 Sorry, I didn't mean to startle you, but we're going to get started. It's 6.05 for my last and third minute speaker. Is that right, Jonas? Are you all set, Jonas? So welcome, everybody. We wanted to start today by acknowledging that it's Yom Kippur today, and we, just by trying to be constant for community members to know that we meet every first Wednesday, we totally over-seen that it was the highest holiday. So we apologize for that, and we'll try to get into, you know, try to keep working on our calendar so that it's not, you know, that we're not disrespecting any holiday or any disability or religion. So with that, I'm going to pass it on to Megan just to do this. They're all here. Oh, I'm really tired. So we just want to acknowledge that L32 is located on the land that's long-served as a psychophenin in exchange among indigenous peoples for thousands of years, and it's home of the Western Avenue. L32 honors, recognizes and respects these peoples, especially the Abenaki, as additional stewards of the lands and waters on which we gather today. In that spirit, today we will begin by acknowledging that we're guests in this land and we need to respect and help protect the lands within our use. So one of our four goals is community engagement. So tonight, we're hoping that you can help us improve our understanding of the larger community. And we want to tell you that I know that we don't have a lot of community members, but we have enough people here to know the community. And this is one of the first steps. It's not our only step. It's not a request for having better community engagement. It will help us communicate better with our communities and trade opportunities for us to have a dialogue back and forth so that we can get our best support for our college schools. Yeah, there you go. When we met in September, in person, there was a small group that came and participated and we had also sent out a survey for people who couldn't come out, which as an aside, we've done the same for tonight as well. There were a couple of themes. The board is a little longer summary of what we learned from the input session. We asked folks to tell us what are the most effective ways for people to receive information. They really like their local school communication. They do like newsletters. The things that they most want to know about from the district level are things that pertain to everyone in district-wide focus areas. We asked them what are the most effective ways for them to share information with us. There was some positive feedback around surveys. They cited school board meetings and forums. They had some feedback about getting too many emails. There was a lot more information really helpful for the board. One of the reasons I share this today is because we also acknowledge that it's a pretty small group of people that gave us this feedback. That's part of what tonight is designed to help surface. We are good at school systems of communicating in pretty traditional ways. We are trying to expand that. It is not to discount the feedback we do get from these methods because it is really important. It's been helpful. We will make some changes just based on that. But tonight is about figuring out the voices that we are not hearing because of the way that we typically communicate. That's what this piece is here. This is only the very beginning of this. We don't have one conversation about community mapping and say we've checked that box. This is really going to connect to the longer term planning of the board and some deeper work. Thanks for being part of this first piece. You're in tables for a reason. You've all followed directions nicely and sat at the table. Hopefully where you live, those of us who do not live in the community, we will float around. We're going to do this part for about 20 minutes. You're going to talk in your town groups. The goal here is to surface things about your community that the board would need to know to be able to seek engagement with those members of the community. Here are a couple of questions. It's meant to be a conversation. What are some of the gathering places in your town? Who are key community organizations or people? Our towns are small. Who are some of the voices we miss in our towns and how might we engage them? What else? The goal for this first 20 minutes is to stay at your table. There's chart paper. In a way, we want two people to record. One person will take markers and jot themes on the chart paper which will be important for the next activity. The other person, there is a sheet of paper on each table. Some of you might have actual contact information for people that the board might want. That's what that second piece of paper is. The goal is to have conversation, talk about these, go beyond these questions, and then jot down on the chart paper answers to these questions. People that you want to seek. Organizations you think the board should connect. The next activity, I will flip it back. Afterwards, we will break up and you will then leave your community table and wander to the other tables to read what they have to say. Some of you know your other community is very well too. You might have additional things you could add. So we will kind of leave the town tables shortly. Questions about this first part? We're right on time. So we'll set a timer and have a conversation. I'm wondering if your kids were there? Well, they're 25 and 26 now. Zora and Dashel? What were you doing? I was reading interventions. I worked mostly with the youngest. Not everyone. Zora is a little English. Concert academy. That's how far all those stories went with her. My kids are 27 and 29. Will was there for kindergarten. Then we moved to Florida for a couple of years. Take care of my dad and then we came back. And then he was there for four years. And then here. Gathering places. Who would like to do... My good friend. There's this and this. The school. That's the list. I always think of Dudley's. Dudley's is an informal gathering place. No restaurants. Oh, Fox Den. Fox Market. That's what's market is. I was there, but they didn't have anything to eat. And I was very hungry. The sandwiches are amazing. It was like a million dollars. I thought I haven't tried yet. But I put them there. I didn't want that. She gets dinner there a lot. I called them about the chickens. I thought they had roasted chickens. And I thought, well, I don't know my chicken that well. Transfer station. Yeah. Okay, that's nicer than dumb. BP and sons transfer station. Do people gather there? Oh, definitely. There's always people talking. It's like the post office. We could have a Marshfield address and get mail at the house. But it would be one less point of contact. It's the same as having a landline. I would never talk to my in-laws if we didn't have a landline. They would never call me. When it's finished, the East Calus general store went in. We didn't talk about the corner store. That's the Whammy bar. Whammy bar slash people's first store. And so number 10 and Curtis like boat launches, swim areas. Oh, yeah. We have trails now too. And some people gather to bike or hike those trails, like the town trails. We've got a couple active farm stands that. Yes. Yep. Schoolhouse and Pooley flat. Maybe it's morbid, but the cemeteries are another place. And even the roads. I mean, how often do you have to be like, yeah, I'm sitting. I'm sitting. They're still talking. Okay. It's okay. Yeah. Bus stops. Yeah. So this, that'll probably, is it anything we're missing? Town hall, school, Whammy bar, make the corners. Town Clakes office. Town office. Hi. I just want to give you a reminder that we're live. In case you didn't know. Yeah. You know, to brag the school is a, yeah, I mean, it's been town meeting. It's been voting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We pretty much again, my first year and now we're getting back to our building use procedure. We will have the. Historical society is going to be doing a bike thing in November. Evening like people using it for birthday parties. Well, that may be something that in a town like Berlin that. And maybe that's different than the other. Yeah. It really is. If there is engagement around the school. Right. The, the Grange. Yeah. Is, is it is a place of opportunity. It's not really in Berlin, but because we support it. Because is that, I think it's right before the line or it's right after the line. No, it's. Is it in Berlin? It is in Berlin because we had to vote on. Yeah. And it's available to, to be used by community members. And it gets a fair bit of use. We used to always, there used to always be something going on there. Whether. It has the old artwork from the school. Is in it. You know, so once they renovated. What's turning up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's available to, to be used by community members. And it gets a fair bit of use. We used to always, there used to always be something going on there. And it gets a fair bit of use. And it gets a fair bit of use. What's. What's. What's the neighborhood network? Or the neighbor. Network. It's. WNN. I don't know. She keeps track of all the people with young children moving into the area. It's a. I don't know. The details. I get very nice and kind of so it. That's the way. Invited people to join and it's like if you. Would ever be interested in helping out. If you would ever be interested in helping out a neighbor in need, like if someone has surgery and needs meals, like that might be a time that today is sent out an email, or if someone needs their woods to act and do it, whatever. Oh, okay. It's like neighbors helping neighbors, but it's the, you know... It sounds like rent-forge form, but your own version... I would just say, I love this first-part form. After leaving Northfield with was a total dumpster fire, coming to Worcester where people are like, somebody drop their wallet. I want to make sure you get it. Does anybody have, does anybody need a childcare seat? You know, when it's like in Northfield, it was like, just yell at it and swear at everybody all the time. Lovely. I think it was just so whole. Just catch the damn sheep, you know? Yeah. And there's a lot of dogs that seem to go missing. I mean, I do feel like there's a lot of... Usually someone gets on and rants about, like, don't let your cats out, because they will get eaten. This is missing cat season. My cat has not gone missing at all. Oh, God, not from what? I know. Are there any other live, physical gathering places? The dump. Rent-forge form or... Yeah, I mean, rent-forge form. Rent-forge form. Any other... It's Facebook or the other dump, rent-forge form. Okay. Might be a bias to retail as well, basically. Some Saturday morning, I made a show up at the dump. It was just TV. And I feel like everybody will know there's an outside. It's true. Like, the people that are involved in that kind of thing are involved with the precedent school board information. But they might be a good time for being in touch with you to prevent a wide debate. Outstanding. Who is to begin a girl group? Town meaning solutions committee. Yes. Susan would like... I mean, we'll just put her down as a... She's an amazing resource. Yeah. Sam Armonies, too. Now, to the next one. She's involved in, like, the Vermont Middlesex community, whatever community I guess it is. We're listing, I do some. What's yours? I mean, you're talking about all the people who are there in the WhatsApp Middlesex. Yeah. Right? We're listing a lot of leaders. I would say I'm working with some of the public, and people who are in this thing are like introverts or people who are not comfortable with public speaking. What about the little four-corner school? Yeah, what's there? I just did this and you knew exactly what it was. What's happening there now? The Bone Builders meet every week there. Historical Society. Oh, good place for info sharing. I think the Bone Builders meet every Thursday. And you can rent it for, like, graduation parties and things like that. Well, Zora and Dasha went to preschool. Yes. My 11 happened when they were there. That's crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. Well, that's pretty good, I think. Actually, East Montpelier is huge from coast to coast. It's a lot of land. It's just amazing. Who are some of the voices we miss? Do we go to Horn of the Moon? Is that East Montpelier? Is there anything else there? Is there what? Not any other sites there? Well, I guess we could say Anand Despar. I was going to ask Anand Despar. That's so big. But isn't that mostly middle sex? It turns and it's a middle sex. You pointed that out. Well, I think part of the community we miss and I sort of brought somebody here today. Something's found in the community. Oh. Yeah, a lack of commerce generally. Yeah. Those are some themes. That's me. Thank you, Daniel. Evidence in our tax space, for sure. And if you think about who are some of the voices we are missing in our town. A lot of our conversations are town and school center. But we have an Asian population. I was going to say that elderly are very much left out. And families who no longer have. It's like, I would say I saw a callous family at homecoming weekend with their 20-something-year-old kiddo watching both boys and girls soccer. But I do think people often lose touch. They think that the ski program exists as it did 15 years ago when they were heavily involved. The things are the way they were when their kids were in the schools. And whether it's callous or U-32. And that's not necessarily at all the case. Some people use them after I went to one of my neighbors. I've used that one as well. I think there's like a small pool of overextended volunteers. Oh yeah, always. I mean we do miss like where we live. Like we were so close. Yes, yeah. Where do you live now? We're up in Berry, Berry town. So we're up on some kind of a ridge there. From Phelps Road. Yep. What about at the high school? What are the types of groups or ways to connect with the community that's here? I mean is it like sporting events? Yeah, I mean that's pretty much for us. That's what we draw. The co-curriculars, right? Theatre, music, sports, all those kinds of things that people come on board. Our art spatch that we do at the end of each semester is a huge draw. So maybe, you know... Which are, you know, multiple... Right, right. But there's nothing, you know what I mean? It might be nice to have a booth and it has like each of the towns, but what is it that comes together? So we're super fortunate. Is it arts bash or something? Yeah, so we do those kinds of things. Well in social media, what's our presence on social media? You know, do we have statistics about... It didn't matter if you had a kid or not. We're having a high breakfast. I'm so excited. And the coats and coffee. Coats and coffee, would you like... No, that was on this weekend. Shit. You were live on television. Did anyone show up? Were people better than me? No, people came up, dropped the coats and then left and Chris Pollard and I had a wonderful chat. Which made me very glad that we only scheduled it for two hours. It was a mistake to do it on the same day. We learned a lot. To do it on the same day as the other clothing swap? That's why I was thinking it was the weekend after the clothing swap. Yes, there were things... So the school is really trying to do more community things. Like we're having our second blood drive. And really looking at ways we're not... I have broken the news to Dell so I can make it public. We are not doing a play this year. But... I'll be back before Wednesday. But we are going to do... We'll have the winter concert and an art show and then we're going to have a student showcase. So classes will decide as classes what they want to do. So there may be a component that's a play that people are presenting things in the gym. And so it might start with people in the gym and then people wandering around. And just looking at ways of opening up the building more to the community. Making it a community resource. And having classes there. At the beginning of the year open house. At the school? At the open house. Are there any places outside of Worcester that Worcester folks go regularly? Popular. Where would you go grocery shopping? Is there any engagement in any other or is Worcester kind of... I think it depends on who. Then it starts to become different. A little separated. Like probably the co-op crew. Yeah. To the shop shop. Yeah. It becomes more fractionated. Yep. That's what's great about the gym. We all have trash. Yeah. That is true. Why not? It switches interfaces and in particular because it uses fixed font sizes. And does not have natural flow. Like it doesn't reflow for the format of the device. You end up having to zoom in and then scroll back and forth. Scroll across and then down and then... Or I zoom in and out and out and out. I mean I make it work. It's not my favorite. The usability issues. And then you're holding it back here. Focus on your eyes with your mouth. Which is attractive. How black. Now all of the... You don't give a... I got so... It's a trauma. And Katelyn will be like... Would you like your glasses? No. And you say no. No I don't. I'm just fine. So then I'm just kind of figuring out the line. It's not going to get any better. I'm still going to look weird. So we have like... So I do have something to add. Maybe if we still do this. I'm just going through it. With the bonfire. So you think you need a whole bonfire where they can do the corn roast. Corn apple and corn roast. I don't know where to write this. I'm going to put it on the bottom. It was the spring fair. It's a gathering place. Is that... I'm writing it down here. Is the beach shelter still there? They shut down... They shut down during COVID. And now they have finished. And they have like a grant system. Going on. Based on emails that I've received. Corn roast in the mall. So I know that the PTO... Did you just fly like out of the air? Why are you at home? Why are you at home? I don't know. It's kind of like karate kid moment. So then it was the spring fair. And that was the PTO run. That was great. And so that... It's not... The pizzas that they serve in the crisis. They serve them at the festival. It's sort of like... Yeah, committed to education for sure. I think committed to education and art. Education and art. Yeah, it comes up like... I think we have three theaters. If you can't... Where do we meet the bowlers? Where do we meet the bowlers? Where do we meet the bowlers? Where do we meet the bowlers? Where? And a lot of historic preservation. You can't... Yeah, foreigners is... Yeah, so... Definitely... We hold on to traditions that... That just have lasted... Since I was a kid. It was a volleyball age festival. Every year. Black flag festival. Right, that's another important one. It's newer, but yeah. I was... It was interesting to see that they were doing a... A ball festival type thing at the rec field. Yeah. I was like, ooh, and I wasn't going to be around. But now I'm going to be around this week until I'm like... I'm going to go down. Here's an example, like the... Events committee for the Maple Corner Community Center. It was like... Planning a separate kids event. For the... My wife's on the commission. There's this awesome thing that's already planned. Why are we... So they... Change their mind, fortunately. They have to go to that side of town. They have to go right or so long down. That has to be like... That's what kids are. Yeah. That sounds really fun. And it's interesting. Our, like, matriarch... East Palace information passed a couple of years ago. Erlene Leonard, and she... One of the kindergarteners was playing iSpy as we waited for her to pick up. iSpy... Something white. And we're all looking at the rec field. And she said, your hair, Mrs. Johnson. I was like, of course. So as a taxpayer in East Montpelier, I did not have children, so I had no sense of access to the school. I'm happy to pay into it, but there was no relationship until I had kids. And that's why when people are so about my school, my town, and we have to have these town lines, half East Montpelier, three quarters East Montpelier, quarter Palace. If they had decided our whole road like the Palace, I would have aligned myself. So I also think there's a whole group of people living in the woods or people without children. People without children, yeah. I hate to start conversations, especially with some of you, are just jumping into the missing voices part of the conversation. The goal now is to kind of break away from your town groups and take a look at what the other towns have written down. And it will spark new conversation. You can jot something on someone else's chart paper. You also may see something that middle sex wrote down and say, oh, that makes me think of and then go back to your town and write it down. So it's nice to do it with a couple of people so that you know the goal is to move out of your town groups. And we'll do this for about 10 minutes and then we'll just have an small enough group. We'll have an informal conversation and share just what they learned from this. So the farms are not connected like they do with Fairmount and Templeton? The big organic farm. Oh yeah. I know what you're talking about. And heat houses in here. And they have a soccer team. I don't think we have any. I don't think we have any. So there's only one place that only the old shares but they don't. They don't farm it. Right. Yeah Dudley. They have two RVs. They have Microsyns. And they have... That one got sold to Superstore and it's not local. Well, we did write it down. They service like Calis too, and Plainfields, and Marshfields. It was really nice. The very last meeting on Saturday, one minute till noon. Good to have you. But I never saw the TV once, so I don't know if they used my TV. I didn't see that. I didn't see that. I watched like an old children's TV at the sea. Every time I had a movie, you were watching it. And Jason Chen's show, it was so amazing. And the woman Heather from, from, from very Ramon Puff. But I didn't see mine. Oh, okay. Yeah. You know what? Consider that part of your town hall. Yeah. Everything that happens in the town hall, the town, the community lunch, the clothing shop. Oh yeah, clothing shop. Your fireworks on there? Fourth of July. Yeah, you've got the folks who do the mushroom farming. Oh. Oh. And Calis. Yeah. Weisman. Yeah. I don't think. They started a Calis? Yeah. Really, I didn't know that. Where about? Yeah, that's a good point. Where were they? I think it was these Calis. No kidding. Yeah. Where is the Whisker Club? The what? Where is the Dome? It is on the Calis Road. If you go past the school, where you get to the bridge, it goes over the North Branch. It's down there. That's where you live. Huh? Our site. Where is this? I know. I understand. I know. I know. If you live somewhere else, you have a county road. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the community lunch is huge. Yes. It used to be Harry's. That's what it used to be. Oh yeah. Harry's. Well, I'm just going to say Storm's. Me too. I love Harry's. There's another. Harry's was Walmart before Walmart. It was amazing. What? Like the circle farm. There's a little farm. That doesn't surprise me. And I mean that. That's why. I always knew when Christmas season was starting. Because they put a Christmas tree on the roof of Harry's. And that was like. The start of the Christmas season. When they let it out. When I came to Vermont for my first trip. You have to go to Harry's. And I was like. You can get it. I would. I want to. You know. It was the place to go. But then. I thought. So. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was like when. That's different. I was having the same thing when. It was like a例. When that showed down. I mean, we've been buying our lumber there for years. I was like, that was a perfect space to like create this team thing. Well, I guess not. But yeah. I guess that's why they put the porta potty post there. Yeah, you'd have to talk about a business plan. Yeah, it was a super fun. I see Peter all the time. I'm glad that you made a company. Yep. And I did it. Business. Business. Business. So, no. So, the development council is just re-enabled. So, it's us, Waterbury, our community, Waterbury, and it's all technical. So, I'm happy to share this with you guys. Most of the businesses are Waterbury fairs. So, I'm happy to share this with you guys. Yeah. So, there's... Oh, God. It's tiny. It's not tiny. In an organization like Waterbury, the Department of Labor, we actually belong here to businesses. And it's usually all over. So, the business goes from there. They say, well, I actually love Waterbury. That little bit that they need is where usually they're from. But it's a lot of business. So, I'm happy to share this with you guys. Where are they from? Forgot groups, too. I haven't been there in a while. I haven't been there in a while. So, I'm happy to share this with you guys. So, I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I'm happy to share this with you guys. I think we all did a good job of focusing on our towns, but I was thinking about the other day driving through Montpelier behind a U32 bus and how many of our bus routes must travel through Montpelier and just think about that sort of negative space. But seriously Montpelier is sort of a moving force around this district and to deny its role in the community would be disingenuous. Two things that I noticed, one was broadly in common, the other probably so, but it only came up in two towns. Broadly in common was that Frontport Dorm is clearly an important resource to leverage. And I think maybe we could be making more use of it to not just post an announcement of an upcoming meeting, but use it as kind of a mini newsletter of what's going on. And I'll put a pin on that one because I want to come back to that newsletter very briefly. But the other thing I noticed was that Worcester had it mentioned as the town royalty, but then it also came up in Middlesex as the sense that maybe there's a little bit of clickishness that goes on too. Elitism? Or was that believed the word that I used? It didn't end up on our board, but I wondered what, you know, that might be impacting other towns as well. The sense that maybe there's like the in-crowd in town and the people on the outside of that are having a little bit harder time getting engaged because they think that this in-crowd is really the ones that are just wanting everything and it's hard to get involved. I don't know how to cross that boundary, but I think it's something worth thinking about being aware of that social dynamic and how to get across that boundary. And then one thing I want to put in on the newsletters is most of the newsletters at least around me are distributed in what's called the PDF format and it's a terrible way to distribute information. Some people are not engaged because it's difficult to read the other, especially on mobile devices. And so I've talked about it for years, I won't go too much into that, but I really would like to see more in the town may need to put newsletters information into a more natural format that actually works better across the place. The interesting thing, we're over here chuckling about the Worcester royalty because when we think of that, it's not an elitism thing, but it's the heritage, it's the holders of all the information and the holders of the history of the town. They're the people who know stuff. But you know, thinking about what I was just having a little side conversation very briefly, but anyway, with Natasha wondering like does front porch form, we do a lot of communicating through front porch form. Does it, does it match? There doesn't match. Does it reach everyone and how do we reach it and how do we leverage the dump in Worcester and LBJs to get information out? I think one thing that I've noticed too is that when I was looking at each one of these, there's the local businesses are listed, but there are other businesses that operate within this area. I mean, we actually, Berlin has the Chamber of Commerce within its bounds for central Vermont and there's some other organizations. And I get to be a part of one of those, which also shows me like the bigger piece of business engagement, which I don't think we do. We listed places, but we don't engage them, right? They're just there for us right now. And so I think that sometimes as you speak to the Montpelier isn't really just the base of all that, but it just seems to be where concentration of that activity goes on. And I think that that's an important place to engage more people, particularly some of our larger taxpayers in terms of some of these businesses and what they do. The other thing that some have noticed, we listed U32 and more likely, I thought it was, and it wasn't that we were saying it was in Berlin, but it was the co-curricular events. So that those are those opportunities of getting not only direct families, but also grandparents or other people in the community that it's a way for all of us to access and to share what are ways to become involved, what are ways for us to get feedback and information. Just a quick thought then, because I didn't see a show of anywhere, but as long as we're talking about the void that is Montpelier and where we can have these other spaces where people commonly gather, it occurs to me that I'm not sure exactly what level of engagement we're looking for out of businesses and so on, but if we're looking at how the spread of information and for each people, it seems to me Kellogg of February would be actually a notable place for all the campuses, a place where people would be, you know, possible to see post-its on and so on. We keep talking about Montpelier because we sort of exist around it, and I think there's an assumption that most of us flock to Montpelier for things we need. But there are families on I'll say the outer northern edges where it is easier, convenient, closer for us to head to Waterbury. And so there is a division within our district of the families who sort of congregate Waterbury side versus Montpelier. And there's probably crossover families to people, but there is that, and sometimes it can feel less inclusive. I don't know. It's not always considered. That's all I was going to say, Barry, thank you. Also, you were talking about how to clickiness and that definitely came up with us for a callus. We've definitely had these clicks where there's these little centers, but there's, you know, all over the place, but there's not one callus center. We have Adamant, East Callus, Maple Corner, North Callus. You know, it's all over the place. And some of those can get very clicky and people not wanting to go over from one place to the other. So that's a big challenge. Well, I just wanted to say thank you. I think this shows us how interconnected we are even within our other communities. And definitely our barrier center was also missing. I was saying, you know, and that's, you know, that's a huge part of why we're here, too. Sure. It is with the consistent theme of reaching elderly or people who may not be comfortable with technology that we have vibrant senior centers that serve our communities and perhaps having, like, a listening group opportunity on a, you know, quarterly basis in those settings might be another setting where we could be reaching people by going to them, to those community centers. Since a lot of the places we talked about are places that you might spontaneously connect with somebody walking into Dudley's or going into your local post office, et cetera. Thanks. I was thinking about something you think we need to consider next. I was running down some things that hurt just more questions to maybe be helpful. I think it goes to what Diane was saying about, like, what are some of the goals here? So some of the things I was asking myself in this conversation is, like, what are we expecting when we talk about community engagement? Is it info sharing? Is it people being physically present somewhere? Is it just the fact that there's strong avenues of communication? Is it people being involved in some way? Is it being and having a positive perception? Is it about, you know, the vote? Like, what are we talking about? And I say that because I don't live in the district, I live somewhere else. And as I think about engagement in the community that I live in, I put on the other hand of not a school personnel person, but a community member. And I know as a responsible citizen that if I want some information, I have to make an effort to go seek it. I know where to find it. And I know that my town's school board or select board has those avenues of communication. So it just kind of makes me think, are we, with these questions, thinking like people need to be coming to school board meetings versus other things, like we have communication avenues. But it's a responsibility of citizens to seek and not just to be served at their doorstep. So I just think about those things around community engagement. Yeah, and I think what we're hoping, this is our first attempt at this, right? But what we're hoping is that it's all of that actually, right? And at different times, we want to just give information out for budgeting, right? Like we're trying to pass the budget. We want to get that information out, but make sure that before that, we immediately reached out to the community so that we got their input and had a conversation. But so I think at least the way that we were seeing this exercise is that it would inform all of those questions that you're saying to me, sometimes it's just going to be, you know, that we've been posting this cycle, for example, that is popular, and that the Friends of Washington Central can spread the news about something. But that we might, from what we're hearing, need to provide food to be able to get people into coming to this community forum, and have a dialogue. But that we also need to reach out to maybe go to the senior centers or have a, yeah, some. So it's a way to us mapping is like getting a better understanding of who we're trying to reach, when we're trying to reach it, and how we reach it. And this is just the first step. So we're going to try to synthesize all of this information into the sheets and then do it again, right? Like not do it again, I think. But maybe go somewhere to see who they're not reaching. But we don't have all the answers where as we, it's an aspirational goal that we want to have a concrete goal on us as more members in our expert data. And I think it's that we know that schools handle it along, right? So we need the understanding of the community for any change that we want to put in our schools. Yeah, and just to kind of close out this part, if there's something that you think of later that you wanted to add, this is in the packet, and we will also push it out through the newsletter. It's already been out, I didn't check it to see what we have. And it just repeats the same thing. I think we are community members of our state for this, but we're turning to our board learning part. Thanks, Laura. Thanks, Nate. Good work. This is great. I don't know if we need to rearrange tables, if anybody needs to move anything, or you want me to stand and be one of your customers in your team. No, I'm sorry. Why do you think I want to see people out there? No, I didn't come up with anything. Folks are processing, that's important. I've been hearing a lot of processing going on in the room with a sense of, okay, what does this mean, and what do we do with this information, that's great. So if you had an opportunity to plan through or read Chapter 3, the book we've been looking at together, improving school board effectiveness, a balanced governance approach. The authors of Chapter 3 are focusing in on a key element of school board work that is often overlooked, at minimum overlooked. And at best it's given kind of a cursory view or a lot of times school boards can have a bit of sort of misunderstanding that community engagement is like school-to-family partnerships or school-to-building partnerships. And so thinking about what kind of, when you think about it, the governance level, strategically, what's the board's role? We're all community members and so we come and we cross over, we wear multiple hats. Some school board members are teachers or administrators in other districts. Some have children that are in the system, so they have that parent hat. Others are perhaps connected with a business or someone else that's connected with the school system. So there's a lot of sort of crossover of roles and engagement already. If we were to back out of that a couple of steps, what is that again legitimate place for the school board to be engaged with and to engage the community and involve the community in its work? And let me tell you some things that have emerged in research since this chapter was written. Build a strong connection or relationship between boards that believe they are engaging and involving the community in their work of setting a vision, setting goals, monitoring progress, reporting out. When boards report that they are doing those things, engaging the community in their work, they're more likely to be overseeing a system that is improving an achievement for all and closing gaps at the same time. That's why this is incredibly important. In fact, research that's emerging this month and maybe next month before I have access to the full report suggests that boards may need to govern differently based on who their community is. So just incredibly important to know who your community is and in our case, not just an individual town or school community, but the whole district. Like, how is Calis different than Eastmont-Pillier or Middlesex different than Wooster? And what are the opportunities in one place that we might overlook in another? What are those natural connections to the community? So the authors, when they wrote this chapter, they were drawing from social capital theory. Pretty fancy word for how connected are people within the community or outside of the organization in which they serve. One of their theories or their premise is that thriving organizations have a stronger connection between the board of directors and different community constituent groups and the board of directors has strong relationships among itself or within its own number. They use the terms closure and brokerage. Brokerage has always disturbed me a little bit. There's a lot of connotations of brokerage that don't resonate with me, so I tend to use bonding and bridging. I wondered if there was a science teacher in the room. What are the scientific terms for bridging and bonding? Is it physics, chemistry? There's an overlap here. If the material holds together to itself, we call that cohesion. Thank you. And if it sticks to something else, we call that adhesive. Right. So that idea is the board sticking, right? And is the board sticking together? Does it have adhesion and cohesion? The cohesion being really important. As you think about those couple of terms, I just draw your attention to, I want to say page 44, where they talk about social capital theory. In the middle of the page, they write that these are critical elements at the most basic level. School boards are influenced by two realities, internal relations among board members and external relations with other stakeholders in the community. These are critical elements when measuring social capital in organization. How well do board members work with each other? And what outside connections do they have? I've been in this work of school board development for going on 16 years and I was a school board member for several years before that. My phone is most likely to ring back in the days when people actually call people or I'm most likely to get an email from a board member or superintendent that is concerned with which one of those two aspects? The bonding with each other or the board bridging with the community? Which is more likely to prompt someone to reach out to me? The bonding with each other, right? And we know, in fact, subsequent chapters here, the very next chapter talks a little bit more about drama in the boardroom and how that can cause chaos in the classroom. The first chapter deals with that. And there are school boards in other communities where members have a hard time getting along with each other. That's really critical. You could say it's square one but I hate to suggest that one of these areas is more important than the other because they're both really important. And it's also important and later in the chapter they unfold, it's not about groupthink. It's not like the board needs to think all the same way or have the same perspectives. In fact, quite the opposite. If everybody on the board agreed all the time, how many board members would you need? One. And floor could just govern the district, right? I don't want to play into any thoughts people might have. As you think about that though, the importance of having multiple people, multiple voices on the school board has multiple voices, multiple perspectives. In fact, if the board always agrees with each other, something's not right. Something's wrong. And the decision is not likely to be the best. I could go a lot further in that because I spent a lot of time in that area. How we help boards see this is not about groupthink. When we say we need to be united, we need to be united as a team. It's not that we're losing our individual voice or our identity. In fact, we're probably strengthening that. There was research done about 10 to 15 years ago, pretty popular, Stephen Covey's son, Stephen MR Covey, published a few books out of that research, and the first one I think was called Speed of Trust, so that when there's high trust in an organization, things get done quicker. And as they point out in this chapter, one of the pieces that's super important to that, when there's high trust, people collaborate and they share information, right, when there's trust. Now, that could be true internally for the board members with each other, and that could also be true with the community and the board or the school system. Again, when there's high trust, people share information, they collaborate, and things get done more quickly. When there's low trust, it's constant wrong. Everything's slow. I'm wondering what her motivations were for why she asked that question. I'm wondering why he made that motion. What does he really want, right? We become more suspicious, and that takes a lot of energy, a lot of mental bandwidth, and it just bogs things down. So one of the important pieces for school boards to consistently be mindful of, and I would say this extends to the school administration and the school community as a whole, how are we doing on trust? Are we having trust for each other? If someone says something, are we trusting that that comes from a good place, they really mean it? Or, and I've had this happen before too, where I was doing a workshop like this and a board member turned and faced the camera, and the legislature needs to do blood, and they had a C-span on. And at the time, I wondered, I mean, we're talking about superintendent evaluation, all of a sudden, and it's like, oh my word, you know, cameras don't help, right? I mean, and anytime you get a situation where somebody is saying to someone the next day or at the coffee shop, did you see how I told them last night, that's not a good sign, right? So trust has to come from an authentic place where we are true to ourselves and sharing our truth, like it requires some vulnerability. I was talking with a couple of people before we got started here this evening, and we were talking about how important that is, but if we don't feel safe, we're not likely to be vulnerable. If we don't feel safe, if we feel like our position may be threatened, our reputation may be threatened, our role on the board, our role in the community, or our position in the district, if we can't speak our truth, we need to be mindful of that. There are some great self-assessment questions that are embedded in this chapter. I really appreciated those. I think they would lend themselves well to a board just doing kind of a two-different checklist, right? How are we doing our bonding with each other? Are we able to say what needs to be said? Are we able to hear clearly what someone's saying to us, or are we always looking for hidden motives? And then the other checklist of self-assessment about our connections with the community. We just did an exercise, which I know this is like one piece of the ongoing work of thinking about who is our community, how are we engaged, who's connected to whom, and those lists began to be formed as the author talked about here in this chapter, of how important that is to identify who are we connected with, and then perhaps who are we not connected with? Now, if a board finds that a lot of people are connected with the same people, then do board members need to break those connections? Or what? Anybody get into that? Now get me into the chapter. What do you do if a bunch of board members are connected to the same group and you're missing other connections in the community? Add connections. Add connections, right? And diversify who is connecting with that missing chunk, right? Right, yeah. They talk about add connections and then diversify who's missing in the chunk. Who are we not connected with? I've seen that be a powerful exercise for school boards. To recognize there's a community and maybe it's people who are hearing impaired. Any type of grouping in the community but no one is connected to that group, what are we going to do? Who's got a connection, a relationship, an opportunity? What are some of the benefits or results of a lot of connections in the community? How does that benefit the school board or benefit the district? Yeah, put a graceful flow of information that you might not otherwise have. Absolutely, that flow of information. They talked about that. You might get a heads up on a road's not going to be plowed or you may just get a heads up on a political thing, anything, right? Just flow of information. And then two-way flow, right? So that that segment of the community is hearing about the needs or concerns of the school district as well as the school district, school board having a conduit of information coming through there. Good. So we had a few questions that I shared with you in advance. Let me pull those up and see how far off-track it might be. The author suggests we got into the two realities a little bit. How might individual school board members enhance trust among the board district and community without making promises that are outside of the role of one board member along? How can individual school board members enhance trust among the board and within the community without making unilateral promises that they don't have the ability to fulfill? What are some promises they could make personally? I think having as a board having norms that you've discussed and then you as a board member be consistent with those so that you can represent and understand that you will always be consistent with those. Yeah, and in a lot of times we call that operating protocols but having norms as a board that everybody agrees to and does their best to adhere to can go a long ways toward building trust because things become predictable. Lead by example show the actions you do. Lead by example, yeah. I've said this many times in the last three months in Vermont that boards need to model the type of behavior that they would expect to be happening in the classroom and it's interesting as an older adult myself how quickly we can lose that concept, right? That we wouldn't allow or expect that kindergartners would behave in a certain way but yet as adults you've probably seen this before sometimes we behave outside of the norms of what we would expect school children. Yeah, seriously? Whoa, man. I'm sure not your parents or anyone who lives on your street. What else? What else could a board member do individually? Yes, sir. Just listen to people and reflect upon it. Yes, one promise we can make is to listen. Thank you. And I appreciate it. You added to reflect on it. Yeah. Just inform the board there we can go and meet with this community member or with community group and then report back. So it's not a surprise to anyone. So that concept has a norm of no surprises and also kind of individual transparency of telling folks in advance I'm going to go meet with this disturbed upset patron whatever it is, right? Whatever it is. And then share back, this is what I found. Be committed to the goals of the district, right? Like one thing that we can do is we're talking to our community members is like we have to share goals. Make sure that, you know, we're sharing goals and be committed to that. Doesn't mean that your opinion doesn't matter but you're committed to that and believe that also it can learn, right? That's something that we can always share. Really important. As individual board members we're always going to have our own interests. We're going to have things that are important to us and we're going to have things we feel strongly about but making sure that whenever we're having conversations with others we're also putting forward those agreements that we have supported to commitment goals purpose and particularly to children. And as you think about this so I feel like we got a lot out of that you know, the what else and the listening really important authentically than what you added reflecting on what we heard what is somebody trying to tell us. To what extent let's just think a little hypothetical so it doesn't get rough. To what extent is a typical school board representative of all segments of the community they represent? And why might that be an important area for board to explore? Kari, some other board that you've heard of maybe in Massachusetts to what extent does a school board tend to represent all segments of the community? It's hard to assess my sense is not that well we know the people we know and what we know and it's a lot of work to reach out. It takes a lot of the intention to follow through even to identify the different constituencies. We don't know what we don't know. The last credible national survey of school board members 2009 really suggested at that time that school board members were likely to be more traditionally inclined than the general public. They were likely to be more fluent more likely to be white more likely to be male more likely to be older they're kind of a typology of that tendency that historically other groups have not been as represented on school boards and maybe not a current issue in Vermont I don't know these numbers I'll be able to find out now but in some states still there's a real lack of representation of women on school boards which is interesting and maybe not a surprise depending on ethos of those states but I am curious now that I put it out there in Vermont what are the numbers how does that look I was just going to say I think that there's a certain amount of privilege that comes with being on the board whether it's the privilege of you're in a two income household there's another person who can watch the children while you're at a meeting or you are retired so you have the time to sit on the board there's certain things that allow a group of people to be able to be on a school board that are not going to allow a number of our constituents to be able to sit on the school board and so then we're not hearing their voices so that I would say that that's not limited to school boards no absolutely not absolutely not it's a peculiar empty space so a lot of us have been talking about this when it comes to school boards and written about it and interestingly just to be fair school boards are the most representative of any other group of people in any kind of governance in our country but when you compare that to the U.S. Senate you know it doesn't say a whole lot so and or no level right yeah why is representation important good points Natasha made it takes a certain amount of social capital you have to have enough financial stability that you can either take off work or be off work or have channel care or have gas to get there I mean there are a lot of folks in our community that couldn't serve on a school board because they don't have the time or the resources yeah like baseline skills that make it comfortable to approach taking a board a commitment pursuing a board commitment whether it's appointed or elected and this kind of goes back to our town-based conversations and when our kids learning about Civics and then how are those conversations extending if there is a dinner table conversation at home you know because we're trying to reach the next generation of people who might explore this is something they want to have as part of their adult lives but also bringing those conversations to adults who may not have considered it right because it's not part of your family culture or something that you through volunteerism in your high school career or in some other capacity if you haven't been part of a group experience like this or Robert's Rules of Order there's a lot of things that are intimidating about participating in a board beyond the socioeconomic and time commitments that education piece is is huge we don't have time to go into all those things wrong with Robert's Rules of Order but it is the epitome of European centric thinking it really is the epitome of that and what you're saying about as Natasha said it takes some finances it takes resources it may take some other kinds of skills I have worked with school board members that were functionally delivering there are people with less than an eighth grade education serving on school boards across the country but it tends to be rare and there are people from every kind of background but it's interesting it's not lost at the state level right now that we have a very strong tradition commitment to local control but we're not preparing students and young people to exercise local control well we're not raising generations to be able to know how to be part of a group and how to adhere to group norms and how to maybe confront group norms in a healthy respectful manner it's something I think it behooves us to think a bit more about how do we prepare people to serve in a democratic setting like in school it's rich I hate to talk too much I think one thing too about our boards over the years is it's generally people who have had kids or have kids in the school system and so when we talk about those groups that are not represented if you didn't have a child in the school system the likelihood of you being engaged in it through particularly board membership is probably extremely low I'm trying to think I don't know of any board member who hasn't at least had a kid in the district and it's funny what you're saying I've heard board members say you have no business being on the school board if you don't have kids in the school and I've heard retired board members say you don't have any business being on the school board if you have kids in the school you're too busy you've got conflicts ventures I've heard both sides of that but yeah it would be something to give some thought to how is the board getting representation there's models of boards now that we start to see where they say here's a person from this segment of the community needs to be a part of the board or a person from this segment of the community needs to be a part of the board which is a very different way than electing your neighbor to be that person and that can create a very different and diverse board if you're looking for that I have a lot of creative names coming to mind I've had part of those conversations before so it's like Mountain Molly I just want to say that part of the reason that as a board member part of the reason that is is that we tend in Vermont to just look at Vermont so when we look at the donut it's not just the donut, it's just New Hampshire it's Massachusetts, it's the entire United States and then the world because if we knew what the lack of public education was you would have people running to be board members, right? If we knew what is going on in Tennessee or what is going on in Kentucky or what's going on in Texas, right? So is that this connect too that we go beyond here and that's good for students to understand which I think we do a good job at U32 but we should be as concerned about what Montpelier is doing we'll be as concerned as all of our students in New Hampshire. What can we learn from neighboring states or other places and model a little bit of an anti ethnocentric behavior so it's good for most people So we talk about modeling I want to ask the board members how many it raised your hand if you had a parent or a close family member it was on a school board or a select board or some kind of local public service Ah, school board members did you have someone in your family sir that's not as many as I would have thought but it's still a sizable it's a factor and I've worked with boards in Vermont that have had a family on board for more than 80 years I think even more than that a family member it can be a legacy thing which is not horrible you're raising your children to serve a little bit of mindful of time sorry can I ask a question that goes off of that how many of you would want someone that you are an ally with on the school board in your school when you were a kid does that make sense I don't know you're close so you asked if you had a family member in it and only two of you raised your hand four how many of you wished there were more people like yourselves that were involved with your school when you were our age I wasn't thinking about my school to be fair I was an unusually involved child in high school and that still is a pretty foreign concept to me I went to school board meetings as a kid and it just never would have occurred to me wow that's really strange to expect that my mom should have been there I knew since I was eight years old I wanted to be on the school board I didn't know what they did but I thought it was important so we talked a lot about the barriers to entry barriers are systemic and some of them are choices that we make like what bag you said like there's how do we I think that's a really really important barrier to entry like the time commitment right and the volunteerism with the little token stipend but feeling comfortable enough to even approach the idea of that that's really hard I hope that all of us on the board have at some point talked to other people in our community about joining the school board and those people are always of the same socioeconomic stratum that this board is populated with and we've talked a number of times about how do we increase that socioeconomic diversity on the board because that representation is not there Maggie had me thinking about another kind of foundational belief system of volunteering with the stipend to be on the board is that your voice deserves to be heard and so it's interesting to think of from the age of eight you knew like oh that's something that I want to do and there's a whole subset of our population that I've been told repeatedly that they don't have a voice or it doesn't deserve to be heard and that's something that I think makes me even more challenging to access right like that's that's a certain amount of autonomy you have over yourself to believe that that's a space you deserve to be in that also makes your job as an educator so much more important right because the more the people have their voices heard don't put it that way don't put it that way of course I am no no no I hear you I'm just saying that there like that's a big belief system to think I should be heard in my community it starts when they're a little let them know that they have a voice and maybe parents do parents are absolutely key to that as well teachers well part of this entire conversation is because knowing that our board is not currently physically populated with voices from all the corners we have to figure out then how do we get that because some of those barriers we're not going to be able to resolve those barriers of what allows our board members to be here and participate we can't fix those all or at least we can't fix them right away and so it's coming us to figure out how to get the voices even if they are not even if the goal is not to get them on the board although I think that is a good goal and while we're working on that how do we at least make sure their perspective is shared I'm going to shut up for a while my hands are all over I want to go back briefly too if you've never seen an agenda if you've never encountered what is a moderator there's so much that it's not exclusive to school boards it's board participation in general and volunteerism and I do think we do a good job in this evidence in part by these young ladies here with us today and the groups that we have after school at both the elementary and middle and high school level here but I think that just understanding how these systems work is another layer regardless of your economic or social status or whether you have kids at home I was just going to say Megan sort of went where I was going or hoping to go which is action steps and it just occurred to me that it's one thing to sit on a board and enjoy your privilege and be on that board it's another thing to like publicly call out your own privilege and to you know identify yourself to the community as a tool and leverage that privilege to bring other voices into the conversation I was going to say I think about a lot about that a lot has to do with the quality of the board meeting experience I know lots of people who have the privilege and the smarts and the time to serve on the board but when you ask them they'll take you on for doing this you know you're seeing and I think it's not easy but we have to really attend to having high energy effective meetings for anybody to be interested in doing it because it can be deadly boring for you there's a lot there's a lot of communities where I would want to be on that board I was just thinking that I've been in a lot of different states and most recently in Maryland where they are appoint school board members the governor appoints school board members so it's all about who you know and it's usually the worst people that could possibly it means you try like you would get the right governor elected to get the right people on the school board and when coming back to Vermont thinking we are such a lucky state that we do have local autonomy the way that we do and like I recognize that as a kid because my dad was the justice of the peace and even when he didn't run they still elected him justice of the peace and he really took that job very seriously he was like the community has put a trust in me to do a certain job and that instilled in me this idea of like your word is your bond you know like you really want to live up to what people think of you and I think that that's something that is really special about this state and I think that it's something that we need to continue to work not just in our homes but also in our school systems to like perpetuate that idea of we have this wonderful system where people can really be as involved as they want to be because there's so many different ways to do it so how do we to Maggie's point get people comfortable to have those skills to be able to participate in all of these different ways so as they get older they want to stay in Vermont they want to raise their kids in the communities that they were raised in and they want to participate in their communities and be active members of it Love it, for as much as we miss with school board representation in communities in those systems where school board members are appointed and that's been around since the late 1800s. Some cities like Chicago they've gone back and forth over and over, appointed and not appointed and pendulum swings somebody is often trying to get to representation but what they find is that people that are appointed are way less likely to be a minority or way less likely to be lower socioeconomic status. Whatever you want to point out as far as representation problems with locally elected boards it's worse when they're appointed. One of the things that I thought of when you said pendulum so the balance between structure and making really engaging accessible board meetings there is a bit of a pendulum because sometimes the structures that we use and I don't mean broader tools but the concepts that we use to organize ourselves are also what protect us from quite frankly perspectives that could find their way out of the board and not feel like what we think so when we think about setting our vision, setting what we, you know setting our earlier we were talking about how to monitor the system but making that preserve so there is a balance between not tearing down all the structures because the structures protect us from staying true to our vision and yet making the space. Great point making more space for more people more ideas more different perspectives and kind of who's board chair, vice chair like what about board meetings if we want to get into practical steps you know what about board meetings are either engaging of the community or a barrier to the community word choice items on the agenda what items are first you know what are those things that people tune out before they actually fully tune in and how might we get there so I'm looking at the time realizing we've just got a few more minutes want to make sure we kind of encapsulate a couple of thoughts one is that we know representation is important and who's on the board is important but as has been brought out also how do we hear from people in segments that may not be on the board for a variety of reasons of their own choosing that's not something they're going to do how do we make sure we're hearing from them and for me what's been a nagging concern over the last three or four years is it's not just about sort of who's on the board and who we hear from but what we do with that information how does governance advance a more inclusive more supportive a better future than what we've inherited how does governance help promote inclusivity inclusivity because I think that's a really really big we know students need to have that sense of place sense of belonging I feel safe here but our community does too and how might a board whether it is something to do with the agenda the way the meetings are run or other opportunities to provide access in engagement how does a board actually govern in ways that makes a difference for students and families from those various populations we don't know enough about that and it's interesting because I've read lots of articles in the last 20 years of criticizing boards for not being representative enough not having more diversity on the board and so forth but just because someone looks like they might represent a group or sounds like they might represent a group doesn't mean that decisions are being made at the dais that actually advance opportunities for that group and so that kind of that next step I would encourage you to be thinking about as you think about who is our community who are our students how do we serve them how will that affect the way you localize your policies what board choices what ideas might be in there how does it affect budgeting how does it affect the conversation that the board is having with itself among itself to model something that's a clue to begin I said I really wasn't joking there are lots of boards in lots of communities in the US I wouldn't want to be a part of and many of you would not want to either so how does the board ensure that it's personal behind the scenes and in the public is one that people would want to step into right how does the board behave at a dais in a way that's respectful but yet is also all voices clearly being heard when there's differences of opinion how it's age old but how do we disagree agree how do we model civility seems to be missing if you just really want to be entertained tonight you can't sleep sometime just do a google search school board's gone a lot and the type of outlandish behavior is almost hard to value chairs being thrown some of the boards in the top 10 I've probably worked with and it's interesting because there's there's just challenges that we have to think okay now what about us not what about them but what about us how do we model how do we invite people in invite them into the conversation and invite them in to be with us full participants so lots of rich stuff in this chapter again the self assessment is something the board might consider here's an easy way to self assess are we reaching out and reaching with the community and are we bonding as a team that's able to do good work together I know my time's right out any last word take away from the book or something that you have had in the hall in the last 45 minutes Chris do they get to the why we talked about boards getting together working well and bridging the community why that has an effect on student achievement it says it does but doesn't explain the mechanism of why I think we're learning more about that all the time you know about what is the potential connections but be careful because in like governance research no credible person is ever going to call it causation the school board did this and that caused students to have thriving amazing lives right it's too far removed what we do know is that in systems where students are graduating and having thriving amazing lives that boards tend to behave differently than boards in systems where students are struggling and graduating not prepared for what's next like we know boards behave differently in those two different extremes but why where's a potential causal link I don't know the credible researcher that can make a claim like anyway it gets really fuzzy here but I was saying to a couple of people before we started like when I we use boards self-assessment data to say okay the board says it's doing these things how are those students doing on some bench there's something really powerful when the board says they're engaging and involving the community in their work again they're way more likely to be overseeing a system that's improving achievement overall with closed gaps but I couldn't begin to tell you that the board was actually engaging the community because when you do that research well there's questions in there that the board absolutely doesn't do but they say they do it so you know is it a culture is it a culture of inclusivity is it an attitude is it a I'm trying to not use the word spirit you know is it an atmosphere in the board in the community in the district that people are embracing and including and does that have power itself just the fact that we say we're including the community what does that mean thanks for your time tonight Flora I know you've got a meeting to follow to reset Flora great you had an amazing meeting and the young lady's got books tonight you got this I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I