 Good evening, everybody. Can you hear me OK? We'll struggle with the mic, but I guess you can hear me. I don't think I can hear you. Jen, is there? More or less. No, too. Good evening, everybody. We're going to call the meeting to order 6.05. Welcome. We're really excited to have our honorable representatives and senators here with us. Thank you for taking the time to come and chat with us and be part of our community. We are starting a little bit later than we wanted, but we want to take time to have everybody introduce themselves so we get to know you and you get to know us. After introductions, we would quickly just ask you to maybe share a little bit about what your priorities are, and then the board members could ask some questions. If that's OK with you guys. So we'll get started, and I think we'll just go around and maybe start with you, Ann, and come down. I don't know how we're going to do it with the mic. Mark can run the mic over. Come on, do a lot of them. OK. And I forgot to say, if anybody's comfortable, you can introduce yourselves with your pronouns too. You don't have to. But if you would like to, go ahead. OK, thanks. I have a button, so shoot her. Representative Ann Donoghue from Northfield and also represent Berlin. Hi, I'm J-Benn. Nice to see everyone. Glad to be here, and I represent Eastmont Collier. I'm Maya Elliott. I use she, babe, pronouns, and I am a student representative. I'm Willow. I'm from Middlesex, and I use she, her pronouns, and I'm also a student representative. Good evening. Natasha Karpanning, representative of Worcester, and I use she, her pronouns. Hello, I'm Daniel Keeney. I represent Callis, and I use he, him, pronouns. And if anyone's there, I'm a board member from Worcester, and I use she, her pronouns. Maggie Weiss, Callis, also she, her pronouns. Thanks for joining us. I'm Ursula Stanley. I use she, her pronouns, and I'm a member from Middlesex. I'm Roy. I'm the superintendent, and I use she, her pronouns. For Yismith, it's Ms. Montgillier, and I use she, her pronouns. Hey, I'm Cari Bradley. I'm from Callis, and I use he, him. Joe Zito Van Fleet from Worcester, he, him, and I'm also a, I think that's it. I'm a board member from Worcester. I'm Libby Johnson, and I'm from East Montgillier. Hi, I'm Joshua Sevitz. I'm from Middlesex, and I use he, him, pronouns. I'm Krisby Bay from Middlesex, and I use he, him, pronouns. I'm Andrew Perksley, I live in Marshfield, I represent the Washington District, and I use he, him, or Adam. Tommy's living in Montgillier. I also represent the Washington District, and I'm she, her. Thank you, everybody. I'm wondering. No. The screen, the screen. The screen. OK, trying again. Just, figure out. There you go. So I just wondering if we have anybody in Zoom. And, Mark. There are four, two people that have come in. Yeah. But I don't see anyone else waiting in the waiting room right now. OK, can you give them a chance to introduce themselves? Sure. Is there Eric? Yeah. Hi, I'm Eric Anderson. I am representative from East Montgillier. To see him start pretty, I have a show doing tonight from team, so. Thank you. And then I forgot one thing, and a physical practice. And we really wanted to do the land acknowledgement tonight, and I forgot to ask the students. I wonder if you mind doing that now, just so that we can get a practice of doing it. Doe is located on the land, which has long served as a site of meeting and exchange among indigenous peoples for thousands of years, and is home of the Western Abenaki people. Doe honors, recognizes, and respects these people, especially the Abenaki, as the traditional stewards of the lands and waters on which we gather today. In that spirit today, we will be given by acknowledging that we're guests in this land. We need to respect and help protect the lands within our use. Thank you so much, Mike. With that, I would like to first I would like to bring out a book since it's both Spanish. I don't know if it's English. Go for it. So I guess we'll just go around and give a view of the last letter session. I assume you only want to hear about education policy issues and not just everything that's going on. There's obviously a lot going on in housing and childcare and things that intersect with education. I serve on the Transportation and Appropriations Committee, but I was served on the Education Committee for two terms, so I have that background of education policy. We had a lot of work in the last session with the weighting study, which I know you guys spoke about a lot. That's going to be rolled out over the next few years. I think that's something that's going to hopefully really bend the whole state and really looking forward to how we have more equitable weights and how that provides more funding for the students that send in their support. Senator Cummings and I were on an income-based education study committee about switching the education fund from property tax to an income tax. That was a very interesting time. It turned out I was very supportive of that, and I sponsored a bill with Senator Plena last term. But we definitely found out it's trickier than we thought, at least that I thought. It's difficult to hide how you deal with renters and a lot of different things. So there's still some discussion about how we can do that. That would definitely impact how you guys do your work here, I think, and how towns operate in general. So there's going to be some more discussion about that. I think those are the two big things that are kind of the background. I know the Education Committee is really looking at literacy, concerned about scores and coming out of COVID and how we deal with that and how we can be supportive of teachers. And now there's still 1,200 or some teaching openings in the state. How can we support teachers to stay in the profession and get more people into the profession? So I'm definitely interested in that, from just education policy, but also in appropriations, how we can provide funding for. Pay people's tuition, their student loans that they went into teaching, other ways to support especially special education teachers and special education in general. There's a community school program that we started a few years ago. That pilot study, I'm really interested in how that works and what the outcomes are that and how we can provide that kind of funding for all schools. Because schools, just in general, are doing so much more for our communities than we used to as far as just picking on all the other community needs that our families and students have. And so they should be compensated for that. And I think it's a good role for the schools, for some of those things, but the schools will take care of the children in this way. I guess the other big education thing that is happening is this universal view. We passed it last year. We funded it with the extra funds that we had in the education fund at the time, but we didn't create a long-term funding source. So that is definitely gonna be a big discussion that $27 million on top of $29 million or whatever it is gonna be on top of the money for the child care, on top of the money people wanna do for a family leave, on top of the other thing. So it's gonna be interesting how that stacks up with all the other programs. I'll leave it at that for any further questions. I'm Anne Cummings. And I serve on economic development. My third time through there, but it's new to me this year. I've spent about the last six years on health and welfare, and I chair finance. My job is to find out how to pay for all of these things. We spent this afternoon looking at the child care bill and some of the possible ways to raise the $279 million, and it depends on how high we go up an income level, how much we subsidize, how much payment is there. One of the studies has put the price tag pretty close to 400 million. Not decimal, thus. So we're looking at that. Universal meals does come up. The meal study I was told was released today. Last year we were told that there were a whole lot of kids that we were under-reporting the kids that were eligible for federal subsidy. That hasn't materialized. It looks like it may go down a little bit more because of a federal Medicaid thing, but we're staying somewhere between 27 and 31 million. The question with child, we also have a child tax credit, which went in last year. We were thinking parents could use that for childcare. So we may be rethinking some of this in trying to get a childcare bill out. All the employers, and I assume schools are right there, you need your teachers to be here, and in order to be here, they need childcare. The other thing we're working on is in economic development, we have a major housing bill we hope to get out. Definitely this month, there was a summer study committee, we're working on a lot of local planning, zoning, funding, trying to facilitate the development workforce housing in some of our more densely populated downtown and village centers, and that one will be coming out. And after that, we're gonna be dealing in workforce, which I believe is starting in the house. They're doing it first and then it'll come to us. But again, part of the problem with the childcare bill is no matter how much money we throw at it, we don't have the childcare workers, even if we raise wages, to put everything that needs to be there to meet the need there. We know we don't have the teachers, we don't have the nurses. We have, and we're not alone, this is pretty much a national issue. We're aging, we were told that by 2050, maybe 2040, 25% of our population will be over 65. So, no, by 2050, there will be more old people than children for the first time ever. And I think it's by 2030 something, a corner will be over 65. So, we're trying to figure out how to recruit younger people. Also working on the impact of all the CLA violations. We usually move one or three or four towns that are outside the CLA boundaries will be because of the rapid increase in housing price. We have 34 towns. We're gonna work, I mean, you can't get appraisers. So, we're probably gonna be doing something to smooth that out. Also, there's a question on your income sensitized and your property tax, but suddenly your $200,000 house is worth $500,000 house. Are you going to, even though your income hasn't changed, are you gonna be hit with a major increase? So, all I want, my mantra has become, we're working on it, and we are. But there's just a lot of very complicated issues with if money, we could print it in the basement, we'd be fine, but we can't, and we just have a lot of heavy lifting to do. Again, Ella Chapin, representative. I don't use she, her, if they pronounce. And I'm new, I'm due to share committee. So, not a huge number of school, I'm not really doing things that I'm working on at the moment, but I would say I'm gonna be working on a lot of issues that affect families and children and equity issues. We're looking at a lot of bills already that affect how we really work on diversion and restorative justice as tools in our communities and how we increase the equity around our state of access to those kinds of programs because they're not geographically equally accessible in our communities and across the state. Right now we're working on the reproductive, there should be a shield bill to protect patients and providers around both reproductive healthcare as well as gender informing care. So those shield bills that we're working on in the legislature will address both occupations equally. I wanted to just bring up the, I don't think either of you guys mentioned just the decision that's come from the Supreme Court around public funding for independent schools and how the decision related to Maine is gonna affect the amount previously probably we're getting information from the education on this and I understand that we are moving towards some activity in the legislature and not knowing the details yet, but we are certainly thinking a lot about how to ensure that our students do not have that all have, are not in environments, no public funding is going to environments that have any discrimination. I know my understanding is the legislature recently passed some bills around ensuring that independent schools address ensure they're providing equal services for children with disabilities and are gonna be looking at something along those lines to make sure that the discrimination is not happening with public funds. So there may be a lot more going on in that regard and a lot of conversations, but I guess I know that that's gonna be a priority for the legislature this year, hopefully too early to start this by any. Hi, I'm Representative Ndonahue again. And I've spent all my time in the legislature on health and human services, one committee or the other, the back and forth on human services. This year we're working closely with the health care committee, but we actually, both committees went on a field trip today. We spent part of the day down in Washington County mental health. And so I know that you won't be surprised to hear that we have a huge crisis in mental health with kids, which obviously has much impact on the schools and the workforce issue comes up there as with everywhere, one of the really frightening things we heard. Washington County mental health has 16 beds in what they call micro, the very intensive wrap around two children in a home. And they have 16 totaled, but they actually can only operate four of those 16 currently because they don't have the staffing for the rest. And that means all those beds that kids could be in who are instead, they said either in emergency apartments or remaining at the Broward River Retreat when they don't need to be there and they're stuck there. They also were telling us in terms of their crisis, mobile crisis team. It used to be even 10 or so years ago, maybe three calls a month on average would be a child crisis as opposed to responding to an adult crisis. And now it can be three a day. It's that radical change. We are also working on the whole question of the replacement services for what used to be at Woodside and when Woodside closed, the average number of children there is somewhere between maybe five or six or zero in that range. And now the proposals are for as many as 18 to 24 or more as needing to replicate what used to be covered by that in terms of locked children's treatment or stabilization programs for the justice of all kids. So a whole lot of issues to be dealing with in that sphere as well. And we're just, obviously the session is just started. So we will also have the child care bill in our committee and we've heard the same overview report and all of the different financial pressures. So it's the start of a challenging year. Thank you. But you know what I ask, Ann, will you join us? Sorry, I haven't found the link. Is my name introducing yourself, Ann? Yeah, thank you. I already heard a year or two and if you want to share your pronouns too. Sure, yeah. So Ann Watson, she, her pronouns the newest senator for the Washington district and I'm just also really grateful for the remote option today. You can all hear me okay? Yeah. Okay, great. Well, so thank you. So I am on the Senate natural resources and energy committee as well as government operations. And I mean, a lot of the priorities that I have for myself or around climate, which is great to be plugged into the natural resources and energy committee getting to work on things in that space. But just thinking about things that would be relevant for you all, for the school district is actually probably more in line with the government operations because we just passed a bill that allowed the COVID provisions of meeting remotely and not necessarily having a physical presence that just got extended. And so that's, and we're actually going to be taking up a bill, I think in the coming weeks about some potentially permanent changes to open meeting law, gathering all that we've learned about having to meet remotely through COVID and seeing if we can make some of these changes permanent. So if you have any suggestions around how that could or should look, I'm certainly open to that. And yeah, so those are just a couple of pieces that I think might, well, at least one piece anyway, that'd be relevant for you all. The other thing, I realized this is not related to my committees, but we did just get a link from the state treasurer. Has any of you talked about this yet, the unclaimed property? Yeah, you have talked about this? No, okay. So there's a database of unclaimed property that, I mean, the fund itself has millions of dollars that are basically owed back to Vermonters. And I took the time ahead of this meeting to just look up to see if any of the, like the school district was owed any money. And it turns out that Berlin Elementary, Romney Elementary, and East Montpelier Elementary are all in the database as being owed money. And they're different amounts of money. One of them is, at least one of them is like in the $200 or more category. So, you know, might be worth tracking down. So it doesn't specify how much. And to be fair, that is, it looked to me like it was showing up. And so, you know, it's, I think it's worth looking into. I obviously can't say it's definitely, you know, UL, but it's worth, it looked to me like it was UL. So worth tracking down. I'm happy to send along a link if that is useful. So I think I will leave it there for now. Can I just interject something? Really on behalf of some of the new representatives, if you get the brilliant idea of a constituent service where you look at the list and call the people in your town, maybe think twice. I tried that one year. I called and asked for John Smith and there was a kind of cold silence. And he died three years ago. What are you falling about? What are you falling about? What are you falling about? What are you falling about? What are you falling about? There was one other thing I wanted to, I forgot to mention, that is school construction. Something that I've worked on in education committee so I shouldn't have forgotten it. But there's the assessment that we did and then there's the evaluation. I think we used a different term that's going to, the report's going to come on October. But talking about the treasure, reminding me because we've had some meetings with the treasure about how do we get back to having some state aid for construction because our schools, what we learned from the assessment are in, which we all do, which are a lot of different maintenance to say at the least. So how can the state help make our buildings to be adequate for the teaching children? Thank you. Thank you everybody. Now I'm suppressing it up to board members and students. Any other things you have to take into your questions? Let's just talk to you. Okay. I don't know if any of you can speak to this, but when I hear, you know, finding educators, we know that there have been in the past some significant challenges with the Office of Professional Responsibility and the process for achieving licensure, in particular if you're coming from a different state or trying to return to the state, if your license is expired. I'm wondering if anyone can speak to that challenge. Yes, last year in the workforce bill, we actually directed the Office of Professional Responsibility to do an intensive review of the, specifically around mental health counselors, the licensure on some of those interstate, what the barriers were and what we needed to be doing to address them because there are a lot and it wasn't something we could just say, stop doing that. We told them we need them to identify those barriers. There also is a interstate compact bill that's in the healthcare committee being acted on right now to help them on that. Is that specific just to mental health professionals but also educators? I'm sorry, you asked educators. That was the area where the biggest barriers were identified so maybe that we need to take a look at educators then as an X piece because that was the one that kept coming up so yeah, thank you. Yeah and related and or anyone, a number of years ago because education licensing falls under the agency of education, so it does not fall under Office of Professional Services unless you're a speech pathologist in case you have to do both. Yes. But there was a number of years ago some conversation about whether or not it should be moved to OPR and it was a very controversial topic and I didn't know if that, because of the workforce shortage issues, is anyone hearing any rumbling about that being brought back up? I have not heard anything. Okay. We did talk about an education and I was surprised at how complicated it was. It seemed like it was almost purposefully complicated at a time when we didn't have such a crisis and it wasn't like stop doing that one thing. It was difficult but what AOE was saying is like well we're offering waivers for a lot. So there's a lot of people teaching on waivers which doesn't seem to be a sustainable solution. One thing that we're working with the teachers union on is kind of build your own, they're not like parent educators or other people that are already in the building that don't have a license, how can we get them a license with their lived experience and make that an easier process? So that was something that we started. I don't know where that is right now but I know there's interest in those kinds of things. But I haven't heard about moving until, okay. Yeah I just, I wanted to ask about tax rates for second homeowners. Just we've talked either today or on other days in the course of developing our budget about affordability and declining enrollment and an aging population. And it feels very troubling that there's that, I think we saw an article earlier this year about all these towns in Vermont that have lower tax rates for second homeowners than they do for primary homeowners. But I think I'm curious about what you all have heard what the considerations are about raising taxes sort of statewide on second homeowners in the current context. Okay, right now we have two categories, homestead or non-homestead. And non-homestead are all those not your full-time residents and businesses. I'm working on the assumption that there is a bill. We started working on one last year to do a more granular division in that non-homestead area. The reason second homes may be paying a lower tax rate is that when we did at 60 or probably the adjustment, when we divided our homestead and non-homestead we set the tax rate. It was higher than the homestead tax rate. And we set it there but whatever the formula is we knew at that time that eventually if school budgets kept going up that it would surpass it surpassed in Plainfield quite a few years ago it's going to be a painful discussion. And so I think you tend to keep kicking the can but as we look at that, I think it's probably time we recalibrated how those tax rates they all go up now with the same percentage, same impact. But if we don't see a bill to further look at those non-residential, non-primary residents I anticipate something will end up in my favorite Christmas tree, the miscellaneous tax bill which is where we get kind of a Christmas tree and it is a bill on which one can hang thing and miscellaneous tax is such a broad subject that it tends to get well decorated the last few weeks of the session and things that have been floating around and not dealt with tend to end up there but I'm anticipating that I'm going to see a bill for the income-based education funding and then I'm going to see a bill on second homes and it's just, I think because there's so many new people bills have been just very slow. I have three bills and one doesn't belong to me on the board that have come to finance. I should have about 10 by now. So it's, they've just been slow getting out this year probably because of the one third turnover in both bodies but I have faith they will show up. So you can say it is something that I've heard a lot of people bring up and it came up on the income-based education tax committee and it's not quite a recommendation in there but it says like you should look at this. And people that are legislators that I talked to which is probably a small sample of all 180 for support of it but if I call that, it's bigger than half. Problem comes with dear camps. Hi, so my, I don't know if this is a question so much or a comment. My day job is a family position. So firstly, universal school meals I'm really rooting for because I think that's so important to state and healthy schools. And also during our most recent budget discussion one of the challenges we ran into is some of the federal COVID relief funding that's going to be expiring has been used in our schools to fund additional nursing and school counselors and finding the money to continue that is going to be a little challenging. So just putting a plug in at the state level, I don't know, in the mental health bills you're thinking about if some funds could be directed to schools for that. So I think as you all know that need is not going away from the federal money, the federal money is. My brief comment on it is that the proposed budget from the governor this year has come out and it has a zero percent increase for our designated agencies, mental health and developmental services. So that is obviously something we're going to have to deal with because particularly in today's days of inflation the zero percent means it's cutting something that we know we're very short on right now and the schools are obviously a huge piece of what the designated agencies work on with the success after six, success before six. I always say we leave out all of our six-year-olds in the state because we have success before six and we have success after six because we do nothing when you're sick. I think you all know this, but I'll just add on to that comment. One of the realities that schools face, we are not allowed to have wait lists, we are not allowed to not serve students and so when reductions are in the end and a number of years ago there was an actual study done looking at how much funding schools are supporting that they're really supporting, we are really supporting because there are not community-based services. So I know that I feel like I would be remiss if I didn't say that. That's part of the challenges. We are not students come in our door and we have to figure out how to meet their needs. Oh, there's one there. I have a question about the pre-K funding. I don't think the governor's budget will go into this, but I wonder do you think it will be in the form of direct payments to parents? Is that what you mentioned, child tax credit? I know at the federal level there's direct payments to parents. And I just wonder if you have any idea if that's going to be payments towards centers or parents and if that's going to be means tested or sort of if you have any. The short answer is no. I don't know. I know the status of four-year-olds in the schools and that's all going to have to be dealt with as part of the issue we've got and how do we pay for that? Within the Education Fund we have had a huge surplus because people went out and bought the things that were supposed to buy with the federal money that got sent out. That's what it's supposed to do, but it's going away and by next year it will be gone. At the state level we have done a very good job of only doing one-time appropriations. The mental health system has been underfunded for years. We know you need mental health workers in your school. The families need counselors and this is not new. COVID just brought it on. It's like childcare. It just brought it to the forefront. When we look at that we're going to have to be looking at what do we do with four-year-olds? They're kind of in school for I think it's 10 hours a week. Do we keep them there? And who pays? We put money in for universal meals. There's a lot of people that feel probably here you have a lot of kids who qualify. You get into Montpelier. You probably don't have as large a group and could that money be better spent and could you find a way to feed the kids that really need to be fed without a stigma? In this day of swipe cards, I put money in my account at the state house. I go up, I give them my number. They just take it out of my account. I could go up and give them my number or could say free or just whatever covered. That will take some startup money I'm sure but we're looking at a lot of that. We've kind of piecemeal these systems. We also put money in last year. It's up to 32 million for the PCB testing that we're doing in the schools. That was just the amount of money we could find. At the same time, there's some tax rate reductions and other things. No way we think that's enough money but we're quite sure. We're all saying is there another Burlington high school out there? We're hoping capits already found some. We're hoping we can keep it localized but that's a big concern out there and I'm sure you don't want to deal with parents. It turns out there's a lot of toxicity in any of your schools. I was just going to add that there's a lot of talk about pre-K and how that overlaps with childcare discussion. So there's some bills to make it universal. Pre-K and fourth graders only public schools not allow any payments to go to private providers. That really concerns other people. That's why the short answer is no, we don't know what it's going to be because that's part of the big debate. I don't see if there's any other questions so we'll add a couple. I feel compelled to say that I believe that maybe the most significant issue our district faces in the coming years is our declining student enrollment and I know you know that. You spoke to a couple of things you're doing but our projections show that our population will decline by about 20% in the next three years and our projections aren't usually wrong. We're in our smallest school in the district and I'm just looking at the banners and wondering what the class of 25 and beyond is going to look like. Again, I know you talked about housing and childcare and those are pieces of the puzzle and these are complex long-term challenges but I felt you have to hear it from us because we represent thousands of people who care deeply about these schools and we're on the precipice of some very significant change and we don't know what the applications are for the fabric of our town. Well, just thank you first for being on the board. I know these are tough decisions. I think being on the school board is tougher than being in the legislature. And so thanks for struggling with that. I wish we had a good answer for how we could change that around or just even stabilize it. The one thing that I think is going to help, I mean childcare in general, but I think specifically some kind of paternal parental leave. I have a lot of co-workers. I'm in the work of the state when I'm not in the legislature. A lot of them just have, we can't have anyone. I have one kid and I'm like, that's all we can deal with because of childcare and just leaving work. So I think a paternal leave program could at least help have people, families, think about it a bit more. No, just going to say that is in the mix. We have a bill that went through last year that did a very broad range of family leave. There's some discussion about, well, since it costs $36,000 a year to provide childcare to an infant, maybe we could start with paternal leave and help families. Not everybody wants to put their infant into childcare. So it's all out there right now. It's just kind of swinging around in the blender, but eventually something will come out of it. This is sausage making at its finest. I would just want to add a couple of things. One is that when we're talking about these CDs and infrastructure also reminding ourselves about our career and technical education centers for the workforce, just in Washington Central we have more kids that want to go to the career and technical centers and we don't have the capacity for them either, so that infrastructure money is really important to us. And emphasizing what Carrie said, we also know that we're going to face because of inflation rate and low revenues, we don't know what we can put in the rainy fund for later on to help us. This year is hard. Our budgeting for 24-25 is going to be probably the hardest budget that we'll ever be facing. And it's not just us, we're around the country, so whatever you can do for that, healthcare, there's so many things. And the last is that preschool, I know that preschool bail just dropped under laps today to just really look at it and make sure that you're getting different perspectives for who comes to testify. And I know that there's this, you know, scary to think that you can't send to private providers. I think the most important thing to remind ourselves is our moral obligation to serve all our kids and the foundation of our democracy what we're doing with those public funds. So we can't have two systems that don't play by the same rules. So it's okay to send it to a private provider that is compliant with the same rules. We take all our do-buries like that, authors at once, we don't send them back. We take them and we serve all of them. That's not the case in other places. So just to, we have finite resources. So thank you for all you guys. So I'm going to go ahead and do two, and then we'll be coming over. And I, Maya and Willow, come out. I want to go to this spot, but you guys are such good leaders. And I know that you have experience. What? How's Maya? You want to have anything? You go to Maya. I'm not going to go to this spot. I don't know, I was just listening, and I was trying to understand both of it, which means like 70% of the public was out there. I don't know, I just want to say that I think the meal plans are incredibly important, just looking around at my fellow students. Not only those that can't afford it, I know some who would refuse to get it because it's a famous thing, but also those who maybe their parents could afford it, but it was still difficult, and so they didn't eat. And the fact that the food is now free, I've seen so many more people get lunch, and it's a big struggle sometimes for people to eat. So that's a huge thing, but yeah, that's what I could think of. So to touch base on the mental health stuff in school, we have kind of like a presentation for the next school board meeting. We didn't bring it today, but we sent out a survey to all the students, all the high school students, with questions, one of them being what makes you get out of bed in the morning, and then what something someone would have known by just looking at you. And we got a ton of responses, I think like 95, it like bumped up, and that's a lot for like a high school survey. Like I'm guilty of just hitting the trash button when I see one. But 92 was a lot, and the responses were so genuine, so we're excited to like share what they said, and like... Yeah, so... Maya! That is actually just about to ask the representatives how much contact you have with students. I know they started some sort of student group, I think, to work with the state. State Council, Student Youth Council, yes, was started last year. I think I do have friends who's on that, but we can try to get you the info that we get from the survey, and other stuff going forward as well. Yeah, because I've got three of my committee members have interns, so they're college students, but they're youth to me. And then we have the pages, but that's about it. There are a lot of mentor mentees in the state house today, but not a lot of opportunity to talk, and that I think is important. It's a two-way street, so you can understand why we aren't just doing everything that you think we should do, and we can understand what you think we should be doing. And look at the youth council and see what that feedback will to us is, so that we do have to learn from that. One thing, I don't know if this happened on my or your page, but Chair Campion of the Senate Education Committee started two years ago, and did it this year, always have the pages in, because they're students of, they're giving testimony, at least those students that are pages about their experience in Vermont schools, which I thought was great. Yeah, I don't think that was a thing when I was a page, but it's really good that you guys are trying to get more student points, especially the student representatives committee that was made for. But I would say just like, yeah, keep a lookout and keep talking to students. I don't know if you guys would like to hear some of the responses, but... It's okay, I, hold on a minute. Yeah, sure, thank you. Well, so I neglected to mention that I am actually also a teacher. So I teach in the Montpelier Roxbury School District and Physics and Engineering and Math, and so I'm still teaching one day a week right now, and one day is when we don't have a session. So I think I'm a little bit unique in that. I think there's a couple of other teachers in the legislature right now, but... But yeah, so I have quite a bit of contact hanging out with students and talking about, you know, all of the issues that matter, you know, how mental health and stress is going for them, you know, all the way from that to like, you know, how GPT is like affecting their, you know, classes and whatnot. And so in addition with the government operations, I believe we're actually planning to have, I think it's the Youth Council come present to government operations. I think it's either this week or next week. So there's some intentional communication that's happening there as well. So yeah, thanks. Thank you. Willow, go ahead. I mean, do you... Wait, I want to sit here. Just a minute. Oh, I hear that. Next meeting. So our first question was to keep it school-based was, if you could change one thing about the school, what would it be? And then the responses were a better community, the standards for grades, to have pizza Fridays, callback changes, and then what makes you get up in the morning? And then someone said, my boyfriend, tech, sports, the possibility that I'll get to art slash create, the fact that I get to see my friends and go to tech every day and actually learn and have fun, what is the difficulty on a daily basis, school, friends, family work, et cetera. How best could the school help support you? And someone said racism, someone said, go into U-32 after tech, there's no support. Remember to do homework, remembering everything, tired after a long day, exhaustion. And then another one was what gives you joy? And they said family, my friends, my dog. And then what is something someone would know about by just looking at you? And these responses really showed how much students are drowning in their feelings and how they can thoroughly express themselves, how bad my anxiety is, I'm extremely worrisome, I'm from North Carolina, that I don't like math, I'm trans living in a transphobic household, I don't know myself, I hate myself, IDK. So it really just varies from painting that student's face on a daily basis, and it shows how much mental health is a very prominent thing throughout anyone's life. And I think high school is definitely a way, a place to show a healthy way to get help and to be overall better and feel better. The youngest member has joined us, anything to say? Not yet, sadly. Thank you everybody, as you can see. Even though no one wants your attention during the legislative session, what do you find is the most effective way for folks to convey their views to you and that you're receptive to it? And I think that's just about it. So how would you be able to do that? That's proof of you and also what will be advocated? I try and meet with people, but as a committee chair, I am booked through lunch every day. So finding time that isn't at eight o'clock in the morning or five o'clock in the afternoon is hard. Emails, I think we all stay up on the emails and get a lot. But I try and answer all of them. Sometimes something gets lost in the mix, but that's a good way to initiate something. And then if it needs to go further, we can talk or work things through. But I think email is probably the best initial way. Yeah, it's an email except that I can't keep up with them, so I don't get mad at me if I don't respond. So try again. Like this last week, I had somebody that just kept saying I'm pushing this to the top of your email. And that worked, so I finally found the time to respond to them. But meetings are good, things like this are great if you could find the time. So coming to the State House and talking to us, it's harder for the constituents, but it is helpful for us because we're there to have an actual one-on-one in-person discussion. Yeah, we did some town halls like that last year. We'll do some more of those. Because actually talking to somebody is definitely the best way, but it's hard to do that with as many people as there are. We have, I think, 62,000 people that we're representing. So obviously I'm not going to talk to all of them. And our district has gotten much larger. We're going to Randolph next week, Stowe. It probably takes over an hour to get from one end of her district to another. So we have a lot of new territory. Yeah, Matt knew it. I think us floor representatives have money. We were constituents. And we're really happy to get back to people. I know everybody works hard to get back, but like Andy said, just, you know, go over, you're probably in your position. The more you go, as you get, it's really a flood during the session. Just a reminder that we're out of session for seven months of a year. And that sometimes is a better time to have longer conversations. So I would agree that just email is a good way to start a conversation for me. And I would also put a plug in to keep pages plenty busy that you can call the State House and get, especially for one-way communication, that you want to make sure you're representative or a Senator should read. I'd say that's a great way to get, like, we get handed a message and read it. And especially if it's pretty timely and something going on, it's just a really great way to go, oh, this constituent of this group is clearly giving me a message that this isn't worked. So I would just remind everybody that that's a great way for one-way messaging. You said most of it. The one thing I would add, of course, we have it a whole lot easier than four Senators in terms of volume. Make sure to put your town on your email, because email doesn't have a return address, and we get a lot of emails that come from people on the other end of the state. And it's not that I don't care what they say, but I don't really. I don't have the time to answer, you know, people who are from all over the state. We want to prioritize you. We want to prioritize you, right. I want to prioritize people from Berlin and Northfield in responding and connecting and so forth. And when you don't know where the person's from, then you can do that prioritizing. And on that note, we might not be on the right committee. That's our job to then connect to the people that we can grab every day out on the floor or in the cafeteria. So, you know, we can be often more conduit, we only have one committee and that's all focused, but we can be that conduit. Thank you very much for being with us tonight. And there's coffee and some cookies and fruit in the back. And I'm glad to see you two enter. Can I just talk to my hostess for just a quick second? She's the host. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm Gailian. I'm the principal here at Gailian. And I did just, there's also a restroom, if you go right out of the door, the second door and right on the right, there's the restroom. And I encourage everybody to stop and look at our kindergarten. Very great if I wanted to stay at school, which is a big deal in elementary school. If I wanted to age, kids start kind of now. So it's one of the things, because they won't tell you which is the morning up. But our kindergarten did a hundred things that we love about kindergarten and Doty. And I think what it does is it, I mean, it just makes me all get it feels because it just really reminds me, it's just the joy and the wonder that our kids feel when they come here and everything. And I'm sure it's true for every school. A particularly excellent kindergarten licenseeer. I'm going to detail something. I'm dead. No, I don't want to let Megan speak, but I just want to say, you can put our email on the second tier, but prioritize our student email. Thank you for coming. We really appreciate it being here in whatever manner you're here. And I probably should have kicked this off this way, but I'll do it before we move in. I'm not sure if people know this and I thought of it, Andrew, when you said, February is board member recognition night and that's part of why you all have a very unsatisfactory and not enough gift at your seat. But we do just want to thank all of you. You put a lot of time and effort and time here and time not here and we really appreciate all of our board members. And I wanted to say that before, in case we lose audience members when our legislators leave, I wanted to say that now. So thank you. So let's take a five minute and then... Ask them to support the budget. Ask them to support the budget. Yes, please support the budget if you live in our district. Support our budget. I can't tell you how to vote, but kind of support the budget, please. Tell your friends to support the budget. You talk to a lot of people. Tell them to support the budget, please. So I have a couple of adjustments to the agenda. We already called the meeting to order, and I'm just starting at the beginning. I know that we didn't put here any adjustment, but I think you guys will all agree with me. We just wanted to add one topic, which is budget communications. So is that... Okay, you guys have a couple of things on that. So we'll add that... Let's do that last. We do number three, four, and then five, we'll move into budget communication. Okay, will everybody pick up something else? Okay. So we're going to do from two to five here, and then we're going to move into the room where we were for our quality committee to do the three second of sessions so that people at DOE can undo the room. We won't need organ more because there will be second of sessions. So is that okay with everybody? Okay. So let's get started. We have approved the use of fund balance for the strategic planning consultant, and we have some paperwork here. You guys could have a motion, and then we'll have some discussion. I move the board authorized the use of fund balances for the purpose of executing a contract for strategic planning consultation, not to exceed $62,000. Thank you for that second. Okay. Do you got that, Lisa? Yes. Yes, discussion, questions. On the memo, on Jonas? Just to be clear, this is not the process that we need to undergo to talk about the structure of the district. This is a separate process? No, this is the... Okay. My understanding was that that was happening somewhat separate from strategic planning. It's fine. I'm just clarifying. Well, I think what we've been talking about is in order to have a conversation about what's our structure, we have to know what it is we want for kids and families, and the strategic planning process is designed to engage our communities in what we want for students. And then it will need to give us the information needed to be able to then have really concrete conversations about structure. So they're not unrelated, but that's how I would describe it. So this group won't have any expertise... There's that mic right there. This group won't have any expertise in schools that are being potentially consolidated or anything like that. They'll just be providing a process. Yep. Sorry about that. Yes, I'm sorry. Their expertise is in strategic prioritization, instructional outcomes, equity, how to help schools know and engage communities in what they want for students. That is their expertise. They don't come in with specific... They're not coming in... Some districts approach this work from a... We're doing a building analysis or a numbers analysis. That's not what they are coming to this. They're coming to this with instructional, educational, and community engagement expertise. Is it... Just out of this for private purposes? Just because the predictions that we're getting is that something's going to happen next year. Is this process going to be done quickly enough so that we'll then be able to engage communities in terms of any control consolidation or classroom schools? Things like that. Just a quick... Okay. Do we have time for that? Yeah, that's why we're bringing it to... That's why we're bringing it now so that we can move quickly and hire the partner so that we can get going with the process. And then... When I said get going to the process, we don't have the process yet. Right now it's just engaging them on the work. Yeah. And the intention and the desire... This is why I want to desire you to approve the use of fund balance, is that then we can execute a contract and begin this month, in the month of February. And the goal is to have it... The bulk of the engagement portion and the resulting information in the December-January timeframe of next year. So that would mean we don't have time to do any of the... Mike. We can't hear you. I'm sorry. So then we're really talking about if we do anything in terms of schools a year later. I'm assuming. Just a time loss. The length of the contract with them is through December-January. The information that we will receive will be earlier. And I would imagine the first step in the process is them pulling together the group to plan the process. And we will adjust that timeline accordingly, so that we do have what we need in time. I just wanted to make sure folks know that this contract extends into next year so that they also can support us during that process too. Yep. Thank you. Can I just restate the way I understand this is we've asked the group to acknowledge the challenges we're having with population and everything else as we engage with the community. So that's... It's not the only factor, but it's an important factor. But the outcome of this particular process will be a vision and strategic plan on a pretty high level. It's not a restructuring plan. It'll inform the restructuring plan. So a year from now, hopefully, if it goes well, we'll have a strategic plan, but then we'll have to get to the hard work of a restructuring plan if that's what it's called for. And so I think you're getting at, like, what about next year's budget? And I think we're going to learn some things about next year's budget, but it's not going to be the master plan, you know, by next year. Thank you. It will help us see the opportunities that we might have to get there. It doesn't necessarily mean school closure, right? So it depends. Okay. Any other questions? Has there been discussion on, like, the size of the planning group that we'll work with? Exactly, not yet. That's what they will do. Right. We've asked them to help us design the process and then carry out the process. So both. Question piggyback from that. Is that planning process going to include community stakeholders? Okay. And then the second question is there were two bids made or either of these Vermont businesses and if they're not, you know, what types of school communities and communities in general have these organizations focused on in their work because we are small and rural. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. So Great Schools Partnership is a New England firm. Their office is in Maine and they do a lot of work in Vermont and have for quite a number of years. In fact, they've done work with us before at U32. So they are very well aware of kind of the type of clientele we are. The other firm was a Vermont firm and what I would say is that in the conversations with the stakeholder group and the follow-up conversations with both organizations, Great Schools Partnership really understood the depth and the time and the energy that we needed out of this. The proposal was a lot more robust and frankly included more time with us. The other proposal was also very interesting and had a lot of good things and in fact we took some ideas from that proposal, asked Great Schools Partnership if they could integrate that. They were very receptive. But I think Great Schools Partnership understood the magnitude of the amount of engagement we want. The engagement of all of the voices including ones we don't hear often enough that was really important. Cost-wise, actually, once we realized how each organization calculated the price, actually Great Schools Partnership was, if anything, less expensive per day but they really understood what we want. That was probably the biggest difference between the two. I would just put in the plug for Great Schools. I've worked with them at Berry and I still am in touch with the consultant because the work they did was so valuable and she knew the community and she made it a part of not, it wasn't on visioning. It was on coaching in that area but they know these small communities, these rural communities and I looked at this and thought, well, that's a lot of money but maybe I'm not as gumbo about visioning and strategic planning as I am on concrete things but I have faith that they'll do a good job. Any other questions? Well, those are favorite of the motion. That's right. Please signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed? Aye. Hearing none, the motion carries. Thank you, everybody. We are very excited. Okay. That's moving to approval of teachers. May I read them? Yeah. Can I do all three at once? I think so. I've done that before. I make or recommend a motion to accept the long-term substitute recommendations. Jen Donovan, long-term sub at Romney Music. Emily Glankner, sorry. Long-term sub at E-M-E-S for Music. And Max Sagala, long-term sub for U32. Can I have a second? Second. Any discussion? All those in favor? I do have a quick question. Sure. Is it teacher at E-M-E-S? Does that change the fact that there was, I guess, a volunteer that is teaching the band at E-M-E-S right now? Eric, that's a good question. I don't actually know the answer to it. And Alicia is not here at the moment. So we can follow up on the answer to that. Thank you. Any other questions? Seeing none, all those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed? Yes. Have it. The motion carries. And then before moving to executive session, I wanted to talk a little bit about our plan for the budget. And we were wondering if the board would be OK with having a present. This time around, we took a little bit longer with the budget because it was harder and we haven't had a presentation by the board to the community besides the presentation that we have scheduled already for March 6th. So taking advantage of our meeting on the 15th, if we wanted to start that meeting and we would record a presentation, giving us an opportunity to reach out more community members. So as a proposal, we just wanted to add it to the work plan and start planning for it. The steering committee meets next week, right? Yeah, next week. So we will do the bulk of that work at the steering committee. We already have a presentation going, and we've got to divide it. Just wanted to touch base with you guys, if that was... Yeah. We don't need any formal motion. Yeah. And at the same time, you know, encourage board members to, you know, if somebody is reaching out to you, we will start putting stuff out now that we, you know, with the information for this meeting and the information on the budget, community members are reaching out to you, encouraging them to, you know, support our budget. That's all I have for it. So that, it passed, but the percent increase doesn't have to go on the ballot, correct? Oh, that's another... Yeah. Yeah. I was wondering if we had to... Yeah. So if you remember, and we had lots of other important things to talk about that night, which is why it probably didn't... The short answer is you acted on the language with those percentages in it because the law hadn't been passed yet, and that is what went to our printers. So had we, and Suzanne had, and shared a little bit when we were in the other, when we were at East Montpelier had said, hey, just, you know, kind of made us aware of it. But again, that was a big night. We had a lot of audience. We did not spend a lot of time on that. Had we taken a motion that allowed some flexibility, we might have been able to make that change, but we did not. So it will go as a way that the law required it before. That's unfortunate. And the main thing is that it had gone to the printers already because we could have, but you know, we could have had an emergency meeting, but it had already gone to the printers. It was much more involved then. Yeah. And just to give a sense of timeline, the governor signed the law on Thursday afternoon and it went to the printers Friday morning. So there would not even have been time. It really would have been, yeah. No regrets. Yeah. We did the right thing. It's fine. I trust the community. I'm not concerned. We did the right thing. No regrets. Absolutely. With Jonas just said, and for the sake of transparency, which we talked about a lot, having percentage out there, should be. I mean, can you actually know what you are meaning about this budget and give them full information, make it full choice? Yep. That's our hope. Yeah. I'll echo what you just said. A lot of robust conversations in my household about transparency and including it, where I was feeling the same way as you are, that I want this to be supported and yet, you know, it is really important that people know what they're voting for. The second thing I just like to suggest is in addition to a presentation, it would be really nice to have something that is social media friendly. Yes. It's just real simple. It is an image. It can go on Instagram. It can go on Facebook. It is not pages and pages and it just explains the very, very, very little information. But I guess, as a talking point, I think that would reach a lot of people who are not going to read a presentation. And just to be clear, I was not trying to be untransparent. Whatever the opposite of that is. I just think that a lot of people only read what's on the ballot and won't attend our presentations necessarily. So I think it makes it even more important that our communications about the budget don't just include a 12% increase. But what does that mean for the individual taxpayer? Because the 12% sounds scary and when you look at the numbers, it's not as scary. So I think that we just need to be even more diligent about our messaging. So that the 12% is not the thing that people see. Okay. I agree. Thank you for everything on it. So with that, I want to move us into executive, our first executive session. So if I could have a motion. I make a motion that we go into executive session for the purpose of negotiations, superintendent evaluation, student enrollment request. Thank you. I would like to include Megan and Suzanne for the negotiations. Yeah, including Megan and Suzanne for the negotiations. Are we going to need to adjust it to include anybody later? I don't believe so. Okay. That's all? No. All right. Yeah, thank you. No, that's it. That's it. That's it. Yeah. So the second by... No. I got it wrong. I got it wrong. I used to use the same one. Joshua? You did it. Second. All right. There you go. You have it, Lizette. So moved by Lindsay's second by Joshua. That will include Megan. Just me. Yes. And that will be the only one with an action out of executive session, which we can probably just let you know. Lisa, what? We'll let you know through Jonas. So, sorry. Yes. Just me. Yep, just me for the remaining two. I am in this one. And it seemed like we all said we were wrong. Thank you. Hold those in favor to signify by saying aye. Aye. Gillian is probably standing there, so she can...