Board of Education - Regular Meeting

Recording in progress

I now call this meeting of the Board of Education to order. I would like to remind everyone that some of our meeting presenters may participate via Zoom. Ms. Ozenski, may we have a roll call, please?

Trustee Baskett? Yes. President Feaster? Here. Trustee Muhammad? Here. Trustee Norton?

Here.

Trustee Schmidt? Present. Trustee Wilkins? Here. Trustee Wilkes?

Present. We have a quorum. Thank you, Ms. Ozenski. I would now like to introduce the non-voting member at the table, Jazz Parks, Superintendent of Schools.

Thank you, President Feaster.

I believe that brings it down to our land acknowledgement statement, and I generally turn it over to Vice President Wilkes, unless there's another trustee who would like to volunteer to read it. Trustee Wilkins, please. Thank you.

We acknowledge that the Ann Arbor Public School District occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of the Anishinabek, Three Fires Confederacy, the Ottawa, Ojibwe, Potawatomi. The taking of this land was formalized in a process alien to Native cultures by the Treaty of Detroit in 1807. the ann arbor public schools recognizes that many other native people lived on this land at different times including the fox sioux shawnee kickapoo miami musketoon and cherokee many of whom were forcibly removed from their homelands Acknowledgement by itself is a small gesture and does not exist in the past or solely in a historical context. Colonialism is a current, ongoing process, and we understand our responsibility in educating students about our participation. We further recognize the ongoing relationship and dependence upon and respect for all living beings of earth, sky, and water. It is our responsibility to care for this land, and we honor with our deepest gratitude the Native people who have and will continue to steward it for generations.

Thank you so much, Trustee Wilkins. I believe that brings us down to approval of the agenda. Trustees, you have been provided with the agenda in advance. Are there any changes or additions?

I do have one. Yes, Vice President Wilkes. Yes, so under item 11.4, it says approve closed session for August 27th. That's a Thursday. I just want to make sure that date is correct, or should it say August 26th?

Thank you, Vice President Wilkes. We will make that change. Do we need to vote on that change, Ms. Ozenski? Is there a motion to make that change? So move. Support. Support. Moved by Vice President Wilkes, supported by Trustee Baskett. Any discussion? Seeing none, this is on the change of the date for the closed session.

On the change as amended?

Correct. Correct. On the change as amended?

Can we change the agenda as amended? Approve the agenda? I'm sorry, approve the agenda as amended?

Yeah.

Would that be an agreeable? Is that the motion?

The motion is to approve the agenda as amended. Bill, support Trustee Baskett? Yes. Thank you. Thank you.

Ms. Sotensky, please.

Trustee Baskett? Yes. President Feaster? Yes. Trustee Muhammad? Yes. Trustee Norton?

Yes.

Trustee Schmidt? Yes. Trustee Wilkins? Yes. Vice President Wilkes?

Yes. Motion carries. Thank you, Ms. Olszewski. That brings us down to public commentary. The Board would like to remind everyone the individuals who have signed up for public commentary will have their name called and will be given an opportunity to speak. Commenters will receive up to four minutes, and the public commentary period will be limited to 45 minutes. When your name is called, please come forward and speak at the microphone. To help manage your time, a clock will be placed on the screen in front of you. We would like to remind everyone that public comments generally pertain to Ann Arbor Public School District matters. Comments about any individual or individuals are expressly prohibited. Also, please understand the board members do not respond to public commentary, but we will listen carefully and we'll follow up as appropriate. Ms. Ozenski, how many signs do we have for tonight? We have four signed up this evening. Thank you.

First is Lyndon Dibble.

Hello, everyone. Good evening. I'm Lyndon Dibble, a candidate for Ann Arbor Public School Board. I'm here to speak about two issues tonight, the first being transparency and communication from within the district. I did not have a car available to me this evening, so I kindly requested one of my friends to drive me here. However, many people don't have friends who would be able to do that. This location is unsustainable and is unequitable to the community at large. I would recommend the board, and I myself propose that we make it AAPS policy to have these board meetings located at our schools throughout the district, most likely on a rotating schedule. If this meeting was held at any of our major high schools, I would have been able to make it there via bus or via car. I'm sorry, not via car, via bus or via bike. But here is a 30 minute walk to the nearest bus station, a 30 minute walk. And it's a 20 minute drive from my house. So you can see why it would be unsustainable to have the meetings here. Second is the communication to the teachers union. The district recently moved to fact-finding, and I'm very interested in seeing the report that comes from the fact-finding commission. However, I think it was unkind and not very professional to inform the union that we were going to do this decision ahead of time just to let union leadership know and so that the community did not find out with angered feelings, especially at this heated time. The second issue I want to talk about today is a screen use policy inside of AAPS. Today, with the House bill banning cell phones during instructional time, AAPS needs to make a comprehensive policy that doesn't place burdens on teachers and that is effective. The issue with all these policies is enforcement. Enforcement is going to be the biggest challenge. So cell phones are always going to be a problem. I would like to focus more on computer usage in our classrooms today. Our screens use overall is way too high in the district. I have been a student inside of AAPS, as most of you know, for all of my career. I've seen high schoolers cheat blatantly in the classroom on their assignments, on their computers, chat GPT, open AI, and just searching answers up on the web via Google. Cheating is rampant when we provide access to computers in the classrooms, and it's unhealthy. It harms students in literacy and their social skills. It harms students' mental health. And we're encouraging screen use by providing devices to students starting at very young ages. In elementary schools, even, we provide devices to kids. These social media companies and media companies and online companies are trying to attract kids young and get them hooked and addicted to these programs. And we are actively encouraging that within the district. Technology also costs the district a lot of money, both in the sinking fund and from the general fund. So looking into reductions of our tech use could be a good way to save the taxpayer dollars and save the district dollars, which could go to paying our teachers. That's all I'd like to say tonight. So thank you guys and have a good evening.

Thank you. Alexander Huberlein.

Good evening. My name is Alexander Huberlein. I am an incoming senior at Pioneer High School and I'm speaking tonight on behalf of high school students across AAPS. As the district shapes this phone policy, the student input must be considered on decisions that directly impact everyday student life. With the need to develop a student phone policy for the district, and considering how many differing perspectives on the topic, I've collected written feedback from over 50 AAPS high schoolers to advocate for a student perspective. First, there is widespread support for putting cell phones away during instructional time, aligning with Michigan law requirements. Teachers deserve our undivided focus, and learning requires an environment free from device distractions. Second, there is equally strong support for maintaining student access to phones during non-instructional times, like passing periods and lunch. In our student petition, students highlighted their needs for accessing phones during non-instructional time, sharing some examples of why this access matters. On family logistics, one student wrote, activities get rescheduled, and being able to coordinate updates with my family during the day is essential, especially since I drive my siblings after school. On personal responsibility, another shared, I use my phone during breaks to manage my schedule, track assignments, and handle communications for my after school job. And finally, on safety, a student noted, it helps me feel safe. If there were an emergency, I get up call for services quickly and contact my parents. Our student view aligns with the draft AAPS cell phone policy recommendation for high school students that was prepared on the July 29th meeting, requiring phones to be put away during instruction unless authorized by a teacher while allowing access during non-instructional time. I would like to urge the board to adopt this balanced approach, which accounts for the unique fast-paced realities of high school life. Cell phone access during non-instructional time supports our ability to balance jobs, family responsibilities, extracurricular activities, timely communication, and safety during the day, while keeping our focus on academics when in the classroom. High school is meant to prepare us for adulthood and real-world responsibility. The district's proposed plan sets a clear, mature boundary, protecting classroom focus while respecting our responsibilities outside of instruction. We ask the board to support this balanced recommendation. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. John Benson.

Thank you for today. Hello, my name is John Benson, Ann Arbor resident, father of three. As usual, I'd like to talk a bit about finance controls and reviews. I'm going to start with the sinking fund. So thank you, Ann Arbor residents, for passing this millage. Thank you to teachers, trustees, candidates, administration, mayoral candidates, and others for endorsing the passage. This time, I think it's very important for the board and administration to engage in some sharing and transparency increments around this fund. First, can we consider specifying funding requests beyond capital program funds? At least specify sinking fund versus capital programs other than sinking fund. I think this would be an easy and reasonable transparency advancement. Second, can we understand if purchases made with sinking or other capital funds may sooner or later create a new maintenance, software fee, et cetera, that would have to be paid for by the general fund? I have a suspicion that money spent on certain equipment, technology, and other big items once past a couple of years, regular software maintenance burden shifts to the general fund. I believe this should be a strong gating discussion point in initial reviews going forward as well. Third, can each sinking fund approval contain points on why it is definitely something the general fund would do or not? Or if it's an investment toward reducing spend in the general fund, can the savings be actually projected initially and then revisited for realization benefit analysis? I think a strong example of that would be the solar panels. can a presentation be made about all single vendors charging over $100,000 in the general fund tagged as facilities, supplies, technology, copyright fees, including why they do not qualify for sinking fund and what our true maintenance costs are and how those have changed in the last five years at the vendor level. Finally, fifth, I know recent articles and statement publicly on the sinking fund highlight repairs solar panels safety and security, but there is significant spend recently out of the sinking fund on some of the, for instance, architectural firms. millions of dollars, in fact, although they seem to be funded out of both sinking fund and bond fund intermittently at large levels. I know technically it's doable, but it may be better to be consistent, particularly with these kinds of expenses. I also happen to see now the December 5th, 2022 memo where four architectural firms were selected, the fee schedules presented. It looks like we really need a workup on how those fee schedules, which vary significantly, have realized to our final annual net outflows to those vendors now that it's been several years later. I'm happy to share that memo. Finally, I want to emphasize and reemphasize I am about financial transparency. I am about helping solve what looks like a disconnect in our multi-year revenue versus our salary and benefit people versus our private vendor contracts. I have watched and shared the June 17th meeting where I gave comment on these ideas and was very encouraged in what I thought was a spark for positive collaborative discussions between the trustees and the CFO after his presentation and between the trustees themselves on several contract reviews, all of which I have shared proudly. I hope everyone feels that is positive work. Spread the effort. Spread the credit. Whatever it takes to have more clarity around our finances, that is what I am about. Please, let's continue working together. Thank you.

Thank you. Jennifer Oldham.

Good evening, Trustees and Superintendent Parks. I explained your cell phone policy to my rising ninth grader. Her response was simply, that won't work. Students will still have their attention pulled into their phones at every break. Students will still be distracted at school. We know addictive algorithms pushed by big tech are like nicotine pushed by big tobacco. Your proposed high school cell phone policy is like building smoking lounges in schools. We know better now than we did in the 1970s. We know that adults should protect children from addictive things, be they drugs, gambling, or software, and that school should be a safe place for students. And we have the example of the big-hearted people who fought back against big tobacco and have saved millions of lives. Computer games, ed tech, YouTube, and social media are all available on smartphones. These softwares all maximize engagement using addictive algorithms. Like all addictions, they steal from the life we value. I know you'll be reviewing the mission objectives, parameters, and beliefs of the Ann Arbor Public Schools later this evening. Here are three parameters I hope you'll consider before choosing a cell phone policy. One, we will make decisions and take actions based on the best interest of the student. Two, we will never abandon our commitment to excellence. Three, we will not engage in anything that does not support our primary, secondary educational programs. While the initial implementation of bell-to-bell cell phone and personal device bands is reportedly difficult, And the learning benefits are outlasting the transition difficulties in Florida, which began in 2023. A bell-to-bell policy with reasonable exceptions was instituted in New York at the start of last school year. A high school teacher from New York told me that the first three weeks were tough. And enforcement took a lot of energy. But once students got used to the policy, she said she got her classroom back. She told me that as a teacher, she didn't really know what had been lost to the smartphones. With the bell-to-bell ban, students pay attention to her again. They listen and take on hard projects again. Their attention spans are growing. 22 states and Washington, D.C. have bell-to-bell cell phone bans, as do France, Norway, South Korea, Brazil, China, Bulgaria, Italy, and much of Australia. Only seven other states joined Michigan in banning phones for instructional time only. Nonetheless, some Michigan districts are choosing bell-to-bell cell phone bans. In Avondale, Michigan, the schools moved to yonder pouches to store turned-off cell phones during the day. And here's what one veteran teacher reported. She said, "...it's really been life-changing, to be honest." It has made everything so much easier. Students are more engaged in their academics and the lessons being taught throughout the day. They're socializing in the hallways, laughing and talking with each other. I think it has so many benefits for students. Closer to us, Jackson chose a bell-to-bell policy. The district announced, the administration teachers and staff at Jackson High School believe that what you pay attention to is what you learn. The off-and-away policy? has been created to increase engagement and academic outcomes and decrease incidence of negative behaviors. Why? Because school is serious. School opens or closes doors for the rest of our lives. As adults, we know this. As the most educated city in America, we know the importance of primary and secondary education. Now we need to teach our children how important their intention really is. Thank you.

Thank you. That concludes public commentary.

Thank you very much. We appreciate hearing from our community. The board would like to thank everyone who spoke and shared their comments tonight. Ms. Parks, are there any points of clarification?

No, I just echo thanking our speakers this evening. We don't have any clarifications this evening.

Thank you, Ms. Parks. Uh, trustees, this is the number 4, the community feedback portion looks like there is no community feedback has been received for this meeting. So there's nothing for you to review in that section. And I believe that brings it down to reports of associations. Do we have a representative here from?

We have no one here from the.

Are there any other reports of association groups present?

No other reports.

Thank you. That brings us down to community group reports. Ms. Ozenski, do we have any groups signed up for this evening?

No group reports tonight.

Thank you, Ms. Ozenski. I believe that brings us down to board committee reports. And it looks like we're at the governance committee. The governance committee met on August the 3rd. I believe all members were present. I believe we discussed the agenda for this meeting. We also went through different policy series that you'll be seeing tonight that had been sunset and that needed to be reviewed. That's Policy Series 2000 and Policy Series 4000. Essentially, we took our time, went through those, made changes we thought were appropriate, and we're offering them to the board so that you all can let us know what you think about what we came up with and obviously make any changes that you all think are appropriate as well. And that is all that I believe we did. If I missed anything, my colleagues on the governance committee, please let me know.

I think you covered it, President Feaster. Thank you very much.

Looks like we were the only committee who met between this meeting and the last meeting. So that, I believe, brings it down to number eight, information. And our superintendent's update, I will turn it over to Superintendent Jazz Parks.

Thank you, President Feaster. It's a pleasure to be able to provide a brief update with you all as trustees in the community this evening. trustees this week we had the pleasure of welcoming back all of our administrators for the 26-27 school year during their multi-day leadership retreat which is taking place here at the Earhart administration building our building principals and our district leaders have taken part in A series of professional learning and training. Some of those examples would be the restorative practices training, updates on school safety and transportation, implementing teacher clarity through the evaluation and instructional leadership processes. special education and human resources. So we thank them for everything they are doing to launch this school year and create safe, positive and productive school environments and for their commitment to supporting the return of students and staff in the next over the next several weeks here. As we look forward to the start of the 26-27 school year, we're happy to report that overall, the district is trending above last year's official fall count. So as of today, the total enrollment is up about 2.6% from last year's fall count. Now, we know these numbers are fluid and will continue to ebb and flow over these remaining weeks leading up to the start of the school year in those first couple of weeks of the school year. So we expect that number to trend up and down, but we will absolutely continue to monitor closely what our enrollment numbers are looking like, both kind of at the district level and by school so that we are, as always, making any adjustments in staffing as needed based on how those numbers fluctuate. So we'd like to commend and thank our student accounting and enrollment team for their efforts during this really critical time of year, especially Ms. Robyn Skaczynski, who is our student enrollment specialist. This year we wanted to just address kind of some of the questions we have gotten about split to multi-age classrooms. So each year we have some split classrooms across the district. We try to keep that number as low as possible. In particular, last year we had very few because we were rolling out a new curriculum. And so this year, we are scheduled to have about 13 multi-age combination classrooms across the district out of our 300 elementary classrooms. So that's about three, four percent of our elementary classrooms will be multi-age, multi-grade classrooms. So combination classrooms are a well-established instructional model, and they are becoming more common as enrollment shifts increase. uh through this district and others and while these classrooms are sometimes viewed differently because they include students from two grade levels they are intentionally designed to provide a rich learning environment students will continue to receive instruction aligned with their individual grade level standards while also benefiting from flexible small group instruction opportunities for leadership peer collaboration and differentiated learning experiences Our teachers thoughtfully plan instruction to ensure that every student receives the support and challenge they need to grow. So in the AAPS, we know that the success of a classroom is driven by the relationships built within it, the quality of instruction, and the dedication of the teacher. not simply the grade configuration. So we're confident that our staff will continue creating engaging and supportive learning environments where every child can thrive, including in our multi-grade classrooms. Again, we have about 13 scheduled out of our 300 elementary classrooms across the district.

I see you have a question. We don't generally accept questions, so you would have to answer. You'd have to email us and we can get back to you.

Thank you, President Feaster. So the next topic is interlocking. And that will conclude the superintendent's update. Over the next two weekends, we are proud to have our students perform at the Interlocking Center for the Arts. On August 16th, the Pioneer Band, Choir, and Orchestra students will take the stage, and on August 23rd, Huron and Skyline students will take the stage. The concerts take place at 1.30 on those days and will also be live streamed, so please consider tuning in to watch our highly talented performers at this premiere opportunity. We thank all of our dedicated staff who have prepared them for this moment. The spotlight is theirs as well as our students, so we look forward to those performances. And at that On that note, that concludes the superintendent's update.

Thank you so much, Superintendent Parks. I believe that brings us down to first briefing, trustees, and I believe we're at the 9.1 policy series.

I skipped 8.2 items.

Oh, I'm sorry. Took my glasses off. Apologies. We're at 8.2, Student Support Advisory Committee Report, and I'll turn it over to Superintendent Parks and her team for that report.

Thank you. We have Ms. Austin, Dr. Hayward, and Ms. Backelaar coming for this report. Trustees, if you remember, as a result of some of our discipline data presented last year, we devised and put together a student support advisory committee from a cross-section of stakeholders across the district, including students, staff, parents and representatives from our community agencies, some of our community agencies that support our students. In terms of the way that we go about supporting students through discipline or behavior or mental health, we wanted to really just kind of dive in and take a look at what our current practices are and where we need to do better. So that we can see improvements, not just in our discipline data, but in how we offer and provide supports to students and the professional learning that we need to offer to our staff in order to be able to do that. So we have, again, Dr. Hayward, Ms. Alston, and Ms. Bacalar here to talk through what our initial work has entailed. And then we'll also, as we wrap this up, talk about some of the action planning that we're doing for next steps of this work. And so we're really excited to share this update with you. So I'll turn it over to Ms. Alston.

Hi, good evening, Trustee Super and Parks and our community. We are excited to come to you all tonight around the work that we have done throughout the 2025-26 school year with our students, our parents, teachers, and community partners. So the Student Advisory Committee was established in response to the discipline data that we shared with you all spring of 2025. And now we are entering the school year 2021. 2026 and 2027. So we sincerely appreciate the members of our committee and their continued commitment to our students. And we're going to provide an update tonight. So tonight's presentation is organized into six different sections. We'll begin with our purpose, sharing who's on the committee and our progress over seven monthly meetings spanning from September 2025 through April 2026. And what we set out to accomplish, we will walk you through our review of the current rights and responsibilities handbook and share highlights from our exemplar reviews. Next, we will highlight our parallel work that occurred during the 2025-26 school year and close with next steps and how we will move forward together. So these photos, as you can see, shows the work that occurred over the last school year. And you can see that our stakeholders came together to collaborate and to be critiques of our current Rights and Responsibilities Handbook. They had an opportunity to get to know one another, to make connections, and form interpersonal relationships with one another. We sincerely thank our committee, and we know that the work that we asked our volunteers took time away from some of their ordinary duties. Next slide, please. So this shows you all of our committee members. And again, we wanted to highlight the work of our stakeholders that span from our students in grades six through 12, our parents, guardian caregivers, our teachers, staff members, and also our community partners. And these individuals showed up meeting after meeting. And again, we're just really excited about the work that they did. And now I'll turn it over to Dr. Hayward. Oh, no, Jenna. Sorry.

Okay. I'm in your blind spot. Sorry. All right. So let's talk briefly about the advisory committee's purpose and process and outcomes. Slide, please. All right. The overarching purpose of the committee was to provide advice on reducing suspensions, making sure to have perspectives from students, teachers, principals, parents, and community members. The advisory committee set the stage for medium and long-term changes through their recommendations. Next slide. So as Ms. Alston mentioned, they met seven times, but they also had homework in between. The committee's work began with a review of suspension data from spring 2025. Next, the committee spent parts of three meetings going through the current AAPS Rights and Responsibilities Handbook page by page. They critiqued the language and the content and provided input on needed changes. The next few meetings were spent analyzing exemplars from three large school districts. And finally, the committee provided input on recommendations. I'll turn it over to Dr. Hayward to share findings from the Rights and Responsibilities Handbook Review.

Thank you, Ms. Bacalore, and good evening, trustees and community. As previously shared with you, our goal is not only to eventually produce a new and revised Rights and Responsibilities Handbook, but it's also about helping to change our mindsets. in our thinking relative to punitive consequences for our students, right? So this, we're hoping the work that we, and when I say we, I mean the entire advisory committee, principal, staff, everyone who's going to provide input, you all, will be work that will precede us, right? We want to make sure that students coming in who are not even in kindergarten will benefit from the work that we are currently doing. So it's pretty impressive work and we're very proud of what we have, what we're bringing to you tonight. So I want to talk to you about, and I want to thank again our committee. Here you'll see pictures, and at our last meeting in April, we just wanted to take some time to celebrate. We met monthly as a committee from 4.30 to 6.30. So students leaving schools, adults leaving jobs to come here to work with us, and just an amazing group of individuals. And so At the last meeting, we wanted to celebrate them by giving them certificates and a nice bag of just some things that we just wanted to share with them to thank them. I'm going to get into the themes. And so as we did the work around reviewing our current rights and responsibilities handbook, these are some emerging themes that came from the committee group. To the right of each of the next six slides, you'll see the advisory team voices. And these are quotes taken directly from their work as they were charting and writing notes on all the handouts that we gave them. You'll see some of the quotations there. But I wanted to just go over with you briefly the summaries of each of the six themes and And so for theme one, the committee is recommending that we shift from punitive to restorative and trauma-informed language. And so our current handbook language is punitive. It's adversarial and compliance focused. The committee wants to center it around respect. empathy, restoration, and student well-being, such as replacing terms like victim perpetrator with person harm or caused harm, and removing the word charges, for example, which is typically language associated with the criminal justice system. um we would also note that it this extends to the attendance language as well we don't want it to be punitive we want it to be supportive so that's theme one next slide is thing two um the committee is recommending that we define terms clearly and ground the handbook in law so they repeatedly flagged vague undefined terms throughout the handbook such as terms like truancy, loitering, inappropriate dress, and persistent disobedience. We saw a lot of this when we looked at the suspension data that carry real consequences, but really no clear definition. It's up to interpretation depending on who you ask, right? And so the recommendation is that we anchor the definitions in state law and where applicable and to hyperlink key terms for additional resources for our families. And undefined terms create room for consistency. It's too ambiguous and we want to get rid of that. We want our students, our family and our community to know what it is that we're expecting of them. Theme three, next slide, please. Strengthen due process and make procedures transparent. And so really explaining that family and students should clearly understand what happens procedurally during a disciplinary situation. We don't want them to have to guess. We don't want parents to say, well, what happens next, right? We want them to be able to go to this document, refer to this document and know what the steps are when there are disciplinary situations that we must move forward with. We want them to understand their rights at each step and how decisions were made. And also to document infractions. So making sure that our district is consistent in how we document student infractions. Dean Thorne. Building progressive discipline and intervention before consequences. We saw a lot of this in our exemplaries, which Ms. Bacolor will share with you later on in the slide deck. But our current handbook, it jumps to consequence levels. without describing any type of restorative or intervention steps that should take place prior to consequences. And so the committee wants the progressive discipline approach where we're front-loading students and families with resources, supports, what restorative justice and practices look like, all of those things, and then having those consequences and action levels later on at the end of the book, right? Because that's not the priority. Okay. Theme five, update outdated content and address emerging issues. So just language here. We have language in our current R&R, the term beepers. How many of you have a beeper? You've said it. Some do. The majority of us do not carry beepers anymore. We know that in the medical field, often doctors carry beepers, but not anymore. Oh, no more. Okay. That kind of language, right? We also have to want to make sure that we update our new handbook with current policies that we are implementing now and that you all are approving, such as graduation policy, credit policy, and the cell phone policy once that approves. So we want to make sure that AI, we have no language in our current handbook regarding AI. And then some information about the chronic absenteeism and truancy as well. Theme six. This is the last theme that emerged from our committee work about our current handbook. And theme six, our handbooks just needs to work better for our families and our staff. It needs to be print friendly, user friendly, reader friendly. We need to remove the vague language and make sure that everyone understands for the most part what we are saying as a district. and just making sure that we have that information in there for our families and it's readily accessible and available to them.

I'm going to turn it over to Ms. Bacalore.

Okay, so after the big job of looking at the rights and responsibilities, we turned toward exemplar reviews. And this was an opportunity for us to compare the AAPS approach with other school districts, our procedures, our philosophy, etc., after looking at a wide variety of handbooks across many districts we chose three for the committee to review jefferson county kentucky which is in the louisville area baltimore city public schools and the san francisco unified school district These three exemplars show a different way of addressing concerning student behaviors. So here are some more pictures of our amazing advisory committee. And then I guess we're moving right along to... All right, I just wanted to point out the bottom left and the bottom center are pictures of our committee members actually looking at the giant handbooks from other school districts. Just a little... illustration there all right next slide please. Okay, so starting off with Jefferson county i'll start i'll share a little bit about each of these exemplars you can tell right off the BAT that this is different because it has a really different name, it is the students support and behavior intervention handbook. And again, just like in Dr hayward section, you can review these advisory team voices at your leisure next slide. So for each exemplar, we ask the committee, what do you see in this handbook that is a must-have for AAPS as we move forward with new policies and a new handbook? This slide shares a summary of must-haves from this particular exemplar, and I've put in some screenshots to show you exactly what the handbook says. The committee really appreciated that this handbook opens with a statement of values to be instructive, not punitive. They also have a process for parents and guardians to acknowledge that they've received the handbook. And finally, this one, it was actually my favorite for this reason too, but it includes really easy to understand visuals and QR codes and links to community resources that families can use. The next one that we looked at was the Baltimore City Public Schools Student Code of Conduct. Again, you have some advisory team voices on the slide. And next slide, please. Committee members praised this handbook for clearly laying out shared expectations, not only for students and school staff, but also for families and for community partners. This handbook also uses whole child language throughout and provides a clear definition of restorative practices upfront. The bottom screenshot shows how interventions, how the interventions are specifically shifting away from harsh discipline. They move toward educating students about the harm caused by their actions while seeking to reunite those students with their school community. And finally, we have the San Francisco unified school district student and family handbook again totally different title included a great it has a great deal of information on the website, but we looked at a certain part of the handbook. slide please. So this handbook was interesting because they started with the board policy and acted when the handbook was released. The handbook also lists specific infractions that cannot result in suspension, such as truancy, willful defiance, or dress code. And part of it is on the website too, but this handbook includes extensive matrices of support by behavior categories that reflect the systems developed alongside the handbook. Next slide, please. All right, so how do we summarize the feedback we received about these three? This is a summary of the high-level musts across all three handbooks. At the top level, the handbook introduction needs to start with values and be written in an instructive versus punitive way. Looking at policies, it will be beneficial to describe rights and responsibilities for a broader set of roles and to use suspension as a last resort. Next, our new handbook and process needs to develop leveled intervention matrices that clearly describe support options using trauma-informed approaches and restorative practices. And finally, as a family-facing resource, the handbook must be visually pleasing, easy to understand, and include links and QR codes to community resources. Now I'll turn it back over to Ms. Alston to talk about recommendations.

So based on the committee's work across seven meetings and their input, here are some draft recommendations to revise the current Rights and Responsibilities Handbook. And they're divided up in this order, discipline philosophy and policy alignment, restorative practices, as well as trauma-informed approaches. tier interventions and consequences framework, clarity. We know that being clear is kind with definitions and stakeholder rights, community resources and family engagement, and also a document that is designed for accessibility so that it can be accessible for everyone. We will shift our focus from the committee's recommendations to parallel work that was happening across our district as we were going through the process. And so through our district initiatives, you will notice that during our leadership council meetings, which occur monthly, as well as our community events and district and building level committees, we really had a focus on restorative practices training for all of our principals. We also reviewed monthly suspension data during our meetings and had data review conversations. We also took our leaders through the exercise of looking at the exemplars that our advisory committee reviewed. We also had a student mental health partnership summit that was actually held in this very room and a community meeting at Pioneer on school safety that was led by Ms. Margolis. And we have an active multi-tier system of supports team as well as a positive behavior intervention support team. All right, turn over to Dr. Hayward.

Thank you. Some of the information on this slide, I'm going to be redundant, but I think it's important so that everyone can understand how seriously we take this work, right? And so Ms. Austin talked about meeting with our leadership team monthly to review suspension data. And so every month when we meet with them, we look at the suspension data by the district. We talk about scenarios of things that are occurring in the school. They give input, how could we have handled it differently with alternatives to suspension, et cetera. So again, it's about shifting our mindsets. And we do that by constantly engaging our team in conversations around suspensions and alternatives to suspensions and sharing resources, right? In terms of articles, website, we do that in our weekly bulletins that we send to our principals about suspensions what are some alternatives what are other school districts doing so just front-loading them with a lot of information and supports oftentimes our principals will contact us when there are issues what do you think walk me through your thinking in terms of what are your next steps right because we're here for them we're here to serve and so we serve our principals and provide them with some supports as needed. Professional coaching, we're continuing and planning for all of the trainings for our administrators, meeting with the ISD to have restorative practice sessions for staff this year. Principals went through restorative practices days one and two last year, days three and four, half of our principals are going through that currently. So today and tomorrow, we had 29 principals here who are working with the IARP organization who provides us our training. And then our other half will be here next Monday. So that's day three and four for them. And again, we've already worked with, partnered with the ISD to have dates for additional staff to attend those sessions so that they can get the training as well. We started a positive behavior exemplary committee last year that consisted of special eds and folks from special ed and from principals so that we can bring back PBIS to the district and in our schools. So we met monthly We visited schools in Wayne County who are exemplars relative to PBIS to see what it is that they're doing and met with principals and staff, right? And so we're moving on. We're moving on with that and we'll continue to have those conversations this year as well around PBIS, Positive Behavior Intervention Support. And then with CPI, making sure that our staff, principals, staff who sign up, understand de-escalation techniques when they are engaging with some of our students. And so that's the Crisis Prevention Institute. Next slide. We will continue the work in developing our district's MTSS or multi-tier support systems, which includes positive behavioral intervention support, and tiered mental health supports. We know that because of you all, we were able to purchase Panorama last year. And so just recently, Ms. Austin, Ms. Linden and myself met with Panorama to talk about dates where we'll meet with the district team and with the building team. So we have that on the calendar already. And then just strengthening our partnerships. We couldn't do the work that we do without our community partnerships. And so Michigan Vape Free Schools, Communities of Practice, the ISD Bridge Program, the ISD and their Mental Health Action Team, Corner Health, NutriZone, Ells Place, the Depression Center, U of M Regional Alliance for Healthy Schools, ROS, Michigan Medicine, psychiatric, psychiatry services, and many, our community partners, our Peace Neighborhood, Community Action Network, Avalon Housing, like the list goes on and on because we know that our students come to us and they have multiple trauma issues, they have multiple needs, and we don't profess that we're doing this by ourselves, right, in a silo. We work with our community partners so that we can give our students what they need when they need it.

Next slide.

I'm sorry. Oh, so additional proactive measures include things that we are already doing, which is the SABRS screener, the social academic and emotional behavior rating scales. And we started this two years ago, giving the first year screening tools to all students in grades six through 12. And they take that to at least twice a year, fall and spring, but they can also elect to take it in. Schools can also elect to administer that in the winter as well. And then the TRAILS curriculum that teaches the CASEL-5, which is self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship skills. Next slide, please. And I'm going to turn it over to Ms. Austin.

All right, so I'm going to share our 2025-26 suspension data. And as you can see on this slide, and even prior to the slide, the parallel work that we have outlined in the previous slides highlight the work that we have done to really address reducing suspensions. And I want to say we hit it hard as a team collaboratively. And overall, you can see from 2023-24, the 2024-25 and the 2025-26 school year, that we have overall seen a decrease of suspensions. Suspensions decreased by nearly 30% from 922 last school year to 657 this school year. So that's a total reduction of 265 suspensions. And so we see this as a significant decrease. I do want to point out we still are working on the inequitable distribution of suspensions for our students, and that will continue to be our focus for the 2026-2027 school year. Next slide. All right. We have a technical glitch. Can we pause for a moment, please? Thank you. All right, so this table shows our suspension data from 2018 through 2025-26. And it just basically shows what I showed you on the last slide. It's just divided up into different levels. Next slide, please. This is a plot graph that shows the number of suspensions from elementary buildings, K-8 buildings, middle school buildings, and high school buildings. Next slide. So this table shows the number of students by demographic breakdown of suspensions over the last three school years, overall and by level. While we know we have done a lot of work as a district to decrease our suspensions, as I noted on the previous slides, we acknowledge that our Black students are economically disadvantaged. Students with IEPs and male students are suspended at a higher rate than other demographics. Next slide.

Is now a good time for a question?

Sure. Or do you want to wait? I just want to read this. I don't know if I... Go ahead. It's just a quick, that slide, I guess, can you go over, like, explain how we're reading it? Because some of it doesn't even make sense. Like, I want to make sure I'm reading it correctly. Just to give an example.

So I can give examples in terms of just overall data. So if you look at the percent of the population compared over time, you'll see that the data will reflect that, for example, Black African-American students are disproportionately suspended at a rate of four times their population. And you can see that by the negative numbers that's displayed. Let me get my laptop. So the percent of suspensions versus the percent of the population. So the higher the number,

displays that they're being suspended at a higher rate amongst their larger population okay so like this i'm just looking at this the not the not english learner here it says 91 percent so they're so 91 percent they make up 91 percent of the suspensions that seems very high no percentage

No, that's the percent of the population. You're looking at 2023-24. Yeah, I'm just... So the non-English learner, that's 91.4% of our population.

That they make up for the suspensions?

That's the percent of the population.

I'm just trying to... I don't know if I'm... Population...

So based off this table, I'm going to bring it to 2025-26. So let's look at our economically disadvantaged students. They represent 74.9% of the suspensions of the population. They represent, though, as a total, they're 28.3% of the total school population of our district. And then they're suspended at the difference between the 74 and the 28 is 46.6%.

Also, okay. That's what I want. So you're comparing the, so for example, I'm going to bring up English learner versus non-English learner. So you have to compare those two numbers. Okay. I just wanted, so pretty much it's saying not English learners at our higher percentage, 91% compared to, and it's lower percent for English learners when it comes to suspension. Yes.

Okay.

Thank you. Sorry. I just wanted, that's okay. Cause I don't want to read it wrong.

So this table shows the suspension reasons over the past two school years. As you can see, physical aggression and fighting remain the most common suspensions. And during the 2025-26 school year, you'll see at our secondary level that alcohol and drugs reflect a higher number of suspensions, and that is due to the use or distribution of illegal substances. When we know that students need support for addiction of substance abuse or tobacco use or other concerns, we do consider them and place them into alternatives to support them and put them in succession programs. All right. Turn it over to Dr. Hayward.

We have about four more slides to go. And so I'm going to talk to you about our next steps. And next slide, please. Thank you. So our goal and the work that we have been doing, this team here, three, over the summer is developing an action plan based on all of the work that the 2526 Advisory Committee shared with us and recommended. We have met with the superintendent to gather feedback as well. We are working to define AAPS discipline, philosophy and belief statement, which we have a draft of that as well. But our goal is to meet, we're going to bring the committee, the Student Support Advisory Committee back together this month, actually, August 25th, to talk about the, to share with them our draft action plan belief statement. Because again, we don't want to work in silos. We want to continue to partner with this amazing committee that we have. Next slide. build a phase implementation infrastructure that includes a tiered intervention matrix that's organized by grade band. It'll have behaviors on there, interventions, restorative measures that principals and school teams could use. It'll include some examples of natural and logical consequences. But again, these are the alternatives, right, to suspension. And we just want to front load our school teams with as much information and processes as possible. We'll develop systems for regularly training and supporting our principals and our school staff. Next slide. And so here we get down to redesigning the rights and responsibilities handbook. So we plan to redesign the handbook itself as a genuinely family facing resource, which includes legal and special education review links. helpful links that parents, that's at their fingertips, family resources that they can use, more visual and accessible tools. We'll continue on with our professional learning, partnering with Wayne RESA, with the ISD, with IIRP for restorative practices and other organizations to help shape this work that we are doing. And if there are any questions that you have, we are available to answer those.

Thank you so much for the presentation.

Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you all for doing this work. And as I had a chance to say to Ms. Baccalaureate earlier, I'm really impressed by not just the effort that you put into this, but the quality of the work that you did, especially with the advisory committee and getting a wide range of perspectives and circling in on, I think, a really sensible and valuable set of recommendations. As everybody already knows, it's sort of, I can't think of the right word, but anyway, a hackneyed statement that what matters is implementation. And so one of the things that I wanted to ask coming out of this, because all the steps, I mean, certainly all the steps that you talk about are important, but I remember in a report that was commissioned by former Superintendent Trisha Green some years ago, one of the things that it showed was not just the disproportionate representation across different groups, but also substantially different levels of enforcement. and of punitive measures taken at different buildings. And that was one of the key issues that they had hoped to address at that time. And I see that you're talking a lot about working with building administrators and teachers and doing training. And I'm just kind of wondering a little bit more about what that looks like. I mean, how do you translate this into real change in the school hallway?

So I think... And mentioning the things that we're doing, right? It's about changing mindset. And that's what we have to do. Oftentimes, and as a former principal in this district, when we have behaviors, our first recourse is to go to the handbook, right? Because that's what we're used to doing. But it's about changing mindsets. And so we're helping to walk our principals through that. We're not saying use this, even though it's still our rights and responsibilities handbook, we're saying we have to shift our thinking, right? We have to understand that students come to us as they are, and many students have gone through trauma. We have students who have mental health issues, and we want to be sensitive to that. But in order to be so, we have to help provide the professional learning for our leaders and and staff so that they are in tune to what our students are going through. We walk our principals through the suspension data as we see those buildings who are suspending more often than others. We meet with our school principals as a way to support them. What can we do to help you? Walk me through some of the suspensions and talk to them about alternatives to suspension. So those are some of the things that we're doing now. Ms. Austin may want to add to that.

I agree with everything Dr. Hayward said. It really is about shifting your mindset from being punitive to proactive and restorative. And particularly when we think about our young people, we are... we are trained to teach behaviors that we want to see. So making sure that teachers are equipped with the skills to teach those behaviors that we want to see through positive behavior intervention supports. And so making sure that when we are redirecting behavior or trying to transform behavior, we are Highlighting the positives of what students are doing, as well as giving them the critique and feedback and being mindful to give more positive feedback versus a critique. I mean, imagine if your boss all the time told you all the things that you were doing wrong daily, daily, daily without some praise. you're going to be reluctant to make that relationship and connection with your boss. And so thinking about teachers, not as bosses, but as leaders, you know, and building those relationships with students, it's important to recognize the positives that students are doing and make that a part of your school culture and climate.

I'm sorry. Go ahead.

I was going to also add, we do have a pretty well thought out action plan that shows what our next steps will be detailed with steps, with dates and everything that involves all of our stakeholders. So that is something that's also on the horizon.

That's exactly what I was going to say. As a principal at the time that you referenced, what was missing at that time was a plan on how to do that across the system. And so that was an important component that we wanted to make sure was included this time around, how we're going to make sure all of our schools and school teams are on the same page at the same time. And so that was a missing component last time. There was still a lot of siloed work on how to actualize that plan that was developed at the time. There wasn't a consistency of implementation and a roadmap on how to do that. And so we wanted to make sure that as we're doing this process this time, we're building those things in for our schools.

Vice President Wilkes. Thank you, President Pfister. Again, I want to thank you, Dr. Hayward, Ms. Alston, Ms. Becklor, for presenting this. Very impressive. I know that, so I've only been on this board two years, and I can remember seeing the student discipline data the first time it was presented. And we were all asking, well, so, you know, what are the next steps? What do we do now? And it's so encouraging to know that those steps are being taken. And we actually have a plan to address this issue. It's not like we're wondering how are we going to try to address this. So I'm just glad that we hopped on this right away because it involves our students. And and we need to address it. So I did have a couple of comments and a couple of questions. First of all, I really, I'm glad that this is, it's not punitive, but more restorative focused, which is exactly what we need. I mean, we don't need to have any type of lingo that's equated with the criminal justice system. That's just not who we are. We're here to support our students. So, again, glad to see that. The fact that you said you're defining terms because a lot of the terms are open to interpretation, and I have to agree with that. I believe that bias can creep in, whether implicit or explicit, and by clearly defining what terms mean, I think that that... allows us to try to help eliminate that possibility. So I'm really glad to see that. I did have a question about the reduction, 30% decrease in suspensions that you referenced, Ms. Alston. And I'm just wondering, was that reduction attributed directly to the use of sabers? What exactly would we... attribute that to? And I know you mentioned the panorama. Is that what it is, the panorama system? And if you could give us a brief synopsis of what panorama is. I know we spoke about it a while ago, but for those folks who may not know.

Sure. So yeah, we nearly 30% reduction in suspensions. And I would not say it's directly correlated to our Sabres assessment that we do with our students six through 12. I can attribute just a guess and a hunch would be to us talking about alternative suspension and addressing that with our leaders. We made it a district initiative when we came to you all. That was last spring. And that was our focus. And when you focus and you have a North Star and you get your leaders on board and then, you know, you talk to your teachers, it really does help to create some momentum so that we are questioning the decisions that we make before just saying we're going to punitively suspend a student for the behavior. So it takes conversation. It takes that relationships and a great effort for us to, again, address the high suspensions that we had in the district. And then as it relates to Panorama, Panorama is a digital software that will help us to house all of our data. So like our academic data or assessment data. It'll also be a place where we'll have like our office discipline referral data that's in there so that we're able to analyze that data and make decisions based off what that information is. And so we could look at individual student data or we could also look at data collectively by grade level, by demographic, by trend data, by cohort. It gives us that ability to do that in one space. We do that now and we do it simplified through Google Docs. And there's just other tools that are available to us that we're excited that we will be launching that this year with our leaders to dive into Panorama. Is there anything else you would like to add?

Other important thing to say is that it aligns with our MTSS system, our multi-tiered system of support. And so we'll be able to look at both academic and student well-being data by student and by grade level and by student. Keep going.

I can feel you sneaking up.

Dawn is actually our resident expert.

For mid-sentence. No, no, it's just standing. I promise you're doing great. I will just say it's whole child. So we're looking at attendance, behavior, academics. We're using it for intervention plan creation, monitoring those, holding people accountable for doing the work with kids, and then supporting the people who are being held accountable for doing the works with kids. And it also is transparent at the district level. So much of what's going on is wonderful. It's happening at the building level, and we just can't see it or support it. So we're excited about that.

Yeah, well, thank you. And thank you for supporting our students. I mean, we are here to teach our students. We are here to guide our students. We are here to support our students. And so just based on what has been presented, it's clear that that's exactly the direction that we're heading into. So thank you.

Professor Muhammad.

So first of all, thank you. I know it's a lot of work thanking the committee members, but you all putting this together. I just have a few just really related to the schools that were chosen that we were comparing to. How was that chosen? And then my second question is, what were their expectations when it came to training? Because I know that we're doing restorative practice training for the building administration. There was a list, but were they training all the teachers and staff as well? So I guess it's a two-tier question.

So I'll take the first step at it, answering the question. So in terms of the three exemplars, how were they selected? We really was going through looking at different rights and responsibilities, student family handbook, whatever it's called in the districts to see. Like we spent hours looking at districts handbooks. And so we narrowed down these three because we didn't want to bring to the committee five or 10 of them. Right. One of them, the San Francisco Unified District, is over 200 pages, correct?

Yes. But I think it's important to know that we also provided links to many other school districts to the committee so they could review too. And I think that we also went on some information from AASA about school districts doing exemplary work around student supports.

So the committee received five district links, but we focused, we narrowed in on the three that we share with you all tonight. And then your other question was around training staff.

Yeah. And just to follow up, like, was there criteria, I guess, or you just looked at what, I mean, what criteria did you use to pick these three criteria?

So we talked about, and you all can chime in, but we wanted to look at supportive handbooks. Handbooks that supports the student, the whole child, right? That had resources for family, community resources for family that wasn't punitive. And those are just some of the criteria. Thank you.

And just adding on and addressing, specifically addressing racial inequities in suspensions.

And yes, my second was training. So what were these schools doing as far as training? And then did it include teachers and staff? Because I know we don't train everyone in restorative practices, but did it include and then, you know, teachers and staff as well?

So as it relates to the districts, we're not exactly sure what their professional learning path looked like. Based off their family-facing guide, my assumption is you did a lot of work around mindset because in these exemplars, you can see that it's really proactive and supportive versus being punitive, you don't see a lot of the same language that is in our rights and responsibilities handbook. I mean, like three-fourths of the handbook is about supports, and then like a quarter of it is about what you can do when there is suspensions that are warranted. And what was your other question, Trustee Muhammad? Oh, teachers and training. So we know that our teachers are full of professional learning. So we started with our administrators with that, which has been a year journey. So days one and two of restorative practices was given to our administrators last year. This month, we're focusing on days three and four of restorative practices with the IIRA. And some of our leaders on their own went through the WISD or Wayne RESA to be trained in restorative practices. The thing about restorative practices, a lot of practitioners will say they're doing restorative practices, but they're not all really trained through the IIRP, which is the organization that we use. And I think I just messed up that acronym. But nonetheless, our organization is truly trained. She helped author some of the materials, and we're just really excited to have her on board. Our plan, though, is as we give our administrators this training, that they will take this information and share it back with their teachers. It's not a train-the-trainer approach because we're not trained to be the trainer, but eventually we will get to our teachers being trained in this as well.

Also, as I said in one of the slides, in terms of next steps, Ms. Austin and I met with the ISD a couple times last year to work out some dates for the 26-27 year where staff can sign up. It's quite expensive, but they are partnering with us and they're going to have dates on their schedule. And oftentimes our staff go to the ISD to take courses in professional learning. So that's available to them for this year, this school year.

Trustee Wilkins?

Yeah, I wanted to echo everyone else's thanks and especially what Trustee Wilkes said about it's... I mean, great is not the right word because none of this is great, but it's refreshing to see that the problem is being addressed and not just, okay, check a box. We had a student support advisory committee. Okay, let's move on. But it's leading to, you know, that was a lot of work and these next steps are a lot of work. So, um, We really appreciate all of this work that's going to go into this and the future work that's happening, and it's important. It's good to see that you're not sliding by the slides that don't look that good yet. Like we're pointing out there are some categories that's got to get better, but we're pointing out those categories that need to get better, and we're working on that, and I appreciate that. My only question was in the next steps, there's piloting changes before full district implementation. Is that just because you can't do a full district at the same at one time? Like, if we have all these good ideas, why don't we just have the whole district do it?

We agree with you. We agree. I was about to say we actually agree 100%, but I'll let them speak for themselves.

We will make sure you all have the most up-to-date slide. And in the slide presentation, in the up-to-date slide presentation, also have a link to the draft action plan as well. Fantastic.

All right. Great.

Thank you. Again, ladies, thank you so much for the work. I've always hated our rights and responsibility handbooks, and you guys have heard me over the years say I've always hated the book. the challenges you've enumerated. But I do have to, well, I want to go back to why do we have a Rights and Responsibility Handbook? Is it not required? I've been told that, you know, the kid's got to know the consequences for their actions. But in the past, when you've read the book, you really don't understand exactly. I know we have had the best attorneys in this district read the book and tell me over and over, this does not make sense. So again, I'm glad you're looking into that. But let's start with the question, is it legally required? Hi, Dave. Always keep an attorney in-house.

Yeah, I believe it is because there are certain notifications in there that have to be made and, you know, the books are signed for and that helps us later on. But yes, it's because of the notices, the FERPA notices and everything else is and there they are required.

The Title IX notices. So every parent understands that. Unfortunately, not every family looks at the book until their kid's in trouble, right? And as I said in the past, it was not really clear what would be the outcomes based on the actions. So hopefully you guys will work on that, clarifying that. Talk to us regarding accessibility. Is the book available electronically?

So our goal is to make sure it is electronically on the website, as well as have some visual tools such as QR codes and a way for information to be translated into different languages so our families can understand it. And we are also going to change the name of it. It will no longer be called the Rights and Responsibilities Handbook. It'll be the Student and Family Handbook.

Thank you. And so right now, though, it's only available in print?

It is not available. So our current rights and responsibilities handbook is available in print and it's also available online. You can go online to read it or download a PDF. Our goal for the student and family handbook is that it will be digital and it will be available in print and as many ways we can get it to families as possible.

And since it is required legally, do we obligate the families to acknowledge that they've received the book?

That is part of our action plan, yes. Do we do that now? No, we do not do that now.

I didn't think so. So, right now, we're looking at language accessibility. Again, digital accessibility is required. Are we looking at changing some of the consequences for some of the misbehavior that we normally see?

So yes, so part of what you'll see in the revised handbook is a behavior matrix that outlines what some major and minor behaviors are so that our leaders and our teachers have a guide that outlines like progressive discipline, like what can happen if a student does this before ultimately ends up to be a suspension if a suspension is warranted.

And so in that, we talked about training, but we have to also acknowledge the bias that is out there. Insubordination. We always hear, you know, that is a number one offense, insubordination. And, of course, how a student's action may be insubordinating, that's a term, against the teacher or the staff is subject to personal opinion and thoughts. How will you, professional development, monitor for bias? Because usually it's a classroom management thing or a teacher bringing it forth to administration, the student's actions. Any thoughts on how, did any of the exemplars give us help or guidance regarding monitoring that?

I would say that, I mean, when we look at the common reasons for suspensions, I know when I first entered the district, when we had these ODRs and filling them out for elementary students, a lot of it has to do with insubordination or disobedience. I mean, those are some of the terms that were on these old ODR forms. We don't see suspensions related to that as much as we did in the past. So much of the work that we have done to change mindsets, I believe has helped with that. No longer are there the days where you have just kids being sent to the principal's office. Teachers have worked really hard to cultivate relationship with students where they're not taking students out of the classroom and just sending them to the principal's office. They really are working with students individually. As it relates to bias, Yes, there's bias in all of this. And so we still have much work to do as, you know, if one student's behaving this way and another student's behaving this way and they're demographically different, why are we, you know, choosing different pathways to teach them the behaviors that we want to see or to redirect them? And so part of our work is to bring some commonalities, K through 12, and bring some clear intentional work around what are some major behaviors and minor behaviors so that we're all on the same level and building this K to 12 system.

Thank you for mentioning the adults' behaviors that we need to look at. I just want to briefly remind folks, or I know you guys know this, but as we look at consequences, as I've mentioned, there sometimes are, how do we say, certain students, such as athletes, have different set of consequences for their behaviors as opposed to the debate student. Not that we have debate anymore, but, you know, the other student who is not a particular athlete. Are we looking at that? Then I would also ask looking at staff behavior, such as allowing police in our schools to do the questioning slash interrogation. I do appreciate your mentioning having a trusted ally in the room. And let me go all the way back. Again, I've always hated the handbook, and I've always been told we legally have to have one, so live with it, Susan. And we have changed the cover and we've tried to make it better. But what I appreciate, you know, your efforts is that you've got student voices right there at the table to give you from their perspective versus what one trustee has said and has experienced their perspective. One of the things that I've been very worried about in the past, again, is allowing The police access to our students without a warrant, questioning, because it's convenient for the police to come to a school because they know where that's where kids go, usually Monday through Friday, as opposed to stopping at their homes. As well, again, having access to our students and their attendance records. We've often heard that too. Again, training the office professional, for example, that just because a police officer shows up and asks to see Jamal Jones's attendance on Friday, he or she is not obligated to do that. So again, we need, like you said, I think someone said it's a holistic view and really appreciate it. I know this is not easy work and it's not quick work, but I would love to see the action plan. And again, there's a lot that we have asked you to do and you guys have already known work begets work, but it also gets better. So really appreciate it. Looking forward to seeing your progress as things move forth. What are we doing for this year in terms of a handbook?

Yeah, so once you all have the link to the action plan, it'll show you time stamps for this year. So for example, one of the action items is to reconvene our Student Advisory Committee meeting, our team, and we will be doing that August 25th to go over some of this information that we went over with you tonight, but also to show them pieces of what's in the action plan, for example, this tiered behavior matrix that we're talking about, which would be a part of the rights and responsibilities handbook or the student and family handbook. I get used to saying that. And then we also have information action plan as it relates to our leaders seeing that information. And then our leaders taking that back to their staff to have a survey so that all of our teachers and staff also look at it. and then a process for our leaders to get feedback from students and focus groups, and then take that information back, compiling it, and then taking it back to the Student Advisory Committee, again, to get their feedback. And then part of that review is special education review to make sure that what we have in there aligns with special education, and also doing a law review. So Collins and Blaha will hear from us so that we can make sure there's a legal review. And then coming back together after there's this final draft, going back to our student advisory committee, going back to our stakeholders so they can see that. So I think once you see the action plan, a lot of the questions that you have will hopefully be answered. If not, you know, you know how to reach us through different.

But for this year, schools.

So that's all this year.

What is the book that we're handing out this year?

So the goal for the book for the student and family handbook, our goal is to distribute it January of 2027 of this school year.

So we don't have to legally give it out in September of this year.

So it'll still be the current one. Yes, the current one until January.

Okay, that's what I was asking.

I went all the way around the corner.

And you did a great job, and you gave us a lot of information with my simple little question. So thank you so much, ladies. Appreciate the hard work. That's good.

Vice President Wilkes. Well, actually, Ms. Alston, I think you addressed my question. I was just under accessibility. I wanted to make sure that the student and family handbook will be available in various languages. Yes. Okay, good. All right, thank you.

questions. Thank you all very much really appreciate it.

Thank you very much. Doctor Hayward miss Austin in this back a lot.

Leave that brings us down to a point 3 office special education update.

Thank you, President Feaster. We have Ms. Lewis coming forward for an update. It has been quite some time, I believe, since we have provided an update to trustees in the community on the work taking place under the umbrella of our Office of Special Education Services. And so Ms. Lewis is here tonight to provide some information and updates on how under the structures that we have in place here, Through the Office of Special Education, the work is flowing down to our students and families and to our buildings and building leaders also. So I'll turn it over to Ms. Lewis at this time.

All right. Good evening, trustees. How are you tonight? Good evening. We have a wealth of information available for you tonight. And what I will attempt to do is focus on the things that I believe are top of mind for you. And then some things I may move through a little bit quicker, but it will be there for you to read during all of that free time that I know that you have. And as Ms. Alston said, if you have questions after you've reviewed some information, please don't hesitate to let me know. So tonight, we're going to talk a little bit, as Superintendent Park said, about giving an overview of OSC, the continuum of supports and services that we offer in the district. We will talk about the students that we serve, students that have individualized education programs, as well as 504 accommodation plans. We'll talk about staffing. I know everybody wants to know about that. We will then begin to talk about some of the services, the supports that we have across the district through our Least Restrictive Environment Success Team. We'll talk about some unique programming considerations for some of those very very much individualized circumstances that we have. We'll talk about summer programming, compensatory services, building inclusion coaches, post-secondary transition planning, and assistive technology supports. And I'll start, yes, there you go. Our vision and our mission within our department is to work collaboratively, right? Because all of our students have unique needs. So we are working with students, with families, with teachers, with administrators to truly provide the individualized service and support that students who qualify for special education services need. The next slide just gives a brief, well, not necessarily brief, but a sweeping overview of the roles within our department. We have assistant directors, compliance coordinators, teacher consultants, district level supports and ancillary leads. And I will talk a little bit more about those. That is a list there of each one of those. For example, I have three assistant directors. We have four compliance coordinators. We have three teacher consultants. as well as one social-emotional learning, one district-wide social worker that supports. And then our ancillary leads, they carry full caseloads across the district, but also support each of their ancillary groups and provide some leadership in that way. Here, that next slide just gives a visual representation and this is hot off the presses. We have two new team members on our team. These are not additional FTE. These are replacing individuals who either resigned or retired at the end of last school year. You can go ahead to the next slide. So as you heard me talk about, we have ancillary discipline leads, and each of these leads provides, again, service and support, helps us, again, to review our staffing in each one of these areas to help plan training for each of these ancillary groups as well. Next slide. The other information that I want to share is our building administrators. They are the primary points of contact for special education programs and services for the students that are in their buildings. So the building leader is the first point of contact for staff, for families, if there are questions, if there are concerns. And later on in the presentation, we will review what I call the OSC path to resolution. But this just gives a general overview of all the things that building leaders are responsible for as the special education leaders for their buildings. Now we're getting to the good stuff, staffing. When we are staffing, we take many things into consideration when we're staffing. One of the things that we must take into consideration is the Michigan administrative rules for special education. Within that, that gives us very clear guidelines for teachers in terms of what caseloads are allowable and for some ancillary staff, specifically for speech and language pathologists. Other ancillary groups, it is not as clear, clearly defined what those caseload limits are. But we also take the approach that we don't necessarily staff fully to the limit, especially at the beginning of a school year, because we know that throughout the year students will be added to caseload. So we give some room for growth within caseloads. And we also take into consideration the intensity that each of those individuals of the students that they are serving. So if a speech provider, for example, is serving and supporting a categorical classroom, their caseload might be lower than a speech pathologist that does not have any students that are in a categorical classroom, just because there's a bit more intensity provided and needed for the students in the categorical classroom. There are for some the program classrooms within the Michigan administrative rules define that each program must have a certain number of teaching assistants in those programs. There is no requirement for through the Michigan rules or the federal rules for that matter and I guess I will add that within the federal rules there is no indication for any teacher or service provider on caseload limits. Those are strictly Michigan rules. Those are not federal rules. And so within the Gen Ed classroom, there's no requirement within MARS to have teaching assistants in the general education classroom, but we do that. And so adult support, as you'll often hear about, can be provided by a number of people. It's not designated only to be provided by a peer educator or a teaching assistant. And sometimes, as you all have heard much about, we use registered behavior technicians and board certified behavior analysts to support with students who have some very unique behavior concerns that are not necessarily appropriate for the school environment. And we are working with those students to change those behaviors within the school environment. Next slide. So this gives just a broad overview so that you can see for each type of program or ancillary provider what the caseload limits are. I will say that the only area where we have a waiver from the Michigan Department of Education in terms of caseload size limit is for our autism program teachers, and as you know, There is a shortage and has been a shortage for teachers with autism for years. And so we in line with Washtenaw County Intermediate School District have a waiver to have eight students in our ASD programs instead of just the five. Next slide. This just tells approximately how many staff we have FTE allocated for each row across the district. Next slide.

This tells how many teachers we have allocated across the district. Next slide.

And this slide explains what the requirements are for paraeducators for each program across the district. And I will add that most of our programs have beyond what the minimum requirements are. Next slide. This slide is just to give you a glimpse into the life of the special ed teams and IEP teams across the district. As you can see, initial evaluations completed annually has continued to rise. And we have gone got to put my glasses on here from if you go back, I'll just take it back to 2018, 2019. Right. Pre-COVID 227 evaluations completed in that year of those 200 students were eligible. If you come down to last year, and as you can see this slide, we completed this information back in the spring. At that time, as of April 24th, we had completed 464 initial evaluations just up until April. That already was exceeding where we were for the 24-25 school year. I looked up the data today just to give a brief update. We had an additional 38 initial evaluations between April 25th and June 30th, making our total for the 25-26 school year 502 initial evaluations that our teams had to complete throughout the year. Next slide, please. So also that staffing for our teams ebbs and flows based upon the number of students that we're servicing, the needs for those students. So for example, for last year, we increased our social work FTE because we had more students that had those needs. We also increased our elementary or our resource program FTE last year because In prior years, we had a waiver for elementary caseloads up to 23 students. We are no longer operating under that waiver for a resource program. So therefore, we needed additional resource program FTE. We redistributed some paraeducator FTE, just as we do every year based upon what the needs are across the district. And we also added BCBA support and nursing support to assist with some unique situations last year.

Next slide.

These areas were our critical shortage areas last year, and guess what? They are continuing to be our critical shortage areas this year. Next slide. And this, we do service non-public schools. So these are all the services that we provide to both our traditional schools in the district, as well as our non-public schools located within the Ann Arbor public schools. And this does not include charter schools. They provide their own services. This is just for non-public schools. Next slide. These are all of the programs that we offer in the district. And so as you can see, that list is there. Next slide. And these are programs that are offered by the Washtenaw Intermediate School District. Next slide. And this gives a broad overview of where programs are located in the district and what programs are serviced and offered by the WISD. Next slide. I will not bore you with the report on the teacher shortage, but Andrew, if you could move to the slide where there are some key highlights, key findings from the report, that would be great because we all know, and again, if you'd like to take a deep dive into that, you can most certainly do that and we can circle back. But while we are doing programs like our Grow Your Own program, and that is helping us to have more staff and special education teachers, we are also having more teachers who are deciding, you know what, it is time for me to retire or I'm going to do something else. And so we aren't necessarily seeing the gap close in vacancies because while we have more people coming in, we also have more people that are leaving the profession for various reasons. The other thing in terms of people wanting to come into the field, the needs of our students are changing. The intensity of the services and supports that students need sometimes make individuals decide, maybe this is not necessarily the field that I want to go into. Next slide. So now, you heard me talk about staffing shortages. And so when we have a staffing shortage, we have some very specific things that we must do when that happens. We have to notify parents. Within 10 school days that that service disruption begins, parents are notified. Then we must keep track of what services the student is missing. We must document that. And we have to let the parent know, here's what we are doing to address the shortage in this particular area. Next slide. We document and track all of our services as well as our parent communications and power school special programs. That's what that PSSP stands for. Next slide. So compensatory services, when students, if a service provider, if we have a speech and language pathology vacancy, what happens? The team is not necessarily a, the student missed 200 minutes of service, so they will. get 200 minutes of compensatory. What we are required to do is look at what type of progress did that student make on their IEP goals and objectives. And sometimes there are times when maybe the student did make significant progress on their IEP goals and objectives because often the entire team, including the gen ed teacher, is supporting that student in whatever that deficit area is. So because the speech pathologist has likely had some consultation with the classroom teacher, and so it may be that that team comes together and says, well, the student has made some progress, so maybe we're only recommending 100 minutes of compensatory service. But that is an IEP team decision that includes the parent, and it happens, again, as an IEP team. They might come together and they might decide, we have a new speech therapist, and we understand that this missing service has had an impact, and maybe before, little Concetta only had a speech service once a week, and the IEP team may decide we are going to do a new IEP, and now she might have speech services two times a week instead of just the once a week to compensate for the missed service that she has had. So again, these are overseen by our Office of Special Education, and we work in collaboration with building administrators to keep track of students that we owe compensatory service to.

Next slide.

And we provide that service in a number of ways. It might be virtual, it might be after school. Sometimes we even offer summer programming or supports. Next slide. Compliance monitoring, right? So the Michigan Department of Education, as well as, well, I'm not quite clear on what the plan for the US Department of Ed is at this moment, but I'll say this, historically, they have monitored and collected data annually related to special education and the services that we are providing. The Michigan Department of Education continues to provide oversight and collect data and follow up and give us written reports on that data. You can keep going, Andrew, till you see the catamaran. Yep. To the MDE-STRAM report. Next one. So three times a year, we get a strand report, a workbook from the Michigan Department of Education that reviews various performance indicators related to special education programs and services from students birth through age 26. So for the full continuum of programs. And they look at our data, they look at were our IEPs timely, were parents involved in the process? So there's a whole data set that they look at. And if we aren't meeting whatever their target is, we might be assigned some corrective action, which might mean some training for our team, inclusive of teachers as well as administrators.

you can go right on through those to the path to resolution.

Now, while the state is looking over our shoulders and The U.S. Department of Education has their data collections. Parents also, you know, they know that, listen, sometimes things aren't going quite like they want. And so we have what we call the path to resolution. And we always want parents to know that their first point should be their child's classroom teacher and or their child's service provider their case manager or their 504 coordinator at the secondary level and if they haven't gotten the support that they need there then they can go and talk with their building leader if they still was like no resolution then they're going to come and talk to their assistant director Then if they still don't have resolution, they're going to come and talk to me. Now, if they come and talk to me and they don't get some resolution, something is going on because I really do. We partner with families, right? And we get to this point and we are there to work together. And what I tell my team is that I'm not upset when parents get upset because what I know is that's their baby and they are wanting the best thing that they can get for their child. And so I look at that and say, how can I help you? What can we do? How can we come together to get whatever it is that this student needs? And if for some reason I'm not doing it for them, they are welcome to reach out to the appropriate level director on cabinet or Ms. Linden. And then if they've gone through all of this then you might get an email in your inbox. You might, you might. Or, right, they also, we give them their procedural safeguards and they know that they have a right to file a state complaint. Next slide. 504, accommodations. So Section 504 is an accommodations plan, and it is for students that might have a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits a major life activity. And they can either have a documented record or be regarded as having a record of that. And I just want to share some data with you around 504s in our district. So again, this was as of April 7th. But as you can see, from pre-K all the way through 12th grade, we have 504s. Next slide, please. And every building. No building is without. I'm like Oprah. You get a 504.

You get a 504.

Okay? special education programs. There are 13 eligibility categories within the state of Michigan. And then let's, I just wanna share some data with you around that as well. So this was the distribution of IEPs in the district on April 7th, 2026. Again, across all grade levels and this is also a fluid number because my philosophy is that the majority of students who have IEPs are eligible under categories that once we have provided them the service and support, We believe that within three to four years, they should no longer be eligible for services. So for example, if we have a student who's receiving speech and language service in first grade, it is my hope that we have done the things that we can do. And by the time that student gets to sixth grade, they no longer meet the criteria for eligibility with speech and language services. And as you can see, at that time, we had 2,300 total IEPs for the year. Yep, next slide. This slide gives some data, and this data came from MI School data, the student enrollment report. And I just wanted to show the trend of what is happening and the complexity of students with IEPs in our district. So as you can see, we had 1,800 students with IEPs in our district, and our overall enrollment of students without IEPs was 1,000. not 1,000, 15,434. 10 years approximately later, our overall enrollment has decreased down to 14,679, but our special education enrollment has increased. So while our overall enrollment has dipped a little bit, our special ed eligibility identification rate has increased a little bit. Next slide, please. So previously when teachers may have had two to three students with an IEP in a classroom of 25, next slide, please. Teachers now will have three. And if you think about the number of students with 504s in our district, and just between last year and the 24-25 and 25-26 school year, we went from about 750 504 plans to 1200 504 plans across our district. So now approximately 20% of the students in any teacher's class within our district has a student that has some sort of unique learning need or might require some sort of accommodation or specialized support in their classroom. And I know that that is something that is where we have to help our teachers because this is the space that we are in. Students are coming, students are here, and sometimes those students are having more complex needs than they have had in the past. Next slide. Just a brief, quick difference between 504 and IEP. One thing is a 504 plan is an accommodations plan. It is not specialized instructions such as IEPs. And whereas with an IEP, there's very specific criteria for each of those eligibility categories. Eligibility for a 504 is a bit more gray. Next slide. The other piece is for Section 504, there is no funding, federal, state, local, otherwise. But for IEP funding, we have federal funding, we have state funding, and we have the luxury in Washtenaw County where we have local Act 18 funds. Next slide. And that for the 24-25 school year afforded us approximately a $38 million reimbursement that would have otherwise had to come from our general fund. And so you can see the impact of special education program funding on the general fund is minimal, about $4.6 million. next slide and just you know i'm going to talk about the elephant in the room as they say right uh the act 18 millage the wisd sets that budget and as you can see their overall budget decreased from fiscal year 25 to fiscal year 26 which means that there were in general less funds for all districts across the county and as all districts uh costs increased, then each district was then looking to get an additional piece of a pie that had shrunk. So again, sometimes it's not necessarily all within our control what that reimbursement will be. Next slide. The Least Restrictive Environment Success Team is facilitated by Kim Suszynski, one of our assistant directors. And the vision of that team, you heard me talk about, is to create an inclusive environment. And I will say that this is one of the things that I am extremely proud of for Ann Arbor Public Schools, and we do well. We are outpacing state and county. county for the amount of time that students in our district are spending in general education settings. And so that is something that I am very proud of and I will continue to advocate for inclusive learning environments for our students. This team, you can go ahead and go to the next slide, Andrew. This team Meets on a regular basis, building anybody in our district can submit a request for this team to say we need help with training. We need help with coaching. We have a student that we are not sure what to do with. This team gets together and it is comprised of assistant directors, our. teacher consultants, we have consultants from the WISD that also support this team. They meet, they review every request, and then based upon whatever the case is, they deploy the most appropriate support to that building to meet with that team and to talk about how we are going to support them. Next slide, please. And I just want to remind us that students with IEPs are general education students first. So it is not, you know, those students down there or they belong there, but they are general education students first. Next slide. And the LRE Success Team, again, this shares who is a part of that team. they focus on, again, how do we ensure that students are in that least restrictive environment, whether that is through training, professional development, resources, might even be supporting with IEP development. Next slide. And again, they offer both training and support, right? Training is more of that structure, short-term, one-time, but that support is coaching. And one of the things that we are focused on from the Office of Special Ed, and when I met with my team this week, we talked about it, is that we, and I told them I'm not speaking French, this includes me, we are going to be much more visible in schools and supporting our teachers and helping to build capacity this year. Next slide. This talks about the team and what happens when those requests come in. Next slide. This is just a quick look at the type of requests that came in last year and the level for those requests. And as you can see from the slide, graph the elementary level is our heavy hitter level and that is because that is where you are having lots of new and initial eligibility so those are students that are just sometimes becoming eligible for services and support students that maybe have been new to the district and haven't been here before and by the time those students get to the middle school and high school we have worked through and better understood what those needs are and are on a better path of service with those students next slide and this talks about the type of requests that have come through next slide Janine Harper has spearheaded some of our unique supports this year. You heard me talk about we have some students that really... You've had people come here and talk about we're concerned about safety and students. So there have been some students that maybe it has not been the safest and most appropriate for them in the school setting. And we've partnered with some community providers to offer support to those students. And I was so excited today. We were talking about one of those students and they said, we believe that sometime during this coming school year, the student will be able to come back and engage in within their high school program. And that warmed my heart because I remember that student from my first tour of duty, I like to call it, and just to see the growth and the progress for that student. But it wouldn't happen if we weren't thinking outside of the box. And so this graph here shows sort of the continuum of programs and supports, the least restrictive environment continuum from the regular classroom setting to maybe a specialized school, even to homebound or hospitalized if someone is unable to physically come to school. Next slide, please. So again, working within the continuum, right, we have BCBAs that we support with. You heard me talk about specialized hybrid programs where a student might spend part of their day in one place and part of their day on campus with us, registered behavior technicians, and again, consulting with those community agencies and supports. And we do a lot of partnership too with Community Mental Health for Washtenaw County.

Next slide.

And this, again, is that beyond the curriculum continuum where we are looking at not what we can't do. And this is what I tell my team. I don't want to hear about what we can't do. Let's talk about what can we do, because. We are required to offer FAPE for every student that lives within our borders. So it might not be something we've ever experienced before, but we will come together and problem solve and think about what can we do to support that student. And that is how we go beyond the curriculum. And parents are thankful and supportive of this work. Next slide. Our summer and compensatory programming. So Jaron Bryant has, thank you, is our lead for our extended school year services program. You can go ahead and go to the next slide. Where these are federally mandated services and students are eligible. It's not just open to any student with an IEP. There are some very specific criteria for being eligible. for extended school year services. So it is a very small percentage of our students actually qualify for extended school year services. And that's based on the regression and recoupment, what happens between breaks, right? Are they losing everything that they've learned and it's taking a very long time for them to learn that information back? Maybe it's the nature and severity of their disability, Or are they at some critical stage of learning that if they don't continue that learning, it is going to be a challenge for them? So we continue to offer ESY services. And we've even, he has a proposal that he is preparing to share with me this week for, he calls it those GAP students. Because some students, maybe our traditional summer school programming at the general level might not be appropriate, but ESY isn't appropriate either. And we've got a middle group of students. So we're now working to see what can we do and how we can support those students who don't necessarily, where neither of those programs is appropriate. And we've talked about compensatory services. Next slide. Our summer bridge program. So this program is a program where there may be some students whose families have opted not to send students to school for kindergarten and or first grade, sometimes even second grade. And they've had the students in school. BCBA, ABA, Applied Behavior Analysis Therapy, and they go to ABA therapy every day as if they were going to school. But those students have not had an opportunity to acclimate and prepare themselves for the school setting. So each summer, for the last summer and this summer, we have operated a summer bridge program to help prepare their students so that when they come and present at elementary school, they are ready for the elementary learning environment.

Next slide.

Inclusionary practices. You heard me talk about I'm super excited about the amount of students that we have within our district who are receiving their instruction in general education, and we will continue to work to advance increased collaborative practices within our district. Many schools, I know Scarlett is still very much on course and on track with that in-class service model, but there are multiple co-teaching models available and we continue to support the work of those. Next slide. Building inclusion coaches. So this is a program through the Statewide Autism and Resources Training Initiative, as well as the WISD, where any teacher, gen ed or special ed, and since 2019, we've trained almost 80 people, I say we, they have gone to receive training at the WISD, And it helps them become advocates within their own school buildings for inclusive practices. It helps them to help build capacity and change mindsets within their own school building. And so this program, go ahead, next slide, Andrew, has four different levels of training. And so they start out at a level one in training where they go through some very structured training for each level. There are particular things that they must do at each level to be level 1 current, level 2 in training, and level 2 current. Our goal is that we would have at least one building inclusion coach at every building across the district. Right now, we only have... and coaches in 14 buildings. But we are working, go ahead to the next slide, to truly develop this program at a district level, because this has been a WISD program. And so folks could just go say, yes, I want to get that training over at the ISD, but there was no sort of accountability or collaboration here in the district. And so beginning this year, we are going to have more collaboration, have some training, Mandatory meetings for those building inclusion cultures within our district so that we can have some consistency of implementation across the district. Next slide. Our post-secondary transition planning. So when students turn age 16, it is required that we help them that if they have an IEP to begin to think about what is your plan as you approach adulthood. So that post-secondary transition planning process We work with the student, we work with outside community agencies. You can go ahead and go to the next slide. To help that student develop the plan that is most appropriate for them based on whatever their own individual interests are. They have a transition assessment that they must complete to really think about what they want to do as they move into adulthood. One of the things that I want to highlight is students with IEPs, if they don't earn a high school diploma, they are eligible to continue to receive services through age 26. And those services, when they are age 19 through 26, are provided through the Washtenaw Intermediate School District.

Next slide.

Yep, you can keep going.

Yep, keep going.

Yep.

And then our assistive technology. So Carrie DeSoma is our new Least Restrictive Environment Assistive Technology Coordinator. And assistive technology is any sort of equipment, low-tech or high-tech, that will help students to truly access the curriculum. Sometimes when we think assistive technology, we think everybody's got to have a device or everybody needs an iPad. Sometimes it's not that. Sometimes it's a visual schedule on the desk for the student. Next slide. And one of the things that our assistive technology team focuses on is that universal design for learning. And what we want teachers to think about is if I am thinking about, am I creating a space that is accessible for all, then I know that I am supporting the needs and the variety of needs of students within my classroom. Next slide. I think this, listen, we might be at the end of the road. Look at that. Yes, this is it. Just if you wanted more info on each of the eligibility categories. Any questions that you have?

Thank you, Ms. Lewis.

Yes, trust me.

Well, having worked under you for my last year before I retired, and you were leaving at the same time that I was to go to another district, I don't know if this district realizes what a gift you are and how knowledgeable. I have worked my whole career under many, many directors, and there's a reason you got some estate award through the Children for Exceptional Children. I don't know what the award was, but... I think, I'm not sure, maybe from this report, people understand there are just so many facets to this field. And there are children that can't speak, and there are children that you wouldn't even know they have an IEP or 504. They maybe have a lisp when they speak. And it's just so, this is really an excellent, and I hope everybody takes the time to actually dig into this report, because, you know, you went fast, but it's still a lot, right? I just have a few things I just want to, I don't know, question or just clarify. So you were talking about at times you get waivers for classroom sizes. Yes. And for instance, in an autism classroom, there was a waiver. And then you're supposed to have more paraprofessionals. And we're having a hard time hiring those people. Connect that, if you will, to how we do contracted services for things. Because by law, we have to have those people.

so uh for the waiver for the asd program with that waiver part of it is that then we must have a minimum of three uh additional adults in the space with the teacher and uh we utilize sometimes we have a program through edu staff where they have um some i'm gonna call them highly qualified Sub TAs that go through some very specific training, those TAs go through, we allow them, offer them the opportunity to have our NVCI training. So they have some very targeted training that just the general TA sub doesn't have. And oftentimes those are some of the individuals that if we have a vacancy in one of our categorical programs, we will utilize the support of some of those targeted edustaff subs. In some instances, we may have used some of those registered behavior technicians for students that might be on the autism spectrum and have some behaviors that we are working to realign for the school setting. And that may be a case where we have used registered behavior technicians. I meant to say this, and I will add, we have had our posting up for RBTs. We have not had qualified candidates for that. And I was, you know, as I told you all in your free time. In my free time, I was thinking, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could offer, to be an RBT, it's 40 hours of training, and then you have to pass a certification exam. I was like, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could offer that training for any of our teaching assistants that wanted to earn that training and do that for free? And don't you know, the next day, miracles do happen. Jessica Luck came to me and said, we have an opportunity where we can partner with the Michigan administrators of special ed and the department MDE. And we can offer this to every peer educator in our district who would like to take that training to be a RBT. They will have the opportunity to do that. And so I am super excited about that.

That's great. On slide 15, you had showed the increase in evaluations.

Yes.

Is that a function of we just have a lot? I mean, post-pandemic, we've had a real change, I believe. In behaviors, is it because parents are educated more and they know that they can ask for an evaluation? What do you think has spurred that change?

I think it's all the things, honestly. The more you find out about it, right? You think about cell phones, right? When they first came out, nobody had a cell phone. Now everybody, right? Some of us have two. So I think the more that people know and the longer something is out there, the more people are going to ask for that, the more educated that folks are. So which is not a bad thing. It's a good thing. But again, it is causing our... numbers to increase.

And then the non-public schools.

Yes.

How, like we don't have enough resources to take care of everything we need to do. How is it we get funded when we give services to children that are going to non-public schools?

So their funding is the same. So we are reimbursed at the same rates for the non-public schools as we are for our schools. Okay. So their costs are reimbursable just like ours.

So we're not picking that up.

I mean, a teeny tiny bit, yes, but not an extraordinary amount.

Hold on, guys. Just hang with me for a minute here. Okay. So we know Public Act 146 and 147 passed, dealing with dyslexia, literacy, structured literacy, all those things. The least restrictive environment, the moving special ed teachers into the classroom, inclusion, I get all that. what we know the law says is that if a student exhibits difficulties with reading characteristics of dyslexia we are required by law to have people trained and it doesn't stop at third grade and so i applaud the efforts at scarlet with a classroom for some of our very lowest readers that they don't get to take advantage of all this wonderful stuff we're now doing with you fly and everything but they can't be forgotten so what are we doing to position ourselves so that we and i just had a conversation with miss linden about some activities that might be happening but what in special ed what are we doing so it's not just at scarlet it's a tap and it's at all the middle and high schools so those kids that are really

missing out on accessing the curriculum because they can't read very well yeah we and it's interesting you should say that when i met with uh high school and secondary principals yesterday one of the things we talked about was um perhaps folding in some additional academic support time into those schedules to be able to offer some of those classes we will continue to offer orton gillingham based training for staff in the district so we will continue we're continuing on that path okay because we Yes.

Now it's mandated and, of course, the kids... Even if it wasn't mandated. Thank you very much.

Vice President Wilkes. Okay. Ms. Lewis, thank you for that comprehensive report that you gave. So I just had a quick question, a couple of quick questions. So you mentioned that there's an increased need for services among our students. And I guess coupled with the special ed teacher shortage, put those two together, I'm assuming that special ed, it's been a while since I've been in the classroom, but I'm assuming that special ed services start on day one of school. So are we prepared to support all of our students with special ed services on day one?

We will be.

Good. Thank you for that reassurance. Thank you. Yes, yes.

Our team is working. And I will say this. Typically, like we have worked with, we're coming your way soon, right? You mentioned, someone mentioned contract agencies. We know that we have some speech support where those things may be needed. So we are looking at what are ways that we can close those gaps. And we will be coming back to you to make sure that we have some of those services and supports.

Okay. Ms. Lewis, would you mind talking a little bit about, to go along with Trustee Wilk's question, compensatory services when, just highlight again, compensatory services when those services either are paused or we are working on staffing a certain position? Yes. Student misses service time.

Yeah, so we keep track of those services. We are required to notify parents within 10 school days of that service disruption. So from the time, the date that the service stops, within 10 school days, we will notify parents, let them know we don't have a provider. Here's what we are doing to get a provider. Here's our timeline. Sometimes we may have someone in the wings that we know the person will be on board on this particular day, but we give them all those details. But we keep track of all those times missed. And then once we have a provider available, that's when we reconvene that IEP team meeting for that student and look at what has their progress been, what service they have missed, and what type of compensatory option we should look at for that student.

Okay, thank you. Just one more quick question. You mentioned building inclusion coaches that we want to try to have one in each building. And I'm wondering, so are there current Would these be current employees who would get additional training or would be hiring new people?

No, these are not new people. And actually, all those 80 people that have gone through that training have done that. for no additional compensation because they saw the benefit of the program. And so these are teachers and staff that are currently in our building that are looking to be a leader in their building for inclusionary practices, but there's not additional FTE.

Okay. Thank you. I'm just, you know, along the lines of being financially responsible. We always have to keep that in mind.

They're hiring 32 more people. That is not what I said.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you. That is not what she said.

Just a quick question, just because it's the sort of thing that's on my mind. You made reference to what's happening in Washington, D.C. and the disorder at the U.S. Department of Education. How much are you insulated from that? Has it had an effect on you? Are you worried about what may be coming up in the near future?

Well, I'll... answer that in a couple of ways. One, Michigan was a leader from a state perspective. We had special education rules before there was IDEA. So I don't anticipate that there will be a going of the way side for the expectations for special education in Michigan. And then from a funding perspective, if you when you get a chance, if you go back and you look at the federal funding that we get, it is less, I believe, even than what we have contributed from the general fund. So the federal funding for the IDEA is minimal. So now I'm going to do my shameless plug and say, if at any time you have an opportunity to engage with our federal legislators, senators, senators, congressional representatives please remind them the importance of fully funding IDEA versus where we currently are which is I think somewhere around maybe 13% and even fully funding was only going to be 40% so yes thank you yeah

Thank you so much for that great information.

Thank you, Miss Lewis. You're welcome. Thank you. You take a break.

Sure. All right. It's 938. Let's take a break and come back at 945.

Thank you. Hi.

Welcome. Oh, no worries. Glad to help. They are recall the meeting order at 9.54. I believe we're down at number 9 first briefings that looks like we're at 9.1 policy series 2000 administrative sunset review and I'll turn it over to the parks to walk us through where we are in this policy.

Okay, so thank you, President Feaster. Trustees, we have gone through this series, the 2000 series in committee and made some recommendations. And we want to walk through those changes with you during this first briefing here. So we'll start with 2000, the mission and beliefs. There are no changes recommended under that section. I'm sorry, say again.

Put it up on the screen.

Oh, yeah. Then we go on to 2100. No changes there either. Then we have Policy 2120. After some discussion, we don't have any changes. We're going to keep that amount there at the $100,000. We had initially talked about some changes there, but we're going to leave it as is. And other than that, just some technical minor changes, verbiage. So no real changes there. Then we have Policy 2200. No changes. Policy and procedures on the back side there, no changes either. We have some wording, rewording on 2300. Administrative hiring, you'll see some rewording to be specific to the class that that central office administrator language covered. there, which was the Executive Cabinet. That language was from a different kind of org chart, so it's just come in line with the current org chart. 2320 has come in line. We've made the changes there to come in line with the law, evaluation law. Administrative Committees, you'll see the change in language there that we work through regarding the Administrative Committees. With the feedback from the Governance Committee there. 2420, no changes. Same with 2500, 2520. Questions? Question on 2500. Okay.

Oh, it says, but no less than every, is that 5 to 7? Or is it 5 instead of 7?

5 to 7 range. Yep. 5 to 7 years. Would it be more clear if we actually wrote 2 or 5 to 7? It's clear?

Yeah, I just, I couldn't tell with the...

Okay. All right. 5220, strategic plan no changes. 2600, we have instead of board established, we've gone with a recommendation for district-wide goals, given that with this strategic planning process and the establishment of district goals and objectives, the board goals should regulate to what will become our strategic plan. And then just some rewording of how that last sentence was written. Same content, though. 2620 legal controls, some updating of the current org chart. So taking out deputy superintendent, there is that position does not exist in the district. So just updating that. And then under number two, we just have some rewriting of the language also and updating the language there for legal controls. And then this next section, 2700, the FOIA section, some updates here, all run through our, with our legal counsel, so that we can ensure that everything in this section, this policy is in compliance with law.

I have a comment on that one. The top of page 19 I think we might not want to strike the word coordinator. You're correct. Thank you.

Thank you.

Do we have a FOIA coordinator?

We do. It's not the individual's only job, but it takes up a lot of that individual's time. Okay. Yeah. Okay. And then we have no changes recommended to the policy 2800, which is the therapy animals policy.

I'm sorry.

Go ahead.

President, I just had a question on the FOIA, the next page, page 20.

Page 20.

I was really confused under request processing section 20. It was really confusing what that meant like whose failure to respond and Anyway, I was unclear about the intention of that section Because it makes it sound like well we have to respond to you know written request right away except if we don't then Then it means that we're denying it and so I was a little confused I

Mr. Comsook, can you provide some clarity there?

Well, you know, I'll have it all memorized.

A failure to respond is willful and intentional. A failure to respond, you know, we have Without reading that, FOIA says that you have to respond to a request for information within 10 days. Doesn't mean that you have to provide the info, just means that you have to respond to it. So if we, because it gives you time to coordinate, to file objections. So people, some, and you get an automatic 10 day extension as well. Oftentimes, requesters think that because the statute says that you have to respond, the responses could be, yes, I've got your FOIA. It doesn't mean that the requested information you wanted, here it is within 10 days. So that's, I just wanted to clarify that. Failure to respond constitutes the district's final determination to deny the request if either applies

So it assumes that the failure to reply was intentional if within that time frame there is no response and then there's no request for the extension for the time frame of the response. Is that correct, Mr. Thompson?

That's what it says. Now, these came right out of the statute. They're printed on our website, so... not clear i agree that's what the statute says um and you know unrelated to this as shantae said this is a full-time job and someone in her office is really coordinating it as the requests come fast and furious i was just trying to clarify if it because it said in some cases

that we would request more information. And then I was trying to figure out whose failure we were referring to at that point. It means that if the official, if the FOIA officer does not respond and they intended not to respond and or it was clear that there was a request, is that what that means?

So what I'm going to do is Before we have the second. Second briefing. You'll have a response from the superintendent before then.

First briefing.

Awesome.

Not worth it. So again, this is only the first briefing. All right. Thank you.

Any other details or feedback?

Give her a second.

Okay.

About the administrative committee.

Talk to me a little bit. Oh, I'm sorry. That's page 12. Talk to me a little bit about the discussion that you guys had and why it changed the way it did.

This was just making a distinction between committees of the board and committees on the operations side, making some distinctions between that. Okay.

So an administrative committee, okay, they've got.

The committee we were talking about this evening, like the student support advisory committee, right, is an administrative committee. It's not a committee of the board.

The board has its... Oh, okay. All right. I think they're also defined... Sorry, I don't mean to... I think they're also defined in another policy, right? What is administrative. But this is just making it... I think the big change was that they... They are not dissolved. I don't want to say dissolved. If you don't reinstate it, that they pretty much dissolve.

Yeah, they sunset. But it's your purview. It's not we're going to do whatever. If I need you, I'm going to bring you. Okay. Thank you. Yeah.

All right. If there's nothing else on the 2000s, then I think we are prepared to review the 4000s.

These are the human resource series. Excuse me. Human resource series, Ms. Langford is going to go through.

All right, good evening board and. I was left in the audience here. All right, I will try Andrew once you get those up to go through these pretty quickly. They have as well on governance twice, I believe. Yes, I missed the 2nd time, but I was there for the 1st time. All right, so 1st 1 is. Policy number 4000. The only changes that were made here is just making sure that things are in alignment with EEOC policy. So you will see there in the purple, the things that were added, like the genetic information is the new one on EEOC. So we just wanted to make sure it matched the actual law. And then below that is just legal references. So you have that.

And legal did go through these as well.

Policy 4020 is the anti-harassment, and we just wanted to include in here AI. Of course, AI is a big thing right now, so we need to make sure that digital and AI-generated harassment is also included. Below that is just kind of a definition about AI and harassment, and again, adding that genetic information to that one. On the second page, down where it says complaint procedures, I'm on page four, We just changed titles. We used to be HR and Legal Services. We're now HR and Employee Relations because I do not have a law degree. And so, that's just a title change. And then again, at the end of that, you'll just see legal references to Title IX and Civil Rights Act and things of that nature. Policy 4050, there's no changes recommended. Policy 4100 under recruitment and hiring. We just have down here, again, a reference to AI because we need to get these in all of our policies so that we're covering that under there and then legal references as well. 4120 is conflict of interest, and this is about outside and remote employment. And this just states that if you're working out any outside employment, you're using any of our equipment, any of that nature, anything of that nature that you need to notify the superintendent. And that would mean like a different job, not just working here. 4200. This is, again, adding AI tools into professional development just to make sure that those tools are being used appropriately and that there is some, oh, what is the word I'm looking for? That there's some clearance by the superintendent for those particular tools to be used. Policy 4300, there's no changes recommended. Policy 4400 is just a change from his and her there. We caught it in most of our other policies, but somehow missed it in that one. Policy 4450, again, just changing the department from human resources to employee relations and employee relations. Policy 4500, this is just adding to our safety and security policy that it's just not the physical safety, but it's also the well-being of our staff that we are also concerned with. And we also added our behavioral threat assessment guidelines here as well, so that that was included in policy. 4600, again, dealing with AI, just making sure that we, that, It works with created by district employees and that there is an improvement process to make sure that the equipment that is being used, that people know if it's being used on our district property, that we also own that. So anything that you do on AI there. 4700, no changes recommended. 4800 is teacher placement. I know all of you recall the prohibited subjects went away, and we now have an MOA on teacher placement, so we're recommending this policy for retirement. Policy 4810, there's no recommended changes. Policy 4820, teacher discipline demotion and dismissal, again, recommending this one for retirement. as we have MOAs with our unions now on this one. Same for layoff and recall, which is 4830. And I think that's everything.

Thank you so much. Questions? Trustee Wilkins?

I just had a suggestion. I have a question first. Genetic information? Genetic information. Can we explain that?

Yes. I actually looked it up a long time ago when it went into law. So genetic information is using someone's, so say your mom has some disease and you're using that genetic information against the person who's either being hired or whatever you're doing, but that's what genetic information is. So it's using your family's history to discriminate against the person.

Who would have thought? And I had a suggestion on page 10. Okay. The word stakeholder is in there. And one thing that I, one of many things I took away from the MASB conference that I attended this weekend was that it's practiced now to remove the word stakeholder as it can be an uncomfortable or insensitive word, especially to our indigenous communities. Okay.

I heard that as well, Trustee Wilkins. As a matter of fact, did you hear that from Deb Macon? Was that in her? That was news to me, but enlightening. Would you say constituents?

Constituents is fine. Community members?

I'll have to have you all explain to me the logic behind that later.

It connotes the colonialism and the ownership of property and stakeholders weren't always historically rightfully stakeholders to that property. Okay. So they got that name through maybe nefarious ways.

Fair enough.

So it's just more sensitive language. Thank you.

Thank you for that edit. Situants or community members?

Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Yes, ma'am. All right. That brings us down to second briefing. Number 10, and it's 10.1, new policy 5900, student personal electronic device, cell phones. And I'll turn it over to Superintendent Perks and her team and find out if there were any changes.

No changes to this policy. There were a couple of questions after first briefing around some of the implementation of the policy and what it would look like for students to put their phones in lockers. And when we went back and spoke with our school teams, in particular at high school, what we found is that there is very, little use of student lockers at that level. And so they did not think that that would necessarily be something that would be realistic for students to do on a daily basis, putting their cell phones in their lockers for the duration of the day. And so we did follow up on that question that was asked the last first briefing. But there have been no changes since first briefing.

Any other questions?

i'm trying to decide where to have this conversation if it's now or if it's i think later it's probably best well i don't know about that um so i'm trying to get a handle on and and um trustee muhammad brought it up at the last meeting i'm trying to get a handle on where we really heard the voice of the people that are going to implement this because this is this is a we know administrators are part of it but it's a the way this is presented um you know six times a day or however many periods your school has a secondary level um you've got to separate a child from their phone they got the caddies they got the you know And I'm just, I don't feel secure. I want to know more about what hard data that you have to show me where teachers feel about this. Because when I'm digging around the state and I'm seeing the MEA surveys are showing 83% of educators want bell to bell. I'm seeing U of M study and they're looking at urban districts, 76% in Michigan are doing bell to bell. You know, I'm just like, Because they've got to buy into it. And if they don't get what they're saying, but that's what we really want, it's just hard to make it. I just want to know that they're part of the team and that we're going to, because implementation is everything.

For sure. So I see Dr. Hayward coming to the podium, so I'll turn it over to her in a moment. Okay. From first briefing, if trustees recall, we shared that schools, high schools specific to high schools. Yeah, there was a survey. There were surveys administered to the school staffs. And so the results of those surveys were. have been reviewed both here at the central level, central office level, as well as by the building level. And we are able to look through some of that information provided by the survey, which I believe is probably why Dr. Hayward is coming to the podium to share some of that information. Additionally, I think it was President Feaster maybe who talked about his engagement with the teachers union leadership about the sentiments of teachers in general also. But Dr. Hayward, what specifics would you offer regarding the input from staff?

Thank you. And so thank you for your question. What we shared previously is that we did not give a uniform survey to principals to take back to their school staff. We asked them to engage their staff. All of the high school principals, all three comprehensive high school principals, I should say, did send out a survey. And so I do have those results, but again, they ask their own questions about current policy that we currently have around current practices that we currently have around cell phones. And, and I can share that so that you can share with the trustees just in looking at that information. There were some outliers, but most of the responses were that they,

uh we we do not see as many issues as as we used to see um and i'm paraphrasing so and and i appreciate that i i have to so so as far as the conversation with the president of the union back in february whenever it was you know because you that doesn't hold water with me because it's like why doesn't it because the union has not done a survey Where is that coming from? Is it, oh, well, nobody's come and complained to me. Well, they're kind of busy complaining about the contract. That's where their heads are at right now, which I understand. And so I don't have any evidence from them to educate me about what teachers want. If you only give a survey that says, What we're doing, how's it going? As opposed to these are some options we could do. How do you even know? So I'm just, I'm struggling with this because to me there's just, those are the people that have to implement this. I mean, we know that that's where it's going to land. And to piggyback off of... Go ahead, Dr. Harris.

I was just going to say, I agree, but it's also going to land on every staff in the building. Oh, I get it. Everything put in place is going to be the responsibility of paraprofessionals, community assistants, administrators, and teachers, no matter the policy that you all agree to. every staff is going to make sure that they work to uphold the expectations.

I get that. I just think that's missing information.

I saw Trustee Muhammad and I saw Trustee Baskin.

I was going to add, too, for the elementary perspective, although there wasn't a qualitative survey that was conducted that shows the data that you're looking for, Trustee Smith, it is an overwhelming response once our principal leaders went back to their teaching staff that they wanted students to have their cell phone devices or technology devices the whole entire day.

Put away. Put away. Sorry.

Sorry. What time is it since one? Say one of them put away the entire day.

Yeah, I got that. But I, you know, and I hate to use examples anecdotally because it's this teacher, that teacher. I haven't interviewed all these teachers, but.

Well, don't use anecdotal evidence, Tom.

Well, I will. I had to give an example.

You just said you wanted to avoid it, so.

I'm just, yeah. When I talk, I have talked to some high school teachers, and their thing was, well, I didn't even know we could do bell-to-bell, or I don't want to do those caddies, or, you know, and I'm thinking, at the elementary and middle, we didn't ask for something, what we're saying we want to do at the high school. Did we say to the middle school teachers, are you okay with if we just do instructional time only? Probably not, because it's like, that's not a good idea. So, yeah. Rima, go ahead. I'm sorry.

Trustee Baskett, please. Go ahead.

So, I hear you, Trustee Schmidt. I mean, I would have loved to have more data. And, you know, I know I've talked to Superintendent Parks about this. Objective, we can't take back time. You know, objective, quantitative, ask all our stakeholders.

We've heard from... You don't say stakeholders anymore. Sorry.

Sorry. Sorry, I will change that. Our constituents, it includes like parents. I know we've heard some parents speak about it. I know we've heard from the student voices today. I would love to see more from the teachers because they are going to be the most impacted, but we can't, you know, where I'm struggling. But at the same time, we do have to have a policy by the beginning of the year that So I think it's important that whatever policy that we put in, and I feel like this policy, especially hearing from our students or parents, I feel like it's a balance for now, but I do want to make sure that we have follow-up, not in like maybe even as soon as midpoint to see, you know, are we seeing what disciplinary data do we have? Like, are we seeing increase in disciplinary data? asking feedback from our teachers through some kind of survey where it's like what's working, what's not, but more specific questions. But I would be okay with supporting this, but I think it's important like to have a midpoint or something, midpoint and then end of the year to reevaluate and then having whatever board is next year, reevaluate and then make changes if needed.

And, you know, one of the things that to your point that we talked about during first briefing was that, you know, we are very much so aware that this is a starting point. I mean, we at any point can tweak any policy that you all decide upon. um and in order to be able to do that with the type of information that we need to adjust a policy to become more effective it certainly requires the type of uh tracking that you're referencing and so we have we have that at top of mind okay thank you trustee um i i don't want to rehash last first briefing

It's too late, and I don't think we're going to gain any more knowledge. And again, practically, we are up against a timeline to have something passed as required by law. While it would be beneficial to some to get more information, feedback from the teachers, in this current environment, I don't think we're going to get a non-biased opinion from most of them. So we have what we have. I accept the fact that some trustees are not going to be comfortable with what we have based on what we have. But I do think it's time for us to vote. I was just going to point out we have not in the past voted on regulations. So I'm not sure if that's what the board is expected to do. But I saw that having the regulations and the supportive materials, being the flyer and the posters, were to inform us but not necessarily to ask for our approval. So I wanted to, again, focus what we're supposed to do is regarding the policy itself.

Correct. Thank you. Okay, thank you, President Feaster. So first of all, I just wanted to say that I'm really glad that we heard student perspective tonight from Alexander. I see you're still here at this late hour, so thank you for hanging in there with us. But it was truly refreshing to hear from a student. who actually went out and you said you spoke to 58 other students. I think that's what you said. I'm just quoting what he said, trustee. Is that okay? Thank you. But again, I just want to commend you for coming out and just exercising your right to come here and share your perspective with us. So, and I would like to add that we have heard from more adults on this issue than the students themselves. Yes. Who will also be impacted by this. Yes, our teachers will be impacted, but so will our students. And so, again, I appreciate hearing the student voice tonight. So, as we, the board, consider a cell phone policy that works for all of our students, I think it's important to keep certain facts in mind. And I just want to add that... I mean, really, this whole thing has kept me up at night. I don't know if it's kept everyone else up, but I've really been thinking about this and really just trying to weigh pros and cons and whatnot. But data show that children of color tend to get the short end of the stick when it comes to school policies. So just look at the disparities in our school discipline data that was presented tonight. Studies have shown that bias, whether implicit or explicit, comes into play when you have zero tolerance policies. OK, in essence, a full day cell phone ban, in my opinion, is a zero tolerance policy. Zero tolerance policies have been shown to be punitive. which is something else we've talked about tonight, versus restorative. Zero tolerance policies leave very little room for providing our students with guidance or an opportunity for teachable moments. Again, let's aim for instructive versus punitive, and I would like for us to prioritize equity. uh... cell phones are not bad they're a tool and our students aren't bad either the students that are using them are not bad it's unfortunate but i believe as a public school district along with other school districts we've actually missed an opportunity early on when cell phones were first introduced to our students we missed an opportunity to teach students how to use these tools i mean the phones are helpful they can be a useful tool in the classroom So, again, we missed an opportunity to teach students how to use these tools in a responsible manner. Let's not punish our students now with a zero policy because we missed this opportunity. So, in essence, I believe that the policy that has been drafted could actually work. OK, I just want to reference one other thing. So an article that appeared in the August 5th New York Times has also helped shed more light on this whole issue from another perspective. The headline reads, the U.S. relies on family caregivers. Millions of them are kids. And I repeat. The U.S. relies on family caregivers, millions of them are kids. So I know this may sound unfathomable to a lot of us, but some of our young people in high school may be shouldering heavy caregiving responsibilities. whether that's caring for aging or disabled relatives or helping with younger siblings. Completely banning cell phones for these students could lead to deciding whether to stay in school or not. So I just think that we need to look at this whole cell phone policy issue from various perspectives, not just our own, but really try to walk in someone else's shoes, another student's shoes. Someone actually... I mean, again, students are carrying some of this burden, so I think we need to keep that in mind. And a one-size-fits-all approach is the exact opposite of equity. I believe that the draft policy that we currently have, that we're considering tonight, actually has more wiggle room in it. It's not exactly a one-size-fits-all approach. So anyway, that's my spiel. And again, I believe I can support what we currently have. I agree with Trustee Muhammad that we need to revisit. And Superintendent Park, you have made that very clear that this is not something that would be etched in stone. I think that we need to evaluate, take a look, see if it's working. If it's not working, let's come back to the table. But, again, I feel some reassurance knowing that we have an opportunity to reevaluate and make some changes if we need to going forward.

Let's go to Trustee Wilkins and then Trustee Norton.

So, Trustee Wilkes, thank you for that. I like that we're making sure to keep other perspectives in mind. And equity is supposed to be forefront of all of these decisions, or I hope it's forefront for all of these decisions. So, I thank you for that. Trustee Schmidt, I'm every high school teacher I've talked to when I've said, bell to bell or just during instructional time, say bell to bell because it's so much work to police the phones and they wouldn't have to police the phones. Superintendent Parks, I'd like to push back a little bit on the use of the lockers. So I know I had two kids go through high school. I don't think they could have pointed out where their locker was. Yes, it's true that they don't use it, but I don't think that means they couldn't. I mean, there's a... There's a secure storage device that we don't have to buy that is already assigned to every kid there. So there's some issues. I want to push back on that a little bit. Lastly, I like how we're approaching this as a first step, and this might not be where we land on. And I think, frankly, that should be how we are with all of these policies, right? Is it more difficult to start with a stricter policy and then loosen it up a little bit? Or is it more difficult to start with a loose policy and then have to tighten it? I don't know. So I'm asking the experts if you have an opinion on that.

I think it could go either way. I think it's hard to say.

Trustee Baskett and Trustee Schmidt.

I wasn't going to say anything, but I just had to push back on the pushback of the lockers. Just to clarify, and as I've mentioned, a lot of students don't use their lockers. The buildings are huge, but the lockers are also not necessarily secure. My locker was burned. My locker, I lost everything in my locker, including the new coat that I spent how many hours working for, including all of my notes and everything, the whole semester's work in a locker that someone decided to vandalize. no fault of mine, but I paid the price. These cell phones are expensive. Some are thousands of dollars because nobody wants a $10 phone. Again, I just want to encourage us, let's vote on this. Let's evaluate if things happened. We have committees. We have you know, administrators to give us feedback as well as our students. And again, thank you, Alexander, for your comments and for the work that you did. But, trustees, it's time to vote and move on. We have other work to do. It's not just the cell phone policies.

Trustee Norton, I'm sorry. Oh, I'm sorry.

No, it's okay. Thank you, President Feaster. So, I'm sensitive to the fact, pardon me, that the only part that we are actually being asked to vote on is the two paragraph policy at the beginning of this document, which is extremely flexible, shall we say, and allows a lot of leeway for interpretation. So, given that, I was just going to offer some strong suggestions. And I've said this to other people before. First of all, the idea of reevaluating on a regular basis is very valuable, and it's something that I think it would be good to make standard practice across a lot of different areas in the district. having had a child who had teachers have to tell her repeatedly to put her phone away, I know that it's kind of an issue. And that's why I think that making sure that when you implement these regulations, that there is sufficient training and conversation at the building level to make sure, first of all, that all the instructional staff, the student-facing staff, are actually agreed on how they're going to implement it and to make sure that it is implemented uniformly. And secondly, that the building leadership will have the backs of the teachers and the other instructional staff to support them when they're having to do this. And even though there may be accusations of bias one way or another, and if that's not the case, then people, teachers, classroom teachers and others shouldn't be afraid of implementing the policy for fear of running into that. But that depends, of course, on the groundwork laying and how it's going to be enforced. And the last thing I was going to say is that in your regulations and Section 9 consequences, I think you've already done a lot, but I was going to say that maybe some lessons from the student support advisory team might be useful here in considering some of the language and how we couch the reasons for the policy and how it gets explained to students and so forth. because I think that the point I think several speakers have made, you know, school is supposed to be serious. You've got somebody up there spending their day trying to offer students a high-quality education, and the student's obligation is to actually pay attention and to be part of that process. It's their job. And I think making that sort of an argument or something like that on the front end is maybe better than just saying because we say so and then how do we you know that we do consequences so i just want i would hope that you would consider that as as you uh finish these draft regulations thanks mr schmidt

So I want to address the zero tolerance concept. Having taught through the years where that was the thing, I don't look at when a student has a phone that they're not supposed to have and you say, I have to take it and put it in the office and you get to pick it up at the end of the day as a zero tolerance activity. If I would say, I'm going to take that, and you're never going to use a phone, and you tie a lot more into that, or you're suspended, or you have detention, or any of those, that can be zero tolerance. But to me, I think that that being used in this conversation doesn't fit. Is there a reason? I think what we're trying to accomplish, what I'm hearing from my fellow board members, is we still want kids to have access for some things. Over the last week, I went to Ohio, where I went to school, and happened to tour through the new middle school and high school they've just built, and spoke with the vice principal, and they have a bell-to-bell policy there, and I think the state may have passed that. And I asked her, I said, so how's that going? And she said, well, you know, a lot of my parents are the ones that are having the biggest trouble with this because they want to text their kids all day. And she said, and I've had some meetings with parents and I've said, you know what, if you want your daughter to check in with you at the middle of the day, she can always stop in the office and call you, text you. We have phones in everybody's rooms. If your daughter needs to make a car, she wants to come down to the office. She said, you know, once we put it into place, people figured it out. They made plans before school, they still did it after. Is it possible that we even look at the idea of still giving kids, just use it at lunch? That way we're not separating from our phones every class period. Because it's like, take it out. Oh, I got to get my fix because that's what it is. I got to get my fix. My dopamine hit. And now when I go, I got to hang it up. I got to put it away. Can't wait to get out of class because I got to open my phone. Is there some way that you thought about maybe just lunchtime? If you want to just at lunchtime sit on your phone and get that all taken care of. so that there's a smoother half-day, morning, afternoon. We're not doing all that. Was that even contemplated? And I'm not talking about lockers. I'm just talking about up and away off your person. And check it at lunch if you really got to get that. But I don't, it would just subtract all that other stuff. And I know the kids are always going to be trying to get the phones out. I'm not silly enough to think, you know. But that just seems to me like a middle ground that allows both, but takes that fight away from the classroom every time they walk in.

That's part of the looks.

Well, Trustee Schmidt, to sort of address that, just from my perspective, it seems like if you're going to take a student's phone away during passing period, Who was supposed to enforce that? To me, I know you're concerned about teachers having to, you know, carry the burden of trying to enforce certain aspects of this policy. And it just seems as though if students are allowed to... If they have to put their phones away during passing period, it seems like that would put the burden on teachers to be out in the hallway even more so, policing or whatever word you want to use, policing those students as they're walking back and forth to class. I know I had a chance, anecdotal information here. I had a chance to talk to a teacher who actually spoke during public commentary, and it was suggested that we have CAs sort of you know, watch kids during passing period. And from my understanding, there are only a handful of CAs in each building, and they're doing other things. I mean, they have to, like, check bathrooms, and, you know, these are things that I learned. So the burden would either fall on teachers, which is what we want to avoid, correct? I mean, that's what I'm hearing. Or it would fall on CAs, right? who have other duties you know other responsibilities at this point so it seems like if you if we want students to put their phones away during passing period it seems to me as though it's asking teachers to do even more but okay but just think about this so if your phones are away

they're off in a way there's not the in and out yes of course every adult in the building like you guys said earlier it's not just the teachers every adult in the building would know it's not lunchtime i shouldn't see a phone i shouldn't see if i'm in the hallway kid enters my room i don't have to be like get your phone in the thing i can say hey how was your track meet yesterday So, you know, yes, teachers will be part of that, but it's not that they're, they shouldn't be, there's just no phone. They shouldn't be seeing a phone. In the lunchroom, they can see a phone. To me, it's just a lot cleaner of a situation.

Let's try to wrap it up. Trustee Wilkins?

I also, I like the idea of lunchtime only. Yes, it's going to be work for teachers. You know, these are... We're also trying to teach... teenagers that are becoming adults that have more responsibility. So I don't see teachers having to be in the halls trying to catch students with their phones, right? You're just going to assume that they're not using their phones because they're not supposed to use them until class time. So will there still be some burden on the teachers if they see if, yes, but it'll be less, I would think, than at the beginning of every class time, like we're talking about. And I think that's a better balance. Use the word balance, Trustee Muhammad. And I don't see this policy as a balance. I see this as the The least thing we can do, the most lenient thing we can do and still support the state law. So I think the lunchtime thing would be more of a balance.

We could just do instructional time for everybody. That's the least we could do. Okay. I don't think you've spoken yet, Trustee Muhammad. Then we'll come back to Trustee Baskett.

So, you know, I thought about it a little bit more about high school. And I'm just thinking about my own kids. Now I have one going freshman and one a senior. And how massive these schools are, but their schedules are all different. So that's what I struggle with. If you restrict to lunch, I have a kid who literally will be coming, will be finishing like maybe two, two classes and then has to go to college doing like dual enrollment. So that's like what I struggle with is like, We're going to have to have, like, there's going to be kids with their phones to check, like, what their schedule, did anything change, did they get an email from their professor? And now you have the burden on the teachers or the principal who sees that phone and says, why are you having it on? You know, so I feel like it's, you know, especially in high school, just seeing that there's going to be so many, and some of them have half day, half day, I don't know. So I feel like it's going to be very hard to police just limiting it to, lunchtime just thinking about my own kids and I know you've had high you've had high school kids you know through the system like I'm just trying to think of how they're they're going to be able to police that

Dr. Hayward, can you talk a little bit about the discussion that you had with the school teams regarding the lunchtime piece in particular?

Sure. When I went back after first briefing to talk to them about allowing students to have their cell phones out during lunch only, it was unanimous. It is unenforceable. There are many halls in these high schools. We have to keep in mind, as I stated during first briefing, that community do not have lockers for all of their students. So we wanna make sure whatever we implement is consistent across our high schools. Community freshmen and sophomores have lockers. They don't have enough for all of their students. So seniors do not have lockers and juniors can have a locker if they ask. And most juniors do not request a locker. Pathway students do not use lockers. And so they don't know how they would, with so many halls in these large buildings, how they would enforce, and you have hundreds of kids walking down the hallways, how they would enforce students to keep their phones out and off and away during passing time. We wonder if that will be a tardy issue if we say it has to go in the locker, which most students won't put it in the locker. Be clear about that. But then if those students who do put their phones in the locker try to get on the other side of the building to get their phone to check their messages to see if there's a change and pick up with their younger sibling or in their dual enrollment institution, and then they're late for class. So will that increase tardies? You have at the high schools five administrators, five community assistants, and then it's paraprofessionals, teachers, counselors, et cetera. So if you think about 10 people, if we were just to say the five administrators and five community assistants, that's 10 people in the hallways of 1,500 students. So how is that enforceable?

basket last word thankful quick question do our high school still have multiple lunches yes yes that that's an issue i mean we're assuming all this to when we split we try to limit to launch that's different for a lot of students and how do you differentiate by i'm going to launch with my phone Not every student eats in the cafeteria. I never did. Never did. You know, I'm going to my car and I'm pulling my phone out, having lunch in my car, and you are stopping me because what? My lunch period is now versus your lunch period, you know, maybe 30 minutes from now. It's just a headache to try to enforce. I mean, it's admirable if, again, we have 50 kids in one lunchroom and everybody's good, but that's not what we have here. So, Trustee, I think, again, this is a viable option as a first release, if you will, with, again, the Board will decide how to evaluate this a year from now or whenever. I personally think less than a year is probably not enough time because you've got to give people time to adjust and you know, make changes. But may we please vote on this?

Let's go to the second briefing on 10.2 AN 2286 New Dickin Audiovisual and Low Voltage Trade Rebid Contract Recommendation.

Thank you, President Fieser. There are no changes to this item.

Yeah. Any questions? All right. We are at the consent agenda. Ms. Osinski, will you please read the consent agenda?

Approve minutes of the July 29th, 2026 regular meeting. Adopt policy 5900 student personal electronic devices. Okay. AN-2286, new Dickin audio, visual, and low-voltage trades rebid contract recommendation. And approve a closed session August 26, 2026 at 6 p.m. for the purpose of attorney-client privilege and negotiations.

Thank you, Ms. Ozenski. Would anyone like to remove an item from the consent agenda? Trustee Schmidt?

I would like the cell phone policy.

Thank you, Trustee Schmidt. Anything else? Okay. Ms. Othenski, I think, would you please read? I'm sorry.

I'm confused why the flyer and the presentation are in under. I can take it out.

It just got, it just has duplicated it. I just duplicated the entire item. Okay.

But vice president will so do we need to vote on whether or not we agree for moving out from the Senate comes out if anyone wants to come out automatically comes out and then we'll address after after the consent.

I got so I guess this is asking would you please we just need a motion for the consent to the science that the policy.

Vice President Wilkes moved to accept a consent agenda without the cell phone policy. Is there a second? Second. Trustee Muhammad supported it. Any discussion? Seeing none, Ms. Sosinski-Blitz.

Trustee Beskett?

Yes.

President Feaster? Yes. Trustee Muhammad? Yes. Trustee Norton?

Yes.

Trustee Schmidt? Yes. Trustee Wilkins? Yes. Vice President Wilkins? Yes. Motion carries.

Thank you. That leaves us with Policy 5900. Is there a motion? No phone policy. So moved. Moved by Trustee Baskett. Supported by Trustee Muhammad. Any discussion? I saw Trustee Wilkins' hand first.

Two things. First of all, there was something about we're only voting on the policy part and not the procedure part.

The brochure, the flyer, and all that.

That's not a part of it.

But all the words in the policy we are voting on.

That's all in the draft, a document that is five pages long.

All right. So I had a question about the middle school policy. Devices may be used outside the building before the first bell and after dismissal to arrange transportation.

That's my problem. Go ahead. I'm sorry.

I just think the words to arrange transportation, I wondered why that's in there. Like, it just, it doesn't seem to be.

After dismissal, you're saying it doesn't matter why.

Right. Yeah, it's just, it's after dismissal, after the bell rings.

So you want to have that striped?

If we can.

We can do whatever you want to do.

I said it was too late, so I wasn't sure.

No, no.

No, it's too late.

It's too late to take.

That was my problem.

Thank you for clarifying that.

And I'm going to do a push for, well, stored in lockers or backpacks. So is that going to be the student's choice?

Yes. Yes. According to the policy as it's written, it's up to the student. Okay. I think I have to ask you, Vice President Wilkes, who moved for it, do you accept her?

You're not, the board does not approve the regulation. Correct. So you're making suggested improvements to the regulation, which really shouldn't be part of this discussion? Yeah. Because you're just voting on the policy language.

So the regulations are administrative. That's my first statement. I'm looking at policy 5900. Yeah.

The first page, the two paragraphs there. Yes, ma'am.

So that's the policy. Okay. Yes.

So just the first page.

The regulations are all the administrative pieces that are operational.

I believe the regulations and everything after it was presented because there were a lot of questions.

The first two paragraphs don't say anything about bell-to-bell or passing time or anything. That's right. These are the first. This is just the policy. I'm confused.

So I think what the trustees are asking is how do they, how do we make changes to the regulations should this policy, the first page only?

So trustees wouldn't make changes to the regulations. my team and i would make the changes to the regulations trustees would uh yes at any time we don't regulations don't require us to wait um so we that's the purview of the administrative or operational side so the policy pieces though is where the policy those two paragraphs on that first page that's the that's the board purview so the two paragraphs we recognize that they're

that personal devices can support communication. At the same time, excessive or inappropriate use during the school day can interfere with instruction.

Are you reading?

And then there's a purpose of the policy is to establish clear expectations. Neither of those two paragraphs say anything about bell to bell or So what are we voting on?

I'm sorry, I don't understand. That's a great question. If indeed what we're looking at here is mirroring what the state said, then we could list in here as listed on whatever the number is of the state law, because it's what the state law says. because that's what you're going for. But you've got to have something here, because otherwise it doesn't. You're exactly right.

Is it up to the board or not, whether it's bell to bell or something else?

I'm confused.

I don't know. Yeah. Well, the draft isn't.

My impression is that the administration would like to consult with us and would like us to be on board, but that technically they do not require our approval to set the regulations. Is that an accurate statement? Yes.

Yeah, I mean, we certainly want the board's input and feedback on the most enforceable and best policy and wouldn't kind of just unilaterally make it what we wanted it to be without the board's input.

Just to summarize it.

Yes.

The business of the board is to pass policy. It's the business of the administration to administer those policies, and the administration does it through administrative regulations. And they're sitting here listening to these comments. So when the administration drafts the regulations, I'm sure that they'll take that into consideration. But you don't want to get into the position of having the board get into regulations. That's the business of administration under the school code.

Okay.

Vice President Wilkes.

Yes. I'm sorry. Were you going to say something? Okay. So I'm not really sure where this fits into the discussion, but is there some way for us to put in writing or insert that we would like to revisit this policy, say, in the spring? Okay. just so that it doesn't fall by the wayside. So I know that we said that we're going to see how this policy works going forward, but I think it would be helpful to actually have that Again, a suggestion that we have some sort of time frame in writing. That would go in the regulations. Regulations. Okay.

Well, I've put it out there, and there we are. Which we can certainly do. Thank you.

We could also add, you know, in accordance with state law in this policy, and state law is instructional time ban, right?

I think we have to do that. Okay.

Right now, I'm sorry. I'm a word person. This isn't a policy. This talks about a policy or a reason for a policy, but there's no policy in those two paragraphs.

Yeah, my confusion is... But my confusion is also that if we put by state law, then we're saying it's just instructional time unless the team decides they're going to do something different.

Which would be outlined in regulation.

Yeah, because state law says you have to meet the minimum, but you can go beyond. Yes. Yeah, so right.

Yeah, but I mean it. It is confusing to say by state law if the state law is instructional time. This is the minimum.

So should we send this back or a rewording? I mean, it's just because I'm just asking maybe so that we can.

All right, trustee basket. Are you done?

No, I'm sorry.

No, that's okay. I mean, we've been at this for 45 minutes. And absolutely important. But again, I've asked that we have done all the work before this point, but it sounds like there's still some concerns. Should we send this back to get the proper wording that makes everyone feel comfortable and be done in 10 minutes as opposed to two more hours? Just asking the question.

If we vote on it now and it fails, it will go back anyway, I assume.

So we have to have something by law.

May I? I use my AI because we love using AI when we can, right? No. I mean, we knew this. The law says that you are required to do the instructional time. Because our state is set up with local control, schools can decide to have a more strict thing. So to me, to say something in here about, and Ms. Osinski, like you said, in accordance with state law, And so, yes, it's the regulations that would change this because if indeed it passes as is and in a year it's revisited and it's like, yeah, you know, we could probably do a whole bell-to-bell. That won't change. It's still in accordance with state law, but the regulations would change. So I think that's an easy thing to change so that we can still move this. We can't wait any longer because we've got to educate to our parents, our students. Posters have to be made, whatever. But there's, I mean, this should have all been done in the last school year. So, you know.

So it's been, Trustee Muhammad?

So I was just going to ask. So it seems like, I mean, you know, the regulations does not need our approval. So that can move forward, but our policy does, our specific policy. And for the policy, it seems like from what I'm hearing, we need to include some kind of description, maybe not by state law, but maybe even just saying, just summarizing how we want to approach this without getting all the specifics. So like, it could just be like, you know, for, you know, for grades, whatever, whatever, we are asking for, it seems like bell to bell for, and not specifics, like not like for whatever, elementary, middle school, we are Rick recommend where we went bell to bell and then for high school, only instructional time and just put it in there. And then at least like that gives you guidance and then not all the specifics. Can we just add something like that? And would that be enough?

Ms. Ozenski, did you capture that? And then I think we should still put though in accordance, reference the, the in accordance with state law.

But something like, so in elementary and middle school, bell to bell policy. And then in high school, only instructional time. Sorry, I don't, I don't know how I, we missed, like we missed on this back. I mean, with that, or do we have to take it back to committee?

So do we say something like, in accordance with state law, the Ann Arbor Public Schools prohibits the use of personal devices during instructional time in class or something like that?

That's for high school. And then for elementary and middle school would be belted out. right, isn't that, I'm trying to summarize what we have it without getting into the weeds of how we would implement it.

I don't think, I don't think parents, I think what it really comes down to is what are the regulations, what are the rules, that's what parents, that's what we're sending out to parents and kids and everything, that the policy just, just make it what it is and it can, you can change your regulations because that's really what, that's where it all happens is what are the rules.

So, I guess I'm going to ask people who are going to support this in order to support this. You want you want to add all those specifics or in accordance with state law specific?

I would include just just so that there's guidance to because right now, if you just say in accordance to state law, how you'd interpret it is pretty much only an instructional time. And what us as a board. Seems like we, I mean, again, we haven't voted on it, but what I would like to see is some clarity, like maybe again, but it could be like a few words. You know what I mean? So that that gives the direction for the administrators to, you know, set the policy based on the will of the board.

I guess the question is, is it necessary? In order for this to be an adopted policy, once we vote, assuming we approve it, is it necessary?

I think that's a great idea, but obviously we have a motion on the table. It's been moved by Trustee Baskett, supported by Trustee Muhammad. We could do a vote now and see where we stand and go from there, or we can try to tinker with it now. What is your preference?

Just to answer if it's necessary, we're guiding, from what I'm seeing, examples of other cell phone policies. So it's better to be a little bit more specific so that it doesn't, you know, if there's like a brand new board, I'm just saying, then it can be really changed based on how we set the policy. The administrative part is based on what we are approving as policy. So I would recommend maybe including just, again, generally what we're supporting here and then leave it to the administrators to actually, like, implement. what we're hoping to accomplish from this policy.

So then again, why do we need to specifically say bell to bell? We haven't even been using that terminology throughout this entire discussion. So I guess I'm not really sure.

So off and away all day?

I am not a fan of wordsmithing.

So if you look at the edition, you may have to refresh your, if you have it up on your screen. Does the addition meet the need? Move that to the top.

You know, there has been a very vocal group from our community, which I want to compliment them on, I think, doing a really great job of trying to educate this board and people on our staff about what's happening nationally. And to me, This is like throwing a bone at them. Oh, we'll still put Bell to Bell in there for the two other groups, even though I know so much of what they've worked on is to try to do it across the district. I don't know. It just seems like... Christy, that's not fair. Well, I'm sorry. That's how it's feeling. That is not fair.

It's not what you can call it. No, call it whatever. I mean, we talk about wanting community input. We talk about getting student feedback, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. and then you say we we're just throwing them a bone that's disrespectful to us as well as to them so you know i mean i understand you're you're passionate about this position trustee and i respect that but don't disrespect us in the process of of the frustration i mean i'm as frustrated as everybody else i reached out to nearly all of the trustees to ask are we ready to vote on this If not, let's please not put it on the agenda so that the staff with our input could work this out. Now, it was on the agenda. I assumed everybody was ready. Apparently, it's not in its finest shape. And again, at 11 o'clock, after 50 minutes of conversation that we said we weren't going to have minutes of conversation on, we still don't have a product that we're all comfortable in voting on. So again, I, and I'm never comfortable in wordsmithing at the table in public. I can just see the feedback that we'll be getting now, you know, so reconsider this.

So it's been moved. It's been supported. Are we withdrawing support? Are we withdrawing the motion?

So do we withdraw?

Do we withdraw? We've wordsmithed before. I mean, it's not. And that did not turn out well, Trustee. But it's not changing much of what the administration, you know, it's just summarizing.

Everyone, if you want to see what's been added. accordance with state law and our public schools prohibit the use of cell phones and personal electronic devices in all elementary and middle schools during the school day. For high school students, cell phones and personal electronic devices must be silenced and put away during instructional time. School staff for educational, medical and or emergency.

Are we going to have an issue with defining instructional time?

No, no. I'm asking the question. Yeah, no, we can. We can. That is something if if we wanted to define that further, we could do that in the regulations.

Are we comfortable with this?

Can we still say, Dave, in accordance with state law?

Because state law does not spell out levels. State law is the minimum. State law says instructional time. So in accordance with state law, it can be stricter than that, which you've done here.

Oh, yeah, that worked for me. Are you okay? Yeah. Okay. All right. Yes. I did not realize that. Did not know that this is what I didn't understand.

I'm not going to, I didn't know either.

He talked about it in committee. I thought there was a clear understanding of. That this was. The difference between policy and recognition. So the superintendent is okay with this? Yes. It's been moved.

Who moved it? It was supported by Trustee Baskett. It was supported by Trustee Muhammad. Do you all still move and support it given the changes?

Well, now we have to make another motion because it's been amended, right? Will you accept the friendly amendment?

I would support this as amended.

All right. Trustee Baskett has accepted the friendly amendment to the motion. Any other discussions, trustees? All right. Seeing none, let's have a vote.

Hey, Trustee Baskett.

Yes.

President Feaster.

No.

Trustee Muhammad. Yes. Trustee Norton.

Yes.

Trustee Schmidt. No. Trustee Wilkins. No. Vice President Wilkes.

Yes.

We have a policy.

Motion carries.

All right. Thank you. So now we're down to board action. Sorry. All right. There's nothing on the board action. Now we're at item for agenda planning. Trustee, are there any item for agenda planning? Just a clarification. Yes.

Are we and again, Vice President Wilkes, I know this is in your purview and you've been trying to get dates. Are we still hoping to have a retreat before school starts?

Well, actually, no. I know we suggested September, and I think that's the date that would actually work best for me, and I think for all of us. So, Superintendent Parks, we can talk, but I know... I don't need a date.

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to start controversy.

No, but we mentioned a date in September, and I think that that would be best. I initially said, let's try to do this before school starts, but I don't think that's realistic.

Okay. I just needed to know for my calendar. I'm sorry. So, for...

For gender planning, so I would like to revisit student absenteeism. I'm pretty sure that, I think that's on our calendar, I'm not absolutely sure, but so specifically what mechanisms do we as a district currently have in place to proactively and effectively address this issue? Yeah, I would like to look into that a little bit closer.

I support that, yeah.

Sounds good. Anything else? Okay. That brings us down to items from the board. Do trustees have anything they would like to share? Seeing none. I do. I do.

Sorry, Vice President Wood. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm slow here. No problem. I think this is, wait a minute. Okay, you know what? I can't call it up, so we'll just call it a day. All right. I think I can remember off the top real quick. So Trustee Wilkins and I had a chance to go to Summer Institute, sponsored by the Michigan Association of School Boards. I just want to let everyone know that professional development is important for our teachers, but it's also important for us as board members. We're constantly learning. We're constantly trying to learn. best practices when it comes to being board members. And it's also great to network and collaborate with other board members from other districts. So we had an opportunity to do that. So again, We are trying to become experts in what we do here at the board table, and we do take the time to do it. So, again, so, Trustee Wilkins, thanks for coming along. It was great. And, yes, I just wanted to share that.

Good. I'm glad you guys had a chance to go do that.

Absolutely.

All right. If there's nothing else, that brings us down to adjourn. Do I have a motion to adjourn by voice vote? Moved by Trustee Schmidt, supported by Vice President Wilks. Any discussion? Seeing none, all in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed say nay. We are adjourned at 11.14 p.m. Good night.