WEBVTT

METADATA
Video-Count: 1
Video-1: youtube.com/watch?v=3O7o8xHwAM0

NOTE
MEETING SECTIONS:

Part 1 (Video ID: 3O7o8xHwAM0):
- 00:00:03: Meeting Call to Order and District Mission Statement
- 00:01:07: Central Middle School Overview: Mission and Middle Schoolers
- 00:06:41: Central Teachers' Collective Efficacy: Purpose and Student Voices
- 00:09:27: Proud Moments, Student Voice and Family Communication
- 00:15:48: Feedback Driven Initiatives, Results and Future Goals
- 00:22:10: Central Middle School: New Building Impact Discussion
- 00:24:54: Central Middle School: Teacher Satisfaction Discussion
- 00:29:21: Central Middle School: Enrollment and Disciplinary Trends
- 00:34:47: Central Middle School: Sixth Grade Transition Discussion
- 00:38:41: Otter Lake Elementary Overview: Priorities and Demographics
- 00:41:59: Otter Lake: Academic Goals, Assessments and Results
- 00:47:54: Otter Lake: Actions to Reach Goals and Volunteer Program
- 00:51:09: Otter Lake: Learning Walks, Student Experience and Theme
- 00:57:30: Otter Lake: Community Events and Future Opportunities
- 01:00:11: Otter Lake Elementary: FastBridge and CKLA Discussion
- 01:04:57: Otter Lake Elementary: Free/Reduced and Compliments Discussion
- 01:11:09: Otter Lake Elementary: Spanish Immersion Discussion
- 01:15:28: High School Activities Update: Winter Sports and Goals
- 01:17:40: Winter Sports Recap: Hockey, Swimming, Skiing, More
- 01:24:45: Performing Arts Highlights: One Act and Dear Evan Hansen
- 01:29:03: Activity Highlights: Ticket Sales and Community Engagement
- 01:31:15: Spring Sports Overview, Skill Building and Ownership
- 01:36:11: Speech Tournament and Facilities Discussion
- 01:38:22: Activities Finance Clerk Discussion
- 01:39:06: Multi-Age Updates: Decision-Making, Staffing and Strategic Plan
- 01:44:56: Districtwide Multigrade Classrooms: Supporting Greater Stability
- 01:46:39: Unified Multi-Age Approach, Student and Staff Experience
- 01:49:21: Multi-Age: Design Team, Communication, and Curriculum
- 01:53:07: Addressing Teacher Buy-In and Parent Concerns
- 01:56:56: Experience With Multi-Age: Student Readiness Discussions
- 02:01:15: Concerns with Readiness & Benefits to Multigrade Learning
- 02:04:12: Financial Discussion, Concerns, Research and Statistics
- 02:08:45: Benefits of Multi-Age and the Transitioning Period
- 02:15:06: Detrimental Studies & Parental Solicitation Discussion
- 02:17:32: Accessing the Video Discussion and Public Awareness
- 02:19:07: Leadership Trust & Multigrade as District Success
- 02:23:56: Public Education and Multi-Age Final Statement


Part: 1

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(object banging) - I now call this meeting the School Board of Independent School
District 624 to order. Before we begin, I just
wanna read something and we'll see if we do this every meeting. The mission of the White Bear
Lake Area School District, the community at the forefront of educational excellence,
honoring our legacy and courageously building the future is to ensure each student
realizes the unique talents and abilities and makes
meaningful contributions with local and global impact through a vital system of systems,

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distinguished by students who design and create their own future. A culture that respects
diverse people and ideas, safe and nurturing and
inspiring experiences, exceptional staff and families
committed to student success, abundant engaged community partners. And that is our district mission. So to ground us in that,
I read it to begin. And my goal would be that
before every meeting, we can allow one board
member to read that. And with that said, I'm gonna ask the clerk to call the role. - Arcand.
- Here. - Daniels here. - Skaar.
- Here.

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- Streiff Oji.
- Here. - Thompson.
- Here. - All right, our first discussion item is B1, Central Middle School. Let y'all come up, welcome. - Thank you for having us tonight. We are really excited to have a moment just
to brag about Central. For those of you who
haven't met Len Elvin, I asked him to come with me tonight. He is our associate principal and has been a really
important part of this work. And then I also just wanna
acknowledge that Ali Losey, Kelly Murrow and Shelley Johnson, who work in the building

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also came to support us in this process. So as we were thinking
about how we present at the end of the year versus how we present at
the beginning of the year, thought I would take a little bit of time just to talk about the
middle school experience and what it's like to
be in a middle school and to work in a middle school. And here's what I know to be true. Because we have all attended school, we bring long held beliefs
about middle school shaped by our own
experiences and memories. However, truly understanding and supporting middle school students is more complex than
those experiences alone.

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Middle school is a time of rapid change and growth as students learn
to balance new privileges and responsibilities, while
becoming more independent. Today we will give you a
glimpse into the complexity of the work we do at Central Middle School to build a community aligned
with our school mission. Our school mission has many similar items
to the district mission. And a few things that I
just wanted to highlight that we always come back to with this is we're always talking about how are we being equitable, safe and supportive for students.

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How are we creating a culture
where people are open-minded, they have integrity, empathy, and respect for each other that we cultivate student agency and joy. I think joy in today's world is a really important place to just pause. How are we providing and
modeling joy for students and that we are in partnership. In education, we talk a
lot about relationships and we're all about relationships. But at Central, we really try
to take it one step further and say, how are we all
really in community together? And how are we teaching
kids who are ages 11 to 14

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to be in community together? - The middle school student, every time I tell somebody
I work in the middle school, they pat me on the back and be like, whew, thank
you for your service. I say, I'm not in the military, I just work in the middle school. But. (people laughing) So there are, you know, some misconceptions about
middle school students. Some of them are the students
are mean, rude and defiant. Middle school students are
emotional and hormonal. The students care only about
friends and peer influences.

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And students can't think critically about complex topics and ideas. And the one misconception
that really stands out is the grades don't matter. You know, at some point in time, some of these may have been true, but the one about the grades don't matter, they might not matter as to
impact if you get into a college or not, but they definitely
matter what the skills and the habits that you're building. You know, the foundation. And we know how important
the foundation is for trying to build something up. And then they also matter in the sense

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to help build confidence and provide areas of
strength, areas of growth. So grades not matter, that's, you know, one of a
misconception that's out there. But it's really, it is a misconception because the things that
they're doing in middle school, academically socially they really do matter
in like the foundation and building the kids up. The truths, middle school students' brains are in a period of
rapid growth and change. Middle school students struggle
with executive functioning.

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Middle school students care deeply about fairness and justice. Middle school students push boundaries, take risks as they learn independence. Middle school students are self-conscious and feel like everyone is watching them. Middle school students
want adult connections. And middle school students
are not mini adults. They'll tell you they are,
but we know that they're not. But I mean, one truth that's not there is that middle school
students wanna succeed.

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They want to do well academically. And it talks about that adult connection. They want good relationships with the adults in the building, the students in the building, they want to feel that sense of joy that she talked about and that love and just being successful and being, putting their mind to a task and being able to complete it. - Besides understanding the
students, there's a lot of work that goes into being a
middle school teacher. I started my work as a
middle school teacher and I've chosen to be a
middle school administrator because I love working in middle school

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and I love working with
middle school teachers. We have focused a lot this year
on our collective efficacy. And teacher collective
efficacy is the belief that teachers working together can positively impact student performance. And I've said to my teachers
repeatedly, your work matters. There's too many narratives
out in the public that are negative about teachers, negative about the work that we do. And I always remind myself,
I don't have to do this work, I get to do this work.

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And so I am so proud of the way that our staff comes together
to support each other in service of students. With that this year
we've had three focuses that have really guided our work. Really talking with students about their purpose for learning. Why are you here, why
are you in middle school? Why does it matter? When we do that, students buy in and then talking about
the quality of questioning and student status and those
really go hand in hand. How are we asking students questions

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to deepen their thinking? And how are we we lifting their voices and helping them to learn and to ask questions of each other? We choose to see their strengths before their struggles, which doesn't mean that we don't see the struggle, but we know that when we
build on student strengths, we will increase their confidence and we choose to give them a
clear purpose and direction. We wanna make this a
little bit visible for you. 'cause often you like
hear about these things in the abstract and teacher actions have great impact on student achievement.

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I took the opportunity to
just talk with the teachers and I asked them two questions. The first question I asked was, what have you gotten better at this year? And what has that done
for student learning? And I wanna bring, you
can read the things here. These are a summary of
common themes that showed up, but I wanna bring some
of their voices to light. One language arts teacher said, I've gotten better at questioning, putting more back on students. Students have been pushed to respond at a higher level to text. We are reading in class and
help others with responses.

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Our tech ed teacher
said, I'd like to think I've gotten better at getting my students to understand what they're learning has real life connections. I feel that this buy-in from students has improved their learning. Another teacher said, I've
always prioritized relationships, but this year I've prioritized getting to know students even more by having conversations for a few minutes at the
start and end of class. This has allowed me to show students how much I care about them personally. A social studies teacher said, enhancing student voice in the classroom,

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students have been able
to make their voices heard in our classroom community and this has allowed them to
become better critical thinkers and to see themselves in our world. I appreciate we have our
administrative assistant in our student support
center and she supports all of our counselors
and our social worker and our school psych. So she sees a lot of
kids when they come in and they might be heightened emotionally. They're having some sort of concern. And she said, I feel like my patience and problem solving skills
have improved as I've worked with smaller and larger
groups of middle schoolers,

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teaching them step-by-step techniques towards reaching a goal because she is the face that they first see when they come in and she helps them to be
able to problem solve. And then one of our special
education teachers said, "I feel like I've grown in my ability to ask inquiry questions that
help students push themselves and to think for themselves and apply math concepts in
new skills they're learning." And that this continues to be an area that she wants to grow and develop. Especially being able
to provide opportunities

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for all students throughout the school. The second question I
said is, if you did this and this was the learning that you had, what are you actually most proud of? Because what I've learned
about the teacher psyche and especially at this
time of the year is, is we care really deeply about kids and we're always reflective and we'll say, yep, we
did this really well, but I'm still not good enough at this. I still need to do better here. So you're constantly working
through that cycle of like, what else can I do and how can I give more and more and more?

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And I really just wanted
to hear from teachers, just pause and recognize,
what are you really proud of? And one teacher said, I'm most proud of implementing a new
curriculum with fidelity and getting student feedback, voice and choice to make
this curriculum even better for students next year. I'm proud of celebrating
students on a personal level. It's rewarding to watch them light up when I can put it on display and make their learning public and they can really
celebrate who they are. I am proud of partnering
with families, teachers and students to provide eight
different groups this year

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in topics of mindfulness,
a girl's leadership group, test anxiety, impulse
control, and family change. Our counselors are proud of earning the RAMP designation from ASCA. And I just wanna pause for a
second to acknowledge this. Central school counseling
program has been identified and recognized as a ASCA model program by the American School
Counselor Association. Central is one of 12 schools in Minnesota to receive this recognition this year and one of 208 in the country.

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There are fewer than 2000 schools with this recognition nationwide. It requires evidence of a data informed
school counseling program that's aligned with the national model for school counseling. This includes evidence of direct and indirect services to
students, program planning that incorporates ASCA student standards and improved outcomes as a result of the school counseling program. We also had teachers say,
I'm proud of how my students support each other in middle school, where they support each other. They make concerted efforts
to include their peers

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and are mindful of greeting each other and encouraging each other's success. I wish that more adults, quite honestly in the world would pause to do that for each other. I'm really proud that
we've created a community of middle school students where they can do this for each other. - Student and family voice.
- Oh sorry. - It's okay, some student voice, they talked about supportive environment and learning, various
instructional methods. Students prefer fun games for
learning, hands-on projects

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and group work, partner choice, bear time, students
enjoy choice activities such as grade level tournaments, gym time, homework and study time. And sometimes they just
like to be in the space with their friends and they can just chill and not do anything and not have any rules or anything to go back and just sit back and have 20 minutes to
themselves just to be teenagers. Students appreciate the
five minute passing time and the warning bell to
help manage their time. We've been creating new clubs and talking with students
about different things

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that they are interested in after school. So we have continued to offer
a wide variety of clubs, after school activities and
fun events like assemblies, after school parties and our snack bar. A couple of direct
quotes for some students that they just talked about on
the day to day in the school and things that help them
feel supported and success. I like when adults in the
school know me as a person. They care about me without giving up. 'Cause middle school is
the land of mistakes.

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Kids make mistakes all the time, but being able to not give up on them and really support them. And then another student
said, treat them with respect and then also provide support
and a sense of belonging. And we use that with some
of our clubs well too. Just trying to create
spaces for people to have some support and some
belonging within our space. Some family voice, what we're doing well, communication and engagement. Some families appreciate the communication including daily and weekly emails.

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Teacher communication
regarding assignments and tests, proactive teacher reach out about issues or positive feedback and communication with both
the parents and the students. Student activities and support,
teaching and curriculum. The staff and environment,
we're really trying to build on some of the
things that we are doing well or families enjoying because
we always want to make a welcoming space that families are interested in coming into the building to our different events.

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So we're always trying to get feedback and get information from families or things that we can offer to increase just the overall
engagement within the families to get them into our space. Areas for improvement, student
behavior and accountability. Communication and information access, enrichment and academic structure, programming and wellness. So the communication and information is really to
try to find a happy medium because some sixth grade families who just come into middle school, they want all of the
emails, all of the calls

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and then some families who are
in the eighth grade are like, I've been talking to you for three years, like I know who you are, I don't. So just trying to find that
happy medium, that space that we can get everybody the information that they need in a timely manner. And student behavior and accountability. We really work to try to create
partnerships with families. No, I talked about the mistakes that will be happening in middle school, but some small, some big. But we always try to work with families to help to talk with them
through those situations and figure out a solution
that works for everybody.

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But sometimes there are
some difficult conversations that we have to have with families, but just that communication and that partnership
help us make it through some of those tougher conversations. - A few things that we have
done based on the feedback, it mentioned the RAMP designation, we are also participating with Avid, we are doing a teacher and student agency survey and
I just wanna give a shout out. We've had 25 career guest speakers in to talk with our
AVID students this year. And they are people that range anywhere from graduating directly from high school

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and going into the workforce, to people who have advanced degrees. And so across variety of different job
opportunities, we've partnered with the White Bear Lake Police Department with their net smarts
internet safety presentation. We've had a partnership
with Career Pathways and hosted a eighth grade career fair. By the end of the year, every student at Central
will have received a positive postcard from a staff member acknowledging a way that they have contributed to the school

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or where we have seen their growth. And then several other, you
know, opportunities as well. And with that we have some results. And so we have some data
that backs this up as well. - Our sense of belonging, a 9.6% growth. So we asked the question,
I feel like I belong. And then a 9.6% growth to this year to I feel like I belong in my community. So that's something we're
really trying to build on

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and create a safe space for students to feel like they belong. A sense of respect, 12.3% growth from 2025 to end 2025 compared to 2024. So it says I feel socially accepted and then this year, I feel valued and respected in my school community. And then a 19.4% growth in caring adults. If I had something on my mind, my teacher would carefully listen to me

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compared to there's at least one adult in the school I can talk
to who cares about me. So there are just, it's
been growth in those, these questions that we ask
students about just that space that we're trying to create
of a warm, safe environment that kids definitely feel like they belong and that they're supported. - I believe that when
students have physical and psychological safety, they
feel a sense of belonging. They feel like they're
a part of a community and we've seen that we
have had growth in that, that in turn then leads to a space

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where students are able
to take academic risks and to challenge themselves. This is our MCA reading data. I know MCAs are important, I know how important they
are to the community. And as a mom of two children, I also know that my kids are more than
just one data point in time. And as I've said to my
staff, we have to be able to tell the story behind this data. And so as I look at 23, 24 versus 24, 25, our sixth grade has remained
relatively flat and our seventh

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and eighth grade have continued to grow. I believe a huge piece of that is because how we are working to develop community within the school and how we're helping kids to see themselves be a part of the school. We see this in both reading and we see this in math for students. Am I satisfied with these scores? Absolutely not. But do I know that
there's more to the story? Absolutely. As I think about moving
forward, I really wanna continue to think about the student experience

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and the sense of belonging. Creating places for
students to be physically and psychologically safe. And as we are thinking
about our continued work, we'll continue to do
some of the same things that we have done throughout the year. And one thing I asked my staff today 'cause we were with them, I
said, as you have reflected and we were doing some self-assessment based on the teacher evaluation. What is one area of strength that you have and what's one area

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that you think we need to grow next year? And it doesn't have to
be a point of weakness, it can be a point of strength
that we can build on. And I went through all of those Post-its, and interesting to me 'cause where people and staff are feeling the strongest is in their classroom
environment and culture. And that's what we're seeing in our data and places that they say,
hey, we really need support and we wanna continue to
grow is in our assessment and in how do we continue to further engage students
in their academics. So that's a little bit
about a day in the life of middle school, questions. - [Speaker] Well thank you. We can open the floor
to questions, go ahead.

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- Thanks for the report, was great. Really like hearing about
Central Middle School. I spent many years at Central myself. I love the building, I love the school, I love that age group, like you, I just, I found my fit there. So with all the new
construction and the new spaces and the new cafeteria and all those things, how has that impacted the
year four students overall? I mean, you know, I know
it's a long projection and how it impacts, but just what you're
seeing this first year with all that new space.

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- I am so grateful to have the space. My first year, we actually had a classroom in the media center. We were so packed, we were
all on top of each other. And when kids are just
all on top of each other, there can be a lot of like tension. And just having space has been fantastic, to be able to have kids
have space to spread out. Having one side of the
building for sixth grade has really helped to smooth the transition and giving them just sort
of their own little house and their own little home to be able to transition
into middle school and then having seventh and
eighth grade on the other side.

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Our new cafeteria is
absolutely phenomenal. We can have three
lunches in the cafeteria. We have 325 to 350 students
that are in and out and they know how to handle
those rituals and routines and they absolutely love
all of the outdoor spaces and the new gym spaces. Middle school students
love to move and be active. So being able to have a variety of those spaces has been great. I also think I just
wanna thank the community because when we invest in our kids and our kids have seen these spaces,

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they know how valued
they are in the community and how much the community values them and we take time to remind
them of that as well. - Just one other question, when
you're comparing sixth grade to sixth grade last year and this year? Seventh seventh eighth eighth. Those are different groups
though, each year, right? So it was last year sixth graders, this year sixth graders. - Correct. - So there's that too. That kind of factors into test scores. - Absolutely. - It's a different group. - Absolutely, it's a
different group each year. And so we will take time
sometimes to look at it by cohort,

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like what does it look
like from that sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade? And then sometimes we
also look at it by grade because sometimes we'll
notice, gosh, there's a pattern of something that's happening and what can we learn from
our sixth grade teachers or gosh, eighth grade's really
making gains for our kids. What can we learn so we can
figure out what's happening in the system to support kids. - Thank you. - Okay, thank you, other questions? - So thank you for sharing
about Central Middle School and looking at some of the data, your 19 point gain in caring adults and kids that feel that
they have caring adults

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is really commendable, actually, also with the sense of belonging and growth in middle school, that's huge. So I really appreciate you sharing that and the focus that you
have on the whole child and not just that academic score and then yeah, just really appreciate the whole child picture and the work that you all are doing to really make sure kids feel safe and willing to take risks
so that they can gain and grow academically as well. - Thanks, thank you. - All right, Mr. Skaar.

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- Thank you. Thank you for the
presentation, appreciate it. And when you were, earlier in your presentation you mentioned that some people were
like down on teachers and I know I read a Wall
Street Journal article that showed teachers satisfaction level was going down, trending down
and turnover was going up. This is nationally, I'm not talking about
this particular district. Can you add any color to that comment that you just mentioned?

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00:26:01.500 --> 00:26:36.360
I'm interested in that. - 100%, I absolutely can. Like you say, you've read that article. I think if you're on social
media you can find, you know, comments on social media feeds. I think when sometimes there are, sometimes there's misconceptions about what's actually happening in school. I think teacher turnover, we are consistently asking
teachers to do more and more and more and know the kids, right? And it's a really, really complex job.

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And I wanted to take this opportunity to say it's also a job
that's really worthy. It's a job where are highly skilled and they're highly trained professionals. These are people who have
graduate level degrees, who have studied what it
means to be a learner. And I wanna disrupt
sometimes the narrative that is out there in the
world about what it means to be an educator or to be in education and to bring that forward. And my hope today was really to exemplify also what is their voice. Here are the things that
are actually happening,

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so that we as all leaders and members in this community
can step out in the community and say, actually when I hear
somebody saying something, here's what I know is
happening at Central. Here's what teachers are doing at Central, here are some of the
strengths that they have. Because I think it takes all of us to bring that narrative forward and I just want people to
really value the educators and to really value the
middle school students. There's lots of misconceptions
about middle school students and they're really important
part of our community.

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- Thank you, you know, I
have an idea, you know, I was talking with a
teacher from the district, he's retired now, he was
retiring a couple years ago. He was I think a fifth grade teacher and he went into the doctor, you know, he went into like urgent care emergency and the doctor was his fifth grade student and he told him what an impact he had because his kid was having problems and he took him aside,
talked to him, coached him up and I thought it was a really good story.

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So those stories are really helpful, I think could be helpful, if you guys think it's worth it. But I think when you
hear the success stories of a teacher that had such a
significant impact on a kid, you know, and they remember it, it's kind of important. How many kids from our middle school go to White Bear Lake High School? Is it 90%, 80%? - I am not gonna have
the exact number on that, but I would say the
majority of our students

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transition from eighth grade to ninth grade at the high school. - But we don't have a percentage. - I am not gonna quote a number because I don't have that and I'd wanna be accurate
with you on that. - I think it'd be helpful because that's kind of, when students transition to a different district or go to private schools, it's like at the
elementary, it's at the end of junior high, you know what I mean? That kind of thing. So I think that's a good
metric for us to look at.

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What's our capacity at the middle school, how many do we have enrolled
at the middle school and at Central and then what's
our capacity, do you know? - Yeah, I have about 958 students. And it's about even
across all three grades and it looks to be almost the
exact same number next year. And really proud of the fact that our students have stayed and we've had some students
that have come back also from, you know, other either online or charter options.

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And the building can hold more than that given the expansion of the building. - So you have capacity to grow. - Absolutely. - Let me see if I can understand, oh, the disciplinary trends, the DRR trends we heard
from the high school that I think on April 13th that their trend was like 40% down and their attendance went up. So we're saying that maybe
that's a direct corollary.

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How is that, do you guys know off the top of your head? - Yep, I follow discipline all the time. I would say philosophically I believe that if kids aren't in
school, they aren't learning and if they aren't in
class, they aren't learning. As Mr Van said, we really
work in partnership to be able to problem solve because what we do know to be true is middle schoolers
are gonna make mistakes and so we're gonna work with
them through those mistakes. Over the course of the years that I have been here, our out of school suspensions
have continued to drop and have been amongst the
lowest in the district

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and our attendance rates have increased. And so we have seen that and now we've really seen
these also big jumps. Not only our kids in school and know that when they make
mistakes they have a space where they're gonna be held accountable and they have to learn and
they have to repair the harm but they're also gonna
be valued for themselves and be able to overcome those mistakes because there are caring adults and they're going to be,
also, when they make mistakes with each other, the
adults are gonna help them to learn how do you solve those problems?

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And then we've seen growth in
our academics because of that. - Thank you, and then when
you're looking at those charts, you had it divided into one, two, three, four, what does that mean? What are the one, two, three, four mean? - Sure they're two different surveys. So we just looked at like what
are some correlational data. One was our bar survey that we
gave at the end of last year and one was our student
experience survey this year. And so it is from something where it goes from, you know, most agree, somewhat agree, somewhat
disagree to least.

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And so it's in next year. - So number four would be
where they strongly agree? - Correct. - Okay, and that's a good metric to track. So the trend line for
those that strongly agree, that's kind of where you want to be. So when that goes up, that's a good thing comparatively to the other categories, I would just based on my
past experience with that. I was looking at the MCA scores and, you know, when you look
at, as I've said before,

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you gotta look at the trend. The trend is up in
seventh and eighth grade and that's a good thing, as opposed to looking at the
raw scores, the trend is good, it's flat in the sixth grade. Have you guys delineated from the scores based on which elementary school they came from? I mean is it one school
delivers higher results in sixth grade versus
another elementary school?

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How many elementary
schools feed into Central? - The schools that
primarily feed into Central are Otter Lake, Oneka,
North Star and Lincoln. We have a few kids that come from Mitoska, some from Birch and a
couple from Lakeaires. But I have not dug into
which elementary school, what I have dug into is
looking at our data to say, what are we doing? Because what we know is that our kids are coming in fifth grade and sometimes there's been
a dip in seventh grade

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from our sixth to seventh grade. I've also dug further into the data because what we've shared here is who are our students
that meet or exceed. And I absolutely want students
to always meet or exceed, but what I do know is that about seven, if I include the kids who
are partially proficient, we're at about 75%. And here's what partially
proficient means on the MCA. It means that they have
some level of learning but it's up and down. So maybe they haven't mastered
it as deeply as possible yet. And middle school is a
time of that rapid change.

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And what I know about our
Minnesota State standards is a lot of them are cyclical and so they're gonna have
that repeated practice. And so we wanna look at
who's met and exceeded. We also really wanna
dig into who's partial and what do we know and what do we have to
do better in the system to support them to bump them back up? - Okay, thank you. - [Speaker 2] Thank you. - All right, Ms. Thompson. - First thanks for the presentation. You guys always do such a good job. One thought I was thinking of

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just kind of on the sixth grade data is they're transitioning
from elementary school where they made it to fifth grade, right? You're the oldest kids in
school, you're like the ones that all the other kids are looking up to. So there's this sense of maybe
empowerment in the students. So like I made it to fifth grade, I'm almost done now,
I'm gonna be a middle. Then they get into middle school and now they're back to
kind of starting over in the social aspects of school, right? Like now you're the youngest kids in the school and you're in middle school. It's a whole different world.

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So I'm wondering if a lot of it could be transitional based
impacts on their ability to really dig into the work. 'Cause they're in this
whole new environment and they're learning how to navigate a middle school socially, there's all kinds of things happening. So while we can say that
they're not just hormonal, they are going through
a lot of change, right? And so that may be an impact. And as they finally get into eighth grade, it's like they've made it,
they're used to the school now, they're used to the systems, they're used to how things work and they get back

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to that level again, right? Then they go off to high school and now they're in ninth grade and it's kind of a similar cycle. I feel that we kind of see that in the data when we look at that. - I think that aligns to
our sixth grade family saying we would like
continued and more support and how do we help our students
transition to middle school? - Yeah, so I think a lot of the questions you're asking and you
know, how do you feel? Are you feeling valued? Are you making those
connections with adults? And I think that's all very helpful because it can help them to have somebody

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to help them go through
those transitions, right? And feel that they're
supposed to be there, right? And that it's not so scary and nervous. And I had the great honor and pleasure of taking part in
the teacher of the interview, the teacher of the
interview process recently. And our teachers, well A,
they're just amazing human beings and I'm so thankful for them. But you hear a lot of this
story of an elementary teacher who made a relationship with
a student in elementary school

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who is now in high school
and is still reaching out and communicating with that teacher because that teacher
was their person, right? And those connections are so important and it's oftentimes with
students who have extra baggage that they're bringing to school every day that we don't see, 'cause
it's not a notebook or it's lived experiences that they have outside of our school. So I just, all the work and everything that's in
here is really showing what we're doing here in the
district to try to address

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all of those things that
impact our students. So I'm just thankful for it. And while yes, we always
want them to do better and to improve, I've noticed that all the things we're impacting to help remove those systemic barriers are having impacts in our schools. So I just wanna say thank you for that. - [Speaker 2] You're welcome. - All right, well thank you very much. - Thank you.
- And we're just proud that our students have
an opportunity to learn to make decisions, fail,
recover, and move on

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because that's so important
as they start navigating and they're stuck
between the child's world and the adult world and that
in between is so important that you play a vital role. So thank you for doing that. - [Speaker 2] Thank you.
- Thank you. - All right, we're gonna
move on to discussion B2, Otter Lake Elementary. Welcome Ms. Nelson. - [Nelson] All right, hi,
good evening everyone. So Otter Lake is one of the elementaries that feeds into Central. So I guess it's a match made tonight. All right, so tonight I'm gonna focus

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on our priorities. Just a big overview of Otter Lake, a lot on our academic goals, some really cool student experience things that we've done, some of
which you've witnessed, signage outside that was mentioned at the last board meeting. It did not survive that
storm of last weekend, but students got to bring them
home and it was really cute because they were like, I'm
gonna hang this on my door. And it's messages that said
like, believe in yourself, shine today, don't give up. So super cool, and then what's next? So Otter Lake. So at Otter Lake we are
currently at over 500 students.

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We're at 72% white students,
18% free and reduced. And then 25% of our population
is special education. We have a huge staff that
is so incredibly amazing and they have over 500 years of combined teaching experience. Some of the most senior
teachers in the district live at Otter and we're
so incredibly happy that they're there, continuing to lead and be mentors for new teachers coming in with as much excitement

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as they have the first
year that they started. So programming wise, we have five special
education cluster programs. So what that means is
students are identified at needing a really high level of service and they can come from
anywhere across the district and they'll be bused to
Otter to be serviced there. And then we of course have our Spanish dual language program. So this is me really
bragging for a second, but last year we went through
a really extensive process as a staff and a parent and student community to
become a school of excellence.

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And so the process really
was that we had to collect extensive data around our academics. We had to fill out extensive rubrics to see in multiple categories that was identified by
the Minnesota Association of Elementary School principals to say, if you do all these
things, you do them really well, you're a school of excellence, knowing that everything's a process and not everyone's perfect. You also had a highlight
gaps that you might have and what your plan was going
to be to address those gaps.

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And so I call it the
Otter Lake Master thesis. I think it's literally
70 pages, super proud. And then in the fall of this year, we were awarded a School of Excellence and so had a big community celebration, also celebrated the opening
of our brand new playground that the students and
families got to help design. So just so much to celebrate
to kick off the year. And there's me showing
off some of our awards, bringing about Otter
at the MESPA Institute. So here is our Otter Lake
Elementary priorities.

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You can see our mission is
over there on this side, but what we really focus on honestly is this whole targeted area in the middle. And so ensuring that academic
success of each student. And in order to do that we have to, as Catherine and Van mentioned, we have to make sure that they belong, they feel cared for, they feel safe. That's where those true academics
can really start to shine. So their experience matters, their family engagement matters, making sure we look at
everything through a lens of equity matters. And of course our staff
wellbeing really matters.

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People need to enjoy coming to work. There can be some really hard days and you know, I can tell you
in our cluster programming, there can be some
really, really hard days. And in the end, people come back and start over new each day. They love and care for the
students so incredibly much and just love our families. So I wanted to do just a
little comparison data. So we do a lot of tours at Otter Lake. And Otter Lake is
situated in a unique spot where families have some
choice, where they tell me,

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yeah, I see a White Bear bus drive pass, but I also see a
Centennial bus drive pass. Or I also know that my
neighbor goes to Mounds View. So these are the schools where
families really could choose that is very near our boundary area. And these are straight from MDE, these are MCA scores and you can see that Otter
Lake, I brag about Otter Lake, I think it's the best place on earth, but really it can show
through our data as well

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that our students are achieving at a really high level on MCA scores. And our attendance is actually, I think even higher this year. So really proud of that. Always working and striving to make sure we're not
leaving anyone behind and that we know the story
for every single student who is not achieving at the
rate that we want them to. But whenever I give the
tours, I say, I'm biased. I think Otter is the best, but I would challenge you to
find a better elementary school and most of those families come. It's one of those things

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where you can look at the data points when you walk in the building. You can feel that you belong. It doesn't matter if
you're student or family or coming new to the building. So then just a little bit about our academic goals for this year. So that is that 80% of students
will demonstrate low risk as measured by FastBridge and then that 95% of students
meet their IEP goals. We do have all of our students take the
FastBridge assessment, and that is to use as a data point for us because that really is what this is.

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I'm gonna show you our
mid-year data point. It's a dipstick, it's a one time, here's how they're doing
it on this particular day. And it gives us really
great data for all students, even students who maybe would
not take the MCA, right? Maybe that they would take the MTAS and just getting data in a different way. But just as a reminder that
FastBridge is a monitoring tool, it's a screener and
that it is really going to be looking at individual skills. It's to help us create groups for students

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so we know if they need enrichment, if they need intervention,
are they on grade level? it's important data in that way. Whereas the MCA is students
take all of those things and put them together
to take the MCA test, which is a much more summative test. All right, so you can
see for kindergarten, our English section, sections,
excuse me, I just have it where it's gonna show fall and then winter, you can see
that our kindergartners came in right around the 50% mark and made tremendous growth
into the winter screener.

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Know that this is
obviously really old data I'm actually showing you. So this winter screener
is given in January, right when we come back
from the winter break, we're gonna be giving
the spring screener here at the very end of May. So who knows when I come back next year, I'll share that data with you too. But huge, tremendous growth and this is our Spanish
Dual Immersion Program. Students coming in really high. And this is in Spanish. And I kind of referred to this before, but how it works is all
kindergartners are required

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to take an English screener. Then the Spanish immersion students also take Spanish screeners because that is their targeted language that they're gonna be learning. So that is the language in which we want to progress, monitor over time to see gaps that they may have. We also will be keeping
track of the English portion, but in kindergarten, really the majority of their day is in Spanish. There's minimal English instruction. So we would not continually
assess them in English and we would not anticipate huge growth

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because they're getting
30 minutes a day only. Okay, all right. And so our first grade here, you can see that when kiddos came into
first grade, I'll tell you, this group of first graders ended their kindergarten
at around 94% low risk. They came back in and had quite a dip. And so working super
hard to make some growth, I did take a peek at their data just to see like where are the
kiddos that were kind of, oops, on the bubble.

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And six students have already
met their spring growth goal that were in the winter
high risk category. So like I said, this is
kind of lagging data for us, just given the timing of my presentation, but making some growth. Here in second grade, again making tremendous growth. You can see from 75% to 88%, third grade started out at
80% and had a slight dip. I am confident that that
will rebound quite nicely based on all the assessments
I've seen since this data.

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Students working super hard,
same with fourth grade, came in really high, had
just a little bit of a dip and they're working really
hard, doing a great job now. And then kind of the
same with fifth grade, still our low risk category is really something to be proud of, given this kind of just midway checkpoint. And I just wanted to
note on here, you know, how we do look at data
too is we don't just look at high risk, low risk, we look at multiple different categories. So in between this, there's students

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who are just like on the
MCA, like a partially meets and some of them are one point away, it just happened to be,
but they're so close, we are confident they will be low risk to end the school year. Some of our action items that have helped us
reach our academic goals is we follow a really strict
instructional schedule. We work hard to make sure that
our students are receiving all of their core subject
areas for the amount of time that's allotted and that
every single student is receiving the tier one instruction.

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So that's the instruction
that every student gets. Even though we have a really high special education population, we're very careful about when students are getting pulled for
specialized services and really trying to be
as inclusive as possible. We have a really
structured what I need time and MTSS process where we're
reviewing data every six weeks and carefully considering what skills students will be working on. And we use flexible grouping and so students may
have a different teacher during that time so that they
can really narrow their focus

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on what they're working on. We've spent a lot of time this
year practicing and reviewing and refreshing the letters learning and different and instructional strategies that they learned in
their letters learning. And really now taking our CKLA curriculum with their letters learning to make the curriculum
come even more to life. A strong focus on our team collaboration. Last year we had started a really robust parent volunteer program
that is still going strong. I know some of you have been at Otter

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and have volunteered,
read books, et cetera. This year, we also had students from the high school reach out to us and that is the photo that
you can see on the slide. They had come to Otter last year to help volunteer at our school
carnival and they loved it. And so these two young men said, yeah, we have this new thing where we can do student
groups on Wednesdays at the high school and we would love to see if students would like to come with us back
to Otter and volunteer. I was like, whoa, and this was
in the spring of last year.

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I thought, okay, that sounds good. I didn't really know what
would come out of it, but you can see a really large
group came on Wednesdays. They had their own little name badges, they would check in, they
were assigned classrooms. And really the goal, much like our parent
volunteers is we wanted them to work with students in whatever it was they were doing during that time. So nothing special, it wasn't
gonna be drop everything. Now we're just gonna play a game because our high school
volunteers are here. So if they were doing
something with literacy, the high school kids
were sitting next to them doing literacy or helping with math or playing the math game.

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Some of them had
specialists during that time and they were really excited. So they got to play the ukulele in gym and all those things too. So that was a really
successful experiment I'll say, 'cause we weren't sure
how it was gonna work out. But they took it very seriously. They did a training, they
signed a code of ethics with us and of course the elementary
kids think they're celebrities and want them to come every day. The other thing that
we worked on this year as a staff is learning walks. And I'm sure you've heard about that over the course of this year with some buildings trying
out different things.

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But essentially what it was,
was we together as a staff, we defined what we felt a
vision for student learning was. So that is different than our mission. The mission is what we ensure, we are going to ensure students are gonna be
able to do X, Y, and Z. A vision for student learning is what is the student experience,
what does it look like, sound like, feel like in the classroom? And then what would a teacher do to create a condition to make that happen? Once we narrowed that focus down, we had two focus areas this year. One on student engagement,

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so active participation
and meaning making. And then we also focus on assessment and students constructing learning goals and then tracking their
progress towards those goals. These are just a couple of snapshots, but what we did was once
we had defined those areas, created some look fors, teams were able to go into each other's classroom and watch each other's
classrooms in action. Again, really focused on
what are students doing and then what is a teacher
doing to make that happen? It was so powerful

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because we would go into
a classroom one day, the next day we would go
into that teacher's classroom that was an observer
and they would already be putting into action something they saw that were like, that was a great idea. I can't believe I've taught
next to you for 20 years. I never saw you teach before. I can't believe I didn't
know you did that. So really right away replicating that. And I think a change of culture
in terms of allowing people to come into classrooms is
that we are really focused on where do we wanna
be is the ideal state. And then wherever we're
at is where we're at.

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But then we're just gonna take
a baby step to move forward. What's the small tweak we
can make in our system, in our routine, in our instruction that will get us to the next step, knowing that we're not gonna
be able all just jump there. So those have gone really well. We did two cycles of learning walks. One was just within their own team as we got used to the process. And then the next time
around, I allowed teachers to choose like what grade level or if there was a specific teacher they wanted to do a learning walk with and then myself, our instructional coach

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and then the teacher would do
that and then have a debrief. So a lot of learning took
place this year at Otter, I am excited to see our
MCA reading results. As you know, we don't
get that until far later, which is such a bummer 'cause you know, a third of the students who take it will be on their way to
Central Middle School. But we are really confident in the work that we've done this year
and we're just really excited to see that play out. So for student experience, we do a lot of different things at Otter.

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So we have, there's a
few pictures on here. We do bear awards where
teachers can give students, it's a bear award really recognizing something amazing they're doing. And then once a month we draw and each grade level has three students. They can choose a prize or eat with myself and my building assistant, Molly Franta, and then bring a friend
and you would be shocked how many kids want to eat
lunch with me and Miss Franta. It's a lot, so it's really exciting. We also have a really
big read-a-thon event with bringing community readers in. This is our second time

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that we've had the Black Student Union come and give an assembly. So just so many fun things. The other thing is we've
had a year long theme of kindness, so Otters for Others, and this was all teacher driven. So two teachers put together, it's like a mini curriculum, each month had a different
theme related to kindness and it really started
with kindness to yourself and wellness, branches
out to your classmates, to our school, and
finally to the community and world, which is
what you saw on display

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outside of Otter with the signage. With that, they do kindness
journals every other week. Each student has a little journal and there's prompts that they write in. And then they also have buddy classrooms. And with those buddy
classrooms, there's events and challenges all related to kindness. With the last Buddy challenge
being that we were able to secure some donations and they got to purchase
a present, if you will, for their buddy class related
to something that they did with their challenges and students. I can't even explain to
you how excited they were

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to pick out what they wanted to purchase for their buddy class. And they're just so
excited to give it to them. The Post Office was like, you guys are not my
favorite people right now. There's so many packages coming to Otter. But students were coming up to me and like begging to get more money because they wanted to
give more to their classes. So really amazing. And then we have a really large student ambassadors program at Otter Lake. It's nearly all fourth and fifth graders.

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It's a service orientated group where there are student
ambassador mentors that come in. Is anyone a mentor? I know there's some mentors in this room, but they come in once a month and they'll work with students on, maybe they'll be creating
birthday bags for Solid Ground. So it's collecting donations and then putting the bags together to have a little birthday party. So cake mix, cards, things like that. And everything is around service.

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There's a day of service that's coming up the last week of school that all fourth and fifth
graders participate in. And right now we're in the
middle of a big diaper drive and one of the many activities
they'll do on that day is actually when you
donate to the food shelf, they like you to pair things down or if you don't, they will for you. They don't just give out
full boxes of things, but they'll package them down
to make it more manageable and to go to more families. So really excited about that. And then just really focused on doing so many fun
things in the classroom.

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So one of the pictures up
there eating the chicken leg. Fourth grade had a medieval unit in CKLA. And so for lunch one day, they
worked with our food service and food service made a
specialized lunch for them, which would be what they
would've eaten back then. A chicken leg, it was the funniest thing. Kids dressed up, they
thought it was the best. And then we really try to do a lot of community events once a
month, whether it's PTA sponsored or we sponsored at the school
level, so a community dinner. We did a game night with Nashke Games

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and that is American
Indian Games, Tanya Flowers is actually in this photo, I
think this was her second day of work, but also she is an
acquaintance of Nashke games. So families came in, they
had a community dinner and then they got to learn and
play Native American games. It was a blast. So yeah, just trying to do things to bring community together. If you've been to Otter, we're
really spread out building and so you could go a long time without seeing people in another wing. And the way, you know,
elementary school is designed,

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They all have separate
lunches, separate recess. They might not ever really see
the older and younger kids. So we have to create those opportunities. And we do that by some of
the things I just mentioned. I didn't put our student
experience score on there, but I think we're right at like 98% of students feeling loved,
cared for and safe at school. We'll give our spring
score here in just a bit, but future opportunities. So we are actually going
to be starting a new special education cluster
program at Otter Lake.

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We will roll Spanish dual
immersion up to first grade. So we'll have kindergarten
and first grade. I didn't put this on here, but we're gonna be adding an
additional preschool program. The Tamarack preschool program
is just wildly popular. I think it filled in like
one minute or something. And so we'll have three preschool
rooms at Otter next year we're gonna be implementing
new math curriculum. And then we really
started this last spring thinking how do we want
students to set their own goal to monitor their own learning?

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And we started small because that's actually
an interesting task given grade levels. So for example, second
grade tracked spelling. But what we would really
like is to expand that, to be thinking more
individually like a student making their own goal and tracking it. Because we know when you set a goal and track it, you're
going to see improvement. It's a great way to model
for our students doing it. And so we're really gonna lean into that even more next year. And then of course this
is our Otter Lake chant that all of our students,
we say it every single day.

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It's adorable. I just met a preschooler this last week who had never met me in person. They've met me in person many times. My hair was up, but they're like, I only ever see you on the TV. And I was like, okay, yes, celebrity. All right, so with that
I'll take questions. - Well, thank you, I just
have a quick question about the FastBridge. I know that each year they take it, but as they go on, the rigor increases, so that also affects the scores, right? - Yeah, and actually

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I'm really glad that you brought that up. So they take it three times a year and that is mandated by
the state of Minnesota. When they take it in the fall, it's not a review from last year. They're already, you
know, jumping up a little. But fall the winter is a really big jump for every single grade. And then winter to spring,
it still increases. Not as big of a jump
as from fall to winter, but it is significant how
much harder it gets, yes. - [Speaker] Okay. - Thanks. - Ms. Streiff Oji? - [Speaker 2] So can you share,
like you talked about CKLA and aligning that with
the letters training,

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there's lots of questions that
I hear and get about that. How are you going about doing
that to deepen the knowledge and skills of your teachers? - So the letters learning really, I came from an avid school. We're not an avid school, but many of the strategies
are just high impact, best practice teaching strategies, maybe with a different
label, might be labeled avid, might be labeled letters. It's very similar. So when we have our
professional development, I model all of those. And so what I do is we
might be reading an article

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on anything, but we're
gonna use a strategy like marking the text, like pre-reading and we're gonna work through
that strategy together. And then I also then have them write and document like, okay,
this strategy is called this. How might you use this in your classroom? How have you used this in your classroom? Doing some brainstorming. But you know, when you
start a new curriculum, it's a heavy lift. It's a lot and it's a lot of new learning. And so many of the strategies
are things people have done

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their whole careers that may
have just taken a back seat as they got used to the new curriculum. Now we're in year three, there's a lot more comfortability around integrating these strategies again. And I think that we will
see our scores raised because of that. - Thank you. And I love that you're modeling
it for your teachers also. And then when you get your data, can you give us some examples
of what you do with the data? - Oh, sure. So we have really structured data meetings that we do by grade level.

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That includes all of the special services that might be included. Our school psych, our social worker, grade level team members. And we have one interventionist and then our instructional coach. And like when we kind of
start fresh with a new batch of FastBridge screeners,
we are looking to see where have kids landed, who is in the red, we call it the red. So that is the high risk
category and why are they there? And then we go up to yellow, same thing. Any student that's in red

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or yellow is gonna be put
in an intervention group, whether it's in the
classroom with a teacher doing that flexible grouping or with our intervention teacher. We continue to progress monitor
that data then each week and then at the end of six weeks, that's a round of intervention. We'll review that progress monitoring data to see if students can exit intervention or if they need to have it strengthened, maybe they are flat or maybe they dipped. That actually helps us identify if students may need a
referral to special education.

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You know, students come
into elementary school and it's part of our
responsibility as educators to ensure that we are finding students who may have a learning disability or they will continue to fail their whole entire school career because they do just
need something different. So we repeat that process
over and over and over, quarterly we review our
building data as well. Much like Catherine said,
today we were with staff and we did data meetings all together

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in the library and
people could move around and ask questions, put students in groups one last time for the year. And then we also really reflected on where are we at as
a building this year? Where do we wanna focus next year? What worked, we did the
stoplights, so what works so well? What do we wanna continue but
that needs some refinement and what do we think
we can just stop doing? Of course the stop doing
list is like nothing, which is kind of, I think
it's every educator's curse. Like no, we can keep trying more things

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and not wanting to let anything go. But, so I think that's
what you're looking for. - Yeah, thank you so much. - Yep. - Other questions? - One's a comment, one's a question. I love the idea of your learning walks and the, you know, the teachers are benefiting
from those and it's great. And then with the preschool Tamarack, do the kids then go over
to Tamarack from Otter? Is that when you say
it's Tamarack preschool? - [Nelson] So we partner with Tamarack and now two of our preschool classes will be outdoor experiences.

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So really very similar to
Tamarack but on Otter's property. - Okay. - They do go over to Tamarack too, but it's not on site. And then we do have one preschool that's a Spanish exposure, for people who are interested in that. - [Speaker 2] Yep, great, thank you. - [Speaker] Other questions, Mr. Skaar? - [Skaar] Thank you for the presentation. Congratulations on winning
School of Excellence. Did you like get a new car
or something for winning it? - I should have, it was a lot of work. - [Skaar] I agree.
- Yeah. Well we got a great banner
and a really cool plaque.

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- Okay, well that's good. Hey, you know, on the
18% free and reduced, is that a meaningful statistic anymore given where we are in Minnesota with that? - To be honest, I don't
think it's accurate. You know, especially at
the elementary level, we ask families to fill it out but we ask very generally, we're not gonna ask any specific families. But with, you know, free
lunch and breakfast, there isn't as much incentive, you know,

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once you get into secondary,
there's reduction for fees for after school activities. We just don't have that
at the elementary level. I would say I think it's
much higher than that just based on experience and also based on families that are seeking out additional resources. We have a partnership with the food shelf for food packs on the weekends and so we can't make a
family fill out the form. But we'll still service families

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and make sure that they
have all the resources that they need. - So there's probably
other ways to measure that that are better. - Yeah, I think it's hard, you know, it's a very private thing, if families are struggling financially, it's great when they trust the school and reach out for additional support. But we are really protective
of that information and just really hold it with a lot of care because it takes a lot to ask
for that level of support. So I don't know that there's
a great measure to be honest. I think it would maybe have to be something at a higher
level that would say,

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we're gonna count this in a different way now that breakfast and
lunch are free, but. - All right, thank you. Also, I appreciate you benchmarking against our surrounding districts and you know, we're doing
well holding our own and actually doing better. And I would encourage
all of the principals across the district to
benchmark like you have and my friend from Matoska has, and was the last one, I can't
remember if I left them out, I apologize for that.

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On FastBridge, I sense that that is a
very meaningful statistic. You would agree with that? - Oh yeah, yeah. We use that data. It is a significant data point
I would say it's not the only data point we use in those data meetings, but it is a main one. We also use CKLA assessments
when it comes to literacy in partnership with that. And then there's another assessment we do called Words Reading and Isolation. We don't put any of that, you
know, data out public facing.

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But all three of those data points are gonna be used to help determine if they need an intervention group and what skill they're gonna work on. - [Skaar] Would you say
FastBridge is more reliable than the CKLA one? - Well, FastBridge is nationally normed, so that I would say is important. CKLA is norm within our building. I think that they both hold a purpose and they both have a place, which is why it's really important to use it all together. - All right, thank you. So one thing on the what I need, the kids that say their grandparents
need more money,

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I wanna meet those kids. (person laughing) So what would be like
the number one compliment that you get from parents
regarding your school and then like what's
the number one complaint that you have to feel? - That's a really, really great question. I would say the number one compliment is just how good it feels
to be at Otter Lake. Families in general are very, very happy with how we really focus
on the whole child. We try to make it fun while also holding

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really high academic expectations and really high just
expectations in general when it comes to behavior and attendance, I would say a complaint. I think over time there's
been some traditions that you know, used to be long standing and since over the years
curriculum has changed, standards have changed and things that people held really dear. For example, every grade
level used to go to Tamarack. That was a really meaningful
partnership and Tamarack and Otter worked together
to create curriculum

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that aligned with standards. Since then, things have shifted. So now only half the
grades go to Tamarack. But a cool thing is the other
grades go to someplace else to still have a field trip experience that aligns with their standards. So I think it's not like a complaint, like I'm gonna pull my kid out of Otter. I really wanted them to do that thing. But I think just over time,
if people have had students that Otter for many years and we do have families that
have a number of students that have gone through,
they'll be like, yeah, I remember when my oldest did that, but yeah, it's cool that my youngest

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gets to do this instead. So I think it's more of like
just changing with the times and longing for some of
those old traditional field trips and things like that. - All right, thank you. - Okay, Thompson. - Well when looking at the results for the kindergarten
Spanish right from the fall to the winter and seeing, you know, it's a pretty significant drop. But I would imagine as
you were mentioning, the rigor is different and
it's a whole new language. - [Nelson] Right. - So like when you were
testing in the fall, is it just like basic knowledge
of like, you know, Hola,

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like more simple uses because they haven't dug into the work yet and then by the time they get to winter, they're probably trying to
like speak a sentence or? - Yep, just like all of
our fast word screeners, they do start off, you know, I don't even wanna call it easy. It's hard for the kids to
do those screeners always. A lot of the students in our
Spanish immersion program, you know, even on the English screener, screened very high in the fall. When it's in kindergarten
it is not, you know,

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expecting the world of them. But really it's looking at them, they've had no teaching. They take the fall screener before school even starts in August. So it's really just a benchmark. But then, you know from
there in the winter screener, yes it's definitely trying to gauge where students are at
based on the teaching and learning up to that point and become significantly more rigorous with expectations, yeah. - And then are they
only taking the Spanish, like are they doing it in
Spanish only or both, Spanish?

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- Nope, so it used to be required that they would do both by the state and they changed that actually right before we started our program. And we were so grateful because assessments in
kindergarten take a very long time. They're done one-on-one or
in order to get to do them. And so if we were having to do both, it would take a lot of instruction time, which is why we're not going to do that. But really, we are
monitoring the language, their target language
that they're learning, which is Spanish because if
they needed intervention,

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it would be in Spanish. I'll just highlight that
if there is a student that is really struggling, we have given them the
English fast word screener to see like where are they at because it is still our
responsibility to find students who might have a learning
disorder or disability and we don't want that language piece or instruction to get in the way of that. So we take that into account
when we're looking at the data. But for most students,
they're just getting used to having their entire day be in Spanish where they don't understand all of it

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but they are moving and grooving with it. - Yeah, thank you for that. And then just, it's not really a question, but having the student, the high school students
come into the school, I just absolutely love
that for several reasons. One, hopefully some of them
become teachers, right? Like that's our hope. And then it also meets some of our strategic planning, 'cause I took part in both of
the strategic plan processes and in the last one I was
in the fourth category, which was we will establish
healthy vital engagement with our entire community. Which I think that's one

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of the things we discussed in there is like how can we get
our high school students to be engaged in our middle and elementary student
learning experiences? Because I think it helps them, elementary kids love it when
the high schoolers come in and walk through at the end of the year when they're grad, right? Like oh yeah, because they look up to them and it's the someday that's gonna be me, even though it's many years away, that is something that they look up to. So I think that when they're
partnering together like that, the learning that's happening and just the building of
relationships is probably fantastic

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and I would love to see it. - Yeah, it's really, really cool. And just the focus that it's
not just like we're gonna have fun with them, but like to
see the high school students be students, is really powerful. Like oh they have to read too, yep. - Well 'cause it hits, I mean
it really hits all of them but it hits the second
one that will promote, encourage and support
students' personal learning experiences and aspirations. Right, so we're getting several of them tied into that experience
that they're having and to see how many you had engaged, that's really wonderful

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and I hope that we can continue that. And have that happen in
our other schools as well. So thank you. - [Nelson] You're welcome. - All right, well thank you very much and even though the signs are gone, every time I go by I am gonna sparkle. - [Speaker 3] Good, so
that's what we're about. High impact, Otter Lake. - Thank you so much. - Okay, we're gonna move
on to discussion item B3, high school winter and spring
activities update, welcome. - Thank you. Hi Chair Arcand, members of the board, I'd like to first introduce Taylor Turvet.

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She's our assistant activities director, she's gonna present for us tonight. I also wanna send the
regrets from Brian Peloquin who had a family emergency tonight. So I'm gonna co-present and really be here to answer
any questions with Taylor. So welcome Taylor. - [Taylor] Awesome, thank you'all so much. So on behalf of the activities office, I was just gonna give a quick
overview of our winter sports and highlight some of the
things we have coming up in the spring activities office as well. So this is just a rundown
of our, who's in our office, who's working with our
students, our student athletes.

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We actually recently hired a new activities finance
clerk, Mac leverty. So she's been a great addition and really our goal is
to help shape students through the unique power of sports, music, activities and at least get one or at least have them involved
in one thing that they love. So if 80% of our students in White Bear Lake Area High School can find one thing that brings them joy, that's our goal right now. And the way we kind of measure it, whether or not that's
happening is through buckets. Like if they're having fun,

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if they're growing in their skills or in their sport, if they're
learning lifelong lessons as well, building relationships,
purpose and culture. So those are kind of the six
buckets that we really hope to bring to life for our students. So just to kind of jump into some things that brought joy to all of us. First of all, we had a Winter Spirit Week. The first week of January we
really kicked off the new year with a fire and ice theme and there were two different
teams, Bonfire and Ice Castle.

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There was dress up dates and we with a pep fest at the end of the week and a big winter dance. It was really fun. Mr. Res actually also lip synced to a song from the the Frozen movie. So yeah, he had a great time but it just really was a great
way to kind of, you know, get some spirits high and having a good time
in January when sometimes it can feel, you know,
like a long winter here. So in the sports world of our office we have 11
MSHSL sanctioned sports

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that we offer in the winter and then the One Act Play is a a sanctioned performing
art that we have as well. So I'm just gonna give you
a a little bit of a overview for all of those different offerings. First we have the adapted
floor hockey team. We have 15 participants with that crew and they didn't win that many games but they had a lot of fun. I don't know if you've ever
gotten to see one of them, one of those games played, but that's really an excellent group. We have a lot of teacher coaches
involved with them as well. So they do a great job. Our boys swim and dive team
has increased participation, so they started with 25
last year, they're up to 30.

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There's been some continued growth there, which is really great to see. And we even had a stay qualifier, Benedict Hoefer, in the 200 freestyle. So really big congratulations to him and to coach Jake for all the growth that's going on in that program. Alpine skiing, we had
some state qualifiers, as well on the boy side
we have 14 participants and the girls had 16, they practiced really closely together. And then we had two boys and Josie Guidinger the girls side qualify for State, Cooper Feirn and Josie, this was their second
year in a row qualifying.

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So excellent to see them return there. And then the Nordic ski side, those programs are really booming too with boys having 23 participants,
girls at the 22 mark and they also practice
really closely together. So it was a better year as far as snow goes,
compared to last year. So they were all really happy about that. A lot of success in
our gymnastics program. As far as the participants go, we had 14, which is a healthy number given the facilities for this group. And for the first time in 21 years,

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the entire team qualified
for the state tournament, which was really excellent. We've had individuals qualify on their own but this was the first year
that the entire team qualified so that was really great to see them at Roy Wilkins Auditorium. We also still had a couple
individuals, Mira McQuay and Grace Mueller, they
qualified as individuals as well and we're only graduating one senior so that's gonna be an impressive
group to keep your eye on. And Sara was also the coach of the year, so she's just doing excellent
work in her second year

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as the head coach. Cheer, the competitive cheerleading team is incredible as well. That's not a MSHSL sanctioned sport but we treat them as a
varsity sport in our office. They have 16 varsity competitors,
also a huge feeder program with 32 in the middle
school and elementary. So much so that we're
adding a JV group next year, which is really exciting
to continue that growth. And they still have a
really big state tournament. It's not run by MSHSL but they do a great
job in their own right. We finished second in
the Game Day Competition

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and then third in what's
called the traditional ones. So that was a really great
showing for the girls there and they got to qualify for nationals. They went down to Florida to compete and earn third place in game
day competition there as well. We had another Minnesota coach of the Year, coach Bre Sherrick. So this was her first
year as our head coach and she's just fabulous to work with. The girls really love her. So I'm excited to see all that she'll continue
to bring for the program. On the hockey side, it's been really fun to get to know the hockey
culture at White Bear Lake,

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in the high school. Our girls numbers I
think are really healthy on the boys side too, but girls hockey is kind
of on a downward trend as far as participation
goes across the state. But here we're really healthy. We had over 40 girls try out, we kept 37, they finished eight 17 and one, but we had a Miss Hockey finalist and Maddie Lee, she also
earned her 100th career point. So she was an incredible player moving on to play in college at St. Cloud. Our goaltender Macy reached
1,000 plus career save. So she had a a great year.

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She saves a lot of shots and has been wonderful just as a junior. And then on the boys side,
it was a heartbreaking end of the season, but they
finished 13, 12 and three but seven of those losses
were one goal losses. So I mean that speaks for itself. That's a really competitive,
really talented group. They advance all the way to
the section championship game and that's what I was saying,
it's a heartbreaking loss to Gentry to drop to
them in the championship, but they only graduated a handful of guys

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and we're expecting them to come back and be a really strong program too. So I dunno if any of you went to go see the section final at, but that was a packed house and really great energy at that event. In the girls basketball scene, that's historically been a
really successful program. They have a younger crew this year, but they still finished 10 and
17, they had 39 participants. It was great to welcome some of the middle schoolers
up into the program too. So that helped build those numbers. We were still able to field four teams.

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The boys side, numbers are booming. 53 guys, they had over 70 tryout too, but just due to facilities, and there's not that many
schools with over five teams. So we made some cuts there. They finished nine and 18 but another milestone
was had by Colin Piper. He reached the 1000 point club. So there was a lot of highlights
for that group as well. Our wrestling program
had a lot of success. So girls wrestling right now is a partnership emerging sport is what the high school league calls it. So they still put on a
state tournament for them, but they don't have like
a girls team tournament.

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They have individual opportunities and we qualified four girls to participate at the state tournament. So with 11 on the entire team, four out of 11 going is pretty excellent and I would say 11 is actually more than a lot of our peer schools, the numbers are pretty healthy and we keep going up from seven last year. So that's really exciting
to see the growth there. And then our senior Jinet Demanou, she finished second overall
in her weight class. So that was really an incredible feat. She also medaled last year,

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so she's the first girl from White Bear Lake Area
High School to medal at state and now to have medal twice. The boys side, the
numbers are huge with 43 and they practice really closely together between the boys and the girls. So that's a health, a healthy partnership. And we had another state
qualifier on the boys side, Indiana Kane, he's just a ninth grader so we expect big things from
him to continue on as well. All right, and that's just a snippet or some highlights from our sports, but we have a ton of other offerings as far as performing
arts and fine arts goes. So the One Act Play is an
MSHSL sponsored activity.

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And this year we performed The Curious Incident of
the Dog in the Nighttime, and I also saw that our tech
director Morgan is back there. So I just wanna give him a
shout out, he was excellent. They finished first overall
in the subsection final. The performance was incredible,
sadly we went over to, and the stage was a little different, so the setup got kind of funky and they ended up getting DQed, but really just because of the setup time, otherwise they would've won. So that was a bummer, but it
was an amazing performance. We had 13 performers, seven crew members,

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and then the two directors. So shout out again, to Morgan in the back and to Braylin, who's our director. This year we offered a spring musical, as opposed to just a
student led performance. So "Dear Evan Hansen" was
the musical this year. This was the first year in a while we've done a spring musical. We always have the big fall
one, which is excellent. But this was a really opportunity to be the first ever
high school in the nation with the performing rights
for Dear Evan Hansen. So it was like too good to pass up.

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We ended up selling over 2000 tickets and it was such a big
deal to get the rights that we were sponsored on Fox Nine. So I actually have a clip of that to show you in a moment here. But it was an amazing production and again, just really put
White Bear Lake Area High School on the map nationally. And then we have a lot of
other activities going on. So Speech had a couple
of state qualifiers, three national qualifiers. DECA was a newer emerging
program in our school. So we had a state champion in the entry level interview event.

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Brooklyn Brown is a 10th grader,
which is incredible for her and for that program's growth. And then the big music
event for us in the winter is the SEC musical festival. So Mounds View hosted that,
this year we send 70 band kids, 37 choir and 35 orchestra kids to go tour a weekend event to work with famous artists and conductors and just really got to have
an amazing experience there. At the end of that, there's
an opportunity for them to get asked to perform
in the honors concert.

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So we had 10 band kids take part in that. 14 choir kids and then seven orchestra kids were asked to participate in the honors concert. Overall we have over 70 coaches and directors in our winter
programs that we partner with. And so it was just an incredible
year working with them. And to give you kind of a little highlight of our Dear Evan Hansen video, I think if we were a little
bit hesitant about the audio, so, shout out again to
Morgan here for the help.

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- [Speaker] Just wanna
make sure this is on. Okay good. Wait, before you play
until I get back there. - [Speaker 4] You wanna
turn the captioning on? - Thank you. - [Speaker] Okay, we're good. - [Speaker 3] Oops, are we still good? Okay. (upbeat music) - So that was just a little snippet of what was played on Fox Nine and the amazing performance
that those students and our tech crew put on. So we can send the full
Fox Nine interview too. But that was just a little preview

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of the whole performance there. Just some final activity highlights and other data for you all to note. Our pride here at White
Bear Lake Area High School and our community has just been something that I've been really taken aback by. And the number of people that show up for our events is amazing to see. So we have student passes
that allow our students to get into our competitions for free. Over 2,000 students of the
2,700 have downloaded those, which means they're showing up for events. We also have adult season
passes that can be purchased.

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So we had 651 of those sold and then 210 senior passes were sold to. But as far as individual game sales go, we are selling over two
12,000 competition tickets. So people are really showed out for our winter sports, Cinderella, oh 4,151 tickets were sold
for those performances. So many of those were
sold out or packed houses. We also use Hudl for many
of our broadcasting games.

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So almost 9,000 streams came from those. So people are watching
all around the Twin Cities and family can watch all around
the country or world even. And then our local SCCTV broadcasts at least 10 competitions as well. So those are really nice broadcasts that they put on for us every season. Again, the Boys Hockey
Section Championship was a really big highlight. We sold out the 31,000 seats
in Aldrich Arena there. And we're just continuing to
highlight our student athletes, our activities, all of our programs

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as many ways as possible. As you probably know, one
of the best ways to do that right now is through social media. So we try to partner with the
sports photography classes and some of our student classes to highlight through those platforms. So that's been a fun partnership as well. So that's kind of the recap
of our activities office and everything that we've
been up to this winter. We also launched 11 spring
sports that are sanctioned by the MSHSL.

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We also are really excited to have added girls flag
football this spring. So that's taking off around the state. Over 100 teams are
competing with that group. Right now it's run by the NFL or the Minnesota Vikings are
really kind of championing it. But we're really excited
about where it's gonna go. We're actually hosting our
first home games this weekend. I know some folks in the
room are gonna attend. So those are on Sundays. But that's been a really fun
addition to our programming. And then other activities that go on a spring
fishing, ultimate Frisbee and trap shooting are all
other non MSHSL sanctioned

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activities that we really
support seriously in our office. - Thank you. - Yeah. - I just thank you and your group because one of the things
we don't talk enough about is the career readiness skills these athletes and these
participants learn, they learn to fail, they learn to get up, they learn to try again, they learn to be successful,
they have to work as a team, they have to communicate no matter if they're on
the field or on the stage. It's so important that
they learn these skills. Plus it builds ownership of the building.

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They wanna be there because
it's now their building. And that's really important,
so I want to thank you. I do wanna mention of spring sport, I had the opportunity the other day to go to the boys track meet. - Oh yeah.
- Oh my goodness. How well that track meet
was run was incredible. - [Speaker 3] Yeah, those are
serious productions for sure. - So I mean, and I was
just really impressed how well it ran and how
quickly they got through and did a great job. So keep up the great work and I'm gonna open it
up for other questions. - I don't have a question,
but again, a comment.

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I went to the robotics tournament
at Marucci at the U of M. It was fabulous. I learned so much about robotics, which I knew nothing about really. I mean, I've heard about it for many years and it was really great
to see the participation of the students. And then I was so impressed. There were students that came back that were in robotics
years ago that come back and mentor and help the team and then volunteers from Medtronics and different organizations that come back and work with the teams on
Saturdays and after school.

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And it was just really
fun and really impressive and very exciting. If you ever get a chance
to go, it's great. I'd encourage anyone to go. - Yeah, yeah, we have two robotics coaches that we work with out of
our office and over 30 kids that were involved in that
group in the high school. I know the middle school
is a really robust program with robotics too, so. - Yeah, right. There were some eighth graders there too. - [Speaker 4] I bet. - In the competition. - Yep. - It's great. - Thank you. - Other questions, Ms. Thompson? - Don't really questions, just comments.

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It's fantastic to see this because as chair Arcand said, it's just another way for our students to learn how to work together
and to overcome challenges and to build strength and endurance and all of those wonderful things. And I had the wonderful pleasure of going and watching the
"Dear Evan Hansen" performance. And I had to keep reminding myself that these were high school students that I was watching perform, 'cause it was just
phenomenal performances. And there were a lot of
tears in the audience

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by all people that were there. Not just women who seemed
to be a little tailored as more emotional, but
there were men crying. There were people who, and
it seemed like certain parts of the performance or the subject matter hit them at that moment. And then you would notice that
people would get emotional and just the raving of everybody that was there of how wonderful it was. Truly remarkable. And then just a highlight
for me that I thought all of our students who have won and do the work, it's amazing.

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But the DECA student, for a 10th grader to win in an interviewing event, I mean, I just think
that is pretty special and I'm looking forward
to seeing where she goes as well as all the other students who have done so well, and flag football. With the kids that I work
with it, everybody is like, I wanna sign up for flag football, I wanna play flag football. So it's exciting to see
that that's a new sport and I'm sure it's gonna
have, it's gonna grow. - [Speaker 4] Yeah, you'll
have to come check out

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our girls team at some point. And thank you for visiting the Dear Evan Hansen performance. - It was wonderful. - And I did see the Fox Nine interview and the student was in the interview. - [Speaker 4] Yeah. - And how long did they
have to get that together? 'Cause it wasn't a planned. - Right, it was a little bit short notice and Morgan could correct me if I'm wrong, but it was under five
week turnaround time. And usually it's at least a six to eight week is the ideal situation for a musical production. - You would have no idea. It was fantastic, so thank you. - Thank you. - Right, Mr. Skaar.

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- Thank you for the
presentation and your enthusiasm and command of the details of the program is really impressive. So thanks. We hosted a speech event, maybe it was a month and a half ago. Two months ago, I was
wondering how that went and how the facilities, you know, what kind of comments did
we get back from the people that we were hosting? - Yeah, yeah, that was a great event. I was here on Saturday for that. Our facilities are incredible. So I just like to take a
moment to recognize that. And I know I wasn't here
working in the district

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when everything was being
built or being funded for, but wow, we are so lucky. We were able to have actually a volleyball tournament going on. So there were, it's like
over 20 volleyball teams here in the youth program. And we had the state or this big speech event with teams from all around the state. So the facilities were being
used in every square area. There was also a performance
from the Lions Club going on in the performing arts
side of the building. So the fact that we had the, first of all,

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the parking and the capabilities to have three huge events
going on simultaneously in every square inch of the building was pretty incredible. And there were no complaints. We had a lot of signage to direct people towards
the right doors and whatnot. But yeah, that was a really special day just to see every square inch
of the school being used. - Do you think it'd be
worthwhile to survey folks that are at the events, just, you know, kind of what their experience is. Maybe ask them like three or
four questions real quick.

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Something like that. That might be helpful. - [Speaker 4] Yeah, I
think that's a great idea. - So you have a activities finance clerk, does that finance clerk, does that person report,
does that have a dotted line of reporting to the district finance or what's the reporting
relationship there? - [Speaker 4] Yeah, she reports
directly to Brian Peloquin, the director of activities, but she works really closely with the district finance office as well.

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- Okay, thank you, thanks. - [Speaker 4] Yeah, thank you. - Anything else? Well, I guess thank you for everything you're doing, and go Bears. - Go Bears, thank you all. - Thank you. - Okay, we're gonna go on to our next discussion item B4, Elementary multi-age
updates, come on down. - Members of the board, I'm
gonna introduce myself here with me and I have a statement
that I wanted to read and then we'll get into our presentation. So as you know, Jen Babich, director of Teaching and learning. Carrie Kruismark, who
you've seen recently, principal at Lakeaires
Elementary, Julian Stanky,

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who you've seen recently at Birch Lake. And then Lori Moser at Oneka. I don't normally do
this, but I really wanted to make sure I got my thoughts out and succinctly as we make
sure we have enough time to talk through everything. But I wanted to take a moment just to ground us in this decision 'cause it is very complex
as we think about multi-age. So I'd like to take a moment to ground us in how decisions like this are made. Because clarity about our process matters, especially when there
are strong perspectives. At the center of every decision we make is our responsibility
for student outcomes.

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That responsibility is shared
across teachers, principals, and district leadership. And it guides how we
design learning experiences for students each day. Each year, staffing decisions
are made at the building level based on student needs, enrollment, the professional judgment of the principal within clear district
expectations and support. This is a comprehensive and often complex process that requires balancing enrollment, academic and social emotional needs, programming and the
strengths of our staff. Multi-age classrooms are not a mandate.

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They're one of several
strategies principals may use when aligning staffing
to best serve students. These decisions are not one size fits all. In some cases, that means
single grade classrooms and in others it may mean
multi-age structures. Multi-age classrooms are
also not new to our system. We have used them in
different contexts over time and we have learned
from those experiences, both what has worked well and where stronger supports are needed. What is different now is
the level of intentionality, alignment and system-wide
support being put in place

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to ensure they are
implemented thoughtfully and effectively for students. We have heard from
families, including some who are also educators, and we
take that feedback seriously. Families care deeply about
their children's experiences and that perspective matters. At the same time, these
decisions are being implemented across multiple buildings, with leaders moving forward
based on their specific context and the needs within their schools. Staffing is one of the most complex responsibilities we hold. In a system like ours, with elementary schools varying in size

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with uneven grade level cohort sizes, that complexity requires thoughtful, flexible approaches rather than
a single standardized model. Our role at the district
level is to provide clarity, expectation, and support. Our principal's role is to lead, while making informed
decisions within that framework for their students, staff, and community. As district leaders, we also
lead alongside our principals to ensure the conditions, alignment and supports are in place for
this work to be successful. This evening you will hear
directly from principals

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who will share more context about how they arrived at their decisions, the plans we have in place
to support students and staff and where we are in the process. I want to take a moment to
thank our principals and staff. This work has required
thoughtful collaboration, professional courage, and a deep commitment to doing
what is right for students. Collaboration across
nine elementary schools is not easy work. It requires time, trust, and a willingness to work
through different perspectives in service of a stronger system.

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You'll see that some of our
principles are presenting today and many others are in the audience, that reflects the level
of shared ownership and commitment to this
work across our system. I'm deeply grateful for their leadership, their willingness to engage
in this level of collaboration and the care they continue
to demonstrate for students, staff and families. When we create space for
building level decision making, we create the conditions for
leaders to respond thoughtfully to their communities while
staying aligned to our system. Limiting leaders to a single approach, regardless of context,
would reduce their ability

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to make responsive decisions
that best serve students. Our focus remains on strong instruction, thoughtful leadership and decisions made as close to students as possible. Thank you. So as we start, this
team worked really hard, so I just wanna make sure and shift, but I'm connecting and really wanting to focus on how does this align
to our strategic plan. And we've had some good
questions from people. And so we have four tactics
and when we think about when or four strategies, we will create and sustain a safe, equitable

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and nurturing environment,
you'll hear from principals. But this is about consistent
class sizes across our system. We have had class sizes, we have ranges. And if we didn't do multi-age,
we might have classes well below the target class size and well above the target class size. And so this really is about
balancing those class sizes, ensuring a consistent student experience regardless of school or cohort size. And then really working on
those strong relationships and a sense of belonging that you've heard from
Angie at Otter Lakes, Catherine at Central, and
our focus as a district.

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Thinking about, I'm gonna skip around a little bit 'cause
really they're the highlight, not me, but we'll promote, encourage, and support students' personal learning. This really allows for more flexible, responsive instruction as we think about meeting the needs of our fourth and fifth graders. We wanna maintain grade
level expectations. And you'll hear that, ensuring
all students are supported towards readiness for
middle school and beyond. And then I think the one I wanna land on and finalize is really thinking about how we continuously transform. We have had educators leaning
into multi-age for many years. We have a school that's
built around multi-age

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and we've supported it the best we can in terms of when you think about them more as a reactive structure. And this proactive support is really built on continuously improving. And how can we better
support our educators, students and families for
a stronger experience. So with that, I'll shift to my colleagues. - [Speaker 6] All right,
thank you for having us. So here's just a few pieces
around our multi age classrooms. So seven of our nine elementaries are gonna go to multi age for next year. Maka and Otter, they are gonna stay

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where they're at right
now and make that shift in the future due to those other programs that they're implementing currently. So how did we get here? Like Dr. Gillespie shared, we do have both currently
single grade level and multi-grade level classrooms, and multi-age classroom, excuse me, with varying levels of educator support. And we have class sizes that
exceed the district average because of the relative size of our neighborhood elementary schools, despite educator to student ratios remaining consistent year over year. And so schools that are
implementing multi-age

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are doing so to support greater stability and consistency in our class sizes, recognizing natural
variations in student cohorts, that again speaks to those
sometimes extremely large cohorts or extremely small cohorts that create the smaller class sizes or the very big class sizes, especially felt at the smaller buildings. And then all schools will remain aligned to the same district expectations for high quality instruction
and student experience. - [Speaker 7] So when we think about, you know, what we've been doing building and what we've learned, all our elementaries have
been doing multi-age,

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at some point over the years successfully, but in different ways. So through these experiences, we know that we are gonna be able
to take these experiences and the variety of styles and we can strengthen
from those experiences, our approach across our system and apply to what we're
gonna be doing in the future. And next slide. So then with this system wide approach allows us to bring some more clarity.

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Obviously we're gonna be
doing a lot of more work and some of that work has already started, but a unified multi-age approach improves support for both our students and our teachers of course. Grades four and five
specifically were chosen or paired because their
standards in those grades and the assessments just have
a lot of natural alignment, which is an important part of what we were looking at, which just made like a lot of common sense

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when we were looking at this opportunity. And then educators will cover
all the core subject areas in these grade levels,
following the state standards as we should, for both those grade levels. And then thinking about that student and staff experience, which
is a key important part of what we think about for
our students and our staff. Building strong relationships and communities in the
multi-age classroom environment

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is an important piece. Multi-age can bring peer
mentoring opportunities and leadership opportunities
for the students. That might be the older students or maybe it's the more mature students, maybe age doesn't necessarily matter and teachers can have routines and norms established early in the year if they have those looping opportunities in their classrooms. And incorporate those things right away. Having done this for four
years in my building,

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I can tell you those teachers
love that day one, day two, those kids that they've had, day one man, they're just flowing and going. They don't have to teach
a lot of the things. And the rest of the kids
are just, they absorb and learn through osmosis and those are things that you just can't, time is of the essence. So some of those little things are magic and the staff experience
is one of unification amongst colleagues that
they get to work with. And not just one or two
teachers on a grade level,

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but it's all teachers. And not just my building, but
it's at Julian's building. At Dan's building at North
Star, at Birch, at Otter, or not Otter, sorry, but
at North Star, at Oneka. Every building it's a unity of educators doing this together. We often say we are better together. This is, we are better together. - All right, so how are
we preparing to do this? So we are, Julian, myself and Jen Babish and I are co-facilitating the design team.

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So the design team is made up of, you know, classroom teachers, some of our SPED educators, specialists, interventionists, ML teachers. And we have started, our first
meeting was on April 13th and we met and we talked and looked at a lot of research, you know, grounded in this work,
this multi-age programming, not just at four or five, but you know, across, you know, k, you know, all the way through high school, you know, to like start, you know,

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and grounding ourself in the work and what does that look
like, what does that mean, you know, for us as we
go forward with this. And then looking forward to,
you know, like our meetings that we are currently having,
you know, we are looking at you know, building that framework and then going forward, you know, with what that will look
like when we get to June where we can actually do some
dedicated curriculum writing where, you know, any four or
five teacher can join that or a specialist or SPED or ML intervention to really
look at what it will look like.

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Here's what you are teaching, here's what these curriculum
plans, unit plans look like. And then, oh, go back. I didn't finish everything, sorry. And then looking at also
professional development, you know, for our four or five teachers and thinking of, you know, we've had a great community of practice, you know, for each grade level and department, you know, throughout, you know, the last couple years. So making sure that we have, you know, that dedicated next year for
our four or five teachers. And then looking at what we can do

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beyond just communities of practice, but also more, you know, like detailed or professional development for our four or five teachers
throughout the school year. Not just at our communities of practice, but how we do that maybe at
the building level as well. And then how we are communicating and how we have communicated. So as soon as we knew
we made this decision, you know, we communicated with staff first and then we sent it out
to our incoming third and then our current
fourth grade families,

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you know, just to share what
was going to be happening for the next year. We've also communicated
with our PTOs or PTAs and had, you know, conversations there and then stakeholders. So last week we had our systems
accountability committee and we talked about it
there with our teaching and learning department, our other fourth and fifth grade teachers, we continue to get information from them. Like just today when we had
our communities of practice, we gathered more information,
you know, from them, you know, to help guide our work. And we took that and actually use it today

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in some of the things that we worked on. And then also from all of our teachers and staff who are going to
have some kind of touchpoint with our fourth and fifth grade students. So they're specialists, ML teachers, and then any student
support staff in sped. So then creating that common language using that guaranteed and viable, we have that already developed. But then how does this
four five fit with that? And do we have to make some,
you know, like differences in how we look at what four five is

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compared to what everything else is. But knowing that, we have to align that with our already established
guarantee from the curriculum for instructional expectations,
which then will help create that consistency among all nine of our elementary schools. Because that is like the
most probably important and impactful thing that
we can do is to have that consistent experience
for all our fourth and fifth grade kids across
all our elementaries. - [Speaker 5] We didn't
have a question, sorry.

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- Thank you. - We turn that on, thank you. I just had a couple of questions to share and I hope I'm not playing gotcha 'cause that's not my intention. One of the things we do know
that the number one thing for success for this to happen is to have teachers on board and trained. How have you gone about
getting teacher buy-in to make sure that they're
on board to do this? - Yeah, I can talk a little
bit about how we started and then they can talk more.

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But we've worked really
closely with Tiffany, the union president, to really gauge, the past two rounds of negotiations, we do interest based bargaining,
so where it might not be a topic that is contract related. We talked about the supports that we have, knowing that multi-age has been here and it's been a discussion on
how can we best support that. So in terms of the system level, really keeping close to her, talking through things at our
professional learning council. But you guys would be able
to talk about her specifics. - And each time Tiffany
has also sent out a survey,

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you know, to just our design team as well. And then getting feedback and
gathering that from our fourth and fifth grade teachers
has been really impactful to help us and guide us with, you know, like what else our teachers need and then also supplying
them with talking points or, you know, like a summary
of the work that we did, you know, each time that we've met. - Okay, I just have one
other quick question is how are you addressing the concerns of parents,
especially fourth grade parents

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or third grade coming into
fourth grade who are concerned that their students is gonna struggle and get further behind? Can you talk about how you let them know how they won't and how
we can deal with that? - Have you guys heard from parents? - I haven't heard, I've
only heard from one, but it had nothing to
do with like curriculum and, you know, assessment
or anything like that. So, so far I have not had any. - So having done this for
four years at Lakeaires, and not that there aren't parent concerns for that specific question,
every question I've taken

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has usually been something
completely different. And I don't wanna disregard
that type of question, but usually questions are usually around like the age thing and
we talk through that. Or sometimes questions have come up, things that I've tried to
think through like, okay, what kind of questions could come to me? And usually when you get asked something, there's something that
you could never predict. It's like, my son is in this
classroom and their lunch and recess doesn't match
up with their friends.

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And it actually had nothing
to do with multi-age, it was just magic of the schedule and schedules are a nightmare. And it, you know, or it was, what are my chances of my
son having this teacher? Well, it has nothing to do with multi-age. Typical, like, well, you know, but they had an older child
that had that teacher. So maybe that's just me at Lakeaires, and I've been blessed not
to have too many things. But a lot of it is about
just any questions, please come ask and ask and ask.

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Making sure, and same with the teachers. I've always said, if you hear anything, let's, you know, reach out or
have me, you know, notify me so I can reach out proactively. I don't wanna have a
parent not reaching out. I'd rather like, hey, I heard that maybe you were wondering something. Let me be proactive and just like, let's have a conversation, rather than stewing over something. But I have not had very many in four years and everything that has come up has been a good conversation, so. - All right, thank you.

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I'm gonna turn it over to
the rest, Ms. Streiff Oji. - Yeah, so I multi-aged
for 10 years as a teacher and I was at a school within a school that was multi-age, all multi-age. And I know about the
benefits of multi aging. There are many and I also acknowledge that it's late right now. And so it's a short time
for people to get ready. So my questions are around, do you anticipate
students changing classes when you talked about getting them ready for like middle school, is that something

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that you anticipate, changing classes and teachers that would
take on different subjects? Have you even gotten there
with your design team or? - No, so you're talking about like maybe departmentalization
like within? - [Streiff Oji] Yep. - That is something that our design team is
definitely looking at, but we haven't landed on, you know, like what was best for kids just yet. But it's something that, yep. - Thank you. When you talk about
dedicated curriculum writing time for educators, but it's voluntary. So what does that look like
for those that choose not to,

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which I'm gathering most will not because they wanna be prepared. And then when they do
that, will the curriculum and pacing look the same at
the various schools as they? - Yeah, great question. So part of it is this is how
we would do curriculum writing with any new standards or new instructional
materials that we would get. And so the design team,
I wanna just point out that we have broken up
into working groups.

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And so the design team is able to choose if they wanna work on
curriculum assessment and development, student experience specifically with our specialist. And so as we think about art and music and PE, what may that look like? Also, we're focusing on
the student experience as we think about SEL field trips, fifth grade graduation, all
of those important moments that maybe fourth grade
has and fifth grade has.

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And so one of the things that we're doing specifically with the
curriculum assessment and PD group is we're really looking to see first, the standards, and then how do we ensure that students are gonna be
proficient in both fourth and fifth grade by the end
of that academic school year. And so we start with that base and then we're looking at
each content area separately. And so we have a math
group, we have a literacy or ELA group, social studies and science

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we'll be doing next. And so we have two more
dedicated half days that our design team is
meeting to work through that. And then we have our
voluntary two days in June. And so what happens is
we have kind of the group that's able to meet and wants to meet and does kind of front loading that work before the summer starts. So then when we start the school year, then we can get everyone immersed and looking at what that scope
and sequence may look like.

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And then we have those
intentional communities of practice throughout the year where grade level teams
are meeting specifically to look at how are things going, what are things we need maybe need to take a note of that
maybe didn't go so well for next time that we can improve. And so we have both kind
of that front loading for those that are able to, and then everyone's able to kind of look at it over the summer. But then knowing we
have an intentional work that we grade levels
meet throughout the year to be able to tweak things

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and to give feedback
so that we can improve that student experience. - Great, thank you. I just know that it stretches
kids in a lot of ways, beautiful ways, social
emotionally, academically, the ongoing, if you can have
the same teacher for two years, it's lovely over time. I actually was a product of four, five, six so three grade levels and I know it can be done and I think it's much
more of a real life model. So I'm excited to see where it goes and excited to see that you're doing it

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across the district and not in isolation because it's really difficult for teachers that are trying to do it
in isolation, so thank you. - Thank you, other questions, Mr. Skaar? - Yes, I would ask, is this gonna be a topic
on the May 11th meeting where we have the benefit of public forum so we can hear from
parents and families or no? - [Speaker] Well they can
come and talk about it. - But this presentation and discussion won't be on the May 11th. - [Speaker] I'm not
sure at this point, but.

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- I would suggest that
we have it on there. How was this decision made? Who made this decision,
how did it bubble up? - The principals made the decision. So every year they get an allocation for staffing in their
buildings based on enrollment, that staffing allocation hasn't changed. And then they decide,
each year, some of them have had to do multi-age
classrooms to be able to stay within those classroom sizes. And so then together in
partnership with teaching and learning staff,
they decided to do that. - Okay, thank you. This seems to be a significant decision,

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a significant change. And you know, from what
I've heard from parents, they've used the term blindsided by this and also at least one indicated that there was a potential that they would leave the district and go to a different district,
which is concerning to me because this decision could have enrollment impacts. And right now, enrollment is
something we're all keen on

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to make sure that our
numbers grow to the level that we expected when
we passed the referendum and spent $400 million on our facility. So that highly sensitive to that because as we all know, enrollment
translates into funding. So I just wonder, with
the significance of this and the significance of
the decision and you know, and I hear the process
that you went through,

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but it seems like it was not
enough to educate parents and families on this
change, the impacts to it. And I would also suggest that something this
significant as a change should be made at the board level, as opposed to individual schools. And I think it should come to, I think this decision
should come to the board to deliberate and discuss. - [Speaker] I'm sorry, I
may make sure you were done.

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- Yeah, I'm done, thank you. - Has everybody had a chance that wants to talk before I start over? Okay, go ahead Daniels. - Yeah, so really it wasn't
really a financial decision, it was more about balancing class sizes and keeping within our parameters and giving some flexibility to buildings as they do staffing. And I do remember years ago when we had very, very large class sizes, I mean very large, in the 30s and upper 30s in elementary.

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And that caused a lot of parents and a lot of families
to leave the district. So I appreciate that you're trying to stay within those
parameters that we had by being flexible in creating this. And then my question is, when you've done research, and I know Chris has alluded to this, that there are some
benefits to this in the data that tells us that cross age
classrooms are beneficial. Can you just speak to one
or two of those things that you've researched or seen?

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I happen to read, like we had a guest at our house last weekend and they brought a paper
from Winona, Minnesota and it had a whole front
page article on the benefits of cross age classrooms. And I should probably get a
copy and and send it around, but they've been doing it, they just started last year I think and they had many wonderful
things to say about it. But I just wondered what you could tell us about you know, what
you've read or researched. Chris kind of alluded to
some of the stretching and some of the role modeling
and things like that.

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- Sure, yep, yep, so we
alluded to some of those things with the student experience. I think looking at the research, both if it's single grade
level or multi-grade or multi-age, there
really is a status quo, I would say as we look
at academic achievement, it really matters more
about supporting teachers and having consistency with our planning and support that's gonna have the impact.

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The research does say though, with the social emotional learning of having a multi-age class, they really see benefits in
both students that are in fourth and fifth grade or whatever the younger, the older students that they're seeing that they're really achieving at a higher level when it
comes to leadership, mentoring. You know, you're really raising the bar for all students in that area. And so, you know, we're really focusing our efforts on supporting
our educators to be able

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to have a consistent multi-age experience for kids across the district. And then really focusing in on what is that student experience and how can they have
those, you know, moments that they would have in fourth grade or those field trips
that are really important or fifth grade, fifth grade graduation, those kinds of things. So our intention with the design team is really to focus in on student experience,
professional development for our teachers,
curriculum writing and yeah. Is there anything else
anyone else wants to add?

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- No, that was good and I'm assured that you're gonna be like
looking at it measuring and reflecting and all of that. I mean I obviously you're getting, we're at the base, we're
just getting going but. There'll be time for
teachers to do some of the, I mean with their teams but also individually some
extra time for them too. - Yes, yep, so part of the agreement with the teacher union also
is that we would support them with curriculum writing hours above and beyond what
we would normally give as just, we know it's an extra lift

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to getting things up and running and to be able to support
them that way as well. - Yeah. 'cause I think if you
were end of one in a second or third grade classroom or in a building, it would be difficult but now you're gonna have the support of the entire district,
all the seven elementaries. Yeah great. - Thank you. - That's all I have. - All right, Ms. Thompson? - A couple things I
guess, I think, you know, change is hard for people
to come on board with and I have to say I had some
questions myself about this,

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but the more research I did and the more questions I asked, the more I am starting to
see the benefit to this and it is happening in other areas where they are having benefits
from this and in the world we live in a multi-age environment
every day of our lives. So when kids start in daycare,
they're in a classroom with the infants and then
as some of them get older, they go into a classroom
with other, right? And it's a multi-age class and it's all the way until
they get into kindergarten or well into kindergarten,

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'cause even preschool is
a mixed age classroom. And then we keep them separated
until middle school starts to kind of have some crossover, like if students are in
choir or other things. And then high school, we know our kids are in multi-age classrooms
so we're already doing that. And in Lincoln we have our
Gifted Services Program where those students are third, fourth and fifth graders altogether. And that has been going
on for several years and has had amazing success

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and we have third graders
in that classroom, right? And people are buying into that and they want their kids
to be in that program if they qualify for it. So I think, and that shows that our gifted students are
doing these things, right? So why shouldn't all of our kids have the opportunity to do that? It's an equity issue and it also allows like the
mentoring program, right? So we think about the high schools who went and mentored at Otter and the younger kids look up to them, it's the same thing in fourth
and fifth grade, right?

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The fifth graders are the big kids, they're gonna be the ones. And so everybody always
looks up to that group. So this I think is also
another way to allow them to learn from each
other, to grow together. The older kids can help the younger kids kind of come along in those things. Some of my questions are, are we gonna loop this? 'Cause that is another thing that I like, I met somebody at one of my first national
school board conferences I went to who, it was on
a school board in Illinois and she did her dissertation
on Cuba's literacy rates.

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And so she went and actually
lived in Cuba a couple times while she was building
and collecting her data for several months. And the main thing she found that was the key success
there was that they loop, so their kids start in kindergarten and they graduate school
with the same teacher that they start with and
that builds a relationship and it allows them to form
that like bond with each other. So they are they, you know, I mean you think a Cuba and people are like they have a higher, I don't know if it's today,
this was many years ago,

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they have a higher literacy
rate than we do, right? And usually you think that
they'd be behind but they're not. And a lot of it has to do with the way that they loop their students and it's also they're very good to their educators in
their in the country. But I guess so like I think there would be a benefit
to looping these students so they stay in the same
classroom with the same teacher if that's a possibility that
we could make that work. In the teacher of the year interviews,

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many of our teachers talked about wishing that they could loop with their students. And when we've had that happen
where students are put back with the teacher because
maybe they're struggling or they have other things and they built that bond, we allow them to be with that same
teacher and it helps them or teachers have actually asked to go to the next grade level so they can go with those students, right? And I think that has a
really a great benefit to doing this. And these kinds of things are happening

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all throughout the
world in other countries where we often look and we go, well we should be more like them. Well this is our opportunity
to see if this is a great way to help our students success. And it is a big ask for our educators. So I definitely don't wanna dismiss that. And it's a big ask for them. In the past we've done things where we've given some time
like you know this is coming but it's maybe a year away and this is like we're
doing this in the fall. So I'm a little nervous about that

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and hoping that, I'm sure
you guys are doing this and getting the teacher buy-in and I would just say since
you've notified families that everybody knows this is happening, if they have an elementary age kid, I personally in my emails and I check my spam
and I check everything, I've only had three emails so far on this. Not to say that maybe we won't get more coming down the road, but you know, I would
think if it was something that families were super concerned about, we would hear from them because
we always hear from them when they have a concern about
something that we're doing

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that really impacts their
life or their family or their student's education. So I'm excited to see where this goes and you know, if we
have, I guess a question like so which school as
an example for people who kind of aren't maybe still
getting on board with this. So if we have a classroom in Oneka that has 32 students in it, but maybe at Birch we have a classroom with 20 students in it. Now this will allow us to even that out

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across the board so that no student is in a classroom where
we have 31 students, 'cause that is not helpful
for all of our students or the teacher in that classroom. So maybe if you could just
speak a little bit to that piece 'cause I think while it's
kind of mentioned in here, it's not very specific. - So I did the calculation just broad. So right now if we didn't multi-age, we'd have uneven enrollment. The lows would be 19 to 21 students with highs of 30 plus students.

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And that can require pulling
staff from other areas right now because we're able to multi-age, it's also allowed them to keep grades K through three within those class targets. And sometimes that can cause one of them to bump up if you're evening
out a bigger class on fifth and then it really can result in the same inconsistency in a school. So one of our schools,
if they didn't multi-age, would have 20 per class in fourth grade and 31 per class in fifth grade. Just as an example. - Comment. - Thank you, I don't
have any other questions. - Mr.Skaar, you think you had a question? - Thank you.

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Did you look at any studies that showed that the combination would be
detrimental to student success and family concerns? Any studies that you looked at? - [Speaker 5] Not that
I looked at, no, no. - So would it be safe to say
that we have confirmation bias that we made a decision and we're looking for studies
that confirm the decision. We didn't look at other studies that possibly would be detrimental.

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- [Speaker 6] Were there
studies that you found that said they would be de detrimental? - So perhaps there's none
out there that are, okay. - I think most studies out there show that it's the teacher impact and that would prevent any
negative learning issues that the teachers overcome that, that was the few studies I read said that, that that's the biggest part, the training and the teacher involvement and that's the major factor
that will prevent that. - Okay, thanks for the answer. I had one other thing just for the board.

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You know, we have a lot of challenges with, you know, academics, enrollment. I mean is this just another change? You know, it seems we
already have like a fire hose that's coming at us. Is this just another change that can potentially derail us, would be a question for the board and that's why I would like to have this on the next board agenda,
to discuss this more and actually talk more about how we solicited parents' input on this

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and family input on this. The other thing is, I don't
know if I would use Cuba as an example, it's a
communist dictatorship that imprisons political prisoners and they can't even run
their electricity grid. So I don't think that's a
good benchmark, thank you. - [Speaker] All right, I know Ms. Daniels had a question or comment. - So I think all questions from parents and community are important. So even if we get three or four emails, the questions, you know, are important

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and I think we have the
capacity to answer them all. And I would encourage parents or community members to
watch this work study is gonna be, you know, the
video will be on our webpage. Do we have to replicate
it in another meeting? I don't think so. I think this is a great presentation. This would get some discussion going and they could get a lot of their questions answered
if they watch this. And they certainly,
community members can come to work studies just
like any other meeting. And then if they watch it,
they'd be prepared maybe

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to then publicly if they had questions, call their principals or an administrator. And I would encourage
board members to do that, which I do as a general
practice when I have questions and I think it's an expectation
that when I have questions or other board members or
community people have questions, there are resources to get those answers. And so I would say please,
if you have questions that are not answered that
you don't have answer to, to call your principals,
call an administrator,

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call somebody that can, you know, help you figure those answers out because your questions are important. All questions are important, but my feeling is no, we don't have to redo the presentation, but we can have people watch it and then, you know,
and also ask questions. - I thank you, any. Did you have something? - Yeah, I just wanna say, you spoke to how the decisions were made. You spoke to how the principals looked
at complex problem solving and worked together to make this happen.

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And I trust our
administrators in the district to do what's best for our kids. So I feel like that is
a management decision and not a governing decision. And we are a board that
should be governing and not trying to tell you
all how to do your jobs. - I think one thing that
maybe is getting missed a little bit is how difficult
these decisions are. And we have had multi-age and
we're trying to do it better and we have varying sizes of elementaries and so it is frustrating for staff, frustrating for parents
to have class sizes

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that are below the targets
but well above the targets. And they're well above the targets in a sense that if you have to allocate an FTE there to make it, then they're really small. But it does pinch other
parts of our classes. But this has been a really
intentional decision because fourth and fifth grade
standards are very similar. So for example, the team's diving in, but the lexile level that's tested for fourth grade reading on the MCA and fifth grade reading is
the exact same lexile range. And so we have unit
plans for fourth grade. We have unit plans for fifth grade.

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If for example, Birch Lake
would have to multi-age, if we weren't doing
this, Birch Lake teachers and Julian would have to
figure out how to multi-age with two separate unit plans. Carrie's team who's been
wonderful working for years, they didn't have the supports that is what we're used to 'cause it's really hard as a system to support one certain area. And so this really is
allowing us, but fourth and fifth grade was selected purposefully on the alignment of standards, which I'm not trying to minimize at all. It is hard, and the
parents we've heard from, it has been more from one school. I partner with the principals
when they have questions,

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people often are
frustrated at the district. I get that, that's
communication, that's hard. And so it really is best to
start with the principals. I just sat in a phone call with another, with Brian at the principal there. We partner really closely, but it is each principal really, this is not an easy decision. Staffing is really hard and no one's complaining,
it's been like that forever because we're trying to
be fiscally responsible with the resources we have and we have been able to
maintain our class ratio and staffing for many years.

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It has not changed since
I've been in this role for six years and these guys
have made really difficult decisions within that time. - Thank you, I have one request. I know you talked about the research that you looked at. If you could send it, not anything else, I just love reading it, I'm sorry. You know, I'm not the kind
of being a curriculum person, I love to go through it and read it and if, if it's okay I
can share it with the rest of the board if they wanna look at it, but I just like reading it. - [Speaker 3] Absolutely. - I would just say, or I don't know if we're,

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if you know Tiffany was waving at me. I don't know. She can't talk. - [Speaker] She's not a speaker. - Okay. - [Speaker] You can speak to
her afterwards if you'd like. But right now, unfortunately that with the
rules, we don't do that. - I thought the whole board
would benefit from whatever she was saying. All right, thank you. - I was gonna say the same thing, but I guess my thing then would be that these decisions are made because funding in public
schools is lacking.

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And it has been ever since
I've been on the board and long before that. And it is not keeping pace with inflation. It is causing our
districts to have to make these kinds of decisions because we don't have the proper funding. I still think this is a good thing because I think this is the way that things will move in the
future is we're gonna start seeing more and more of this because it is beneficial to the students. And I'm really hopeful that
that's what we can show down the road as we move
into this transition. But if people are upset about
having to make this move

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because we can't afford
to hire more teachers to ensure that all of our
schools have lower class sizes, then I just ask our community members to advocate with their representatives and those who make these decisions
at the legislative level. And in federally, really
the federal government does not participate in public education in a way that they should
financially participate. They leave it up to us states to do it. And then, I mean, we could
go into all the other nitty gritty of it, but that is where people really should
start advocating if they think

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this is something that they don't like. Because we can only do what we can do with the resources we have. And so thank you for making
this very tough decision and having to dig in and do this right now because I'm hopeful that it
will show a great success. And, you know, that's what happens when we have to do these kinds of things. - Just one last thing, our total funding in this school district has exceeded inflation
for the last 20 years.

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That's just a fact, thank you. - All right, and that's disputed. So we'll just leave it at that. I want to thank you for
coming in, you know what? I know this wasn't easy and I really appreciate you that I was throwing questions out there and you're able to answer
and they're more, you know, please don't understand
that was outta curiosity and I've heard things
and looked at things. Keep doing what you're doing
because at the end of the day, the reason you're doing
it is because our children and that's what we make our decisions based on, to provide our children the skills they need to be successful.

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And we want every child to be successful to grow and be able to reach for the stars that anything they wanna do. So I want to thank you for that. Have a good day. - [Speaker 3] Thank you, thanks a lot. - Appreciate it. Ah, we're finally to the part,
we are at the adjournment. Can I get a motion to adjourn? - So moved.
- Okay, by Daniels a second. - Second. - All in favor of say aye. - [All] Aye. - Opposed. Thank you very much, we are now adjourned.