 Okay. Seeing a presence of a quorum, I'm calling this meeting to order at 6.32. So our first order of business is to approve our minutes from February 11th. Mr. Denley? Yeah, just a small mission in attendance. I should be listed there. Any other? Does anybody want to make a motion? Miss Dancer. I'm going to approve the minutes of February 11th, 2020. Second. Moved and seconded. All those in favor? Signal by raising your hand. Your name is 6-0. Now we have our long awaited student presentation and water bottle feelings. I'll do a very brief introduction that we have three students here with us tonight. You can see their names up on the screen. And while they're currently working on some very neat things at the high school, this is really about their work when they were middle school students what they successfully advocated for and accomplished and is still in effect today. So one of the three of you come up and introduce yourselves and I'll handle the slides. I'm Tessa Kaywall. I'm Lucy Smith. I'm April Shilling. So hi everyone and thank you for letting us present the water bottle project. Today we're going to be sharing our overall process and the results so far of this project which we started in eighth grade and have continued throughout this year. Please feel free to ask us any questions you have about specific details after the presentation. We thought of the idea for the filler. One day when we were in environmental action club run by Miss Welborn at the middle school. Walking through the school we saw many littered plastic bottles and realized how much plastic waste our school produced and because of the plastic bottles sold at lunch. The solution that we came up with was to instead sell reusable water bottles. We thought that a big selling point for the bottles would be if we had a water bottle fill near the cafeteria instead of just one near the gym which would encourage students to fill their bottles. We thought the reason behind kids buying plastic bottles was because they didn't have a reusable one. We wanted to provide the students with reusable ones so that the school would need to buy less and less plastic bottles eventually not purchasing any at all. When we looked up the cost of the filler it seemed too expensive to purchase. We never thought we could raise nearly two thousand dollars as well as money for the bottles and for our idea and our problem to the principals at the middle school. Our plan was to first meet with the principals to see if any of this was even possible and at the end of our first meeting we left his room with the plan to fundraise for the bottles as well as the filler. We came up with the ideas for raising large sums of money through GoFundMe accounts and fundraisers. We then refined our ideas into a plan. We were going to host a student versus staff game of some type, start a GoFundMe account, have multiple other fundraisers such as bake sales and finally raise extra money through word of mouth for our GoFundMe. Then depending on our total fundraising amount we would buy a filler accessible to all and buy students reusable bottles even if we weren't going to be at the middle school by the time we finished. Finally we started taking action. We set up the GoFundMe and planned a student versus staff volleyball game which ended up being a huge success. After all of our fundraising we ended up with about two thousand three hundred and twenty dollars of available funds at our disposal which is much more than we thought we could ever have. Another part of our action plan was to get word out about our project. We ended up being interviewed by a reporter from the Gazette and the article that came out about our project just a little later sparked some donations on our GoFundMe. We also held many bake sales after school which raised around two hundred dollars each time we held one. Along with some PGO grants, extremely generous donations of fundraiser and bake sales we were able to gather large sums of money to put into action in our school. Once we had enough money we found which filler was the best and fit the characteristics for what we wanted. The school then made the purchase of the filler and had it installed over the summer. We are still continuously meeting with Principal Smith and Ms. Wellborn who have been with us throughout the whole project and have helped us so much. Currently we are in the process of receiving a donation of two hundred fifty dollars from Target to add to our total funds. With this money we are going to buy as many stainless steel water bottles as we can to offer to students when they ask for a plastic bottle. We hope this option of a free reusable water bottle will be chosen over a plastic bottle. Based on statistics from November from one of the kitchen managers we were already down to one case of small bottles and two cases of large bottles per week which is a major improvement from last year's purchases since we are down fifty percent. So above is a picture of the filler located in the middle school near the cafeteria. There are already roughly four thousand bottles filled which we'd say is a major success. We never thought we would accomplish as much as we did and we are very proud of the result from our project. We appreciate the opportunity to come and share with you all our long journey to where we are now. We still have lots more to do. At the high school we are currently working on other projects such as more environmentally friendly utensils. We hope to make a large impact on our high school as well as we try to switch over to a more environmentally aware and active school. Please don't hesitate to ask us any questions. And thank you all very much for letting us present. We would also like to add that we support the funding for solar panels at either the high school or the middle school. Mr. Minerva. I'd like to thank you for a very cogent and well rehearsed presentation. Thank you. Mr. Salmon. So I want to thank the three of you for coming and doing this and all of the work that you've done along with Miss Welborn and the co-principals and other staff members. And I also want to thank you for the hydration station because I worked hard on the former finance director for three years to try and get a hydration station in that exact spot. And he kept saying no. That they needed to be in other spots in the school and not there. So thank you very much. And I'm going to see you again when you're seniors. Mr. Deming. So thank you for an awesome presentation. As you continue your work at the high school, you should know that you have an open invitation to come back here. And if you think that there is some money that would help out with an effort that you've researched and gotten support for, it's totally appropriate to come back and like in the winterish time before we vote on the budget to talk about that. And we can have that discussion. So definitely encourage you to come back to that. The Environmental Action Club I wanted to ask you about. That sounds really great. So did you start that off in like seventh grade? And like what kind of stuff does the Environmental Action Club do? So we started this project in eighth grade. But in seventh grade, it was just the Science Club, which was separate from environment action. So we only really started doing projects in eighth grade, I guess, but just it's an atmosphere where kids can like choose a project that they really enjoy to do and take on action with the support of Miss Welborn especially and the school to back them up for things. Thank you. Thank you. That was a really great presentation. I'm looking forward. I've been following since the very beginning when you first started fundraising for it. And I think the approach that you took, sort of the, as you call it, the idea plan and action and implementation and sort of then following up with researching and understanding, defining how it's what the outcomes are and the progress that you guys have achieved is a really great skill set and can be applied to future environmental action in the high school as well. So thank you. Thank you. Let's give them a round of applause. The principal Jones in the back room likes to receive now that we're at the high school. So very politically activated, motivated and connected into action. So thank you very much. That's great. Okay. So now moving on to committee announcements and public comment. Are there any announcements from the committee first? Mr. Denley. So I wanted to thank the Northampton School Committee and Laura Fallon from the Northampton School Committee in particular for organizing and running a workshop for the Mass Association School Committees, our region last night in Florence. It was a great opportunity to meet others on other school committees. And so there's a presentation by Tracy Novick on Chapter 70 and how that's been updated with the Student Opportunity Act. And if you don't know Tracy Novick, if you want to follow one person on social media who knows everything and shares everything and update at the state level, she is the go-to person. She's just a font of information. So she gave a really great, in-depth presentation. It was also really great because our Senator, Joe Cumberford, was there and she gave an update on some other efforts that are continuing. I think she characterized the Student Opportunity Act that got a lot of press and attention last year as a great first step. But that's what it is. It's a first step. It addressed a lot of what has been inequitable in state funding of public education, but there's still a lot more to go. And so she's currently focused on a Senate study looking at charter school funding. There is a study looking at the municipal wealth calculation, which is a big deal for member towns of our region, as well as the assumed percent of special ed students in the foundation calculation, which is 16%, which as we all know is quite low for many districts. So yeah, it was really great time to connect and I just appreciate the work of our volunteer colleagues across the river for making that happen. Any other announcements? Seeing none, we'll open it up now for public comment. And before we get started, just remind those in which to make comments that speakers are limited to three minutes. We don't gavel you out at exactly 3.00, but we ask that you focus on keeping your statements to three minutes or less. If your statement runs longer than three minutes, that's fine, but you'll need to have multiple speakers for that so that you cannot cede your time to a speaker to allow them to speak longer than that. The statement may be read by multiple speakers so long as the speakers keep to that three minute maximum. So I ask, please come forward and state your name and where you live. Hi, my name is Andrew Rose. I live in Amherst and I'm speaking to an item on the capital budget that you'll be voting on today. So we, some students had hoped to be here to speak directly to this. Saho Lee and Allison Braun and I submitted a proposal to Amherst to fund a solar study and that's being considered by the Amherst Joint Capital Planning Committee. But it relates to the 15,000 for solar study in your capital budget. There are differences, but there's real advantages to combining those funds. Sean Mangano suggested that you could probably hire the same consultant to do the solar study that is going to be proposed as a part of your capital budget, which my understanding is would focus on the middle school hill and if there's extra, then perhaps the middle school roof. And the 25,000 that we are proposing would be looking in depth into the possibilities for solar canopies on the middle school and high school parking lots. Looking at the possibilities for third party purchase, which costs nothing and up to owning them and having the storage to go with it. It's a fairly long proposal that has a lot of little pieces in it with cool stuff like going to get the chargers. Those are all questions. Obviously, there's no commitment to actually funding these studies, but if Amherst decides to have the proposal go through, it would be helpful to know from the regional school committee if you're happy to have Amherst pay for that part of this investigation. And I think we'll see if we can get some time to ask that question. Have you discussed the possibility of voicing your support or indifference to Amherst paying for an additional study and combining it? We certainly want the 15,000 in your capital budget to pass today. So thank you. Thank you. Any other speakers? We do have public comment until 7 o'clock, but I think we'll move on since I don't see it's definitely well past 6.45, so we'll move on. So next on our agenda is the superintendent's update. And I'll be brief because much of the update will be found in other agenda items, particularly about COVID-19 and the budget vote and some of the other items. But I want to mention a couple of things. The first is that last Friday I was able to attend a meeting. Every year there's a legislative delegation that meets with superintendents and all three of the representatives, the two representatives of senators that represent our four towns were present. And to Mr. Demling's point, I'm continually impressed with the two representatives and senators' ability to understand local educational policy, ask probing questions to better understand what's happening, and they're not a group, right, they're individuals, but I feel like there's a lot of interest, and I think that was shown in attendance and interest in the four town meetings this year, and there was check-ins about where we are with that. So I just want to share that. There was a group in the Great Span Advisory, and I will talk about that at our next meeting that visited JFK Middle School in Northampton about a month ago, and just want to publicly thank Northampton. They pulled out all the stops. They had us meet with a group of parents and staff members, counselors, classroom teachers, the principal, the PGO. So we really got a full-scale experience at Northampton in a couple hours, and that was really helpful. And I think the last thing I'll mention, certainly if you would like to comment on this, you can, but you don't have to, is the high school had a career day recently, last week, the week before, last week, thank you. But we had different professionals from different areas of our community come in and be able to talk to students. Again, another opportunity for them to envision different careers and pathways moving forward from post-high school and really a wide range in roles. The reports I got from both Mr. Jones and Mr. Siddique, who was primarily involved in organizing, it was very successful in having students think about their future selves, which is part of adolescence, so it's good to help folks along. You don't have to comment, but if there's anything you would like to say. Okay, sounds good. But that's the update. Any questions? Okay. We're racing right through this. Famous last words. Leaving lots of extra time for later. As the acting chair, I do not have any update for this evening. Are there any subcommittee updates? Mr. Denley. So we had our most recent monthly CPAC meeting last Friday. The continues to be a working group that's reviewing the results of the special ed survey. Some good things in there, good bits of feedback. One of the main themes was about communication, particularly points of transition to new buildings. And it was interesting to highlight, particularly since going through the sixth grade, studying the possible move of the sixth grade to the middle school about how transitions are unique in special ed, not just because you might be part of a particular program, whether that's building blocks or ILC, but depending on where you are in the continuum of special needs, your point of contact at a particular school might be more well-known than others. And so you go to a new place, you might not necessarily know who your point of contact is. That might be very clear, say if you're an ILC and you meet the ILC director, but if you get, say, only certain services and you go from, you know, the big change from sixth grade to the middle school is you go from one or two classes a day to potentially a handful or more. And so that idea of having one central home teacher or a point of contact that you always can check in on and get updates becomes, you know, a point of anxiety for students and for parents. So I think as the working group continues to review those results, it would be good for those two groups to have a little bit of communication and at least just to update on what's going on because there does seem to be a lot of good overlap there. I agree. Any other subcommittee? Moving on to new and continuing business. And slowing things down, I think, given the topic. So I thought a lot about how to share information about what I'm calling more commonly COVID-19, but I know in the media it's getting talked about as coronavirus. And I thought actually this is, today was the fourth communication to the community on it, and I actually found it instructive to go back. I'm not literally going to read the four emails, but just to talk about where we are, where we were, where we are, and perhaps where we're headed. I think the consistent threat has been close communication with the public health department, both locally and at the state level, and also surrounding districts so that we've been consistently in touch with Julie Federman. I mean, she's unfortunately not suggesting that she's sick of my phone calls and emails, but I wouldn't blame her if she would. She's the head of public health in Amherst and really works with some of the other towns as well. I've also been in a lot of touch more recently with Jennifer Colkeen, who's the superintendent of Union 26, because we want to, I want to make sure that folks in Leverett and Schuetsbury understand what advice we're receiving in Amherst. Not that they have to agree with it, but, you know, invariably there'll be families who have a fifth grader at Schuetsbury Elementary and a seventh grader at the middle school and separate from Snow Days, which is a different topic for a different day. This one they really want to understand, you know, what's the thinking and how is it connected. So the first communication that we drafted was on February 26, it was the Wednesday after the February recess, and at that point there were 53 cases in the United States and one in Massachusetts. And so the goal of this email was to assure the community that we, which is still true, we don't have any cases or suspected cases in the Valley, in Amherst specifically, our region, but also in the larger Valley, and that we shared Massachusetts Department of Public Health guidance for school administrators and personnel. We looked at our custodial staff and our cleaning and our cleaning mechanisms and we communicated a number of ways where if people had questions we now have a, thanks to the grant that we applied for, received. Last year we have a nurse manager who is the point person for any concerns and we did receive concerns, and some of them were, I traveled to X-Place. Is there anything I need to do? My child may travel in the coming weeks. I heard someone traveled from here and so it was good that we had that initial communication. Simply that there was a place to call and I can certainly answer some questions, but this is someone who's an RN and has a bunch of degrees about public health who has a little more informed opinion than I do on some of the individually specific cases. I think it's also worth noting that that first email elicited a number of families and staff members to communicate to us about autoimmune disorders that we may or may not have known about and it may not have been the student, the student's family, we would have no knowledge of that. It may not be the staff member, maybe the staff member's partner, spouse, parent, child, and so there were already people who were on heightened alert because they fit in that category that keeps getting mentioned in the news as like if you fit these categories then and that number is a non-zero number and it's a number that is significant to me, it's significant to us as we plan, not that we want to over plan, but assuming that everyone in our community is in good health and doesn't have compromised immunity is an inaccurate information and that became loud and clear as our first communication went out and we gathered more feedback. Our next communication was actually just last Friday, it was March, excuse me, March 6th. At that point we put into effect additional cleaning mechanisms beyond what we were doing before which was wiping down door handles, all those kind of common sense things that we have now purchased a spray product that's sprayed multiple times a day on door handles, on common area railings, areas where there's a lot of physical contact and areas where viruses stay on for long periods of time. So in addition to what we were currently doing, we upped the expectations and really been hiring to new school member has a dual role and I want to compliment him and Rupert Roy Clark for being on top of this right from the very beginning, looking at what products we're using, making sure that we were doing that and it also focused a lot on what are behaviors that are pro-social, proactive behaviors. So we had things like washing your hands in soap and water for 20 seconds. It's worth noting that we don't, OSHA rules would not allow us to be purchasing large amounts of hand sanitizer to replace the OSHA rules as well as science would tell us that washing your hands for 20 seconds is a much better strategy than hand sanitizer anyway and hand sanitizer has significant amount of alcohol in it and with both younger kids and older kids we have different problems with alcohol and products that are left out hence the OSHA rules are around that. So we don't become the hand sanitizer police but it's not the recommended first step for school districts or organizations. Something I'm terrible at is avoid touching your eyes, nose, mouth that's just not a strategy and now that the camera's on me I'm sure I'll be self-conscious and do it about 45 times for the rest of the meeting. Avoid close contact with people who are sick cover your cough or sneeze or tissue use a tissue avoid sharing dishes utensils. One of the feedback we got from our athletic director is it seems commonplace on certain teams to share water bottles, right? So it's the flip side of what you heard earlier from the students about individual water bottles and so we gave clear messaging to our student athletes around that's not a team bonding activity that's actually a germ sharing activity and we encourage student athletes not to do it. And the one that got a little more attention and a little more consternation perhaps was to avoid shaking hands or hugs as a greeting and substituting other measures, elbow bumps, other things and for me I just have been saying I don't shake hands right now and that's been my strategy to use but that we know that shaking hands is one way things get transmitted. The other thing that we talked a lot about in the letter on Friday was that staff members and students should stay home if they're sick and that seems really simple but we got a little more specific about fevers and staying home for 24 hours and I think it wasn't that much of a change in practice for students however it was a significant change in practice for staff that I think as a staff in general and I'm not the best example though I think I did well the last couple weeks with my illness staying home is not really in front of students and we really tried to advise them at this point in time for the safety of the community and it's not just about COVID-19 it's about the flu which is prominent in our community as well as many other things. We've started tracking our daily basis staff and student absences we did notice an increase after we sent the letter on Friday hard to know whether whether the letter caused it or illness caused it but it is something that we are actively tracking on a daily basis not necessarily on an individual level but on an aggregate school and district level to assess that we also shared some resources from the CDC, the Department of Public Health and the Town of Amherst flip ahead to Monday so one of the things we again at every email say there is everything we've understood is there's no significant risk right now we don't have any identified or suspected cases in our community but we wanted to share with staff about how to receive employee assistance because what we were hearing was the level of stress on staff was significantly high working in this field and also to recommend for our students that counselors are available if they need to talk through some of these issues we also made our own page on our website that's dedicated to COVID-19 which collects all the letters as well as a frequently asked questions page that's been updated and links to other resources such as the town website Bay State actually has a really nice website that we noticed and we've included that I think today we included that on our website so that way there's one place you can go for all the coronavirus and it's on our if you go to our front page there's a clickable link that brings you there yesterday was also notable in that multiple universities including a college in this community decided to take really active steps in not having students come back from their college spring break very different environment UMass has not taken that step as a public university but it certainly caused a lot of concern also causing concern today was that the governor declared a state of emergency in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts because of this the number of suspected cases is over 90 it's now not just in the Boston area but has hit Berkshire County as well pretty significantly actually if you think about the relative size of Berkshire County in seven suspected cases they're not all confirmed but and we had a meeting this morning with the Department of Public Health in the town of Amherst and the short story is they recommended that we move from the mitigation prevention phase to the preparedness phase of our response and so that might be some feel like some lingo but what it essentially means and this was communicated this afternoon is that we maintain school operations as they are so it doesn't mean that if there's an staff member for instance some special educators might work in more than one building that we change the protocol for that staff member working in more than one building we maintain our daily mission around students as it pertains to the school day however there are pretty significant changes to anything that's not explicitly defined as in terms of the core mission on a daily basis of our schools so the recommendations and someone asked me today are they recommendations or they mandates from the health department and for me there's no distance between recommendations and mandates from the health department whether it's the state health department or the local health department makes recommendations they're the experts in this area and they're concerned not just about our students but the larger area and it's a public health crisis that we're facing so one thing they recommended is that all field trips be cancelled for the rest of the school year field trips are wonderful for our students I can speak volumes about the value and yet can school exist without field trips in a productive way and the answer is yes to that and so we have cancelled field trips for the rest of the year the reality is the field trips are cancelling on us anyway so we had a number of trips to Amherst College those were cancelled long before I put this out and many other communities have asked that you know different things that we were planning to do have gotten cancelled because of this because of the response the second point that we made today were that all of out of district and this one more to staff but I want to share it with the larger community all out of district and district wide professional development is effectively cancelled for the rest of the school year required professional development like safety care which is something we provide for staff will be done on a school by school basis so we're not unnecessarily combining school staff for training so it's going to be a little cumbersome a little inefficient but we'll still be able to provide the meaningful PD that we need professional development we need to do but we're not taking staff out of district to go to other PD elsewhere another recommendation was to reduce the evening events that have more than 50 participants until it's felt to be safer for our community and so that has already affected like wildwood staff, wildwood math night fort rivers math night the registration for kindergarten we're still registering students for kindergarten but we're not having the major event that brings together last year probably 120 people we're not doing that same for the ninth grade registration night we're going to move to electronic communication around those things and the really hard one was the musical so I want to be really clear about that and this is one we held off more longer than most communities around canceling events like this and principal Jones was very helpful we met with we met this morning as an administrative team we then met principal Jones myself and Mr. Bechtold and thank goodness we have creative thinkers on our staff but one of the things that I heard from Mr. Bechtold was we have to figure out a way for the students to be able to perform they've worked way too hard for this to be you know and he understood the context he understood the rationale and the reasoning and so the two fronts we're working on I think there's been progress even since we talked not that long ago this afternoon we're one trying to think of a school based set of school based performances where students would be with their classes that they'd normally be with at least a six foot buffer which is the recommendation we received so they'd be an authentic student audience and students would be able to perform the show with an audience not just in an empty auditorium whether we live stream or can tape a performance and share it with a larger community it's a really powerful show we'd want to do that there's some copyright trademark details that we have to work out on that second part my experience so far is that people have been very understanding of the public health crisis going on and very willing to be flexible with things like copyright trademark however until you ask and get confirmation we can't commit to that but I really want to thank Mr. Beck Mr. Beck told the Mr. Jones for thinking of creative solutions in the current climate of how to manage this we're having this is not just about the schools this is for anything happening on school property so for instance there's LSEC basketball game tomorrow and we're concerned about the number of people so the athletic director has been working with LSEC about how might we limit participation I think they're middle school students how might we limit participation of spectators even in that setting it's going to hit I there's a town counselor here so I've already talked to the town manager about if it's going to be district meetings and we expect more than 50 people we're going to have to figure out the town's going to have to figure out a different way to do that because in our schools we're going to follow the recommendation from the Board of Health which is to limit events that happen in our schools you might be thinking about these meetings you have right now and participation we're under 50 I counted but with the state of emergency declared in Massachusetts my understanding is although that's not confirmed I know the town manager did reach out to the state around this that it does relax quorum rules and remote participation I'm not sure we're quite there in terms of school committee meetings we haven't had 50 people in a while but you can't guarantee that you will or won't have a certain number and I think as this develops we'll have to focus another piece that we took with the support of our local colleges although frankly there are less of them that we need to get in touch with this afternoon than when we plan this is that we inventory pre-practical student-student teachers and university students who volunteer in our schools about their travel plans next week now I want to be really clear that that's not because I think anyone's going to northern Italy or Iran or China or South Korea next week however where they go may become a level three zone where they would have to be quarantined and with the break coming up for students we thought it was incumbent on us for the protection of our 2,600 students and our staff and faculty that we were simply asking the question not out of curiosity but that we would have an active record of where students went because frankly hard for me to not say a specific place because then it goes to a place they may go to a county of a state and at the time they go there there's no restrictions and at the time they come back there may be the need to quarantine because this is a fast-moving evolving situation and with our staff, with our families we have ways to talk about that with people who are more itinerant in our schools we don't and particularly with the break coming up we did ask now the reality is we don't have to ask Amherst College students that right now North Smith College students that right now but we worked with UMass and had great conversations including with their their emergency management people and what we would do if this scenario happened and we worked out protocols I want to publicly thank the university for engaging us in multiple conversations over the last couple of days and they sent a preemptive email out to their student teacher saying please participate this is really important the district is not looking to share this information with us unless it's a public health crisis you know so we're not it's not information that's being shared with principals Ms. Westmoreland and I having this information and then keeping track of if things develop in a certain way what we need to do with it and we worked out those protocols with UMass the last thing that the email to staff had and I think this is really important just as important as any of the other items actually is it included a list of classroom resources that Mr. Sheehan, I asked Mr. Sheehan to organize to be able to talk to students about COVID-19 one of the things we know is that we're getting students who are very stressed by it students who are not at all stressed by it probably more less stressed than we want them to be frankly in terms of promoting good healthy behavior and then everything in between and well our counselors have done that there are really outstanding lessons that have been developed for students as young as preschool and as old as students sitting next to me in high school and we sent that out as an organized list both in terms of the implications of COVID-19 what it is and the science of it and the racism and other xenophobia that's occurring so kind of all three of those had lessons that different lesson plans at each different level that we wanted to communicate to teachers because we're hearing very clearly from teachers that they wanted to have resources that they could work with students on during advisory during other periods of time I want to recognize that this is a time of high stress for many many people there are a lot of rumors out there that we continue to try to debunk and will fail because rumors travel faster than we can and our goal is to have the educational experience as normalized as possible that students come to school they see familiar faces they learn the primary content and they go home happy engaged students and that's really our focus it does mean curtailing things that happen after school it does mean curtailing some things that were planned for during school the governor is very clear in his recommendations today when he declared the state of emergency and this letter was written before the governor's speech we just added the thing about the governor declaring that but the staff email had went out before with all the same content I'm in touch with the health department all the time North Hamptons in a very similar boat they had the same challenging decision on their musical that we had one undetermined thing is athletics sports we're waiting for the MIA to come out with their thoughts about it you can see that at the college level people are all over the map Ivy League just canceled their men and women's basketball tournament and then your brother tournament is happening with fans there and other tournaments happening without fans Italy just canceled series A their primary soccer league they were happening without fans and they've canceled it that'll be a different matter so for the NCA to manage but we are looking I know tomorrow there's a conference call the State Department of Public Health and people like Jill Consolino our nurse manager and Julie Federman so I think they're going to have some real clear recommendations for spring sports but it is something that I know I've got a lot of questions about this afternoon even though we put in the letter we're looking for more guidance and information it's high on people's list I know Amherst College canceled sports but that's a little different because the students won't literally be there much of the spring anyway and so it's this emerging situation it changes by the day and our goal throughout has been to give consistent updated information and consistent means what is happening right now and that's the hard thing for the community and it's hard thing for us is what consistent meant yesterday felt different than what it means today and I'm not clear what consistent's coming next week I could be really optimistic and say a month from now we can relax a lot of these rules it's trending in that direction to be very blunt it's not trending in that direction so I can remain optimistic that like us many other organizations are taking really strong measures to control this crisis I think they're all measures that are met with sincerity and effort I can't guarantee that coronavirus and COVID-19 won't come up in our community we are doing active planning for that as well working with the health department working with actually that's where Desi sort of comes in and they've given some guidance but what we saw today as an example is we saw Arlington, Massachusetts which had the first case of confirmed I believe confirmed COVID-19 of a student choose not to cancel school and then we had another community closer to where we live who had a relative of a substitute teacher who had been self-quarantined not confirmed with the illness and they canceled school at one of the elementary schools and then we have a school in the Berkshires that had one confirmed case in their town and they canceled school for a week and the thing I want to express to you is that's not a critique of any of those three districts there is a real lack of clarity and guidance coming from any agency and the advice we continue to receive is work with your local board of health to make those determinations so that there is such disparity within our state and then I'm from New York talk about disparity of how people are responding it's even wider because the outbreak is much more significant in that area and so the thing we know is that the best thing we can do is communicate exactly what we're doing exactly why we're doing it and the guidance we're getting and we can't control other districts we can't control what's happening in New York State or frankly what's happening in Northampton or Hadley or West Springfield or Arlington but we can listen to our community we can make interests that the experts in our community have been recommending to us I'm optimistic that as the governor has declared a state of emergency there will be more clear guidance coming from the state level but I want to be clear it's not here yet so that was really long winded but it's an important issue that is dominating what we're doing on a moment to moment I should say also I'm sorry the last thing I promised but we do have a screening group excuse me we have a steering group that's meeting on a weekly basis at least that includes Mr. Jones and elementary principal rep central office staff family center or special ed so as we're developing our processes and Jerry Champagne from an IS because that's pretty critical we have a steering group that meets on a routine basis to review the new information more than just meeting on a weekly basis but we do have a steering group that allows us for building based leaders as well as district leaders to be communicating and talking about what people are hearing and what our next steps are I'm sure there's lots of questions that are coming so let's start with Mr. Menino I'm a little confused you said there was no definitive cases of virus in the valley but yet you indicated that we're scattered cases are across the state I was under the impression that the tests are not available how many people have been tested until we know how many people have been tested how do we know whether it's here or not so right now there's I'll let you go first sure so there's what's called presumed cases so those are two categories one are cases where the symptoms fit traveled to places that have large amounts relatively large amounts of COVID-19 or they were in for instance like in Massachusetts where almost 80% are stemming from one particular employer called Biogen and particular meetings that happened at Biogen and so when people have come up with symptoms that could be flu could be COVID-19 medical professionals are looking at well what are the risk factors and might it be COVID-19 so right now we're doing a lot of presumed pieces we won't know and the testing is getting my understanding is testing is getting better still not going to be getting better is being more readily available it's still not perfect but people look at the risk factors and try to make their best assumptions right now of what's flu what's COVID-19 based on symptoms but also based on context but Ms. Spitzer knows more than me so we work in a medical environment so I think you're right on and I think you're right to point out that we've tested enough and readily available and it's a problem that would agree Mr. Denley so we certainly can't predict the future but one obvious question that is going to be on every parent and student's mind is there exists the possibility that schools could close that we could close our public schools so I guess just my general question is how are we preparing about how that would get communicated because that's just about the biggest kind of thing we could communicate and what preparations are we currently underway to prepare for that possibility the reason I ask about that is I would imagine that the effectiveness or not educationally of what would happen after we close school would depend to a degree on what we did to prepare and it seems like quite the challenge particularly the younger you go with the grades we hear about colleges closing they just switch to online it's pretty hard to have an online first grade class in an educationally appropriate manner so just any thoughts across the gamut on that so the first thing that we learned today is that the state would only make students and staff make up days up into 185 days so at the region that's one more day than they've currently had snow days and at the elementary level that's two more days than they currently have snow days so in terms of literally making up the days it wouldn't be like for people who are like we're going to be in school on July 4th the school year wouldn't extend much beyond where it currently is it's not fully answering the question now I promise I will get back to it the other thing they had is that there's an accountability measure that the state has tracking for chronic attendance challenges and they've stopped doing that as of March 2nd so in other words if there are absences in the school beyond March 2nd they're not attuned to the accountability measures that students schools have getting more specifically to your question we've looked at multiple scenarios we sent out a survey this afternoon specific to high school faculty trying to ascertain in terms of distance learning that's what we're calling a distance learning what are some of the barriers one of our major concerns about distance learning is students with special needs and what that looks like we called in to Desi their answer was telling us that was a really good question and that if we come up with something they'd be curious to look at it so when I say we're not getting support I think they're really busy there they call us back in the midst of this and it was a pretty high level person who called us back so we're trying to collect that data if the data shows that we should pursue it more than we would survey high school students because not every high school student has internet access we're looking at mobile hotspots and purchasing some of those if we would need to one of the data points that we already received is how many students at the high school if school ended today would have enough credits to graduate we didn't relax rules and I believe this there was 3% of students who have enough credits to graduate today who are 12th grade students that is one of the reasons we're looking at particularly at the high school some is the age of students some is that we want students whether they're walking across in a real stage or a virtual stage who knows what it'll look like hopefully we'll be in better shape we want to get students make sure students get there that's why we're starting with the high school to do this exploration we were really clear in our email that we weren't committed to doing this if we have a long-term closure but we're trying to gather and ascertain what are the barriers and what would work for all students what would work for some students and what would be compensatory services we might know and we might have to go down that road so it was pretty amazing I haven't talked to Mr. Jones and I talked about a lot of things today so this was not one of them something like that and we already had 20-30 responses when I checked about four o'clock and so we want to give people a day or two to respond to that and Mr. Champagne, Mr. Sheen and I are sort of the steering committee on that and working with Mr. Jones and we're going to ask a different set of questions likely to high school students to understand what some of their challenges would be in that scenario we're not looking at it at the pre-K to 8th level first of all because the credit recovery pieces isn't so huge but also because the applicability and just the readiness of students to use that medium I think is we really question the educational effectiveness of doing that so we are trying to prepare as best we can as particularly as it relates to the high school at the other levels we're looking at some of our existing products like Sora so at the elementary level Sora goes to our wonderful librarians but there are ways for students to continue reading and even young students to continue with read-alouds that Sora has it's an online program that students can use and perhaps how can we offer reading comprehension to other questions with that every math program does have an online component but we're not imagining like a big Google hangout where there's a formal lesson taught in the same way that we can imagine that potentially happening at the high school level I want to be honest my friends at the higher ed level have said that there's no easy fix on that either while colleges are going down that road and there's no critique here I wanted to spell anyone here in the public that I'm hearing anything other than wow we have a lot of learning to do in a short amount of time and again that's not critiquing colleges decisions to make whatever decisions they make but just because you hear people are going to it doesn't mean there aren't bumps in the road and a lot of challenges and place like Amherst College for instance there are some schools in the western part of the country where staff have been able to come in and use equipment in the school while students aren't there so you have a couple different scenarios distance learning scenario where everyone's not at school and then you have a distance learning scenario where staff are at school but students aren't so we're trying to plan through all of those but at the current time a lot of our work has been if there was a parent who was diagnosed with COVID-19 what would we do and I can't give you a clear answer because the number of contextual pieces are huge does a student have siblings has the parent been in multiple schools are there other high risk factors the matrix of decision making is really complex on that but it's a matrix we're diving into with the support of the town I also want to note that later this week the town is getting together with all departments and actually institutions that are in the town like higher education to talk through our approach more generally I'm trying to work with Jill Consolino our nurse manager, the town manager and the Julie Federman to maybe do this is going to sound really awkward perhaps but like a Facebook live event this week because what we don't want to do is have a forum and have 100 people come that's not what we're trying to do at the same time there's so much misinformation and people are so hungry for accurate information that we're trying to figure out a vehicle or a mechanism to be able to communicate to large groups of people that's live that can take live questions because if we just did like an Amherst media thing you can't maybe we could do a call in but it feels one step removed from and we have all sorts of concerns about doing it on Facebook just because of other things about Facebook but right now that's the best thinking as of 6, 7, 25 tonight about trying to get an organized event in the next week or two where we could be communicating with the public and the public can be communicating with us in a live active way so details that come on that and I'll share that but what we know is that it's an evolving situation that there'll be a gap in time from the moment we plan it to when it happens and information will change and that's why we have an active link on our website specifically for this you can see the chronology of communication as well as active other resources sorry that was long winded as well but this is what everyone's doing everything else has sort of fallen off by the wayside because this has been our real focus around student and staff safety and I want to just loop back before Ms. Spitzer has a question to remind everyone with something I said at the beginning because I can't under I can't stress it enough that we can't just think of the average healthy person in our community we have to think about the vulnerable students the vulnerable staff the students and staff with vulnerable family members the elderly including the elderly who are on that front and so when the health department is making their decisions as hard as they are and as painful as they are it's really painful today to tell people they can't go on field trips and musical production that students have been working and staff have tremendously hard on can't go on as planned that's why we're trying to think of creative solutions it's for the public health reasons and that's just really hard I met with this morning with the Senegal Gambian Scholars that we mentioned earlier that we're not doing international travel as per recommendations from the Mass Department of Public Health as well as the Governor students were wonderful in understanding it they rescheduled for fall and we'll keep our fingers crossed that this is not still an issue in fall but I really want to thank the community because the community certainly is not shy at expressing its viewpoint as they should be or should not be shy at the same time the understanding of this issue I feel like it's been incredibly well understood by the larger community and while we can disagree on certain steps there's been a really concern of fellow person in our community and beyond that has been really and I use this word lightly heartwarming heartwarming to see like the emails I've gotten that have been complaints have said I know you're doing this for these reasons have you thought of right and everyone starting from that frame to regional public schools it's larger than any of us so I just really want to thank the community for that viewpoint and framing Miss Spitzer I just had two follow up questions one is I'm assuming all of our teachers have paid sick time off but what about like substitutes or folks who may be not full time employees with union contracts are we doing anything to kind of make it financially or less stressful for them to call in sick so it's a good point and I can get back to you Miss Cunningham couldn't be here tonight and she's been managing a lot of the HR personnel side so I can't say specifically but we have not been subs have been very active the last couple days once we put out please stay home and you're sick I know that's a different question because you're asking about what if the subs are sick because I feel like if you have paid sick time as employees do which is I think something everybody should have it's easier for you to call out but I'm assuming there are people who might be working in our schools who may not have that kind of that are at-will employees and so it may be harder for them to turn down a day subbing if they're sick and don't know about the subs but it's just something I'm concerned about in general that's a really good point thank you and then my other question is I know there are a lot of kids in our schools who are food insecure like would we get the Berkshire food truck traveling maybe to communities where there would be more I don't know I'm just curious about if there's been planning around that because it seems a good beginning there's been some so one of the things and we're equally concerned about that I know some communities in California have like gotten approval from the state to be able to do food truck deliveries there's been some current concerns expressed locally about what that would look like are we using the same kitchen that we're shutting down and sanitizing and what about staff we're going house to house to do that one of the things that we have been in touch with is other community agencies like the Survival Center that in the case are there other existing mechanisms that could be expanded in the community for that instead of necessarily replacing what we're doing because some of the guidance we've gotten is a little different than what I've seen in California around doing that ourselves versus partnering with community agencies around that and I'm glad you bring that up because there are real financial ramifications I don't mean of the food but it just dawned on me to say of all the cleaning all the products we're buying and when we get to the end of third quarter budget and we get into fourth quarter we're going to have to have some active conversations about that if we indeed have to close school that's going to have both health safety food security but also financial ramifications for our district as well and we're going to do the right thing by kids because that's what we do in the public health department because they're the experts in the area but none of those things are free and I want to be really clear about that as well So I have one a smaller question but going back to the small behaviors I think it was in the first letter the small behaviors that we can be doing to keep ourselves healthy and safe and the hand washing being one and you mentioned not wanting to we can't buy lots and lots of hand sanitizer but I do what are we doing in the schools particularly in the high school and the middle school to support students washing hands before meal time Yeah, so we have it's hard to mandate that for 950 students at the high school but there's been broad encouragement around that that Mr. Jones and I have spoken about and reminders around that much like anyone else it's hard to force those behaviors on students I really think that's where some of Mr. Sheehan's lessons that were sent out this afternoon to high school faculty because I've heard from some of the high school faculty and they're pretty compelling about if someone isn't concerned they would get concerned with some of the videos around how infections grow over time and so I think the best thing we can do at the high school level is the social norms piece of what is the social norm not just saying wash your hands but actually to see the visual of infections growing over time in different areas that's the best kind of intervention that I believe at the high school level we can do for those of you who have adolescent students or adolescent children you'll know that just telling them 5 times is much less helpful than showing them the impact that it has both hand washing but also how the infection grows I never mean to put you on the spot but make sure you're invited to jump in if you'd like to Mr. Jones, I don't know if there's anything you want to again, not that you have to but anything you want to add that I'm missing Bill, I think you didn't start, but in the cafeteria I've seen students use the hand sanitizer and we had a quick walk in the building various parts of the building students and no students in our year life At the high school we don't have the capacity for 950 students to wash their hands for 20 seconds that quickly before lunch so we do have to make adjustments in the way OSHA laws work is within reason so at the elementary level we do have the capacity for every student to wash their hands for 20 seconds At the high school it's just frankly not feasible in every location, particularly in the cafeteria and that's why we've done that Thank you Thank you and now we're caught up to our I told you I would slow us down but I think just I'll end by saying we just need to keep talking about this this is not going away it's not going as a public health issue it's not going away as an area of public concern and I know based on your question tonight it's not going away as a school committee concern and certainly not going away as a concern I have and adjusting to a different flow in terms of field trips other matters is going to be a real adjustment I'll just say that meeting with my district directors who are saying I mean I can't pull all the counselors from the district together at the same time no you can't you can meet with the high school counselors you can meet with the middle school counselors so we are going to have to readjust our norms around how we do business I think it'll frankly affect central office and district staff a little more than at the building level because really what we're doing is building the work's going to happen much more at the building level than pulling groups of people together is going to slow down some district work as well it's been advisory if not for COVID-19 I probably wouldn't have been ready to present something tonight I am not ready to present something tonight and the time and energy and the bandwidth that it's taken is warranted and there's a finite amount of things that anyone can work on at once and this has been a key thing for all of us to be learning about as we go yep thank you so moving on to our next item which is the budget vote is I do not have it sure there we go this is not a terribly exciting powerpoint presentation because it's basically all slides are exactly the same as what you've seen recently there's just fewer of them my page has a little bit of cuts yeah there are a couple of changes but mostly it's pretty much exactly what you've seen can I just frame this that well the slides you have in your packet there's a page that Mr. Slaughter Dr. Slaughter and I made of motions if you remember in the past regional motions around budget tend to be for the long long and tooth and so we'll go through it but what we're going to come back to is the motions the first essentially four motions that are on the pages that follow some of the communication about coronavirus so I just want to orient folks that there's motions and then there's the slides and so the motions are wording because the state requires us to be wording in its particular language but if we could I'll just take you through the slide deck a little bit if we could so the first one we'll have here is the revenue budget so what we have here is some history involved but also and some rejection out into future years but more importantly as the column says FY21 proposed and again the sort of bottom line number of $32,639,531 has not changed I don't believe since last time what that column represents from an assessment method is to utilize we've talked about a variety of different methodologies but the 45% I don't want to say that EQV methodology so part of it is based on our sort of classic model part of it is based on our use of EQV to set the assessment amounts but it is using the 45% percentage as opposed to 50 or 40 or 30 or anyway and that's in the packet at the end of this presentation we just put that all the different methods on there so you would be able to track that we're talking about the 45% method after some of the adjustments that were done early in February so if there was any questions about it we wanted you to have accurate information of what the assessments were to each member community I am correct that there has been no agreement yet from the four towns on the assessment methods so that is true we did not have another four town meeting but I would say that I've received positive feedback from members of the communities about the 45% method with the numbers that you have in the packet we'll never know until we get to town meeting and town council how it goes particularly town meeting in some of our communities there's sometimes a gap between what elected officials in the communities perhaps prefer but people who are against seemingly every method at the last four town meeting have called me to tell me that they feel like this is fair and they can support this at their town meeting and the towns will vote how they vote and same with the town council we'll vote how it votes I don't want to preclude that it's just a little different process with the town council than it is at a town meeting so again the changes so I'll point out a couple of things we changed the transportation reimbursement up to 800,000 we have some better numbers relative to sort of performance by the state this year so that's gone up a little bit that reduced the burden across the board for everyone the I'm trying to think of any other changes that's the primary one on this slide and so I think that that takes care of that and if we switch to the next slide we have a the ultra condensed version of the expense budget so we have our salaries coming in over just shy of $18 million with some increase in price or significant increase from a year to year standpoint for substitutes and that's primarily driven by the change to minimum wage that we want to accommodate that and so that causes us to put about a 5% increase in our substitute line our expense accounts which carry in a variety of expenses but in particular some of the larger ones are things like our health insurance costs are in there and so again those are in place so that overall change on 11th Slurs' standpoint is at 2.5% overall we have a series of additions and reductions which we'll show on the next slide and that brings it down to the budget that is the total we'll ask you to vote on tonight and you can see it's a 1.47% increase over last year's budget or the current year's budget I should say again not a wild set of changes from what we looked at before relative to the expenses that we've been looking at for the coming year and if you go to the next slide I'll actually defer to you to go through this part so I'm only going to talk about a couple of these and I'll take questions for any but I'll talk about the ones that I have one that's small one that's new but others that there were questions about last time so alternative funding sources to be really clear that's UMass based on the agreement with the university and the district and then through the town of Amherst that was announced maybe two weeks ago something like that and the regional share of that which is $15,000 which we'll receive both this fiscal year the current one next one and the one after and then we'll have to be renegotiated one thing that you haven't seen before unless you've been in the Amherst school committee is because it's connected is a coordinated environmental action analysis so this is working with both the town of Amherst the Amherst public schools the regional share is a little smaller given our budget constraints to have a a firmer person work with us about energy improvements and to work with us not on the large scale projects like Uncapital but our routine energy efficiency some with expertise and pulling the money both from the regional budget the Amherst budget and the town we feel like it's sufficient for someone to be working with us on that the next one I'd like to speak to is the world language cut which should be termed a little differently and I'll explain why and so we've had a declining number we have a declining enrollment at our secondary level and as a result we've had a declining enrollment in French and so this year for instance at the high school we have two French teachers teaching one study hall each because there wasn't a need for them to teach five classes based on the current enrollment so what this really is we went for it's taking away two study halls from the high school that were added because we didn't have enough student demand to fill a full complement of French courses so there is some personnel pieces that we're working through of how to support staff from a student perspective it's reducing study halls that were unanticipated the number of study halls we were able to offer this year it's not actually reducing a world language section in any language what are those French teachers doing if they're not covering the study hall we're working through with the French teachers and because it's pretty identifiable HR, the principal and the department head are working through some alternatives around how to perhaps cover other classes or other languages or working with staff to become licensed in more than one world language which is not atypical but that's an active conversation that human resource is leading with staff but from a budgetary perspective it's essentially cutting two study halls which we didn't anticipate having until that played out after the budget last spring when students enrolled and we looked at the core class sizes and what the needs were the last one which I haven't been that I want to be a little more clear about much of this comes from revising the middle school administrative model so right now we have a co-principal ship which I think we shared last year has an additional expense we're currently searching for a principal right now and that search is ongoing the principal will hire an assistant principal going back to the school year assistant principal that the middle school typically had over the last six or seven years and so there's significant savings from that model change so there's some other savings around the edges but that's the primary part of the savings for that administrative production and I think I'll open to any questions on this list but that's what I wanted to add from where we were last time Mr. Jenner we have questions one on the grade 6 to 12 math curriculum training and support so we've talked about this a little bit the last couple of meetings and my understanding from a couple of meetings ago was if we had the budget then the appropriate educationally preferred level of that position would be 0.8 FTE is that given the year of the implementation is that correct? it is I want to be clear that when I said 0.8 I'm talking about 6 to 12 which is a regional budget so right now it's funded at 0.4 from the region and 0.2 at the elementary level so it's funded at 0.6 and I think if we were able to find a way I think for that extra year I think the implementation has went smoothly because of that position and I'd like to fade it a little slower than what we're being forced to do Mr. Jenner I'll get back to that later but the second question is on the coordinated environmental action analysis could you talk a little bit more about that because so this is like the third or fourth environmental slash green slash renewable energy item that has come across our deck and I constantly struggle with on the one hand you know I support the principle you know the ideal and I'm grateful to live in a town where we in region where we don't have the argument about crisis should we be dealing with it and yet we have fiscal scarcity so to me the question ultimately comes down to with a lot of these things is the same question how do we get the most carbon reduction bang for a limited resource and I feel bad questioning investments in specific things again and again when I can't answer that question and this seems like a pretty small amount so I'm just wondering what the total is towns and what the scope is right so I can't answer the question because I don't think they presented their budget I'm looking at town council right now but I don't think the town has presented their budget currently for the schools combined between the Amherst and region and I'm a little foggy on Amherst I want to say it was more like $5,000 but I'd have to go back and loop back and double check is that when we have questions when our facilities director has questions the same ones you just asked what's the most bang for a buck this list of projects that I'd like to do that there is a someone who can answer those questions and do that analysis and support that work it's not a replacement for capital investments in longer term studies but there are routine day to day things that come up all the time some of them don't even get discussed broadly at school committee because they're within the facilities budget and our facilities director frankly he drives an electric car he's very invested in green technology and yet he's also got a day job and so the idea is to have someone who can help support us in those decision making matrices about what's the most bang for a buck there's five different ways we can go someone with a background experience who can support us in that way you know when I talked about with the town manager I think he's supportive of supporting that and that there are no shortage of people who can support us in that with people with background experience and hard science data knowledge not necessarily just what feels like a good idea to someone like me who's very much a novice at this that's the best I can offer at the moment so I think it's still in development you can hear that in the way I described it but we really want to get the ball rolling with this and not have it just be capital projects that are big but also our routine practices a minor point has nothing to do with the budget could you consider using the current logo for the elementary school I will work on getting the new logo in place I just thought I'd mention that it's important it's a borrowed slide deck template I understand just comment I use it as often as I can Miss Spitzer I just want to say I'm happy to see that we are thinking big picture about how we can be more sustainable or environmentally friendly I'm wondering too if there's an opportunity at the end of the just to get by some of the other stakeholders it seems like before we actually engage with this person I'm not sure what point in time but at some point I think it would be really great to harness the energy from the students who are doing the water bottle filtration and the energy from other organizations and stakeholders in our community to have a little bit of a say in what they find or at least find a way to share that hopefully we'll inform when we're not dealing with COVID-19 but it just seems like it would be nice to bring it together with the folks in the community who are really invested in this we're lucky to have a lot of people who are fully agreed we want to move to capital so excuse me the capital projects list is not different from what you've last seen but what I did want to point out to you on this slide in particular because it has color there are projects that are funded from other revenue sources for example infrastructure improvements of $10,000 there's a revolving fund so folks that use the pool pay in a fee we collect that into a revolving fund that we use for the purposes of maintaining our pool likewise with the summit or the southeast campus renovations that should say summit really but and with the on the far right there field improvements we have $200,000 I've been out at several community preservation committee meetings I was in Leverett just the other day I'll be in Shootsbury on Thursday seeking the approval and they're putting it to the townspeople to use CPA funds to provide that support to get our fields project moving forward and then the parking access and repaying that $30,000 again we collect small number fees from students for parking we put that into a revolving fund that we use to repair those and so those are all identified sources for those the remainder of those will be of the projects that are there are scheduled to be borrowing and so there's an appropriate assessment to each of the member towns for that total of $425,000 in total we'll borrow it probably next year we will not see those hit the books from the standpoint of assessment dollars needed from the communities until fiscal 22 so the assessment amounts for capital that you will see will be for projects we've already done or in process of finishing as we speak and recently we went to the not the bond market but the band market to borrow the band is a stand for bond authorization note it's a short term borrowing that you do you can kind of continue to do that multiple times if you don't want to actually bond something we got a very nice rate of 1.54% on the band for this year and so if we get to a place for example if the opportunity to take on the middle school roof project comes to fruition this year we may then bond it and roll in the band into the bond so there's a lot of different moving pieces on this but nonetheless this will be new borrowing that we will do probably in fiscal 21 being assessed beginning to be assessed in fiscal 22 but the amounts that you'll see I think maybe on the next slide I'm maybe not if I had another slide but certainly in the motions have the actual assessments to member towns and that set of assessments is based on the current borrowing so we had projections probably in the fall which we're just a smidge higher because we know we're going to borrow that so tiny bit smaller not wildly smaller but a little bit smaller than what you may have seen in November when Mr. Mangano may have presented those to you and I'm having to answer questions as best I can about any of the particular projects if you have any of those as well I want to note that this isn't this has all been shared with the towns and it's not a change from prior presentations okay sorry you said that in your own way but I just want to be super clear about it may I stand sir about the $200,000 for the study for the grounds if we don't get the $200,000 all together from the towns what's the next plan so I've answered this at every CPC or CPAC meeting and we'll continue to answer this question which is fine it's a imminently appropriate question to ask because you know different towns will make different decisions potentially about this so first and foremost is that $200,000 is not likely depending on a series of choices you guys will make probably in the next six months or so or eight months will not likely cover all of the design and engineering necessary to go to construction plans so it'll be part of that if we get some portion of the $200,000 then we will scale our first phase of design and engineering based on what we get and then we'll craft a new plan based on where we're at at that point but you know I fully and I'll say this now and I've said it at each of the meetings I fully respect each town's decision making process around that and what they feel is best for their community and what they can afford or not afford nice thing about the CPA money is that it's got some state funding match that helps reduce the immediate burden of taxpayers in your community and yet still gets us our recreational facilities there's lots of concerns because it physically sits inside the confines of the town of Amherst and I appreciate that but it's owned by each of the four communities so and the public has access to it so we're not going to deny people access to those fields once they're once they're updated to a new status so it's not a straightforward easy question I think everybody's each town evaluate and make their vote count would go to town meeting or town council but basically what you're saying is that we would just scale back the initial planning process if we had to that's right that's right because we haven't voted and there isn't a line in here for any other monies from from our usual capital process for that so all right thank you Mr. Demond I just want to briefly comment that it might seem strange that we're going through the assessment method and the capital and the budget without a lot of you know lively questions but so if you're I feel like this is one of those regional topics where it's the last step in a very long process and you know the reason is because we've been meeting on this since last fall and we've had many lively discussions about capital and assessment method and budget and so not that we're completely exhausted but you know it is I think so sometimes you know it would be a little funny if you're watching from the public's point of view for the first time all this stuff just sort of goes by in 15 minutes and I mean it's actually it's been a long road right the flash was earlier you know as far as the presentations and the information and that's where stuff was earlier and it is it's a long process it's you know it's a fairly complicated process so it takes a number of meetings to sort of paint the picture and get feedback and negotiate the limitations and opportunities that are available so it does seem rather anticlimactic to me at this point but at the same time it's good to be here too at least from my perspective it is Questions? Is this the end? Yes So I'm inclined to approve the budget with the exception of changing the FTE of the math curriculum support cut from 0.6 to 0.8 and then offsetting that with a corresponding reduction of what we contribute to the Special Ed Stabilization Fund so if we if my math is right please correct me if it's not that would be 13,000 and so the contribution to the Special Ed Stabilization Fund would be 85,798 and then we would kick the FTE of the curriculum support up to 0.8 and you know so the reason I say this I mean I think I get that the need to get that fund up Special Ed Stabilization Fund so it's not it's not without cost to refill that to 0.8 FTE but you know I think back about what we've done with math curriculum over the years at the region and depending on how you count this has been almost an eight-year process depending where you start the finish line from the middle school, the high school influx, the 9p and all that and it just has so many touch points with so many of the subgroups that we talk about all the time you know Special Ed this came up at the seatback meeting we had a good discussion about it as well and I just feel like if you know we feel like it's it's it is going well and we have confidence that this is a resource that's going to solidify this for you know for the coming many years that it's worthwhile you know so long as the superintendent didn't feel like that the level of reduction in the stabilization fund that 13,000 wasn't such a negative impact and so you know I guess I'd like to hear a point of view on that that's that's that's the only change that I would like us to consider I'd be amenable to that change you know I wouldn't want to go much below I wouldn't want to go below 85,000 you know our goal was to fund Special Ed stabilization at the regional level where if a student came in who was a residential who would need special needs required residential support that we'd be able to fund that I don't think the 13,000 dollars is going to make or break that piece we start going below 85 then I start getting concerned that we're not committed to funding that I think I agree with Mr. Demling's point about the value of the met support of the math implementation that if that's not done well it's no matter how great our curriculum is it's all about the implementation and that support's been really incredibly valuable in making this year be a smooth one even though it's kind of a very quick process so I'm amenable to that if the committee so chooses if I may so just to paint the picture a little bit for you so we've been able to contribute to that stabilization fund both in fiscal 19 and fiscal 20, 98,000 dollars so the current balance is a little over 196,000 there's a wee bit of interest in there and so the difference between funding it at 98,000 versus funding it at 85,000 is making the balance up to 294,000 versus 281,000 and the thing is as Dr. Morris spoke to those placements that's the right neighborhood for the larger more expensive placements it's a defined thing it depends on the kid in the actual placement but that's in the right ballpark as far as getting to that place and so that just paints the picture of where the balance is it's not like we're 25,000 we're trying to really ramp it up we're kind of on the place of getting to your full funding for that just like a clarification of why you didn't recommend the larger amount originally larger amount for the math it's a really good question I was trying to be if you think about where we were two months from now two months ago we were in pretty fiscally constrained situation with towns that weren't coming to any clear agreement about the budget so I think I constrained it I think Mr. Demling's idea is a good one and I you know I support it but it was coming from the place of trying to get four towns to agree on a budget that in you were at those four town meetings it didn't look entirely clear like we had a pathway and trying to create a pathway I think do that and then not let us off the hook for the specialist stabilization I imagine this is the last year we'll fund this budget adjustment next year because we wanted to get in the neighborhood of $275,000 because that's it doesn't there are some students who's out of district placements maybe a little more than that but that's a pretty safe place holder so that if we do have a student who moves into the district whose education costs that much we can manage that year and deal with the year after without freezing budgets because that's really what we don't we want to avoid at all costs so hopefully that answers the question. Any other? Mr. Deming. This is a separate topic I didn't want to forget about so this came up during public comment about the possibility of one of our member towns essentially gifting us resources for a solar study of a different variety than what's in this budget so this would be looking at parking lot canopies. It's a funny topic for me to think about during an open meeting because I'm a member of that other committee but the presentation was submitted and we haven't discussed or voted on that as Ms. Spitzer so just thinking about that with my regional hat on, given that the question was asked I guess I would have a hard time saying no to funds that were offered to us essentially gifted from the town to investigate something that we would probably want to investigate anyway in an ideal world that would hopefully happen within the broader context of that best bang for our buck kind of where are we utilizing those funds to get the most sustainable but just from a pure regional school committee point of view I don't know any of the legalities about accepting gifts and such but there's a superintendent to my right who has his hand up. Stop speaking. So this came up for a different reason in the past and so I did a different school committee member to inquire about the legality and basically the legality operates the same as any gift that would come to the school committee so if a municipality or an individual wants to gift something to the school committee as you know they can make a gift for a specific purpose they can make an unrestricted thank you gift and it would be up to the school committee whether to accept it but there's nothing legally that would preclude of course a school committee to accept a gift from the municipality it could even be a municipality that isn't in the region it operates the same way as any other person, individual, corporation or not for profit that it would be up to the regional school committee whether it wanted to accept the gift but it certainly could. So can I just ask to help me understand so that is not included that we're voting on tonight that's a completely separate it would be a gift like the last agenda item at every single meeting that we have that you have gifts that are approved or donations that are come and it goes to the treasurer and it's up to the school committee whether they would like to accept it or not I guess my question is but that we're not we don't need to, we probably can't be discussing a potential gift in this meeting right now. It is not on the agenda and it's not on the gifts category at the end. One question just from related but could you provide clarity because it came up again in that meeting about my understanding is the parking and access roads through paving at the high school was limited it's not a fully redoing the parking lot it's just patching up the holes and making it more usable but the section of the parking lot it's the one we can orient it that direction out in front of the building and particularly essentially the driving lane that's closest to the sort of embankment that's the most sort of torn up they're actually going to take it down to I believe basically to the underneath gravel and re-pitch it so that it drains properly because part of the issue has to do with drainage so they're going to re-pitch that and then repaid it so it's just that section really with a lot that sort of driving lane is really all that's going to get done for that there are continuing and existing needs for both the middle school and the high school parking lot that would be much more significant can we get a ballpark do you have a ballpark about that one that's been discussed that I have a number for not that's very helpful but the middle school parking lot I think the side on the district offices side I think $60,000 was the number for that and that was not take it down to the gravel and re-do it that was take a layer off and repaid which is a pretty significant and helpful level of repair but that was about $60,000 and if you think about the area is a little bit more than twice the size of this one but it's not as in depth of of a reclaiming and resurfacing processes we'll have up here so that gives you kind of an order of magnitude I think but I don't have any better numbers than that I'm going to ask for advice on how we handle Mr. Demlings earlier ask about switching the contribution to the special ed stabilization sure so there's actually four votes we're asking for from this agenda item so if you look at the vote stage the first one is about assessment methods so that would be unaffected by Mr. Demlings' motion the second one would be affected the further voted part would be affected and so I think what I would recommend from a process perspective is that when it says voted to adopt a budget of it would be adopt a budget I think the language I would recommend would be consistent with the district presentation and the amendment made by Mr. Demling or the suggestion made by Mr. Demling and then the further voted at the bottom would go to 85,000 instead of 98 but I think then for the record would note that it's consistent with what was presented with that with that change the other two votes the debt assessment and capital plan bond authorization would be unaffected as well by the discussion that Mr. Demling and gender and one other question it's two-thirds majority of those present it is is the answer I have a question somebody who want to read our motion Mr. Demling moved to amend section 6 of the Amherst Pellum Regional School District Agreement by adding subsection J as follows for fiscal year 2021 only the alternative operating budget assessment shall be calculated as 45% of a 5-year average of minimum contributions with the remainder of the assessment allocated to the member towns in accordance with the per-people method found in section 6E of the Amherst Pellum Regional School District Agreement a 5-year average of minimum contributions will include the five most recent years or take any other action relative there to moved second second second by Spitzer all those in favor signify yes by raising your hand 6 to 0 another motion I suppose I can move I moved to adopt a budget consistent with the district's presentation with the change suggested by Mr. Demling for fiscal year 2021 for the Amherst Pellum Regional School District and to assess member towns according to the method in the just approved amendment as follows Amherst $16,798,875 Pellum $913,777 Leverett $1,507,955 and Schuetsbury $719,197 second moved in second all those in favor signal yes just a quick motion question does that need to be part of this motion this in further moved or can that be a separate motion I think a separate motion probably makes sense okay and is it okay that we didn't mention the sum total at the beginning of $32,639,531 I would recommend that there's an amendment to the motion to include that that might not be the right language I'm not a Roberts rules person so I apologize Mr. Demling I moved to amend the motion to state adopt a budget of $32,639,531 second and second in so we're voting on the motion to amend the previous motion all those in favor signal yes by raising your hand 6 to 0 and now we'll vote on the prior now amended motion all those in favor signal by raising your hand 6 yes do we have another motion Mr. Demling I moved that the I moved that the district excuse me skipped ahead I moved to assess member towns for debt service on previously approved projects according we have a further voted to do before that sorry let me start again I move that included within this budget proposal is a contribution of $85,000 to the special education stabilization fund second moved in second all those in favor signal yes by raising your hand 6 to 0 Mr. Demling just a procedural thing because sometimes I forget what I'm going to say before we vote after we do like a second if you could just call for is there any further discussion 9 times out of 10 there isn't because we've had the discussion before the motion but occasionally something will pop in when I have that do we have another motion Mr. Dancer I move that we assess member towns for debt service on previously approved projects according to the debt schedule for fiscal year 21 as follows Amherst $342,141 Pellum $27,540 Leverett $40,456 and Schuetsbury $33,357 second are there any further discussion seeing none all those in favor signal yes by raising your hand 6 to 0 who gets excited to read the last one Mr. Demling I move that the district I move that the district hereby appropriates the sum of $425,000 for the purpose paying costs of the following projects including the payment of all costs incidental or related there too 1. High school exhaust fans in the amount of $45,000 2. HVAC modifications for Summit Academy and PIP in the amount of $50,000 3. Renovations in the high school girls locker room in the amount of $15,000 4. Renovations of the walking cooler and freezer at the high school in the amount of $45,000 5. Replacement of AC chillers at the middle school in the amount of $100,000 6. Makerspace renovations at the middle school in the amount of $50,000 7. District-wide solar PV study in the amount of $15,000 8. District-wide ADA improvements in the amount of $50,000 9. District-wide asbestos abatement and management in the amount of $20,000 10. District-wide access control upgrades in the amount of $15,000 11. Grounds improvements at the high school in the amount of $15,000 said some to be expended at the direction of the regional school district school committee. To meet this appropriation, the district treasurer is authorized to borrow said amount under and pursuant to Chapter 71, Section 16D of the General Laws and the District Agreement as amended or pursuant to any other enabling authority any premium received upon the sale of any bonds or notes approved by this vote, less any such premium applied to the payments of the costs of issuance of such bonds or notes may be applied to the payment or of costs approved by this vote in accordance with Chapter 44 Section 20 of the General Laws thereby reducing the amount authorized to be borrowed to pay such costs by a like amount, and I further move that within 48 hours from the date of which this vote is adopted, the Secretary be and hereby is instructed to notify the Board of Selectment of each of the member towns of the district in writing as to the amount and general purposes of the debt herein authorized as required by Chapter 71 Section 16D of the General Laws and by the District Agreement. In addition the committee shall cause the same information to be published within 10 days after such authorization as a paid notice and a newspaper circulating in the district. Is there a second? Second. Is there any further discussion? Mr. Sullivan. I was waiting for that. I just want to say thank you that we got the 15,000 for the looking at the renovations of the gross locker room, but it actually won't happen until 2025. Any further discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor signally yes by raising your hand. Six to zero. Thank you. Moving on to our next item the Bus Contract approval. And this is a vote as well. I was hoping he would introduce it a little bit. But I will instead. It's pretty straightforward at this point. So we put out a bid for bus services. We do this every actually five years. We do a three-year contract with two one-year extensions. We had the bid opening in early January. There were two qualified bidders. Traditionally we've had two companies win the two different parts of the bid. This year a single company won both parts of the bid. Which is why there's a single contract in front of you with the five-star transportation company out of Southwick, I believe. And so we bring it to you for a vote of approval and then we'll ultimately need signatures from all of you. Simultaneously we've sent this to the bus company for their signature as well. We are under a little bit of a time constraint. So once the bid's open and the determination of the winner has been declared, then there's a 60-day time window. I think we have until early April to actually get it all signed sealed. In that regard, I want to say the 8th or 9th of April which would be 60 days. So taking care of this now we'll make sure we're well within our deadline. They answer any questions about the contract itself if people have them. Mr. Deming. Not being a contract expert, is there anything in here that you saw that was substantially different or out of the ordinary from our previous bus contract? No. We make very, very, very, very few changes other than just, you know, we refine things like the mileage that we know to be the case or the needs for the district. And the bidders were aware of that from the start. So the format of it is not really changed just from previous contracts. I will say just for informational purposes and this wasn't surprising because my predecessor, Mr. Mangado, had anticipated a fairly significant increase in price. You know, over the subsequent years, we'll go up by a cost of living index basically, a consumer price index change year to year which in our last contract there was actually a year that went down. Partly due to that, partly due to changes in other aspects of costs that businesses take on and anticipating a fairly modest increase over the, you know, in two years the bids came in significantly higher. So overall on the contract, about 10% higher than what we're paying this year. So it was a pretty significant jump, a little harder on the section of routes that cover leverages. That jumped much, much more than that. I had a good conversation with the administrators on both leverages about why it went up as much as it did but it went up quite a bit. They had a price index, I mean the price cost went up, but also the way in which we attribute those costs also worked against them. So their increase was really significant and really it's going to be difficult for them, I understand that. But nonetheless, you know, the impact on this budget was in about the 10% range or so as far as increase. So it was a pretty significant increase. Fortunately our predictions in our budgeting was close to that. So you didn't see wild changes in budget relative to this, but nonetheless it was a significant change from our current year contract. As far as cost. Mr. Seline? You answered my first question already and the second one is where will the buses be and how are they coming on away from Southwick or are they going to be a lot closer than that? There's some constraints within the contract about how close they have to be. They actually have a facility off of Rocky Hill Road if I'm not mistaken right over by the, there's a storage place there across from the UMass stadium. So I think most of them will be there. But there is a certain response time if something breaks down that they have to be able to meet. So they'll have some, even if they bring some from a further distance they'll have to have some there for the purposes of meeting that requirement. Ms. Fitzer? Two questions related to our earlier conversation. Are fuel costs included in this, or do we bear the fluctuations in the cost of fueling the buses? Fuel costs are built in. Okay, because they've just dropped. Dropped. A lot. Right. Just something. And then the other thing is I would note, not have been asking this two weeks ago, but in the event that we are not transporting students because we are not holding classes is there anything built into the contract that would allow us to not have to pay for the services that we're not using? So I think we will have to have some conversations with them about it because I think it changes things a little bit. Generally, they bill us for essentially services rendered. So if they're not driving, they are contracted for a certain number of days of driving. And if they drive fewer days, because like the superintendent was talking about, the seat says, well, you just have to meet that 185 that you set out so June 22nd, I think it's the last day if we use all our snow days. And yet we close for two weeks, there's 10 fewer days of driving. I think that begs the series of questions that we need to figure out because and I think, you know, we'll ask that, you know, that's not a contingency written in the contract. So we'll have to look at our contract language in particular around that. And then we'll also have to look at what the state's guidance is relative to that and what their expectations are. And we'll go from there. Thanks. I hate to throw a wrench into the works, but the Spitzers just make a couple really good points. So would it be more prudent to ask questions before we sign the contract? I mean, I know you just said we're under a time crunch, but I'm just wondering if, given what's happening, we have to look at kind of like, you know, outside the box scenarios, right? And so are we going to box ourselves into a position that's less fiscally advantageous if we sign this contract now and then ask for leniency? Well, I think it's a valuable question to ask because this contract takes effect, you know, and so, you know, COVID-19 may be with us in the fall and next winter. So I think it's a salient question to ask. And to be perfectly blunt, I just don't know the detail of the contract at that level to know. We might have a very clear answer on that. So it's, you know, we do have the latitude of a meeting in a week or two weeks, two weeks, which would still sort of fit within the timeframe of the requirement we have relative to when the bids were open. It's at the committee's, you know, discretion as to whether they choose to vote on this tonight or not. If you want that question answered, we can certainly get that answer where you can vote it and then I can just inform you about what the situation is. You know, the, whether it's covered by the language of the bid may influence whether we can alter the contract or not as well. So we may be stuck kind of either way. I'm not sure. It can't hurt to delay. Yeah, I get, yeah, if it's a matter of just getting an update and then potentially approving the contract or not, I guess I would be more comfortable with that getting as much information as we can about what our options are there. Sure. And you know, the fuel cost question is another one that I don't know how much we'll be able to definitively answer. But if we are in a case where that global price has just dropped way down and we're locking in something for a six-year contract, it may be prudent to reevaluate that. I don't know. I don't want to try and time the market, blah, blah, blah, but you know, just a pause if it's not going to impact our ability to close on the contracts on screen. So there's a couple of things I would offer relative to that. There's also a few years ago, if you recall, that gas went from you know, $1.75 to like $4 a gallon. We didn't have to pay, you know, that where it sort of lags a little bit but is factored in is in that cost consumer price index. So if energy prices, particularly oil prices drop and stay low, the overall you know, effect on economy is such that it may cause that to reduce our price. So it lags and it's not an immediate one-to-one sort of linear relationship, but nonetheless, there's some aspect of it captured there as a component piece of that. But certainly have to provide more clarity later. Mr. Sullivan. Just want to mention that diesel prices don't usually fluctuate and drop as hard as gasoline prices do. Can I ask one clarifying question? Councillor, what date by I think we have till April 8th or 9th to perfectly sign. We still have one way to the other. A little bit of wiggle room. So am I hearing that we want to get those questions answered before we vote? Yes. So I'm just going to reiterate the questions, make sure I get it right. So if we have fewer days of school and more contracted days, is one question sort of what's is sort of what happens relative to that? What's our obligation to pay for days that we don't use? The second would be just to provide greater clarity around the price of fuel and its impact. Was there another one? Mr. Debye. Yeah, I guess, again, not to throw a wrench in the floor. I guess what I'm thinking out loud is if I don't know what the price is for the fuel that these buses use just to be clear. But if there was a recent sharp drop in that, would it be more advantageous to renegotiate the contract at a lower price point? Is that even possible? What are the variables there that we have to you know? Dr. Morris. Yeah, so I think the challenge with that is that it was an open bid process. So our ability to renegotiate something that was from a bid process like breaking procurement law is, my guess is somewhat limited. You could correct me if I'm wrong, Dr. Slaughter. I think the other part about missing days since it's sort of the bid process was silent on it it might be opportunity to have that conversation be clarified, but I think the other piece would be re-bidding the whole thing. Just in fairness to all the companies because it's not just the price point got lower for one company it's getting lower across the board. Right. So we're asking for clarity. Thank you. Thank you. Moving on to warrant review. Is that Ms. Spitzer? Yes. Warrant review was before school choice. Can I just clarify you handed me all of the warrants that I have some that I had copies of previously and then you gave me a package. I think you handed you all of them. That would be wonderful. You will also include some that were signed by Mr. Fonch. Okay. Is it important that I distinguish that? Distinguish that? The reporting is about the amount of money spent from what sources. And we're doing it page by page rather than summarizing. Bear with me. On March 2nd of 2020 I authorized a transfer request for $17,000 and $840.92 to replenish so from it was a funds transfer from the student activity master account to replenish funds expended from the principal student activity account and again that was on March 2nd of 2020. On February 20th of 2020 I authorized a request to move $244 to be transferred from the district treasurer's student activity master account to replenish funds expended from the principal student activity account. I also authorized by signature to payables in the amount of $104,580 sorry $387.50 for the warrant dated March 3rd of 2020 this included general fund expenses of $61,617.09 revolving fund expenses of $12,902.27 and grant fund expenses of $29,754.04 and other funds in the amount of $1,100 excuse me $114.10 for SH gifts which SH was senior high that was dated March 2nd of 2020 this was authorized by Kip Fonch to payables in the amount of $6,268.04 for the warrant dated February 3rd, 2020 this included general fund expenses of $6,268 $6,268.04 also on February 14th, 2020 Kip Fonch authorized by signature to payables in the amount of $212,543.69 for the warrant dated February 14th, 2020 this included general fund expenses of $207,952.35 revolving fund expenses of $4,212.50 and other funds in the amount of $378.84 for senior high gifts authorized by my signature to payables in the amount of $612,903.81 for the warrant dated February 20th, 2020 this included general fund expenses of $606,078.81 revolving fund expenses of $500 and grant fund expenses of $6,325.01 I also authorized by my signature to payables in the amount of $88,261.60 for the warrant dated February 25th, 2020 this included general fund expenses of $67,939.32 revolving fund expenses of $14,688.28 and grant fund expenses of $5,255 and other fund expenses of $379.00 for high school gifts. Dr. Slagg. Just to add one thing. So the first couple that she read were transfers related to student activities just as a reminder in case you forgotten. Our student activities funds sit in sort of two accounts. We have a savings account. So when funds are collected by virtual fundraising or gifts to those student activities they sit in that. We try to the sort of checking account that we sort of spend money out of we try to keep a limit on how much is held in there so as to manage the cash flow and to make sure that our principles are taken care of that conscientious way but it requires to move money from one to the other requires your permission that's why it's there. The reason to bring this up as a reminder is that if around some of the changes to what we're doing related to COVID-19 we may have to refund people who have paid into us student activities funds so there may be more of these kind of transfers that come up reimbursing people and that will create a bit more of a volume of outflow so we'll need to move stuff from savings which is where it sits now so I just want to give you a heads up that may occur as we move ahead and see how it plays out. Thank you. Next on our agenda is our school choice vote. So that is also on the same page of warrant items or not warrant items excuse me vote items that was mentioned earlier as I expressed last week at the hearing my recommendation is to not accept new school choice students and to be very clear that would still net an increase of school choice students because of the number of school choice students coming from our four communities and that are currently 6th grade students that we're already seeing an increase of about 14 from the current year just based on graduating 12th graders and then incoming 7th graders from next year current school choice students would remain in our district and 6th grade students who are in any of our member communities would be welcomed into 7th grade but we don't see ourselves having slots without increasing class size beyond the natural flow so I'd rather not have false hopes for community members and family members from other communities who apply for school choice if we actually don't indeed plan to take any so that is my recommendation for you to consider. Mr. Minino. My understanding this is a one-year vote it does not imply a change in policy of any guy. That is correct every year actually the default setting if you don't vote is your district is school choice going to state regs and you have to vote every year otherwise the default sort of takes over and I would not imagine to your point that this is a change in practice I think it's looking at just a one-year anomaly of 6th graders and the students across our four towns our school choice and their community then flowing to the 7th grade and a pretty low 12th grade. Any other discussion? Do we have a motion? Mr. Devlin. I move to not accept new school choice students in the 2020-2021 school year other than those coming from the four sending elementary school districts. Second. Second. Seconded by Mr. Minino Mr. Devlin. Any further discussion? Mr. Devlin. I just want to say I appreciate the school choice program and the families that contribute to our community that some of them are most active in our PGOs and like Dr. Morris said this is a numbers thing for this year but certainly doesn't change my philosophy or approach to the program which is it allows us to add hundreds of thousands of dollars of services every year to our budget and in addition to welcoming lots of new and diverse community which is win-win so. All those in favor of the motion please signal yes by raising your hand. Six to zero. I've got to make up time in the next one as well. Moving on to student opportunity act plan. This is a very brief one so as part of the student opportunity act that was passed by the legislature in the fall every district regardless of whether they're getting any anticipated new funds or not is required to complete a student opportunity act plan. What you see is the template which is stuff by our clerical staff. Of course it's like a horrific form that gets documented sent to a desi but this looks a little nicer and we wanted to look nicer because we put it in the newsletter last week. It was also sent to CPAC for discussion at their meeting across all three districts. The region is not anticipating having significantly more funding as a result of the student opportunity act. That's not a critique of the act. If you were in Holyoke or Springfield or Brockton you'd see significant amounts of new aid coming in. The way the state set it out is any district that was receiving over $1.5 million in new aid had a long form. We are not close to that group so we have a short form which is intended to be two pages. They had an exemplar which I followed so we sent it out to the larger community. We sent it to CPAC for their feedback. LPAC is not meeting in a timeline. It does need to be voted by every district in the month of March. I don't think we need to belabor the topic tonight. If any committee members have feedback before the next meeting they can communicate that to me. I'll also be looking at the feedback I received from the larger community which I think frankly has its mind on other things at the moment but we did communicate it out all three districts last week. I actually think I want to give the state credit. I know I said some negative things about perhaps some in the past. I think this was a little achievable form that asked the right questions and focused superintendents to focus on or got the students pushes superintendents to focus on what are critical subgroups in the community that need additional support for the school to be successful and what's an active plan to do that. I really compliment the state for coming up with a reasonable plan. I'm unaware but I heard from a legislator that perhaps charter schools have a different timeline and expectations around this. I don't know but there may be people in the committee who want to look at this but from my perspective other than the timeline being too quick to complete these, fortunately we did district based strategic planning last year and that could be integrated into a lot of this work. It's really just an update for the committee and the community. It's been shared out with the larger all the staff and families in the community and if there's any feedback individual committee members want to give me. You can certainly give it to me now but feel free to contact me anytime next meeting but I just wanted to at least share publicly that it does need to be voted before the end of the month. That's it. I have to ask is it useful to assess what the charter schools motivations may be for supporting this or not? You mean why their timeline might be different? I heard that from a legislator Friday I was unaware of that opinion. I have not verified I'm knee deep in other things so I've not verified the validity of that but I just know given the topic of charter schools has come up in a variety of ways on this committee that people might be interested at least to find out if that assertion is true. Assertion excuse me is true but I apologize I did not get I plan to get to that before tonight's meeting and it didn't happen. Ms. Dancer. On the top of the page where you have the two items for commitment three what is extended engagement rate? So that is another way to measure students who stay with our school so for instance there are students who don't graduate our school at age 18 and yet they stay engaged with school activities so for instance they may be students who are still trying to pass the MCAS they may be students with special needs that continue on extended services beyond 18 so it's another desi metric that accounts for students who may not have passed the MCAS but haven't dropped out. So it's a different way to calculate that. Thank you. Any further questions? Comments? Moving on to public comment management so this is a conversation we do have a policy that's very general about public comment and I think the purpose of tonight's discussion is to talk about how we're implementing that policy and how we're executing that in our meetings. Ms. Dancer. Question. Just being on the committee this year where is the three-minute time for comment come from? Do we set that or is that a kind of a standard for public comment and meetings? I'm not suggesting we extend it, I'm just wondering how that got set. Mr. Denley. So it's in our policy it's our policy BEDH on the website and it says speakers generally will be allowed a maximum of three minutes to speak and its chair's discretion can change that length but speakers generally it's been written in our policy who knows who decided that's what it should be. I think it's pretty standard with open meeting law or it's the general practice of open meetings public comment unless they say otherwise the kind of default practices three minutes. Yes. Just one comment. I think that when you say you announced that it's time for the public comment because we have people perhaps watching from home who have not seen this before to explain that we do not reply to public comments. I think that would be a good piece to add. I also think sometimes people sitting out there are expecting something and it doesn't happen so I think that would be good to add. Mr. Dimley? Generally speaking given the policy is very broad and differs to the chair's discretion I just think a consistent application of how we apply the rules and the expectations would be helpful and I think the chair did that tonight with setting up the expectation about sharing of time in three minutes because the reality of the situation is that we have vast majority of people that will work within the rules and I've been up there before myself, before I was on the school committee it could be nervous and overwhelming and you go past three minutes it's an honest mistake you need some help or notes from somebody but it's interesting if you are intentionally breaking the rules and not respecting that the standards ought to be applied to everybody for the issue of fairness so I think articulating that the sharing of time is not a thing it's not in our policy I'm not sure what that means I don't understand your initial what we mean is the example of someone goes over three minutes and then they want to keep speaking and somebody else will come up and say I cede my time to the speaker and then so the speaker continues on and if somebody else comes up then it can continue on they could pass the baton it's ironic to me because actually in our policy it says that if a group shows up we encourage one speaker to speak for the group we've had very large groups of 60 people going for hours if it wasn't for one person respecting the three minute rule so I think between that and also the going over time I think that's why it shares discretion it's that you know when someone is sincerely making an honest mistake and when it's a different case I think the other thing we've probably struggled a bit with public comment is just when the tone of the content gets very visceral and attacking of individuals I feel like we don't have a very precise and clear understanding of what the legal bounds are on that I think we had the legal advice from our council that you shared with the committee that suggested it's a pretty broad interpretation of what's allowed given First Amendment there was a ruling with NADIC school committee in their public comment personally I think it would help to have some further clarification on that from council when we talk about defamatory remarks it might be a different case legally I don't know which is why I would want to get the guidance whether you're talking about the superintendent or school committee member or a friend of the school committee member or family or friend of the superintendent or a staff member or a student there's all these different we don't adjudicate truth or falsehood in public comments people can come up and say the sky is yellow when they're perfectly allowed to do that when it gets into making assertions about individuals I think I know about you all but I would be more comfortable with which groups are allowed to have those comments and which groups are not so Mr. Menino two points I do want to question the three minute allotment I've seen people who have well thought out cogent letters trying to read one page of the side and they don't finish in three minutes I mean so maybe it needs to be five minutes and the second point is that letter did that letter say that defamatory remarks are permissible I mean it said defamatory remarks are permissible I just want to make sure I get that straight Dr. Morris so I think if there was a committee member or two who wanted to follow up legally and other questions and that memo is pretty dated so my advice would be having one or two members preferably two because I just think that way two people hear the same thing set up a conference call with our attorney to talk through some of the questions like if there's a feeling like that memo isn't sufficient or came from questions from committee members who are no longer on the committee so I'm hearing a little bit of that I think having two committee members set up a conference call with and then report back to the larger committee so that there's more clarity that would be my recommendation if the committee feels like it needs more clarity Ms. Bitter and I'm looking at Mr. Sullivan because I think we were both at the same policies of committee with Ms. Westmoreland and so sort of around this idea of trying to think about whether or not we needed to make changes to the policy and clearly I think this letter says we do need to make changes but I think if anything we're going in the opposite direction of what I'm hearing from the committee in terms of what they would like to see so I think the tricky thing was when we met and I will be very open that I'm generally think that we want and this is my own personal opinion and I know there are folks here but I think generally we want to err on the side of free speech and on the side of allowing folks to come and even if we disagree with what they're saying to give them a venue for that I know sometimes it's really uncomfortable but I think as public officials I think it's part of what we signed up for so I guess just because I have a feeling there are differences in opinion on what we want to do it's hard to put create a subgroup of folks to get to the illegal opinion I think clearly there will be a legal opinion on what we can and can't do them they go beyond what's here but I got frustrated because I felt like when we met in that small group there were folks I wanted to have on the table to talk about this in more depth and it's a kind of uncomfortable thing to have this conversation in an open meeting in an open setting like this because I think we do have a lot of different opinions on it and I just wanted to put it out there and then the other thing is just going back to Mr. Demling's point about Glen clarity I feel like it's pretty specific in the letter that we are allowed from naming our otherwise identifying staff and students that seems to be there was support in the legal argument for that I think it's not maybe what you're saying is clarity on people related to us who are officials who are not necessarily exempted from this idea of being able to be named and criticized in public these are the points where I think we need to have a conversation as a group because I think it's hard for the two people who are going to be talking or the one person talking to get much clearer I think I sort of personally see it as sort of related but separate questions because I think we can ask for legal opinion on sort of how you might approach a particular thing without having sort of a proposal that you're reviewing it's really you know providing sort of updated guidance on what is feasible from a policy perspective and I also sort of maybe I'm misunderstanding some a little bit I'm going to look at Mr. Demling but I sort of understand the question not to restrict defamatory comments but how do we address them maybe that's not what you were asking because I think you know the comment was if somebody says the sky is yellow and we all know it's not but the way our public comment segment of our meeting is structured we can't respond to that there's not a mechanism to sort of present an alternative perspective or factual basis or evidence to the contrary to that and you know and so in the particular situation where somebody is making false accusations or allegations about an individual maybe not by naming them how do we how do we address that in sort of we don't really want to just leave that out there hanging but what can we do as a committee that's sort of within the realm of both free speech and policy and open meeting is that Mr. Demling so that's interesting but that isn't what I was actually I think the most achievable outcome would be to totally sidestep the question of what ought to be allowed like any opinions about free speech or not free speech and just say well what legal groups ought there not to be defamatory speech about right so like students and staff are called out in the memo from our attorney from a year and a half ago that sort of begs the question other specific groups of people who would also be protected and when we talk about protection we're really talking about will the chair gather them down and cut off the public comment I think having that clear guidance as opposed to trying to figure out in the moment of well it said staff and students and didn't specify anybody else so you know come in and talk about anybody off the street and any member of the public I was imagining if I was a member of the public not associated with schools for example and someone in public comment was saying outrageous things I would imagine there would be reasonable concern there so I think we just want to be clear about what our sort of obligations are less than a broad base kind of back and forth discussion about what ought to happen from a free speech point of view Mr. Minina come back to your original concern about what if a public person from the audience says something that is clearly defamatory and hurts that person's reputation maybe hurts their livelihood and we sit here moot and the public never hears a rebuttal how do we address that what do we do about that nothing let it pass it seems to me that's the question you were just the issue you were just talking about and I guess I feel like guidance on that would be helpful what legal guidance is there for that kind of thing because it's very difficult especially for the person who's sitting up here running the meeting so Miss Spitzer? maybe the answer is nothing you just have to let it go but it would be good to know that I almost wonder if that's a separate question from the issue of public comment because I could see that same type of situation arising from public blogs or newspaper articles like I feel like there are a lot of different ways in which that type of situation could arise and it wouldn't be limited to things that people come up to the microphone and say but could happen otherwise and we could potentially have a policy on how to address those types of issues that aren't limited to public comment I think I see them as two those two things as separate things as well because the public comment is here with us and people talking directly to us I think somebody doing something outside of the meeting that might be the same kind of thing but it's not here in an official school committee meeting is really a little bit different would be good to know that too but I don't see that as being tied into the public comment here I do think sort of going back to your first statement which is in opening public comment trying to making sure that we make that statement or I in this case make that statement that says we're not going this is public comment it's not a conversation where we cannot respond that can to a certain extent help not completely by saying that by us not responding to a particular statement that is not by any means an endorsement or support of that perspective that's how we are supposed to run this meeting and I think that can go potentially a long way because I agree that by us sitting here and not responding to potentially false allegations we're letting it stand without knowing that we're not allowed to speak it could be perceived as we're endorsing or supporting or not at least challenging that statement so I think in that making that statement up front is important express that caveat in a couple of ways not just stated in other words stated in another way then the public comment will begin one other related point is that we're now having these not now but we have hearings and I think they have a slightly they also engage the public and I'm just realizing when I click on policy it's page not found it's actually not listed under the I can't find that policy but I'm wondering if that policy has it all changed with the charter and if we may need to I think at the very least we shouldn't there it is okay but I just want to highlight the fact that these budget hearings are another place where this potentially these issues could come up and we may want to think about looking at those two if we're looking at this issue in the context of public comment what next what is this the end of this discussion is there a future well we're not at the next agenda item which is the future agenda planning that would suggest that this is the end of this discussion it does feel like we want to come back to this and I think sort of are there so I know the policy subcommittee is not scheduled to don't believe scheduled to meet but are there some leads into our next conversation but are there two people following Dr. Morris' suggestion that would want to follow up on this with council to get some of that guidance on that update on that memo so I think it makes sense for the our acting chair to be part of that and I would the Spitzer I think her perspective on this I would value if she was available for that that one too I'm happy to do that does that work okay noted so subcommittee organization so this does sort of relate to the prior conversation and one of the things I put this on the agenda because I wanted to have this conversation about it gets to the number of meetings, the number of hours that committee members are asked to serve and all the various sort of ways that we are working and providing service to our district and that none of us are sitting around eating bonbons we all lead very busy lives very jobs or day lives that compete for our attention with the work that we are doing on the district and also the challenge of finding people that are willing to step up and do this work and so really trying to think through what is the core focus of our work as a committee and in what way do these subcommittees support or challenge that role and our ability to do the job and the community's ability frankly to envision themselves being able to serve or step up to serve should any one of us need to step down we have I don't think we have it in here in the packet but if you look at the spreadsheet of subcommittees we have at least two pages of tiny print of subcommittees not all of which meet regularly but it is intimidating to look at that list so at least my perspective and so I wanted to have that conversation here in terms of thinking about how many standing subcommittees in what role do subcommittees play in or standing subcommittees play in doing our work do we need them all do we need to have regular monthly meetings for a variety of a whole host of subcommittees or are there other ways for us to tackle some of the work that needs to be done in between these meetings in a way that isn't as stressful on our own schedules in our own time and sort of getting a group of busy people together to meet on a regular basis so I talked a lot I sort of float that out there and I would love to just hear other people's ideas and thoughts on that suggestions on that I think we have a few committees that haven't subcommittees sorry that I haven't met in a while so thinking through that and this really is just a discussion Mr. Demi also so I'm glad you brought this up because so one effort that the last couple years that I thought was maybe a good model for some of this was the state level advocacy work that I did with Mr. Ardonias so she was the one who originally we have to speed on what the issues were at the state level and then a lot of the advocacy work was about brainstorming about meeting with representative or meeting with a school committee colleague and then what did we want to focus on in terms of bringing back and suggesting to the full committee about a letter or a meeting or some particular voting point and just with the two of us occasionally looping in a third member from Pelham occasionally that worked pretty well and I think one organizational advantage we have at the region is that we have a nine member committee and so a quorum is five and so if you have up to four members working offline then there's no open meeting issue so therefore two or three is absolutely okay and I feel like a lot of the work that our subcommittees are tasked with doing is of the form we have a discussion so the policy subcommittee is a perfect example of this we have a discussion and we have kind of an idea of where we want something to go and then we say okay policy subcommittee go draft some version offline and then policy subcommittee works does that offline they're not taking the decision making authority away from the committee there's no real movement on that front but they're doing like that kind of resource creation work and then bringing it back and then that kind of goes back and back and so what I kind of feel is if we can accomplish that same task with two to four people without the administrative overhead of a subcommittee it's just going to make it more effective for us I think I think it really kind of require each of the people who have served on those subcommittees kind of reflecting on whether it's a good fit like I've never served on a policy subcommittee so maybe what I'm saying doesn't but like the superintendent evaluation subcommittee is another good example of that where there was certainly no intention and it didn't you know that was we were offloading the decision making authority but there was a lot of churn that had to go a lot of work had to go into working out those documents so that was the first opportunity and I certainly think that when we look at our list of subcommittees if they haven't met in a while that's a great candidate for modifying the subcommittee because once even if it's a very small focused topic with the postings and the quorum and the meetings and the motions and all that it's very time consuming as we all know Miss Dancer? My experience again you know this is my first year and I was put on the budget subcommittee I mean it's something I'm interested in the budget and made the chair and we had a couple of meetings and you know it just kind of here's the information and then we came to this meeting and here's the information again and to me it seemed like why am I doing this in a subcommittee and then coming here and doing it again and others of you have been on that committee longer than I have so I don't know how you feel about that and I did talk briefly with Dr. Slaughter and he had a good point which is you know at this time maybe there aren't regular issues with the budget but there might be a time when money is really tight you might want to get feedback but I'm wondering if if that again that's something where you could get several people and instead of having a formal subcommittee but I don't have as much experience as the two of you do so Miss Vitzer? So I have been on the budget subcommittee with the superintendent's evaluations of the committee and the policy subcommittee currently serving on all of these and then the BOPEP person now so balance amongst the members seems like something we definitely want to talk about and I know I'm not the only one who maybe has a few more but anyways getting back to what I want to talk about one of the things I've realized as I've joined these subcommittees and been on them now for two plus years maybe is the learning curve so when I first joined the policy subcommittee Debbie Westmoreland on that she was essential in us kind of getting our bearings and you know also folks who have been on the subcommittees longer sometimes have that knowledge so when I joined the superintendent's evaluation subcommittee I believe opera was still here and so anyways there were ways in which learning happens and some of that knowledge is held by individuals and so I guess any fear if we move to totally rid of standing subcommittees is that I think we'd want to find a way to kind of maintain a person who would have that expertise in the way that you're kind of the advocacy expert for lack of a better term so I was thinking about this is like if we could find a way to maybe create a point person who would be the policy point person and as needed they could pull in others to help do the work there is substantial work and the other thing about this that I wanted to bring up is some of it's seasonal in terms of maybe there will be more definitely with the superintendent's evaluation that comes at the end of the year generally you need a little planning in the beginning but a lot of it comes later so I guess just three things making sure we maintain that institutional knowledge and maybe it's having a person on the committee and or a person within the administration who could kind of be like an advisor role and then also just I think making sure it's even across time and across members because some of these have been flow and you probably don't want to be on three subcommittees that suddenly you know have a spike in activity activity at the same time it seems like there are different kinds of subcommittees it sounds like some of the subcommittees really have work that they have to do and maybe some don't necessarily I mean I don't think my only experience is the budget subcommittee I mean the subcommittee doesn't create the budget you might provide some feedback of some kind maybe but that seems different than the policy or the superintendent those seem like very different kinds of tasks but you've been on all three so maybe you could offer your opinion I do agree they are different it's interesting listening what I hear is that it's all work related right so it's the work that we're doing and not is it the subcommittee or some other mechanism but it's work that we have to do as a committee and how are we doing that work and in some cases a standing committee or standing group might be the appropriate way and other if we have a budget issue that we need to work through that's work that happens but maybe it's not I'm just building on that so I think it's interesting because I think something it's the classic if there's an official subcommittee we have to do things because we exist and so I think if we it's like looking at it from the other way rather than looking at it as we have these subcommittees and what do they do thinking of it from the full committee perspective and what's the work that we need to do and how are we going to do that and maybe for this particular case we are going to choose to have a standing subcommittee or at least maybe have a remit for the year or six months where we need to do the superintendent evaluation who wants to work on setting that up and be on point for that and that's sort of an ad hoc we have work that we need to do and it has to happen in between our official meetings I will say for the policy subcommittee because I think with the exception of Mr. Sullivan and Ms. Westmoreland we were all new because Kara was also Ms. Castinson from Pelham was also on that with us at the beginning we were all new and it was really helpful to have that institutional knowledge between both of you Mr. Sullivan and Ms. Westmoreland I don't remember how many years you've been on the policy five so I think that point is really an important one and Ms. Westmoreland was also it still does serve as sort of the shepherd sponsor faculty advisor for that too so that model is kind of an interesting one but when we first joined there wasn't work that was coming from the full committee and it was only in the last nine months that we actually had a high volume of work that had to be done so it is interesting to have been on one subcommittee that went through both scenarios of what are we going to work on and then actually being tasked by the full committee to do the work Mr. Denley? So that being said I do think we still do have subcommittees where it makes the structure of a subcommittee make sense like some of the examples are when we want there to be a regular opportunity for robust public participation like CPAC I think is a really good example of that I mean I think as we go through organizing and structuring I think that might benefit from just an organizational refresh it's been six years on and just looking at how do we want that structure we have other great groups as well doing good work in that space you rock and embrace race and so too but that's I certainly don't think equity is something that is solved and then we put it away so that's definitely something we want to continue and have that regular input but in terms of streamlining the structuring I think it's a good opportunity to look at the time that's spent from the public's perspective and from the school committee's perspective and what's the most efficient way to utilize all the opportunities for input on this topic? Is it possible to see a list of all our subcommittees? You said it's a long list I mean maybe we could start by just individually going through that and seeing or somebody telling us which ones are active and not active for those of us who are newer because you mentioned several things and I don't know if they're subcommittees that I've never heard of so I would find that very helpful That list was part of the agenda items in the past Right, and we haven't gone back to that in a while I'd like that suggestion to go through that and then come back and I think picking up on Mr. Demling's comment I think defining what is a subcommittee and again through the lens of how do we do our work and what is the role of a subcommittee versus a task force versus a working group and how do we what is that role what function does that play and how are they structured, yeah Technically a subcommittee must post the agenda items and submit minutes Is that the difference between it and other committees or other working groups They must post the agenda items My understanding is that they're all public meetings so fall under open meeting law regardless because they're so they all have to be posted Do they all have to submit minutes Yes I can't see no difference So we can share out the list of subcommittees That'd be great And we'll on our next agenda item look at that having that future future meeting So one thing that came up that Miss McDonald that I've spoken about is currently there's not a representative from Leverett I'm a committee and a Leverett school committee invited me to their next meeting which I believe is April 2nd or whatever Monday that is I apologize it wouldn't be the 2nd perhaps it's the 6th to go and just talk a little bit about the regional school committee and hopefully they'll work out their process also the Amherst seat won't be filled so a question that Miss McDonald and I discussed is the one thing that really does need to happen at the next meeting is the Student Opportunity Act needs to be voted by the school committee sort of some of the other items that's why I was asking Mr. Schlotter could be pushed to April 7th where hopefully we have a closer to a full complement of school committee members we don't have to push that but we could for instance next week we have a full committee meeting and if regional members were amenable and coming we could have a regional meeting briefly before the Amherst meeting just to take care of that one item that needs to be done at the end of the month and it doesn't really matter to me I'm happy to go either way I'm just conscious that there's one town not currently being represented on the committee and there's also one town without its full complement of committee members and is this an opportunity to perhaps slow things down a little bit to get until that complement is restored even like the subcommittee conversation I think it was a useful one and then I'm still thinking well there's multiple people not in the room and I think the more conversations that get had without a full complement the more times you're repeating those conversations a month later so again I'm okay with either and I think Mr. McDonald and I spoke about I think we were both amenable to either but if there was an interest in not having a meeting on March 24th on March 17th at the beginning and Ms. McDonald wears both hats at the moment so she's able to talk to the chair and just push the mind I'm still April until we have a more full complement that's amenable to me we could also have the full meeting on March 24th regardless I know for me and maybe I'm tipping my hand a little bit I get conscious of particularly when a full town isn't represented having a lot of dialogue you know doesn't feel wonderful and hopefully the board committee is able to appoint someone prior to the 7th so whatever the committee wants to do is fine with me on upcoming topics the only one that I know we need to do in the month of March would be vote on the Student Opportunity Act in the bus contract in the bus contract I believe you said was April 8th yeah I think technically yeah it's going to go a little close I'm going to make a few people procurement officer a little nervous but I'm just concerned we wouldn't have all the information within a week that would be sufficient for you to have and just to add on that we're not fully represented and more than three of us three of us are not able to right so we have six seven sorry and so that's why we polled this out today when we found out that Mr. Harrington wasn't able to attend just making sure that we actually do have quorum before we meet so I do think so it's not to say because Dr. Morse represented my perspective accurately I'm fine either way meeting on the 24th or pushing and just handling the votes that we need to at the prior to the Amherst School Committee meeting on the 17th but it is something that think about I don't know if we know that that far in advance whether you'll be out of town or we won't know if we're sick but it is something to be thinking about can I just ask for the Amherst School Committee meeting would we be meeting then at before 6 p.m. or would we maybe just we meet at 6 and start at 6 30 okay so the regional meeting would be at 6 that would work for me it works that's my quorum beef time you're right you can bring it to the meeting I'll bring the crock pot to the meeting awesome well you might be out of here in time too there's no parade but to Mr. Sullivan's point it is St. Patrick's so are we good I prefer the modification but the 17th so we'll move forward with that March 17th and then the other items we'll put together for April 7th and that may be a longer meeting but hopefully a more fully represented meeting before we come out and that'll likely be at Amherst Town Hall I'll confirm that but for the people who are regional members I think we did have a meeting there or two but I just wanted to highlight that it wouldn't be in this space on April 7th March 17th that quick meeting would almost certainly be at Amherst Town Hall and not at this location thank you 6 o'clock okay great and there are gifts somebody want to read miss Dancer I move that we accept correct I move that we accept the following gifts gift from Mass Mutual number 10000 390 matching gift of M. O'Connor gift in honor of Caitlyn O'Connor $3,000 to PIP and $2,000 to Best Buddies as attached letter total of $5,000 gift from Florence Savings Bank number 210546 to support fiscal year 20 ARHS scholarship in the amount of $500 anonymous gift your cause check number 5601972483 to support arms at principal discretion for $10 and gift from Mr. and Mrs. Rahm and Mitlesh Gupta two copies of India unveiled for the high school and middle school libraries estimated cost $113.82 for a total of $5,510 second just a quick note I know it's late but the two books came in a box from a family that's trying to donate books about different parts of the world all over the state and absolutely gorgeous images I enjoyed it I looked at it with Mr. Sheen any time we're going to bring a gift to you all we evaluated truly incredible I think it'll catch a lot of students' eye as well as having a lot of good content but I just want to thank the family they have no connection to Amherst it's just their passion to be donating these books to different libraries where middle school and high school students have access to them so I thought it was just kind of a neat story and it came in one of those like a hand packaged set of these just incredibly large wonderful books so I thought I'd share that any further discussion nope all those in favor signal by raising your hand 6-0 I moved to a jar second Mr. Deming got it first no discussion please raise your hand 6-0 we're adjourned