 So, since for the recording, we don't currently have a quorum, but we're going to start with the celebration of learning about the lead-up classroom. Well, thank you. My name is Shane Oaks. I'm the student support coordinator here at White River Valley High School, and I've been at the school now for the past four years. Tonight, I'm going to talk about lead them up, and this is a curriculum and an organization that's been around for the past seven years or so, and it originated within the team sports space, working with young athletes and coaches from the middle school, high school, and collegiate levels. I had the pleasure of learning about this through a coaches forum back in late 2019, and became interested in the possibility of using this within the broader school-wide community, extending beyond just the athletic space. In 2021, we applied four and were chosen as one of ten schools across North America to pilot the lead-up classroom, and we started using this school-wide as our social-emotional learning curriculum at the beginning of last year. We deliver that through our teacher advisory system. CASEL, or the Collaborative for Academic and Social Emotional Learning, is really the leader in this space around SEL, and they define SEL as a process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions, achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions. Where does this happen? Really, it happens all around us. It happens in our communities. It happens with our families and our caregivers. And certainly for our students who spend a large majority of their time, it happens within the schools and within the classrooms where they have opportunities to practice and work on self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, relationship skills, and social awareness. As we've come out of the pandemic, experts are saying that students have emerged roughly about two years behind in their social-emotional development. And so our timing and rolling this out as a high school was very, very intentional. I mentioned that we teach this or deliver this to our teacher advisory program at the high school. And the mission of our teacher advisory program is to develop a sense of belonging and community that fosters students' development of their own identity as learners and leaders. The Liedemach Curriculum is just one of the components of our advisory system. The curriculum itself, and I grabbed this slide from an old PowerPoint, so it has been around seven years now, but it's a curriculum that really focuses on developing communication skills, confidence, engagement, enthusiasm, focus, habits, relationships, self-awareness, and self-discipline. They talk about the curriculum being applied or used through an MPS filter, and that stands for memorable, portable, and sticky. So the concepts, the language, the ideas are easy to remember. They can be used across multiple settings and situations, and they just are concepts that stick with kids and adults and are easy to remember. One of the core lessons within Liedemach is this idea of the green team. And so you might hear students talking about being green, and what does green mean? Well, when we talk about being green, green really represents special. Specifically, people that bring out the best in others and are consistent at this day in and day out. People that you know that you can count on and that they're going to show up selfless, they're going to be hard-working, committed, encouraging, and enthusiastic. Within this, green falls on one end of the scale, and at the other end of the scale, we have the color red. We might talk about red moments or people showing up with red behaviors. And as you can imagine, those would be things, situations that are toxic, bringing a lot of negativity, can be demanding, and really a drain on the culture. And then within that, there's also a category called gray. And we think of gray as people that are kind of floaters, that they're easy, just kind of go with the flow, trying to stay under the radar and not drawing too much attention, looking to follow others. And there's nothing wrong with being gray at all. And in fact, in a lot of spaces, it's quite welcome. But when we're talking about building a strong school culture, if we're just living in the gray, if we're just kind of doing enough to get by, we're not building anything special. And that's really important, I think. So, school-wide culture starts with our standards, and one of the first activities that we do within our curriculum after we teach this concept of the green team is to identify what are the leadership traits, the character traits that our students themselves value the most. We ask them to paint a picture of what they want their school experience to look like and feel like. And this turns into brainstorming activity where different values and themes really bubble up. And you can see this year's standards came up with five different traits, trustworthy, supportive, loyal, adaptable, and compassionate. And these are all values that were identified and voted on by the entire student body. And I think that part's really important because it provides them a sense of ownership in shaping, naming, and identifying the space that they want to spend their time in. Lead-em-up also fits really nicely within our PBIS system, our Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports. Not only do we set school-wide expectations, but we spend a lot of time recognizing positive behavior in celebrating student success and achievement. And within the lead-em-up curriculum, we have what they call a green verification process. So with social media today, you might see that different celebrities or high-profile people have their accounts verified. And there's a blue check mark that represents that person is really who they are saying who they are. And so this is a twist on this, but really to be verified green means that you are consistently showing up and living out the values that we've identified as a school on a consistent basis. And so how do we figure this out? Throughout the year, all students and staff have the ability to nominate each other for consideration of being green verified. And about four to five times throughout the school year, we will take all of those nominations and vote on and select those individuals that really rise to the top. Now we also, through this process of nominating, share out the specific examples of what brought somebody to take the time to nominate or recognize or celebrate somebody else within the community. And those stories, those examples get directly shared with the person that's being nominated, regardless of whether or not they get verified. So throughout the school year, people could randomly open up their email and get an email saying, you've been nominated for green verification. Congratulations. And then they read down and they see somebody writing something really nice about something that they've done and appreciating them. And as a person that filters and sees all of these nominations and sends out to the students and the staff, a lot of times I get replies back just kind of recognizing how touched or how important that was for that person to hear on that day when they received it. And I think it really makes a big impact with our broader school culture. At the end of the year, for all the students that have been nominated, we'll have one other special recognition. And that's really, we call it the most valuable green. So of all the students and staff that have been verified throughout the year, we get to select one standout student and one standout staff for that honor. You can see a few pictures of both students and staff who have been verified so far this school year. And as I really enjoy looking at all the smiling faces in these photos. In addition to that, as I said, Lead Him Up has been around for seven years. It's a program that's used across North America. They also have their own special award and that's a recognition and that's called the green 13. And so each year of about 10,000 or so student, students and student athletes that interact with the Lead Him Up program, coaches and teachers nominate individuals who really rise to the top and demonstrate what it means to live out their lives in a green manner. Last year, our first year of working with Lead Him Up, one of our very own West Trombly was recognized with this national award as a green 13 recipient. And for anybody out there that knows West, I think you know the character that he has, the presence that he brings to the groups, the community and the impact he had on the school, and certainly was well deserving of this award. So what is the impact? Why is it important to have a social emotional learning curriculum within our school? Well, it allows us to set a clear vision for what we want our school to look like and feel like on a daily basis. We are constantly creating a culture of celebration, ensuring that we shine a light on all the good things that happen within our school community and don't get just focused on the negative things or the missteps that might come up. We're helping students to develop the skills that they need to embrace and recognize leadership opportunities as they present themselves. We're working to improve the climate and culture, and we're also looking and have been effective in reducing our student discipline issues within the high school. Now I know the principals are going to talk about a board report later on, but this is just one example of what our behavior observation referrals has looked like over the last two school years since we rolled out lead them up. And while I'm not going to give all the credit to this work to just using the lead them up curriculum, I think that it certainly has played a role in shaping the attitude, the way that we engage students, support students in our intentionality in working to develop a positive healthy culture for our school. So, one of the, one of the quotes that lead them up says or uses all the time is be green build green. And I leave that with any questions or comments that folks might have. I didn't have any questions but that was very informative, you know, hear about this and getting that kind of hear more specifics is really helpful. It seems like a really great program. So thank you. I just would like to say that, you know, there's a lot of programs out there and it's sometimes it's not the program it's person behind the program. And I just want to thank Shane for all he's done for our school and the culture and I tell people that I think Shane bleeds green, because he's really he goes by it. You know, a lot of people may talk the talk but he definitely walks it. So thank you, Shane. Just ask for a minute. Thank you very much, Shane. We still don't have Peggy principles would you like to do your report while we wait. So we have our regular principles report and then we have our social emotion and data report so maybe we'll start with our, our principles report. Pam, your virtual. So I just would say, it feels like a short turnaround from our last board meeting just because we had that break in the middle. But to highlight, we had our kickoff assembly in the elementary, we're kicking off respect. So, I'm sorry, responsibility, we went over that on both campuses. And then really nice partnership with the middle school, we had a guest speaker and talking about vaping. And so while the whole elementary did not attend, our fifth graders who will be transitioning to middle school did attend that. And it was a really great presentation and I thought just a nice segue for our students will be moving up to middle school next year. So thank you to the middle school for inviting our older elementary to join in that. So it was really wonderful. Your highlights. No, I think Shane did a really good job with talking about lead him up in social and emotional. But one of the things is the reduction in school discipline. And one of the things I think is interested in kids will come in and when they know they've done something right away, they say, I just had a red moment. So the language and the philosophy behind lead them up is definitely going through our entire school. So it's good to see. I don't know when you two want me to jump in just tell me you want me to go. Okay, sorry, I'm virtual, but Andrew, I think you and I might be suffering from the same same thing. And so I appreciate being able to be here at my house and share with you a little bit tonight. So I am I'm just going to read from my notes. There's just two areas I wanted to highlight for today. One is around the SEL report, which I'll speak to that in a second and the other piece, the shorter piece in terms of what you have in print was the request to have the middle school folks look at their schedule and increase the number of minutes of direct contact that core teachers have with students. So we have we have worked through that particular adjustment of our schedule. We have not implemented it yet. Our hope and our goal is that a call it a new schedule, but it's really an adjusted schedule will roll out on January 30 Monday, January 30. It's a natural sort of transition mid trimester. I'll just give you a couple of the key points and I also will be having sort of a video conference conversation with all of the kids to let them know about this next week as well as just shooting a memo home to folks just giving that an overview of what looks different in the schedule. The the core pieces of it are that they're the core classes, meaning science, social studies, literacy and math. During full weeks will meet five days a week. And so that equates out to when we're talking about minutes, it's four hours and 30 minutes or 270 minutes and again this is a schedule adjustment for the remainder of this year. During the early release weeks, there are four hours or 240 minutes of core content time with a call back opportunity being built in on Friday morning during that early release day for teachers to be able to access kids and do some catch up and for what for a day of reasons. So the predominant changes to to the schedule are the number of days per week and the minutes and then we also in order to do that. There are the pod advisory, which is a really significant part of the middle school environment and the middle level learner the advisory still will happen each morning. And then on Friday afternoons during the full weeks, we will continue to have our pod advisory with a focus. We are going to be focusing around SEL and building that community around the school wide expectations and the ships that define the middle school which is citizenship I won't get them all right now I don't have them in front of me. So those are the parts of the schedule that have been adjusted. We are also beginning to with our first meeting next week, I believe it is as a district team to start talking about schedule for next year so these conversations are all happening as we go so I just wanted to give a little overview. Hopefully that's helpful about the adjustments that we are making to the schedule for the rest of this year. So I didn't know if anyone had any questions that I may or may not have an answer for but I'm happy to try. Okay. And then since I'm still talking and then I can be quiet. The SEL report that you all received. So the SEL report that you all received. And then we have a plan to spend our Friday afternoon last week as a staff. Really dissecting and analyzing the data report from September to December. So that didn't happen. So there's going to be a backup plan in place between myself and the student support coordinator. But what I also want to point out is that I personally looked at it with a just from an overview because I've only been there since November 28. So I can look at the December data and make some connections. What I wanted to point out and and I appreciate Shane going first because he's sharing sort of those key pieces that we all want to have as a part of our school culture and he. He's made a statement that school wide culture starts with clarity around expectations and vision and that's critically important so that we all understand where it is we want to be going as a school. So I think that I often use that someone much smarter than me shared one time and it's whatever we allow as a school community becomes our norm. So we really want to make sure that we have clarity around what it is that we believe about who we are as a school and a community. And so when I looked at it quickly I could definitely categorize and you can see it as well in the report. There are some very clear areas that emerge more than others around like disruption or defiance disrespect those kinds of things. They were the consistently large columns on the graphs. Yet I also wanted to articulate that those numbers don't represent all kids. Yet in some way shape or form when we have these types of behaviors happening in our classroom it is impacting the entire learning environment for all so really trying to zero back and identify what is it and who and how do we define ourselves as a school. So in the last six weeks that I will be here working with the middle school. I'm planning to work really closely with the students for support coordinator and we've talked about analyzing the data from from Swiss week by week. And trying to highlight where we're seeing forward progress and reducing the numbers of some of these specific areas. And also where we can continue to focus our energies around redirecting and recommunicating behavior. She and I are also. Going into each class in each advisory beginning this week just taking capitalizing on the opportunity to review school wide expectations and then ask questions at the end like what do we need you to do as a student. What do we want our teachers to be able to do what will we do as student support folks to both correct and altered behavior and how can we celebrate and recognize so. Those are just some really quick highlights around where I'm at with these two key areas so I hope that's helpful. All right. Sorry. I just wanted to also say that I think it's really important to give Sandy Tracy credit because she's the one who put this together and I think it's a I see how much she puts into this about crunching the numbers make sure the graphs are just right. So it's it's a lot of work that she's done put this together for us. I'm just really thankful for her. So just a little framing. This is a snapshot. I think of what our our program areas look like. But yeah. Why don't we pause. We Peggy's on so we can start the meeting formally and then do this as a separate part of the agenda. Is that all right. Okay, so we'll get we'll get to that in a minute. We'll just do kind of do it officially. Thanks. All right, so we'll call the meeting to order at 706. We, you know, got to hear the celebration of learning and some from the principles so far. But let's get to the top of our agenda. So do we have any adjustments to the agenda, other than what we just did already. Then we'll move to the consent agenda approving the minutes. So Chris had asked that we not approve the minutes last month for to amend them and he emailed. This adjustment to the 1129 22 board meeting. Minutes, which was in the part talking about the public complaint about dense board member policy a one after with the yes vote dismissing the complaint all votes for yes dismiss the complaint. Board members commented that even though the board member in questions action didn't rise to conflict of interest three board members did comment that the board member action comments were a board member holding a public seat board members requested future discussion or conduct in the code of ethics that's something that was in there from before for the board could make this mess. So that was his comment about those minutes. Are you coming. entertain motions to accept the minutes or amendments. I'll make the motion that we accept the minutes as amended. I think we should wait for Chris to actually be here since he requested the amendment. If you'd like, we can table the November minutes and. I entertain a motion to do such a thing. I make a motion that we. Table the exception of the minutes until Chris Johnson's president at the board. And everybody else. I'll make a motion to table the minutes until all board members are present. Probably both. The minutes for November and December and December. I'll second that. Okay. Any discussion. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. All in favor say aye. We'll table those minutes for next meeting. And then went to public comments. Is there any public comment at this time. Yes. Go ahead. Hi. I just wanted to say the. I just wanted to speak real quickly. The biggest pushback. was that there was no data to show that we need any such resolution and that's absolutely not true. The Vermont Department of Health and the Vermont Agency of Education published their Youth Risk Behavior Survey every two years with the latest data being from 2019 due to some delays in the 2021 data. This report clearly shows that LGBTQ kids suffer from drastically more bullying, hopelessness, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts. It's very clear in the data, the data direct from Vermont kids, our kids, with 74% survey participation rate from middle school and 85% from high school. So it's hard for me to accept that we should just wait for tragic data from our school district before we decide if it's worth doing something. Even something as small as formalizing our support for the LGBTQ kids. I urge the board members to familiarize themselves with the data. Just googling Vermont Youth Risk Behavior Survey if you haven't seen it already. And you can look through the data. There's plenty of stats that show this discrepancy all across the board. So that's all I wanted to say. Thank you. Thank you. Any other public comments at this time? All right, then we'll move on to board comments. Does anybody have any board comment they want to make? I wanted to formally thank the Superintendent and Dana Decker for the community meeting that was held last week. Dana did a great job and there was a lot of really wonderful conversation that happened. And so I wanted to formally thank her for that. Thanks, Shannon. The comment I would make is that we have a number of open board seats up for election this voting time and petitions to get on the ballot are due at the end of the month. So if there's anybody out there who would like to run for school board, go to the town clerk's office and they can help you manage that process. And if you want to talk to any of I'm sure any of us would be willing to talk to anybody who's interested. Tammy, did you have something you wanted to say? How's that? All right. So we've done the celebration unless there's any other bird comments. We've done the celebration of learning. I have a board comment. Okay, go ahead. One more. So I have let Andrew and Jamie know that I will not be running for this seat again. I'll be leaving the board. I've got some career things going on some some additional courses I'm taking. So I won't be running for my seat. And at this time I'm going to also have to step back and not be participating in quite as many committees and board responsibilities. So there are a number of those and I'm going to have to hand those off to other board members. Thanks, Shannon. Yeah, I had meant to bring that up and the adjustments the agenda I think at the end of the agenda will go through the various things that you've been doing and and try and see if we can get other people to step up to take over some of those. Can I also say thank you, Shannon, for all the work you have done because you have done a lot on the school board. I very much appreciate it. Second pass. So we were in the middle of the principal's report. Why don't we do the social have them finish the social emotional learning report and then we'll circle back to the superintendent report if that's okay, Shannon. All right, what I would have said is this is the ying to the yang. So the what you heard about lead them up and all the other things we do in the elementary with PBIS responsive classroom. This is showing I think the how it's going and we collect behavioral observation data or write ups is probably the more simpler term on things that are unexpected behaviors. And so you can see it all listed out there and then these graphs kind of like put it to life for you. I don't want to go too deep into it. You're welcome to take time to look at all all of them. But the ones that for me are the most like telling are the triangle graphs. And I'm noting that I should have we should have done page numbers on here, but really proud of our primary grades who universally 90% of what we're doing is working for them. 4% in the targeted and then 6% in the needing much more intensive feels like really wonderful numbers. And then in a three through five, I feel like we're exactly hitting the recommended mark of having 80% of what we're doing working for 80% of the population and then 14 and six. So and I think all of our data in the elementary is really steady from last year. So it just feels it feels good and consistent for us. And I know that Pam already spoke and I know that Jeff already spoke a little bit too, but I just wanted to highlight that those pieces and happy to answer any questions. I have people had a chance to review the social emotional learning report. And if anybody had any questions. Real quick, Andrew, I just I wanted to highlight. Rae, if you could go back a couple slides. The slides that that were that Andrew was pointing out is right here. And this is based off of national data around behavioral expectations and what schools that participate in positive behavioral interventions and support should see in regards to referrals. And so at this time of year, we would want to have students within the zero to one referral range of office discipline referrals at this point of the year. And so what you're seeing here as an example in our K2 is that 90% of the students that's the case, which is great. They would they would also say in their research that we would want 85% of our students following in that range, meaning that the universal approach around responsive classroom PBIS is meeting students needs. When they start to get in that two to five or six plus referral range, that's when teams are meeting. And we have teams that meet with our folks that are part of our social emotional support teams. We call them our target intensive social emotional data team meetings. And if students are in that four or six percent, that's when we're starting to dig down into individual students and look at if we need to identify some individual behavioral support plans or social emotional support plans for them. So that just gives you I wanted to give the board that sense of what's what do we do with that? David, that's like the next level of what we do with this data to better support kids. One thing that might be helpful is seeing how many kids kind of go from the red to the yellow to the green versus green yellow, you know, like, is there is this pretty stratified of this point? Or is there a lot of movement between the different groups? Time period. Well, you can see the movement from last year to this year. It doesn't say number of kids, but you can see it within the percentages. Yeah, but like, are those are the reds all the same kids from last year to this year? Or are they, you know, jumping like you're doing targeted intervention on certain kids? And how effective is that? Right. Progress monitoring, right? Does the is the students dropping in the in the amount of need of support? Right. Another comment I would have was it was helpful in the these these graphs are great. And I like the you know, being able to see the fall to the fall compared. But it was helpful also seeing the graph that chain had and lead them up. presentation where it showed just straight the two years worth of data so that you could see that downward trend. You know, when you just see the fall and then the fall again, and there's no spring winter spring, you know, you don't, it's harder to tell like, was there a gradual decline that then is continuing? Or was it, you know, we had one level last year, and we're at a different level this year, you know, might help to look at an overall trend versus just the year to year comparison. We have that. Not that we this is a lot of graphs already, but it might be helpful. And my other question was, the does the administration feel that there's been any change in the way things are evaluated, you know, like, we did have a change in administration between the in the high school and were things expectations changed so that things that may have been a write up before aren't now or were then and are now. So, you know, how much apples are we comparing in the write ups? I think one of the things Andrew was that we really emphasize no phones in the classroom, and there was a lot of write ups, I think on phones in the past. So that's been a non issue this year. So I think a lot of write ups. If you see the graphs, boy, last year to this year, it's a huge discrepancy. And I think that's one of the major, major ones. Yeah, that's great. With middle school data, with it being higher, is the sense that the behavior is kind of been increasing or that the teachers are enforcing it more. I can only I. Yeah, hi, Andrew, I can only speak to one conversation that I had with respect to the data before we even were planning to dive into it. So there's a little bit of some folks shared that there's been a real intentional focus to make sure that data gets entered into Swiss this year. So I can't really say percentage wise, et cetera, that there's more data entry this year than there was last fall, although that's what I inferenced from that conversation. So I would say just from that quick conversation with teachers that many of them have taken the time to it takes time to do this because they're also corresponding with families really trying to wrap that support around kids that they have been entering more data into Swiss more referrals than maybe they had been in the fall of last year was an intentional focus. So there could be that reflected here. Thanks. Does anybody have any other questions about the data report? Thank you for putting it together and for adding that context and explanation. It is great to see the progress in the high school and I hope we're able to continue in the elementary school having a small percentage. I'm hoping to continue addressing this and going forward. Thanks. We'll move to Jamie. So I'm going to report a few important additions. One, I'll be attending a meeting on Thursday evening. Sorry, Thursday during the day with the House Egg Committee members to discuss what they foresee is upcoming legislation, but to also offer some insight from the the field about how what they might be considering could impact students in our schools. And so a few of those items are one, there's still the the item out there around how to continue to fund universal meals. Legislature did a one year stop gap with that. I have not heard of what they're considering in regards to how to pay for that moving forward. The use of the Ed Fund surplus I cannot foresee being an option this year. That's what happened last year and why I say that is because as in some of our as in your towns, but in some of our other towns, the CLA's have taken a significant decrease, which is raising havoc with tax implications. And so when we go through your budget, you'll see that that our budget's coming out in a pretty good place in regards to tax. A lot of that has to do with the yield and giving that Ed Fund surplus back to tax players. But I have some towns, the CLA's dropped so much. I can give you an example in one unified district. We're anticipating almost a five cent decrease in taxes while the other town's going to pay eight cents. And that's based on the CLA. And so anyways, that's something we'll be following because that would have a significant impact on our students and families if it's not taken up by the legislature, which there is some sentiment that it should be passed back to local districts to decide how they want to handle it. So stay tuned there. The other good update I have a positive update is that we didn't know that free and reduced lunch applications decreased significantly across the state and certainly did in our school our schools based on it being the third year of universal meals. The agency did anticipate that it's not going to affect our appropriations for title funding. Our allocation is going to be the same as it has been historically and they've committed to providing schoolwide waivers as they have in the past for those towns that have schools that have followed under the 40 percent threshold for this upcoming year. They also said that the plan is to leverage Medicaid data and that they plan to come out with a new annual income verification process for families moving forward to better collect data in regards to which schools have higher levels of poverty throughout the state, which of course influences how title funding is allocated. So that's something that I wanted to provide the board with update two. And then I also wanted to let you know that we have held forms to gather feedback on the attributes for the next middle school White River Valley Middle School principle that also included surveys that went out to stakeholders. We did have 15 candidates apply and we are moving nine of those applications forward for the committee to review and decide how many out of the nine they want to interview. That calling of the original candidates came from me based on just knowing of references, checks, preliminary reference checks, also candidates who we've interviewed previously in the past for positions that we've had open and based on that information. That's how we were able to call that down to the nine candidates. So the committee has students, school board, Peggy, thank you for serving on the committee. It's being facilitated by Mikhail Martin who works for us now. That's who facilitated the hiring of Jeff Thomas. That committee will narrow this down to two candidates who will then have site visits for a day. That process will include the community to be able to meet and give feedback as well as the faculty and staff. I'll collect all that information and be prepared to make a recommendation for you with the goal to be hopefully your February meeting or a special meeting in February. So I'm feeling good about the process thus far. I'll take any questions folks may have. Thanks, Danny. With the free and reduced lunch, so it's not affecting our title funds, that's used in the people as pupil calculation though, right? Not this current year. With the new enactment of the legislation, it does have a waiting factor. But the expectation would be that that will have that new formula that they're going to use to come up with that for next year, meaning the income forms and the use of Medicaid data. With those preliminary numbers that we got around the cost equity model from last year was based on our previous free or reduced lunch rates. Anybody have any other questions for Jamie? Hope you muted yourself, Andrew. Sorry, then we're on to the business manager report. You all have my report about what's happening in the business office during the month of January. If there's any questions, I'll have to answer them. Otherwise I'll come back on when we talk about your budget. Sounds good. Policy committee draft three of the flag policy. So Rodney, you can jump in here too, Rodney, feel free. But so this policy has not changed since the last time you saw it. Other than there's been a request of a slight edit from the Stratford school district. It's to the bottom of the first page. It's really clear that this policy has been created to allow students or approved school district school groups to come forward with a request of flying of a flag. You can see or staffs on there or staff is going to be struck before the policy goes in front of the board for possible full board action. It requires a staff sponsor, but it would not be that a staff group would be coming forward with a proposed flying of a flag. So that is going to be cleaned up. It's a slight edit, so I think we'll be still ready for action. It's been warned in the paper for action at the full board level next week. There's been a lot of discussion still about this at each of our local districts. And I would say that if you have a strong opinion about this policy or if you support the current drafting of this policy for those full board members, it would be important for you to be at the full board meeting next week, because I would say to you this is not a policy that has consensus across all of our district boards. Thanks, Jeremy. That's done in the agenda as task force updates. Do you have any task force updates? Who is coming? I was going to mention the shadow day that we had for the task force and that first branch and it was canceled. And then we rescheduled that for the 10th that they'll be coming down. There was about a dozen students, I believe. And then we have a Newton visit plan for the with the Cadwells. So we have a family from Stratford and they're going to be presenting on that evening. But we haven't set a date for that because both of the parents coach. And so we're trying to find an available day. So yeah, and then it's also the facilities task force. They're going to be meeting with the group that the music group and performing arts group around the performing arts lab coming up. Is that next Monday already? I think it is. It is. Yeah, three thirty to continue that discussion. And then we'll move on to discussing the budget. So you all have your expenditure budget in your packets. We haven't made any huge changes in this draft. Right now you're looking at an overall increase of five hundred forty three thousand nine hundred and ten dollars, which equates to four point three seven percent. It does include the performance contracting. You'll see that that's been added on the last page of the expenditure. Just the least payments that we'll have to make for that. And we offset the expense. So that was really the only major adjustment this draft. I don't think you saw that last there was one other one, Tara. It was driver's ed. One point down to point five based on determination and meeting students needs with a point five drivers at teacher. So that was the only other FTE change from your draft in December to now. So I did have a question about how the energy stuff at the very bottom of the budget was going to be shaking out. You know, you had some savings in the propane and oil fields, but then you also had the pellets separate, which seemed like it was going to be more than what was listed at the savings. Plus there's the. Other debt payment which increased for that. So I was curious how that all worked out. They see if I can find why I do know the debt payments are coming in a higher the lease and we'll take action. We would take formal action on this in February. I do know that the lease payments are coming in higher than we originally expected due to interest and interest rates have increased since when we started this about a year ago. So is the idea that it's not going to be. Cost neutral, not completely, but I think for your district, the difference annually was one seventy two. How much, Sarah, one thousand one hundred and seventy two dollars net. Increase in your budget. Which seemed still like a no brainer, you know, to do one point six million dollars worth of work. Let me see if I can. Figure. OK, so yeah, so we're looking at the page. The bottom of page ten and the start of page eleven. There's forty six thousand dollars added for wood pellets in the energy fuel oil. We have thirty two thousand dollars less. And seven thousand dollars less for electricity, but twenty six thousand dollars more for propane. So. You know. It seems like we're paying more energy. Costs than before or we're budgeting for more than before the change is that. So I wasn't sure that it was adding up for me on that side of things. But did we account for not using oil at all on the Bethel campus? That's a terror question. Tara, do you know where you're coming up with that number? Or did you just not get adjusted? Yeah, we took out propane cost sorry, fuel oil costs completely from the Bethel campus, which was seventy thousand dollars. That was totally removed in your current budget of twenty three. You had seventy thousand dollars in fuel oil and that was removed altogether because you're going to be using wood pellets and an increase in propane versus having fuel oil. So last year was budgeted for one hundred and forty thousand and this year it's budgeted for one hundred and eight thousands. That looks like it's thirty two thousand dollars last increase in your fuel oil for your Royalton campus still. Based on four dollars a gallon. That's almost double. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I guess that makes sense. You don't have a savings as far as fuel oil and Royalton campus have an increase. Yeah. OK. That that makes more sense. Thank you, Tara. No, but that I want I mean, yeah, that is going to be important for us to delineate for folks though, right, that there's actually seventy thousand dollars in heating fuel savings at Bethel, even though you're only seeing that in that line item to equate to thirty two. Right. So the other line that I was curious about was the twenty six ten four twenty the cleaning services where it goes from like last year we increased the budget to a hundred and thousand five hundred. From thirty eight thousand. And I just don't remember what that was from. And I tried looking in the. Expenses from this year and I haven't seen it. Corresponding increase and what we're spending on that line item, but I might just be a missing it because for operations contracted services, you had sixty five thousand last year for Bethel and thirty five five for Royalton and those are the same figures that are in there this year. And that's based on where you where your budget was utilization was twelve thousand two seventy and twenty two. And then eighty seven hundred for Royalton campus in twenty two. So that's for the four twenty cleaning services. It's not cleaning services. It's contracted services. Oh, so it's just labeled wrong. Yeah, it should say contracted services. That's the new chart of accounts. OK. All right. Well, time to fix. But do you do you feel like we are going through that like we did increase from thirty eight? Is that just things shifting around to being in that code instead of other codes? It's the same budget line item that we had in the current for what you anticipate may need to bring in for contracted services. So that's going to be trying to think of some of your contracted services off the top of my head. Control technologies when they come in, if it's not a repair and maintenance, but if it's just a actual your contract that you have with them, your security contract is going to be there. OK, well, I guess we'll take into that a little more, though, before next week. I was going to tell the board we're not ready for adoption tonight. So other than that, everything looked all right to me. Does anybody else have any other comments on the expenditure side of things? For questions. The other thing I wanted to bring up with the board, we talked about it a little bit in the finance committee. Meeting is, you know, this year we have a very fair favorable yield because of the big Ed Fund surplus. If we didn't have the favorable yield, then we would see taxes go up. And so this year it's kind of a favorable climate other than the CLA and right now we are budgeting to put in two hundred thousand dollars balance carryover from the big surplus we have. And my question would be, do we want to decrease that sum, which would increase taxes this year, but make it more sustainable going forward? You know, it does look like we'll have, because we still have some of the ESSER funds and other grants that we're able to supplant some of our regular money. We should be able to get another good surplus this year, probably not as good as this. This year, you know, we have almost a million dollars of surplus, but we shouldn't have that, but we should have some to play with next year. But basically any freeze from that two hundred thousand dollars balance carryover winds up adding to the tax rate in the future. So given that we're basically less than a cent increase in Bethel and three cents. Was it in Royalton? I wondered if. Doing slightly weaning that down now and diverting more towards the building funds to try and take advantage of. The favorable yield and avoiding a large jump in the future. Would be a smart thing to do. And I'm yeah, it's three cents in Royalton and just under a cent in Bethel. So if we, you know, ascent is basically seventy thousand dollars, we could go from two hundred thousand down to one hundred thirty or something along those lines. And add a cent or just keep it the way it is and plan on dealing with in the future. But, you know, if in the future we don't have money to put into. Hang down the tax rate, then that's another three cents that would be added on to a tax rate, which this year. It's not we're not asking for a big tax increase, but in the future, if we had a big tax increase and then I also had to add in that that might make it difficult. So that's the one thing I wanted to have everybody discuss tonight. Anybody have thoughts? I guess part of my thought would be. I understand where you're coming from, but there's a part of me that says people are going to look at us and say, well, you're all overbudgeting because you have this surplus. They're not going to understand all this federal stuff. You've overbudgeted, you've got all this money you're putting away and you're going to ask us for more. Rather than being very straightforward in our budgeting and say, we're going to put in one cent to put in a reserve fund and just saying, this is what we're going to do on the select board. We said, this is what we're going to do. We're going to put this much money aside in reserve. So we're so we budget for it. Right. And we will be doing that. I mean, anything that we're not giving back and taxes now, we're going to be putting into the reserve fund to use for capital improvements. Right. But it's but it's all coming from surplus per se. Right. Rather than this. And it's sort of like, OK, well, how about we get that money instead of. Whatever. It's just a different way of looking at it, I guess. Yeah, no, I mean, my argument would be that what we're trying to do is be sustainable. Right. Well, yeah. I understand that. But I'm also looking at the other side, too. Yeah. And you have any thoughts on I mean, I think that I think we're going to. I mean, this is a happy place to be, right? So we can acknowledge that at least that we're not hurting for money this year. I think we put it away as much as we can reasonably because boards before us haven't been able to do that. And that's how we got into the pickle with things like million dollar heating and cooling projects. But I also think that people are hurting right now. People are still recovering from COVID and and the economic impact of that. And so I think I kind of think we leave it where where it is. We're putting away a significant amount. And we'll just have to deal with taxes in the future. We can tell people that we're just really, really lucky this year. Taxes are unfortunately probably going to go up in the future. That's what taxes do. So I don't know that people won't vote for a budget in the future. Knowing that they've had a couple of years that were a little bit easier. All right, Rodney, you have any thoughts? Yeah, I guess kind of agree with Shannon and Peggy that trying to put away extra money for savings might not settle well. Yeah, then we just keep our tax kind of down this year and and even though it might cause a larger increase next year. Well, it sounds like we have pretty good consensus then. I was mostly bringing it up just because, you know, this is a library. I see it. I see it both ways. Yeah, I appreciate the thought, Andrew, having been on the side of a budget that didn't pass at least once. It's not a fun place to be either. So. And yeah, we still do have plenty that we're putting aside for future. Building. All right, so do we it doesn't sound like other than the couple of things. That you're going to look into. Sounds like everybody's happy that the way things look right now. Is that right? Be able to be able to sort of decide for now until. Until next meeting. When our special meeting to approve the budget. Wednesday. Yes. Next. That's my. And I do see you, but I think we're going to hold. Regular, you know, hold it for public comment, if that's OK. OK. So then on to the next discussion item, preparation for annual mail or in school district meeting. The the deadline for writing a letter to include in the mailer is Friday. So I will get on that and send out a draft, hopefully tomorrow for everybody to. With you, if there's anything that you think I should include as far as, you know, messaging or, you know, any ideas, send in my way and I'll try and incorporate them. Anybody has anything else to say on that front? Now be the time next Wednesday. Once you approve your budget, we will move right on to the warning to get that language solidified with the hope that you would be here in person, if possible, to sign the warning that night. And then we get it over to Pam the next day to get her signature as your clerk of the board and to certify the warning so that we can include it in our mailer, which ideally will go to the printer's early part of the week of the 23rd. All right, sounds good. For the warning, we talked off and on about combining the reserve funds to a single reserve fund instead of having separate. Royalton and Bethel reserve funds. And it makes sense to me to just have the single pool of money and use it on whichever campus you need it for so that we're not, you know, having to ask taxpayers for money if we have a big pile of money in one town and not in the other. Can that be included on the warning if everybody else is doing that? Double check that, Andrew, I thought you had already done that in your articles of agreement. I'm fairly certain that we have it. But yes, otherwise, I did do that in one of our other districts last year. We put the article on the warning to create a district. So it would be White River Unified District Capital Reserve Fund and the White River Unified District Building Reserve Fund if you wanted the two separate funds. Otherwise, right now you just have building reserve funds. And a capital reserve fund would be for new buildings or what would the capital reserve fund capital is anything that matches your capitalization of assets policy. So over five thousand dollars. So it may not have to be something building specific, but that's something is a capitalized asset. It gives you a little bit more flexibility. And can it be used for building expenses? Like can you use the capital reserve fund for building expenses, but not building expenses for capital expenses? Right. Then I would say we should just have the capital one and not a separate building one. Yeah, I would advise that the warning creates the unified one and that then you ask the voters to put what you have into that capital unified. That's how we do the last time, Tara, right? We called we called the initial question to create it. And then we asked them to put the money in it. Yeah, we funded it with the surplus. Is this something we need to make a motion to? You do it through your when you adopt your warning. OK, yeah, that's what I was thinking about. Is everybody OK with this? Rodney and Peggy and OK. Sounds like a plan then. Hey, Andrew. Yeah, could I recommend that when you do your letter that goes out to the public that you very carefully explain simple language or whatever, not necessarily all the anachronisms if I bet that word correct. How all that federal gift money helped us save to put money away? How how that work? If we hadn't had that, then we wouldn't have had whatever people need to understand and how we used it so that it's not going to come back and bite us later. For example, did we create a new problem, new programs that we're going to have to fund later out of our budgets? Or did we do things that were one time things that actually helped us save money in the future? I'll do my best on that. OK, simplified language and no acronyms. That's always difficult. But I can. OK, update on the audit. So the plan is still to have it for you in your February meeting to review and adopt the last thing we're waiting on is we had some additional revenue that we needed to do at the supervisory union level, which impacts in the additional assessment. So we're just waiting for that to be completed by the auditors, which hopefully they'll get done this week. And then we'll know what the revised assessments are for each of the member districts, which will then be the final draft of the audit. All right. We're not going to do anything on the budget right now. We'll do that next the special meeting on Wednesday around the public comment. Public comment at this time. Yeah, Emily. I don't know if this is an appropriate question or not, but I didn't catch it in the budget when we went by scrolling quickly. Did we budget for a foreign language? Are we bringing foreign language back to the middle school? Because I did not see it and I'm concerned that that's not maybe in there. Jamie's got his thumb up. Yes, we added we added a point six back in. Thank you, Emily. Also, is that budget available anywhere that we could review it? Absolutely. Yeah, it's on the SU website and is sent out as part of the board packet. So if you go to the the folder for this meeting, if you go to the school board minutes and agendas, then in that folder for this date, it has the reports and documents that would be in that folder. WVAR VSU conference has raised its hand. And Andrew, we have somebody here. That's OK. I have a question about the student support cut. It looks like if I'm reading it correctly and I may not be, but it looks like there's a hundred one thousand dollar cut for student support. So I guess my first question is what exactly are those positions? And I had heard something about the remedial. There was remedial cuts in Royalton this year. And are those positions kind of in the same? There weren't remedial cuts. We couldn't fill the position. Oh, we had so many designs in the game. So it wasn't planned. And then it was so late. It was hard to hire. But I see. We currently have that bill. Yeah, just just to be clear, it was some titling that we had in regards to positions. We have this. We still have three student support coordinators for next year's budget. And we have four school counselors. And so if you look your student school counselor line increased, which is what we have right now. So one of the school counselor salaries essentially was being carried within the student support line. So there's no reduction in FTEs. So those are not those are not student support as far as in the classrooms helping teachers. That was my concern. These are these are student support coordinators like Shane Oaks that you heard from earlier tonight. Thank you. And then what about the cut? There was a cut for Jim as well, right? Fifty two thousand dollars. No, hold on. I'll find it. Are you cutting the position for the Zed? And that was reassignments based on P teacher was promoted from internally to do drivers and athletic and activities. So we are budgeting for the same FTE teachers that we have currently in place. Is our P teacher at the elementary in Royalton? Is he currently teaching health as well? He's teaching. Yeah. And during the winter months, a little bit of health too. All right. Thank you. Is there any other public comment? Any kind of questions or comments? Andrew, I had one more question that came up in my brain. If there's no more public comment, but I wanted to ask Jamie. OK. So we've talked before and we've been putting off the discussion of what Jamie learned going over our Articles of Agreement for merging the elementary schools. And it was supposed to be on agenda after agenda. And it just keeps sliding off the agenda. So I apologize that I did not remember it at the beginning of the meeting. But as we were going through, I'm like, oh, we have got to cover that piece, please. So I actually had it tentatively planned for your February meeting. Full discussion item. If you look under 14 future agenda items, it's on there for February. No, you're right. We had some other things come up and it took us away from that. But I do think it would be a worthwhile conversation, actually, a full conversation with the board. OK. Well, you're muted, Andrew. Thank you. Go ahead. Is there one more person in person with a comment? I wanted to bring up was the community meeting the other day. I wanted to agree with Shannon. It was wonderful. I think that there was a lot of constructive conversations that were had. And my question is just around how does the board and the district take that information that was shared and help to ensure that those, you know, that there's positive changes now for our teachers and our students in our school? Will that information all be gathered? And what are the next steps from those community meetings and all that information that was shared? Because specifically, there was great information about our teachers and our educators and what they need for support. So I would love to hear more of those conversations continue. Now, thank you for that feedback. I am sorry, I wasn't able to attend that. It does seem like it was a great event. So. Any administration want to comment? Yeah, I mean, the plan is to continue to have conversations like we had last week. And certainly the plan is to then have a presentation to the full board around the data that we've been collecting. But I think that data is going to be influential to many of our districts under the umbrella of the SU. So if we as a community, Jamie, if we were able to try to put together something, some sort of celebration for the teachers, is that something that the board and the district could help, you know, to support, I guess? So if we were to able, if we were able to get donations and everything and coordinate some sort of celebration for the teachers. Yeah, teacher appreciation weeks coming soon. And I would love to coordinate with some community groups around that. That would be awesome. Yeah, OK, good. What's the best way to go about that? For elementary. Yeah, reach out to the principals, but then if you need further help, don't be a free to reach out to me and I can get you in touch with the right folks as well. I'd like to start something with the community to just open up the conversation of being able to celebrate the teachers. Is this based on equity or is it just like teacher appreciation week would be my case on equity? I don't it would be for teachers. We just had the meeting was based on equity. The teachers. The question came up as far as like what do our schools need and what do our students need and what do our teachers need? Right, that was in our group. And so within the framing of equity. Was our understanding of that meeting. Well, I would I mean, certainly we do have the PTO and they would certainly be a good starting point for. Community action on separating the teachers, I think. Do we have. Years ago, we used to have the PTO, which one is it that has it has a very app in the PTO and that's all doesn't happen anymore. That's all that's always. Jamie Rainbow brought it to me better. There's a lot of work with that. We just talked about putting out a flyer to try to garner new blood. All right, literally today. Yeah, I think she's actually still. In charge of it, it's just she got burnt out on and just doing that. Nobody was picked it up. Well, I'm going to try to coordinate something with the community. So I'll reach out with Jamie and just try to see if we can do some sort of celebration. I wasn't aware that teachers Appreciation Week was coming up, but I heard that we're not doing nearly what we could. So I'd love to see it increase. Basically need some members is what it does. It needs more than one. Thank you. May 8th. All right. Why don't we take this time to talk about Shannon's redistributing some of her committee assignments? So she's currently board clerk. She's on the recruitment. Committee or what do we call that? Task Force Task Force. But the task force and negotiations. Is there anybody I think having some of the negotiations is pretty vital? So is there anybody who would be willing to step up on to the negotiations? Go ahead, Jane. Just so that so I think knowing the time commitment would be important. You're looking at every Thursday. From about five thirty until eight. Would be the time commitment because we're in the thick of exchanging proposals starting Thursday. And we're pretty set on well, it's yeah, we've already agreed to when the many times happened. So there's no adjustment there. It's at six o'clock every other Thursday in the in the committee meets every week at five thirty for us to do our work. Peggy Rodney, are you guys have any ability to do Thursday yet? I can't do it. Conflict. All right. Yeah, Peggy's got cows. I've got cows. I've got basketball at that time, unfortunately. How essential is a person from Red on the negotiations committee like we'll be able to get by for a couple months until we have elections? Yeah, I mean, possibly right. I mean, we've had in chatting to speak to this, there's been a time when we have had a district not participate just due to conflicts, right? You know, we're right now, we're negotiating our ESP and a majority of those folks are actually employed under the umbrella of the SU. Certainly you have the most ESP folks, educational support personnel as the largest district. But, you know, certainly we could build in executive sessions so I could keep you abreast on what's being discussed at our monthly meetings if you don't have someone there. Yeah, I think that would might be the way to go just because. I think I'm sure Chris is going to be coaching basketball at that time, too. Yeah, I won't have any extra barn help boys until after basketball season. So I'm I'm stuck doing chores on Thursday, like it or not. I mean, I might be able to join the meetings late, but yeah. I would say I mean, again, Shannon, you could speak having been I think that can be sometimes difficult, Andrew. Yeah, especially with the learning curve of negotiations. Yeah. All right. Why don't I think we'll not have somebody on there for now? Jamie, if you could keep us informed. And yeah, we can maybe discuss it at the. I don't know if it's worth discussing at the SU board. So I guess see if there's any other district that would want to add an extra person or something like that. I can I can continue to try to get there when I can, but no promises until March. But I'll help out where I can. OK. Well, thank you. But as of March, I'm not not there. Yeah. For clerk, I think if I can handle doing the minutes and getting them out, so I'll be I'll take the clerk responsibilities unless somebody else would like to. And how much is the recruitment task force? How much is that at the moment? It's an hour. Every other Monday afternoon at this point around four o'clock. We meet and talk. All the plans. You've got to stop doing things during your time. It's a lot of your time, though. This is for meaty cows. They certainly are. I'm writing. Do you have any ability to? What? When did they do it again? Well, every other Monday at about four o'clock, I think I could be able to do that. OK. Yeah. A point since it's a task force, so. OK, well, if you're able to step up for that, that'd be great. Anything else we need to talk about on that front? No, that's good. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Shannon. OK. Then we're on to new hires and resignations for any of those this month. And other we have any other I guess that we just did other future agenda items. We have the. So the upgrades, I presentation. Former Arts Lab expansion project update. Board code of conduct policy updates and merged elementary school updates. Looks like it'll be a busy month. The other thing we'll need to figure out at some point is and I don't know if we want to talk about that now is educational meetings for presenting the budget and. Answer questions and whatnot. Yeah. We usually do a couple of those during February in the weeks leading up to the time. We want to try and schedule something for that or we could talk about it at the special meeting on next Wednesday. If we want to budget. Think about it and come up with times that work for everybody or do you want to talk about it now? Yeah, I think we can talk about next week. You'll just warm as a board because before I had to be part of your those had to be voted via Australian ballot. So we need it as part of your warning. You can have a special meeting just on the budget information and not needed to be part of your annual warning because you're voting from the floor on your budget. Right. Now we're back to that this year. OK, then we'll talk about figuring out what we want to do for. Community education meetings next week. So our next meeting date is going to be this upcoming Wednesday. We've got a special meeting. Is it warned for a specific location or are we going to do that at the because of the campus? Do you know, Jamie? We'll do it at Bethel. Let's get mixed up this week. So we'll want it for Bethel. All right. So next week, it does seven. Do you want to go seven? That helps us to in principles. I don't know if you I don't know if you need to be there necessarily. So we may be able to give you that night off. But Tara, that would let us be at Sharon at five thirty and then go to Bethel for seven. All right. Sounds good to me. Any anything else? Or we. I think we are ready to adjourn. Entertain the motion. So moved. Any second? Second. Thank you, everybody.