Kirk C. Watkins, Peak to Peak. The Boulder Valley School District Accountability Committee (DAC) met on Tuesday, October 6, 2020. The DAC meets on the first Tuesday of each month, and since March has met using the Zoom platform. 

The Committee approved the minutes from the September meeting. The first speaker, Kitty Sargent, secretary for the Board of Education, reported that the school district had approved the academic calendar and reset the dates for the reentry plan. She reported that policy KI, which addresses visitors in schools, was being studied. 

The superintendent, Dr. Rob Anderson, reported that the reintroduction had taken place and that the children and teachers were happy overall, although there were still some concerns from parents and staff. He said that the concerns that had been present prior to the reintroduction had been tempered by the success of the reentry and said that the health numbers were looking really good. Despite the uptick in COVID-19 cases, BVSD still had better numbers in comparison to the Denver and Adams Public Schools. 

Following his updates, Anderson took questions from the group. He reported that two students, one parent, and one staff member in the district have tested positive for COVID. He went on to say that the district was following the protocols from the Boulder County Department of Health. https://www.bouldercounty.org/families/disease/covid-19/

A proposal was made to create a dashboard to track the numbers of incidents in the district, or another type of system utilized to create a time sensitive method of tracking numbers for district residents. The following website, which is currently under construction, is being developed for this purpose: https://www.bvsd.org/parents-students/academics/covid-19-reintroduction/covid-19-dashboard.

Bill Sutter, Chief Financial Officer for BVSD, presented the District Finance and Budget Overview. His presentation was a combination of current year updates and transitions into 2020-2021 projections. The District has a decrease in enrollment of about 1,400 students across the district, which includes the increase in enrollment for Boulder Universal online school. Charter schools stayed steady due to their backlog of waitlisted students, and much of the decrease can be traced to the youngest children not enrolling due to COVID-19 concerns. 

Staffing numbers have been heavily affected for the current school year. Retaining and placing employees to adequately address the changing variables was and continues to be an enormously complicated process, and the funding of such being an unprecedented task that is extraordinarily complex and unpredictable. 

As an example, bussing has decreased substantially affecting the number of drivers needed but recognizing more will be needed as students return to onsite education. These and other scenarios have caused enormous uncertainty in the budgetary processes for the district. Other unknowns being dealt with include deep cleaning for the buildings, unemployment claims and fee-based expenditures, including athletics, preschool, food services and community schools. 

As a standard, each student qualifies as a $9,950 cost per year. Each one percent loss, or 300 students, in enrollment equals a loss of $3 million. 

Even as costs are currently greater than the expenditures, Sutter explained that this was a structural anomaly which would be one time versus ongoing. It would be good for the short term, but not necessarily for the long term. 

Also being developed are the financial updates and forecasts for the upcoming year, as well as the audits for the 2019-2020 fiscal year. Following that is the revised budget for the current year, which is adopted in January. 

Sutter next gave a presentation on the Timeline and Milestones, which described the length of time and steps required to develop the budget. Multiple concerned groups and meetings among various contributors combine to create the budget by a series of meeting milestones along the process. Data inputs which have been set by statute contribute to the data required to develop the budget over the course of the year. 

These are fixed points along the timeline which correspond to points in other legislative bodies timelines. These also correspond to work sessions scheduled throughout the year, which have specific budgetary development milestones to meet. Action items are considered in the early months of the year and depend on the data gathered up to that point.

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are affecting every level of the district and the state’s processes, Sutter said. He recommended focusing on the Strategic Plan to maintain focus and to prioritize what was important in the plan, despite declining enrollment and other hurdles that are being encountered. 

Sutter offered to meet with any school parent group or other interested parties who have an interest in the BVSD budget processes. For a complete breakdown of the budget process refer to the BVSD website at https://www.bvsd.org/about/district-accountability-committee/meetings-agendas.

Jorge Chavez, DAC executive secretary and chair of the SRO review subcommittee, said the subcommittee has been tasked with performing an in-depth analysis of the SRO, or School Resource Officer program and the viability for their continuation within the district. He was asked to develop recommendations by October 13, 2020.  

According to Chavez, Committee members found they did not have a clear description for the role of the SRO, what was trying to be achieved by the current SRO program within the district, how its effectiveness was being measured or who provided oversight of the program. The SRO’s are theoretically maintained by local law enforcement, Chavez explained, but the BOE and the district are only tangentially involved. 

Chavez said that while the main “selling point” for the SRO program was their role in providing “soft” work, i.e. relationship building, counseling, mentoring, teaching and outreach, these are typically difficult to measure, and they were not currently being measured at all. This means that they have no factual basis for the relation with SRO’s.

Next, Chavez provided a definition of the SRO program based on the job description for new hires. He said that all of the training is provided by local law enforcement, and therefore based on law enforcement techniques, and focused on law enforcement. This suggests that the primary focus of the SRO is law enforcement, which contrasts with the stated benefits of the program and the needs of the district. 

They found very little actual research or data that suggested that the program fulfilled its role. The research indicated, however, that the presence of SRO’s caused increases in fear and concerns about school safety, particularly for students of color. 

The main issue, according to Chavez, is the potential problems from the SRO program versus the creation of safe environments. He said it was difficult to track the program’s effectiveness due to a lack of research supporting it, and the training which was overly directed at law enforcement with little oversight. 

lf Frid, DAC executive chair, stopped the meeting to allow for questions at this time. 

After answering several questions and committee discussion, Frid called for votes on three points. 

The first was to pull back on dependency on SRO usage in the district, the second was to add a trauma informed health care professional who would be able to do the “soft” work that the SRO’s were not trained in, and increasing transparency in record keeping as a result of incidents reporting on a more comprehensive level. After discussion, Frid continued with the vote but received public comment. 

The Committee recommended voting on the entire recommendation package as a whole, rather than as a piece by piece vote, and then passed a motion to vote on it as a whole package because the DAC committee said it was an interdependent piece that would not carry weight without all of the pieces. The vote was cast and passed unanimously, with no abstentions.

The next DAC meeting will be on Tuesday, November 3, 2020.

(Originally published in the October 22, 2020, edition of The Mountain-Ear.)