 I'm calling to order the monthly respiratory school for the director's meeting. Once in a moment, 20th, 2019, it's 336. We're just called to order the public comment. Come on up. You can either go to the microphone or the table, whichever you're more comfortable with. I'll see you here. Thank you. Please keep your name. Sure. Folks at home who you are and who you are. Sure. So hi, good evening. My name is David Hall. I am a resident of Montpelier, over on North Street. I have three kids in the schools, one in high school, two in middle school. And this is the first time I've joined you guys. So I guess the first thing I wanna say is to each of you, thank you so, so very much for the time that you volunteer to do this. I work for the legislature. I'm an attorney there for the legislative council. I believe in public service. I wish I did more of it, and I appreciate what you do. So thank you. I came now in the public comment period because I won't be able to join Peter Sterling later. And I just wanted to sort of articulate two points to you about access to facilities. When people, I was saying to my wife, when people come to my committees of jurisdiction and they ask for change, but they don't exactly say what the change is they seek. It's not super helpful. I wish I had something to tell you that would solve what I see is not problems, it's good problems, but it's an issue. The first is access for people like me, old men who play basketball. At the peak of my season, I play on Monday nights up at Doty, I play Wednesday nights at Romney School, Friday mornings at the rec center gym, Sunday mornings at the rec center gym. Having all those opportunities is great. I would say that most of the friendships I have in the city are based around some basketball game. That's how I met people, that's how I know people. And it's a community building thing. And so I just wanna say at the most general level, anything that you can do to support and increase access to the court facilities at the schools, I promise you as a return on the community investment. And I don't, my fear, not my fear, but I just hope that we can not have it be cost-prohibitive for a lot of people to be able to use those facilities because this is an expensive endeavor at this point. The other point I wanted to raise is in my capacity as a coach in rec basketball, I've coached for many years in coaching my son's team this year. This year, five, six grade boys, we have almost 30 kids from three teams. And we don't even get two full practices a week. We have one full practice at the rec center gym and then we have to share slots among the 30 players. That gym is tiny. And then we play all our games at the middle school, which is the court, it's twice as big. And I was looking at the high school athletic calendar. I understand that the high school and middle school facilities are also heavily utilized during basketball seasons. I guess knowing that the city council is gonna be looking at the rec center and possibly investing a lot of money in working on that property, understanding that we have a limited capacity in the schools for access to courts. I just wanna put my two cents in and say, anything that you can do, anything that we can do to increase the amount of facilities and the time available, facilities for teams and for residents is great. No easy answers, I understand that. Just wanted to put my two cents in on the record. That's it. Thank you very much for your time. Anyone else? You? Okay, all right. Thanks for your time. Thanks for your time. Okay, I'm good. All right, I'll have a public comment. To consent agenda, do you need to pull the jewelry board? I think we should pull that out, I would propose that. Yeah, I didn't know where to put it. No. Okay, do you want to add it? I don't have anything, why don't we add it to the regular agenda and the executive session since now is the time to amend the agenda, but we might not need to have anything in the executive session. Okay. We've got that between now and then. So I'll make a motion then to consent agenda minus the jewel legal action. I'll second that. I'll submit it. All right. Any opposed? Great. Now we're on to Lindsay and Mary. So I wrote an email to the board because of the snow day, Lindsay was working with NHS students to present and they had planned that day to practice presenting. So they asked to be rescheduled. Okay. So they are rescheduled for December 18th. They are already on that agenda for that. So we have Mary Bechtel here. Mary is the district social emotional learning coordinator who the board was very smart in putting into the budget last year. She comes to us from Michigan and through mental health agencies here in Vermont and now to us, right? And Mary is phenomenal. She's been an amazing addition to our staff. She has a wealth of knowledge that us educators who talk about reading and learning all the time don't have. And so this fall, Mary has come in and done an audit of our systems in regards to social emotional learning, behaviors, discipline and all that kind of stuff in the systems we have in place with our lack thereof. And so she is going to present the findings to you all tonight with a whole lot of data. And some things jump out at us quite, you'll see right away. You'll see right away that we collect data in very different ways across our four schools. Mary's gonna talk about probably, I bet she'll mention, how hard it is to put your fingers on data of this type in our district. And several other things that are, that are themes across the district and at the end she'll point us to directions. We need to move forward around systems with social emotional learning. So this is a big area of focus for us right now. Leadership is struggling right now with social emotional learning. There's no, like I'm not gonna sugarcoat that in any way. They are struggling and spending a large majority of their time on a small number of students who are showing very crisis-oriented behaviors. There's probably a better term for that, but Mary will use better terms than I will. So I'll let Mary while I'm pulling up her PowerPoint, I'll let her give you a little bit of her background. But please welcome Mary. Thank you. Thank you for that very kind introduction. I come from Michigan via Florida through both mental health and education systems. I'm a clinical licensed social worker and also a certified school social worker. And I've kind of gone back and forth between hospital mental health settings, mostly acute settings and also working behind the scenes with case management with funding sources. And then also working with both as a practitioner in schools. Prior to 2006, I was really doing more traditional social work, where I was doing groups with kids and things of that nature, working with kids individually. And then it started working with the Michigan's Integrated Behavior and Learning Support Initiative, where my job really changed in its function to learning about systems and how to impact student social emotional learning and even academic kinds of getting outcomes through a multi-tiered system of support. So really was working as a systems coach and also helping schools and districts that I was working with to implement training and coaching pieces to make sure that practices, good evidence-based practices were implemented with fidelity. And so when I left Michigan, I was working as a technical assistance partner in managing the training and coaching activities in a region about the size of Vermont. And so I'm actually really excited to come back and be working in a district because I like to be closer to the work. And it's really the work, you know, it's happening. But I'm excited to be able to bring that perspective. And I don't have a clicker. So, you know, to the work here in the framework that I operate out of is just a multi-tiered system of support. You know, where we're looking at what kind of social emotional learning and behavior support activities are happening for all kids in across the buildings. You know, and then layering on top of that supports and practices for some kids who might need more with regard to social emotional learning supports. And then we're gonna have some kids who need a more intensive approach just like with reading or math or any other academic subject. The systems are really the same. Typically though, people think of behavior and social emotional learning differently. They have a hard time kind of sometimes making that switch to be able to think about it that way. So that's part of the work. And then also helping us set the systems. And what we always wanna do is start with data so that we're using actual real data to drive our decision making, especially when it comes to behavior and social emotional learning. There's oftentimes emotional reactions that adults have and there can be a lot of anecdotal talks. We wanna try to really move to what is really happening and how can we use that data to drive decision making. So, we'll be given this task to us to gather the data that's there in the buildings. And people were great coming together to try to pull together for this presentation tonight. And we're gonna go through it. But just starting with district-wide data, just to give a quick snapshot, we have students with a variety of needs in the district. And this is really a district where I think over the decades has really relied on the fact that it's a pretty affluent district. Kids have been coming into the schools with a lot of social emotional skills already part of who they are. And they know how to be a student and they are able to emotionally regulate. What we are having here is just a breakdown. So we know that we have about 130 students who have individual education plans and about 15% of those are specifically for students who have an emotional impairment. They're diagnosed with social emotional condition that's requiring a specialized plan. And that's only about one in 10 students that have an individual education plan. But 88 of them are on 504s. And again, those are students who've been identified with anxiety, depression, ADD, eating disorders, things like that. So in any class, about one out of every 10 students has an IP, almost one out of 10 has a 504. And then we have our education support team process that's identifying through teacher referral and sometimes data, students who are generally exhibiting externalizing behaviors. They're acting out in the class in a way that's disrupting the school. And so then what happens is those kids are brought to that EST process to try to figure out how to support them. And that adds another one or two kids per class. And then we also have internalizers. Kids who are really anxious that we haven't been identified for 504. And so the point here is about out of every 10 kids in the class, five of them are struggling with some sort of social emotional issue that can impact their learning pretty significantly. And so this is what we're gonna kind of dive into a little bit here. So we're gonna just go through each school and talk about what they're seeing in their buildings. And then we'll talk about how they're trying to address this in their buildings currently. And then talk about how we can take a step back and look at how we can do this in a very intentional and systematic way. Okay, so Union Elementary School is using a data collection program called SWIS. And so they're working really hard to get their information entered into that program. And their referrals entered into the program. And they are doing a pretty good job with that. The Linda's assistant principal there is really in charge of kind of making sure that some of this work is happening when she's been doing a fantastic job. It's not an easy job to get this kind of system up and running. If you look at this data, what you'll see is that a large portion of the referrals that they're seeing, which means really when kids are leaving the classroom because of some sort of behavior or going to the office because of some sort of behavior is aggression and physical contact. And so we wanna keep this in context. This is an elementary school. And so if kids are, you know, be rough with each other, then this is the kind of thing that they do some instruction on how to relate to others in a way that's not even putting their hands in each other, how to resolve conflicts in different ways. So we wanna keep that in context. There are some of these that are really are unsafe behaviors that are reflected in this data, but those are kind of grouped together if you wanna look at it. And then there's, you can look there and see what kinds of other referrals that they have. What's the meaning, Gigi? Yeah, aggression, aggression. What, say that again? The last one, is that aggression? It's aggression, physical aggression. And so the difference between physical aggression and, you know, contact is really if a student actually is sort of hitting or pushing, that's aggression. And the other piece is, you know, maybe it's just the shoving piece. But again, some of those behavior, they're actually working really hard over there right now to make sure that that's really operationally defined. And, you know, some of that's teacher perception. Sometimes, you know, if a child is shoving someone, you know, and then two minutes later, they're okay. It's really an opportunity for learning. Other times, there really are students who are being, you know, physically aggressive and creating an unsafe situation for themselves and staff and others. And so they're really working on delineating that. But the point here, I guess the big pitch, the big idea is that what kids are doing with their bodies and how they're expressing themselves with their bodies is an area to be addressed. Does that make sense? I forgot to say, Mary, in the beginning, too, she's got so much information here, so that's a quickie, but let's hold, like, bigger questions till the end. She'll lose time for that. So write down your questions. I just forgot to say that. Sorry, Mary, go. And this school's also taking this data just so, you know, and looking at it on a regular basis and using it to drive their decision-making, they've gotten started with that in a really good way. So we'll talk about that a little bit more. But this is just showing how there's, you know, you can, does this have a pointer on it? Right here, you can see, you know, there's about 10 or 12 or 15 students, I think it's 15, who really are being identified as, you know, needing support on a pretty regular basis. And so what is important about this is we know this is happening. We can predict it, we can prevent it. And so a first step in this is using this data to start asking questions about, you know, what's going on with these particular students? What do they need? You know, why is this so hard for them? If you look here, you can see that the vast majority of these referrals are coming right out of the classroom. And so these behaviors are, you know, oftentimes disrupting instruction. And so that's an area to be addressed. And then this is pretty typical. The other behaviors are on the playground. You see that a lot in elementary schools, you know. So that's not a big surprise. And then you can see here that the referrals are going up. So right now, you know, we're seeing just, you know, almost double the number of referrals in October that we saw in September. And we're while in our, you know, way this data was printed out a little bit earlier, I think, to having even more, as we keep moving along, having said that, part of the November data, they were struggling with so many referrals that they were having trouble keeping up with the paperwork and entering it. So it kind of moved to a different system, which I'm gonna show you here. They just started keeping track with a log, with an office log, because otherwise you have to go in and you have to fill it out on a computer program. And they said, we just don't have time for that. So what they have here is they had between 10.7 and 10.31, 65 office calls. And this is kind of in addition to some of that. Some of it was reflected in the data before and some of it wasn't, just so you know. So cleaning this up a little bit is part of the goal, but they've done a really good job of just documenting what's going on. And if you look here, you can see, you know, adults are kind of running around the building, chasing students and who are refusing to follow directions, throwing things. Some of them are coming, aggressive climbing on things. So just dysregulation. That is hard on staff who are really trying to teach math. And so this is kind of just a summary. We already kind of talked about these things, but one of the big ideas is these 15 students are really exhuming behaviors that are disruptive and unsafe. And that there isn't a real good systematic way of addressing that in the building right now. And so, but if we look at this from a tiered standpoint, if we look at this for what is it that Union is doing with all of their students? You know, what social emotional learning and behavioral supports are put in place at this building for all students? They have a fantastic, well-represented school-wide team that's really focused on teaching, practicing, reinforcing, expectation. And this year they're really focusing on common areas like the playground and things like that. They've done a lot of teaching on that. They have a reinforcement system in place and their team meets every Monday morning and is looking at this data and talking about how they can really try to make sure that those pieces are in place, which I think is why when you looked at their data, even though the playground is an area for improvement, a lot of those other areas, you're not seeing a lot of referrals out of them, which you'll see in other schools you are. So some of what they're doing is really working with their focus on this. They're talking about the fact that we're seeing a lot of referrals coming out of the classroom. What teachers are saying is we need some strategies that we use in all of our classrooms to manage some of this disruptive behavior, some of this disengaged behavior. We don't really know what to do. And so from a school-wide level, the staff are asking for that and that would be kind of a universal practice that all teachers could be implementing in their classrooms. And so we want to be able to help them focus on that. Also, one of the things we're talking about is what social-emotional learning standards do we want to make sure we have in place? So from a universal level and a district level, when we talk about reading our math, this district has worked really hard over the last year to make sure that what it is the kids are supposed to be doing is clear and that there is a guaranteed viable curriculum around that. We want to do the exact same thing for social-emotional learning. So every child who comes into this district, everyone knows these are the social-emotional learning expectations and skills that kids will leave here as when they graduate, having internalized, and that we're gonna be teaching and practicing and reinforcing those skills just like we would reading our math. And this school is really talking about this. They're talking about curriculum, they're talking about standards, they're even talking about how they can start doing some grading and other kinds of things. They're doing a lot all at once and so I think that that's part of it but they are having these conversations about the universal level. This school also does have an evidence-based practice in place at that next layer on top of their universal pieces. It's the check-in, check-out, or it's also called the behavior education program. This is a very well-known, very effective intervention if it's implemented correctly. They've been doing it kind of their own way for a couple of years. So we're really working on trying to do it the way it's intended so that we can really hopefully see some of those outcomes but they're committed to that and the staff who are dedicated to this, which, number one, they have staff dedicated to this so that's critical and necessary. The staff are open to that feedback and really looking at how can we change our practice to make sure we're doing this the way it's intended. So this is exciting for here. We're still working on sort of entrance and exit criteria for tier two interventions, what needs to happen to monitor student progress, how those interventions can be assessed for fidelity but those are all things that we're kind of working on. Tier three, so tier three, I just kind of cut and paste this for all the schools because with kids who have really intensive needs, in all the schools there is an education support team that exists and it has the right people on it. You have social workers and you have counselors and the principal and assistant principal and some other, the nurse. And they're meeting regularly to identify kids who have needs, talk about what to do, but there aren't really good organized evidence-based practices in place for these kids. There aren't good spaces where those practices can take place for these kids and there's also kind of a vagueness around what adults are supposed to be doing and also kind of what roles and responsibilities are. So this is an area for growth kind of across the board and I think this is something we're seeing across, you see across the country, especially in a district where these kinds of things haven't been necessary. When she's with one or two students, it's something that can be manageable. Once you start having five, six, seven, eight students, it can really kind of knock a system off culture a little bit and so that's something that we'll be talking about. So Roxbury, Roxbury's data system is very informal and so I call them and they say, well, we have a folder and we really have one major incident in it and I didn't know all about that incident, I could have just typed this up myself, and they handled that incident, they actually did a beautiful job of handling the incident but the system's just so much more informal there because it's more like a family when you go out which is something that they're really working on. What they are saying is there's a lot of anecdotal data about the fact that kids in the building really reflect what we looked at the district data, about half of the kids in each class are struggling with a social emotional learning issue that the staff feel ill-equipped to handle is what it boils down to. And the teachers, when we ask them for this information, some of them type things this long to give information and try to give a picture of what's happening with the students in their class but the types of behaviors are really similar across the building, kids who are not following directions, kids who are dysregulated and disrupting the classroom environment and the teachers are struggling to handle that. This particular school also has behavior expectations that's very loosely taught and they're talking about that. It's not really done in a systematic way, every teacher kind of does it their own way and then they have a counselor who two days a week is doing social skills groups in mindfulness conflict resolution is sort of their tier two kinds of things. They do have grade level teams that are meeting weekly now to discuss their form of assessment data for reading and math and really I think that's the data they're digging into right now, talking about instructional strategies, talking about how to adjust strategies and part of that system is going to be talking about behavior but they're really focused on trying to make sure that their classroom environment is keeping kids engaged with instruction and then kind of just managing the behavior the best they can and then we have, I go out there and serve a day our instructional coaches out there helping with those kinds of things and then the behavior specialist for the district is out there working with a couple of the kids who are on specific behavior plans. It still feels the same at the school as it does at other schools from a behavior standpoint but it's so small that it just you know, the kids just you know what's going on when you walk in building. Main Street. So Main Street, the way they did their data the way they reported it out is they have major problem behaviors by type and this is something that's required to be reported to the state. So every school in the district and every school in the state actually has to report specific types of behaviors these major behaviors over here and they have 26 of those that have occurred this year and so you can kind of look there and see you know what they are most extreme disruption is a big one. They also have been really struggling with boss behavior on particular with one boss that there's some systems issues you know with that. They unlike the elementary school the problem behaviors you're seeing are everywhere. There's they're not you know in one location and then we also can see that in the eighth grade it's really kind of the bulk of the behavior the favor girls are seeing very few in the fifth grade at least from major problem behaviors and then just like we looked at from a district wise standpoint about half of the kids are on some sort of plan and half of them aren't and so you know when we think about resources you know why that's important is these kids might have some extra special education support and these kids don't and someone were thinking about practices and systems that's why that's important. And then just like with the elementary school you know things were popping up in numbers in October. Now the middle school also is collecting data with their pod room and I think you I was told you're familiar with the pod that they put together and the pod was really created to be a space where kids could come and engage in an intervention that's gonna help them to prevent a problem behavior from occurring and it's also kind of set up so that if a student is experiencing a difficulty they could go there and then kind of reset like experience an intervention and it would help them both of those things to help them engage in instruction and it gives them a space for that to happen. And so they've had a lot of students use the pod these students over here have only been there I think once is that that's the number and then you have some who've been there two, three, four, five, six times and then you have some over here who are going there all the time. And so this data is important so that when their team is sitting down and looking at it they can start asking okay why? You know, what's going on here? Why are these kids out of instruction coming here? Now what shows up on the forms that they have to try to collect data around it these are the reasons that they're going, the kids. These are the ones where kids kind of self select to go or there's some sort of pre-planned reason form to be in the pod these are reasons that they're being sent out of the class. And so in general about 34% of the kids are going there because of a behavior issue that the teachers struggling to manage in the classroom which they are asking for help to do and then these are the kids who are coming and then you know just really having this sort of issue that's going on that they are having trouble paying attention in class or accessing their learning. Some of these kids and they'll even tell you this just don't feel like going to math. You know, and so they'll show up there and the number of those kids because we don't have a way to really tease that out is more, you know, you kind of get to know but that's where the state is important because if a kid does that once or whatever but if a kid's doing that all the time then that's where we need to start asking different questions about what this child needs and is this intervention really working for them? And so this is the kind of conversation that the data is helping the staff to have in the building. They're spending about 118 minutes per day there which is, you know, showing that kids are actually getting little snippets of intervention which is good because they're still back in instruction and so why this might look like just a few minutes you have to keep in mind that that's 119 minutes per day ideally of intervention. Now it's a struggle because this is not a staff room. All the other buildings have a staff room where there's a space that intervention can happen and this is the building where it's kind of there's people all over the place coming in when they can and so there's a little inconsistency with that but it's something that they're still trying to pull off in all the buildings space, you know that there's somebody there or there's somebody's there or in this case there's just a whole bunch of different people trying to staff the room. We really wanna focus on having good evidence-based practices in there so when a child comes in we can say this is the type of intervention they're receiving, you know and then we can measure if it's working or not. That's the goal with this pod and with all the other spaces that exist, you know, in the district. So that's just kind of a summary of some of the stuff we already talked about. School-wide, this is a school that they have a school-wide team. Their team is, they have expectations, you know, behavioral expectations, social-emotional-line expectations defined. The teaching practice and monitoring of those things is a little fuzzy. You know, the expectation has been put out there but systems aren't really, you know in good solid place to help the staff to be monitoring their own behavior around those things. Although, they're really trying. There's weekly prompts that go out and there's just different kinds of scripts that go out to staff and so there's just pieces that just need to be, you know, tweaked on that. And then their data process has been refined so that they can really use this data to drive decision-making. And then we already talked about the pod. They do have some lunch groups and other little social-emotional groups where the counselors are meeting with kids when they've been identified and referred for social-emotional learning kinds of things and social skill learning kinds of things. We really want to talk about, you know what specific goals are kids working on, monitor their progress, what are the entrance and exit criteria for those kinds of interventions? And those are areas for growth, you know, that we're talking about. Also, their SSTs, which are their, you know blocks that they have for intervention. They have some of those designated for kids who need to do some movement work and, you know, they're really working on trying to help the staff who are doing that. I think it's the PE teachers so that they can, you know implement some social-emotional self-regulation activities with the kids. It's a fantastic idea and the staff are doing their very best with it. But even more training about how to do that in a role-focused way would be, it would be good. And then again, talking about, what we've been talking about is just trying to be consistent with what's going on in the pod and making sure that that stuff is as evidenced. And I'm not just, the tier three is the same as the tier three at Union. At the high school, this is the data that was shared and they have data here. It's not organized in a user-friendly way that, and it's not really being looked at by the whole, by the staff in the way that's, you know, kind of recommended so it can drive decision-making. You know, there's a few people like this is not possible, you know, Jen who have the data. But the goal is to get this data out in front of everyone to make a decision-making. And so what we talked about is best practice is to look at what's called early warning signs and that's attendance, behavior and course proficiency. And if you, and you have sort of cut-offs with these pieces throughout the year. And if you have a student who is, you know, tardy-lat or who is gone, a student who is also exhibiting any type of behavior that's coming to the attention of faculty and also course proficiency deficits. If you have a student who has all three of those, they are, can be predicted to drop out with an 80% accuracy rate. And so these kids right here have fallen to that list when we pulled this data together. And these also just happen to be the same kids, low on the hold who are exhibiting behaviors that the staff are really having trouble keeping up with. And so these kids here are short of care, but these are kids who are exhibiting internalizing behaviors all of the time. So when we talk about kids who exhibit behaviors to get attention to staff because they're causing a ruckus, that's where you kind of see this. And these kids might have suicidality or be talking about things that they fly under the radar in schools. So the staff here are really dealing with kids who, you know, sometimes up to six hours a day, they're dealing with kids who are emotionally disregulated, who are exhibiting maladaptive coping strategies here at the school. So cutting, vaping, things like that. You know, so it's in crisis management with some of the staff. They are, there's a lack of engagement with some of these kids. And this just, this isn't just the 15 kids, this is actually information that staff have said. These 15 kids are exhibiting and then also other kids where they're just not engaging in class discussion. You know, they'll put their heads down, they just won't talk because they're anxious or having a panic attack. Some of those, it's transient. You know, they might just have a peer conflict that's causing that to happen that day. Others, it's more of a pervasive kind of a thing going on. But with some of the 15 kids, we're also seeing kids who are leaving class without permission, wandering into other classes that they're not even a part of, be very disruptive, leaving campus. And when they're asked to redirect, when they're asked to file a direction just refusing and escalating, you know, becoming very agitated. So it's the kind of situation that, you know, is very taxing for staff. Again, when you're trying to teach math, that's hard. And even for the support staff, it's pulling them away, you know, from doing the tier one and tier two work that we want to try to do to help the kids have those skills in the first place. And so that's kind of what's going on here. We, you know, I think that the social worker and the assistant principal are kind of taking some of the bulk of this from a crisis management standpoint. And so they're spending a considerable amount of time with these students, trying to help them, you know, to get to the day. And also the special education case managers are spending considerable time with these 15 students, just trying to help them get through a day. And so part of this is because across the district we have a lot of reactive responses to problem behavior. And what we're trying to talk about as a district is how to take a step back. And for students who have significant social emotional learning needs, put evidence-based practices in place that really are gonna help them to be set up for success the moment they walk in the door. And how that's done really requires some intentional planning and also looking at staffing and staff roles and responsibilities and seeing, you know, what's in place, what maybe isn't in place, and how to move forward with that. You know, partnering with mental health organizations and others in the community at this level is often really important. Traditionally in schools this isn't something that is, this shouldn't be the school's sole responsibility, but it often becomes the school's responsibility because there's just gaps and holes in the system. And so pulling those different elements together is gonna be really important in the long run for these kids. They are really trying to do some stuff at the universal level. Here they do have, I think you know, learning expectations are defined and posted throughout the building. You know, when you walk in you can see them. You have habits of mine. They're being, you know, evaluated. Teachers are teaching them. There's not much of a curriculum for it. When I told Olivia when I sat down and asked some teachers, you know, Tommy, how are you doing that? They said, well, I don't know. Do you have some information you can help me with teaching some of these things? So I think we, and the other teachers had a very good idea of what they were doing. So pulling people together in a way that we can be very intentional about how we're teaching some of these expectations and then making sure that we're, you know, building our proficiency skills and learning targets and grading and things around those are gonna be important. And then of course, using the data. They did, you know, have some restorative justice practices and some other SST types of things they're doing to try to help make sure that we're getting ahead of this and teaching these skills at the school-wide level. But some of those practices, a lot of them actually have fallen by the wayside because of a lack of a systemic way of supporting them with the staff. So that's where, again, we want to back off and say let's take these good ideas and think about how we can do it in an intentional way where they can stick instead of kind of do it in this scattershot sort of way. And I think also in this school, and this is, I think important because this is actually something that I don't see necessarily in schools. I've been in a lot of them. I think I had a hundred schools in my region in Michigan where I was going around to each one of them and looking, and something unique about here is these messages are actually reinforced as part of the culture here. So even though it's not part of a formal curriculum, it is something that I hear regularly throughout the district in this building in particular with regard to self-management, being prepared, being kind, being inclusive. And so I think that my guess is that this district's been able to kind of rely on that for a lot of years because it's the culture. And now we're having some needs that are going beyond what has been seen before that are going to require a more intentional approach, a more scientific approach. So we have a planning room here and the counselors and social workers do meet with students individually when they're available but they've really been struggling to do that because of the crisis work that they've been doing. And sometimes the planning room is thought of is by consequence, as a consequence by a lot of kids and not as an intervention. So that's, tier three is kind of the same boat here. The one difference here is that the social worker, or Elia did, it has partnered with a community resources and when she has a social worker who is, you know, Dave who's here from the community, he's providing individual counseling here in the building. And so that's a great start for how to, you know, be thinking outside the box for kids who have intensive needs. You know, but that's kind of a first step from an integration, you know, standpoint. So we want to step back and look at how we might go to build on that idea. So as far as recommendations go, you know, really just taking a step back and approaching social-emotional learning in the district as a very, you know, in an intentional way using implementation science to make sure that the practices that are going to be put in place are, you know, identified based on what our needs are in the district and what the data is telling us that those practices are selected with, you know, in a collaborative way and that we plan for how we're going to install them and then we make sure that there's good sound support for their implementation. So we're not just sort of training and hoping and that we want to do that at all tiers. We want to say, what are we going to do at tier one in each building? What are we going to do at tier two? What are we going to do at tier three to support social-emotional learning and that there's going to be training and coaching available in each building. I'm not sure if you guys have seen this before but it's from Joyce and Shower's and they've done some good research on if you just train people, give a presentation or a lecture, even demonstrate how to do things and put some practice in the training, that's going to stick in classroom application about five percent of the time. But if you build a system and have coaching and feedback and data cycles in order to be able to say are these practices that we've selected, you know, part of our system, you can jump up to, you know, almost full implementation and that's what we want to get to. We have kind of a training help model going here and so we want to try to move away from that because our outcomes with these kiddos are sort of looking great like this a little bit. So we also want to make sure that our standards are clear to everybody so we know or even teaching and that we have ways to measure that and also that there's very clear roles, responsibilities and staff training needs and that, you know, that can cause some, you know, a need for having discussions about, you know, what are we doing? You know, what's my job description? What's your job description? How does that relate to the need that we're seeing in this data? And, you know, right now we're in the process of clarifying existing interventions and resources and roles and responsibilities and it's a little fuzzy. So that's a little fuzzy. So we want to try to make it clear, pull it into focus a little bit. And so I put this in here because this is my understanding why Louie hired me is, you know, everybody has this great idea. There's lots of ideas here, lots of them and they're good ideas but then everyone says okay and you can even look at documents and this is literally what they say, they'll say we're gonna do this and then we're gonna get this outcome but there's no implementation plan and so that's where we need to take a step back and try to put some in place. But we can't, we also have to do it in a way that's not trying to do everything all at once. There's a lot of stuff going on in this district right now and that's why I think stepping back and saying from a social emotional emergency point, we want to really be careful, we're gonna be really careful about those interventions that we're going to choose so that we make sure we're doing the things that are gonna give us the biggest bang for our buck with all kids and with the some kids who really need more. And then Louie has this all over the district now. This is a little bit more detailed one but it's just how to do that. It's more, if you've seen this before, it's just really having a vision and making sure that as we move forward with social emotional learning that we have a vision for that and that we have the resources and the skills and training around the skills that we need that we have incentives set up so that the staff understand why that we have the supports for them to make this successful. So that's what we have for you. Today's kind of a quick overview but do you have any questions? Yes, ma'am. Then is this the staff? Probably. Well, you know, the staff put it, no, that's a great question. What we wanted to do is have a district team or where we're all looking at this data together and the idea is that we'd be doing this on a regular basis, that we'd be talking about what is all this data that we have look like. Number one, get it cleaned up so we're all looking at similar data just like we did in the process of doing with the academic pieces so that we kind of are comparing apples to apples across the district from social emotional learning standpoint and then we want to be able to make sure that everybody is looking at it on a regular basis in their buildings and across the district. Would that answer your question? Yes. So my next question would be, what next? I'm so pleased you have all this data. I hope they won't tell you. So Mary's collected all of this and this was just obviously completed for you all, right? Yes. And from this, I have weekly leadership team meetings called Leading Meetings and we've switched, this year we started, so one is what I call hot topics and one is instructional leadership focus to talk about instruction and how we come to a common understanding about best practices as a leadership team. And because starting in January, we're gonna change that hot topics focus to an SEL focus and inviting social workers and APs in and let Mary lead the conversation and starting with this is where we need to get straight on, a few things. So Mary's gonna lead that for us but we have this space provided for leadership and the people who are directly involved with this work to come together to start getting our system in order. So, thank you very much. Thanks to both of you because it's really great to see the data collection of the people long term thinking and that's going into place. One of the questions that I've had here is to see some of this data which is my sobering is in addition to the plans, the systems that you're trying to put into place which are on a longer time horizon, are there more urgent needs? Are there any band-aids? They want to bounce. So there's some of that is going on as well. Yeah. Is that anything that the board needs to be informed of? Or the board could certainly be hearing things soon with a few of our kids who are really, really dysregulated in crisis. I'm thinking in one in particular, the elementary school and one in particular here at the high school and our Washington mental health agencies have said no more. We have no space, no whatsoever to provide you for anything. So, I hit your face. So, you know, Mary Renee and I were talking just this afternoon about one particular kid. It was really tough, really having a hard time right now. And luckily, Mary has the background from working in the mental health field and the insurance field here in Vermont. And so, she's like, no, no, no, no, no. You know, like, sometimes systems don't talk to each other. And so, we don't always know what's available to us and what's not. So, thankfully, Mary has that understanding and can help us out to try to figure out some other financial things. Because, you know, you all know when you have to place a kid in a separate school because we simply cannot serve after all the things we've tried. It's not cheap. And they're not a whole lot of seats available. We are not the only school district struggling with this. Not at all. But if that's the need, then that's what we do. Exactly. Yeah. And it's been my experience that the mental health system is just so overburdened that they can't offer you. And that's, I mean, that's been, when I was doing, you know, clinical work, that's certainly a true statement. I think that thinking about, and this is really the work, you know, I mean, so I hesitate to kind of come up with an answer because I think the answer needs to come from the people who are looking at the data as a team and talking about what's happening. But how do we put good sound interventions in place within the school system? Also collaborate with the community when, you know, we can, and then also talk about what else, you know, what else is out there and making sure people are knowledgeable about that. And again, having roles and responsibilities clarified. Things fall into the school because that's where the kids are. And so pulling other systems in when we can, that is that, I mean, we're in the situation and I think all the staff would say, you know, they're every day dealing with this. So they want immediate relief, both for the children who are suffering and also for themselves who are kind of suffering, you know, dealing with us. And they're such caring, wonderful people. Oh, they're, they go, absolutely. You know, people are, you know, their hearts are just, you know, broken over this. So I think people lose sleep over it because they're worried, you know, they're scared. I mean, I've been with people who are in tears and not in tears, partly, you know, they're tired, but they want the children to get help and they feel, they feel helpless. And so we don't want the staff to feel like that. So some of this work is building up to having good sound support someplace for kids as they come up the pike. And some of it is how do we make sure that the kids who are here now and our care are getting what they need? And my recommendation is to take a step back and look at the data and then talk about what kids need, look at what our current resources are and say, how can those be utilized in a functional way? Where are the gaps? Where are the gaps in skills? Where are the gaps in training? And where are the gaps in, you know, human resources? Human resources. And then, and then come back to you and say here, because this is kind of a preliminary piece. Really the work needs to happen with the people in the building looking at this and having that discussion. And it's gonna take a while. Yeah, it'll take a while. I mean, I think that they've already all been thinking about it, but we haven't been thinking about it from a district standpoint. And that's where when you're looking at from a district standpoint, you can start leveraging resources, you can start blending resources. It can just be done in a different way. You can start thinking outside the box a little bit. And sometimes that fixes things and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you still need human resources. I don't think we can answer that just yet because we haven't had that discussion. But in the meantime, these kiddos are still here having all that you saw in so. So kind of with that in mind, like looking at your complex chain matrix, which of those little squares are the scenes that's the most obvious thing? Oh, that's not a voting question, Jane. That's just asking the same question. Bridget kind of was asking the question. I know, but if you're gonna put up your little chart. I'll have to go with this one, Mary. I'm just like, I'm gonna go with this one. So I think there's a lack of shared vision, although it's not resulting in sabotage in this case. There's a lack of shared vision in terms. So I've never gone to a computing. Yeah. Yeah, let's go to my confusion. Just around what's the system? What happens? We're reacting to everything right now. And so we react with what we're thinking in that exact moment, responding to the effect we ever were seeing. I think there is a lack of skill, because what Mary said I think is completely accurate. We, for a very long time, we had kids who have come to school ready to learn and haven't had a whole lot of chaos in their lives. That is changing. And in a small system like ours, like she said, five kids in crisis dysregulation mode to smaller schools really influences things. So I think there's a lack of skill with how to deal with those. And also a classroom management skill we need from the classroom teachers. That is an obvious need in many of our classrooms, not all. Some of them are dynamic, with classroom management and kids. And some of these are still there. We do have a resource issue, so we're gonna present our initial budget in two weeks to you all. And there will be resources added around this piece. It was one of the main reasons why we wanted Mary to present today with the data. And I would say, and then going down a strategy down here, around, it goes back to the shared, maybe that's the shared vision piece. Because we have a lot of false starts, right? So maybe it's not, maybe it's shared vision, but a strategy around how are we going to put this in place? Do you agree? I would agree. Yeah. I have a couple of nuts and bolts questions. First of all, thank you so much, Mary, for coming. It's really, really helpful for us. So are you, in terms, we talk a lot, we review the data that exists, and we talked a lot about making data-informed decisions, moving forward, and using data to drive our strategies and how we address these problems. Are you thinking that there's going to be data consistency across our schools? Like, are we gonna be using the same measurements across all of our schools? Or is it gonna be still more of a school-by-school system? I mean, my hope would be that it's somehow consistent, and I think that's the goal. And again, my job is to ask the questions, and then the building leaders, and their social-emotional learning support staff, I think, will answer those questions. And come up with what works, but we want to do it in a district way. So it's not happening in silos like it is now. And that's a huge culture shift that we've been talking about. Our schools have, regardless of whether there's new leadership or not, the culture of our schools is to act as a school, not as a district. And so right now, we're really, at the district level, we're fighting against that culture, and it's taking time to break down some walls and barriers around that. Even though we have two brand new principles. Yeah, because they're coming into a culture of people talking to them, right? And so it's just, that mentality is tough. And in terms of the metrics and the data that we have right now, do you feel like, based on what I saw here, do you, it's a little bit of a loaded question, but do you think UES is a little bit out in front of our other schools in terms of the quality of information that they're collecting? Yes. On the quantity level, it seemed like it was there, but it also seemed on the quality level. I think that the people at the middle, what all the schools understand what to do, they understand it. They just don't have the tools to do it. And I think the difference is, is that when you give a tool to it, they can pull it together. I mean, they're using Swiss out there. We don't have to use Swiss, but that gives you that data in a very quick, easy way. Now, entering it is something that, from a system standpoint, that has been a challenge. It's been a challenge for them. They'll tell you that. And that affects the reliability of the data. So this is a discussion that we want to have, what's the easiest way to get data collected that gives us the information we need to support kids? And that is the discussion. And I don't have the answer for it, because they would come up with it, but that's the question we want to ask and have them come up with the answer. Does that make sense? Yeah. And we want it to be easy, because when you're teaching, I always go back to you, you're teaching a class, you have all these kids, you're managing everything. You have one who's struggling, and then you're supposed to document that. In reality, you have to go in, open up your computer, type up all the stuff in there, and that can be a barrier. And so Linda's going around, running around and saying, please, please enter this data so we can make the decisions the right way. And maybe that'll work, and maybe there's a better way. But they're doing it. They're doing it, which is amazing and wonderful. In this case, I feel like leadership and shared vision kind of go hand-in-hand with the schools, so getting them on the same page and the share of the children's. And I don't believe they've spoken about this before together. Like, we're going to start the work together. So you also mentioned that kind of previous years, kind of the culture of the schools maybe kind of a lot of this. And what's changed? And I'm also looking at like the MSMS and like on the eighth graders, but there's... It's a tough class of kids. They're very great. What can I tell you? We have a few courts that maybe we didn't have in the past that are consuming a lot of time and energy. I will say that teachers from the age dawn of time have said, oh, that group of kids. That's been a common thing, I think. It's interesting, here at the high school, I had a teacher in my office last week who said, they have a bubble of, I think, 10th grade that he was referring to. And he's like, there's just so many of them and they're ninth graders or something. And when he's like, usually we can embrace them and we bring them in and like, they change quickly to our way of thinking. He's like, they're overwhelming us right now because the number is like, yeah. Maybe this is a little bit of a question but it could be yours. So does any of this have anything to do with the weakness and the instruction? First instruction? I would say weakness. I'd say- I was trying to figure out an adjective. Yeah, that we need to work at defining what best instruction is and we need to get our principals and our coaches into the classroom to coach teachers and target needs. I think we need to figure out it. We, like many teachers, confuse our compliance with engagement and so I think we have complying kids and not engaged kids and when kids choose not to be compliant anymore, we don't know what to do. That's what I was thinking when you said, you know, they're always out of the math class or they're always out of the something class and it's the only one they're out of. Well, and- And you know, Tina, some teachers are stronger than others in classroom management and new teachers often struggle with classroom management. It's a hard job. Yeah, it's a good job. Nice. Go for it. I think there's also, I think there's two things going on. I think yes, and I think everyone would agree that as kids are coming in and things are just changing a little bit with kids having attention, spans are a little less if they're on electronics and things like that. But there's also a subset of kids that overwhelm the system because there's not a system to address that. So you can, and I've even seen it. I'm thinking of a first grade teacher who's an extremely strong teacher who has some kids that are just really dysregulated. And so they kind of need something a little bit different than what, I mean, I think at the same time we have to kind of meet in the middle where general education teachers, it's so important for them to be teaching in a way that's going to allow the need of students to access the instruction and that looks different. That type of instruction looks different than traditional general education instruction. Especially in a community like that's where inclusion is such a large part of the culture. You know. That instructional agility right now. Right, exactly. It's, so I think classroom management is part of it also instructional strategy and how the small number of kids who really need something very different is are addressed. All these things to gather. And even if you're a really strong teacher and really good at classroom management there's a tipping point. You can only have so many of them. Yeah, and I think that's, yeah. Yeah, and Ryan was bringing that up to both of us today around like, it's like I want to be clear that some of my best teachers are struggling right now. Some of the ones that I would name is like top notch or having a hard time with a couple kids in their class. And he's like, and that's different. You know, that feels a little different. And yeah. So yes, and also this other piece. Keep up. Oh, thank you. Yeah, this is fantastic. It gives us a great context of what you're, what are you thinking about when we're starting with what your needs are? Well, wonderful. Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, thank you for coming. Thank you. It's good luck. Yeah, and see if you can rally Peter in this. Does he have on or what? Yeah, they're out next. They're strategizing. Stratatizing. That's fantastic. Trying to get together and change things. This is the ball. Oh, they're just sitting out there in the dark. Yeah. Come on in, you got her. She got a plot. We're gonna hop aboard. Sure. Hi, I'm Peter Sterling. Like to thank you for dedicating the rest of the school board meeting to this topic. It's really nice of you. No, seriously, thank you for making time on this. It was nice of you to come to the school board. It is. Nice to see you. Thank you. We're here as coaches and Montpelier residents and people active in youth sports to ask you to consider revising the policy to make it easier for the public to access school facilities on both evenings and camps and hopefully even during school breaks. We each have a part we're gonna say, I called a bunch of schools around to inquire about what their school policies were. And I think it's pretty safe to say that our district has the most cost prohibitive policy as far as allowing the public to access. The gym, Twinfield district residents can use the gym free after they fill out a form and have it approved by the principal. Rumney and Doty do not charge community members to use the gym. Berlin charges $25 for less than three and a half hours of use plus $25 on weekends. And Spalding, youth groups associated with the school are allowed to use the gym for free anytime and to groups not associated with the school and not involved with youth pay $40 an hour which is less than what we pay. And one of the policies that I thought really worked and then was in Berlin, they let you use the school gym for free if they decide your organization benefits Berlin students. And so for example, I coach, I'm right now coaching a Montpelier girls pay to play a travel team. We have 10 Montpelier girls and we have to pay $15 an hour to use the gym on weeknights. And it doesn't sound like a lot, but it really does add up. And I know Brian, you've been involved with sports and Jesse, and of course Bob has them. We've all had to pick up the tab on a kid who can't pay. And it's not like it's a big deal, but this stuff does add up for parents over time. And I just don't know why we would have to pay to use a gym when the janitor's already there. And the one other thing I'd like to touch on is trying to use it on the weekend. You can use the Montpelier, the middle school gym on the weekend, but it's $60 an hour plus a $15 fee. So if you want to use the gym for an hour and a half, it's over $100. And there's just no way you can run a practice for your team at 100 bucks a pop. So we feel like, I feel like that cost on the weekend stops us from practicing. And I know others may touch on this, but I want to make sure we say it. Montpelier is a very difficult place to find indoor recreation opportunities. Once the weather turns, the rec center, once we get to mid-November, early November, the rec center is basically booked up. You can't really get time to practice their midweek or on weekends. And once the rec center's booked, there's no place to play. And yet we have these gyms that basically sit unused on the weekend. So I'll say one last thing, and then I'll pass the torch here. I coach both youth boys and girls, and there's an important difference in coaching them. Boys, it's very easy to get them to go to the open gym opportunities at the rec center. You go there, if you've ever been there, drop, I know you dropped your kid up there. There was always a million boys shooting around. It's great stuff. Sixth graders, eighth graders, all that. Girls will not go to an open gym and shoot with boys. I coach really good basketball playing girls. They are really confident. They are really good at what they do. They will not go to an open gym and shoot in front of boys. Even boys their own age. And when I ask them to go to the open gym, they look at me like I just asked them to shave their head. It is a completely foreign thing to them. They really only feel comfortable playing in a much more controlled or private setting. And I don't know what it is, but I've never gotten them to be able to get to take advantage of that. So in essence, they end up practicing a lot less because I can't get them to play in the open gym setting. So that's my part of it. Go ahead. I'll go next. So I don't know most of you. My name is Bob Cody. I graduated this school in 1979. Just give them a background. 23 of us graduated between 1968 and 1987 in my generation. And now their kids are going through and now my kids are playing for a mom player. Very proud of mom player Solence. Long legacy. What Peter said about the girls is true. I used to play in that rec back in the 70s and 80s. Girls never came. We have girls teams and mom players, but they felt the same. I don't know if it's intimidation or whatever, but it's a small gym and it's very, very loud. So one thing I want to say is that I don't think there's a clear cut policy that we have for the uses of the gym, which is really important because when we called other gyms a few years ago, when we were into this situation, we found out that other teams from outside the area, non-tax paying citizens, teams were using our gym ahead of us and we had to get in line. So that's before the $60 an hour came up, which I believe came up last year. So as a taxpayer, a long time resident of mom player, and I think my family's done a pretty good job investing into this community. I'd like to see the kids have the opportunity to have access to these gyms that's not so much that it's expensive as Peter outlined. The other schools are less restrictive, but one of the schools we contacted a few years ago to see if we could use their gym because their U32 players were using our gym and there was a mini Metro team and an AAU team. When we contacted U32, they said, fine, you guys can use our gym, but U32 has the right first refusal. So if we booked it on a Friday night or whatever, and they told the U32, oh no, we needed Friday night, we would get bumped. We were mom player citizens, we were already bumped from our own school and I just thought that that was wrong. So I guess that's what I'm here to say, is that we all know there's an opiate crisis, obesity crisis, all these things going on with kids. I know that my kids, they are boys and boys can get into a lot of trouble, but by them playing sports, when they come home, they are tired. In fact, my son was just here at the open gym and I can tell you that he's probably taking a shower right about now and he will not have a chance to play in his video games. He'll go right to bed and that's because he had access to this gym. He's fortunate, he's on the varsity team. Hopefully he makes it again this year. But my younger son is in seventh grade and he plays mini metro and this is what Peter's talking about. On the weekends, if we could get some access to the gym at a reasonable cost or I think I'll turn it over to Brian and Jesse that they've got some plans, I think they're pretty good, but I'm just giving you a little bit of background of what we ran into and I think the mom players should take the lead on this. Have a good policy. Thank you. Good evening, everyone. I'm Brian Murphy, I'm also a Montclair resident and I love kids too, but there's a little bit more selfish on this part. I'm talking about adults playing basketball. Trying to play basketball? Trying to be a play basketball. Jesse and I are playing a game together so he has a very good reason to say trying. So we would love to see a change in this policy also. I understand that there's a fear that something's gonna get damaged and so forth, but we are responsible adults playing basketball. We actually go about sweeping the court before and the place is actually in better shape when we're done playing than it was when we first go in. It's just, we don't wanna fall. We're old men. Any sort of slip or fall on us, we're out of traction for out of play for six months or so. So we're very careful about treating the facility as well to make sure the floor is clean and everything. But on top of that, we didn't even be willing to, if the policy were to say you have to include some sort of a bond that would be held so that if there was any sort of damage done, that payment could be taken out of that. We'd be perfectly willing to do that and then when we're done playing, we'd get that back after we signed it for six months a year or something like that. Some along those lines so that if there was ever an accident or something like that, the school systems wouldn't help financially. We'd be willing to do something like that. We're willing to work with it. We're not looking to cause any sort of problems, but the idea of having to pay $100 every single time we wanna go ahead and play when you have eight guys and everyone's coughing up 12 bucks or so, it's a lot of money to ask people every single weekend and it winds up killing off the chance of getting people together to play. And having that exercise to run around with other people and that social interaction that occurs is all good for mental health. It feels wonderful. I hope that there's a policy to allow that to flourish more. Can I just add before Jesse goes, we were told the reason we have to pay not only the $15 an hour, which is the normal hourly fee to use the facility, but the $6 an hour, that's the weekend fee for the janitor. And as Brian said, we don't really need a janitor there. I mean, we sweep the court. We're not trashing the place and running around the school and doing stuff. So that's what makes the cost prohibitive for us is paying $90 to have a janitor supposedly there to let us in and monitor us and unlock the place after we go where. And we did play there for almost two years until we were asked to leave just because the policy changed. And we didn't have a single incident. What, you know, probably two years we were playing there, you know, for it without paying the $90 for the hour and a half fee. So we just wanted to have that. Peter, can I speak to that just because you brought that up right there? So that's part of the contract. According to our AFS-T fee contract, which is the union of the janitors are a part of, the custodians are a part of, any weekend or after school event, it says in the contract you have to have a custodian. Actually, it says you have to have two custodians. One to two there. So the union was having an issue with things like we were going to be great around that. So I just wanted to make that clear that that is a contractual issue, but we are in negotiations or you all are in negotiations right now. So that's up to us to try to negotiate out of the contract that I do want to make that clear. Is that unique to Montpelier district or is it, or do the other school districts have that same union clause? Do we need a normal contract? Yeah, I think, you know, that would be something to put in front of them. One quick thing I want to say when Brian was talking, because I can see us, we're not looking for the school to run a calendar or a schedule and whatever. I know that when we had baseball, we had the Google calendar and all the coaches, we had different fields and we would just plug in the times and if there were conflicts, the coaches would just work it out. But it would probably make good sense to have the school, you know, be the administrator of that calendar because you may have something that comes up, you know, that's, and we have the court, but you have something that comes up that's very important and say, hey, sorry. You know, and we would honor that, obviously. Those types of things. Just thought I'd throw that out there. My name is Jesse Remick. I have a daughter who's a sixth grader at Main Street Middle School. In addition to support of all of these asks that we're here today, I'm also interested in getting together a softball team and trying to start, we've been working on softball in Montpelier from youth softball from Farm League on and I think this year, we actually are going to have a middle school team and our goal is to bring it to the high school as long as there's interest. One of the many challenges we have here in Montpelier in every sport, but especially spring sports, is space to practice inside when the weather is rainy, the fields are muddy, we can't get out there and we are showing up two weeks behind all the other teams. So I'm here trying to understand what the concerns are, the contractual issues should try to be part of the solution. I've taken a look at the fields with Andrew LaRosa, trying to understand all the options we have from a city standpoint of fields, indoor facilities, and to try to help figure things out. In addition to our basketball game, I would say, we do, very often we sweep, we clean the court. A few policies I was looking at at other schools, they can designate an adult who's responsible for the actions of the group, whether we're signing some kind of waiver or somehow being volunteers in the community of being coaches gets us into a category of, what do they call it? Approved. Approved group is different than just someone from the public asking to use the space and if that can somehow help, if we're putting ourselves out there, then we're taking responsibility for anything that happens to the space while we're there. I'm willing to put myself on the line for that, if it means that we can use the gym and also provide space for our kids. I remember from my time on the board, one of the concerns or problems we had was janitors were working in an enormous amount of hours and we struggled to find the time for them to staff events where they were really needed, like the outdoor events that happened out there and we were struggling and we actually, I think we ended up hiring more janitors, but I was wondering if there's a way to have a conversation with the leadership and maybe it's the leadership, maybe it's the individual janitor saying, look, what do you think for these three low maintenance events where the place is not gonna get trashed? Like in other words, you're not gonna come in Monday morning and find a whole hot mess. Would it be possible if you not to have to staff one, two, or three events? Maybe they don't want, I mean, my sense is, this is my recollect, maybe they don't wanna come in for everything on the weekend. I mean, maybe there's, the whole while you're negotiating this contract, I don't know when the new contract would start, but it's just a thought. Maybe they don't wanna come in and clearly it has, but like for the events we're talking about, whether it's a mini metro practice or an old man's basketball league, we're not degrading the facility, but you know, when you do like the outdoor things around the track, that big field day, that's a lot of work for staff to clean up that even. And that kind of does degrade the facility in the sense that you're creating garbage and you're moving stuff around, but using a basketball or to play basketball doesn't seem like a heavy lift. Just a thought and questions. Any other questions, especially? Yeah, I mean, I'm very much in favor of us taking the full demand of possible work in these spaces. These are public assets. We have a very long winter and we have a very long dark period during that winter where kids can't be outside necessarily, or if they are, you know, they're gonna be in really cold conditions with headlights on, maybe doing some cross country skiing. But I mean, I guess I'm very sympathetic to this because I was a middle school, a high school athlete and it cut me out with a lot of trouble and I had access to a lot of community resources that I feel like our community desperately needs. So with the resources that we currently have, if we're able to figure out a way to make this work for kids and adults, both, I think that would be really helpful. Yes, I totally echo that because that's exactly right. My only hesitation is to really have a good handle of what the true cost would be for the district of this, just to, you know, I think it does start with negotiations over need to have staff and how to need to have staff and it sounds like it seems very manageable to have the idea of an authorized, responsible party or whatever, take the place of a school employee, perhaps, but I'm sure there are some costs and we should really consider what those are and if they're insignificant, fine, but if they become significant, again, I really do think that needs to be part of the conversation. We did, you know, have a party of the ways with the record department, right? So we kind of, the city as a whole has made a decision to keep kind of record schools separate and I'm not sure that the school district, you know, supported that. I'm not sure we had really a bunch of a choice, but there was a point on part of those things and this brings the school facility back into a general public service in the recreation needs of the City of Montelio and I think that's a great thing, but we really do want to consider now that, you know, that there is such a split, you know, what the budget impact would be. Do you know? I guess it would be interesting to know why that was entered into the country. Was it that applied? I mean, no, I had to, why did they apply? Was it because they found a mess and they said, okay, we're done with this, we need, you know, we need, or was it because, in all honesty, they wanted more money. They wanted to work on the weekends and get paid for the weekends. If we knew something about that, I don't know how we'd know, but that might affect the negotiations. Since that appears to be what caused these charges. Well, I think it wasn't added to the project, it was in the contract, but it wasn't being interpreted to require Jan or her to be there to open the gym. So I don't, okay, this is my recollection that it wasn't that new language went in in the last couple of years, but the language was there. We were ignoring the language. Was it gonna say that? No, sorry, but then you decided not to. I have a question. So if the boys basketball team or girls basketball team, because we usually never practiced on Sundays, but sometimes that happens because of a playoff game on a Monday or whatever, would the janitors still have to be there for that day? Technically, yes, however school staffed, when our coaches are considered our staff, so when it's the school staffed, then we're allowed to look the other way. I think you bring up a very good point about what the costs are and obviously I think if we know what that is, maybe we can work on our end of it as well. But I will say a couple little things. Haven't grown up in Montpellier. We used to be division one, numbers constrain and now we're down to division two, but we had a bunch of years where Montpellier really wasn't on competitive in sports. And we are now. We have some really young kids and this feeder program started back when you were involved with Lilly, you could just see it starting to swell. And these kids, I don't know if it's, I wouldn't say it's peer pressure. I call it peer liking. They want to be like that and there's just this drive and I can see it in, you know, even coaching the younger kids, I can help coach 7th, 8th with Bill Brzezi, but we started back when there were three and fourth graders and they wanted to be like Leo, you know, quite frankly, they went and saw the game and that's when my brother was a really good basketball player here in Montpellier, both of them were. And that gym was packed, you know, and Montpellier was a, we were a force, we were the smallest school in the state, division one, but we were always either vying for a championship or we were in the playoffs. And we have that now going on with these kids. And I think it's great because it's just inspiring other kids. And I just have to be sports, but it does. You know, I see kids starting to reach for this. And one thing that's unique about Montpellier, I played division one and then when my nephews played division two and now going to all these gyms around the state, Montpellier's the closest gym to the exit of every school. If you wanna go to Burlington High School, every time we play a tournament in Burlington High School, man, I gotta go to, do I go through the Old North then? Do I take 127? My mother was from Burlington. Right, same, every school, even U32, Spaulding, none of them are right off the exit. We are, second light, take the left, you're here. And we heard that last year when Bill Verzezi organized the mini Metro teams to play here last year. And then that's when the cost came up, which, you know, we understand, you know, you had to contract them. But we could, that gym was full, almost all day long with people from outside of it. And all of a sudden they were looking at Montpellier, like, hey, this is the place to be. You know, this is an easy gym to come to. And there was a lot of pride happening. So I just throw it out there because there's a lot of possibilities here with sports. And I don't think that's what should totally define a school. But it is very important. And I think it keeps kids off the street now with trouble. Yeah, and I do want to say that we essentially have one full-time staff member whose primary job is for building youth scheduling. So our buildings are used to such an extent that we have one full-time person doing it, which is who's Tracy Locke, who you don't let know. Thumbs up to Tracy. So Tracy, Tracy's responsible for that. And she puts, you know, she's got guidelines on her. As Peter knows, I was a basketball player. So you all are speaking my language. And basketball court time use is huge because there's one court and many teams wanting to use it. And that's been since I was a kid, too. And when our teams are in session, that's who she prioritizes, right? So you have boys varsity JV, girls varsity JV, boys seven, eight. I think we have five, six, too. Do we have five, six? No, just the seven, eight. Girls seven, eight. So like that, right there, it ends up a considerable amount of time as well, right? So it's tricky. It's absolutely tricky. But that's not what we're talking about. We, all of us, understand you defer to the school team. I always talk about the girls' travel team, which is essentially the Montpelier girls' team with that. In all seasons. In off season, trying to get into the gym before the school teams are practicing, that's when the season primarily is or on the weekend when it's not being used. Like, we understand we're not going to. It's like, and by the way, the tricky part, when we have custodial staff who's overburdened. I totally, my last thing I'd like to say, and I really will be quiet, I promise, is feeding off what Bob said about bringing community spirit and getting people in the gym, this is a way I believe to get community members to connect to the school who don't necessarily have a connection to the school. Like, in our men's game, a lot of them don't have kids in the school anymore. But they're now connected to the district where they pay taxes because they get this thing out of it. I believe it connects people to the school district a little better when they can use the facility and when they don't have kids here. And thank you for your time. You're welcome. So is it true that the middle school and high school gyms go largely unused on the weekends? I'd have to ask Tracy. I don't have access to the calendar. I'm sorry. That's what I've heard. I mean, one way to look at the cost, I don't know what's to do about the cost of the district and how do you deal with that. But there's real costs. But what exactly is, what can I just kind of finish? So one way though to look at the cost is that if the rec department could magically double or triple its gym capacity on the weekend for a few hundred dollars a week, like the city would clearly do that, right? I mean, that would be an unbelievable bargain compared to somehow actually constructing additional gym facilities. So there's some, if it's true that the two school gyms go largely unused on the weekends, it's clearly economically rational to pay what it takes to open them from the perspective of the entire city. So how do we get the money in the right time? So you're suggesting it could be something that could contractual relationship with the rec department where they basically buy the gym out for all those open times and they can manage everything? Or could it be a weekend custodian that might be going in the budget that's being presented in two weeks? Yeah, so I mean, when we're talking about costs, we're talking about custodians and sometimes it's a question mark, do we need custodians? And an administrator, which we already have, who's already doing this work. So I don't know if this would really add in terms of cost on the administration side, damages and wear and tear. And you can, wear and tear, you know, they're gym floors, you know. But damages, you know, you have to have some kind of policy in place to assess for that. And then, you know, people will kind of manage that, which might dovetail in with custodians, which is opening and closing, you know. And the other question I would ask the board, is there a difference between Old Med, your words, not my, Old Med. We own it. Can I bring up one thing? Tell me what the bagpipes here are. Can I bring up one thing that we ran into? What is the landscape that we're talking about in terms of sports teams? Like you had mentioned a feeder program. We've talked a lot about basketball, but like what sports, like what's club, what's school, athletic teams. I'm trying to just understand like, who are all the players unattended for this conversation? So we have, well we have, you have a rec, there's a rec league for the three, four, five, six players, girls and boys. And that's primarily run through the rec department. But the games are, exactly. The games are played at the middle school on Saturdays, I believe. So the middle school gym on Saturday morning is pretty much occupied every Saturday, except for me. November to February. Yeah, November through February. And then the seven and eighth teams are in the middle school and then obviously you know about high school teams. There is, there are what they call pay-to-play sports like there's this league called Mini Metro. And the whole purpose of that is to have students from fifth grade to ninth grade, no, eighth grade, fifth through eighth grade. And they have to be from their community. In other words, if you are from mom player, then the players have to be on that team. And they try to get people playing time, but it's, it is a commitment and uniforms have to be bought and stuff like that. And you have to pay into the league. And it's Burlington, Essex and all, Spalding. So, so I think that's, that's what you're looking at there for those types of teams. And then in the spring, there's AAU, which is like basketball as well as a development program for the school season, that they're usually built around local towns. So, Montpelier has been developing with Bob and Bill Bruzezi have been building out that program in the youth level. So that's the spring time that they're off and they're playing. But it runs up against what Jesse was talking about with spring sports. I primarily endorse sports for three quarters of the season. And I don't want to, I don't know if I, I don't know the procedure here, but this is the first time I've ever been in front of the school board. That's true. Yeah, I, this used to be the principal's office, so I knew where that was. The library was over there. But, so I knew this area pretty well then. But the one thing that we ran into a couple of years ago, and I don't know the, the personnel's or whatnot, but what we ran into, we were, when we asked to use the gym, there was U32 people using our gym. And, and I, the only, I really, one of the policies I like to see is I like to see it being Montpelier first. I really think that's important. Not that we're trying to push everybody else out. That's not the point. But they don't let us into their facilities and we're the taxpayers. And so I think that's, that's one thing that if, and, and, but we, and the reason I make that statement is because the past administration, I don't care who, Brian Ricca, I guess, he met with, we went to him directly, actually Nick did the high school varsity basketball coach. And he got, nope, that's the way we do things. And so we had to just swallow it. Okay, let me go back to a point you mentioned earlier about the school teams, when they practice on weekends, they don't have to have a janitor here because the coaches can serve part of staff. This is a very particular to our own situation, but in our game, we actually have two faculty members that play with us. Would that count as staff and therefore not be initiative? I think we talked to them about quietly using their badges. We could do that. We're trying to like take them more. We had a conversation when I pulled down the plane and I said, seriously, I'm talking about this right now. You're the match. All right, so, got it. Whether it's a middle school coach or a volunteer rec coach, I think there's potential there to follow them in that same category, right? So, go ahead and say that. Just quickly, the preference things does get a little squirrely. If it's not, if the fee doesn't cover thing, I'm thinking, and I don't know this, but is the martial arts thing still going on at Union and is it run through the rack or is it a private business? I don't know, Steve, I thought it was a private business. It used to be through the private business that was being promoted by the Recreation Department. So, as kids would sign up for the program, I used to be on a rec board, so, I forget the name of this, it was a blue wave or something like that, but, so the rec department would go ahead and promote it and they would get like $3 for every kid that signed up, something like that, and then the rest of it would go to blue wave or whatever it was. Okay, the other reason I mentioned, I think, okay, what if there's a business that wants to use it for a class and then how does that work for a preference system? So, I think there's, obviously these things don't be decided, but, and I think that clearly a not-for-profit or a club or whatever it would, we don't think you have systems for that or anything. Yeah, they don't pay as much. Great, so. So, do you need to move into the next session, but? Thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you very much. So, can we need to consider whether there's a policy committee or say something like that? I think this is something that is, or looking at work on, if you can just let me move to the next session. Have a good night. Good night. Okay, thank you. Good night. You're all right. Okay, we're cool. Over your introduction. Thank you. Good night. Have a good night. So, P.H.T.R. was in trials, so I was not able to talk to P.H.T.R. I have, I tried to do a little digging, but there isn't really very much information in the engagement letter that we sent in. There's very little information in there, so I still have a lot of questions about what we've been joining. I have a couple questions about the engagement letter. We could, people would rather, the engagement letter would be a contract, so we could, that would be a contract. So, if people feel like it would be better to talk about the engagement letter with the lawyer in executive session and want to make that finding, we could do that or we could talk about it now. But it sounds like you guys still haven't been able to take that action that we were hoping you'd be able to take in order to inform our decision. Correct? No, that's correct. Is that correct? It's not a decision with P.H.T.R. So, do we want to maybe kick this back another day and tell you the thing about that conversation? I mean, since I wasn't able to talk to him, I don't even know if it's a rush. I don't know, he hasn't gotten back to me on it, so my, I was like, yeah. Let's kick it to the next one. Kick it until we talk to P.H.T.R. Right, yeah. I mean, because I have a program. Official form of P.H.T.R. Make sure we have an understanding of what we're dealing with. I think that would be good. Do I have a motion on that or? I think we can just, we can support him. So, I think that we find that discussing our contract negotiations with the board at a substantial disadvantage. One second. Someone second. You want a second? Second. No, second. Second. I was a member. Hi. Defosed? Move that way into our executive session for the purpose of discussing contract negotiations. I'm second. I was a member. Hi.