SPEAKER_04 0:00

BEHC, the Frequency. Happy Friday, Frequency Listeners. I'm your host, Shay Castle. And today we'll be hearing from Boulder Valley School District spokesperson Randy Barber. BBSD has been in the news quite a bit lately, with planned school closures and a lawsuit over anti-Semitic bullying at Southern Hills Middle School. We talk with Randy about those topics, plus a few more hot button issues. Before we hear from Randy, here's a word from our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Boulder Bookstore. Visit Boulder's community bookstore on the Pearl Street Mall. Besides having an amazing selection of books, the store hosts author events every week. On Saturday, September 19th, come see Shannon Hale, author of Dream Big, a graphic novel for kids. The event begins at 2 p.m. Visit Boulderbookstore.com to purchase tickets, see a full list of upcoming events, and support the store's literacy foundation in its mission to donate books to schools and students in need. That link, once again, is boulderbookstore.com.

SPEAKER_00 1:15

I'm Randy Barber. I'm the Chief Communications Officer for the Boulder Valley School District.

SPEAKER_04 1:20

So obviously, first topic, the biggest one in the news right now, is the Resilient Schools Plan, which is the consolidation and closure of some schools and some reconfiguring of boundaries, which I will do my own overview of, unless you want to do your own spiel of it.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

You know, first of all, I do want to say that this is a large moment for our school district, and we don't take this lightly. It's a big deal to be talking about consolidating and closing schools. So as I go through this plan, I do want to mention that this is not about the quality of our schools. This is really about how do we really deal with the capacity that we have in our community. We've got schools that are, you know, underutilized. We've got uh resources that are really spread thin amongst our elementary schools specifically. And so the plan that we proposed to the board this last week really works to address that. But I'll kind of step you through what the game plan is, which is in Broomfield, the proposal is for school consolidation with Birch Elementary closing and the school communities merging into the Cole Elementary building. In the superior Lewisville area, the team proposed reconfigurations at both El Dorado and Monarch PK-8s to create an elementary school at El Dorado Building and a middle school at the Monarch Building. At the middle level, the proposal would combine the current Monarch and El Dorado middle level attendance areas into one attendance boundary for both middle and high schools now. The elementary level is a little bit more complicated with Monarch PK-8's attendance area being divided amongst El Dorado, Fireside, and Superior Elementary Schools having their attendance areas take on those students. Finally, in Boulder, Douglas Elementary would close. Its attendance boundaries would then be split between Heatherwood, Eisenhower, and Col Creek Elementary Schools. And recognizing that Douglas is a newer building, it's well positioned on Baseline Road. We thought we could utilize it for choice programming. So High Peaks Elementary is proposed to move into that. High Peaks is BBSD's most in-demand focused school. And so it would relocate on the Douglas campus, increasing access for students who live in the eastern part of our district, something that the board had prioritized. And then the plan also proposes relocating Community Montessori to the current High Peaks building, co-locating it at Boulder Community School of Integrated Studies, or people call BCSIS. The Community Montessori building would then close. Meanwhile, under the proposal, Flat Irons Elementary would close and its attendance boundaries would be divided between Foothill and Whittier Elementaries. And then finally, in Boulder, Bear Creek and Mesa Elementaries would consolidate with Mesa closing and merging of the school communities on the Bear Creek campus. If approved by the board, and that's expected to happen on September 22nd, these changes would take effect starting the 2027, 2028 school year. Four schools are closing at this point. So it's a relatively large change.

SPEAKER_04 3:57

Yeah, let's speak to that. It is a relatively large change. And yet we heard the president of the board, Nicole Rajpal, say this was a more conservative approach, particularly in Boulder, which has 16 schools and only needs 10 for the projected student population.

SPEAKER_02 4:13

We could have done more. We chose not to because we listened. We chose not to because it doesn't necessarily feel like today is the best day to do that. I think this problem is not going to go away. And so I think down the road, we'll have to continue to look at what makes sense for the city of Boulder. And I think that these maneuvers really do set us up, set the district up for success to continue to be able to evolve and adapt, be resilient, meeting the needs of our students with our facilities.

SPEAKER_04 4:40

That was a clip of school board president Nicole Rajpal speaking at the August 25th study session where the plan was first announced. Back to my conversation with Randy. Can we talk a little bit about why a more conservative approach was taken?

SPEAKER_00 4:55

I think there's a lot of ways that we could have sliced it. Our team really, when they sat down, they looked at the way that kids open and roll in the area. They looked at the capacity of the buildings. They looked at how well the buildings are standing up over time. There were a lot of different factors that we considered. There's not one size fits all that works for it. We really looked at it on a regional basis. And the honest truth is, as the board president mentioned, there probably could have been more closures taken. At this point, we feel like this is a good step. We think it's enough. That doesn't mean that in, you know, five years from now, again, we're basing things off of our current projections or five-year projections. If we continue to decline, more may be necessary. And then the other part of this plan, too, is to look at our bilingual schools. So that's another element that's not fully concluded in this study at this point.

SPEAKER_04 5:43

I know it's not included in this study. Was there anything you can say about what the look at the bilingual schools might be?

SPEAKER_00 5:50

Yeah. So as the team was looking at our schools, one of the things that came up is it is apparent that something needs to change whether dual language schools. They really wanted to spend a little bit more time with it because for a few different reasons. We did a large engagement process before we started to think about what the plan would be. We really listened to our community. Those themes are really what helped to frame the direction that we went. The dual language schools, one of the things that we recognize is that the feedback that we're getting in that area is it's not as strong as it could be. We know that people value it. We value the idea that we want our students to be bilingual and be striving towards a seal of biliteracy. But what we're also seeing is that students aren't necessarily moving on from that elementary level into the middle school level. We're seeing that our Latino parents aren't necessarily choosing that. And so we've got more English-speaking families that are joining that program. So there's a lopsidedness that needs to be addressed. And then one of the other big things is I was mentioning the engagement, we didn't have as many Spanish speakers participate as we wanted to. We actually had a special session in May in which we heard from them specifically. But again, if we're going to take action on the dual language schools, it really behooves us to make sure that voice is in the room before we take action. The team really felt strongly that we spent a year really analyzing that and come back specifically to the board with that as a plan.

SPEAKER_04 7:08

Okay, so next year is when that will come back to the board.

SPEAKER_00 7:10

Yeah, I don't have an exact timing on when they'll return to the board, but they do plan to return to the board in about a year from now.

SPEAKER_04 7:17

Okay, thank you. Yeah. Shifting back to the current proposal on the table, what are the impacts to the district from a financial sense? There were a couple figures shared, but not a real good explanation of like what the overall was. So I think those figures were that it would save three and a half to four million annually, but required facility changes could cost up to 10 million. What's the overall fiscal impact to the district from this plan, if passed?

SPEAKER_00 7:43

The plan wasn't really oriented around cost savings. Really, what we've been trying to do is think about as we look at the way that enrollment is going to be declining over the next five years. And so we've been watching this for some time. And in the next five years, we're expected to lose about 1,700 students for a total of 5,000 since I think it was 2019. So that's that's quite a few students. And we're lucky as a school district in the fact that we're financially very smart. We're conservative with our money, we manage it very well, and we win awards for the way that we manage our money. So unlike a lot of other school districts, typically they're at a place where they have to cut in order to just pay for what they're already doing right now. So that's kind of the difference here in Boulder. And I know that some folks, as they look at this, they're it doesn't make sense because that's what they hear in all the other school districts. In this case, what we were trying to solve for a couple of different things. One is that again, seeing how much capacity there is, but most of the resource stretching, when you've got students really spread amongst all these schools, and so you've got to have the staff spread that way as well. What ends up happening is that it starts to impact the education. In the last couple of years, we just started to notice that really kind of take shape. And what that looks like in a classroom is your specials teachers, kids really look forward to specials, right? The going to the gym to do physical education, art, music, these specialists are being spread across the district to multiple schools. So they might be driving for a good chunk of their time and then spending a certain set of time, or you know, maybe the kid can only go to specials for one week and then they won't see that teacher versus the way that it normally is, where they get to sort of rotate through those things. And again, if you're an artist, a budding artist, and you really want that experience, that's something you look forward to. And so waiting three weeks is a long time. And so what we heard loudly from the community is that they want to make sure that to the extent possible that we have full-time staff in the schools really supporting kids. And so those opportunities sort of wane as you kind of spread that thinner and thinner.

SPEAKER_04 9:35

You guys have art classes at school?

unknown 9:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:39

This week, well, we used to have one day uh like of everything, but then we started doing it for each week. So this week we have um music, but we skipped it because we want an appeal chair.

SPEAKER_04 9:52

That's a clip from an after-school art class at Tantra Lake Apartments. You can hear more from the kids in the June 10th episode of The Frequency. But I thought this audio perfectly illustrated what Randy was talking about.

SPEAKER_00 10:05

So for us, it wasn't so much about, again, that we needed to make a financial cut in order to survive tomorrow. There is a financial piece to this. And I would be lying if I said that that wasn't an element of it. When we talk about the financials of it, a portion of what we'll be able to save is going to be utilized for one of the other things that we heard from our community, which is class sizes. Over and over again, we were hearing the class sizes are too large. So in order to do that, you have to drive that down. So again, we're not trying to just meet an issue where the district's close to default. We're not. You know, if you just compare those numbers that they brought up in the board meeting, it feels a little lopsided. We're going to be doing some facility modifications to make these changes work and that kind of thing. But another key element that wasn't really included in that reporting was the idea of ongoing savings that we'll get from the efficiencies. And that's not something that's easy for us to quantify until the plan's really done. And once that happens, a lot more of these specifics will start to come into frame. But we do know that by having kids in less buildings, having to keep them up at the same level, we will have cost savings there.

SPEAKER_04 11:05

Absolutely. And I think that's the clarification that's needed is like the $10 million in facility changes is one time the three and a half to $4 million in savings is every year. So it looks at first left-sided.

SPEAKER_00 11:17

Yeah, you're, I think people kind of do that whole thing of like, okay, this doesn't make sense. You're paying more to change, but no, over time you will have more cost savings.

SPEAKER_04 11:26

What are the employment impacts of this proposal?

SPEAKER_00 11:29

We're still waiting to see exactly what the impacts will be for our staff. We at this point believe that we'll likely see a slight increase in teacher employment because essentially we will have to still take care of the same number of students. They'll be in a smaller number of schools, but we'll still need to have that many educators doing that. Plus, again, we'll be leveraging some money into lowering class sizes. So that actually equates to more teachers. So every year we go through a bit of a process that will be similar to this. But again, I don't want to underestimate the impact emotionally about this. If somebody's worked at a school for many, many years, the idea of having to go somewhere else and also be a little bit up in the air, part of the other thing that we have to wait for is open enrollment to conclude. The timeframe is usually November to January, in which we're asking kids to apply to where they want to go and all that kind of filters in. And then we do staffing usually around spring break. Well, this year, in order to try to make that easier, what's proposed is that we would actually move that process up a little bit. We'd still start it at the beginning of November, but we'd end it right before we go off to winter break. And then that would allow our staff to be able to do that staffing work, start to figure out exactly how many staff will need at each building, what that looks like. We'll obviously be working with teachers once they're placed to then figure out if they want to have their student go to the same school, if there's room and all that kind of thing. How do we make that happen? We actually have a liaison that's working with families and staff that the folks can reach out to. We also have a form on our website for those bigger questions about like, okay, what's this going to look like? And then other processes for document requests and all that kind of stuff. It's we got all kinds of things happening right now.

SPEAKER_04 13:01

What about employment that's more tied to buildings like custodial staff, maintenance, lunch ladies, things like that? Do you have an estimate of how this might impact those staff?

SPEAKER_00 13:10

We really don't know quite yet. We know that we have a good amount of attrition every year. So typically, one of the ones that came up was our SAC or after school programming for students. They're always hiring a good chunk of folks every year. So we don't expect to have impacts there. Our desire is to really take care of every employee. But again, it will follow their negotiated agreement if for whatever reason there aren't enough spots.

SPEAKER_04 13:32

Great. What about the facilities themselves? What is the plan for these buildings that will close? Is it to sell? Is it to lease? I don't even know what your options are as a quasi-governmental entity, you know?

SPEAKER_00 13:44

Naturally, I think everyone wants to know if a building's slated for closure or what will happen to it. That process will begin once the proposal is agreed upon. I will say that we have been in constant contact. We went and presented to our municipalities during the engagement season. So last spring, making sure that they're aware. There have been certainly conversations prior to the plan being considered. There's been folks like the Museum of Boulder that have come forward and said we might be looking for some space and hear that you guys might be opening up some schools. We've put all that on ice until the board passes the plan.

SPEAKER_04 14:16

What else should I be asking that I'm not before we move on to our next topic?

SPEAKER_00 14:21

Gosh, that's always a great question. One other thing I could mention, this really is coming as a package plan. If we don't take action, we know that we'll just see the stretching of resources further and further. And so it's really important that we take action. We would expect that the board will vote on the package as a whole versus kind of parsing it out and deciding on elements of it. Again, September 22nd will be that opportunity. We have a board meeting prior to that. There'll be public comment at both of those board meetings. So folks can come out and share their thoughts. Lots of avenues for folks to be able to get their questions answered and that kind of thing as well.

SPEAKER_04 14:52

Great. Thank you so much. Next topic is about the recent uh lawsuit that was filed by the ADL on behalf of a student from Southern Hills in regards to anti-Semitic bullying incidents at that school. What does the anti-bullying curricula look like and programs look like within BBSD and what changes are coming to them either as a result of this or were coming down the pipe anyway?

SPEAKER_00 15:18

Anytime that you hear about a student being bullied, we take that incredibly seriously. The school had taken some actions, but clearly we recognize that on a systemic basis, we needed to take further action. So our kids do participate in curriculum, they participate in programs that train folks to prevent hate, step up and be an upstander when it comes to bullying, those kind of things. And yet we recognize that there's some room for growth there. Our superintendent a few weeks ago came out with a six-part plan in regards to how we're aiming to address this issue: anti-Semitism and discrimination and sort of hate actions. Part of it is definitely looking at our policies and procedures and strengthening those. Another element of it was creating a coordinated response to anti-Semitism and acts of discrimination. We were also looking at improving our communication efforts, and that goes beyond just a website, but also how do we, when we do have instances, one of the things that we heard about was the idea that you can let these things sort of fester in the dark because it feels like a one-off. And do you communicate that to a community? And so we're taking a greater approach and saying when things happen in our community, we're going to stand up and we're going to let folks know about that. We will be doing more training for our administrators and educators as well as our students as well. The superintendent's creating a Title VI advisory council that will address anti-Semitism and will bring in members of the community to continue to give us guidance. And then finally, we are looking at strengthening consequences for repeated acts of hate. So a student doesn't get away with doing this multiple times. And I'll mention that we are continuing to be in discussions with the ADL. We do mediation with them and the Office of Civil Rights. And so we're hoping that that will come to a conclusion in the next week or two. We didn't wait. So when they brought that concern forward, we immediately met with them and started having these conversations of how do we resolve this? We really do not want to see hate in our community.

SPEAKER_04 17:06

I'm going to break in again for a brief explainer and some context. The ADL or Anti-Defamation League filed the lawsuit against Boulder Valley School District. They also conduct anti-Semitism trainings in schools and government groups. An ADL training was given to City of Boulder staff and council, for instance. There is a movement to get governments and schools to drop the ADL because of their definition of anti-Semitism, which includes certain criticisms of Israel and its ongoing military campaign in Gaza. The other thing important to note is that this is not the first instance of bullying that parents felt was handled poorly by BBSD. A group of parents formed more than a year ago, united by discrimination and bullying experienced by their children, and, they felt, an inadequate response from the district to curb or curtail the behavior. Here's a clip from Lisa Kunkel, a BBSD parent who circulated a petition asking the district to implement anti-discrimination curricula provided by a group other than the ADL.

SPEAKER_03 18:07

Some of the specific concerns with the ADL is the conflation of anti-Zionism and most pro-Palestinian speech with anti-Semitism using the IRA or International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition uniformly, right? Like I don't think anyone thinks anything but when they read that Title VI complaint, that these deeply troubling incidents of anti-Semitic bullying need to be addressed, and that what happened to this child and family is incredibly concerning. And like how the district figures out how to approach that is going to be a really important question. So all of us are saying there needs to be a comprehensive response to anti-Semitism. Our caveats are like it should not be with the ADL and it should not be using the IRA definition. And also a question about would it make more sense to have an integrated anti-oppression framework that addresses anti-Semitism, but also addresses other forms of racism, addresses Islamophobia. Certainly, that board meeting made me think a lot about how prevalent anti-Semitic discriminatory bullying and harassment is in the school district. It also made me wonder: are kids being targeted based on their perceived immigration status, on their gender identity? And it would make sense for the school district in this particular moment to look at these are the multiple ways in which children might be facing discriminatory bullying and harassment, and how could we address those comprehensively?

SPEAKER_04 19:45

Okay, back to my interview with Randy. Part, of course, of the reason this is in the news is because of the parental response to the ADL itself, given their dabbling in politics and their definition of anti-Semitism, having a political sort of bent to it. So is the district adopting the ADL's anti-bullying curricula?

SPEAKER_00 20:05

I I don't know what the outcome of the mediation is. That will be made public as soon as that's completed. We've certainly heard the community loud and clear on this. I think there's middle ground to be struck. Obviously, no one, our community, the ADL, our administrators, no one wants to see a student bullied. There's no question about it. I think we can all agree upon that. The specific definitions and that kind of thing, I can't comment on that until I know for sure how the mediation ends. But we're already moving forward. We've got language out there that ensures that students are protected.

SPEAKER_04 20:34

How does the district know whether or not it's doing well on bullying? Are there benchmarks? Is it just like, well, it's still happening, so we're failing? Like, how does the district know whether or not it's meeting the mark?

SPEAKER_00 20:48

A little bit of teasing or the typical sort of things that happen amongst kids. There is something that is to be expected. But when it's repeated, when it's something that keeps a kid from wanting to come to school, or when it has to do with hate issues, where they're being named because of their race or religion or that kind of thing, we can't allow that. We all have to address these issues and we need to make sure that there's no room for hate in our communities. I know the superintendent, when he first got here, he was a year behind me in 2018, is when he arrived. One of the first things that we did was we met with uh whole groups of Latino parents, and that was their biggest issue. And so we've done a lot in terms of the process and that kind of thing. And yet, when you have folks that continue to bring forward situations like this, clearly the work's not done yet. And so I think part of it is continuing to train, continuing to have those resources. I mean, we've done so much in regards to trying to get the reporting out. It's on all of our websites across the district. It's now really easy to make those reports. And yet the feedback that we got in this case was yes, but we don't feel like things happen when we do report them. So, okay, back to the drawing board to a certain extent. How do we really work with our administrators to make sure that when one of these cases comes up, that it goes not down a different route, but that it's Taken seriously. I mean, when you think about school violence, schools, unfortunately, we learn a lot from things that go wrong. School shootings certainly have taught us a lot in regards to the way that we need to look at threats. And I think this has taught us a lot in regards to, we did have a response at the school level, but again, systemically, we didn't have the right things there. And I hope in five, 10 years from now, we can have another conversation. And bullying is not on that list of things. I think it's been 15 years that I've been in school, communications, and everywhere I go, bullying is one of those things that's really, really hard to conquer because it is a constant element of a school culture. And you got great things that happen in schools, but then there's kids being kids. And how do you make sure that we are supporting kids to have conflict, but do that in a way that is healthy and not in a way that hurts kids?

SPEAKER_04 22:43

So when you talk about your the Title VI group that you're going to bring together to address anti-Semitism, is the district committed to a range of views on what anti-Semitism is or is not, given the global global political lens that is currently on that issue?

SPEAKER_00 23:02

Yes, absolutely. I don't know exactly the process yet. And we're still a little bit early on in terms of how that committee is going to be formed. But yeah, absolutely. We definitely want to have, as you saw in our board meetings, there's a lot of different opinions around this. So we want to make sure that our community is reflected. And I think that is something else to just say, which is our schools are a reflection of what's going on in our community. I think sometimes we look at our schools and we go, we can't believe that this is happening there. But when that happens, you really just have to look out to the larger community and you realize that actually that these elements are out there too. What happened in our boardroom is exactly a reflection of even the larger national politics around this. And you don't get away from that. Schools is kind of the place where those things tend to be catch points, though, as folks are trying to figure out this. And now we're talking about our kids. It's understandable that people get really passionate about it here.

SPEAKER_04 23:51

So I do think the state assessments coming out got overshadowed a bit by the couple of other things that the district has going on. So there was some good news in there. So I'd love for you to give the high level what did we learn from the recent state assessments?

SPEAKER_00 24:04

Well, and I have some breaking news too, because we found out the district is actually accredited for the third year in a row, accredited with distinction from the Colorado Department of Education. That truly is amazing. The superintendent has told me that I think we're sixth in the state, even outdoing Aspen, which is just when we think about performance and the kind of work that we've been doing with our strategic plan, I think it's really an indicator of just the work that's been done by our educators. And again, that focus on the most important things. Looking at data, making sure that we're really focused on students and their individual needs. These are basic things that educators do on a normal basis, but really focused on that work, making sure that we're thinking about that and supporting kids all the way through graduation things like college and career and things like what's going on at the Apex Center. I could go on and on about all that stuff. But in alignment with that, one of the things I'm really excited about is when the CMAS test came out, one of the highlights was our middle schools. A few years ago, I don't know if you remember the Shay, but our middle schools, a few of them were not doing so great, Casey being one that comes to mind. And now one of the brightest spots in this year's results were middle school math, where BBSD achieved statistically significant 2.9 percentage point increase. Now, I always say that it's kind of geeky whenever we get into the numbers, but when you talk about that kind of gain in these test scores, it's really big. It's not the only place that we saw increases in C mass, PSAT and SAT, 72.2% of our students met or exceeded expectations in English language arts. Compare that to 72.7% last year. In math, the percentage increased from 57% to 57.8% here in Boulder Valley. We're known for excellence, but that ability, and I think this is actually really crucial to say, like in a school district that's suburban, that has affluence, it's not unusual for school districts that perform the way that we do to just sort of be like, we're good enough. Enough kids are making it to graduating and are doing all the things that we want them to do, to be like, okay, we're good. But here, one of the things that Boulder Valley's really done has had a focus on equity. And so I always have a note whenever we put out the press release that we know that it's not good enough. We still have gaps, we're still trying to address those. But it when you have a strategic plan like this and you're putting in that work, to see that growth in the middle schools, to see that growth in closing gaps is truly amazing and something that I think is a national model.

SPEAKER_04 26:36

I would love for you to define for listeners, explain to them what the achievement gap is and the progress that BBSD has made and still has yet to make on it.

SPEAKER_00 26:46

So when we talk about achievement gap, we're talking about the difference between our white students and students of color, typically. And there's been persistent achievement gaps over time. I remember when I first got here, I would see these clips from the Denver Post or whatever they were talking about, our achievement gap. And so it's something that's been on the mind of our school district for a while. Our white students, oftentimes students with means, they can get things like tutoring to support them and that kind of thing. I would say students of color is one way to look at it, but really it's impoverished students. So if it's free and reduced, cost lunch, right? Those kind of programs, though those things overlap. And really, I think it's maybe the more important way to look at it. So they don't have those kind of secondary means to be able to get up to speed. And so oftentimes they're not able to keep up in class and they fall behind. And so that's where you kind of see these gaps. They still remain for us. Some of our historically underserved students, including black and African American, Hispanic, Latino, multilingual students, there's still some places that we need to work on in these different areas. Closing these gaps is definitely a central focus for us and it's part of our unified improvement plan in the district. And so we're continuing to work on it. We see strides, but it's still something that we need to continue to effort.

SPEAKER_04 27:55

So is there anything else? Any other news you want to break or anything else you want to say?

SPEAKER_00 27:58

Oh my gosh. I guess one other thing would be the technology side of things. So as you may know, a Boulder Valley School District a few years ago implemented a district-wide bell-to-bell cell phone restriction for students. And this summer we've added on that through our system, so our Wi-Fi and our computers, no longer can students access social media. I think last spring we turned off Chat GPT as well. So there's always a balance when it comes to technology. We want to make sure that students are getting the skills that they need in order to really do well in their future, whether that's again college or career or whatever they choose. They're going to be touching technology. There's no question that they'll be working with AI. I think at this point it's pretty clear. And yet, we know that the research shows that when kids are on their cell phones, they're less attentive to their schoolwork. And really, the place that I think it shows, if you ever walk through a high school it now is socially, all the kids would be down looking at their phones. And so that ability to have them there present and hanging out with their friends during lunch and having conversations and playing foosball or ping pong or whatever it might be is really crucial. And I think you're seeing some of this through the lawsuits and the settlements that are happening in a national level too. And people are coming to terms with this technology that really is integrated into so many of our lives now, all of our lives. And I think we as adults probably realize a little bit like, how is it that I end up on this never-ending train of videos I can't stop? But for our kids, it's even harder where they are mentally with their development. And so I think it's important that the school district has taken some actions in order to protect them while they're at school.

SPEAKER_04 29:29

Yeah, I found myself wishing that someone would make me give up social media during not possible giving my job.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

Yeah, if it wasn't for my job and needing to stay on top of it, uh trading in the phone for a brick or you know, they've got those things where you turn off your apps. I dream about those moments at times.

SPEAKER_04 29:46

And I think you were right to talk about all the lawsuits. Colorado's just announced a huge payout from Meta. And I do think the AI lawsuits are slower, but are also coming. So it's sounds like at least they'll be prepared to use AI, and but it'll be more in an instruction-based scenario rather than just like open access on campus.

SPEAKER_00 30:06

We have something called the magic school. And so our teachers actually can use AI, but it's a much more supervised sort of situation where they've got an assignment and then they have them utilize it. So I think that's a good first step. As our kids get to be high school and prepare for their lives after, they do need to understand the difficulties and the ethics of it and all the things that we talk about in regards to the information that you put in there may be accessible to other folks. And so it's not all private. I think it's sometimes easy to think if it's just on your feed with friends or if you put it into Chat GBT that it's just you and the computer, right? So it's important that we teach them all those things. It's a progression, and yet I know a lot of parents are now trying to get their arms around what this means. So we certainly will continue to work with our community to find those right balances.