 I will make sure we keep on task. Approve minutes of Monday, September 27th, the full board. Is that a motion? Kathy, would you entertain a motion for all three of the minutes for approval? Yes. So I would make a motion to approve the minutes of Monday, September 26th, Monday, August 23rd, Thursday, September 16th, all of 2021. Do I have a second? Second. Is there any discussion on those, on the motion? All right, hearing none, so moved. Board correspondence, I received correspondence and I forwarded it to everybody from Peter Plank. So if you have an opportunity to take a look at that and read it over, it's some suggestions to the anti-racism policy. And I forwarded it on and shared it. He has some thoughts that he wanted us all to think about. Any other board correspondence? You're open. No? All right, so we're on to board development series, board operations, open meeting law. Susan, that's again tonight. Hi, Susan. Hello, and thank you. I have to tell you, I looked at the agenda and I thought there's no way they're ready for me at six o'clock. So you guys are on it and I'm glad I was on time. Nice to see you all again, although for most of you, I'm seeing your initials, but that's lovely too. I am here tonight to talk about open meeting law. I think I can present, right? Do I have a share screen? You do now. Okay, thank you. Okay, let's try that again. I'm sorry. You just hover over the three little dots. Yeah, no, it's saying it's available, but it's just wanting to share the Zoom. I'm sorry. Just one moment. Yeah. So what format is your presentation? It's a PowerPoint. I guess I can just upload it into a Google Sheets. Maybe that's the better way to go. We didn't have this problem last month, did we? No, I had it ahead of time. Susan, do you want to share it with Ray? I'm sorry? Get it right next time. Do you want to share your presentation with Ray and then he can project it for you? That's what we did last month. You're right, it is what we did last time and I will attempt to do that, assuming it is not too big. So Ray, your email again? R, B-A-L-L-O-U. I got it, thanks. Good. I am sorry, everybody. I did not expect this little glitch. Okay, it just told me it sent, so hopefully you'll have it there in a moment. And in the meantime, I'll just say to you about open meeting law. I am not an attorney and so what I've got prepared for you tonight is sort of the top line. I'm not gonna say superficial, but sort of the top line stuff because our time is also limited. There is a prerecorded webinar, well, past webinar now recorded on our website in full that we gave in May of 2020. So there were some news in there accommodating the state of emergency changes that were made, but it was done in conjunction with the secretary of state's office and the deputy secretary of state was on that webinar, on that call with us. So if you're looking for more than we're gonna be able to cover tonight, I'm gonna suggest that you go there. Have you had open meeting law training before as a board? No, okay. So I'll start by saying that the intent of the open meeting law is transparency. The secretary of state and legislature and many states are now having some version of an open meeting law. We are publicly elected officials handling public money and therefore the public should be able to understand as much as they want to about how that money is being managed and the work that you all are doing in your boards and that is the essence of the open meeting law where it gets tricky sometimes is it's inconvenient, particularly for smaller groups that are trying to get together quickly on the fly and then you realize you need to warn your meeting and put out the agenda five days in advance and all these other specifics. Thank you very much, Ray. So managing it is harder than the intent of the law. We can jump ahead here. So we'll talk about the open meeting law embedded within that is executive session. We'll talk a little bit about what you can and cannot do electronically as a board and as a board member, which also takes into account email and social media because as we talked a little bit about last time you really can't take off that board hat. You can put another hat over it sometimes but the board hat is always there and that applies with open meeting law. Thank you. So the open meeting law declaration of public policy this is just the statutory reference and I think what's interesting here and it wouldn't have been interesting to me until I started like spending a lot of time around our education laws is this is one VSA. The education stuff is all 16 VSA. This comes first and before so many other laws because it applies so broadly to any public commission, board, council or public agency. And I think when we put it in that perspective we're in some pretty esteemed company as to who is required to meet the demands of the public meeting law. So I mentioned open to the public is kind of the baseline for open meeting law. That means that they have access to anything that you're discussing your conversations and the documentation that supports them. Advanced public notice, public participation and governmental decisions are all built into the way Vermont's open meeting law is structured. So the law says it's public bodies. That means basically anyone who is publicly elected and having anything having to do with public monies. That means that board committees and even subcommittees are also subject to open meeting laws. So if you're having a policy committee meeting it needs to be warned the same way as a board meeting with the agenda put out five days in advance and available to anybody who wants a copy. Committees often get forgotten here I guess is the way I'd say that. So when does it apply? Critical in all of this are the term quorum which I'm sure you're all familiar with. It's a majority of the entire public body. And again, that entire public body could be the committee even though the committee wasn't elected as a committee it is a byproduct of the board, thus still a public body. And I know this sounds nuts because it sounds nuts to me because I'm not an attorney but the open meeting law particularly as it was amended in 2018 by legislature and the secretary of state. Spends quite a bit of paper and ink defining what is a meeting and conversely what is not a meeting. And actually they start with what is not a meeting which is kind of something you don't see very often in official documentation. So the stress point here and the italics and the bolder mind when the quorum of the public body gathers for the purpose of discussing business or taking action, it's a meeting. If you all happen to attend the same church and you're sitting next to each other some Sunday that's not a public meeting unless you got talking about board business. You wanna go out to coffee? You can do that. And so they even go on then to define what is business of the public body and its governmental functions. So your meetings, meetings of your subcommittees, public forums that you might hold with the majority of your board with the quorum of your board present all would be considered subject to open meeting law. Other question? Yes, good. I need clarification. You're saying subcommittees and committees also fall under this. But the definition of a meeting is having a quorum present. Right. So we have a six member board, we have a six member board, a quorum would be four. So my question is, does the open meeting law apply when you have less than a quorum? Yes, because it becomes then the public body is the committee and the quorum, if you have three people, the quorum is two. Okay, so it's a quorum of the convening body. It's not the quorum of the overall board. Exactly. Gotcha, thank you. Susan, I have a question. Sure. Could you go back to the last slide, Ray? So if the board wanted to get together or needed to get together to discuss something that's not included in the business of the public board, for example, issues that were getting in way of the board doing their work, so interpersonal issues, would that have to be a public meeting? That is one that I will, so we'll get into some definitions of what is and is not a meeting. And that's what I would call a kind of gray area. So there are times when it is okay for the board to meet, as you say, with the intent of not discussing any board business. And I would really direct that question to your attorney who's probably more familiar with your specific issues. If you're gonna spend a whole two hours just getting to the core of difference, interpersonal issues and interpersonal differences, I think that technically, that does not need to be a warned public meeting. That can be... Gathering of the board? Yeah, yeah, but the caveat is when you are seated or standing or walking with the people with whom you generally conduct board work, there is a temptation to slide into it. And that's why it's, as a matter of course, it's a safer thing to run it as an open meeting. But I understand there are circumstances that probably are not covered in the umbrella of this law. Thank you. Sure. So I took this and I flipped it back around backwards. I started with what is a meeting. A meeting can occur anywhere. So you could all be seated in one place. You could also all be not seated in one place. And that one place could be a restaurant. If you're all together and you're gonna talk about board business, it doesn't have to be in the boardroom wherever you typically hold your meetings. And it can occur over a string of time. And that kind of blows our conventional definition of meeting out of the water, right? So a string of emails on a topic that is board business is a violation of open meeting law. Because it's involving a quorum, though you're not all in one place at the same time, you are communicating with one another about board business. And group emails, even more problematic. So there are provisions in the open meeting law that you can communicate by email for a few select topics. Scheduling a meeting, creating or refining your agenda and distribution of materials that will be discussed at the meeting. So if you get a board packet from the chair, and generally those don't come from the chair, generally they come from central office, but if you get a board packet, that's okay, as long as you don't then begin a conversation about it in any way, shape or form, until you're all at the warned meeting at the same time. Ethan, I see you have a hand up. Yeah, I guess the way I've always heard it was that you could share information, but you couldn't reply. Well, there's a limit to how much information you can share also because if you're sharing information that would normally be conveyed from one to all at a meeting, then it should be at the meeting. So it's only these select items. If you're sharing information about some bids that you were getting, which I don't know why a board member would be, that's really something that needs to be happening in the body proper in the meeting. So it's fuzzy. It's a little fuzzy. Interpretive. Yep, but no discussion, zero, none. So the risk is if you share some information, somebody is gonna respond back, right? And that then might get somebody else involved to respond to both of you. It gets murky then. So best to just really keep it clean. The line is agendas and meeting information to be discussed at a later date. One thing I will offer as a very useful little tip, which I didn't know until I started working at VSBA, if you send out, if you're board chair and you're sending out the draft agenda to all of your board members and you're encouraging feedback and input or this is a, you know, or an okay, if you send it out as we often do to, and you put each of their addresses in the two line of the email, if somebody hits reply all, you're at risk of a meeting, right? Not for that specific item of the agenda, but it might lead to something else, might lead to something else. However, if you put all of those board member names in the BCC line, the blind carbon copy line and they reply all, it won't go to anybody who's in that blind copy line. So it's really good practice to just use that function and then nobody can accidentally reply all and chime in on something that they didn't mean to. So if then it's a communication strictly between you and the chair, you're not a quorum, I don't, you don't have any three people boards, do you? We do have one. You do. Okay, so then you need, that group needs to be especially careful because then two of you are a quorum. I see a couple of, Andrew has a hand up. Yeah, so one thing that we do do communication about is like the presentations that we give about the budget, the informational meetings that we do for the budget season. Is that the sort of thing where you just need to have fewer than a quorum working on it at any one time? Or like if we email out that presentation and ask for comments as long as it's done individually, it's okay, or is that the sort of thing that should be done in a meeting? It's best to be done in a meeting, but I understand that sometimes you've had the last meeting and it needs to be spit and polish ready for the presentation. So in those circumstances, I believe it would be okay for one person to send it out to all and have them respond individually to you if you're the one who sent it out without including the rest of the board. So if you wanna say, I think this slide might be clearer, easier to understand if it said, instead of the way you've got it laid out, one-on-one, that's okay. Ideally it happens face-to-face in a meeting, but I believe that would be okay, one-on-one. So does that mean that Google Docs has the comment on it as well? Yeah, okay. Google Docs, no. That kind of collaborative working out of the meeting is problematic. I know it's so easy, right? It seems like it should be such a wonderful tool, but it's a problem for open meeting law because you're actually advancing the work of the board behind closed doors. Stacey. So you can stop me if I'm jumping the gun if you're gonna get to this later, but what happens if you do accidentally break this rule, if you reply all and hit your board or if you add something to a shared doc and dance? So if you are, let me back up. As a public body, it is your, and members of a public body, it is your obligation to know this law and comply with it. If you mess up one time and it's contained, probably nothing happens realistically. There are consequences built into the law for violations, but something like that, if it happens on a really occasional because I messed up basis, probably isn't gonna come to light, but there are histories, recent histories in the state of the local reporter who's covering the board meeting, not being able to get the information that they think they deserve and they'll cite an open meeting law violation. And then it's a big McGill, it's a big to do and you have to involve your attorneys, it gets expensive and the penalty to the state is expensive. So, try not to. So I mentioned that in 2018, they revised the law and defined what is not a meeting. So if there really is truly no discussion of public business and you're at social gatherings or even if you come to the VSBA conference in a couple of weeks and you all come, that's not a meeting for you. Training programs, and this gets Sarah to your question earlier. I've gone in and done facilitations with boards that are just not working well and some of them warn it and some of them don't. And so that's why I say I encourage you to check with your own attorney on that because one of the ones that warned something like that was because they had been through a violation and so the board was overly cautious not to run that risk. Training programs is, again, it's a fuzzy area, right? Is this a training program that we're doing right now? I think so, right? But one of you might give me an example when you're asking a question of something that actually happened in your meetings and then all of a sudden you're discussing public business. So it's a tough one. So, and just to reiterate, other than those three items, scheduling a meeting, organizing and refining an agenda and distributing meeting materials, email, telephone, teleconferencing or in-person meetings for anything else is risky. It's not automatically a violation, but it's risky. Public, so there are really specific criteria associated with every phase of the meeting and this is where I'm gonna gloss over some of them because some of them are pretty nitty gritty and I'm going, I'll refer you to that webinar if you want to dive deeper. It was put on by two attorneys and it's very technical in that sense. But regular meetings, you're obligated to set a regular time and place for your meetings and post and make agendas available within at least 48 hours in advance of the meeting. Special meetings have slightly different parameters. So it's 24 hours notice and you need to make sure. So in the regular meetings, you have at your organizational meeting identified what your regular media channels are. Your media outlets and one of them is probably your website. Special meetings have more specificity about the warning because it's a shorter period of time. So your newspapers, radio stations, anybody who specifically asks about it in writing should get notified and obviously all members of the board. 24 hour advance notice for those agendas and occasionally there is such a thing as an emergency meeting and it's called on the fly really emergency. And the legal definition is when necessary to respond to unforeseen occurrences or condition requiring immediate attention. Last March comes to mind, right? That would be an emergency meeting. Or if the roof gives way in one of your buildings that would be an emergency meeting. I can't wait 48 hours for you to get your agenda posted, right? And so you're gonna get it out there the best way you can to let people know that you're meeting. It's still an open meeting. It's just that the criteria for warning it and the advance public notice softens a little bit. So posting agendas I mentioned before at least 48 hours before a regular meeting, 24 hours for a special meeting. Where on a website if you have one in the municipal clerk's office for all of the towns in your district if you cross town lines in two designated public places. And that's usually established at your organizational meeting and or there's a lot of history behind that and somebody probably the assistant at central office knows where those places are. It's often a town hall or a public library or some public facility where people know to look at that bulletin board. And also made, so if somebody were to come to central office asking for the agenda it would be given to them directly or contacted central office directly. Minutes, minutes are fun because there are actually legal standards for minutes in open meeting law. So there's a minimum content that needs to be included. They need to be posted in draft form within five days of the meeting. And they have to stay posted for at least a year after the meeting. The only exception is, so the draft minutes are posted and then you have your meeting and you approve them. So then those draft minutes can be replaced with the approved minutes. But they need to be available for a year's time thereafter. Ron, thank you. Okay, executive session. This is an area a lot of boards really take lightly and it's really very, very specific in the law. There is a limited scope to what is permissible for executive session. And there are actually 14 statutory categories and they're all quite specific. The intent needs to be really clear that you're going into executive session for one of those 14 reasons. And so the motion to go to executive session should include the, we recommend that you just include the language directly from those 14 reasons. So put it all right in your motion that we're going into executive session. If you're going into executive session for personnel, which is commonly reflected in minutes, that's wrong. Personnel is not automatically a case for executive session. If it's a student discipline issue or something with a student, then it's executive session because you're maintaining the student's privacy. If it's an issue of an employee of the district having some question in their performance, that is not by and large a protected category. Ethan. Yeah, where do we get a copy of these 14? I will send them to you. They're available. Actually, the probably the best resource is the secretary of state's office. Oh, thank you, Megan. Actually, thank you. I've never heard this was available before, my bad, but there you go. No, that's why I'm here. I'm glad you asked the question and thank you, Megan, for short circuiting my response. Yeah, and they're very clearly laid out. And finally confirmed that it's an appropriate action. And if there's any question, you'll know ahead of time if you're gonna have executive session that night or that week. So check with your attorney about the appropriateness of it if you're having some difficulty navigating the language of those 14 and how this fits in because it's not all black and white much as I like to make it look that way in my slides. So the most common one that people school boards rely on is the language I have here to the left. Premature general public knowledge would clearly place the public body or person involved at a substantial disadvantage. So contracts, labor negotiations, arbitration or mediation, grievances, union grievances civil litigation or prosecution. You don't wanna be airing your dirty laundry necessarily if the board is named in a lawsuit, for example. And anything that's attorney client privilege. Those are obviously confidential. And then it goes on, okay? So real estate, if you're negotiating real estate and you're trying to figure out, well, the most we're gonna pay is, obviously you're not gonna do that in public session because the seller of the real estate is gonna know that's your maximum and you're not gonna be able to have a meaningful negotiation about that. Employee actions, appointments, evaluation, discipline and dismissal. Student actions, as I mentioned, there are privacy issues there, public records. Public safety, if there's a clear and imminent danger to public safety and security or emergency response measures if disclosure could jeopardize public safety. So this is really an opportunity for the board to safely have discussions that otherwise could alter the outcomes. It's not to protect you from having hard conversations in public. Yeah, Megan. Thanks. So this slide seems useful and would you suggest instead of using the term personnel like the motion would be, I'd like to make a motion for employee action or any of these? But I'd go back to the premature knowledge would that's in the previous slide. That's the language that's really critical, okay? So not all dealings on real estate are necessarily protected, but if you are negotiating a contract that has price implications, then the other party, because it's open to the public, the seller of the property has access to your internal discussions that really weakens your negotiation, right? Similarly, you're not gonna, you're not going to in public meetings say, well, we're gonna put three and a half percent in the budget for the contract that we're negotiating, even though right now we're at 5%, but we think we'll get to three and a half and it'll be okay. You don't want them to know that now when they're at, you know, whatever, they're at seven and you're at five. You know, if the union had advanced knowledge of that, then your whole negotiation would be immaterial because they'd know what your bottom line is. They'd know how far you'd go. Just to finish the question, well, we're re-ask it. Like if, can you give us a sample language of how that would sound if it was a student matter so we can make sure we say everything that needs to be said? Like we have made a finding that premature knowledge of a student matter would put us at a disadvantage. So I would- Well, in the case of a student matter, it's different language and that's where I'd refer you back to the link that you just so kindly put up there, right, and I would use that language. Just take it right out of the statute. That's your safest bet and it should be really clear what that means, okay? Does that help? Okay, so executive session, the motion should include a loose reference to the subject matter. We're going into executive session to discuss negotiations on the school purchase of the lot of land that's next door. Or more often the case now, negotiations about selling off a school that we're not using anymore, okay? That happens from time to time. So that should be specified in your motion so there's no big question what you're going in there to talk about for those who are following the open portion of your meeting. But, and then the board is expected to be there and you're welcome to invite anybody else to attend. So it may be legal counsel, it's often administration who has more knowledge about something that's going on in the schools. And you're welcome to invite anybody, you know, if you're talking about a student's issues and it's up to the discretion of the board whether that student ought to be invited. And if so, with or without parents and you know, all of that is up to the board's discretion. This is a good one. Minutes are not required in executive session. And we recommend that you do not take them because if you take them they, somebody's gonna look for them in a public records request. If they don't exist, you can't turn them over. And since you cannot take action in an executive session you must come out of executive session and make a motion to take any action in open session. Now you could make action, your action could be, I make a motion that we handle the employee issue as was discussed in executive session because everybody at the board table has just been in that executive session meeting. So you don't have to go into a lot of detail in that motion. And you know, I put this note at the very bottom here even if you fit into those 14 categories, if you don't feel that it really is necessary to have executive session for a given topic, don't. It's a whole lot easier to not have to ask for forgiveness. If there's no reason to put yourself in that position in the first place. So use it judiciously, it's there. It is a tool, it's a valuable tool. I certainly wouldn't want anybody to feel that it's not accessible. And I think I have this somewhere else but while I'm looking at this slide I wanna really remind you, everything that happens in executive session, everything is strictly confidential. That's an unwritten rule. And it speaks to board trust, trusting each other and the community trusting you even though they may be dying with curiosity to know how X, Y, or Z went. Don't tell them. There's a reason that you left the public meeting to have that discussion. I think I've got two more slides. Yeah, oh, electronics. So we talked about this a little bit already. I won't beat it up. But if members are participating remotely like you all are tonight, you need to identify yourselves when the meeting convenes which you're doing by having your names up. And you need to be able to hear and be heard throughout the meeting. So if you have a bad internet connection and you can't hear what's going on then you shouldn't be marked as being at the meeting because you may have something to say that you can't communicate. And if a quorum is participating remotely as is the case here, the agenda still must identify a public place and somebody has to be there from the body. So I believe Kathy is at the school somehow. Somebody's there tonight, right? Okay, and that member. And to be honest with you, I've seen it both ways that it needs to be a board member or a representative of the body. So if you delegate that to Chris, I think that's permissible, but Safeguard is have at least one board member present. And if you're meeting remotely, then if there is a vote that's not unanimous, you must do a roll call to make sure that every vote is registered. Email, we talked about some. You know, it gets dicey when you start having any kind of discussion. So probably not okay, a group email involving a quorum that discusses anything about your board business, collective editing of a document, participation in a Facebook group. So let's say half plus one of you are members of some parent Facebook group around your school and somebody from the public chimes in about what a crappy thing that happened at school on Thursday. And can you believe this teacher said this and that teacher said that, don't get involved. Because even though that might be your best friend who you'd be talking to as a person to person, once you're in a bigger setting like a social media, platform, you've crossed that line and you've now made a public statement and you're one board member who doesn't speak for the board in that context. Yeah, Sarah. In Stratford, a lot of the communications throughout the town come from a listserv. And would that be the same thing? Is there any time when there's something about a school issue that I can come in as a private citizen? No, not in that context. I gave you a very quick answer. I wanna underscore I'm not an attorney but you are perceived as a board member. And so what you say will be perceived as coming from the board and then you run the risk. Now, if you have two different accounts, and you're a member of that listserv two ways and that's maybe you can fudge it that way but I wanna get a little legal input on that one. You mean by using my private email that could be, okay. And that brings up another point while not 100% related to this. Use your school emails for your board business. I trust you all have them. And I cannot tell you how much of a pain in the neck it would be if you had somebody wanna make a public records request about your school board communication. And if you don't separate them out, you've gotta turn over everything. It's sort of what happened to Hillary Clinton with that server and all of a sudden all of the wedding plans for Chelsea's wedding were public knowledge and not that anybody cared but it's because in order to turn over the public things she also had to turn over the private things because she crossed a line. So to keep it clean, you know, most email platforms allow you to forward from one to another. So you can do that without your even noticing that it's a difference. You don't have to go checking in two different places, right? You can have it all streamlined and just make sure when you're sending something out it's going out under the correct email address. This is one of my favorite sayings. Board meetings are public meetings but they are not a meeting of the public. I may have even said that last time. So public meeting, you have your business to do. Public is there to observe what's going on. They have an opportunity to comment and that's that. You're not in a big open dialogue with everybody who's seated in the room. That's not what a board meeting is for. The board meeting is for conducting the business as specified on the agenda. And those are just the statutory references. Yes, Sarah. Sorry. No, it's perfect timing. Look, we're up to questions. So because we have these hybrid meetings now where there are people, the public present but they're present virtually and they make comments throughout the, you know write them in the comment section of the virtual meeting. Is the board under any responsibility to read them allowed to respond to them, to do anything with them? That's a good question. If you have that comment channel open then anybody at the meeting can see the comments, correct? As long as they're, so if you're attending the meeting physically at the school where we would do them and I don't have my personal computer with me then no, I, well, I guess they go up on the screen. I don't know, you have to be pretty good to find them quickly, but. I'll have to research that and I will get back through Chris, I'll let you know what I come up with. Okay. Because they would only be shared with people at the meeting and that, you know, unlike minutes which are then posted for a year for everybody. Well, and it's, I mean, and also in the case where if you're attending the meeting you would not be allowed to make a, and if you were attending in person they would not, you would have the opportunity to speak only during public comment. Right. But if you're attending it virtually then sometimes people, you know, feel they have the right to comment and that we have to read it and we have to respond because, and that's not an option that's available to people who attend in person. Right. And so, you know, obviously we want to replicate the live meeting as best we can. Now, it's possible after your public comment period on your agenda, I don't know about Google Meets, I'm not as familiar here, but I wonder, I know in some of the platforms you can close the chat. And that takes care of that, you know. We can publicly announce that also. Right, right. Thank you. Sure, Stacey. Hi. So to follow on Sarah's question, I click these meetings and I generally will copy and paste whatever is in the chat just into the minutes, into the public comment area. I don't know whether that's appropriate. As Sarah said, sometimes people really, you know, chat about the meeting, take their live vlog. Right. Their thoughts about the meeting as it's happening. So I don't know if that's appropriate, but I did want to mention that I do try and capture those. Okay, thank you. I'll find out what the strict interpretation of open meeting law is with respect to that, if there is one. Thanks. And then I also wanted to ask about virtual participation. So you mentioned that you have to identify yourself. Sometimes we have two people sitting behind a screen and it'll have one person's name and someone else will pop up and it'll be a family member who also wants to add comment. I'm assuming that's okay as long as that person identifies. Mm-hmm. And really the more important piece of that identifying is that board members identify yourselves. Okay, and I, you know, some of the public participation, again, it varies by platform, but some platforms have the opportunity to have participants and observers. And there's sort of two categories of people attending the meeting. And the observers usually can't unmute and speak, but they can type into the chat when they have a question. And so that's another way to try to control some of that action as well. Because I've heard stories of unruly meetings that are hybrid and somebody from the public has something they wanna say and they feel it's the time to say it and they just have at it. And it's really disruptive and it completely derails the meeting and the board work. So you wanna be careful about that too. Thank you, Susan. Yeah, Andrew. Sure, Andrew. I had a question about subcommittee meetings. They're supposed to have, you know, an agenda, agendas and minutes and stuff. For subcommittees that have a sort of informal membership, how do you do quorums and things like that? I mean, I guess there's no action usually taken at these meetings. They're usually kind of discussion to bring back to the board for action. Can you give me an example of a informal membership? Well, like an example would be right now we're having a subcommittee discuss preschool expanded hours. And, you know, we kind of did a first meeting with a small member people of the board, but then figured out a bunch of other people that we'd like to invite. And so, you know, there's not, I think it's gonna be kind of as a sort of ad hoc who's gonna be there and who's not. There's kind of a core group, but we're asking people to come in and help out. So if that core group is all board members, is that what I'm hearing? No, it's like- No, it's not. Most of the administration, faculty, community. Okay. It's only one board member. Is it a committee of the board? It's a task force. It's a task force for the administration. Then that's a different matter. These are board committees I'm talking about. Okay. That have board charter for their tasks. Okay. Thank you for that question. It's a good distinction and an important one to remember. I think I'm over my time. How are we doing on questions? Again, for those of you for whom this was an early or first exposure to open meeting law, I really encourage you to take some time and watch or listen at least to the webinar that's on our website because there's a lot of good information in there. We have a webinar archive page and it's accessible through that. This is me. I wanna thank you again. I have told Chris, I know you're into budgets wholeheartedly now and so we're taking a hiatus in this. And actually when we resume in the spring, I will be gone. I am retiring at the end of this year. So I have yet to find out how we're gonna handle the balance of these meetings for all I know I'll come back and do them with you again, which I'm happy to do, but I have yet to work out some of those details with BSBA. I assure you somebody will be here to share with you on the remainder of the topics that we scoped out. Thank you very much. I do. And again, if you have questions after you think about it, just shoot me an email. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Hey Chris. I've never been in love with Jamie as a name anyway. Yeah, sorry. All right, so public comments. Do we have public comments? Any public comments tonight? Not here. Not here? No. Any public comments online, please raise your hand for star six to unmute. Go in once. Go in twice. Hey guys, we're gonna move on. Reports to the board. Good evening. You have my handwritten report. I just want to emphasize again that we had planned to warn and look to adopt policy tonight. But after the policy committee met, it was it's a 10 day notice we have to have in the paper on policy adoption. So we didn't make that. So one of the things I want to talk about under that policy part and when you get to next agenda is whether or not the SU board wants to take up a special meeting and or they could warn this for action prior to a retreat. The retreat is on the agenda. So far, I've only had eight responses just to put a plug into that Google form I sent and four out of the eight said Saturdays are not a great day. So we're still without a date. And if folks are wondering why Saturday felt better than Friday and we're back to through committee meetings and board meetings we're back to about four nights a week right now. So it really is Fridays or Saturdays just so you know. Just because we're in the thick of budget, negotiation, supervision, evaluation and other committee work we have going on across the SU. But we'll get to that later. I'm working diligently still to try to make certain we can execute tests to stay. I am starting to receive some interest of folks that would be willing to help us in certain districts implement that. I'm also still looking to bring on two more full-time medical assistants for the remainder of the year to help us navigate COVID-19. We are having positivity still in our schools. It's been isolated. We've been able to work diligently. The medication efforts work. We're not seeing spread within the school but we certainly are seeing positivity come into the school. And with that is a significant amount of work that it places on a pretty small team of folks. And I will tell you that you know we had positivity in four different locations. Sorry, three different locations last week which results in a huge lift of the WRBS COVID-19 team. And so I am hoping that we can get some additional folks on because I'm really concerned about burnout at this point. And we're only in October. So if you said to me, Jamie, what's the biggest difference this year versus last? We're putting into contact tracing is like quadruple compared to what we did as an SU last year. Quick question. Which districts do you need the MAs in and are you looking for someone who has a certified medical assistant or just someone with some training experience? A minimum. Yeah, at a minimum we're looking for someone who has a certified emergency medical technician. And we're looking for two that would be hired at the SU level so that they could go to triage if we have positivity within a district to assist. But then they also would help because many of our nurses right now due to contact tracing are severely behind in regards to the other duties that they have day to day. And they're having a big difficulty keeping up frankly right now. And so the idea would be that we would have two folks that we could deploy across the SU to relieve the day-to-day pressure so that our nurses could get caught up. Yeah, I was wondering they're so hard to find right now. So I was wondering about bringing someone who may be retired you know like bring them back into the fold but I'm not sure their licensing would be up to date. So that would be a concern I guess. No, I don't need them to actually be currently licensed. Actually a retired medical professional would be ideal. Right. And they would work under the licensure of our actual school nurse. Our school nurses can delegate duties per statute. So certainly not being currently in license by having that background training would serve us just fine. Okay. Awesome. Please send them my way. Please send them my way. Yeah. Jamie. Yes. Just a quick question. Could you just repeat was that I missed the part where you're losing some people on the board or for contact tracing? What was that you were really looking not just the medical technicians it was the last part of your report. No, I'm not losing anyone. I'm really concerned about fatigue right now. That's our COVID-19 team is I would say significantly fatigued. I'm really worried about burnout. Is there anything we can do? If you can send anyone who you know that may qualify like I just said as an EMT or medical assistant someone with a background in allied health sciences that would be helpful. Thank you. Thank you. I guess the only other thing is I would say is just as a board being just really aware that your administrators are maxed right now as well I will tell you this year is significantly harder than last year. Your teachers are stressed the system stressed and I would say that you just please if you have a request go through me because that chain of command is going to be important because many of your principals are running ragged at the moment. I mean that in a dearing way. It's not meant to be critical. I'm just saying they're just working really. Please just reach out. Thanks, James. Alright. You also have my written report so I can just give some highlights and entertain any questions on it. I'll talk later about the SU wide universal screening data report and so I won't spend too much I won't spend any time on that here because we'll spend some time on that in a few minutes but just to add to that what you will see there is the the aggregate SU level data and so it's important just to remember in addition to that which is what we looked at at this level the teachers and schools data sort of at deeper levels because they're looking at specific data, class specific data and all that's really important for making decisions around how they're going to address any needs they see instructionally, how they might do small group interventions, anything like that so I just always want to make sure when we're looking at sort of high level data we remember that there's a lot that's going on in the classroom and at the school level around those assessments and using that information to help students grow I also referenced the work in math we talked a lot about sort of the different resources that we brought in around math and so one of the things we'll be pairing that with this year is work on the SU level grade level proficiencies and looking at making sure we have coherence across all of our grades and all of our schools and looking at the learning scales and performance indicators there and I think that will help us make sense of the materials that we have coming into our classrooms and make sure that when we've got kids at different schools who then feed into a single school that those experiences are more equitable and we have kind of the high level expectations of kids at all of our schools and then the last piece in the report is just around the work we've been doing with the Taren Institute, this has been really fun to see it sort of pick up some speed in the last couple of weeks they've done a lot of work with middle school in Bethel around flexible pathways and personalized learning as well as with Sunbridge and Chelsea as part of the first branch and the restructuring there and now we'll start working with the Newton School and just thinking really around with that pretty unique experience for students that are in the middle school and middle-year grades and making sure it's a really enriching experience and rigorous for all those students so it's a great partnership working with them around that so thank you any questions? alright, thank you and we're up hi everyone so I feel like October was really quickly so we've had some more training with the Claire Martin Center and some more coming up on Friday also to go along with some of what Ando is just talking about with the Taren Institute in middle school around personalized learning plans and flexible pathways I think those conversations have now started to open up in our department as well principals and teachers are now really opening up and branching out with those kind of conversations and we've been doing a lot of planning for students who need specialized instruction real deep modifications of work so we've been using that work in our field as well it's been a nice connection and a nice follow through also we started to see an uptake in applications for our paraprofessional departments so we're starting to reach capacity I'm pretty excited about that and also we were able to hire another special educator we'll be starting after Thanksgiving and I have another potential special educator in the pipeline which I'm super excited about so we're definitely getting there with the capacity in our department one other thing because we're talking about the conversations around budget and we're starting to think about budget just something new that I wanted to make you all aware of is that the state is going to start administering special education funding through a block grant system which is based on the total size of your school's student population previously the state did like reimbursements to districts for special education based on the number of students in special education programs so what this is going to look like we're all still waiting to hear the business office myself we're all still waiting seeing here what this is actually going to look like but this will be the funding system for now on starting with the next school year any questions everybody's all good all right Ray you're up sure I haven't had a chance to review my report and I would entertain any questions that you may have any questions for Ray? I don't have a question but I just would like to say that Ray you do an outstanding job for us in our meetings and when I make a request for a subcommittee meeting just to get all that stuff out and be so that we can just click on a button and have people attend virtually I know it's a lot this virtual COVID environment is created a lot of work for all of everyone but I would especially like to comment that I think you're doing that outstanding job for us thank you Sarah we have a team effort and I would like to just respond back and say that trying to choose my words carefully it's a very good team thank you I agree thank you Ray last but not least Sarah thank you hi everyone you have my report I have just a couple of updates I want to provide we're still on target to have our the third and fourth week of November the auditors continue to work through the last few items that they have remotely and then we are still waiting for guidance from the agency of education on our ARP SR3 funding the application hasn't been released to us yet so we can start to apply for that we've got some additional guidance in last week on what we need to do for community engagement which Anna can go over in further detail but the state is waiting for additional guidance on their end also from the legislature so that's where we're at and then I'll rejoin later on in the meeting and discussion item so if you want to provide any additional information just to build up that on the ARP SR or SR3 grant we are as Tara said still waiting to even have an application for that yet from the AOE the piece that we do have which came out in sort of the rules from the federal government is guidance around how do we do stakeholder and public engagement so more information will be coming out from that we have done a fair amount of that in developing the recovery plan in the spring and so what we'll want to do at this point is just make sure that we want covered that are applicable for this SU and have any updated information in the time that's passed sort of since the end of the spring till now as we think about how we want to use this additional set of funding to meet our needs we're also in a different place than we were in the spring in terms of where we are with COVID so we'll have to make some adjustments there we have more costs in some areas than I think we expected so all of that will be updated but I know that's a big piece of our budget going forward and everyone is sort of in a waiting pattern across the state waiting for that approval and the release of the application and they keep saying soon but nothing more specific than that so that's what we're working with Any questions for Terrell's report? Policies 9.1 F27 revised bids 4.5 5.5 6.5 7.5 8.5 9.5 9.5 10.5 11.5 12.5 13.5 14.5 15.5 16.5 17.5 18.5 19.5 19.5 20.5 20.5 21.5 22.5 23.5 24.5 25.5 26.5 27.5 28.5 29.5 30.5 31.5 32.5 33.5 34.5 35.5 36.5 37.5 38.5 39.5 40.5 40.5 40.5 40.5 40 41.5 41.5 42.5 41.5 42.5 43.5 44.5 46.5 in after warning 10 days in the paper. All right, looks like we're good with that one. Okay, and the next one is the anti-racism policy draft number five amended. Everybody should have received an updated copy. It's moved out of the committee. I believe the committee has done its work on it and this is our final version that we're bringing to the board. So any changes, discussions will take place at the board level now. So this is policy labeled C30 and so it does have a policy ID now we'll see and you know I think that policy committee members could jump in but really what happened was based on hearing comments and discussion at the full board level about wanting the policy to be focused on policy and to not include procedures. The policy committee took action to move most of the procedures actually into policy. The discussion was that a majority of the procedure was policy when you took a deeper dive into it and so that's what they did. Anything to add from the policy committee on that? There was no other change other than what I just described of moving procedures into policy. Jamie the only other thing was that the one the one procedure that was in there was the anti-racism statement which was laid out and it was said you know we said where it was going to be posted and what it was going to say and all that and that really was a procedure. So we took that out and just charged Jamie or the superintendent working with the anti-racism committee to to come up with that statement. So that's the only other thing. All right any more discussion around that? Can I just and we can we can set the day later. Our folks interested in setting a special meeting to get these approved. I mean it needs to be a course 10 days out from Thursday because that's the earliest I could warn it in the Herald. But is there a sentiment around wanting to do that or folks just want to wait until next month. I just I need to make sure I hit the paper at the right time that's all. You have a question? Yeah I just wanted to advocate for having that meeting. The policy committee has met a bunch of extra times. We've done a lot of work. I would love to get these through without waiting another month if possible. I know it does involve asking everyone to come out for another meeting but I don't think that we should do it in conjunction with a retreat though because I think I think that there's going to be a lot of public and a lot of comment. I agree. And it would not we need into our time to do what we want to do as a board retreat. I agree very much but I would advise getting something on the calendar for as soon as we can. I agree with Stacy. I can't see that. Are we throwing dates out November 4th? You've got the board calendar there. I mean we're a bit limited and that's before Thursdays start happening for negotiations. Is Thursday night 10 the best? Are you going to be by the fourth are you in negotiations? We're going to try to start pulling that committee together pretty quickly. Yeah well I mean the board doesn't give me enough time. Oh it doesn't. We need 10 days. Got you. What about is the eighth taken policy? Policy could be could the policy committee give up that meeting? We could do that if folks could commit to the eighth. I could do that. I would be willing to give up the policy committee meeting for that. I mean it's really policy committee work right? That would be great and we'll do a special just for that. Okay and I'll get it in the paper Thursday. Just so you know but I don't I'm unavailable the 8th through the 18th so but 6 p.m. 6 p.m. Great. Good. All right we're good to go. Okay. Sharon. Look at us going guys. We're almost on the bottom of the page. Awesome. Thank you guys. Thanks everybody for working so hard on this. Thanks for your up again. I'm great. All right I'm here to talk about the universal screening that we did in September from all of our schools. Ray is going to pull up. I just made a couple of slides to make it a little bit easier to see the graphs. I think hopefully you had a chance to look at it on your on your own. A couple of things that are important for just understanding the report. So we use a number of different assessments. A lot of them have been laid out in that kind of assessment calendar that we sent out earlier in the year. Some of them are better sort of for using across all schools and tracking in sort of this kind of regular way across the course of the year. So the Star 360 which I believe you've been looking at for a couple of years now is one of them. We have added a second assessment system called Track My Progress which is is for the same purposes and we're just trying it out at two schools this year. So in some of this data you're going to see sort of two sets of results. They're not you can't compare them to each other because they are sitting on different systems so we'll look at that but they are we believe they're sort of assessing the same content for our students. I think that's the and then we'll look at this data again in February and then at the end of the year and be part of how we monitor progress across the whole SU. So the first slide here is the data for reading. We use this assessment for grades 3 through 10 and this is the basic sort of proficiency whether they sort of our students are meeting the proficiency benchmark for the fall or not and so it's a it's a kind of that binary that cutoff and overall you can see across grades 3 through 10 51 percent of our kids are and there's a relative like relative consistency across all grade levels. We do you know you see a little bit of a drop down there in grade 6 so that's making you know making us wonder. Grade 6 is you know looks different in all of our schools in some ways you know it's the middle school it might be part of an elementary school so it's an area where we could do some good work across the SU and to grow you know where grade 6 you know really working well for our kids where can we learn some lessons so it's a it does stick out as being kind of in a it's in multiple places and then we've I think we talked about it a little bit in our last meeting we do have assessment data on grades 1 and 2 we don't have this kind of data for them but these assessment platforms do offer the assessments for that grade level so we're going to probably test drive some of that in some of our schools and at the next round and see if we get information that we think is helpful how our students do and it is a computer adaptive test so there are some reasons why we don't do it for kids but our kids are coming increasingly more more facile on the computers at that age and so there is there could be an argument now that we wouldn't have made a couple of years ago for doing that that assessment with the younger grade so we'll we'll try that out and and be back and see if that gives us information that's helpful for understanding where our kiddos are at that level I just pulled into this slide show the the results from the spring state summit event reading just so you would see sort of where we were close to the end of the year last year we looked at this this is the same data we looked at in at the beginning of the year in August when we looked at that result and that's just so you can see again we're the darker line and the lighter line is the scaled score for meeting expectations and this is on average so you know there are places where we are pretty close to that places where a little further away if you go to the next slide you can see a little bit hard with but this is again the same as in the report the darker line again is our schools and the lighter line is what has been established as the state benchmark for the fall and so in a lot of places we're tracking really closely to that I think one of that shows that we don't maybe didn't have a huge summer slide which I think it's good we had a lot of good programming going on at one planet in other places we so that's it's good if you saw we saw if we saw it's not exactly the same test obviously but if we saw a big change we'd have some more concerns about what was going on in the summer so that's that's good and again this is where I was explaining earlier track my progress uh schools are that lower line star 360 or the higher line they've just established different scaled scores for their test it's not that one test is a lot harder or a lot easier than the other they've just they're two different companies so I can't combine them um but they're both being tracked against what is established as a state benchmark trying to be predictive of how students would do at the end of the year on the summer so in reading again I think we are pretty pretty close to the uh where we where we want to be on an average and in some places you know we want to be exceeding that so any questions I just keep going through if anyone has questions please just kind of raise your hand you don't have to hold it till the very end we've got the same set of slides looking at math so math we actually do start testing at in first grade so we have data from first through tenth grade again this is an area that we have not been focusing on with the same you know the same concentration of literacy across the SU before this year and I think we'll you know look we are hoping that a lot of the the time and resources we're investing in math will start to shift this picture um overall we've got about a third of kids are meeting or exceeding in the expectations um and there's a lot more um change across the grade level so it's not as you know not as consistently around um some places you know the grades are looking a lot stronger than other places um we are pretty impressed with uh how our grade one did you know their first shot at this and so looking at you know what you know what are they coming in with from kindergarten and how do we build on that foundation because they've literally got some some really good foundational skills for us to work with um and then we do see uh quite a pretty good drop-off in middle school we do have a lot it's a much smaller number of kids especially in our seventh and eighth grade cohorts so I guess as soon as your group gets smaller that um you know the numbers get a little bit noisier because a little bit of change will reflect more looks bigger but I still think we have uh some work to do around looking at both the curriculum and the instructional practices in the in the in the middle school grades to make sure that we've got high expectations and teaching that math is that to um to uh improve that sort of that score uh this again is the score from the spring the aspect of state summative and so uh you saw this in august it's pretty far off of the of the scaled score for meeting expectations and then if we look at um the scaled score for the the screening in the fall go ahead and put the next one uh the gap is not so big again it's not exactly the same scale um but you can see really the in the elementary grades we're tracking along pretty well the middle grade starts to really see that gap and then a little bit of a tail back in when we hit nice and temporary so you know we'll certainly have our focus on the middle all the grades but um the special attention to middle school and see what we can do um to close that gap from a systems perspective so i'll just add i just want to remind excuse me remind the board we're in just starting year three of our literacy work and you know research would really say it takes three to five years for this type of change so we take hold so i want folks to here we are not taking our foot off the gas pedal around literacy at all all right it is absolutely focused on that in addition to saying we have to serve our students really well in mathematics um i will tell you that expectations therefore have increased i think there is a greater pressure on our journalist teachers at the elementary level i think they would tell you that so i will echo that for them that doesn't mean though that we don't have to be really sound in both literacy and mathematics and oh by the way we do need to start to focus at science at some point here as well right and so um what i will tell you is that in literacy there's really two things we're focusing on it's really on strengthening our core content knowledge in phonics and then it's going to be on writing okay we've got good practices in general around what a strong literacy block looks like and around guided reading that work is still in place and we'll continue to implement it with fidelity but those are the other two pieces in literacy and then in math we're just starting this launch this is just year one and so our focus is on strengthening teacher content knowledge it was making certain that we have common core aligned materials i will tell you we did it in some places it's also making certain we have the same common materials in a building we had multiple buildings where we were not using the same materials so we had multiple programs within a building and so those are the steps we're taking right now in mathematics we also were not teaching math for an hour a day and so what we know is that we need at least 60 minutes a day of explicit math instruction and support if we want to really get to what we want to get to in regards to the common core state standards and so one of the things we did when i shared back in may those uh non-negotiables around our multi-cured system of supports a bunch of those non-negotiables were focused on establishing just some minimum instructional requirements because we know if we want to meet student need universal instruction instruction for all is where it's at we can't fix the fact that 33 only 33 percent of our students are meeting the expectation through intervention intervention is not going to solve that right it's going to be high quality universal instruction from the classroom teacher and so that's where we're focusing we have implemented math intervention as well because we do know that we need to have targeted math interventionists and what i would say to you is is that there are some schools that started this work more so last year and i think if you look at our elementary math data you'll start to see that we are closing that gap more which is a positive i said that was a real celebration when it on that i was sitting down because i felt like some of that work that we had started in certain schools last year is paying off already so i would expect us to see the data change more swiftly in math then you're necessarily going to see in literacy this year and year three but we should continue to see literacy grow if we start to plateau then we're going to have to dive deeper because that would be a problem we're not at a place where these with this data should plateau and when you look at the goals they speaks to the fact that we have to continue to grow maybe just one more comment on this on this data before we move to the next section or any or any questions is just to note that the the benchmark failed scores that you're looking at in each of those graphs that we are you know that we are we're trying to aim for as our average um those are it's the best way to say they're seasonal they're for right now so that's where that's where kids are expected to grow so those will shift when we come back in um in february and show and show and present on the january data those numbers will all have gone up because they will have accounted for student growth over that time i just don't want you to say that we're trying to like move in the the goal post because it just it does it gets moved so every um the scale score is trying to mention like where kids should be right now in the school year where they should be in the middle of the year where they should be by the end of the year and so that's that's how those numbers will change thank you all right anything on that before we move to the yeah for the next one knows it isn't yeah is that okay just to go to the next one yeah okay so i think we were tasked at the end of the what month we at the end of the september meeting um to come up with some proposed uh goals uh specifically talking about achievement um that that you all could uh talk about as a as a um as an su board um and think about whether we do with set these as sort of the our goals for the for the coming year so um we went back and uh looked at sort of that conversation and what we um were proposed and here are the three that we are um are proposing right now is there with some some intermediate roles in between there so the first one and again we talked a lot about the scale score but it would be that for all the grades assessed on the statewide summative assessment that our all of our schools will gain an average scale score that exceeds the proficient range in el a and an average scale score that was within the proficient range in mathematics the difference in those those goals is is based on kind of where we are currently we do see that our performance in el a is higher we were um i think at least a couple people mentioned trying to you know stretch these goals so um we we set it to exceed if we can look at um a little bit later what that means between in terms of exceeding the range and within the range um we talked a lot about average and that's an important way to look at the whole system um and making sure that everyone's moving up but we um we also have you know particular concern for students who are you know scoring in what is considered level one or not yet meeting expectations that's um and so really paying close attention to those kids um and trying to reduce that that number of kids in that group by half um by 2025 so that would be fewer than 15 percent of students in um scoring level one in el a and fewer than 20 percent of students scoring level one in math um and then the third goal again i think came out of the conversation that we had in september we don't necessarily have the right assessment um right now to to create a new numerical goal but that we'd have um we have all students in grades catered to applying foundational skills and literacy and math that set them up for success in later grades so that is praise and really more of a placeholder way as i mentioned earlier we're looking at test driving sort of the the computer adaptive assessments in grades one and two um for reading and uh i think if that turns out to be something that works well we don't and we don't have any concerns with that and i think that we would base our we looked uh in the in the spring get that data and then set a goal that would then um be going for it after that so that's um that's where we are right now i think the next um so this is i think i showed this in the in the in september this is comes out of the states every uh vermont's every student succeeds act plan and where they set these four levels of performance and you can see sort of where they've got the proficient scale score the midpoint and above the upper kind of the upper bound the numbers in here were developed in 2016 so these are not necessarily the most current numbers and we believe number that will be released by the state in january um and that's we probably would use to set the goal for 2025 but this just to give you an idea when we talk about being within the proficiency range or being or trying to exceed it it would look it would be kind of drawing off of um numbers in a in a chart like this all right next one um and then also just because we're setting up that goal at 2025 again that's what the state has got in their in their plan also setting some interim targets um by taking the difference between our current performance and that goal and then you know dividing it up evenly across the four years between now in 2025 again these numbers may change as we get updated information from the from the state but it would still be the it would still set the same process for determining kind of the interim targets and the and the final goal and the same thing for math so i don't think the individual numbers are probably not that important you can see with math that the goal is you know the each each year we've got sort of a a bigger a bigger space to grow and um because we're just starting at a bit of a lower spot there and then around the second goal this isn't thinking about really moving as many more kids out of that level one performance range so it would be looking at how many we have currently in in level one that was 29 percent of our kids in eLA and 41 percent of our kids in math um reducing that in half uh and then again trying to set interim targets by dividing that over the four years and then the last one again is is more of a placeholder based really thinking about those foundational skills that our kids in uh k2 um have before they sort of head into the the middle um the upper elementary and into middle school and the plan would be to have a dashboard on our su website that communicates this and that those interim targets we would highlight where we've been meeting or exceeding and or not meeting the benchmark um so that that information would be public and easily accessible not just in a report like you could click on a tab and this would be updated and live um and we're looking to redo our websites over the next year is it anyways just just to remind folks so that's a feature that I think we could we could definitely try to look to implement maybe just one other sort of comment is maybe been better with the earlier with the achievement report but I think we it is important just to remember with all this and I especially think about any of sort of the teachers who maybe maybe listening in that we are still like fully aware that we are in in the middle of a pandemic um and that uh you know a lot of the expectations that come out in these tests and in the state reports don't necessarily reflect that there's not really a numerical way to reflect what has happened I mean um over the last 18 months and you know what will continue to happen is you know kids have to miss school uh if they get sick and that sort of thing so I just I I just say that because I think I want to make sure you know it is something that is on top of mine all the time for us is that we are keeping high expectation for kids and also really recognizing that um it is a it is more than a challenging time for them and and the some of the ways that we measure performance have not adjusted um and so we have to just keep in mind as we're thinking about you know what what are the things that we're doing what are we pushing on our kids need the best education they can get they need our best instruction um and we have to understand it within this wider context that we don't have much experience and except for the last uh we'll ask them in one month so any questions any questions I might have that hi Megan Megan do you have a question hi just a quick question I just was thinking when you're talking about um looking for a way to assess the younger kids I'm just thinking about the time that they're spending you know they may be competent on the um computer but considering measuring how much time they're spending with a screen I'm wondering if that's part of the conversation as you think about how to present those numbers yeah no I think that's I think that's a really good point a lot of the um a lot of the I mean a computer adaptive test we've have especially on this newer platform we have how much time each kid is taking on the test so I think that is that will be an important part to see is this something that is you know that that is taking relatively little time compared to the the time they're spending school or is it something that is taking up a you know a lot more time so I think that's a good point and can be part of sort of when you look at uh overall what um what platform we want to go with I think that's a good one to to be thinking about um as we move towards uh the proficiency based grading I mean basically the teachers will be writing updates on how they I mean each report card basically how many proficiencies they think each kid has like is that something we could use for that k-2 group yeah I think that yeah I think that would be helpful I think there's a lot of I mean I think a lot of rich conversation around um what yeah what the proficiencies are and how to how to sort of assess them um could make it really yeah a rich time to do that too yeah I think it's difficult to compare between teachers and buildings maybe but so yeah I mean there I think yeah I think there's sometimes that's the I mean we hope to have the same we hope to have the same proficiencies across our you know our buildings because they are um you know they are sort of at a level of where you know all you know all students are getting there um and I think the the calibration of between teachers which is also what we work on and when we think about the benchmark assessment system the reading that all of our students um in the younger grades do but it's not necessarily great for reporting out because they haven't all been sort of calibrated in the same way you know a computer test has been so that's that's the balance some of the time that gives us more information on the classroom in the student level but not necessarily helpful system-wide information so I think that's but it's a good I think having these ideas are good for as we figure out exactly what's the right um thing to measure sort of our progress on anybody else I have um of course I really like this and where we're going and this is really where the rubber hits the road um we're working so hard um and so many ways and I'm not talking about myself I'm talking about the people that are in the front lines in the classroom um but we really need to know what the score is and we need to have a target of what the source should be and so we can we can truly measure and so I'm really really excited about what we heard tonight and the superintendents say not only are we talking about this at the board level or the district board level but I want to have it right on the website create a dashboard so that the parents um and the community members are trying to figure out is this worth it or this this public education effort is it worth what we're asking them to pay they can see the results um and and some will be will be you know marching up and down other ones who are going to be be challenging but I just think that is the way to go um I didn't see the material you just presented in the packet so I and I don't have my long-range glasses so I appreciate through the chair if you could make that available to all SU board members and district board members because I think it's so so so so important and that we Kathy that we continue this agenda meeting in our next meeting where we've had a chance to look at and think about um what's been presented tonight um because at some point I I believe the board should should should say yeah this is this should be our SU goals for this year and the interim for the next it doesn't mean next year we don't change our our goals but I think that's important for the staff to say okay this is this is this is what we're shooting for and um I also told you before also helpful if that's the goal then we're doing our budget do we have a budget that's going to be able to allow us to achieve those goals going forward and to me that's the number one budget question um so that's helpful as well I think as far as seeing things clearly it would be helpful I love these graphs but it'd be wonderful if we could see the graphs and okay and here's and I know the numbers are change going to be changed for the the January scores um but I still think you can show okay and here's our goal okay now I could say the numbers are going to change but does that mean we're all marks are above this I think I heard one thing it didn't hear but to be able to see it graphically on them the reading and on the map and the same one thing with here um if we achieve our goal how's this going to look different well the blue is going to be moving in this direction um and and the orange is going to be contracting as well so you're and I think that for one board member um what we can kind of see what we're talking about here and if the change is so minute that I can't see it then I'm saying well is it really meaningful um so those are two suggestions and I'm sure you can come up with better ones but to the extent that the board can see what you're proposing I don't have a chance to kind of look at it I'm boy I think um this is going to be one of the the most outstanding things we have done in a long long time um and it's and it's a credit to the superintendent team for doing this and the board supported this so thank you I agree thank you I wanted to largely echo what Bill said I I'm really excited seeing these goals and hearing some enthusiasm around how we're going to meet them I also really really appreciate the transparency of the dashboard um keeping everyone updated I would only add uh to under um that you know I do feel like at some to some degree this kind of can't just all be on the position of the educators and if there are opportunities uh for community engagement be it libraries or after school programming or tutoring to you know help in any capacity um you know you should let us know and we could see what's available in our communities but I do think that um it's very exciting to think that we could get here um and to see a plan for getting there so thanks for putting this together thank you so we'll send that what I think we'll do is we'll send up that slideshow and uh we'll work on goal number three some more um and then we'll look to have it on the agenda again next month for possible action does that sound good agree I think it sounds great quick all right sure yeah you didn't jump in you guys know I love budget so it's that it's that policy statement that's so critical as Bill just said so this is uh again this is our first shot right uh and this budget this part is really focused on personnel just so you know um you're going to get much more detail on November and then we're going to give you another one in December if in November we're feeling like we're way off we're probably going to need a special meeting just so you know because we like you to adopt the SU budget in December because it drives the rest of your local budgets so just be keeping that in mind um so you can look at this budget and I think that there's real celebration once again where we're currently in special education that was increasing significantly um prior to us really trying to do a better job at formalizing our system of support so I think all the work that our classroom teachers are doing in our interventionist is paying off because if you look right now I'm just personnel we're we're at point two percent um from 22 to 23 and so I think that that's a huge celebration um in the special ed realm in regards to personnel and you may say well do you have enough support I would say absolutely if we could get to the levels of staffing we want to be currently right now what's budget in 22 we'd be in good shape I want to remind you that we're still short right we're gaining but we're not at what we want to be what we budgeted is not what we've been able to hire to this point um and so that's that's a huge celebration we'll continue to tweak that I don't think that that number is you're going to see that probably change for next month um and then the biggest changes above is that we are looking to um add a position in the curriculum department underneath onda in this suggested budget um and that is because the more that we're digging in to our curriculum right now we're realizing it is it needs work um and what I mean by is clearly articulating again publicly and ensuring that our teachers have vertical alignment around what we expect students to no understand and do in each content area throughout each grade level cluster so that it is clear what we expect a student to be able to do in literacy math um science global studies physical education at the end of grade two like it is clear it's articulate anyone can understand it we have common rubrics that we use to measure it we have pieces of this but I will tell you there is a great deal of growth that needs to happen and as we look at it and think about how do we make this happen in a really responsive way that's timely I do believe we're going to need extra support in that area that's focused on that work um and so you'll see that there is a change in that department there okay um the there's really not any other changes really of the substance in the other departments other than I don't want you to think we've lost the pre-k coordinator all right we have not lost a pre-k coordinator what we have is if you remember we have Renee Hinton that's a pre-k coordinator slash interventionist okay and so that position is still in the organization it's Renee Hinton who you have we just took we used to have a fully part-time pre-k coordinator um that was more on like an admin type contract and an interventionist and we merged those two positions um and that seems to be working well right now and so you'll see that reflected in the budget but I didn't want folks thinking that we lost that if you looked in my board report I'm actually going to continue to tell the fact that we need to continue to invest in our pre-k um that that investment is significantly um crucial to make certain our kids have what they need to succeed in the earlier we can intervene better um and so you'll see that the other change I will tell you that's in the special ed budget is is that we are looking to have 2.0 triple e teachers where right now we have uh 1.6 so we're looking to increase that so we have two full-time triple e teachers to do more early intervention that's reflected in this budget just so you know and that's captured in the fiscal year 23 budget um another one of the areas where we've saved some money in special education just so you know when you're looking and saying how are we keeping special ed essentially flat is we have saved pretty significantly by partnering with our community mental health organization so by us contracting services with clare martin to provide therapeutic intervention in our buildings um and for us to have case managers from clare martin who are able to do social emotional supports in each one of our intensive programs um that are house here in royalton and bevel so our alternative programming that was formerly known as the restorative classroom we used we used to hire private clinicians to come in and do that work where now we are able to partner with community mental health and get folks that have the same credentials if not even a little higher but at a much more affordable um and sustainable cost and it allows us to pipeline into all the other wraparound services that clare martin can offer um and so that's part of where too we've able to um really see some savings financially around some efficiency there and um the other thing again as I said the budget would change you've probably saw my report we are identifying that we are currently right now in our system of supports lacking in regards to best supporting students who have um kind of global cognitive delay and or who are on the autism spectrum um and so we have a meeting in that night in terra with the central romont supervisory union which is in uh northfield williams town washington orange to talk about if they had any interest in partnering as two supervisory unions to provide programming that would best serve those students um i think we have a a great deal of growth we need to do as a system in that area i think and that would occur concur um they feel like they do too so i'll be able to share with you in november if that's coming to any fruition um the idea would be able to better to partner to better better provide services for our students but to do that and again another another fiscally responsible manner right now we have to contract out for that and or look at more restrictive learning environments to meet those needs and so we would look to try to partner to better do that um in-house but with uh with a collaboration across the two s years um and so those are the big highlights of the budget i'll let terra jump in too but i i want you to see the intensive program coordinator these are covered partly by esser and some of them are covered also by our title funds okay um which we won't be losing we know we're going to be losing essers so as we look at your local budgets there's times where we're going to be looking to budget in intervention even though we may have it covered by esser funding at the moment so that we don't lose it um when esser funds leave and so that's something i've talked to many of you about at the local budget around the idea that we need to keep those positions as placeholders um and keep them in the local budgets even though we may have federal revenue right now that we're able to use um to support those positions but we need to ensure that we don't lose that i also believe that as we strengthen our system we should need less intervention uh in some of our districts we have a lot of interventionists that we should be able to start to see decrease in regards to academic academic intervention that doesn't mean we're we're losing staff it just means their assignments may change and so the monies that we already have budgeted for that intervention we'll be able to utilize that to ensure that mass covered as well right so we shouldn't need as much reading intervention as our reading improves we should be able to take some of that funding and transfer it to ensure that we have reading in math where prior to this year it was all focused on reading we didn't have any math intervention um questions thoughts um i know that the eight percent number may flag people if you look um again the big chunk of that really is in regards to getting some additional support around curriculum alignment um and that's not to say by the way that we can't use some grant funding to cover some of that position i don't want you to think that that would all be funded locally but i think it's important for you to see that difference and then again we'll continue to work on the special ed budget as well but i would i tell i will tell you that i have no reason to believe that we can't keep it in a reasonable range but delivery hopefully even better programming um and we'll see how that partnership works out potentially with cvsu megan has a question and you'll see the full budget in november where the local budgets we do in december we you'll see all the budget lines next month uh because we're going to be looking to get comment again so that if we have to have two meetings in december we will um but that we're looking to try to have this wrapped up in december right any thoughts common questions thoughts did i miss anything no you did a fantastic job all right um board retreat if you discuss the suggestions dates and times what was the suggested date well i mean i suggested some saturdays just because you don't have other board meetings or commitments uh it seems like maybe saturdays are not great for folks so um i guess i'm open to suggestion it seems like sarah might have a great one no i don't i just have a question to clarify one how much what are we talking about a whole day meeting or are we talking more you know three what are we talking about i suggested nine to twelve on a saturday and i suggested that only because we had done it in rochester stock bridge and i found it to be a really positive meeting i'm looking at bill because he's next to me we did that sarah and then we had lunch yeah um you know we wrapped up by 1245 and i felt like we all came in with fresh hat at least a fresh mind at least i did right like i came i knew that's the only thing on my mind i didn't have a bunch of things that had hit my plate already prior in the day and it just it felt pretty conducive to an actual retreat um so that's why i suggested the saturdays but i get that we're also coming up to a busy time of year for folks too with holidays and things so and hunting so what saturday did you get i really didn't get good feedback on any of the saturdays i mean only eight people have filled it out thus far so that's not even a quorum but i the best saturday got was four and that was for a week from this saturday and then i got four people who said saturdays don't work um so do we have a commitment from the board to do this well i would wonder and i know that everyone is sick of zoom but my conflict is a childcare one on weekends um so either we could have it at campus and people with kids like someone wants to bring their kid to play with my kids you'll play with anyone on a playground for three hours um or uh you know i'm happy to i guess take it by you know i can sit on zoom for three hours i've done it many times i don't think that retreat really works on zoom i don't think so but you know i think if we want participation we might have to consider that as an option especially if we try and do it on weekends um unless we move a little bit further out into uh the spring time yeah i think that we're entering a time of year i mean not only with added meetings for budget but also Thanksgiving Hanukkah Christmas that so it makes it you know make that's that makes it difficult i think um but i also i mean i believe that we need to be in it will be better if we're together um and i think that the sharing of a meal is a really important part of it too so i like the nine to you know 1245 or whatever just because i think that's an important part of of it but cool um what if we we thought about like doing something in February like that's kind of everybody's downtime you're sick of the winter you're sick of being inside perhaps we would be enjoying going out and having lunch with each other at that point in time um we've all gone through our budget season and done all that and uh new mind minds looking towards the following year so cut to your suggestion that February would be great as half a day maybe uh to me the public is nice yeah we'll take Jamie's jet i i i think that's great too i don't think there's any magical time i think it's impossible given the fact that by definition people on boards are busy people yeah this isn't the only commitment this is not the only thing that people do uh to take care of their community um and and their jobs and responsibilities and so i do want to report the retreat we had in rochester and stock bridges well attended part of them's getting to know each other uh about half our board were new putting myself so uh and being there in person made a difference um and it wasn't like we're making a ton of decisions that's not the first it was kind of get together build the team as the sense of a group and discuss some interesting things and uh i agree sharing food is it's a wonderful way to do it so i don't think we have to have 100 participation i would really encourage to throw that net out again and see what other people haven't responded whether we can get response um and then we can make a make a decision so you want to do that jimmy try throwing it out again so we can get everything soon and um or do you want to try getting something soon billy's justing or i'm not i don't think it's a magical time and this is a busy time i do think there's something important about coming together and so February is not too late to me what about if we throw a date out and sort of i mean it's so what i'm thinking of is February 5th it's a Saturday put it out now that was people three months to to work around their schedules and plan it you know put it in um sometimes it's easier to put a date out than to put a lot of dates out and try to get people to this you know to say yeah i can do this one but not that you know so and it gives us that opportunity to go back to our local board to talk about it you know what i mean like go back and remind people and you know what i mean like you can take i can take it the effort board and say hey this is the day we're planning the full board retreat okay i mean it's three three four months out you know i mean i'm gonna be as ready that you know i can plan around it yeah i i agree and you know if i if i know that there's something coming up in February then i can line up some childcare help if i need it i also think if we push off till February you know we are in the middle of a pretty serious covid surge in our state right now if we push up till February more of us will have had the opportunity to get boosters and hopefully those of us with children will be able to get them vaccinated so i think that pushing it forward a few months to me makes a little bit more sense from a covid consciousness point of view sounds like we got February 5th February 5th our date look at us and our teamwork um Ray's gonna send you all an invite here in the next 10 minutes um action i think we're just gonna table that until next month when it looks the same and our resignation through hires any other business tonight anybody no uh next meeting date is monday november 22nd where uh let's see so we got our next meeting date is actually going to be remember november 8th as shearing we just put a special on for the policy for policy yeah so that one will be back to beffle we agree we would go down and then back down i want to reiterate that we can be at the su office right now so i'm not sure we're going to schools but the that's what it was deciding when you guys set the meeting locations but we're mostly virtual so it kind of made makes sense to have it at the su office but we can discuss that next month if it if it turns out it's not like that i think we should go back to the sectional office i think i'm my staff and i are fine but having to be at the su office yeah and i drove there tonight because i got a habit and realized oh crap we changed it um um so the 22nd is that Thanksgiving week for uh it's uh what was that a full board it's a full board meeting do we want to try to have a meeting Thanksgiving week or should we try to that's the monday of thanksgiving so that i mean i think we could hold it off Americans are allowed to give thanks until Wednesday of that week i thought okay all right on that note i think i'm going to have a voting motion to adjourn all right thank you everybody don't move we're adjourned bye bye