Anchorage School Board: 9/1/26 ASD School Board Meeting

Okay, good evening. We'll call the ASD School Board Tuesday, September 1st board meeting to order. The time is 6:18 PM here in the boardroom. Present are members Blakeslee, Bellamy, Jacobs, Lessons, and Higgins. Present online are members McDonough and Wilson.

We also have our new student representative joining us. We'll introduce himself shortly.

Okay, we've called ourselves to order and conducted a roll call. Would our new student representative please lead us in the flag salute and then read our land acknowledgment?

Of the United States of America. And to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

We acknowledge that we gather here today on the traditional lands of the Diné people on Upper Cook Inlet. For thousands of years, the Diné people have been and continue to be the stewards of this land. ASD is committed to diversity and inclusion, and it is with honor and respect that we recognize all Indigenous people who live and learn in our community.

Thank you. I want to welcome you to our meeting and thank you for attending and supporting the work of the Anchorage School District and this board. The board thanks students, parents, teachers, staff, school business partners, and the entire community for your investment in our district with your time, your talent, and your tax dollars.

Board members, we have an agenda in front of us. Uh, we have pulled two items from the consent agenda and moved those down to action items. Those were memos, uh, 20 and 22. Uh, with that said, is there a motion to approve the amended agenda as drafted? Mr. President, I move to approve the amended agenda as drafted.

I second.

Is there any opposition to approving the amended agenda? Seeing none, we have approved our amended agenda. We'll move on to reports. We have our Student Representative report first. Uh, welcome, the floor is yours, sir.

Hi everyone, um, I'm new. My name is Steven Gibson. I go to Polaris and, um, I'm very, very excited to be here. Um, so just a part of the Student Advisory Board, if you don't know already, it's a, a group of students who meet together, uh, once a month and we discuss, um local issues affecting our community. So, uh, we just had a meeting today, did it like approve the agenda and everything, um, but we're having our actual meeting, uh, on the 8th.

So I will be heading that, and, um, we have a lot of schools, and we're very excited to be here and talk about the issues affecting our community.

Thank you and welcome, Mr. Gibson. We will move on to board conference and committee reports. Is there a board committee chair wishes to make a report at this time?

Hear from Member McDonough first. Thank you, Mr. President. Um, I think I'll start with the Governance Committee and then re-enter the queue for the Ad Hoc Advisory Committee. Um, so the Governance Committee met on August 27th, last week, and we completed a large review of some student handbook-related policies. Most notably came up policy discussions about weapons and dangerous instruments, which the committee discussion ended up leading to some, some direction for myself as chair to work closely with the administration to look at how we can clean up the language and define some of the newer intentions about restorative justice practices as, uh, to be more objective about these issues.

The committee also looked at academic honesty policies and noted that it's, it's nigh time for new board policy on the use of artificial intelligence inside of the district for students, where the intention of the committee was clear that we don't want any students to be using AI for plagiarism or for basically shortcutting their academic learning, but we We do see the need for the policy to be, to begin much broader and much more comprehensive of the new uses of AI. So that's another thing that as chair, I'll work more closely with the administration and bring forward further recommendations later this semester. We also passed an inclusive— well, we, we've recommended that the board will review a resolution that's on the non-action agenda tonight. For inclusive diploma options. This resolution came from recommendation of a principal who received the Governor's Council of— for Disabilities and Special Education Award last year for Educator of the Year, and she's been working with the state legislature to advance an option inside of Alaska schools for students with disabilities receiving modified instruction to get a full diploma that would then be, uh, something they could use at their— in an inclusive college or inclusive career or in a military track, for example.

Um, the committee had to defer a full discussion on the school visitor management system where a large number of community voices have come forward with concerns about surveillance technology and whether or not they actually have a place inside of ASD's current operations. Although at this time it did seem that there's a large presence of surveillance options. The committee just ran out of time, so it'll be on a future meeting for the, the public to review with us. That's all for the report. We will not have a meeting by the time the next board meets, so we'll look forward to some conversations with admin in the meantime, and then we'll meet at the end of September.

Thank you, Member McDonough. We'll go to Member Blakeslee. Yeah, um, from the Finance Committee, uh, sort of recap, we also had a meeting on August 27th, and we had a bunch of topics that we talked about. The first was, um, being presented findings from the substitute usage audit that I believe those findings are going to be posted on the website. Is that correct, admin?

Yes, I believe that's what we discussed. So, um, it will—. Yes. It will be posted on the website. Yeah, it gets posted on the— there's a link on our website to the city's website where they get it posted.

Okay, great. So it will be posted on the website, um, the findings from that substitute usage audit. Uh, we also talked about the resolution that was proposed by the assembly a few weeks ago, um, Assembly Resolution 2026-211, where essentially the Assembly directed the mayor to create a budget proposal that included at least 2 of 4 potential different spending scenarios. And specifically, this comes around how much the muni may or may not be able to fund the school district around the full cap, um, that they— the maximum allowable contribution they could provide to the district. And so they asked the mayor to essentially look at scenarios for funding levels where They would either fund the district to the full maximum allowable level, um, but then potentially reduce additional services, government services.

They asked for a scenario where they didn't, uh, fund the district to the maximum local contribution and instead did not cut community services, and they asked for scenarios where potentially, um, there is an alternative where funding options could avoid reductions to both essential services for the municipality and avoid reductions for, um, funding the school district. So we sort of just discussed the fact that this resolution had been made knowing that the mayor's proposal would be submitted on August 31st, which was yesterday, and we made a plan as a finance committee to essentially revisit that proposal once it's been submitted, and then sort of evaluate what potential implications that might have for the district and what response we might want to bring in preparation for our next joint meeting with the assembly, which is happening in a few weeks. And the other topics that we talked about were related to waterfall funding, which is also on today's agenda, but we talked about board priorities, spending priorities related to potential waterfall funding that we would receive through HB 263. It's the one-time funding that's coming from the legislature, which we now know that amount. Um, and so the board essentially just provided some high-level ideas of things that were priorities for spending both in FY27 and FY28, which we'll discuss again tonight.

And then the third topic that we— or the fourth topic that we discussed in our Finance Committee meeting was asking for more time and planning for more time for Finance Committee meetings, given budgeting is a very meaty topic and will likely need a lot of additional time to have more informed and robust discussions, at least until the FY28 budget is finalized. So we're planning to add additional time to our meetings going forward, and that is what we have.

Thank you, Member Blakeslee. We'll go to Member Bellamy. Yes, thank you, Mr. Chair. Communications Committee also met on August 27th.

We had all things back to school. The comms team presented a review and update around this year's back to school focus of Gearing Up for Success. We took a look at all kinds of data from our website, email, social media, news coverage. Printed materials, school communications. Uh, there was a wonderful slideshow that kind of captured all of the highlights of getting our kids and staff back to school.

We also looked at, um, what's things that we're looking ahead and planning ahead for. Uh, one member, McDonough, will talk to you about in a minute regarding the, um, right-sizing ad hoc committee, which, uh, Communications Committee will definitely be supporting. Uh, we also talked about the legislative luncheon that's coming up, as well as the legislative priorities. I do need to remind board members, if you have any additions to the legislative priorities as they are written now, you should get those to the president by the end of the meeting. Um, other than that, uh, that's pretty much all I got, and our next meeting will be September 24th.

Thank you, um, so I will finish this off with the ASD Rights Sizing Committee report. We met, uh, the day before, so we met on August 26th. This was the first meeting of the ad hoc committee since its charter was placed by the president, and so a lot of this meeting was just very direct orientation of what the issue is and where the committee would like to go forward. We received a debrief from the Chief Operating Officer, Jim Anderson, and a similar version of it was shared with the board tonight. But what really stood out to me is that the, the administration has a, a way of assessing instructional levels of service that the committee sees as an important lens to bring into the community.

So there's a, there's a disconnect in messaging where the administration sees the benefits of learning that can happen when we combine schools. And one example they brought up was Baxter as a school that, you know, there was great heartbreak and, you know, it was a, it was difficult and troubling for a lot of community members. But at the end of the day, the students at Baxter last year, after it received the new Naka Valley Elementary School, they're doing better or at least the same as they, the, they were tracking. So this is, uh, an issue that's showing a positive. And while ASD has about 5,000 less students than we did 9 years ago, this is not an issue that we'll be able to just wave away.

Um, so the next steps for the committee: we reviewed and had discussion on the charter and on a communication and recruitment plan. And I'm going to go through notes with the superintendent and his team tomorrow so that we could begin seating the advisory members of the committee, and that we can get a public outreach plan fully actioned with the district's administration. No meeting date is set for the upcoming meeting because we want to give the community time to understand our mission and see if each person, if they're right to serve on the committee. And then once we've filled in at least the majority of the advisory seats, then we'll begin announcing the next meeting of the committee.

Thank you. That concludes our reports for tonight. We'll go to guardrail monitoring, or yeah, it is guardrail monitoring tonight. Superintendent will not allow unsatisfactory employee performance to go unaddressed. Dr. Bryant.

Thank you, Mr. President. So I'll invite up our Chief of Human Resources, um, along with Mandy Clark, our Director of Leadership Development, to answer the board's questions on this guardrail report, which primarily focuses on different dimensions of the evaluation process. So with that said, I'll pause and see what questions there are. We did receive some in advance that we're prepared to speak to as well.

Yeah, just as a reminder for the board, you received a copy of this report in early August and had the opportunity to submit some questions just to kind of seed the discussion tonight. So yeah, for the record, Marty Lang, Chief of Human Resources, and give Mandy an opportunity to introduce I'm Mandy Clark. I'm the Director of Principal and Leadership Development. So we are happy to respond to any questions you have about this year's Guardrail 3 report.

Member Bellamy, thank you. I, I sent in some questions, but I can't find them. Did you capture— I don't know how you captured the questions that came to you, but can you look and can you just start talking from the questions that I, I know I sent them. I just didn't pull them back up tonight. I'm sorry, and I'm looking for them.

We have copies of those here, so we can read the question and, and respond. Yeah, happy to try to find mine. Yeah, so I'll start with question number 1. So the number of teachers with at least one rating below proficient increased from 82 in '24-'25 to 93 in '25-'26. While the number receiving an unsatisfactory rating doubled from 15 to 30.

What does the administration believe is driving that increase, and how should the board interpret it? As declining performance, stronger identification of performance concerns, or some combination of the two? So I'll let Mandy start our response to that question. Thank you. Good evening.

So we have had a greater focus, um, of professional development and coaching with our principals on how to provide effective feedback and that coaching directly as it would encourage growth for our teachers and for all of our staff. We also have had a greater focus on looking at our high-quality instructional practices and looking at how they're reflected in the Danielson Framework when we're having principal— helping principals do observations. So I'll add to that. I think, you know, in addition to principals being more confident in the process and therefore maybe more willing to engage, that might explain in part the increase in the number of basic and unsatisfactory ratings that we saw year over year. I would also say that if you look at the beginning of the year snapshot that was in last week's Board Connect, we are continuing to hire more teachers on things like emergency certs or alternative certificates who haven't had the same level of teacher preparation that somebody who's been through a full university program might have coming in with a full certification.

And so I think that might also explain why we see more teachers showing up less than proficient in some areas. And it's not that they don't have great potential to become teachers as they're going through, you know, their program enrollment with the university. It's just that they aren't there yet, and so they need that additional support. And then the last thing I would add to that is, you know, with the last couple of years, we have been hiring later in the season, and it is just harder to find high-quality candidates the later in the year that we hire. Okay.

I'll pause there and see if there's any other questions. Otherwise, I can continue to go down your list, Member Bellamy. I think I almost have it here. So many emails. Oh my God.

I'll summarize the second question that we received while you're looking at that, and that really was, you know, we track through this report the number of folks with low ratings. I think there was a question about when they're put on plans. We haven't reported out how, how have folks been successful when we put them on a plan of growth or a plan of improvement when we've identified concerns. So we do have some numbers to share with the board about kind of the success rate when, when members are put on a plan. So when we looked at that report, we identified 93 teachers that were identified as having at least one rating that was below, below proficient.

And so of those 93 teachers, it was asked how many were placed on a plan of growth or a plan of improvement, and there were 27 teachers that were placed on a plan of growth or a plan of improvement out of those 93 that received in one area one basic or unsatisfactory. So other teachers, so teachers may have improved off of those ratings of unsatisfactory or basic over the course of the year, or they may have only ended with one basic on their final evaluation. When a teacher only has one basic on their final evaluation, then it would not necessarily go into a plan of growth or a plan of improvement. It's really an opportunity for coaching in that area with the principal and the employee. So of the 27 teachers that were placed on a plan of growth or a plan of improvement, 8 improved off of the plan of growth or plan of improvement, 15 resigned, and 2 were non-retained.

Okay, but just one basic a low, less than Basic wouldn't put a person on a Plan for Improvement, right? It's just an opportunity for support. That's correct. If, if an employee receives one Basic on their final evaluation, then that does not, that does not open up a Plan of Growth or a Plan of Improvement. However, if you receive one Unsatisfactory on the final evaluation, then that does go into a plan of growth or plan of improvement.

Okay. All right. And I think that that process though, it works. It gives support where support is needed, and it helps to get people in other places other than the classrooms. That is correct.

Okay. I'll wait for somebody else. Anybody else?

I don't know if you want me to go through all 8 of the questions. Um, well, I don't think you have to do all 8. Can I tell you what I think was my favorite question? Yeah. Which one was your favorite?

There was actually a couple of questions that pointed to, I think, a larger question about this report in general that I really appreciated, um, from the board's questions. And, you know, I inherited this report when I came into this position 4 years ago and have tried to clean up some of the, the things that I wanted to make clear But the essence of the question that I really appreciated is we've spent a lot of time talking about the processes that we've used, and there were some bigger picture questions. How do we know that we are identifying all of the issues that may persist, right? When there's folks who are not performing at a proficient level, do we have the mechanisms in place really to surface that? Clearly we have the systems to address that, but how are we locating those things to make sure that we're not leaving students as the beneficiaries of unsatisfactory satisfactory performance.

And we haven't really spent a lot of time focusing on that particular question in this report, and it's given me a lot of time to sort of reflect and think about some ways we can improve on this report for future years, because we certainly are doing a lot in that area that isn't necessarily tied to evaluation. You know, Chris Opitz and his department in, in A&E are pulling a lot of data from student reporting that obviously goes into goal monitoring reports. It's also aggregated by schools and shared with principals, and sometimes his team will boil it all the way down to the classroom. It gives us an opportunity to celebrate what's really working in our schools and also equip principals and supervisors with information about classrooms that may not be performing as highly, and that gives them an opportunity to go in and figure out what additional support that teacher needs and whether or not we need to engage one of these processes. We're also doing learning walks with principals.

We have look-fors for things like PLCs. Mandy is walking principals through calibration training to make sure we have good interrater reliability when we're employing the Danielson Framework as our evaluation tool with teachers. So I have a lot of confidence that we're doing a lot to make sure that we are addressing things, and there's other things in the academic strategic academic plan that are going to surface that even further. And so I think in the future we'll try to fine-tune this report really to show the ways that we're surfacing those issues and then the processes we have for addressing those performance issues. Great.

And so for— I know the teachers use the Danielson framework. Talk a little bit about what we do with our principals and assistant principals. Yeah, so we have a set of principal standards that we've used at least for 15 years, my tenure as an administrator in the district. There are some strengths in those and there are some gaps in those standards, and we've known that for a while. So Mandy, myself, Kirsten Johnson, we've been part of a statewide committee that's been sponsored by ACSA that is looking at a possible use of the Leadership Paradigm Framework as an evaluation tool for administrators.

And that conversation has been happening for the last year, a little, little over a year, and we're going to be piloting that framework as an evaluation tool through our principal supervisors with one of their principals for each principal supervisor. And so we're hopeful by the end of the year we're going to get some really good feedback on whether or not that's a good replacement tool, because it is the primary vehicle we've been using for professional development for leadership for our principals. And so we'd like to have our PD really well aligned with the evaluation tool that we use for our principals and assistant principals. Okay, great.

Anybody else?

Member Higgins.

Yeah, mine is focused on, on reporting and, and dealing with issues that way. I've had PTAs come to me this last year. This is a little bit unusual. I've had parents and, and even kids, and some of their concerns, they don't know where to report them. They don't know how to get them done.

And if you don't You know about the concerns, you can't handle them. And if the— if no one knows the process to follow for reporting it, because sometimes you're trying to report it to the principal level, you don't feel like it's going anywhere, you don't have support, they don't know the process of where to go. I've had a principal tell me that if a teacher had an issue with some problem like that, they can go to the union. Well, if it's a safety compliance issue, it's a ASD issue, whether the union's involved or not. So I'm getting all kinds of different types of understandings of what steps they take, where they might go, or anything like that.

So my concern is identifying and reporting and addressing it requires knowledge of it, and there needs to be some process followed to ensure that people can do it. Sometimes I've told them go to the ombudsman, at least they, you know, they have an independent type of view if they're not going to do anything. What are we doing to make it so that parents, if they have concerns— a lot of concerns out there with kids that are being aggressive and they feel like their kids are at risk and they're just not interceding— that was a common issue. Um, uh, the staff not being accessible to parents was an issue, um, and, and some are almost retaliated against for, for raising concerns. How would How do we communicate to the staff?

How do we communicate to parents and to kids where they go if they have a concern, if they feel like it isn't being addressed, or they're not sure what to address it, or they're afraid if they raise it, it's not going to be— they might be retaliated, or it may impact them? You know, a lot of people can feel that for, um, without justification, but they still feel that way. It may not be anything motivating. What are we doing to help that? Because that's been an issue that's been out there a long time.

Well, before I got on the school board, okay, so it dates back, and that's a long time ago. But is there any plan to do something to address that type of issue? There's, there's a couple of ways that we do, and probably some things that we could enhance. State statute requires us, as part of evaluation of certificated employees, to provide an opportunity for parents and the community to provide feedback. And so we do have links that we push out every year that give folks an opportunity to provide that kind of evaluation-based feedback.

For more acute issues, we also last year developed a complaints dashboard. We have a number of different pathways where both internally and externally people can raise concerns or complaints about things that are happening in the district. And so we— those used to exist sort of in different places on our website through different processes. And we put those all on one complaints dashboard now. So anyone from the public can go to that website.

You know, you can find it on the menu of options on the, the main page of our, of our webpage and look at the descriptions for the different processes for reporting that and figure out which one they believe is best, you know, to get their issue addressed. We have somebody on the back end, even if they choose the wrong, you know, process, who's reviewing those concerns and making sure they get directed to the right process and the right person to address it. So in the last year, I believe we built a lot more infrastructure in place to better receive those complaints and make sure they get addressed. We're doing that through our JIRA ticketing system internally, which also gives us a way to sort of monitor whether or not, you know, those are actually followed up on, whether they're closed out. And eventually sort of the next step is to be able to provide the board with some reports on how that, that complaint process is going overall.

So you would have numbers and categories of types of issues. You keep it tracked that way, correct? Yeah, that was one of the advantages of doing it through the JIRA ticketing system is we have reports that we can then pull. Okay, thank you.

Yep. Just one member, Bella. Just making sure that in order to support Guardrail 3 in monitoring and support and resources, you may not have the answer tonight, but do you have what you need in terms of resource, human or otherwise, to, to do it from the way it should be done? Well, I feel fortunate that we have Mandy because Mandy does a lot with our principal development, professional development, and is really I think this is a passion for her, has taken on the, you know, supporting principals, understanding the process kind of from start to finish and making sure that they have the ongoing support that they need. Mandy, I don't know if you have anything that you would add to that from your lane.

No, I think one thing that we've also been able to do with some of our leadership development is we've joined the National School Leader Collaborative, and that is really, they they have set up the structure of the National School Leader Collaborative, which is what Marty was talking to additionally. And, and so that really gives us a full resource of many different states that are actually utilizing the same framework for leadership development that really looks at the whole totality of school leadership and also provides opportunities for how teachers— we can help train teachers that are interested in leadership opportunities as well. And part of that is mentor— through mentorship and having teachers that are looking for additional leadership opportunities also helping with the training of some of our new teachers or teachers who are on alternative certs or choosing a different pathway. For education. Awesome.

You know, I will say with the cuts that we've made on the business side of the organization, there are some things that we have offered, like supports for our classified supervisors, that are more challenging to offer in the same robust manner that we have the last few years, just because we have fewer people to do that work. So we could always use more resources, but we also understand the sort of financial situation that we're in as a district. And so we are certainly supporting the effort the best we can with the resources we have at this time. And if I may just chime in, I agree with what was just shared. And of course we have nearly 100 buildings and there's only one Mandy Clark.

So to ensure that consistency and alignment is an uphill battle that, you know, we're faced because of the lack of resources. But the, the second piece is that I feel, and this will be a part of ASD Listens, is that sometimes the assistant principal and principal roles can be misunderstood because a huge piece of what that role is intended to do is to be the instructional leader of that building. And every year, as more cuts face our schools when there are fewer adults in that building, the principal's attention will get put more into the crisis management than the instructional leadership. We have incredible principals that make it happen, but in a well-resourced environment, we would not only have wonderful principals but a strong pipeline of future principals through our assistant principal pool. And oftentimes in very scarce resource environments, APs can be the first thing to go.

But when I reflect and think about our staffing, especially in our elementary schools, we have nearly 60 elementary schools and only the Title I schools have assistant principals, we lose a real opportunity to develop that future crop of principals. So I think in the next 5 to 10 years, we're going to be faced with more, you know, first, second-year principals who were recently out of the classroom. And ideally, they would have that extra time to focus on the intricacies of instructional leadership. It's not an easy problem to solve. An assistant principal is an administrator.

It is an investment, but it is tied to the principles that I think are the spirit of the guardrail.

Member McDonough.

Thank you, Mr. President. Um, I have only one question, and I apologize—. Not—. McDonough, you're coming through as very muffled. Could you check your audio, please?

I will No, I'll fix it on and we can move on. Sorry about that.

Okay, you're barely, barely audible. And so, um, while we— while Member McDonough addresses that, we will ask if any other board members have questions.

Seeing none, we'll move on to the technical report. Dr. Bryant on College Career Life Ready interim grades 9 through 11. Great, thank you, Mr. President. So in 2 weeks, I look forward to a conversation on our College Career Life Ready goal. Um, we'll take a moment to pull up the PowerPoint.

Um, so this goal specifically focuses on the CCL goal to increase graduation rates, and one of the ways that we monitor whether we're on track is through monitoring the credit on-track status of our students across their high school career. If we could move on to the next slide. So in addition to the technical content that's here for the board to review over the next couple of weeks, I did want to applaud our assessment and evaluation team that's put some work into enhancing our goal monitoring presentations, I would say, in a more positive way. So you'll notice the first positive improvement is on this slide that shows the, the goal itself. That part's not new, but the part that is new is the format.

And then if you look at the right-hand side, we're trying to make it more digestible for the public to understand what does on track even mean. So on this slide you'll see, um, how many credits you need to be on track by 9th grade. So in this instance, that's 5.5 credits. And then going down to 11th grade, if you have 16.5 credits, then you would be on track. So we're trying to connect the dots to make things a little easier for the general public.

So I thank the assessment team for putting a lot of thought into that. Next slide, please. There are similar minor format changes here, but this goal— this slide shows our on-track status related to the goal. We're currently at 75.58, so we are trending upwards from the baseline, but we're still far from our goal of 90% for 2028. So that would be an area where I would anticipate some discussion as to what can we do to facilitate the earning of credits.

Next slide, please. And then this slide looks fairly similar to, to what it's looked like before. We break down the data by grade level, the on-track status, but you will notice that in the top right corner it does show you where we're at in a relative sense. You'll see we're ahead 2.42 points, so it's just put up there in larger text for clarity purposes. Next slide, please.

And then we'll leave the board with the on-track status disaggregated by race, ethnicity, economic disadvantage status, English language learner students, and special education students, and more, so we can discuss the variance between our subpopulations and ways that we can target and provide specialized supports for those groups. Slide. And this is one of my favorite enhancements to the goal monitoring report. So really, this is an administrative synthesis of what we think is working well, where we that we can think more deeply about, and I think this is an area where I'm curious to get your perspectives going into our conversation. And we wanted to do some of the heavy lifting on questions that we do want to explore so we can continuously improve and get closer to reaching that goal.

So this information has existed before, but it's been within the heads of individual administrators. So we're trying to really elevate the goal monitoring experience by condensing and synthesizing some of our findings on one slide. So I hope that's something that the board finds valuable. When you review this data too. And then next slide.

And then another enhancement, we're making the action steps a little bit more digestible. About a year ago, we broke down the, the process where we had a long list of different action items, so we hadn't clarified which ones are universal across all buildings and which are more school-specific actions. So we're continuing that practice, but the formatting is different. But we will still continue to share explicitly with the board and public what are the priority action steps, meaning the things that from a district level we're putting energy and resources into, and how that fits into, into improving our progress towards this goal. So I think the format enhancement works really well on this type of slide too.

So that is the, the technical report, and we'll follow up in 2 weeks with our senior administrative staff.

Thank you, Dr. Bryant. That completes goal monitoring for this evening. That moves us to public comments.

Welcome to the board's opportunity for public comment this evening. We set aside a 1-hour time slot at the beginning of our meeting for public comments. We'll be able to accommodate all testifiers this evening during that period of time. ASD conducts its public meetings under Robert's Rules of Order. Provisions of Robert's Rules include: do not attack a member or speaker's motives.

Please, no profanity or foul language. Refrain from disturbing the meeting. No cheering, applause, outbursts, or waving signs or posters. If you have handouts you wish to share with the board, please give them to Ms. Sullivan, who's seated to my left. It's— there are additional details in the entrance of the boardroom on the table to the right.

Our first speaker tonight is Harper Kushner.

Hi, good evening everybody. My name is Harper Kushner. All right here, welcome. You have 3 minutes, please begin when you're ready. Thank you so much.

Not tech savvy. Um, I am a teacher at Tyson Elementary, Title I school. I'm in the intensive behavior school-based behavior support program. Um, I wanted to come in tonight and give some comment about some issues that are really facing our school, uh, and in my classroom. Um, so I'm here because I need you to understand what these budget cuts are actually looking like in my classroom and in our classroom.

Um, not on paper, not during a walkthrough or a snapshot. Um, I encourage you guys to come in for one day. Day, not, not an hour, not a half hour, like one whole day in my classroom. Because in our program we have 3 intensive classes, uh, our building subs have been cut and we are already struggling to get subs and parasubs into my SBBS classroom. So even when we do have a substitute, that does not help us at all because a lot of the subs come in and they are not trained and they're not able to work with the students that we serve.

On top of that, our paras are no longer allowed to cover our teacher positions. And so if I'm out or one of my teaching partners is out, our paras are picking up the slack whether they're getting paid for it or not. Because like I said, not a lot of people come in to sub for my class. I'm K-2 and it's, it's a lot. Um, so when one teacher or one para or one coach is out, everybody in my program feels it, including our building administrators.

We have to move people around, we lose that direct support, we stretch ourselves thinner and thinner. It is day 10 of school and we are burnt out. We are burnt out. Our coaches are exhausted. The teachers are exhausted.

Our staff is not trained. We have a new para— like, I'm not even gonna read this. We have a new para in my classroom. She was on noon duty at a former school. She reported to me this morning that she's getting multiple sub calls every single day, and she tells them every single day, no, I'm a sub now at Tyson.

She is not NCI trained, that is nonviolent crisis intervention trained. That is not a building administrator problem. That is a district problem. Problem. This is my third year in the district with ASD, um, and we didn't have early return, we didn't have refresher training, we didn't have any sort of supports in place.

We are drowning and we need support. In El Paso, they had the school board and district reps come in once, once a month and do one full day of substitutes. Now we've got lots of trainings coming, right? But then I'm gonna have to stretch my class thin because she's going to do a verbal intervention class. I want to go to an IEP training, which is two days.

How am I I don't have a pair if I don't have subs. So I would encourage this board to come into my class, right? Tyson Elementary. Come into my class for one day and you can see what we're dealing with, and hopefully you guys can provide some support. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. Our next speaker this evening is William Baxter.

I'm William. Is it on? I'm William Baxter, and the, uh, the FFA and 4-H, uh, uh, auctions coming up at the fair, the September 5th, at— it's got viewing at 11 o'clock, but then it starts at 12 o'clock. I recommend, uh, You know, I think was, you know, like, uh, the Ferrandi is a big thing. I think that the, uh, the auction at the fair should be a big thing too.

And the other thing is, last week— what, not this week of the fair, but last week of the fair— was, uh, mostly FFA, or FFA kids were going around the barn, and it was really great. It's been They really did a good job. The FFA people did really good job.

And Bartlett was there. They had 8 kids there. It was great. And that's all I have to say. Thank you.

Thank you for your testimony. Our next speaker is Bruce Schultz.

Welcome. You have 3 minutes. Please begin when you're ready.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I've been— except for a brief period during the remote learning time— I joined ASD in 2019 as a substitute. Because of my degree, they've given me all grades in all subjects. So like I said, with the exception of that period during COVID I've been a constant fixture in many of the district schools. Last year I was privileged to be one of the building subs at a local middle school.

The important thing is that the substitute, as opposed to a para, we're given the opportunity to teach any level, any grade, any subject. We are more versatile than most are. The service that we provide is an everyday, all-day, all-year commitment so that the teachers know that they have somebody they can rely on to cover their classes. I'd like to call your attention to the first speaker.

It may seem like quite an investment, but when you consider that your administrative assistants have to scramble if you don't have a building sub and there are no subs on site, what do they do and how long does it take? Are any other substitutes available? Now, one or two Building subs shouldn't be a problem when there is no classroom to be assigned to. The substitute can find their own work. For example, PE classes in the middle school level, there may be 3 instructors, but there might be 140 students.

Another set of adult eyes in the room isn't a bad thing. So I respectfully request the board to reconsider the position that you no longer have these building subs to rely on.

And having been one, I recognize the value. And again, you could show up at any given school now And you could see this where teachers call in sick. This morning, a prime example. I had already returned home this morning when I was called by the AA that I had just left because a teacher wasn't feeling up to teaching their class.

Now, if any of you have any questions about my experience, I'd be happy to answer.

Thank you for your testimony tonight. Our next speaker is Daniel Whitfield.

Welcome. You have 3 minutes. Please begin when you're ready.

Hello, my name is Dan Whitfield, and I am currently the band director, uh, at Goldenview Middle School. This year marks my 22nd year in the Anchorage School District and my 16th year at Goldenview. And I'm testifying with you, uh, to you today on behalf of myself and on behalf of my amazing students. For the last 16 years, I've worked hard building the Goldenview Band Program into the largest music program in the state of Alaska. 2 Years ago, 6th graders were integrated into the middle schools, and I was blessed with an additional halftime band director to help teach the added 150+ students that were enrolled in my band program.

Facing a potential budget shortfall last spring, the part-time band director position was cut, and that FTE transitioned to other areas of the school. The result this year: my student daily load is 330 eager yet very loud middle school students. I'll say that again— 330 students every single day, an average of over 50 students per class, over one-third of the entire Goldenview Middle School. Come through my band room doors. When large amounts of FTE were restored to the latest legislative funding boost, no help came to alleviate my student load.

And despite my repeated pleas for assistance or help, nothing has changed. I'm frequently told it is what it is, or given assurances like, if anyone can teach 330 students a day, you can. But in a day and an age where we as educators are often asked Is this considered best practice? I ask you all tonight, is a student load of 330 students daily considered best practice? The reality is my students will ultimately feel the brunt of this situation.

With classes between 45 and 83, connecting with students is nearly impossible. All the extra things that made Golden View Band special I can no longer provide— jazz band, lunchtime practice sessions, extra help before and after school All gone. Grading has been exceptionally challenging, as even a simple assignment that would take 1 minute per student to grade takes me over 4 hours to complete with 300+ students. On top of that, teaching in an environment where the volume is regularly above 100 decibels for 5 hours a day makes me question how healthy this teaching assignment is on me personally. What I've seen— what I've always thought was my dream school has quickly evolved into a teaching nightmare.

I deeply care about my Goldenview students and my community, and I wouldn't feel like I did my best if I didn't advocate for them, which is why I'm here tonight. It's my only hope that they receive the education and experience that every one of my prior students has received and that they wholeheartedly deserve. To close, I would like to extend an invitation to all of you to spend a day in my Goldenview band room, witness some of the amazing things my students do daily, and see how my schedule and student load is impacting them. You'll see moments of amazement, amazement, but you'll also witness the challenges head-on. Thank you for your time.

Thank you for your testimony. Our next speaker is Tammy Hoagie.

Welcome. You have 3 minutes. Please begin when you're ready. Thank you. My last name is Hoag.

That's okay, it's my husband's last name.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak tonight. Mr. Whitfield, who just spoke to you, does not even know I was coming to testify tonight, but my name is Tammy Hoag. Let me give you just a little bit of background. Both my children attended Goldenview and South High and were in the band programs there. The reason why this is important to me is because my child just graduated from college with the music degree and served as the principal tuba player in every one one of her ensembles in college, and this was because that man who just spoke to you put a tuba in her hand.

I also served as PTA president at Golden View twice, as well as substituted at both Golden View and at South High School. I only recently learned about the amount of students that Mr. Whitfield was going to have in his class. He had also stated that he has had a success program for 16 years. I have seen that as I have been at that school. For, um, the coming year, just like he said, that he is going to have over 330 students across 6 classes with only 1 planning period.

All other teachers have 5 classes with 2 planning periods. That is a huge constraint on that classroom. In his classroom, I have substituted in that the music department there. They have a capacity of 80 students. Do you know what it's like to have massive instruments with that many kids?

You barely can fit 55 to 60 kids in that classroom. But I want to go for this context, if you will, for a minute. If you took a choir or an orchestra class and they had about 100 students and their standard was 1.0 at a full-time employment, Mr. Whitfield with his 330+ students would be teaching 3.3 times a larger capacity of kids than those teachers. Let's just say you took another class and they had 150 students. That means there would be 5 classes with 30 students max.

He would be having over 60 students. He, he would be teaching at a 1.0, 2.2 times, or 1.8 times larger than any any regular core class. Now I'm asking the district these final things: what additional staffing and support is being provided? When funding and positions returned to the schools, were resources directed to help manage this enrollment? How many other teachers carry a comparable student load?

And are resources going preferentially to programs with fewer students in it? So successful programs should be supported. His is 16 years of a successful program. Parents deserve to know that a teacher with this record is being asked to carry this heavy load and whether he is given the resources and help to do it successfully. I urge you, ASD, to look into this, and I ask you to examine that he needs the support and help to manage 330+ students.

Thank you very much for allowing to testify. Bye. Thank you for your testimony. Our last testifier tonight is Emre Manyoki.

Welcome, you have 3 minutes, please begin when you're ready.

Hi, my name is Emre Manyoki. Um, I've been, uh, coming to school board meetings to try to make a difference and improve the, uh, quality status of the school district. Um, I'm sort of a scientist. I've been observing this process, and, you know, I— there's a lot I could say about it, but I can never get it in these sound bites that I'm allotted here. I did request that we do a public forum back in January where speakers like myself could actually explain something of value to the public and just generate more public involvement in the situation rather than, you know, having everybody try to cram it into 2 or 3 minutes.

But that request was ignored. I was here last weekend, or last school board meeting, and, uh, one of the school board members mentioned is that well, from closing all these elementary schools, which was widely unpopular within the community, uh, he says, well, we lost, we lost some public trust there and we need to gain it back. And I disagree with this sentiment. I think the public should not trust this system. It's dysfunctional and it's not doing right by the students that are supposed to be benefiting from the system.

And they don't— they're not allowed to vote for you guys. They're just subject to the whims of this system of control. And, you know, all I hear about is funding. Nobody's talking about increasing the quality of learning, looking into innovative ideas of how we can, you know, make students to be more motivated and more productive. It's just all about, well, we just need more money.

You know, as if this is just a corporation, we're just trying to like move products and, you know, push the numbers. But, you know, a big part of the problem that the— this funding missing is because students are missing, because people that can afford to or have the, the time to homeschool are choosing to pay private school or, or go the homeschooling route. And, you know, it's like, so basically you have a very expensive product to offer the public, but to some people you can't give it away for free. And to the other people that can't afford to pay for alternative schooling, then, you know, they just have to deal with whatever you guys give them. And I think it's It's totally unfair to the students, the pe— and the teachers and the parents.

Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. That completes public testimony for this evening. We'll move to Item E, our consent agenda. Board members, again, this has been amended to remove items 20 and 22.

Is there a motion to approve the consent agenda as drafted?

I move to approve the consent agenda as drafted. I second.

Okay, seeing no discussion, could we have a voice vote to approve the consent agenda, please?

Member McDonough.

Member Blakeslee? Yes. Member Higgins?

Yes. Member Wilson?

Member Bellamy? Yes. Member Lessans?

Yes. President Jacobs?

Yes.

Mr. President, point of order. If you can hear me now, please let me know. I think we might have fixed it.

Member McDonough, your audio is now audible. Would you like to vote on this item, please? My vote is yes. Thank you. Member Wilson, are you with us?

Can you hear me now? I can. Member Wilson, would you like to vote on the consent agenda? Yes.

The consent agenda is approved by a vote of 7 to 0. We'll move to action items. The first item is ASD Memorandum Number 020, Amendment to Professional Services Agreement for Ingleview Elementary School Replacement Project. Is there a motion?

I move Sorry, I move to approve ASD Memorandum 020 to execute, um, a professional— an amendment to the professional services agreement for Inlet View Elementary School replacement project.

I second.

Sorry, I was looking for the full I found it. I'm still navigating. Oh, can I try that again? I move to approve ASD Memorandum 020 to execute an agreement to the professional services agreement— excuse me, to execute an amendment to the professional services agreement with Envision Architecture Incorporated in the amount of $284,350 for additional construction administration, site-related services, and demolition hazmat services to complete final project closeout of Inlet View Elementary School replacement.

That was seconded by Member Bellamy.

Um, Member Blakeslee, I believe you pulled this item. Do you have discussion? I do. So this is a little bit of a follow-up to the, um, last memo that we approved at the last board meeting related to the demolition expenses that we already talked about, but I know this is an additional expense, so So, um, one— sorry, my computer is having a lot of tech issues. Hopefully it holds out.

It's terrible timing. Um, so I guess one question that I have is— I have a series of questions, but one question is how, um, this expense differs from the expenses that was— or the expense that was included in that other close to $900,000 that we they did approve related to demolition, construction, etc. For Inlet View. Sure, so Envision is our designer of record. This particular board memo is for all of the efforts the designer has had to go through over the past year or so.

So they have received a total of 568 requests for information from the contractor, and it could be any kind of thing from, we found groundwater that was, that was too close to the surface. How are we going to compensate for that? If you look at the new parking lot, underneath the parking lot about a year ago, they found loam that was much, much deeper than what they needed. So the designer had to get with Geotech, civil engineers, and others to redesign the plan. For them to get the aggregate inside so they could get it stable enough to even put a parking lot on it.

This also includes about a year ago, right after we found out how bad PCBs were at Ursa Major and started doing the— trying to figure out in the view what was the scale and scope of their PCBs. The designer had to work with industry experts, consultants, try to figure out how to do the testing, how to take that testing and evaluate a new design for how are you going to remove the foundation.

Of these 568 RFIs, they resulted in 220 potential change orders that the designer had to go back and relook, and it could be anything from we were supposed to get something from this company that was about this size, and now all of a sudden that's no longer available.

And it's something that's larger or smaller, and how does that impact everything?

And then obviously the additional demo fees was a multi-trade discussion and design to be able to come up with that. We talked about 2 weeks ago, why can't we just demo it and throw it in the ground? It was, I mean, we have industry experts in Alaska that helped do that piece. Then finally, they added an estimate for $100,000 for project closeout. So imagine with a nearly 50,000-square-foot building, which is about the size of 15 to 20 houses, all of the different changes have to be accounted for and auditable.

So everything, every one of the RFIs, all of the PCOs, all of the actual change orders have to be incorporated. Into what does this building look like when complete. Some other things we did was get partial approval to occupy. Like last December, we, we needed to move everything into the building, so we were getting partial occupancies approved by the municipality. And, and actually, in a project this large, it happened throughout the building, so you could get something moved in there or get something installed So you could keep moving on and all of those things really kind of add up.

I mean, it's a large, large project. I appreciate that, and I completely understand how projects can often become larger than anticipated. So I— yeah, thanks for the additional context. So then I think my— one of the primary reasons that I pulled this too was just to better understand um, how these contracts are essentially set up. So with this particular expense, it looks—.

Is it—. It says in the memo that the current design team fee budget for time and materials basis was overspent in October of 2025. Is the $284,000 and change— is that the number that's reflected in what was overspent in October 2025, or this is on top of that? So the October 2025 was the underneath the current parking space. That was $40,000.

The additional contract administration services was $94,000, and that really was incorporated to code changes from the start of the design several years ago all the way up through construction. It was the 568 RFIs. That they, they, I mean, who could account for how many requests for information, what might they be and how long might each of them take? The 220 potential change orders, which requires sometimes, I mean, you could have 3 or 4 PCOs and only pick one of the 3 as you're looking for a new or creative way to use, to put something in a building because what you'd originally planned for you know, a couple years earlier when you designed it, just simply isn't available anymore. And as something occupies the space it wasn't planned to occupy, you know, you really do have to go through that.

The additional demo fees, all the consultants with the industry experts for the concrete slab was about $50,000. And then the last chunk of that $284,000 is the $100,000 for project closeout, and that's where it really is every single thing that happened from several years ago with initial design, cleaning everything up, making sure you've accounted for everything from that time through all the change orders, through all the permit changes. Um, it's expensive and it's complicated. And also recognizing things are expensive, complicated, things change all the time with contracts. Um, did this contract, the original design contract with Envision Architecture, contain any not-to-exceed amounts?

And is that a standard procedure that we take part in when setting up contracts about having not-to-exceed thresholds before administration has to be made aware that costs are going to be exceeded prior to them being accrued? That's why we have a contingency account. We estimate what things are going to cost, but we don't know exactly. I mean, no one could guess 2 or 3 years from now what is really going to happen as you're doing a design contract. So Envision was our designer of record.

They were not the construction project.

Different joint ledger keys, different accounts.

And quite honestly, we did do on every, on every design, whether it's a roof replacement, whether it's a building, you start with a 15% design. And that kind of gives you a rough order of magnitude of how much a project's going to cost. Once you go— and you'll see multiple board memos this year where it looks like we're modifying contracts. It's because we are. We'll get a 15%.

They'll sit with the project manager. They'll sit with a lot of us. And we'll figure out, okay, we don't like that, we like this, we don't like that. Let's look at this a little deeper, and then you'll do a 35%. After the 35%, we'll do a 65% design.

And once you get to 65, you have a decent estimate of how much things are going to cost. But you don't know all the problems you're going to face, especially with tearing down a building and building a whole new one, right? And then typically at 65% is when we start looking at, okay, this might be a good bond year. Even better if you can go the next phase, which is 95%, where you have a fairly accurate cost estimate and scope of the project. Well, the designers involved naturally at the 15%, 35%, 65%, 95%, and then once you start the project, there's all of these change orders that continue.

So they are estimates, and you can't— we, we don't give them a cap. We were in the middle of a project build. We knew that we had more than enough money in the project to be able to cover everything that was happening. And it— and if you think about, if you were to take 568 RFIs and stop each one and wait 4 weeks before you decided if you could do it, it would take a decade to build a building. You'd never get there.

Sure, and I get that. And also recognizing we're not building any more buildings, at least in the foreseeable future, that like this particular project. Um, I guess this is more of a statement slash question, given we're in these sort of austere budget and fiscal realities. I—. Is obviously not my area of expertise, but I I am wondering if there are mechanisms that we could look to in the future about establishing not-to-exceed caps, or if that— for any potential future contracts for really large projects.

And again, that might not even be something you can answer, or the answer might be no, but those are sort of the, the broader questions that I have just looking at our fiscal picture. We certainly have contracts that are not-to-exceed.

The construction contract was not to exceed, but then when you have to do a changeover or a change order because something happened that was completely unexpected on any, any project, then do you really stop the project when your whole construction season is about 80 days and wait 4 weeks to determine if you're going to move forward because it automatically pushes it to the following summer. Sure. Okay, well, those are my big questions.

Thank you. Seeing no other discussion, can we have a voice vote on AST Memorandum Number 020?

Member Lessens? Yes. Member Bellamy? Yes. Member Wilson?

Yes. Member Blakeslee? Yes. Member McDonough? Yes.

Member Higgins? Yes. President Jacobs? Yes. ASD Memorandum Number 020 is adopted by a vote of 7 to 0.

We'll move on to ASD Memorandum Number 022, Acceptance of Grant Award FY27, Department of Education Early Developments Comprehensive State Literacy Development Grant. Is there a motion I move to accept—.

I move to approve Memorandum 022 to accept the Alaska State Department of Education and Early Development's FY 2027 Comprehensive State Literacy Development Grant Award totaling $700,000. This is year 2 of a 5-year grant.

I second. Motion made by Member Lesson, seconded by Member Bellamy. Member Lesson, you pulled this item? Um, I did, and I wanted to take a moment to talk about it. It's a substantial grant that, um, we haven't had a chance to really dive into, and, um, personally, I appreciate that the memo is trifurcating an appropriate word.

I've heard of bifurcating, but it, it, um, it supports, uh, it directs resources in multiple directions, including, um, to birth through age 5 interventions, elementary and secondary literacy. And I know that I've talked about the importance of all of those three things at different points in time. And I continue to think that, um, well, they're all important, um, but in particular, I wanted to use this as an opportunity to maybe shed a little light on paths forward for secondary literacy. Um, I know we have a board goal on third grade reading, but the needs of our older students remain profound. And I think it's really important that we address them.

So I'm hoping that staff can explain what some of these tools are that we would be funding. There's something called Read 180 and also Gradebox AI. And so I shared some— my interest in this last, last night, and I hope that staff can kind of give us an overview of what these tools are. Are, how ASC intends to use them.

So, Member Lessens, I'm happy to shed some light on what those tools are. I'll start with Read 180. Read 180 is a computer platform-based reading intervention that focuses on phonemic awareness. And so essentially, particularly for this particular allocation, the— this is aimed at secondary students, and it does is have a different platform than some of our other phonemic awareness kind of platforms that are a foundation of just basic literacy for students. When we get to secondary level, a lot of the programs that work on phonemic awareness are very elementary-based.

This particular one is geared specifically, specifically for secondary students that need that type of instruction in their reading and instruction. And so it doesn't have, you know, some of the more elementary-looking graphics and colors and things of that, it's more age-appropriate and specifically helps our secondary students essentially feel seen and heard a little bit better in the way their intervention operates.

Sorry, I just paused in case you had other questions.

I feel like maybe I would. But I feel like I served up like, what are these things? Yeah, okay. Yeah, so, um, the AI Gradebox, um, that is, um, something that we would like to utilize the grant for in a pilot status. So I think everyone's pretty well aware of the AI technology and just the progression, and there is— this particular program, um, is a grading program that's geared for teachers that would help accelerate potentially their ability to grade and, and focus their instruction based on that grading.

So this particular program will upload student assignments, will give suggestions for feedback on a particular assignment once the teacher has entered the rubric or the grading criteria. Nothing goes out automatically. It's always approved by the teacher first. But what it also does is it loads Alaska State Standards. And so as the teacher is grading through AI Grade Boss, It's checking Alaska State Standards in the particular subject that they are teaching.

It's looking at the assignment and the grading criteria, and then it will give feedback to the teacher after they've graded an entire classroom worth of assignments. Are there standards that are missing that you could particularly look at either reteaching or just teaching more specifically? And so it also lets you know what strengths are in the classroom. And so we would like to use a very small part of the grant to pilot this work, um, as a technology that could help our teachers?

Um, I understand that piloting things takes a leap of faith, and my role on the school board involves oversight I just, I guess I'm, I'm sharing my feeling that every part of me is screaming, this is not how I envision teaching and learning. I guess in my mind, in a perfect world, an educator would have a reasonable class size and have time to respond with a nice red pen to every piece of material that a student writes. And so I recognize that that doesn't exist in our reality right now, and that we have teachers who are massively, um, their class sizes are untenable to provide the kind of feedback that I personally envision would be most beneficial to our students. And so I see the possibilities in AI, and yet yet it makes me extremely uncomfortable. And I, I don't know how else or what else to say or ask to get me past discomfort.

Sure, I, I do have one hand. I do have one. I have a couple additional comments just because I agree. I think it's new territory. I think that there's, there's a wiseness in our approach to AI, particularly when it comes to students and grading.

So the first caveat is that none of that grading and feedback for students is an automatic push out to students. There's always a teacher filter in that process. So AI may generate the comments or give the suggestions for grading in this particular program, but the teacher would always be essentially the human that, that double checks the work to make sure that we're on track. The second thing I would just— I was going to add is because the standards are loaded in this particular program, it gives us an instructional opportunity. Honestly, when you're a teacher and you're teaching your lessons, you sometimes you don't always see the forest through the trees, if you will, when you're teaching the standards and where those weaknesses are.

And AI uses their metrics and technology to really give some input to the teacher of, hey, we really need to reteach this particular standard, or we missed it in this particular assignment, so we need to go back. And so there is an efficiency that I think could be advantageous for our teachers to give them kind of like a— I want to say an outside viewpoint, even though it's technology— that they can get some feedback on how their students are doing in, in those grade-level standards that they operate with. So that, that's a positive in my mind, where they can get that feedback immediately immediately right from their grading.

I guess maybe the follow-up question I would have is, um, has there been like a pre-pilot pilot? I mean, where, where has this— have educators had a chance to weigh in on this in any way? And, you know, have people have already been using this, for example, in their classrooms and said, hey, this is a really unique tool, I've benefited from it, my students have benefited from it? I mean, Yeah, so 14,000 licenses, like, that's a pretty big pilot. That's like a couple of grade levels, or—.

And I think it would be tied in with some of the AI conversation we started at governance around what our policy is, blending with Member McDonough's work as the chair around having board policy and administrative regulation. You know, this is another step into that world. You know, my, my take is that if we don't enter into this world to try some things, we're going to be really behind and probably more reactionary than proactive around how we're approaching it as a district. And, you know, so that's just, just my thought process around it, is we've got to start somewhere, and, and this is one of the ways that we could try something. And it is a pilot, so if we don't like it it, it goes against our grain, we can, we can throw it out.

And I'll just add, um, so not ASD specific, but one thing, um, that we've been doing is diving into what does the future of AI look like. And, um, so I actually just started reading a book, um, from the founder of the Khan Academy and it speaks to this specifically and about drilling down into that individualized instruction and that feedback based on specific standards. And so the big picture is what does that individualized learning look like in times such as these and how do you interact with that? So I do have that recommendation as far as maybe handholding, but that, that is the same theoretical model that this is using, um, that has been practiced. I mean, Khan Academy's been the leading edge of this, um, piece of technology, and so I would suggest maybe diving down that pathway for some theoretical questioning, um, but that will direct those student pathways and that individualization.

Member Higgins. Yeah, I think And I could be wrong, but I think Cube coming up with the conference is heavily focused on AI, and it would be great if administration had a chance to see that. I saw where Finland starts off AI kindergarten, and they do so because it's like sex education. You have to teach these kids. You may see something, tell you, your mom telling you to go someplace that's not necessarily a safe thing to do.

You may get false information, and later they teach teach them how to check the information and verify it. Then they go before to how to ask questions to get the right answers and checking it. So, um, uh, we're not going to avoid it, uh, but I do think looking at best practices, not just in the country but the world, what, what are people doing, really makes a lot of sense right now. And I really like the idea of the way Finland was doing it because it is like sex education. You better to recognize that kids at young ages are going to get information to them that could put them at risk.

And, um, and I had a chance to meet one of the two people that created AI two years ago, and that was interesting. And as he put it, is it going to eliminate attorneys? And he said, no, attorneys using AI will eliminate the other attorneys. We're not going to be able to prevent using AI. It's going to be And if our kids are going to be prepared for the future when they leave school, they need to be knowledgeable of it.

It's like trying to keep the calculator away. And I hope that we're looking at best practices. And CUBE is one area that the administration, I think, would benefit from if they had a chance to go there and see what they're doing and how they're making it work. The last one did there, they focused heavy on first saving, looking at administration. The savings was the top priority.

Then it becomes teachers and it becomes student. And I know we have an AI class at one school, an introduction, but I just think we, we can't ignore it anymore and we need to be more inquisitive as to what the options are. And I would love to see some of those options.

Member McDonough.

Yeah, thank you.

McDonough, your audio regressed to its almost inaudible state. How's this? Better. Better. Okay, I'll come very close to the mic.

So I appreciate Member Lessens pulling this and bringing in the discussion both about literacy at large, which is really the underlying motion and the direction that these dollars are going to go in for an AI pilot.

The two questions I have are, could the administration outline the size of the pilot and its timeline? And that's the first question. And then the second question is the way that the evaluation will be brought back, both to build policy and also to look at a scaling plan.

So, Member McDonough, not all of that has been quite developed at this point because we're still in the middle of a lot of our AI discussion. We also want to receive on the grant before we put it— put a lot of time and energy into it. So there's still some work to be done on that end, I guess, is the short answer. But we anticipate spending minimal dollars of the larger grant on this pilot as just a way to get our, kind of our, dip our toes in the water, if you will. So it will be a smaller pilot.

We will likely look at teachers who are really interested in helping us and giving us feedback. It won't be a pilot where we ask teachers who are not comfortable doing that to participate at the beginning, and that way we can get really good kind of a back and forth conversation about how, how is this technology used appropriately in the classroom.

Okay, thank you. And I'll, I'll note to the board, as this evolves, um, I also too am reading books, and the book that comes to mind is from from a scholar named Greg Cajete. He wrote, "The culture's vitality is literally dependent on individuals in community with the natural world. Indigenous cultures are an extension of the story of the natural community of a place and evolve according to ecological dynamics and natural relationships." And with that quote, I approach AI very skeptically, I don't see it as an extension of the ecological dynamics and natural relationships of a human culture and of our people. And, you know, I would caution offloading any more of the way that teachers can interact with their students into these tech.

But for the time being, I think a diligent pilot can give us more intentional understanding of how to protect and ensure this technology works with the needs of Anchorage's communities.

Member Lessels. Thanks. Maybe I have one other question, and that is, what— to what extent do we understand privacy safeguards that are linked to this technology? If I'm a student and I write, I don't know, a personal essay about something sensitive that happened in my life, you know, whether— whatever the topic would be, um, how do I know that if this is uploaded and graded that it doesn't stay somewhere and doesn't get attached to me in a way that's really fundamentally different than turning in a paper and getting that paper back, right? The— once, once data is out there, data can be hacked, data can be bought and sold, data can linger.

So what do we know about the privacy protections? So just like any of our other systems where we would put sensitive information, We enter into contracts with these folks that spell out what they can and can't do with the data. Everything that we've approved so far from an AI perspective, we approve it in what's called sort of a district container. And so that container doesn't allow the company to operate on that particular data set to, for instance, say, continue to train its model with, with our information. So we have local administrators then that manage that particular container for us.

In the contracts that we enter into, they sign privacy documents with us that say they cannot resell any of the information. They're bound by all of the federal laws around that. So both FERPA and other privacy laws— there's several different laws that, that bind these groups buy. No one is hack-proof. There's— it just doesn't exist.

And so there is always a risk on, on the front that a company can be hacked. And then there are safeguards and consumer protections that kick in if somebody is hacked. So for instance, if that happens, we have to notify the folks of that particular hack and what was actually exposed for those, those groups. But it's the same thing right now with any other technology that is cloud-based, or quite frankly, stored in our data centers, right? We're, we're also not hack-proof.

No, no one is. And so that data, for instance, if they were writing that same essay that they might upload to this system, they would likely be writing it in Google Docs. That's what most of the folks do. So that system also has the same issues with that, right? So Google also has privacy terms and conditions that they— that we enter into with them.

But again, anything that is put into a computer and stored online, there are always risks that are involved in, in potential pack. It, it just is the nature of the business.

If I may ask one more question, if this is a pilot project and you're going to be working with a small group of educators, to what extent will students and families be notified of their classroom's participation and have an opportunity to opt in or opt out? Yeah, great question. Talk about that. Yeah, when we've, when we've done pilots with programs like this, there's always a permission form and an awareness by the parent. So if, um, if they do choose to opt out, then we would not utilize this grading system for that particular student.

Seeing no other discussion, can we have a voice vote on AST Memorandum Number 022?

Member McDonough?

Yes. Member Higgins? Yes. Member Blakeslee? Yes.

Member Lessans? Yes. Member Bellamy? Yes. Member Wilson?

Yes. President Jacobs? Yes. AC Memorandum Number 022 is adopted by a vote of 7 to 0. We'll move on to non-action items.

Does anyone wish to discuss a non-action item tonight before they're brought back at our next meeting?

Seeing none, we'll move to our superintendent update. Dr. Bryant. Thank you, Mr. President. Um, I'll give the team a moment, uh, to pull up a brief slide deck. And really, the intent of today is really just to share that since our last school board meeting, we opened our schools, and last week was our first full week back.

So I just wanted to share a few examples of some of the joy and positivity that we've seen in the schools and what I've seen personally in some of my school visits, and also some of the challenges that I see coming. And then I'll speak briefly to what the public can expect in the waterfall spending proposal. So I guess let's go ahead and advance to the first slide.

So these are just a few quick snapshots that just showcase that we're really fortunate to have wonderful educators and leaders who helped families and students experience a strong start to school overall. I have immense gratitude for their dedication to our students' progress. There was a lot of positive buzz and energy. These are just a few photos of various schools and campuses. But across the board, many of our students were excited to be back, and it was just very heartwarming to see so many educators welcome those students and families with open arms.

The first day of school can be one filled with both positive buzz but also some anxiety because it's a shift for any grade level transition. So major kudos to our wonderful educators and building leaders. And this is just one picture at Gladys Wood Elementary School. School. This was one of my first stops of the year.

I wanted to pull out this picture because I think it's a good highlight of the power of positive community partnerships. So I'm thankful to have had the opportunity to greet the University of Alaska Anchorage athletes who dropped by to welcome back students alongside me and the Gladys Wood team, and it was just really great to see the small informal conversations that get young students thinking about their future. And, you know, Principal Straw is just an example of a great seasoned administrator. He's been in that building at least 4 years, if not 5, and to see him and many of his colleagues across the district have really thoughtful structures in place to welcome students back. It's not easy, but at Gladys Wood and schools across the community, there was successful implementation of parent drop-off and pickup, and at Gladys Wood specifically some new structures to make grabbing your breakfast and lunch as quick as possible so that we can approach learning with urgency.

Not easy work, and I'm thankful to have experienced educators and leaders like Mr. Strauch. Next slide. And then one of my other stops on the first week of school was to go to Service High School, and I just wanted to spotlight this photo because I wanted to see our freshmen first start in action. So just a reminder to the public, we have a special first day for 6th graders and 9th graders, and this is, I believe, our 3rd year doing so in the district. And, um, Service is just a great example that you can take the vision of a Freshman Start and really make it your own and align to the, the needs of the Service High School community in this example.

So you'll notice in this picture there's a lot of adults standing near this entryway, and this is actually where the bus drops off the students for the day. So on this day was the freshmen's first day, and you can't see it, but the faculty members to my right are all holding pom-poms and signs and noisemaking machines, really just to give those freshmen a hero's welcome. And that's just such a difference from what it was like even when I was in high school, where the freshmen are kind of the little fish in the big pond and there's just a lot of anxiety. There certainly weren't pom-poms on my first day of high school, and I think it's just a which is a wonderful thing that Principal Azam put in place for these students. And these types of events were happening throughout the district in contexts specific to those students.

And then you'll see a lot of peer mentors in the picture. So there must have been a dozen or so upperclassmen who have been preparing for this opportunity to welcome their peers into school. And something you won't see in the photo is that after the students arrived, We assembled them all in the gymnasium, and Ms. Azam actually hosted a mock graduation commencement, which was really an opportunity to have those many students together to get the wheels turning about their future and how to make the most of their time in high school. The purpose of these intentional 9th grade transitions is, and I say this as a former 9th grade teacher, an opportunity for a student to think about about the opportunity to reinvent themselves. If let's say they didn't have a positive time in middle school, it's really a clean slate.

And for those students that had a strong middle school experience, we got to keep up that momentum because this is where it gets real. We have transcripts and real consequences to our decisions that you make at, at the early age of 14 years old. So in the big picture, I just wanted to take a couple of moments to share that we've put a number of changes in place to support the freshman transitions. I've been pleased about the progress we've made towards on-credit rates. We got to see a small preview of historical data on that front.

We've seen our graduation rates increase, and we've seen expanded access to high-quality programs and courses, but I think it's really valuable to put faces— student faces, faculty faces— behind those data data points, and it was just a heartwarming thing to see. And then the next stop, it was great to drop by Wendler Middle School, a similar type of event, but this was for his new 6th graders. And that's also a really interesting age because those 6th graders can be really intimidated. It's their first time going from a smaller elementary school setting into a very large facility like Wendler Middle School, and that's the first time that you're learning how to use locker. You're learning how to move from class to class.

It can be just really nerve-wracking, and I think a lot of us can probably relate to that. So it was nice to go into the beginning of school with Mr. Wilson and to see him kind of quell that nervous energy. And I could also notice the, the sigh of relief for students who had the opportunity to engage in those learning how to use a locker and finding your class without the added pressure pressure of older students who will generally fill up that building with a lot of excitement and energy. And then Chinook was another example of a school with a new but incredibly experienced principal who ensured that her students had a strong start. She had a lot of returning students and also a lot of new students.

And across the board, what I'm seeing is that our principals, like Dr. Witt, like Mr. Wilson, prioritizing making sure there's a strong learning experience, but also making sure that our students and families feel like they belong in ASD and they'll thrive in ASD, and they will.

And then these are just a few other snapshots. The, the key point I wanted to make is that even though it was just the first couple of days of school, that doesn't mean that there wasn't great learning happening across all the buildings that I visited and many, many more. Aside from that, there were strong starts, and as soon as the first day, kids were practicing their reading skills. They were practicing their tactical skills and even social skills for some of our very small learners. So it was a wonderful thing to see.

And then in the next slide, just because we hit the books pretty hard on the first day doesn't mean there wasn't time for a little bit of joy. So this is just one example of Aquarian charter school that has their annual flash mob dance party. So essentially when students are dropped off, they are greeted by their wonderful teachers all dressed up in cowboy hats and cowboy boots to make sure that students feel welcome. So it was a joy that our students were greeted with choreography and bubble machines, and it just really made what could have been a very nervous day into a day that felt exciting and warm and welcoming. So just my gratitude to our incredible principals, as well as for our families and students for choosing ASD and for sticking with us and helping us continue to improve, because we certainly always can.

But overall, my assessment is that this was a pretty strong start despite the major headwinds that we faced in the months leading up to this time. So in close, and I'll just park on this slide for a minute, commitment. Again, I really left the first couple weeks of school just with the feeling of gratitude for everyone involved, especially our employees who are all tasked with doing a lot more with a lot less. And, you know, there were headwinds. I'm sure nothing was perfect, but overall the joy, positivity, and commitment to learning, I think, was outstanding, and I look forward to seeing that momentum continue.

And I wanted to also offer some things. So first off, thank you to the board because you were part of this as well. As a result of your leadership and adding back 100 positions, we saw the fruits of that labor on the first day of school. Even though it was impossible to hire every single position on such a tight turnaround, there were a number of schools that I was at where those positions were staffed with someone. So you really did make the difference.

And of course, there's so many much more that we can do, but it really did help our school start even stronger than they would have otherwise. And on that note, of course, I'd like to thank the, the legislature and state leadership for very promptly alerting districts on August 31st— that was yesterday— that the full waterfall funding that we've been discussing for the past several weeks is available to school districts. So for ASD, just to be clear, that means that approximately $32 million in additional one-time funding is coming to the district. You may see a $110 million number floating around. That's the state allocation.

Anchorage is the 32. So today, um, the, the breaking news is that the administration released an initial proposal for how to spend those funds, which the board will review, deliberate, um, for consideration at our second meeting in October. And I would like to say that this proposal reflects a couple of things. Um, one, we know that we have major needs in our schools today. There are ways that we can use these dollars to add resources for our students.

Uh, we've recommended some flexibility from the board to do this. So as we discussed in our work session, we're proposing that we have a meaningful amount of dollars set aside specifically for potentially additional positions, but also things like high-dose tutoring that we can come to the board and public and say, we know based off of some preliminary data that there's some correlation between high-dose tutoring and achieving catch-up growth for our students students that need the most support. We also know that going into this budget, we had to make some difficult decisions like scaling back on supplemental learning opportunities, including credit recovery support, and this proposal attempts to restore some of that so that we can ensure that we keep the momentum in terms of our graduation rates and student success. And we know that even beyond the classroom itself, if you can't get students to some of our specialized programs and offerings, they may not be able to fully realize the, the full potential of an ASD education. So this proposal also proposes funding transportation and student activities from reductions that were reduced in last year's budget and expand student access to programming and activities.

So with all of that said, we have needs today. I saw them in every school that I've visited, and there are many more schools that I've yet to see. But we also need to consider that a smaller— that we do have a pretty sizable structural deficit along the way. So that is why this proposal also sets aside a smaller but meaningful portion of the waterfall funding for stabilizing our FY28 needs. And I want to be very clear about this because I could see this as something being misunderstood by the public, that the administration's proposing to save the money without some sort of purpose.

And it's, it's quite the opposite. The reason why we propose setting money aside in this proposal is because we know that our status quo budget right now today will be significantly more expensive going into next fiscal year. So just the same number of staff we have now and some of our other obligations will cost about $40 million extra. That's not adding a lot of new positions or contracts, that's just what we have right now today, and we know that's not enough. So really, by setting aside some of these dollars, we are reducing the deficit, but I feel sometimes in the community that gets misunderstood as the money's going into some sort of vacuum, and really our intent is to set that funding aside because we know we'll need to spend that money to maintain who we have.

And one of my top priorities is to try to figure out a way to minimize the disruptions that happen when we pass a budget with a large structural deficit before we know our revenue picture. So this won't fully solve that problem because we didn't set enough funding aside to stabilize everything, but now we have a chance to deliberate a path forward to stabilize something meaningful that can move our progress forward on, on board goals. So if this proposal were approved, it would reduce the scale of the deficit, but it wouldn't completely eliminate it for next school year. So, uh, and what we shared with the board, and we'll also provide you with a calculator so you can do your own simulations, is that this proposal would reduce the deficit from around $40-ish million for FY28 down to roughly $26 million. $1.2 Million, and in some ways it's understandable that there may be a sigh of relief there.

But I want to underscore some of the comments shared by our CFO Andy Ratliff earlier today, where even though that's a smaller figure to have to reduce in our budget deficit, we have to think about it in the greater context of the $90+ million we already cut from the budget the previous year. And for those of us who've been on the board for a while, we've made enough a number of significant reductions in the years leading up to that. So $26 million is actually going to be really difficult to balance, especially when our intent is to try to minimize disruption, um, and negative impacts to our students as much as possible. We're getting to that point where we're literally choosing between school safety, security in buildings, versus class size reduction relief. Those are the types of impossible decisions decisions that we're going to have to make until we can really get a handle on our long-term pictures.

Now, we don't have to make all those decisions right now, but I really would be remiss if I didn't mention it because it's going to come fast, this, this decision point that we'll need to make around our FY28 budget. We're essentially in the FY28 budget planning season, even though we have until March to transmit that information to the Assembly. Those conversations are going to happen here in the boardroom over the next couple months, and by December I would hope we'd have a pretty good understanding of what the options are, and then we'll need to make some decisions going into February. But these topics of managing the tensions between the needs we see in schools today with the pressures that we see on the other side of this fiscal year are really significant and very consequential for the board going into the next few months. So for me, one of the most difficult parts of getting to just this initial proposal is trying to find the right balance between managing our current needs with the needs that we face at the other side of this fiscal year.

I appreciate the community members who participated in a recent poll that we conducted via Alaska Survey Research. We didn't have the full runway to completely, you know, convene community conversations and all the components of ASD Listens quite yet, but I did take it upon myself to request just a one-question Pulse poll that was taken by about 1,000 community members, and they are also sensing those same tensions that we're sensing here at the boardroom. We have to balance two tensions that are interconnected between needs of today versus the needs for FY28, and when given a binary choice case, community members are opting to think about next year's deficit versus restoring needs for now. And then for our practical purposes, we've already made a commitment to at minimum invest in FY27. We already have invested tens of millions of dollars towards FY27 from these new dollars, and there'll be an opportunity to invest more.

But not to get too in the weeds, but I think one of the bigger things for the board to consider is, one, what are ways that we can refine this proposal? And two, thinking about, is this the right balance? And you can think about that balance between FY27 and '28 as just two sides of the same coin. We could make a choice to invest more deeply in FY27. We have very few educators in the talent pool, so there will be challenges, but that's going to increase the deficit on the other side.

And then on the flip side, um, we could choose to even invest more conservatively towards our future. Right now, more than half of that waterfall funding is being reinvested into '27, but what the board's going to have to finalize is, is that the right combination? Should we perhaps even invest more towards the future so that we can stabilize as many of our current employees as possible? There is a case to be made that the more we invest towards stabilizing our staff, the less disruption that our educators will face, but also, um, the, the more anxious our parents will get if they feel that they're facing class size increases on top of the class size increases that have already happened. And that's exactly what's going to happen if we go into FY28 with a deficit much higher than what it's currently already projected to be.

There would be very few options for the board to adopt a balanced budget that wouldn't require reducing educator positions, and I don't feel that our community is in a good headspace to accept that reality. So I want to do whatever I can to try to protect as many educators as possible. So we only had the final budget number, um, confirmed by the State Department of Revenue yesterday, so we're very early in this conversation, but these next few weeks will be very important, and I look forward to conversations with board members, and of course I'm always willing and able to meet individually with you as you brainstorm ways to take this proposal from where it is now and where it needs to be by the time you approve it. So with that said, we will be launching ASD Listens later this month with the launch of our survey on September 8th, and this flash poll is just one of several things I hope to try to add new ways to add in community perspectives, to try to get community voice in the conversation before the decision has been made. Um, there's still work to be done, but I hope the community knows that we're trying to make a step in the right direction.

So that concludes, uh, my report. Thank you, Mr. President.

Thank you, Dr. Bryant. We'll move to school board closing comments. We'll start to my left, Member Blakeslee.

I do not have any member comments this evening. Thank you. Member Bellamy. I only have one announcement for the board. Um, uh, the Association of Alaska School Boards has some seats open on the board of directors.

Um, the application, uh, is online, and if you want to apply, you need to apply by October 7th. And you'll need to have the board's approval of your application. So think about it. Right now I think it's Member Jacobs and myself. My term is over in November, so I would hope that somebody would consider.

Thank you.

Member Lessis. No comments, thanks. Member Higgins. Never had a short words. It's just a few items, objects here I have to bring out real quick.

One is very disappointing this week with community council is listening to a representative misrepresent what the school district is doing and saying we won't put money back in to bring teachers back, we're just letting classroom sizes go up, and talking about why they don't need funds. Um, we've had We've had before representatives saying that we had enough reserves to make up a $90 million deficit. I love that one. Uh, we've had a lot of misrepresentation. And how much are we going to initiate more communications to the public so that we can educate them on what we've done?

Some of that education is going to be difficult. Uh, we projected certain amount of money with Saving Schools schools. We've got more kids going with the, with the charter school. That money goes down. We only expected $51,000 per school for the last 3 when, when we weed it out, and we're going to lose money.

So it's going to cost us more money by closing those schools, and that's going to be an issue. But looking at the funds that we do have right now, the morale in the school district with the classroom sizes, with the special ed kids in they're just feeling inundated. If you—. If the board hasn't been going to, to some of these schools, walking in the classrooms, listening to the teachers, I urge you to do it because it's, it's depressing for them. I am very concerned about the turnover we're going to be looking at and the impact it will have.

So I hope that we can have an assessment of what we really save with closing schools and where we're headed so that we can make an assessment of that and we can evaluate how, how good was it, uh, what can we learn from it. As far as the process, I'm glad we have a right-sizing committee, but we need to be willing to step back and look at it. Did, did we benefit the kids by moving elementary 6th grade into middle school? We know the, the academic results in the year I looked at, it didn't go up, uh, it didn't go down dramatically, but didn't go— it went down. And so I'm getting that type of information, but we need to be willing to question what we've done, whether we want to do it differently, and how we do that.

Um, the one thing I'll just throw in is that I hope that we never accomplished it in June, but one of the things the board has always done in the past is worked at some type of retreat where you really focus on making the, the, the board board more effective, how we work together, how do we get things done. Uh, we had the chance with the National School Board Association president. I was told that she was going to be there. That was changed because it didn't— wasn't with the agenda with the board president establishes that. But we as a group, we've got to recognize that we don't have the relationship with the public.

We're losing a lot of issues with the And when we come with the funding, I don't know the right answer, but I do know that the academic impacts are being addressed if we do not try to do a little bit more in the classroom sizes and the kids with special ed. So I just, I just come out with a whole list of things that I would hope that we look at. We've never had a 2-day budget review of knowing what the departments have for budget. Budgets and what they're doing. That was always something done in the past, has never been done with this board since I got back on it, and that is upsetting to a lot of people I know that used to be on school board, and they're looking and trying to say, what are they going to do to bring about that change?

We don't have the department presentations, but we need to work together better with the superintendent and the board where we're sharing information. Alternative alternatives to a proposal, not just this is what we want, these are alternatives and this is why we did what we did. No operational audits, zero since I've been on the board, for this is my, uh, 6th year coming back. No operational audits. We can't tell you that we're spending money well without those operational audits.

That's what we've always done. We've saved a lot of money with that, but it's been derailed, and we aren't getting it back. And I don't know how we work together with the administration to accomplish this unless there's— unless the administration wants to really be involved with that. Got blocked on one audit, didn't get the results of the other one, and now we really— it's hopeless at this particular point in time. So, um, there's a long list, but as we start this school year, we got to focus on kids.

I know we got gotta focus on academics, but we also, if we can get focused on doing something other than just cutting money, I don't know if we're gonna do that. Cutting money is critical. And I'll just close with the last comment. I remember the Anchorage Daily News asked me, what's the long-term solution? What's the root cause?

And I said, it's the voters. You want to know what you want? Value education. You want that? Ask the candidates how they stand on those Vote for your kids or don't vote for your kids, but know what you're voting for.

And then that we bring about real change because it's the elected officials that you select that's going to make a difference. If you want additional funding for education, you want closed schools, you want all this other stuff, you have to make that decision and you need to be informed. And so many people don't even know who the representative is. So I just hope that the voters between now and November ask the right questions. And when you get answers like you're not paying money to bring back teachers when gave them money, ask the school district.

And I hope the school district sends more information out to the public that addresses this miscommunication. I'll be polite, miscommunications. Thanks. Member McDonough.

Thank you, Mr. President. Um, I'd like to express how much it meant to me to see the start of public comment. Two teachers coming on a Tuesday night— you got to wake up early tomorrow, and the board needs to know what you're going through. Um, so for the teacher at Tyson and the teacher at Golden View your testimonies meant a lot to me. And then hearing later Dr. Bryant's, um, his, his commitment to ASD Listens, I think I'd like to add a consideration of a plug where ASD Listens can also include case studies by school boards visiting classrooms as we are available and as it could be not disruptive to the school.

Um, I need to know what our business is doing for our children, and particularly for the high-needs children in, in that gentleman's class and Mr. Tyson— I mean, at Tyson Elementary. So, um, I would love to have visits to schools. I would love to make myself available for the full day which both teachers requested, if that can be done by the principal. I understand running a school can be hard, and if it can work, I very much look forward to bringing what I saw in those students' voices who are often so silent back to this body so that we can understand what their children need and more importantly bring those stories to the city government, which is currently deliberating how much to fund next year's education, and to the lawmakers in Juneau who are going to gavel in in January and start deciding how much education is worth then. We know we do not have enough resources, and it's teachers like them two who are really suffering the most under this weight, and I would love to see their stories reach all the way to the halls of Juneau know, and getting the dollars back into our classrooms.

Thank you, Member McDonough. I understand Member Wilson has no closing comments, so that brings us to the end of our business tonight. Is there a motion to adjourn?

Move to adjourn. Second. Made by Lesson, seconded by Blakeslee. Seeing no opposition, we are adjourned at 8:20 PM. Thank you.