 It's not because you guys can ask anything that you want. Typically this time of year, I run a bunch of of these little, I usually run the forums every month anyway, we're getting back to that now that COVID's over, so it's nice to get people together, have these conversations, get some feedback, what people are concerned about. But this time of the year, it's really about trying to make sure that people understand the budget, what we're asking for and why. So that'll be probably about 15 minutes depending upon how many questions folks may have. And then we'll move into kind of just having a general feedback kind of discussion about the whole policy that we're looking at. And that's a draft policy, it's not finalized by any means, it's just kind of the starting point where we're at. And so there's some of the discussions that are going on with the faculty, as well as they've been having some advisories, conversations with the students at the high school to get their feedback as well. But, and I'm gonna apologize for a long day if I sit you down a little bit. But again, as we'll talk a little bit about the budget, maybe 10, 15 minutes. And this is just kind of a broad overview. You know, it's what we're bringing in for money, it's what we're looking at for additional expenses next year. It's what the impact that the school district is actually having on your taxes versus the bigger impact this year, which hopefully both people are aware about is the impact that the change in real estate now is to say, because that's been marked. And so I've broken those out for part of this discussion. So a lot of it right now, kind of what we're looking at, you know, we're coming out of COVID. When we were in the COVID years, a lot of the effort and a lot of the funding was really designed to try to keep the kids from falling behind as best we could and to keep them safe. So that was the focus of the budget. We're coming out of COVID now, and right now we're in what we're calling the recovery phase, right? We've got kids that, you know, because of quarantine, because of, you know, remote session that there's lost learning. And so there's a lot of extra resources that have been there for the last year or two, trying to get the kids caught on what's been lost. So right now, the biggest goals for the school is making sure that we're still pushing forward on the board's ends, right? You know, foundational knowledge in the core subjects, you know, critical thinking skills, all those things that the board, through its conversations with the community is identified as important. But the biggest thing, in addition to that, that we're trying to manage is this catastrophic increase in taxes across the state that has happened because of the changes in property values. So during COVID, Vermont was actually a very nice haven for folks that were trying to get out of the local cities. They would come here, they would telecommute, and all those people kind of moving into the area, put a lot of demands on housing stock that was already limited. And so it's not unusual for the values of people's properties, you know, on an average price tone, they've got 100,000. And this is statewide. So that's a little bit of what we're gonna talk about when we develop this budget. These are the things that we were kind of looking at trying to do for the community. So again, this is high-level numbers and we can go into as much detail as folks want. So the current budget that we have this year, the one that we're living under is $22.1 million. What we're requesting for next year is $23.5. And so you'll see that this is a $1.3 million increase. Now, these are the expenses, this is what we're spending. At the same time, what's going on is we've been increasing our revenues. So while we're asking for a $1.3 million increase to help kind of support all the programs and things that we're doing for kids, we're also generating $2.3 million of new revenue. So that means our ask from the school side of things from the taxpayers, we're actually asking for about a million dollars less from the taxpayers than we did last year. And last year it was kind of similar, right? We were spending more, but our revenues were up so much last year that we actually spent about a half a million dollars last, asked a half a million dollars from the taxpayers last year. Are these revenues, the new revenue, is that state money, COVID money, or is that just due to the increase? It's a combination of things and I can pull the detail out if you want. I guess I'm asking because I'm curious to know whether it's kind of going to be an ongoing thing or that it's going to disappear. Yeah, and actually we're gonna hit on that in a little bit later. So you've got the property yield is way up and there's lots of ways to think about the property yield. For us, the easiest way to think about it is it's how much we get from the state education fund per kid. It was 13,100 last year, so our 847 kids that we have, we were getting about 13,100 from the state for it. This year it's 15,700, I believe, it's right on the tax sheet. And so we're getting an additional 2,000 something for every kid that's there. So that's a huge chunk of this 2.3 million revenue, I think it was about 1.7 million dollars. We also generated a significant amount of revenue from students that pay tuition to come here because they want to come here. That has been growing prior to COVID, it was in about the $250,000 a year range, it's up to 465,000. So we've got a lot of revenue there. There's a couple of other parts and pieces and savings there. Those are the biggest chunks of all. Now, one of the things to kind of break out of that this, so let's go back in summary. So yeah, we're looking to spend more because we're trying to improve academic achievement for kids. We're also spending more because inflation, heating oil is up, fuel oil is predicted to be up, what we're paying for supplies pretty much across the board. Those lines, we're getting hit for anywhere between 12 and then a 16% increase. So there's a lot of that that goes into the expense piece. On our new expenses, about 365,000 of that 1.3 million is what I call discretionary. It's new things that we're asking for pretty much to build programs for kids. A little over a million of it is due to contractual obligations. In other words, I don't have any control over it really, right? It's the inflation. We have seven different master contracts with the different staff that work throughout the school. They have guaranteed step raises and we're in negotiations now about what the pay raises are gonna be. So those are the things that have been agreed to by law that we have to pay for and have to plan for. So any questions on this so far? So big picture, yeah, we're asking for more because we're trying to do more for kids. Plus, it's been, we're coming out of tough years, a lot of inflation, there's a lot of other things going on. But we're also generating significantly more revenue. Now the question is, is that going to stay that way? It has gone up every year, that property yield. And the fact, so again, I can't say definitively yes, but it's likely that it will. And the fact that the property values have jumped up so much, that means when people pay their taxes this year, they're gonna be paying more so it's gonna flood the education fund. There's gonna be a lot of money in there for us and that's where we get our funding from, right? We build the state, they give us money out of that fund. So it is likely that that will continue to do a lot, at least in the short term. I have just a quick question about the fuel and inflation. Are you able to lock in prices with fuel throughout the year, so without looking like a lot more than it was last year? Yeah, I actually, I have the numbers. I think the fuel oil was really scary at the beginning of the budget process, right? Because things were looking like they were gonna be very high and moderated a little bit. I believe the fuel oil was up about in the 10 to 12% range. The supplies were closer to the 16, you know, all the supplies and things that we bring in to run the building and clean the buildings and all that. And the fuel oil's a little bit different than the diesel fuel. The diesel fuel was up about 20%. We did the calculations for the budget at that point in time. We do go out to bid, right? So that, you know, we estimate, you know, what amount of fuel are we gonna use this year? We go out to bid for that. And usually as long as they're a quality vendor, we pick the lowest price. And then we lock in a contract for that so that it stays the same for us throughout the year. So we don't have to worry about it suddenly increasing in the middle of the year when we're in a fixed budget. So yeah, they're really good questions. The local tax impact. So this is relating back to what you will pay out of pocket in terms of taxes if this budget goes through. What happens in terms of your local taxes is really impacted by two things. There's what's controlled by the district, right? And that has to do with how much we're choosing to spend on education versus the revenues that we generate. The other piece that's out of our control, and this is usually the huge one each year, is this common level of appraisal, right? When the values of your homes go up, the state expects you to pay more. And that's what the CLA is all about. And I'll show you some numbers and kind of how this works in a few moments. But right now as things stand, if it were just the school that was involved in things, your taxes would actually go down by about seven and a half cents for $100 of assessed value of your property, right? So I'm gonna put some actual numbers on what that means in terms of like an average price to home. Last year, if it were just up to the school, right? What we were doing at the schools, the taxes would have gone down by six and a half cents per $100 in six months. So again, the school has been carefully trying to manage things to make sure that we're not having a bad impact on our tax figures. So what does this mean? So we got the school impact here. We got the CLA impact, the common level of appraisal that has to do with how the property values changed. If it were just on the school side, what would be happening on the average price to home in the average price to home in Vermont right now is 385,000, it's almost 100,000 since last year. So on the average price to home in Vermont of 385,000, if it were just the school's impact, everybody would see a decrease of about $290 of their annual taxes. What ended up happening was there was a huge shift in what they call this common level of appraisal between last year and this year. And what it means is as the number goes down, it means you're paying more taxes because in the case of like Braintree, what this 88.72% is saying is based upon the state's assessment, you're really only paying 88, taxes on 88.72% of what your property is really worth. So they're saying you're not paying enough. And how do they determine that? Well, they take a look at where the town is assessed you at. And then over the course of the year, they do this equity study, equity equalization survey they call it, and they go out and they see what the houses we're selling for in each of the towns and whatnot. And they say, you know, based upon what we're seeing in terms of where things are actually selling and based upon where the towns are actually assessing stuff, in Braintree, the folks in Braintree on average are only paying taxes on 88.7% of what their homes are really worth. So we're gonna have to charge them more so that they're paying on 100% of that value. So on the CLA side, if you're in Braintree, they're adding 20 cents per $100 of assessed value, so you would see your taxes go up by $777. Brookfield is going in the opposite direction when they did their assessment in Brookfield. So Brookfield folks should be really happy right now. And part of this is because the town reassessed last year, right? I think they did. So what happened here is they're saying, oh, and we checked to see what the houses were going for in the township of Brookfield. They were actually selling below what the new assessments were. So you're actually paying 110% of what you should. And so they're gonna give you a deduction. So just based on the CLA piece here, on the average price total of $385,000, you would see a reduction in your school taxes of $659 for the year. Randolph is at 84%, so they got hit as well. They're looking at an increase because of the changes, right? Their property values went up significantly compared to how the town assessed them. Overall, increased to $669 for the average tax. So these are big numbers. Does that map make sense if Braille Tree was closer to 100, shouldn't it be less than Randolph? So yes and no. This change depends upon what this was last year, the CLA was, and they had different CLA's last year. So it's based upon the shift and the change. So it's a good question. Now, what we do to figure out kind of what your total taxes are gonna be is we put in the impact of the school with the impact of the changes in the real estate values. So the school is actually gonna help bring these down, but more in the case of Brookfield is actually gonna give you more of a savings. More of a return, I should say. So when we combine them, this is where we end up at. So this is the change in tax rates from last year for each of the three towns, combining both the school impact as well as the real estate change impact. So in Braille Tree, they're gonna be paying an additional 12.6 cents for $100 in assessed value on an average price, called the $385,000, you're gonna see an overall annual increase of 488. If your house is worth half that, then, or your property's worth half that, then this would be cut in half as proportional. Or if your properties were double that, then you'd be paying less than this. For Brookfield folks, if you got a $385,000 home and you combine it to your savings close to $1,000 in your property taxes, Randolph, we're gonna be paying as I'm in Randolph as well, 300 and 70 United. So questions on this, thoughts, concerns, or all the fun stuff, huh? And yeah, it's big changes. Now, to make sure that people understand it's not just our towns, if you look across the state, being around 85% for a CLA is kind of about where the average is. So the values in real estate wasn't just here. It was across the entire state that people saw these dramatic shifts. Some of the towns are gonna be paying significantly more than this, the Stoes and the Killingtons because the property demand is really high in those areas. So they've got some pretty catastrophic taxes that they're gonna be looking at. So when you go to vote in March, one of the things that you'll be voting on is whether or not to accept the district budget. And so this is kind of breaking down what the district budget is that we're asking for and what are the components of that that actually go into what you need tax for. It will be just to give you some information so you can go informed. The other thing that you'll be voting on are what are called surplus and reserve funds. Surplus funds are any monies that we have left over at the end of the budget year. And the last couple of years, we've had huge surpluses because we've been receiving so much grant money. We have to plan out what we need. We have to ask the taxpayers for it. And the grant money comes in or we get reimbursed for things that we didn't expect we were gonna get reimbursed for. So we have large surpluses and I'll talk a little bit about what we've been doing with that. And that actually gets back to your question about, is this gonna change dramatically in a couple of years? Because we've been using it to make sure that we buffer the taxpayers if that dramatic change happens. So there's surplus. It's the money that you have left over at the end of the year. That surplus, you can do one of two things with it. You can roll it into the next year to help offset people's taxes, which is something that we have been doing to try to help the taxpayers out. Or the voters in March didn't vote to have some of that money go into reserve funds. And so we have various reserve funds. We put money aside so that if we get a big bill like the heating system that crapped out on us at the high school, we have the money available to do that repair without having to go back out to the taxpayers and ask for more to go out to bond. So we've always got that money. So has that issue diminished in order to what level? So the heating issue itself, it has been completely corrected. So everything is up and running the way that it should. The overall cost actually came in less than we thought. I got the final numbers the other day. It was about a quarter million. Sorry, that was my question. It was, has that impact, how has that impacted the state of the reserve that we have? Has it used it all or has there? I'm gonna show you those actual numbers. For that particular reserve fund, that's the facilities reserve fund. We usually keep about three million in it. So it was a quarter million for that repair. So it actually came in under what we thought. One of the reasons that that took so long was because about 25 years ago, they put in a wood chip boiler. And the company that built that wood chip boiler went out of business. When they put it in, they connected it to the normal heating system at the high school so that it was kind of all one unit. And so when it crapped out on us, we didn't have the ability to get the parts. They had to actually be fabricated from scratch. And so that's why the wait time. Didn't use standard parts. Had to go get fabricated and people actually really worked their tails off. We're gonna be sending a big thank you out to everybody that worked with us, the other towns as well as the contractors that we worked with because of how they pulled things together because it was looking like it was gonna be a five to six month project. Good questions. So one of the things, again that we'll be voting on is a little bit of what to do with the surplus funding. So at the end of last year, when last year's budget concluded on June 30th, we have a $1.3 million surplus. And so in working with the board and kind of talking with folks, what we've decided to do with that is we're gonna take 1.05 million of it and we're gonna use it to help further subsidize people's taxes for the next three years. So we're gonna be taking this amount of money, dividing it up into three equal parts, which is about 350,000. And we're gonna add that to offsetting people's taxes next year, the year after and the year after that. So that's gonna help bring people's taxes down. The remainder is gonna go into kind of various reserve accounts that we have for different purposes and I'll talk a little bit about that in a minute because those are things that folks need to specifically vote on. So this is how we've been using surplus money at the end of each of the years we've been taking a good amount of it because it's taxpayer money. And we've actually been using it to feed back into the next year's budget so that you don't have to pay as much in taxes. And so, right, we took the money and that came at the end of 2019, 2020, that this was, I believe, kind of the first real impact here from COVID. So we put a big chunk of it there that helped subsidize this budget. And then the year after, we took forward in 13,000 of that that was remaining subsidized, the current budget that we're in and we still have a little bit left over to subsidize next year's budget. And then the next year that came along, we built it and did it out for three years. And then this year that came along, we built it out for three years. So you see how we slowly built things up, right? So that we're constantly having a good amount of money go back and subsidize folks. Well, should these surpluses ever kind of run out, what will happen is we'll also have three years of slowly declining subsidies that we'll be able to do internal changes to compensate for. So it's not like we would have this cash drop here. So there was a lot of planning and a lot of thought that went into this. To be honest, I don't see this pattern changing anytime soon. You know, we probably won't be having 1.3 million dollar surpluses every year, but we'll probably be having 500 to 600, 700,000 that we'll be able to do this way. And again, most appropriate thing is to try to put the majority of it back in to help out the technical. Reserve fund additions. So these are our reserve fund accounts that we have. So March 7th, people actually both put money into these if we're asking for it. We have a reserve fund that covers our vehicles and our buses so that we can replace them when needed. So there's 867,000 in there for right now. We have no need to add anymore. A new bus is about $85,000. We could replace the whole fleet and still probably have a little bit left over. Usually what we try to do is we try to replace the oldest one or two each year. Just to make sure that none of them are getting more than about six or seven years old. In the building maintenance fund right now, there's 3.2 million. We spent a quarter million on the heat. We also have a major repair to do in terms of the high school field house that's coming up next year. We're actually gonna be asking the board to approve reserve funds for that. So that'll be about a $300,000 repair. We need to replace the bleachers. We have water that's coming in underneath the floorboards. It's actually coming up through the foundations. So we've had folks come out and drill in and tell us what we need to get fixed. And that's for the safety of the kids. So we are gonna ask the voters to approve $500,000 to put over in the building maintenance to help kind of offset what we're spending out of it. We try to keep enough in here to make sure that we can replace a roof on a school building when the time comes. A roof is about a million bucks, including mechanicals. So we've got more than enough. We've put aside for a legal fund for over a couple of years, we've never really had to touch it. A lot of it at that time was due to the fact that we were having these much faster pace of negotiations with the unions, right? It costs a lot to have negotiations because you got the lawyers sitting at the table, there's those fees. And during COVID as well as the fact that the state took over how they want to negotiate healthcare, we were kind of doing negotiations every year or every two years instead of every three or four. And so that was the holdout for that. We're suggesting putting another 50,000 in there. We're gonna be asking the taxpayers to do that from the surplus because we've had a lot of HR issues for the past three years under COVID. You know, we had a lot of people across the country and half of the teachers left and then the pool that remains the quality is in this eye. We've had some really good people but you tend to have more HR issues and lots of times you're getting a legal involvement that happens. The Special Education Fund, the state has changed how they provide funding to us to help serve our special education students. In the old days what they would do is they would reimburse us. So if we had a student that had severe needs, we were guaranteed that the state was gonna give us a significant portion of that act so that it didn't take all the money out of the budget that we had planned a year in advance. They had moved to what's called a block grant system. They give us one chunk of money at the beginning of the school year and that's it. There's only reimbursement in extreme cases. So we have a district where we have students that will move in in the middle of the year and or move out and a lot of them are typically high need. So if I get my block set of money that's helping me get through the year for the kids that I currently have and all of a sudden I get two or three students that have a lot of needs and each student's gonna cost 180,000 students to cover, I'm gonna have problems. And so I devise creating this reserve fund to be able to cover and have money available to cover for those potentialities. And then the operation fund here, this is pretty much the account that we put the money in that we're using to subsidize budgets over the next couple of days. We have money that we're spending for next year but we need a place for the money to sit for the two future years and so that's really the way. So questions on surplus and reserve. And we are in very healthy shape here. Matter of fact, we're at the point where we're looking at some bigger projects because we've got more than we need in some of these accounts and we wanna make sure that it's actually going into serving the kids as much as we can. That's it in budget. Most of the students didn't see too many jobs drop when we talked about the tax rate, so that's a good sign. All right, so what I did is I handed out, because this is more of a kind of informal discussion but I can go in as much detail as folks want. One of the things, I've been talking a little bit more about it with the cabinet. One of the things that was kind of painfully obvious when I started a while back was that the district itself, it didn't do a lot of the things that normal schools do, right? You know, we go back five, six years now, we were one of the lowest performing in the state, those scores have gone up, not as fast as we'd like, that they have been improving, but a lot of it has been years of trying to build in the structures that didn't exist here and when I talk about the things that normal schools do, we didn't have textbooks. For the most part, with the exception of elementary, we didn't have curriculum. We didn't have any kind of program materials for the teachers to use. There was no real specific homework policy. There was no consistent ways of grading and grade books and there's no testing, assessment systems. I mean, those are all things that have been built over the last couple of years that normal schools do. So those things are in place now and we're at a point where we can look at things that have been specifically and very directly potentially impacts the learning of students in the classroom level and so that's the reason that we're kind of looking at this homework policy at this point in time. The basic gist of homework is, you know, there's a lot of research on both sides. The basic gist of a lot of it is that if the homework is of high quality and homework may not even be the best word for it, you know, it's independent work for students. If it's of high quality, it does have an impact. If it's of questionable quality or if a school district is just putting on amount of time, right, every sixth grader is gonna do an hour a night, that is typically a very bad thing because it has nothing to do with the quality. And so one of the things that we're doing with this homework policy is homework is very effective at extending the time I learned that students have, right? There's only so much time in a day that the students are having direct contact with the teachers within the classroom, right? And that's real productive time. They do a lot of learning then. But if we can get them to spend some time, you know, regularly after school, engaged in some learning activities, we are actually going to be able to increase, you know, what they're learning, how deep they're learning it, just because of that extended time that they're in contact with the course material. You know, a lot of the high performing schools, I've thrown that in there on the last page and I am not recommending this. I do not believe in a time policy in any way, shape, or form. But when you go and examine the highest performing schools in the country, you can see the amount of time that they're expecting the kids to put in above and beyond. And in some cases, that time that they're putting in is actually doubling the amount of contact they have with the content that they're learning, right? You have the time that you're spending during the day and they're doubling it with the time that you're spending. So kind of with that is a real, simple, kind of broad overview of let's have a discussion about that, about what people feel and what people think. What is it that you think you'd like to see? And what is it that you think in no uncertain terms should we be doing, should it look like this? But I'm gonna get my notes. So I'm happy to start. My name is Bill. I've got a seventh grader and a fifth grader. And your name has come up in our house it's a week or two ago. So a horrible thing that I do now, I said, came in and he said something like, my lame millie to this, making our teachers grade our homework and he was very upset with me. Having said that, I know from my own experience how important that homework is, especially as you get into later years in school. So I think it's great that there's policy, I think it's great that it's going to be enforced, I hope, across the board. Some teachers go way overboard if they're left to their own devices and some do nothing. So having a consistently applied policy I think is very important. I think the kids need to be able to anticipate how much homework they're going to have on a regular basis so that they can plan. I think parents need to have access to some way to look at the assignments their kids are supposed to do. And I think that there should be a way for parents to provide feedback to the teachers. Because my kids will say things to me that they will not say to their teachers about the utility or lack thereof of the assignments that they've been given. So I think there should be some feedback mechanism. And I'm glad to hear that you don't think that there's a time-based, because the time it takes students to do things varies so widely. I think that that would be a mistake. So I think homework is good, it's onerous, but I know I learned more from homework than I ever did from the classroom instruction I had. Because you're doing it on your own terms at your own speed. So I hate for my kids that it's gonna be a bigger issue, but I think it's a great thing. Looking at the Vermont school rankings and seeing that Randolph wasn't even on the list because it was so poor performing. I'm terrified for my kids' future. I need them to be well-educated. They need it and I think that's a big component. Yeah, they're in a, actually, as we get to the end, what I can do is I can pull up at least some of the performance data that's right now that we have right now. The state's been really bad about releasing testing data since COVID started. I don't know what they're worried about, but we've brought in our own assessment systems like Track My Progress and Started 360, so I'm happy to share some of that with you. And the results are looking pretty good. We were one of the few districts as far as I could tell with the bit of state data that was released that actually was improving during the COVID and that was due to the hard work of the cabinet and the hard work of the teachers. So I'm gonna be happy to share that and I'm hoping the state actually releases last year's testing. They've been waiting, they should have done it in October. So I've got some really good feedback. So you talked a lot about the idea of consistency, right? In terms of getting all the teachers to kind of be on the same page if we're gonna do this, the idea that we've got to be able to, or the students have to be able to anticipate what's due, when, where, and how, and why. And I call it kind of a portal for the parents that the data's in there that you guys can log into and kind of see where the students are. All right. I think that at the high school through a power school that exists, elementary is typically a little bit different. They typically don't use student information systems awkwardly, but high school does as regularly. So it's something that we can talk about. But we've been touching on this idea in our meetings that in the last one, we kind of went out and said, okay, let's just take a look and see what some people's grade books. And I'll see what they're tracking and what they're doing just to kind of inform ourselves. And one of the things that came out of discussion is the idea that the consistency piece just isn't there. There's a lot of people keeping a lot of good records, but it's not in the place that's easily accessible to anybody about the future. And I do want to make one more suggestion and that is that you build some flexibility into the, I know that the homework has to be graded and assessed to make sure kids are putting in the honest effort, but I think you can build in some flexibility for missed assignments or late assignments. And if the progress of the homework is really to get the kids to learn the material, then if there's a policy where they can revise their homework, if they didn't do well on it, I think it's not supposed to be punitive, it's supposed to be something that helps them engage and learn. Having that sort of damocles kind of hanging over your head all the time, but if I miss one assignment, it's gonna kill my grade. Kids are busy today, they're stressed out. And unanticipated things happen all the time. So I think having some give in the system would be helpful to keep them from getting demotivated. Yeah, it's not good. And so I do have those two down, especially about the ability to revise and the flexibility for missing and late works. So are there thoughts, are there comments that we can talk about concerns? Yeah. My name's Dave Lin. Hey. I run the teaching and learning center at Norwich, so I train faculty in teaching and learning and I write policy for managing and learning there. And I apologize, I asked for the researcher. I wasn't trying to be obstructionist. No, I think it's good. So I sent you a bunch of comments. I think, I agree with everything you said at the middle and high school level, unequivocally. I think that is true. And also, because I have a lot of experience with college students, I'm happy to talk about what I'm seeing if you guys are all ever interested because it's kind of a disaster. Hey, here's a, well, here's a question for you. What has happened, and this actually wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing for our high school, is connecting with some of our students that are freshmen having to come into a panel. Yeah. And as well as potentially having some of the faculty that are working with some of our students to come in and have a panel just for the teachers and whatnot to get some feedback about what's going on. I invite some of the teachers actually to our teaching and learning event in August last year. And I think the timing of the pandemic had everything to work out. But I would love to get more cooperation between Norwich and Randolph in particular. I feel like that's something that Norwich is not good at. It's an opportunity that's really missing for both of us. So I do have concerns about homework at the elementary school level. I think the research is not as clear. You know, and I think in particular, I mean, Hattie's research is interesting, right? Because he's never said, for instance, that we shouldn't have homework at the elementary school. He said we need quality homework. But he's also said that 99% of the homework that's assigned is not good. Exactly. And that for struggling students, actually, it can have a negative effect. And frankly, right now, I think a lot of students are struggling. So I worry about the impact, particularly on struggling students at the elementary school level. Because I think the research there is just, for at least for me, it is not good. So, you know, I think the consistency on it is good at the upper levels. I worry at the elementary school level. I do think too, like if teachers are gonna be giving feedback, I think there needs to be some kind of plan for students to act on that feedback. Most of the time, the research shows students don't even look at it. Much less do anything with it, which is a waste of the teacher's time. It's not good for teaching and learning. So without a good plan for acting on the feedback, I think it's kind of a lost opportunity. Not to, not to, I totally agree with you. And that's why I think having that bi-directional communication with your parents and the teachers is important because you can't rely on a ninth grade student or a seventh grade student or even some 12th grade students to look at the feedback and make good use of it. So the, don't lose your thoughts because you said a couple of really good things that I might be able to add some value to. Let's go back and make sure we're down the feedbacks so I touch on that, because- It makes it feel all this feedback. Yeah, we've had some pretty deep discussion so it's nice because a lot of the things that folks are saying are things that we've kind of had on. And so that's actually kind of reinforcing to hear but the idea, you know, you gotta have, you gotta, the struggling students, you know, you might negatively impact them. So one of the things that we've been scrambling around is okay, how do we support that? You know, we recognize that some students may not have the best best home life to be able to go home and depend on a parent necessarily, especially at the younger ages. Even the homework should be tailored so that it can be done independently. So how can we help those students out? And so one of the things that's in the budget that we didn't talk about is we built in enough money to send activity buses around every afternoon. So the students need to stay after and work the teachers to be able to get caught up and get that extra additional support that they need. We've got a mechanism to allow them to do that in a nice way. And again, that may not be the best way to do it so we're open to ideas. We have a number of structures in place for learning support through interventions during the school day as well. You know, outside of the ring of academic faculty gets out. And so we have those in place to try to be able to help exactly what you're talking about. But if there's other ideas that are there that are better than what we're looking at to help with that, that would be really good. So the idea of this feedback that folks are talking about is really critical and the ability to kinda go back and correct work. We've had discussions the last couple of years during COVID. And so let's see if I can do this without being too overly long and try to make the point of it. You know, we've seen a lot of rise in behaviors with kids. That's been true across the state and across the country. And we've spent a lot of time, you know, bringing in behavioral interventionists and working on trauma-based practices and things like that. And it really hasn't had an impact. And so, you know, we talk about we're in this action research phase and kinda look into what the data is saying. So I think there are some very positive things that have come out of it, is that, you know, the teachers know better ways to kinda interact with the kids that they'd be coming from a trauma-based environment. So we've been settling on, or I've been settling on these discussions with the cabinet about the idea of bander is, you know, right, the self-efficacy. Where if, as a student, I know that when I come into this building every day that I am going to be capable of doing the difficult things that you ask me to do and do it successfully, I'm gonna feel really good about myself. Good enough about myself that the things in my life that might make me feel bad aren't gonna matter as much anymore. And so we're trying to have this shift away from, you know, we're still doing the trauma-based work, but the shift towards doing things that are gonna build students self-efficacy. And one of them is exactly what you're talking about at speed, right? If you've done a significant piece of work or even a minor piece of work with me and I take the time to sit down and talk with you about it, all those powerful unintended messages that I am sending you as a student that you matter and I care enough to sit down and spend this time with you and that this work is important and I'm not gonna let you off the hook for not doing it because I care too much. Those things build self-efficacy. And so that feedback piece that you're talking about is really important and kind of really critical to this. How the best way to do it is always, you know, the discussion and there's lots of ways, but those are as we're kind of building this out. Those are some of the discussions that were happening. So they're really good things that you're sharing. So. It's like the other thing I think is gonna be hard is, you know, I think what we're seeing at our level and we're getting kind of the results of what's happening before us is that the vast differences in the level of proficiency among students in the same grade is so vast that differentiation is very difficult. And I think differentiation in the classroom is already a tall order. I think differentiating homework is frankly, I worry about the workload for teachers in some cases, but I think differentiating that homework is gonna be even harder. I mean, I think about my own fourth grader who, you know, was speaking of track and track progress is that 98% of the beginning of the year I was like, what is she gonna do? Yeah. You know, I'm still kind of asking that question in all honesty. And so I think I worry about the kind of the quality of the homework then when you have these kind of vast proficiency levels and how that actually like it leads to problems both for the struggling student and for the student for whom it makes him like busy work. So I think the quality is really hard to dial in in the current teaching and learning circumstances in a lot of ways. So again, I'm just taking down the ideas. Just a second. If I can, I'd like to add on to that. I'm Lynn Garrett and I'm a third and fourth grade teacher at the Randolph Elementary School. And so as we talk about this, particularly, you know, providing quality feedback as well as differentiated homework instruction, I know that I never have enough time in a day. And I know that I work really hard, not only during the school day, but after the school day. And so I worry a little bit that if we put too much emphasis on this homework piece that the time that I spend, you know, as you said, take one-on-one and talk to someone about their performance on the homework and differentiated and so forth, that that time has to come out of something else and I just don't know where it's gonna come out of. So if we are still talking about the same-length school day, I think we have to acknowledge that that if we put too much emphasis on the homework that something else has gotta get. Yeah, so the, and again, so this is the conversation. So I can tell you where we've kind of landed on a couple of these things in the discussion. And this is an opportunity to say you're wrong and there's a better way to do that because that's part of what this discussion is about is getting the best ideas from people that are collectively in the room. So we'll start with the concern that you had. So when we crafted this, it wasn't, and that's why the time piece wasn't on there. So I was making this argument that we don't need to have homework every night. We don't need to do it for everything. But as we're doing this curriculum work, part of it is identifying what are called foundational standards, right? So in other words, if I'm the third grade teacher, of everything that I teach, there are certain things that I've gotta do really well because if I don't, the next teacher that gets these students is not gonna be able to build upon it. And so my argument would be two fold one, and this is where you get to push back as I'm just thinking off the top of my head, definitely homework for foundational standards or definitely independent learning activities whatever we wanna call it. This homework doesn't quite encapsulate the vision I think that we've got. Definitely for those to reinforce them. The other place where homework would probably be a definite is as we do this curriculum work when we get into next year, we take the next step in it, is what we call targeted standards. So this is everything the students are supposed to learn in my class. These are the things that are critical for the next teacher in line. I'm really gonna hit those hard to make sure that I'm making sure that the students are gonna be successful and able to build upon their knowledge when they get there. And then when we do our data analysis at the beginning of the year next year, hopefully each grade team in each department at the high school is gonna be able to walk away and go, oh, in my class I know that historically my kids have been doing four on this standard, this standard, this standard, and this standard. And so I'm gonna target those this year and we're gonna work on creating some new learning activities together that might better able to get those concepts and skills across to the kids. And because this is an area where the kids have struggled and we struggled getting these ideas across to the students, this is an area where probably maybe homework's a good idea too, just so we're getting that reinforcement. And I think that I can't speak for all teachers and I know that there are different practices, but I certainly think that that's the practice that we have been operating under. Yeah, and so that's good. But again, what's happening, that goes back to the consistency piece, what's happening at the schools is different. Some do, some do a little bit, some not much, some don't do any at all. And so it's trying to get that consistency because that is gonna help with one of the problems that you're seeing is this broad range of skills that the kids are coming in when they're working with them at Norwich. It's also, it hurts us too because that's the same thing that happens here so we can get into the differential conversation is that if you hit up different standards that maybe weren't as important than you did when these students come together into the next class, you've now created that vast array of students with different needs and differentiation needs, right? That's in the classroom so that consistency should help with that. But you bring up a really important point for where things currently exist right now is that we've got struggling students and they've got vastly different needs. How do we differentiate for them? Well, we put some systems in so that we don't have to differentiate as much. So two of the things that we were trying to do and we did a little bit of it last year was we built in the summer academic programming. So the students came in and we provided transportation and caught up on some of the areas that they were missing. And we've also been doing a lot of after school kind of programming. We just haven't had the transportation for it this year. We'll have it next year. So the best scenario, again, and this is where folks here can say, no, you don't think that's gonna work, is that at the end of the year, we're close to the end of the year, we do a broad diagnostic assessment to track my progress or one of the other assessment tools that we have. And we're then able to start identifying what weaknesses the students have and then what's gonna happen is when you lay all those students out, oh, I got 100 students here and 50 of them all have the same weaknesses I'm putting you in this pile. I got 25 that all have pretty similar weaknesses I'm putting you here and I'm putting you here. And so what we can do with that knowledge is that when the students go to the after school academic programming and the summer academic programming, we fix those problems and we fix those skills. So that when those students go back into the teacher's classroom, the next teacher's classroom in line, they don't have such a broad array of differences anymore. Or the other thing that we could do is that if we know these students have these deficiencies, you all go together with the same teacher. So this whole 18th, 19th century concept of having kids of the same age moving around, that may have worked good when we were training clerks for the British Empire, but that's not what we're doing anymore. So why are we doing things by age instead of by proficiency level and by need? Well, depending upon the age, there's the social aspect of it too that we don't wanna. Yeah, I don't want to totally get that and I'm the one who would minimize the importance of that just by virtue of who I am. But. Just putting a freshman in a, putting a freshman in a class full of seniors. Yeah. That's gonna be an entertainment. Yeah. But, so getting to what Linda was saying about limited hours, limited minutes, limited seconds in every day. And what you said before about the trauma-based interventions that were tried, I hear from my kids about the levels of chaos that they experience on a daily basis in their classroom and it is not fair. Now, I have nothing against special education. I'm gonna, I'm not, I'm not gonna say this because I'm the majority of them aren't necessarily special education folks. Okay. Yeah. But no. You're right. It's not- I'm in agreement with you. It's not special ed. It's kids who cannot, for one reason or another, participate in what would have been considered an ordinary classroom environment 20 years ago, even 10 years ago. At some point we have to say, how much accommodation to, you know, the kids who can't do normal school are we gonna make because it's ruining the opportunities to learn for other kids. When there's a kid who's throwing furniture and you take every other kid out of the classroom instead of taking that child out of the classroom, who does that benefit ultimately? In the very short term, perhaps a benefit to that student. But I just, it's not just that. It's the moments, it's the everyday chaos that I hear about from my daughter in particular has had multiple years of classrooms that are not conducive to learning. Something's got to give. And so the reason I'm laughing, so don't lose your thought. The reason that I'm laughing is because I agree with you. I wasn't interrupting because I didn't agree in the story that I can tell. And one of the things that was bothering me is that we started to say, okay, we're doing all this trauma-based work and we're doing restorative practices and is this having an impact on students? And so I'll give this example. So I've got a student, trauma-based student that is in a classroom, blows up in the classroom, tells the teacher to go out themselves. And then when the teacher actually tries to build a relationship with the kid and work with them then and there and say, hey, can we sit down? Let's see if we can work this out and do what we gotta do. The teacher says, screw you, I'm going down, I'm gonna go talk with my counselor, because that's the accommodation. And so what does that student learn in that situation? I get to go down, I get to blow up in the classroom and my consequence is I get to go down and talk with a warm and understanding person who cares deeply about me, which is important. Those conversations need to happen because the student, that's how they're gonna eventually develop the skills and self-regulation that they need. But at the same time, we've kind of enabled that behavior, right? You had a bad reaction in the class, which happens, it's okay, but we gotta deal with it. But the result of it was you got to go down and talk with a warm and comforting person. Whereas there should be a natural consequence that follows that, like consequences that schools always add. And then you also get to have the conversation with the counselor. But I think one of the things, and this was across Vermont, that happened when I got up here, is they got away from the consequences and they started to focus mostly on their story. And so that's the, those are the conversations and discussion that need to happen so people can learn and grow. But if you're not careful, if there's not a balance between the two, I think we're actually enabling more of a behavior. That may be why it hasn't gotten better with all the trouble in these practices, I don't know. So we've had a lot of discussion about revising handbooks at the beginning of this year and making sure that when those bullet happens, that there is a reasonable logical consequence for the behavior and then you get those restorative kind of supports in the struggle. Yeah, good. I think my question follows your comment. And I think about even your answer where you're kind of talking about identifying the script of students with these weaknesses and these weaknesses. And I think, and I'm seeing this in my own classroom, we are doing a lot to work with struggling students and we should. I worry that the high achieving students are actually getting the short end of the stick a lot of the time. And I have a couple of them on my own, so I have a personal investment in this. But I think in our, again, it goes to differentiation, right? I think a lot of our focus, especially because of the pandemic has been on the students who are struggling. So how does the homework policy? What are the, we have the transportation things, we have the intervention after school, but what's being done for the students on the other end of the spectrum to make sure that they are challenged, that they have extra opportunities, that they are kind of doing the things that I think they crave, at least I know my children do. Because right now it feels like they're being left to kind of flap in the wind. And I agree with you. I think, and again, coming into Vermont and kind of seeing here as well as other schools, I think that folks have been struggling so hard in terms of managing those other behaviors, those other issues that they have been forgotten and they've been left behind in a little bit. We've been having a renewed focus on advanced placement. We've been having discussions, especially now that I've got a second body to do some work with me about moving over to the international backdoor program. And so those are things that are happening right now and we're having those discussions about. The hope is that the curriculum work that we're doing combined with kind of the other programmatic changes are gonna get the students and develop the skills that they need that when they get to the level to take those really advanced courses at the high school that they're gonna prepare and write for them, because many of them are not right now. At the lower levels, those are discussions that we're gonna have to have is how are we gonna be able to differentiate and help the students that are. I mean, I think this for me, dovetails with the homework discussion because what we have done, I mean, I think about the time after school that we use, for instance, like I have one kid who's studying. Oh my God, like, Rick, it's just my throat is cropped out. Nope, it's not that we've been sitting at the end of the day, so. So he plays D&D and he's studying probability to kind of figure out when these dice are gonna roll, right, and so one of the things we do, we have time to explore those interests, to do those things because, frankly, he doesn't have a homework ever, ever, from the middle school. And so we, I admit we're in a privileged position, have been able to use that time to pursue their interests and supplement their education because they're not, or in fact is what I often see as busy work that is what homework looks like, even at the college level, definitely doesn't work. And so I worry, I worry about what, maybe a lack of consistency, what the quality of that homework's gonna look like, how that might be paged on the things that we're able to do to supplement the education in ways that I think is necessary, even what we're seeing at the time. And I think that's really, I understand it from middle of my high school. I'm particularly concerned about that element of it at the elementary school level. But I think for me that's a big concern. So I'm trying to pull a little bit at it, so it sounds like, so I'm not misreading it, it sounds like what you're saying is that in terms of at least what you're seeing with your own students, your own children, that after school time might be a very beneficial way to build an additional. There's a lot of reading that gets down. I mean, they do all kinds of stuff for that time that I think supplements their education and reinforces their education in a way that's important. And I think they're not always getting during the day, in all honesty. Which is fabulous. And in the dream world, all parents would be able to do that on an elementary level. That's not to say that you shouldn't do that because I certainly don't believe that we should go to the lowest common denominator. But I also have to express a concern for equity for families that I know. I have to try to knowledge our privilege. Yeah, I absolutely, I don't mean to. Yeah, that's for the homework thing, right? So to me, the homework gives us that time. And at the elementary level, I don't really see the research that reinforces the value of it. So before 11 years old, which I think the research is really clear, it's very questionable whether it's beneficial for those kids that age to have homework. To me, having that time for people who have it is beneficial, and it doesn't actually benefit the other kids to have the homework. So I question the value of it at those levels. So the, sorry. I was just gonna say, with probably, I would say the exception of reading and other basic skills that. I think it depends on that one. I think some of it depends on what our vision is homework. For a lower grade elementary student, so grades kindergarten through two, homework might be going home and playing a math game with dice with the parents for 15 minutes. And so that vision of what it is and what it could be, that's why we hate using the word homework, because it conjures the visions that we all had when we were back in school. But that has benefits on multiple levels potentially because that social interaction that they're having with parents that they might not. That's a big piece of that bubble. It's a little bit different for the high schoolers. But the piece about the afterschool programming and the equity, that is one of the ways that we could adapt the fact that we've got those activity buses at the end of the day. So we could build in programming at the end of the day at high level and middle level and help in students with recovery. And they could spend the time to go in and do that work with their teachers right then and there. And then they've got the transportation home out there. So does that mean, I will say traditionally, Brookfield has been left out in the cold because anything that takes place at Randolph were the last bus, which means the kids can't get bus there. So the kids were looking at First Lady League, it was gonna be afterschool program for the bus. So is that different now for Brookfield school? Yeah, it's been different here for a little while. We've been trying to actually make sure that the equality is here that you did not have. That's been a big project of mine kind of since I started. Remember when we started here, my first year, we were actually talking potentially about shutting Brookfield down because I think the enrollment was in the 40s. You know when we got here with our three kids, they were like, yeah, the school can stay over there. So everybody, and again, so the way that I talk about stuff is I process out loud, so I'll talk and it may not be what I mean at that point in time as I'm thinking my way through it. But so I tried to have that discussion, everybody got really upset and said, oh God, I touched on a nerve here. But the reality was it sparks some really good conversations and so then we changed tactics and said, fine, then what we're gonna do is we're gonna try to make things better so that the enrollments go up and you're sitting at 80 something right now. So and that was the same thing at Brookfield. Until this last year, that's the other thing is the enrollments in the district have been steadily, but they're kind of funny they go like this, but the overall trend is we're gaining, I think it's about seven, eight students a year. So we've had that enrollment increase which has helped a lot with the budgets too. So there has been significant investment in Brookfield. So in my understanding, there is a bus currently that an actor schools soon. If the budget passes, there will be next year. And that wasn't, and that'll be for all three schools. Brookfield ran off in Braintree and kind of based upon the model that we did with some of the summer programming here. So they may not go to every stop that you're used to, but what we'll do is we'll set them up. So okay, based upon the kids that we have, what are, we've got the bus that's going up to Brookfield, what are the three or four common areas that we can drop the kids off and all the parents who are about to make them up at the end of the day or whatnot is kind of the plan. And actually, you know, in a $24 million budget, that activity bus, I think it was $70,000 to do for the year for the three schools, an activity bus at each school, so it's a possible benefit of that for $70,000. So I think it's great that all of these changes are happening. I have a senior right now, she's had zero in one month until this year, and now she has all her AP classes, she's taking AP physics and she can't do it and she doesn't understand it and it's really a challenge. And so to fill this in, and I do think homework, a homework policy is awesome. I also worry about the equity piece of it because there are, I hear from so many teachers, oh my God, I don't know, I don't think I, you know, I can't expect the same thing from this kid as I do from this kid because this kid, you know, sleeps in a closet or whatever and doesn't have warm clothes. And you know, like that's the survival mode, people are surviving, kids are surviving and then there's, you know, kids with great parents that can help them and participate. So I think it just has to get started. I think we just have to get started and the buses after school are great and the focus on it is great and moving out of COVID and thinking about a positive way to move forward. I think that's really important. It'd be great to see the test scores increase, it'd be great for seniors to know their work and be able to get it all done. And it sounds like it's heading in a good direction and so that's a positive impact. And of course, Melinda might be able to spend, spend a lot of time, maybe a second before the summer. I'm just fiddling around with this because it's fairly new to me. Usually they prep, I don't want to score, that's why. All right, I apologize that the dots are small and so they do, you guys do it three times a year. And so what this is, is this is the testing that the students are doing on track, my progress and it's giving an indication of how things are shifting over time. Different colors mean different things, right? If you're in the red, you're well below average. If you're in the yellow, right, you're below expected. If you're in the blue, that's what we would call proficient and then if you're in the green, you're well above expected or that would be the exceeds or the exemplary if you were comparing it to the old S-Back and probably the same kind of scoring system that'll be on the Cognio and the States which is just so cool with this year. So if you take a look, let's take a look at Brookfield where the students were when they tested in the fall, right? So you've got 30% of your students are at proficient and 46% of your students that are in the exceeds when they did the testing again in the wintertime. You got a couple of students down in terms of being proficient but that's because they moved over to the exceeds category, right? And you can see that the number of students that were significantly below average and this is mathematics, right? Has been reduced as well as the numbers that are below. So you see this shift of the students getting to the higher levels over time. That would not have been the case five years ago. And so there has been some significant improvements here. Braintree, again, the ones that I can remember off the top of my head before the state was messing around with the testing and they're not doing it during COVID or afterwards. The schools were all increasing. They've been increasing for two years at least before COVID hit. Braintree was at the point where 70% of their kids were hitting proficiency or higher in mathematics and ELA I think was even higher. This school was close. Randolph was a little below that but not by much during that time. So there were significant increases that were happening. Randolph High School was starting out in BIS will be well. Their final, the students that were taking the SBAC in the final year that SBAC was offered had historically been about 11% that were hitting proficiency. Last year in this data I'm not supposed to share they're around 30%. It's at a great number now but they tripled it during COVID. So there is a lot of work that is going on in the schools that the teachers have been engaged in that's been effective. On the mathematics side at the high school and at the elementary schools, right? We bought in programming that never existed before. They've got the Carnegie math program that's happening at the high school that they've been using for the last two years or so. Bridges has been at the elementary for probably a year before I came but it wasn't used consistently across the elementary levels until the last couple of years. And so if that's paying off so there's been a big reinvestment. So we are on the track of getting where we want to go but it's been a long track. You have a lot of years that the goal was keeping things fiscally low and you start to put things at odds when you're not supplying what you need to get to where you wanna go you're not gonna get where you wanna go. So I say, I asked this question acknowledging it's a national problem. But I was thinking about the physics example and the math, what you're just thinking about. That was the physics teacher. Oh, well. This will be in my day-to-day life. This will be in my day-to-day life. Second hardest class I worked at, we'll say. Can't say I did well on it. But I think so much of being set up for success and of course like physics, right, is that really quality math education that comes before it. And I know that hiring highly qualified teachers is very difficult right now. I don't know if this is true. I have heard there are math teachers at the middle of high school not have backgrounds like math or math education backgrounds. But I'm wondering what we're doing to try to attract higher quality teachers especially in those really fundamental areas. I mean, and I think, and I say this, actually I mean it's back up second, our teachers are fabulous. Yeah. I love our teachers but I know there's been turnover, right? And so in hiring it's just hard everywhere. No, I'd have to go back and take a peek but we actually have done very well with hiring. And again, we're not South Burlington but even before my time, the administration has made sure that the teachers were well paid for the region. They're not making 100,000 plus like there in some towns in Massachusetts but they're making probably, especially the ones that have come over say, they're making 10 grand more when they come here from Northfield and Williamstown and probably about the same if not a little bit more if they come from Buffalo and whatever the valley. So typically if there are high quality teachers out there we get them, which is very good. The one, you hit on a very important piece and this is something that was a new thing for me when I got here and I was in huge schools in Massachusetts. So you had, if we had a math department at Marvel I probably had 14 math teachers there. The problem here is even if you've got somebody who on paper and references are great and has the license and whatnot who looks to be a really good teacher, if they end up not being a good teacher because they typically teach all in one grade, those kids have all just watched a significant portion of the year. And so that's one of the things at the high school that impacted. We've got a core of some really good teachers right now but there were a couple of years where an individual teacher or two wasn't quite up to snuff and that left a lasting impact. And again, go ahead. We're talking, just don't use names. So my daughter who's a senior now hit that gap and it started when she was in fifth grade here like her teacher was put on administrative leave for whatever reason. So she didn't have that. And then sixth grade she didn't come in again. And then in seventh grade I was like, oh finally she'll have some math. And I think the teacher was quite good but then something happened and he left also. And then eighth grade was kind of nothing. And ninth grade she got a grade, yes. But that's like, that's a long time. That's a long time. And then there was a pandemic. Yeah. And then with the small schools like this where you're limited, you know, the big school, if I had lost a teacher when I was in principal, I could have shifted things around so people could have covered for that. You can't do that here. And so that has, the quality of the teaching especially as we've been doing the walkthroughs it's been actually kind of fun to see where it is now compared to where it was with COVID has actually been superb. We're gonna be, we've been mostly in the elementary Heather and I are gonna be getting into the high school in about a week to kind of see. But a lot of it isn't necessarily the quality of the teaching that's gone, but in general. But if you get, you know, one that's not up to snuff or something bad happens, you can work things out a lot of the time. Because then you have a sub and it's fractured and there's no continuity. Yeah, and people are doing the best they can but they're just not. So that was a huge impact for a number of students. The first couple of years. Other kind of close out ideas in terms of homework policy concerns, or things that you wanna make sure that we're keeping track of and thinking about as we're potentially crafting. I would just say that we need to have a lot of conversations along the way. Yep. Yeah. Which we did. Anything else that people wanna talk about? Homework, something like 40% of our students come from an economically disadvantaged campus. And I know especially in the upper grades I know students who have quit sports because they kinda had to work. Yeah. And I'm concerned a little bit about excessive homework in the upper grades because I think sports are important and I think some kids do have to work for their families or watch their brothers and sisters who are smaller because their parents are working two jobs. I mean, I agree with homework. I got a lot of homework when I was in school, tons of it. I remember 11 o'clock nights all the time, mostly because of the AP class and things like that, but, and I think it does help. But I think we need to be cautious, ease kids into it, and we gotta really pay attention to the kids who have maybe some of these disadvantages at home because they're gonna get really frustrated and they're gonna like school even less if they get bogged down with it. Just be cautious with that. And when you were talking about college, I'm very interested in that because I'd be interested to know in the disparities in a grade level, if that has to do with kids from different states, public versus private, I think there's a lot that could factor in why there's disparities in the same age level in college. I would love to see that broken down because I do believe that certain states' education is probably better than others. We've largely drawn Massachusetts, which has generally a pretty strong educational system, but we are seeing significant issues. We recruit heavily out of Massachusetts, but we're also essentially an open enrollment institution. So, I think it also varies between town, within the state. I mean, I have one daughter that went to Woodstock High School and one that is going here. Sarah had homework every night all night from day one. She did grade and all of her AP classes, all of that. And Annabelle not so much. So, but they've had positives and negatives for both situations, but I do think the town's very in their education as well. And it might have to do with teacher consistency like we're talking about, teacher consistency and processes in place and that have been there for a long time. We're getting there. I think we're getting there. But there's a couple of good points because I spent 20 years in Massachusetts and in their highest performing schools. And there's also a penalty to pay for kids that work that hard. Belmont and the students would be in at 6 a.m. in the morning to do whatever work they couldn't get done the night before. They'd be in the cafeteria. They'd go to their classes when classes were over. They would go to their sports for two hours. When sports were over, they'd do their extra curriculars that were started at seven o'clock that night. And then they would do the six hours of homework after that that they had. And I can remember doing a play with one of the kids, being in the play with one of the kids and it was horrible to watch. The kids would come up, they'd do their scene, practice their scene and then they would go back down into the seats and they'd frantically start working on the next piece of work that they had to do and then they'd get called up for the next scene. And so the impact of that overly high performing type of an environment was I had seven to 10 suicides a year. The kid got a frickin' B on an exam and that was enough to go for yourself in front of the train that was behind the school on actual stories. And so there's- Well that's not good either. No, but a part of it is trying to find that balance. So yeah, there's a lot of good, there's a lot of good there, but there's also you gotta find that balance point. One of the things that the Randolph schools in Brookfield and Braintree have really been exemplary in my years of being in education is just how much they care about their kids. I have never seen, and this may be true across Vermont, but I have never seen the care and the kindness to work with the students that I see here. I mean, you got attendance rates here that are 95, 96% and graduation rates that are in the 90% range as well, which is unusual for a student for a population of 40% poverty, but it's because they could like be here. So there's a balance in that. Conversation, anything else? I got a lot of good notes too, yeah. I have an idea that I wanted to quote that is not homework related. Sure. So I know the Kimball Library maybe a year or two ago did some kind of survey of teens, youth in the community. Was it real school? Okay. And the results that I saw, and I didn't get to see like raw data, but it was described and it was kind of shocking how disconnected the students felt from the community and how unvalued they felt. So I was reading front porch form and seeing like the hundredth request for somebody to come and shovel steps or something. And I was talking to my kids and I was like, it's too bad we're not down there. You just walk down the street like I used to do and shovel somebody's steps. And we started talking about how many opportunities there are for people, older people who need help, somebody who's mobility limited, who needs a shelf installed or something. And my kids have been working with me at home since they were old enough to walk, changing the oil in the car, doing brakes on the car, mowing the lawn, just any hand sign. Yeah, I heard chickens. Going down the street. And all the neighbors' animals, exactly. And I think it's been a great shared experience for us to bond over projects that we've done and problem solving, and they feel valued and they have skill, and they're young, but I'm wondering if there's some way we could start some kind of service core or something in my high school or middle school or both that would let kids do good in the community and help their neighbors who need it. There are a lot of older folks who need groceries gotten, need things shoveled, need help cleaning, need help with whatever. And I know there are tons of liability issues that would have to be worked out, but I think we're missing an opportunity to take advantage of the energy, enthusiasm, and skills that our kids have. And there are opportunities that go begging. There are people who need help. There are kids who could provide that help and it would make them feel like they were doing something valuable and something useful. And it might be an opportunity for kids who maybe go low academic performing kids and my high academic performing kids to get together around something. Now kids are sports inclined, which is where my kids have bonded with kids from different backgrounds. It just seems like it's an opportunity to do something. And I realize it would require significant investment on the part of the administration or schools if they were the ones to coordinate it. So I just wanted to ask if that's something anyone's ever thought about? If there, I don't know anything about it, but is there a model where it's been done elsewhere that we've been looking at? Oh, we used to have an interim call when I thought in my high school, I don't know if it's still up and running. That's what I was just thinking about too. I know I volunteer at the food shelf and I know that groups of students come to help and that's either through the honor society or also through, which is just a limited amount of time that you'd be eligible, but then there's also an interact group. And I don't think interact is still viable. I think there's some here. I hadn't, they were pretty active right up until COVID and then I hadn't heard much about it. Okay, so I wondered about it. But that's a service, a local service kind of organization open to all regardless of academic performance. And I think it's also, I have a sister who does it in New Hampshire. And so I know a little bit more about it, but like, so it could be all through high school too. Local as well as international. And is it administered or? It is administered by a local school. It's an extracurricular, it's all, but that's- Interact. Okay. But that brings up, you know, an interesting question, you know, possibly for the future, you know, in terms of community service, you know, should that be a mandatory requirement? I was just saying, you could get out of homework if you're doing community service. Well, there's arguments on both sides of it. But if we're talking about, you know, advancing students and giving them a step up, the, you know, the Ivy League schools, one of the things that they're looking for are actually the three main things that they're looking for beyond, you know, your academic record, you know, did you take courses at levels that challenged you is foreign travel. Well, we have that, we've got a pretty good foreign exchange program of its community service. And it's, did you do something in a leadership position, you know, a team coach or an extracurricular coach? And so, you know, that's a whole other conversation that we could have, you know, this is something that should, if we built that, you know, should it just be voluntary or should this be something that every student should be expected to do because they're valuable? I think as we get out of COVID and we start getting back to normal stuff, like we are this year, focusing on those school clubs and like bringing them forward so you actually know what's available so your kid could sign up for it. So I never heard of interact, you know, until now. So maybe they need to do a little bit more market areas. Yeah, I think it died a little bit during COVID but I think it's still there. But I'm, now that you, you brought it up because I hadn't heard it spoken a little while, I'm gonna go check. And I'll bring up the marketing piece because we got, and Lee, it's mad, the tech center could be put a little rad together and be definitely just good. Scott, like just getting the information out about all of them. Definitely, it's not very clear. It's not clear at all, like. You can scroll way to the bottom below the sports. There's a new website next year. I was gonna say don't get me started on the website. That always takes me 20 minutes to find the lunch menu. It's like, no matter where I go, that's not really what you want to do. You just have to Google OSSD now. I do, but then you get to see the high school one. That's our classic school website. Norwich website is the same way. I just checked this morning. I just emailed Sarah. Okay, Sarah. Like I said, they're actually, they're creating the new one this year behind the scenes, so hopefully around the center time. All right. I appreciate the time. Actually, we had wonderful conversations. And it was, we were talking about it when we came in. It was almost 30 degrees soon, this would go out. But thank you very much. Thank you. Wonderful evening.