school program of which tina was founder. i think more so than just being given the opportunity to express ourselves and to air grievances -- i think we also as participants in democracy demand results so the thrust of my talk tonight will be about the lack thereof. in my work as a youth media arts facilitator, i speak regularly with educators. overwhelmingly they tell me i wish my parents were more involved. we have parents who are involved in the process, active participants in our children's education and we are asking for your help, we are asking for more dedicated talented teachers, like tina, not less. our desire for that

has been evidenced by our organization efforts since she was received the non reelection. it's also been reflected in our attempts to gain clarify from the administration and from the board via our campaign of email, phone messages and by our continued presence here at these board meetings. the lack of a move by the board to rescind the non reelection of tina and further more the complete lack of effort to reach out to and work with the community, the members here represented in this manner has led to conflicting stories about next steps and confusion as ho how to achieve our goal of keeping tina as a resource to the district. needless to say, this is frustrating for a community that feel that it's been under served for too long.

we /urpbl the board to act now and rescind the non reelection of tina and in so doing, reverse the action of robbing the district of a great asset. >> i'm a youth coordinator and i have some -- all my youth have had miss [inaudible] as a teacher and i'm reading through one of youths. she should stay because she has been one of the nicest teachers i have had and she has been very generous and thoughtful and she is the only filipino person in the middle school so why would you take fec's teacher filipino education centers. only

filipino middle schoolteachers. and i heard they're taking them out because they don't have the [inaudible] national in a filipino educational school? right? another student had said that -- give me a second. she said, "us for years and he's known her for months," so he doesn't know what he's talking about. so of course they're youth. they're speaking out of their passion for their teacher. i've noticed from both of these schools that these principals have only stayed there for some amount of maybe a year or two and they don't need the teachers as well as the students as well as the parents. and i had said in my last speech over here, that

they are the facts. they are the actual evidence and i was really thankful that you guys are thinking of the students doing the 43 towards that and wanted to restore something that was lost. and restoring discipline -- these teachers have done that even without that certain qualification -- or not -- specialized qualification because they've

done that through their classes. like you said, you have trained individuals, profession /alized in this. they've had that and they're making changes. so having that restoring thing -- why can't you restore their jobs because these teachers have made a change. thank you. >> thank you. so i'm seeing no other speakers so seems like some of the people that signed up not here. we will move on to the next group of speakers which is lake shore elementary and i have quite a lot of cards. if you plan to speak on lake shore issue, can you stand up please? i'm going to give

you similarly 15 minutes total for your group to speak. you won't have individual time for speakers, but at the ends of 15 minutes your time will expire so as soon as you're ready line up at the /ph*eubg and d mic and we will begin timing. >> good evening. my name is dave and i'm the pta president at lake shore elementary school and i'm member of the school's [inaudible] council. i'm the parent of a third grader at lake shore and he's very fond of saying that he loves his school. as i'm sure you are aware, lake shore's principal,

lindsey keener announced her resignation. her announcement came after a prolonged campaign from members of our own community to have her position fired from lake shore. >> i think we should clarify that resign and fire are not the same thing. >> she resigned from lake shore and i've come here tonight to express my disappointment for how the school board handled this matter. i found her to be

an effective dedicated principal with a deep commitment towards lake /shoerp students and families. i'm aware that the parents who led this campaign against miss keener contacted members this board of their claims, but the board made no attempt to fact check the claims against her. i would hope the district would take a more effective roll in handling this situation and that all voices have a chance to be heard. as we move ahead, i hope the next principal will share the same qualities as miss keener, i hope they'll be as committed to lake shore student as miss keener has been. i hope that the next principal will be as approachable as miss keener. and i hope our next principal will always put the students of lake shore first as miss keener

has done. i appreciate your time. thank you. >> hi, my name is vicki and i am a parent of a second grader at lake shore. i am a single mother so honestly, i didn't pay much attention to what was going on at the school. all i knew was that lindsey was a great principal whenever i had an issue which wasn't often, she always responded effectively. when there was a problem with my son called me right away. we worked it out. it seemed like a very civilized process and it was ongoing. so that instance alone showed me that miss keener not only cared, but that she worked closely with the teachers who were willing to work with her. so i would like to move the

discussion forward. i do echo david's view that i don't really know what the district was thinking when they just blindly -- i don't know what happened. whether they put the heat on her and asked her to resign or what happened, but it's caused a lot of pain in our community. many people, parents and kids are suffering. we try to keep it from the kids, but the kids pick up on it. they know what's going on. so i just have said here, suggestions for rectifying [inaudible] and preventing similar ambush in the future. it doesn't serve the district to respond to a small group of parents via the board or directly to out somebody without really getting a consensus. the group of parents that did this were a

small group and they still don't represent the majority of parents. so whereas many were not involved in this, nor approve of it now. we remain deeply divided and many parents leery of -- >> if we can put the time on pause for just a moment. we ask simply just because this is a public meeting that's recorded and broadcast, that you refrain from mentioning employees by name. we can't prevent you from that, but we do ask as a courtesy for both the employees and other people in the district. >> sorry, i've already done it. so we're simply the principal

will not make things better at lake shore. ousters like this continue to occur -- it's a waste of resources to be responding in a random manner in response to ousters. one, the district invites -- not saying she would come back, i doubt she would -- the district invites lindsey to stay at lake shore, or offers to renew her contract. two, the district establishes clear measures of the principal's performance based on the unique nature of lake shore so as to simplify discussions. three, to avoid an occurrence like this district wide in the future, they will not consider a

request to oust a [inaudible] that is the pta representing the student bodies at a school where it is proposed that a social worker or school principal or school secretary be fired. that's all. thank you. >> i'm going to say some similar things to what you've already heard. my name is lisa, greetings to you all. i'm a parent of two children at lake shore elementary school -- two african american children. and one reason why we chose lake shore is because of the great ethnic and socioeconomic diversity at the school that we wanted our children to be exposed to. we've been at the school for four years and have really loved lake shore, but

just the past few months have become quite stressful for us. so i came here today to voice my distress and anger at what i think is this district's serious mishandling of this attack on our principal by a small group of disgruntled aren'ts. they maligned miss keener to her supervisor in the district, as well as certain members of this board, all the while caming in a written document to represent the lake shore community, although they were a very small group and nobody else knew what they were doing. many of you have seen this five page document maligning the prince /palg. it is filled with trivial complaints and misstatements of fact, and yet they have made no

credible attempt to /aeu cred date these allegations even when parents who learned of the attack who were dismaid began to call and write letters to members of the district and to you board members. in fact, two parents who were dismaid by this submitted a petition with 140 signatures. it was very impromptu they put together. in one day they put together this petition of parents who wanted to save her and no response came from the district. these two petitioners were attacked by the group of parents trying to oust her principal and were told they had no right to have a petition. so no one at the district came to the school to talk other parents or teachers or the staff to hear the other side of the story. the hatful

parents refused our principal's request to meet in mediation and to this day, most of the other parents at the school do not know the truth about how and by whom our principal was attacked. so after enduring a couple of months of this hostility, the principal did submit her resignation and decided to leave our school and we consider this to be a tragic loss. she has been a very strong advocate for the large population of african american, ell, special needs with whose families do not have a strong voice at the school. these are the groups of people that we really are family very much values at the school. our principal worked to implement district policies to close the achievement gap and to implement restorative practices. she is a principal

who knows and loves most of the close do 500 students at the school. and a great many of them are very sad to know that she is leave inging and they don't know the reason why. so now we are initiating the process of deciding who our next principal will be. my voice was not heard when our principal was attacked and forced out, but now i want it to be known that i expect the next principal to be similar to miss keener, to be a strongly supportive advocate for our african american ell /spaoerbl needs and socioeconomically disadvantaged students and i want the principal to have the support to do what is best for

the students at lake shore, even when he or she has been attacked by parents. and i'd like to introduce my son. >> everyone liked our principal and i hope she has a good time when she's gone. i hope she visits. and she was a very good principal. thank you. >> good afternoon. my name is sonia and i am a parent at lake shore. i've been there for four years. my daughter is now in fifth and i'm here just to

-- actually, i am on the site council board and i got the opportunity to do a lot of volunteer work at the school. i've worked on the yards, in the office, with the teachers and i've gotten a chance to witness our principal put her heart into the school. and i guess it just saddens me that such a major decision was finalized by the district without everyone having a chance to have input. and i just hope in the future that proper channels can be implemented so that everyone's voice can be heard before such a major decision is finalized. i feel that we're losing a really good principal so just

here to support her. thank you. >> my name's theresa. i've been at lake shore for 4 years. i was also a member of the executive board of the pta this year and i've worked closely with our principal and i found her to be an excellent prince /palg, very easy to communicate with, very re/spopbive to parents, but my interpretation of the issue at the is that teachers and some parents were at odds with the district policies of restorative practices, keeping african american children in the classrooms instead of sending them out when there's trouble. and to my mind, that's why she's leaving because the pressure was put on her from forces who didn't believe in

the district policies. and while those of us here wrote letters and contacted people, we didn't get any response. so i want to know how is the district going to support principals who are going to implement their policies when they're allowing subversive parents to oust them. doesn't seem like a very productive way to go forward. if i'd like to see anything come out of this, i'd like to have the district come up with a policy for investigating or coming into a site when a problem like this arises. often times i think it arises similarly to the way it did at lake shore where there's

an underground group of them. >> we have a couple more minutes because we were interrupted by the president. >> two more minutes. >> i would like the district to have a policy so this doesn't happen in the future. >> my name is doctor [inaudible]. thank you terry. my partner is officer grave here. we have a son at lake shore elementary. i'm here as a parent. i have a lot of professional opinions and personal opinions about what happened, but i'm here as a parent. my concern is the message to the children. of lake shore. we've heard about what happened already. but the key points that i intersect with the goals here is that we were privy to documents that

could be taken as offense to african americans and english language learners and just the groups that the district tends to champion and target as our general education. and so i'm concerned as minnesota who wrote letters and documented it, that parents like myself were not given equal voice. and parents who didn't have the privilege of access to email or translation were not given voice and were not heard. i think that's a direct violation of what the goals or. so we need to change the goals or enforce the goals. if there's nothing else that's heard from what i'm saying today, my issue today is that the district supports restorative justice that we're showing our commitment to access and equity and making sure the diverse families at lake shore -- all of them -- privileged parents, not so privileged parents, feel

that their voice is heard and has equal weight. equal weight. and the reason i bring this up again is that there continues to be sidestepping of traditional organization that we use. putting up non translated surveys on email that only hit the percentage of the families so i think equal voice is very important. thank you. and i support you and i want to support you all supporting us doing what we all say we're going to do. >> i have a couple more cards on isolated issues. please approach as i call your name.

two minutes each. >> good evening board members and president norton. my name is heather and i'm a parent and i'm here to talk about the 2013 special day class relocation and how it's going to effect student placement. i want to con grand jury late you on the guiding principals it's been a long time coming and i'm glad that it has been approved. it sounds like the april student assignment meeting is probably for me. is that going to be open to the public? can someone tell me the dates? >> commissioner -- do you -- >> i believe it's the 22nd at 6:00 pm.

>> so over the past few weeks i've spoken to a number of people, exchanged emails with miss norton, spoke with my teacher at the school where my daughter is a student and lots of parents both of special needs students and other /staouptds and i put together a few thoughts that i've heard from them about how different students are going to be affected by their placements. i have a son at another school and we are trying to transfer him to jefferson, but looks like that's going to be more difficult than we thought. i'm going to read this handout and maybe this can lay a little ground work for the meeting in april on student assignment. i'm here to draw attention to the plight of some families is

[inaudible] to consider hiring more short term teachers in order to ease the transition from a few schools serving special needs students. is that for me? oh, okay. please read it. >> thank you. >> we do a ton of work over at the board of supervisors and working on issues with the board of education has been very educational for us, but important for us to learn all the work you do. i'm a father of a 1-and-a-half-year-old son who i think nearly /spwruped one of the meetings at -- it's not on the agenda, but there's a lot of excitement about

creating the pathway for contracting. we've been eager to engage -- we pulled about 14 other community based organizations to find out what we know and we figured out we know nothing. we don't know if there is a draft, we know some point maybe soon -- at one point i think your consultant -- we got the impression he was going to reach out to community based organizations to get our take around continuing the community driven aspects of this conversation and again, we put our heads together and we didn't find that anybody knew anything. so we have a /khrebgive request -- we have 14 organizations -- letter's here, i'll pass it out. we want to put what we're asking for in writing. [inaudible].

folkings are really excited in the community. we want to engage so if we can get a draft copy of whatever mr. tom is looking on, let us look at it, give our input, we've done so in this letter to start that conversation, but the worst thing would be for folks to come if blindly, show up here and [inaudible] been more than gracious in sitting down with us and commissioners so we'd like to do that that. thanks. >> good evening commissioners administrators. i'm here on behalf of the [inaudible] town center. it's a filipino community center and i'd like to invite the commissioners and administrators and the rest of the staff and everyone up there that we are going to have an art exhibit on saturday. normally i don't do that here. it's, like, out there in e