 OK, so we're going to call this meeting to order. Tonight on our agenda, we've got a fair amount of board education and ownership linkage material to go through. And we are doing monitoring of treatment of students and treatment of staff from the previous year. We're going to start with public comment. And as I am trying to make it clear to the public how we do public comment, I'm just going to read to everyone here the expectations for public comment. The board welcomes comments, but it is not able to take any action on them other than to direct the public to the appropriate staff member or to the complaint procedure. Comments are limited to three minutes per speaker. Time may not be ceded to another speaker. Comments are to be addressed to me, the board chair, or the board as a whole, not to any individual on the board, on the staff, or in the public. Please raise your hand and wait to speak until you are asked to by me. Please identify yourself with your first and last name and your town of residence. Please refrain from restating comments that have already been shared. You can express agreement with those comments. Order and decorum shall be observed by everyone. Shouting and profanity are prohibited. As the board chair, I will maintain the order and decorum of the meeting. So I'm opening the meeting to public comment. Please raise your hand. Go ahead. So Lindsay Schwannier, I live in Randolph, Vermont. So I have a son that is in the third grade, and I'd have to say that I have major concerns over the high school. If you even go on Zillow and you go to greatschools.org, we have a 1.2 star rating, whereas Sharon Academy has a 4.2 star rating. And that's a little concerning. I feel like this school has been plagued by principals grooming the children, Chick-fil-A, we're not agreeing with what they're saying, the BLM flag, the mascot, the trans in the bathroom, the CRT in the school district. I'm having a really hard time seeing how you guys are making a safe, happy, and healthy learning environment for these children. And it's really a great concern that I do not get any good feedback about this school district. The only feedback that I have gotten is that the reason why these kids do well is because it's their parents that are pushing them to do it. So you even said in an email that we have a good attendance rating and we have a good graduation rating. Behind that is the parents that are pushing their kids to go to school to graduate. So it's hard for me to win the test scores are so low. And to say that below average is the average, it's not cutting it. When you have parents that are the big force behind their kids, you guys have to take some responsibility as a school district to do better for them and to make a safe, happy, and healthy environment. And this has been plagued. I mean, all over the news, not one person has ever said to me anything good about Randolph School District. I do take it back, though, because the elementary school is pretty good. And I haven't heard any complaints about the elementary school. It's just the high school. Not one good thing. And that's just a concern for me. I want better for my kids. And I think the school district can be great. I really think you guys can do so much. But you have to focus on the education piece. And then with all the other side stuff, you have to make sure everybody's safe. Just because somebody doesn't agree with your point or view doesn't make them a bad person. It shouldn't make them get suspended from school or fired from their job. I guess I'm just a little disappointed in the school district. Here. Anyone else? OK, I just want to begin the sports meeting. And please tell us your name and the town of Randolph. OK, Randolph. And what's your name? Jill Hopper. Jill Hopper. And yes. And OK, do you need anything more? That's it. We live here. No, that's fine. OK. We have a grandson that goes to high school. And they promised him they were going to have a track and field team for him to go to down at White River. And now we're finding out, I just found out, that no one has done anything about it. And on the 28th, he's been practicing all fall, waiting for this great moment to go down there because he wants to do it. He wants to be on the team, that's Ford's team. And I don't know what to do. That you don't have a track and field run going around the athletic field here. You don't even offer it. So I don't know what to do. I have to go back and tell them that it looks like it's complete. And why? I can't think moment that this promised it his mother signed up for it. So I don't know who to speak to about it. I would say that you might start with the athletic director, Nick Bent, find out more. You could also talk with the administration. OK. How would I just call the school office and ask to talk with them? Make an appointment, however. Nick Thresher, East Randolph. I felt that I needed to come and speak for the people who don't want to say anything due to fear of repercussions. It's not an irrational fear. We all saw what happened with Travis Allen and John Hellfam. To remind you, what we had here was a group of 14-year-old girls who felt uncomfortable with this transgender student in the locker room when they were changing. When brought to Lane's attention, his response was, wow, it's state law. And completely dismissed comments the child made while in there. I'm sorry, but that's not how things are done here. We all understand what the law is, and that isn't what we're trying to change. We are trying to make sure that the school accommodates everyone as the atmosphere changes. When I say everyone, I mean transgender students and young women. It's really sad to see how this community has responded to Lane's device of behavior. Instead of solving the problem, he chose to pin one side of the community against the other, saying that if you don't agree with him, you're a bigot and full of hate. Now, hold on. This is a small community. You all know me. You all know all of us. You really think we're all just a bunch of bigots because we want to stand up for a bunch of young girls? I've seen way too many tragedies involving young women in this area for me to sit back and shut my mouth when they're saying that something is wrong. We all have beliefs and we all have feelings. Believe it or not, all we want to do is solve the problem at hand. Nobody here is against the transgender community. We are just here to stand up for girls who feel uncomfortable or unsafe. And when we say unsafe, don't run with it and say we're calling transgender people unsafe. What we are saying is unsafe is having 14-year-olds with varying genitalia changing in the same room. I was 14 once. I assume most of you remember that awkward time in your life. I assume most of you remember how well certain things were functioning too and how well your 14-year-old brain was not. I'll remind you that these same kids cannot smoke or get a tattoo for another four years or drink for seven, all because we have deemed them not immature enough to make life-altering decisions on their own. Yet at 14, you think with all the bad decisions you make, we can stick two sets of different genitalia in the same locker room. I think not. Remember that we don't need to just protect kids from each other, but also from themselves. I'll tell you this. I'm so glad to see the amount of people considering homeschooling that I am. It's sad to see people feel that they need to pull their kids from this school, but I'm so glad it's gaining traction. I think we all know why Lane sent out those divisive emails, trying to cause all this turmoil. Look at the test scores. He doesn't want to focus on something he promised to improve and failed horribly. He found a scapegoat and he's using every single one of us. Rated 37th out of 46 Vermont high schools. What a joke, Lane. I talk to lots of people every day, whether it's at the store, job site, or just Facebook, and the overwhelming response is that you need to go, Lane. We could have all stayed out of it had you had done your job. However, you have chosen not to listen to problems and to discipline anyone who dares question you. It's now the board's job to terminate your position and if they cannot do that, I'm 100% with John Helfan saying that every single one of you need to go. This whole thing could have been avoided with some damn stalls. Another person or anyone online? Lane, I'm assuming you're watching now, please. Yeah, I'm assuming he is. Sarah? Yeah, I'm sure. Sarah, I'm proud of you. Why don't we go with Sarah? I have something to say. Can you hold on a minute, please? We'll do one there and then I'll come back. Okay. Sarah, I'm proud of you. Yeah. Go ahead. You have three minutes, Sarah. Okay. So I'm listening to a lot of these negative comments. I certainly think it would have been better if locker rooms were safe for everybody and comfortable for everybody. And that's a problem we ought to be able to solve as a whole culture. But I wanna remind people that safety, first of all, safety and comfort are two different things. You can be very uncomfortable while you're doing something where you accomplish something. I'm a little uncomfortable right now, for instance, because I'm speaking to a group of angry people. I also wanna remind people that danger comes from behavior. So we have conflicting reports about the behavior that happened in the locker room. And we as the public don't know. The people who know are the people who are involved who have given very different reports and the people who investigated it who are not allowed to speak as they should not be. It's confidential. And frankly, it's none of the community's business. Who did what? The issue is that kids are feeling unsafe without getting what they need in order to understand that if you wanna be safe, you have to watch people's behavior. If there's unsafe behavior and if there was and it wasn't addressed, then that's a problem. But we don't know that. And I don't like that people are assuming the school board has done the wrong thing. And if the behavior is not unsafe, then that's really not, kids need to know. They need to know how to stand up for themselves without bullying. They need to know that how to watch other people's behavior to assess risk and where to turn when they find that they really are in danger. And we need to be, we need as a community to be teaching our kids how to handle those things. The greatest divisiveness in my observation has not come from the school board or the principals or Mr. Millington. It has come from hateful messages that have been called in and posted. And yes, I know that those are largely from the outside, but somebody local must have given away those children's names to the people making the calls. And even if 99% of the people who are angry and upset with the school board had nothing to do with them, why haven't you been screaming from the rooftops what a terrible thing that is? Thank you, Sarah. Thank you, Sarah. Your time's up. Yep. Okay. My name's Anita Scott. I'm gonna try to get through this without being upset. I'm sorry. Randolph. You all think that we're pissed off about transgender. My fucking daughter was in there with a bra and her kids took her knees and had nothing to do with her being scared. It's not right. It would have taken two seconds for you guys to fix something so my daughter's not seen naked. I don't know why you don't understand that. I have two transgender in my family and don't give a shit. I don't care. I don't care that they are. What I care about is my daughter felt like she was violated. Violated is way different than being like the school called me and said, do you want to press charges? No, just fix the dang problem. I had to never stood up for my daughter over this and I should have because all of these people are pissed off. All of my change, Blake's story has not changed but they got shit for it. I don't want my kids to have that. But now I'm standing up because it's not right. Put a dang stall in there. Don't make all 10 kids go to a different room to change when you could have just said, hey, you know, you guys are, this is how we're gonna fix this. You're making people uncomfortable. Do you think it'd be okay for you to maybe change into one stall or instead of making everyone else do it? I don't mean to cry and be pissed off, but for God's sakes, my kid is 14. She was in a bra and naked to her knees and said, please don't come in, I'm naked. And it didn't matter. I called the school the next morning and they said, we're sorry, that's all we can offer you. If your daughter's uncomfortable, she can go change some other place. So Ava being who she is takes it on and takes all of the girls into the boys locker room. Well, that made everyone else mad because she didn't identify as a boy. No kidding, she just wanted to have everyone be able to change in one room without having me such an ordeal. This has been made out so much worse than it was. That last meeting was terrible. Not one of us said we were scared for our kid's life or that they were being beat up or molested or touched inappropriately. They didn't like to be seen naked. That's all. They're 14, they don't want. Yes, he is now a she. He still has a penis and that's what these kids have feared and said, we don't like that. We don't want them in here changing with us. It could have been changed so much easier than all of this. You know, my daughter felt terrible that I didn't stand up for her. I feel bad for all of these parents that are afraid to stand up because they're afraid of what's gonna happen to their kids down the road. Thank you for your comments. Anyone else? I'll speak. My name is Molly Mullen, I'm from Randolph. I want to start by saying we elected the school board. It's something we have to vote on. And if you didn't want these people here, you shouldn't have voted for them. You are free to write anybody in. There's only so much that these people can do. There's only so much that Lane can do. There are laws we have to follow when it comes to releasing information about children that we work with. My kid has been bullied for the past three years in school, I'm not allowed to know who did it or what the repercussions were for that kid. Am I pissed? Absolutely, sorry if I can't say that. Absolutely I'm mad because that's my baby and I want to protect him. There's only so much that they can do for us. And if you don't like it, then you should vote somebody else in. But I think these guys have done a pretty good job of sitting here and listening to all of you on a monthly, weekly, whatever. Sometimes messages or phone calls and you know what? They sit there and they take it. These people aren't the reason of the issue and I think we need to stop throwing them under the bus and harassing them. With that being said, could things have been handled differently? Absolutely. We really do need to keep in mind that these are children and we should not want to alienate a specific child based on how they are feeling in their body. I was 14, that locker room was horrendous. The last time I knew though, it was a big open space and there was a separate place. It's horrible being a teenager. It's even worse when you feel like you don't fit in. There is a solution here. We all know that there is a solution for both sides. We need to find the solution without being mean and harassing people because our kids see that and that's how they learn and grow. I was born and raised in this town and this is not what I know. I know a loving town that accepts everybody and who can get along through differences. I am not part of the hateful group here tonight. I want to come up with a change and that's why I'm here. I'm not here to point fingers and name names. I want both sides to feel safe because I want every child in this school to feel loved and safe no matter your opinion on this. Very much. Do we have another one over there? Oh, we've got one over here. Please state your name and your town. Justin Ford, Randolph Center. I agree it must be a hard job for you guys and I don't want it. But people do need to speak up for things. I don't easily get offended. I generally only consider myself with people in issues that directly impact mine and my family's lives. This is one of those topics. The fact that I voice my opinion in handling of the handling of this controversial issue and then immediately read our community members and school administrators name calling this missiles and outright slander to anyone who opposed their beliefs is disgusting. Just because someone has a different opinion or view on a topic that doesn't give you the right to bash them, attack their livelihoods or falsely accuse their children of criminal activity. Although I don't agree with LGBTQ community. I don't discriminate against them, harass them or hate them for the record. That's the proper English use of the word them. I have friends, family, employees and customers that are part of the LGBTQ community. If any of them can say that I discriminate against them or hate them, I'll eat my hat. Just because we don't agree with your name or we don't want to harass them, it would be little bit. I understand you're going along with the Vermont Department of Education but my opinion is that the issue of gender has no business being raised in schools. Kids need to be kids. They need to develop mentally, physically and emotionally. A lot of this is repeated before making important decisions. It is, is that not why it's illegal for kids to smoke, drink, buy lottery tickets and listen to the military, et cetera. They might make a decision based off another individual's advice example or rhetoric that may adversely affect their health and happiness for an overall life. But it's okay for a child to decide they want to become a member of the Office of Sex. To me, that's blowing. And one more thing, to have the highest official in their school district wrongfully accuse my son of a criminal act and then question him about it after specifically being advised that nobody has permission to question him without a parent being present is without question inappropriate. And it seems as though half the community is for this type of behavior and half is against it. Yet, this is, yet it is the half that is sympathetic to the bully in the locker room that is throwing around in terms such as they get intolerant misogyny and bully and even racist. I don't get it. The definition of a bully is to seek harm, intimidate or coerce. It seems to me that you are the ones that are literally bully. Same thing as a school-year bully just going from a suit and tie or under the veil of a bride flag. Thank you. Anybody online? Do we have anyone else in the locker room? Hi, John Hellfant, parent of three OSSD students. So this arguments or discussions got blown away out of proportion. This was never about by gay, trans or straight individuals. This is about people with male genitalia and people with female genitalia not being in the same bathroom, locker room or shower room while one of the two is in various states of undergarments or partially naked or naked, period. That's as simple as I can make it, that's all it's about. If anything, it's about women's rights, girls' rights, which have been fought for in this country for over a hundred years. This is a board made up of totally women. You know, when your female children look back at these ORCA meetings, what will they think about you not standing up for their rights? As this woman said over here. Lane gave a deer hunting analogy. He said there was a guy in his field walking his dog and two hunters came along and he said the guy with his dog should just move to the next field. Well, let's just put that in the terms of this situation which is there's a woman in a woman's locker room and two people with male genitalia walk in and she should just move over to the next room. That is the definite misogyny right there. That is men dictating to women what they should do with their bodies and their rights in their safe spaces. School officials will never be the parents of my children. That email that was sent that Mr. Ford talked about is I don't even know what the word is for it's disgusting. You're not my children's parents. If you think you are, you owe me a lot of money because they're expensive to raise. I think I should get all my tax dollars back. Lastly, I wanna talk about school scores. This is from US News, 2022. And I'm gonna compare us to Lake Region High School. We are 39 out of 52 school districts in Vermont. We are 12,672 out of 17,843 school districts in the country. That puts our overall rating at 29% out of 100% in the country. We have five students who have gotten a four or five on an AP exam, which is the grades that schools will give you a buy on that study in college. Math at 21, reading at 48 and science at 33%. Lake Region, which is similar in size, is fifth out of 52 school districts in Vermont. 1,562 out of 17,843 school districts in the United States. That puts them at 91% out of 100% in the country. They have an AP of 28% math of 47, reading is 73 and science of 49. I think you guys should ask them what they're doing right because we're not doing what they're doing, obviously. Thank you for your comments. Let's take your board. Randolph Center, excuse my nervous voice. As test scores show, our kids are not being taught very well, but I wanna bring up what we are teaching them. How to adult? Are these kids being taught to be high functioning adults and community members? Are we setting a good example of teaching them to problem solve, communicate and compromise? Or just being right fighters, calling names, refusing open dialogue and bullying? Lane Millington wrote me this week telling me that he holds parental rights to my children. Aside from the craziness of that, let's talk about what a parent's job is. We love them, protect them, we teach them and guide them as parents. We are leaders. Parents are leaders. A leader is what the superintendent is or should be. A leader should direct everyone on the best path. They do not bully, intimidate, retaliate or refuse to hear what everyone has to say. This is not a leader or a parent that I would want my children or anyone else's children led by. It is also the job of the school board. The school board should be doing. The board should be aware of what's going on in our schools and should be responsible for those who are leading our kids. Now, not taking action in complete silence is not leading and you are just as guilty of failing our kids in community. You should be able to put your own feelings aside and do what's best for everyone. Are you each personally confident in your own actions that you're doing the best you can to lead our children? Are you doing everything possible to solve these issues? Which one of you will stand up and say enough is enough? I'm a leader and I'm gonna start working for everyone. Thank you. Kevin Taylor, East Randall. I've been here my entire life. I went to the school. The worst part of this entire situation is it has become all about opinions. And we can argue with each other sitting here. We can argue with the people who don't agree with us on the internet. We can argue whose fault was whose, whatever else. What is totally being lost here is our kids have to go here. And we as parents expect a certain level of number one education to come out of here which does come back to you folks. And I know that you take some offense hearing from us, saying that sort of thing. And I get it. But this issue has caused divisiveness on both sides and it was not necessary. The decisions that were made around the locker room stuff and everything else, we gotta get past that part. Nobody here is ever gonna convince my side of the story to someone that disagrees with me. But we don't have to. There's a buck for every seat, you know? We should all be able to come here and speak to each other like humans and not have to look at each other in the crowd and worry about retaliation or have an argument, you know, a rebuttal of comments after a very heartfelt display of thought regarding the situation. We're all grown-ups here, you know? What kind of example are we setting? This has become nothing but he said, he said, she said, we are not acting anymore like adults or like we would want our children to, than the 14-year-olds involved in all of this. At some point, we're gonna have to get past the wrong, what was done wrong now or then and what we're gonna do about it now. And I don't agree with trans individuals being mixed in with the locker rooms. And I see that you have laws and everything else to follow. But I do agree that it could have been handled differently. And if maybe you guys said, yes, it could have been handled differently or reached out for some comment on the situation and didn't paint the picture that people like us, what? Five seconds. I'm done. Thank you very much. I'm not sure if, I'm sorry, I'm Collin DuClo from Brookfield. I'm not sure if this can work during the public comment, but just directing a question towards you. Can I just ask if there's anything on the table or in the works that's addressing the locker room situation? I would encourage you to, you can call the central office and they can fill you in on what's going on. And if you're getting the community letters, the community emails, I believe some stuff went out with the community. The newsletters going out from the district. So we'll be looking back on this. Okay, so we're gonna move on in our agenda. So next up is the, we need to start thinking about the annual report, believe it or not. And so usually the board puts together a piece as well as Lane. And so I'm hoping that either we can have a group. So last year, I believe it was Kelsey and I work with Ben Merrill who helps to write that up to sort of talk about what the board has been doing. And then, or we can talk now and just sort of brainstorm the things that we wanna highlight in that annual report. So do we wanna make a little committee to work on it or do we wanna just brainstorm now the things that we wanna make sure get put into that report? Who writes that? Ben does. So Ben writes it, you worked on that committee last. So he writes it, but how does he, is he here? He, pardon? He's not here. So if we brainstormed tonight, he's not here to hear it. No, no, no, we would write it up and then we would give it to him. Usually authorize who on your team's gonna do the ones kind of responsible to do the work and then bring it back to the group. Right. So do we have some folks that wanna work on that? You can set up a meeting with Ben or anyone super interested? Sure, I'll be on that committee. You'll do that again? Okay. Anyone else along with Chelsea? And I'll work with you on that. No other team. I'll be on that committee too, yes. Okay, and Sarah. Okay, so I'm gonna need a motion to have Sarah Chelsea and I work as a committee to work with Ben to put together our annual report. So moved. So moved by Megan. Seconded. Seconded by Hannah. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Okay. So, and we'll just get together, we'll just email and set up a time. Okay. So last year, didn't we get what Ben wrote the previous year so we could sort of see what we talked about? Yeah, that's in, I think, I don't know if we got it. Cause it's in the town reports, I can get it. Yeah, and there are some around, like I have one around somewhere. I'll get it to you. But Linda can get it to us. Okay, so it's done. Next up we have Heather is gonna talk to us a little bit about Portrait of the Graduate. And remember we're gonna be using the Portrait of the Graduate process to re-examine and look at our ends to sort of see where they can kind of fit into and the Portrait of the Graduate is gonna be work with the community to look at what are the outcomes that we want for the district, for a graduate of our schools to look like. So you have... Yes. Something to show us. Great, sure, perfect. Yes, many districts in the state of Vermont have adopted a Portrait of a Graduate. The Vermont has a recommended Portrait of a Graduate. This work should really look at the ends, outcomes, life skills, dispositions that we want every student to be able to leave our educational system with. And so it really is a document that speaks to equity and academics and outcomes and it should be created as a community document, ideally. With many voices, including student voices, families, educators, the board. And so I'm recommending that this would be led by the superintendent or myself and would be a series of meetings where we would bring community members together to look at some samples, talk about what we really want to see and ultimately create a beautiful document that captures this thinking and that can be used as a vision to lead everyone staying focused on these ends. Staying focused on what do we want every graduate to achieve. We did apply for and were awarded a $5,000 mini grant for this equity. Like to use some of those funds to support the creation of these events, possibly marketing materials to go out to community members to invite them in. We could also use some of the funds to provide refreshments or meals. Good things happen around food. Or other expenses that may be incurred, such as bringing in experts or consultants who may want to guide us in this work and give us some structure. So this has not been begun at all. This is really the first, we've spoken about it very briefly at a previous board meeting, but at this point we have a little money and I think we have a real purpose given what's been going on in the community. And I'd like to propose that we move forward to start some planning and inviting the community into this process. And are you gonna, before you were talking about that, you would possibly lead the charge. And we had worked last spring with Jackie Wilson from south of here. And she had talked about doing that and would be willing to work with us as a consultant through the BSBA. I would very much like to partner with the Vermont School Board Association and include Jackie Wilson in this project. Okay. And so that person could lead help to lead. Yes. I think so, I think that's an excellent way to involve the Vermont School Board Association. Okay. And we had created a ownership linkage group that was gonna do Portrait of the Graduate. We've tried for two months to get a committee together and it just hasn't happened. Do we wanna still have that committee work with? It's my recommendation that this is not a subcommittee of the board. Okay. Let it be more an initiative through you. Yes. Okay. And so we would not wanna have a quorum but we would want school board members to be involved. At least school board representation. Yes. And ultimately the final document would be presented for board approval. Okay. Okay. So that's a little bit. Board approval for implementation. Or board approval that it happened or board approval for what? For spending the money. What I'm thinking is if we have a document that we are presenting as our vision for achieving our ends, that should be something that we are accepting into our practice in an official way. So implementation. Yes, for implementation. So, and the board, so this is where we struggle with our ownership because the board is supposed to be reaching out to the community, which we could be doing with a few members helping out in this process because it's really looking at outcomes. What does a graduate of our system look like and what does the community want? Well, we could do it as board work but then it's less collaborative like talking back and forth with the community in a collaborative way. We see how we struggle with it during public comment. Right. And so I want a meeting where we can have dialogue. Dialogue. Lots of dialogue and open conversation and collaboration and come to a sense of like, we can agree on this. We care about every child in our system and let's do our best for them and here's our vision. I want it to be board work and I want it to be. So maybe I need some help. I need some help maybe understanding what's the best way to accomplish this work. I would suggest, and I don't know how the rest of the board feels, but maybe we could have a conversation about that, that we have the administration do this piece of portrait of a graduate and that we also have the committee that comes up with other ways to reach out to the committee, reach out to the community for ownership linkage, because I think more is probably better than less. And I worry that just doing this isn't gonna put the board out in the community to be accessible for conversation, for dialogue, for even as a board, if we just stand there and listen to people like open comment, even though we can't say, well we think this and we think this and we think this, at least we can listen and bring it back as open comment. Yeah, I'm sure Jackie, because Jackie's district, she did it within her district and they had sort of, they had ends, like we have end outcomes, because my, what I'm hoping that we can do is as, and maybe it's more of a collaboration between the board once you've done some collaboration, maybe the board can sort of come, once we sort of know what you're doing, we can come in to sort of look at, okay, here's the portrait of the graduate, where are ends and because those, the ends that we have probably will fit into what comes out in the portrait of the graduate. And there may be some things that we add in. So right now, if you look- It may or may not, it may be that they lead us to really reconsider our ends. I mean, that's kind of the point, right, in collaboration is maybe changing direction. I agree with Chelsea that we shouldn't piggyback on this as the way to get work done that we should be doing anyway. I think these are two completely separate, and representation in the portrait of the graduate process from the board is important as one of the players and leaders and with the community, but it's not for us, right? Right. So we have work to do on our ownership linkage plan. This might teach us a lot and give us direction on how to do that, but this isn't our work for that purpose. So that brings me back to Dan. She's gonna run with the portrait of the graduate. We as a board need to look again at, okay, we had started the, you know, back in September, we need to have a plan for what we wanna do in terms of reaching out to the community, and we haven't done it yet. We need to make that plan. How do we wanna go about doing that and- The same way we wanted to two months ago, but we haven't met yet. We need to meet. Okay. Although that committee was around portrait of the graduate, so now we'll just reverse it. Yeah, though, because that was what we were gonna be doing. Who's on that committee? Oh, I am. I am. Got to Hannah. Oh, we got Scott on there too. Oh, right. And Scott was on there too. The only caution to throw out there is that the focus and the purpose of the portrait of a graduate exercise is to develop new ends. Right, right, right. Well, that's- One of the hesitations has been, touching those old ends, that I don't even remember what the date was, two, 16. 2016, yeah. But that if it would be unfair to engage in the process and not see it through, so that if things change, they change. And so that would be the only, because I think that was kinda what killed a little bit of the Winston process, which was a pretty good process that he ran, but we kinda got to the end, and he was delving more into means than ends. Right. But I would think the board, if you're gonna have us engage in it, which I think it's a really good process, just recognize that at its purpose is to develop goals and ends. Right. So does it delve into the means as well? Because we don't wanna be in means, we wanna be in ends, but it's primarily ends, that's our work. I'm just bringing it up, because the board has been reluctant to touch the old end statements for years, just from my experience on the board. So just- Whole point. Whole point of the board. Right. For a lot of folks who are comfortable that as that work happens, as it gets developed at some point in time, part of it is it does go out once it's kind of in a draft form or close to a final draft, the community votes on it, right? You get some feedback on it to see if it's acceptable. See, that's where I'm trying to figure out how we can, why we can't work as a collaborative team to come up with the portrait of the graduate and sort of in that process, pull up our ends and see which ones, the community is like, nah, this one isn't really, because it sort of fits with that portrait of the graduate, big picture, outcome picture. If what ends up happening, because we, having done this process before, if the values of the community really support your ends, they should never have to look at the ends. They're going to come up with something similar anyway through this process. And so I would be cautious about, people should be aware of what the current ends are, but if the values of the community is really still looking at those things and thinking they're important, that's what's going to come out of the process all on its own. And I wouldn't want to shade the process ahead of times with an expectation that we want to get back to where we started from, if I'm making sense. You're not making sense, I'm sorry, I'm not following. So you mean by bringing up the ends? Bringing up the old, yeah. In most districts, Swamp Scott was a perfect example. We went out, we did the picture of the graduate, and it was pretty close to the mission statement, and that was actually the original mission statement that they had, and that was satisfying because it meant that their values were still in the same place. But they didn't start by reviewing the old mission statement and what it said, they were starting out adulterated with clear eyes. Right, let's start, okay. So you're saying, your recommendation would be, fresh start, let's look at Portrait of the Graduate, let's get stints, let's get parents, let's get community members, experts, and do that Portrait of a Graduate. Fresh eyes. Fresh eyes, and then the board can then look at that, maybe then the next step is the board then looks at that result, and then adapts our current ends to that Portrait of a Graduate. Yeah, because you don't want a disenfranchised work that the community did. Right, what do folks think about that? How does that sound for a process? And then we would have some board members, maybe because we can't have a quorum showing up, doing things, but maybe... Helping facilitate the different groups. Right, we can have a couple of board members, maybe one period of time, and then it's a couple of board members, another period of time helping out in that process. And this is a good time to do it, we've been through a cycle of controversies. And so where people are in terms of their thinking about what's important has probably changed. And so it's probably a good timing, you know, don't waste a crisis, we're in a crisis, people are thinking about things in detail, so this would be a good time to have those conversations. So Heather, at the VSBA conference, have you contacted the Uplit Learning, so that's another facilitation group? Did you find out, are they reasonably priced? Is that a group that you're considering or? Currently their website is down. We have been, and we're also interested in connecting with them on another topic as well about creating student leadership. And so we do want students involved in this. I do think they will be a partner with us, but I have had difficulty getting in touch with them. I'm not quite sure what's going on. All right, so next steps for the board. So you're gonna be moving forward on getting things organized from your perspective. I guess I'm trying to figure out how the board, so the board will just wait until we hear from you in terms of? How about a vote of support if you wanna move forward with this process? Okay. Because that way you're speaking to us with a unified voice. Okay. It doesn't, you know, it's not, but just a vote of support. We support the process, get to work on it. Okay. And board members then as they move through that process and we're working with them when they get the final product, we'll do that. But in addition, am I hearing still that we wanna have an ownership linkage committee still meet and talk about other ways that the board might be reaching out to the community? Well, we still need a plan. I think that's a good idea. I think this is kind of an event, right? But there should be an ongoing plan. Like an ongoing plan. It is a series of events just from my experience. I've run this before in another school district and it is a series of conversations and then we also, this is a great opportunity for linkage. We have to go out to communities into local places to be close to home, to invite people in to talk about where we are in the process. So you, we want to have people who are committed to working on it all the way through. Various things. Right, but it hasn't been. And it's a process with things that happen. But it's like a thing and then it's done. And there's a product. Yeah, yes. But the board needs to have kind of an ongoing, I see. Regular engagement on the plan. That's part of it. This can be part of it. But this is not enduring. No, you end up with an end statement or what used to be called the mission statement at the end and then kind of drives things. But as far as your linkage plan is that might be a good focus for having a facilitator come in for the board's PD for the year to try to get the linkage plan set up and actually have one that's created by the end of that facilitated process so that you can walk away knowing exactly what the board is going to be working on. Right, and I had emailed Jackie about working with us on that and she said she would be willing to work with us on that. But we hadn't gotten together yet as the linkage committee. And in a way, this could be a long-term linkage plan because it should be a living document that is, that it was sort of at least the conversation is renewed every year. Is this still our document? Does it need to be tweaked? What do we need to do to remind teachers that this is our document, to remind the community that this is our document? And so it shouldn't be a stagnant like, okay, we're done with that. And it's to bed because as technology changes and as community needs change, it should be reviewed at least annually. Yeah, and that's what's supposed to be happening with our ends as well, which is the piece that the board hasn't figured out how to do. We sort of created those ends back in 2016. And we didn't, or maybe even earlier than that, but we haven't really revisited them. But they were so general that it seemed to work. They just made it difficult to really hone down. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, okay. So I need, I will say, can we have, do we have a motion to, to, I don't even know. I mean, if you wanna go ahead and start the process, I don't think you need a motion from the board to do that. Sure, why not? But we could give you one or... But remember, unless the board speaks as a whole to us, we don't have to follow through. Okay. We plan on, and one of the reasons I'm holding, I'm trying to hold you to this without saying it, is because I wanna make sure that when we get to an end process that it's used for something. Right. Because part of that approval is, yep, we're running with this process because if we go through this, we pull the community together to have this discussion so we don't disenfranchise people. We're committing that we will see this through. That's the real goal behind it. Okay. That makes sense. So I need a motion from the board to direct the administration, the superintendents, to start the process of creating a portrait of a graduate with the community, students, parents, and faculty. I have one more question, both of them. Sure. To make the motion. What is the timeline of this? I've done it in two weeks to do the focus sessions and then depending upon how complicated the information you get back from those groups, you need a team to get together and try to distill it down. You have different groups that are saying what's important. A lot of it might be related to each other but you need some really good wordsness to be able to kind of concentrate it down into a couple of basic statements. And that takes a little bit of time. I think we, I think I could say, I would say plus being able to go out to the community, once we've got those basic statements and seeing if they're in agreement, you know, whether they hit the mark and getting the support from the community, I would say that's just reasonable. I'd like a little bit longer because sometimes people get stuck on a word or a phrase and it takes time to get unstuck. So it takes a series of like brainstorming efforts. Like if some people want a certain word and someone want another word, I don't know how else to explain it. So say yours, Ann. Sometimes it needs a whole nother meaning to get to. Implementation maybe for next year. Yes, I think that we could do it in six months. But three, for this community, given what's going on and the division, there could be some stuck points that may take some time and compassion and discussion to work through. So I think three months is a very tight time. Yeah, I would. And it's not to be critical, just to be realistic. So yeah, I would like to close the end of the school year. And implement means putting it into place. I'd love to have it in place in the classroom. So if you're saying actually putting into place the ends that are derived from it, that would come about most likely, if this is done by the end of the year, we take it into account during extra budget cycle in case there's budgetary impacts, which there almost always are. That's the main tool by which we do our work. It's a process. It may take a couple of years to get stuff really after running where we wanted to go, depending upon what people are coming up with. Which is we have to first see what the goals are that people want folks to achieve. But the actual process in getting to an end statement three months or the end of the year, you know. So we can present it out to the community at the end of the year, possibly. Would love to, yeah. That's the good way to kick off a new year and to kick off a new budget planning season. And the state has a lot of resources. So they've already created a generic one that they want districts. So the state is behind all school districts coming up with a portrait of a graduate. Because they want boards to be focusing on outcomes. What do you want? And then to tweak it to your individual community as a district. So we have, we'll have one to start. Suppose they also have created a new graphic, but I haven't seen it yet. But, and remember we looked at this earlier in the year to just sort of look at it. And I remember when I was looking at it, I did notice that many of our ends that we already have kind of fit under many of these things that are in the portrait of a graduate. So I, as Lane said, I think we're gonna find that unless things have changed dramatically within our community, it's gonna line up fairly well, I think with sort of where our community was before. But I mean, there may be some changes or some other priorities that are stronger priority for the community as a whole. So, okay, so do we have a motion to direct the administration to start the portrait of a graduate process? So moved. I second. Okay, moved by him. Seconded by Sarah. Okay, any discussion? Any more discussion? Any other questions? Okay, all those in favor, say aye. Aye. Aye. Okay, so we can get that started. Did I already give you Jackie's information, contact information? She, you might wanna just check in with her. I can, I will email with you about that. Okay, so moving along. So we're not quite out of, so we did the portrait of the graduate. So back to ownership linkage committee. We're not gonna let us off the hook. Katya, you were the chair of that committee. Can we get that committee to, to meet? Trying to spearhead us. Oh, okay, all right. So, do you wanna try and, try to send out the doodle poll again? Okay, so we'll try and get that one. Now on that, you're on it with me. And I'm on it. And Scott. So Scott was on it. Right, and then did you join because Scott. Oh, did I join, was that what you joined last week? Oh, yeah, yeah. I joined something, I don't remember. Megan joined. Just, let's all have it this. Yeah, I think that was right. Yeah. Pretty sure I saw it in the next one. Yeah, so it's Megan Hannah me. So it's four. And committee meetings now, so I got clarification from the VSBA lawyers that all commit and open meeting law committees, committees of the board also have to be warned. So when a committee meets, we have to warn that. So that's work for Linda. So we need to just be aware of that. And then we have to do 48 hours. Before hand, before we meet. And I believe in our binders, I put in the directions for that. So we can go over that when we look at the binders because I can't remember. That's why I put all that information in under our rules of procedures just because there are all these little details that we need to remember. So we can reference that. Okay, so we've got a doodle poll going out and hopefully that group can also meet and just start sort of thinking about ownership linkage other than the portrait of graduate part of our linkage. Okay, next up is our complaint procedure. So Sean met with me. Do you remember last board meeting you directed me to meet with a lawyer to go over that? And I emailed it out to everyone. And I didn't bring a copy of it. I think it's in a pile of handouts somewhere. It's not the one that's in ours? It's not the one in, no. So it was, yeah, Megan's got them all. Oh, you got them all? Okay. So you got them all? No, you kept them all. I have it. You got it already? Yeah, I thought I gave it to everyone. No, I have the, okay. So the one in your packet is the old one and then Sean went over this one. So it's the newer version. It's not really pretty. We can make it pretty, but it's not, it's just so that you know it's based on the basic format. This one you changed. No, thank you, Megan. Come now. This is the new one, okay, so it's nice. This is the emailed one. This is the old one? No, this is the new one. The one in your packet is the old one. Okay, they're the same. They're sort of the same, but you'll notice in the new one there's a little blurb at the beginning. So he looked at what the BSBA, so the BSBA is Vermont School Boards Association, what they like to see in this procedure. So it's just sort of acknowledging people in the beginning and then it goes through basically the first five steps which were very similar to our own. And then you'll notice in step five, he made the clarification that it's, because remember what we were looking at was that when people came with a complaint, they thought we were gonna rehash all the facts. And really the board's role is not to do that. The board's role is to look at policy and procedures and to make sure that they were done fairly and consistently and that they were followed, that policies were followed. So that's what he changed in the language if you're looking there. And then, so that you'll notice in step five looks very different from, because then I think in our step five, it just keeps talking about the issue which was sort of unclear. And then he put in some legalese in, where is that, in the standard of, where did he put in, like he says the standard of review which is sort of, it's legal language, but he said that was the language you wanted to say. Where did he say? Second floor, line up under step five. Step five in the second part, right? Oh, in the first part, okay. Second grade standard of review. Yeah, yeah. That's what you were referring to. Yeah, yeah, that's it, right. So it's saying that, yeah, and that's just lets people know that what we're using for the review. On the review on the record and the standard of review shall be whether the superintendent's decisions regarding the complaint constitutes an abuse of discretion. He said that was the language to you, so. So anyway, so as people look at it and hopefully people read it before this meeting, are people comfortable with the changes? That's better than it was. I mean, the only thing that I'm still seeing potentially that might be helpful is on now step seven, previously step 10. I don't, and I don't know if it's worth like repeating some of the previous language which says the board makes a decision, board decisions are final, board sends, but makes a decision, because we're making a decision on the standard of review, right? Isn't that what we're? Were there were the procedures? With the procedures were followed. We're not making a decision on. Given the information that was available. So I don't know if it's. So you want to add? Well, I mean, that was kind of one of the questions we had for our lawyer was that just to help clarify that the board is not making a decision on the actual case, but whether the procedure was followed properly to come to the decision. So I just feel like that's some information that potentially like reiterating that at the, because the board makes a decision. Yes, we're making a decision, but not a decision on whether, what the facts are the case. Yeah, we're making a decision on whether the policy, yeah, the policy procedure was followed appropriately. So I just feel like that it might be helpful to have some sort of language in step seven that just reiterates that, what you're actually making a decision on. So do you have, do you have some wording that you? I am not a lawyer, unfortunately. Okay. But I wouldn't that be nice. I mean, I think that that was a question that we just asked Sean again and say, Okay. You know, in step five, this is some of the language that you used. How can we reiterate that? Okay. You stated in a way that a lay person is going to understand what it means. Okay. So can I, I will need a motion for me to contact Sean again and just have him or our people in agreement. Yeah, I think that wording can be confusing to people about what it is we do as a board with our decisions. I mean, I think it's very nicely said. In step five, the board shall conduct a review on the record and standard of review. But I think reiterating that at the end as that is what the decision that we are concluding. All right. So are there any other things that board members see in here that feel, they feel like we need to address? Or is that the only, I know. Well, that's why I was looking for that standard of review, but it was only in step five. It's not in step seven. So I think reiterating that would be okay and more clear. So I need a motion for the board to direct me to go back to Sean to have him help me. Word Smith. So moved. Okay. Second. Seconded by Sarah. Any discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Okay. All right. So I will do that. Thank you very much. All right. Next up, we have our lovely binders that Linda put together for us. So missing from the binder is our complaint procedure because it's not finalized yet. And so, and was there, what else did I leave off? I didn't have you put in. It was just the- Just that one I saw. Just that. Okay. So I just want to go through the binder. So you'll notice in the beginning it's just all the meeting dates and where the meetings will be held and the time. I ask a very quick question. Sure. Our personal emails are the, we only as far as community contact, only our board emails are provided. Right. Thank you. Right. You'll notice I don't even give those lists as a public list. That was my question. Thank you. I can take them off if you want. Right. And then, so this is just a listing. So next up is a listing of all the board members and contact information. When your term is up, just sometimes you can forget that. There's some basic information on the second page. Just, you know, folks in the district how agenda and distribution, where the warnings are put, so that you're aware of that in case somebody asks you. All of the committee responsibilities, those are sort of our standing committees, not the small committees like the ownership linkage. And then we have what Chelsea and I were calling our orientation document that basically just welcome to the board. This is typically the time commitment, board makeup and duties. So they're just the responsibilities of the chair, of being a board person in general, the vice chair and the board secretary. There is just sort of the main key points of policy governance. And that came from the Vermont School Board Association website. And then there's just, there's a link to, and it's, you'd have to type it all in, but there's a link to just the VSBAs. It's a short video of just sort of what it really means to be a board member. And then rules and procedures, which you all hopefully had time, you had time, I believe last time, I sent it out to you a while ago. There were a few things that I needed to go over with Sean, just to make sure they were all set. So again, in here, it just goes over sort of how our meetings operate. So if we have questions, and you'll notice it gives you information on warnings and when the different warnings need to be done, what to do with minutes, although we're not really doing that, but Linda is doing it, but if we have questions, it helps us just know that information. And then you'll notice letter F in that is about committees. So this is that information about committees. And this is where the chair, we put in the chair of the committee will run the meeting, be responsible for setting the agenda and providing the OSUD clerk with the necessary information to warn the meeting. So that's just an extra duty now when we have committees, because we need to make sure that those get warned. Does everybody see where that is in the? Hannah, you're looking confused. Did you find it? No, I did. Quite honestly, I was doing the alphabet in my head because in here, G comes before F. So I was singing for myself. Whoops. Oh yeah, oh dear. So that should be H. Very good. Nobody caught that before I had poor Linda print it all out. So you just gotta fix it by hand. So that's an addition. And that's from what I learned from Vermont School Boards Association and talking with the lawyer from there. And then public comment, the last time we talked about emails coming into the board, the board decided they wanted me to be responsible for responding to those comments. When I checked in with legal counsel, that was why I couldn't finalize this document because I needed to talk with them. They did not suggest that I copy the board on those emails just because of the open meeting and laws and the possibility that somebody might reply all or reply back and then it just causes a problem. So the education part is just, because that was more a communication and I could probably just let people would it be helpful for people to know that I responded? If you could just fire off an email that says this person has been responded to. Okay, cause then you're not sitting there wondering. I agree. And sometimes if I'm busy, it might take me a couple of days before I respond to someone. And sometimes if you get an email from someone, you're gonna then forward it. Is that, I mean, that's sort of what we said is we were gonna forward it to me as the chair. That's what we're all doing, right? And I will respond. That's what we're all doing, so that's fine. Okay. Okay. Are we still like not supposed to be opening these ones? Like, are you getting nasty ones? I haven't really gotten nasty ones, but ones that are obviously from fake accounts like the names are odd. Like one of them is get shorty. I don't know, did you guys get that or no? I don't remember. Okay. I know, I didn't get that one. Okay, I will forward that one then. Okay. I'm not opening them because I know it was discussed that anything odd not to open. Yeah, I'm back with one of the hackers. Yeah. That's one of the ways that they send smooth emails when you open it up. Right, it's got something. Yeah, that's how they catch it. So, Link is where the, as far as I understand it, where the danger would be not opening the actual email. I think my kind of rule about it is if I am the only name that's in the two section, that one needs to be forwarded. But so often they're, you know, all of us. Right, yeah. But open, some will correct me if I'm wrong, but if they've sent something to us, that line of communication is there whether we open it or not. It's about clicking a link once you have it open. Yeah. And if I'm wrong about that, man, oh man, I must have been there many, many times. So, yeah, probably worth asking. Maybe I'll check in with Tina and just... All the other danger I think is if there's a picture and you have pictures automatically to download into when you open an email, the picture can have a tracer and can, and so you should say your email to not download pictures unless you say, I'll take the picture. Just an extra safety measure. Okay, we have the Chromebooks. So even with the Chromebooks, they need to be set like that? I would. Okay. Is that the only place people are opening emails? No, I have to open my email on my phone. If you want to get a photograph. Exactly. The Chromebook doesn't have the only place where... Right, right, yeah. You can look at your email. So it knows if you opened it or not. Let me talk to Tina. Just make sure... Yeah. If it's a strange email address, because I'm just thinking of... Right, I just didn't know if... Yeah, I see training that I just went through said if even the email, the email is weird, you got to be careful that I don't remember exactly that. I think a lot of that, at least at this point, is past. Okay. I would still be cautious of links within an email, especially if it's from somebody you don't know. Right. Yeah, just in general. Okay. So generally the emails are gonna come to me. I'll respond. I will let people know that I've responded, but I won't send the content of the response back. Same with... So in person, so you get somebody comes up to you at the grocery store. You know, again, it tells you the procedure. So if it's an operational question, if you don't know, you can send them to Lane. If you know, it's the principal of the school or... I don't remember the name of the bus guy. I have to explain. The name of the... Bellavance, right. If it's sometimes it's a school bus thing, you can direct them. And you can direct them to the complaint procedure. So hopefully people will be doing that. You can talk to people, you just can't speak to the board. Right, right, right. And it's important for us to help people know where to go to get information or if they have a question or an issue, ask Lane or go to the athletic director or go to your child's teacher and sort of go through that process. So that's just more of just helping the community know how to get their questions answered. So that's that information. And then we do have the district has, this is one of the required policies. So I just put that in there too for us to know is just some general information about participation at board meetings. And then I put the general public comment preamble here in case I get sick and I'm not here. Maybe Katcha's not here. Somebody has this, our process is gonna be each time before public comment. Somebody's gonna read that preamble just to make sure that people understand what our procedures are. I had to change it up again. And that was Pietro and Sean didn't, they wanted me to keep it short and sweet and not do that if there's a large group and we have a sign in and then we're gonna divide the time between he was, they were both like nah, just keep it to this and work with it. So that's why that was taken out. And then the final bit of your binder, all of our policy governance policies. So these are our board policies. This is what tells us pretty specifically what we need to be doing and what we need to be looking at in terms of the limitations on the administration, the outcomes. So our ends again, you can see they're very, they're not, they're pretty comprehensive but they're not very specific. And then the last section is the open meeting law information from the Vermont League of Cities and Towns and that's just a reference item for everyone just because it's helpful, it's got a lot of information and it's hard to remember this stuff from month to month. So it's there so that if we're not sure we can pause for a minute and look it up. And it's got a lot of the usual questions that we might have. Okay, and then we will be adding once, I wordsmith this complaint procedure with Sean, we'll add that in there too. So you'll have that as well. Not sure where I'll have you put that in. Put it in the list, I think it was right before the policies. Yeah. And you'll see two pieces of green paper that we're gonna put it in here. In between those two, okay, perfect. Yeah, I think that will be good because that will come right after the rules and procedures, yeah, yeah, perfect. Yep, excellent. Or after the preamble, yeah, there we go. When I can get tabs, I just didn't. Yeah, no, I think the green paper is the green paper fine. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think. Thank you for that. Thank you for that. Thank you for, yes, this is fabulous. And we have a nice picture of kids on the front of your skin. Awesome. Okay, so there's that. And how are we doing for time? Pretty good. Okay, so next up, we have, the treatment of students, parents, guardians, and community, 2.1 EL report from Lane. That we need to decide if we want to accept. And 2.2 treatment of staff. These are just first reading, right? Nope, this is the final second reading. And remember, this is looking back to last year. And what we're focusing on is his interpretation reasonable. And does his rationale make sense? And the evidence that he provides, is it sufficient enough to back the interpretation that he put forth? Okay, so with treatment of students, parents, guardians, and community, are there any questions or any concerns in regard to the reasonableness of the interpretation, the rationale for it, and the evidence given? And also remember, there is an evidence finder, as evidence that is in it related to this. So that would mean, you know, like, oh, I guess it's in the other one. You know, like he doesn't put in here, you reference student handbooks in here, right? But he's not, but he isn't like, we don't have a student handbook here to look at, but he's referenced it in provision four. You go to the binder, it's there, or sometimes there's a link so that you can look it up and that sort of thing. Right. And Lane, there was just one typo under provision four, last paragraph, your board is missing an A. So are there any? I see it to the side of the paragraph. Any, is the board ready to accept this feeling that the interpretation is reasonable? You had a month to take a look at it. Evidence sufficient to support the document? Okay. Do I have a motion to accept? I can do it. I'll make a motion to accept 2.1 and 2.2 as we're in. Okay, do both of them? Yeah. I second. Seconded by Sarah. Any discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Okay. So moving on, we have a second reading of, this is a recommended policy from the auditor, correct? It makes sense. This is prevention of conflict of interest. So in other words, we shouldn't be signing into contracts if it's my brother and I'm the one who's signing the contract on behalf, things like that. So it's that sort of conflict of interest. It's also making sure that folks aren't accepting gifts more than $125. It doesn't usually happen in much more private business thing, but. Okay, so are there any questions regarding this policy? We looked at it last time. We know YLIM is feeling like it should be in there. We've had a recommendation from the auditor to put it in there. Do I have a motion to accept? I make a motion to approve the prevention of conflict of interest policy. Okay, do I have a second? Second. Oh, seconded by Panna. Panna. Okay, any discussion? Okay, all those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Keep on forgetting to do that. But I guess when it's, when it's unanimous, we're good. Okay, Lane, we were going to have you. We're still struggling. He's struggling to get some of the information that he's needed to report. So again, this is a report on our ends from last year. So the. And so, yeah, we'll talk a little bit about what's happening at the AOE. What we've talked about kind of the pre-board planning meeting as well was this idea that, you know, the information is dense, so maybe we break it up over several board meetings. You know, what's available as it's becoming available so that people can ask kind of deeper questions about things along the way, and hopefully makes a little bit of sense. Let me get this going here. I have notes on this. So the goal would be that as data becomes available, if it becomes available, we can try to start to talk about the different ends statements that we have and start to try to put some data that's associated with it together so that people can see it. But one of the biggest problems that we have is this idea that most of, especially the foundational knowledge ends, we're reliant on comparisons to state testing. This is how the district is doing. This is how the state is doing. If we're within a certain percentage of the state or if we're approaching where the state is since this district was starting out at a very low point, you know, that would mean that we are in compliance. The problem right now is the state has not released state data from the last round of testing. There is data that they haven't released from previous rounds of testing as well. Going back as far as three years, we've been able to hack stuff together, but we can't do it because they just don't have enough this year. So I've been trying to devise some kind of work arounds to talk a little bit about this. The other thing that I noticed that was recent, just so folks are aware, is the state has changed its website out of the blue. None of us knew about it. I logged in about a week ago to start looking at some older SBAC data there to try to get some of that information, and it does not exist on the website at this point in time. They have demographic data. If you want to know how many kids were in school and what grades they had, that sort of information, but not the SBAC. I think that what is going on is that they are getting in things prepared for the transition, remembering that last fall was the end of SBAC, and just recently, last in October, they announced that they were moving on to a new testing system called Cognita. And so some of this may be preparing for that, but I'm just hoping that we get to see that data at some point in time. Context is important as we talk about the data that I'm going to show you in a little bit. And again, we're going to do it, hopefully, maybe a 15 or a 20 minute little presentation over the next three or four board meetings with what we can kind of piece together. But for context, remember that 2019, 18, 19 was the last normal year prior to COVID. That's important when we look at this data. 2020, there was no state testing. That was the year that COVID hit in March, and then everybody was rushing around to get everybody out into remote session as soon as possible after that announcement came on. And they did not do the SBAC that year. 2021, that was the year that we were either remote for the first half, and then sometime after December, October as we got towards spring, we switched into hybrid mode. And then 2022, which was last year, right? Spring of 2022 is when they do the testing. That year was in person, but we had all the disruptions that were due to COVID surges that were happening within the school, right? We had the COVID snow days. Some schools had more than others, but we also had this kind of rotating nonsense that was going on where, because of what the quarantine requirements were at the time, if we had a kid in the class, the whole class would have to be shut down for the quarantine period. So just an incredible amount of disruption over the course of three years that folks should be worried about. So to be able to talk a little bit about what I was able to piece together since I don't have the state SBAC data, the state level SBAC data, we have to understand a little bit about absolute data versus trend data. Absolute data is data that's valid without being compared to anything else, right? And these actual numbers from us in 2022, 72% of OSSD fourth graders, right? Hit the mathematics proficiency threshold, which was a 45% point increase over their third grade scores the year before. So actual data stands on its own and it makes sense. Another example right in 2022, 54% of OSSD ninth graders achieved ELA proficiency in 2022, which was a 19 percentage point increase over their seventh grade scores. Trend data on the other hand is a little bit different, right? You see the trend line in there. Trend data is useful for showing change over time. It can show if things are growing or if they're declining. But in terms of absolute value, it's not as strong. What this particular graph represents is the district's overall enrollment, not including our preschools, so our preschools have been growing. And the graph is pretty chaotic. You can see that by how much the data points jump around. And one of the other nice things about trend data is that if you've got good trend data, you can use it to kind of predict what's gonna happen in the future. And depending on how good it is, is how far out you can predict that things are gonna continue in the same way. What makes predictability easy is you see how all these data points are jumping around and we've got our linear regression line in here, which is actually pretty stable at this point in time, is the fact that these data points are very far from that line. When the data points are very close to the trend line, you can have a lot of confidence that what you see happening in terms of the line and what it implies is gonna continue for some time into the future. When it's scattered all over the place, your guess is as good as mine, what next year is gonna bring. And that's kind of what the data is showing you, right? Every year, our enrollments are jumping up and down and depending upon what we're in there. So based on this trend line, it actually is pretty stable. This is the total district enrollment. And so what you're seeing here is that you got this negative point seven. So on average, we're losing seven tenths of a kid per year as each year goes by based upon this data right here right now. Prior to this drop, we were actually increasing between five to nine kids per year based upon the trend lines. So again, trend data versus absolute data. Again, can't really predict too much about the next year just because it's jumping all around all over the place. The pattern there, though, suggests as you're gonna see another jump back up. Why is it this chaotic? There's really kind of two major factors. I think that we're going on. The first obviously was COVID. We went through bouts of fear with both staff and students where everybody would rush out in homeschool because they didn't wanna be in the district when COVID was running very strong. And then when things seemed like it was better, they'd come back and then they'd go back into homeschooling. We also have quite a bit of divisiveness as some folks talked about earlier today that's been happening in the district that started way back with the school mascot and then it was Black Lives Matter and then it was the same sort of threats and intimidation when it came to masking. And then the fact that the district was publicly recommending that students get vaccinations. And so that heated rhetoric has caused some folks to pack up their bags and leave the district at this point in time. So that is legitimate. Some are homeschooling, but I think some folks have actually packed their bags and left. All right, see if we can kind of put this together. So since I don't have us back, what we're gonna talk about is the NAEP assessment. And that's a national assessment of educational progress. The students take it every other year. And it is very similar in terms of SBAC, right? It focuses in on math and ELA skills. And while it's not easy to do like an absolute comparison and by that I mean, okay, if I've got a group of kids and 47% of them hit the proficiency threshold in SBAC, that doesn't necessarily mean that 47% of them are gonna hit the proficiency threshold in NAEP, right? They might, but I can't really compare too strongly. There's not a really strong correlation there between absolute terms, but what we can look at is we can look at what's happening in terms of trends. Because if the NAEP data is doing this, which it is, that means that student performance overall in the state of Vermont and across the nation is going down. And if ours is doing the same thing, well, that kind of would make sense. If ours is going in the opposite direction, that tells us something, right? Whatever impact was happening to all the rest of the world, if our data was going up at the same time that theirs was going down pretty significantly, then we must have been doing something different than what was happening either in the state or in the nation. Does that make a little bit of sense? And stop me and ask questions if you need them kind of a long way. What the NAEP focuses on is it focuses specifically on fourth and eighth grade. So it's not like SBAC where you can look at from grades three to nine. It's two very specific grades, one at the elementary level and one kind of at the middle, almost the threshold at the high school level. And the NAEP is a huge test. It's across the country. I'll talk about what this data means in a minute. It is across the country. And it also is used by the federal government to take a look at how the states are performing. It was probably a piece that came out of no child left behind and on the accountability piece. So you got two colors here. You've got orange and you've got blue. Blue is how the state was performing on me. Orange is how the district was performing in terms of SBAC. Again, absolute data might be comparable, might not. What the data points are telling you is what percentage of kids hit the proficiency threshold. So you know, the high number here for our district was that in 2022, which was last spring after three years of COVID, 72% of our students hit the proficiency threshold or higher on the SBAC. But if you take a look at the long-term trend going all the way back down to 2006, our kids have been improving, they've been growing. What's been happening across the country and in the state, they've been going down. Since I don't have the state SBAC data, I can take the trend data from NAIC, which again, similar exam, and they've been dropping, we've been going up. Based upon the interpretation from the last rounds of the ENDS document, we are in compliance. And that's a pretty damn high score from all the nonsense that I heard during the opening statements in here. Do you have our NAIC data? They don't break it out by school. Oh, they don't break it out. They break it out by state. It's a quality test that the Congress put into place. But it does track pretty well because again, the Vermont scores are actually doing the same thing that the national scores are doing. Vermont, the only difference is that the Vermont scores on NAIC are here, national scores are doing the same thing, they're just a step along in terms of the NAIC. So the red line there is what? The orange line is us. How do we know? Because we have that information internally. If we don't get it from the state. What they gave us is we had the individual student data, right, because we have to, at the end of every year, based on federal law, we have to send out those letters about how your kid did on the last round, so that has to happen. But they have not given us the combined state data to be able to look at. We were able to take that individual data and thank God for Crystal and the rest of us that are mathematicians and take all those individual students and do some massaging of the data to get these data points, which is difficult. So a couple of times later, he said SBAC, but he meant NAIC on this slide. So blue is NAIC, orange is SBAC. So on SBAC in 2022, our fourth graders are right in 72% of them at the proficiency threshold. And you can see what was happening prior to COVID as well. They were doing, we started the work at the elementary schools the year after I started here when I started to get a feel for what was going on. You saw it rising, COVID hit. You got the expected drop. And now we had kind of a normal year last year, even though it was disrupted. And now not only are they back up, but they're back up above where they ever were before. And this, by the way, is math. So these are our SBAC scores. The orange. The orange. So our students took the SBAC. They have not yet taken the NAIC. They took the NAIC last year. I was a smattering of our students. They do NAIC testing every other year. So they come into most of the schools. So all fourth graders took the NAIC tests. A sampling of our fourth graders took the NAIC. But all fourth graders took the SBAC. In our school, I can't say that for other schools. So you're getting into actually some really good questions. For the testing on the state tests, like SBAC or MCAS, if we're back in Massachusetts to count, you have to have 95% of your students actually take it. We hit 95% every year. With the SBAC. With the SBAC. We hit that most schools did not. So it becomes even kind of difficult to compare ours with the state data, even if we're out. Because the students, if they're self-selecting, who's taking the SBAC, usually not the kids. It's usually the kids that want to take it because they think they're going to do well. So if we had 95% of our kids taking the SBAC, what percentage of our students took the... I'd have to go back and look. I think in our case, it was the majority of the fourth grade, if not all of them. You said a sampling, who chooses the sample? The federal government. They basically send us a letter and said, on these dates, you will. And they tell you which students to sample. Yeah. If I'm remembering without going back and looking at the actual letter, I think it was our entire fourth grade. I would appreciate that. Well, and the blue line is all of the state. So that's not our school. This is the combined state scoring. This is not our school. So you can't compare. Oh, thank you for that. The blue line is so they don't give us how our school did with Nate. They take the samplings from all the schools around the state and say, this is how Vermont as a state did. So we can't compare our students right now on these. We can compare the trends. Yes, we can. And the trend is that the state, on average, is going down. The nation, on average, is going down. But our fourth graders in math are going up at a significant rate compared to everybody else. And again, I'd like to be using the state SBAC data, but I don't think we're ever going to see it. At the VSBA, the people in the assessment workshop that I went to said, it's going to be coming. It's just, it's going to be very late. It has to come to keep continue, to continue to get the federal transfer on that. They haven't aggregated it. They were talking statistical language. They're three years behind. So if and when they get caught up, I'll be surprised. I'm wondering if they're going to ask for a waiver because they're moving to a new assessment system and just going to forget about it and start fresh with cotton. That's what I'm worried about. Again, I have no reason except a little bit of logic to believe that. So again, so here is OSSD. This is fourth grade math. This is only looking at the three COVID years, what was happening. So if you only look at the trend lines for those three years or so, right? You see here that the state as a whole that was kind of level for the most part, going down just a hair. In our case, we were increasing by quite a bit. We were actually increasing by 8.5 percentage points per year. So every year they went by for the fourth grade class, 8.5% more of the entire fourth grade class was hitting the proficiency level than the year before. Eighth grade math trend. So look at our eighth graders. We're looking at our older students here, right? Blue, right? We started out in a very low place, long kind of before I even came on board. Head progress, right? Had some good jumps here. We had that weird year. We talked about this last time. A lot of this was still can't figure out why the heck that happened, right? Got up, had some high years, had to drop down during COVID. Huge jump, little bit of a decline in 2022. But overall, our trend line is all the way up, which is a bit of a sign. And again, we've actually surpassed starting up from a very low point, right? Only 12% of our kids, 11% of our kids are actually hitting the proficiency threshold way back in 2015, you know, to the point where we're up around 30, close to 35, 33, okay? Not where we want to be, but it's tripled. There's work that's going on. If we look specifically at the math during the COVID years, you know, the three years that should have been the most difficult to have any improvements whatsoever in our eighth grade class, on average of those three COVID years, every year that went by 6.3%, more of the entire eighth grade class was hitting the proficiency threshold than was the year before. And again, the state was going down, we were going up. And we can do the same thing with ELA. ELA is not quite as dramatic. They had a little bit more trouble for some reason following COVID, right? It's kind of where I came in somewhere around in here. You start seeing the increase, right, from the work that was happening, especially at the elementary school at times, you get the drop from the COVID hit, and then you see the recovery in 2022, even when 2022 was the tough year. Are we increasing by a whole heck of a lot? No, but we're going up. State certainly is not. Eighth grade, oh, sorry about that. This is fourth grade. This is specifically looking at the three COVID years, right? It's kind of flat. State's going down. We had a minor drop, right, in 2021, but we're actually above where we were when COVID started a little bit. What does it mean? Our students are improving faster than the state, the nation, and the ELA, and math, and that improvement happened during the most challenging time for teachers in living memory. And so I get very upset as hard as it is to keep my mouth shut when people are misquoting and misinforming when they come into these sessions because what it does is it disenfranchises the teachers who did the work to make this happen during an incredibly difficult time in history. So, questions, thoughts? Is there a way we can share this information maybe after public comment? I made sure that I put some of the basics out in the community message, and that was because only 5% of your kids are hitting an AP score. Well, no, AP scores are three and above that the colleges will accept. Some of the high-tier colleges of Harvard or Yale might only accept fours and fives, but it starts at three, that's the cutoff. So that was misinformation that was spoken here today, and it's actually 38% of our kids are hitting it, and then some, depending upon some of the classes, some of them were just created in the last year or two, it's a little bit lower classes that have been here for a while, it's higher, some of our classes, it was 100% we're hitting it. So, again. Well, and your number, I mean, when you're looking at statistics and you have five kids in the class or four kids taking the class, it's hard to say, oh, you know, you can say 100%, but it's hard. Well, there's a couple of the ways that I can actually answer that question. Important pieces is unlike most schools, there are some pretty strict prerequisites to be able to take some AP courses to make sure that the kids are gonna be successful so that their numbers are high. And that's important, we used to do it at Marblehead and Belmont because the Newsweek rankings are based primarily almost solely on how many of your kids are taking AP exams and where they're scoring, which I think was being quoted here. We have a small school, we don't have a lot of kids that take it, but the first thing that they look at is how many kids, about a percentage of your students are taking the AP and then you know how and they're doing it. We let any kid take an AP course who wants one because of the equity, it's fair, it's just. And we learned, we did some research when I was at Belmont, we found that a kid that took an AP course and got a C in it, actually learned a heck of a lot more than a kid that took an honors course and got an A in it. And so it made sense to kind of open it up to everybody. Okay. In terms of this, I can actually try to talk a little bit more in detail. There were lots of asterisks on the NAIC data, the blue lines. There were groups that they did not include in their testing data. Students of color were not well represented when they did their testing. Students of poverty were not well represented in the testing. Those are both marginalized groups in terms of school systems that typically perform lower. So while we included everybody in our testing, they took out a number of groups in their testing and stuck primarily with the regular white population. How do you know if they had them on? Yeah, little asterisks on the data when I was going through and taking a look at them. So this is actually, even though it's going down, it's actually a little higher than it probably would be if they kept in all the subgroups and really wanted you to show the impact of those marginalized groups. Why would the national data take that out? No idea. My guess is, again, we don't wanna, unless you lived in the schools during the time of COVID, there could have been a lot of reasons why, just because of the difficulty of testing and everything else that was going on at the time. Like I said, a lot of the schools, one of the reasons that Dan said, Dan French, the secretary at the time, said, you know, you can't take the data, especially for comparison. Well, that was because some schools, maybe only 38% of their kids, actually took the MCAS, or the ASCAP. ASCAP. In our case, it was 95 or higher each time. We were living after it. The other thing that we fight here, and it's still a part of the culture, was for years, students were told to blow it off. The state testing. Oh, I got a lot of AP courses that I'm taking. This is gonna be too much of a hassle to have to take the S back, and people will just excuse them for taking it. I don't know how they got away with it, because it put them under that 95% threshold, but for some, somehow they did. If that happened in Massachusetts, two years in a row, if I was at 94.4% and 94.9% in two years, they would have come in, they would have put some pretty strict sanctions in place on us. It doesn't happen in Vermont. So it's just, it's kind of interesting to look at the data. But we do have a very high poverty population. And so there was progress going on in pockets. It's getting better now that we've got the systems to manage it. So at least in terms of ELA, I've got some comparisons I can show. Again, the absolute data might be comparable. I can't say for sure. I tried to do a little bit of research. The last time that somebody tried to compare S back to NAEP data was like in 2015 or 14. And so it just didn't seem appropriate if there were seven or eight years that it passed on the absolute side. But there is a correlation between the two. But the trend data, are students getting better? Are they getting worse? That you can tell a lot about. And so next time, hopefully what we'll be looking at is we'll be looking at the adaptability end in the special education data. Assuming we get here, get what we need. So do you ever call or talk to anybody in person at the state education? Dan, Dan, actually I give him credit. He met with us. And he says, what about the timeline for the, they told us mid-November for the state state, the release of the state aggregated data. So when you went to the website and it wasn't working, like do you call the office and say hello, what's the deal? Can you send me my- Oh, it's obvious what's going on. They're creating a new website from scratch. And my guess is, is that they're trying to get up to date. Typically in most scenarios, that's something that we get messages from the AOE from the, usually from the secretary the superintendents do that kind of outline the things they're working on and what's changing and what to expect. But this was another one that we didn't get a message on. We didn't get a message on the fact that they were changing SBAC until just before the board meeting last. So that happens. So the communication piece there is tough sometimes. So when you compile the SBAC data internally, you take like, do you get a report of everybody's scores, like everybody in the school and then you- If they have their data the way that it's supposed to be, we get it by aggregate for the state. This is how all third graders in the state perform. This is how the third graders in your district perform. This is how the third graders in brain tree perform. This is how the third graders in Perkfield. So you get all that data. In the report that they haven't sent you yet. Usually. Okay, so the report that you have that you just presented, that- We looked at individual students and put the pieces together ourselves because we had the data for each individual student. How does that come to you? And just like, this is all- You know the letters you get when your kids take them? That's how it comes to this. So you get a copy of the letter and you have them all in a file by grade and you just go through and enter- By one, by one, and then, yeah. So it's not a good use of people's time. Especially when the state does it anyway and it should be getting the data out on time. But, yeah. No, there's a lot of, these are, and usually I compile it. And there's a lot of massaging and there's a lot of data and there's a lot of parts and pieces that go into being able to just to create the grass for you. But we track all this stuff in pretty good detail. So when we have it. Lane, when you say you massage the data, it doesn't sound right. We're not changing- No, so we're taking individual data and using it. That's how I- We're gonna put all the third graders together and find out what the averages, that's what I mean by massaging. Okay, we'll put all the fourth graders together and find out what the averages, yeah. No, we're not changing it. I'm sure we'll hear that at the next- You did your own aggregation of the data. Give Crystal- Press the numbers. Crystal, LaRocca, a lot of credit for that. But again, so that's this piece and the goal is next time is to take a look at that adaptability end. One of the only difficulty with that one is that it relies on graduation data. Again, that's something that comes officially from the state, which we have not received yet. So, but there is other parts and pieces to that we can talk about next round. Okay, so are you gonna write this up in an end report? I was hoping I'd get the data and just be able to do the data. And just, shh, okay. At some point, we will get a full end report with all of this information in it. You're presenting it as we go along. And again, my interpretation does not use Nate. I'm just having to discuss with what we got. Yeah, get it, get it, got it. I just wanna make sure at some point we have the end, this is the interpretation, this was the data we have for it. Even if it ends up having to be, I'm gonna use the Nate data, because that's all I got. Well, then I have to go and that's gonna be a major piece, because I have to go back and change the interpretation and the rationale for why it's a good data point to use. And it's ugly. The other reality is that, like I said, the departments are actually working on, this was the division from way back when, it's the actual departments, the math department and the English department that are deciding these based upon this end, this is what it means to have foundational knowledge, this is how we're gonna assess it and this is why we're gonna do it that way. So they have that work nearly complete and so the whole end's document's gonna change. The goal is they're presenting that data to me or coming in and presenting the data to the board. Okay, and that will be for the next, by next year, the next end report. So this is looking back to last year, which you're using the format that you did from the previous year. Okay, yep, okay. So moving on, we have board policy 4.4 and I had, I remember each month, you all had asked for the next month's selfie vowel to be in the packet and I didn't get it out in time for Linda to put it in the packet. So that's why it came separately and I know a few of you don't have printers. So hopefully. I brought copies. Oh, you brought copies. Oh, yay, so that's for 4.5, that's for the December meeting. So if you need a copy so that you've got it, but for right now, we're going over 4.4, which you had from your packet before. And it is in the current packet? Yeah. 4.4. Okay. So in this, remember what we're doing is we're looking, this is how we're doing an evaluation of ourselves as the board in terms of are we following our policies? Are we doing what we've stated in policy that we'll do? And unless somebody has a new way of going through it, I'm gonna just have us kind of look at each section of the policy and check in with sort of what people felt. So this policy has to do with the chair's role. The first section of the policy, the chair, especially empowered member of the board, ensures the integrity of the board's process and secondarily occasionally represents the board to outside parties. So has your chair been doing that? This is sort of an evaluation of your chair. So... I would say always. Always? And example would be, one would be with the emails and how you're responding to those on behalf of the rest of the board. Any other comments or concerns? Moving on to the next section in the policy, the assigned result of the chair's job is that the board behaves consistently with its own rules and those legitimately imposed on it from outside the organization, for example, like from the state. So one, meeting discussion content will consist solely of issues that clearly belong to the board to decide or to monitor according to board policy. So have we been doing that? Are we keeping to our agenda? Are we staying in the board's domain? Are we getting into operational decision-making? We are definitely not getting into operational decision-making. Okay, so it's hard, it's hard not to, right? But we are not doing that. We are staying at the board level, policy level. Number two, information that is for neither monitoring performance nor board decisions will be avoided or minimized and always noted as such. So those are those things that go into the consent agenda. Those are things that are required by the state but we've delegated to Lane to take care of but he has to have us take a look at it and approve it because of state law. You've got a divisive policy you're gonna have to start looking at next time. Uh-oh, are you? You're required under state law. Oh, okay, which one is that? So that's the... Is that the equity, are they doing it, making it an equity plan? No, it's the non-discrimination in mascots and school branding. Okay. See you in that next time. So get prepared for your next round. So remember one of his jobs, one of our policies says he has to make sure that our district has all of the state mandated required policies. So, and then because of state law we have to approve them, so. Uh, so that's that section. Deliberation will be fair, open and thorough but also timely, orderly and kept to the point. Let's say most of the time, most of the time. Yeah, most of the time we can get distracted and. Yeah. And have time management issues. Yeah, yeah, I have no sense of time. I will own that. For me, a half an hour can sometimes feel like it was five minutes. So, I've been relying on Katia a lot. She's done an excellent job of just sort of being the timer, which I really appreciate. But that could always be improved upon. The next section, the authority of the chair consists in making decisions that fall within topics covered by board policies on governance process and board management delegation with the exception of employment or termination of a superintendent. So the chair can't do that. Areas where the board specifically delegates portions of this authority to others. Can't think of an example of where we've done that. The chair is authorized to use any reasonable interpretation of the provisions in these policies. So one, the chair is empowered to chair board meetings with all the commonly accepted powers of that position, such as ruling and recognizing. I think I've been trying to do that fairly well. Any comments, concerns? The chair has no authority to make decisions about policies created by the board within ends and executive limitations policy areas. Remember, we work as a board as a whole. So we make decisions as a board. The chair doesn't have any special authority to make decisions in that area. Therefore, the chair has no authority to supervise or direct the superintendent. Superintendent is here. I haven't been telling you to do things on the side. So I know perhaps, oh, maybe that was in the next section. Yeah, three, the chair may represent the board to outside parties in announcing board-stated positions and in stating chair decisions and interpretations within areas delegated to her or him and report such activity at the next meeting of the board. There, I've tried to let people know if I've said something. So that's why I liked being able to CC you all when I responded to somebody's email. So you all didn't get to see one of the emails that I sent, just explaining to someone who didn't, who was contending that I responded to somebody during public comment. And so I shared with them the preamble stating again that I may respond if I'm gonna explain that you can use the complaint procedure or you can contact such and such a staff person. So I've been trying to make sure that I share that information with people so they know any other concerns in that area. The chair may delegate this authority but remains accountable for its use. I haven't really delegated much. Periodically, I've delegated to Katya. Little things here and there. The chair will ensure that the board fulfills its obligations and works to improve the board's performance. Been trying to do that. Encouraged you all to go to the BSBA conference. Hopefully the board decided that we wanted to kind of have things in this binder. I think that will be helpful for all board members to just kind of not rely on one person to remember everything or to have all that sort of knowledge that's shared so everybody knows how we're operating. All right, so we're supposed to select one area for improvement. So I think it's policy governance is tough, right? And sometimes it's hard to like not get in the weeds of the management of what's going on, especially when there's controversial issues like what's happening now. I do think it's helpful to speak with one voice through the chair. I think it's impossible to do that unless we can meet to talk about things. So I think it's important that if board members request meetings that we have them because there's a reason people want them, it's not for nothing. And so when that happens, I think it's important to be respectful of those requests and to also, at the end of them or during these controversial times, have the board speak through the chair with one voice out to the public in making statements. I don't know if there's a policy for that, where it would fall. So what I'm hearing you say is you would like to see our board. When it says the chair may represent the board to outside parties and announcing board-stated positions and then stating chair decisions and interpretations within the area delegated to her or him and report such activity at the next meeting of the board. Okay, so what I'm hearing you say is you would like, when we have these controversial issues, you would like to have our board meeting and making a statement more than we have. Not remaining silent. Not remaining quiet. Okay. Okay. And what I also hear you saying is to, in order to come up with those statements that requests for special meetings be honored and happen. I don't think there anything to be scared of. I don't think there anything to be like, should we do it, should we not do it? Like I think it's just good sometimes to have a meeting so people can talk and hear what each other has to say and come to an agreement or not come to an agreement, but at least have a place to discuss some of this. Yeah, yeah. And that's important. I think the only recognition we have to have is those meetings need to be had. They have to be worn and have to be old. So there are very few cases for which we can go into executive session. This is sometimes situations where we may want to have executive session. And we can't. We may not be able to find under the statutes a reasonable allowance to go into executive session, which is fine. But then you're like speaking openly. But the recognition that potentially those meetings will have to be in an open setting and cannot be in executive session. Right, so that's difficult. So just, yeah, just right there. Well, it's difficult, but it also is the opposite of silence. So if our only option is to have difficult and potentially awkward or creating more or less conflict, that in my opinion is better than silence, especially when we have public comment filled with asking us not to be silent. So if we can't do it privately, then we have to do it publicly. But I don't, but can't not. And in my opinion. Advice and counsel from legal counsel that can always be an executive session. So that is a way to be able to conduct a negative session with legal counsel present on a topic or issue. I just got a question that's leading out to the, to that, to the legal counsel would be an open session. And obviously no decisions can be made in executive sessions. We can't draft an article or anything in executive session, correct? We could come up with a statement in executive session. That you'd have to vote to direct the chair. Right, you can. Right, right. Yeah. But you wouldn't have to vote along the statement in. No. You could just come out and say, we're coming out and we're voting that. You know, we're gonna. Direct the chair to. Or the legal counsel to create a, yeah, exactly to create a statement in terms of our position. So if we have legal counsel there, we could enter into executive session with the legal counsel. You don't want to keep that information from what you just did. So it seems like we should do more of that. That's all I'm saying. Okay. So. The discussion still has to be public. Yes. The discussion to, to go into executive. The discussion of the topics are public. The guidance from the attorney is. Is. Right. So. The attorney can help guide us, make a statement so that. Right. We can all. Talk about it openly. Go into executive session with the attorney. Come up with a statement. That you then present to the public so that we're not silent. That's like a way. To make it work. Topics of controversy. I highly recommend that you go with whatever statement that legal counsel creates. Another general question over when we were viewing these. One of the actions we do is select one area of this policy for improvement over the next year. But then we move on to the next policy the next meeting and. How are we holding ourselves accountable to actually. Well, because we. You see that we have in here. What actions will we commit to. In the next year to improve our application of this policy. Who will be accountable for leadership to ensure it happens. I think that's kind of my question. We assess. When we do this, how are we making sure that we're actually like next month. We're looking back at we've reviewed last month that we're actually making actions. We're doing those actions that we're committing to. Well, when do we want to reassess our progress on this. We could say we want to do it at the next meeting. Would the board like to do that. Are we gonna have more. They just said we're gonna have to have a. A new state required policy. So maybe we'll have another controversy. And we might need to have. Where is it. So when do we so it. So one of the things we have in here if you look on the last page it says when will we reassess our progress. I'm just saying this more like in a general term with all of these because I feel like we review them. We select an area. We talk about the actions and then typically we're like we're reassess this progress in a year but are we actually like. That's on our it's on our annual agenda. So like in a year we'll review this again. We'll go back. And you say yes did we over the last year commit to. Making a statement. Publicly if a controversy that we all felt like required a certain meeting and make a statement. Did that happen. Yes or no. In a year when we review this again. Makes sense. All right. I'm getting really tired. I know what time is it. I got my flu shot today. And I'm like we're at 8 30. We've got Heather coming at 8 20. So just let her know we're like we're real close. OK well let's let's get there. All right. So we're we're good. So I'm and I've been hanging on to these. Maybe what I'll do is put it in some sort of format. Well I think like that like you know how we were like review minutes from the previous meeting right. I almost feel like that would be a great thing. To have like this was what we reviewed. And this is what we all came up with. And just so we can all like be like OK. Yeah we remember that. And then next year we'll review it again. Well do we want to review this one at the next meeting or at the no no no. No. OK. So next year. Yeah. So we're good with next year. Yeah. So I may I may have you. I may bring you my my things to just be your notes. Have in a thing so that we can refer back to them. I've just been keeping them and they're not. They're kind of messy and I'm printing on scrap paper. But I will well at least we can have some sort of record. Plus it's on our and you remember what when I'm saying our annual agenda that's the whole year. Remember we looked at that at the beginning in August. You know what happens and each one of these policies that we review is on that and it'll be there again next year. So we get sort of prompts us to do that review again. But when we do that then we can look at OK. What did we say we would focus on and we can make sure we've done that as part of that review. I know we're trying to hurry but I have one more. Sure. Sure. The special meeting. So if a board member requests a special meeting. Is it up to the chair to say. Well I don't think there's reason to have one. Yeah. And that happened and the other thing is emergency meetings. It has to be an emergency. Right. But there's a distinction between special and emergency. Yes. Yes. So what got requested was an emergency meeting. An emergency meeting is an emergency meeting. So emergency defined by whom. Defined. So legal counsel gives you the idea of what. So an emergency. So like during Irene. An emergency meeting could be the water is running you got all these people together to figure out how you're going to stop the water from going. An emergency meeting could be. I don't know. We have some emergency here and you need a board decision and we need to get together. You don't have to warn it. It's just poof. It happens and I should look at it says in here what what. Counts as an emergency meeting. So what we could have had was a special meeting. But what got requested was an emergency meeting. And I was actually away. Cacha spoke with legal counsel and I believe. The emerge there wasn't an emergency. So on the fourth page of the meeting and special meeting. Regular meeting. So saying we'd like to request a special meeting. Special meeting. Yeah that happens. So let's see. Emergency meetings. There is no specific requirement for announcing and posting notice for emergency meetings which are held only when necessary to respond to an unforeseen occurrence or condition requiring immediate attention by the public body. Creating a statement by the board. Doesn't isn't an emergency. I would say I would argue it depends upon what the situation is. Oh yeah I guess. So just collapse. Yeah OK. But that's the emergency is the building collapsed. But this is this is a very subjective thing though. What yeah constitutes an emergency death threats. I think constitute an emergency. A lawsuit. A lawsuit. Certainly. Let's see what I would I would disagree. I would say those can wait 48 hours for the special meeting status. Yeah. So I. So I work with them. No maybe not. Yeah yeah yeah. But so why am I speaking vaguely about this. So I would board you about a death threat right like. So I would love guidance. Hey why don't why don't we see if we can get a special meeting together because this doesn't work. I feel like there was just a very. We're not going to do that and. Personally I felt it was an emergency but not by school board rules and that's fine. Guidance would have been good and but there was just this shutdown what I felt was a shutdown of communication. We're not going to do it. We'll come we'll hear public comment and yet again. Not we it there it's not we're not saying anything. Big A. We can't in public comment but recognize. And I'm happy to say this publicly because I said it to them directly recognize the group of people that is coming in to make public comment is choosing venues on purpose to make sure that there is no comment back. I had a two hour open forum but all these folks were were at not one of them asked a question and that is not the first time in Black Lives Matter came up. It was primarily the same group of folks. I held two open forums before board meetings. They were there. They would not ask questions about the issue. And when we asked them specifically about it at the brain tree piece and said hey I had that open forum how come people weren't asking questions because we don't want to talk with you. So is this ingenuous for them to come in and say that people aren't talking when they don't want to talk to us. They are choosing these venues on purpose because it's a one sided conversation. They have been advised by me repeatedly look if you if you've got good stuff here you've got to write to your beliefs and you want to talk with the board you reach out to Linda and you ask her to put it on the see if they can get put on the agenda so that you can have that discussion. So they've they've had that information for a while. So I would just argue at least in the case of these folks if we can get a discussion with them I think it would be awesome and I think it would be very beneficial. But my experience has been the last thing they want is an open discussion. But we can put it on the agenda. So in hindsight then I wish I had requested a special meeting with the agenda item of discussing the board's placement. This isn't about I want to discuss how I feel personally. I mean I'd love to discuss how I feel personally but but a special meeting so that the board is saying something responding not responding to each and every person. That's not what we do and we need to find we speak in a common voice. Let's find out what our voice is. What is our voice going to say about this. I also don't want to dismiss the people coming to the meeting and saying something in public comment. If that's how they are choosing to do it. I want to honor that. That's where they want to do it. Perhaps they don't want to be responded to personally. Hey you said that so we're going to say this back to you. But we as a board are going to say something about why we have better attendance at this meeting than we do you know usually or when a controversy isn't going on. But each time one has come up we take a lot of hits for we'll sit here and listen. We'll have stoic faces and then not say anything about it as a board. And maybe we don't say anything about it. The issue but we say this is who we are as a board and this is how we function you know and we support this group this group this group this group which is basically all of our people or part of the PR piece is that you know because again they're my impression so I got to be very in my experience is they're not looking for a two way conversation. This is an opportunity to come in. Some of them very genuine in terms of beliefs there are other matters in terms of some of the other discussions that are going on but it's an opportunity to hear them potentially based upon what you've heard collectively afterwards responding with a yeah we've heard we've heard you that you know we we have these concerns as well or these are things that we should talk about more please you know let's set up well we'll set up a time at the next board meeting have an open discussion because unless there's an open discussion I think it's resolved. The one problem I see with some of that is they want to talk operational we don't do operational. I would love to have an opportunity to respond to the things that they have said they have not given me that opportunity and remember we do we do policy because we're a policy governance no no if you go if you even look at me if you talk with the SBA also we are looking at policy all is our administration following policy procedure protocols is it fair so what and what the discussion that folks want is we want to talk about how we run the the blocker room that's their realm that's not our domain so our domain is the policy that we're following from the state yeah like that that can be that is also education as to what the school board does or Lane has invited you in multiple times to talk at his open forums or talk with him in person or talk with him please take advantage of that will they maybe I mean I don't know I just think that saying something is important yeah it goes with that ownership language and I think it's important to bring that back to the board so we're not just this like weird group that doesn't do anything well when do we kind of get to a point where the board is also like part of crisis management like that's my well and maybe we need to move on so we can talk with Heather because she might be able to help help us understand as a board what our role is in these kinds of controversial issues because they're going on not just in our district but in other districts but what we need to remember is we're we're looking at the policy level we're not looking at the operational level and some of what legal counsel will will be advising us is we are we are following state law federal law it's it it's not going to be a discussion about how we're going to manage the locker room that's not going to be but we haven't even said that as a board yeah Winston but you have you have said we have there is a conflict resolution protocol this is who you need to talk to and if they choose not to talk to those folks which has been the case then that's on them it's not like we haven't been open it's not like we haven't been inviting it's not like we haven't struggled despite the controversy and potentially putting my life in danger and the lives of other people in danger to have those open forums that evening that we haven't been there and been available to actually have that conversation and so again there's there I get I'm in I'm in I'm more in agreement with you even though I'm probably not but they've had a plenty of opportunities and people have taken great so at some point in time it literally has to be said is that these are your opportunities take them if not then move on if you have legitimate complaints you know I told that to John Clark half a dozen times if you think you have legitimate complaints then you need to file it so people can investigate and can take a look that's the appropriate way that we do things lawsuits I commend them for filing a lawsuit because that's the civil way of doing things that's why they exist appeals are the civil way of doing things raining down terror in violence on a school district is not the way to do it right so we all get that just having a discussion about it and making a statement to the public would be seems like a thing we could do and I'm not to help our ownership linkage noted and and so in requesting meetings going forward it's helpful to hear how that needs to be and yeah the kind of meeting it needs to be and what will happen and all yeah and I think I think we did respond we to to the one request for the emergency meeting and we we I included the legal counsel advice on that I know there was like four of us that asked for a meeting maybe it was a emergency meeting and clearly that was not the right thing to ask for but it never happened here we are it's all fine just going to doly noted and I appreciate you bringing it up and it is on here now as our goal is to make sure that we are making statements and me and meeting and that I'm so the other thing is though please just one at a time so just for that full email yeah yeah because then it becomes an open meeting so it's got to be just a direct email to me okay so I'm going to have we need to just I'm going to have us move to so the next couple of things on the agenda the VSBA conference the consent agenda is the meeting notes but I'm we had are you texting with Heather I texted her and said we'd be ten minutes but that was more than ten minutes ago okay so I'm on the VSBA okay any discussion none okay all those in favor hi okay so we're going to table that and consent agenda move to approve the minutes by Katja seconded by Megan all those in favor hi so we've done that negotiations so we do we want to table that we're all on the different negotiation committees kind of know what's going on are we they're all ongoing good to go there's no really okay okay so we're going to move on to that anything's outstanding in the financial report that you're concerned about now just the what we talked about is that we have that kind of emergency okay fun that we're funding that we're looking for from the reserve account because the heating pipe reversed okay that means there's no heat here until it gets fixed and the pipes are under the foundation yeah I'm like so that's why we gotta replace our buildings and just so you know we're you're going to get a doodle poll request for a special meeting because we need to we've gotten three applicants in for the open Brookfield spot so we're going to need to meet to meet with those candidates so we're there's going to be a request for a special meeting we're going to put in that because that's going to be a worn meeting we're going to put in the as well as I want to look at the camera when I say this as well as the work that started on revamping the four locker rooms on September 27th we will be asking for the money to complete that work okay so that will be in that on that special meeting agenda as well so there we go and the recap I'm going to be just checking in with Sean to just finish out that complaint procedure wording doodle poll for the for the ownership linkage committee meeting and there is going to be a doodle poll for a special meeting for a point and for the surplus funding requests okay so now I need someone to give me a motion to move into executive sessions so move for personal issues and legal counsel I second okay all those in favor hi all right thank you for thank you thank you