Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAboutCity Council Meeting - Council Workshop - Minutes - 07/06/1999 . COUNCIL WORKSHOP MINUTES July 6, 1999 COMMITTEE MEMBERS PRESENT: Chair Leona Orr, Sandy Amodt, Tom Brotherton, Tim Clark, Connie Epperly, Judy Woods, Rico Yingling STAFF PRESENT: Jim Harris, Marty Mulholland, Steve Schopfer, Charlie Lindsey, John Hodgson, Brent McFall, Jacki Skaught, Glenn Woods, Larry Webb,Norm Angelo, Jed Aldridge, Roger Lubovich, Don Wickstrom, Jackie Bicknell PUBLIC PRESENT: John Santana,Barb Grohe,Becky Hank Director of Operations Brent McFall—This is the first time that you've all been together since the first of July when Jacki Skaught started as our Economic Development Manager. 1 want to take an opportunity to introduce Jacki to you. Jacki comes to us through Tacoma and she's worked extensively with the City of Tacoma, Tacoma/Pierce County Economic Development Board and the Port and state and about everybody else that you can think of in economic development circles, and so she just has excellent experience. We were delighted that she was interested in Kent and one of the things that impressed me very much is when a candidate does their homework on the city as opposed to us just doing our homework on the candidate because it means that it's a two-way selection process. I think we got a perfect match, and I'm just really pleased to have Jacki here. Jacki Skaught—I did a lot of research on Kent, and I called other cities and organizations to find out what cities were good places to work and what cities understood Economic Development. There were only two that kept coming up and Kent was one of them. And so I was really pleased. I had actually done some of that research before I saw the job announcement. And when a friend brought me the job announcement and said your research is over. And so when I came through the interview I realized in talking with people on the interview panel that it was a culture that understood and in fact I kept thinking as they were asking questions they get it. They get it. And then John Ryan just looked at me and he said you get it. And I thought okay. So I'm very pleased to be here. Haven't gotten very far yet. Meeting all the directors this week. Meeting with the Chamber, the Downtown Partnership, those things that matter to you people in terms of making your city go the way you want it to go and I walked all over downtown today on my lunch hour and you've got a lot more downtown than Tacoma does—and potential. I think the thing that's overwhelming me already is the amount of potential here and the interest in pursuing that. So it's a pleasure to be here, and I look forward to working with you. Y2K Update Information Systems Director Marty Mulholland introduced Steve Schopfer, Year 2000 Coordinator. Ms. Mulholland said Steve had been an IS Director for the City of Lacey, • Washington for 10 years and then moved on to be the Director for an Alaska Council Workshop,7/6/99 2 Telecommunications Company. He decided to return to the state and we brought him on board last July. So he's been here a year now just focusing on Year 2000 planning and tracking. Mr. Schopfer gave an overview of the Y2K planning and implementation project: When I came on board we had an initial mailing of around 370 vendors. We went after one that we'd done over $10,000 worth of business with in the last 18 months. That was the cutting off point. We figured that anyone with that amount of business we needed to make sure they were still going to be around. Or if they weren't, we were going to look for somebody else who would do the same type of service for us and we could rely on. We didn't get a very good response. This was back in January of last year and up until almost October of last year. So we did another mailing just last month. We're now down to around 70—80 left that we haven't heard from. None of those are really show stoppers. They're people like contractors, a few chemical suppliers, a lot of local firms that we need to make sure they're still going to be around to do business with. We've gotten a lot of responses back from our 2"a mailing and we just have to go through and see where those people stand with us. Specific things of concern: Obviously electricity, PSE. Of all the electrical providers in the state, PSE is the largest. They provide electricity to over 70 cities carrying everything from the Canadian border all the way down to Longview and everything in between. They are fairly quiet about what they're doing. I would imagine you remember back in September or October, we tried to get PSE to respond to us and they wouldn't. So we drafted a letter with Mayor White. We had seven other cities sign it and send it to the CEO of PSE. That got their response. So they since then have come in and gave us a personal update and then they started giving updates to the organization that we started forming. We have a monthly meeting every month at Fire Station#76 up on the West Hill and we have Y2K and Emergency Managers from jurisdictions throughout the area come and discuss issues and do presentations, trying to stay on top of things. Since that time, PSE has been very quiet. The only thing we have to go on are their quarterly updates that are basically a public document they send to everybody and of course according to that they say they're fine. You were presented with and approved the purchase of the new generators. I've been working with Charlie and Eddie at the Shop about how long (we're putting a schedule together) it takes to refuel the generators, how long they run, where they're going to be placed, and where the existing ones are at, and can we get fuel out of the ground from the Shops and at the main Fire Station from underground tanks if we have to rely on generator power. We are upgrading the Petrovend System, which is the system we use to get fuel out of the ground, at the Shops the middle of this month. And we can get fuel out of the ground at the main fire station at the training center. So we feel like for the lift stations, for the complex here, for the Shop and the Commons that we can keep the power up in the critical areas we need, if it goes down. If something does happen, they're going Council Workshop, 7/6/99 3 to open up the Commons for city staff and probably council to have some place warm to • go to in January. That's an issue. US Bank was bought out by a firm back in Minnesota the middle of last year. We've been working with their Y2K person who is now in Minnesota as to where they're at. We're also working with our finance folks to make sure the bank has a reserve of cash locally here for us to use if we need it. It's an undetermined amount at this point. It's probably not going to be made public except to you as to how much we're going to actually keep in reserves over there. Valley Corn is supposedly Y2K compliant. They've tested. Everything is up to speed with them. They have generators. They rely on us for some of their repeater sites. So we feel pretty comfortable about those three big, critical vendors. Over 420 Embedded Chips were identified. We went through and inventoried and checked web sites on those back in the October, November, and December time frame. At that time we could only get responses out of about half of them. Since that time now, they've actually started testing and some of them are taking back their statements as to where they were. I just spent most of last month going through our list again. I've come up with some things that are critical to us like chips that run some of the control panels at the lift stations and we're going to need to upgrade some of those chips now. We're still working on some of those critical issues, to get to some of those issues that we thought were okay, but now they're not. The biggest player there is Siemens who is basically buying everybody. They've bought Texas Instruments. They bought McKinstry which handles the HVAC's for this building and the other buildings. We've had Siemens come in and do an independent upgrade of all of our software. We're having an independent contractor come in at no charge to us to validate what Siemens has done as far as the HVAC systems go. Traffic Signals—we've got compliance letters from our vendors stating that everything is compliant. The only area where we have a problem is in the traffic count piece which is not going to affect signals. As you all know, you approved the Honeywell card swipe system for the Police Department. The Entry Plus System which is an existing system for Centennial is compliant. As a side note, Facilities has been getting a lot of requests from tenants in Centennial about the HVAC, the Entry Plus, also the alarm systems, the elevators. I drafted a letter last week for them to send to all the tenants in Centennial basically stating where we're at on all the systems in that building so they don't have to get inundated with calls. Desktop Applications—all the desktops, all the hardware as you know from the technology plan have all been upgraded or are in the process of being upgraded. All the desktop software, which is most of the Microsoft stuff is compliant. We'll be applying patches throughout the remainder of the year on those. Printers, faxes, copiers that are either leased or owned are all compliant. The big issue on software of course are the main applications, the Payroll, the Utility Billing, LID, Building permits. I've got a little synopsis on each one of those here. We've been doing quite a bit of public awareness. . Mayor White and I have been in a couple of places explaining things to different church Council Workshop,7/6/99 4 groups, at Trinity Church,the Chamber of Commerce, the big Y2K or whatever it was at Emerald Downs two or three months ago, the Senior Center, and the School District. We've done Utility Stuffers. We've been putting it in the newsletter and we just did another update for the media this weekend. Emergency Preparedness--I am assuming you know about the tabletop exercise that was conducted a couple of weeks ago —very successful and enlightening to the staff. There were 70 employees there. They all saw quite a bit of benefit in that. We plan to do another one in September. It's good that they practice these things whether it's an earthquake or Y2K or a volcano or whatever. It's a very good exercise and staff saw the advantage of practicing and using that. Conclusion—If we can continue to stay on top of our vendors and embedded chip suppliers, and stay on top of testing the software applications we're doing and the hardware side of things, we should be okay. I'm not going to promise that everything is going to be fine, but there is something that just happened recently in the US legislature that may provide us with some legal protection. I'vc been working with Legal throughout the whole process, with Tom Brubaker approving everything that we send out or get back in. We're making sure Legal is happy with that. The legislature just did a new deal with the White House. They've been balking at this for quite a bit of time over the last year. The State of Washington tried a couple of attempts and those both failed. Basically this is a bill that will limit liability and there's only one sentence in here that's really pertinent to us. It says, "exempt". It's going to exempt municipal and governmental entities from punitive damages. That's really the one sentence we really care about because this is a local government. It has been passed by the Senate but I don't think it's been signed into law yet. We'll have to wait and see what happens over the next week or two with this. And of course,we'll get more clarification through AWC, through the web as to exactly what kind of exposure we still have. Space Utilization Plan Parks Director John Hodgson—What I want to do today is just highlight some of the concepts that we had in the first meeting and then talk a little bit about what we think are the first three things we need to do and to start looking at putting some budget numbers together into the year 2000 budget, and then see if we're still heading down the right road. (Mr. Hodgson showed a schematic of the current campus: Centennial, City Hall, the parking garage and the Police Station.) As we build out, we have a corridor that goes from the corner of Centennial from 3`d and Gowe all the way straight through and opens up a very major common community area for people to get permits, whatnot. This breezeway here opens up to new council chambers as well as the second floor where we have the Mayor's and Administration offices. The blue here is not water but it's a glass in-fill of the second, third, and fourth floors. The adding on into a common area here that would probably be like a caf6. It would be mainly like a cafeteria for staff but it could be, if we wanted to make it larger, actually a community type facility and also a piece of this would allow us to add to the size of our council chambers. Council Workshop, 7/6/99 5 The Police Station goes this way and as you know it goes over Titus and the discussion that we're having right now is probably to close Titus and go further south. The key elements are infilling of City Hall, the Chambers and the Police Station. That still grants us some space down the road if we ever want to do something on the eastern side of the facility or the campus. The major piece that we think we need to work on right now(and probably the highest priority) is to get the infill on the second, third and fourth floors of city hall done. You know this is a very beautiful building but it's somewhat dysfunctional in terms of being able to accommodate everyone's needs. As every department slowly gets a little bigger, we're not gonna be able to accomplish very much if we don't have that piece taken care of. Another piece that we think is real important is to start doing all the new tenant improvements on the third floor Centennial Building to set up for what we will be in 10 years and start moving the Planning Department, who is down on the first floor up to the P floor of Centennial. Then the third piece that we want to look at is the improvements on the first floor of the Centennial Building. So those are the three major areas that we think are key for us to start looking at budgeting for the year 2000. And,hopefully, based on our Capital Improvement Program,we'll be able to do funding for that. We don't really have any budget numbers right now but those are our key areas that we want to concentrate on. Remember, we're looking at a 5-10 year plan. Our goal is that by the year 2010, when we're at least 130,000 and, Mr. Brotherton, I know you think we're going to be 150,000, we can accommodate the citizens of Kent with this facility. We're not prepared to do anything on the East Hill Maintenance Shop for at least a year, maybe two. The property we're buying has a three year lease on it, so it's not in our plans for the near future, although we may be moving some small elements of our maintenance crew there,but not for at least a year. Councilmember Sandy Amodt--You had mentioned that in the glassed-in area potentially having a community coffee shop lunch area. If the rest of the council is agreeable, I would be real interested in seeing what the numbers and the plan would be for something like that. You said it would be additional monies. I think it would be a real benefit to have a community facility for citizens to come in and actually eat lunch and have coffee and that type of thing and actually know that they're part of the city. John Hodgson—I think what we would do is look at the size that our staff needs and the size the community might need and build the shell and then, whether we make the tenant improvements or whether a vendor comes in and does that, but certainly something we can have our consultants look at. Councilmember Connie Epperly— On all three of the pictures, we show the two extra blocks for the Police Station. At what point are we looking at that property? Wouldn't it be feasible to pick up everything for the future plan rather than to wait and then try to be picking it up as go? John Hodgson—Well, you budgeted and we have some bond money, I think it's a million or a million and a half dollars, to buy the land for the Police Headquarters. So we can do that. Brent McFall—Basically, if you're comfortable with this plan, we need to move ahead and buy land. You're absolutely right. Council Workshop,7/6/99 6 • Councilmember Rico Yingling—What effect will the priorities that you've set have on the permit center? John Hodgson—Well, what this does is allows us to start building it and we think that's pretty important because of the study that was recently conducted. It starts pushing some people that don't need to be on the first floor upstairs. We still have a major lease on part of the first floor,but I think what we're doing is making that one of our highest priorities. It could be done by the end of next year if we start it today. We may need to take a little bit of money to start some of the construction drawings, if we have any unencumbered capital money or anything like that. Sandy Amodt—Where would all of the funding come from for this project and what's the contingency plan, if council were to approve this, if the economy didn't stay as stable as it is right now. John Hodgson—There's going to be a variety of funding sources for the whole Space Plan. There'll be some Capital money out of our Capital Fund, which will fund a fair portion of it. We'll probably have some monies from Public Works or some form for the Shops area. We're working with Parks on that. The Police Station and all the Public Safety improvements—we've always talked about a Public Safety Bond Issue. If the economy slows down, it becomes a series of prioritization of are we going to build all the other things that are listed and all the other requests that come through in the Capital Plan against this project, and it's going to be up to us to come together with you with a package on where the priorities are. Judy Woods—My only comment was that when it's phased like this, then you have the opportunity to pull back if anything should occur. We can easily change our approach or direction. Brent McFall—The critical things that will help us would be if we do the infill of City Hall and fully occupy the Centennial Center and build a connection between. Council chambers would be really nice to do but we could survive if we didn't. The Police Station would be real tough. What we'd have to look at on that is if we didn't do this, we'd have to look at some other option. We'd have to look at something that we had earlier considered which was an East Hill precinct. The problem with the precinct is in a city our size where we're sort of at build out, we're just sort of on the cusp of maybe precinct size, and you have to duplicate so many systems when you do that, that the final analysis was that we'd be better off to go ahead and do this. The Police Department in their current building without expansion would truly be on top of each other, but some of you that have been around for a while remember when they were in the wing of this building not all that many years ago, and so it can be done. It's just what kind of work environment are you going to provide? Councilmember Judy Woods—I would love for you to bring a proposal to Operations soon so that if you say you can hit the ground running in January 2000, that we do. That's my personal opinion because we might as well get on with it, and Jim and his group came to Operations for the additional positions today and we have to do this if we're going to make it possible for them to do their jobs well and we want them to respond positive—this is like a report. We have to do this. At least the first phase. And then by the end of the year, I'd like to see a second, third, fourth, and fifth year out as to how we think this is going—how we might do this in addition to the Public Safety Bond. Council Workshop,7/6/99 7 What other kinds of things do we anticipate? Where do we anticipate finding money and . that kind of thing. Sandy Amodt—I'd like to see the numbers and the plans when you get the numbers up and running and then have ample time to review and make decisions based on that because there are a number of different alternatives. And, of course, I know you'll do that and show where the money would be coming from. John Hodgson—1 think probably within the next 30 days or within the next two meetings we could have a pretty good idea of what it's going to take to get all the designs, construction drawings and all that done for those three phases and a good clean cost estimate where we think we're going to find the money. Introduction of the new Kent School District Superintendent Brent McFall introduced new Kent School District Superintendent, Barbara Grohe: Well I'm actually going to let Becky Hanks do the honors of the actual introduction, but we were just going to start this off as a reminder for you and by way of introduction to talk a little bit about some of our ongoing activities with the school district and relations that we've had with the school district over the years. And I always have to put in my quick reminder to council members that we always have to remember that a significant portion of the City of Kent is not in the Kent School District and so any time we talk about school district issues we have to always keep in mind we have the Federal Way School District as well as Kent District and in fact we'll have this same opportunity some months from now, I hope, with the new Superintendent of the Federal Way School District because they're changing superintendents as well. We provide school security and we set up student traffic court which allows students with traffic citations to find alternative ways of being sentenced and having that citation dropped if they successfully complete that adjudicated by their peers,who are tough! Drinking Driver Task Force has been very involved with the schools. Recreation and Parks is one of those areas where I think you all know that we really have tremendous cooperation over the years—reciprocal use of facilities. Many of our recreation programs are offered on school playgrounds and in school buildings. We cooperated on the Lighthouse Program and late night programs for youth and teens. Use sports programs, community education activities, after school programs that we run at a school, youth employment and internships. One of the things that I think has been real successful in our youth program is training kids into the work environment. Teaching what it is to show up on time every day for a job. Adopt A Park Projects. All of our different arts activities. Kid's Arts Day and Reclamation Art where we've used school art classes. The Missoula Children's Theater. The Artist in Residence that we've done at schools and scholarships and that sort of thing. The Fire Department has worked with them on School Emergency Response Training, actually training faculty and staff in schools to be prepared to be an Emergency Responder,both in the critical situations where we're just overwhelmed or in an immediate situation until we can get there. Emergency Management Plan Reviews. Participation in drills. The Gift of Life Program which has been very effective in giving Council Workshop, 7/6/99 8 students what you know right before prom and party time in a realistic sense of what it • looks like out there when you mix drinking and driving. CPR Classes and all of our fire prevention kinds of activities that we've done. Participation in career days and that sort of thing, trying to give students again an idea of what it's like out there and what kind of opportunities might exist. We've worked in our Home Technology upgrade operations to extend fiber to schools and so we're at a point now where virtually all of the schools in Kent will have fiber optic cable delivered to them because of the things that we did working cooperatively, again with the school district on TCI's franchise, to get that extended. And as you know perhaps, last but not least, we do collect a School Impact Fee for the school district to help offset costs of growth in the district. We have a lot of things that we can work to enhance and I know it would certainly be the staff s commitment and I'm sure council's as well to work with the school district on enhancing our relationship. We really would like to talk about joint use of facilities,joint construction, opportunities where they might exist whether that be buildings, fields, co-location of parks and gymnasiums and all those sorts of things where we think that maybe we can get to the point where school facilities are better utilized, our facilities are better utilized and we can join to a great partnership there. There's just lots of opportunities and certainly a long history that we've had with the Kent School District and one that we want to continue to develop and continue to work on. Certainly things that I've heard about Barbara are that she is very much involved in building this kind of partnership relationships with the cities that she served and so we're real pleased to have her here and I'm going to turn it over to Becky now and let her make the introduction. Becky Hanks —Barb's here tonight and I think you're going to find her a real delight. Right after the decision was made I was chatting with her on the phone and shared with her that the Mayor's office was sending an invitation to come to a council meeting and she assured me that she had been real involved with city work on different projects. She said, as a matter of fact, you can give the Chief of Police the phone number of our Chief of Police and he'll be happy to share about some of our interaction and I asked Ed the other day, did you follow up on that? Did you call the city police chief and he said,No I didn't, but everything that he had heard was true and he's had just a brief chance to meet her. She's been receiving calls from numbers of people. I mean her calendar has been extremely busy and she jumped at the chance and when I called her back in Iowa last month she said absolutely, let's get that on the docket right away. Thus we're here today. Barb is here on day number 6. Actually that's not true. The Fourth of July weekend so you're really getting to like day number 3. We are excited about having her here. She is has a record of being very involved in communities. Really pushes for partnerships on multiple levels, business, city, county, work with municipalities as well as getting the teachers out into to the community. Getting community people at our schools and she really walks a talk. So I bring to you Barb Grohe. She's actually Dr. Barbara Grohe. But she wants to be called Barb. Council Workshop,7/6l99 9 Barb Grebe—Most people don't have those nice things said about them until after they're • dead. It is a pleasure to be here with you this evening. I do want to have kind of a background for getting all the help for schools that I can find and that's any organized group I can get my hands on. I have to admit that I was somewhat envious when you were reading your list because on your list are the two things that I tried as hard as I could to get done in Iowa and never managed to accomplish. And that was Impact Fees and TCI fiber to the schools. Neither of those were we able to accomplish. I'm very envious of your ability to get all that done because I know it wasn't easy to do, having worked through that process. I was also interested to hear your interest in combined construction projects. I think one of the partnerships that is my favorite, of all the ones that we did when I was in Iowa, was we worked with one of our communities on the construction of a new school and it was a fairly major project because it was going to include an arterial road and brand new subdivision that was being planned, a golf course that was going to be where we thought the school was going to be and the owner was going to donate the land as soon as we could identify a parcel that we all agreed on. The arrangement we ended up with was that the city council designated our playground a city park and so all the playground equipment was donated by the city. When we built the elementary school,we built a smaller gymnasium. When we built the school we had an agreement with the city that we'd build a pool, a golf sized gymnasium onto an elementary school. The agreement was we would pay for the cost of the regular size gym, the city paid the over-cost and in that particular area there were no facilities available for the city's parks and recreation department because it was way out. And so • the gym became then the city's park and recreation and we used it on a joint use agreement. In addition to that, there's a 60 acre park being developed around the school that includes wetlands, an outdoor classroom and a trail system that connects all of the planned and existing neighborhoods in that community and they are all connected by a trail system to the school. So there will be no bussing to that school because everyone has a safe walk to school as a result of planning it. It was a unique opportunity because we hardly ever get to start literally from the beginning and decide where all the houses are going to be and where the roads are going to be and where the trails were going to be before you put in the school. And so it was really a nice opportunity to work together and I'm pleased to say that the League of Cities gave that community in our school district an award for the cooperative planning that went together because even to this day, that school and its community continue to think of new ways to share the school facility. All of the computer classes for example that are offered through the recreation department take place in our computer lab at that school. And all of the adult recreation takes place in that gym and the multi purpose room was built specifically in that school design so that it could be opened in the evenings for adult activities. So that community,that had no recreational facilities, cooperation between the city and the school district meant that the tax payers only paid one time for it and that the facilities always had someone managing them during the day, and during the evenings we always had staff available. Council Workshop, 7/6/99 10 I'm hopeful that we'll be able to do some of those same kinds of activities here because I • think they bring our community into our schools and so you have people involved in the schools whether or not they have children in the school. I think that for the communities involved, it allows a better utilization of the tax dollars that we all collect, so when the public comes to look at what we're doing with their money,there is an accountability there that says here's what we put together for all of us to use. I think that works to everybody's advantage. So I'm looking forward to those kinds of activities here. I'm quite impressed by everything that you already have going on. If I had to give a job description for the Superintendent of Schools, it would be "planning for the future"because my job is to make sure that the future in front of us is well trained, well equipped, well educated, and all of those pieces that we do to contribute to that lifestyle, that we're trying to have in our communities. We also did a lot of work with service learning projects where we had children who worked in their communities as part of a school class on helping the community develop. Now, this was a community that had volunteerism at an all time high. I've never lived in a community that had so many community volunteers in my life. And it was just expected that everybody in the community was involved in some community project or more than one. And so we were trying to instill that same activity in our children and our kids were everywhere in that community and often those were class projects. And then we'd sit down and talk about the fact that the quality of like in the community had something to do with what you did in your community, both as a child and as an adult. I think our children learn valuable lessons from those kinds of projects and again they were only constrained by the imagination of the children and the teachers who work with them. We had a first grade class that baked bread for one of the noon day meals that one of the churches provided, and then they'd go down and serve it and they visited with all the folks that were coming for meals that day and then got to go back and talk about that. That was probably the only hot meal those people had that day and what would that feel like for you and how does this happen to people, what else could you do to help? So you've got the students involved in the communities in which they live and we worked really hard on that. Council President Leona Orr—I want to say one thing. I am truly pleased to meet you and I'm very excited by the things I'm hearing from you so I think this is going to be a wonderful relationship. Judy Woods—Most other people here know this, but only three of the seven members on the Kent City Council have children. That, however, has never ever in any way influenced our feelings about how important it is that children come first, and our frustration has been often that we can't do enough. I think to be able to partner and to be even more creative will allow us to meet some of these unexpected challenges that we see where every kid is at risk today. Ten years ago, it was the single parent household that we most were worried about—even five years ago. Well, after the things we've been seeing occur in the last year or so, it's a whole new world out there and the challenge is monumental. But I think you'll find that seven people at this table who are willing to Council Workshop,7/6/99 11 work with you wholeheartedly, enthusiastically, and spare no effort to ensure that we do . the best thing possible for our kids. Barb Grohe—Thank you. I think the real issue now is making sure, however we can, that each of these children feels connected to the community in which they live and that someone feels connected to them. One of our teachers had this very interesting project that would cost no one any money, which was one of my top priorities. She had the kids in her class (they were all junior high students) match up with someone in the community. We used the Rotary Club and the Senior Citizens Center and about any organized group that we could get in a single spot, and what they did is agree to be a reading partner with one of the kids. The student and the adult partner would read the same book. They had to agree on the book first and then read the book and every week journal back and forth to each other about what they had read and what they learned from it and what they got out of reading it. And then at the end of the project we generally tried to arrange it so that the kids could meet the adults they'd been writing to for the last six weeks. And it was a fascinating project because it had some unintended consequences to it. First of all, all the students and all the adults finished the books they started,which for some of them, both adults and students, was quite an achievement. Secondly, they became really good friends because six weeks of writing to each other every week, you got to know each other as you went through this. And so the kids felt connected to one other adult in our community who shared their experiences with the students. When the kids got to • meet their adult mentors, many times the adults would tell them stories about their own difficulty in learning to read and appreciating being able to read. One of our Rotarians said this is the largest number of books I have ever read in six weeks. And, it turned out that he was not a particularly effective reader when he was in school and for this period of time, unfortunately, he got paired with one of our best readers so she was reading like a house a fire and he was running like crazy to stay up with her. We also had one lady who was reading with one of our students (one of the senior citizen connections that we made), and they both agreed that they liked horror stories. Now I'm not a Stephen King fan because I think they're a little more horrible than I'm ready for, but the student chose a Stephen King novel and so he wrote to the lady and told her that was what he wanted to read. And she liked horror stories too, so we knew this would be okay. But if you've read Stephen King you know that his language is colorful, to say the least, and so the senior citizen called the teacher and said, you know I don't think I can do this. I find this language very offensive, it was never allowed in my home. I'm very distracted by the new book. I just don't think I can spend time, and it will be really hard for me to do this. I think perhaps he should be matched with someone else and the teacher said, well let's do this: why don't you write to him the first week and tell him what troubles you're having (this was one of our tougher kids). And so they got back this letter. So the next day he's in the Media Center saying to the media person, well, do they write horror stories without these words because I've got to find one. So they came up with Council Workshop,7f6/99 12 this book, and they read it and journaled back and forth. Well, I happened to be at the school the Meet Your Reader Week, and I come in and here we have this very large young man with the most torn up jeans I've ever seen in my life. (I throw them away when they get to that level.) But obviously,he worked hard to get them to that shape so he could wear them to school, and he was standing next to the most diminutive little lady you've every seen in your life, and the two of them were going on about this horror story they had read. And they had formed this fast friendship. Later on the teacher told me, she said, you know if his mother would have told him he couldn't read that book, it would have been a battle royal, but because this lady said I'm willing to read something else but I'm not going to read this language, they've had this really nice relationship. And I think this was one of the few ways we found, frankly, to connect this young man to somebody else in the community who was a good influence on his life, and it just came out of a project that said maybe our kids could read with other adults in the community and talk about what they've read. And so sometimes the smallest projects end up with dividends you just don't plan for. But I think the connection piece is the piece we're going to work the hardest on. I know we have to work on student achievement—that's the State of Washington thing this year —but student achievement isn't going to do us any good if we end up with violent kids, and so I think we need to put them together. We want our kids to achieve well and just like parents and one of my friends told me one time, her goal in life was to raise her children so that when they were adults, they would be people even she would want for friends. And I think that's probably a sufficient goal for education, too. We want them to be competent, but we want them to be good people too. And we're going to work on that, and giving them good role models is part of that way. And so we're going to be talking about projects that connect the kids to the communities in which they live and to adults who can be role models for them. So I appreciate your willingness to help us with that. Connie Epperly—I wanted to welcome Barb too. I think I'm the only one on the council that's a product of the Kent School District. I've gone to three schools in my entire life. And I've gotten two kids through school, and one is now wandering up to the high school —my alma mater. I've even dragged them back through my elementary and junior high and high school so I'm very involved with the schools. My youngest just graduated from Kent Junior High, and when we went to her graduation, Mr. Vegas, who it was his first year when I was down there, he went Connie Cameron is that you? So, yeah, the teachers are still around. Leona Orr—I just wanted to say again that I'm very excited to have you here. We have done an awful lot over the years and I'm one of the ones that doesn't have any kids,but I've been privileged to be involved with a number of projects with the school district. So I think we're all very much looking forward to working with you in the time to come and I love your enthusiasm. It's wonderful. The meeting adjourned.