. No. I abstain. Five-one-one. So at this point, that replaces the motion. So we have a motion to approve Yoh and Yoh for Financial Audit Services. Do we need any additional discussion at this point? All of those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, please say no. No. And an abstention? No, I said yes. Yes. Okay. Six one. So the motion passes six-one and Yo and Yo has been identified as,
the firm for our financial audit services for this year. Moving on to, Item 8.6. This is an amendment to our annual organizational items. Mr. McDaniel? Yes. There's a memo asking or requesting to add several accounts, with Huntington Bank, to eventually replace accounts held at Comerica Bank. And Mr. McDaniel, I think from our discussion earlier, I just wanted to well, actually, I apologize. Let me put the motion first. Is there a motion to approve the amendment to our annual organizational items that allows
for specific accounts to be established at Lacoue. And I'm sorry, I just, I had asked you earlier and I just wanted so that everyone could hear. We originally had a money market account at Huntington. Correct? Correct. And now we are looking to allow any of the accounts that are listed at Comerica to duplicate of that, so to speak, to be at Huntington because of, additional interest revenue that it could generate? Yes. Okay. Are there any questions or discussion on this? And just as the FYI,
you will see this all again in June when we approve our organizational items. This is just an amendment so it can be done before that time. Correct. And we're asking for the amendment now, so that we can start to move some of these funds effective July 1. There's additional interest earnings by choosing Huntington, compared to Comerica Bank. All right. All of those in favor, please say President? Oh, Trustee Lacree? I'm wondering if there ought to be another amendment to this annual organizational item. Well, now, of course, we have switched the auditing firm, so that would be number 12. But then on number 11,
they also don't have all of the people who are authorized to speak with legal counsel on behalf of If you're talking about the board president, I was told last year that that was not needed because it's in policy. Okay. There's also the, executive director of special education is not listed there. Let me see where I'm sorry, what page is that on? Oh, it's number 11? It's item number 11. That's true. That is not on there. So, I move to amend the annual organizational items to include the Executive Director of Special
Education under item 11. And the Executive Director of Special Education. Is that the right title? Okay. So hold on just a second. Before we get a second on that, are you okay if we're going to add two, we're going to add, the is the title executive director of special education, and, change it to, what is it, secondary director of Assistant superintendent. Assistance. Oh, and change, right, change executive director of secondary to assistant superintendent of secondary. But what about the assistant superintendent of elementary?
Are they listed? Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. They are there. Are you okay with that addition as well? Alright. So we have a motion to amend to amend the original motion to include adding to sorry. I need to think about this. Adding to can I just say item 11? Mhmm. The executive director of special education and changing the executive director of secondary education to assistant superintendent of secondary and adult education. Okay. So we have a motion to amend the original motion
to include adding to item 11, the Executive Director of Special Education and changing the Executive Director of Secondary Education to Assistant Superintendent of Secondary and Adult Education. And that was moved by Trustee Lacoue and is there support. Trustee Allspa. And then is there any discussion on this? Okay. So we'll vote on the amendment first, and then we have to vote on the whole thing. So all those in favor of the amendment, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Okay. That's seven o.
So now the motion is Do we also need to put forth another amendment to correct, number 12 where it says that the audit firm is Lewis and no? I don't think it matters because we'll approve it in June. So it's fine for right now. Okay. Yeah. It's probably better that you don't because then it stands in conflict with what actually happened for '20 for the '24 to '25 split order. So, so we have there's a motion to approve I'm sorry. To approve the amendment to our annual organizational items that allows for specific accounts to
be established at Huntington Bank. And adding to Item 11, the Executive Director of Special Education and changing the executive director of secondary education to assistant superintendent of secondary and adult education. All of those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. That's a seven-zero vote and those items are all updated. And then Mr. McDaniel, can you get that updated so that it is does this sit on our website? No. Okay. It does not. Just in the minutes. Just in the minutes, yes. Okay. Thank you.
All right. Moving on to Agenda Item 8.7. This is a follow-up from our last meeting. The board was discussing information and timing of I Ready testing data that we want to see. Personally, I don't believe this requires a formal motion but rather the board coming to consensus so our superintendent understands what we're looking for. During our last discussion, there seemed to be agreement that we wanted to see an analysis of student performance with the trend over fall, winter and spring I Ready data three times and others who weren't sure that that
would be value added to have all of that each time. I'll say that my preference would be to review the spring end of year I Ready data in September, which could include any recommendations for the coming year along with the review in February or early March that includes the fall to winter student progress data. And I know that Mr. Russo had some thoughts in this as well as how he'd like to incorporate this with the MICIP. Thank you. Mr. Russo? Thank you, madam president. You know, if it pleases the board, I I wanna come back to the the five year data,
trend or the five year data trend that you asked for last time when I mentioned it was the will of the board. I wanted just to make sure that we were coming together on what we expected from from the cabinet team. Right? Moving into year two and moving into more of a data literacy model and data centric model, we'd I'd like to see, I agree with madam president that if we did a September presentation that included our I Ready scores, our PSAT and SAT scores, and our M STEP scores,
that would be a host of data. Right? We talked about this before. It would be a lot of data. We could synthesize I could synthesize that for you. We could together, and then put forth a brief presentation in September that would also demonstrate how it informed our myKIP goals for that for that school year, for that to be a one event situation in September. And then in February or March, have another one where we talk about, student progress from fall to winter. So just to recap, it would be two separate data presentations to the board.
September would be the timeframe in which the first would happen. It would include M STEP, I Ready, PSAT and SAT scores, and how our we would go through the process of how we triangulate that data to look at where we need to improve from a continuous data cycle from myCAP. So it would inform our MyCAP goals. We could kind of do that all in one one meeting in September. And then in February and March, have a student progress, look at what fall to winter data looks like for I Ready only. Because that would be the only measurement stick we'd have at that point.
Trustee Lecui? Well, if you'd if you'd only like to discuss the I Ready data two times a year and and consolidate and do spring and fall both in the fall, I really don't have a huge problem with that if that's how we want to proceed moving forward. For me, the biggest point that I was looking for was to to be able to observe trends and you need a minimum of three data points to have a trend in the first place. So having the five year trend as part of the presentation is what felt important to me. I would still like to do the things you're suggesting too where where we talk
about ways to improve throughout the year, and you can see what happens between fall and winter. But it's also really valuable to be able to see from year to year what does winter look like so that we can put that into context to figure out what's happening. And just to directly, just a couple things. So for Trustee Lacoue, I want the five year dash rent is fine to do both in, in the fall and in the winter. But the fall when we do the September just to clarify clarification, when we do the September meeting, we won't have fall data right then.
We'll only be reviewing spring and how it informed what it would look like, what our myCAP goals would look like for that year because September, students are still taking it till, like, mid October ish. But the February winter one would have the fall to winter. So that would show the growth from the beginning of the year to the midyear I Ready. That's fine. We'll be able to see the five year spring trend. Yes. I think that's perhaps even more valuable. Trustee Blake? Yeah. I think maybe out of the three, like the spring to fall is least valuable because that's over the summer and a
lot of kids even go down in that because But I think it's fine what you're saying and what you're suggesting that that would be fine. I just want to avoid getting, like, a whole data dump in that September meeting, but without enough I I like I want you to guide us through this and show us not just 50 pages of presentation, but what are the big things you're noticing? What are the I mean, I want all the data to look through, but I don't want to spend four hours going through page by page by page. I'd like for you for your team to Executive summary.
Yes. But tell us, what do we need to know? Like, what are the important things? What are you noticing? And then we can ask you questions about the rest. And then February would be just, I ready, right? Yeah. I I'm fine with that. I just you're talking about a lot of things in September, all of which are important, but I wanna make sure that we get the real picture. Yeah, and trust me, Blake, just directly, you will get all the data. We will do an executive summary. We're hoping for, you know, five to 10 slides. I I I I wanna be very clear that if this is the cycle we're looking into, we're I'm very happy to do that.
Right? I think that's where we should be living with not only our staff, with our students, with how we look at data. I wanna just make a couple of clarifying points that I that I mentioned to to to, madam president earlier. If there are embargoed scores during that time, we will have to either not talk about them out loud, meaning if if PSAT or SAT or M STEP are are embargoed, at September, we can either push it back, you know, a week or two to get them if it's October, because we've been all over the map, and miss Hampton and doctor DeLuca can talk about this as well, have been former principals and and mister Cusimano and every everybody.
M STEP sometimes is the embargo is lifted in the middle of summer and sometimes it's November 15. So it's hard to get I I think we're in a trend now that M STEP is trying to get letters out to families earlier so the embargo gets lifted earlier. That has been the trend. That doesn't mean that gets that stays. I just wanna be very, like, the intent is to do this, but if the data becomes embargoed at that point, we either have to push it back five, six weeks, or we just talk about not those pieces. Yes. That's right. We just ignore those area to omit those pieces for the timing. Because we know iReady will be ready.
So I don't think then we should be tied to a date, but if if a two week or four week longer would give us a better picture than what we thought. Is, you know, we don't I don't feel we need to make a motion. I think we come to an understanding, and the idea is that, hopefully, we can do that all in September. I I think if some of the information is embargoed that we, you know, we have the I Ready, so we can do the I Ready, which to me, I think feels, you know, the most important because that's, like, so closely timed to our students' growth and what they're learning,
and would drive, potentially, practices in the classroom throughout the year. But, I mean, I would I'm sorry. I do agree with madam president on that as well. That's that's real time data that we can look at. Right? It's not it's not really something that's looking at just programming. This is really student growth oriented. So, yes, I agree with all of that, and the intent is to provide all that at one fell swoop. If we cannot, we'll we'll deal with that at a time, but that would be the intent. Trustee Lacui? I guess, after Trustee Blake spoke, it just made me kind of wonder. Would it be a huge inconvenience to talk about the I Ready spring data sometime
at a at a different time, like in July or something when we might have less going on, and to actually break it into a couple different chunks for the reason of just avoiding having a huge data jump data dump that we then have to, you know, sort through and That is versus I'm laughing because this is the conversation I had with him earlier. Mhmm. Well, let's have it. Let's have it again. Yeah. Absolutely. So in in the spirit of trying to move, you know, the entire district, meaning how we interact with each other in terms of data literate data literacy and
how we talk to teachers and how teachers talk to students and try to triangulate that data, I would much rather have it altogether. This is a fifty minute conversation we had earlier today. I would much rather have it together if at all possible. I understand that if you wanna look at data like that, at at look at the I Ready data and then have questions about it. But I also wanna say that, you know, there'll be over this if that's what we're talking about to your example, Trustee the Cooley, that would be, like, in in July over the summer, I think you've said. I was just trying to give you enough time to Right. Prepare the spring data.
Yeah. Yeah. I think the spring data comes in May, early June. I don't think it's problematic. I think it would be parsed out again, though, to look at, like, well, this is here, and then this is here, and then this is here. And I don't think that's how we would like to inform our practices. I don't I don't think that's how we want to roll be rolling out data in this day and age. I just I would like to be able to triangulate the data together if possible. And I understand the embargo could push it back to October. And I'll be honest. Like, I did not I don't want the data right in June because I want the
district to look at it and identify what areas potentially need improvement and what are we gonna do for the following year. So I wanna give them time to be able to look at that so they can tell us how that data is driving practices for the coming year, rather than us saying, okay, well, what are you doing about this? I'd like them to look at it and be able to tell us, you know, how they're going to address areas that they think need improvement or where the priorities are based on all the information and tying all of that to the my QIP.
Trustee Alsfa? So when I look at the data and I think if we did look at the data in September or we did look at the data during the summer, our next question is, well, what are you going to do? The value of the data is how it informs our instruction. So and we build that into I completely believe in working smarter, not harder. Don't reinvent the wheel. The MIP is a requirement where we say how the data will then inform our instruction. So I think it's kind of a repeat for us to look at the data in the summer,
ask this question, and then not give our instructional team the time to plan, and then have them answer that question outside of my KIPP when we want I think it's just working smarter if we get that all together. I like what you said about trang triangulating the data. Sorry. It's late. And then I like what, madam president said about, you know, like, how does that inform us? What are we doing? And tying that to the my kit. Because I think, you know, if you show me all this data in June or you show me all this data in July, I'm gonna start asking a bunch of questions.
And, you know, you need to plan out your professional development and your instructional strategies to really answer the questions. Trustee Blake? But my question back to, Trustee Alsbaugh's point is if we look at it in the summer, at least you have time to plan how you're gonna address. But if we don't look at it until September Well, I think they were looking at us. So they're gonna look at they're gonna come with us with a, This is our plan already. Okay. Right. Maybe that's I mean, if if if you guys are anything like me when I'm an administrator, I'm watching those scores come in on a daily level who did not click okay
to complete the test. You know, what grades, how our progress, and, you know, I mean, I'm sure you guys are looking at it, but I just want you to come to us prepared to ask the questions you know we're gonna have. To answer the questions. Yeah. Correct. Like I said, it's late. Sorry. Trustee Lecui? I guess what I'm thinking about though is from the board's perspective, we're looking at this pretty high up just like what is the health of the district kind of a thing. Whereas, yeah, the teachers and the instructional staff who are trying to use this to inform their instruction, I mean, they're getting this in real time and they're adjusting as they go.
But for us, like, if we looked in July or August, for instance, at spring data from the previous year, we would be able to discuss and analyze, okay, this is what happened last year, and now coming up for this year, what are some of the big, like, the big areas that we really kind of want to focus on? It's not necessarily what specific strategies are the teachers going to be doing to address it, but it's like, what are the major areas that we have strengths or deficiencies and what are we going to be looking for as the year comes up. And then we'll hear more about how they do that as that goes on,
but that's sort of how I look at it when I think of I Ready. Yeah. The administration had just asked for that to be September so that they would have all the data and be able to present it all at once and link it in with the my tips so that they're all aligned with that and the strategic plan. Yeah. I I would offer to because I hear what you're saying about I Ready, but I Ready really is supposed to be an instructional move. Right? You can look at data trends over time, but then you look at what happens if M STEP comes in contradiction with I Ready. And you've told,
you said out loud to the community that this is what we should be focusing on. That that's why you triangulate data. That's why we wanna get our staff to do that as well. Well, like I said, it's fine if you wanna proceed, doing it two times a year. My main issue was, do we wanna see the five year trend? And it sounds like maybe everybody is in favor of that. Yeah. I I I think we're okay with that. So Alright. Well, let's move on, to additional comments. 10.1 is additional comments by members of the Board of Education. Individual board members may use this time to share information about school visits,
updates from committees or organizations they're assigned to, or to express their personal opinion. Each trustee has three minutes, and there's a timer on the smart board, I believe, for reference. If you run over that time, I'm happy to ask the board if they're willing to extend time. With that, trustee LaSanne? Thanks everybody for sticking through tonight's meeting. I know it's late, so I'll try to keep this brief for you. Since our last board meeting, a few important events have taken place that I'd like to quickly share with you. As we all heard tonight, the MPP, Master Property Planning Committee process is now completed, and I have to be honest, I'm a bit disappointed about how the process ended.
I noticed even during the committee meetings that members kinda seemed frustrated because they didn't understand what the district really was asking from us, and what they're really trying to do with the information. I know that many of us were hoping for more progress and after all the time and the money that was spent on plant Moran, I expected to kind of receive a strong recommendations tonight as to what the whole committee purpose was. The presentation that we saw tonight was almost a mirror of what we saw during our meeting, so it's kinda hard to take forward.
Like other trustees have said, I would like to see what the open ended questions actually people wanted. On a more positive note, last Monday along with members of our administration, I had the honor of touring the Schultz campus with congressman John James. We highlighted one of our district's most important programs, ATPS. It was a wonderful visit. Our experienced special education team had a chance to speak directly with congressman. Both he and our team asked very thoughtful questions and had wonderful dialect with each other and obviously we toured the campus as well and got to see some of
the students and the wonderful work that the staff does there. It was truly a proud moment for our district and I'm grateful for everybody that was there to help make this visit happen. I hope everybody had a great Easter and enjoyed the long weekend and happy to have a little bit better weather now. Thank you again for being here tonight and for your support. Thank you. Trustee Lukumi? Well, earlier today, we discussed how, Mr. Russo made the decision to eliminate the district's DEI director position, and he did this in response to a federal executive order and the letter and to avoid risking $10,000,000 in federal funding for our district.
And I know this came as a surprise to many, including board members. Just days earlier, our secretary was responding to board letters saying he didn't anticipate changes either. And since then, I've seen a wide range of reactions, some expressing extreme concerns that this signals an end to appreciating diversity or that it might somehow impact support for special education students even. And I want to be very clear, that is not the case. It has no bearing on any of that. All this decision did was eliminate a six figure central office position that had no clear metrics.
And that's no fault of the person who was in that role. It's just what that role was like. Many of you may remember when previous trustee Andrew Weaver asked questions about it. He asked things like, how do we define DEI? What are we spending on it? What measurable outcomes are we tracking? We got zero answers because we weren't tracking those things. In fact, years after the position was created, our strategic plan still included a $10,000 objective just to define DEI. So really, this should come as a relief. The positive things that predated and were co opted by DEI can and will continue.
What's being removed are practices rooted in political ideology like discriminatory or equity of outcome based programs. For example, we once used a tutoring grant that turned students away based on the color of their skin. And that kind of race based, well, racist policy is no longer allowed. Now support needs to be based on actual student need, which is really how it should be. This is our opportunity to support true diversity and inclusion without the divisiveness. Just a few weeks ago, my daughter's school held an event called Gate Goes Global,
and I know many of our schools do similar things. We heard our student representatives talk about something similar, earlier today. Families created booths, and they represented different countries and they were placed all around the school. There was food and dancing and clothing and traditions from around the world. It was a joyful and unifying celebration. No one was pitted against anyone. No one was labeled a certain way based on skin color. That's what real inclusion looks like. Families, educators, and students coming together to share and celebrate who they are. Meeting students right where they're at and helping them.
These values existed long before the political DEI movement and they'll thrive long after. The teachers and staff who love and support your children's growth are still here. The golden rule still applies and it is a step in the right direction to trim ineffective roles and practices so that we can refocus on what matters most, which is ensuring that all students receive a high quality education. Trustee Annas? Thank you, Madam President. I recently attended, over the past several weeks, Meadowbrook Elementary's PTA meeting.
It was great to see, a lot of parents involved and, they have an upcoming Annie production, which I'm excited to check out. The RCS Foundation recently held their scholarship ceremony, and, myself along with, President Butel and Trustee Blake attended. And I just wanna extend my congratulations to the 70 graduating seniors who received over, excuse me, dollars 113,000 worth of scholarship dollars going towards their next step in their education.
And of course, as, the PAC president, Melissa Hoffman mentioned, the fabulous Sparkle Awards ceremony. You cannot come away from that night without your bucket being filled. And it just doesn't disappoint. And I'd also like to thank, Trustee Luzanne for getting, Representative James to finally come into our district and check out our special education ATPS program. I I'm hopeful that he'll remember the impact that a strong public investment, that a community makes in our special education population matters,
especially in the upcoming, budget talks that congress will be holding. Specifically of concern for me are the Medicaid dollars that our district receives, which will directly impact that special needs population that he got to to tour in our facility and meet some of those students. Specifically for those who don't understand what Medicaid dollars go towards in a public school district. It's speech therapy. It's mental health counseling. It's occupational therapy. It's nursing services for students with disabilities. There's a myriad of things that Medicaid impacts in a public school district and specifically
in a special education population. So I would encourage folks to reach out to our elected representatives and remind them how important these tax dollars are to come back into our district to support our most, needy students. Thank you. Thank you. Trustee Blake? Sure. So a couple of things have been mentioned. My time, that's not my time. My time is up already. There were someone probably liked that. But, my my, I I did as Moose mentioned, I attended a couple of of really nice events recently, the RCS RCS Foundation Awards,
and it what was especially touching to me were the families who had suffered some some very unbelievable losses, and they came forth to give awards in on behalf of their loved ones, and that was that was really touching. I did attend the sparkles of sparkle awards for my second year. It was even better, I think, than last year. I really enjoyed it. It's it's, it's it's hard to describe. There's nothing quite like it. And I appreciate the opportunity to hand out awards. I'm also going to an art show, by the way, at the Administration Building, which I have a little artist at home that's gonna be in the art show.
So I'll be there tomorrow and somehow getting from there to the PAC meeting, in the half hour's time. But I do have to, you know, because I can never resist, I have to respond regarding the DEI issue because I made some statements here during the last meeting where I talked about how it doesn't matter and maybe I had ESP. I said it doesn't matter if our structure changes or how we deliver, but these are our principles and these are our promises. And I believe that. I believe what I said then, and I I do believe what missus Schreck, I'm sorry. Yes. Missus Schreck said tonight about how our teachers are gonna continue.
But we cannot avoid the message that this sends to some people and the way it lands to some people. You know, we're all sitting up here and almost all of us are white. Almost all of us are upper middle class. Almost everybody up here is straight, married, has children, Christian. We do not have diversity up here. And to stand and tell an African American man who's come here tonight that you're wrong, your viewpoint is wrong, the way you're looking at DEI is wrong, because listen to me, a white person, I'll tell you it's it doesn't matter. It's not important. That's totally tone deaf.
It completely ignores the experiences of people. And I don't think it's the way that we ought to look at this. So we have a challenge going forward because we've made a decision and people are taking it a certain way. And we have to prove to these people that we mean what we say. When we say we're still going to represent your diversity and we're still going to hold equity as important and we're still going to make sure everybody's included, that's a challenge now. Hold us to that challenge. We need to we now have a higher bar because we've made this decision to
prove to people that we're gonna do it. And I'll say one more thing, the statement about how somebody steals your lunch money, now they're gonna want your dinner money and all that. There are hills that we will die on. We are not going to continue to do just any old thing that comes out on an executive order. But I'm sorry that this decision had to be made, and I acknowledge the pain and the fear and anger some people feel. I think it's important and we're going to do our best to make sure that we keep our promises. Thank you. Trustee Alspa? So I want to thank the PAC,
Parent Advisory Group for having the SPARKLE Awards. It was I attended it and helped pass out some of the certificates. First of all, they are amazingly organized. It was great having the numbers on there so I could track people and figure out get them the right certificate. And for me, it was fantastic to see people, up on stage and being recognized that have helped my children over the last two decades navigate their educational Variance, so that was very bucket filling. I do want to say that since our last board meeting, the federal administration has issued some directives that are very punitive to all of our
students. And the consequence, that they have threatened would create real harm to many of our students. The Michigan Department of Education has affirmed that both that is following both federal and state law. Rochester Community Schools have stated that we are confident that our district has not violated any such law. It is unacceptable that local districts are being pressured into making decisions that are not in the best interest of our children. Our district has been forced to discontinue the Director of Equity, the DEI Director, not because it was right for students, but to avoid potential consequences that would hurt many students beyond just,
that would hurt many students. We must stay focused on what truly matters, what is doing best for all of our children in all of our schools. We are threatening critical funding for special education in Title I and the service of a political ideology that is unjust. These programs support our most vulnerable learners and they should never be used as leverage. Despite the challenges we face, I draw encouragement from leaders like our state superintendent who refused to sign the certification letter, like the MSU school board who has called for a mutual defense pack.
I I think it's sad that we live in a situation where school districts and higher educations are pulling together to be mutually in defense of our current federal administration. This is but this is the collective action we need to protect our students from harmful overreach. I agree with everything Trustee Blake said. We do lack diversity and because we lack diversity, we can't understand other people's struggle and we need to make room to honor those struggles that are different than ours and we need to acknowledge that some people have experiences that are different than ours.
And I remain committed to creating a learning environment where our diverse community is represented and included and welcomed and safe. So that is the way we need to go forward. And I agree with Trustee Beck what you're saying. The bar is much higher for us now because we face these challenges. Thank you. Trustee Gupta? So I also want to share some thoughts on the elimination of the DEI position. As one of the community members who advocated for a cabinet level DEI Director role
back in 2018, along with some folks in the audience today, a role that we envisioned as taking on specific challenges affecting our students and making a measurable impact, I also shared the deep disappointment many others have expressed. My disappointment is multifaceted. I'm disappointed that the work of celebrating diversity, improving equality, and promoting inclusion of all students has been so demonized and misrepresented for political gain, and that this polarized political landscape continues to strategically divide us on basic principles of
human decency, making some question whether basic norms like kindness and inclusion are worthwhile or indoctrination. I'm disappointed that as our district has undergone leadership changes, the DEI role has lacked consistent direction and decision making authority and lacked measurable outcomes for evaluation. The trends on achievement gaps, lack of representation in curricula and staffing, disproportionate discipline across certain student groups, and other indicators we hope to improve upon have not improved in any significant ways
since 2018, highlighting the continued need for more effective approaches. I spent this past week with 33 students at the FIRST Robotics World Championship in Houston, Texas. And while we had so much fun and so much to celebrate, there were also stories shared that exemplify our students' diverse needs, such as the students who were afraid to travel out of fear they could be arbitrarily picked up by ICE and incarcerated without due process, the students struggling with mental health due to enduring racial,
homophobic, transphobic, and or ableist slurs by fellow students and adults in their community. The student who recently lost a parent and felt the warmth of support from her teammates, the students who shared that their only safe place to be is with our team because they don't feel accepted anywhere else. Every student is deserving of a safe, inclusive, and equitable learning environment in which all are celebrated and feel a sense of belonging. This was always the vision yet realized for the diversity,
equity, and inclusion work in RCS. And while I do believe that our district will continue providing the best possible learning environments for all students, I will continue to advocate for a data driven vision, budget, and policies Thank you. Thank you. I'll go ahead and start. And I'll just add on the regarding the diversity, equity, inclusion and the change of positioning or the removal of that position that I think it is the district's responsibility to step up and ensure that our students do not
feel the loss of that and that we are continuing as Jessica, Trustee Gupta indicated, that we do have data driven policies in place to ensure that every student receives the supports that they need, and that we are celebrating diversity and including voices at the table. I'd also like to move on and talk about Rochester Area Youth Assistance and their sponsoring a water and boating safety class on a 13.2 order. Madam President?
Point of order. Trustee Annas? Could you please ask our two trustees to stop texting each other during the meeting? Well, there shouldn't be any phone usage going on while we're sitting at the table. It's 10:36. I had to check a couple of messages. It's family related. It is not related to anything other than that. I'm disappointed that Trustee Annis is accusing us of things with having nothing to show for it. And maybe we'll put that in the norms because there really should be no phone usage while we're sitting here. But let me continue. There's a water and boating safety class on May 13 from seven to eight at
Van Hoozen Farms. Please, the event is free, but please register by emailing rya@rochester.k12.mi.us. And, it is with, funding from the Ashley Iseman Boating Safety Foundation that, Raya is able to put that on, and it's in conjunction with the Oakland County Sheriff's Office. Since our last meeting, I had the privilege of attending Musson's Lion King show. They had two sold out performances. The costumes were amazing. The students were amazing. They did such a great job, singing and acting.
There were a host of teachers and parent volunteers who worked with the students since October to make this performance so successful. And I was thrilled to be there. And I think they probably could have held several additional performances too. I also, as Trustee Ann has pointed out, attended the RCS Foundation Scholarship Reception. And these are donor directed scholarships. And so if there's anyone in the district who would like to participate, they're always, looking for those to do that. The program has tripled in size in the past eight years, and we'd like to see that continue. I attended the SPARKLE Awards,
which recognized over 500 people, who had positively impacted the life of a student in our special education programs. And I was honored to be able to congratulate those who had been who were being recognized and to help pass out their awards. This is always a positive evening and hearing about the different different ways so many have enhanced the learning environment of our students. And last but not least, I attended this month's PTA Council meeting, and it's always a great opportunity to hear what our PTA Council is doing and connect with parents throughout the district. As I attended these events,
I continue to reflect on what positive things are happening within our district. While there is always room for improvement, we truly have an amazing district and I look forward to the many spring events that highlight our students' academic, athletic and extracurricular achievements as we move through the end of the year. And with that, we are now moving on to comments by members of the administration. They also have three minutes, but additional time may be requested. These comments allow members of the administration to share information that they believe is valuable to the board and or community.
And these are comments and not discussion items. Mr. Russo? Thank you, Madam President. Mr. McDaniel? Thank you, Mr. Russo. There's a lot on my mind tonight, but I think I'm going to leave it to welcome Yo and Yo, Brian Dixon, Mike Rocca, who's a parent in the district, Nicole Demand and Cameron Colwell. We look forward to working with you. Thanks. Thank you, Mr. McDaniel. Mr. Murphy? Yes. I'm not sure anyone wants to hear additionally about the SPCC. It's been talked about a lot tonight, but I also realized that we promised to give those updates when we met during the superintendent's update and failed to do so earlier tonight.
So very quickly, SPCC met on the ninth. We covered basically looking at the policies that were brought forth to you tonight for a first reading. Also, we reviewed the administrative regulation updates that were in your most recent board update, continued the discussion on conflict of interest. Where we had left that is a legal question that we wanted guidance on. We received that. We had additional questions. So the questions have been sent and the conversation continues. And then finally, we discussed student privacy policy and the emails that had gone back and forth about
that, had a robust discussion about that which ended as previously referenced tonight in a, not a consensus on whether we needed additional clarification from attorney or any other steps forward at this time. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Murphy. Doctor. DeLuca. Scott here. I wanted to extend gratitude for the community's continued support and value in special education and our district's commitment to ensuring the learning needs of all students. I also need to echo the sentiments expressed already this evening regarding last week's Sparkle
Awards. Our pack did such an amazing job, and it was wonderful to have an event that celebrated over 500 exceptional individuals for their contributions to RCS special Thank you, Ms. Cather. Mr. Cusimano? Yeah. Just a reminder, come support our K-twelve art program starting tomorrow, April 22, goes through May 1 at the Admin Building. I don't know the exact hours, but I think it's 04:30 to something, but that's on the website. Thank you, Mr. Russo. I would like to, make the board aware that today's professional learning,
our elementary staff, anchored the morning with data dialogue, in grade level, building wide and vertical configurations. And, then our buildings focus on their goal areas to round out the afternoon. I think that the intersections made with, the conversation this evening around data presentation and future my work, will really help us, draw closer the intersections between district goals and building level goals and how, we can continue to generate, high level work within those, bodies of the organization, those groups within the organization.
I also, can't help but feel a lot of gratitude sitting here about the ways that our educators have been hosting countless spring celebrations. We heard our students speak of them. We've we've attended, various, musical or theater performances, upcoming art show. Certainly our our communities and family are supporting young people at home as as miss Gupta described with robotics to see all of the ways that they're brilliant and and bring those, demonstrations forward both in an academic lane but then also in those, year end demonstrations of learning that are so very important.
So I know those are tireless hours, both for our educators after their work day as well as, for the volunteers across the community. So appreciative of that. Thank you, miss Hampton. Just a few announcements from me, starting over my three minutes, hopefully. Mr. Cosmarano, it's from three to seven from April 20 it's three to 7PM, April twenty second through the twenty fifth at the at our, central office. That's at 52585 De Quindo Road. Just a reminder, there's construction at the front of the building. It is not fun to get to. In fact some cars won't even make it, so I'm kidding.
No, I'm not kidding actually today. It was a little bit of a mess. But for families who wanted to attend, please please know that that's, give yourself a little extra time in trying to navigate navigate that that De Quindre Road. Authors in April. Authors in April and sparkle awards were my two, introductions to the community after after taking the position of superintendent of Rochester Community Schools, and I was blown away by both last year. Sparkle words this year was incredible, learning curve for me. I finally got a seat. I didn't have one last year, but, I put the folders to my chest to to to hold them,
and I was sparkly all over the place. So, note to self, don't do that next year. I am not going to be able to attend authors in April this year because I will be in DC advocating on behalf of full funding of IDEA and for, public ed in general. So I will be in DC on that night and I'm really sad that I'm missing, authors in April. It's a great event. I am attending Saturday shows at Rochester High School for Anne of Green Gables and it's Stoney that night for Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of eighteen twelve. Excited to spend my Saturday with one of my children going to musicals.
It's gonna be a great Saturday for us, and I echo, a lot of the things that have been said around the table already, but to most specifically, we're we're we're in a, there's a lot of struggles that are happening not only here but across the country, and I just wanna say that we have a lot to be proud of here in Rochester. There's not only the celebratory events that we need to look at, but the things that are done every single day by our educators. Our our our principals and our teachers work tirelessly to make sure that students' needs are met and families' needs are met. And in the discussion that can get lost,
and the political ideology this and this over here, I wanna thank them for their commitment to our for our students and our families, period. Thank you, madam president. Thank you. I have just two announcements. On April 24, it's the Adams High School Honors Convocation at seven P. M. At Adams High School. And on May 5, we have our next Board of Education work session at six at Reuther Middle School. We are adjourned. Thank you for attending and have a good night. We are adjourned. Thank you for attending and have a good night.