Springfield School Board — September 14, 2026

1:39 Pull things and have them tabled. The man's still not... Bob's in. Oh, Bob is in. How's that sound? Everybody good? Yeah. Feel free to head up. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the September 14th, 2026 meeting of the Springfield Board of Directors. Jeff, how many people do we have online? Zero so far. Okay. Well, thank you for being here this evening. Could everybody please rise for the pledge of allegiance?

2:29 I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. And, Director Brandt, would you be so kind as to acknowledge the land we are on? Absolutely. We acknowledge that we are in the traditional homeland of the Kalapuya people, specifically the community that was known as Chipan, the area that we now call Springfield. Kalapuya people, who have lived in this region since time immemorial, were illegally dispossessed of their land and forcibly removed to what are now the Grand Ronde and Siletz reservations over several years, but

3:16 most notably in treaties between 1851 and 1855. The Kalapuya are now members of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, and members of the Kalapuya still live, work, study, and thrive in this area and continue to make important contributions here in Springfield, across the land we now refer to as Oregon, and around the globe. This information is shared out of a responsibility to honor the heritage and the humanity of all people, and to promote unity within our school district. Thank you. Moving to agenda item two, approval of the agenda. I'll move approval. Second. Are there going to be items withdrawn from consent?

4:02 This is the time. No. Yeah. I'll be pulling one through 13. Okay. Director Langworthy will be pulling- Five ... A one through 13, the agenda items having to deal with minutes. And I'd like to pull 5A-16, the alternative education program. And in addition, I would like to add 5F, structure repair contract.

4:50 Mr. Chair, is that considered an amendment to the motion, pulling things off the consent calendar? No, this is an amendment to the agenda. So as the chair, I like to make any changes to the agenda up front when we're approving, rather than when we get to the consent topic itself. So we have pulled from the consent items one through 13 by Director Langworthy, and Director Cole has also pulled alternative education programs and added an agenda item F, structural repair. So may I ask a question? Yes. Director Brew, are you saying because we've had a

5:35 motion to approve the agenda in a second, that if we want to pull those items, someone says, "I would like to make a motion to amend them," and then we would need a second of that, and then the board could vote on, we accept the agenda with as amended? Yeah. Yes. Is that where you're going? Yes. I think that's a way to do it. If so, if we want to amend, maybe someone can make a motion to amend, and if there's a second, then we can go from there I move to amend the agenda as presented. I second. Okay. Presented by Director Brew, seconded by Director Langworthy. Any further discussion? Okay, call for the vote. All in favor indicate by saying aye.

6:23 Aye. Aye. And are there any against? So that motion carries five to nothing. And that was the motion on the amendment, so now we have to vote on that. Yes, that's what you just did. You voted to on the amended agenda items, so we're now official. Yep. Okay, so moving then on to agenda item three, which is the presentation regarding integrated programs annual report 2025 and '26, and this is presented by Dr. Maagard. Waiting for it to come up.

7:10 Chair Light, Vice Chair Langworthy, board, thank you for this opportunity to provide information about our integrated programs, integrated guidance annual report that we submit each year. So, the annual reporting requirements, this is actually a pretty brief presentation, and it's contained in the annual report narrative that we're required to provide to the Oregon Department of Education on our progress in these two areas that they ask about. And so this presentation is in that narrow piece, and then there can be some follow-up information that comes after this.

7:59 So this is a requirement by the Oregon Department of Education. Is there a date that it has to be submitted by? Yes. So by September 30th, these two narrative responses will be provided to the Department of Education. And then, as a follow-up to that piece is that we're presenting to the department using currently embargoed data and information. And then, in mid-October, that embargoed data will become public information, so you'll have more details after that date. So just to clarify for the public, an embargo means we can't actually use that data until ODE is presented to

8:46 the public. Correct. Okay. And what's interesting about it is that we're using that data to provide information to the department on our progress. And in that respect, you'll see in your packet that there is an adjusted report that's provided to you because, as I was getting information about the level of detail that could be provided, I had some conflicting information. And so I had a tentative green light, and I provided that information to you, and I found out that it was a little bit more detailed than is advised, so I pulled back that detail. Okay. Thank you for that- Yeah

9:31 ... clarification. Of course. And just so you know, throughout the year, we are required to provide information to the ODE around our expenditures and progress on specific markers that is required of us throughout the year. Those reports, we're not required to bring that to the board. And so we do that periodically, and we can do that upon request. But this one is required, and it needs to be presented in a public meeting where public comment can be provided. But there's no approval around this particular presentation. The presentation satisfies the requirement. Correct. Thank you. So just as the quickest, broadest overview of

10:17 integrated programs, integrated guidance, and those terms are used synonymously, but generally referred to as integrated programs. So the top three, what are called embedded programs, those three pieces are interwoven throughout the integrated program application process. And then the targeted programs, starting with high school success and below that, there are specific application requirements, and there are specific funding streams that are associated with those programs. So that's the quickest overview of integrated, and I could go into a lot of detail about what is integrated at the Oregon

11:05 Department of Education and what is still not, but that's for a different day. I would urge individual board members if you have questions, he could probably do a presentation on each of these categories. Mm-hmm. So there is a lot of information there if you want to explore further, but you would talk to Dr. Maagard. Can I? You mind? One thing as we were preparing this, we had one of the folks that work at Lane ESD gave an overview that, as luck would have it, Director Brandt happened to be a part of, and we can certainly invite her back to kind of give the layman's overview of what is in the integrated programs, because there's a reason why the first three are kind of embedded and the next seven we have

11:52 to report on individually due to the funding that the legislator gives us. So that's something that if when we talk about priorities, if that's something you want to add on, we can certainly do that. That's a quick presentation by this committee. Okay So the narrative questions are essentially what is going well and what have been some challenges and barriers. So the specific text of the question for us is: as you review your progress markers, overall reflection responses, and reflect on plan implementation, how do you see your progress contributing to the outcomes and strategies in your plan and your longitudinal performance growth targets, LPGTs, and local optional metrics?

12:37 Discuss at least one outcome where you've seen progress. So we chose to talk about three. One, our graduation and on-track measures, and we have seen positive trends for our four-year on-time grad rates and our five-year completion rates. There's some caveats to this. Yes, there are, Ken, caveats to some of these indicators, and we can get into them a little bit tonight if you want to talk through it. But it's probably more productive once the data is public. And then we also have indications that traditionally underserved populations are showing positive trends for graduation rates and ninth grade on track rates.

13:24 We also are seeing very positive trends in our elementary ELA, English language arts. And our current year gains are adding on to the previous year gains of over 6%, and I'll leave that level of detail for now. But we have seen, again, some strong gains for our traditionally underserved population, including English learners, students experiencing poverty, and in particular, race, ethnicity categories as well. And we attribute this largely to our strong approach in science of reading, the PD that

14:09 we've provided to our K2, K3 teachers, our implementation of magnetic reading foundations, and really mapping out curriculum implementation at the elementary level. Another area that we are seeing a strength is our English learners. We have strong indications that our current ELs are on track to English language proficiency that is at a level that the state expects us to see. And again, that's one of the requirements that we have when

14:54 they're less than proficient in English, we are required to teach them English as a language skill. And then we're also seeing our ever ELs and current ELs graduating at higher rates. And just as a quick information, anytime that a student is in our system designated as an English learner, when they exit out of being an English learner, they are put into a category of ever-EL, ever English learner, so that we can get indications about the success rates of students who were an English learner in our system, and then when they exited that status. Which is really great for us because I think

15:42 we do a great job when students come in as an elementary age student, and they do not speak English proficiently yet. And then as they progress through our system, they tend to do very well academically. We believe that this progress is tied to our teaching English approach, especially at the elementary and middle levels. We strongly believe in co-teaching. We really, at the building level, try to stay engaged with our families in their language. And we know that we need to continue to focus on middle and high school because when students come into our system later in their educational career and they don't speak English yet, it's challenging for us.

16:36 So I already talked about that. And then, so a place where we've seen challenges and barriers to implementation. First, we chose to speak about attendance. And we've talked a bit about this in some of our individual meetings, and then overall, we've talked about this as well, that a regular attender is any student who attends 90% or more of the school year. And while we have seen overall attendance increasing in our district, so many students are attending more days throughout our system, but we're still not reaching that threshold of 90%. And

17:21 so we're putting some things in at the building level to engage in some of that preventative work, but we've not seen the increases that we would like to see in that area. And in particular demographics, specifically, we see some barriers in that area. And really our past work, we have engaged in some preventative measures, and we've come off of that a little bit. So we're really reinvigorating those efforts this school year. The second piece where we have seen challenges and barriers are around community engagement. And specifically, we have heard from our students and our families

18:07 that engaging in two-way communication and having a clear understanding of where supports come from and how they can access those, I think that's been a barrier. We're looking to expand participation of families and making sure that when we do have a forum where students and families can participate, that we're pulling the voice of all of our families, and making sure that we address all of the demographics and all the levels that need to have that voice in the room. And then I think this is where partnership comes into play, where there's a

18:54 shared accountability and really prioritizing making sure that students come to school. And obviously, we want to be cognizant of student and family barriers, and then also sickness. We don't want to spread illness when we don't have to. But there really needs to be this partnership when we're talking about regular attenders. So that's the nature of the narrative responses that I'll be providing to the department prior to September 30th. And moving forward, just on a quick note, we selected our local performance growth target to be fifth grade science. And on another note,

19:40 this is the last year of this format of the integrated guidance, and I'm just getting up to speed on this. And now there will be a new application process called the unified application, and this will require us to come before the board and get approval to submit that application. But that'll be for next year. Questions, thoughts, comments? Director Brew, followed by Director Cole. Thank you, Dr. Baker. So I know the goal for attendance is 90.1%. Are there schools that actually reach that?

20:26 Are there districts similar to ours that reach that? So I want to make sure that this is really clear, because when we're talking about 90.1%, that is for a student to be considered a regular attender. So we get percentages of students who are regular attenders, and so you're either a regular attender or you're not. Because we have many students who are regular attenders, and we have many schools where there's 90% attendance. But that doesn't mean that every student fits into the category of regular attenders. But here's what I'll tell you.

21:16 Many of our schools, and our district as a whole, is below the state average in regular attenders, despite our increase in attendance. And there are districts, surrounding districts, that have better attendance rates than we do. And so we're doing two things right now immediately, is we are reinvigorating our preventative efforts at each of our buildings, and we are looking to our surrounding districts to get ideas from them on what they're doing differently than us. Thank you. Director Cole.

22:01 Yeah. So I guess this is the last year, so the performance growth targets that the state has implemented for all districts, those don't apply till next year? Or do you know, are we being measured? There's the categories that I like, our local performance one, this fifth grade science. Does that apply this year or does that apply next year? So this year will be the first year baseline of that local- Okay ... measure. Okay. And then we'll look to grow from this school year's data to the next school year. Okay. Yeah. So personally, I would love to see a presentation, information on

22:48 all of the growth targets, the new criteria, where we sit. The state has the common metrics and then the local one, and I understand we have been grouped with five other districts, and they group and cluster them in terms of then we have to... I don't fully understand, I guess, why we're grouped that way and what that means. And then there's also performance in terms of the closing the gap. And so some more detail and presentation of that, I think that would coincide nicely with some of the board. We've talked about wanting academic reports and more academic data, and so it seems to me that would fit in with one of our key priorities.

23:34 Yes. And we're trying to get a better understanding of those pieces as well. And so we took a lot of advisement in that development of what we see as closing the gap. And we took the recommendations of the department when they said to compare to the state average or compare to this new category of these like districts. And so we're trying to gain an understanding of that as well. Okay. Yeah, it'd be great if when we have some understanding, come back to the board and explain it to us. That would be great. And we'll be coming back to you with the new requirement around interim assessments. And so we could potentially kind

24:21 of sandwich those together Because this will be the new requirement for the interim assessments, and then providing some more clarity around how we're measuring our performance as we move forward. Great. It could fit nicely, yeah. Thank you. I was going to just comment there and say, as Sean pointed out, I happened to have been in with meeting with him that coincided when they had a Lane ESD presentation on this topic, and I think that information, as he had suggested, would be fantastic to share with the board if we want to try and work towards setting that up. It was nice to be able to see where the data points were and those kinds of topics, so it's fantastic information. Is it a presentation that can be shared digitally

25:06 to the board? Yes, but specifically for some of Director Cole's questions, she answered some of those in that presentation. Right. That's why I think it might be helpful. Like, where does this whole, the interim assessment stand? Why are we grouped with these other districts? Is there a real rhyme or reason to that? And I think you'd be surprised at some of the answers that she offered. Okay. And this is the Lane ESD person who's in charge and offers advice to all of the districts- Okay ... in Lane ESD. Yeah, that would be helpful information. I see a bunch of head nods. So yeah, if we could get that. I had a question. I wanted to go back to the question that Director Brew

25:51 asked regarding irregular attenders. We have even some schools that are hitting that, correct? But when you give the number of 63%, that is an overall rate for the district, is that correct? And so, data's at 68, elementary has improved to almost 70, and then middle school is 61. So do we know the whys? Have we surveyed student population? Have we surveyed families or communicated? I'm wondering if they understand the importance of regular attendance. I know I've spoken to teachers, and it's a problem for them because you have to repeat certain parts of your lesson

26:37 when students aren't there. But I'm wondering, what are we doing or what are we planning to do to help address this? And for me, it always starts with the why. Why do we not have the attendance we would like? So our first step is to work directly with our buildings because that's where the- Okay ... that's where our principals and our teachers and support staff, family resource support, is at that level. Because I think there are a variety of possibilities of why a student might not come on a day, and the people that are closest are the ones who are going to be able to assess what the situation is and then help individually, and then communicate to us about what added

27:25 resources that we need to provide. Because sometimes it's younger sibling is ill and older sibling, regardless of the age, stays home with the younger sibling. It can be that type of situation, other types of instability and transportation, and then many other things where it all requires partnership with our families. And I think that's where we can always do better, is work in partnership with our families and our community. But we're putting some things into place to where there's easier communication to us about what we're missing when it

28:11 comes to supports for our families to make sure that there is regular attendance. Okay, thank you. I think there might be interest from the board, at least from me, on going a little bit deeper, understanding the whys, what we're doing to address it. It sort of works hand in hand with the community engagement piece. Student voice sessions, family events show families want more accessible two-way communication. So what can we as a board do to help support that effort? Is there a budget involvement in there? There usually is. So, at least from my seat, I would like to know more. Because the data's pretty clear. Attendance leads to success,

28:57 and so, yeah, what can we do? Or what are we already doing? If you remember, that's one of the areas the board called out, and so we'll be discussing that later on. Good. Exact topic. Final question is that we've selected the local performance growth of the fifth grade science. What's our metric for that? Currently, this is the ODE setting what the metric is, and it is statewide assess-- or yeah, it's a statewide assessment for fifth grade students on science. And so will this be a spring test?

29:42 Mm-hmm. Do we know what it is currently? Yes, we do have information on performance right now. I would not be able to tell you- Oh, right, and I'm not asking for that, but I'm- Yeah ... thinking that it might be helpful to the student and to the teachers to do a pretest as the baseline, because sometimes it's the growth. So they might not hit the mark that we want to hit, which is one point of data, but if there's an improvement, and I'm particularly concerned around kids who may not have had the grade K through four precursor in science. If we're measuring at fifth grade And ODE said that we were not in compliance with the science.

30:31 So knowing that, what are we doing, or has there been discussion at your level around how we can bring those kids up to speed? Mm-hmm. So currently, because we're interested in that, that's why we chose this metric, because we're interested in implementation and how students respond to that. And technically, so this school year will be the baseline data for this local metric. So technically, this is the first year that we have chosen fifth grade science as the local metric, and so this year will be the baseline data. So we will only provide information moving forward to next year, correct? For the ODE report, yes. Yeah. So one of the slides we have is the four-year

31:19 trends- Mm-hmm ... of science. This is the best of a problematic set of metrics we could choose, or local. We really like the idea, I like the idea, and my colleagues in 4J and Bethel like the idea of using the interim assessment growth. The problem is, is they haven't even come up with a formula for what that growth looks like, and it's also combining two things that don't necessarily combine the scores in i-Ready on how we do reading and math. And right now, we're actually using an assessment for this year that is not one of the approved assessments. So that baseline

32:04 technically couldn't even be set for two years now. And so, that's why we had to not do that. It was a unique set of circumstances for Springfield, and so we looked at the others and tried to find the one that was more. So when we give the presentation, we will go through why we did not choose the ones that we did, that Dr. Megert talked about. We're going to have that presentation. We'll go into more depth as to why we didn't choose the other five, or six that were available. Yeah. Yeah. I think it would be helpful to know where our students are now. Yeah. Even if it's not something that we submit to the state. Would it inform teachers, would it inform families, and help us do, if needed, some kind of

32:51 remediation to help families and students get up to where they're feeling successful? I very much agree with everything that you said. And I think when we do the presentation, it'll be a little bit more revealing. Okay. And so we'll leave it at that. But- Sure ... because one of the things I heard from the board is there was some question on if we're teaching science or not in the elementary level. This hopefully will give people some reassurance that we actually are, and we're going to get measured on it. And unfortunately, Director Light, this is just a set proficient or not proficient. It's binary. And so we can collect and measure growth

33:38 and report that out to the board. But as for this assessment, it's either did they pass it or not pass it. Yeah, I'm thinking more internally. Yeah. And so- The state report is one thing, but really knowing where we stand, what actions we're taking, it's, you know. And that might be a good idea for a pretest so we can know where kids are in that type of thing. Yeah. So yeah. Okay. Thank you. Very interesting report. Thank you. So will this come back to us when we have more un-embargoed? Okay. Yes. And I think that'll be for you to decide about what and when, what information you would like to receive and in what format. Okay.

34:23 Other questions? So- Director Langworthy. Yeah. So with the attendance, I see that there's a baseline here. So I'd be curious what improvements we're aiming for, like how much the percentage increase. And I also saw that we have been reactionary in the past. Now you're being proactive, and I'd be interested in what that means. And then going further, are we going to be getting data on how the attendance is showing up, say monthly? Are we going to be informed of that? You certainly can be. I think that's one of the things we can talk about when we get to the prioritization part.

35:09 Okay. But that's something that the board has. If they would like a regular update on that, that's something we can do. We just need to make sure it's on our agenda and we're ready for it. Sure. The data is the data. Thank you. Any other questions from board? Thank you, Brian. Appreciate- Thank you. Appreciate your time ... this presentation. Thank you. Moving on then to public comments, agenda item four. We have four people listed. So taking in order, Ryan Herlands. Let me read the statement. This is the portion of our agenda for public comment. The board provides three ways for community members to share public comment:

35:54 written public comment, in-person oral public comment, and virtual public comment. Written public comment is received via email. Public comment received via email for this evening has been reviewed by the board and is posted on the district's website. I don't believe we had any written public comments submitted. The deadline for submitting a request for oral public comment was today at 2:00 PM. Those who requested an opportunity to speak this evening were notified by our board secretary about their request. Time permitting, the board may also hear public comment from individuals who signed up in person at the administration office before the meeting. We encourage groups with a common purpose to designate a spokesperson.

36:39 If your comments will be covered by a group spokesperson, please indicate so when your name is called. I want to remind those members of the public who have indicated a desire to make comments, that our policy provides for a limitation of three minutes per person. The board will not hear comments regarding any school personnel, whether named or implied. Any complaints regarding a particular employee must be processed through the procedure set forth in board policy KL, which requires the complaints be submitted in writing to the superintendent. This procedure must be followed before there is any board involvement with such issues. A compliment involving a staff member should be sent to the superintendent, who will forward it to the employee, their

37:24 supervisor, and the board. And again, speakers are reminded that their public comments will be limited to three minutes. And Director Langworthy is our tail twister. Great. Thank you for having me here. My name's Ryan Herlins. I'm a science teacher at Thurston High School. I'm also SEA's vice president. Again, beginning of the school year, so thanks for all for being here. Thanks for all your work. Just wanted to give a little update on the state of Springfield Education Association. So, our morale is sort of mixed as we start the school year. There's been lots of positive stuff, including our new employee orientation, where we successfully signed up a dozen or so new certified staff

38:11 members as union members. But we also grieve the loss of so many colleagues from budget cuts last year. We're excited about some changes we have, where there have been lots of positive things with Superintendent Stover. He came and spoke at high school in-service that I attended on our welcome back, and that was the first time in a long time that we've had that kind of interaction. There are reports that I hear from all over the district about Superintendent Stover at schools interacting with teachers. Staff report that things feel a little bit lighter to start the school year because of that, and things related to it. So, as we head into another year of contract bargaining in the

38:56 spring, SEA is cautiously optimistic that we'll have a better experience, a more positive experience. Yeah, and just want to remind you all that we had talked in the end of last school year about potentially a motion to create a space for SEA at future meetings, so we don't take up the public comment, but we just have a built-in spot. And I'd ask if you guys would consider bringing that more directly to the floor. Thank you very much. Thank you for taking your time.

39:41 The next person is Cheyenne McDaniel. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. Before I start talking, I want to see a raise of hands. How many of you have a child on the spectrum or have an autistic child in your life? No one? Great. There's- This is going to be fun. Oh, you. Oh, there's a hand. Perfect. Okay, three. Raise your hands high, and we'll give a count. One, two, three, four, five. Okay. Thank you for asking the question. My name is Cheyenne McDaniel-House, AKA Jackson and Marie's

40:27 mom. Both my children attend Maple Elementary. On Thursday, as a result of the budget cuts that this board has made, I had the most scary thing happen to my child. My autistic child managed to get away from his fourth grade teacher because there was a lack of supervision. Now, what happened, yes, his teacher does hold some fault to it, but who holds the most fault? The school district, because you guys cut 30 positions. And of those 30 positions that have been cut from this school district, that could've been more eyes on my son before he made it to the main road. If something happened to my child and he got hit by a car, he got abducted, he has

41:15 zero communication. None. I would've held every single one of you guys accountable for what happened. You thought I was a b***h last year? No, you would've been up for something worse. Thank you. Johannes Tadeo? Before I get started, I will say, I have to leave early. It's not that I don't care. I will be following online. And so yeah. Board members, Superintendent, my name is Johannes Tadeo. I'm a Springfield graduate, a parent, and a community organizer with SAFE-R.

42:03 We continue to hear about declining enrollment and families leaving our district, but we cannot focus only on numbers. We need to ask why families are leaving, what they want from public schools, and what Springfield already has that we should be strengthening and investing in. Our students deserve a well-balanced education. Reading, math, those are essential. Science, social studies, art, health, hands-on learning. A strong public education should prepare students to think critically, understand their communities, communicate across cultures, and participate fully in the world around them. This is why we should expand opportunities for bilingualism, bicultural learning for all students. We should seriously explore whether dual immersion could become a whole school model,

42:48 one that strengthens academics, builds cultural understanding, and creates a deeper sense of community and shared investment in our schools. We should also examine screen time and conduct unbiased surveys of staff, students, and families, including families who have left the district. Don't assume why families are leaving. Ask them. What would bring them back? What issues and concerns caused them to leave? Dual immersion is a gem. It should be something we should be proud of, invest in, expand, and promote to families, not shrink it. Students have spent years developing bilingualism, biliteracy, deserve a meaningful pathway to continue that growth. Yet at the middle school level, their dual immersion experience has been reduced to a one-term class. That is not a true continuation of

43:34 dual immersion, and not something that was shared during the meeting that we had. We need a clear plan. How do we restore a strong middle school and high school pathway? How do we expand dual immersion to serve more students? Could a whole school dual immersion model become something that attracts family to Springfield? How do we recruit and retain bilingual educators and make Springfield known for strong bilingual education? We should measure the demand, evaluate student proficiency and educator support needs, and currently survey our families. Dual immersion should be part of the district's enrollment and recruitment strategy. If we're concerned about families leaving Springfield, let's invest in the opportunities that give families a reason to stay, and others reasons to come. We cannot cut our way into stronger schools.

44:19 We need to identify the gems we already have and invest in them and let them shine. Dual immersion is one of those gems, so let's protect it, let's expand it. Let's continue to work with community members and other folks that are experts on the program. Springfield is a place that I truly believe in. I grew up here. It's so sad that I had to go through so many different experiences. They took away my Spanish. They changed my name from Johnny to Johannes. We have an opportunity to create a healing thing for the community, and to be able to really invest in dual. Thank you. Thank you. The last oral public comment is virtual. Nicole DeGraff?

45:14 Can you guys hear me? Yes. Okay. I'll begin. Good evening, I'm Nicole DeGraff. I'm speaking on behalf of the Springfield Community for Good Governance. I appreciate seeing this permanent superintendent search on tonight's agenda. We want to ask you to conduct a fully transparent search with meaningful participation from across the district. During the interim search, I had repeatedly asked whether participation on the interview committees could be broadened. I was told a broader participation would be for the permanent search. So please follow through with publicly discussed plan explaining how parents, staff, and community members can participate. Please ensure that every board member receives the full stakeholder survey results early enough to use them. I did not receive those results until the interim

46:01 process was over. 69 respondents or 12% of the community who answered the survey raised concerns about board governance. One specifically urged the next superintendent to set and maintain clear governance boundaries with the board, ensuring roles are understood and respected. I find it disheartening that we did not directly ask candidates how they would navigate those governance challenges, and the permanent search should include those questions. That is why the new operating agreement also concerns me deeply. The proposed draft seeks to make the chair more equal in operating with the superintendent, and I think the public deserves to know who is setting the district's priorities and directing the superintendent's work. When that direction is shaped by the chair and vice chair behind closed doors before the full board can meaningfully consider it,

46:49 it makes the public being left out to respond to a course that's already been set underway. This agreement should protect board members' access and participation in decisions so the community can see its full board governing in public. On Friday, September 11th, the Oregon Government Ethics Commission has voted to proceed with a second investigation involving this board superintendent selection process. Having participated in those processes, I take that very serious. The latest investigation concerns whether the board satisfied the prerequisites for conducting the interim superintendent selection process in executive session. So please establish and explain the permanent search process publicly, adopt clear selection criteria with an opportunity for public comment, and show how stakeholder feedback will

47:36 inform the interviews and your decision. Our next superintendent and the community deserves a sound process and a board that is committed to its own governance responsibilities. Thank you. Thank you for your input. I'll remind any of our public speakers that if you choose, an option is then to submit your comments in written form. So if you have that available, it's useful to the board to have a hard copy at some point. So, moving on then to action items. Number five leads off with five A, the approval of the consent

48:23 agenda. And I would move that we approve the consent agenda items 14, 15, and 17 as amended. Second. Approved. Motion by me, and a second by Director Cole. Other comments? Call for the vote. All in favor, indicate by saying aye. Aye. Any against? Consent agenda as modified. Approved five to zero. The items that were pulled, we're just going to take in order, and we will start with agenda item

49:08 5A1, the August 24th, 2026 work session minutes. Okay. And maybe we'll start with Director Langworthy, as far as pulling it from the agenda. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'm just interested to go through each meeting minute to know what was added or changed, or if it just simply hadn't been approved yet. Okay, I think that's helpful to both the board and our constituents. Mm-hmm. So, why are they... Maybe ask the superintendent? Right. So, in previous meetings prior to getting here, there were some questions about the minutes, and we had to do some research.

49:53 The minutes are taken and recorded by our person sitting right across from me, with the local government, um, association. And then we just simply look at them to make sure that there are no discrepancies or anything like that. What we did this time, because we knew that there were some board members that had questions about the minutes, we kind of had an ad hoc committee where we gave the copies of the minutes to a board member to look over to see if they agreed with accuracy, because I think that was some of the questions. That board member did give us some feedback, and we

50:39 incorporated that feedback into what we're presenting to you. And really, we haven't changed or amended the minutes. Marty nor I have really had a hand in any of those changes. It's just that we're way far behind. I would like to also take a second step of once we get these minutes, to form an ad hoc committee, ad hoc being a limited scope committee, with the board, to talk about how we would like to see the minutes moving forward so we don't have these, and we can continue to just put them on consent agenda. For most boards that I'm familiar with, that's one of the things that happens,

51:26 is they're on consent agenda and were approved. But I appreciate you asking the question. We try to have a process that was inclusive with the board. So what we've presented to you, we've had feedback from a board member. So August 24th, 2026, there were some questions from the board around the minutes, the accuracy of, or summarizing, or- Jonathan? I think it's my understanding, all of the minutes in this packet, this is the first time that the board has seen these minutes. I don't believe any of these are ones we've already reviewed previously. So they just have not been approved? No, none of these have been approved. Right. In fact, once you approve the minutes, we really can't change them.

52:12 So once you vote on approval of the minutes, those are the minutes that we are going to present and have on our public website. So, I'm confused. So, we have minutes going back from April 13th. Yes. Are you saying... So these haven't been uploaded to the district site yet? No. And how come we're just now getting this action item to approve? We wanted to make sure that the minutes were accurate, and we didn't have a repeat of some of the questions that board members had about the accuracy of the minutes. I wasn't involved in some of those conversations, but previously, I saw the meetings, and we just wanted to make sure that there

52:57 weren't the questions, and the board had the confidence in the minutes as presented. Okay. And so, I guess going back to my question, so if we were to go through each one, so the August 24th, through the 10th, through the 5th, all the way through July, May, April. So were any one of these anything changed, or was anything... No. The only changes were, well, there were some changes that was based on board member feedback. Okay. So, yeah, I haven't seen these. So that's it. So- So either the- I guess there were some changes, and a board member made a comment about it, and

53:42 is that board member satisfied with what they're seeing? Mm-hmm. Director Cole, were they submitted to you for- Yes. So yeah, they were submitted to me, and I reviewed all of them, provided comments where I had them. And so, having said that, the majority of them are fine. There's a couple that I would like to remove and table for some corrections and be brought back to the board when those corrections are done. But, so what do we have, 13 different meetings that we have minutes here for? There's two of them that I still think need correction. But yeah, so. Okay. Director Brew?

54:27 So we're still on the August 24th meetings? The session- Yes. Okay. Was this meeting one of the ones that you wanted to table? No, it was not. Okay, because I have an edit to these ones. On the 24th? Yes. Okay. On page of five of six, where it says "Board communication" Director Brew did not participate. Actually, the prior paragraph where I discussed my proposal to address declining enrollment and whatnot, that was under board communication. It wasn't part of the dual immersion- So these are minutes that need to be adjusted. Yes. So I would suggest that maybe we move on from there. Okay. And particularly those that just have not been presented to the board.

55:15 Ultimately, the board's responsible for the minutes, but if it's just that we have not approved them, I would suggest we do that tonight, take some of them off the table, and those that we do are going to need some modification, adjustment, or whatever, we table those for a future meeting. That's... So- I would request that that August 24th meeting minutes be tabled. Okay. And please, any board members, if you can then, would that go through Marty then? Please give her the corrections, and that way we can get this done at the next regular meeting, which will be the meeting in October. And just to clarify, what we'll do is if there is a correction, I will actually look at the meeting to confirm

56:01 that it wasn't, because it has to be inaccurate. And so we'll look at the meeting of that timestamp, wherever a board member has, and we'll see where we are. The more specificity you can offer, like you did, Director Brew, is helpful. And just an additional request from me. When they come back to the board for approval, if the changes of any type can be in a different color of ink so that we know as a board it's real easy to zero in on the changes, that would be helpful. Mm-hmm. And that might be something, that's the kind of feedback when we have an ad hoc committee that we can establish and just put out there, just the agreement saying, "This is how we're going to do things." Okay. Okay.

56:46 Yeah. If there's any changes that anybody has or there was changes that we made, we'll put that in different ink. Okay. That's one of the suggestions. Great. So the two I would like removed from the ones we'd approved would be the June 22nd, 2026 special minutes and the June 8th business minutes. June 22nd. And what was the other one, Ken? The June 8th business meeting. There's two minutes there- Okay ... one for the budget hearing and one for the business. Right. And in that same, what I asked Director Brew, Director Cole did send some specific comments. Okay. And for one of them, I think that was a right change and we're going to make

57:31 that. The other one, that's one I would actually have to go back and look at the video of. Okay. So we have three meetings: August 24th, June 22nd special minutes, June 8th business minutes. So the others are all just needing approval. Yes. I want to pull May 11th. Okay, May 11th. Yeah. Okay. And we will be providing us some feedback on the specific part? Great. Thank you.

58:17 So my thought then is that I could entertain a motion for approval of those that there are no objections from the board, rather than go through them individually at the pleasure of the board. Is that okay? So, I will, again, I move that we approve the August 10th, 2026 regular minutes. Number three, August 5th, 2026 retreat minutes. Number four, July 27th, 2026 special minutes. Number five, July 13th, 2026 special minutes. Number six, July 6th, 2026 organizational minutes. Number eight, June 9th, 2026 special

59:04 minutes. Number nine, June 8th, 2026 budget hearing minutes. Number 12, April 27th, 2026 special minutes. And number 13, April 13th, 2026 business minutes. Second. Motion by Director Light, seconded by Director Brew. Any further comments or questions? I'll go ahead and call for the vote. All in favor indicate by saying aye. Aye. Any against? Hearing none, motion carries five to nothing. So Jonathan, I would move that we also approve item number 5A14, the financial statement,

59:52 and 5A17, the out-of-state travel for the Thurston baseball team. Because I don't think those were pulled from the- I thought we already approved that part- Did we? ... of the consent agenda. Okay, I apologize. Up front. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks. I think I made that motion to approve 14, 15, and 17. Thank you. Okay. Okay, so- I'm sorry. Protocol question. Do we need to move to table the other things, or will they just automatically come back? I think it would probably be safer to have that as an official- Okay ... action saying move to table to be presented at the next business meeting or whenever you would like those presented. I would move that we table the August 24th, 2026

1:00:37 work session minutes, the June 22nd, 2026 special minutes, the June 8th, 2026 business minutes, and the May 11th, 2026 business minutes for a future meeting, pending corrections. Second Okay. Moved by Director Cole, seconded by Director Brew. Any comments, questions? I'll go ahead and call for the vote. All in favor, indicate by saying aye. Aye. Are there any against? Hearing none, motion carries five to nothing, and I would urge that we do it at our next regular meeting, which will be October 12th, if that's- Right. I think we can- ... possible with staff. I believe we can get there. Again, there's already one that

1:01:22 we're ready to make the change on, and it's just we- I need the information- Okay ... for the other three. Thank you. Okay, moving on then to action item 5B, the action on items, discussed in executive session. I think, Johnson, don't we have to... We still have the personnel report and the alternative education items, 5A- Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. Yes. 14 and-- or 15. Treated as separate items. Yes. Actually, all I have indicated is the item 16 on consent, the approval of the out-of-state travel. Or no, no, no, no, I'm sorry. The financial statement and the out-of-state travel were already approved. Okay. So the items we still have to discuss-

1:02:08 So then, next we'll move then to action item 5A-14, the financial statement. No, 15. No. And I took back that. Oh. Yeah. I believe we approved the consent, a calendar, a consent agenda with specific things removed. So I think the- Oh ... so those were on the consent. No, they weren't. Yes, they were. They were on the consent agenda. Mm-hmm. So they've been approved. Mm-hmm. Somehow I missed, with item 14, the financial statement. I believe that that was included. I had 14, 15, and 17 as part of the consent agenda. I apologize if I didn't get- That's right. The one that you pulled out was item 16,

1:02:54 and we have to deal with that. That's the alternate education program. You've approved everything else. So on this consent agenda, what we've gotten so far is we've tabled four of the minutes. We approved everything else. We have approved the financial statement, personnel report, and the out-of-state travel. We still have to deal with item 16. Mm-hmm. Does that work, Director Cole? Yes. And I apologize if I wasn't paying attention. That's quite all right. Okay. So yes, we will move then to action item 5A number 16, the alternative education programs number 26-27.009. Second. Okay. So do we need a motion, or do I just raise the questions I

1:03:42 have? We need a motion and a second, and then we'll open it for comments and questions. I move approval of item 16, alternative education program number 26-27.009. Okay. We have a motion. I'll second. Okay. By Director Brew, and a second by Director Cole. Thank you, Dr. Nakayama, for being here to answer questions. So Director Cole? Yeah. The resolution and the report we get talks about the evaluations of the programs, the alternative education programs we're approving. And this is something I guess I brought up past years in trying to find those, and I can't find that we've got all the

1:04:29 appropriate evaluations for the programs. And so, we're supposed to approve them, and they're supposed to be evaluated, and I'm just trying to make sure we're doing what we're supposed to be doing. Absolutely. Thank you for the question. So the process- Could you move your microphone a little? Thank you. Is this better? Yes, thank you. Yeah. Okay. The process hasn't changed. As you mentioned, this is an annual review. We, along with other neighbor districts, participate in the annual review as directed by Lane ESD. So what that looks like is that each district evaluates one or more programs. Those evaluations are submitted to Lane ESD, and then Lane

1:05:17 ESD posts on their website those evaluations. We looked this evening, and they are not yet up. So I suspect that they might still be waiting on an evaluation to come in or just given the turnover with the new school year, they're not yet up. Okay. Because the question I also have, I guess, is in looking at least one of them, the Looking Glass Riverfront, was an evaluation that was done from March of '25, which would seem to be more than a year in arrears. And I guess, are we evaluating this previous year? Which would've been, I think, a March 26 date on the evaluation. So maybe that's one of the ones that they haven't posted yet.

1:06:05 That would be my guess as well. Okay. I actually am going to a superintendent's meeting tomorrow at Lane ESD. I will ask our superintendent, Wetherall, about where we are with this, that it was raised in our meeting, and that the evaluations. And then I think maybe once those are posted, we can just send them to the board. If that's okay with the board, we'll send them. We can, yeah. Or would that be something you want us to go over in a meeting, I think is the question. If they're there, I'm just not comfortable approving it without the-- We're supposed to be approving this that the evaluations have been done. And I'm not comfortable approving it without having documentation that the evaluations have been done.

1:06:51 And so some of this is, I guess, out of our hands. So do we table this, or do we go ahead and approve and get the evaluations, I think would be my question. Yeah. And I'm not sure about implications about- Right ... not- That's what I'm going to ask. Thank you for asking that question. I am seeking your approval because we do currently have Springfield students participating in these programs. If we don't have the board's approval to continue contracting with these alternative education programs, it places our students' programming in jeopardy. I recognize the sticky place that you are in, and what I would ask is that the board at this time approve,

1:07:38 given the long history of these evaluations. And as you mentioned, we do have evaluations from March 25 that you referenced. These were approved last year. There are no new programs listed as part of this item. And should you see anything in the evaluations for 26 that does not agree with you, this could again be brought forward as a topic for the board to discuss. Yeah. I didn't see an evaluation, even an older one for Bridgeway. So, on there, so there's no evaluation for Bridgeway that I'm aware of.

1:08:24 I believe there were some special circumstances last year, but- Yes. There's continued controversy with the Oregon Department of Education around the status of Bridgeway being an alternative, private alternative site, and they're still arguing about some semantics, but there was an approval from the Oregon Department of Education to Bridgeway, and we received a verification letter from the Department of Education approving them as a private site that can be contracted with school districts. So, there's kind of this ongoing issue around

1:09:10 this agreement as a consortium in Lane County, and then there is this ongoing piece around Bridgeway and what category they fit into. And regardless of which of the two categories they fit in, we're still, with that approval, the district is allowed to contract with Bridgeway. So, and what we're hoping is that now there is some turnover in staff at the Lane ESD, including the superintendent, and so we're hoping to get some clarity about this during the school year. She obviously started on July 1st as well. So, couple of things. One, I think it's really important to

1:09:56 consider the fact that we have students in these programs right now, and there is a strong assumption considering the fact that these programs have all been approved in the past, and they have to be in compliance with state, the state mandates around what it means to be an alternative school. And if they aren't, then we will document that, and then we will have to come to you and let you know that we are no longer contracting with them because it would be illegal to contract with them. So if they don't meet the state requirements, we cannot contract with them. I'm just... The resolution says the programs have been evaluated

1:10:41 on several criteria, and I'm just looking for the document. No, and I think I understand. Again, it's another example of what's in our policy is slightly different from what we're asking, and this is one where we don't have control over the evaluation and approval process. And so I guess to an extent we are asking you to take a leap of faith, but it's a leap of faith based on what other districts in our area are doing, and that we know that there's approval from the state. And so that's why we need to clean up some of these things, right? And I understand that, but kind of like the decision, the point that the board is at is if we don't approve them, then we have to stop sending our kids to them, and then what do we do with them?

1:11:27 The students who need these services. How quick does that take effect if we don't approve tonight? I don't know that I have a great answer to that question- Mm-hmm ... because I don't think this has happened before. But I would imagine if you don't approve it, then we have to stop pretty immediately sending the kids there. And that's going to send another problem. Again, I would urge the board to approve this. Let me find out from our superintendent, because I will be eating, meeting... I hope I won't be eating her. I will be meeting with her tomorrow. I'll ask the specific question.

1:12:13 This is one of those things that might be a meme that I've just said, so hopefully people will bypass that. Well, I understand both sides, and I argued for the approval last year. But given that the same concerns were raised last year, I think we need some definitive action or longer runway from Laney SD because I share Director Cole's concern. We're approving something and assuming a due diligence that we don't have in front of us. So if we could have that conversation, I'd really rather not make this an annual... I'm sure you wouldn't either. Yes. Absolutely. We can maybe move it to later in the year,

1:12:59 given that this September timeframe seems to have been troublesome in the past. It shouldn't be something that we annually face. And my thought is, do we currently have students in the program, and did we have on the first day of school? For all of these programs listed here Well, for some that are on the list. It doesn't have to be all of them, but if so, do we actually need to be presenting this in August before kids are even in the seat? And if so, since we're reliant on Lane ESD to provide this information, is it a conversation we should have? I think, and we need to bring up the conversation first. Mm-hmm. Because we don't want to, through due diligence, unintentionally keep students from receiving the services

1:13:44 that are on their IEP, and these would be services that are on their IEP. So we'd run a big risk of violating federal and opening ourselves up to lawsuits if we didn't. I think what I'm hearing is that I would say we're going to approve this, and ask the superintendent, direct the superintendent, to discuss the issue of the lagging with Lane ESD, and further provide those reports once they're made available, or provide access to the reports that say they meet the criterion. You could do that and we'd be covered, and then if we don't have those

1:14:31 reports, we can come back and say, "Unfortunately, we didn't get a report on this," or, "We've checked with ODE, and even though there's not a report, they give it the seal of approval," or something like that, so that it's closer to the spirit of the policy. Would that be acceptable? So you're giving conditional approval and then directing me to provide the board with an update on where we are with the evaluations that are required. Mm-hmm. And you're directing me to provide those evaluations either by link or giving you copies of those evaluations once they are posted and approved. It might be that I talk to the superintendent, Lane

1:15:19 ESD superintendent, and she said, "We only do these evaluations X number of years, and we don't have those, but it's good to know, and then we can do some advocacy." And I think one of the things the board has asked is where they can help. It's when we find things like this is advocate to our Department of Education and others saying, "You're asking us to do something that we actually can't do because the timelines are off or the approvals are off." It helps us, and it helps us from having to ask you for approval for something that we don't even have the insight into. Well, and if I'm remembering from last year's conversation, the evaluation is largely

1:16:05 based on information provided. And sometimes these agencies are not submitting in a timely manner, which makes Lane ESD a problem, or did I misunderstand that? Yeah. So there's an agreement among local districts to evaluate one or more of the programs. And so they're assigned to local districts, and we do it as a consortium. I see. Okay. And then when we complete it, we submit it to the ESD, and the ESD posts it. And what we don't have right now is information about why it's not posted. It may all be done, and

1:16:52 it's not posted, which is why we didn't bring it to the August meeting because it wasn't posted yet, so we waited until September, assuming that it would be posted by then. So that's the follow-up with the ESD, is the posting of the information. And I think the board, from the questioning I'm hearing, is the people we would like to know what we're dealing with. Because if we're going to approve something that's based on an evaluation that we don't have, worst case scenario, what if ODE denied, right, and we've already approved? Mm-hmm. And I get it. We can back out of it and that kind of stuff, but this, again, seems to be something we should be- Just a point of clarification.

1:17:37 The programs that are being assigned to local districts to evaluate have all been approved by ODE. We wouldn't engage in an evaluation process with a program that we couldn't actually send students to. So this annual evaluation that local districts engage in is just, again, one of those checks, right? Because it's not our program. We're contracting with them. We have a shared responsibility as a consortium to make sure that the program is as we believe it to be. That's the

1:18:22 aspect of that annual evaluation. But no program would land on the list if it were not already approved. So again- Dr. Brew ... if I may, I want to address the district administration that when we bring these things up where you're saying, "We want you to put your stamp that you've met this policy when we know that you're not meeting the policy," we would rather have you come to us and say, "You need to change the policy to meet what we can actually do." Reality. Right? Because we are the ones that individually get

1:19:08 sued, individually brought before government ethics because you're not following your own policies for things that are out of our control. And so it's not that we're not sympathetic, we are. We just want to be able to say, "We are following our policies, even if that means changing the policies so that we can follow them." Yeah. I think- We have one more year. If this happens again, and what I'm hearing from the team is we actually were cognizant of the discussion last year, and we waited till the last possible moment because the other alternative is we could have our own programming here, but it's way late to do that. Yeah. And so I think the point is well taken. Let me do some research on my end. And we have to continue to note these things.

1:19:55 That might be one that we just go ahead and look at the policy on this year. So in case we have the same thing, we won't be in the same position. Yeah. My hope is that this will change once we have some consistency in the changeover in the administration. But it might be worth going ahead and just looking at that if we establish a policy committee to make sure we're not put in that position again. We're not meaning to be difficult. Yeah. If I may, real quick, just that if we are in this position in the spring of this school year, which is when these evaluations are supposed to take place, if we're not confident that that has been shored up at the ESD level, then what we will do

1:20:43 is we will evaluate all of the programs rather than just a single one and be part of the consortium. So rather than changing the policy, we will take action internally that will ensure that we're bringing forth to you the evaluation of all the programs. And we didn't change it this school year, and we stayed with the consortium because of the turnover in the superintendent at the ESD. So you won't need to change your policy. We will ensure that all of them are evaluated internally by us. I don't want you to commit something if it's going to be problematic to actually- Well, and hopefully we don't need to make it. Wouldn't that be the ideal situation that- Yeah, we want to stay with this ... we can work with Lane ESD to come up with a program. So, I don't want to put... Everything we take

1:21:31 in-house is a burden on staff, so I want to be sensitive to that if we don't need to do that. Yeah. I'd just like to point out, I guess the resolution's like this may not just be a policy issue. It also referenced an Oregon revised statute. So this may be state law, not something that's just us revising a policy. And I am certainly sympathetic to our students, and if we can approve this with the understanding that we would get reports back on where we are with the evaluations on a short timeframe or within a week or whatever from the superintendent, and if their evaluations aren't complete, some sort of plan to have them completed within a

1:22:16 reasonable amount of time, I would be okay with that. So let's even put some more meat into it. I will provide a report. I'm going to look at my calendar really fast to make sure I have the capacity. I'll speak, as I said, with the Lane superintendent tomorrow, and I'll provide a report to the board. I'll email a report, and we'll make it public what the superintendent said by Friday. That would be helpful. Okay. And then based on that, we'll provide access to the links of those reports because, again, I'm hearing that they were already done. It's just a matter of posting. Yeah. So I just wanted to make clarification then, because the

1:23:01 actual resolution here doesn't seem to be out of compliance with how it's written. We did evaluate, did we not? We just haven't gotten the formal posting back from Lane yet. We did evaluate the ones we were assigned. Other districts did their evaluations, and so we're just waiting for those evaluations to be posted. Do we get copies of those evaluations that other districts have done? It's just the posting. Okay. So we've got to wait on the posting, so I will- If we have those internally, can those just be provided, or do we have to... With this resolution, can you just provide us the evaluations? If they've already been done, we don't need to wait for... As long as we have documentation of the evaluations, we don't need to wait for them

1:23:48 to be posted. We have the one that we engaged in. Other local districts have theirs. They've all been submitted to Lane ESD. Okay. And then that's when they're all made available back to us. Okay. I have not received anything directly- Yeah ... from a local district. Okay. Which one did we evaluate? Jasper Mountain Safe Center. We can send you that evaluation, the one that we actually have control over. Let me just make sure that it's not something, again, from our current ESD superintendent that would get us out of compliance. I think have the conversation and

1:24:36 then we'll know more soon. Are there any other comments or questions? I have a motion on the floor. Can you repeat the motion? Is it- The motion was for the approval of the alternative education programs. I might want to add, maybe someone wants to offer an amendment that the superintendent will provide a report from after contacting Lane ESD by Friday. Are you taking- If someone wants to add that as an amendment, that- Friendly amendment there? I move- Huh? Friendly amendment, will you add here? Sure. Okay. So,

1:25:22 did I propose the amendment? I don't think we actually had a motion for it, so- No, not yet. You have not yet motioned. Okay. So I was offering- Yeah ... something that the board could do. Oh, we don't have a motion. So I would move that we approve the alternative education programs- Yeah, with the idea that the superintendent will report back to the board by Friday of this week on the status of the evaluations of all the facilities. Can we say in that amendment instead that we direct the superintendent to provide a report to the board by Friday? Yes. So the amendment is, just to clarify, you move to approve the report and also direct the superintendent to provide an update from the conversation with Lane

1:26:08 ESD on the evaluations. Yes. Second. Now you direct motion by Director Cole, seconded by Director Brew? Okay. I was looking down. Any further comments or questions? I'll go ahead and call for the vote. I'm going to do a roll call vote on this one. Director Cole? Yes. Director Brandt? Yes. Director Brew? Yes. Director Langworthy? Yes. Director Light is yes, so the resolution passes five to zero as amended. Thank you. And thanks for answering the questions, too.

1:26:57 Okay, so I believe this moves us to action item 5B, action on items discussed in executive session. Yes, I move that the board take no further action on the item discussed in executive session. I second. Moved by Director Cole, seconded by Director Brandt. Go ahead and call for the vote. All in favor indicate by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? I will abstain. Okay, with an abstention from Director Langworthy, motion carries four to zero to one. Then action item 5C, budget

1:27:43 appropriations resolution 2627.011. Hello? Hello, good evening. I'm here to present resolution 26-27.011. This resolution is to recognize $3.7 million in additional revenue from loan proceeds, and appropriate $3.7 million in expenditures to the 26-27 general fund budget for the structural repair projects. Because these funds were not known when the 26-27 budget was adopted, they were not included in the original budget. This resolution allows us to formally recognize the revenue and

1:28:29 establish the related expenditure appropriation. I recommend approval of this resolution. I'm happy to answer any questions. I'll move approval. I'll second. Moved by Director Cole, seconded by Director Brew. Any questions or comments for Melissa? Hearing none, I'll call for the vote. All in favor indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Hearing none, resolution passes five to zero. Thank you. Thank you. Action item 5D, policy committee nominations.

1:29:15 So I will ask Superintendent Stover to give a little clarification around the ideas pertaining to this committee and the participation of. So one of the things that, and we've talked about this, is to have, so we can make our meetings more efficient when it comes to things like policy, is that the board establishes a policy committee where it would be two members that are appointed by the chair to serve, and then the superintendent along with any relevant staff that would pertain to that policy. So if there's an instructional policy, we would ask the instructional team to be there. If it has to deal with operations, we'd ask

1:30:00 relevant operations people to be there. It would be open to the public, and we would establish a meeting so that the kind of order would be the policy committee reviews it, gives any feedback that they have. We would present any suggested changes to the policy. Then once they've done it, we would bring it to the board for a first reading, and then we could bring it to the board for a second reading. And that's kind of the cadence. We get these policies, so for instance, what would have happened, the policy that we're about to look at for a first reading is the immigration enforcement policy. We would've given that to the policy committee

1:30:48 saying, I'll just go ahead and give you a preview of what I'm going to say, "We recommend the policy as is written by OSBA, that we approve." And then if there were board members who were interested in it because it is your policy to say, "Well, actually, I think this is redundant. I'd like to see this out," we could do that, and then we would present to the board in the first reading, this has been reviewed by the policy committee, and here are the changes they recommended, if any. Okay. Thank you. I visited with Superintendent Stover on this topic because I didn't have good understanding of what it was about. And given that we're a relatively small board and we're subject to whatever's outlined in the policy, I

1:31:36 feel that It's important that all board members participate in this process. So it was assuring to me knowing that we'd still be participants. I look at this as similar to the oversight provided in the past by the vice chair on budgetary things, RFPs and dairy resolutions and nutrition services. And so it can be very valuable to have that reliance on an individual board member or two to do the sort of the pre-work on that, and it doesn't in any way then circumvent board participation at the next level. So,

1:32:21 do we need to have a motion to form the... Is this a superintendent committee or is this- This would be a board committee. A board committee. So we- I recommend to be a board committee- So we would need to have- We'd have to notice it and make it open to the public. Yeah. And so the board needs to... Yeah. I assume we needed a motion to then create it, or, I don't know. Do we have to take action to... Since it's a board committee, I presume we have to take action to- Well, I think at the very least, we need nominations of a couple of board members willing to participate. I don't know about the actual resolution. Well, I would- Would you be comfortable- I would agree with Director Cole saying that, we move to form a policy committee made up of two board members and relevant staff to discuss policies prior to the first reading.

1:33:08 Superintendent and relevant staff. Yeah. Superintendent and relevant staff. Why don't we have the motion, and then we'll open it for questions. I move that we form a board policy committee made up of two members of the board, the superintendent and relevant staff. I'm trying to think. Yeah. To evaluate all of our policies, whether they're amendments or revisions or new policies. Yes. I'll second. Well, not to review all of our policies because we've done that, but to review policies as presented either to the board or board members willing or

1:33:53 interested in revising or revisiting. Yes. That's better said. Yes. Yeah. One key point I forgot to mention when I was trying to sell this is that when we had... Another benefit of the policy committee is if we had questions like we just had where we see the discrepancies, that's something we can bring to the board policy committee. We can have those discussions with the board policy committee first, report on those discussions in the first reading. But it gives the board another tool, like when we see these discrepancies, to say, "Hey, Superintendent Stover, would you please look at this policy?" Whatever. And we can bring it before the board, and then that way it gives us a little think time as well. Okay. Okay, so it's board charged. The board member

1:34:39 is the one that charges- Well, the board can ask- Or has to- The board member can ask that a policy is reviewed- Uh-huh ... and we can review it with the policy committee, and then we can come back to the board saying, "We were asked to review this policy. We did. Here's what we found. We recommend taking no action. We recommend taking this action. We recommend..." As Director Light said, we're not at the point where we need to do a overall review of all the policy. That's another reason why the board would form a policy committee. But I've heard enough that there's discrepancies between some things policy that to me, this is a much more efficient way to do that, and we don't have to take up meeting time to talk about discrepancies that we're finding.

1:35:24 I've seen this in a couple of the meetings I've reviewed as well. This gives us a nice runway to actually identify those ahead of time to see if we even need to take any action. And because it's open to the public, other people can comment on it. We'll post it and say, "Hey, we're going to review these policies." And it also, OSBA provides model policies, and some of those are required. We have no choice but to implement that. Some of them are recommended, and some of them are strongly recommended. And this gives me an opportunity to say, "Do we really want to recommend this or not? Is this something that is pertinent to Springfield?" Because sometimes the policies in their recommended, it's

1:36:09 just trying to solve for a problem that we don't have, and we don't foresee having that problem. Mm-hmm. And there are other things, like maybe we need a policy on, in a previous district, we didn't think we would have to have a policy on support service animals, which we actually have here. Mm-hmm. And we did, and we had a hard time finding model policy because we were one of the early adopters of having therapy dog policy in the state. So it just allows us to be proactive on some things that we don't currently have policy, but maybe we need to. Well, and there's been conversation around changing our operating agreements, and that often has an impact on policy. They need to be in alignment and they- Right ... haven't always been in alignment.

1:36:55 So it'd be given to the policy committee for the overview and then brought to the board. Director Brew? Not technically an amendment, but I would like to open it up and say that staff can also recommend policies- Yes ... that are in need of review. Because we've heard more than once, "Well, we know that we can't actually do what's required in policy and-" Yes. So that would- Thank you for that. Yes, it would be whomever needs to. It's not just limited to the board, though it is your policy. So if we're saying, "Hey, we found this discrepancy," we could bring it to the policy committee. They say, "Yeah, that's not that big a deal for us." Or we could say, "Yeah. Oh, gosh, we didn't- Thank you ... even realize that." Yes So yes, anybody can bring

1:37:40 it to our attention, and then the policy committee can look at it, and we can always report. Part of the process is reporting out at the meeting, saying, "This is what we looked at." So for instance, if someone, you for instance, brought a policy on something and the policy committee said, "No, we don't think it needs to be reviewed," part of the report from the policy committee would be, "We didn't review it." And then you as a board member could then call a question like, say, "Well, I actually really want to review this, so I motion that we review this." And if it gets a second and a vote, then we go from there. So there's checks and balances within, but the idea is to be more efficient. Yeah, and I think there's stuff that you can all read in the paper,

1:38:28 that's an old term, or online, regarding AI or digital policies and- Right ... things like that, screen time. So this actually helps us move a little quicker, I think- Yeah ... on those kinds of things. That's right. So, do we need to amend the motion then, okay? The motion as presented would work. Okay, motion as presented by Director Cole, and it was seconded by Director Brew. Is that correct? I think it was- Or Director Brand. I want to get that correct, so I'm sorry. That's why I don't remember. Any other comments or questions? Okay, so call for the vote. All in favor indicate by saying aye.

1:39:13 Aye. Is there any against? Hearing none, motion carries five to nothing, and now I guess we move into the nomination. You can, or according to your policy, you can just appoint some people as well. Okay. So it's how you would want to do that. For what it's worth, I'd like to nominate Director Brew. I think he'd be a great addition. I think that would be, if he's willing to do that, that'd be... And I would be happy to serve myself. I have more time, and so if that works for the board, or we can hear other interested parties. Yeah, I would like to know if any of the other

1:39:58 members are interested in serving. I'd like the two of you to go ahead and take it. Yeah. I'm there, too. Yeah. So generous. You're such a giver. You're trying to be decent- You're such a giver ... on this, right? And we will obviously- Please ... get with you two to find a date that works, a time and a date, and we'd want to have this on a recurring schedule. Okay. Great. Just a clear clarification, the other board members not officially in the committee are still welcome to participate, I would assume? Yeah. Sounds like it. Well, you can participate. Observe. When you talk, and before I say anything, I need to get a clarification- Mm ... just to make sure. In other places, as long as you don't talk,

1:40:45 you're okay. But Oregon's a little unique on that, so before I would say yes or no, I'd want to get an opinion from probably OGEC as well as some other attorneys, just to say, "Hey, if they come in and don't talk," it's going to be a noticed meeting anyway- Mm-hmm ... because it's your... So I'm going to have to do some research on that to find out. Yeah. Take my board hat off. Yes. Member of the public. If we're allowed to do that. And just to reiterate, after it goes through the policy committee, it'll be presented to the board- Yeah ... as a first read. Yeah. And there's usually a month between first read and then adoption, so there's a lot of opportunity. But hopefully it'll save the other board members more time in that it's already been reviewed by Director Brew and myself.

1:41:31 Okay? I think you probably want to make, since you nominated, you're probably going to want to... Did we vote on that? Did we vote on the nominations? We just did it by consensus, but since they were nominated, you probably want to officially say, "Close the floor for nominations," and then take a vote on those nominations- Okay ... that we've just given. I was thinking it might allow us more flexibility if we leave it with consensus. Yes. I'm just trying to think of Robert's Rules of Orders here. Okay. And because there was a nomination, if you had chosen just to appoint people, then I think- Okay ... we're good. But since you chose to nominate, let's just go ahead and make it official that these are the nominations for the board policy committee. I will entertain a motion.

1:42:16 I move to approve the two nominees for the new policy committee, Director Light and Director Brew. I'll second. Okay. Motion by Director Brand, seconded by Director Cole. Call for the vote. All in favor indicate by saying aye. Aye. Are there any against? Motion carries five to nothing. Moving then to action item 5E, the board planning schedule and additional board meetings. This is one from a board meeting standpoint. I just want to clear the docket. So when we approved, it was with the caveat that we would

1:43:02 revisit at the retreat. We ran out of time at the retreat, and so it's just something that's hanging out there. In looking at our calendar, there are three months that we only have one board meeting. Typically, we have two. So, I should say there's four. There's November, and then there's December, and that's a tradition, really, just to have the one meeting in December. And then March is a possibility, and May. And I've seen two meetings in all of those months. So the potential, we have Thanksgiving break, um- The week before the meeting on November 30th.

1:43:50 There's also the opportunity to have a meeting post spring break on March 29th, and there's the opportunity in May to have one, I think it's pre Memorial Day, May 24th. And I'm not arguing for or against. This is a very curious board that I've seen, and it gives us more opportunity. I know we can add meetings. In my experience, that doesn't generally happen, and it gives staff less planning time as well as board members individually. So I usually look at having the number and then if we want to take something away, we can. But I will just present that for discussion.

1:44:38 Director Brew? I guess my first question was if we went ahead with our usual calendar in those three months, would any of those require staff coming in on what would traditionally be their vacation? The 23rd would of November, because we have the whole week off. November 30th in November. No, but they're asking if we kept the traditional, because it would be the ninth and the 23rd if we did the traditional, because there's an extra Monday in November. There's a fifth Monday in November. Right. We do it on the second and fourth. So yes, the 23rd would require, if we had a meeting then, it may require some staff to come in from what is

1:45:23 traditionally the whole week is off for our district. Okay. But we could move it to a different- Yes ... week. Okay. Well, the November 30th then avoids Thanksgiving week- Yeah ... because that is traditional and gives post the November 9th meeting, then there's a timeframe prior to Thanksgiving week for work to be done. So I've considered that. However, if we did go on November 30th, staff would be gone the entire week prior to that. So- Right ... we'd have to- I would then recommend a lighter agenda. It's a work session. And if we're doing our jobs, if it is based on what we're going to talk about, priorities,

1:46:08 maybe that's one or two presentations that we can have done prior. It would also kind of, if you did that, the pros of that, it would take place of two birds and one stone because you kind of get a November, December mix in there. I would not recommend that we have the 30th and then try to add a second meeting in December. I would say the 30th- No, that wouldn't work ... would be the November, December kind of like one, a work session to cover both November and December. And then we would have a regular business meeting on the 14th, which would mean the next meeting would not be until the eighth. So you'd have the 14th to the eighth, during the holiday season, without a meeting. So it really is, I think we could handle the November meeting

1:46:56 as long as with the understanding it's a fairly light meeting, and we have that agenda well worked out, and people can give the presentations so that they're not having to work on the break. Or I can poll the staff to say, "Hey, who's working on the Monday and Tuesday?" Yeah. And that's what we'll let you work on that. But I would rather do the latter than the former. And these would all be work sessions, by the way. Well, the 30th would be a work session for sure. Yeah. Well, and even the March one, May- Oh, okay ... they're all the second meeting of that month. Yeah. So Director Cole? For me, I guess it's a little bit putting the cart before the horse. I know we've established some priorities. We've given feedback to the superintendent, and he was

1:47:41 working, and I think we should... I may have seen some information already about the staff resourcing of being able to respond to our priorities. And so it seems to me, and maybe if we can do that at our next work session, go through that and establish what our priorities are and what they're going to work on in the staff time. We'd have a better feeling for then adding meeting dates to accommodate those topics. May I make a specific suggestion? That if you want to, you could approve the addition of the, you could amend your calendar for the addition of the 13th, and then we can say also in, I don't think you need a motion for this, we can just bring it up on the 14th, the business meeting, to talk about the May or March ones there, and that way we'll have a better sense, and it still gives us

1:48:29 plenty of time to add those on to the calendar. So we're kind of like the 30th would be a test thing, and then to make sure that we're not just pushing this off, we would have it on the agenda for the 14th as an action item to decide if we needed to add the March, May meetings. The 14th- Yeah, the board always has the opportunity to add the meeting, so it's not critical that we establish it now. I just want to have that discussion, put it out there, and then particularly with your suggestion as a specific date to make future decisions by, I think that keeps us accountable also. And we'll also have some data to see how the 30th worked when we added it on,

1:49:16 whether it was effective or not, or if it's taxed staff too much. Yeah. Could you restate the dates and the months? Because I wasn't tracking, Shawn. Well, if we accept the November 30th meeting, then the suggestion is then move the December meeting to the 14th so that- Well, it's already there- Oh, okay ... on the 14th. Oh, I had the... Okay, I have the wrong piece. On the 14th. Adding a November 30th meeting is what- Yeah. So adding a November 30th meeting, but to address the concern that Director Light had of, like, "Well, we always talk about this, but we never actually add them," I would say that on the 14th we can actually have that as an agenda item that we will discuss adding more Which would be the March and the May meeting at the 14th, whether that's needed. The pro for that is that we would've had

1:50:05 some data on how did the November meeting go. Did it work well? Did it achieve its purpose? Or like, "Wow, we should never do that again." Yes. So in that way, we're not committing things right now, but it still answers, hey, if we need it, we need to have them. Yeah. So I move that we add a work session on November 30th, 2026, and that on the December 14th, 2026 meeting, we add an action item to consider the addition of two other work sessions in March and May. I'll second. We have a motion by Director Brew, a second by Director Cole.

1:50:50 Any further comments or questions? Okay, hearing none, call for the vote. All in favor indicate by saying aye. Aye. Any nays? Hearing none, motion carries five to zero. Thank you. Moving to action item five- F ... well- F, we added- Did you want to do about the planning schedule at this point, or? No, we have to do 5F, which was added to the- Yeah. No, I get that. Yeah. I was just looking at the full title on the E and wanting to make sure that we covered everything. Yeah, that's what we- Okay ... had. Thank you. Yeah. So, we're moving to five,

1:51:36 action item F, the structural repairs. This was brought forward by Director Cole. So- Mm-hmm ... I'm going to- Yes. I see here. I've got some information here. So you just actually approved in the earlier action, the $3.7 million overall. In that 3.7, there was a contingency fund. There was also, which I discovered today, is because we worked with Essex Construction on doing all the work, they gave us $138,000 discount. And so I believe Director Cole asked about what the discrepancy was. That's the discrepancy. So, we have

1:52:23 $138,000 credit plus what we have in contingency. We discovered at Walterville Elementary, and I've got some pictures in my superintendent's report, that the trusses were in worse shape than we thought they were. In order to fix them and bring them up to specs, we had to add an epoxy. The epoxy is, I don't have the exact cost, but it's very expensive. Per foot it's over $500. We tried to find more economical ways to do that, and there were none. It's the epoxy or nothing. That Walterville was in much worse shape than we thought, and so when we opened it up and saw where we

1:53:10 were, we needed repairs. And let me get to the exact number, but it's over the amount of what we needed to change orders for Walterville exceeds the $150,000 spending limit the board has on policy for these types of things. So right now, we're still under the $3.7 million budget that we have established, but I need permission from the board to actually spend over the 150,000, and it's close to 200,000 for the specific change order for Walterville, and that that's where

1:53:55 we are. So we actually have the money right now. We are getting close to the end of what we have the ability for, for change orders, but we're still under that overall target of 3.7 that you just approved. Because of the credit we got by Essex for giving them all the business. And the reason we're bringing it to you is because we're trying to follow board policy, right? And that's over the limit, and I can do some quick, after I look on my email, do some quick back of the napkin math exactly how much it is for Walterville, but I would like just to be safe to have a resolution to approve the change orders for Walterville. We can certainly table it and wait till either the work session

1:54:43 or the business meeting. The problem is, is where this is where we have to add the epoxy is in the gym and cafetorium. And so right now the kids are in there. They're allowed to be in there to get their meals, but it's still not to the place where we can let them participate fully. Once we add the epoxy and get it tested, we feel like we can, and we can release the gym to them and move on to the other areas. This was originally designed to actually finish before school started, but when we opened up things and saw that we needed the epoxy, we couldn't move forward, and we had to get a pricing.

1:55:28 And we just got that, I believe, it was sent to me on Saturday, and then I forwarded to you on Sunday what the pricing was. So just clarification, when you talk about the limit on change orders, are you meaning the limit on contingency? No. What I'm saying is, per your policy, I can only approve expenditures of 150,000 or less. This change order for Walterville is over that $150,000 mark. So we would ask that you approve the change order for this one thing. As we move on, hopefully we will not, or we'll be in trouble, we won't have change orders that exceed the 150,000, and we'll just keep on approving them, and we'll give you the report like we did last month of where the

1:56:15 change orders are. This is a specific one for Walterville because of the amount of epoxy we had to add to bring it up to code exceeds 150,000. But this change order, this amount will come out of the contingencies, right? Yes. Right now, and I verified with Melissa, and she's here. I think she's still here, right? Yes. Yes, she's here, and she'll stop me or- Mic ... throw the mic away, yeah. If I'm saying something wrong. At least I hope you will. And so we're good now. We're still under the 3.7. Again, we don't know what's going to happen as we get into others, but Walterville was one of our oldest schools. And the reason why there's urgency is because we want to give them back their gym and cafetorium.

1:57:01 Sure. Mm-hmm. So I'm comfortable. I'll make a motion that approve the superintendent to authorize change orders in excess of $150,000 up into the maximum of $3.7 million that the board has authorized for the project. That would work. I'll second that. Okay, a motion by Director Cole, a second by Director Brandt. Any further comments or questions? I would just ask that as you're approving anything that's suspiciously large, do you assure the board that- We will continue to- Right. Yeah ... give you those updates once we get those change orders, like we have done the past two times. And then my other question, too, was to make sure that we're

1:57:46 planning in advance, since this is obviously cutting it really close to our overall contingency, that we come back if you see other change orders coming with a proposal of how we address those overages and overruns. Yeah, I think that's wise. I also would like to say, but I haven't had a chance to speak with Mr. Yancey directly, I would like to say I think we prioritized what we thought would be the worst first. And so we're hoping that maybe change orders will be less and less as we go on. But I don't know that for a fact, so I don't want to say that. I would like to say, I think the information presented hasn't always been clear, and there's been some omissions of some things, and it hasn't been clear, and I would appreciate if that could be the

1:58:31 numbers being reconciled. I'm not sure how a credit of the contract giving credit, I presume that has to be done as a change order. I don't know. Yes. But that's not a change order that shows up on the list of change orders that we received. I think we did on some of the change... The first list, I think we did notate where there were some credits that were given. I'll have to go back and look at that report. Yeah, I think- Okay ... I did review that, and I sent some questions about, because there were different numbers for the sites than what was in the bid. So those are still some questions I have on the project as a whole. Okay. And I have that, obviously. Yeah. That's why I got with Melissa to the extent I could to show- Yeah ... one discrepancy.

1:59:16 I will get with Mr. Yancey and Terry to see where there are discrepancies from the bid and what we have, and make sure we clear those up. So, I'm just going to put this out there. I am concerned there are things that are unknown and unknowable when bidding a project. There are other things where it's kind of like, "That should've been pretty obvious. Why is this coming in as a change order? Why wasn't it in the original bid?" And I'm not saying this is one of those, but I'm just saying, I'm kind of wary- Right ... when something is really big and was totally hidden,

2:00:04 so. Yeah. And I actually have been out to the site twice- Yeah ... and seen it. These were covered. And in fact, the beams were covered by plywood up top, so you couldn't actually see them where it was obvious. Some of our gyms, you can see them, right? Yeah. They're wide open. Some are covered. And this is one that when we got into it and got it covered, we found more problems. For instance, one of the ones that needs the most epoxy was almost breaking. But because where it was, it was on the corner of a wall, it was held up, and so it didn't fail, just because of where it happened to be placed. And that's why I think, and I don't want to speak for him because he's not

2:00:51 here, but I think that's one of the reasons why Mr. Yancey suggested a larger contingency fee, because there were so many unknown unknowns. Mm-hmm. And so I want to get with him to make sure I'm correct in that we were trying to get the worst first. So maybe there won't be those big unknown unknowns. We've had some pleasant surprises and this is an unpleasant one. Mm-hmm. Thank you. Any other comments or questions? I'm going to add my own. I think that one of the things this provides us as a board is looking to the future and our upward advocacy with the legislature. This is a concrete example. The expense came to us as a

2:01:39 board unknown with very little warning, right? And so I think the state needs to be looking at some strategies to fund these capital improvements or these major repairs. Most districts in the state suffer from aging facilities. And so giving legislators exact numbers and the impact that it has on our programs, I think is very useful. So looking forward to when they get into session, if we have the opportunity to visit with our legislators, this would be something that we should bring forward and see. Superintendent Stover mentioned that in North Carolina, they actually provide that, right? Or in other districts, not just North Carolina, other places that there's-

2:02:25 Yeah ... a dedicated operations fund. And that can be done, but- Roofs are going to fail, right? They're going to age out. HVAC systems are also going to age out. And really the way it is now, we have to raise the money locally, right? Mm-hmm. And there's not a dedicated school funding stream done by the state. Oregon is an anomaly as far as that goes. I would like to say, I think the legislature has been thinking about it. They funded the assessment. They put a lot of money into consultants reviewing every facility we have, and they did that for every district in the state. So we have a report for every

2:03:12 facility we have. What they project for what work we need to do in the next year, two years, five years, 20 years they're projecting down the road. So they've kind of started to collect the data to be able to make those assessments. And I think that's a helpful first step. Yes. But once we have it, right now we're making difficult decisions on staffing or fixing a roof that we know is going to start leaking, right? The way it is, and I, as a superintendent, I like having dedicated funding streams for operations. And then for ongoing, for instance, if we have an abundance, if one year we don't spend or we have more money than we project,

2:03:57 then the board can always move that surplus to a dedicated operation. So maybe that's something we need to start looking at. Preaching to the choir about a capital improvements plan- Yes ... I've been advocating for, for a while now, so we have some sort of plan on what we're going to spend. And I'm just suggesting that the state go to that next step and actually fund it. Because as much of an impact as it had on Springfield, it has a much more major impact on smaller districts that don't have maybe the revenue sources that a larger district would have. Yeah. And I think one of the reasons why this was brought about, just to memory, we had some big gym failures here. Mm-hmm. And also, I believe on Medford, Oregon

2:04:42 had one as well. And so our insurance, PACE, said, "We can't keep on funding these. You have to do it." So it's nice that we had that plan, but this then came back a little bit as an unfunded mandate. And I'd like to point out that the state government does back bonds for- Yeah ... public universities and community colleges. And unlike cities, counties, Willamalane, Lane County, school districts are not allowed to charge systems development charges to fund their capital projects. Mm-hmm. So in some ways, the state government is tying our hands because we're not

2:05:27 allowed to use the same tools that cities and counties and park districts can use to fund these capital investments. Yeah. And bonds have their own limitations. Mm-hmm. So, okay, so I'm going to go ahead and call for the vote. We have a motion on the floor. All in favor indicate by saying aye. Aye. Are there any nays? Hearing none, motion carries five to zero. Moving then on to agenda item six, under discussion. Item A is board priorities and agenda priorities. So this is just to give a better handle to staff on what the board would like to see.

2:06:13 And Superintendent Stover. For this, I'd like to actually stand and speak. So anomaly, I'm just used to that. Thank you. That's why the podium was awkwardly staying over there, so I would have this opportunity. And we are two for two, I think, on this actually working today. It worked last time, so we'll all cross our fingers so that you guys can actually see what I'm doing.

2:07:14 We did do a test run of this, actually. I see E1 had announced it, that it was going to- Yeah, probably. Right. So let me take this off. I won't- Do we need a motion to buy the superintendent a new cord? It's just... I don't know. Maybe it doesn't like me or this computer. We have to move the dongle purchases to next budget cycle. Let me see. Priorities. I'm going to take advantage and print out priorities. Okay. I shared the document. Just in case I'm not sure. Work items. Yeah.

2:08:05 And while you guys were at the end of the executive session, I literally came in here. But maybe I was sitting... There we go. I was like it was too little. Yeah. Just take a little. Yeah. Should we take a five-minute recess? What's that? Take a five-minute recess. Yeah. While we're getting set up here, let's take a five-minute recess. Right. Yeah. I'm good. Put together policy committee. No site facility. I think we should, uh- Ah, here we go. Good. We can either- We still have five. Well, I'm not going to move. Just throw it on there. Yeah. Ah, okay.

2:08:51 I mean, if it's that easy. When in doubt, check the cord, right? I appreciate that. Yeah, thank you so much. I'm just going to do it. I'll send the formal email to the agenda setting committee. I will say that as some points made, I think he may be getting at it. Yeah. He can decide a little different. He may be getting to that.

2:11:12 Thank you. So, board members ready to proceed? Yes. Ready? Yes. I was asking too much for my mouse to also work at the same time. I'm going to leave that there. So what we have is this is the document that we created behind you and beside you, that we created last meeting. And what I did is then I took it back to staff and we added some comments, that are in green, and some timelines.

2:11:59 And what I'd like to do is just kind of quickly go through each of those. What staff and I have put together, and then after the presentation, we are going to ask you to prioritize your top three, and there's a little priority level. So you can just put your initial or you can record it. I'll get Brian to write it in to our thing, because you guys don't have the computers with you. And you can record your top three after we do the presentation. Okay. We don't have this printed at all or anything? No, we don't have this printed.

2:12:45 I sent it to you electronically. But I think the best way for you to do it is to record what your top three are, and we'll just go in order and then we'll record those on the sheet. Could- And we'll see where we came up with. Remember when I- Could I get it printed? What? Could I get it printed? Yes. It's just a lot of paper. Oh. Well, don't worry about it. Don't worry. That's why I didn't, but that doesn't mean that was a good reason. It's a reason. Yeah. So let me go ahead and do this right now while we're waiting. Yeah, I'm going to go ahead. Okay, I've got it. It'll go to that printer right there. Okay. Thank you. Yes, and then we'll make copies. It's 15 pages, so.

2:13:31 Make copies. All right. So we differentiated between green and red. To a Google Doc. Green are some, remember we asked you what you wanted for elementary curriculum, and then you gave some information, advice, sources. What staff did is they added some other information, advice, sources that we thought it was important that you guys know, and then we put together a timeline. And this doesn't hold true for every item, but in general we have a, "Hey, do you want a quick timeline? And here's what it might look like, and here's how much time we're giving an estimate. If you want a more comprehensive one, then this is how much time. And if you want a really deep dive, this is how

2:14:16 much time." And so let me go through all of these. So for the elementary curriculum, here are some of the things that we added on there. We are fulfilling all the content requirements through both our core curriculum, and we've actually created guides for teachers that show alignment to the concepts, and their curriculum standards. And with outside resources that we have purchased, for instance, Mystery Science. We're also following the recommendations that the Oregon Education Department has released, just for clarity standards. With the instructional day at six and a quarter, 6.25,

2:15:01 and the importance of building solid literacy and numeracy understanding, it will be important to have the board advocacy to legislatures. Kind of like what Director Light suggested with our capital thing, our capital expenditures. I say thing because that's clear to me, and I realize when I say thing, it's only clear to me. So I'm trying to work on that. And how can we effectively share previous presentations that we've given in board meetings, small group meetings in other venues? So as we did that, when we were thinking about that, for a quick hit, we can do an overview of all of what we have, take a best of the presentations that have

2:15:49 been given over previous years. And we recognize that a couple of board members at least have not seen those presentations, right? Or may not have seen those presentations. And to that level, if that's what the board wants, we figure we can do that the next two or three months. It would take about 10 hours of staff time. If you want a more comprehensive of a start over, here's what we're doing, here's the hours, an audit of how many hours we're actually spending, then our estimate to get that level of clarity would be around 35 hours with three to four staff members. For instance, one of the requests I've had is, can we get how much

2:16:34 we're actually teaching all of the six required subjects? And that would take a little bit more time if we'd-- Seven, eight required subjects. Thank you for that. And then- Don, real quick. So is that 35 hours per staff member or 35 hours total? I think it's- All staff ... it's taking what we already have and adding some on. And that's a great question. I'm going to say 35 for all staff, but we'll ask Brian when he gets in here just to make sure. And if we want to do a deeper dive, a real kind of a curriculum audit, so to speak, then that would be at least three to six months process. So as you're thinking about these topics, thinking about

2:17:22 also, do we want to have the quick hit? Do we want to have the comprehensive or deep dive? Now, for some of these, it might be that we start off with a quick hit, and then once you get more information, the board might decide it was a deep dive. I think the thing I want to caution board members is one of the things we're trying to prioritize is particularly the instructional staff that we spend time in schools. And so every time we're working on something, we're not at schools as much. And that's not a problem, but just like anything, there are trade-offs for things, right? And so we thought this was a helpful way to present the items to you so you would have when you made

2:18:07 a prioritization, you'd kind of have it be educated on what we think. These are just estimates. They might go over or under what we estimated. But at least it's a starting point. So the next one is surveys for exiting student. Each year we have lost students. And these are some of the-- I'm not going to go over what we said. We want to make sure one of the things, and actually one of our public comments actually mentioned this, we want to also look at an asset base for both our staff when we talk about staff satisfaction, and students also finding out what do

2:18:52 you like? What keeps you here? I think we're not just looking at why did you leave, but what keeps you here. I would like to do interviews as part of my entry process, this is a note I put in, with people who have left or chosen not to come. So for instance, we get notifications for kindergartners that are going to an online school, and reaching out to some of those kindergarten parents and saying, "Hey, what is it about the online school that you liked?" I think we get better information than just getting the survey. I have asked all my colleagues, we're part of the large district coalition, and I asked specifically if anyone had an exit survey for families. The only one that came close was a survey that

2:19:39 4J has. Nobody else. We're talking Portland, all Clackamas have an exit survey that they give. So we would also, if we develop one, we'll be breaking new ground. But I did get one from 4J. What did 4J say about the response rate? It wasn't very effective- Yeah ... is what they said. That's why I would rather do as part of my entry, which I'm planning to do anyway, ask this as a question and maybe specifically ask families that we know have left, "Why did you leave?" If they're willing to talk to me. Director Buru. What is Synergy? Synergy is our student information system that we use. So that gives us the data.

2:20:27 So if the quick hit would be a report using added fields to Synergy to compile information of what we're seeing. So we're just actually using the data to make some guesses, maybe followed up with some focus group surveys. We figured to do that well That would take, and maybe use or adapt the surveys that we have from other districts, which is four days. That would take about six months to do that well. For a comprehensive surveying current families about why they're staying, use the entry plan process to call families, hold focus groups to develop recommendations. We're estimating a one to one and a half year timeline. Really, it's making sure that we have a

2:21:15 broad enough plan or a broad enough set of responses to make really good guesses. And it takes time. And the last thing, and it might not be a deep dive, is there are firms that actually do this work, and they will actually say, "We will give you more students. We will guarantee that we take your projection, and we go above your projection. And for every student that we get that is above the projection or above where you are, you give us X amount of money." So it's not exactly a deep dive, but that's one thing we could do. We would have to do an RFP.

2:22:01 It would actually probably be less than the one to 1.5 years. The problem is, there's a financial implication to that. There are a number of different companies that do it. The one that I'm familiar with was actually, they're out of Memphis, Tennessee, and Memphis had the same problem with declining enrollment. And that company helped stem the problem and added onto it in Memphis, Shelby County, Tennessee. I'm just personally familiar with that. There are many other groups that do that, though. Okay. All right. Student behavior. So we have what the board put, again, in black. What we added is we have to understand the harm. We'd want to make sure that we're also understanding the

2:22:47 harm of exclusionary practices. And what I mean by harm is, sometimes it's helpful to do exclusionary practices like suspension to get a family or a child's attention, but when we keep on suspending the same child over and over again, it's obviously not working, and we need to do things that work and things that don't work. In some of these, we have to make sure that we are still in compliance with state and federal laws that drive practice. So, one of the things that makes a public school great is that we accept all students no matter what their circumstance is. And some of our students are coming to us with some troubling issues that

2:23:33 we have to address, and we have some things in place to address those that I think the district does well, but whatever policy we do on student behavior, we cannot provide further jeopardy by having, for instance, exclusionary practices. If someone qualifies for special ed, we could run into a real lawsuit there. We want to make sure that we provide an overview, make sure the board has an overview of what we actually have. We have behavior specialists. We have an autism specialist that works and advises teachers on these. We have our behavior system. We think that we want to make sure we look at the data

2:24:18 because one of the things that I have done previously, for instance, particularly in DC, was when we actually made everyone collect their data and analyze their data, there were some trends that popped up. So for instance, if we saw an uptick in behavior in the cafeteria for second period lunch, then the solution would be, let's have some more administrators during second period lunch to look at that. If we see, for instance, a lot of referrals from a particular classroom, then we can take an asset-based approach and make sure the teacher has the training needed to handle discipline practices or to look to see maybe we need to rebalance

2:25:04 classrooms or do things like that. But actually looking at the data and making that a practice of the district provides a lot of helpful information. And then the other thing we needed, again, was we might need to add advocacy at the state level, and we want to get some staff surveys about the current level of supports, where they think we're doing well and maybe where we have some room for growth. And I kind of mentioned this, is that we are doing a lot of things well, and we want to make sure that in part of this, we first report on

2:25:50 the highlights where we are working well to restore relationships. That's the best way, if we look at the research, of ensuring that kids have appropriate behavior. And I want to say this very clearly. I believe students need to have the freedom to learn, and teachers need to have the freedom to teach. And when there are disruptive behaviors, we don't ignore that. We don't say, "Oh, this is what it is." We work hard to find solutions to each of the big, serious behaviors that we see by looking at data. Some practices are going to take a little bit longer to implement, but the payoff at the end

2:26:38 is great. Some, we might need to do things like rebalance classes or look at different placements. But I think this is one where we need to have patience, and we need to have almost a step-by-step approach of where we are And we also need to understand what is the extent of the problem, based on the data that we have currently from the last year as well as this year. So our quick hit would be to do an overview of the current data, the trends we are seeing, and the work building base teams are doing to create. So kind of giving you a lay of the land. We figure we could do that well within three months. This is one where maybe once you get the lay of the land,

2:27:23 you want to shift towards a more comprehensive approach, or even a deep dive. So, if we did a comprehensive approach, we would have to do the same as we did above, plus doing some focus groups, some observations, and some survey work about the perceptions of discipline to really see what we need to do comprehensively to see if we actually need to really change our whole approach. And then, a deep dive would be additional options for refining or adjustment. We didn't really have a good differentiator between a deep dive and a comprehensive approach. Okay. I guess the deep

2:28:09 dive is adding on training and adding on more interventions which might have some budgetary implications. Now I'm scrolling down. Let me just take a pause there for those first three things. Does anybody have any questions? Because that's a lot of information at one time. Yeah. I guess, because the exit survey was one that I really advocated and also the policy one, the way that it's framed in this document is not at all what I understood. For instance, if we go to the school discipline thing, I don't know that any of us said we need to change our school discipline policy, but it seems

2:28:56 like a lot of what you're saying up there is related to let's rewrite our policy, let's reexamine. And my point was, we just need to understand it and be able to articulate it so that the public understands it. Yeah. And, so, I don't remember what you- So what I said is the quick hit is kind of what that is, right? A report-- Let me make sure I get to the right one. An overview of current data trends we are seeing and the work of the building base teams are doing to create productive learning environment for everyone. We figure we can give you a really good, solid report within three months, and I think that's more of what you were asking for, Bob.

2:29:42 But let's say that we wanted to go deeper. Here's some of the work we're thinking about. So for this part, which is really what you said, that's more of the quick hit, and that's not really doing anything else but looking at existing data. If we want to do a deeper dive, these are some of the, in green, some of the things that we need the board to think about so that we don't run amok of them. And so that's maybe a little bit the danger in providing kind of options within the options. But we want this to be comprehensive and move forward. Does that make sense to you? Yeah. If it doesn't, please let me know.

2:30:29 This- I think you should know what you do already, and you should be able to articulate it, right? Yeah. Albert Einstein said, "If you can't explain something simply, you don't understand it well enough." Yeah. I think I erred on the side of time because there's a lot of priorities. I think with the discipline, we can give a pretty solid report, maybe even before three months, because we do understand it, and we do have the data readily available. This was just giving some-- We have to couch everything into one package that we can make sure that we have the staff time to give a really comprehensive report that you're not saying, "Well, I want more of this," and we're giving another report. We'd rather do it well one time than

2:31:16 maybe not do it as well a couple of times. Yeah. It also gives us some time, like for instance, we can make this available to board members who would like to see it to say, "Hey, does this meet the expectation that you have? Can you give us some feedback so that when we do give the report, it hits all the buttons?" Okay. But great question, and what was the thing with the survey you were talking about? So, the survey about surveying current families about where they're staying, and entry plans. To me, that's Newton's laws of

2:32:04 motion, right? It's like things at rest will tend to stay at rest, right? Unless people have an outside force that's pushing them out of the district, people are going to stay where they are, right? And so I'm not sure what that buys you. What I've been hearing since we started is we have fewer students. We're losing students. That means funding, that means teachers- Right ... that means support staff. And, just my simple analysis, we're losing more students than any other district in the county as a percentage. And so there's a reason,

2:32:49 and if we don't ask the question, then Stop complaining, right? Because there's a reason behind it. Yeah. And it's not necessarily going to be easy to get that information, but it's really important if we want to change it. I agree with you. And the way I tried to structure this is, we can try to see what information we get on a survey, but my previous experience is that we're not going to get great information. And so it's much better to have to do calls to find out the parents who did not come and why, as well as ask parents, "Why are you staying?" Right? Because there might be some things that we don't

2:33:35 know are popular. And it could be, like a theory I'm working with is some parents might have a particular school they're interested in, but because of transfer policies or whatever, they're not able to get there. And so that might be a clue if we change our transfer policy. I guess what I'm trying to-- and maybe I should've said this from the very beginning, and this was verified by my colleagues. I don't know that we're going to get great information with an exit survey or giving a survey to people who we know have chosen not to come, who for instance are sending their kindergartner to an online school that has a one-day option, what we're seeing.

2:34:22 I think it's much more important for me or someone on our staff to assign someone to actually talk to these parents and ask them why with a script, and that just takes time to have the capacity to do that, but that's much more effective. And so maybe even asking some if questions. "We see that you chose an online school. If the district had a similar program, would that influence you to come back to the district or not?" There's a lot of trends out there, for instance, micro schools. "If we did a micro school based on a theme, would that cause you to come back?" Those types of having a trained in getting a script would be, I think, much more comprehensive and better way to get the information I

2:35:09 think we all are seeking. Yeah. And I don't know that we're going to get that in a survey. Yeah. And it depends on how you define a survey. Right. A phone survey can be a survey. Right. But I think the people that are leaving for religious reasons will be glad to talk to you. Yes. I think people that are leaving for discipline reasons will be glad to talk to you. Exactly. People that have a bone to pick will be glad to talk to you, and it would be good to know. I agree. So- And I think some of that I can do in my entry plan as with I'm talking to groups of parents. Yeah. But I think to get a real robust set of data that helps guide us to where we are, that's going to be a longer process. And I guess I'm just doubting the efficacy of an actual paper survey or a survey that we send to someone, because none of my colleagues in the

2:35:54 larger districts where they're having a similar problem have found that to be a good use of their time and resources. I do know when you have people calling, asking these questions, that is a better-- and we're going to get better data. So I should've been a little bit more clear on that. Thank you for pushing me. At least from my position, I'll speak to Bob's request for exit surveys. That's been something I've been asking for for two, three years when we first started seeing the dramatic drop in enrollment. And yes, I love definitive data. And the longer you take, the more you spend, the more you put into it, the better data you get. I want information prior to this next budget cycle, because I think we need to look at the

2:36:41 trends. I have a different experience with survey data. When we did the interim search, we asked Grenmier to do a stakeholder survey, and I think we got 560 surveys back. And again, from an identification of trends, it was very helpful. And that's what I want as a board member. As we're grappling with the issues of enrollment, which has a severe impact on our revenue, I think we need to take a rifle shot rather than a shotgun approach or hope that this new thing or whatever will not only stem the flow, but get a reversal.

2:37:28 I think it's also important, I agree with you, to know why people are staying. What are we doing well? But the loss of 2,500 plus students says to me that as a board, we need to be more active in determining the why. Why did they leave? Is there something actionable there? It may not be perfect, but again, I keep feeling the impetus. I don't want to take a year, year and a half- And that's- ... before we can actually make the decision. And that's why we have the different approaches. Yeah. And I appreciate that. This is very, very helpful. I'm not sure that we have the time to have the discussion, just given the lateness of the hour.

2:38:13 Yeah. It might be something we want to push off to the work session on the 28th. Right. I just think that it's-- I've heard anecdotally from a lot of constituents their perception of what's making them not to want to be in Springfield and as a- Right. Yeah. And I think I've heard some of those, too. But I've also, interestingly enough, I had a conversation with a parent who's well-connected in the county, and one of the things this parent says is, "My kids have had a great experience all the times that they're there." So we have to differentiate what it is, because I know there are a lot of parents who are very, very happy with what we're

2:38:59 doing, right? And I acknowledge that. Yeah. But we have, again, we have 2,500 students that are no longer here. So their experience was different somehow. Yeah. As a board member, I don't know how, or I don't know the prevalence of a reason, and I think the better we know coming into... I'm not anticipating that the legislature's just going to dump buckets of money on us. No, nor am I. So it's really, really important to know- Right ... why these folks don't feel served for whatever reason it is. And the nice thing, the good thing about the survey, I have an example, though it wasn't met with great enthusiasm, and we do have some names of people who have left us. We can send it to them, or we can try to

2:39:47 the ones that we have the best contact information and see what kind of response rate we get just on sending this random survey. If we don't get it, then we know we're going to have to do a much more kind of calling comprehensive process. Because Lane County does have the information of students who have withdrawn or left. It's going to be trickier for the students who have never enrolled. That's going to be a little bit harder. But then they were never part of our student enrollment count. Yeah, that's true. So- Yeah ... I'm really concerned with the ones who were here- And then left ... and for whatever their reason- Yeah ... they left. And we know it's just making sure we have up-to-date contact information. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Okay, so good news is we already took care of this one, board meeting calendar. So we're going to move on past that really quickly. I want to add one thing-

2:40:32 Uh-huh ... to that. I was neglectful- Oh ... in that we have sort of gone with the 6:00 start time. That wasn't ever an explicit board decision. So maybe that's something we want to talk to. Right. And then that's, you see my note up there. My only note is need to add in start time. Okay. So that is the one decision. You can always start... I went back and listened to the meeting, and you could make an argument for either way. Right? I think we said, but we never voted on it, and we said we would talk about it in a future meeting. So we do need to talk about that. There's all kinds of different ways you can do that.

2:41:17 We could go back to a 7:00 PM start time, but then it could be a late night for like this meeting right here is a good example. It could be a later night for everyone. Well, and again, my intent is to make it an intentional decision from the board- Right ... rather than- Yeah ... laissez-faire. So, I'll go back. Let me hit beyond. We can do it backwards. We can do a decision-point memo at work session on the 28th, and on, I'll just add this, on start times. The pros and cons of starting at 6:00, which I've already outlined some in some things. Like for instance, you could start at 6:00 and have your executive session after,

2:42:05 or because really you're, for like today, you started at 5:00. Or you could move it back to 7:00, keep the executive session at 6:00. It might be a longer night. So I think that- You could have work sessions start- Yeah ... at a different time than- That's right ... your regular meeting. So there's a lot of ways to do that. And per your policy, that is one of the prerogatives of the board chair to kind of organize and call those meetings at the time. And what I'm hearing is you want to get some feedback from the- Love that. Yeah. Great. All right, superintendent evaluation process was handled in executive session. I just put it up here because this is one of the things we talked about. All right, 10-year capital improvement plan. So what I've gotten, I've asked Brett, and he's actually

2:42:52 provided a straw man on a facilities advisory committee process and timeline that I think we would need to work on, and that's just what it is. My quick hit comprehensive and the quick hit is we've prepared a proposal. We can give it to the board at a future meeting that we determine, and we can mark it up and say, "Hey, we like this. We don't like this." It's a straw man. This is to me is probably more of an order of operations proposal than it's either a big, medium, or large, or small, medium, or large. Comprehensive is that any substantial

2:43:39 changes or proposals that the board makes, that would be the comprehensive. So you'd actually look at this, say, "Hey, here are the things." If we want, it's hard to quantify the deep dive until we know the structure and purpose of the committee. So some of the things, and I actually referenced this with another item that I said this maybe would be good to fold into a facility, omnibus facility committee. It could be, for instance, land swaps or housing, things like that. We could maybe all put it into this big facilities committee meeting, and we have some ideas of who should make that up, and we can further refine those. Okay? Legal counsel at meetings. What I have for

2:44:26 you is we do have, we asked our current attorney how much that would be. I think we need to, and I could draft a proposal that says this is what they said, and we can do some kind of combination of it based on their rate. Or if you want to have some other options, we're going to need to do an RFP, and that would probably take till November to really give people enough time, just to let you know on that one. So I could work within whatever we have, and if you're okay with that, that would be October 12th we could get that to you. Policy BG and DFA review update. I have a BG straw man, but I don't think we

2:45:12 should do that. I believe that in our current policy That we already have, board members can visit in ways that they think are appropriate. I would like us to clarify some definitions and language, and this might be a good place for me to bring this policy to the board policy committee now that you have that, and move from there. Again, I have a straw man here, but given the hour and the capacity, I don't know that we're ready for that today. And since we have a process, let's just use that as our first test case. Okay. Student performance and academic updates. We can give you updates after every interim assessment, and we get the

2:45:59 data and we're processing it. Like for instance, i-Ready gives us a lot of data, and they give us some decks that we can share. We can certainly share that in a coherent way and a predictable way, and put that on our board schedule. If you want to go deeper and above that analysis of assessments and report how the assessments are linking to the support and actions we give on the central office team, because we really are trying to do a database decision-making process, then that might take a little bit longer time to get that at the level that would be appropriate for the board. And then a deep dive would be just revamping our whole entire model, and that would take at least one year plus to fully do that. Okay?

2:46:45 My sense is we're more of right here to start off with, and then maybe go from there. Okay. Attendance issues. A quick hit is three times a year, we give updates to the board on attendance and regular attenders, so that you're not seeing where we are when the data is embargoed and we can't actually share it with you. We can give you where we think we are at a regular cadence that we put in our board meeting document. A deeper analysis of why students are regular attenders and what gets students to school every day, using survey in a focused conversations, that would be, we would work on this

2:47:33 year, have proposals that we would start for the school year next year. That's what that process would be. That gives us a chance to say, I think when we initially looked at the data, we have a group of students who are not at 90%, but not too far from 90%. They're like 80 to 90, 75 to 90. I think that's one of the first groups we want to target and see, because if we get that group, the numbers that we saw-- and do you have that off the top of your head, Brian, about how many kids that was? It was a substantial amount of kids that fell into that range. That's going to be one of the first things we do, and we could do that and

2:48:19 see how we do with the reports that we offer three times a year. If we want to go deeper, that's going to take a little bit of time. We're almost done, because there was a lot we talked about. Student support system updates. We'll come back next meeting after feedback is gathered on the support updates. So, the way we saw this is getting information from our kids on what we can do to support them and I would like to have students, instead of having a typical advisory schedule, have them look at some of the issues that they care

2:49:06 about, work together collaboratively, give them some coaching and mentoring. And they would actually come to you in May with a proposal of what we think needs to change in the district. So the students would actually be sitting up here giving a proposal. I'm not quite sure, provide existing student reports to the board. This might be where we didn't get as clean or robust of what the board was looking for, so we made a guess. Taylor is meeting with staff members and the students this week, and so our idea is we'd like to come back to you when we get more information. Is there anyone who wants to provide some update that we might have missed on the student support systems updates?

2:49:52 So I don't know specifically, but I could imagine from my point of view, that providing existing student reports would be, we have the SEED survey the students do every year. We have some history that- Yeah ... I know the response rate is pretty low, but it's also we have it and it's statewide- Yeah ... so we can kind of compare how we're doing to the rest of the state. So I'm going to add on just on this real fast. That's kind of like the same horse, different color of the curriculum updates. When we have them, when we get the information, we're putting those on for information purposes to the board. Okay. I also like my idea. Well, we're going to do my idea of having the students come up and do a proposal for you as well.

2:50:39 Okay. Would be the same thing that once we got it and analyzed it and we're ready to present, we would. And we can put that on the calendar. All right. So staff well-being. Report on all we're doing to ensure staff well-being within, we think we can do that within three months, kind of what to your point, Director Brew, A deeper dive

2:51:24 would be, that takes about a year. I've actually done this with staff. So we would start off with a survey that we have access to, hold some focus groups, make sure that we give teachers at every school an opportunity, and I would actually go and talk to them about that, and then follow up with the data saying, "Here are our ideas." And then have maybe a regional meeting to discuss which idea they want us to pilot, and we would pilot it. Okay? That would be what we would do for a comprehensive. For a deeper dive, we would do all the above work with stakeholders and staff to bring specific recommendations. So that's a year to gather data, and then a year to pilot suggestions.

2:52:12 Okay? So we could just give you the data comprehensively and say, "Here's what we did," or the deeper dive is we do the data, and then we pilot one and look at the success. This is from previous experience. To do it well, it would take two years for that level. But staff would have lots of input, and they would direct us on the ideas. Community involvement, listening suggestions, that's already part of my plan of action. And it's already part of the requirements around the next iteration of the integrated guidance program application process that Dr. Megers is going to give you a report on. So we can give updates as planned on 10/26.

2:52:57 A more comprehensive model would be after those updates, we prioritize further understanding and have more focus groups. So remember on the 26th, I'm going to give you an update on what we're finding, what the community's saying. My suggestion is let me provide that update, and then if you feel more information is needed, we'll add that on to the priority list. Potential land development partnerships, that's the one I recommend we go-- I'll get you. We fold into the facilities advisory group. Director Langworthy. Yeah, I want to go back to the staff well-being. Uh-huh. I was going to pull the personnel report earlier, but I decided to pause and

2:53:42 ask it while we talked about staff well-being. I wanted to follow up on a question that I held in August. Where are we with the exit interview survey? So we do exit surveys. I tried to ask where we are with the latest one, because we only had, if you notice on what you approved, we had four resignations, one retirement, right? Mm-hmm. So we'd be asking the four resignations what happened. I don't know. I'm going to get with Dustin to find out exactly where we are. We have to be very careful with Oregon law that we don't discuss personnel meetings in open session. And so I have to check on is there a way to do that in executive session, and right now, that is not one of the reasons why you can

2:54:30 go to executive session. Or we need to make sure that we can give a broader impact of the resignations over the past quarter or the past half year. These were the big reasons why, which is what you asked for, at least what the big reasons are. I just have to make sure. This is one I want to get clearance on to make sure we're not getting ourselves in a pickle with Oregon state law when it comes to executive sessions and reporting out information. For instance, in other districts, we actually had this as a part of our personnel report, but that was always done in closed session. Mm-hmm. And in Oregon, we're not allowed to do the personnel reports in closed session. We would present it in closed session, and it would be voted on in open

2:55:18 session. It's a little bit different here. And so that's one where I have to build some understanding. Interesting. Would we be collaborating with... Well, yeah, I guess I see collaborating with SEA and OS. Yeah. If I did this, the overall staff wellbeing survey, I would like to collaborate with SEA, specifically Brandon, and have he and I go around and talk about like, so when we give the overall survey, then I have previously met with each individual school staff and said, "Hey, here's some questions we'd like you to answer, and the reason why we're doing this, and what we're going to do with the information." You have to do that, and then we would actually give them the unfiltered

2:56:05 information provided to the staff, as well as what our recommendations are based on that information. And I think this would be a perfect way for us to collaborate with SEA if we did that. But that is a longer process. Okay. And OSCA too. OSCA is right. All staff. Both. Okay. Thank you. The only differentiation we actually have, we differentiate it two ways. First of all, elementary, middle, high, or elementary, secondary, and then classified, certified staff is how I've done it in the past. Again, I want to make sure I work with SEA, and then I work within our established Oregon statutes to make sure we're not unintentionally breaking any

2:56:52 laws. Okay. Let's get back. Any other questions? All right. I'm taking too long here. I apologize. We've already taken care of the policy development process. You guys are scheduled to talk about the superintendent selection process. So we can skip through those. And the last one is explore the development of a local levy. The quick hit here is an overview of and possible discussions with similar communities that had success with a local levy And like for instance, Willamalane had success with theirs. Are there any lessons learned? Are there any things we need to think about as we're preparing for one? If we actually do the

2:57:39 comprehensive, would be that we actually get a committee together to discuss this, and have recommended actions needed to place that on the ballot and how we can effectively support without breaking lobbying laws that we have. And so that's the formation of possibly an outside advocacy group if we found one. And a deep dive would be a combination of the first two. I think we want to prepare ourselves to understand the feasibility of that, and to see if there are some districts that have similar profiles to ours, what they did if they had a levy, and what they were successful on. That would be my first step. Okay?

2:58:24 Can you go back down to page 13, I think? Which one? The one right before the last one. Got it. This one. Okay. Potential land development. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I apologize. So for the potential land development and partnerships. Yes. Here you go, Bob. Thank you. That's our recommendation. Doesn't mean we have to do that. If you want that as a separate committee, it would be similar to the levy work.

2:59:12 We'd want to find out if there are some jurisdictions like us that have done the potential land development partnerships, what made it successful, what didn't. I think we'd want to have a committee of people across the district that have expertise in this area on that. My thought was to fold it into the overall work of the facilities, have an omnibus, but if you don't like it, we can certainly separate it out. For myself, I would prefer to separate it out. Okay. I apologize about the microphone thing. I forget sometimes.

2:59:57 As do I, don't worry. All right. That's what I have. So what I'm going to recommend is you're ready to rank yours within. I would like to schedule meetings with board members, we can do it via phone, to say, "Hey, what questions do you have on this priority? Is there something that you want me to add that we don't add?" And then so we're ready to make some hard decisions on what we're going to prioritize at the September work meeting. Kind of like what you want me to get started on. What are the top three things that we get started on, and at what level do we want to have that? It could be the top four depending on what

3:00:44 the board chooses. And that will be on the agenda for the 28th? Yes. And in between there, I would like to schedule meetings with each of you to make sure I captured everything correctly and there's nothing on here that we're missing. And all we'll do at the work session is say, "Hey, here are the missing things that we had, and this is where it goes." So we don't go through this whole process a third time. Any comments or questions from board? No. Again, I will say, I guess I would like regular information on student achievement, student performance, and

3:01:29 just kind of those metrics and yeah. So something regular would be great with- And that's a low-level ask. That's what we're saying is a low-level ask. The only thing we would need is just to make sure that we put those on the board calendar that we already have established. Yeah. And that you give us some leeway to actually-- We might not be able to do it the month we get the data. It might have to be the month after. Yeah. That could be included as one of the priorities. That's not a real high-level ask. Yeah. If we have enough runway and we can put those on the calendar, that's what we're saying it's not a huge ask. Yeah. So that's kind of number one for me, and I guess, I think if we can get a sites and facilities committee going that can

3:02:16 do some work on the side is good. I think that the land development piece is integral with the sites and facilities. What I envision them getting a handle on all of our sites. It's property disposition of all of our properties and where we keep them. And so to me, it needs to work well with that group. So I would, yeah. So the way we were thinking about it, and I haven't had a chance to talk with Brett, is that we kind of have an omnibus committee that is more global, that takes care of all operational land-based decision-making issues, and that there are maybe some sub-committees within that. So there could be a land use committee made up of the appropriate

3:03:01 people. There could be a capacity committee, a facilities planning committee to outline what we think is needed. That can be one way to do the facilities committee, but we can also just have separate committees. Mm-hmm. I'm just trying to give options of what we could do. That's one way we could do it. And these are your priorities, so what I'm going to do, my only job is to say, it's almost kind of playing name that tune We can do that in this many days. What I can tell you is we can't do all these things, so we have to have some priority with them. And so if you want everything at a surface level, we might be able to

3:03:48 do all the things. If we want some that are comprehensive or a deeper dive, we're going to have to put off on the back burner some of the things. So just so I'm clear, we're just going to put our individual priorities to you in a meeting? Yeah. You're going to come to the meeting on our work session ready to say, "These are my top three priorities." And if you can actually do that ahead of time, we can have it up there, and it might be that we all agree on the same priorities and there's not much of a discussion. It could be that we have to make some difficult decisions on what we cut and what we don't cut. Sure. But I didn't think it would be helpful to do that without us telling you how much time we think some of these things would take.

3:04:33 No, it's appreciated. I think, yeah. Then we're just guessing. Any other comments or questions? I think one of the advantages of allowing more time on the 28th is to clarify our particular interests, because obviously, I don't think we have time this evening to do that. No, I like it. Yeah. Well, there might be time. I don't know if there's mental capacity. I'm not sure that I have mental capacity right now, so time. Okay. Thank you. What do we have? Appreciate it. This has been very helpful. Moves us on to agenda item six under discussion B, policy

3:05:19 immigration. Yeah. So that's very simple. I'm recommending, which you've already had, that we go with the proposal as OSB has presented it, the sample policy, which you have a copy of. If you have already read it because you did get this last meeting, if you have some markups that you have, we can hear those now, but my recommendation is we go with it as it is. And this is first read? This is first read, yes. So when we bring it back again, in the interim period, you can also weigh in. Right, but that is also what we were supposed to do between this period now. And so I guess I'm going to ask, does anybody have any things that

3:06:07 they see need to be changed on this? You can make a case there's some redundant things in there. Mm-hmm. But for the purposes and the timeline we have to approve it by, which is the end of September, this policy works, and then as we go into it, this might be something that the board policy committee can look at and refine and maybe take out some of the redundancies. But right now, my recommendation to the board is we keep the policy as presented. So this one right here that says proposed- And this was reviewed by Taylor Madden? Yes. Okay. I asked him to look at it, and that's why I'm giving you this one instead of the one where I took out a bunch of stuff. He didn't like that one as much. He liked this better. So that's why we're going with that.

3:06:52 And have we gotten input from some of our stakeholders, particularly the Latino community? No, we have not. Okay. Since I think it largely pertains to them, I would- Okay ... suggest maybe we try to put that. I'll try to see if we can send this to some folks for their comments as well. Thank you. And can report back if we have any substantial. This is the one that really is very clear, and probably overdoes it. There are some redundancies in here, but the feedback I got from Taylor is these redundancies help give some comfort, and they are much more aligned to what we're

3:07:37 already doing anyway. Okay. Did you have a question? Just my recollection was the previous version we got still had alternative language, some different- Yeah ... and so I didn't really spend time reviewing because- So the one thing we can say thank you for that, the superintendent is going to be the primary point of contact for coordinating interactions. We're going to add that on to the policy. And according in the district, we don't need the immigration liaison because the superintendent is the primary point. And then we're identifying an alternate position. She'll serve as the alternative point. That could be Dr. Meggert or Brett, or something like that.

3:08:22 There is one version I saw that had the principal as the alternate point of contact for their school and just taking out a second person. For a district our size, I would recommend we're going to have a second person, and then we can have the principal as the primary contact for their school. Thank you for that. Those are the only things we had to add. And so I as the superintendent, because it's that important, want to be the primary contact for this. Again, though, we did discuss, of course, you never know with this administration what's going to happen. We think there's no great evidence, and I want to remind the board that this has actually happened. This has happened away from school, but we don't see great

3:09:08 evidence that immigration enforcement agents have come on to any public school so far. Doesn't mean they won't, because they surprise me every day. Comments or questions? Thank you. All right. I think I'm up next, too. You are. Yeah. So reports and discussion, agenda item seven, superintendent report. Yep. Okay. This is fun. This will be good I just wanted to give, so far we have the one-year action plan. I think you guys know that in my board communication, I've been giving you of where we are, but I thought it'd be

3:09:54 nice to have the highlights of what I've done so far. So remember, we introduced this on the 10th of August, so we're almost about a little bit over a month out. This is just a sampling of what I've been able to do so far. I'm pleased that I've been able to really prioritize time on my calendar to get to know the district. So, so far, I've visited every school in the district, most at least twice. I can't say I've visited every school twice, but we're there. I've met with every principal to understand their vision and learn about the schools. I've attended district PD, as you heard in the comments, and introduced myself to staff in a number of different places, not just one. I've been able so far to meet with a number of community leaders, including last week with the Chamber of Commerce,

3:10:39 director of the Springfield Chamber of Commerce, who's going to connect me to some others. I've met with city leadership, meaning the city manager and assistant city manager. I met with them last week as well. We met with the Willamalane because that partnership is really key to what we're doing. We met with him about three or four weeks ago, Brian. I've attended a lot of community events like the Springfield Block Party yesterday, the NAACP Gala, and I've gone to, so far, three athletic contests, one boys soccer, one girls soccer, and an away football game. Unfortunately, I was out of town the week we had two home games, and I could have gone to both, but I plan to go

3:11:25 to whenever we have home games and if I can to the away games. So Corvallis. And I'm happy to report it was a good effort with Corvallis. If you don't know, the Springfield High School football team blanked them, and probably would've scored more if we didn't get penalized for excessive celebration and things like that. But it was nice to see that. Though the superintendent for Corvallis, when I texted him I was coming, he said, "Keep in mind we are a soccer school." For whatever that means. So he was lowering expectations even before I got there. I laughed at that. So I've met with some parent groups like the Springfield High School Athletic Boosters.

3:12:11 I attended the school beautification that was a joint effort between the administration and PTA, was able to talk to PTA at Two Rivers, Dos Rios. I'm going to attend this Thursday, the PTA, the barbecue cookout, at Guy Lee. There'll be elote and hot dogs, I believe. So I'll be there at six o'clock. I'm also tomorrow going to have my first small focus group, with a group of parents, at 6:30 to talk about issues, which I think is a better way to get feedback. So I'll be able to report next time how that went, and hopefully that will incentivize the word on the street is this is a good use of time and they'll actually listen and we'll incentivize more.

3:12:56 That's been a little bit of a challenge to get those scheduled. I appreciate the group from Guy Lee to actually helping me get that scheduled. So we'll look, I'm excited about that. I've met with staff. My goal is to meet with all staff, but this is going to have to be a year-long process just because of our contract and meeting laws. But I've met with Thurston and Centennial Elementary School so far, just one-on-one meetings to talk about what my vision is, how we want to support them. I thought both of those went really well, and I just talked about the small group listening session. Okay. The dual language. We had a productive dual language immersion meeting. We still have to work on the follow-up in the committee, and we're doing that, and we plan to give you an update at the work session on

3:13:44 where we are. But this is just what we did at the meeting and the feedback. I think there's cautious optimism, but as you heard from the public comments, I think people want to see now what's next and make sure that we're following through on that. I really liked it. For me personally, I like the tabletop exercises. It was different from what I'm doing to you right now, where a bunch of people talking. We did do a little bit of talking, but we spent the majority of our time, about an hour I would say, getting feedback from the participants that were in the meeting. One of the deltas that we see-- Well, I don't know why

3:14:30 there's a blank slide. Yeah. One of the deltas that we do see is we're still not getting enough participation from our students, our families, that we're serving the English language learners. So we got to figure out how to crack that nut. We have reached out to some groups like Safer, for instance, to see if they can help assist us with that. And they said they would get back with us, so we're looking forward to that. Okay. All right. Instead of having this, we just have this as familiar faces, new places. So this is all of our movement that we've had within the district. I think the theme here is we've moved people within the

3:15:17 district administratively, except for the one loan, or maybe two loan, as myself. I guess I could be in a new place. And Dr. Cassan, who's our special programs assistant director, works with Nicole. She is a new face in a new place, but she brings a world of experience, so we're excited to have her. Everyone else has previous experiences with the district, maybe in some different roles. We've had some assistant principals that we've moved up to principal positions, and we've had some people that are in new roles, going to the principal position. Okay. This is challenges and opportunities, the truss repair.

3:16:05 You've already gotten this language and these pictures, but we thought it'd be nice to show the public where we are and to have that available. This is a picture of Two Rivers Dos Rios after they've taken away and where the truss repairs are. I thought you'd like to see, this is what the epoxy injection looks like that we voted on. And this is an example of at Walterville where we need the epoxy going in, and you can kind of see the cracks in there and how we have to shore it up. This is the most important slide. We had a remarkably smooth and uneventful opening of school.

3:16:51 You heard it a little bit from our SEA vice president, but there was just a really good feeling in the schools that we went to. We had district staff out at every school. Every school got visited multiple times by multiple staff members, and it wasn't an inspection. It was like, "Hey, how can we help you? Is there anything else you need?" We did do some walking around. What we saw was a lot of intentional teaching of routines, which is great. That's what we need to do in these kind of first three days. And as we go in, I plan to get to some schools this week. I'd like to start seeing some instruction started because there's no reason why we can't. We have to make sure that every second counts. And so we have some pictures for you. Come in, we are awesome. That's true.

3:17:39 Students all grades and were in classrooms on Thursday. And then on Friday, we had everybody but our kinders. We did the staggered start for kinders, as Mr. Brandt would know. And if you weren't at Springfield, it was great. They had for their freshmen on our first day, I would've liked to go to school. It'd be great if school could be like this every day. We had an assembly and there were cookies that the freshmen could get and take a bite of. There was also a DeLorean on display for all of you "Back to the Future" fans. And the band was playing as the freshmen went in for their orientation. It was great, and I think the thing that's impressive is it was really a

3:18:26 student-led process that kind of did the orientation, kind of like for those of us who went to college, the old RA advisor type things. We had our students that did that, and so that was great. It was good to see in action. I was happy. I got to see them walking into the gym and was jealous that they got cookies and I didn't. We've had some really positive media coverage, which is what we want and need about the start of the first day. Even a story on KVAL, which was very slim on the actual story that went on, but there's a YouTube video that has both Brian and I doing a show, and it probably shows I need to work on sharing the floor a little

3:19:12 bit better. I did every once and again say, "Hey, Brian, do you have any thoughts on this?" You'll see it all on the YouTube if you look there. But we were very pleased with the coverage that we've gotten so far. In fact, the Register Guard, who was just here, did a deep dive in some of our schools. And I don't know if you saw the story about the crossing, the student who was working as the crossing guard safety patrol. But that was a great story, too. So we're very happy with the coverage. We're talking about attendance. My welcome back message was prioritizing help us by getting the kids to school every day. That's the best thing. Showing up is 90% of solving the problem. Okay.

3:20:00 This is something I sent to the administrators at the end of our first day. It was just, again, one of the smoothest openings, and I've been in a lot of openings over the course of my career. It's one of the smoothest openings we've had. It was remarkable. We kept on knocking on wood of like, "Well, something has to go wrong soon." I guess that is the bill. Maybe the bill is that we just handled with the repairs is the one thing that was the little fly in the ointment. So that's where we are. Here's a picture of the aforementioned Springfield block party. I stood around and watched people, got wet. We didn't have a booth that attracted a lot of people. All we could offer was Willamalane Jeopardy,

3:20:47 and compared to what I saw some other booths getting where they had spin the wheels, we didn't get as many. And so that's my report for this month. Any questions? All right. Well, that was 11 in 24, so that was probably good. We should aim for all of those. All right. Thank you. Sean- Thank you ... one thing I guess I would just mention that next time maybe you talk with our partners at the city and Willamalane and sub, talk to them about maybe having resources help us out with our sites and facilities committing if they would be willing to- I can bring that up- Because I think that is some valuable information ... at our Team Springfield meeting upcoming. Yeah. So I'll make sure I ask that to say, "Hey, we're thinking about forming this. We would love to have some

3:21:34 representation from Team Springfield." Thank you. And just for those of you who don't know, Team Springfield consists of city manager leadership, Springfield Utility Board leadership, and Willamalane leadership, and the school system leadership meeting together regularly to talk about issues and have mutual supports, and that's worked really well. I'm impressed that the district has that. That's a great topic for us, so thank you for the prompt. So moving on then to agenda item seven under Reports and Information, Board Communication and Comments. No particular order.

3:22:19 Okay. I don't have anything. So I will. I had the opportunity to attend the NAACP Gala, with Dr. Stover and some of the rest of you. That was a great fun event. Then last Wednesday, I was invited to attend the board meeting for the Community Alliance for Public Education, CAPE. I think many of you are familiar with them, and that was really exciting and I hope Dr. Stover will have a chance to talk to them too. They do some great work. They ask some hard questions, which I can appreciate. But I really enjoyed talking with them.

3:23:04 And then today, before this marathon, I spent six hours at a- ... retreat for the Wildish Community Theater Board. And that was really productive and so thank you. Well, Bob, you're running the ultramarathon today, right? That's right. Yeah, I- Director Grant ... can just jump in there and just say, I shared that it was an exciting opening of school. I successfully launched all three of my kids into school. I even got to see Brian hanging out at Thurston Elementary that first day. It was nice to see staff everywhere. And by all accounts, I heard it was very successful.

3:23:51 And then, I did also get the chance to join the Springfield Education Foundation meeting that they had recently. So I jumped right on in there and it was a fun meeting to be able to learn about some of the feedback from a program they sponsored for a summer hike. And it was nice to see the work that they're doing. It was cool to see all of the work they're doing for fundraising and the causes they're supporting. So I'm happy for the appointment there and looking forward to more work with them. Okay. Thank you. Director Langworthy? Yeah. Thank you for the presentation tonight. That was great. It was great to see everything that you're doing. Yeah, I too got to get my kid off to school.

3:24:39 She's a crossing guard as well. She's a big fifth grader now, and school's been a lot of fun. I've been out of town, so I haven't been able to do much regarding my board volunteer service. But I do look forward to more board meetings where we get to talk about, perhaps SCA, OSCA, so the classified and the licensed, having a spot at the table to be able to share what they're doing, how they're doing. And something I am excited to mention, I'm looking forward to bringing onto the agenda AI

3:25:27 pause policy or talking about screen time for our students. I know there's some, like Los Angeles, they have definitely dove into their putting a pause on their screen time. So, I look forward to these conversations and everything else that's coming up. That's it. Thank you. Well, we still have one more item, so I will be brief. I just want to thank board members for all the work you're putting in, your committee work, your work on the agendas as we move forward. I want to thank Superintendent Stover for being receptive and inclusive and getting out and visiting.

3:26:14 And I know that, Brian, you're doing the same thing. So, I like the direction. So- Mr. Chair ... moving on. Yes? Just a reminder that we said that this would be a time if we had any ideas for future agenda items. I don't have any, but Director Langworthy mentioned it, and if anyone else has any now, I think it's the time we set aside for that. Yeah. And Amber and I have already received, as chair and vice chair, sort of the rough draft of the next meeting. And did you send that to all board members? Both-- Yeah. Yeah. So we've established a schedule and when we have more time, I can review that with you. But I think it will really help us be more

3:27:02 structured, get more done. So, I'm definitely looking forward to that. So, the last item- Director, like before- Oh, yeah ... you did this, I want to ask, is AI something I should add to the priority list and come up with kind of like the same type of thing, or not? Because that is a big topic as well. From my perspective, yes. But also including just digital responsibility overall. I think we owe it to our kids and our families to join hands in this process. Yeah. Great. Thank you. Sounds like a policy committee thing as well, right? We don't currently have a policy around AI in

3:27:48 specific. The state is working on some. I have a ton of model policies. This is something I've been interested in a while. I've got a ton of model policies. I actually shared with Director Langworthy some guidance we'd given in other districts. So, I feel prepared. I just need to add that on to the thing. I'll try to provide an update of how we add that on and just email it to the board Okay. Yeah. And I see it sort of as a broad topic of AI, screen time, digital responsibility, whether something we might be contemplating as separate policies or a more inclusive policy, or things that

3:28:33 we want to take a look at as sort of watchdogs for the students. Yeah. I will be kind of leery about where we're crossing the line from governance into operational stuff. But I want to be supportive of the superintendent and the district, however that. So, I'll fulfill- I definitely feel like we need an AI policy. Yeah. And as Superintendent Stover indicated, there are districts that have already done this, and they're clearly at a board level and not... Gives guidance to the operations, but doesn't go beyond that. So, okay. Thank you again for your presentation. So,

3:29:19 moving then to agenda item 7C, the superintendent search. I'm going to give a quick overview because, again, of the late hour, and we've been here forever. It can be pretty much what we did as an interim search. So it starts with selecting a search firm. The timeline is sort of driven, I can tell you what's typical is that some districts are already having the conversation and did so in August. Okay. But usually the real work begins in October, and then might culminate again at the board's discretion, but

3:30:04 sometime in March, April, and then. So determining how inclusive, how collaborative we want to be. There's been some comments about wanting the district to be more inclusive. When we went through the acting process and the interim process, then part of that was driven in no small part by the timeframe. Acting was super short, 14 days. Interim was longer, but still somewhat shortened just because of the timeframe. So the permanent search gives the opportunity to be more

3:30:51 what the board would like to see, collectively decided. But it does start with having a search firm, and part of that is how extensive of a search do we want to do? Nationwide, regional. But I think keeping in mind assurances made to stakeholders, to the community about how that would look. And then the comments I think that we got through the Grenmier survey also I think helps inform us as far as things to be thinking about. So I would like to propose then this would something that we also discuss on the 28th, make some time to really flesh it out, start the process.

3:31:39 The RFP, and Grenmier did their work with the interim. There was a list of five interested companies or organizations, OSBA being one. But there's many more out there. So and what would that timeframe look like? When do we issue the RFP? What's the timeframe for submission of proposals? And then closing date. So that's the first step. Other questions? I'm sort of interested in taking an approach that delays a monetary commitment to the process before we have a

3:32:24 real chance to really evaluate the current progress. And I'm thinking that maybe there could be a happy medium between delaying the superintendent search, starting with an RFP, and maybe prioritizing community engagements first, right? And then start moving in that direction as we progress through. And the reason I say it is because if things are really starting to shape up that we're happy with how everything is already going, we may not need to have a monetary commitment at all, right? We may just reach a natural conclusion that, oh, sure, maybe we'll just extend this current contract. In which case, we can save the district some money and not having to go through a process that may not be necessary.

3:33:12 So I guess I'm just coming at it more from a our dollars matter at a time like this, and if we don't need to spend money on a process, then we don't know that we need to go to that process level just yet, I guess is my concern. So I don't know. I mean, that's just my thoughts on the matter. I'm certainly open to all of our suggestions, so... And in response to that, again, having made assurances to the stakeholders in the communities, in that preliminary decision, I think that that should include those voices. Yeah. So how would we do that? We did our community surveys literally as a survey, partly because it was expedient. We needed to get it done.

3:33:57 And I've heard from folks saying, "Well, I would've liked to participate more in some kind of a listening session type of format." So again, at the discretion of the five board members, we're in charge of that design. We usually work with a search firm, and even that is up to the discretion of the board I think you have to have some idea of the dollar value of the contract when we're selecting a consultant. We've got to give them some idea of the range that we may be weighing on that. Yeah, and that's a typical thing that you put in the job description. Usually we look at comparables, so districts our size,

3:34:45 our neighboring districts, things of that nature. But it gives at least a starting point to the potential applicant. Well, to Director Brandt's comment, I would think that we could do some effective listening sessions, some effective outreach, maybe with the assistance of a facilitator, the ESD superintendent, for instance, or someone else, where the expense would be minimal, but we would get that valuable data. Mm-hmm.

3:35:31 Anyway, that's all I'll say. And then at that point, we can have the discussion about this is what the community wants. Do we feel like we already have that, or do we feel like we need to go broader? And then if we do feel we need to go out again, then we can look then at hiring a firm. That's sort of the spirit of what I'm going after. Right. If there's things that we can do to not delay the overall process, but not necessarily commit to a larger dollar RFP, that makes sense to me that we can

3:36:18 do two things at the same time, right? Yeah. And I should point out that initiating the search doesn't mean they always conclude. Yeah. So, there are some districts that have gotten midstream, and the feedback they've gotten has been supportive, and so they've shortened the search. But those are, again, things that as a board we're going to want to discuss. So thank you for raising those questions, because I think it's important. And feel free, you can reach out to board members in other districts. I'm sure they'd be forthcoming in how their processes work, what didn't work, what did work, that kind of thing. So if you need contact information for some of the other board members, I could provide that.

3:37:06 Okay. Any other questions at this time? Okay, we may have set a record. So our next meeting is September 28th, 2026. It's a work session. It's scheduled at 6:00 PM. Keep in mind, you've probably already received notification. I think Marty actually sent something out about the Lane Regional. They've in the past called this their roadshow, but OSBA does a sort of a road trip through the ESDs, I should say, and then they meet with districts and give them an update. Part of it is usually an update on the upcoming legislative session,

3:37:52 what they're seeing is coming down. They've already sent some information out. But if you have the opportunity to attend, that would be great. There is a dinner that it starts with, but it gives you the opportunity to meet other districts, other superintendents, other board members, as well as- What was the date on that one again? ... from the statewide level. What day was that? Marty might know offhand. I can tell you in a second. I think you can find it. Oh, if that was one that came across my head... Oh, yeah. I'm going to be out of town during that period. I remember seeing that now. Thank you. October 12th and 13th. If I email as well, and then I email, get a response. Yeah.

3:38:37 There'll be one in his box. It is the 13th, and starts at 5:30, I think, with the dinner, and then the actual meeting starts at 6:00. So, all right. Anything else for the good of the order? Thank you to everybody. If there's anybody online still, thank you for attending. This meeting is adjourned at 9:40. Made it. Get them in. My pleasure.