 Hi everyone. Sorry, we had an RTCC meeting that ran a little long. So we're just getting started here. I'd like to call the OSSD meeting to order at 640. We are going to talk about a learning modality and where we stand as far as that goes. We're going to get a budget update for next school year and 2022. We're going to talk about special ed and elementary sort of end ends monitoring that we're doing in those arenas. And amongst other things, so Brian Baker has already agreed to be our meeting evaluator. And we will have several opportunities for community discussion, questions, et cetera. We do, so there will be after various things after the learning modality, after the budget update, et cetera, there will be a chance for community engagement. If anyone would like to say something right now, that's fine too. So I'm going to mute myself. And if someone member of the public would like to say something to the board right now, that would be fine. So do you guys need to take that? All right, hearing none, we will proceed. So our first discussion will be about learning modality and Lane Millington superintendent is going to talk to us about what he and the other administration officials and cabinet decided to do as going forward. Lane? Gotcha, give me a moment to get set up. Now, this is going to be a similar presentation to those folks that were with me on Thursday. I've updated a little bit of the data that goes along with it. We will talk a little bit about the survey data. If folks remember that when we left the meeting at the last board meeting, we had this plan in place that we would start planning for potential full in-person instruction. And one of the parts of the plan was taking a look at some survey data, sending out a survey to kind of see where people's appetite was. And so that's the first part of this. Let me get this going. So board members that are here, can you see? Awesome. All the problems, I don't be able to see my notes that go along with this. Couple of things to note here. Shut my speaker off. That are going to be important, is that we actually, we did two surveys. We did a survey in October, we did the same survey again in November. The October survey had a bunch of IP addresses in there that had submitted the survey over and over. You expect that a little bit, right? Because if you got two parents, there's also a teacher in the school or you've got kids. First speaker's off. Somebody else has a speaker besides me. I can't find my mic, I don't know where. It's usually right, oh, wait a minute. Nora, can you hear me? Can you hear me when I'm presenting? Yes, I can. Thanks, yes. Say it again, Nora. Yes, I can hear you. Awesome, just to make sure. So again, so we did the October survey, we did a November survey. It looked like people were kind of stuff in the ballot box a little bit. When you see IP addresses like that. But the interesting thing was it was mostly parents. And when I had a chance over this weekend to take a closer look at them, we had almost as many stuffing the ballot box for full in-person as we're stuffing it for full remote and hybrid. So the data is probably from both months is actually pretty accurate as far as I can tell. The other thing to kind of point out that I think is important is to remember that survey data is just that. It represents what people's desire is right now. It does not necessarily tell us what is wise to do or what is safe to do, okay? So in terms of the parents, and this is the parents overall, we'll break it out a little bit later by what the elementary level said. We'll talk about why we want to look at the elementary a little bit differently. This is the parents in total. You see a couple of changes between October and November. And remember that the November survey went out shortly after we did have our positive cases within the high school and a positive case over at Grain Tree. You see that the full in-person went from 55% down to 49%. So a modest change. Hybrid, the desire for the hybrid schedule stayed approximately the same. And the desire for full remote went up 5%. So 5% of the people that were originally for full in-person pretty much switched over to deciding for full remote. And we actually saw that play out after the positive cases of COVID. We had a number of parents call up and said, I want my students now in full remote. We also had some things that played out after those positive cases in terms of the teachers. We had two more resignations on paraprofessional staff. And then we had three teachers who legitimately had medical conditions that were kind of borderline. So as long as the risks in the school were low, it was safe kind of for them to be here. It was minimal risk. But now that we've had the outbreak, are now pursuing to be able to go out and to teach remotely. It's expected at least that this sort of pattern is going to continue to happen each time we get some positive cases in the school. We will probably see more parents seeking to shift over to going full remote and teachers as well, who might be on that borderline cusp in terms of medical necessity to be switching to remote as well. In terms of teacher modality, you know, what they were looking for, prior to they seem to be very focused in on the hybrid schedule and their commitment to the hybrid schedule has not changed despite the positive cases that we had a week or so ago. But in terms of full in-person, it went from 21% down to 6%. And this is important because whatever we decide to do in terms of a learning modality, we have to have a willing staff to be able to carry it out. So it's kind of one of the things that we're looking at, one of the metrics we're looking at in terms of determining what might be possible. And again, you see the rise, you know, the percentage of teachers that would like full remote has actually doubled, from 16% to 33%. Students, I'm only throwing this up there just because we had a few. We had 24 students in October that had done results in the survey. The majority of them want full in-person or full remote hybrid was their least choice. And even though this is a small number of students that kind of put into the survey, this kind of mimics what we see when we talk to the students as we're walking through the school, the majority of the students do want to be here. Raven, we did get a couple of responses on the Raven, which is a separate program. They are full in-person, they really can't function in any other modality too well. So they're full in-person, they will remain full in-person. That program serves between 12 and 14 students. Now, take a look at the elementary only results. And the reason that I broke this out by elementary was because we had talked earlier about doing kind of, when the conditions are right, doing kind of a phased in approach. And the students to start with are the younger students because they're the ones that are gonna benefit the most from the socio-emotional learning that occurs, right? They're the ones that are losing out the most on that if they are not here. So if we take a look at the elementary only results, you see that in terms of full in-person, right? About 62, 63% of the parents would like to see those elementary students here. That did not change that much between October and November, one percentage point. So it's probably completely insignificant that change. And you'll see that the hybrid didn't change much and the percentage of parents at the elementary level looking for full remote didn't change that much as either. That was pretty constant. In terms of the teachers, those that are looking at the elementary level for full in-person. And again, these teachers believe and really do wanna be back in connection with these kids. That one thing is clear if it's safe to do, but that is declined from 25% in October to 10% in November. And it makes sense because the people that are at the highest risk in these schools are the adults, right? A lot are older, a lot have health conditions or folks at home that they're taking care of or folks that they go home to that are either older or have health conditions. So it makes perfect sense. In terms of the hybrid, they're still pretty committed to that hybrid schedule at the elementary level. Now, one of the questions that was asked, and I thought it was an important one at the last meeting, so we can talk about this in a little bit more detail, is that when the cabinet sits down, the cabinet is myself, it's the principals, it's the directors, it's the other leadership across the district. And we have these discussions every two weeks is what are the metrics that we're considering? Basically two, right? Is it safe given current conditions and do we have the staff to support a different modality than the one that we're in? Well, in terms of do we have the staff to safely support it? Remember right now that only 6% of the district, the staff in the district overall, with 124 staff members putting in on the survey, only 6% said they are for full in-person learning. 10% at the elementary if you just look at the staff at the elementary level and all. And then the second question is, is it wise given current conditions? And so I put this little list together that compares where we were the last time we met in October and where we are right now tonight. So when we met in October, we were average in about three to five cases per day in Vermont, nobody was in intensive care and there had been no deaths since July. And it was just starting to rise. We talked about the fact that coronaviruses typically start to pick up steam in October and continue to pick up steam through February. Right now cases in Vermont are 25 to 30 people per day contracting COVID, 43 on Sunday. And Sunday, if you look across the nation and across the States, Sunday tends to be the day where there are the fewest cases reported and we had 43. We have folks that are in intensive care. We had four going into the weekend. One of them has died and that's the first death in Vermont since July. In terms of Vermont schools that had seen positive COVID cases, at the time that we met last month in October, there were seven schools. This was funny, Thursday morning when I was preparing this presentation for the open forum, there were 23 schools that had reported positive cases of COVID. By that evening on Thursday, it was up to 30 and today it is up to 32. The two little asterisks that are there is for two reasons. The first is to remind me to tell you that some of those 32 schools have had more than one outbreak. That is not a part of that 32 count. The second reason there's an asterisk there is because the data on the website isn't complete. How do I know this? Because we had five cases in Randolph and on the website it only shows us as having two. So it looks potentially at least in our case it's been under reported, you know the number of cases in the schools. I can't say that that's true for the other schools and districts that are out there in that posting that I can say that it is true for ours. In October when we met national cases were at 39,000 per day. It's been a little quiet in terms of the COVID front because of the election but national cases right now are 100,000 plus per day. Today it was 106,000. Right yesterday was actually a little bit more than today but we've had four or five days over 100,000. National deaths per day in October was 665 on a rolling seven day average. National deaths per day right now are over 1,000. So again, the question comes back to do we have the staff and is it wise? Trends in area schools. I have a chance every week or two every week and sometimes every other week to talk with the other superintendents in the area. There's about 14 of us that meet. And there was a lot of discussion going on even locally South Royalton for one about the fact that when the kids leave for the Thanksgiving holiday they do not come back and they go into remote session and they stay there until after the December break in January and then they'll reassess. I am not suggesting that for us here. I am just saying that this is the discussion in and around the state. There's a lot of worry right now about COVID fatigue. People are tired, they're not wearing masks the way they're supposed to be traveling when they shouldn't. We've got the holidays and the vacations coming up and I think that's one of the sparks for this discussion. There were two superintendents that have recently gone to full in-person at the elementary level and they both had the same comments. The first one was we are hanging by a thread each day because of staffing. And the second one was it'll just be a matter of time until this collapses due to staff attrition. And for those of you who don't know and who weren't a part of the RTCC meeting that just happened, Williams Town, who was next door to us just went into full remote due to conditions in and around the town. And the last piece of information that I'll throw out there is that the governor recently extended the order for state workers who work from home through March 31st. And so there is a split so that people are aware of what is being asked of the schools versus what they are asking of their own state workers. I get that we're different entities but we're actually a little bit more of a risky population than a lot of the state workers are that work in their office buildings with a lot of space in between. So just information to throw out there for people to take into consideration. Cabinet recommendations, they remain the same as last month but folks are open potentially to full in-person for grades K to two. And again, for us, full in-person means four days. We need three days. We need the two days to let the aerosolized droplets that are floating around in the air if somebody has the infection to settle down and then one day to go in and wipe it all up. If you go in and you wipe it all up and then they settle, it kind of doesn't do anything any good. So that's the reason for potentially having those three-day weekends. Two days, 48 hours to air things out let the droplets settle. The day to do a deep clean, disinfect them, tell everything that we tend before we come back into school on Monday. Now, the reason that these grades are potentially possible is because K to two, they're smaller class sizes, right? 12, 14, 15 kids per class. We get a problem and I'll talk about that when it comes down to the square footage of the classrooms when we get the grades three and above. Right now, the governor and the AOE put out a revised addition in terms of the guidelines for operating under COVID that goes into effect on November 16th. So I'm in the middle of writing the next chapter in the OSSD COVID handbook. Two things got really strict. The first thing that got really strict in the new guidance is grade seven and above there has to be six feet of social distancing. It is not an option anymore. Prior to that change, it was an option. Six feet if you can do it, but if you can't, we understand now it's six feet. The grades K to six, it's three feet. And so I did some analysis. RES is gonna have the most trouble. And one of the reasons because of that is when that school was built, the state limited the size the classrooms could be. They are actually smaller classrooms. About half the classrooms are 550 square feet. About half the classrooms are 625 square feet. That was the limit set on us by the state when that building was rebuilt. They cheated a little bit. They built some little spaces between the classrooms as kind of a place for teachers to meet one on one or one on two students. But what this means is that even if we're following that three-foot rule, not the six-foot rule, the three-foot rule, that's the maximum that we can have in those classrooms. And the 550 square foot classrooms, you can have one teacher and 11 students. And in the 625 square foot classrooms, you can have one teacher and 14 students. So we are limited to who we can bring back equity. Right now, K to two, based upon the class sizes in those grades, we can probably pull it off. If we try to go above that, we are gonna be in violation of that, what is now a hard rule in terms of three feet, especially at RES. The other thing to be aware of is that to make this work, we need to order standalone desks for the kids to sit at. In most of those classrooms, they're tables, right? It's meant for collaborative learning. Doesn't work in this setup. So we've got an order out for desks. And then the final question is, if we do this, what would the timing of it be, right? The most reasonable time would be after November 16th when the new guidelines and safety protocols kick in. But then where are we at? We're a week away from Thanksgiving. We've already talked about the fact that a lot of schools around the state are talking about not coming back after Thanksgiving because they can't trust where people may be traveling. So do we do it after Thanksgiving? Do we do it closer to December? Or do we wait until, you know, and the end of second quarter and the third quarter? I don't know. Again, it's hard to predict because conditions can change. They could get dramatically better. It's all based on probability. They could get dramatically worse. So that's a piece that's worthy of discussion. So folks are open to full in-person K to two. But the biggest question is if, you know, the board decides that it would like to move forward on this is what should the time be. Just to put a finer point on it, and I think this is an important one because I want people to realize this, especially if you're out talking with folks in state or federal government, the support to this district and to most schools at this point in time, I've listed it. As of today, we are 10 months in. We have received one box of 1,000 disposable paper masks that was given to us in September. We have received two small boxes of hand sanitizer which was given us in September. We received a box of 900 cloth masks which we just got in mid-October. And that's it. That's been our support from state and federal government so far 10 months in. We did, they do have a CARES and ESSER that's set up. We are applying for reimbursement. We don't know when and if we will get that money. Hopefully it comes in relatively soon because we're a million dollars in right now and additional costs. The one thing that did come through which I am very pleased about was from the Coronavirus Relief Fund. The state did set some of that money aside and gave it to efficiency Vermont to kind of dole out as needed to help schools either fix their ventilation if they were having ventilation problems or if you're in a condition like us where ventilation was working, the way that it should and well-maintained to be able to enhance it. So we did apply for the grant. We just signed off on the paperwork on it on Thursday last week for $170,000. The majority of that money is going to go to replace the fans in the ventilation systems. When we put those higher degree filters in there that filter out the aerosolized particles, right? It adds pressure in the system. It's hard for the old fans to be able to blow through those filters effectively. So these fans will be upgraded that are coming from this grant will be able to keep up a nice constant stream of air despite the resistance caused by those new filters that are in there. There's also some controls that will be going into place to make it a little bit easier to monitor when the filters are getting bad and need to be replaced and where the air is going. So that is the OnePlus so far. So after dumping all that on, yeah. Let's see if there's questions or thoughts out there and as well as board discussion and everything else that should go with this. Okay, first I'd like to open up questions to the board. Do people have questions, comments, anything else that they would like to hear from Lane? And then I'll open up for public comment or question. You said that the cabinet recommendation that the cabinet was open to K through two, four day in person, but what about the staffing of those grades, the teachers? This is, I think people can still hear me. So this is actually will be a good test. One of the things that we worry about is let's just say tomorrow we decided that everybody comes back full in person. We don't know if we did something like that, how many staff would resign? How many staff would call out sick? How many staff would show up with a doctor's notes? All legitimate. I mean, there's real anxiety around this as there should be. The elementary level, they tend, again, it's only four percentage points. They tend to be a little bit more open to the idea of full in person. They recognize the importance of connecting with these kids, especially because the socioemotional learning and these are smaller classes anyway. They're ones that we can accommodate. We can have the full classes back in those grades and we can accommodate them within the social distancing parameters. So it would be a good test at some point in time to try this and see what happens. It's a small control group. We have enough resources that if something fell apart on one day, we could probably scramble around and try to fill in with those. So good question on the staffing piece. Just to add onto it, and I don't need to make the light of this, but just those, I have a four and a seven-year-old and they may be the least risky in one sense, but they're also the least likely to be good at blowing their noses and washing their hands. So that's just something that occurs to me that it may be low risk in terms of the spacing and also whether they carry it or not, but gosh, they're germy. Yeah, and I'm good. Well, it's a good point, but there's also another piece out there that people may have forgotten or not realized is that last March, March 17th, when we went into remote session and most schools across the state went into remote session, the youngest students ended up in protective bubbles at home, right? They're too young to be running around by themselves. They were mostly at home. They were mostly at home this summer. So for somebody to come to me and say that there is definitive research at this point in time, we've had these kids have been in exposure with one enough or long enough for us to really tell that they're at lower risk. They might be, there's good logic behind it, but there may not be. I don't think enough time has passed with them back in school in a condition of full in person to be able to tell for sure. What the research tells us is that their bodies are so small that they have a hard time. They can't project the virus, right? They don't breathe as hard as an adult does when they cough, it doesn't travel as far. So that's a part of it. I also more my personal belief than anything else, especially the little, little kids, their bodies are too small to generate enough of a viral load to really load somebody up with it, right? You gotta absorb a certain amount of the virus before you catch it. I think it would take them a lot longer to be able to build up that load in somebody else just because of the size of their bodies. Don't know, just some thoughts that are out there. But again, if people are gonna depend on this research that says, yes, these folks are at lower risk, yeah, the initial data does say that, but again, there's not a lot of data because these folks were protected right up until the start of the school year and are only now, for the most part, being exposed to what everyone else has been exposed to just because of their age, so good point. Yep. Any other questions or comments from board members? And sorry about that, let me turn my microphone back on. My speaker's sorry. Go ahead, yeah, still can't hear you. A little bit better, Frank. Can you hear me now? Now we can. Okay, sorry about that. I was just wondering about sub coverage. So once we've got people in and working fully in person, they may get sick and have to be out, are we, I know that was an issue before. Yeah, it's still an issue. Again, you know, if we're talking K to two, it is a small pocket, it's a limited size, it may be possible, we don't know until we try. And again, worst case scenario is if it doesn't work, you know, for a day or two, admin and whatnot can scramble around to fill in the holes until we say, nope, we got to convert back. And again, I'm not pushing to do it now. I'm just saying it's possible. My personal opinion, and again, this is just me, I'm not the decider in this. My personal opinion is that we are probability wise on the cost of things getting extremely ugly for the next couple of months. And so, you know, I am definitely not pushing it right now, but I do believe that it is a possibility. If this is a place that people want to start, then this is the place to start. Any other questions or comments from the board? Okay, hearing none, I'm going to open it up for public comment, question, clarification, et cetera. Norah. Could I jump in? Chris, did you want to go first? It's fine. It doesn't really matter. It doesn't really matter. I can go after you. All right. Just being too polite, right? So, Norah Skolnick, teacher elementary school at RES, and I am one of the teachers who is fully remote this year. I had a few things that I wanted to say. One, and more my role as one of the presidents of the Education Association, we have talked with our members at quite length, and it was the overwhelming feeling of the membership that they did not wish to return to full in-person or four days a week in-person, even at the elementary school level, even with the lower grades. I, we completely agree with everything that Lane had so eloquently put into his presentation. Thank you, Lane, for putting all of that together. I think the one area that, I don't know if it's really a disagreement or maybe it's a degree because is that the K through two teachers from what we have heard when we spoke with them do not wish to return to fully in-person at this time. I think we agree completely that, yes, that is the place to start when we do start opening back up to being, having more days and have full-in-person, but now is not the time to be doing that. I was originally gonna read, we sent a letter to the board and I was gonna read all of that again and I'm happy to do that. But I think Lane just so eloquently made all of the points that we put out and all of the reasoning behind it. The rates are going up. I mean, 43 in a day, that's almost, I think that's more than what we had when we had the school shut down completely. And that's not necessarily an aberration. That's the trend. It's regularly over 20 cases in a day. When my last look today, I think it was at 23 and that was this morning. It could have gone up since then. I think that the understanding is there that yes, it may not even be the students who are transmitting it. That's not known for sure, but the adults are at risk and you can't have teachers. You're not gonna have any education if you don't have the teachers there to teach the children. Even if it's half the class, at least they're able to maintain that and the hybrid while it's not what any of us want, it is working given the conditions that we are under that we're all facing in this pandemic. I also, and I don't have these figures in front of me, but I question on some of those lower grades. I do know that there are classes K through two at RES that have 18, 19, 20 students in them. So those classes would not, you would have to move some of those children around. So you'd be switching who their teachers are. You might potentially have to switch where they're going to schools in order to have the capacity to do it. I don't have all those specifics. I don't wanna overstep on those reasons, but just that this is not the time to be doing this. This is the time that as Lane has said, other schools are talking about going fully remote. I think we are very lucky to be doing as well as we are doing. And I don't know that it's just even luck. I think it's also due to the care and the planning that has gone into this and that the hybrid is working for given the circumstances that we are all under. Thank you. And I'm actually piping to, I think we agree more than you think in terms of the K to two piece. I too, I'm not proposing it for right now. I think it is a very bad idea. The other piece of information that we didn't talk about is Orange County, where we live was always the lowest in the state. We were in the lowest state in terms of infection rates. And then we had Orange County. I think if I, I might be off by one person, I think in the last four days we've had seven cases in Orange County. Nine when I last looked. So it is growing. There are, in terms of the K to two, there are students that are fully remote that bring the numbers down a little bit, from the higher pieces that we talked about. And I'm also in agreement. I like the hybrid schedule because it is a good balance. I talked last month on this idea that the model around the country seems to be this idea is that, you get everything up and running really well and things were running well in the country for a while there. There was a nice balance there. And then people said, okay, let's start opening stuff up. And they kept opening things up until it blew up in their faces. And why do we want to repeat that? If we have something that's a good balance in terms of risk, as well as the benefit that the kids are getting right now, it seems that that's what we should be maintaining. Again, my recommendations, my thoughts, but just to pipe in on what you were saying Laura. Thanks. Yep. Chris. Hi, Chris Armstrong, elementary school teacher. I have kids in the high school and elementary as well. So I also, I just want to start out by applauding, first of all, the decisions of the board up until this point, Lane's leadership and the efforts of the administrators and the teachers that over the summer took what seemed to be an impossible task and have made it so successful to this point. And I think it's amazing. You guys have done an amazing job. A few things that jumped out at me in Lane's presentation that I want to talk about quickly. One is the kind of the suspicious guidance from the state. As you mentioned, that state workers are being told to work at home through March 31st, whereas we're not only being asked to stay open or maybe possibly pushed to full in person at times, but also that the guidance has now dropped to three feet for many of the kids in the building. So that really jumped out at me. And I also, in thinking about that three feet, I don't think that that was known when the surveys went out. So it would be interesting at how that might change survey results in the future. If this is somewhere we're going with this and we really want to continue and we are going to keep up these monthly surveys, having everybody know that three feet is now the new guidance for those younger grades and that going in person K through two might mean going to three feet, I don't know, but I would assume that that would possibly change a lot of staff member and student parent opinions. And then just one other piece about the timing and it sounds like Lane, you're on it too, that you don't believe that this is really the time, especially given the holidays and stuff. Just on the date though, as you said, like do we wait till after? Do we wait for it into December? I think it's hard that we might really, given the incubation period and when things really start to spread after initial contact, like the Montpelier event, we're finding out now, I mean, the numbers have continued to grow and grow over the last month, right? And given that that incubation period and the fact that then we're walking, then we're going into Christmas and New Year's and not only could that blow up in our face, but people who do decide to visit family members at that time, not knowing that they're sick if that were to happen, just seems like a really risky timing to be going about it. And then Lane, I'd like you to just clarify one thing and I think it's just maybe the way you said it, but when you said it might be a good test to see how that influences the staffing or something. It almost sounded to me like a little risky if we were to test this without really knowing what staff thinks. I know personally that would be a really hard decision if I was faced with and I had to decide, am I gonna resign? Because you mentioned that there's some, you might get a lot of staff that did resign if they had to be in that situation. And I would hope that more communication would go in before we decided that this was like a test run because that's people's jobs and people's livelihoods and people's lives. So I don't think that's what you meant, but maybe if you could clarify a little bit on that comment, I'd appreciate that. Like I said, there are two metrics that we're looking for. Is it safe? Is it wise? And do we have the staffing? And like I said, in the last slide, my recommendations have remained unchanged with the only difference being is that we're open to the K-2 when it's appropriate. My recommendations at the last meeting were third quarter. And again, that's thinking about probabilities, what we know about coronavirus is where things probably will be, but nobody in this environment can predict that far out. But for me, that is probably the earliest possible, especially given how ugly it looks like, things are gonna be now through February. If it follows the same patterns as most coronaviruses, it will drop off pretty quick in February. So you're potentially looking at March, April, right? And we'll have to take a look at what the conditions are and what the staffing levels are at that point in time. That survey, by the way, will be done monthly. That's the intent at this point in time just so we can track how emotions and how people are thinking over time. And would you consider putting in that three-foot piece? Just, I guess, as we continue that survey, if there is new guidance from the state, maybe a blurb that kind of updates that at what we're really looking at. I know the last time when I filled out that survey, I didn't realize that that would be the case that the K-2 might be at the three-foot distance at that point too, so. Yeah, there's a lot of info that has to go out for the next one. It's not just the, they revamp that whole 25, 30-page guidance piece, but it's also, now we got the winter sport guidance and all that, most of which, if things keep on the tack that it's going, before we get to January, when they're saying they might allow the kids to start working on the winter sports, if it keeps going the way it's going, it's not gonna happen, I mean, it's just, yeah. So a lot of changes, yeah, no, but agreed. And I do communicate out those changes each time they're done. I resend out that handbook, and I'll try to put the summaries in of the big pieces that have changed and where to look. So good points. Are there any comments from parents or someone besides staff? I'd like to ask a question. Lane, it's a question for you. I'm curious, since we've had so many additional cases in Orange County in the last couple of weeks, is there any understanding of where these cases are coming from, and is there any possibility that we're having an increase in spread due to kids that are asymptomatic? Do you know anything about that? I could not give you a answer based on any data. My guess is based upon what we're seeing in the high school and at the elementary schools is, and you've seen it kind of in my emails, is there is a lot of people traveling to hotspots and they're coming back, they're not quarantining. We catch a couple a week, sometimes a couple a day, because people post onto social media what they did over the weekend and have to tell them, nope, you need to go home and you need to quarantine. So my guess is, if I were a betting man in Vegas, I'd lay my bets down on the fact that what we're seeing in and around the communities is most likely coming from the traveling that's going on in the hotspots. And odds are that's only gonna increase as we get closer to the holidays. So I don't have a definitive answer, but that's the best I can give you, I apologize. No, that's good, thank you. Someone else? Hi, my name's Kathleen Foden, I'm a kindergarten teacher. I ran off elementary school. I just wanna think about with the three feet guidelines where students would be in the classroom. I would envision that some students would be in the cubby area and close to the bathroom and close to the sink. If we're stretching out our whole class, I have a classroom of 15 right now. And that kind of makes me feel uncomfortable in the sense that I don't want it's to feel isolated being in the classroom. And I worry that sometimes the way our classrooms are laid out, if we're respecting state guidelines on that, that we would isolate the students in the classroom. So that's just a concern that I have in the lower grades. Thank you. And you know, as well as I do, how hard it is to keep the little ones apart even with the best of intent and the best-behaved kids. It's almost impossible, yeah. Hi, this is Pat Miller, the principal in Braintree. I can add to Kathleen's concern. I know in classrooms, in order to do that, if we brought the K2 kids back, we would need to do away with the rug area where the kids go to sit for a group meeting time. And for little ones, that's really tough. We really need them not sitting at their desks all day long. They're only six years old. And so, or five years old even. And so that part of it, I think, would be really tough too, because in order to spread them out, we have to take up that area with desks. And it's wintertime, so it's not like they can take the break outside that easily. Good points. Hi, I'm going to jump in now. I'm Julie Hinman, I teach third and fourth grade at Randolph Elementary. And I just want to make sure people realize that at the elementary school, the kids have their masks off to eat up to three times a day. And so if you take away the three feet and you have kids eating breakfast, snack, and lunch in the classroom, they could be, it could be an hour a day where kids are without masks in the classroom. And I just feel like that's unacceptable for our staff and the students to have that much exposure because we're eating in the classroom. So I'm not sure that this is even a good idea to be talking about. If I could just jump in and add to what Julie just said, again, this is Chris Armstrong. I just feel like from the beginning, the district has been so adamant about being a six foot district and that has been great. And I've heard Lane say over and over that the state recommendation, the state guidance is the minimum by what we go by. And that if at any point we feel as a district that it needs to be stricter for the safety of our community, then those are the decisions we're going to make. So I just hope that any decisions that are made are made under that assumption that we've all been led to believe and I think you guys have done a great job with it. I sit back and listen to Lane go through the facts and the details on it. And he's so knowledgeable about it that I feel that we are in good hands with that. And I hope that we continue to recognize that state guidance is that minimum and go by what we have in our gut. Lane said before, take a gut check, feel what you really think is right. And so I think that that's an important point to consider. Hi, can I jump in? Sarah Richards from Braintree. I'm just gonna kind of piggyback on what Pat said. I have seven kids right now, half day, then 14 kids a full day if they do come back. And I think the biggest concern that I have would be for seven, six, seven, eight year olds being at their desk, a big majority of the day. Right now when I have seven kids, we can kind of make do with the room that we have. I can put some at their desk, spaced out appropriately. And then we can kind of spread out on the rug. But if we do bring in 14 desks, that would really make up the whole space in my room. And having kids at their desk at the primary age would be really hard. They need to move, they need to wiggle. And it would just kind of, it would make it really hard. And with the cold weather coming, we can't get out as much. And we're doing that as much as we can now, but it's gonna be harder with the cold weather. So that's just my thought. Thank you. Hi. Hi, this is Lizzie Meyer. I teach fifth and sixth at Randolph Elementary. And I just wanted to jump in. I was part of the task force for the elementary over the summer. And in some ways it was actually a fun challenge to really think through how we could make this happen for our students and our community. But it was a ton of work to really think it through. And it was work that I was happy to do. And I'm so happy to have the students back that I do. So I would just ask that if at some point we do really think about making this move that we have some real lead time to think it through, but there's everything from, as Julie said, the complications of eating in the room to how many kids you can have at recess safely and keep those distances. And so I just, I don't know, I just wanted to put in a plug that it really was a lot of hard work and hard thinking and hours of moving post-its around and figuring things out. And so when it does come time, which I'm in full agreement is not right now, just that we have some lead time to do as thorough of a job of planning it we did for this fall. And so what will happen and what is happening, again, we're just planning just keep our fingers crossed someday. That's the hope that we get back to normal at some point in time. But that new guidance that came out, it's gonna fall out in kind of the same way it did over the summer that you were involved in. And that's, the general guidance is there, it goes into the overall handbook. And then that goes to each of the schools for the school-based teams to kind of adapt that to the context in which you live, which you guys did a fantastic job about. And that does take time, especially to do it well and to do it right. And again, it's not helpful that the guidance changes as frequently as it does. So especially with all the planning and the purchasing that goes along with it at times. So point well taken, Lindsay. If I could just pick up on both Lindsay's point and what you were saying and this is Ted Kellman I teach at the high school. And I think in addition to the time planning just we need to think about from the experience of moving into the hybrid model, the amount of work that it was in making the physical transition and then figuring out how to deliver quality education to kids under these circumstances was tremendous. And I think it was disruptive. And there was a transition period where even with extra two weeks, you know, it was a wobbly takeoff. And I think that everybody did like an amazing job from what I've seen at pulling it off. But there's a cost to kids learning in any transition. And I think that, you know, to what you were saying some of the data that you were laying out and some of the, I think responsibly like sober predictions or possible speculation about what the winter might look like. We also have to really consider the possibility that we might have to make a transition going the other way and that there's sort of, we need to factor in the time that either of those will take and what I think would be worst of all for kids would be to have to make a rapid lurching decision, transitioning from one thing to another. And then the one other thing I just wanted to say because I think we haven't heard from as many parents tonight, but I know and I think it's really valid the huge struggle that parents are feeling and some of certainly also invoked like the social emotional damage that some kids are experiencing from, you know, not having this full experience of school. But I think we also, you know, particularly now that we've had people in our community contract the virus and deal with that level of trauma just need to really confront and weigh very heavily what that would do to our community to have a member of our school community become extremely sick or God forbid, die of the virus. So not that I have to remind anybody of the gravity of that but it just also seems like really important to have that weight on the table also in terms of the impact on kids. Thank you. You're very good. Hi, Dana here. So I'm listening to all of this. I'm just trying to feed my brain because there's this part of me where I'm a parent at the elementary school and my husband hasn't gone back to work yet because he has to homeschool the kids when they're only there half time. So there's that hat I wear but there's also this special education hat I wear some of my students I am lucky enough to teach 11th and 12th grade where we are back four days a week and it's a small population cause a lot of students are remote fully but I have a lot of students that come back in in special ed that have immune compromise disease and they're only allowed to come in because of how small the school and student population is. So I think about that and I also think about at the high school the older teachers that we have too that come in because they have to come in and teach math, right? I'm thinking about the only math class that is being taught on the 11th and 12th grade level and it scared me when we had the outbreak at the high school a couple of weeks ago. So like whatever we do I hope we're just very thoughtful like you are doing a lot of time in consideration and knowing that if we bring everyone back in at the high school what that would look like in our pods cause I do think the pod system has worked at the high school obviously when the last the outbreak just happened it worked very well actually. So that's all I wanted to say, thank you. Yeah, Dana a good, very good point. At this point based on the numbers and the classroom sizes if all the kids came back we couldn't maintain the six feet. So I have no intention of ever recommending at this point in time that the high school goes back full in person not unless something dramatically changes. So yeah. I know I've spoken before so I don't want to take someone else's place if they wish to speak. One piece that I wanted to add though is I guess an acknowledgement that we know that all of this place is a burden on the community and that it's difficult for the parents. The purpose of school shouldn't be childcare but we understand that that's also necessary in our day and age for parents to be able to work and not having that childcare available four days a week as a hardship. I guess what my asking of the board is to balance that with the safety and for all of the reasons that we've laid out before why that hardship needs to exist and that perhaps the district can be looking to help or to work with other organizations to find ways to meet those needs that have not been in place before. You know, schools have taken up a lot of the burden in terms of community needs. This is one burden that we can't take up right now and but we need to figure out a way to help the community with that and we should be part of that discussion. So I don't know if it's helping to have childcare centers or with other organizations but somehow to be working on that cooperatively while keeping everybody safe and maintaining for all the reasons we've said before the current status. Thanks. Are there any other parents or community members that would like to speak? I'd like to speak as a parent. My daughter, the kindergartener at Randolph Elementary and she actually has a social anxiety disorder and so it's sort of imperative that she does go to school and we do have that in-person, you know, social contact piece. However, she's also fully aware that we're in the middle of a pandemic and it's tough to even convince her to go sometimes and I've seen her benefit greatly from the small classroom size and I fear that if we were to go back full-time, I mean, if we're in the grocery store and someone gets too close, she's like, mom, they're not six feet away. And I think it would be really hard for her in particular and I think a lot of other kids that I do work with at school to kind of be in that environment where, you know, we have to stress all of this social distancing, physical distancing but then we're kind of like stuffing you all into a classroom. And so I see, you know, I see this hybrid is working well. I see a lot of kids benefiting from the small class sizes and this is a big stress on our kids as well as us parents and teachers. And I think that especially thinking about it from the kid's point of view, you know, it could be quite stressful to increase their class sizes right now given everything that they're going through. Thanks, is there anyone else? Hi, this is Megan, my friend is an elementary school student at Braintree and at the last board meeting in October, Lane, you presented some information regarding student performance data that you, and it appeared to be very preliminary data that you presented it nonetheless indicating that student performance was not really being impacted by the hybrid learning modality. And I was wondering if you have any updates to that data since you relied on it so heavily during your last presentation? Well, for starters, I didn't rely on it heavily. I just made the off comment that as people were preparing the data for the ends, they had said that they were actually surprised about how well the students were doing. And they made the same comment that Jen just made. And we actually heard that from a couple of the superintendents too that are in the hybrid modality that there is a significant amount of benefit to these smaller classes. And you have fewer students, you build better personal relationships with them. So we've seen a dramatic decrease in the number of behavioral issues that we typically experience, especially at the high school level. And those behaviors often get in the way of learning, not just for the student that's having the behavioral issues, but for those that are also exposed to it a little bit. We are gonna be presenting some ends data a little bit later tonight. So I hope you can hang around it to see what that data shows. Okay, I see that it's about 742 and we have a lot of other things to cover. So is there anything different or new that needs to be presented right now? Sorry about that. Gotcha. Okay, hearing none, let's just open this up to board discussion. Are we, you know, we've heard a lot of opinions seems to me that most people are sort of on the same page that we should continue with a hybrid modality. What do you guys think? Is there any reason to veer off the course that we are currently on? I don't think we are. I mean, if I'm talking as a parent, I would really want my son back in full time, but then I have to take a step back and as a board member look at, you know, what's best for everybody around. So it's tough that way to hear, you know, everyone talking about it, but so as far as his education, I would really want him back in school because I don't believe he's getting the education that he should, but you have to weigh the risk with the reward and that's where the question comes in. So I mean, I would be hard to be in favor of changing it right now, even though I really personally would like him to be back in school. Other opinions or comments from board members? There we go. This isn't different, but I just want to say, I think it is the responsible and safe and community-minded thing to do to stay as is, and I appreciate that there's work going on in order to make the change where that to become possible, but I think it would be irresponsible of us to vote to go into any more in person. Anne or Rachel, do either of you have any comments? I want to just say that it's so very helpful to hear from our teachers and from our community members. And you can't hear me. Can you hear me now? Okay. It's just very helpful to hear from our teachers and staff and also from our community members. It's hard to make a decision in a vacuum and having people's input is very, very helpful. So I just want to thank everybody who's participated so far tonight. And I know we didn't hear from a lot of parents, but in particular, Megan, thank you for speaking out because I know you're not an educator. And so a lot of people wear two hats or more. And it's hard to be the one, kind of the one person or the one of the few who are not wearing an educator's hat as well and give that perspective and I appreciate it. But all the teachers, thank you. Any other board member comments? Okay. I think we should probably make a motion then and vote on this seeing as we've decided to take over sort of the responsibility for changing modalities. It seems to me like maybe we don't need to since we're basically agreed, it seems to me to continue the hybrid modality for the time being, is that true? So then therefore we don't need to make a motion. We will just continue to operate as is. And hopefully we'll be able to remain in the hybrid modality for as long as possible. So great. Thank you for everyone for comments. Thanks for attending. We do appreciate hearing from so many of you and it's great to just have all these staff members and community members just being part of our meetings. It's great. We do have lots to do tonight though. So next we're gonna hear from Lane about next year's budget. Lane? Set up here. Okay. Too many windows to flip through. The big thing is you guys got to tell me if you can see stuff. So do you see the, at least a presentation? The only problem with this is I can't see my notes at the same time as I'm presenting. So I'm gonna be seeing how much I can remember. Now, before we kind of start talking about the budget for next year, at least what we're planning, this was actually one of the simplest budget processes I've been through so far because there's not very much that we are looking for. And that was kind of the plan going into this year. We spent a year kind of doing a reset and then a year kind of doing some adjustments. And the community was amazing in terms of stepping to the plate to help us get to where we needed to go and we get the supports in place, especially to go after the ends. And in our case, the ends for me and for the cabinet where the adaptability end as well as three of the foundational knowledge ends. We'll talk a little bit about this as we go through. But the real goal at this point in time is moving towards what we call a level service budget. And that doesn't mean that the dollar amount that we ask for every year stays the same. It means that it increases just enough so that we can continue doing what we're doing. Because the cost of things go up every year, salaries go up a little bit. So there will be increases, but they will not be anywhere near as significant as what the towns were willing to provide for us over the last two years. There are two stressors on this as you may know in terms of as we approach this level service budget goal. And one of them is making sure that we're doing what we need to to enhance student safety as we work our way through COVID. By the best predictions out there and hopefully this doesn't make people too depressed, we are only about a third of the way through. We are not half the way through. We're not three quarters. We are about a third of the way through before we get back to something that resembles normal at least in the school environment by the best estimates that are out there right now. And so we gotta make sure that we're doing what we have to keep the safety going. And hopefully over the course and time as things hopefully springtime early summer start to wind down, we can increase the time on learning with the students in the schools. And then the other piece is just making sure that we're continuing to maintain those structures we put in place that is helping us drive towards the strategic ends. Now, there are four strategic ends that the cabinet and the district has been working on for the last couple of years, some a little bit longer than others. The first one goes back to the board's adaptability end. And in my case, I interpreted adaptability as looking directly at our students on IEPs and on service plans to make sure that they are adaptable, they are getting the skills that they need to be able to be successful in their lives without a lot of additional support at some point in time making sure that we are providing that for them. And so the goal here for these students is to decrease the number of students on IEPs as a percentage of the overall student population to within 1% of the state national averages. What is that? Well, we want the percentage of our overall population of students that are on IEPs to be at 14% or less. We also wanna see that over the course of time student IEPs are becoming less restrictive. And we also wanna see over the course of time, as we're building these structures and we're implementing, we wanna see that over the course of time, more and more students are able at some point in their careers to exit their IEPs, meaning that they have developed the skills because of the work that we've done with them that they can now be independent. We don't need that support. Ah, the 14%? Yes, yes. We can go into a big discussion about this as probably isn't the time, but a lot of it has to do with structure. There are some students that will always need an IEP, but at the very least, that's why there's two goals here, at the very least it should be less restrictive. Instead of spending three quarters of your day one-on-one with a special education teacher, maybe we've given you the skills so that you can go out and you can be successful in four of the five of your core classes. So there's that progress. In terms of other OSSDNs, I should have changed this. It should say foundational knowledge. The other three Ns that we are working towards is increasing the number of students that are achieving proficiency on ELA and mathematics aspect and on the Vermont Science Assessment. And what does that look like? We want at least 70% of our student populations when they take these assessments to be able to hit that proficiency benchmark or higher. That's what we're striving for right now. Now, in reality, what no child left behind is always required is that someday that's 100%. But given where we're starting, given the fact that we're just now putting the structures in that haven't existed for so long, 70% is a reasonable goal. And when we get there, we can reassess and say, hey, you know what? We've got what we need to keep this ball moving forward or you know what? We might need some other structures if we want to push it further. We'll know when we get there and we can take a look at how things are and we can assess it at that point in time. So this is what we're potentially looking at and we'll talk about where the changes come from. Remember, at this stage of the game in November, we are only looking at expenditures. We also generate a significant amount of revenue. We cannot look at the revenue side of things until December because we've got formulas that we're waiting to come in from the state that usually come in the first week of December. Last year, they did not come in until late. We weren't able to give you guys those numbers until the January meeting. So hopefully they're on time this year. Couple of points here, these budgets. You know, if you look at 2020-21 and 2021-22, what we are looking at is not just what we get from the state and from local sources, but as of a couple of years ago, we also had to put in our grant monies in there that we received from the federal government. So there's about 900,000 in grant monies that adds to those totals that does not come from either the Education Fund or from local taxpayers. So that's important to keep a look at. The change that we are potentially looking at right now and the majority comes from anticipating, you know, negotiations of what salary increases will be is $554,000, an increase of about 2.69%. Once revenues come in, that number should go down. Okay, again, we're just looking at expenditures. That's all we can do at this point in time. In terms of a breakdown of what that $554,000 increase encompasses, 62% of it is salary increases in benefits, right? We're going back into another round of negotiations. I think I've done more rounds of negotiations than most superintendents have been superintendents for 15 or 20 years now, right? Because of the state healthcare piece. You folks as well that are on those teams, but 62% of it is salary and benefits. The next largest chunk is what I am calling other. Other encompasses things like we went out and we purchased and brought in a whole bunch of different software platforms to help us in terms of when we're remote, right? We're remote a couple of days a week in the hybrid schedule. If we get stuck going back to fully remote, those platforms will support us. So a lot of the money that's in that other is to support those platforms. There is a little bit of money in there that is geared towards some of the structures that we needed. We're looking for a few thousand dollars for a director of guidance and counseling. One of the biggest things that happened during this time of COVID is people's anxiety levels are through the roof, at the national level when people were talking about the fact that suicides and things were up, they are. So we have additional counselors this year and they are going out and doing home visits on average of 90 to 120 a month. And so we need somebody to oversee that whole process. We have also expanded our multi-tiered support systems, especially at the high school and somebody to oversee that and assist with that, especially when those supports need to be behavioral. Okay, we got a pretty good structure for the supports that need to be academic, but we need it for behavioral. In terms of the 10%, that 10% that's a staff increase, that is for taking our nurse who serves brain tree in Brookfield and making her a full-time nurse so that she is able to spend 50% of her time at brain tree and 50% of her time at Brookfield. It is not a good idea to have students that are diabetic, students that have other health needs to not have access to a nurse in those buildings at all times if we can manage it. Again, they're smaller schools, that's not reasonable, but the least we could do, especially considering we're probably gonna be dealing with COVID not just this year, but next year and maybe a little bit after that to make sure that we've got that person on staff. Talked a little bit about the support services. We are looking, this is a small amount of money, we are looking to expand the support services at the high school. Remember, this is the focus right now. They have a lot of curriculum work that just started up a little bit last year and is going full steam ahead right now, but the problem is, is until that curriculum work is done, we have students in the pipeline that missed out on the benefits of that work who need remedial help. And so this is short-time money for a few years to make sure that we are providing the foundational skills for those students through the MTSS program so that when they leave us, they have the skills as anybody who benefited from the really good curriculum that we're putting in right now. We got pipeline students and we got the ones that are just gonna benefit from the curriculum work that's happening. We do not wanna forget about those pipeline students. So that's the basic breakdown of that 554,398 that we're looking at. Expectations between now and December, hopefully we get the formulas we need from the state and then we'll be able to take a look at the revenue side. It is expected this 2.69% increase is going to go down. It's almost assured. And again, right now all we can look at is expenditures. Total increase. Nope, total increase. So if you take a look at what we had last year, what we're looking for for next year, 2.69. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So again, this is a small, you know, I would expect if we get to level service, 2%ish, give or take a little bit, it's probably the norm. 1.6 would probably be the average. So we're almost there. Just to make sure that we have a backup plan in place for a couple of reasons. Again, we talked about one, you know, we're a million in the whole right now, most districts are that or worse in trying to operate under COVID. There are grants out there that we're all applying to we're 10 months in, we haven't seen a penny yet. I got to make sure that things balance because the state did not change the law that we have to be in the black at the end of the year. So I did confirm this both with the auditors and confirmed it with our legal counsel. We do have the ability to make an operational reserve fund. And I'm gonna ask this board and I'm gonna ask the town to vote to put that into place in March. What will happen is we did do our due diligence at the end of the last year, we have a significant surplus because we saved every penny we could. It should go into that operational reserve fund. And then what we will have is we will have money, the board would have to vote to release it once it's in there to cover any shortfalls that are due to COVID. And there's a secondary reason for doing it. And it's not one that is preferential. If we go to a vote on a small budget increase and it fails, whatever money is in that operational reserve fund, we could choose to use to subsidize next year's budget. So there's a million bucks in there after we paid off the COVID piece, we could subsidize the next year's budget by a million dollars, a million dollars less we'd have to be going to the Ed fund and have to be going to the local taxpayers to pay. The last, again, we worked our tails off, it was 1.1 million. And again, it has to be confirmed by the auditors. The problem, however, with using a surplus to get you through a year is the year after you get a double hit, right? So it's preferential not to do that if we can avoid it. So I will go out, my recommendation is to go out with the budget, asking for the little bit that we need that's in addition. If it fails, then the backup plan is we'll hit the surplus and figure it out the year after. And those are things you guys have to discuss because you're the ones that would have to vote on. But that operational surplus, that operational reserve fund, I think is going to be critical because we don't know how long this is going to go on. We don't know what's going to materialize from the state to help us pay on the shortfalls. So it'd be nice to have it there. The district does not have access to it once it's there unless the board votes. So it's just like, when we came to you for facilities to do the roof, the money sitting in the reserve fund, I can't just go and use it to pay for the roof. I have to come to you. You guys have to consider it. I give you the breakdown of what it's going to cost. I give you the bids and then you vote on it. And then once you vote, then it's approved to be able to use for this purpose. Shortest budget presentation you've had for me. Questions or thoughts or concerns? We will vote on this in January or something like that. So December will be another kind of round. Hopefully we've got the revenue side of things at that point in time. But yes, your official vote on the budget is in January, at your January board meeting. And that gives us enough time to meet all the deadlines and guidelines to get it ready for the March vote in front of the town. Any questions from board members? The only other piece I can add is the superintendent's report kind of went into a little bit of detail on what each of those categories of spending were. They kind of spelled out what the money was. Yeah, we'll ask you for clarifications at that portion of the meeting. Are there any public comment? Any questions or concerns about the budget? I just have one question. This is Chris Armstrong. Lane, could you just talk about the operational reserve fund and what the money can be used for? I know in the past, the town has voted to put it into like a maintenance fund. Is that the exact same thing? I think I asked questions about this before and certain funds can be used for certain things. So I just wonder, what can the operational reserve fund, what can it be used for? Because it sounded, I think at one point I asked somebody, can we have like a student education fund where it goes specifically to educational resources and not maintenance? And I was told that there's just legalities on what it can be used for. So the fact that you said that you could use it to subsidize a budget, could you just go into a little more detail on how that works? So what it can be used for is determined by the voters. We put an article up for them to vote on that defines what the money can be used for. And once the voters vote on it, it has to be used for those purposes. So in terms of facilities, they left that one fairly general, right? So facilities reserve funds, but it's meant for the bigger things that we can't do through the normal budget. So like the roof on Randolph Elementary that got repaired this summer, that came from the facilities, right? Fell under that category. The paving that happened around the tech center and behind RUHS, that came from the facilities reserve funds. So as long as the board is voting on things that meet the categories that the town voted on and said was okay, we're good to go. So it's all on how we define it when it goes into that article. And then, you know, if the town votes on it, as long as we stay within those parameters, when the board votes to approve these funds for use, we're good to go. So can you just remind me, because I can't remember the exact wording then in all of the votes leading up to what, what was the wording in the last one where you said we have a surplus for this year? Is with that, what would that allow us to spend money on this year? And are we going to have the same wording for the next time we vote for it? I missed a little bit of what the question was. Typically the surpluses that we have at the end of the year, they're typically in the two to $300,000 range. A lot of it is due to retirements and then hiring, you know, younger teachers that are coming in that are lower on the pay scale. In some cases, it's because the teachers that are coming in, you know, aren't taking the health insurance with us because they've got it with their spouse as, whereas the person that left was taking the full, you know, family plan. Typically that gets divided at the end of each year into the current reserve funds that we've had. A little bit goes into transportation, helps us replace the buses when they're needed. A good chunk of it goes into facilities just to make sure that we are maintaining the buildings and the properties, the ways that are necessary. We also, in anticipation of this change over that someday will happen, they keep pushing it off and pushing it off. We also built a special education reserve fund because they are changing the structure of how they fund special education. And we don't know what that impact may be. And so we did put some money into a special education reserve fund. The voters voted that in on last year. I am gonna call this operational reserve, which leaves us open to being able to pay for the things that we need to do to keep the district running. Yeah, I think that answered it with the specifics. It would cover things like that. Potentially additional staffing if something critical happens and we need that. Any of the other work that we did across the district that supported actual academics, our main mission, you know, that would be under that operational fund. Are there any other questions? Okay, hearing none, we're gonna move on to the next thing on our agenda is discussing annual report to voters. Thankfully, this is a short item. Basically, this district submits an annual report. It's published in the Herald and our website, et cetera. Typically the superintendent, the principals all submit reports. And as just the board, usually I have written that. If anyone would like to write it and send me, that would be great, but they don't have to. So I will take any volunteer suggestions if any board member would like to write the annual report. Otherwise, basically someone will write it, will send it out for comment to one another just to make sure everyone agrees with the tone and everything that's included. And then it will be published. If no one else wants to do it, I will do it. So you can let me know. If it's top of your list, that would be great. Yeah, usually about a page and a half. Next, we've got the approval of the Title IX policy. This is a federal policy that is required. This is our second reading of this. Are there any questions about this policy, anything that's included in it? If not, I would like a motion to approve the federal Title IX policy as written. Any motion, we approve the federal policy as written. Second? Okay, all those in favor, please raise your hand or say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, we've approved the Title IX policy. Next, we have two reports. These are also second reads. These are lanes, monitoring ports, 2.1 and 2.2. We looked at these last month. It's the student's treatment of parents and students and treatment of staff. Are there any questions for laying about these reports? Then do I have a motion to approve EL reports 2.1 and 2.2? Is there a second? All those in favor, please wave or say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Next, we've got another presentation from Lane on the special education and the elementary school performance. So I'll turn up my, if you turn yours down, I'll turn mine up or do you want to keep yours on? That's your, just in case there's questions that come in. All right. For some reason you can't go to present now if you have it partially equal. Again, I don't have access to my notes, which is fine. I remember most of the new way, but sometimes there's some special things I want to make sure that I point out. Kind of think of where to start. So this is actually one of the ends, one of the four ends that we've been working on for the past couple of years. It relates back to the board's adaptability end. Like I said a little bit earlier, this one focuses specifically on special education. Right? If the students are adaptable, then at some point in time, the hope is is that we're able to provide them with what they need to eventually move off of their individualized education plans and be able to be self-sufficient. So the goal is to move towards that self-sufficiency. And we talked a little bit about what that ends goal was as I interpreted it with the special education department about two years ago now. One of the big things to recognize is that we really did and do need to improve the delivery of special education services. We've talked about this in separate meetings where the national and the state average for the percentage of students on IEPs in a district is around 14%. We're currently at 23% and rising by 1% a year. And we've talked a little bit about the budget impact that that has. That's an enormous amount of money that we're spending for a good end, but it doesn't really seem like we're getting a return on the investment for the amount that we spend. That budget has jumped in recent years anywhere from 14 to 17%. This year that increases at 9%. So that's actually a good thing in terms of the budget. It's actually below the state average, increase for special ed in the district is about 14. As well, 14 seems to be the magic number for special education for some reason. But again, our goals here are a couple of things. We want the number of students on IEPs to go down. And we want that to continue until at least we get to the state or the national average. We also wanna see the students on IEPs are becoming less restrictive over time, right? We don't need as many services to continue to perform at a high level. And then we would hope to see that there are a number of students acquiring the skills necessary because of the services that we're providing to be able to exit their IEPs at some point in time during their careers with us. Now, the one that's more difficult to measure is the one that we spent about a year working on with the special education team. This idea that over the course of time, the students that's on an IEP who is receiving services, those services should lead that student to be in a less restrictive environment, should lead to a reduction in the services that are required to allow that student to successfully access the curriculum the school has to offer. How the team approached this, and it was awesome to watch them work, is they developed a rubric with scores that range from one to five. One is the least restrictive, right? IEP that you can be on. A five is the most restrictive. And these rubrics were heavily weighted towards the total time each week the student spends receiving services, okay? Because the logic being, right? As you get better, you need a fewer minutes, fewer hours receiving services each week. And that means that you're approaching a less restrictive IEP. In terms of looking at data like this, there are two things that we would expect to see if the services we are providing are successful. And remember, we have just spent, this is the first year of it, we spent last year developing a new plan, a new way of delivering services to students at the elementary level. And so this collection of data is gonna be important over time because it's gonna give us feedback to be able to tell us whether or not what we're doing is working, right? It's achieving the goals that we've set for ourselves. Now, once we get some longitudinal data, right? Because what you're gonna see today is baseline data. It's the first year of taking a look. We would expect to see two things if conditions are improving. The first deals with what we call cross cohorts. So if you take a look at the average rubric score of the students in third grade and the average scores of the students in fourth grade, right, cross cohorts are not the same kids in fifth grade and sixth grade, what you would hope to see is that over the course of time, in general, you would hope to see the rubric scores go down, right? Because the logic being, again, not always true, but in general, on average, the logic being is that the higher grade the student is in, the more years potentially of services that they have received. And therefore, we should be seeing a bigger impact later on down the line, right? So you should expect to see things start out high and go low. That's with cross cohorts. In terms of same cohort, so if we take the students that are in third grade this year and compare their average rubric scores to when they're in fourth grade in the next year and in fifth grade the next year, again, you should see those rubric scores going down, one means least restrictive, because they're getting services for an extended period of time. If those services are doing what they're supposed to, the students should be improving. They should be moving towards a less restrictive IEP. Does that make a little bit sense? Well, a lot of jibber jabber, but it's important jibber jabber. So they did a lot of work last year and we'll talk a little bit about this data, what it means, what it tells us, what it doesn't tell us. So last year they had not started the new process yet, the new service delivery model. That began this year. So what we're taking a look at is the students at the end of last year, where they were what their average rubric scores were. What you see is something kind of interesting here. If you take a look at that line, it's pretty flat. There's a trend line that's in there. You got some cohorts that are doing a little bit better than others, that's to be expected when you're looking across different populations. But as you go from number one there, which is pre-kindergarten, pre-school, number two is kindergarten, number three is first grade, number four is second grade, goes all the way up to 12th grade. We don't really see anything decrease, I believe. Things aren't getting worse, but they certainly aren't getting better either. Ah, but we got to bring some other data into there in terms of students that may be moving out of the district at that point. We'll talk a little bit about that. But you would expect to see the overall, but you see that trend line that goes right down the middle. Right, it's almost flat, it's actually rising a little bit. So you go with what the trends tell you. It actually means that it's either flat or it's getting a hair worse. I mean, infinitesimally small, but maybe a hair worse. So we're basically maintaining. So despite all this money we're spending, despite all these services that we're providing, for whatever reason it is not having the desired income. So that's the old money. What we're hoping is that in two or three years when we look at this data, and right now we only have the cross cohort, we can't look at the within cohort because we need multiple years to do that. What we hope to see is that that trend line starts to do this. Sure. So how does the trend line determine? How does what? The trend line determine. So, and I guess we both got our speakers on it. There we go. The trend line, it's mathematically averaging out the highs and the lows. You got some that are high. You got some that are low. So it's finding the midpoint. It's averaging out that data to see what it's doing in general. And so what that trend line is telling you is that it's flat. Yeah, you got a lot of scatter there, but the trend line is pretty flat. So there's no real improvement. Assuming obviously that this measurement has meaning which we do believe it does. I guess the reason I asked that was it looks to me like the later grades would be lower than the earlier or in the middle grades, which are definitely higher. Yep, but if you take a look at this for your, you've got the younger grades that are on the low side, the higher grades that are a little on the low side, but you got all those grades, equal amount that are on the high side between grades six and 11 by the looks of it. So they do average each other out. So if you wanted to break the trend line down a little bit, so let's look from one, which is pre-K to two, three, four. So that's from pre-K to grade two. You see that if we did a trend line there, it would definitely be rising and rising a lot. And then if you looked at nine through 14, which is the middle school, the high school years, yes, it is decreasing. So you could chunk it out and break it down by different schools and what not, which we didn't do. Now, it gets a little tricky too. We'll talk a little bit about this when we look at the next chart here. As to do when you would expect to actually identify students that are in needed services. Students that have a disability, it's a disability, it's there, it's not like it comes and goes in most cases. And so hopefully most students are getting identified early. And we're gonna take a look at the chart in a minute that'll show you where we're identifying our students. But this idea, one of the other measurements that we're looking at, an increasing number of students acquire the skills necessary to exit their IEPs each year. Well, if we take a look at what's happening in terms of students that are entering IEPs and students that are exiting their IEPs, this is how it breaks down. Last year in 1920, over the course of that year, we lost 24 students that were on IEPs. 12 moved out of the district, so we can't say too much about them. 12 were moved off of their IEPs. That's something that we can say, yeah, we had an impact on these kids and so they no longer needed those services so that they were 12. And of those 12, 11 of them were moved off prior to grade seven, which again, we're reading a little bit into the data. It means that the disabilities that they had probably were not that severe. On the other hand, we gained 52 IEP students last year. 15 moved into the district. We have no control over that. They came in with their IEPs. 37, however, were found eligible as students here. Nearly half of those 37 students were found eligible during preschool. And the majority of those were speech and language. And we'll talk a little bit. That's something we might wanna talk a little bit about in executive session, but there's some things that should be said about that. So we had a net gain last year of 25, right? 12 were moved off, 37 came on. When are students found eligible? Well, this actually is a pretty good pattern here. This is a positive piece of data. You wanna identify students early, right? Because the sooner you can identify them, the sooner you can begin work before the academics become incredibly difficult and incredibly hard and hopefully remediate the problems before they get there. Make them self-sufficient. Give them the skills and the strategies they need that when they encounter the problems that are a manifestation of their disability, they know how to overcome them on the run. That's the goal of a good special education. So you see pre-K, we identified 16, kindergarten we identified three, grade one we identified five, right? You see this cluster in the early grades, but you also see something interesting on the other end, right? The question becomes is, why are we identifying students for IEPs in grade eight, grade 10 and grade 11? Now, again, it's just one year's worth of data. There could be a very good reason for it. There could be bad reasons for it. The possible bad reason is, is that these are students that had problems all along and somebody should have identified them a whole heck of a lot earlier. The good reason, and this one's a little bit more difficult, see if I can explain it well, is a lot of students, especially with disabilities that are kind of low grade, what'll happen is they'll internally all on their own, they'll develop their own compensatory skills, right? They'll be able to handle their disability in most situations. But the problem is, is as they advance through the grades in school, the work gets harder. And eventually, after enough years have passed by and the work is getting increasingly harder, all of a sudden they hit a year where the compensatory skills just aren't good enough to get them through the new difficulty they're encountering with the material. So you do get a small population that pops up later on. It should be a very small population, one or two. And we've got one, two, three, four, five, six. So is that good, bad? Right now I'm gonna say it's probably good. These are probably students without knowing the students directly. These are probably students that have really good compensatory skills that they learned on their own. When they got to these higher grades, things just became difficult enough that those skills couldn't carry them through anymore and they needed the extra help. It's really sad when you pick up on it in grade 11 because you don't have a lot of time to work with the students before they go out potentially and encounter the really difficult work in college. So one of the things that we might talk about depending upon how this chart changes over time is do we need to have some additional screening methods that all students go through just to see if we're picking stuff up and dealing with it as early as possible, which a lot of schools do. So again, it's a beginning. Takes three years to establish a trend, but we've got a plan, we've got goals, we've got what we're working towards. They're reasonable and they're worthy. That's important. They meet the board's ends in terms of adaptability, the way that we chose them to interpret them. And we've got the data that's gonna help us inform what we're doing, whether or not the new model that we're putting in the place is successful. So questions on any of this. We're gonna learn a lot more as we do this. There's a lot more data. Once we get two or three years of data, there's a lot more really cool things that we'll be able to look at that we can't look at it yet. So there are, are there any questions from either board members or public? All right, we'll move on to the next part of the ends monitoring presentation, which is about elementary ELA, is that correct? Yeah. So one of the difficulties we had this year, typically Octoberish, you know, we sit down, we look at the ESPAC data because that's what I tied a lot of the ends to. We look at SATs, ACTs, that sort of stuff. A lot of that stuff didn't happen last year. And right now we got notification on Thursday of last week that the state is trying to get a waiver so it doesn't happen again this year. Whether or not that'll pass, I don't know, but that's what they're going for. So we've kind of broken things down into two. We'll take a look at some elementary data that we've been able to gather through Track My Progress. We'll talk a little bit about what that is and why we're using it. And then next month, hopefully the high school data will be here because they just started a new program called STARS 360 that they gathered their assessment data. So let's take a look at what it's telling us. And I do, before we kind of switch over to the other presentation, just my kudos out to the special education team. They did a tremendous amount of work creating the cohort. They actually went in and reprogram the software they used to track student IEPs and build in a database section so that every time they are reevaluating an IEP, they are putting in the new rubric score so that it can be tracked over time, both collectively and by individual students so that they've got that data as they do their work. So they did a really, really good job. See if I can remember all the parts and pieces of this as we get later into the night here. If I begin to get nonsensical, tell me. All right, so can you guys see that? And I don't have my speaker on so I'll let you turn yours up. Case questions pop up. So, well, maybe that won't work. Nobody can ask questions until I'm done. And I can always flip back through the slides. So a couple of things to remember as we kind of look at this. First thing, we just kind of talked about this. SBAC was not administered last year, right? So 1920, so 18, 19 school year was the last year that we had SBAC data. Right now, like I said, the state is trying to get out of it's applying to the federal government for a waiver to not have to do the state testing again. I don't think the federal government's gonna let them get away with it. The money that you receive from the federal government, our title funds about the 900,000 a year comes from the state receiving money from the federal government because we are accountable and we are held accountable through this testing. Okay, so without the testing, you don't get the money. The students, and this is an important thing to remember when we get to the math discussion, the students transitioned to fully remote learning on March 17th of 2020. And I did the mathematics of it. I took a look at the number of days that they spent in fully remote session when that happened. They spent 40% of the school year last year in terms of student days in fully remote. Okay, so pretty significant chunk of the school year in that modality. And it wasn't the smoothest of all switches, right? We had like three days notice when the state came down and said, you're gonna do this, so figure it out. Which I give the staff a lot of credit. They did a pretty incredible job. In terms of the two, because we will look at data from both, we'll look at the old SBAC data and then we'll look at the track my progress data. In terms of the two, they're measuring the same things. They're both tied to the common core standards. So they're measuring how students are doing relative to the standards of the common core. What we've noticed, however, is that students tend to score a little bit lower, about 5% points lower on track my progress than they do on the equivalent SBAC. Okay, we've only had one year that we could do that sort of a comparison, but that seemed to be what fell out of it. Because of this, it's hard to look at things in terms of absolutes. Oh yeah, they got 50% on SBAC and 45% on track my progress, so that was defined well. Not really, because there's a five point shift there. So trying to compare things in an absolute term is not a good idea with this data. What is a good idea is to look at the trends. SBAC, were they getting better over time? Track my progress, were they getting better over time? Because that has meaning to us with the data that we have. A couple of things about the work that we had been doing within the district. ELA efforts started before I arrived. That's important to know. They had gotten the curriculum hammered out. The real work of folks taking a look at teaching and delivery and whether or not it was effective using assessment data that happened while I was here. So ELA is at the elementary level has had the longest amount of work done on it. Math started a year or so later, year and a half later at the elementary level and science is just beginning K to 12. RUHS, remember they were stuck for those first couple of years. They were working on proficiency based graduation requirements and standards based report cards. Those were state mandates. So that took up all their time. They started doing a little bit of work on the curriculum last year and then it really kicked into full gear this year when the budget passed because we needed to put those structures in place. Comparison, we're gonna take a look at data. We're gonna take a look at the spring SBAC data and we're gonna compare it to the fall track my progress data. And there's a couple of things that you need to know about this. SBAC is given in the spring time. It's given at the end of the course. So if I'm taking my science, SBAC, it happens at the end of the year after I've had a full year of the course right then and there at the end. They're pretty darn close to the end. So the students are really familiar with the material. Track my progress on the other hand because of how things worked, the data that you're gonna be seeing because it's the only data that I had three years of, you are gonna be seeing what's called the fall data. So that means these students went over the summer had whatever gains and losses happen over the summer because they're not working with the material. They came in the fall and late September, early October took the track my progress test and that's where these scores came from. So three years in the fall. Okay, does that make sense? So again, a little bit different in what we're looking at. This is why the trends are important. So if we go back the last three years of SBAC data for students in English language arts, what this chart is showing you, it is telling you the percentage of students across the elementary grades, all the grades together in a big weighted average, the percentage of students that hit the proficiency threshold were higher. So if you look at 2017 there, that dot, it's about 46%. That means that of all the students in grades, actually, if it's SBAC, it's grades three to six, of all those students combined together when you aggregate out about 46% of them hit the proficiency threshold. And what you'll see happened as we started doing this work, you see that trend line going up, that work was having an impact. Not only was it having an impact, but we got the slope of the line down there at 4.3, right? Y equals 4.3X. What the slope of that line is telling us that is over the course of those three years, every year that went by 4.3% more students achieve proficiency than the years before. So it was increasing. Now let's switch over to elementary track my progress. There is one year in common, right? The SBAC goes from 2017 to 2019. That's the three years we're looking at. The track my progress, again, taken in the fall, goes from 2019 to 2021. So 2019 is in common to both. Again, you can't really compare absolutes, but even if you did in this case, it would still look pretty good over those three years. Not only was it increasing, but it was increasing at a faster rate than the SBAC. For every year that went by 5.43% more students were achieving proficiency than the year before. But these three years here, and these three years thereafter, we're looking at these here now. So not only are they still improving, but their rate at how fast they're improving is accelerating, which is a good thing, it's what we want. And that's taken into account that 2021 dot that you see dropped, that's this fall. That's after students spent 40% of their year in remote session last year, right? That's in the average as well. So rate of improvement in ELA for SBAC, it was going up at 4.3% per year because of the work that folks were engaged in the following three years, including the horrible year with the fully remote learning. It was improving at an accelerated rate. So questions on ELA, elementary math. Again, this started out a year, year and a half after. Wait, Lane, I have a quick question on the... The only thing I can see is the presentation, so you'll have to turn it on for me. Are you there? Any questions? Well, I'm just curious. The track of my progress, that's only given in the fall, but the year you had there was 2021, we're not even into 2021 yet. So is it just labeled by the end of, what the end of the school year will be? Okay. That is correct. So it's labeled by the end year. The other thing about track my progress is it's actually given multiple times a year. It's given fall, winter, spring and summer. Cool. So are we gonna have that at all? Was because that's actually number one, that's the worst data. The kids actually get better if you look at how they progress through the course of the year, because they got more of the course under their belt. But it's also, it was the only data that I had three years worth of. I had one, I had two sets of winter data, which is even better than this. And then I only had one set of summer data because of how things fell out with coding. So I chose this one just because I had three years. I believe in trends, right? Things can change from year to year, but when you get three years, you can call it a trend and it makes a little bit more meaning when you look at the statistics and how things change. So good question. So that will be better data than the SBAC overall because it's given more frequently, right? Yeah, it serves a little different purpose to part of this restructuring. It's not just about building a curriculum that's tied to the common core. The teachers have to be able to, in real time, assess the students and get feedback on how they're learning what is being taught right now. Because if they get that feedback and they realize the kids aren't getting it, that's when they pull together with their departments and have the discussion saying, hey, my kids aren't getting it, are yours. And if the teacher says, well, mine are getting it really well, they share ideas on how it was taught and that teacher goes back and reteaches it. If the department gets together and they all say, no, our kids are doing equally poorly, no matter what we do, then that's probably a place where we wanna build in some professional development in that content area for those standards. So that's that when I talk about informed instruction, that's the process that we're talking about, collecting data, real time, seeing what it's telling us about how the kids are doing relative to the standards and being able to adjust what you're doing right then and there to make things better if they're not meeting the standards the way that you want them to. And track by progress is really good at that. That's why we adopted it. I'll just say that I like the positivity that you're having with this, but if you look at your trend line, I mean, we're blaming that last, that dip at the end on COVID last year, I mean, if it comes in basically the same, we're on a negative trend line. Yes. Yeah, I mean, that's what I'm saying. I like the positivity, but, you know. So the good question, because we want to be negative just as quickly as we are positive. Remember, you've got five years of a positive trend line and you've got a dip, right? Cause you got the S back years and now you've got two years of the track, my progress year is a deposit and you got the dip that happened in COVID. So can I guarantee it was COVID? No, but that's the logical explanation. I was just, I heard you say that you only had two or three years of information. That's why I was kind of thinking. So three years of S back and now we're looking at three years of track by progress that you can put together. Now what's going to be interesting is when the winter data comes out, because what that's going to give us an indication of is now that we're living in this time of COVID, how good is that hybrid? Was it better than the remote? Was it not? So when we see the trend difference between the fall administration and the winter administration, that's going to give us some indication. And that's going to be real important in data, especially as we're getting closer to the springtime of saying, should we be going back to fallen person or not? Are the conditions good enough? If the scores are really low, that yeah, we really should be doing this because it's better for kids or if the scores are actually pretty good, maybe not where we want them, but conditions are still kind of mediocre or crappy. That goes into the decision making process that we're all going to have to do. But very good. I appreciate it. It makes it feel like people are paying attention. Ha ha ha ha ha. All right, elementary math, SBAC. Remember they started their work a little bit after the ELA, but they really threw themselves into it. They had a wonderful person on staff who actually trained them in three different classes that were related to teaching under the Common Core because part of it is how you teach it, not just what it is the students are supposed to learn. And this is a really cool line for a couple of reasons. One, it's going up. So hey, yay, we're doing what we're supposed to. And it's going up by more than 3% a year, which means that it's because of what we're doing. Usually the error is anywhere in the 3% plus or minus range. So since we're above that in all these cases, it means it's because of what we're doing that's causing the change. But if you look at this line, you'll see that the data points are on the trend line. That's a really good thing. Yeah, this one's really good. And usually if other conditions in the world don't change, when you see that, it means you got a couple more years of that before things might fall apart. So this is under SBAC. We had three really good years. Now you're going to see the impact of COVID and math. So you see that there's two really good years, that trend line continued. And all of a sudden that 2020 to 2021, that 40% of time that those kids spent in remote session, again, I'm using the best, what's most logical, it fell and it fell hard. If we took a look at just, if we removed that, what we would call this out of whack data point because of COVID and you saw that trend line, it was actually rising a little bit faster the last two years than it was the three years prior to on the SBAC. So again, we had this huge, and this kind of makes sense. This is math. ELA is complex and there's lots of parts and pieces to it, but anytime you engage in reading and writing, you're using the majority of the skills you're learning. That doesn't quite work that way. There are standards I learned here that I need to build on here, but there are also things I learned that I just learned here and I'm probably not going to build on it again in the future. And so if they're not doing it every day consistently, that's why math is one of those courses you don't like to see in a rotating schedule, you don't like to see them skipping days for math. It's one of those things they need a chunk of it every day to do successful. Math hit us hard in terms of COVID when it happened. And we'll talk about the recommendations they're actually already implementing them. And it's a part of that budget piece. When you go back and you look at the budget, remember we had some money that was set aside for those additional services. That's what it's for. We can't change the modality we're in, but we can have those kids that are struggling in math that track my progress and start at 360 is identified, have them come in four days a week to get some extra help and extra one on one time. That's the deal. With COVID? Well, there's a reason the state's trying to avoid doing the testing again this year because it knows what it's going to show. Okay, because we have a responsibility to get a hundred percent of those kids across that efficiency, which will be some point in time. I think it's more than their decision this year. There's more to it than COVID because we're all up and we're all running in one form or another. We're actually running fairly smooth. So there's really no reason not to do the SBAC. I think they're afraid to see what the results are. So rate of improvement, the last three years of SBAC, it was going up 4.2% more students per year were crossing the proficiency threshold across the elementary levels. The following three years, if you look at the three-year trends, it's down 2.37, right? Because of that big hit, it took that COVID year when we went to remote session. But if you throw out that, sometimes you do that, right? If you got nice data and you got some that's here and there, you throw out the bad stuff because you don't know why it's bad. What would have happened during that two-year period is it actually would have increased to 4.5. And threw out that when we was COVID. So things were doing what they were supposed to and what we were putting our money in our efforts into. Hopefully in two or three years, you're gonna be saying the same thing like this out of high school. That's the goal. So summary findings on this, ELA should continue doing what it's doing, right? The biggest kind of change over where they're at in this process is making sure that the grade teams are becoming self-sufficient both collecting the data and using it to have those deep discussions about informed instruction. This is what the data is telling us. This is where we know the kids are hurting. This as the educational professionals are what we're gonna do differently when we go and we teach those lessons in the future to connect with them. So that's kind of where they're at. Mathematics needs to continue its current efforts but they really do need to remediate the impact of remote learning, right? That remote learning, we took a hit in mathematics across the elementary schools and part of the reason for doing this track, my progress testing was to get this information, was to tell us what they missed so that when we started this year, first thing we did was took a look at least what the foundational standards were that they missed taught those first before we moved into the new curriculum. So that's what's supposed to be happening right now. And then the other thing that they need to do and we'll get the data in winter is analyze this year's data in real time to see what the impact of hybrid learning is, right? So that we can figure out what else we have to do to adjust our practices to keep those kids from falling behind because the likelihood at least in mathematics is that they will fall behind. It won't be as dramatic as what we saw when they went through remote learning but they will fall behind being here every day. So thoughts or questions? That's the fun stuff. This is stuff I like. Because it tells you so much. Are there any questions either from board members or from the public? Any comments? Okay. I don't hear any. Let me see. Okay. I don't hear any. Someone needs to put something in the chat if they actually tried to say something. All right. So next we have a consent agenda. Thank you, Lane, for all those presentations. That was appreciated. So we need to approve the minutes from our October meeting. Are there any changes or substitutions, additions, solutions? I make a motion. We approve the minutes as presented. All those in favor? Any opposed? Okay. Next we have this pretendence report. Lane, do you have anything to add or sort of highlight about your report this month? Not unless there's questions. Like I said, I spent a little bit of time trying to detail out a little bit about the budget pieces. They were just so small. It didn't make a lot of sense to make the presentation a lot longer. But that would be the only thing that I would call that to make sure that people check that out when they're on board with that. Oh, the facilities and grants piece. This was actually really good. The work that the facilities crew has been doing. Just so folks know, we've received a considerable amount of money, almost $300,000 in grants this year because of their work. 102,000 that was received to do the E911 work. That's making sure that any phone in this district if somebody calls out for emergency services, it shows up the room number when they pick up so they know exactly where to go. That was an incredibly expensive change over. It was mandated by law, but we got enough in the grant funding because of the work that the facilities did to pay for about half of it, which was really good. And then because of their work, we did receive another 174,000 in coronavirus relief funds to help out with the HVAC systems, make them more efficient, move more air, which I thought was really good. So we have people doing it. So paid for their salaries and then some between those two grants. Any questions for Lane on his report? Okay, we also had director and principals reports in our agendas and a financial report. Is there anything you wanted to highlight or bring to our attention about the financials? Financials are good. You know, where they're expected to be at this point in time. The auditors are doing their job as well. They're going through, they spent the last, they spent about a week in the building and then they're doing a lot that's remotely at this point in time, their yearly audit. We had Brian do our board evaluation tonight, Brian. I've got mostly fours and fives. It was well attended both by, you know, the board members and the public. Thank you for whoever's left. I don't believe there's terribly too many, but I did give the three to the four a three plus, I guess the more the meeting proceeding without interruptions or distractions was long discussion, very, very good discussion, but it did drag down on the time wise. Everything else was pretty good. On the back again, it's mostly fours and fives on the one that could pin to something that would happen tonight, but good meeting. Thanks, probably in our agenda planning, we should a lot more time for public discussion. And I think that would clear up some of our bad grades on our board evaluation. All right, we do have an executive session. We have personnel, student issues and also the superintendent's contract to discuss. So board members will move out of this meeting to another remote link. I literally just emailed it to you for a discussion. Thank you everyone else for attending and do I have a motion to move to executive session? Second? All right, so we will thank you all for attending and we will enter executive session. I need the motion. I second. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Good evening. Thank you everyone. Hi, everybody. Good night, get to sleep.