 It's 31 and we'll call a meeting to order. The focus of the meeting today, we'll talk about school learning, modalities, and board authority to do such. We're gonna review the strategic planning discussion that we had started at our retreat a few weeks ago. On our agenda, you could see that there's a discussion of equity, but I chatted with Emily Therrien and Dana Decker, and they decided they'd rather have that on the agenda next month. So that will be postponed until September. All right, do I have someone who's willing to be the meeting evaluator? Meeting evaluator? Rachel, you're meeting the public. Oh no! First off is public comment, and I just wanted to assure people that we will have another time for public comment after Lane's discussion of next year, so. But right now, if you have something you would like to add to the conversation, please do. I'm gonna mute myself, and I will wait for people who want to comment publicly. Did you find the email? Laura, is there public comment that I need to document? I'm gonna forward it, thank you for it. So I'm gonna give you that. I'm not on the slide yet. Finally. So you want a piece of paper? Do I do that one? And then if they're doing public comment, you probably want to mute your volume up and then turn it down just over here and part of this. It's a good next year. Just if you get the guess for me, thank you. So far, I've not heard from anyone. Is there anyone on this call who would like to make a comment publicly right now? Okay, hearing none, we will move next to our first order of business, which is Board Management and Governance. This is Lane's discussion of school learning modalities. All right, Lane? All right. So what happened in about a week and a half ago is we got updated guidance from the Agency of Education as well as a new directive from the Governor. They changed three basic things. The first is it took the authority for determining the learning modality that districts was in out of the hands of the Secretary of Education and put it into the hands of the school board. And so one of the things that you need to have a discussion about and decide tonight is whether the Board wants to retain the authority to determine what learning modality the district should be in at any given time or whether the Board wants to vote to arrest that authority with a superintendent and with a cabinet. The other two changes that happened at that time was the first was that the superintendent now has the authority to close the schools due to COVID after a consultation with the Vermont Department of Health. And prior to that, that was reserved for the Secretary of Education. And then the last thing and probably one of the bigger things was the fact that the Governor ordered that there will be no in-person students in the schools until September 8th. So those were the biggies. But the big thing for the Board to discuss and determine is learning modality authority whether the Board wants to retain that or whether it wants to hand over the authority to the superintendent and the cabinet. Amongst Board members is there a discussion about that issue right now? Well, I personally would like to see the kids in school five days a week. I guess what I'm asking is whether we have discussion. I think the first order of business really is whether we want to retain the authority or you want to delegate that authority delaying and the administration to decide how these schools are going to operate. So really that's the first order of discussion. Can you just remind us who is on the cabinet just for the good of everybody that's here? So when we talked about the superintendent and the cabinet, who would that include? Lane, do you want to take that? Hang on, let's do that. I'm going to see if you can talk. You want me to tell you who's on the cabinet? Yeah, can you speak into the mic? Elijah Hawks, principal at the iSchool. I'll let you set in, co-principal. I'll let him answer that, go ahead. So, sorry about that, what was the question? Who's on the cabinet, Lane? Who's on the cabinet? It's the principals and the director. So Elijah Hawks, keep you set in at the high school. David Roller, right, Burkfield. We've got Erica McLaughlin, principal at RES. And then Pat Miller over at Braintree, as well as Steve Kenney, the special education director and myself. Felicia is as well, sorry about that. And Lisa Floyd is in kind of her new role as examining the seventh and eighth grade, the middle school model as we call it, who will also be involved. Other questions from the board around, how this sort of designation of authority would operate? Well, I have a question, just in terms of, we would be going against our policies if we decide that we are gonna then take on the responsibility of the board to determine how kids are gonna be educated and how the schools are gonna operate. When you look at our delegation of authority, we pretty much said to Lane, you figure out how things are gonna be done and we're gonna do that within the limits of our executive limitations. And for this to produce these ends for us, but we didn't, I mean, we're sort of getting into his territory of how it's gonna be done if we decide that we're gonna take this on. I don't feel comfortable or, and I also don't feel that I'm informed enough to make that kind of decision. I believe the cabinet and the administration have more information to be able to make other comments from other board members. Does anyone feel differently from the other, they would like to retain that authority over the decision making? I think we should. Okay, so Brian's thanks, perhaps we ought to keep going. I mean, we'll definitely take Lane and the cabinet's recommendations, but I think we should, with them and parents in public, we should make the decision. Others? You guys, the rest of you, think we ought to do. I think I tend to hold with Ann that that's an operation, too. I think we should go around the manager's issue and the other state's issue, so that to me it falls to the people who know the structure and function of the school better than I do. I think as far as public health information, I would disagree with Ann that they necessarily know more about that. I think we all have access to the same information from the state public health information is available, but they have the advantage of knowing physically what they can do in the school. I'm torn, I'm on the fence, but I'm leaning towards agreeing with Brian because I don't think that having the final authority means that we already have all the information. I mean, we need to make an informed decision. There's no way we put a decision out there, I don't think, without understanding from Lane and the cabinet everything we felt we needed to understand in order to make an informed and safe decision, and I think the community is looking to us to have more of a role and I think this is an important one for us to take. Thanks to all sides here. I'm also feeling kind of on the fence about this. I mean, I do feel like the board needs to be involved in the decisions that are made, but I don't feel comfortable as the board being the sole deciding factor in what happens because I do feel like the administration understands the capacity of the school and the needs of the students perhaps better than we as a board understand it. So I can definitely see both sides. So I think I'm in a similar vote in that I do agree that there is an operational, but there is a governance role in this decision as well. And I do think that that is part of our elected role. I think there has to be more involvement with the board and we are elected by our community to be able to speak to what's happening here. And I think that not having that involvement moving forward puts us at a disadvantage in the people that put us in these roles as well. In a practical way, Lane, what would that look like if there was some board oversight and use it to be expertise of the cabinet and other administrative officials that should be involved in making that decision? How would that, how could you see that that partnership would work? It could work. I think it's kind of, might be important to talk a little bit about kind of where we are and the decision-making process that went into it and then can kind of expand into what kind of, because it'll kind of play into the information that people would need to be able to make the decisions about switching either more to in-person or more to remote depending upon what's going on in the community. A significant amount of time was spent by the cabinet reaching out to the community to get a feel for what mode people feel felt the most safe there, getting started. And probably 20% depending upon what's going on whether you're in high school or the elementary level, so remote only, I'm not comfortable outside of that. Another, about 44%, which was interesting because that kind of mimicked what the national averages were across the country, said hybrid and then the remainder was in-person. The goal for the hybrid start isn't necessarily to maintain hybrid throughout, hybrid throughout the remainder of the year. It's an opportunity to come in in kind of a safer mode, to get things started, to build up some trust with the community members and then things are looking good, it's to move over to more in-person. The other piece that we have to take into account and this comes back a little bit to the MOU discussions is what are the staff going to do? There are a lot of staff members who are not comfortable coming into the schools. And if we get into position, if a decision is made to go all in-person, and I got 1,000 kids that show up and have the staff call out sick that day because they don't feel comfortable coming, we've got a real problem on my hands. And so those are kind of the things that were weighted in making the current decision. That would be vital information for the board to have to know in terms of trying to adjusting things from a hybrid to either fully remote or fully in-person. The biggest one being what's the response going to be from the staff? Are we going to have the people here we need? Other than that, it's your gut, it's what the community supports primarily. Recognize that we will always or should always have a remote contingent, depending on the level, it seems to be about 16% or so, who will have medically justifiable reasons for not being here that includes the kids. And so the cabinet has been doing a really good job of trying to match up the kids that are in that category with the staff members that are in that category to make them fully remote from here. So those are kind of the decisions of mine. But the basic data is will you have the staffing for the plan that you need? Is it safe? Is it the recommendation of the Vermont Department of Health right now based upon what the current context is in terms of infection rates sitting around? Are there questions on that? My question was just what sort of community outreach was it? Was it that questionnaire that was sent to all the parents about whether they would prefer which modality and why and for how many children and that sort of thing? They had two or three surveys that went out and wanted to kind of help us hone down the questions for the second survey. We didn't get a lot of response to the second survey, we had about 150 families that responded the first time. And so then the principals got together with their teams and actually called the ones they hadn't gotten responses from, a better picture of who categorically will not come to school under any circumstances who was willing to do the hybrid who was interested in the in-person. That was kind of the breakdown that they said. It was about 2044. And do you have a sense yet for your staffing sort of capacity for how much in-person possibilities we actually have? So it all depends upon the memorandum of understanding what we agree to with the staff. As things currently stand under the CBA and I apologize that this part of the discussion is going to take the humanistic element out of things which we don't like to do. But under the CBA as it stands, the staff have to be able to provide the essential functions of the job, right? So they say they don't want to come in, they're anxious or even if they say they don't want to come in because they've got a reasonable health condition, at best they'll be able to use up their leave time. And at that point in time, once all their available leave time has been used up, then the district can say, hey, you're not able to perform the essential functions of your position even with reasonable accommodations. We gotta let you go so that we can get somebody to come in and help us manage these students. That's not a desirable position to be in, in terms of morale, in terms of the fact that hopefully this passes sometimes in the next six months to a year. We don't want to lose good teachers, but that's a possibility where things stand right now. In terms of the memorandum of understanding, one of the things that we had discussed in that that little group was this idea that if there is medical necessity, if you can provide a doctor's note that doesn't say it's recommended that you're not in the building that says it's a medical necessity for you not to be there for whatever health reasons or emotional health reasons that a person has, that potentially we would honor that. Now, that said, where does that put us numerically? We know the number of teachers that said they're gonna seek that, that doesn't mean they'll all get it. You're probably talking 16 to 20% of the elementary school and probably 5 to 10% of high school students. And so then the question becomes is, what do we do if they are definitely out of remote learning, we're gonna have to match up kids with them? Even something they not necessarily want to be in the middle because it probably won't be a perfect match. And it looks like a pretty good match at the elementary level from what we know right now where it's unclear by school level. Sorry to talk and concentrate with a mask on your face. So I guess I'm still a little bit unclear about this difference between administrative and board authority on deciding these things. So obviously, if the board decided to retain that authority, we would rely very heavily on the advice and study of the administrative cabinet. If we see that responsibility, then how are we kept in sort of... You'll be told exactly what's going on. Same thing with the entire community, the rationale behind why we may be changing things. I think one of the benefits of leaving it in the hands of the cabinet is the fact that we'll be able to be more fluid. Unless you guys are willing to call a bunch of emergency meetings, hey, we've been at this for three weeks now. Things are looking really good. We'd like to move a little bit more towards the in-person modality. We take the next board meeting before those discussions and decisions could be made. We might slip things down a little. Or if we get into a critical situation where, hey, we really need to switch back to old learning, you guys might be in a 24-hour column. I may have to shut down the school for a day before we have that meeting to decide that now, given what's happening, infections or whatnot. So again, I think the only real negative impact, because more discussion has always been more lines on a problem or always could. It's just the fluid, how quickly we can have it. I would just say the board would need to be committed to new and special emergency meetings. Board questions for Lane before we decide whether I'm ready to make this decision? Well, my microphone's on. Oh, my microphone's on. Well, I'm just curious with the other board members that feel like they need to be just being involved in this decision-making. What are your concerns? What do you, how come you feel like you need to be managing that on top of what the administration has been? I'm just curious. I guess I feel there are two levels here. I mean, oh, my mic is not on. I feel like there are two levels. And I'm not looking to be micro-managing here about things that I'm less qualified to figure out. I don't think the board should be deciding which students are A and B, but I do think that the board should retain some of the authority that the final decision, once we've seen everything that's been worked through with the people who know what's going on, there's something that doesn't feel right about us saying, hands off, we've been elected to this body to help steer the district. And to my mind, this is probably in my tenure on this board, going to be the biggest thing that happened. This is serious stuff. And to take a step back, not even a step back, to completely kind of wash our hands and not have a horse in the race just doesn't feel right to me. It feels like a shirking of responsibility that I was elected for. I like to that this is, we are elected by our communities and we are representing the communities that we are elected from. And this is such a major thing that's happening within our communities and for our students. And I do feel that if there's a time for the board to kind of step up into the role, this is an example of it. And again, I'm not into any interest in the micromanagement, I just feel there should be some board connection and oversight to it as well. Well, I'm curious, what would that look like then? What are we looking at? How are we gonna do that? I've been seeing all the emails that have been coming through, we've just listened again to how they've gone about this. I'm listening to what they're doing and I'm not feeling like, oh my God, they're not covering something or if we don't have a way to step in to stop what's going on, they're gonna do something that's gonna be a detriment to the wider community that makes up this district. I feel they need to be very clear that I have no way feel that the board taking authority or retaining authority over this decision is somehow in protection of the district, that somehow there are decisions being made that I personally think are dangerous or wrong, but I also think that we should have a seat at the table and ultimately our signature should be on the, this is how it's gonna look. And it does mean more meetings and it does mean taking opportunities to go to the MLU discussions and taking an active role and owning what we're here to do. So I just really need to clarify that me having this opinion, which I said I was on the fence and I kind of talked myself onto one side of it, is in no way a, because I think that Lane and the cabinet have not done a good job. That's not it at all. It's that I feel the board has the responsibility to retain the authority to stamp it and say, this is what we think is best for our district and our community. And I'm gonna chime in after Hannah and I agree with what Hannah's saying. I don't see this as a vote of no confidence or a lack of confidence. I just think this is a discussion that is the biggest one probably before us. And the fact that as a governing board, we don't have insight or a final approval, which very well would be what's being presented by the cabinet. But to hear that before everybody else on the street hears it and to understand it so we can speak to it, that's what I'm looking for. That's an explanation that I want. So it's, I'm not suggesting that something isn't being done well. I just think we need to be more included. And right now, it may be more meetings, but I think that's why we're here and why we got elected to this. So what I think I'm hearing you saying is that we are, as a body, ultimately responsible for the decisions we need. And I think that's true. And the difficulty we're having now is that decisions are made and information is distributed and we can't speak to it because the decisions are made without us. I think it's true that whatever decision is made, we're responsible for it because we have hired Lane who develops his cabinet. But I don't think that means that we are in a position where we should be making the decision. One of the possibilities is again, the specifics of how a modality is carried out is more on the operational side, what modality you want. You could make the argument as policy is if the board, one of the things that might make it easier is the board could restrict itself to the high level. You're a hybrid, leave it up to us to figure out what hybrid means and explain it to the board. Or you're a full in person and we determine the best way to carry that out. That's the operational aspect of it. Or you're in full mode. That's a possibility there is to stay at that high level. Given the conditions, given all the discussions we've had the data that we've got coming in, we're committed to moving to full in person. All right, cabinet, we'll go ahead and look. The pros and the cons of it, are there any operational issues that you see in terms of staffing that might get in the way of being able to carry that out fully and if you can't carry it out fully, how can you move along that continuum as close as you can get? That's a possibility too. So again, I'm not making a recommendation either way because I'm not comfortable either way. This is one that is uniquely yours to make the decision on. My opinion is just basically what Lane just said. If we decide the higher level but we still need to have the information provided by Lane on exactly what that those modalities would look like then we can make the decision on how to proceed that. I mean, I could come in every month as part of the board meeting is the monthly recommendation of what learning modalities should be. We could discuss the finer details of it and if you like it, you say yes or if you don't, you say no. This is what we'd rather see but that could be a normal part of the meetings. So one of the challenges I have with that is just that Lane and the cabinet are collecting the information from the community. They are getting the data from parents and what they need or expect and acting on that when we are not. So getting into this opens up a whole nother collection of data so that we can make an informed decision. And if we are just taking what they're giving us for information, then we're making their decision. That also means we're responsible for it. So we make a decision and we make the wrong call to the next board meeting in the meantime COVID spreading throughout the school because we don't have a meeting or I would imagine probably we'd get to have an emergency meeting called that, hey, we've got a problem here or I don't know, we make a decision and a bunch of people, a bunch of the teachers don't show up because they're sick or whatever. I mean, I guess I still feel like that's operational and it needs to be, it's the operation of the school. And that's not our purview. It sounds like we have some new board members who given our policies, wanna delve into management which if we're gonna do that, let's start changing the policies that explain how we're supposed to be working as a board because this is, I'm very uncomfortable with it. I'm much more comfortable leaving that decision making to the administration. Now, maybe we can look at it at an end that, you know, and it's uncertain times. I mean, no one has all the answers. No one knows what's gonna happen. You know, the temperature cools off, we can close people in the space. We don't know what's gonna happen. So it just, I guess administrators are talking to parents, teachers are talking to parents, staff are talking with one another and with the administration. I just don't think we need to be in there as another layer. I mean, we can evaluate how well he's doing. I mean, is he treating people when we have a treatment of staff policy? Is he being fair to people? We have a treatment of parents policy. Is he, you know, are people getting clear information? Are they feeling like they're hurt if they don't wanna send their kids to school? Can they do that without feeling sort of bullying to, you know, why aren't you sending your kids to school? That I'm okay with looking out, but not deciding how things are gonna be. I just wanna say to be clear, we are responsible. For what happens here, not for day-to-day operations, but for what happens here, we are responsible and I'm not trying to shirt that part of our, what I'm saying is similar to what you were saying, is that the management and how things actually happen are best made by people who are boots on the ground and we've talked about that repeatedly. And the people who can act in real time to changing information and situations and people who have the best information. And like you said, he's collecting it from the staff, he's collecting it from the parents, he's collecting it from the community. And maybe we need to know more about what he's collecting so that we can make a better judgment about whether they're making good decisions, but as far as making the decisions ourselves, I think that's more managerial. I would agree with that. But we are responsible, I just wanna be clear with it. Right, we're responsible for watching his management of it, but he's making the decisions. We've given him that, we've delegated him that ability to make those decisions. Anyone else wanna lay in on this as we come maybe closer to making the decision here? What's your thought, warrior? I think, I feel like the buck does stop here, that we do have some sort of responsibility for the way that the decisions are made and that we just feel we're responsible for it. I don't think we are responsible to make the decision, however, I think probably, I guess I feel like the administration should do their due diligence and recommend, come up with a recommendation, say, yo, this is the way we think we should go forward. And I think it is our duty then to listen to that and ask questions, grill him if we want and then rubber stamp it, or you'll grill him and say, hey, have you considered this or that or this is what I've been hearing or I've heard some other district is handling it this way, is that something we could incorporate? I guess that's the way it seems to me to make sense to move forward, is that really the administration does the work but before the decision is made final that we say, we weigh in on it and hear it out and then we're able to speak to our constituents with a just a wiser way about us because we've grappled with it ourselves and said, okay, this is what I've heard and this is why they made it and this is how I feel about it. So I guess it's more of a hybrid model still holding the administration responsible but allowing ourselves the chance to educate ourselves about how that was made. Makes it easy, doesn't it? Are we ready to vote on this? Do we want to, does someone ready to make a motion or do we have further discussion or questions laying or other points to consider? I mean, that question we owe that hybrid look like. Like, would that be a possibility of what you just mentioned Mark? So I think we probably have to have an additional meeting but I don't know how would you see that going forward? So again, remember that we are in a position of limited time and the last guidance that altered everything just came out about a week ago. So they're geared up right now getting everything geared up for a hybrid model. The main goal when we had that discussion before we even talked about models was that the main goal is the biggest thing that we've got instilled in the community and amongst the staff is trust. That they can have faith that they know when they come in that they're safe as can be. That we're taking care of things that were organized and we know what we're doing. That we've trained them properly so they know what they're doing. And the best way to accommodate that was I could schedule. The goal was to keep that up and running for a little while until the trust was built and then to see if we got more buy-in and more staff saying, you know what? Now you know what? I was a little nervous about coming in unwilling to switch over and be kind of an in-person to hopefully get that buy-in and have that change come. But there are complexities to all of them that we had to take into consideration. One of the ones is substitute teachers if we're in a full in-person home. We can't get them, nobody can. A lot of districts have decided because of the complexities of just trying to acquire subs and have them trained and be able to follow all the hundreds of protocols we now have in place that it just was easier to go to remote learning and that's what we did. So a lot of details there, you know, and it gets complicated on the buses. There's lots of regulations around the buses, assigned seats and spacing. And if we have all the kids coming in, you know, together at once, we can't keep the spacing on the buses. And now, you know, we might be breaking that trust because the odds are if we're gonna have problems, my guess is with COVID or an infected individual is gonna be right off the bat in the first week or two of school because everybody's been out travel around this summer. Once school gets up and running and people are back on routines, again, taking a best stab at it, not that it's guaranteed. After two or three weeks, you know, folks have been a little bit more isolated. They're hanging around with the same pods of people as they're coming in and out of the school. I would argue it's probably less likely if you can make it through those first couple of weeks to have a COVID case. Assuming everything in the outer community stays the same as it's always been. And then you get that trust in the switch. So just, it's complicated. There's lots of pieces that come in the plan of each of them. And there was a lot of rationality in the decision making about, they were even, you know, looking at some new events the other day, you know, shouldn't the ABs be, you know, rotating days, you know, AB, ABC, like they were originally planned and they were thinking, well, maybe it should be an AACBV day because that C-Day has fewer kids here. So it's an opportunity to air the building out between now and the next couple. But, you know, they had some discussions. They're meeting Thursdays and Fridays with their leadership teams within the schools. They've been breaking and volunteering their time to get the feedback on that. Last I heard about two hours ago, they decided that pedagogically, they would rather stick with the abrogation. It's ongoing and the information's always coming in. As a new board member, you know, I've never experienced something like this coming on and jumping in right in March when all this kind of came on. So this is a new experience for me too. And I'm assuming that none of you have faced this experience before either. So we're all kind of new to this experience. You know, and I don't know what the best way moving forward is in a sense. I think, you know, decisions are hard to make all around and you're always wondering is it the right decision for the time or whatnot. But I also feel like there's the potential to create even more of a unified front if the board is, you know, stepping in and showing up in that sense as well. So, you know, I agree a lot with what Laura said about, you know, obviously I have no interest in making, you know, minor decisions, day-to-day things, but I do feel that it's good practice to have the board involved in some way. And the understanding and then being able to have that knowledge and show that unification, that unified front to our community, to the teachers, to, you know, all the individuals involved. Lady, with that potential sort of format of decision making, how could you see that more pain going forward? Like I said, if the board pertains the authority, it just may slow down the transitions a little bit. The biggest concern, but given the personalities around the table, I don't think it's a really big one, is compelling a modality that we can't staff or we can't, you know, I hate to have the board say, hey, you know, we want you full in person and, you know, we bring that out and roll that out to the staff and start planning for it and have the staff say, we're not showing up for that because we don't feel safe yet. I mean, that's a, that would be a problem and then we have to get back together and say, hey, do you really want us to go through with this as best we can or do you want to change, you know, the mind to something different? I guess I could, I mean, I would, and I'm just looking for myself because I don't know how the other board members feel right now, but I would see it more as you saying, this is what we're thinking about. We're thinking about, you know, this hybrid modality and these are the reasons and these are the considerations and this is how buzzing is going to work and just sort of laying that out so that we, in a way that we could ask questions and become clear, you know, as far as, you know, why is this going forward like this and what are the, what are all the eventualities that you've considered in making that decision? That then makes it easier for us as community members to reflect back to the people who ask us the questions because there are plenty of questions and just say, yeah, this is the thinking behind it, these are the reasons, this is how they're going to, you know, change the way that the education was handled last year and augmented and these, you know, it just allows us to speak more knowledgeably to our neighbors and, you know, and we, I don't know, as a board member, right, then be able to say, yeah, I feel confident about the way this decision was made, the way it was, you know, the information that was generated to behind it and that sort of thing. No, I think, like I said, that might be the possibility that, you know, we come in and we do our monthly recommendation of the board based on where things stand because that would get into the details behind the thinking process of why, you know, these are the reasons why we think it should stay the same as it is and these are the reasons why we think it should change in the planning that would have to go into it in the details and we have to pull up, but that would keep people, I think, pretty well informed on the thought process. I don't mean to dominate the conversation, but I feel like I'm kind of dominating tonight, but I agree that would be nice. It's often, my husband who gets emails from the schools knows what's going on more than I do, and that would be nice, but I think the drawback of that is that it slows, it reduces our agility as a district to respond to what's happening in real time, if they're waiting for our person each month, or even if we call a meeting, it's still gonna set the exact decision of today's studies. That's one of my concerns. They're having trouble hearing you, is your mic on? Yeah, I'm sorry to not know, sorry about that. They, you know, one of the other things to just kind of remember too is the, there's the work that I'm engaged in, there's the work that Cabinets engaged in, we do a lot together, but a lot of it's separate because our contexts are different. Like the COVID-19 plan book that came out, that was me working with the cabinet pulling all the details in. And there's some pretty specific things about how we've got to operate given the directives and the health concerns that are out there. And so I'll be able to easily talk about things at that level, but how that gets interpreted when you get to Braintree versus RES. You know, they have to take those protocols in and they have to put their own specifics on it that fit their school. And so that may be a little bit different. So, you know, the conversations that you'll be able to get out of me is the more high level general. This is what we've learned about the community. This is what we know about the staffing levels. This is what we know about, you know, the health crisis in our local area right now. And this is why, you know, we're recommending, you know, this model. These are the complications that we would potentially face and these are the benefits of it. You know, that would be easy, but if you want to know specifically what's happening, you know, all the details in a specific school, that would require, you know, one of the principles coming in. Yeah, they should all be coming in through separate doors to minimize, you know, congregations as much as possible. You know, if you want to know the details of how they've set that up and who's at which door. You know, I don't think you want to go down that deep into the weeds, but, you know, those are all details that have to be. I would say, again, your husband is getting the emails from the schools. And again, that should be a reassurance to the community that they are thinking about things. They've been open with it. You ask questions or you have concerns. You want to know why we're doing things. Contact us. I live in a residential area. I see, I walk my dog. I have not had any parent come up to me and be really concerned. I take that back. I want who said she was going to have her husband call the school because he knew something about HVAC. But, I mean, I never, even if we were to hold on to this ability to tell them how we want them to open, I'm not going to, I don't think you're going to have that kind of level of detail for me to be able to respond to that community member. And I'm still going to have to say, call the superintendent or call the milling that you're concerned about so you can find out what kind of filters on your HVAC equipment. I'm not going to know that. And I don't think it's my duty as a representative on the school board to know that level of detail. My duty on the school board is to make sure I've got people in place who can respond to people who have a call and can do it in a polite and timely manner so that the community member knows what's going on and can feel confident in the administration. And I think one of the ways we show that we're on board is we've hired him. We've trusted him to manage his people and to be, to do that well. And they've made, if they've made the decision to do this, I feel like, all right, then I trust that they can do it. That's just where I come from. I trust that they can do it too. And I also think that every member of his board should be able to provide as much reassurance as the school without having to provide information on the HVAC system. I'm at swim lessons every day. And every day I have parents of elementary school children that's more my community concerned and wondering when's the next communication gonna come out? How do you feel about how this is working? How has that decision made what went into it? And I cannot provide the level of reassurance that I feel I should be able to. And part of it too, I think, is it's important where possible to connect those folks with us because we do have the details. And so it's hard to respond in general. When we hear, if I hear a community member saying, well, we don't feel it's been communicated well enough. Well, it's nice to be able to sit down with them and say, hey, so what are the parts, we've communicated a lot, but what are the parts and pieces that we're missing so that we know? In detail-wise, the principals right now, they're working out the details that are specific to their schools. The last week of August they will each be doing an online open forum. So the goal of this is they get their details worked out, they get the email communications out to the community members and the families so that they've got the paper copy, the written copy, and then late August they have the open forums to come in and ask the specific questions. Because remember, the principals are still working on the details that are related to the building. They know what they have to do, but there's a lot of specifics that they've got to work out. So there is a communication plan out there that's pretty well, pretty well detailed. And the handbook was incredibly, I mean, I did say to a couple people, did you get the handbook? I said yes, I said, did you read it, for example? So, and I did, so that I could understand the details as a parent. As a school board member, I think that we should have on a high level a seat at the table, and if we wanna call it a rubber stamp, then that's what it is, but yes, this is what has been recommended to us. We have complete confidence in the administration that they've come up with a plan that works, so we are approving this plan. I think that that would, I think the community needs that from the board. I think we should be ready to own it. And I'm, like I said, I got no recommendation for you because I'm comfortable with the way. So, again, I've said this in the past, don't worry about me, you know, the cabinet will wish that it, you know, a little bit more control, but it also depends on the level of control. I mean, if you're looking to micromanage, I'd say no way, but that doesn't, that's right where we are, yeah. Someone just, I'm reading the chapter. Some people pick up, when two of us are unmuted, it echoes for people, so. Yeah, we gotta, we gotta, we'll have a better system hopefully next month because of taking a lot of more of this. Are there any other board comments or questions? Are we ready to make a motion or a discussion on this? This could be. Does someone feel confident to, to bring a motion for discussion? Or for voting? I, I will. It won't, it probably won't pass, but I'll do it. So I move that we delegate the decision of how there are the authority and the learning modalities to the superintendent in the ministry. Is there a second? Any further questions or discussion? We can vote on Ann's motion. All those in favor? We'll repeat that one. I'm gonna, yeah, repeat it, would that be great? Okay, so I move that the school board leave the discussion of the school learning modalities to the superintendent. So I just have a clarifying question. So with that motion, that means that there is no involvement, no, and I don't wanna say oversight, but no final approval from the board with your motion. But it happens and we find out at the same time the rest of the parents find out. Is that the motion? Well, it depends on whether or not Lane decides to do it that way. My guess is, as he has been with us all along, he's gonna be filling us in about what he's thinking and what they're doing. He has been sending emails out to us about it, so. But yeah, so he could choose to not tell us what's going on until he tells the parents. He'll just say one of them. We do have other policies about how he's managing that will allow us to look at that if we, in our monitoring. Ready for a vote on Ann's motion. All those in favor of Ann's motion, please say aye. All those opposed? Nay. Nay. Okay, so the motion does not carry. Is there a competing motion on to those, look forward to a second motion. I move that the board retain authority to accept or not the recommendation from the Supervisor. I might get off, thank you, whoever wrote that. I move for the board to retain authority with recommendations from the superintendent and the cabinet over moda, learning modalities. I think I should turn that one back. Is there a second? Second. I have a question for you, Ann. Yes. What would that look like and how do you envision that oversight sort of bill? When Lane and the cabinet had come to the conclusion that the offering this hybrid model was held best to serve the school community to then present it to the board, allow us to discuss amongst ourselves and question Lane and the cabinet so that we fully understand and have a vote to approve it before it goes out to the community. As a unified friend, the superintendent, the administration and the school board has made the decision to look like this. And in that model, how do you ensure its timeliness? We call special meetings. I mean, and I don't think, I don't know what's gonna happen with COVID. I don't know how often we're gonna have to change the modality, but I hope not every time. I hope that the teachers aren't gonna have to be changing. Maybe that will happen, but if it's in the middle of a meeting cycle, if it's in the middle of the month, we call a special meeting as quickly as we can. I don't know how much noted, legally how much notice if it's 48. I think it's 48. 48 for the teachers, yeah. 48 for special, but emergency you can do as much notice as possible. I think we have to be, I believe we need to be ready to do that under these circumstances. Are there other questions for Hannah around the gist of this motion before we hold the vote? Yes, I just quick clarifying. This has to be a full board. It could be like a subcommittee that means for this. It has to be a full board. That's a good full board. Evaluating this, we're gonna judge whether or not we think this is an appropriate way to based on the community members that have spoken to us, how the information that we've gotten, how much information are we gonna look at to evaluate this. Whether or not we think this is the right modality. You mean post decision? How we're gonna evaluate it? When they're presenting it to us, what criteria am I supposed to be using as a board member to figure out whether or not this is the right modality and the right decision for the administration? In this hypothetical situation I have in my head, they would be presenting what led them to that particular recommendation. Results from a survey but not which students are going where, which doors are gonna be used when, but why they're recommending it. And we can ask until we feel comfortable voting yay or nay. Can you imagine a situation where you would disagree with the recommendation? Right now, no, because I have full confidence in them, but I can imagine myself having concerns. Sure, and putting questions to them. I don't feel like I can really answer that, although if I felt really uncomfortable and that it was a dangerous trial to put the school community through or the children or the staff, I wouldn't vote for it. But the majority could still approve it, right? I mean, it would be a motion and a vote. You're not feeling comfortable coming to work. It can't be forced to go coming to work. Say you decided, you know, we're gonna go all in person and the person didn't feel comfortable. Legally, you can't force them or can't you? So the question is, is if the staff, if the board would have decided to say if you know we're gonna go all in person and the staff member wasn't comfortable and refused to come in, couldn't you force them? Yes and no. Again, they have sick leave, they have leave they could take. They would have to provide medical documentation to us to say that it's warranted. But in the end, once the leave is used up, if they are still unable to come in, even if it's for a clearly legitimate reason, the way that things stand right now, I'm in the CBA, in under ADA and all the other laws that are out there, they have an essential function to perform that we are paying them for. If they are unwilling or unable to perform that essential function, then we terminate them and we hire someone. Because we have a job to do in front of the kids. And again, this is taking the human side out, this is not what we wanna do, this is not the position we wanna be in. But that is how things would unfold or could unfold. What about if a parent didn't feel comfortable sending their child to school? And we were saying, well, even in this model, you've got to send it, what's? There's, you've got the truancy laws and things that technically would come into place. But one of the problems historically with Vermont is that the courts don't bother with truancy. So even if we wanted to force them to, we have to go in front of the court, have the judge get the parent and their order them to do and tell them what the consequences will be if they don't follow through on a failure to send their student. But again, the courts typically have not invested time in that process, they don't have the time for it with the other things that they need to do. So that would be difficult to do. And I wouldn't be comfortable with that. Nora, by the way, was asking if she could pose a question, I just saw the chat. I'll leave more of that up to you in about an hour. Sure, so make sure you have muted Nora. Nora, it looks like you have a question. Go ahead and pose it. Up to two years, I think the second year you have to apply and be approved for, but that is correct. But again, that would allow us the ability, and again, this is not what we want to do, we're just talking the inhumane aspects of things. What that would allow us to do is since we're stopping paying that person, again, with a fixed budget, I now have that money to apply towards hiring somebody who can come in and perform, and again, who will in front of the essential function. But again, that's, you know, when the person has used up all their leave. Understood? My concern about Hannah's motion, it really is, it just seems like it's gonna be really clunky. Like it's gonna be difficult for decisions to be made in the school to move forward in a way that's reasonable, really, you know, that, you know, to educate us and inform us, and then for us to go, you know, before they're able to move ahead the way they would like to. So I don't know, I feel a little uncomfortable. Can we have some type of like a emergency provision that Lane can make a quick decision if it comes down to that, and then, you know, but I suppose we can have a board meeting within a day or two, depending on anything, but if we have, you know, if Lane has like an emergency management privileges that he can change stuff and then get approval in an emergency situation. Yeah, the most likely situation that would happen is we get a couple of COVID cases and Vermont Department of Health says, you know, you guys should be in remote learning right now. What could possibly happen is because I don't have board approval to move to remote learning, I would have to close the schools for the day so we lose a day of learning that counts against us that we may or may not get a week or four. That would be the most likely kind of scenario I can see kind of playing out. Lisa Floyd had a question if the board is willing. Lisa, go ahead. See you have a question. Yeah, I think they're good points. Remember we're coming, part of it too from the board's perspective, I don't know, remember we're in the summer season, you guys don't typically meet in July, you know, so you're aligning on whatever emails that I send out to the community, I should send them to you first and then to the community as well. But that may be part of, you know, how people may be feeling right now is because of the July meetings don't typically happen. So we're just starting to get geared up and you're coming in halfway through the planning process that's going on. I just want to reiterate that I don't see this as a question on the ability of Lane or his cabinet on making these decisions. I think to what Lisa Floyd just mentioned, to me it just comes down to communication and it comes down to having an understanding of just how the decision was made. Again, I mean, I have no interest in getting into the weeds of some of the stuff that was suggested earlier, but it's just the overall global, how did we come to the decision of a hybrid model for Mondays and Wednesdays and Tuesdays and Thursdays because like everybody else in this room and probably everybody on this computer, we've seen that every school is done at different. So how come we chose this? And I don't know, I don't know. And maybe that's okay that I don't know, but again, I go down to as a governing board that lack of understanding, I'm not asking for eight more meetings, I'm just asking for better communications at us to know how that decision was made. And that's where my hesitation in turning full authority over comes from. So, and that was in one or possibly two of the communications that went out. It was for pedagogical reasons when they had the discussion about it, trying to allow the kids the opportunity to work remotely, come in and get immediate feedback the next day, work remotely, immediate feedback. That was the goal. When you have the two days close together, the AA and then the DB, you're getting multiple days off without that feedback. You're getting more days off without feedback than otherwise. So that was one of the primary kind of motivators. But again, it was a focus on the learning piece of it. I'll, we're gonna, we have a monitoring report for this month, communication and support to the board. So if you have some feedback, as we evaluate this monitoring report, we need to give that to Lane. Because that's where we do that. We do that in these monitoring reports. We say, look, we need, I need as board member more information. But I don't think sort of deciding to come in and take on that, that opera, to me it's still operational. What's gonna be happening in the school? Don't think this is the place to do it. I worry that we are impairing our school's abilities to react in real time to information because for kind of almost selfish reasons. Because we want to be able to answer questions that come to us from community members. And it's about us seeming like we're informed and looking like we have control and everybody really has control here. And we're taking back some semblance of control by asking for this ability to rubber stamp what's happening. I can't think of a time when they would come to us with a well thought out plan and we would say, no, we want everybody in school or no, we think you should do it this way. I don't think we're going to, I think this isn't, it seems to me, I worry that this is about us as individuals and not about making our school district as strong as it can. Part of it too, I think that needs to be balanced a little bit. We can talk about that when we get to the communication limitations, you know, at what point should you be referring folks to administration or teachers that, you know, when people have questions that the teachers have the information for or the administration has the information for. I mean, yes, you should definitely have general, the general gist of things but I think there's a lot of good to handing them over to the people that have all the details. That is a part of, you know, one of your policies there is that, you know, when those things come up they shouldn't really be sent over to talk to the people in the know. Again, those are all board policies, you guys can shift them as you see fit or as you feel in need to. I wonder about that as well. Should you be fielding those big, depending, I don't know what the questions are asking, so that should you be fielding those big questions and those detailed questions anywhere? And maybe this is an easy place for me to sit because I'm not getting those questions. I live remotely in a fairly isolated setting. I work out of town. So I'm not getting the same pressure you are. I feel the need to clarify the questions thing. To me, actually, that's not why I think this is so, you know, that's not the primary reason I think this is so important. And I can't give you a specific example of a question because it's more anxiety than I'm getting. It's not, how are they gonna decide who's in grade A or it's anxiety, it's unrest, it's discomfort, that we're all feeling. The words, I share that, that should be a concern. It's a valid concern if this is about us as individuals or wanting to maintain some control or power. I would put forth the word responsibility. I don't want to have, to be the one to say, all kids should be remote or all kids should, staff have to show up and be damned their anxiety. I feel it is our responsibility to take part, to have, to take on the risk that this poses. To take on, I'm sorry, I'm speaking just to you, right? It is our responsibility on this board to have that decision have not just Lane's signature on it but our collective signature on it. I feel really strongly that that is a responsibility we need to hold. So I wouldn't say it's a want to have a say in that decision. I think it's a duty. It's part of what I think my role is here. To own that decision as well. Our name should be on it too. I am interested in who suggested that if there's an emergency situation and the Vermont Department of Health is recommending that we go full remote, I would feel comfortable if I'm allowed in my motion to have a provision that would be under Lane's authority so we don't lose a day of learning. So you don't lose a day of learning and you get the kids safe and staff and administration safe as quickly as possible. Can you repeat the motion now, Linda, please? Well, before it was just the she moved to retain authority with recommendations from the superintendent and cabinet. Could add recommendations from the AOE or whatever you want to call it. The Department of Health, is that correct? From on the property app. I'm going to have to close the school because of an issue I'm going to have here. Say so. That's it for you guys? I feel well supported. Yes. Other questions as we think about coming to a vote here. Anything else we should take into consideration? If we vote to approve this motion Lane, how could you see this sort of unfolding? Has you and the cabinet go forward in making decisions? It's not going to change anything in our decision making process. I'll turn my mic on, sorry about that. It's not going to change anything in our decision making process because we have to go through that anyway to provide you with a well thought recommendation. That portion of it's not going to change when we still collect the data. Take a look at, like I said, the biggest thing would be staffing. Staffing ability and staffing levels. They did not ask for the motion to be read so that folks could hear. Okay, somebody repeated. I can repeat it if you speak to me. Okay, so it is the board retain authority with recommendations from the superintendent and cabinet and the Vermont Department of Health. The board will retain authority in terms of learning disposition. And we'll take recommendations from the superintendent of the Vermont Department of Health. And cabinet, yeah. Okay. Can I say, I've got to clarify a question. Wasn't it the, didn't we want to have something in it so that you could close the school on the recommendation of the Department of Health without- Switch to remote learning as opposed to having to close. Yes, that's right, that's right. For clarifying. But is that correct? With recommendations from the superintendent. Some sort of emergency provision for changing due to immediate circumstances or something like that. Are you saying we need to change that? We need to add it. Okay. Right, I would just say that Lane had the authority to respond swiftly in an emergent situation as directed by the Vermont Department of Health or Vermont Agency of Education. Without prior. Okay, so we're adding to this thing. Okay, so Lane has the authority to respond to an emergency situation by changing learning modality on the advice of the Vermont Department of Health. And for me, the only thing that I would be doing is rather than close, we just immediately go in one session for those days. Any other board comments or questions? We need to clarify before we vote here. Have this motion, which has been read several times, is everyone clear on that? Okay. So it's time for a vote. All those in favor of this motion, you say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries four, five, two. All right. On this topic, Lane, do you have more to say about how the school is going to move forward in these next few weeks? First of all, before September 8th and then after September 8th. So now you guys are in the unendurable position of deciding what learning modality is going to be for the starting school? No, we're not. We're listening to your recommendation right now. We want to know what plan you've done, what preparations so far have been made. And so that's where we are. We want to hear what the cabinet and you have decided. So again, based upon survey data from community members and the ones that did not respond, they were reached out to directly by a phone call. Survey data from the staff as well as a couple of open forums that happened with the staff. They settled in on the hybrid modality for a variety of reasons. Primary one was establishing a sense of trust with folks. Secondary to that was they were very committed, especially up front as part of establishing trust of making sure that they could maintain the six foot distance. Because that's the primary means of transmission. You know, contact is still questionable about how frequent there's actual transmission through contact with surfaces and maybe contaminated. But what they really worry about is air quality and the biggest thing to protect people from those aerosolized droplets that are in the air is maintaining that six foot distance. And so the only way, given the numbers that we have in terms of students, of being able to maintain that six foot distance was to get half of the kids out of the building. And so that was a primary consideration to going into the hybrid mode. Once they decided on the hybrid mode, then the considerations were, okay, how can we manage learning? What's the best way to split this up? The AAB versus the AABB. And again, we kind of touched on a little bit about why it was the AABB rotating on these. Again, it's to give the opportunity for the kids to get immediate feedback after a remote session. One of the big things kind of logically, especially with the younger kids, it's actually true with all kids, but especially with the younger ones, is new information that they receive, they retain it the best the first time they hear it. So they're gonna retain it the way they did it the first time they heard it. If they get it wrong because they're looking it up on their own, and then we wait a little while before we correct them and try to set it straight, it almost is impossible to change that initial learning of the material. So it's very critical to have the students get that feedback as fast as possible. The other pieces to take into account was the idea that under the hybrid schedule, we might be able to run two sub-modalities. The first one is so the main body of the district is under this AAB hybrid schedule. First sub-modality is we'll also be able to run for remote learning for those that need it, right? The teachers that have medical necessity, students that have medical necessity, they're all a little sub-group. We can match the teachers up with the students that need it. They can be over here doing their thing and keeping themselves as safe as possible given whatever conditions that they may have. Once we get up and running under the hybrid system, if we're running under it for a while, we'll have a better feel for what staffings like for how many students are arriving every day if anybody's dropping off the radar and potentially starting to match up some students to be able to come in for four days straight, Monday through Thursday. Those would primarily be to start struggling learners, students on IEPs that really just can't advance in a curriculum without that closer kind of one-to-one contact. And then if conditions permit, expanding that in person more and more. We have an envision that it's having several kind of gates to get through. If you've got a limited amount of resources, they were just focused on the high critical need students that struggle to learn it. Once we've got all those guys and gals covered, then we can move down to, okay, we've got other students that just didn't perform well with remote learning at all last year. So even though they're in a hybrid, they're still gonna be suffering a little bit because remote learning is not a good learning strategy for them. So those ones will try to bring in four days a week as well. So that's kind of how the plan was set up to kind of unfold the remote. Submodality, we can do right off the bat or are you doing those matchings? The elementary principals are doing a really good job without me talking to them today. When they were able to get a subgroup of students that are coming in four days a week, that remains to be seen. We'll be able to reassess that once things are up and running and we know how things feel and how they want to be coaxed and made up of for that. The other piece with the hybrid is again, fewer folks here, less possible contamination, less exposure. Potentially, if we have a student who comes in who is infected, it allows us to keep our cohorts, our groups together, they call a podge, and you try to keep the kids all together and same people all day as much as you can. We will allow for that. The C-Day originally was intended to have everybody out in remote learning to facilitate deep cleaning over the weekend. We can still get the deep cleaning done, but what we've decided to do is that that C-Day is for juniors and seniors. They will be primarily remote learning. They're older, they can handle a little bit more. The health risk is a little bit greater for them if they're exposed. So if we keep them in remote as much as possible and then have them come in the one day a week which is on the C-Day, which is on the Friday, right? Very limited number of students that will be here between the junior and the senior class getting the direct instructional help that they need from the teachers. But it will also be the majority of the buildings open for the deep cleaning, right? The elementary schools will have to run, so it does go here. A lot of thought now for it to kind of win into the plan that we're going to put into place for the fall and get things started at least. And then the hope is after things get settled in for three or four weeks, again, people are feeling comfortable. If it looks like things are safe, you can start to move along and not continue with the full in-person process. And when do you anticipate knowing about your staff and who's going to be available for in-person learning? So right now, what we've got is we've got staff that are reporting, you know, I'm a staff member who is going to be seeking a note of medical necessity. Doesn't necessarily mean they all will get it, but we're taking their word for it as we're doing the planning right now until the next committee. One of the things when we get to the memorandum of understanding discussions is one, we still got a talk about notes of medical necessity. Two, because we may be having unexpected staff doing remote people we didn't expect there. It means last minute we've got to do some rearranging of the current staff, you know, somebody who thought they were going to come in and be teaching second grade this year because our third grade teacher needs to be out for remote. We may be having to move that staff member into a grade they didn't anticipate for, which means that those days that we talk about at the beginning of the year, remember the governor has pushed off the start of school for in-person instruction for kids until September 8th. Those days become critically important for those teachers to be able to do their planning. Right, I was, all summer I was gear enough for second grade, now because of these changes to accommodate things I'm now going to be teaching third grade, I need three or four of those days to get the planning done, to be able to switch into this new role, I'm going to be experiencing this year. And so we actually even have the days now because of that change to be able to provide that tool. Which would be two questions. And how about RPCC, how is that going to run? They are looking at a straight A-B schedule, no remote learning, right? It doesn't really fly with the needs of the students on the Nintendo RPCC, they're there because they want the instructional component but they want the hands-on component a lot. So they're really trying to stick strictly as possible with straight A-B schedule for those students. I have a question, you've been going on about this, that it really sounds like the limiting factor has always been your staff. What about the actual education of the kids? I mean, I personally, my son had an awful experience this spring and so that's really where, and I've heard from my group of people that I've talked with and they felt the same way, that the remote learning was not adequate. So that's where I'm really getting at is it sounds like this whole hybrid is all really geared towards the staff and what about the best education for the kids? And that's part of why the memorandum of understanding is important because they do have a right to have a say. That is part of how things are structured across the United States with the unions and whatnot. They do have a right this day but the biggest thing that's gonna get them here and allow us to do more in person is for them to be able to start off, feel comfortable, feel that it's safe. The second that people feel that things are safe, they're gonna be willing to take a little bit more of a risk. And as difficult as it is, we all want things to be perfect. We want learning to be exceptional. There's no doubt about that. This is not a perfect situation. Best we can do is the best that we can do, unfortunately. And so we're fighting these two competing needs of safety in learning. You gotta decide where you're coming out on that. Hopefully we get everybody back to school and the rates stay as low as they have in Vermont and we know the safety piece is taken care of and then we can focus more on the academic. But again, this is the starting mode just that mix gives people some practice in both the remote, gives people the in-person instruction that tends to be much more conducive to learning. And it hopefully gets people feeling safe in the moments. We're all stepping up, doing what we need to do. The cleaning's happening as has been promised. People are wearing their masks like you're supposed to. They've got good practices down for sanitation. They're coming through midday, everyday, wiping things down like they should. Once people see that that stuff is happening, hopefully they're gonna feel a lot better. But you do have a significant number of kids that don't want to be here. And the parents that no one ever gets here. It's 16 to 20%, it's a high percentage, it's 200 kids. But no, your points are well taken and they hit the room. But again, it's balancing out that, the safety versus education up front no matter how, being a little bit on the safety side so people feel comfortable and gets to trust them. At least that's the goal and that was the thought process. Are there any other questions from the board for Lane at this time? Lane, do you have anything else to add? No, I think I appreciate the process and I appreciate the thoughtfulness of this discussion. Okay, so I'm gonna open up this public comment or questions since perhaps some of the people who are listening in might have a question for Lane or for someone else here. So feel free, usually our public comment. We are not able to take any action. We certainly can clarify or definitely answer the questions. We do ask speakers to limit their time to about three minutes now. All right, feel free. Yep, sure, go ahead. Oh, sorry. So I appreciate the conversation you're having and you've done our unprecedented times and I think everybody's doing a lot of good work with great intentions. So if you took the back center, I think you can start some things and so I really appreciate the fact that we're gonna do two years, three days, three seniors, three days a week, mostly remote, you've got any classes like a fourth year English and some math and science next in. Because I think it's a really good plan if students are five and a half and you split them almost equally as seven and nine in a shop being 60 by 60, I can keep that distancing. What I'm trying to illustrate is the difference between being an all-mentary or a middle school teacher is significant. I also think for the young adults, we often drive themselves to school and when you split that cohort in half, juniors and seniors, you can keep them while saying it's easier because only if half of them take a bus, half of them drive. The work-based learning component really gives them a much more aid and program to me, if you want a job site for a senior one day upon remote. I think it's really rich for my class. I don't have the same challenges you all do. But when you decide not that the type center can be in a shop with seven other students and they're not traveling juniors and seniors with just a small, so I appreciate all the conversations how you're trying to put down the situation. I just want to just illustrate again how different the type center is and if things were to change on another level, to stay the same, just consider. Do you want to comment on that? Yeah, I know, I think Tim's comments are important. The best scenario that comes out of a situation if one arises is that the faculty talk directly with Felicia. Felicia brings it to the cabinet and then we've got all the best ideas on the table for how to proceed and that would be the goal, presenting a recommendation to the board stating all that information into account. Recognizing very clearly that even though we've got three elementary schools, their contacts are completely different too because of their sizes and the access to the resources that they have. So very good comments, I appreciate them. High connected? Yes, now you are. It's to get a start, it's to build some trust. The goal is to move towards more in-person if conditions allow. It's not necessarily to stay in hybrid all year, that's not the goal. The overall goal, if conditions allow is to get folks back as much as possible. The counseling team, I know Beverly's on as well, has been attending a lot of meetings but they have planning in place and they've done some communications with the community as well about how to access our resources both within the school and out of the school if issues are going on so that we can connect people with help that they need and those communications will continue. But I share the concerns that you have as well. It's a lot easier sometimes for us to be identified what's going on, especially in cases of abuse because typically the students restricted at home most of the time, that's not something a parent's going to report on themselves. So it is easier for us to recognize it. But no, the intent is to get things up in a nice healthy start, hopefully. Get people to have some trust and some faith that what we're doing is a good thing and then start to adjust things as conditions allow hopefully more in-person instruction. Does anyone else want to make a statement for us with questions? The possibility of having an AA, BV model or AA and cleaning day BV model discussed that as a possibility in the high school department leadership and I think in district one, pedagogically they might want a BV, we had suggested moving to an AA just to sort of help separate the cohorts a little bit. So if someone were to get ill or to trace, you know. Yeah, the principal's actually brought that, sorry about that, read and chat at the same time. The principal's actually brought that up at the last cabinet meeting at the end of last week and what I told them was I'll support whatever it is that they decide is best and said, you guys have until Wednesday to hash it out and tell me what it is that you want to do, you know, it's just got to be consistent across the district. What I heard today, I have not heard from Elijah and Katie as of yet, what I heard today is it sound like those meetings happened and they decided to stay with the AB schedule. But they did have a pretty rich discussion about that at the last cabinet meeting and they got together as a cabinet as the group of principals to kind of hash out the benefits in the pros and cons of the two schedules and to come up with a final decision. So that'll be finalized on Wednesday. My understanding right now is that they're still sticking with the AB, AB, AB. Does anyone else want to ask a question or make a comment? Do you predict in school? So the goal, again, we talked about the goals of the hybrid schedule. Primary goal was trust, one of the best ways to establish trust is to stick with that six-foot distance. That was a primary reason for choosing the hybrid schedule so that we could continue that six-foot distance. The intent is, you know, barring some new information or some new science, some new ideas that come out. The intent is to maintain that six-foot distance. Right now, you know, what the research says is, you know, the contact, can you pick it up from contact? Probably, but the real way that you pick it up is by breathing the droplets that are suspended in the air. The best way to protect against that is the six-foot distance. And so that's what our intent is to do is to maintain that. Again, can I guarantee you that, I'll always be there. If the science changes and says that there's better ways of doing things, you know, we'll consider it, but the intent right now going into things and for as long as we can foresee, unless the science changes is to maintain that six-foot distance. Anyone else, another comment or question from anyone who's listening in? Don't see or hear from anyone, so if that's the case, let's move on. Next on our agenda tonight is the strategic planning discussion. This will be done at our retreat, a couple of weeks ago, I guess. So I don't know, I mean, I'd love to give it to the rest of my board, thanks. We talked, so our three-year strategic plan, the schools, the districts three-year strategic plan expires this year. So it's 2017 to 2020, we are due for a new one. We began to work on this on our board retreat. We came up with several tentative goals. We began to flesh out, but it was a limited time, limited group meeting just us. This is definitely a community, and staff and administration is a much, much larger project. And so really we just sort of began to float the ideas. The things that seemed to matter to us were thinking about high school academics and whether, you know, are we reaching all the kids? Are the kids choosing RTCC for the right reason? Is the capstone of senior project designed the way we want to, the most effective way? Sort of those larger issues. So we had the issue of high school climate and culture and just working on creating our UHS, are we committed to finding, giving our students, providing our students with the best, most supportive, both academic, emotional, intellectuals or workspace that we can. Another goal was around middle school. Both transition, sort of the format, the modeling, making people feel confident that we're providing the correct sort of model for our students, both emotionally in that emotional time and that intellectual and academic time just creating the space for proper middle school development. Lastly, we talked about, and this is sort of overarching goal really, is bettering our role as a board with engaging community. And necessarily strategic plan, that's what this entails, is community outreach, community involvement, community engagement in developing and determine, well, first of all, determining whether these are the proper goals for the district and then in working on developing and designing the way we hope to attain them. Is there anything else someone else in this group would like to add as we start to consider where we go next in this strategic planning discussion? It's really, this is a 2021 to 2024 project. We need to launch it sooner rather than later. We find the beginning of 2021 so that we can, these are things that we plan to work on and accomplish by the end of 2024. How do you feel, as board members, that we should be moving forward? I thought it was good work that we did that last time. It seemed like we were, I know it was a marathon meeting we had, but it still felt like we were kind of cut short from discussing all those four points that we had. I don't think we had a full discussion. So I wouldn't be opposed to having another session of the board discussing those issues and then possibly pulling other people into it after that. The conversation, I took before, were good areas of focus. So figuring out the next steps and then working towards dividing amongst the board to focus on what areas. I want to schedule a time to look on this in a future meeting where we continue to sort of flesh out our intentions around these goals. I mean, I hesitate a little because I feel like these are so many of them include the community, the larger community and the staff and other people who work at these schools that I hesitate to get too far in sort of figuring out where we want to focus before we include and broaden this into a more public conversation. Well, do we want to move forward now? I mean, do we want to do this discussion now? Are we concerned that what we feel where the goals are not aligned with potential of the community as to your goals? In the past, did that initial work begin at a more level and then was the overarching how we perceive the goals? Is that shared with the entire staff, the folks at all the schools to say if they agree with us or are they on board and then do we develop more fully? I guess I just more, I need more of a process understanding of what those next steps should look like. I do not remember how the last strategic goals were defined or designed. And do you remember? Well, we've never done them before. Yeah, yes, we have. We have? Yes. The last goals, I don't know. Maybe I was on the board. You were on the board and it was done in 2016. I was on the board too, but I'm embarrassed to say that I had no part in developing the goals and I don't remember them even being developed by the larger board. I think they came from Brent. I think that was Brent's. They came from the cabinet members. So if they indeed came from the cabinet members, really, according to the BSBA, this is our work. And so then obviously this is a new process for us. And as we move forward, you know, we need to figure this out ourselves. How do we want to better define the goals? We wanna see if these goals are representative of what others within the school community think is the most important for us to focus on. We're not limited to three goals. We can have more. And so I think maybe that's the way to start the discussion that is, what are our goals? Are these just because it seems amongst this group that those are things we found compelling? Perhaps really none of them focus on the elementary schools. Is that something that we're missing? And how do we wanna frame this discussion? Do we wanna hold this discussion in the community forum? Do we want to involve first the staff of the schools to say, you know, these are some goals that sort of seemed relevant to us. Are these the most pressing or the most worthwhile from your vantage points? And if not, what else should we be considering? I'd love to hear how the rest of you think we ought to proceed. We're doing one of the groups. We had written out what we had done. And I need to look at some of the comments from Elijah Fox. Okay, what does he say? I'd like to ask, this may be an inappropriate time to ask the power boards to do planning, goals, from M's, particularly how we at the school level are guided by the board, but what is important and what we need to share evidence of achieving. One of you wanna take that on, I'm sort of forwarding this. I don't know how to answer that. I mean, there's a difference, but I don't know how to argue with them. I can try, but I don't wanna put words in the board. But I'll be there. Technically, they should be the same. In terms of the strategic plans and the goals that are there, they would typically either be a part of the ends or they could be the sub pieces of the ends that must be accomplished to achieve the ends, if that makes sense. I found in the past that what most, same thing I've done a couple of ways, what most boards have done in my experience is that there is a communal process to kind of develop what that strategic plan is. And I can talk with you about what I've seen done before. And once you've hammered out your three to five goals that you're gonna work on for the next three to five years or that we're gonna work on together for the next three to five years, is that they send out kind of a survey vote to the community, to the staff, and even to the students. Are you in support of this being important enough for us to invest our time and budget on for the next three to five years? And then if you get back at 85 or 90% of them are saying, yeah, this is really important to me, then you know you hit it on the head. If 20 or 30% say this is important, then you know that's probably an area you wanna look at again. But to answer Elijah's question, I would argue, yes, they are the ends or they are pieces that get you to one of the ends. And if memory serves you correctly from our discussion at the last meeting, is that as a board, it felt like a lot of the work we were suggesting be the focus is already happening. And it felt like again, we go to that middle school discussion. I mean, that's something that's brewing right now. You mentioned Lisa's role changing to respond to that. So what I see us is that as a board, we're solidifying the commitment to that process of looking into that. Looking at the feedback we've received about the culture in the high school, the board is saying our goal is to see an improvement. So to me, I think that it is elevating those as being our top issues that we wanna see success in the next three years. And you may need to change your end statements or if they end statement or if they fit into your current end statement, what it is is it's also an admission that there's a lot of stuff there that needs to be worked on. Can't do it all at once. These are our priorities for the next three years. And then once we get those where they should be, then we move on to the next piece in our list as a possibility. So Rachel, how were you suggesting that we proceed? What would you like to see us do next? I feel like we need to take the next steps because otherwise we're stuck in this cycle of talking about it every time and not actually accomplishing anything. Right. I think my one concern, or not concern, but my one question to the board kind of is if we come out to the public right now and say what are the things that you want the board focusing on? These are kind of what we talked about strategic plan. I think my only concern is that the community not feel we're trying to take away from the focus of what's currently happening and the most kind of prevalent issue right now. So that would be my only way of how to approach that in a really mindful way to present the community. So there's no feeling that obviously COVID and the response and how the school year looks is our main priority as a board and what we're discussing. But these are things that we need to look for the future and have in place. So just making sure that's a really mindful discussion and presentation to the community. Yeah, I mean many of them right now seem like new points because all three of those things are not gonna happen even as usual and can't even contemplate thinking about differently structuring them. Perhaps we, I mean I think we could have made some committees to work on each one. Those of course will also, those discussions will also happen in public session but it seems to me very important that we first check in with everyone else, meaning particularly staff and students and or community. So it seems to me some sort of community forum would be the best way to just sort of discuss where do people want us to envision the school moving and on what would they see the best way for us to put our focus? I don't know how to envision a community forum right now or even in the next month. So I really don't know the best way that we can be productive in moving this discussion forward with a larger group. You know the only question I come up with with that is is it is opening it up to staff, faculty, parents, teacher, community. Is that going to end up being like our survey was where we have 50 other ideas and not focus on the four that we did. That would be the only thing that would, if we open it up now, do we limit it and say these were our thoughts, what are your opinions on these four items or do we open it all up and then I can just expect that we're gonna get 50 different opinions and priorities and it's not gonna get us any further along. So I don't know if we should do another session to try to really maybe get more detail because like I said, I don't think we, I think we were rushed at the end of that meeting that we had and a couple of the topics never really got discussed between us. So I feel that we would have another meeting whether it's after a board meeting and I would hate to say that late but or have another retreat meeting with just the board to further that before we go to the public. How does that, if we're gonna have another meeting to sort of hammer out what our goals might be, how does the, how does the open meeting apply? Like, I don't know that we can have, I don't know that we can have a closed meeting. I mean, we had our retreat was. We did and I don't think it, but I don't think it was technically a closed, it was about development. I mean, we can find out the answer to it. We've asked it before, but it's one of those things that comes up sporadically so you don't remember. The big thing is if you're together as a group and you're have discussing things that might lead to a decision down the line, that's a problem, right? So, you know, if you guys are talking about goals, those are, that's something that the board would have to agree and make a decision on down the line that should probably be an open meeting. As I remember, for training purposes, there are exceptions, you know, but I'm not sure a second meeting around this would fit that category. If you're starting to hammer out something that might be under policy, that's an open meeting. I do, I want to get things rolling. I want to feel like that was, well, it was a productive meeting and that it's moving somewhere, but I do share Pauti's concern that September is not the month to go to the school community and say, are these important? We know COVID, but are these important to you too? I just, it's, I think, being strategic about where people's heads and emotions are right now is really important. I know we want to get the ball rolling, but I just don't think it's the moment, it's the season. I think our strategic plan expires though. I mean, we need to have something down. 2020 and of the years, yeah. So we need to have something and this is just the beginning of the work. And we have less than six months to develop this. I agree. I agree, you can't go to the community and say this is what we're thinking about and not say, but we're also thinking about you know, you kind of have to lead with the biggest issue. But I think in that whole conversation, there's a way I do it, mindfully, if the board puts out some sort of, you know, communication to the community and says, you know, we understand this is the situation right now, but at the same time, we still have to move forward as a board on long-term planning. And so we will be starting these discussions with the community in the next few months, you know. So I think there's ways to just let the community understand and kind of gently introduce the idea of it and still be able to move forward. But I do think maybe a communication from the board saying we acknowledge the current climate and the current situation of things going on. However, we still need to move forward with, you know, long-term visions and plans for the school through our strategic plan, which expires. Therefore, you know. I think there may be room for us as a board to communicate more directly with our community anyway. I know there are other boards that each end of a meeting, you know, we have minutes and people can find our minutes. But most people aren't gonna be able to look into our minutes. But to put out a communication, this is what we worked on, this is what we're thinking about, you know, each time we have a meeting, that's more publicly palatable than reading through minutes, might be a good way to help people understand our work. Lane, I think you can mention a previous meeting that it would be possible to get with the IT department about the board having a board email address, so that messages came directly from us, that are, you know, from the forum, Laura, when you post in there, it's very clear it's from... You guys just have to decide it's a board, that's what you want. Oh, okay. You can set it up and, you know, decide who you want to have access to that. And then they can send those emails out to anybody in the community that you want. Like, it's a real simple program. I mean, five-minute stops. Yeah. I think it would be important that it came from us and not from Lane. And I also heard about, like, a blog on the website where we just had, like, these are the couple things that we talked about and these are the answers, this is what we're looking for. Quick, blurbs, nothing that's really in depth. And then maybe at the end. And then maybe at the end, reminding people how to make their concerns known or what the process is to bring concerns to the school system. And just so you know, I think we touched on this in the strategic planning session. Everything that you hit upon, if you're worried about whether or not it will connect with the community, these are the common patterns that have come out of all the open forums that I've had. So you're on the right mark for the most part, yeah. So I'm hearing several things that first of all, you know, a communication, a communication that's more succinct and more sort of palatable to the interests of our constituents. That could be both on the website and in other forums, maybe the paper and the approach forum or something like that. So one of us would have to write up those or dissemination amongst everyone as wide as we can do it. And you know, asking for input or ideas or opinions. And so that we'd have to have an intake way as well, whether it's an email or some other forum. Was there another idea besides those, the blog and the communications? I mean, I think Koch's idea of sort of putting it forth that yes, you know, we understand and we need to further our own mission by continuing to work on a strategic plan is important. And I agree that we just can't let this simmer even though it seems really sort of tone deaf to be working on this right now. So does someone willing to take on that chore of writing up sort of a abbreviated version of what we talk about and, you know, sort of soliciting comments or input? I'm happy to work on the board communications, but I would love to not do that alone. I think it might be good if we took turns like maybe the person who does the board evaluation and like have a structure for how that's rotated through our group. And then that person can say, this is what we talked about. Because it would need board approval before it went out with the board's name on it. So you write it up, you send it up to the group, you get responses within a couple of days. It would need to be, I think it would need to be pretty timeline. You wouldn't want to wait two weeks and then get it out. You want to get it out within a couple of days. We had a meeting Monday night and here's what we talked about. And here's what our next meeting is, so we'd write it down. And here, if you have your answer, this is how you address the questions. And how would we receive comments or questions or anything like that? We can direct them to our board email. Or we can send them through the, through the, I don't know that we'd necessarily invite it directly to that because it's going to come to one board member or whoever checks the email to address. I think it would need to go through the policies we have in place for people who have a service. Which is, if there's a hierarchy that's describing our policies. No, but I'm saying, someone says, hey, I'm wondering if this or that might be a better strategic policy. They're strategic, you know, have you felt considered? But I'm not saying that they need to go through the policy or the teacher of them. So you're just saying more of like an acknowledgement when information is received. Is that, and say, you know, and we'll share this with a group or a response? I guess I don't understand. No, I guess I'm saying, so we're saying, so this is what we talked about and these are the ideas we have as potential goals for our strategic plan. If you have questions or comments or suggestions, where then does that, do those flow back to us? How is the best way for us to receive those? I think we'd have to be at the next board meeting. What I thought we were, and maybe I'm misunderstanding, talking about was how to communicate out, but not necessarily the intake. Because this is where, you know, the public comment is kind of where the into, and the heavy mail addresses, but getting an email address or sending out messages so that the board has a voice to the community. Yeah, that's what I thought. And in those exchanges, it could also have every exchange has a little bit at the bottom that's like monthly meetings help us, just have the general information of how to contact your, how to contact the board, how to participate in meetings, just that's on everything. So it's pretty self-directed and how to get where you need to go. And we then agree as a board that we are willing to take this on and designate one person each month to be doing those information. Loops. I just wonder if that's a good use of our time. We've got Zoe on from the Herald. She's listening to the meeting. She's here every meeting. We've got, who are we going to be getting to? And again, let's remember that parents are one subgroup of the community. Those, that's not the whole community. That's, they are the customers of the system and they are community members, but there are other people as well. And they get a lot of communications from the schools. You get it through the newspaper. And if you're interested, you're going to be reading it. I just wonder, as a parent, I mean, I get so much information that it's just like information overload. So I just wonder, I think when we really want to know what people are thinking, we should have control of that process and target people. Because again, who are you going to hear from if you're, well, we've sort of changed a little bit. Now we're just saying we just want to get more information out to people. Is that right? That's the purpose of it, is to just give more information or are we also trying to solicit information? I see the purpose as increasing communication between the board and the community in general, staff, parents, community members, and helping to build a bit more community involvement with the school. I mean, I think if we almost to build buy-in from these community members and parents, I think that the more we can make people feel that they are involved in a group and in a community, the more they feel they have a voice, the more they feel they can access information that's needed. I think that as we see, telling someone to go to a website and find meeting minutes, that might not be accessible to everybody. Or they may be intimidated, they might not know how to read minutes or what it means. And I think personally, it can be very overwhelming to read something, be like, I don't know what this says. So I think if we can provide communication in a really quick succinct like, this is what we talked about. Here's ways to get more information or if you wanna get involved, if you wanna attend a meeting, making it a little bit more comfortable and just trying to involve that community more. And again, I think a big part of it is the buy-in. I mean, wouldn't it be great to have more parents and more community members turn out to things and discuss things and create more vibrant discussions around stuff? So I think that to me is like, if we can get that communication out there and make it more accessible to more people, that's better for everybody. That's strategic planning and that kind of like, so let me return to Ann. Ann, did that clarify sort of the discussion for you or do you have some other comment or question? I just, I mean, we meet once a month and we need to be monitoring what's going on. We need to be spending time delving into these strategic goals to the ends. I mean, we still aren't really clear on the ends. When we've had these ends, but they're very general. And I just feel like we go around and around the actual work that needs to happen. We get sidetracked on, we need to communicate better. But I think we need to focus a little bit more on really what is it that we want to have as outcomes and monitoring. I mean, I'm hearing people, we've had people say the communication hasn't been good enough for the board. Well, let's look at our monitoring reports and maybe we need to tighten up our policies. Maybe we need to change things around a little bit so that people are getting what they need. But I just, I'm not sure having a communication out to, I guess I'm not sure what that's gonna, what we're gonna gain from that. Well, I guess what I heard, and perhaps I'm wrong here, but what I heard it was a beginning of a discussion about strategic planning and then sort of feeling stymied by the fact that we feel a little bit like we're doing this without knowing whether we truly represent the community of which we were elected to represent. Therefore, we need to maybe solicit information or validation that we are actually moving in the direction that our community wants us to move in. And in sort of this question of, okay, so how do we best do that? And one suggestion was that we communicate more and better with our community, our larger community. And one way of doing that would be making people, letting people know what we're actually doing in these meetings, and perhaps soliciting their involvement through the next meeting. You know, that's a long progress towards accomplishing what we want to accomplish. I understand that. We certainly, you know, there's, could be much better ways of going about that. You know, I'd love to hear what you think we are due to better our community engagement right now around these, you know, this specific chore or task of strategic planning. Well, I'm wondering if we want to do some focus groups. So let's, let's, you know, I don't know. And again, we're dealing with COVID, so it makes it awfully hard. But we invite a few so that we get a real cross section of the community so that we get a better sense. Because when you just blanketly solicit information, you hear either accolades or you hear criticism. And it's usually from a certain segment of the population. And I think we might want to be more strategic in how we go out and get information. So let's, and again, maybe we use, you know, the senior center or the chamber of commerce. So we target the groups that we want to go. And maybe we even just say we want to, we want to have a Google Meets with you and hear from the chamber about what they feel is important for our school district. Many people have mentioned the realtors. So they're dealing with people moving into the community. So maybe we have a Google Meets with realtors and see what they're telling us about, about our school district and how it's perceived or what they're hearing from people as they look at the community as a potential place to reside. Rather than trying to just, I mean, you can try and entice people to come to the meetings. But the other thing is, I know in the past we've encouraged people to come to the meetings, people come to the meetings and it's like, why would I want to come to this meeting? It's really boring and you're not talking. So again, that's where I want to make sure that we're asking them to come to something and they want to know where they, it's a little bit more targeted, I guess, from the past. Because it's just, it's really hard to get people to come to things like this. We've been trying for a long time. I mean, the whole time that I've been on the board we have had trouble getting people to come give us input. And what we've heard from many trainers now is you can't sit in the school and try and get people to come here. You've got to go to them. You've got to do the reach out and don't find the people and target them. Because otherwise you aren't going to get the feedback you're looking for. I do think though that many of those groups you mentioned many of them don't know the school very well or at all. And they really, they have no idea what our strategic planning objective should be. They have some hearsay or there's some that I don't think it's really a very realistic way to do board work of strategic planning. There's lots of people on the meeting tonight. And in some way of getting their collective wisdom around where we should be going now. You could argue and you'd probably be right that it's not a representative sample of the larger community. These are people, staff, parents who are very interested in the wellbeing or the furthering of the school. They want to know what's going on. And they're sitting through this boring meeting. So we already have a very select group but they're also invested. Invested enough to sit through it. So I think we need to do a better job at engaging those people as many people as we can to help us further this work, our work, their work. I think that's our challenge. And I think you're right. It's worth not very efficient. We spend ages talking and debating round and round about everything. But I think that's often the way that consensus works is it's really not a direct path at all. It's involving a lot of different voices that, you know, and you want to hear from everyone and then you want to sort of come up with some sort of clear way forward that everyone feels okay about, you know, and it takes a lot of time. And yeah, so I just don't think it's cut and dry or easy work to do. One of the suggestions, do we want to put out some type of a preliminary kind of where we're at with our strategic plan, you know, kind of put out those four ideas that we had talked about and then plan on doing a, you know, kind of a working meeting with the board. And I guess it will have to be, you know, a public meeting, but really have it just designated for to further those four items. You know, we can put something out now to tell, let people know that that's where we're going. And then we may give it if we have to do a special meeting to especially if we're going to do it remotely, that would be probably easy for everyone to log in and discuss this a little further. But that would be another step to take instead of spending meals and getting something done. I also think if we could just formalize that timeline, I think that would be helpful for me or the process just to understand, you know, this is ultimately our goal, but the process to get there so we know, is it months, is it weeks, you know, how is that information going to be shared? I think we just need if the folks that worked with us last month could provide that overarching guideline to me, I feel like that would be a good starting, a good second phase for us. I can reach out to Susan of the VSTN and ask how generally that, you know, that process works and what the timeline is, you know, I would propose that we'd be done more or less by town meeting, you know, because there's gonna be more turnover then, then we can start, you know, the new board session with a set of goals that are further defined and ready to sort of begin work on. So, and I like Brian's idea of, you know, setting either aside time, say at the end of the meeting, still public, but you know, where we could sort of start hashing out and hammering out further defining exactly what we mean by these goals and how we could achieve them. I know we wrote down in a week that, you know, they need to be specific and clear, they need to be measurable, you know, actionable, et cetera, you know, so that these are things that we feel confident that we wanna prioritize, you know. So perhaps that's gonna be, you know, I know next meeting's gonna be long. We've got a lot of reports from the principals, et cetera, how we did last year, you know, so, you know, whether we need a special meeting at the end of September or we wanna put this off until October, I sort of think we need to do it before then. Principles are gonna be talking to us about how this past year went, how we did meeting our ends, so that it sort of dovetails. I mean, we can use that as an opportunity to hear from the administrators, you know, what do you see? What do you see as the professional educators, the leaders of an education staff, what do you see as the things that we really should be focusing on as a system? That would be great input, I think, to look at and to incorporate into a strategic plan. You know, what is that showing us about how we're doing as a system? That's a good idea. So let's make sure that that is part of next month's discussion, you know, because I think that would be very informative for us, you know, to use going forward. And perhaps we can, if we have time, we can schedule a working discussion about strategic goals at the end of that meeting. Are there other decisions or discussions you wanna have before we move on? Are we willing to commit to writing up some sort of, I don't know, easily accessible description of our work each meeting? Is that something you're willing to do this month as Evaluator Rachel? Okay. And so we will try to define that a little further and see if we can, you know, realize that goal. That seems very manageable to me as a way that we can be more transparent with our community. All right. I feel confident that we are able to move on. Next is the first reading of an electronic communication policy. This was something that was part of our agenda. We saw, we emailed it through Lane a few days ago. Thank you. Lane, do you want to talk about this? Yeah, this is, came out of an act in 2018. And it's part of kind of preventing the exploitation of children. The VSBA got together with the agency of education to put a model policy together about communications between, oops, probably should turn my mic on. Communications between staff and students through electronic means. It kind of defines what inappropriate communications are and requires that there be some sort of formal process in place for folks to register a complaint and then charges the superintendent with developing a protocol to manage the investigation and the eventual disposition of what that report may be. So it is required under statute. Easiest thing to do is to use the VSBA recommended language for this because it's already been vetted by multiple organizations as well as legal. Do you need us to approve this? So this is, would be a first read just so that it's out there for the community. And then the next time we meet it'll be back on the agenda for an approval unless there's questions between now and then. Let's visit this next month. People should look it over before then please. As I mentioned at the start of the meeting we are gonna table the discussion of the equity action committee for next month. Next we have, oh I do have one other board management and governance and unfortunately that's to report that Paul has resigned. He's no longer able to fill his position on the board, he is doing a master's, he's in the second year of his master's MBA and full-time work and just does not feel like he has the time to commit or to give. So that's sad news for me, I've really enjoyed working with him. So that does mean that Randolph will need to appoint someone to fill the rest of his term. His term expires in March. So that's basically a six month term. Last time we advertised that opening and we received resumes and read them over and we talked about them and then suggested a few names to the select four but they were the ones who actually went through the appointment process and appointed the person to replace our Randolph person. So Linda if we could put that vacancy in the paper and advertise for a short term six month school board representative, that would be great. All right, so moving on we've got Yale monitoring. This is the first read of two reports which Lane submitted 2.0 and 2.8. They were in our packages month and we will actually approve them next month. Lane would you talk about those please? Yeah. So executive limitation 2.0 is probably the easier of the two, it's the shorter, it's the global constraint policy. And really what it's about is ensuring that at the district level, at my level that we're preventing any members or organizational practice from violating the law or commonly accepted ethics and practices. I'm reporting that this isn't compliance. We do quite a bit of human resources work through central office with things that rise to our level. There were 11 employees that were discharged. There were 20 investigations and the claims to staff misconduct that were done. There were 19 investigations in this student misconduct that made it to the central office level this last year. All staff issues were resolved without grievance. There were two issues that made it to the board level and the board supported the findings indicating the superintendent acted properly in those actions. So I report compliance. You guys had the bus route issue that came here and then concerns about the treatment of another person student. I apologize for coppiness allergies, it's not COVID. It happens, it comes on for five minutes and then it goes away. Questions on 2.0? How does this compare to other districts? I'm just curious. This seems I had put in just out of curiosity to try to put some longitudinal data in there in the report. I actually was doing a comparison of each of those to last year. Some were up, some were down. I think the students were up and then the staff ones were down. It would be hard for me to say. Two of the districts that I worked for previously had a human resources person who managed all of this. The one district that I was in was much larger where I did a lot of that work. And it was probably about on par. But again, they were a larger district. So thanks a question. 2.8? 2.8 is communications and support to the board. And this is all about just making sure the board is getting the information it needs for its decision-making process. The one kind of thing that I talked about a little bit was in provision six on the ends. And this has kind of come up a couple of times. I think it would be helpful if they received some clarity from the board in terms of the interpretations that I've settled on for the ends. Some have stated that there's other data that may be more important than what's presented. And so it would be helpful if the board just made a clear statement of what it is to add to that or to change. And maybe that'll probably come out, it'll be made a little bit easier, but come out through the strategic planning process that you guys are engaged in. I've been looking at a lot of academic-based data and performance, but if there are the things that people feel is important, it would be nice to have that input. It's gonna be a quirky year anyway. Because we don't have the regular testing data to rely on, it was never administered last year because of COVID. We will be doing some of our internal testing at the beginning of the year. And that data will give us some indications on the academics, but not all the details that you've been used to. Are there further background information for both of these in the LSSB office or? Most of the stuff on EL 2.8, you guys have seen 90% of that here anyway. So I would argue that if there are things that you wanna see that you feel is important in addition to them, happy to provide. The 2.0, I sent you a confidential version because a lot of that got with personal matters, student matters, so you have that information. And if more is needed or more is desired, just let me know, I'm happy to provide it. But they are also in the office, yeah. So to be clear, you asked us for more guidance on 2.8, number six. That's my recommendation on the ends. What happened when I started in the district for those folks that are new is that folks complained about the data dump. Brett would give a large amount of data in a big packet that touched on a variety of different things. A lot of it was subjective data. So being new, when I saw the ends for the first time, I said, well, heck, I'll just treat these like I do the executive limitations. I'll interpret what those ends mean in terms of educational parlance and what seems to be important in the world today, and then choose the data that goes along to support that that's objective. And a lot of that focused primarily on performance data. The Board over time has mentioned that there are other things that might be important to look at too, that provide a bigger picture of the school and the district as a whole, but I've never gotten clarity on what those things might be. And so that would be helpful. To be honest, the academic data you're gonna get every year anyway, just because you should be aware of how the kids are testing on the state tests, on SATs, on the AP exams, so that there are other things that the Board feels is more pertinent towards the ends that you've established. I'm happy to start to collect that data and provide it. That we kind of flesh things out a little bit about the overall health of the district. But again, Board's ends are a job is to try to meet them. It's helpful to have some clarity on what it is you think shows progress towards them. So since he's asking us, we need to be, this needs to not be something that we hear about and then just sort of forget about when you can make a plan for how we clarify this provision for him. And that's to help your work. I'm happy to continue providing what I'm providing, but if the Board itself doesn't feel it's completely serving your needs, then just let me know. Or if you've got some general ideas, I might be able to put the specifics on it for you as well. I know, Ann, you've been the most frequent critic of Lynx's ends reports. Do you have some suggestions for them? I personally have felt pretty comfortable with them, but I know that you think they're... Well, I just, what I've been looking for is sort of similar to what we started to do with some of that strategic planning is not just a report of where we are, but, okay, this is where we are. This is where we're shooting to be. And that hasn't happened yet from this superintendent to the previous superintendent. And that's what we need to be working toward is saying, okay, here we are. This is what we're targeting. This is how we're gonna measure it. This is why we think this is important. And then we get that result back. And that's where then we go back to the community and say, okay, this is how we're doing. Are we on track? Is this where we wanna be headed? Is this working for people? And we haven't really done that. I think he's asking for clarification here. He's saying, here's you. And he wants to do it the way you want it. Or the way we want it, but what do we want? And we need to be very clear on that. The part that I have difficulty with is I don't know if it's realistic to say, okay, 100% of the kids will be proficient. I don't know if that's a reach. So that's where I throw it back to him and say, no, you've gotta come to meet to us as a board and say, this is where we're at. This is what we're shooting for. And this is the rationale for why we're using this test. This is the reason we're using this particular test for these test results. This is why we're shooting for 80% and not 100%, which I would imagine is not gonna be 100% because there are some reasons why I would imagine that we're not gonna be at 100%. Nothing is perfect. So, but that should be in an end's report. This is what we were targeting. This is where we came in. We're still gonna continue to target this. This is the reason why we didn't quite make our target goal. And that hasn't happened. Now, that's on testing. There are other things to look at. You have the IRC's from the test side at the elementary level. We've got to dig down and say, okay, this is where all fourth graders are gonna, you know, this is where we want our fourth graders to be. We're gonna use this test, whatever, so that we can kind of be tracking how things are going and what our target is. Because otherwise, every year it's sort of like, oh, they're doing great. But it's like, did we meet our goal? I don't know what the goal was. And I don't think we can make the goal necessarily. I think we need to work with him to have him say, no, this is gonna be our goal. And this is the reason why it's our goal. And this is how we're gonna check whether or not we've met that goal or not. And that's a give and take process. It involves the teachers and the administrators and the head manager. So just what may make life a little bit easier is I can send out the last two-inch reports. The one from two years ago was probably 35 pages long and went into all the details, including setting goals and dates for completion to be done. And again, people didn't seem happy with that piece. So everything that Anne is asking for was there. There were some ends, admittedly that the success of which, I was trying to find the best way to describe it, the success of which is determined by not having evidence, right? In some cases, yeah, we want all students, the basic goal for the academics is 70%. We want 70% of the kids hitting the proficiency threshold. And there was a lot of detail that went into explaining why the 70% was a good choice at the time. But there were some of them in there that were really, the ends were just so difficult because proving that you met them was kind of having a lack of evidence as opposed to being able to provide evidence. And those are the ones that really need clarity. So it might be worth me sending around, especially the original one that had all the major details in it, for people to just rip apart and give me the critical feedback of what you're missing, what you need. That would be helpful. Because I love finding out the data. It's fun and setting the rules, but I'm happy to send that out to different folks to take a look at and feedback. So it seems to me, since we've got a month for the time that we need to accept this monitoring report, that we use that time to further refine our expectations of Lane so that we can better stipulate what it is that we want him to do each year. Does that sound fair to you, Ann? Yeah. So, Lane, you're going to send us out this... Yeah. I'll send out the one from two years ago because that one really explains all the details behind the decision-making at the time. And I think that that'll get a little bit more into... It might do a little bit more helpful in terms of the evidence feedback. So if we all have the data, then do we talk about it at our next meeting? Because we shouldn't be conducting a lot of business. No, he's going to just email that to us and then we'll talk about next month. I'm not on. I'm not on here. So he'll email us those documents and then next month, having thoroughly reviewed them, we should hopefully define what it is that we want from him in the future as far as Ann's reporting. Good. We will... This is our chance this month to read over both of these reports and then we will accept or reject them next month. Okay, next is our consent agenda. I would like to approve them as one. So we've got minutes from the June 8th meeting, minutes from the July 13th meeting, both included here. And lastly, we've got professional contracts, a list of people that we have decided to... Hire. I signed their contracts. We just need to approve those. I make a motion that we approve the consent agenda all as presented. Second? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right, this consent agenda is approved unanimously. Next, we have the superintendent's report. Elaine, would you like to add or comment on anything that you've included in that report? If there's questions I'm happy to. There's one or two pieces that... Microphone. Sorry about that. Happy to answer any questions if there are any on the superintendent's report. There are one or two pieces that we'll play into kind of what we discuss in executive session. I have a question. And it's actually on the elementary school principal's report. Yeah. And my question is, how come there is not free breakfast at Brookfield for all the students? Like there are the other schools? Well, they're the wealthier district. There's a certain threshold in terms of free and reduced lunch that you have to hit to be able to get that. And they don't have enough in the free and reduced categories. It's kind of the same thing with title funding. Title funding is meant for disadvantaged students. And typically, wealth is the main way of measuring that for it. Brookfield typically doesn't meet the threshold to be able to receive title funds. But because the rest of the district does, the majority of the rest of the district does, it's about that threshold. I can apply for a waiver to be able to use those funds across the entire district as a whole, including Brookfield. If you didn't ask me right off the bat, I could tell you the numbers there. They're probably in the 30% rate where you need to hit 40 or above. Property rate of free and reduced to be able to, yep. It's just really struck me when I saw that. Any other questions for laying on these reports? How about the financial report? Some of that we'll talk about in, because it's good, but there's some strategy behind it, we'll talk about an executive session. We ended things very well. There weren't any concerns kind of going through things. Even the food, you'll see we ended up in the black. We were getting a little concerned. The last time I talked with Robin, we were 53,000 down because of all the extra food that was going out during the days that we're doing the distribution. And trying to get the reimbursement to kind of cover the staffing that was required for that. But no, we're in the black for the food even, which is unusual. So like you said, we'll talk, we'll talk surpluses when we get to the executive session. Any other board questions on these reports? Okay, Rachel, it's time for our evaluation. So in general, meeting behavior. The agenda was well-planned to focus on the real work of the board. We met acceptable or above on everything. The board followed this agenda did not allow itself to get sidetracked. I think we followed the agenda. We didn't hit the time marks, but we stayed on track as far as what we were discussing. So that was acceptable. The meeting was well-tended. The board was prepared for the meeting. The meeting proceeded without interruptions or distractions. The board's decision-making processes were understood and implemented appropriately. Diversity of viewpoints were sought out and considered participation was balanced. Everyone participated, no one dominated. Members all listened attentively as each participant spoke. Board members avoided side conversations. Meeting participants treated each other with respect and courtesy. Work was accomplished in an atmosphere of trust and openness. All right, governance principles. Your mic's not on now. Oh, shoot, sorry. As far as governance principles go, there were a few I felt like I couldn't answer and some I'm not sure about, so I don't know how to really go through this. Board's actions occurred at the policy level rather than the operational level. And based on our initial discussion, my viewpoint, it doesn't match up with those of you at the rest of the board, so I kind of hedged on that one. All actions considered by the board were clearly the board's work and I don't know that that's necessarily true. The board reviews what it has already said in policy about each specific topic before discussion on that issue and we didn't do that. In writing additional policies, the board starts with a broad statement and becomes more detailed and a lot in a logical sequence that we didn't, that was not applicable. The board uses less than 15% of board meeting time monitoring past performance, yes. The board routinely spends time monitoring and proving its own process, not applicable today. The board follows an annual calendar based on a plan for accomplishing its job, yes. The board chair helps the board get its job done rather than supervising or becoming involved in staff work, yes. The board spends most of its time debating, defining, clarifying its vision in linking with its owners and public good as opposed to fixing things. I don't know. And the board supports the superintendent in any reasonable interpretation of the applicable board policies, yes. Thank you for doing that work and thank you in advance for writing up a short description of our meeting. I'll give that to you or the public. All right, next we have an executive session, a personnel issue and the superintendent of values.