Read along below or follow along here (pt 1: https://otter.ai/u/Se1yoc54VzqpyynQnqWg6xD1vA8 pt2: https://otter.ai/u/v2c8kFNqId4e5U-6AdvbvIZlgf8)
Unknown Speaker 0:00
All right, fantastic. It’s nice to see you, Greg. And I think we’ll, we’ll go ahead and start with financials, please. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 0:09
Good evening. So if we go to the balance sheet of the General Fund, which is Page Six of the financials, which you’ll notice is in the current year, the cash and investment is $5.9 million, a decrease. And that’s primarily due to the property tax receivable increase. This is really a timing issue, if you remember. So the 5.9 is if you add the 98 million plus the 15 million that’s restricted, that gives you the difference of between the prior year of 119. But when we when the state allowed counties to delay or not charge, late interest on on late payments on property taxes, they extended that all the way through October 1. And so we didn’t get the cash until October 10. This goes through September 30. So it doesn’t reflect the cash that we received from that time period. So that’s why it’s it’s decreased by by 5.9. It will actually be higher when we get to q2 financials. Okay. And so that’s really what it is. That’s the majority of the cashflow decrease is the fact that we will we won’t recognize the cash until October 10. So there’s that if you look at the taxes receivables, you’ll see that that’s 23 million increase again, do that same thing, we were able to book the property tax receivable back into FYI, 20, which allowed us to outperform, but the cash didn’t hit until after September 30. So any questions on that that’s kind of anomaly due to due to accounting standards, and where we were as estate inventories increased, primarily due to the expansion of PP and our central supply stock, deferred revenues of 5.9. Primarily, again, due to an cares act and funds spent and fund unspent funds. So we spent about $7.8 million in first quarter. And we spend about $1.7 million in the last quarter of FY 20. And so, as of September 30, we’d spent about $9.5 million of the cares Act. The rest comes through as a deferred and deferred revenue, deferred inflows 2.5 million decrease due to the amount of property tax recognized in the prior year. Again, when we were able to pull back everything from September 30. back into it. We also pulled out what we would normally have received in July, August, September. And so if you look at those, when we get down to the actual the actual you’ll see specific ownership tax mill, levy override and property taxes are zeroed out for the first quarter of this year. So, again, a slight anomaly. Any questions on that? Right, then if you go to the next page, page seven, which is the actual actuals, again, just pointing out that property tax mill levy override and specific ownership taxes is zeroed out, investment income is down 631,000. We’re at point two 2% at this point, compared to where we were last year, and so we’re not earning as much interest on our on our investments. charges for services is a $300,000 decrease, and that’s due to decrease preschool fees and field trips. So having field trips, and we saw a decrease in our enrollment in preschool, as we were started in remote learning, miscellaneous revenue $670,000 decrease and that’s due to decreased registration fees and E rate. A lot of it is the E rate. If you remember in previous years, we replaced all of our switches and in our title schools, and we saw quite an uptick in our E rate that’s kind of stabilized back down now. equalization is a $7.5 million decrease. Again, that’s due to the decrease PPR we saw from state funding in the spring. But it’s also as we looked into it, when we looked at the first five months of last year. They were funding us with a much higher state equalization rate because they didn’t know at that point we were going to see such a large increase in assessed valuation. So they were giving us more state equalization upfront, and then when we determine the actual October count the actual assessed valuation, then they they decreased our State equalization. And so you’ll see that, you know, we received quite a bit of our state equalization upfront last year, whereas this year, it’s more level loaded.
Unknown Speaker 5:11
current year cares x 7.8. Again, I talked about that that’s how much we expended through the first quarter. The supplies in the current year is a 4.9 million increase. And that’s due to technology, software devices, pp and other pandemic related purchases. So all of our iPads that we received in July and August, all of those net total about 4.4 or 5 million, so if you pull that back out, we’re pretty, pretty consistent with where we were last year. allocation to charter schools is a $256,000 decrease. And again, that’s due to their respective decreased in PPR. And they’re estimated funded pupil count. And so they, they over forecast where they thought they were going to be in FYI, 20. And so when they did that, then that caused that decrease. Kick prior your capital outlay, you can see that was due to our kindra furniture grant and the main street building renovations. And then the prior year transfer of energy rebates. So if you look at the transfer there, those were the energy rebates and capital credits. So then, if you go down two pages, which is our current year budget to actual everything looks, looks good. With the exception of that supplies and materials, everything is below 25%, which is we’re three, three months out of 12 months out of the year. So we would expect stuff to be in that 25% range or lower. But because we spent so much on the cares that that inflated our budget, when we did the adopted budget, we didn’t have any real idea that we were going to get the cares act and how we would expand it. And so that makes sense to me. When we do the amend the amended budget, we’ll have cares act dollars in that. And so it’ll be more reflective. Any questions on the general fund? All right, then if we go to page 18 of the bond, which is the bond redemption fund, sorry.
Unknown Speaker 7:48
Again, that’s last year’s information. And you can see the expenditures, we don’t pay our debt principal and interest until December 15, and June 15th. And so you’ll notice the same thing in the following page with the exception that again, because we didn’t receive those, we respect those receivables, not just for the general found back for property taxes, we did that for the bond redemption as well. And so you’ll see $0 in terms of property taxes. But we are on a very solid pace in our bond redemption fund. I don’t see any issues or any worries about it. I just wanted to point that out. Next is the cap reserve fund, which is page 23.
Unknown Speaker 8:39
Each 23 is a comparison between the first quarter of last year and the first quarter of this year, what you’ll notice is the allocation from the general and the CPP funds are down considerably. And that’s when because we pulled some of that allocation out when we did the amended the adopted budget in spring slash June, we reduced how much we were going to allocate. And so that’s why that is reflective. If you look at the actual expenditures, we are spending at a higher rate than we were in the first quarter, primarily due to us taking on more capital reserve projects as the building fund decreases and we’re finishing out some of those projects.
Unknown Speaker 9:32
Again, if you go to page 25, which is the budget to actual again, you’ll notice that we’re we’re at a paste is to do more than the budget but again will reflect an increase in that when we get to the amended budget. Community Education Fund on page 27 is again this is a year to year comparison. What you’ll notice is that Our revenue is down in the Community Schools Program. Again, we’re not providing before and after school, the full day childcare doesn’t look like it’s as expensive because it shows only shows $95,000 of income. But if you look at the revenue of 657,000, we used $547,000 of CRF cares Act funds to help offset the costs of running the full day childcare program in the first quarter. And that, that is allowable by by federal guidelines, we couldn’t supplement the before and after school program, because those programs were already in existence. But because the full day childcare was a new program, then we can use CRF funds to offset the expense of that. And the same as seeing down if you look at the expenditures, you’ll see that most of those are booked to the central office. And that’s because we didn’t want to blow up our accounting system with a whole bunch of additional account codes. So we coded kind of two central locations, as we did that. We will come back probably in the January timeframe, as we’re getting ready for the amended budget and take a look at both the the community schools and the facility use programs. Because those we are continuing to pay our employees for that. And we’re not seeing as higher revenues. So we’re going to do some analysis in terms of what it may look like to support those two programs in the future. questions on that? Next is nutrition services. And it’s on page 36 is the balance sheet.
Unknown Speaker 12:04
And as you look at that, what you’ll notice is that the general fund at this point is loaning the nutrition service program funds. It’s still it’s still solvent, it’s still above were above breakeven. We’ve got grants receivables out there, again, remember this is through September 30. And so that was when we were in remote learning. And so we were providing the curbside grab and go meals. And when we went to October and November were better because we were in the hybrid model. And so we were we were at least at half participation rate because we had half of our students in and so the receivables in those two months will be higher. But again, we’ll continue to monitor this fund, the same as the community schools in the facility use to see what kind of support it may need in the future. And that’s really it unless you guys have other questions.
Unknown Speaker 13:10
Any questions from anybody? Paula?
Unknown Speaker 13:15
Hi, Greg. Thanks. So just to kind of reiterate, it’s going to be a little bit of a weird year because of that. Taking the revenues that were deferred, the tax collection and booking 100% of that back to FYI, 20. We’re going to be a little bit understated all year long. On our revenues, right, correct,
Unknown Speaker 13:38
probably to that 2.7 million that we received from July through September, not the big payment, that big payment of cash will come through. But the other stuff, and it will be stated. But the other stuff will will be understated in terms of revenue.
Unknown Speaker 13:55
Okay. So yeah. So just to point out, again, the fund balance that we had reported at the end of fy 20 was 141 1 million that was overstated for the same reason. Because was it like we had called back some revenue,
Unknown Speaker 14:17
kind of not really, I mean, because, yeah, it would be overstated by about the 2.7 million that we received before we received that big payment in October. So we would have pulled all of that back as revenue. And some of that we wouldn’t have received we wouldn’t have received the we do a 60 day modified accrual, which means that after we after the fiscal year ends June 30, anything that we receive in terms of revenue from the county at that point, we can book back as a receivable
Unknown Speaker 14:47
and that’s always we can do that.
Unknown Speaker 14:49
Always we can do that. The exception this year was that because of the extenuating circumstances, we could take it as long as it was necessary that the counties put in place So when the county’s put in place that they had October 1, then that meant we could, we could book that back. So we were really at three days, or three months in a day. And so that allowed us to book it back. If you think about it had that that program not been put in place, we probably would have seen a much higher property tax revenue in the June timeframe. I think a lot of people prime and some of it, primarily oil and gas, they delayed their payments, because they didn’t have to pay late payments and interest on it. And so that normally would have been received in the June timeframe. But because of those circumstances, it was allowed to go all the way through. So overstated in the sense that Yeah, we didn’t receive that money by June 30. But probably not overstated in the fact that we would have received those payments had that program not been in place.
Unknown Speaker 15:58
I imagine the amended budget is going to be a little dicey. This year,
Unknown Speaker 16:03
it will be Tony and I are going to end Shelley Murphy are all going to have to spend a lot of time together. Because you know, we’re still accumulating how we’re spending our our CRF funds. And we have until December 30, none of those were reflected in the adopted budget. So as we’ve moved through that, and we identify how those expenses are going to be done, then that means Tony’s got to react and make his amended budget reflect that. Yeah. And the same with the s are even though we haven’t spent any s or funds will spend those from January one through June 30. I think we’ll expand all of those $2.5 million in that timeframe. But he needs to, he needs to know how we’re planning on spending that we have submitted our our application, and that’s one of the forms that you’ll sign later. But or approve later. But those two point that 2.5 million also needs to be reflected in in Tony’s amended budget.
Unknown Speaker 17:05
Thank you, it’s a it’s tricky one these
Unknown Speaker 17:08
days, it is a tricky one, we are spending a lot of time documenting how we’re using those funds, the methodology behind how we’re calculating. So we’re using some of the funds for increased instructional time from the spring of 2020 to the fall of 2020. And so we have to, we have to show our methodology, we have to show our calculations, we have to do all of those types of things. And so the other thing that we have going is that we have part of total program that was allocated that was appropriated in the screen was $37 million of CRF funds for at risk use. And so same concept there is we have to spend $764,000, between March 13 of last year and December 30 of last fiscal year and December 31st of this year on at risk pupils, so 764,000. But we’ll do the same concept which is use a percentage of our at risk students. And that’s only going to probably be necessary in October, which is when we receive the funding so it’s but it’s just the the tracking and identifying and documenting and everything else that’s taking a lot of time.
Unknown Speaker 18:25
I just want to really quickly if I have a second acknowledge I this came up a little bit at Finance and Audit and to you to john that I think we’ve been really careful about using the dollars to keep people employed and moving our employees around and and putting them in functional places like a bus driver who’s not driving a bus can do other work for us. And then as well as keeping people keeping people employed with the care salaries because that has a ripple effect. We don’t want to be furloughing people losing people that has a huge economic ripple effect. So I appreciate that focus.
Unknown Speaker 19:02
Thanks
Unknown Speaker 19:07
does not look like there’s any other questions, Greg. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Good evening and welcome to the st Grand Valley School District Board of Education meeting. Please stand and join us for the Pledge of Allegiance.
Unknown Speaker 19:24
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the
Unknown Speaker 19:26
United States of America. The Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Unknown Speaker 19:41
Good evening, everyone. Hi, Barb. Can you can you please call the roll for us.
Unknown Speaker 19:47
That Mr. Aaron’s
Unknown Speaker 19:47
here?
Unknown Speaker 19:48
Mr. Berthold here. Mr. Garcia here. Dr. martyr,
Unknown Speaker 19:55
present. Miss Pierce
Unknown Speaker 19:57
here. Mrs. Raglan. Here, and Miss siegrist. Here. Thank you, Barb. Any changes or addendums? Or changes to the agenda this evening? There were no changes to the agenda. Thank you. And last I spoke with you we did not have any audience participation this evening.
Unknown Speaker 20:20
That is correct. No public participation either.
Unknown Speaker 20:23
Thank you. We don’t have any any visitors this evening, which does bring us to our superintendents report quickly in the agenda. But Don, Before you begin, do just want to take a minute to welcome everyone who is watching the meeting virtually. And just let everyone know, we look forward to having children and and people back in the audience here in person, at some point in the future, that we missed that. That
Unknown Speaker 20:51
sounds good. I couldn’t agree with you more. That’s some of the best meetings we have was when our children come and share with us their accomplishments.
Unknown Speaker 21:00
It is Yeah, a significant change. You know, we usually spend what the first hour to hour and a half, sometimes two hours with students and teachers and staff and recognitions and community members, and I’m just missing that. So someday it will return. I know that sooner rather than later, I do believe. But looking forward to your to your update.
Unknown Speaker 21:23
Yeah, and towards that end, you know, I was gonna cover this a little later. But that was kind of a nice segue. I had an opportunity to attend the capstone celebrations for Silver Creek High School, and it was virtual. But nonetheless, it was really powerful. Our students are amazing. And Kerry Adams is amazing. And I was just really proud of all of them. The president of the Leadership Academy started out and then from there, they had interviews, and they had a special guest, I think Gloria nealon. interview the students, and they shared some of the things. The future is in good hands, for sure. So that was that was fun to watch. Very inspiring. I also want to share with you kind of some key benchmark dates here, related to COVID. And next steps.
Unknown Speaker 22:16
Tomorrow, I’ll be meeting with our teacher Advisory Council, we have representatives from each of the schools, so usually about somewhere around 60 teachers, and I will be providing them with updates, and getting feedback from them. And then on the 14th, I’ll be meeting with our safety team. And that consists of Jeff sack, the executive director of Boulder County Public Health, and Dr. Chris Urbina, who’s the chief medical officer, and soda, who is the epidemiologist, and Heather crate, who’s our liaison. And then two board members, Jim and Dec, both of you, thank you for participating with that committee. And then we’ll have a number of teachers. It’s usually like seven or eight teachers representative of the different levels. And then the president of the Teachers Association, the uniserv, Director for the Association and the Vice President of the Association. And then we’ll also have our lead nurses there, and the head of our Student Services Department. It’s a pretty comprehensive committee. And we’ll go over with Jeff siak, an update on what’s happening with COVID in our four counties. And so that’s kind of the next step on the 14th, they’ll probably also be somewhat of a recommendation at that time. It’s always tentative, because things can change. But by then they believe they’ll have data around the Thanksgiving bump, if in fact, there is going to be one. So we’ll see what that brings. And then on the 15th, I’ll be meeting and a couple of board members, I think will be joining us as well, with our parent update Advisory Committee, and that we’ve got I think, about 92 parents signed up for that. And so I looked at it, you know, representative of a lot of our schools, which is really good, if not all of our schools. So that’ll be good. And I’ll be sharing this information at that meeting as well. But then there’ll also be question and answers, and it’s an hour and a half long meeting. But I did tell Carrie McDermott, that I would stay for three hours, four hours until the last question is asked, so that, you know, even though the presentation of information and some of the interaction, but we’ll stay as long as we need to to make sure that everybody gets an opportunity to share their thoughts and their opinions and ask whatever questions and then on the 15th as well. I’ll be meeting with Steve Villareal and all of the A RS the association reps which is another group of teachers about 60 teachers and going over this information with that group as well. And obviously we communicate with our principals on a regular basis. So they are in the loop as well as our assistant principals and Dean’s and and those kinds of things. And then on the 21st we will be Sending out information to our teachers, our staff, and our parents based on the recommendations from the health department’s regarding our plans for reopening in January. And some of the things that, you know, we’ll continue to make sure of, as we are, you know, watching the research closely, the most recent research that I received from Boulder County Health was at a Brown University and Duke University, and then CDC white paper, and information from the cdphp, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. And so those documents had a chance to read them. And a lot of the same information that we’ve been hearing around, you know, which groups are most vulnerable and things along those lines around mitigation efforts, we continue to maintain our high Merv levels at the H vac system, and continue with our double custodial shifts with the extra custodians that we hired will continue with masks pre K through 12, social distancing as best we can, depending on whether we’re in a hybrid or a full on classroom with all students, and then obviously the hand sanitizing the hand washing the health screening. We did hire three additional nurses, we have health clerks in each of our schools. And we have Sophia Jaeger, who runs up our nursing department, but we hired three additional nurses to work closely with Sophia, as well as an epidemiologist for St. brain that will work closely with boulder County’s health epidemiologist, and they were actually involved closely in the hiring process. So we’ve increased our ability to contact trace significantly. We’ll also be keeping our website with the positive Coronavirus cases updated every day and then the quarantine cases. Every Friday, Carrie McDermott’s doing a great job of updating those and we did receive some new guidelines from the Colorado Department of Public education or public health and environment and allowing for targeted quarantining. And one of the things that Boulder County Health and others tell us is, it’s really important to know that they don’t believe that the targeted is going to reduce safety in any way. It’s just more targeted and more specific and more detailed. And what that means is we have to take additional measures up front like seating charts and things like that. So I don’t want people to hear that a targeted quarantining process means less safety, it just means more upfront work that you have to do, which we’re fine in doing so that they can do the targeted quarantining
Unknown Speaker 27:41
and be detailed about it. And I think that that’s a really important distinction. It’s not relaxing, or lessening, its targeting. And in order to do that, you have to again, set up seating charts, masks, social distance, the whole cohorting thing. And Boulder County is recommending and supporting the fact that we would do that based on cdpa cheese, new guidelines that will be coming out. Now when I send out the letters on the 21st 22nd in that area, to teachers, staff and families included in those letters will be a picture of the new state dial with the purple level red and orange, and so on and so forth. And it’ll also have a one page document that’s been created in partnership with Boulder County Public Health, explaining very clearly how quarantining takes place with targeted and with standardized or general quarantining. And then they’ll also be links to the various research documents that Boulder County Public Health and others have shared with us, CDC and cdphp. Recently, so people can stay up on the research that we’re being given by our health experts. And I, you know, I continue to follow on a daily basis, you guys continue to have conversations with all of the agency administrators, there’s, I think, 72 of us in the area, from all of the different entities and agencies. And we follow the data very closely. The good news is, is we’re seeing some lowering of the rates. I think our last information that I received from Jackie capetian, from our testing center, we were down I think, at 1.4% positivity rate, which is down from 10%, not too long ago. So that’s a good thing. And we’re still seeing high levels of testing being done. And we are going to open that testing site up to students as well after the break, so that will be available to students at no charge as well as adults. So a lot of activity going on where that’s concerned. I want to switch gears, but I want to see if you have any questions about anything going on with with our COVID protocols. And then Jim and Dec, after you have a chance to hear from the teachers and the health experts, you can share that back as I will with the board. And that will help inform our decisions for when we return from the break.
Unknown Speaker 30:20
So just just to reiterate one more time on that on 1221 is when people can expect the next communication on what the beginning of the second semester might look like,
Unknown Speaker 30:31
Yeah, and that’s when I’ll send it out. And we’re carrying and Garmin will send it out, you know, and it’s it goes out electronically, so it should get to everybody in that timeframe. But, you know, give or take a day, I always leave ourselves a little attitude, but that’s when it’s intended to go out
Unknown Speaker 30:47
around 1221. Okay. And that’s certainly subject to change between that time period, and then the start of school as well, just as everything has been subject to change during this this time.
Unknown Speaker 30:59
Yeah. And it also give us chance, I think, to hear from the governor’s Task Force, and it’ll also give us a chance to see how the data evolves for a little bit longer. Yeah, but, you know, I always, you know, hopeful because we are seeing, you know, positive trends. I know, nationally, there’s a lot of concern, and rightfully so. And there’s a lot of talk about the vaccine on the horizon. And so we’re continuing to monitor all of these things.
Unknown Speaker 31:28
Thank you appreciate it,
Unknown Speaker 31:29
you bet. A couple of good pieces of information, our graduation rates, and our dropout rates continue to improve. We are now with our traditional eight high schools, up over 90%, we’re at 90.3% for a four year graduation cycle. And again, you know, I’d always say this, but I think it’s important to keep repeating it that our students are expected to do more than most school districts require in the way of graduation requirements. So for us to be up at that level, the highest level we’ve ever been at. And so we’re excited about that. And our Hispanic graduation rate, which continues to increase was at was at 83.2%, for our traditional schools, and it is now at 86.3. And so to give some context, you know, when we first started this, this push to really increase rigor and expectation, but then backfill with support, you know, we were looking at graduation rates overall of around 75%. And we only required 23 and a half credits, two years of math and two years of science, and our Hispanic graduation rate was down at about 55%. So if you consider now that, that’s gone, we’ve gone up in requirements, and the graduation rate is now gone from 55% to 86.3, in four years, doesn’t include all the completion, which takes it up even higher. And then, you know, from 75, in that 75 to 80%, range all the way up to 90.3 for all of our students, and we increase the requirements. So we’re, we’re happy about that. We also have seen a nice trend with our dropout rate, we are now below 1%, we are at point 8%. So not even a full percent of our students are dropping out. And, again, that used to be up in the fours and the fives and the sixes. So we feel very good about the work that our teachers are doing, and the work that our students are doing and the support that our parents are giving us. And our building leadership and our central office administrators and the board. And I think the these are good indicators that we’re moving forward in a positive way. And I think it’s safe to say there really is if there is a gap left at the graduation rates and the dropout rates. It’s gone from this to this. And we’re excited about that and very appreciative of everybody’s efforts. The other thing that I would share with you is we’ve now exceeded $12 million worth of grants over the last couple of years. And that continues to rise. Our most recent one was for about 450,000 that we just were notified of that will fund our new p tech program for the next three years in cybersecurity. And so that’ll be an opportunity for more and more kids to I should say young adults to earn their associate degree at no cost to the students. So now we have the computer information systems, p tech in partnership with IBM and Front Range and then we also have the biomedical p tech out in the Frederick area. And that is with tomar and of axis and Agilent. And then we also have now the cybersecurity one that we’ve got four or five corporate industry partners and we’ll be launching that out of Silver Creek. So really, the premier p tech programs in the state are here in St. vrain. And they’re thriving. And so we’re excited to see that the Mayan reader competition reading over Thanksgiving was first place went to meat Elementary, and we had a chance to visit meat elementary and present Betsy with a check today. And in second place was hygiene. And third place was Rocky Mountain. And one of them asked for, you know, a recount, they were, they were actually concerned about the fact that mead somehow won again, again, that they actually won. And so we got a little bit of a controversy going on there. But they both got received checks and very proud of all three of them a
Unknown Speaker 35:43
lot, a lot of students reading over Thanksgiving. And so we’re very excited about that. The attendance rate during this period of time, which is challenging with the online is stabilizing at around 93%. so grateful to our parents and our students. And it’s hard on students, there’s, you know, it’s, it’s very challenging to log in for several hours a day, that is not easy in any buddy’s definition of easy. So I’m appreciative and I understand that and we’ll continue to try to, to move forward in a way that gets kids back into school in person, as long as we can do it as safely as possible with the recommendations from our health departments in the governor’s office and others. We are in the process of hiring for central elementary schools principalship. Jim heacox has done a very nice job there for many years. And he is transitioning out at the end of this school year, and we will miss him very much. And then we’re also hiring for Eagle crest elementary as Ryan ball who has been there for a number of years, it will become the new principal at elementary school 28. And that school I was out there the other day is coming up nicely. And had to be a really a wonderful addition to the Erie community and to the same brain Valley School District. And you will be getting a detailed report here very soon. from Brian Kraus and Ryan ball and Brian lamer. But that, that buildings looking great as it are a lot of things, we’re looking at some of the the signage for the new auditorium at Lyons. And then obviously the swimming pools going to be coming up at Silver Creek. And in addition to all the other things that you know about the meat high school, or the meat elementary school and things like that, so Brian and his team continue to perform at a very high level. And then Greg, is that purchase services award? Is that public knowledge yet? Okay. All right. Well, we do want to tell that way, if we get in trouble you can get in.
Unknown Speaker 37:54
So the Rocky Mountain group purchasing Alliance, I think it is RP, ci RM GPA, which we belong to, and a lot of both districts and other organizations belong to related to purchasing and announced. And I don’t know if it’s formal or not formally been announced or not, but at their winter conference that Tim Wellman who is our director, or who is our manager of purchasing and reports to Tracy Burnett, is the purchasing Manager of the Year for that group. And St. Green Valley schools, the entire purchasing team was recognized as the purchasing Team of the Year. And so we’re very proud and excited for for them, they work really hard, you know, they’ve been here multiple times reporting to you. And so just ecstatic about the fact that that they were recognized in that way.
Unknown Speaker 38:47
And, you know, just to close, I always need to take this opportunity to thank our teachers and our staff, and our students and our parent community and the business community and everybody who’s really rallied around us the support has been overwhelming. I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge how difficult this is for everyone. And for our students in particular, this is really, these are tough times. I also can cite many instances of resilience and stick to itiveness and forward movement. That’s, that’s really inspiring. So they’re doing they’re doing the best they can. And in our teachers, we’ve seen a lot of empathy and support as we come to the close of a semester, making sure that, you know, we’re giving our students grace and giving them as much support as we can possibly give them and it’s and our teachers and our staff as well. So it’s, it’s been a very heavy lift for all of them. And we are really, we’re really proud of them, but also don’t ever want to minimize the the sacrifices that they’re making. One of the things we just heard from chances that they’re going to push back all the winter sports Now basketball and wrestling and swimming and things like that. And so I know that when those things happen, it’s just another layer of heartbreak for our children and, and our coaches and teachers and our parents. So just know that we’re, we’re fully committed to this, and we’re gonna see it through and we’ll get to the other side of it. And when we do, we’ve talked about things like extending summer programs, instruction programs, for our children, and then evening opportunities to really try to make up ground that’s, that’s been lost. And we also will be sending out a letter to our parents, from our principals, giving them the names of all of the counselors that are in the secondary schools, with their alphabet assignments and their email contacts, letting them know that at any time, they can contact a counselor Monday through Friday, and schedule an appointment for either academic support, and or mental health and emotional and social support for our students. So that is there. And we’re just taking that up another level, to make sure that we’re giving as much of that support to our students as we possibly can in our adults. And anyways, I am grateful to this community and to everybody’s support. And we’ll keep you know, keep working as hard as we can to get there. So thank you.
Unknown Speaker 41:21
Thank you done pursuant to board members have any questions or comments before we move on to reports this evening? All right. Agenda Item 6.1 is the October enrollment trends. And I believe, Scott, that you’re joining us via WebEx. I’ll give you a minute to get situated.
Unknown Speaker 41:51
Hello there. Yes, I am.
Unknown Speaker 41:54
Hi, Scott. It’s nice to see you.
Unknown Speaker 41:56
Good to see you. I’m just down the hall in case something goes haywire. And I can run in there. But I’ll share a few slides of our October report. And then if you have any questions, it’s certainly an interesting year to present the count this year. And we’ll kind of go into some of the numbers. And let’s see, I’ll share the PowerPoint here. Let me know when you have that.
Unknown Speaker 42:41
We’ve got it.
Unknown Speaker 42:43
Okay, so we’ll start from the beginning. So we’ll just skip to the to the first chart here. We went from 31 736 last year to 3630. And that includes k 12. And some alternatives as well as preschool special ed. As you can see, that’s a drop of 1106. So it’s it’s that strange bar that we’ve never seen anything below the zero. But that’s not anything that any other district in Colorado has been seeing. I’ve had some conversations with planners and well 10 other districts that I’ve I’ve talked to and those 10 are down almost 18,000 when you add them up in the Front Range. So for instance, Boulder Valley is down 1500 Aurora is down 1600 Jefferson counties down 3700 Adams 12 1900, district 11 2300. So there’s just been a lot of loss and students across the entire state, in particular in the Front Range.
Unknown Speaker 44:15
A sketch. Quick, quick thing. I think you your your follow up, corrected it and made sense. I think your original statement is that it was something that other school districts were not seeing. But I think what you meant to say was that all the other school districts are seeing significant declines. Yeah. So yeah. But I think the whole state has seen that. But some of those losses are pretty significant, but it’s a trend that everybody’s experiencing.
Unknown Speaker 44:45
Right? Yeah, that’s our de net safe. That’s not what came across. But yeah, in those 10 districts that I talked to, there’s a drop of about 18,000 students among them, so it’s something We’re seeing statewide, in particular and around our neighbors, Boulder Valley, Thompson. Thompson was down over 1000 students. So you know, some of these range in losses of over 10% of their student enrollment from last year. And were around 3% or so loss. But when you kind of break it down, it’s kind of interesting where the losses were. Now this chart shows by grade, the change from last year to this year. And really, the significant losses are, you know, our pre K and kindergarten numbers have shown the greatest decrease from last year. And when you talk statewide, that’s the case for almost every district, their kindergarten numbers are significantly down, and their elementary numbers are significantly down. So I think they’re seeing parents maybe holding out their youngest children, and maybe we’re going to bring them back in the following year, to give them more of a kind of a natural school setting, rather than trying online scenarios with kindergarteners. You know, that’s some of the feedback we’ve we’ve been hearing and seeing from other districts as well. We actually had a slight increase at the high school level. So 109 additional ninth graders over last year. So it kind of as the grades went higher, there were fewer losses at each individual grade, but there’s more significantly impacted at the lower grades. By feeder you know, the the feeder that showed some growth was the hairy feeder with 161 additional students. You know, we had drops in, in the other feeders, neighborhood schools, Silver Creek feeder had the largest 267. But, you know, across the board, we’ve we saw some decline in our feeders. This chart reflects changes in what we saw in new enrollments, and new new to the district that we recorded over the summer, and withdrawals over the summer. And so the bottom line new to the district, we’ve been trending upward with about 2000 new students every year. And that doesn’t count kindergarten. So that’s first through 12th 12th grade 2000 additional students entered our district most likely move in or transfers in from other districts. But you see, we have to drop down to 1700. And so some of that’s reflective of our kindergarten or our lower elementary numbers, but I think just fewer people opted to plug in to a new school or a new district. And then the same for withdrawals or significantly more withdrawals over the summer. As they began as parents began to look at other options. Earlier in the spring, I started developing a new projection based on what I’ve seen with participation and potential enrollment. Still, this was over well, where we ended up in some of them was not anticipating the degree of loss at kindergarten this year. You know, we maintained a pretty decent participation rate at kindergarten, last spring when I was doing these enrollment adjustments. But then, as the fall came, many fewer kindergarteners came in. Still though, you know reasonably close in a number of the feeders with the adjusted projections. When you look at year by year, following the trends 2020 It looks very strange again,
Unknown Speaker 49:40
the actual growth compared to project projected growth. It’s just a trend that we’ve never seen before and any district has ever seen before. We still maintained over 1600 students coming into our district Outside, got some of these are maintaining the the open enrollment that we already had. But we continued really to replace those that graduated. And of course we had the loss of 40 to 50 foreign exchange students which were not included this year, which typically we have from year to year. We’ll get the 2020 data of students attending other districts later in the spring one CBE releases their numbers statewide. This is a map included in your, in your report shows really the concentrations of where students are coming from from outside of our district. And you can see you know, from the north Loveland birth hood, Johnstown, Milliken platteville. We grabbed quite a few from Fort Lupton, Thornton, northglenn, Boulder, and of course, the Erie side that’s in the boulder Valley School District. So we’re still drawing quite a few students from around our perimeter. They’re opting in at all grades, but many are opting in high school level to focus programs that we offer in the innovation kind of programs that we offer. One of the things that we also looked at was, you know, did a number of the families up for homeschool. And we did see that, you know, we kind of trended around 200 homeschool, and these are not Apex program, kids, which are, you know, partly funded in art history. But these are just solely homeschool their own family programs. So we jumped up over 600. This year, private school enrollment continued to decline slightly. So you know, none of the same brain students that could have hopped it out ended up in private schools. But no additional group ended up in homeschools. There’s there is a fair number that just are hard to identify where they’ve they’ve gone. And talking with a lot of districts, some of them have 20 to 40% of the missing that they just can’t identify where they’ve they’ve gone to. So that’s kind of an ongoing study that we’re all participating in is, you know, tracking where all students ended up. A scandal can continue, as I’ve worked on projections coming up. Is there a question? Yeah, this
Unknown Speaker 53:09
is done. You know, one of the things that we did by design last spring, and then even into the fall is we really paid close attention to engagement. And, you know, there’s a few people that said, Why do you keep pushing out the percentage of engagement, it was our way of staying connected to our students, because what we were hearing in other districts who weren’t monitoring that and who weren’t tracking that so closely, those are the districts that lost 10% of their children, and they’re stupid. And so the 3% that we lost was, even though 3% is not good, it certainly isn’t the 10% that other districts. And so I just say that because sometimes, you know, I think, again, you have a little information, but you don’t really have all the information, you need to understand why somebody is doing what they’re doing. And monitoring engagement for us was one of the ways in which we were staying connected to our students and our families. Because we knew that what we’re seeing now and these other districts 20 and 30% of their kids gone, no communication with them since last spring. That’s born out of not tracking engagement. So I just wanted to point that out. Because I know a couple people have asked me that over the months.
Unknown Speaker 54:25
Oh, yeah. Yeah, that’s good point. The, the other tracking that we have been doing is on students attending outside of their, their home attendance area. So these would be kids from out of district and you know, the majority our industry who are attending other schools within our district, so we saw a jump in elementary and secondary. But that primarily is due to the our launch ad program that we initiated. And these are some of the numbers. By attendance area we had at the elementary level 1500 plus students choose to enroll in launch dead. So they continue to be counted in their home attendance area. And so we track them by their attendance area, but they’re in the launchpad program receiving their education. at the secondary level, we had 1800 plus students. And this chart reflects the attendance areas that we’re drawing from those kids are those those students and at the secondary level, we continue to have more births, we’re kind of on an upward trend of we have the 2019 data in our from the state health department, we’ve kind of gone from, you know, a skew of skyline Longmont providing most of the birth in 2000. To a much even more even dispersion. We have skyline area at the largest areas for new births or births in our district, then Frederick and Longmont feed feeders are next. And then mead silvercreek. nyuad are kind of the third tier of areas, providing births, new students, the kind of interesting comparison, you can see the the trend of the upward movement of birth numbers. And then compare it with the five years later, kindergarten enrollment. We’ve been trending upward and kindergarten enrollment as well over the last four years. But you see here the drop. And you know, this is pretty much all pandemic COVID related this drop, all while birth numbers are continuing to go go up. So the thing that will try to factor in is next year, when hopefully things are back to normal. What kind of bounce back we’ll have at kindergarten, will parents plug their students back in and kindergarten or first grade? And you know, what, what level of engagement will they come back at. And so that’ll be something that will be, you know, hopefully communication with each of the schools as they do kindergarten and roll around ups to see what kind of increases we might expect. But I would expect to see a bounce back next year, particularly at the kindergarten level. Just a little bit in way of ethnic and socio economic are our minority population proportion continues to grow. Although the last few years our Hispanic population had been climbing at it actually declined again, and numeric numbers, but the percentage rose because of the overall loss of of all population groups. So you know, we’re still seeing some decline in the Hispanic population in our district that we started seeing three to four years ago. percent free and reduced lunch. We kind of ticked upward again. So we have 9518 students on free and reduced lunch, so 31.4% of our population. So that’s up from 27% in 2018. Almost students just a slight uptick in that as well in 2020.
Unknown Speaker 59:26
course you see the 2013 number that displacement from the flood that occurred in our district in 2013. new building, we’ve had some significant building a calf activity in our district over the last three years. 2020 data is through October. So we’ve had three more months of building permit activity to collect but we’ve been Pretty strong in that over the past two years. This chart reflects the last four years, the number of new housing units by city. So we’ve added 8589 dwelling units over the last since 2017. And now it’d be a student equivalent of 3500 students. course we didn’t see that this year with with the pandemic impacts, but based on our typical student yield, per House of around point four, that’s kind of the number of kids that we would be seeing from these new housing units, and those may be coming in future years. This is kind of the breakdown of where these housing permits, new dwelling units occurred. The little squares are 10 acre square areas, so kind of equivalent to an elementary school site. So a great deal of the density is Southwest Longmont, northeast, Longmont and then Erie, of course, the tri towns through Firestone, Frederick and devono have seen some housing increases and portions of Mead. Last slide, I believe we’ve done some adjustment to our build out housing units, based on some changes in comp plans, as well as we had a boundary change, if you remember a few months ago between Blue Mountain and long man estates that adjusted some of the some of the housing there. So we’re still we’ve have 64,000 plus units built can our district with 107,000 remaining units to be built, which I guess underlines this for this last slide, the red triangles, squares. circles are future school sites, that we’re actively working on quite a number of these as development comes through. So still kind of having this long term look, even though we’ve had this one year loss, they’re still long term growth for this district. And we want to keep focused on the growth and trying to stay ahead of it as it occurs. In some ways, maybe we have a little bit of a break and working with developers and getting land as we needed upfront. So I think that kind of concludes what I have to present. Be happy to answer any questions you might have.
Unknown Speaker 1:03:14
Thank you, Scott. Two board members have any questions or comments about Scott’s report this evening? deck.
Unknown Speaker 1:03:28
Hi, Scott, this is a dick martyr. Good. Thank you for the additional information that you provided in this year’s report. I appreciate the more granular look at a number of the components that are affecting our our school enrollment. So yeah, sure, I wanted to give you a shout out on that or just express my appreciation. So you mentioned that, you know, all of the districts throughout the state are experiencing similar or experiencing student loss. Right. And we know for us, we think we know where some of them are going. But there’s Did you did you say that there was about 20% that we were the people or that we just can’t find that we don’t know where they’re where they’ve gone?
Unknown Speaker 1:04:29
Yeah, a lot of the district planners mentioned that at least 20% of those that have left. They just don’t know where they went. Got some of them. Some of them could have been moving out to out of state or out of country. But a lot of them you know, are probably ending up can homeschool. Maybe not Registering homeschool or are they’re just holding out kindergarteners. So that’s kind of the discussion statewide among planners is some some districts or closer to 40%. Or they were. Scott, just
Unknown Speaker 1:05:15
to clarify this, you’re not talking about 20% out of St. Brain, you’re talking about district planners from other school districts reiling were 20% of their kids are okay. Greg?
Unknown Speaker 1:05:26
Yeah. to other districts that I’ve talked to statewide. Yeah, they’re, you know, and it’s kind of a hard thing to track down students A times A lot of them don’t always leave forward in information, and then the ones that don’t show up, that’s kind of a another discussion item, among other districts, the ones that kindergarten, we know that there’s more of that age group out there, it’s just that a lot of them, parents are probably keeping their youngest, their kindergarteners out and bring them back when they can have a more traditional school setting.
Unknown Speaker 1:06:16
So the thought is, this is a one, perhaps one and a half or two year phenomenon that will bring us back to the trend lines we’ve seen in the past.
Unknown Speaker 1:06:31
I think that’s what a lot of the folks that I’ve been talking with are thinking like, it could be a one to two year, there’s, you know, that there’ll be a point where, you know, some that have gone to homeschool may just stay there. But I think we’ll get some of those back as school returns to kind of normal settings. And I think other districts are, are counting on some of that coming back, as well. But,
Unknown Speaker 1:07:06
you know, things
Unknown Speaker 1:07:07
have might not be normal, exactly for one to two more years. So I think that’s just something we’re gonna have to watch closely. And, you know, pay attention to current and round ups and enrollments, open enrollment, you know, we’re in the window right now. Pay attention to what we’re seeing there. And as well as enrollments as they happen for next year, throughout the school year. So it’s going to be a learning process, I think, for all of us.
Unknown Speaker 1:07:44
Thank you. And just kind of a final comment to continue on the comments that and discussions you and I’ve had over the last six years. When we look at the the slide and the chippers presented, I don’t know where it is on the packet. In the board packet, it’s on page 11. Projections versus actuals. In each of the years since 2015, our projections have been consistently high in each of those years, unlike the years ago, before which have been were high and low. So it seems to me that there might it might be worth looking at the models from a perspective of consistent, consistent, high side bias in producing the numbers. It just seems that something happened after it from the year 2015. And going forward. That’s skewing the results and giving us a high side bias from the models that you’re using. So you know, I raised this point last year and the year before. I’m not suggesting that you that we artificially lower the results, what the projections say but rather to look at the model itself.
Unknown Speaker 1:09:29
Yeah, that’s part of the work that we’ve done in the last three, four years analyzing withdrawals. And that’s something we’ve talked about, I think a number of times, we’ve had significant changes in the number of Hispanic students and students going back to out of their out of the country. So there’s there’s been an impact, I think social, economic and And political, that’s impacted the last three to four years. So that’s something that we’ve added into our recent analysis is looking at the trends of that, of course, this year kind of throws out a lot of the trends. I certainly won’t use this year in to adjust the cohort, but obviously have to take into account. You know, some of the data that we’ve been collecting over the past three, four years on outflow withdrawals of certain population groups and outflows out of the country and those kinds of things. But yeah, I understand your point. And certainly, we’re looking at all the different aspects of the modeling that we can tighten down.
Unknown Speaker 1:11:00
Thank you. I know, it’s a tremendous amount of work. Yeah, I really appreciate the effort, you and your staff have invested in helping us get a sense of where we might be going student population wise. Start,
Unknown Speaker 1:11:13
I wanted to, I wanted to ask you a question, you know, it has it been a process of projecting too high, or have your projections been accurate. But then the withdrawals, which we’ve attributed to a variety of reasons over the last four years, that some of which you’ve just mentioned, are anomalies because of things beyond your control to be able to predict? And then the right question that I have is, are some of those girls projections inclusive of the charter schools?
Unknown Speaker 1:11:47
Right. So yeah, those are good points, the charters do their own projections, and they’ve been traditionally higher projecting than their actual enrollment, also,
Unknown Speaker 1:12:01
but those are included on your reports when you’re talking about Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 1:12:05
Cuz I know, that was also I know that I can,
Unknown Speaker 1:12:08
and hold on just a second. I know that one thing is that’s important for people to know is you don’t do the projections for charter schools. And for the last four years, they have come in much lower than what they have right acted. And so it’s not really a matter of your projections that we maybe need to get a handle on, but maybe some of those projections. And then also, you know, I want to caution you against not projecting the growth, because you’re anticipating that there will be a withdrawal, and then the withdrawal doesn’t happen. And then we’re left short of teachers, and so on and so forth. Right, just proceed. Yep. Caution on that.
Unknown Speaker 1:12:48
Yeah, yeah, there’s a delicate balance between not having enough production so that you’re not prepared with staff. And then that leaves you kind of the last minute trying to find teachers that fit specialized needs. So yeah, there’s there’s definitely a delicate balance in that. But, you know, to your point on the anomalies of student loss, two out of the country and some of the political things, you know, those swung things, sometimes 400 kids, which, with the traditional keeping with the normal amount that we’ve been keeping, the projections would have been under our actual enrollment. So, you know, but that’s a factor that we have to look at. And we’ll continue to look at, but it’s true that some of the, those factors, impact projections
Unknown Speaker 1:13:56
are enrollment. Yeah, I know that in some years, we’ve seen charter school projections cumulatively of several 100 kids more than actually attended the charter schools. Right. Right. So I don’t know if you want to have a conversation with them, and maybe to Dr. martyrs point, help them reconcile their projections. Because I think we, we understand where some of these misfires are coming from.
Unknown Speaker 1:14:22
Yeah, I was gonna make a comment to Scott. But Don actually went exactly where I was going in the fact that, you know, our charter schools are overestimating the number of students that are going to be attending. And then due to the political climates that we have right now. I wonder how willing some of those parents and students would be to let you know they’re intense of either staying or going. So I think you do a good job and the skewed numbers are of no fault of your own.
Unknown Speaker 1:14:58
The other factor that’s come in is I remember back in the day, the average home was in the mid to hundreds. And I think the most recent publication I saw was that $500,000 figure in the long run area. And so with these pandemic conditions were many, many people are losing their jobs and things like that. I think some of the cost of living, we’ve seen people moving out of Colorado, altogether, but it’s hard to know that they’re going to do that. Because we just don’t know until we know. Hi.
Unknown Speaker 1:15:41
Thanks. Thanks, Scott. I always enjoy this report every year, I just think it’s so incredibly well done and insightful. And it’s the closest thing we’ll ever have to a crystal ball. So I enjoy it. But essentially, I just, I think the real value is for us is in the in the takeaways from it and I think you hit on the, the big one this year is the bounce back and looking at where the the bulk of the enrollment is falling off in the younger grades. And you actually already touched on it dawn about thinking ahead to programs and plans that will help us regain regain ground that was lost, especially for those little guys that that aren’t here. But also, I think even a pattern that was emerging before this was the type of building and because I was noticing a divergence between the building permits. And then the enrollment. And I know you do adjust for this as far as the type of dwelling units and there’s a lot more apartments being built right everywhere. And that yields less as far as right kids coming into the schools generally. And then it also feels a little bit like maybe a 10 years ago, when we were in the recession. And we were seeing these building patterns of people losing jobs, people moving in with family and people moving out of the district to do so free and reduced lunch numbers going up. It feels a little bit like that. So I feel like we have a pretty solid track record on kind of dealing with those patterns as well. But I really I really appreciate the the report and the input because it’s such a fantastic springboard. It’s a great starting point for us to start seeing and planning and preparing for, for these kind of needs.
Unknown Speaker 1:17:29
I can see to where, you know, when I think I don’t know, Scott, if it was like six or 700 of those students that were you said at kindergarten and preschool was that correct?
Unknown Speaker 1:17:39
That’s right. Correct. And
Unknown Speaker 1:17:40
you know, that I can understand a parent doing that, that no, there’s some sense involved in that with, you know, if you’ve got this pandemic, you’re not sure if they’re gonna be involved in in person or hybrid, which is very difficult to predict. And they decide to hold back a year. But obviously, you wouldn’t know that. But you also have to count for them in anticipation that they’re going to be there so that you can make the space available and you can staff accordingly. But it you know, I understand why some people made that decision in preschool and kindergarten, to, to hold back. But I do agree with Scott, that I think that those numbers will come back around pretty quickly.
Unknown Speaker 1:18:23
Yeah, I’m glad you know, I’m glad you mentioned that Don, that was one of the notes that I’d taken is just accounting for expecting those kindergarten, you know, preschool and kindergarten students to show up next year, it makes complete sense to me if you had a preschooler at home or a kindergartner to just keep them home and not even not even jump in the mix of anything. And you know, at the end of the day, Scott, thank you so much for your report. I enjoyed it. There really wasn’t anything in the report that necessarily surprised me. I was curious where we would land on numbers. But really, I think given the pandemic and just reading and following the trends that we see across the state and nationally, there was nothing, nothing that that was was surprising or shocking to me. Was there anything that that you saw that that really stood out? Or do you feel the same way?
Unknown Speaker 1:19:19
No, I agree. Some folks I talked to were surprised we didn’t drop a lot more or districts didn’t drop a lot more. So in some ways. I think we retained better than a lot students in our district. So But yeah, I think we all kind of expected to see a drop. You know, maybe there are more kindergarteners and preschoolers than expected but it makes a lot of sense. When you come down to preschool, you have to pay And to pay for online system, it just probably didn’t make sense for a lot of parents. So I don’t think anything really surprised me a great deal with this.
Unknown Speaker 1:20:16
Scott, one other thing, too is, if I recall, and Jackie, you may remember a little bit about this, that a number of the preschool kendor and kindergarteners actually enrolled and registered at the beginning. And then when we made the shift away from hybrid, to online after cdphp changed their guidelines on the 30th of July, that kids that had enrolled then made the then chose so they actually came in, but they weren’t here when that October count rolled around. And so that’s just another nuance in there.
Unknown Speaker 1:20:47
Don, we had a number of schools when we worked through the re staffing process for our enrollment at schools as well as launched dead when we work through that staffing process. There were a number of schools where we did reduce by kindergarten sections.
Unknown Speaker 1:21:10
So then, Scott, my takeaway, and not everybody’s takeaways are going to be the same, of course, but is that really counts landed really where everyone anticipated that they would, but when I look at the at those kindergarten and preschool numbers, the elementary numbers, and then I combine that with the births, then then I’m going to to as I think long term, continue to anticipate that there will be growth in the district, and that we’ll see on the front end, you know, a good portion of that growth happening, hopefully next year, but but for sure, in the next two years, the growth from the pandemic or the impact from the pandemic anyway.
Unknown Speaker 1:21:55
Yeah, yeah, they’re still we’re still in a district that has growth, a great deal of growth potential. And the kids are, are here, especially the younger ones are they’re starting to be more birth. So a matter of time, we’ll start seeing them coming back in.
Unknown Speaker 1:22:18
Great, thank you, you know that that last slide you showed with all of the the school sites and the future school sites, I know that you’re remind me your build out what year does your build out go to?
Unknown Speaker 1:22:30
Well, that’s that’s probably like a 50 year 50 Off Plan. To get to that kind of population, maybe 40 to 50. It depends on the rate. But I don’t know that I’ll be the planner at that time.
Unknown Speaker 1:22:49
I was. I was thinking about that, too. If you say 40 years, I might be alive to see that in 50 years. I’m going to doubt that. I’ll be around to see that. But don’t count on me
Unknown Speaker 1:23:02
for that.
Unknown Speaker 1:23:02
Yeah, we won’t we won’t counted. The Board of Ed won’t be listening to you then at that point. Well, they for these reports, right. And you know, but there will be a lot of work for a future boards and future superintendents years from now. And staff to build to build new schools and that growth will certainly happen across the district. Anyway, it’s just interesting to look at it to think what the future size might be. Right? Yeah. And we’ll be appreciative of your forward thinking. Absolutely. So all right, if there are no other Oh, go ahead, Scott.
Unknown Speaker 1:23:40
No, I was just gonna say thanks. Yep.
Unknown Speaker 1:23:43
Sure. Yeah. And I don’t think we have any other comments or questions. So I just want to once again, express our gratitude for your report and your projections. Thank you. Appreciate it. And it was nice. Nice seeing you this evening. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 1:23:55
talk to you later.
Unknown Speaker 1:23:56
Take care. Bye. Bye. Alright. Agenda Item 6.2. Is the finalized October count report. Greg, I have you on here as potentially making an introduction. And then I believe Tony, and I see Tony. Hi, Tony. Hi, how are you? I’m well, it’s nice to see you. There’s a little bit of a delay. So I just want to make sure I’m not jumping the gun here. Greg.
Unknown Speaker 1:24:24
Yeah. So I will turn it over to Tony in a minute. I just want you know, Scott does a great job with the intro enrollment trends and the birth rates in the building permits and, and all of those kinds of things. Tony does a great job with the budget and how that you know that enrollment turns into funded pupil count, which turns into dollars, but I really wanted to acknowledge amber Muir and her staff tonight because they’re the ones that are working and also registrar’s and attendance clerks in the schools because they’re the ones that are working to solidify our October count data. That is ensures that we get the funding that we need. And this year was a very different environment because of how we had to track attendance and participation. And so I just want to acknowledge the great job that they did in terms of being able to track all of these students and make sure that they were in attendance when they needed to be verify all of that stuff. So with that, I’ll turn it over to Tony.
Unknown Speaker 1:25:26
Great, thanks, Greg. I’ll make sure you can see the screen okay. 2025, that people count.
Unknown Speaker 1:25:31
Correct? We can. But
Unknown Speaker 1:25:34
great, so I’m just to complement the information that God was able to provide. I wanted to give an update on the finalized funded pupil count for 2020, to the board and the public. So as you may know, the district’s funded pupil count is the number used by the Colorado Department of Education. And they use that number to calculate the district’s toll program funding, our funded pupil count multiplied times the per pupil revenue equals our total program funding that is funded from the state and local property taxes and tech. And the reason that funded pupil count is almost always different from enrollment is because state funding varies depending on the type of student as well as other factors regarding how the student is enrolled. But have a little chart here that gives a rundown of how a student may show up on Scott numbers enrollment, but CDE will only fund them partial like though, as you can see your old time birth to 12th grade student counts as a 1.0 funded pupil count. But if the student is considered part time, which has to do with their, their instructional hours that they are enrolled for, if they don’t meet a certain threshold, then they’ll only be funded at a point five other people count. But as you can see down the list of full day kindergarten, first half day kindergarten, as you know, that changed last year when they increased funding for full day kindergarten to 1.0. From a point by date, but there are still some kindergarteners out there, particularly particularly at the charter schools that have a half day kindergarten program. And so those kids are actually still funded at a point five, eight, our homeschool students who are enrolled with the district five, and then our preschoolers, if they’re tuition based, obviously, the state doesn’t fund them at all. But if they do qualify for the Colorado preschool program, or if they’re in special education, then we do get a point by 100 people count for each of them. Then finally, there are a couple of students out there that are on our rolls and they’re enrolled, but for whatever reason may not be eligible for funding. And so that will also count a difference between enrollment and our funding count as they won’t be fun at all. So how does this affect our funded pupil count? And how does the last year’s numbers compare to this year’s numbers? I have a quick chart here with broken down by a couple of categories. And you can see the changes from last year to this year. But you can see regular grades one through 12, decreased by about 787 funded pupil count, our kindergarten enrollment dropped, excuse me, not enrollment, our funded pupil count dropped by 232. APAC, those students that are counted as point five dropped by 7.5 funded pupil count, but that would equate to 15 students change that you would see in enrollment. And then the pre k CPP the COVID preschool program and special education change translated to about 139. So again, this is just the funded pupil count impact of our decrease in preschool
Unknown Speaker 1:29:00
students that Scott showed earlier, it doesn’t include any impacts from tuition and tuition paid aren’t included in our protocol. And then finally, you can see the charter schools actually went up by about 16 months ago. So overall district wide when you add it down at the bottom, you can see there was a total decrease of about 1105. In terms of our funded pupil count from the FYI, 20 year to the current FYI, 21 year, and so this, this 30,195.7 400 pupil count is what we normally would get funded on. And with that decrease if you translate that times our per pupil revenue, or current pupil revenue with about 70 $800 per student, that will translate to a decrease last year to this year of about $8.6 million in our total program funding. But I did want to mention that the total school finance act has a provision in it called declining enrollment averaging. What this is meant to do is that we’re districts in a situation with declining enrollment, they have a provision that says that funded pupil count can be actually adjusted to be the highest of the average of the last 234 or five years of funding people count. First Name brain, when we plug that in, that actually works out to be the last the average of the last three years as the highest. And so what that does is that actually decreases the, the the decrease by almost path. And so what happens is our preliminary funded pupil count as calculated in a non averaged fashion did go down by about 1100. But this is this declining enrollment provision of that have about 500, or decrease. And so that number, there is this 30,736.7. That is our final all in total certified October funding, people count that we are going to be funded in the school finance act. So how does that impact with dollars, as you saw before, that $8.6 million, again, that has to about 4.4, roughly, it would be the impact from last year, compared to this year. Now, one thing to note is that the actual budget impact will be slightly different because as we do our adopted budget, in last spring, we use our zero growth, but we do adjust it just slightly at first and other non zero growth items. And so what that means is that our funded pupil count that we are budgeted at right now isn’t the same as what it was last year. So I just wanted to provide a quick update on that. So again, previous slide show numbers compared to the prior year. Again, what we had budgeted for was pick one, five, yeah, 31 5.2. And so the decrease is actually 580 8.5, which is the difference of about $200,000, compared to the actual budgetary impact on total program, from our funded people count change here will be that $4.6 million dollars. And that’s what I’ll bring forward as a part of the amended budget in January, that will be that number will be part of all those changes. A couple of other things I wanted to show the board, I don’t have as many excellent slides as Mr. tilian. But I do have a historical funded pupil count chart here that you can see the trends. This goes back to 2007, when our funded pupil count was just over 22,000 all the way to the current number. The line that you can see is actually the percentage change. So you can kind of see that, up until about 2014 2015, we’ve been experiencing an increase in funded pupil count growth of about between two and 4%. That has decreased fairly consistently, not not too much. It’s always been in the positive. But it’s but as decrease is you can see that that trend up until 2019. That spike in 2020 is was as a result of the change in our kindergarten funding that went remember from point five, eight to 1.0. And that’s why we saw a spike there. And then finally, as you can see the 2021 number is doing that negative 1.8%, which is the percentage impact of what I mentioned previously. So my last fight. Here’s just a couple other considerations. As got mentioned, declining enrollment is occurring all the state and country
Unknown Speaker 1:33:55
due to the COVID pandemic. One thing to note is that the state set their funding using a higher funded people cap estimate. And so when we see this across the state on all districts, I’m seeing a decrease in their funded pupil count. And what that does is it essentially frees up dollars that they had planned to use to fund public education at the state level. And so the state has some options here. They could simply adjust everyone’s per pupil revenue upward in the current year. And again, from the same number of fun to people count the prostate, give everyone a little bit more for each of those. They could allocate those savings elsewhere and just not not fund those amounts. And then the last item is is what they’re currently on track to do is retain those savings, not allocate them in the current year and then actually put those dollars towards next year’s budget for the finance act and funding total program. So I again, there that could change, they could run some bills during the upcoming legislative session to reallocate those dollars and increase our per pupil revenue. But again, right now it seems like the current drive is that that bullet point three, and allocate those extra dollars. That’s all the slides that I have. But I wanted to make myself available for any questions.
Unknown Speaker 1:35:25
Thank you, Tony. Any board member questions or comments this evening on Tony’s report? No questions or comments, Tony, I think this is, you know, you’ve been been talking about those protections for some time now. And they were right around what we we all would have expected.
Unknown Speaker 1:35:45
Right. Well, thank you. And again, just reach out if you have any questions, and I’m glad to be able to provide that update. And again, I would echo Greg’s sentiments and appreciation of records. And every year in her work. I’m able to provide some quick, brief updates, and some realizations, but there’s a lot of work behind the scenes that are entertained, dude. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 1:36:09
Thanks, Tony. Yes, and thank you remember. Alright, agenda item 6.3 is the review of school priority improvement, unified improvement plans.
Unknown Speaker 1:36:26
I yes. presidency versus Board of Education. It’s a pleasure to be here this evening, Dr. Dad in March of 2020, that the governor issued an executive order pausing assessments in state accountability for the current 20 2021 school year. districts and school plans continued with their 2019 ratings, and party apartment schools continued their accountability clock years. The school improvement process continues this current year. And without that state level data, it’s really improving planning with local data, non assessment data, but continue the school planning process. So we’re going to begin this evening with Rocky Mountain elementary school, and which is in your one of priority improvement. And I’d like to introduce James Garcia, the principal of Rocky Mountain.
Unknown Speaker 1:37:21
Hi, James, it’s nice to see you. Welcome to our meeting.
Unknown Speaker 1:37:26
Thank you, Board of Education, Dr. hat and everyone else in this board meeting tonight. I appreciate that. That being said, I’m going to go ahead and share my screen to do a little presentation through a slide deck. I apologize. my mouse decided to take a little nap. So I’m trying to wake it back up. Okay, I believe everybody can see this. And if you could just give me a thumbs up once you see the full picture. That would be fantastic. All right. Thank you very much. I do appreciate this. Obviously, it’s not the ideal way to present in persons a little bit better, but we’ll just go with what we got. So during this presentation, we’re going to be able to discuss what instruction and learning look like in both the spring and fall of 2020, the UI process for 2021 longitudinal trends UAP executive summary, and we’ll wrap up with a question and answer session at the end. Before I begin, I would just really like to thank our learning leaders for all the hard work and support they provided our teachers, students, parents and administrators during the transition of synchronous to hybrid to synchronous learning and teaching. And Huge thanks. Thank you to DTS for supporting all of our students getting iPads as well as Internet connections to all our students and their families. And then many others saint brain staff members working behind the scenes to support this this transition. So instructional learning during the spring, Rocky Mountain was able to average 90% of its students participating with remote learning. Teachers were continuing to meet weekly in grade levels and teams to support students learning. Additional team members reached out to individual students to support Learning and Technology, any issues that they might have had, and also might have taken place during the remote learning time. Then during the summer, around 40% of Rocky Mountain teachers participated in a professional development related to blended learning seesaw and Schoology and then during the fall and return to school staff engaged in PD around blended learning seesaw and Schoology with the support of our learning leader. As a staff, we continue to focus on ways to engage our students by having Perez office staff and other classified staff member support specific grade levels to be another point of contact for families with the transition back to synchronous
Unknown Speaker 0:00
In a synchronous learning, the overall attendance and participate participation rate for this time frame range from 90 to 96%. This is an overview schedule since the beginning of the school year, we focused on blended learning and student engagement with lots of collaboration between grade level bands, teacher teams, as well as myself and our learning leader Karen Smith. Impact team collaborations took place weekly with grade level bands, teacher teams, learning leaders and myself than data dogs were also part of that process. And we continue the work that we implemented during the 2019 2020 school year, which we are continuing to do this year for the 2020 school year. staff had been very involved in developing this plan. And then on November 9, we were able to hold an open forum to get feedback from our community in which I was able to provide that feedback to the leadership team on November 10. And then wrap up any additional items that needed to be tweaked on our UI P. And now we’re here tonight with the presentation to the board moving into January 13, with the AYP approval, and and then on to January 15, of going to the CDE. For VIP process. Now, the information on this, this information familiarizes you with our students, one thing we are really proud of is how our families have embraced online learning. And with the help of our district, every student has a device and access to the internet. You can see here that 84% of our families are experiencing socio economic challenges. And I want to thank Dr. HUD, DoD and the board for providing devices and internet access, both of which are critical for equity among children. The Other highlights here are 48.24% of our overall building percent our ELL students English language learners, and then 84.92% are free and reduced lunch learners. This is just a breakdown of all the students that are dual enrolled their primary enrollments, Rocky Mountain and then they’re also doing a road and launched Ed. So of the 67 students in launch day, which makes up 18.1. Or I’m sorry, 18 point 16% of Rocky Mountain, so road building percent. That just gives you a breakdown by grade level of where the students came from. And then while while preschool enroll, excuse me. While preschool enrollment and outcomes are inconsistent, we want to celebrate that rocky preschool students outperformed the SP VSD literacy by 3%. Our preschool staff are implementing foundations. And we believe this is a big reason for the success working towards increasing enrollment on a more consistent basis, as well as the goal of getting to a 50% average for both math and literacy to school content areas. full day kindergarten, we increase literacy skills. We have gone from high levels of students with significant reading deficiencies in the fall to more than half of the students no longer being identified with civic significant reading deficiencies and winter and again in spring, we’re able to gather data. What this slide shows is that while students increasingly enter school with more literacy needs, they make excellent progress throughout the year with fewer than 20% identified with significant reading deficiencies by the end of the year. So now we get to the executive summary. If we’re able to incorporate consistent implementation implementation of viable curriculum, we will, the big takeaway here is consistent lesson delivery using district curriculum and content specific state standards will lead to improved intervention for students. We continue to implement the work with impact teams. We’re using Fridays to collaborate with grade levels, academic support teams, with our learning leader and myself joining these weekly meetings to continue the great work you started last year. We also have after school literacy League, where students have an opportunity for additional tutoring from our teachers. If we improve collective efficacy and impact teams, we will again we will be able to continue our impact team work with grade level and content level teams by using established collaboration times consistent focus with curriculum and content lesson planning, as well as data reviewing with writing assessments unit tests, I ready reading and math diagnostics, as well as other forms of formative assessment. We are continuing our strong work with impact teams and focusing on academic vocabulary to really increase understanding and all content areas. We believe vocabulary improvement can make a huge impact and getting students to acquire more reading comprehension skills. Students are able to use their foundational skills to decode words and transfer these skills in the developing more vocabulary to increase their overall comprehension when reading
Unknown Speaker 5:01
And then if we improve foundational reading skills, and vocabulary, we’ll be able to continue to be intentional with direct instruction and laser focus with increasing all students literacy skills and abilities. During the 1920 school year, we really got into a groove as a staff, and the staff can certainly put writing samples around the walls of Rocky Mountain elementary for guests to see the great student writing as a result of wonderful teaching from teachers. This really helped in shifting teachers teaching and student performance across the entire building, I was really bummed that we were not able to take the CMS in the spring. And we know the CMS is not the end all be all. But we also know that we would have seen some very good results from our students as a direct reflection of all the hard work teachers and parents were doing to support our collective efforts, the validation would have really complemented the great work of all our rocky brands. So brings us to our root causes. By addressing these elements, we will be able to you know, because of these the declining student academic achievement and growth, as well as flat rates of achievement, we will be able to improve our overall achievement and growth to move towards an overall school performance framework rating performance as a whole school, meaning executive summary, we talked about those elements. And we can address these root causes that are causing the declining in our student academic and growth scores. And again, we see our current trends are trends are not in the right direction. We are aiming for a 722.3 means skill score and ELA English language acquisition, and a 719 point one in math. By aiming for these cut points, we will continue to increase our overall Building Performance to get to that overall goal of the SPF rating of performance. Again, our trends and growth mirror our trends and achievement, we are aiming to get to the 50 Media and growth percentile, and both ELA and math. by achieving this median growth percent on both ELA and math, we will continue to increase our overall Building Performance to get to the overall goal goal of the SPF rating a performance. axis trend is flat. Like our reading trends, we are working towards the median growth percentile of 50. Again, by achieving this median growth percentile, we will continue to increase our overall Building Performance to get to the overall goal of the SPF rating of performance. Our focus on vocabulary instruction will support access performance, as well as reading and math performance.
Unknown Speaker 7:47
Getting all our students engaged and moving our trends in the right direction by getting to the 15th percentile will get our overall school performance rating trending in the right direction of increases, which again will ultimately get our school to our SPF rating of performance. And right now, we are working on building a culture of reading. It’s another celebration that we have been developing the past couple of years. In fact, we were able to acquire a third place finish during the my on Thanksgiving reading challenge for a second challenge in a row. All our records are increasing the amount of independent reading they do, which in turn improves reading abilities in all content areas. Again, another celebration. I know sometimes it’s kind of easy to focus on the things that are aren’t so pleasant, but this is one of the things that we really want to celebrate. It was great to see Dr. Haddad and Dr. cusion and Mr. perfetti Dini in the building today, providing us that awesome check for the great work that students are doing in the teachers. So thank you for your time. And I will go ahead and stop sharing the screen. So I will be able to see to the best of my ability, any questions that you might have related to our new IP and what I shared in the slides.
Unknown Speaker 9:04
James, thank you to board members have any questions or comments on on James’s presentation this evening? deck.
Unknown Speaker 9:17
Thanks, James, deck martyr here. It’s really encouraging to hear see the programs that are in place to help move us in the right direction. I was wondering if you could remind me again what being in the 15th percentile means with regard to the progress a student makes a student’s growth in one year of school.
Unknown Speaker 9:49
Yeah, so by by being able to get to the 50 that will help us continue to decrease the gap that we have in our deficits but also get us closer to the mean skill score that we’re really trying to get to, the biggest thing that I can really think through is you think of that pie. In that pie, you have your bucket of achievement, and you also have your bucket of growth. And we know that if we’re able to get more of that pie from growth, it will really help. That just proves student’s academic skills, but will also help us get to that next level of our SPF. Really, which is getting us out of priority improvement, to improvement to ultimately performance.
Unknown Speaker 10:36
So if a student is in the 50th percentile, are they experiencing one year’s growth in one year of school?
Unknown Speaker 10:51
That is correct. The the 50th, median percentiles a year has been set by the state for a year’s growth in a year’s time.
Unknown Speaker 11:00
Thank you. Thank you. And it president when we look, James at the data that was in the packet, the percentage of students say for math, or and or reading, that are proficient or above, by grade level, those seem to be pretty low, at this point. On the order of 10% or so for math. And we would expect then, with the implementation of this program, over some period of time, that the percent of students, what is a target for the percent of students who meet or exceed the standards?
Unknown Speaker 11:58
My apologies, I caught some of what you said, but I didn’t care about who question I’m sorry.
Unknown Speaker 12:04
Sorry. Okay, so for the masks. Yeah, no, I think it is, at least in part is the mask and probably my difficulty breathing through it. So when President time the preset, say in fifth grade grade, the percent of students who are meeting or exceeding expectations for math is around 10%. or so. Is that correct? Pretty close.
Unknown Speaker 12:46
Yeah, yeah.
Unknown Speaker 12:48
Okay. Yeah. So with the implementation of this program, how many years is we’ll do project it will take us to get to whatever our target is for me,
Unknown Speaker 13:09
really.
Unknown Speaker 13:11
And I know I mentioned this earlier, that was the hope of being able to get that test last year to see the great work that was taking place. But if we were able to continue to use the trend that we had, from our I ready diagnostic data, and the great work that we saw before on this global pandemic, we would see, I would I would say, to get to your question, two years and two years, we would continue to see gradual increases. And then once we were able to really implement all of the great teaching that was taking place, as much as we’ve done the last two years, we would continue to see those steady increases to get us to that benchmark of what we want to get to.
Unknown Speaker 13:51
Thank you that that’s very encouraging. And just one final question, if I may, what is our target? What is our goal with regard to the percent of students who meet or exceed the math standard?
Unknown Speaker 14:08
Ultimately, not my gradient is one to 100%. But and the reality of the situation that we’re at, obviously, going from a 10% to 40%, and then maybe getting that to a 60%, you know, all and then getting up to the 8085 percentile. So I would say that within the next two years, we should be able to get to at least 45 to 50%, if not more than that of our students, meeting all of those areas, and math literacy as well as writing.
Unknown Speaker 14:41
Okay, thanks very much, James. I know you’re doing the Lord’s work in this regard. And it’s it’s worthy of our best efforts. So thank you.
Unknown Speaker 14:53
Yep. Oh, no, sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt anybody. I know. It’s been different. called this last year. But really I want to enter reiterate the great work that the teachers have been doing, they’ve been the champions of really diving and rolling up their sleeves with impact teams, it’s really helped shift our culture. So much so that you even saw our mind challenge self celebration, because that’s a direct reflection of the encouragement and the, you know, just the, the empowerment that that teachers are providing to their students. So thank you guys. Appreciate that. Hi, James, this
Unknown Speaker 15:29
this is Paula, that was actually a really good segue, you sort of answered the question, I was gonna ask about impact teams. Because a theme going through the GOP appeared to be consistency or sort of lack of consistency. You know, which I can understand when you’re in a classroom, like you’re doing your outreach to each and every student and trying to differentiate and that that’s a good thing. But that also was a little bit rubs against can consistency or it can. So so as I, as I read it, you you reference a lot of the impact teams and the work of the learning leaders. And so could you elaborate on that a little bit more like what does that work look like? And what are those groups doing?
Unknown Speaker 16:09
Yeah, so you’re kind of not trying to take up too much time, but kind of try to provide a little bit more context. So last year, we were able to meet bi weekly, or I’m sorry, not bi weekly with our grade levels, and also our academic support. So your interventionists, your special ed teachers, they would join the grade level bands that they were able to be a part of, according to their schedules, in case loads, there, we would be able to look at a unit. And let’s say we were looking at a first grade writing about just a narrative and expository narrative. So then we would be able to sit down as a team come up with a plan to create the lessons to teach those. And then at the end of that unit, or even just halfway into the unit, the teacher would bring back writing samples, and then we would be able to vet as a team, where are we at with the writing, The other great thing that we were able to do is if it married up into our in service days, or our PLCs that took place, we were able to put our teams in a vertical team. So you would have representation from preschool, kindergarten, first, all the way through, along with the academic support teachers, as well as the specials, you know, art, music, PE, and they could join those teams, and they have really rich conversations. And the best thing from that is they were organic, and they were grassroots, and really helping everybody get on board. And one thing was pretty remarkable. The PE teacher would ask the teachers, what can I do to help leverage better writing in your in your students writing? Is it having them do a word as they’re throwing the ball back and forth is that have them thinking of a full sentence when they’re running a lap and whispering that to me as they’re going through? So just being very intentional with that. And now you fast forward to this year, where we’re all trying to navigate what is synchronous, what is asynchronous look like. And we are still able to meet even though it’s through a WebEx. And during that time, we are now diving more deeply into foundational skills. So kindergarten through third uses the foundation’s curriculum, and it’s the same process. Really what we’re doing is we’re being very laser focused and developing lessons that what do we want our students to know and be able to do? And how are we seeing that they’re able to do that? What little benchmark? Is it? Is it something as quick as them holding up a little whiteboard that says, Is this the word or the diagraph? That you’re asking me to say? And then we fast for our we ratchet it up to fourth and fifth grade where they’re looking at more of the worms or not words, words that are multisyllabic, or a little bit more difficulty. And they’re looking at the morphology of those words, and all of which they’re able to implement into their writing, but also be able to, you know, dissect a word when they’re reading it in a math curriculum or a science curriculum. And the transparency has really been pretty, pretty incredible, even as we’re still navigating this this situation. Does that help provide?
Unknown Speaker 19:03
Oh, Can I add something to that, Paula? to your question? Because this question comes up every year, it seems like during these USP presentations about consistency. And I think the other complexity of this work is that the standards are very broad and deep, as are the curriculum materials that we have to teach the standards. And so if once a week, a team is getting together to talk about a reading standard, and all of the teaching that needs to happen for the full week, you’re trying to plan out four or five lessons to get you to your next meeting. That that 45 minute plan time or our planned Time flies by and you haven’t addressed writing or math or science or social studies. So there is just so much so many collaborative conversations to have on a team and I think that that’s where sometimes the inconsistency can come in. You can’t address every single subject every single week. So we just chip away at it and we prioritize the reading In the math and the writing, and James continues to make collaboration a priority in the weekly schedule, but also during late starts in the after school PD.
Unknown Speaker 20:11
I also think for all of our school improvement efforts, there really are three things that we look for all the time. It’s what James has spoken of, which is the consistency in the coherence within the curriculum and between grade levels from K, all the way up through fifth grade. And then beyond. The second is a strong use of formative assessment to help guide the adjustment of instruction. And the third thing really gets to your point, Dr. martyr and in the growth, you know, in order to continue to see increases in achievement, we have to have greater than one year’s growth in a year’s time. And what will help us with that is having our students in extended learning time in the summer, in the project launch, and you know, really drilling down with small groups of students, using the materials in the curriculum that we know work foundations in Orton Gillingham, and looking for that extra growth more than a year’s growth in a year’s time.
Unknown Speaker 21:08
Thank you, I appreciate some more detail around that. And I also I enjoy hearing about both the vertical and the horizontal integration, if you will. And all of the even the specials, like the more lenses, the more eyes on the students and on the work that has to be done. I think you don’t you don’t lose moments, you know, everybody’s in it. And we can really squeeze out the maximum learning time for you to the students. So thanks. Thanks for that.
Unknown Speaker 21:41
Chico.
Unknown Speaker 21:43
Yeah, I appreciate that additional detail as well. And I am I think I know the answer to this. And I’m not sure who the question is for necessarily, but the consistency around the curriculum. and wondering if there’s there’s data or evidence with, you know, unique population of 50% English language learners at Rocky if that the curriculum that we’re using has evidence of being effective in that population as well.
Unknown Speaker 22:17
Yeah, the curriculum
Unknown Speaker 22:18
is definitely appropriate for our students. And it’s in the What Works Clearinghouse as one of the, you know, stronger curriculums that we could be implementing. And it’s not just what the curriculum is, but it’s also the instructional scaffolds and supports that we put in place for that additional vocabulary instruction and guided practice. So I think that we have a really strong vocabulary, strong curriculum that that supports vocabulary development, which is key for our second language learners.
Unknown Speaker 22:51
Thank you,
Unknown Speaker 22:52
strong PD, around, what are the instructional strategies for the delivery of that instruction
Unknown Speaker 22:58
in our district. Perfect.
Unknown Speaker 23:01
And just to kind of piggyback off that, the other great thing we’re able to do, too, is, you know, as you reference some of our ELL population, they’re able to get a double dose of what they need. So they’ll have their whole group instruction with the whole class, their peer, like peers, but then they’ll also be able to go to that smaller group, as Dr. Cook Bhushan mentioned, where they can have even more laser focused work related to what they really need to ratchet their skills up to break that gap, and really get on the right trajectory of getting to grade level performance.
Unknown Speaker 23:34
That’s right, James, Thank you. Appreciate it. I also appreciate you going into a little bit more detail. I think that it can be easy when you you look at the UI p or you listen to a presentation, you may not realize the how complex and how involved the work is. And so I appreciate you going into a little bit more detail on that. I also just want to take a second and congratulate your school and your students and their families on winning the Mayan reader challenge. That’s fantastic. Congratulations and two in a row. That’s marvelous, marvelous accomplishments. And I also want to take a minute to thank everybody at your school and the teachers and everyone for their hard work. I know that that this UI P and moving children in the direction that they need to go is a priority at your school. I also recognize that now that’s happening during a pandemic. And I know that that everyone is working just as hard. But there are things that complicate that work now just by the nature of of going through a global pandemic. So please, please pass along my appreciation to everyone. I do. I do when you look at the big picture and project launch and everything that you talked about. I do have confidence in the work that all of you are doing and and something we don’t have to talk about. This now that there has been a common theme fundations and then, oh, gee, having such a positive impact, and I’m just picking that up in a variety of different conversations. My comment is anecdotal, but I do think that it’s possible we’ll be able to see some good outcomes with that curriculum and Orton Gillingham, in addition to it, again, probably speaking out of turn, that’s anecdotal. So, James, thank you for being here. Dina, and did you have anything that you wanted to add And in closing?
Unknown Speaker 25:38
So I appreciate your comments, Paul, and I’ll add some comments at the end. But I too, am really proud of the work that James along with his staff are doing. It’s It’s such a challenging time right now. And they have remained optimistic, and focused on social emotional needs for students and families, and also the instructional and learning needs. So I’m just really, really pleased with the progress that they’re making and proud of James’s leadership there.
Unknown Speaker 26:06
Yeah, you know, and how fortunate are we that you know, I was, I had a conversation earlier today with john Creighton, and just recognized I wanted to thank him. When he first came on the board he talked, one of his primary focuses was equity. And as we sit here, and we talk about this new IP, that absolutely is coming into play, particularly James, you noted with, with the technology, and we can certainly thank previous boards of education for their leadership and, and Don, and our community for that to changes this conversation, as well.
Unknown Speaker 26:44
Yes, and I just like to add, you know, appreciate James leadership’s and Dena supportive of the school. And the plan is on paper, but it’s very actionable. And I’ve seen it in school, several school visits, the staff is doing the work every day, regardless of the environment and moving the school forward. So I look forward to when we’re able to see some results in the near future. So I appreciate that, James. All right. Good.
Unknown Speaker 27:16
I was just gonna say thank you all very much for taking the time again, to allow me to present this and for just giving me an opportunity to be a part of this great team of St. Green Valley schools and, again, board and Dr. Dodd and Dr. Bhushan just thank you guys for just allowing our students to get those one on one iPads and just everything that you’re allowing them to do during this this unforeseen time. I appreciate it.
Unknown Speaker 27:38
Thanks, James.
Unknown Speaker 27:42
All right. At this time, I’d like to introduce principal of Timberline pre k eight. And they are continuing year two of party improvement, and I’ll introduce Karen buckler, the principal and to present her unified improvement plan.
Unknown Speaker 27:58
Hi, Karen, welcome.
Unknown Speaker 28:00
Thank you. Thank you. So I just wanted to say thank you to the board and to Dr. Had add, it’s always a pleasure to get the opportunity to stand in front of you. And tonight, I get the opportunity to share the work that we’ve been doing at Timberline PK eight in unified improvement planning. So I’m going to go ahead and share my screen. This is always the moment right?
Unknown Speaker 28:27
It’ll go well. I can sense it.
Unknown Speaker 28:43
All right.
Unknown Speaker 28:49
So you’ll see that our agenda looks very similar to the agenda that James shared for Rocky, I will get the opportunity to share a little bit with you about our current instructional programming and the work we’re doing around school culture. Talk about the process that we’re utilizing to create the UI P and I have some data that I think will illuminate the longitudinal trends that we’ll be sharing. I’ll share the major improvement strategies which are included in the executive summary, some highlights regarding student engagement at Timberline presently, and also some time for your questions. So in the timeline, which again looks similar to that of Rocky, I just wanted to highlight a couple of things, the first being that focus on the on the very top on blended learning and student engagement. I want to say a thank you to the Department of assessment, curriculum and instruction for preparing really high quality professional learning for our teachers. When we began this year, we’ve now experienced synchronous, asynchronous and hybrid environments. We’ve done all three and the work That was prepared for teachers really helped them feel prepared in doing their best to support our students. And also, as James said, a thank you to DTS for ensuring that our students have all of the equipment that they need to be engaged when we’re online, and also for our teachers. And then a second highlight would be the November 5 date where we had our community meeting. That was a time where we had a really solid group of parents, and our parent liaisons and Dina also joined us for that, to provide some feedback and some highlights and really to help us fine tune Are you IP. So when I came on board in August, something that I learned quickly was that the environment in the spring, in terms of student engagement was very challenging for Timberline, our elementary engagement was most challenging in about the 60% range, and then about 80% for our middle school students. So I came in hearing and knowing that that was our priority. When we started school in the fall, we needed to make sure that we found all of our families and our students, and that we work to get them engaged in learning. So what we did was we put into action, some attendance teams on both sides of our building. As we are both in elementary and middle school, we had team members who were calling in the moment. So in the morning, when students were expected to log into their advisory class and their morning meeting, there were support folks calling the families to ask if they needed help, there was a lot of triage going around, because sometimes the difficulties had to do with just getting the tech support that they needed. And so we were able to provide that it was really all hands on deck. I really enjoyed being in the front office and hearing our secretaries actually talking students through, um, how to get logged into their classes. And then of course, our counseling team was on board to help with any social emotional needs and also just basic needs of our of our families.
Unknown Speaker 32:20
Along with that, we’ve really worked hard to develop some positive school culture this year, and not going to take time tonight to share this video with you. This is our virtual open house video, but I’m very proud of the work that we’ve done with this. I had help from Ben calm and communications and also our liaison. Eunice peinado in communications with this, so I hope that you’ll take a chance to listen to it. It really supports the rich, diverse culture that lives at our school every day. Sometimes I feel like I might be the only person at school who’s not by literate. But it also supports that that really rigorous and world class education that students in St. Green Valley schools receive the stem offerings that we have because we’re a stem school. The partnerships with see boulder and Thorne Nature Center and also some of the more unique offerings that we have. We have a mariachi class, and one of our newest offerings on the elementary side, our music teachers currently offering a ukulele club virtually.
Unknown Speaker 33:36
So some highlights in terms of our enrollment, you will notice that a great percentage of our students do identify as Latino, and about 47% of our students are English language learners.
Unknown Speaker 33:54
And taking a look at our launch ad enrollment, you’ll see that we have approximately 142 students whose families have chosen for them to remain fully online. I think that speaks to the fact that our Latino community has been very impacted by covid 19. Certainly we have seen that in our school. And when given the opportunity later on in the year to stay online at our school, we had a significant number of families at that point who also chose just to remain online with us.
Unknown Speaker 34:32
So a bright spot in our data is our early literacy. in preschool, our students come in far below the district average in terms of both their literacy skills and their skills in mathematics. Yet by the end of the school year, and this is this is a historic trend. Their growth outpaces the growth of our school districts. And you will see that in our UI, p that’s a that’s a p That I really wanted to highlight. We talked a little bit with the district accountability committee about why we think that’s happening. And certainly, you’ve heard some conversation about foundations already tonight. And our preschool does implement foundations. And that early literacy resource I think, has made a huge difference in what our students are able to achieve during the school year. We also have a similar story in our kindergarten, the number of students who come in in the fall and are identified with a significant reading deficiency is a much larger percentage than our district average. And yet, by the end of the school year, the number of students who remain on in that category has decreased by a much greater number than our district average. So this is a place where we can highlight some really strong instruction in literacy and math skills. And again, implementing foundations has made a big difference for us. And currently a goal for us is to have all of our kindergarten teachers trained in Orton Gillingham. Some of those teachers are currently enrolled, and some will be completing that training this summer.
Unknown Speaker 36:27
So when I came in this year, we did some pretty deep analysis of iready data both from the fall but also from last year. And what we noticed as grade level teams and content teams, was that vocabulary was really a sticking point for our students, and that their inability to access the vocabulary was negatively impacting their ability to comprehend both both literary and informational text. And on the mathematic side, we found something similar with numbers and operations, and also algebra and algebraic thinking, which we know are really important precursors for success as students move on into secondary and into high school and college as well. So I’m going to move into the executive summary. And what this slide is telling us is that if we utilize standards based instruction, and we adhere to appropriate pacing, and we use formative assessment, it follows that our students will be provided with tier one instruction at grade level, that our teachers will use the district pacing guides with fidelity, and use the results of rigorous formative assessment to guide their instruction.
Unknown Speaker 37:53
We also note that if we improve instructional collaboration to build collective efficacy and writing instruction, and these are happening in our impact teams, where teachers have dedicated time, supported by our district level learning leaders, want to provide consistent implementation of research based best practice and writing across contents. And our third major improvement strategy focused on standards based reading instruction. So we know that if we improve on our delivery of focus standards based reading instruction, that then our teachers will consistently implement that viable curriculum, including research based interventions, and increase reading proficiency for all of our students. And this is a place again, where we’re really counting on our teachers. being trained in Orton Gillingham. We have a great number of teachers who have already taken that training, and to plan to ensure that the rest of our teachers are completing that in a timely manner. And our school wide professional development is around best practices in vocabulary development, including morphology at the secondary level. So the fact that this is a whole school emphasis, and that it is the foundation of what we’re working on an impact teams is the is the way that we will see our students improve in both achievement and growth. And so by focusing on those three major improvement strategies, we would address each of the root causes that you can see on this slide.
Unknown Speaker 39:47
So when we look at our data, we’re really looking at what what is the story that our data tells us and what I have seen and what our teams have seen in diving deeply into the data is it We have a lack of consistency, and a lack of consistency over time and for different groups of students. So what this slide shares with us is that on the left hand side, you’ll see the school mean scale score, and we have two because we have both the elementary first and then the middle school, compared to the state in the middle, and then our goal on the right hand side. So in the first year of our unified improvement plan, our goal would be to meet approaching for all of our students. And the same you’ll see on the math slide, and what I mean by a lack of consistency is if you take a look starting at the top with English language arts, and we look at that score and the middle school side of 730.4. And then you look at the drop in 2018. And then that consistent, stable drop there in the third. So we have a much higher score in 2017, and then just a flat score. And we see that throughout, if you study this slide and look at the numbers, you will see a similar story told throughout. And again, moving on and looking at the achievement trends over time, we’re seeing that same narrative of a lack of consistency, we have some high points, and some low points. And we believe that by working those major improvement strategies, that we will start to see this stabilize, and that the achievement will grow. And on the next slide our growth. So I think that by looking at this, and studying this data, and being able to pull that story of inconsistency, that working with those major improvement strategies, our goal would be obviously to increase achievement, and increased growth for our students across both English language arts and math.
Unknown Speaker 42:17
So this is the one data point that we do have for last year, this is the one state assessment that we were able to deliver. And we have a bright spot here, because you can see that in 2020, our students scored in the 52nd percentile for growth on access. We had 314 students who took access last year. So that is a good number of students at our school.
Unknown Speaker 42:46
So I wanted to take a little bit of time to talk to you about increasing student engagement at Timberline. And I shared with you at the beginning that this is something that was a goal for us from day one of school. And it certainly has been a challenge. Because you as you know, we are expecting our students to engage in continually changing environments. What’s positive about that, as we are learning from each change, we talk together about what’s working and what’s not working. And I think the term that we’ve developed for the moment is learning environment agnostic, we are looking for strategies around student engagement that work no matter what the learning environment looks like. So prior to Thanksgiving break, we pay a lot of very close attention to our attendance data. And our attendance rate was dropping, we see that as a data point, that helps us determine whether students are engaged or not engaged. And we talk about the root causes for that one of which is that at that point in time, our community was hit very hard by COVID-19. Both our community outside of our school and and also our staff. So we came back and decided that this was something that we needed to address immediately. And so we created what we call our student engagement and attendance plan. And we looked at three different tiers of students. So at the tier one level, we were really looking at strategies that would impact all of our students. And then our tier two students were students who were inconsistent in terms of their engagement. And then we had a tier three group who really were not engaging with us at all. We did several different things to address this immediately. One was we did a student survey, and we really asked our students to help identify what were the barriers to logging into their instruction and what motivated them to login. Another thing we did was we changed our schedule, we created longer blocks of instructional time, which required students to log in fewer times to WebEx allowed us to keep our students longer. And within those longer and instructional blocks, we are implementing movement breaks, giving instruction in small groups, you know, doing a lot of different engaging learning activities to keep kids in. And another thing that we learned from the survey was that students were feeling a lack of connection, a lack of personal connection with their peers and with their, with their teachers. So we were able to really capitalize on those longer instructional blocks and core contents in the morning. And that freed up other staff members who are currently serving as mentors. So they are the ones who are really engaging with kids that we see are not logging in, in the morning. They’re making those phone calls, they’re reaching out to them. They’re actually WebEx seen into classrooms with students, so they can provide academic support during office hours later in the day. And I am really happy to report although it’s early, our attendance rate has moved from the high 70s and low 80s, into the mid 90s, over the past week. So we are feeling really encouraged by the increased engagement that our kids are showing us. And we are continuing to track that closely. And talk with our staff and also with students about what’s working, and just continue that work.
Unknown Speaker 46:33
And this slide shares just a little bit with you about our advanced coursework and the percentage of students who are accessing advanced coursework. And you can see in the middle column that we’ve increased the percentage of students who have access to advanced coursework. And on this side, we are not not distressed. But we are focused on the fact that this year we have a lower percentage of students who have who are enrolled in algebra one or higher in math, one of the reasons for that is because of the lack of engagement in the spring, some of our students didn’t come to us with those prerequisite skills. So we’re working really hard to to fix that and meet that need right now. So a goal obviously for us would be to continue to increase students taking algebra one or beyond.
Unknown Speaker 47:32
And one of the reasons that we want to make sure to support students in that advanced coursework is because in our feeder, we have many, many opportunities for students once they leave Timberline. So I did want to point out to one of those opportunities, the P teach program. And currently we have four p teach candidates who are working in our school, their st. Brain Valley schools, graduates who are currently enrolled at UC Denver, and they support for different classrooms, they actually work for us as para educators in the morning with master teachers, and then take their coursework in the afternoon. And that’s been a win win both for those PE teacher candidates, but also for us as a school for our teachers and for our students. And another highlight was I did reach out to Lorraine Baxter a little bit earlier this week, because I was curious about the number of Timberline students who were currently enrolled in the P tech program. And she shared with me out of 203 students currently enrolled 95 of those students attended Middle School at Timberline. So that gave me you know, some positive feeling around the fact that we are preparing our students to take on some excellent opportunities at Skyline. So that’s the end of my formal presentation. I’m going to go ahead and unshare my screen. And I’m take any questions that you may have.
Unknown Speaker 49:01
Thank you, Karen. BOARD MEMBER questions or comments this evening. Paula.
Unknown Speaker 49:09
Hi, Karen. It’s Carla. I just wanted to share a comment. I think your your USP was great. There was a lot of data in there. Absent the state tests that didn’t happen in the spring. But I think you’ve been on the job since July 1, I think you’ve been in this position. Yes. And you’ve done this is incredible, like the drill down that you’ve done on the data, the trends that you’re pulling out of there, the creativity, you’re showing as far as doing the engagement and the outreach. Impact teams we talked about as Rocky is doing. I really think, yeah, you hit the ground running and you really done some incredible work in that community and in that school in the short amount of time you’ve been there. So thank you so much for doing all of that inside of COVID when you’ve been switching up the instructional model pretty much Every month so it’s it’s I’m highly optimistic about about Timberline, I think there’s an incredible amount of potential there. There’s already a lot of development coming out of there, as you pointed out the kids that go into p tech and such, and go into the skyline feeder skyline High School. So thank you so much. That was a great report a whole lot of detail. You can it’s highly evident the amount of work that’s gone into it, and I really appreciate it. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 50:24
Thank you, Paul.
Unknown Speaker 50:25
I appreciate that. deck.
Unknown Speaker 50:29
Thank you. Hi, Karen, this stick martyr.
Unknown Speaker 50:31
I did.
Unknown Speaker 50:34
Good to see you again back. Well, again, we taught together at Longmont high for time. So as a long time ago, are you helped us helped us in that regard? I think that much like my perspective and concerns about our progress with not just concerns but optimism about our progress at Rocky Mountain, I think it’s it’s worth identifying for we’re starting, as we’re beginning this this program, we have sorted on with regard to the English language learning, I’m looking at pages 17 and 18 of your UI P. With regard to that in ninth in the 2019, about 12%. If you look at that whole category for reading, English language learners, about 12% of our students meet or exceed standards there. So that’s the position from which we are moving. And in a similar fashion about 7%. for math meter exceeds standards. So like Rocky Mountain, you have, and you are climbing have a pretty steep slope with regard to the beginning point. And I guess so that’s an acknowledgement of where we’re beginning. And we have what you’ve put in places to move from where we are to where we hopefully need to be. And I would ask the same question that I asked James, for, do you expect? Assuming that we can implement the and you are implementing this program? Where do we expect our student meets and exceeds to be in, say, three years?
Unknown Speaker 52:51
That’s a great question. Thanks. So what I would say is I would refer the board to the targets, the EU IP,
Unknown Speaker 53:01
we
Unknown Speaker 53:02
have specific, you know, identified specific
Unknown Speaker 53:05
targets,
Unknown Speaker 53:06
that’s a part of the EU IP process. And so I would refer you to that. And it begins on page 37 of the EU IP. And so we have specific targets for both elementary and for secondary in both core contents in English language arts and math over the two years that the UI p covers, so we have the, you know, the first targets that we would love to be able to measure. If we’re if we do get to take CMS this year, I would echo James’s comment that I think our staff was highly disappointed that they were not able to have students take CMS last year because they saw evidence in the work that they were doing and impact teams that gave them, you know, some pretty good data to say that there would be growth happening. And so I would say the same thing for this year, I’m hopeful that we will have that measure and we’ll be able to look at the increase in the in the mean scale score. And so to begin with, just kind of, to generally answer your question, Dick, you know, we are looking to increase our mean scale score into that approaching level as a first step. And then as a second step, you know, we would want to continue to grow into that meets level. So, although I’m not giving you quite the same, I guess, a forecast that James did, I think having those very specific targets, really helps teachers have a measurable goal in front of them and for their students. And so that that’s what we’ll be looking for in terms of achievement and and growth both.
Unknown Speaker 54:53
So Karen foot, what that means, assuming that we meet those targets and we get to the 50 of percentile for the school? What does that mean in terms of the percentage of students who meet or exceed the standards? Um,
Unknown Speaker 55:17
I don’t know if I can intelligently answer your question in terms of the percentage of students. But what we’re looking at, for example, if you’re, we’re starting with the elementary students, we’re looking at that mean scale score for our school as a whole to increase from 719, which is below approaching to 722, which is the 15th percentile. And then for the middle school students, similarly, all others that you know, this means scale score is a different number, we’re looking for the majority of our students to reach that approaching level. And what that looks like in terms of the percentage of students, I can’t answer that question. And I don’t know if Ian can answer that question or not. But what I can say is that when we look at our school performance framework, you know, clearly details whether we would have reached that goal or not.
Unknown Speaker 56:18
Yes, I think this is an you know, really that for goal setting CDE. For both schools, all schools are really directing us more to us, it means scale score, as it is, that is what is the gauge for how the schools are going to earn more points on their school performance frameworks, and the different levels. So that is really where they’d like our targets to be an interpretation. And it’s also that average of where income, it’s all students in the school on the spectrum. So as far as Yes, we want to have more students at each school, and statewide actually meet and exceed, of course, but there’ll be incremental steps, but the first step would be in this process would be moving that mean scale score to the next level to the 15th percentile.
Unknown Speaker 57:10
So that helps. Thank you. And I guess what I’m looking for is more of a layman’s understanding of what that percentile means with regard to the number of students or the percentage of students who meet or exceed the standards.
Unknown Speaker 57:29
So, you know, there’s they’re two different measures so that the interpretation of that is how they scores and measure schools is based upon the mean scale score. It’s not based upon the percentage of students that meet or exceed do we would we’d like to absolutely increase, but that’s not where the goal setting is, is for
Unknown Speaker 57:54
school purpose
Unknown Speaker 57:55
purposes.
Unknown Speaker 57:58
Okay, if we meet the state standards, excluded kids, may I interrupt
Unknown Speaker 58:04
for a moment? We’re 20 minutes over our adjournment time. So at this time, I’d like to make a motion to extend the meeting. Another 10 minutes to 830.
Unknown Speaker 58:16
Thanks, Karen.
Unknown Speaker 58:18
Ambar. Can you call for the vote, please?
Unknown Speaker 58:21
Mr. Arens?
Unknown Speaker 58:23
Yes.
Unknown Speaker 58:24
Mr. Bercow?
Unknown Speaker 58:26
Yes.
Unknown Speaker 58:27
Mr. Garcia?
Unknown Speaker 58:28
Yes.
Unknown Speaker 58:29
Dr. martyr? Yes.
Unknown Speaker 58:32
Miss Pierce. Yes. Mrs. Ragland?
Unknown Speaker 58:35
Yes. Mr. siegrist? Yes. Thanks, Barb. Dick, I wonder if it might take a little bit longer to get to the root of your questions. And you may want to do that.
Unknown Speaker 58:47
Yeah. difficult for him to have this kind of discussion that that I think would be helpful in the longer term. So I’m happy to have that discussion outside the board meeting.
Unknown Speaker 59:01
Great. Thank you. Appreciate it. Karen, and did you have anything you wanted to say in closing, Karen, I do want to echo Paul’s comments. And just want to say, congrats on getting your engagement rate up to 90%. This week. They’re in the 90 percentile, I should say.
Unknown Speaker 59:19
Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 59:20
Yeah. So I just say thank you for your time and for allowing me the opportunity to share some of the good work that we’re doing at Timberline.
Unknown Speaker 59:29
Thank you. Thanks, and thanks, Tina.
Unknown Speaker 59:36
My pleasure. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 59:41
Alright, brings us to agenda item 6.4, which is first quarter financials. Greg, we met earlier and went over the financials that began at 530 this evening.
Unknown Speaker 59:53
Yeah, so we will make those available out on the website tomorrow. There’ll be the executive summary dashboard that came goes through each fund and takes care of those things. As we discussed in our meeting, there’s kind of some anomalies in the first quarter of this in terms of property tax receivables, the timing of cash flow receipts, and just monitoring the cares act and some of those things. What I’d like to say is that you know, we’re in a very strong financial position right now, especially compared to other school districts in the state. And there’s a couple programs that we’re monitoring but otherwise we are we are on track and we are following our our budget and and I’m doing well.
Unknown Speaker 1:00:40
Thank you. Appreciate it. That brings us to agenda item seven, which is our consent items this evening. Do board members wish to pull any of the consent items? All right, then I would entertain a motion for approval for agenda item 7.1. Staff terminations and leaves 7.2 staff appointments 7.3 approval of minutes for the November 11 2020 regular meeting and November 18 2020. special meeting 7.4 approval of amendment GMP to construction manager general contractor contract for pool addition project at Silver Creek High School 7.5 approval of fee adjustment one two the architect agreement for Everly Montgomery Fieldhouse renovation project 7.6. Approval of contract award for chiller replacement project at Longmont estates elementary school 7.7 approval of contract award for chiller replacement project at Northridge elementary school 7.8 approval of contract award for chiller replacement project at Timberline PK eight 7.9 approval and still of selection and contract award for classroom furniture for Frederick high school bond project. seven point 10 approval of selection and contract award for board for school furniture for elementary number eight bond project. so moved by gem and a second by Karen BB.
Unknown Speaker 1:02:09
Mr. Arens Hi, Mr. Bercow? Yes. Mr. Garcia?
Unknown Speaker 1:02:14
Yes. Dr. martyr? Yes.
Unknown Speaker 1:02:17
Miss Pierce. Aye. Mrs. Ragland. Yes. And Miss siegrist. I
Unknown Speaker 1:02:25
am point one as a recommendation for approval of certification of the 2020 existing mill levies. Hi, Tony. Hello, how
Unknown Speaker 1:02:35
are you? Good. Welcome
Unknown Speaker 1:02:36
back.
Unknown Speaker 1:02:37
Thank you. Let me just bring up my presentation here One moment. Great. Hope you can see that okay,
Unknown Speaker 1:02:51
we can.
Unknown Speaker 1:02:54
Alright, so, good evening. As you may know, our district is required to certify our taxing mill levy rates to each of the four counties in which reside, in which we reside each year by December 15. Those rates are based on and apply to the 2020 at that valuation amount, which the counties are required to certify to us by December 10. This timeline results in a small five day window each December when we must calculate the millage rates based on his final assessed valuations, certify them and return them to the counties. Now, as you probably gathered today is December 9, not December 10. So there is a we did reach out to each of our four counties and requested final certifications so that we would be able to go ahead and complete this. This action items resolution tonight. They do have a statutory right to provide a revised final certifications, um, through the end of the day tomorrow. We don’t believe that will happen. But if it does, and it were to affect our mill levy rate, there is a small possibility we would need to request a an interim short board meeting to address that item. But hopefully the action item tonight if passed by the board will satisfy the requirement and will be sufficient to address the issue and we won’t get any revised assessed valuation sort of patients tomorrow. So let me get into the actual assessed valuation changes that came from each of the four counties. Compared to last year the district’s net assessed valuation decreased by 1.9% across the four counties and set that just under $4.1 billion. breaking that down across the four counties as you can see on your screen, weld County. Sir I’m sorry on the second line there weld county decreased by about 4.4% and they make about 45%. The district’s total assessed valuation Boulder County, they’re a VX was essentially flat on the sea a tiny little increase there of about point 6%. And Boulder County is the majority of our assessed valuation in our district they make 50 but 54.7% of the district’s total AV Larimer County’s AV within our district increased by about 1.2%, the C county approved bill AV increased by about 10.8%. Now those amount was increased to seem fairly large. But the area of these counties the fall within our district is really quite small. If you look at the percentage of the total, in the 2020 column, you can see that the combined percentage of those counties less than a half percent of our district’s total assessed valuation. So let me move on to how those assessed valuation numbers impact our mill levy rate and the amounts raised by our by our property taxpayers within our district. We use these county assessed valuation numbers to calculate our mill levy rates, which ultimately determines the amount of revenue that is generated by property tax that help fund the education programs and that surplus percent Green Valley schools. For 2020. We propose the board certify the overall military rate of 56.542 mils, which is levied the same across all four County. The rate comprises four categories as follows. So first is the total program Levy, which, when combined with the state equalization funding and specific ownership tax, makes up the district’s total program, our general fund, as determined by the Colorado Department of Education in which I touched on earlier in the board meeting tonight. This levy rate has been locked per statute at 24.995 mils added as it has been since 2000. However, this year, the Colorado State Legislature has changed the law and requires school districts to set their total program levy at the lesser of 27 Mills, or what their mill rate was when they voted to exempt from taper of Hebrews. And then they provide a mill credit of the difference between that and what their mill was last. That’s a little confusing. So if you take a look at my screen here, I’ll outline what’s going on. Um, so normally, we have, again since 2006, levied this total program levy at 24.995. But based on this change, we’re actually required to certify our total program levy at a gross number of 27. mils even then we provide a mill levy credit of 2.005 mils, resulting in the exact same net effective to the program that as it has been previous. The reason the state is doing this is somewhat complicated, but it actually has to do with
Unknown Speaker 1:07:49
whether or not districts across the state were required to reduce their total program levy after they get bruised below what the amount was when they do proofs. And the contention is that they were improperly directed to do that. And so most districts total program levy is too low. And so by setting it to 27 mills and providing a credit, while there’s no impact immediately on the taxpayers with it change, the legislature intends to slowly decreased that mill levy credit to eventually remove it to zero, effectively increasing the mill levies across the state up to 27. Providing for additional amounts to go toward total programming capable and total. So that’s why you’ll see on our resolution and our certification document, that are 24.95 mill levy actually shows up 27 minutes on the levy credit of 2.5. So this is 24.95 Mills, total program will generate $102.4 million, and that’s down from $104.4 million last year. And again, just to remind her because of the nature of interacting this mill levy with the school finance back in the state funding formula, the district will not directly see it decreased as a result of this change. It will proportionately increase it equalization amount to arrive at our pre determined program funding. On the second mill levy is our voter approved melody override, which our voter approved property taxes that go directly to our district to support additional educational needs. Both of our ballot measures were worded in terms of mill levy rates rather than fixed dollar amount. So that means that our mlo revenue fluctuate in proportion with valuation, as it goes up, so does our mlo revenue and vice versa. But this year, our mill levy rates continue the same as last year, but the amount decreased by 1.9%. As AV din our 2008 mlo will remain at 7.32 Mills generating $29 million or 2012 mlo will remain at 6.27 Mills generating $25.7 million. combined these mill levy overrides equal 13.59 Mills, totaling $55.7 million, a decrease of $1.1 million from last year. The third mill levy categories are tax credit rebate and abatement Levy, with levy results from property owners successfully contesting tax payments, or otherwise receiving abatements from a previous year’s property tax assessment. When this happens, the expected property tax payment is not received by the county and thus buyer for that for that year, and excuse me, and so when that happens, the amounts that are forgone are then recouped the following year by being reallocated to the rest of the tax base in the form of this abatement. Now, you might remember that we had an unusually large abatement last year, and while it is still slightly elevated compared to historical trends, it did drop significantly back to normal levels. As expected, it went from $5.9 million last year down to $1.7 million. This was the result in a mill levy of point 407 Mills, down from 1.4 to four Mills last year. The last mill levy categories our debt service Levy, this levy is strictly used to fund the repayment of voter approved bonds that were issued for building remodeling and refurbishing school. This millage rate is set at 17.550 mils, which is the same as last year, this millage rate will generate $71.9 million and will be sufficient to service the district’s current principal and interest payments for the upcoming year while maintaining reserve so that we can make our December payment the following year before we get our tax deeds. So based on these rates, it is recommended that the districts that its total mill levy 250 6.5 14 Mills, down from 37.559 Mills last is a difference of 1.017 mill. This difference is entirely attributable to the change in the abatement. But, as all the other three categories are the same as last year. Combined this mill levy this mill levy rate will generate approximately $231.7 million
Unknown Speaker 1:12:11
for the district across all four counties, which is down from $244 million last year. Finally, I wanted to add a little bit of additional information about the repeal of the Gallagher amendment. As you know that was a 66 ballot measure appealed the constitutional amendment. This amendment interaction with Tabor was causing a long term ratcheting down of the residential investment rate, which is the portion of residential property value that is taxed and on which a mill levy rate is calculated. Back when Gallagher was passed in 1982, the residential assessment rate was around 30%. Since then, it has ratcheted down to 7.15% and was projected to decrease to 5.8%. This year, this single shift from 7.15% to 5.8%. was estimated a decrease the property taxes raised across our district by approximately $19 million, or about 8%. We not only avoided that by the repeal of the Gallagher amendment, we will also realize a much longer term benefit to this repeal, we will no longer have to face that consistent ongoing erosion of the residential assessment rate in future years. And that’s the end of my presentation. But I wanted to make sure I was available to answer any questions for the board this evening.
Unknown Speaker 1:13:26
Thanks, Tony. Appreciate the explanation. No questions. If there are no questions, I would then entertain a motion place for approval of action item 8.1. By Paula, second by Jim
Unknown Speaker 1:13:45
Mr. Arens Mr. Bercow?
Unknown Speaker 1:13:48
Yes. Mr. Garcia? Yes. Dr. martyr?
Unknown Speaker 1:13:52
Yes.
Unknown Speaker 1:13:54
Miss Pierce. Hi, Mrs. Ragland.
Unknown Speaker 1:13:57
Yes, Ms. Seacrest. Hi, Tony. Thanks. Appreciate it.
Unknown Speaker 1:14:02
Thank you Have a good evening. Yep. You
Unknown Speaker 1:14:04
too enjoy. 8.2 is the approval of our fiscal year 21 transmittal form for the elementary and secondary school emergency relief or esa funds. Greg?
Unknown Speaker 1:14:18
Thank you. Yeah. So part of what we were awarded in terms of the cares act relief was to roughly 2.5 million through the elementary and secondary school emergency relief funding. And as part of that, we have to do an application. It’s similar to our special education, our ID a and our title one where we have to do an application for it, we get reimbursed. It’s not given to us up front like the CRF funds were. And so part of this application, which we submitted last week, is this this transmittal form an application and basically what it’s saying is that state the school the school board recognizes that federal guidelines and policies have to be followed in the disbursement of these funds and the expenditure of these funds. And so this transmittal form just basically says, you guys acknowledge that and you approve of us applying for this $2.5 million.
Unknown Speaker 1:15:23
Thanks, Greg. Very straightforward. Then if there are no questions or comments, I would entertain a motion for approval of action item 8.1. so moved by Karen and a second by Chico.
Unknown Speaker 1:15:39
Mr. Arens? Mr. Berthold? Yes. Mr. Garcia?
Unknown Speaker 1:15:45
Yes. Dr. martyr? Yes.
Unknown Speaker 1:15:48
Miss Pierce. Aye. Mrs. Raglan.
Unknown Speaker 1:15:51
Yes.
Unknown Speaker 1:15:53
I miss Seacrest.
Unknown Speaker 1:15:54
I great, Greg, you’re up again for action item 8.1. A Pardon? Pardon me. 8.3. Which is the approval of Safe Schools reopening grant for St. Brian community Montessori school?
Unknown Speaker 1:16:06
Yes. So a portion of these extra funds were set aside at the state level. And part of how they were being they’re being dispersed is through the Safe Schools reopening grant. school districts can apply. Both C’s can apply charter schools can apply our same rain community Montessori applied for it. But again, because they are under the umbrella of the school district. We are the local education agency. And so it’s the same as what we just talked about in terms of assar. This is the approved the transmittal and approval form for them to apply for this grant, in terms of safely opening their schools.
Unknown Speaker 1:16:53
Great. Alright, then if there are I don’t see any questions. If there are no questions or comments, I would entertain a motion for approval. So move action item 8.3 by Jim. Second by john BB. Okay,
Unknown Speaker 1:17:10
I didn’t hear that. Sorry. Mr. Arens. Hi, Mr. Berthold. Yes. Mr. Garcia? Yes. Dr. martyr? Yes. Miss Pierce. Aye. Mrs. Raglan. Yes.
Unknown Speaker 1:17:25
Yes, she said yes. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 1:17:27
I’m sorry to hear that Miss seavers.
Unknown Speaker 1:17:29
Yes. Thanks. It is sometimes hard to hear Barbara with the masks. And yeah, no worries. Thank you. We don’t have any discussion items this evening, which does bring us to our final agenda item which is adjournment. I would like to note that we do have a tentative special meeting scheduled for Monday, December 14. And Greg that is pending, the potential need regarding the mills and their approval. So we’ll wait to hear from you on that. Yes,
Unknown Speaker 1:17:56
we will know by by Friday morning, whether we’ve received any type of adjustment to those
Unknown Speaker 1:18:02
greats. And then so we’ll either meet on on December 14 or December 16. And we’ll we’ll get that information out to people as soon as we hear back from you. Great. Thanks, everyone. I would entertain a motion for adjournment please. so moved by Karen and a second by john. All in favor. Aye. Thanks, everyone. Have a good evening.