Remarks by Steven Norton
16 remarks on the record, newest first · Page 1 of 1
Thank you, Mr. President. Respecting the thoughts of all my colleagues, since I wasn't part of this discussion, I don't serve on the Governance Committee, I just thought I'd share. First of all, I think that some sort of transition planning meeting is an extremely good idea. And I think that there are a bunch of reasons why right now it might be more important than at other times, because we will be at midstream in a number of things that are extremely important. to the district. In addition to all the other things that we could say, gee, I wish I knew more about X before I actually had to…
Thank you. Pardon me all again, and I think that this is really wonderful work that you folks have been doing, and a very good reason to continue to lobby for the continuation of Section 31AA budget funding, part of which is targeted for mental health and schools, but is always at risk of being removed during negotiations. I did have a question because of other things that we have in mind. How would a student who is concerned about keeping conversations private go about navigating this. And to what extent, I know that many of the services as they should be are in school building, and does…
What I'm thinking of this from both directions, what are the obligations on those providing services in the school? I mean, outside the school, it's different. What are the obligations in terms of notifying families if a student has come to them with certain concerns?
So it has to cross some threshold maybe before.
So I'm just imagining, you know, a teenager, you know, who is. Somebody like I was who it would have been maybe easy to easier to talk with somebody I didn't know than somebody I did know and so what sort of options, you know students would have under this system, but either way having it I think is Something that's been missing for a long time. So I'm really glad that we're building this up And I'm glad that the state is finally paying attention Thank you Thank you so very much we truly appreciate the great presentation and
Thank you. And I'm sorry, I don't want to interrupt you for very long. This is I think a really useful presentation I just for the for the folks watching at home one of the issues had always been that the section 31a money which is targeted at low-income students and section 41 which is targeted for bilingual education was distributed equally on a per pupil basis on qualifying Pupils across all districts and part of the point behind creating a weighted formula is to take into account things like concentration of poverty concentration of need which on the big picture is a really good idea but…
All right. Thank you. Oh, did you look at the worst case?
I was going to note to follow on, thank you for doing all this. A lot of people aren't aware, and it's hard to figure, it took me a while to figure this out, that it's not just the foundation allowance that depends on our student count. A lot of the other what they call categorical targeted spending depends on our student count, not either Eligible students for certain services or the total student count so it throws Not just the foundation allowance, but a lot of budget items up into the air if you don't know what your counts gonna look like so Thank you, and I'm sorry Thank you very much
Would you like to introduce this, President Feaster?
So, pardon me, here's the text of the proposed resolution regarding authorization of a standstill agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice. I'll skip down to the meaningful parts, and I'm omitting the legal citations. Whereas, on September 14th, 2026, the Board of Education of the Ann Arbor Public Schools through legal counsel received correspondence from the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division asserting ongoing noncompliance under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, FERPA, and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, PPRA. And whereas on the board subsequently…
the first one, and I want to underline here that I am only speaking for myself, although I suspect that many or most of my colleagues would agree. We didn't really have a chance to discuss this resolution regarding a standstill agreement. I just want to underline that it does not reflect any rollback in our commitment to protecting I don't know that we should go into any additional details. I respect that, Mr. President, but I simply wanted to explain that we have not changed our stance.
All right. If that's necessary, then I regret that we didn't spend a little bit more time discussing it. Secondly, at least if the emails that we get are any indication, a lot of people are concerned about the questions of what might happen in any sort of financial realignment. And I just wanted to emphasize the fact that not only have no decisions been made, but with the support of the board, the superintendent has made clear that she's going to organize a very public and very extensive consultative process to examine those questions and to make decisions about how to make the decisions. A…
Thank you, President Feaster. Finally I wanted to just put out there about the upcoming elections there are a lot of organizations partisan and nonpartisan who are organizing volunteers to be active during early voting and on election day to make sure that the vote proceeds without undue interference and without any intimidation to make sure that every eligible voter is able to cast a ballot and have it counted, I would encourage everyone in our community to see if they can carve out some time to maybe volunteer for doing some of that work. So I just wanted to bring that to everyone's…
But there are independent organizations as well as partisan organizations that are all doing similar things. So you can participate in a number of ways.
Yes, that's the only one I've read. I don't know if there's another one.
Well, speaking as one of the people who does write long emails. First off, I want to to address some of the issues around policy 5011. I was one of the trustees who, all acting independently, was looking for advice and counsel about how to repair our relationships with the community, but also how to fix any potential issues with the policy itself. And while we're not able to act quite as I might have expected, I think that what we did here tonight at least should try and make clear the intentions that we have. And I wanted to underline that the question of the future of this policy is not…