 Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Monthly Commissioners Corner Program. My name is Lucia Campriolo. I'm a newly elected school board commissioner representing Ward 5, which is home to Champlain Elementary School. And I'm joined here this evening by my colleague, Polly Vanderpouten, who represents Ward 3, which is home to Sustainability Academy. For those of you who are newly tuning into this segment, we have resumed our Commissioner Corner Program after a bit of a hiatus from COVID. And so if you haven't tuned in in the past couple of months, I'll just let you know what you've missed, and also direct you to the CCTV website at cctv.org, where you're most welcome to dial up the links to our previous programs, during which you would hear a conversation hosted by our colleague, Commissioner Gulick, as well as myself and other newly elected commissioners, Saja Almagali, who represents Ward 8, and Akila Sokosu, who represents Ward 1. So we are rounding out sort of an introductory conversation with newly elected commissioners, and Polly and I are so excited to be here with you all this evening for a more specific conversation about the BHS-BTC 2025 project, which is a really important project that the entire community is undertaking, certainly a project that the board is explicitly focused on right now and will be for the next coming months and years. And we are excited to have the opportunity to share that project with you all this evening. And it will be, I'm sure, one of many conversations that we'll have and certainly one of many opportunities for you all to participate. On that note, I do want to mention that this is a call-in program, and so we really welcome hearing from folks throughout the show, and you're welcome to give us a buzz at 802-862-3966 at any point to ask a question, share feedback, or just tune in. So with that, I think I would love to spend a little bit of time hearing from Polly. I'm so excited that you are here to join us today. I know I have especially and personally appreciated getting to know you over the past handful of months. Thank you. Grateful for your leadership and to have an example to learn from as you've been serving for a number of years now. I thought it might be fun for folks to hear a little bit from you, maybe what inspires your service as a commissioner or what you value most about the Burlington School District, what's been keeping you busy this summer, and to paint us a picture of Polly Vanderputen, community member and school board commissioner. Okay, well thank you, Lucia. Thank you so much for inviting me to be part of this. So my name is Polly Vanderputen. I represent Ward 3. I have lived in Ward 3 since 2006, but I've really only been on the school board for a few years, so I appreciate the nod to my tenure, but actually I still also feel very new and like I'm learning a lot. I grew up in South Burlington and went to public schools there, and I came to this point in my life, I don't know, maybe five or ten years ago when I had a child where I really concretely realized the importance of the people who volunteered on my behalf. That I grew up in a family that was rich in cultural opportunities and education, but not really financially, but at public schools and people who were volunteering made a huge difference in my life. So when the Ward 3 seat was open, I decided to run for it. I'm also a public school teacher. I've been teaching for, sorry, doing the math over 20 years, but teaching public high school for about 15 years. And I have some familiarity with the teacher side of boards and contracts and negotiations and situations for students and curriculum decisions and all that stuff. So it's very interesting to serve and to see that other side. Fun stuff. I love to bike. I love riding my 1955 English 3-speed around. I rode to South Hero a couple weeks ago, which was Triumph. I love to garden. I love to swim and spend time with my family. I have a husband and a 10-year-old daughter. And we've been having a really nice time relaxing this summer. Nice. Thank you so much. Well, there are two things I want to respond to in that. One is just that I know we are both avid cyclists for transportation purposes. And so for those of you watching and those of you in Burlington right now, you know it's a very hot and sticky day out. And Polly and I met each other here on bikes. And so happy to share that hobby and passion with you. The other thing I wanted to respond to was just your acknowledgement that you are kind of on an ongoing journey and learning despite sort of your previous term serving. And I think that resonates with me so much and I think with many of our colleagues in that we are a volunteer board. And so we volunteer our service on behalf of students and teachers and families and the broader community. And that really it's our charge to be in that space of continual learning. And so I think one of the ways that we do that and we strive to do that and aspire to do that is through community engagement. And so it's really our, one of our primary roles is to be in constant engagement with the community. And we do that in a variety of ways. This is obviously one way. But there are many ways that we do that informal, more formal but also many opportunities for folks to connect with us both informally and formally. And we'll talk about those in just a minute. But it's fun to share space in that way and it's one of the things that inspires my own services. Just being around people who bring diverse perspectives and share a common passion and value for the work that, the charge of the board. Really that work around governance and community engagement. Great. Well, thank you. So I think we're going to transition and spend the majority of our time really in conversation about BHS, BTC, which like I said is certainly the kind of project and really it's more than a project. It's a really significant undertaking, not just for the board but for the entire community. And so it feels especially important and timely to continue to use platforms like this one and others to bring more people into the conversation so that we are moving toward the next series of decisions with as much support as we can for what will be a new school building and certainly what is just about the biggest need our community has at the moment. So I thought, Polly, just given that you have been serving for a bit longer than I have, I thought we might start with just bringing folks up to speed, sort of how did we get here? Could you share some of that context of what has led us to this point we are at today, which is needing and working hard to finance a new school building? And we'll spend a little bit of time in that space of where we are today and then a little bit of time where we're headed. Great, thank you. Well, I'll do my best to summarize how we got to 2020, which is when I started serving on the board. There were efforts made, numerous efforts made by a lot of different community members and committees and the school board to get a renovation off the ground. And I'm honestly a little bit fuzzy on the details because I know that it's been years in the making. And the main thing driving it was the age of the building and of Burlington High School and Burlington Tech Center and that they were not ADA compliant. So there were a lot of issues with the building and they had been acknowledged for a long time, but getting the right plan in place and getting community backing was another step. So I think many community members know that we passed a bond of $70 million in 2018 to fund a renovation for BHSBTC and to kind of bring it up to speed in terms of what was required. The bond passed and we started the renovation and that was when we discovered, I hope I'm going to say this right, polychlorated or polychlorinated biphenyls. PCBs is the shorthand for it. And they are toxic and as the renovations got a little bit deeper and testing went a little bit further, they found that not only were they airborne, but they were in the concrete and the masonry and the joists and pretty much everywhere in the building. So one of the questions that comes up a lot to this day is what happened to that $70 million? What happened to that bond money? Is what you're going to be asking for now going to include that money? And the answer to that is no, first of all. We used about $4 million of that money to get the information that we have now and then realized it was a much bigger project. And something that I learned about bonds and bond funding is that you don't get a blank check of $70 million. It's like here, almost like a credit card, you can have some access to this money but it's not like there was $70 million just sitting in a school district account. So we opted not to use the rest of that and I just want to clear that up in terms of what we're talking about now because it comes up a lot. Shall I continue? I think that is a really important point and I know we'll talk a little bit more about sort of what's on the immediate horizon for our work as it relates to financing this project and so I appreciate sort of that very concrete specific context around the previous bond. Thank you for that. Yeah, so another question that gets asked or something I've seen in comments in different places is why did we choose to close down the school as a board? And it didn't feel like a choice. It felt like completely irresponsible to keep functioning in a toxic environment and it was frankly illegal. The Vermont Department of Health had a certain threshold at which they said you can't operate with these airborne PCBs. They have changed it over time but it doesn't matter because we're now on the federal radar for the PCBs that are like I said in every corner of the building. So while we did have to vote on various steps in this process, the board had no choice but to close down that school and find an alternative and I am surprised to this day in the best possible way at how the community came together and Superintendent Tom Flanagan and our chairperson Claire Wool brought everybody together to get the downtown BHS which is the former Macy's as a space for us to be in person. It's like kind of a minor miracle when you think about the timeline of a shutdown very suddenly in August of 2020 and getting kids into a building in March of 2021. Absolutely and I would reflect as well that along with the support of the folks you mentioned there was also a level of advocacy with our state partners too and funding support made available to make that transition into the Macy's building and I also share that feeling of gratitude and good fortune that we are a community that had a space that our students could relocate to and I know that's not the case for other communities should they find themselves in this situation which hopefully they do not but we do, it's a great kind of moment to highlight sort of the way that community members and leaders and our partners at the state level came together to support that. Yeah, they absolutely did. Now we're on a lease until 2025 which is why our project is called BHS BTC 2025 because that is how long we have a lease for at that downtown BHS building. We were hoping to use it as swing space for other school projects across the district but currently the highest priority is for us to have a permanent high school to serve our community and also a permanent tech center to serve the entire region so we're really focused on that and not sure about the status of that as swing space. We'll see as time goes on but we do have a deadline and some urgency and that's another question that comes up. Why are we rushing this? We need to take down the old high school, okay it's full of toxins but can't we build first and then wait for funding to take it down properly or can't we use existing buildings that are there and save some money and I've been at pretty much every single meeting where we've had the architects and experts and paying attention to all the information and the answer to those questions is we absolutely need to remove the existing school before we build a new school partly for cost reasons it's going to cost us more money if we try to build and then deal with the old school partly for environmental reasons like why would we build a new school and then take one apart that's full of toxins that makes no sense and partly because all that stuff is just going to end up costing us more so we're looking at funding for this and getting that onto ballot language really soon because we are mailing ballots out now we want to have this bond vote in November but we also need to have everything set up by August everything approved by the city council in terms of how much bond we're asking for by mid-July which is like next week so we're thinking about all of these things but it's been really crystal clear to me over the past several months that we need to remove the old high school and we need to build a new school on that site that's how it needs to happen and to get it done by 2025 yeah thank you for that I think there are a few visuals that I'm going to refer folks to that really color in and provide a bit more context to some of the details that Polly's talking about and they can all be found at bsdvt.org which is the school district website there's a specific moment on that website that calls out this project and what you'll find there are conceptual designs which will move quickly into schematic designs but the first phase of conversations that we all had as a board with guidance from our management team steering committees, architects really a bevy of experts and community members was to give shape to sort of the requisite components of a high school and technical center building and so I think in April which was right around when I was sworn in in that first meeting or second meeting that I was a part of as this team we were presented with five conceptual designs that reflected that level of input that I just described from a variety of stakeholders and at that meeting the board was asked to vote on which of the five conceptual designs we would advance as a district and the design we chose was the least expensive of the designs but that's not the only benefit that it brought it really had some other programmatic aspects that made sense, were environmentally friendly were the most cost effective certainly and met the timeline that urgent timeline that we were working toward and so I think one of the questions that's come up for me and that's come up or been asked of me is tell us more about the budget and how it is that you arrived at this budget without sort of knowing what funding was available and I think that's a really good question and it's you know I think the inputs that were put into the project were and I'd love to kind of for you to close any gaps on this but you know was a reflection of the current programming and the student body that we serve and so some really sort of factual actual information around number of students where footage required to host the series of programs that we currently serve and desire to serve that will afford our students the best educational experience they can possibly have within our public school district and so sort of looking at that as a baseline of or guidepost of what we want to build that's where those five kind of conceptual designs came from I'm simplifying it somewhat and I know there is a lot more that went into it over the months leading up to April but what I want to say is you know really thinking about the student body the population, the square footage there are some really baselines that generate costs and size and space and programming are big generators of costs we know when we build any construction project and so I think using that conceptual design to then you know provide the next level of inputs and ask of our architectural team the next level of inputs around to move us from sort of conceptual to schematic is where we are now and we'll be having a look at those in more detail in the coming weeks but we also have some work to do on financing the project and so to that end do you want to share sort of where we are today as far as what the district has identified and some of the cost cutting measures that we have recently approved just as recently as a couple of weeks ago yeah and it's honestly fascinating to sit here and think about this as you're talking that last year at this time we were considering as a board considering a list of like 16 different potential sites because it was like where are we going to build this wonderful new high school and tech center to best serve our community so fast forward to now where we've decided on a site and we've decided on conceptual designs and even some of the schematic designs it's just had to pause for a moment to reflect on this process the most recent news, the most recent development is that we have altered the conceptual design because we've decided as a board to remove so-called high bay programs from the site at Institute Road in part because we have received a grant from federal government through Patrick Leahy toward if I hope I'm getting this right fact check me anyone who wants to but specifically toward education in tech and aviation and so our automotive program and our aviation program and our advanced manufacturing programs all things that had to be shifted anyway with the shutdown of the BHSBTC currently will be relocated out at the airport in partnership with community members such as Beta Technologies which is a growing company out there and it benefits us in a few different ways one it reduces the footprint of BHSBTC on the current site which reduces cost and it also creates a unified space for these other programs to be together like aviation and automotive they get to have each other as a community and they get to be in the community which is really optimal and important for this aspect of tech ed so we had a schematic design reframe conceptual design meeting at the end of June where the architects presented their information and I'm sure that it was filmed and posted and it's somewhere in an archive if people would like to look at it and we got to see some of the new ideas about what's coming up in terms of funding we had some surplus in the district that we're going to use some of our funds that were set aside some of our capital plan monies that were going to be used for renovations across the district and we've decided to repurpose some of that money for this because this is such an important project and then we're looking at a bond basically that we're going to ask the city of Burlington to consider we'll first city council then city of Burlington and hopefully approve great and so just to reflect those numbers if the first conceptual design began at sort of 181 with an additional 29 for remediation tear down of the existing site we sort of began this conversation at 210 and from that we have applied about 25 million of funding that the district has identified and we have reduced the cost of the building of the entire project to the tune of roughly 20 million dollars is the anticipated reduction because of that relocation so we are looking to to do what's best for our students and for our community first and foremost and consider how we can be most efficient with dollars not only because we haven't yet received support from our state partners though we will continue to ask for that support and to look to through the district's partnership with the consulting firm to continue to look at the state fiscal year 23 budget and all of the various programs that this project would be eligible to receive funding support for that work will continue and we know that what's upon us immediately is developing an ask to present to the school to present to the city council around the bond request and again that the timing of that is fast in that the language has got to be developed and finalized by about August 15 so that we can that language can be finalized on the physical ballots that will be mailed home to folks in time to vote so we've got a good bit of work ahead of us near horizon and I think we've talked about some of those upcoming milestones that the project will move through are there any other milestones that come to mind for you in addition to the work of the next six weeks of sort of working together to finalize that bond language which is really a lot of work going into that from again lots of partners including our partners and colleagues at the city council the mayor's office superintendent etc well I would just say it's never too late to get involved there is a form called the BHS BTC BTC involvement form I think on the BSDVT website I googled BHS BTC 2025 to see how does one find this information and it popped up pretty quickly I would say continuing to have conversations with our other local leaders so school board members but also city councilors and legislators particularly around funding to mitigate the old school we need specifically right now $29 or $30 million so any ideas for where that money could come from or how we might get that money would be great and continued pressure on people because I think that there is funding there it's just a question of how do we get it how do we access it deserve it of course I'm biased I choose to live in Burlington but we deserve an absolutely amazing wonderful high school for our community and for everyone in our community I've been thinking a lot about this and about public education and about democracy especially over the past few weeks and recently read a piece about a rural district where the residents realized that complacency is the central threat to democracy and I would say that complacency is the central threat to us getting or not getting a high school so get involved thank you Polly what an awesome call to action I appreciate your conviction in that and the variety of ways that you just offered folks to get involved I think that many of us I know you do as well join our neighborhood planning assembly we dial into our PTO meetings we have our own sort of social media presence or community presence in the wards and districts that we are elected to represent and I would also say that we are available by email by phone and you can find that contact information on the website as well but we really are here to hear your thoughts and I know I've appreciated the last handful of weeks the level of engagement that has come my way and that I have sought out because as you noted and I think what you reflected so beautifully is that you're also sourcing this input and this information continually and it's just about the most important thing that we can be doing right now is communicating the urgency and the importance of this project to our community members so that we are successful in November and beyond well I know that we are coming up at time and I just want to thank you again for joining me for this afternoon's conversation and thank all of the viewers for tuning in today we will be sure to post the link to this recorded program and share it out via front porch forum to folks who weren't able to dial in live and again please reach out to us we are here to represent you and eager to hear from you so look forward to being in touch in the next handful of weeks months and years I suppose to come for those of us who were just elected in March and again thank you so much for tuning in and for making this community what it is.