On Tuesday night, the Montezuma-Cortez RE-1 school board discussed test scores, BOCES and ESS. Superintendent Tom Burris announced that the district will withdraw their application to withdraw from BOCES this year.
The Southwest Colorado Education Collaborative aims to help students as they seek a job or head to college. About 150 students attended its Futures Fair where the group helped students set up job shadow opportunities and provide work-based learning, job opportunities and internships.
They also have a shared equipment library housed at Pueblo Community Colleges that has $750,000 worth of equipment for medical fields that schools can utilize.
The presentation shared that while it is OK for students to not know what they want to do yet, it isn’t OK for them to have no direction. The presentation included a story of one Montezuma-Cortez High School student who attended the Drywall Summer Institute. Now, he knows what he wants to do postgraduation.
She added that the group exists to help students find their passion. This summer, 22 MCHS students attended one of the three summer institutes.
Burris shared that the HVAC issue is “progressing” and that there would be a walk-through Thursday with both lawyers and experts.
“After this walk-through, I anticipate we will begin the negotiation phase,” Burris said, inviting the board members to attend.
Burris celebrated the final completion of the middle school’s play set before telling the board that the district was withdrawing its application to pull out of BOCES this year, in part because the district could not find an accountant to do the required third-party analysis.
Burris said they will reapply next year.
District attorney Brad Miller gave a report on a recently fired teacher.
The teacher appealed the dismissal, but the appeal was overturned, according to Miller. Miller said the teacher was dismissed because of “insubordination, lack of professionalism, neglect of duty and under good and just cause.”
The teacher was reportedly allowing students to violate the cellphone policy, didn’t answer emails from Principal Jennifer Boniface, neglected grading policies and failed to provide adequate assignments and assessments.
He added that she also refused to create a “higher standard” for students, would not attend team meetings, used profanity in school and acted inappropriately at assemblies.
“Her anger made her unfit for duty,” Miller said.
Jim Parr provided the board with early data for STAR testing, comparing district averages for fall and spring.
In reading, the district average was 39th percentile and 36th percentile for math.
In spring, the average for reading was 29th percentile and the average for math was 41st percentile. Grade level is 50th percentile.
He also explained that the recent “Rapid Response” grant from the Colorado Department of Education – about $90,000 – will be used to support “district-wide professional development in the science of reading.”
Trainings will take place over the next two years, with in-person training and coaching for teachers from Grades 3-12.
Executive Director of ESS Lisa Megel announced that incoming teachers have arrived and they now are determining which students need help to catch up on learning during the time they didn’t have a teacher.
“I think we have 111 students that were beyond their caseloads. There's a lot of services that were happening, but there's some that weren't happening the way we would have liked them to,” Megel said. “So, we're trying to go back and capture all of that so that we can provide those services.”
She also gave information regarding threat assessments.
Megel said that during a potential threat, a “screener” will determine whether the school can handle the threat or if the district needs to handle it.
The threat assessment team at the district, a counselor, school resource officer, administrator and social workers from BOCES are involved if the perceived threat is bigger than the school level.
“So, it's not just in-house, we're making sure that we have several providers, people that have different roles, so we can look fully at a student. We conduct interviews, we take all the information that the building has gathered, like witness statements, anything that law enforcement can share with us,” Megel said. “We do additional kind of deep in-depth interviews with individuals that are in some way involved, and parents as well.”
Then, the committee goes through a “really long list” or checklist of sorts before making recommendations for next steps.
“We make sure that we prepare. Basically, what does that look like if it's reentry into school? … How can that be safe, comfortable, all of those things. If not, then what are the other things that we're going to be doing to help take care of that student and make sure that they continue to get an education in some way?” Megel said.
The board approved the city of Cortez memorandum of understanding for the school resource officer and the ACA, ACA-R and ACA-E Non-Legal Name Change for Students unanimously.
This policy lays out the processes for schools when students want to change their name to match their chosen gender identity.
If a student fills out a form requesting that the name they are called at school be changed, the school is expected to adhere to that request, barring instances of inappropriate or threatening names.
Though parental approval is not required for the name change, the district is still expected to notify the parents in most instances.
The next school board meeting is Nov. 19 at 6 p.m.
