 revisions to the agenda during the public comments or correspondence. Any executive committee comments? Good. One quick thing. Could I have a quick updated calendar of meetings? Hopefully we'll know more after tonight. Okay, great. Believe me, I was just trying to get my own meetings figured out. And all the other ones, literally at 4.30. Okay, thanks. And then the other thing I wanted to check was I wasn't at that last SC board meeting. Did the pre-meeting, was that useful at all? The meeting, oh, the 4.30 to 5.30. Were there a lot of people if they wanted to come early? Yeah, no, I'd say, I want to say there were 15 people there. I didn't count them, actually. And they came with questions. I guess I'm probably the wrong person to ask if it was helpful or not. I think it was. I think it was helpful. It made our meeting a little bit too long though for us. That were participating. It felt like we had to duplicate because they really were there to make a point. Not necessarily to talk about the clarifying question. The clarifying question on the Arcos agreement was not really the subject. We went through them, but it was good. It was good. I think it was good. We stayed pretty well on task. We didn't get an odd 2 off track. But then our regular meeting went a half an hour over, so we ended up being there from 4.30 to 8, I guess, as it was, which was a long stretch. Okay, I was just curious. Is there a motion to approve the minutes of September 19th? So moved. Okay, second? I'll second. I read them, I was not here, but I... Any discussion? I had one thing. We said, these are awesome. I feel bad even pointing this out, but there's a... Some place to work, incumbent is in here. It's in 2.1.1. Yeah, it's supposed to be incumbent. I think it's an I and then an E at the end. Sorry. No worries. I'm just trying to prove to everybody that I read them. You're taking Alan Gilbert's place. And you wrote Matthew everywhere. Find and replace. Any other comments or edits to the minutes? All those in favor of approving the minutes of September 19th, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, abstentions? Okay, thanks. Discussion agenda, determine the WCSU budget meeting date. So, yes. So we had said that the service plan was finished on Monday and sent to the state. And last time we had talked that, you know, probably about 63, 64% of the budget is driven by the service, by the special expenditures and revenues. So right now, Lori and Kelly and I are working the next couple of weeks to get that figured and put that into the Washington Central Budget so we can have a full Washington Central Budget for you. And thinking about the budgeting process, and I can get into more context of needed, Matthew, about timelines and dates and all that again, that we thought we'd have a second meeting. It was determined the last time we'd have a meeting in between our two executive committees so you would have two chances to look at the budget, one in early November, one in late November, before December. I'm just going off the regular old calendar that, you know, there's a need for adoption from the SU, but that usually happens the first Wednesday in December. So Lori and I looked at the calendar. It's funny you brought that up, Kari, because we're trying to get all the calendar going. Two possible dates we looked at were November 5th and November 6th. The 6th would have to end by 7 o'clock though. I have a commitment at 7 o'clock online that I can do here. I just need to get a job on my computer. We could look to other dates, but there are quite a few other things and we don't think we're going to be ready with the budget until the Monday before Halloween, which I believe is the 29th. Without having my calendar out. So we're trying to hit the Friday before with the budget all set, but we're not essentially sure that we're going to, actually I'm sorry, we talked about this last week, sorry Lori, Kelly and I talked about this on Monday, that we're trying to hit by the 30th to the 31st with the budget all set. So you're looking for a date for the executive committee to meet just to go over the budget and tell you where we're at with it, what to look like with the level of service, get some feedback on that. Then our normal meeting in November right now should be scheduled for, we'd like to have it somewhere like the 20th because if we did it on the 28th, if there were revisions from this committee to go out for a full board, SU board meeting to adopt the budget in December on the December 5th, we'd have like one day to turn it around. I could show you all this with a calendar if that would help. It's just trying to figure out all that. So I would just note that three of our usual executive committee members aren't here, so it's a little bit tough to kind of say, but we can show them the peak dates. Or I can do a doodle poll with those two days and see what we can get for the times. Yeah, I mean I guess just an informal poll, like do people have preferences that we want Bill to survey? I know Stephen is going to be traveling off. I know already the six works better for me. The fifth is impossible for me. So, because I just, we get seven, I mean I could start listening, but we literally plot it off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll start meeting every night from there until the night to the 20th. Yeah. Let's go, I would say, unless there's any objection or other idea, let's go with the sixth. For now, unless it's totally impossible. So I'd do like a 5.30 to 7. It would really be one topic. It would be budget, unless you want to add others. Yeah, and what about the seventh? So the seventh is U32 meeting. Right, what about an hour before that? Well usually that's Adrienne's, it's the only time that we can get Adrienne for Adrienne, Stephen, and I to sit down, chair, superintendent meeting is from 5 to 6. Not that it couldn't happen because Adrienne and I, we do a lot of phone call exchange too, just because of her work situation. And then you were saying like, so tentatively on the 20th? Tentatively on the 20th right now, because if we went to the 28th, you know the 21st is the day before Thanksgiving. I get it, yeah. So this is just, we're getting into days in November and you know we can probably go to the 20, and Laurie please kick me if I'm saying the wrong thing, Laurie here, because you're the one doing the details. If we went to the 26th, which is on Monday. I can live with that. You can live with that? Mm-hmm. And Thanksgiving is the week of the 20th. Right. I'm fine with the 20th, but as soon as two days ago I wouldn't know that because then we just changed around. Yeah, I understand it. Traveling can happen, Thanksgiving, not get all that. So what is that they just like take notes for? Well I'm going to send, we're going to send something, but you can take notes on it, just that. So we can go with either the 20th or the 26th, and I could pull that as well. Let's do it at that one here. Okay. So we'll go for the 6th, and either the 20th or the 26th, and Dorothy I'm going to take that. Sounds good. Okay, we'll get out, e-mail. You'll start to see appointments for your November local board meetings. I just got one. Yes, because Kristen just started, and she said, you know, remember, because I, it's a long story, but anyway, she's getting those out. And that's why you haven't seen them card because you aren't sure what was happening in November. Sure. This is part of that. So, sorry, the 6th and 8th, and then it'll be in what? 20th or 26th, and I'm going to do a doodle poll. Okay. Then we'll get out. Okay, 2.2, Act 46. So first, there's a Twin Field update. Yeah, we met with, so I think Stephen, did Stephen talk to the executive committee after the first, did he give an update? Okay, so we've had two meetings with Twin Field. One, Stephen was able to be on it, and one, Scott was able to be at. Mark and I went through and looked at some givens. Patrick, the chair from Twin Field's been really good. Patrick, he lived right here. It's been really good about giving us some detailed questions about, you know, what would be the opportunities for students for doing this. So we did that. What can't, we wrote some written responses back to that from both Twin Field. It's kind of like, what are the different programs, different extracurriculars. A lot of it's very similar, just different names. What they call their mentoring program, we call ours. What we call branching out, what they call, you know, for kids to do an independent study. Something they call it. Residence. Residence, thank you. Yeah, so I think different names. The place, then, what we came out of that second meeting was, well, if we were first or more, what would be the game plan to make that happen? So Mark and I were tasked with bringing together the staffs of both of our central office. Mark and I were tasked to do that. He, like, both quickly said, we can't do this alone. We need to bring our central office staffs. We're having a hard time scheduling it with all the central office staff around the same table. Yeah, we tried to start to make an outline of how that would happen. Not to do the work, but just to say whether there's chosen big things that we could figure out. What aspect of it are you looking at? All of it? Operationally? Just central office operations. That we didn't ask anything else in that. Okay. You know, so it's like, I'll just give you a Laura and I conversation was, so, like, how many check runs? We know what their check runs like. How many checks do they have in a check run? What's their average check run? Right, because Laura can say, well, I think it takes, you know, 20 minutes per check to process that. What's the number of invoices that you hand out to people? You know, what's that process like? Because you've got to start thinking, so what's that mean for personnel time? Yeah. For servicing. Sure. How many kids are on child count? How intense are those kids? Because you can have 60 kids in one place and 60 kids and the amount of time to service those 60 kids can be very different depending on that. So we have ways we've looked at that. So we have to bring together the Special Ed Directors, Greencombe Director, Business Manager. Technology is a little bit easier because they contract out for their technology right now. But just to say, if this were all going to be going to Central Office, how would that be? What would be the things we need to go look at and determine? Not to come up with what the determination is just to have a game plan. What are the next steps, I guess? That's the next step is to do that and come back and report back to the group. And Mark and I, we're going to see each other tomorrow. So we're in time. First, the parallel track is how would we work on the governance model? Well, we don't know. And so I don't think it's worth even trying to tackle that right now until you say, hey, whatever the governance is, if you're going to be one single SU, what do you need to service that? And we know that Coonfield's two-thirds of the Washington Northeast budget and they have seven people in their Central Office. So if you do the back of the envelope, it's 4.3333 FTEs that are kind of being paid for. That's not exactly right, you know? But that's just the back of the envelope. Easy way to look at the issue. But you've got to say, you know, what are the different parts and how do you do that servicing? What about from an educational standpoint to Patrick's question? I think a lot of programs are same, but they tackle them very differently than we have. What I know, Nancy and I used to talk about this a lot before Nancy Thomas retired, as the superintendent there. I think you get to the same place, but it's a different way of coming at it. They've really come at, we've come at really through proficiencies and aligning curriculum, where they came in through personalization and personalized learning plan. We have to, both have to have both. And those could be good supporting pieces. That's just how they tackle that work. Yeah, they have. I want to say it's about 380 kids right now in Twainfield. So they have different configurations based on their changes and sizes at great levels. They don't have a lot of, they don't have a lot of debt. They have their own transportation to be contract out. So they are buying their own buses. So that's some of their debt. They have some, a little bit left on doing renovations from a boiler project. A couple years ago, but, you know, that they're building the same age as ours. It was all done in the late 60s. They took the Vermont State, took all the federal money that was coming in for construction and put it towards consolidation. Pulling out the single K-12 schools in towns and putting them into a merge. I mean, there's about 25, 30 high schools in Vermont that were built that time. Mount Ape, Mount Ape right now. Mount Ape, Mount Anthony, ourselves. Otter Valley, North Country. I mean, you can kind of look at it. Some of them have single town names in some of the schools, but a lot of union high schools. The building needs some work. I spent the last three years doing their renovations program just mentoring there. It's different to our school, but there's a lot of really great teachers and proficiency. The reason I'm not mentoring this year was that proficiency between the teachers is still really hard for them too. I think they're where we were two years ago. Even though we started sooner. They did a lot of work. They did a lot of work for several years, and I think they still are with the higher ed collaborative on personal learning plans. They got recognized in the state as being someone that did a lot of that work in the residence program. It's part of what, you know, pain from that work. To say, you know, we really personalized the kids' education, and both roots get you there. It's how you want to go. And that's really what's happy in Vermont. If we were to look at all the 7 through 12 work, some people are going personal learning plans, some are going proficiencies, and once they finish one of those, they gotta go do the other. Like, right now there's a committee starting up at U32 on personal learning plans. We've had personalized learning plans, but to really get up deep. So, the 8, the secretary in the report, recommendations didn't prescribe anything for Twink Field. Let them out for the time being. They said probably within, they would join one or two, one of the two SGOs. They're very good at us. And are they expecting that the board will include them in their final recommendations in October and November? I think so. I think they are. The way Mark and Patrick talk, you know, the conversations I've had. They'll be part of the final sorting here. They think so. I don't think they really know. I mean, I just didn't know. They haven't tackled it. Mark was at the State Board meeting today, but I decided to go. That's why he told me a couple of days ago that he was going to go. So are they still talking with each other? Yeah, they're talking with both. I'm really sorry I realized I was here late, but can we back up as to why? So the reason that we're considering any sort of anything with Twink Field is because the Board of Education may, would it affect us? What are the advantages to us of doing this? Does it get us into a more efficient number? As far as number of students? Or is this just something that has to be done so we have to find a place for them to go so somebody has to do it? So to give you some background, two years ago when Nancy Thomas retired from Washington Northeast, the State Board has had the authority since the 20s to reform SU boundaries whenever they want. And they said to Washington, they have done this to a few other supervisory unions as well, that they are small. Washington Northeast was told that two years ago when Mark Tucker, who had been then this special ed director, assumed the superintendent's duties from Nancy, that he was on a two-year, that it was two years and then they would, Washington Northeast would be given to other supervisory unions. And the plan just reiterated that directive that the Board had given. And so they're actually looking at, there's no final, they did, in the plan, they talked about Twinfield but not about Cabot. Cabots, they tried to do a merge, they had a vote for merger with Danville, Cabot, and Twinfield to make and that did not pass. It passed in Twinfield. It didn't pass in Danville, right? It didn't pass in Danville or Cabot. Oh, Cabot didn't pass either. No. No, they're back into discussions about, which is Danville that talked about where that goes. And we've had some conversations with both the Cabot and the Twinfield boards over the last three years, visited some of their board meetings, talked with the board chairs from time to time about sort of the status of what they were doing to respond at 46 and what we were doing. And, you know, I think without, I can't speak for every board member but I think the consensus of late has always really been and it sort of drove this decision to open this conversation. The consensus has always been that there are possible advantages to our discussing collaboration both with Twinfield and Cabot regardless of how our own governance situation resolves. What would those advantages be? Well, just to explore, looking at exploring that, but essentially, greater power and greater numbers that with more facilities and more staff, there's more opportunities potentially to offer education for kids, things along those lines. But, I mean, the idea of opening the conversation was to really explore that and see if that actually is the case or not. So it's very preliminary stages really at this point. But that's kind of the history of kind of how we can, you know, Cabot at this point as Bill just mentioned is because I think of, to some extent, of what the Secretary said and its recommendations really is engaged heavily in a separate conversation with Caledonia. So that's why we haven't sort of opened that conversation with them. So I guess my one question I had is I don't know if you've I can't remember the charge actually even though it was very recent, I don't remember what you said. So I don't know if you've had a conversation with Mark or sort of what the what's the goal of the conversations like is there a I think they're you know, you did a nice job of bringing the context back there, Matthew, and saying that you know, for three years we've had these on and on on again, off again. And I think right now there's a little bit of trepidation on Twin Peels part. I think we have been while there have been times where there's been conversation that we can talk about anything that's being pulled back a little bit. Because oh wait, we're really talking about this I think in some of the pieces. So I think we're trying to I'm trying to navigate that. That's because people in this office, I had a conversation with the employees here. People said, does that mean I don't do or do not have a job to apply for my job next year? Yeah. A lot of questions. A lot of questions. That brings about the nervousness that starts up conversations that makes people, you know, that's there have been conversations that have happened that I'm trying to say to folks that's not a necessity, but you know at one point there was conversation around hey, would Twinfield close its high school? Patrick actually brought that to one of our conversations. Right now that gets said and I am saying that carefully here that that is not the conversation right now. But people are fearful that that Twinfield is going to get shut down. Right. When you look at numbers and you look at, I mean that's the same conversation we have within Washington San Diego. And we're all losing students. I mean, we have the preliminary enrollment which is we're down. So we had it forecasted but we're going to keep dropping. And you three do expect that to only get worse with the loss of the Rocksburg students. But not only that, I'm just talking about that. I mean, yeah, just from our natural Just from our five towns. Twinfield at any time even tentatively indicate whether they'd rather go with Barry or with us. No, they haven't. They're exploring both to know what I think to see what their options are. Or do they petition to do something different? I mean that they have not, I haven't, I didn't keep up with the list today of which issues were being talked about at the State Board. I know there was a list. But I don't think Twinfield was on that today. From what I know if I got some emails late today they wasn't it wasn't mentioned. I guess just you know, I don't want to go too far down this conversation because I don't know where we'll get to with it but it sounds like the issues of the state plan is going to overtake this conversation at some point. That sort of thing. Yeah, I think it is. Okay, thanks. So we can move to 2.2.2 which is the Articles of Agreement and Debt subcommittees that we the FC Board set up at its last meeting. I believe both are set to have their first meetings on Monday next week two days before the FC Board meeting. You know, just takes time to pull those together. So there's not really much else to say at this point. No, it took two doodles to get to that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, everyone Everyone's busy. I mean, it's basically three weeks out right now to schedule something. Right. All right, so I'm sure we'll talk about that on Wednesday at the FC Board meeting. So we're going to come back to the ACROASIC stuff. I do have a suggestion maybe I should wait until we talk about the agenda. For the SU Board meetings. Yeah, we'll get down there. Board goals. On goal number one, the governance Chris McVeigh and Chris Winters had volunteered to give a little report on the results-based governance model at this meeting. As you can see, neither one of them is here tonight. And Chris Winters, you know, apologized. He just sort of messed up the schedule and thought the Executive Committee meeting was next week and Chris McVeigh's out of town. So I think that we can just move that to, we can table it until one of our meetings and we can probably cover results based on appreciative inquiry at the same time and still stay on track to kind of report something out for the SU Board in December. So I guess I just propose to do that. I am interested to know if there's anybody who is willing to look into appreciative inquiry governance model for recording out on it sometime in November. It's really pretty simple. It's just, I can actually, I have some readings about that model that I could give out. It's really just scanning Google for however long you feel like you want to. It's an inquiry. It's an appreciative inquiry. Yeah, be very positive about your questions you ask and then just bring back what you learn in some reform and maybe some, you know, links to things that people can read on their own if they're some that's all truly entailed. I'd be happy to volunteer for that. Is that for next meeting? I think we can do it, whenever our second meeting in November is, let's do it at that one. And you say you have some appreciative inquiry governance? I have a couple of, yeah, I have a couple of things because the place where my wife works uses it as their governance. Where is that? Food bank. Cool food bank. I also wanted to mention that I was reading the BSBA newsletter last night as I was falling asleep and they were like a piece on the essential work of school boards and that what we received and they referred to it as a model of governance and as I was reading it I was like, oh yeah, it is a model of governance and in a way, I mean at least speaking for E32, that is the model that we've when we've talked about our governance model that's what we've kind of referred to. So it might be another thing to throw into the mix. The essential work and essential work of school board. Are you familiar with it? Well, I know it from BSBA communications but I can't say I've ever really like studied it. I never thought of it in the same way that it's not as prescriptive as policy governance but it does cover the essential work of the school board so it's worth talking about. Okay. So you wanted to go solo on a appreciative inquiry? Sure. So goal number two, student learning? Right, so at the last SE Board meeting I wasn't there but there was a proposal that the committee made that we hope will be approved in some form next week and basically we are, I would be asking the leadership team to come up with a plan to accomplish some significant improvement in both literacy and math scores. That's what we've really needed based on the data in the last Monday report. So there was a secondary piece to that which is somewhat related but somewhat not which was to have a presentation from the leadership team at some point. I don't know when this would be. It's not next week. It's hard to get to the goal. To follow up basically on the retreat and you have a better understanding of where we stand in our system relative to those best practices that we're presenting. So I'll tell you, we'll get a little bit of that because I've asked the team to talk about linking it. The retreat while Nate Levinson was the person that presented that he's really referencing with multi-tiered system of supports. It's a good work. It's happening a lot. So I've asked folks to look at that and to look at when we talk about what are recommendations and I'm in the midst of finishing up the student learning monitoring text report right now and it's going to reference that a lot of the work in which you'll see connections to what Nate talked about. Our biggest issue is time. We don't have the time in the system to instruct the kids. Did those, you know, interventions or what? No, just overall required time for instruction is not there. And that's what you'll see in my report is that time for schooling literally kids probably have about three to four hours of instruction a day for all content areas. Do we have different requirements than other successful school disciplines? We don't have different requirements. We use our time differently. Okay. How does it get used? It's not being used for instruction. So just an example, there's probably an hour and a half out each day for kids for either recess, snack, lunch, time. That's an hour and a half out of six hours. I do have to eat. No, I'm not saying not to. Most schools that either have recess are going to have like a similar amount of time for recess and lunch, right? No. So we have more recessed lunch and snack time than some other successful districts? Yes. So why don't we eliminate some recess? So, but there are things, no. Just look. It's me too simplistic about things. I'm not saying I have much. They only eat if they pass their literacy test. So, yeah, so what else, please? We have a hundred minute variability in the way we provide instruction in our unified arts across our elementary schools. There's a hundred minute difference which is almost two hours of instructional time. We do a lot of, we do a lot of our instruction is done very much in elementary schools like a high school model where it's not integrated. It's individual content. Floor is great about talking on why aren't we using our literacy time to teach math, reading nonfiction books for science and social studies. But we're moving in that through, you know, it's just the curriculum is not there, but we're doing at schools more project-based which is what we're doing at the high schools. Very slow. There's some places in which we, six and a half hours, we're about the least amount of time in school for kids a day of most of our surrounding elementary schools of our neighbors. We don't have the shortest, but we have a shorter time for contracted time for teachers. So can we expand that? Yes, but that's going to... It's a cost. All this is cost. This is why I go back to, what are your priorities? That has to be determined first instead of trying to say to do everything because then we can say, how do we want to do this and what are the resources to put towards that? The money. Money resources. Are we okay with small class sizes or do we want big class sizes? Those are different pieces. And so, those are things, decisions that need to be made about first, what's our... Do we have a highest priority that we want to ensure? Ruben started with East Montclair. Do we want a guarantee? Maybe we don't want to use the word guarantee, but we want to ensure the best we can for every kid that they're literate and numerate. We're willing to do anything to do that. Those are your answers that need to come from the board. Because the community will press you hard when you're like, I want everything for... We can't provide everything. We can't provide deep instruction everywhere. We can provide good instruction in an integrated format. In the US system with only 180 days of school for really about four and a half hours at best a day of instruction, for kids. That doesn't total up to that many hours or that much percentage of a day for a kid that's awake, that they're in instruction. I've had a little bit of a loss here. You know, we're paying the teachers to be in the schools of the kids. Why don't we just send the kids home for that? If they're going there in school, they should be educated. I don't know why. If we're losing an hour and a half a day things like recess are not productive time. We're still paying teachers to be there. I have a little problem we have to negotiate more. We're one in the UK for educating six hours a day or five and a half or four hours a day. We send the kids home but why are we even... I'm not saying to do that but I'm having an issue with everything being negotiated upward when we're already paying for that presence. I'm paid to be at work all day long. I am not paying for two hours of recreation time in my job. Most people are work faculty. I think you're making a leap there. You're making them wrong. Just get clarified. There are other teachers it's actually been proven that teachers would actually hire time on instruction. Contact time with kids can be less productive for student learning because if you don't have the calibration and the professional development time for teachers to work to improve and to learn and to study their time off is just as important as the time that they're instructing kids because they're doing a lot of planning and adjustment for kids to make the adjustments that need to happen. Japan has been in many other nations and we could go right to the ones on top of Tim's study or a piece of studies that have shown that that time not in front of kids even having less of it makes the time you do have more productive. I get that. That's true. Because the kids are off for an hour and a half doesn't mean the teachers are off. Not just that, but we also can't expect kids to mean, my God, a six-hour board meeting. We don't kill ourselves. We can't be educated for six hours at a time. So I feel like they also have to have a place. If we're asking teachers to be there we can't say, you need to be there between 8 and 4 but you're only going to work from 8 to 11 and 1 to 3, so we're only going to pay you for six hours. We're asking them to be there. I do argue. I'm not trying to deck like a slave driver here. I'm just, I compared to my inexperience that I'm carrying out. We spent a lot more than four and a half hours in a classroom a day, I'll guarantee you. We had a fairly good effect. And I don't think it had any, and we had recess time again. I don't remember any I just want to make, I'm sorry. I just want to make sure that we don't get too far into the weeds on kind of like the recess or the 15 knots here. Because I think for the board it's really a goal setting exercise. Which is, I think what I hear Kari saying is that the school quality committee looking at the performance data and monitoring data for the last several months basically has already reached the conclusion that they want to recommend to the board that we set a goal that would establish a higher benchmark than we're currently achieving for literacy and math in particular. Significant improvement. And so I think that the board's challenge is in my opinion to kind of figure out what academic outcome, what educational outcome goal do we want to hold ourselves as boards and the leadership team and the school system accountable to reaching. And then the folks that we've hired who have expertise in education and are doing the analysis of the schedule and probably already have some ideas about ways that things can be shifted around to achieve that goal can bring some recommendations and some thinking. I just want to make sure that I feel like I would propose that our job is to set the bar in conversation obviously with the administrators but to set the bar for the system that's our responsibility that the public has charges with. And then we have the conversation about sort of how to get there. Yeah and I think what Kari was saying at the last meeting was about being able to understand what best practices were using right now that were already part of that retreat that we all took together because I think most of the principles shared with us that spoke the schedule so they are working really hard on all of those issues and that scheduling part to be able to do that we've done dismantle what they've been doing to find the time for teachers to meet to do professional development to have interventions so that we have an understanding of how not micromanage it but I think the more that we understand so for a lot of people it was really eye-opening this retreat board members so it helped us set that guarantee I really don't want to use the guarantee we talked about this at the last meeting I want to see the opportunities for best practice so I came out of that meeting and I'm like the one thing that I can think at East Montana because we've been doing this for three or four years now is the special educators the special educators were still not we're still pulling some kids so that connection that he explained is off so we want to work on that it's not like the board members and the principals recognized that and we were like oh that's the one thing that we're not doing so to me the more that they can come and explain to us what they're doing because they know principal has done a lot of work and tried to redo the schedule and it's really hard when you have limited resources and limited when you have fractional FTEs those drive we're all scheduled not the core learning time when you have small systems the way we do I've done schedules many times and the thing that drives the schedules are singletons and low FTEs so we don't have 60 minutes of math guaranteed for every kid we can't guarantee that right now every day so to improve math we're not even doing what's the national best practice for math instruction and it's because we have to that day for their .2 or .4 of their job you have to move the schedule to make sure that special happens and so my question to the board is when I ask you about priorities I want to do everything for kids I want to have as much as possible for kids don't hear me that I don't but when trying to operationalize some things I have to ask the question what's the priority because if I let the little things that we are fractional because we're so small and our systems drive our schedule we won't be able to do some of those best practices in core instruction and we've tried to reschedule multiple different ways and you know it's hard on an employee to say so I'd like you to work half a day in the morning and come back on Tuesday afternoon and for them to get a job somewhere else that just doesn't work so it's not fair to that employee so what we do is we try to say it's one day or two days or three days you know I know I'm going down a little bit but understanding when I ask for priorities we can make the operation we can put things together but where are we going to give so I want to just suggest to I want to sort of just put out there to this committee kind of my thinking about how this will play out over the next like two months because we when we adopt a goal to part of the timeline that is included with that goal involves coming to a decision about a goal learning by our December meeting or at our December meeting so next week we're going to get our student monitoring reports so that's basically a state of the school it's the leadership team's best thinking about kind of the data that we have and where we're at and you know some of the learning that builds observations that builds talking about and I'm sure we will have a discussion next Wednesday about it school quality committee I think next meets in November um I guess that's right and so I'm hoping that maybe by the time we get to our second executive committee meeting in November that we you know we might have a goal to recommend to think about and then bring that to the SU board in December so there is kind of some thinking around how to get this to the point where in December we're actually trying to take a decision about where we set the bar I mean that's just we're planning to bring you a math goal because that's what I heard in this next meeting we've asked all the teachers to set the math goal for their classes they've given us all that data we're rolling it up it's not coming from the leadership team it's coming from the instructors and Matt yeah Matthew I think we not knowing knowing that we don't know much said we're not satisfied with these results we want to see significant improvement we don't know exactly what that looks like so that's our call we're asking for a response being here's what we think it's possible and you know being somewhat vague but you know when we say significant I think we mean significant there is and I think that's where we'll probably get some responses a response on you we may have to cut out X Y and Z I need to know what do you want to do because I can't we just can't keep in my estimation as your superintendent we cannot continue to go to what we've been going we need to be clear about what the priorities are and as the priorities are to flex and I want to pick on any content no but they're hard discussions but you and I understand what we're talking about and so it's it's when it comes down to that when you've got to make a tough decision it's knowing where the communities want those priorities because what it comes down to is providing equity for all and sometimes that providing equity for all means it's going to be different for different kids and that difference means that the resources sometimes take in from different places to make that happen well we're going to get a lot deeper into this conversation but I think we can tonight next week because that's where the reports coming and I think that's where we'll have the whole group so that's where the conversation should happen all the 24th yeah that's right we'll be one of them today we'll come back to it I guess when we fill the agenda and it's the agenda for the 24th is this topic I think community engagement local board statements addressing the why I know that we had discussed here wanting our executive committee members to bring back from the local boards summaries or statements of those conversations about what community engagement means to them but we are missing three of our regular members this evening we did talk about it yeah we did we went all over the place but we did talk about it and I think we narrowed it down I can find the minutes because that would be lying but we spent most of our meeting talking about this so we did come up with a broader goal in two pieces I was just starting to look it up you can move to somebody else I guess I have to ask again as the committee members I don't really have a strong sense of where to go with this conversation and I'll admit to some kind of frustration a little bit with not really knowing how to pull this one together I guess well Floor and I and Scott went to public access that puts that on about community engagement I really brought home to me to me and our board doesn't see it the same way but to me community engagement isn't having meetings to inform people community engagement means whatever community things are occurring and you talk to people about what's happening in the town or the school or whatever it is you go to the dump for an hour on Saturday I mean transfer station and talk to people there there's also ways of doing it where people come together to eat a meal say at Worcester and then you can get them to go enough to have these conversations but I think for us as a district to do community engagement we need more a workshop we need more information on how to do it I think you just can't pull it out of here it was we came late so we were supposed to sit with different people but not as much as we might have and just that and with the questions thrown on the table made me understand more about what community engagement is so how we get to teach everybody how this works I don't know as Bill says we all don't have any more time we all have the time there is it's how we decide to use it and if we're serious about community there we go again what's your priorities if community engagement is a priority then we'll take a step out of some time or provide people with the workshops and say can you go to these how many people can go to this or that but that's the only way we're going to really do community engagement well or even nearly well we just need to learn more myself too I also went to that there were a few take homes there were a few take homes one was that if you want to have any sort of community engagement piece it seems like you really have to have some dedicated members doing that it was interesting how they brought up when you have to obey the meeting laws all of this becomes much more difficult and I wanted to understand that the schools, the individual schools create committees not the school boards but if the school creates a committee that the school board can fund then that committee can work without open meeting laws need to take place so I thought that was one interesting piece to potentially try to get all schools having a committee that has funding that does that for me was a big take home was tremendous efficiency in community engagement so whenever there's events I'm like thinking right now like oh there's the harvest dinner I had all these good intentions so really at the harvest dinner at Romney I should go with a big sign that says you want to talk about school board issues come sit with me as if I know somebody else bring your teaching torches bring your teaching torches and so to try to be as efficient as possible and piggyback on every like every community event should have like if you have a conservation club they should go, the school board should go the select men should go to try to make it so that when people go to any one event they also get exposure to these other things and so those were big for me and I thought you know talking about funding this in a non open meeting law kind of way seemed like it would make it more efficient I don't know if that's that's what I found in my doctoral work it's a way from open meeting law it's true in Canada and Australia as well but they have more laps in their open meeting law but it's that idea as you go to where the people are and that you go to where the people are going to something that isn't your event and then you piggyback on it and that's really powerful and a lot of it is simple ways a lot of it's really you don't try to get into thick engagement which we talk a lot here about what's called thick engagement about sitting down and having focus tables and all that you don't do that for a while you do a lot of easy to then focus when you're going to get focus together to then go deep but you have to understand that so what's the why why bother with all this activity that you guys have been describing you know I don't know I have come to for them I love the meetings and I always I learned a lot about community engagement so I've been learning to talk to other people and just the different parts of it but I think that when we decided on the board because I was on the same mind frame that you are like either have another retreat or we need especially that there's too many priorities right now so we made a decision that that's not where we were going to go trying to set trying to figure out if somebody had the energy to do because he has to come from the public right or it has to come from a member of the community or the PTNR or something like that we didn't have that right now but we did want to continue to do some community engagement that we still for best as much as we try we don't do a good job right so we said that we would figure out how we were posting on front porch forum you know like do the things that would do them better like I'm just looking we were supposed to post our minutes and we're still you know you still can't find it depending on the website so do the simple things so we said two goals one was to communicate more efficiently what is going on at school that we do sometimes take advantage of front porch forum but not always and we as a board just through the budgeting season is when we attend the community events to be there and use that to tell people what we're doing we did a lot of that last year that was great but then to the rest of the year we attend the stuff but we don't always use it on a certain opportunity we just had a huge harvest dinner and we didn't really take that opportunity so trying to do more of the community engagement to advance where we want to go so inform the community about our priorities because I think especially right now with the quality committee where we're going one thing is us going there the community at large doesn't understand so we talked a lot about that just creating that trust with the community of where we want to go and understanding that they support this for example one of the things that we talk about it's like well music might look different there you know that's where a lot of the extra time is and I'm personally terrified of that but also how do you explain that to the community how do you to find more time in the day right well the boards could also charge the administrators with doing that communication like or something you know where we could be a component of because really like explaining why it makes sense educationally is the job of educators again you know they're going to do a better job than the board members might know that we can support them you know it's where in the communities and not exactly I mean the administrators job is to inform what's happening in the administration and the school board's job would be to make a picture try to decide on what the goals are for learning and so we have an obligation to our electorate to try to represent them they are paying for the school and the school board is tasked with being the per the BSBA tasked with being the liaison electorate and the school and so in designing those big the big view of whether we want to think about you know what our goals are whatever we're going to do or how we're going to spend our money or whether we're going to get a new playground like those are definitely school board jobs and since the electorate is paying for them definitely I feel like we have a responsibility to try to make sure that the electorate knows what's happening and how to be able to get their voice heard is that you look like I'm not making any sense I agree with you I agree with you I'm just saying there's different ways of doing that See I would feel that the administration that's like not their job like the principal is supposed to tell us about what's happening in the school and we're supposed to decide or help decide like the financial and goals direction right so those are I think it's that you but it's also a team effort like the principal puts out a newsletter and says like we had some of our like Kathy Christie when we were trying to do more of the coaching we had them come and present at a board meeting so that other people understood what they were doing so I think we it's good to piggyback on each other I think we have about maybe five more minutes because I really want to end at seven but I guess you know just yeah I don't know what the right answer is but my hesitation about sort of the board really taking a kind of lead role on that is that is some of the things we've been discussing about you know when we meet there's public meeting open meeting law there's camp there's video cameras there's agendas there's specific times for public comment but it's not necessarily like a dialogue between so it's kind of an it's an awkward and intimidating atmosphere for for trying to do communication so we can try to do it informally you know we can visit these events and we can try to build relationships and be talking to people but we're not really sort of getting the word out sort of as widely as and clearly as possible maybe and then the other thing is I really would think it is incumbent on us I think to understand the the rationale for the educational strategy that's being employed you know in the system and to be able to speak to that yeah for sure but I just think the school system in a sense is almost in a better position to do that and maybe would benefit more from if we sort of set a goal around community engagement or had some discussion about what does it mean to really be engaging the community effectively what role can the community play in the school how do we sort of go about building that social capital so again I don't have the answers I'm just trying to kind of respond to what you were saying but the other thing that I think and this is again a question for the group I sort of feel like if we if this committee almost doesn't put some ideas or some recommendations in front of the SU board at a carousel meeting so that all the boards can hear it at once and can maybe discuss it on the same night and we're not going to move on this goal because right now it's just in all these different places think of one thing I don't know my experience in working in communities that work a lot with communities but you know the participation has to be meaningful and like how this board we're participating Bill you know Lori they're our professional staff they're far more engaged in the operation of the school if we as long as we have a purpose to be here we'll be here and the public work the same way and so I mean that's I think it's our if we want to effectively bring that in we have to have something that is actually it has to be worth their time in terms of some kind of meaningful outcome I'm not talking about cookouts I'm talking about you know how are they helping to facilitate the school they won't show up there as we've all said we're all busy busy lives if it's just it won't come to just spend time there has to be a value in their presence so if we want to do that that's we have to figure that piece out to make it worth their time two thoughts about where do we go next is probably the question with this and one is I am intrigued by this question of why I mean that was our first charge and it seems like we've not been able to answer that ourselves either two or two stabs at it and we just have a laundry list we don't have a single why but I would suggest this we would only do it if it were to help us accomplish these student learning outcomes right so is it true that good community engagement supports success so there's no research on that that proves that that's true the only research that's close is parent engagement and it's really on a one to one it hasn't been done on a broad scale for like school systems or school districts we know that the research is very clear that an engaged parent no matter what demographic the student comes from and racial economic urban rural will improve the education for that individual student okay so there's one answer that's what we know from research do we want to spend time unpacking that and figuring out a strategy from based on that what the research says or I build it on Floor's comment maybe we don't have the bandwidth this year to really delve into community engagement or parent engagement maybe what we're really should be focusing on is communication and and just I don't know where this takes us but just saying hey we want to do the best job we can just getting the word out about what we're up to what's going on in the schools you know are part of communicating to the community about what's happening in the system and that would be another aspect of this that's probably more manageable there's something to think about this too we've got a lot of change in the way and you know we're talking engagement tends to also equate within franchisement and if people are disengaged they're a lot more likely to become people like a mob if they're not connected they things can go awry and this is you know I wish that happened in many places in many situations and you know that's one of the reasons you actually have some level of engagement which we have challenges with our education right now funding everything else scale you know and that takes real public support and so if they're not engaged that public support gets diminished very quickly and they can really not just be diminished but they can be get really nasty they can be used against the system if in time if we can get scapegoated and everything else you know so it's just for us to pay attention to it's important that it can really backfire if you don't have it so we're going to have to come back to this topic I guess the only other question I would like to ask people with is public assets when we were planning the retreat we had two directions we could go one was with focusing on educational outcomes and best practices with me the other was community engagement with Nicole so we have that connection we know how much it costs do we want to do that sometime when is it even a priority right now it's just a question that we can grapple with at some point if everyone is okay let's build the agenda for next week I would just say if you want to take a look to the schools going to do it along with Jim Oliver he was a speaker at I don't know seven years ago or something like that at BSBA and his piece is more information but it's really labeling why communities can't do it along and creating that trust on the teams and board etc so you really pretty much can't get from A to B which is what we're trying to do we're trying to move now education to the next level we need that support from the community and because we're at the same time dealing with that for six we as we have been able to see public sentiment is everything we're trying to move something I just wanted to throw that there just because it's that's what we've been scrambling with not for like trying yeah I mean just so you know I totally agree with you I just feel like we're in a kind of wilderness of direction right now I'm hesitant to kind of like you know bring it to the larger as you board without a sort of clear sense of like at this point that's where I'm at you're right so so for the October as you board meeting again you know kind of the the larger part of it is the student monitoring report and discussion thereof so I want to build the agenda around that we have 90 minutes at the next meeting I'd love to I don't know how much time you need to build for the presentation Jen answering that yesterday as we were working on it we think probably 40 to 45 minutes of activity built and I'm going to use the same questions that you had last year Kari I don't think I just talked to you but I think those same questions are important ones for folks to work cross board on unless you in small groups just like we did last year but I think will those questions be in the packet somehow that people can think about a little bit? we can make sure of that because I haven't at the end of that powerpoint from what you gave last year yeah we're going to do the same we'll have detailed data and every individual school's powerpoint up there by Monday of this week hopefully Friday if everything works but I don't want to promise that with the technology of getting everything up and recorded and then so folks can look at that where is the data that we just like it was last year was on my blog which I send a link out in the packet of where it is but the report itself the report itself that's what I'm saying the written report will be in the packet which we'll get on Friday hopefully with some data behind it but not all the individual data and we're not all we have to protect some of it we can't get down to here's the thing and we need to all remember and I should probably put this in the memo too is the limits we have on reporting numbers because if you remember last year I think I told everybody we are allowed to protect to ensure student privacy we can't report below certain numbers since different aggregations so we have to aggregate two or three years sometimes if you wanted to say and what's the difference between our students that are special ed they have an IEP and those who don't we have to aggregate two or three years and look at that at one grade level their numbers are so small and you have to protect you can't release data of less than 40 in some subgroups and less than 11 in others so we have to be able to ensure the privacy by the way Vermont interprets interprets the FERPA law that's one of the problems in small systems we can look publicly down it in really detail good so I'm guessing we probably want to try to schedule an hour for that report and discuss from a minimum possibly maybe more if we can squeeze it out of a report out from the small groups that would be great we aren't even able to do that last time so that would be great to add I'm looking to your cart that's usually a good idea in terms of other things we have to put on the agenda we can try to deal with these first we have just a quick budget update so the dates that we just discussed in the process right we have the act 46 updates that we basically did tonight we have to do with the SU board Dorthy you had a suggestion for act 46 also sorry nice guy I happen to be today too I don't know if we need someone to sit all I'm like yeah maybe much I don't know if we have anything else and I don't have it in front of me an agenda in front of me but let me go get it I don't know if we have anything else that has to be on there well yeah sort of they go hand in hand I think so what are you hoping to get out of that meeting then is it just a dissemination of information as to how the students are doing well I think my understanding is that Bill and the leadership team are working not just on a presentation of status but also on their interpretation of it so what is this telling them where do we need to do better that kind of stuff so I hope that that leads naturally into a conversation with the boards about again where do we want to set that far conversation this is where we're at now this is where we really ought to be or where we want to be so we're moving towards trying to get a more specific learning goal from each board ideally we'd adopt them in common because if we don't then all the scheduling stuff we talked about at the retreat that has to involve the whole system and as Bill is saying when we have fractions of employees that's kind of jiggering with the system a little bit so the ideal outcome is that everybody kind of adopts the same goal yeah so I'll tell you just to give you a little more time to talk about your math if I go too much into detail I've already done it a couple times for you then literally what happened this month and it's such a celebration for me because it's the first time and according to Kat and her 14 years of being this is the first time she can remember we have all math teachers that set a goal for their students all teachers of math have set a target for the number of kids that should be proficient at the end of the year in most school systems this has been going on for 15 or years or more where teachers set goals for their kids not a supervisory evaluation method but to say this is where I plan to have my kids and what did I do that helped to make that happen and what were the things I want to arrive for Bill or for Dorothy or for Floor and what can I do for next time when I have someone that has a similar learning profile to learn from that it's definitely not a supervision evaluation method how do I use data to improve my practice that's a very new thing and that's where I come from as a curriculum director we were doing that for years and it's taken a lot of cultural work to move us there and I can tell you we're pushing a lot of people we're hearing the noise back in the system right now for Dillon once they've had a couple of successful years of it exactly we'll catch on for a couple of months exactly but I wanted to say to me yesterday in this room I said the same thing to the leadership I know we've been hearing a lot of flak but hey this is really good thank you thanks to all the boards to help spur us to do that it should be just a mandatory that's kind of you use your KPIs in here that's your performance measure I mean not just telling you where we've been I've understood that that's the difference of where our system is compared to where their systems are and have been are you done? I just want to hear we kind of have like a straw agenda for the SE board to work off of but I can't remember what's on it if there's anything else other than what we discussed over the last meeting I just don't does the leadership team's presentation include what proficiency means like if the goal is that all of our math students say I want 95% of my students and I want 80% like what does proficiency mean is that a national standard? we're using STAR 360 assessment which is a national assessment that's a nationally normed assessment that shows tight correlation to the smarter balance assessment which is our state assessment that there's good alignment there so knowing that we have good alignment there our report cards are the next place we have to calibrate there's not good alignment between our report cards and our local assessment and the state assessments is that in your report for next week? it's going to be there and that's the next thing last year we showed that our local assessments we shifted those targets we're using the same measure by type what target you use to measure proficiency just as you said so the only other things that are on here that we haven't mentioned already we're supposed to approve a policy committee charge a charge for the policy committee and then we have like a second reading of the policy that's usually a matter of a few minutes what I have to offer is last week when we were last meeting while we were talking about boards that wanted to join the lawsuit against force mergers and David Kelley who's a lawyer out of Greensboro and has done a lot of work with the group of people who are fighting the force mergers has offered to come to school board meetings and explain what the lawsuit is about what it will cover and so forth now I know that last week you had the straw vote there were some people who said I really don't know what I'm voting on so they didn't know how they wanted to vote and that's understandable I mean my head's so full it's hard to to get my head around people who don't anyway he's offered to come and I did quickly email him before tonight and told him the times and I didn't say the amount of time I just thought if it's something you thought would help people make any some decisions that would be fine or the other thing would be to get him to come to individual board meetings but since we're all meeting the same time that's kind of hard so I'm just throwing it out there for he's willing to come in and explain what it's all about and then leave it at that or answer some questions but I think just an explanation and some time for some questions would be fine might be helpful my only comment is about this coming meeting would be the time because I think that it has to be this coming meeting or not because everything will start rolling into what's happening and the lawsuits are not filed yet oh no they're still working on them and refining them and there's many different issues that may or may not be included I mean there are some that for sure like the taking of the buildings and the debt two things that they're going to address but there are many others and so all of that will be actually refined after the full decision of the state board comes out the actual we get the letter saying that we've been merged which we will be getting a letter saying we'll be merged so so that's so that's going to happen but for people they're still asking if people want to join a board could wait until they actually get the letter so you could I suppose do it at a later time but I just thought that it's in the air now and people were kind of asking about it last time and David's willing to come we might be able to give him 15 minutes or so oh sorry I just with the idea that that would only take 15 minutes to me just seems that's really because we spent so much time talking about it at the last meeting which we needed to do but I'm so hopeful that this next meeting we can really focus on the educational outcomes piece but that's just my opinion there's some wisdom though on what she's saying because the educational outcomes might change dramatically if we're merged it's a very different question than if we're not because all of us well because we would want I completely agree that all the board should be in alignment but getting that to happen is a very different thing than having one board vote on educational outcomes for the entire district so can I speak to that though because the reason I have felt really like positive about this conversation we've been having about the educational goal is that it it doesn't matter in a way what our governance is going forward like we have an opportunity right now as the board we are to kind of lay down the gauntlet educationally speaking whether we stay the same or whether we're forced into a merger we can draw a line in the sand that this is our take on what should be happening at these schools in regards to educational outcomes no matter what happens with governance I'm actually confused by that Allison because these boards spent two years going to the same educational outcomes so I'd be really confused that if those which are usually up on the wall that's why we're all pointing the wallet down because they won't stay up there right now but all those student learning outcomes and the standards that if that's going to shift I really need to know because I've been telling all the educators in the system we're graduating kids based on that in two years and it has to be aligned pre-K through graduation and all our schools so to me those are the outcomes so if those aren't the outcomes I have to change my student monitor report because that's what I'm basing the student monitor report off of and we spent as separate boards individually started as a grassroots effort to bring all those up and then say okay what's similar what needs to be tweaked and all that what I think is actually one of the most powerful moments in my six years for in Washington Central is that hey we do want the same and here it is you know I listen to this and that's really important but you know what's happening in this in this debate going on right now is the most important thing in front of these where I don't care what anybody says I mean to the community right now this is a dramatic change in our educational system there were questions at that meeting it's not that you know people didn't want to have a good understanding this is a way to get a very brief you know not a big argument doesn't have to be that but it is a very concise argument about what this is about about the class section suit and I mean I can't mention anything we do being more important at this moment in dealing with that I'm not putting I'm not in any way minimizing the importance of what you're talking about there but this really can't be delayed I mean we've been funneled and funneled and funneled and funneled for three years now and every minute we put something off as we basically let's all go carry in the floor yeah two things it looks like we're going to go over time yeah sorry sorry just sounding it for you all I disagree that this is the most important thing to our students it's just not and secondly my understanding is that actually the individual boards are fairly clear on where they stand correct me if I'm wrong but Callison, Berlin or unanimous you're right I wasn't suggesting he come in order to convince people to join just to answer questions and maybe maybe the individual boards one or two individual boards would be interested in having him at the individual board meetings after the fact at two separate times would be better than doing the whole thing if that makes more sense then I'll just email to the various board chairmen that we have his he can come and they can decide what they want to do with it there were certainly a lot of questions in that room about the boss yeah so I think Allison, if I understand it right I think what you were trying to say is that that decision might be easier if there was just one board is that what you were trying to do so I think that's what you were trying to say but I agree with everybody I get a little panic when people I feel like we have wasted so much time and have pretty six regardless where we are if we're five boards or one board we all want the same thing for kids and in my mind it's not coming soon enough yesterday and yesterday and yesterday so there's no more important work the kids don't have a year to waste basically they never have a year to waste so this is the work that we should be doing if we have time left at the very end and David wants to sit there and make an explanation that's that's the best way I'm not saying that that is not important there might be an actual better idea to just send to each of the chairs and say David's available what time would you want him and this is how you communicate with him and let it go with that because some boards have made they don't want somebody else coming in or they may the ones I think of who may middle sex and Worcester and middle sex will wait to see what happens before we decide but in the meantime you might want to know more I would just note that the local boards will have separate meetings in November also so that may also be an opportunity but I was just going to write an email to the chair and say David's available it's good for him to be able to do this at one shot I know but sometimes you can't I was at Berlin and since no one's here one of the unanswered questions was who is really suing and who is paying for the suit and I don't think that answer has come to that that answer is now there is a fund a defense fund where they're raising the money with a co-fund me site plus sending checks to Berlin because Berlin was unclear too they wouldn't have known they kind of knew but now it's out there so it's not a school budget there's no money coming from any school budgets thank you could we get a copy of that we should have it in the bottom the lawsuit will not be filed so we have something in writing from the state that we're forced to merge no no I was just asking if the financing part of that was something that was a public document that well I put it on an FPF public forum tonight and I can just send you a copy you could just print it I just thought in case somebody asked us in writing what did you say that you just sent a copy for I just didn't want to send it to me so we do have a few other actions we need to take is there anything else that we need to put on the SU board agenda for next week so we have just to review we have budget updates we have Act 46 updates we have the bulk of the time given over to the student monitoring report and a discussion of all of our guest learning outcomes and then we have policy reading and policy committee charge that's essentially the 90 minute the end of it okay action items we need to put the formulas should we cut back to this now if someone is ready to make the motion do you want to do it do you want to do it else than the numbers I'm sorry you have it oh the number yeah the number it's on the front page there 288,287 288,287 288,287 with 47 cents so the floor is moving just to clarify I know it should be the last one moving because I'm on the alternate but yes is there any discussion yeah all those in favor of approving the borders please say aye opposed to sanctions thank you 3.2 approved section 125 flexible benefits budget actually this year we only need one motion and did you receive the email that Krista sent out Monday if not we brought extra copies I'm going to add some correction tables does that have the verdict on it so it would be one motion this year because the section 125 and the HRM budgets are combined with the same vendor I'll give you a minute to just quickly provide for those I think she's still I have the attachment that she's having okay okay so we're budgeting for a level pricing not to increase the pricing of money we charge our member districts so we pull those resources together in one budget and so we're keeping the rate at 70 dollars per participant there's about 331 participants this is combined with the healthcare reimbursement account so if you look at the actual 2018 you'll note that that only reflected our healthcare reimbursement the claims at half a year because it started in January so that was January to June if you look at 2018 and the line that I'm looking down at is you go all the way down and you see the claims on the healthcare reimbursement of 334 473 so that's for a half a year and some of those claims were delayed until this year so that's why we're projecting an increase in the claims that's the new fund and so last year when we had this budget and obviously most of you weren't here I think only Carrie and Matthew were here last year at this time you might have you know when we did the budget one of your first meetings so what we had was a separate budget for the HRA which is the health reimbursement account which is for the employees health insurance and it's our share Washington Central is liable for $2,500 of a family plan and $2250 for a single plan and the employees pay the first 10% so they pay $250 and $500 so that's what that new fund does it actually is a health insurance fund the other fund has been going on here since as I wrote here in 1995 I think for the section 125 plan so I'll make a motion approve the health reimbursement account in section 125 spending account budgets for 2019-2020 as proposed second any further discussion post thank you Laura okay are there any questions or comments on the reports of the board Superintendent Angel I'd like to I'd like to give a couple verbal things um thanks maybe analysis first I want to say I came a little strong there I'm sorry about the outcomes it's just one of those things it's been a lot of work alright I heard to hear that we might want to do something different um the uh two things I wanted to talk to you about as we've talked about several times tonight there's I like the analogy of we're in the wilderness a little bit that 46 one of the things I think that shouldn't happen with budgeting is for it to seem like there isn't chances for input or chances that it isn't transparent on how we're building budgets and so thinking if we were to be merged there would be a definite period between December and somewhere in January where there wouldn't be a board in charge of the FY20 budget development until the transition board is seated I don't think it I think it is unwise not I think it is wise for us to engage in public engagement and discussion about the budget during that time and if it's I don't know where the authority will lie I'm not really worried about where the authority lies the local boards are in charge of the operation of schools through the end of January June 30th 2019 so at those meetings we're going to bring budget information and asking for feedback and collecting all that and giving it to a transition board if the merger were to occur if it's not then we're still in the local place really all it is is the last step which is recommending a budget so we're going to keep working on that and keep bringing that through I'd love any feedback on that I've talked to almost all the board chairs about that and said they're in agreement of like let's get this thing as open for feedback as possible in developing these budgets so we're in that place we've held off on Washington Central because of the way the new assessment we really had to wait for special education so that's the only thing that I you know one of the things that I'll need some help and direction from this board and maybe it's the December meeting we still have a budget meeting so I don't know I'm looking for suggestions and help from you it's really how do we get to that place where people are giving that input and that feedback is being collected and it's like hey we're willing to show you whatever we have in community we want you to give us feedback and all that so I want you to understand that's the tact that I'm trying to come at this from is being more open than before because the worst thing to do to have it even if it wasn't but to seem that way is the worst thing to do so to keep you know one of the things I want to try to do through this work is the keeping of Washington Central together and one of the best ways to do that is to have things as open as possible and so if you say hey Bill you got an idea here's another way to open it up I'm all ears I don't know that I don't know where that's going to be and that's okay for me to leave in that ambiguity right now and Lauren and I have talked about this how do we collect that feedback and keep working on the budget system you know you gave us this board along with all the individual boards and said hey build the budget so you've been doing it don't try to look for savings and combining just build them as individual entities whether they're an individual entity or not and roll it all together at the end so that's what we're doing yeah it makes all the sense to kind of follow our traditional processes and if they end up being advisory then so be it but keep doing it so we're going to try to schedule that I don't know I would like to just do it and have our local board meetings and just do it and not have to worry about who has to call and all that I'm not too worried about that either so that's one piece. The second thing is we talked about last meeting you had given support for us to hire another financial person we finished that today and Lauren can talk more I just literally offered the job right before this meeting at 5.15 Ted Penny Sandville has been working for the state of Vermont as an accountant in the agency of transportation and DMV oh it was DMV she was kind enough not to correct you she showed up like I'm saying DMV and she comes to us with 21 years of experience not only there but in other places so I don't know if you want to say some more about some of the work she'll be doing so we're really looking forward to improving our financials to get ready for software conversion so some of that is going through vendors and payroll and HR systems and streamlining our data so that it's ready to import the worst thing you could ever do is have somebody importing all this archive data that you didn't really need so we're going to be working on that goal as soon as possible the other part is this HRA project as you can see the good news is our employees are really heavily participating as I wrote we've gone up $200,000 in processing so that takes more staff time like I said to Bill when you add a million dollar budget you need to have resources to fund it and so we're working on collecting and getting more out into the schools to communicate with our staff about health insurance there's a lot of questions and things going on right now that we need support here so that's where we've been spending our time is training employees how to use the new online system with Datapath helping them understand their health insurance bills it's just been an outreach that is necessary especially for the next couple years but the software conversion and then also the chart of accounts conversion to meet the state requirements are right up there so appreciate your support and so is this separate from the future plan helping take care of the future plan Datapath is future planning now they've recreated a million transactions back to January 1 to try to correct the system but it's caused employees to have more questions and so Datapath is our current vendor and they do the actual payment processing and work with the health insurance company but what we're trying to do is to reach out and give support to our employees making sure that they feel comfortable and that they understand how to do their own health insurance tracking and management which is a new task because we're self-funded is that confusing or did I go too far there's a question on the financial report maybe with this function that you're just describing where does it show up which line is it it would be in the HRA budget that you approved for the bulk of it it's not in our regular budget and then some of it would be in the software budget that you've approved over on page 11 there's $200,000 there to help with the conversion and we do need to outlay money for programmers and the new software when I last time I told you there wasn't going to be expense to the budget and that's because when we built we came with you with $300,000 testament for a new software over half of that was employee cost to do that because when I've seen other issues and be part of one that transfers financial systems the bulk of the cost was not the software it was the extra help that had to be brought to make sure you got the data conversion right and so that's what half of this position is for this year probably come full time next year so we would include it in the budget as a revenue and expense coming from other funding sources okay once we can roll up the total cost so it's cost neutral to the general fund we're excited congratulations thank you questions on those I'll confess to being slightly curious about whether negotiations are happening so we had negotiations training on Monday night we had all but one or two teachers there from the teacher side we had all but one board member there and on the ESP we had two people shopped from the ESP so I'm a little concerned about that but we had IVB folks up it was really quick because so many people have been through it and for the couple of new people I actually felt for them because we're jumping through it like boom boom boom here we go and if you're brand new to it what's this process but they were good and trusting they were trusting in it I'll catch up if I'm a board member I've got other board members if I've been an association member I've got other association members so they're looking to probably start negotiating the end of November and there will be a meeting on the MOU for the healthcare for the data path future planning work on the 1st of November to talk about that's going to continue past December 1 there are dates set out in Brown rules who will try to be agreed upon in that first meeting and they've asked about the 46 and I said folks I think I can speak for the board whoever is the one in control about who will authorize the contract for FY20 I think they'll be glad to say the folks that are here supporting the board whether they're a board member or not can negotiate I'm sure when Rummy chained over that and I think you were there for this Allison that Lowry stayed on for to be the negotiator for the board but he wasn't a board member anymore was that what you were saying? yeah and most of the board members are greeted like that we think even if we are if we aren't represented for the FY20 board and if Susanna Jove who else wants to come to negotiations in the year we like this stuff and you're lucky you've got two great leaders and Chani and Susanna they're such a good pair together so they play off each other and really Susanna they're really good at it it is cool it works really well alright if there's no other business before the board they're adjourned at 7.18 thanks