 There we go. Rochester Stockridge Unified District Board of School Directors regular meeting Tuesday, March 2nd, 2021 at 6.30 p.m. via Google Meet. And we're calling it to order at 6.33 p.m. Adjustments to the agenda. We will remove 7.5 because we don't know the result of that vote as nicely pointed out by Charity Colton. That's a strange thing to talk about. Or just premature. And then, what was it, 7.2? Oh yeah, audit sale, 7.3. We just need to remove audit sale and just a 1920 audit sale of just Rochester High School building. Is that correct, Jamie? Yep. Are there any other adjustments to the agenda anybody has like to bring in tonight? I saw Carl's hand up. Yeah. I was wondering if we, now certainly we can have it, we can leave it in 7.7 as a discussion item, but I'm, you know, again, given that we don't know the outcome of the vote, I think approving a warning as an action item at 8.2 is perhaps premature. We would probably wanna create a warning when we know what the, I mean, yes, we'll still be operating 21-22 as a combined district, regardless. I can't see any way that that wouldn't happen, but I do think it's probably premature to take action on a warning until we know the outcome of our vote. Unless you wanted to act out of an excess of optimism like me, Carl. We could act out of an excess of pessimism as well. No, I just, like I said, I think for example, the warning would have to have, like I think the warning now has stuff about the election of officers and part of the AOA terms was the consideration of making the election of officers a Australian ballot vote. Yep. I think we should hold off on that piece. No, I think that's a very valid point. Thank you. You're welcome. Should we just, Jamie, what do you think? Should we just cut it out? Yeah, it's fine. I mean, we went back and forth with this. We didn't know if we'd have the results by then or not. And that's part of why I said possible. And in my board report, I said to you that we very well, I'm gonna ask you to set a special meeting tonight. So for just that action. So. Okay, great. So let's keep it and we can talk about, is that what you want to talk about that future board meeting or? Yeah, I mean, I just, at some point, when we come to discussion, maybe if I could get a date from you guys about when you wanna, when we wanna warn a special meeting, I think when Taryn and I looked, we would have enough time to do it before, if we did a quick special meeting before the full board meeting. I don't know if that night works for you guys, just cause a lot of you are at the full board meetings. Anyways, that's something we could consider. The policy committee moved when they're meeting now. It's not before the full board meetings. So that's an option, but we can take care of that. But we can decide that then. Okay, quick. So let's just approve, can I have a motion to approve the changes to the agenda we have suggested? Make a motion to approve the changes that we've suggested to the agenda. Thank you, Amy. Seconded by Carl, all in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. I got you, Jenny. Thank you. All right, moving on. Let's do approving the minutes. And again, as always, Jenny, I wanna thank you for these approve minutes of Tuesday, February 2nd, 2021, regular. Do we have, anybody have any specific notes on any of these or could we move them as a slate to accept? I think Jenny's note keeping has been exemplary. I move we approve all the minutes as a slate. Second. Any discussion? All in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Good. Board comment. Any comments? Yeah, I had a question. Well, I just wanted to make sure that everybody was getting their correspondence with the VSBA and it was kind of specific to Justine. I wanted to make sure that she was getting correspondence with them because when I sent out the email about the socks in January, she responded that she didn't know what I was talking about. So I don't know who signs board members up for that. I'll double check with Christie that should have been part of her onboarding but I'll just double check. Okay. It's an automatic address or a board and that should update automatically, correct? That's the way I've always seen it. So that's how I've used it. Well, I'm just, I'll make sure. Okay, if you can check. Thank you. But it's the SU and Christie who manages that. Okay, great. Good to know. Thank you. Good. Any further board comment, Carl? As I struggled to turn on my microphone and not turn off my camera. No, I don't other than, I dropped off my absentee ballot. Hopefully the entire board did their civic duty as well as well as everyone in our audience and whether you voted for or against your participation, I think personally I would like to thank all of us for participating in democracy. Oh, I agree. Thank you. Good. Jenny, any board comment? I do not, but I would like to just have a generic comment that it's some of these discussion items that we have here, I think are great. And it's nice to be moving on to talking about some of these items other than the budget. Yeah, that's a great feeling to go beyond having approved your budget and worked on some tough details and worked a lot of tough stuff actually over the last six months here. And I really, I'm so sorry again, just Dean's gonna miss the outdoor and experiential education because I'm just, that's her, that's one of her babies. But yeah, I hear you. That's really great. Great. Megan, are you on? And do you have any board comment? So I think I saw last thing she'd left it. Seems to be having some issues. Yeah, I see it. Something going, I think. Left, on and left. Okay, well, we'll get to it then. All right, I think we're moving on to reports of the board, the superintendent. So you have my report in hand. One of the things I had indicated is that we need to discuss when we might want a special meeting. So we can take that up under seven, seven. There was news today from the governor's office that there is going to be a vaccine available to start vaccinating school personnel and staff that come in contact with students that includes contracted service providers, includes independent schools and includes public school employees. The details around that have yet to be worked out or at least conveyed to us. I was a bit surprised to hear that we might be doing it in schools. And so I think there will be a coordinated effort here at the SQ level, much like our surveillance testing to ensure that that goes off without a hitch. And I await those details. I think we're gonna get them on Friday. I do have a meeting with Secretary French on Thursday, a soups meeting. I think a lot of those details may come out there too. That would assist us with planning and preparation. Seems like registration will occur next Monday for folks to start getting registered for that. So I did put a correspondence out to faculty and staff with as much information as I had in a timely manner this afternoon. And so that was a big update. The other thing I wanted to let folks know is, is that presenting tonight about the outdoor Ed is more, I didn't put the names down last week when I did the agenda because I wanted to be able to confirm with them. So it's gonna be Bonna and Melissa and Owen Bradley from the White River Unified District. And Bonna and Melissa have been doing a lot of great things with outdoor Ed now for a while. And I got to see some of it firsthand this fall and was really impressed. So they're gonna give you a brief presentation and answer questions folks may have about that. And then, we await anxiously. We've got two districts voting today plus all the articles that are on about our set. So I'm hoping for some positive outcomes and results tonight. Carl, you had your hand up. Thank you. Yeah, I was just wondering, the, you know, speaking to the idea of the in school clinics, they were saying that as an option, you know, a school or a grouping of schools could vaccinate their employees at a location with the J and J of vaccine. I was just wondering if that was something we were interested in pursuing and if it's too soon that you guys haven't had a conversation about that. You know, if we haven't had a conversation yet, but my inclination Carl is, is that's what's gonna get it to our educators. Then that's what we'll prioritize and we'll figure out how to coordinate it. And so I did have a brief conversation with Shane Oaks, our COVID coordinator today about the logistics around that. And so, you know, I certainly want to prioritize and make it certain that our folks have it and that it's accessible to them. I went, you know, part of me feels like I wish they would look back at this monthly survey data and see we've been in school five days a week at the elementary schools in September 8th and maybe that would help us move up the list of priority. I don't know if it's gonna work that way though. Well, it's certainly in great news. Absolutely. It's just, it's like, you know, you could get teary about it if you thought about it. It's really, really wonderful. All the... Yeah, I really commend you for, you know, being proactive about trying to move forward on this rather than just being like sending out the link to the sign up webpage to teachers to try to think about and discuss the idea of us, you know, making it as easy as possible and as quickly as possible for our staff, you know, to get protected so that that we can be interacting with our kids a lot better and, you know, feeling a lot better about it. Yeah. Good, other questions for the superintendent, Amy? Yes, I noticed in the report you were talking about the annual report and mailer that we do. And that is definitely something I talked to Ethan about that we need to discuss how we're gonna go about doing this last year on Ethan. And I believe Jenny worked quite hard on putting it together a really great book with a lot of great parts and color coding. And I'm kind of wondering what the plan is for this year. In years past, it's been off and on with the support from the SU on getting the book together. So just kind of wondering where we're going. Well, we're gonna go wherever you guys direct us to go. So, you know, we put together the administration in coordination with the board, put together the White River Unified District mailer separate from the town. And that came out quite well, I think. But then in Strafford, we provided all the materials to the town of Strafford and then they included in their town book. And so it's really whatever you desire, Amy. I mean, we will provide you with all the materials, documents, letters, pictures and you guys can then coordinate that or you can give us your report and say, this is the template and just fill it in. So it's really whatever you guys desire as a board. We, that's funny. I'm sorry, Amy, we talked about that. And I think we even mentioned that we thought it should be an agenda item. When we saw it in this report, I figured I didn't need to add it. Yeah, I just really need you to give us a direction one way or the other. Well, I think there's some things that should probably be shared too about this. I mean, that was an all out sort of effort last year and trying to figure that out. It was also expensive. Color printing of that amount is very expensive. And that's something we probably need to take into consideration. But I certainly, I mean, I loved what we did. I'm wondering if we could do it for less. That's sort of what, you know, if there's a way we can make it for less. But maybe I can show you, I've got the file I think Jenny, maybe you and I can both check to see who has the final, the last file. I think it's me. One of the big changes we did was we put all the Excel into word, which is times taking, painstaking, but so much easier to read for the lay person. I got responses back to that. So that's one big change. So anyway, how do you think of Jenny? You want to sit down and make an hour and talk to each other and see what we can pass on? Yeah, that sounds good. It would be good to know if there's some way we could do it for less cost. But if we ended up doing what we did last year, we do have that template that we can go from as a starting point. Yeah, good. Okay, let's, you and I, I'll make a note and you and I find a time to get together and chat about that. Are you usually evening, better for you? Very, in general, yes, but I'll get to find a time that works. So do we have a breakout of cost comparison of color versus not color or this year versus years, or, you know, last year versus years in the past? I mean, like how much more expensive was it? And was it just because of color or was it also because of length? Because it wasn't, it was a lot longer. We added a lot more explanations in it, which was wonderful. Tara, do you want to speak to what you just, what we came across for at Rod and then what your experience was? I used a different supplier for the Rudd-Mailer this year and the cost was higher than what we normally spend with the supplier that we use, but we had a time and issue. So it does cost more to have color pages. So what we had done is elected to do just the cover page color and then all of these subsequent pages were black and white, which saved us some dollars there. And the length of the mail does have an impact on how much the cost is, how many copies you need. Well, certainly, the big decision last year was whether we do an online version. Because that could save enormous, I mean, I hate to take money, you know, business away from spaulding press. You should do an electronic copy, but by statute, you're required to send your budget information to your registered voters and not everybody has access to go online. So you still should do. I'm realizing that we're sort of overtaking Jamie's report in the middle of reports and it is too bad that we didn't make this a general item because we really obviously need to talk about it. Let's finish up with Carl and then Amy and then I think we'll move on from now. And Jenny, maybe we can piggyback on that special meeting. Yeah. I was going to suggest just that. You kind of say, we don't have it on the agenda. Let's not spend a lot of time on it, but I also wanted to toss out that I was hearing from a friend of mine that other towns are doing the legal minimum in terms of a mailing and then putting links on their website and then a URL in the mailing that says, you know, for the full version go online to here and that's where they are doing the glamor color photos and the montages of what the kids have been doing so far and all that sort of stuff. So I do think having a discussion about that quickly at our special meeting might be worthwhile so we can get a direction that's both affordable and really informs our people, especially since we haven't been able to get together in person. Cool. Amy? That's okay. I will just wait till next, till it's on the agenda. Great. Thank you. Megan, are you on? I can't see. Yeah, it says you're there. I'm here. I've been having a little bit of internet trouble, but I'm hopefully on for good. Good. Did you have any more questions for the superintendent on his report? No, I'm good. Thank you. Okay. Good. So I think we're done with that. That's moving on to principles report, please. Yeah, so you have our report in front of us. There's not a whole lot of meat to it because we were in school for a pretty short couple of weeks, it seemed like since we met last at our last regular meeting, but we did have several window wellness components on both campuses, which was great to see and the kids really enjoyed. And I think it was just as kind of official to stay local and do that. They had cross-country experiences, ice skating experiences, snowshoeing experiences, and everybody seemed to really enjoy that. I think some of the other highlights is what else? We had the 100th day of school before vacation, which was pretty exciting to see kids in all classes on both campuses participated in some sort of 100th day of school challenge, whether it was reading 100 minutes, reading 100 books, the list goes on and on. And then we had a little celebration. And then teachers worked together to create these vacation bingo board activities. And we have some fun things. I don't wanna spoil the surprise because the kids don't even know what the surprises are yet, but there are some great community contributions to surprises, even if you just did one activity as a kid. And the idea was just to keep kids active in a lot of different ways, whether it was reading or being outdoors or helping families cook, all sorts of things. So it was a wide array of activities. It was great. We had a lot of fun with it. Oh, good. That's great to hear. So maybe quite a bit, it was done in the last two or three days. Don't tell all your secrets. Amy? Great. I would like to have a discussion, a further discussion about winter wellness and what we foresee for the future. So maybe we can put that on as an agenda item for another meeting. Cause I would like to really understand what we did this year and what the benefits and the drawbacks were and what the future would be. And I do also have a question. We had received a letter home the last day of the four February vacation about lead test. And I was wondering, I had thought that the drinking fountain in the pre-K had been fixed last year. And I was surprised to see that on this note again this year. Amy, we were, this is Bonnie. We were surprised to see that too. We actually had that whole bubbler replaced. As you'll recall the state mandated a lead testing throughout public schools last spring. And or late fall I guess it was. And we got indication that there were three or four fixtures that we needed to address. And we addressed them a couple we just took out. They're no longer in service. They were in the high school. The one that we wanted to make sure of was the bubbler in the preschool which we completely replaced. One of the things they're thinking about is the fixture was replaced and then we immediately shut down. So it's that unused for several weeks, several months. And what they've suggested is that we go back through the testing cycle again which we began two weeks ago. And what that cycle is is you run the fixture twice a day for five minutes for a period of two to three weeks and then retest. So we are going to retest the fixtures that came back above the prescribed level. Hopefully we'll find satisfactory levels. If not, then we'll have to have a discussion about next steps. Okay, and you say a bubbler is that component that's inside of the drinking fountain or is that the whole, is it a drinking fountain? Yeah, it's like one of the stainless steel fountains that you see, you know, it's all one piece. It's got a chiller and a bubbler. It's one integrated piece. So we did put a whole brand new unit in the preschool, as I said. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. I'll just add that across the SU, what we've been finding is it sometimes is the brass fittings behind the actual bubbler itself. And so while who's been working for us in the SU has been advising our custodians ahead of maintenance to change out the brass fitting and that tends to be clearing it up. So that would be the next step for us to address that. But good eye, Amy, I missed that. Thank you. For the questions for the principals, Jenny. I'm also, thanks. Thank you, Megan. Yes, hey guys, just wanna say thank you for the break bingo that we loved it. My family has taken total advantage of and had a really good time with it. I also just wanted to ask a couple of questions, just a question about the afternoon program at both schools in Stock Virgin Rochester, how we are going from the block learning with the more arts and integrated classes in the afternoon. But why are we switching and is it happening on both campuses? It's not happening on both campuses. And staffing is a huge piece of the puzzle for a variety of reasons. I'll let Bonnie speak to it on the Rochester side, but. Yeah, that's correct. Staffing on the Rochester side, we just reached a point where we could no longer staff it despite what I would call herculean efforts on everyone's part. So we're moving, we are moving beginning tomorrow back to the more traditional schedule, which means the unified arts classes are increasing in time. The academic blocks are increasing a little bit. But we simply reached the point where every single day we were scrambling to try and find people who could staff the activities. Okay, my daughter, my daughter's for just wondering why I just wanted to be able to give them a good answer. Okay, thank you. Good for them for asking. They wanted to know, but they enjoyed it. Amy. Just to that point, of course, my daughter's same thing. Why are we doing this? So it might be worth a quick announcement or a conversation with the students of why things are changing. Yeah, we had actually done this about a week before the break, and we had asked teachers to explain the new schedule and the fact that we were changing away from the enrichment block. So I can't tell you why youngsters don't know that, but my hope was that they had had it explained and maybe just don't recall it or don't remember it or as Amy said over her head. Yeah, it certainly was a good model. I hope we might be able to return to it at some time when vaccines are more prevalent and everything's safer. Because I know that's some of staffing issues. Yeah, that was really our big challenge, Ethan. When someone was out, we weren't comfortable. It's not that there weren't people who were willing to come in. I think in many cases there were, but we weren't comfortable bringing people into the buildings. I think one of the things I think Lindy and I would tell you is the success that we've had has been related to the fact that basically if you don't work at the school pretty much full time or go to the school, then you haven't been in the school. So we weren't able to draw on resources we typically would draw on as substitutes. Not sure. No, and hopefully these people are actively, some of these people are actively seeking vaccines because of course I would think that would change. But I don't know, do we have a clear policy about that? Once somebody has a vaccine, are they considered able to enter the school as a substitute or what is our policy? Well, folks can enter the school. I mean, I think certain schools are just being more diligent about or cautious about bringing substitutes in anything. So. Well, I'm just saying if somebody gets a vaccine. Yeah, I mean, any substitute right now can enter our school. If they are on the sub list, whether they have a vaccine or not, they can substitute. So there's no policy there. I mean, there's no guidance from the AOE or the SU saying that they can't do that already. So definitely if they get vaccinated they can. Mm. So Bonnie, do you anticipate this changing? Is it your goal to get back to the enrichment block? So certainly they were popular. Sometimes it was the best part of the day. I think we'd have to have a conversation about that, Ethan. Based on a couple of the changes in programming, I know the board hopes to make next year. I think that all has to be taken into consideration. Okay. So another agenda item. Well, I just also think it's important to stress like with the enrichment block specials or unified arts throughout the day were 25 to 30 minutes because they were getting that second dose in the afternoon. And now on Rochester's campus, they will push back to a longer length of time. So just shifting kind of when it is in the day, not necessarily, but they're not getting something. We're just using the time differently. Good. Further questions for the principals? Carl? Just a quick comment. I had heard about winter bingo from a community member who said that they had heard about it and thought it was cool. And it's been a long time since a community member has come up to me and said something positive. So good job, you guys. All done. Great. Great. Anybody, Jenny, did I get to you? Do you have a question for the principals? I forgot. I know. Okay, good. Thank you. And I think we're ready to move on. Thank you to the business manager, please. Hello, Tara. Good evening, everyone. So you have my report. Ray, if you want to put up the revenue and expenditure summary, I can go over that with you. If you have any questions specific to my report, please let me know. I will give just a quick update on the SR2 funding. We are working to get our recovery plan together and meet the deadlines that the state has established for getting the stakeholders and all of that information into them. And those funds need to be used for learning loss, preparing schools for reopening, testing, repairing and upgrading projects to improve the quality of the air. And then we'll be funded similar to the way that we are funded through our title services. So more to come as we learn more on the SR2 funds. So on the revenue and expenditure summary highlighted in orange is what I've updated. There's the prior month, what was there and the updated projection through the end of February. So you'll see, Ray, if you want to scroll down just a tiny bit, you'll see that the current projected deficit for FY21 has gone down to the 28,917. I have added on the revenue side, we reduced the pre-K tuition revenue based on current enrollment invoicing, increased the interest income to $6,365 based on the current revenue received. We added $318 in miscellaneous income that's come in, $810 for donations. And then I forgot to highlight the one there, the VCF grant revenue that Stockbridge received for $5,000. And then we updated the COVID reimbursement to the $40,099 based on the increase on the expenditures. And then Ray, if you scroll all the way down to the bottom, I have updated, oh, on the revenue page, sorry, Ray, right there. I have updated the fund balances based on your FY20 audit. So that has now been updated as well. So then Ray, if you can go ahead and go to the expenditure side, the change there is the COVID reimbursement, the $40,099. And then if you scroll down to the projected areas of savings, the field trips, there's been some bussings, so I dropped that down to $3,500 there. We've got an increase in books it looks like of $11,914. We added in contracted services that haven't been utilized for $26,779, general supplies that haven't been utilized, $15,742. And then updated the tuition budget versus invoiced to date. We got about a $60,000 savings there. Obviously, if any additional invoices come in, that's subject to change. But those were the updates that I made on your revenue and expenditure report. All right, can nobody hear me? Thank you, Tara. Amy, you have your hand up, go ahead. Oh, you're muted down. Okay, there we go. From one to another, there you go. From one to another. Okay, so, okay, if we could go to the expenditures, the tuition, the $60,000 you're saying is for everything that we've been invoiced to date has been paid. But is in their outstanding kids that we haven't been invoiced for yet? Is that what you're saying? It is invoiced to date. So obviously, if any other invoices come in between now and the end of the fiscal year, that number will be updated. But we've received the majority of semester one and semester two invoices at this point. So I felt that it was an appropriate time to put it on there. But again, we continue to track that on a monthly basis. All right, because there is one, two, three, four, there's like five schools that we have only paid the first tuition payment. So we have to pay the first and the final invoice amount is for both semester one and semester two. So if there are provisions, $18,000 for the full year, that's the number that I used in this projection. Okay, thank you. For annual tuition. That's what I was kinda wondering about. This is a projection, not actual. So if we were built on on the first semester, we're gonna expect to be built on on the second. This is money that has not shown up to be billed for any students at this time. Okay, and I had another question, I didn't write it down. So- I'm gonna come back to you. Yeah, come back if I come up to Nathan. I'm not sure what order here, but I'll go to Jenny next and then Carl. So two questions. The first one, Tara, I was wondering if you could remind us. So the deficit went down to $28,917. And I was wondering if you could remind us what it was the last time we saw this or at least approximately. I have that right in front of me last month. It was 137801. 137801. And then the second question, Tara, I was wondering if you could just, you may have talked about this previously, but I don't remember if you can just give a little explanation of what the VCF grant revenue is, where that came from. That was my question too. I'm gonna direct that to Lindy because that was a principal grant that was issued and they completed it and received the fundings. Right. So both people received one. This was a mini-grant that the VPA put out and you had to emphasize on how you're gonna use the funds for in-person learning to support social, emotional growth of kiddos and potentially in an outdoor setting. So those funds are funds we've been able to access to furnish different parts of what teachers need to instruct outdoors, not necessarily outdoor education, but a classroom under a tent more so. And other materials that have kind of come up that you can't all go to the communal pencil bucket anymore. It's gotta be there, not that we didn't have the pencils, but just organizational pieces. We also did yoga mats for all our students, sleds for students, things like that is where that money is being used right now. Just thinking equity here was this, just for Stockbridge, this grant. This one was, but Rochester also received one as well. So that's the total amount. The $9,000 is what both campuses received. Okay, is this the one you wrote for each other? I knew each other. Yeah. Yeah. I remember that, my favorite memories from the board last year. It's money for the other school. Now that's equity. Very good. Thank you. That clarifies that a lot for me. The other thing I think it's important to know is that when we wrote the grants, even though Stockbridge got a grant and Rochester got a grant, that money was spent across both campuses. Right. The first grant we got, we bought equipment for both Stockbridge and Rochester. And then when we got the second grant, we bought equipment for both Rochester and Stockbridge and Rochester. That's great. Always good to have that in the public record. Good. It was $5,000 to clarify, it was $5,000 total for both of those grants that you wrote. No, it was $9,000. No, it was $9,000. $9,000 for two grants. Where's the 4,000? Where's that shop in last year? I just wrote a note to find it because what is indicated in my revenue report is only $5,000 for Stockbridge. So I'll have to find it. I'll have to find it. One at a time, please. Yeah, I didn't hear you. Lenea, what was your comment? I just don't think we've spent it all yet either, Tara. Oh, okay. No, but we should still record it as Raven now. Tara, if it helps, Rochester's was late in the fall. It was, so that's where you'll be looking for that one. Great. Thank you. Thank you for getting that cleared up. Carl, did you have a question? I did. I wanted to, I think I got the answer that when you're looking at the potential areas of savings on page two, the tuition budgeted versus invoice to date we're capturing an extra 60,249. And that number is not, no kid in that, in that number is a kid that we paid first semester for and we're still waiting for a second semester bill. This is just kids that we thought were gonna be going and they're not going anywhere. We didn't get billed first semester and we don't expect a second semester. Is that correct? Correct. It is who I have physically received invoices from receiving districts to date. And Carl, there's always a couple of those young adults that we, at the time of budgeting, we budget for them to attend, but then they're accepted into the VAS program. So every year, as long as I've been at Rochester, there's been two or three seniors who get accepted into the VAS program after the budget's been finalized. Oh, absolutely. And I would imagine we have a couple of homeschool, you know, high school and middle school kids that we had budgeted for. And then they said, nope, we're staying home or we're doing our own thing and they would be dropping off. I just wanted to make sure that 60,000 is not, you know, there's not a kid that we paid first semester for at Woodstock and then the second semester shows up because we paid first semester, we can expect to pay second, but if we paid no semesters at this point, we can expect we probably will pay no semesters. And as I understand it, our answer is these are all the no semester kids. These, the dollar amounts that I used is the full year tuition that would be in voice. Good. Megan, do you have any questions for our business manager? No, I'm good, thank you. Okay. Amy, ready to go back to you? Yeah, thank you. Just to help me read, make sure I'm reading this correctly. If we go back to the revenue and we're looking at pre-K revenue and in our FY21 budget, we budgeted $24,115. Last month, you projected that we were gonna actually receive 31,000. And then, but then this month, you've decreased that, that we're only gonna reject it. And is that due to kids moving? You had some kids unenroll. Unenroll, okay. So these are moving targets. If any changes per month, then these numbers are gonna change. Yeah, I understand that. Now, can you tell me where we're getting all this wonderful interest income from? I mean, we projected. That is based on, if you're not using your tax anticipation note, you gain interest on that. And each month as we get in the bank statements and we book interest to revenue on all of your bank accounts, that is where that revenue is applied. So again, that fluctuates month to month, depending on how much money you have in your bank accounts, just like your personal bank account. Oh, right. Oh, dear, Amy's having some trouble. Do we still, yes, Megan's on, so we still have a quorum. And just to put in the, you know, also, as far as the expenditure side is concerned, as we get closer to the end of the fiscal year, where we're seeing savings and line items, we will start to increase and add or adjust as necessary. So, you know, we're now into February and, you know, we've gotten through first semester. So there's definitely, you know, more savings that we're going to realize each month, particularly, you know, with budgets are all frozen for non-essential spending, so. Good. Any last questions for our business manager? They're being done? Very good. Let's move on. Policy committee, the anti-racism policy. And we have this, correct? Yeah, Christie sent this out. I'm sorry. I thought it was going to be linked into the agenda, and it wasn't. We'll make certain it's a live link moving forward. But we sent this out. This is in draft form right now. The policy committee is looking to get feedback from each board on this policy. And then we will be meeting on the 4th Thursday this month to take all the feedback received. And actually, Owen Bradley is the lead administrator assisting with the anti-racism and equity work. And so what we would look for you to do, you can provide comments now if you have them. Otherwise, you can provide them to your policy committee member and or send them to me. And that's Carl. And what we're going to do is in each area, I'm going to put like, all right, purpose of policy number one. And it's a Google doc. So under comments, we'll put our side and the comments that we had from that local board were, you know, A, B, and C. And then the policy committee is going to take all those comments and now then make the next draft, which we're hoping that is becoming more fun. So this is really in comment round now at the local district level. What's your preference board? Do you want to talk about this now or do you want some time to get back? I'd prefer to review and directly comment to Carl and to the policy committee. OK, Jenny, how do you feel? Yeah, I agree with Amy. OK, Carl. The one thing I would caution everyone to think about is that the document that was presented to you, Ray, if you scroll down farther, you'll see the last couple pages are procedure. And really, that's not where the board is supposed to have our input. We're supposed to make a policy and then trust our administrators to make the procedure to get that. So as we're looking at this, you can certainly look and see what they're thinking about in terms of procedure. But it is really not our place to really get down to the day-to-day operational procedural bits. What we really need to focus on is the scope of that second block. That's really the policy, because that's where our role and our work comes from. It's not from discussing the attached procedure. I think that's there more for us to have as a reference of how that policy might be implemented and not for us to approve or disprove. Carl, a question on that, then. Is it part of deciding policy how often something should happen, or is it just the idea of what should happen? In other words, then. It could be part of a policy to get an annual review or a quarterly review of something to get outcomes or ends, depending if you want to talk in policy governance speech. So setting a review time frame is part of our issue. And we're certainly allowed to comment on things or say that we're not getting what we want, but we are not nickel in diming around the procedural part. We're making a policy part that our administrators will use to inform how they make procedure. So, I mean, and again, a lot of times you do get a policy that has procedure attached to it. What you can do if you see something in the procedure you don't like is you would say, how would I amend the policy to correct that? So for example, if the procedure doesn't say anything about reporting to the board, you might say, let's make the policy give the board an annual report about that or a curricular plan or something like that. But getting into nickels and dimes is now where that goes and since it was attached, I wanted to make sure everyone was clear on that. Good. We were just finding out. Megan, are you OK to get comments back later? Yes. I'd like to review it and give comments. And thank you, Carl. That's a really good point. I appreciate that. Good. OK, I think we'll hopefully within the next week, I would think. Great, Carl. It'd be nice to be a little timely about this if you have comments, just so things don't lag out too long. That's our recommendation. So we will get back to that. OK, moving on. Discussion items. Outdoor experiential education presentation of WRVSU outdoor educators on the positive results of implementing outdoor and experiential education. Well, it's my pleasure to introduce to you Principal Bradley and Bonna Wheeler and Lisa Purdy. And I'm going to hand it over to you, Owen. And I think they do have a slide presentation to go over with you tonight as well. And, Ray, do you have a copy of that already or no? Look at that. It's almost like this thing is a well-oiled production. So here we go. Good evening. Thank you for inviting us. We're happy to be here and proud to be here. I'm going to do very little talking and hand it off to Bonna and Melissa. And I'm here to answer questions and let you know that it is essential for any program like this to be successful, to have administrative support. And I fully support this program and believe in it. Melissa, Bonna? OK. Thanks, Ray. Where? Yeah, there you go. Melissa, can you be heard? Yeah, just let me. I'm lagging quite a bit. So if you can't hear me, just let me know. OK, we can hear you now. All right. So go ahead. You're the first person here. OK, so we don't have a lot of time. So we're going to kind of fly through this. But so I am Ms. Honeyby, actually, when I run the outdoor program. And Bonna, when she helps with elementary, is Ms. Otter. And she does the middle school program as well as Bonna, right, not as Ms. Otter in the middle school? Yep, yep. Well, the teacher has called us into her office. She said, bring the children. Because I would like to speak to them directly. And one of our environmental educators from Sharon and getting out in the district is Meg Teachout. And she had said that and it really rang a bell. So let's keep moving. I hope that says something to you all. OK. So I've read many, many studies about outdoor education being integrated into school programs. And all of them share them in finding that social-emotional connections are found, as well as more motivation and engagement in academic learning. Lots of other stuff went to. But these are the two main things that came up. And this is throughout the whole world. There's outdoor programs everywhere. So basically, oh, yep. So yeah, stay here for one second. You can read that quote, but basically it helps with their self-esteem, their connection to each other, their emotions, their ability to speak up for themselves, self-awareness, curiosity, relationship building, just being out in nature, that vitamin N, which I know most of us living in Vermont have heard that term before, but it really does help with their mental and physical health. And all of that leads to more motivation and enthusiasm for learning academics. OK, you can. I'd love to add while we're switching is that it really helps their focus. I see the big difference as time goes on with that. Go ahead. Yeah, so students' health and happiness influences their ability to learn. And integrating inside learning with outdoor learning makes happy students, like Lana said. So we, at our school, at the elementary in Bethel and at the middle school, we integrate in the elementary, we take the indoor learning, bring it outside, which I'll show later in other slides. And we also incorporate environmental education and education of nature and bring that inside learning. So they both affect each other. All of their senses are engaged, which we all know creates and happy learning. The sense of freedom that students have without their learning helps with motivation. And it's important also that we are creating stewards of the earth. At this time in our life, we know that it's really important for everybody to understand how important it is to take care of the environment. So that's a big piece of it. OK. OK, Ray. The successes of outdoor education are social, mental, and emotional for their health. In the middle school, we have fewer write-ups or suspensions. We are outside in our middle school most. You can speak more to that. But in the elementary, I don't, I haven't followed up on that fact. I can tell you that we have a tendency to increase and behavior decrease, negative behavior. One of the things I want to say to Melissa and Bonna is you have 25 slides and you have a few minutes. So I know we're going to skip some of them and we could share the slideshow. But be aware of that. And I can help you stay on time as well. OK. So the teamwork community, like I said, we bring in indoor learning outside. So we can just go to the next slide. So we, Owen, would you like us to speak to the important components of outdoor education? It's OK. I believe that I think that's an important piece, yeah. Yeah, so I do too. So it's really important. So ECO, the ECO program is educating children outdoors. At the Bethel Elementary School, we used to have our teachers go outside with us. But right now, we don't have that happening. So there's two different programs that you can have. There's teachers going out with students, which helps the indoor learning come outside and the outdoor learning come inside. When you have just an ECO teacher, which I am in the elementary school, you and an aide to go out with you, you lose a little bit of that integration, like that back and forth. Because you can imagine if the teacher goes outside, they can easily bring the learning back into the classroom and vice versa. They can bring indoor learning outside. So that's a big piece to remember. The staffing also for safety is you need two people. If you're the farther away you're going, you need two people. So that's really important. I emphasize that it's really important to have the teacher elementary programming. So this is what we do, basically. This program builds resilience, confidence, inspires learning, sparks lifelong connections with nature and necessary vitamin N. So we do fire skills. We learn how to work with tools and do a lot of exploration in the natural world. While you're switching, safety is our biggest thing with the elementary school, and they don't even build a fire right away. They have to learn how to be respectful of the circuit and all the rules. So we also build self-confidence through working with their hands and with fire and with tools, integrating school and classroom topics, learning to ask questions and find answers on their own, and a lot of journaling and sit spots. OK, next slide. Thank you. So this is an example of an activity with, this is a preschool class, to inspire learning and inquiry questions sparked their learning and awareness of their environments. We are constantly asking them, what do you notice? What do you wonder? What do you see? This is just an activity with learning about squirrels and resilience. Next slide. The Leibano is saying community building teamwork and awareness are important for big pieces of this program. We go with the ECOs, Three Cares, which is Care for Yourself. And we teach explicitly, teach the kids what these mean, caring for others, and caring for the earth. So we constantly talk about what that is. We use a circle of power and respect, which is, if you can just go back one second to that slide, we use this in a middle school as well. We sit in circles with students so that everybody can see each other and take turns talking, listening, and speaking. Next slide. So these are our outdoor education learning goals. These move into the middle school. Yeah, everything that we do in the elementary school builds towards the middle school. And we carry forth all of these items that you see. So one of our questions, themes of this year for our elementary focus is, why are trees important? Why are they important for various ecosystems? We cover a bunch of science standards throughout the year, but this is one of them about the ecosystem. And there are several involved in teaching these standards. Our teacher, myself as an outdoor educator, and the writing teachers in each classroom are working together to help them understand why trees are important and more about ecosystems. That's just one example. And then they get ready to go. Go ahead. So these are just some pictures of what kids have been working on outside over the years, different confidence building skills. They build their own forts together. That's teamwork. They work on the confidence of using a saw safely. And making their own paint with different materials. They learn how to also harvest different materials in a sustainable way. OK, next slide. Learn how to use tools. And like Bonnet said, we go through safety protocols thoroughly for a long time before they're able to use tools. And they have permission slips that their parents know that they have permission that they can learn how to use different tools. These are different projects they worked on. Next slide. OK, so science, math, literature, art, music, and other subjects are incorporated into our outdoor experience throughout various hands-on learning projects. So we had a kindergarten class working with objects in motion, so that's on the right, those pictures. And then we were learning about different habitats of birds, middle pictures, and I think symmetry for art and some insect bodies for science on the left bottom there. Next. Oh, I forgot. Math and science, some more insect bodies and math games with outdoor nature, next slide. Just examples of journaling and sit spots, so things we learn about, they journal about, and they come back and share. Next slide. So winter, people are oftentimes afraid or don't do outdoor learning in the winter. And this is our students' favorite time. I don't know about their learning to love it this year, but elementary loves to be up in the winter and there's all kinds of learning, the same learning that you do in the spring and fall can happen in the winter. Next slide. OK, fire skills awareness team work. First, cooking, fighting science with fire. So things that we do outside, we are helping them love to learn, so they're still learning while they're out here and they're enjoying their time and they're enjoying to be challenged by having something like fire that they have to pay attention to and they have to be able to start. And we're constantly talking about other things while we're sitting around the fire, so we can have questions that have to do with science or English, whatever's going on in the world. OK, next slide. Thank you. I want to take you to the middle school here. You folks, as far as I understand are elementary, correct? Somebody knows? Yep. And this is the direction that we take the kids through after the elementary. I just thought you should take a look at what we're going towards. And we're taking all those concepts and principles that we start with with the elementary kids and build on them and build skills. And what just came to my mind a lot is that they have learned respect and they have learned caring and they have learned conscientiousness. And it shows with the kids who've had eco already. And it's a lot easier for the older kids if they've had some background in all of these concepts to be able to move forward more smoothly into the next skill levels. And these are the skill levels I hope you're browsing through them. We work with the natural world. I'm just going to skim because we don't have time. But you'll get this later. Safety, of course, is still huge and they still need to stay inside of me and the other teachers. And in earshot, even if they can range a little bit further, they know about sticks and fire safety and how to build fires. They spend a lot of time building fires. They love it. And they don't use matches and they don't use paper. They use fluff and they use flint and steel and will be getting into bow drills once the weather's a little drier. They use natural materials that are out there. We've been fortunate to have shopwood for when it's really lousy. They've been learning how to make fuzz sticks out of that. So they've been learning tools, how to use tools, and how to respect tools, and what to do with tools and always never leave them on the ground or on a table. They're always put away, et cetera, et cetera. They learn all of these things and it's drilled into them, really, because you have to do it. And it's just part of their life now. I feel like they're a lot safer than they were when they came to me. Connecting to the school subjects, it's wonderful working with our pods so that we can do both together. They are learning leadership and leaders just naturally come to the front when we're experiencing all these other activities, whether it's a hike or whether we're working in small groups at the fire pits or cooking or learning other activities. So it's good. It's all good. We start the year with tools and with knots. Here they are moving along to, just so you can see some pictures. The one on the left is when we were building the trail. We built an inner loop and the kids actually did it in seventh and eighth grade. Those were seventh graders then. And they made, the lower left is one of the maps that was, that's half of the trail that they built. And we did compasses and learned how to make maps and use maps. And so it's a lot of skill-building here. All right, I'm gonna interrupt you just for time because I think questions are the key. But before we move into questions I wanna check in with the chair and with Superintendent. Are there any pieces of this that you want more on right away or should we open it up to questions? I think the way, well, I'm a little bit, I'm an instinctual supporter of this idea and this program. I guess my big concern, this is sort of some of the feedback we've already gotten is how do academics fit into this? How does literacy and mathematics, I mean, for me it's instinctual that it does but we need to be able to explain this to people. And the example that was used very clearly I thought by one of our parents was what if I want a regular school education? And what if I want my kids to be in a classroom getting a regular school education? And what do you say to someone like that? Obviously the personal, social, emotional stuff, that's clear, but we're talking about, okay, does this improve math skills? Does this improve literacy skills? What are the numbers that are gonna support that argument? Is this comprehensive in the sense that it takes care of all of the subjects that happen in a school day? Is this a way to do them outside? Or is this something that's separate sort of like our enrichment block? I think that's the biggest question I need to get answered so I can support this when I sell it to our public. I think Melissa might be a good person to start with the answer on that and I'm happy to backfill. And there's also some resources around the state, Ethan North Branch Nature Center. I put their website link in the chat. I know about them. And we also at the middle school are using the junior main guides curriculum, which has pretty strong standards also and everything connects as you would imagine to transferable skills. But Melissa, can you talk a little bit about some of the traditional academic connections? Sure, sure. So none of this takes away the time of literacy or math. So we've, I think in the elementary, we have about two hours for every student, every class in a week. So they still, every day they get their math and their literacy blocks. There's science as well. I'm sorry, say that again. In the inside classroom or outside? Inside a classroom. Inside a classroom, yeah. Yeah, and so the way we've worked this schedule is this year it takes place at the same time that essentials would take place. What I think what should be happening is that teachers go out with the eco teachers so that they can easily integrate what they're learning inside the classroom, outside, and then by SARSA. What we do this year is that we can't fit that in because of scheduling. But if you were to create this program, I emphasize that that's really important because then to answer your question, the teacher knows more about like what they're learning in math and what they're learning in literacy and they can help integrate the two seamlessly. I think that now we're having like meetings in the hallway and on the fly. So like we can integrate this, but it works a lot smoother, smoothly, sorry, if the teacher is a part of their experience outside. Is that? Yeah. Owen, you had follow up? No, I'm okay. I think I could just say a lot of what Melissa just said. But you should and could build the model you want and need with the resources you have. So it's about how much you integrate with the teacher. Ideal is full integration or at least the teacher coming outside with you, maybe a one day a week, two days a week, something like that, or at least familiar with what you're doing. And then the fullest level would be full integration. We have a teacher here at Rochester who really believes in full integration. She's got letter cards, number cards and she's outside doing that kind of stuff. So Amy has her hand up. I see that. Let's go. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm not trying to run your meeting, Ethan. That's great. I just wanted to clarify, could you kind of cut out a little bit? You said that each group goes into the eco classroom for two hours a week. Is that what it is? So it's not. About an hour and a half to two hours. Okay. So it's not in every day that they're out there on. Okay. This is the piece though, Amy and Ethan and everyone, you can build your own model. There are some schools that do a full day outside. There's some schools that do a half day outside. There's some schools that do two hours. We're doing the two hours. There's some schools that do co-teaching basically. Somebody like Melissa or Bono with a traditional classroom teacher and they plan it together and they integrate it. And then there's some ways that you can treat it like a special. And we're learning how to do this. And we encourage you to learn how to do it with us. It's really lovely because you can build the program that suits the needs of your kids, your families, your teachers and the resources you have. Great. Let's go through questions. Carl, how does that end up? And then we'll get to you, Megan. Yeah. What I'm curious about, Owen, is what I'm seeing is a lot of like, you know, there's that video of the Swiss outdoor kindergarten program where it's going outside and using nature as a classroom. What I'm wondering about, because one of the things that in various times we try to integrate in Stockbridge, you know, part of the outdoor education as much, it has more of an agricultural focus. It's around wellness and foods and gardening and relating to plants and say doing a science lesson versus, you know, around, you know, seedlings and gardening and food, food sites and kind of, you know, closing the loop that way versus just, I'm sorry, I shouldn't say the word just, versus what it seems to be the idea of, you know, having an experiential outdoor classroom that translates traditional educational concepts, you know, via an outdoor lens. What I'm wondering is, number one, do you guys do any of that, you know, agricultural gardening, you know, interacting with the outdoors as part of your program and it just wasn't part of this short presentation and, you know, number two, where do you, you know, do you, as we look at families and people getting away from that traditional model of, you know, a K through 12 education sends you to college but it might send you to trades or to the land or whatever can we be especially, I guess it doesn't matter for us and what you guys are doing in the middle school program because we don't have a middle school. But again, you know, given that you might want our kids to join your middle school program but is there that integration around the idea of not just the wandering landscape but the working landscape? Absolutely, we don't have a formal program like that but we are walking all around that and talking about it and I know Jamie has great interest in that and not just at Rudd but as a way, because it's a way of life in Vermont, right? There's the hippies and the farmers and actually I know one guy that's a hippie and a farmer but, you know, the thing, we do want your middle school students by the way but more than anything, well, we want them to want us. We're trying to build the most dynamic programming we can and part of that is this. This is the third school where I've started an outdoor ed program and the one at Twinfield when I started that, we did a full day outside once a week, 20% of their learning and there was a lot of resistance because if you take 20% of a traditional learning away, it really does change everything. So you have to be committed to this in a way that works for you all. I would recommend starting slow, building up, learning from others and starting to get together with the Melissa's and the Bonnas and the Megs. There's lots of good people doing this work and what a lovely thing that's going on and we're teaching a lot about the earth but we're teaching those transferable skills, problem-solving teamwork, self-reliance, being alone in the woods for three minutes by yourself quietly. I have referred to this by the way sometimes as hippie scouts because it's sort of like Boy Scouts and like farmer wilderness but it really is lovely and the kids love school. One of the kids in the middle school earlier this fall said, I'm not sure which two days I like best. The two days we go to the woods or the weekend. I think we're doing it right when that happens. Yeah, no, I think this is great. I think that one of our advantages of where we are, we talk about our declining population, all that. We talk about the negatives. Our positives are our environment, where we're raising these kids and what we can do to give them a holistic and whole education that's not just standardized tests and computers and I'm an IT guy in education. So please don't take my criticism but as being against it, I just would like us to, I think it's important that we honor Vermont's working landscapes as well as our wandering landscapes. Agreed, agreed, agreed. Good, Megan? All right, thank you, Carl. That is right on. I totally agree about having an integration of farming as well as just a wonderment and learning outside period. We have a wonderful program that starts in our kindergarten at Rochester that my child is now in the fourth grade and she talks still about that every single day. And she wishes, one of our biggest challenges at our school is how to get it beyond kindergarten because we do have, test scores are a struggle. We have teachers that wanna dedicate themselves to literacy and mathematics and find that struggle and sometimes just the uncomfortableness of them not being confident in taking kids outside. So we've had a hard time taking an amazing program at Rochester for kindergarten and being able to get it integrated to every grade. And I guess our budget is also a factor of being able to hire an extra person because it does come with the expense of others. So I guess just like how successful have you guys been at getting your teachers out there and getting them to lead these classes? Thank you. Well, that's a good deal. Can I take that? So yeah, Owen and I know the first year that we did this, what, five years ago, we had maybe two teachers really gung-ho about it and took the eco course and so it was great but it took us a couple years to get everybody on board and it just took them being out there and having someone right there holding their hand, which was me, and having another person and seeing for themselves like this, we can do this, we can integrate the learning and now what we have is teachers email me, we don't have a lot of time to me like we used to have but they're emailing me, okay, this is what we have to learn in science or math or writing and how can you help integrate this outside and then I'll take it and brainstorm and we're meeting in the hallway. I mean, they're completely in me because they see that it motivates students to learn and they see that at work. So it just takes time but it does take that a little bit of hand-holding because you really don't wanna just grow people out there that are fearful or don't have that confidence, so. Or just in terms of- So I add to that is the staff training of giving the staff opportunities to work with an eco-person to get more comfortable, get more familiar so that it takes away a lot of the stress for them because they already have one leg in, whereas a lot of it's made a huge difference in the middle school, I have to say that, to individuals, teachers and all the teachers who were teaching outside until November non-stop that it was remarkable and they still love it. So we took advantage of the pandemic in that way. I can tell you, I can't encourage you enough to call North Branch Nature Center. They just got a mega-grant to start up in schools and they will send a consultant, you may have to put some money in, but they will send a consultant for a year if any of your teachers take this summer long class. It's also offered credit through Castleton and it's based in the woods, it's five days, it's in Montpelier and it's a lovely experience. I think Melissa's had it and Bona, have you gone to it? No, but I took my biodiversity course up there with the same people. Yeah, so it's even just to have the conversation with them and I don't know what they're doing with their grant money, but it's, I am never shy to ask for that stuff and just I'm happy to talk to Amy Butler who's their lead educator if you want. Oh, and one good thing, you just totally garbled with me, it was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, place, what was the name of the North something? I'll un-gargle it for $1,500. It's North Branch Nature Center and I put it in the chat also. I wanna make sure, Jenny, do you have any questions for them? I guess the only thing that sounds really interesting, I think you guys did a really good job covering it. I guess two quick questions, you mentioned the two hours, is that the same amount of time from elementary school through high school? And I was also wondering, as students get into middle school and high school and have more flexibility with being able to choose their courses, is this something that all students do or is this like an optional program? We were going to be in the high school this year and the pandemic came and so I've not gone to the high school yet to start it, but they were ready to do that with one day, four days a week for an hour each afternoon is how they were going to set us up with this. For the middle school, we're doing essentials and we have an hour and a half to two and a half hours with the kids outside. That's this year in a pandemic, but usually it's for an hour. Usually it's one hour a day for five days a week with a certain group and then we rotate groups. I also have a vision of this as being an option, a flexible pathway. So if there's a kid that really wants to thrive outdoors and their parents are supportive of that, is there a way that we can get them a full day, a half day, a full week? I know of some kids, high school graduates that have done this and have gone on to successful programs outside of traditional liberal arts schools. So we're wide open. I think the older we get with kids, we still offer the skill building stuff and you'll see the June main guide stuff in the chat as well. But we also need to be open to the kids personalizing this. So, but the first thing we do is safety, safety, safety. And I think everybody's had a question in now. Amy, did you get a question in? She did. She might be gone. It comes up. Okay. I'm good. Thank you. This has all been wonderful to hear. I don't want to think useful for me, Owen. Does your school board have a policy about this? That's weird. Okay. We really, that's one of the things we really want to try and craft a policy statement about this. And we're going to put together so that the administration has a clear guideline for how it should be implemented. And I would welcome any suggestions or even just off the top of your head notions. Probably not in the detail you gave us tonight, but just some broad strokes of this is why we believe in this. This is what it should look like in general. Something like that. So if you can even just send an email to me, the wrsvu.org address, Owen. I would love that so that we can start putting together a policy. Because I felt like we keep saying, hey, get those kids outside. Get those kids outside. Without really knowing what we're saying. And I think it's much better for our administration and the teachers if we have a really clear policy that says, this is why we believe in this. And this is why it's good. And also for the parents, obviously, who don't want their kids outside. I see. I know Carl has a stand up, but I could respond to that. I don't know if Carl wants to add to your statement. No, go ahead, Owen. My first impression, Ethan, is no policy. I don't think it's, and don't be offended, please. I don't think it's proper for a school board to be writing curriculum policy, if you will, like what should be taught and shouldn't. I think what you're saying is we want this and it's good and we want to support it and protect it. And I think maybe a statement from the board, and I don't know, I'll look to Jamie on this. I think policy is usually seen in my mind as like school laws. And if you make outdoor education a school law and something changes dramatically, I would think that you might be boxed in on it. I'm not sure though. That's my first reaction. I do think that setting a goal around it is very important and key. Actually, my comment was gonna be pretty much a lot of what Owen said is that it's not, I don't think it's appropriate for the board to have a policy. What the board does have is the administration is supposed to present that annual curriculum kind of plan and the board making a formal statement to the administration saying that they want to see the next curriculum plan having, you know, X level of outdoor component would be or a level of outdoor component would be the way to do it. Much like we said, it was the board's intention to bring in world languages and we wandered around and we found a way to do that, that the administration supported it and the budget could afford it and all that. We kind of put out a general guiding statement and let people bring something back to us. I think that curriculum, that annual curriculum review and making a statement about what we would want to see from the administration and that would be the appropriate board place to put that. And I could be wrong. So please, Jamie or Bonnie, correct me gently. Yeah, I mean, our policy and our mission statement are so broad as to be almost pointless to some extent. I saw it very much as a guideline, not as a rule when I think of a policy. I want to say I want to make it as clear as possible that I think this is a really good idea and that I want our administration to be making it a priority and our teachers to be making it a priority. And I think sometimes the administration does get the support. Anyway, this is a discussion for us to have and not for you to take your time up. Good, are there any further questions with our presenters here? Anyone else? We would love to have you come visit if we could do it safely. Absolutely. Well, that's coming, hopefully, the vaccines. Good. Well, we want to thank you very much for coming. This was an excellent introduction to this whole program and much, much appreciated. So thank you very much for your time. Thanks, guys. So as I think about it, I think about our continuous improvement plan and how this could clearly integrate with personalized learning and pathways to say that we are gonna ensure that there's an experiential pathway for students and that we're gonna engage all students in it universally so that they have the skills and understanding if that's something they wanna pursue as they get older. What Owen said is certainly my dream that a student could have this be a pathway and they're demonstrating proficiency through outdoor and experiential ed. I think there's a way, Ethan, for us to really capture it in a solid way through that number two goal around personalized learning that's specific to your continuous improvement plan at our sub. Cool, great. Thank you, thank you very much. Be well. All right, thank you. All right, the academic data report, January universal assessment principles were presented for academic achievement data in both math and reading. I didn't mean to cut that off. We could also talk more, but I think let's keep this on the agenda for next meeting too and keep talking. I wanna add a takeaway that is very key to me, especially as I start to think of both campuses next year and how we're building this and vision. I think this is really important. I think this is happening in a lot of science classes on both campuses already, but we need to walk before we sprint with this. Like we are by no means ready to do like full day, any of that. Like I was at Bethel when Melissa first started and in fact, she was my neighbor like we taught next door to each other. And I can remember how hard she worked just taking the kids out and how much time that took and then slowly teachers started to join. And just like that's how we implement literacy programs or curriculum and mathematics. I think it's important that we keep that in mind that we are, there are some teachers that are ready for the full day experience. There's no doubt about it, but there's also we have to educate staff as much as we educate kids. And the first example or way to do that right now off the top of my head is to start in the manner we intended to be of like every kid gets access to it one time a day during a normal special for 45 minutes. And then that person is working with teachers in other ways for it to be part of their science program. But that's just me spitballing. But I just want us to remember what we saw was a five year end result tonight of how hard they've worked at it. So we just aren't there yet. And I just, I want us desperately to race there but it's not fair to kids or teachers to go too fast and not do this the right way. Well, that said, I also believe that it's important to keep encouragement up to teachers because I think it's very easy sometimes to sit back a little bit on something like this. And this is where I, and this is my personal opinion but I just feel like keeping a consistent, this is what we want, this is what we want, this is what we want. Not that it happens fast but that teachers know that this is what we want. Yeah, I think I've got a strategy to ensure that there's progress monitoring of this goal. And I think it needs to be incorporated as part of the principal's reports under goal two. So you're getting a monthly report on the progress we're making toward this. And yeah, cause it hasn't been a clear thing in terms of what exactly, obviously COVID was the big priority, making sure they're outside a lot. Our kids have a lot of experience of being outside. Now, maybe that was just sledding but the fact is they have a lot of experience being outside. And I would hate to lose that some of that momentum because COVID suddenly, we're safer again. Cause I think we've gotten on the game a lot through COVID activities outside. Megan, you still want to say something? Just really quickly, just about, I've given it some thought about, attracting when we are hiring new candidates for positions to become open that maybe we can put that into the application process as well as possibly looking into doing some different advertising in terms of maybe at this like school spring but also doing local, the mountain times, Killington has a lot of recreational people just kind of like thinking outside the box in terms of when people are applying to our positions and just kind of letting, and like maybe where we're focusing on where we're pulling some of our candidates from. That's just a suggestion, thank you. Good. Yes, I recall. All right. Let's move on. So if you look at, we'll start with the reading. So I just want to be clear and a point of emphasis cause Bonnie and I went back and forth with this. When we say winter 2020, we are talking about data from last winter before we shut down. So last school year, so your comparison just so you have that point of reference cause that was a conversation Bonnie and I had in circles of each other the other day when we were working on this together. So I just want to be clear to folks that that winter 2020 data was taken, was collected December, January last school year. And then fall 2020 was when we came back in the fall of this current school year. And then winter 2021 data is data from this current school year just recently completed. So I know sometimes school years and calendar years overlap in weird ways. So I just wanted to make sure that we pointed that out before we got too far. So I just in reading alone, you'll see quite a, quite a jump, specifically EAS which is our benchmark assessment system. So it's where kids sit and read one-on-one and they're assessed on their fluency, their comprehension skills is the summary of that cause I know that's probably an acronym that folks don't know. So you'll notice in our K2 and our primary grades, you know, it's a 20% increase of those kids that are proficient from the beginning of the year but more accurately before we shut down there's a 10% increase. So we're seeing lots of growth in those kids. And I also would say, you know, it's promising. It's showing that the work we're doing around literacy is increasing and you even see that and that we're starting to make, you know, gains in those areas. And then in three grades, three to six, we're still, you know, there's no regression I guess is what I would say, which is exciting. I think there's a big concern about that right now because of how we've gone in and out of in-person learning and virtual learning. And so it's exciting to see that we're making progress and we don't see like significant areas of regression or change. So that's reading. Amy, did you have a question about the reading? And then I'll go to- Yeah, you were saying that so like the three to six they were in before COVID, there was 79% proficient in the BAS, then there was 64% proficient in the fall, but it actually has decreased for the winter of proficient. So- So did you have something in mind that as small as our numbers are, that's as simple as potentially one kid, oh, just barely missing it. So I would say of those in the three through six that are not proficient, there's not large, discerning gaps of how far they're off. They're making progress and they're making, they're making a lot of gains. So it's good to see. So it's probably the difference of a kid is the honest mathematical answer. I see. And then in terms of how we should have done, I also have to remember this is not necessarily comparing the same group of kids. Right. It's last year's third and sixth graders. So again, all it takes is like a group. Okay. To move on. And I don't want that to be like explaining the answer because we want to shoot for what we had that last winter. Right. That's ideal. We want to be happy with that. That's what we're working towards maintaining. Okay. No, thank you. That's a clear understanding. So the benchmark assessment is essentially the teacher sitting down and reading, having them read directly to them. Whereas the Star 360 is that a test they're taking on the computer. Right. Good question. It is a test on the computer. It focuses more on vocabulary. Again, reading comprehension, like they're reading a small passage and having to answer out of it. There's some grammar usage and mechanics in there. There's all sorts of stuff. Okay. Thank you. Jenny. And then we'll get to Bonnie. Yeah. I have two questions. So it sounds like the way you're talking is that the K through two group is larger than the three through six group. Is that correct? Larger means or like number of students. Sorry. Number of students. Because you make it sound like the data of the three through six, the change could be one student. It sounded like... We've closed more gaps with our K through two. Okay. Primary grades this school year so far. Not necessary for a larger data collection point. Oh, okay. You were saying the one student. So I was thinking that one could be a higher percentage of students than the K through two, but I misinterpreted. That's correct. And just for clarification... Just to try to clarify. So I would say that in your set of data population, a 10% swing either way is something to start to take note. And so what I think Lindy was trying to say is that you went from 28% proficient in the fall up to 48, so that's a 20% gain. So that's enough of a gain to say, all right, we're headed in the right direction with our rate of growth. So, you know, there was a 4% change in the fall to the winner in your three through six. Statistically, that's not a big change. Now, will we like to see the same growth that we saw in K through two? Absolutely. What I'm hearing from Lindy is, is she's saying there's a lot of kids on the cusp of being proficient in the benchmark assessment. So the hope would be you're gonna see a big swing here over the next three months as we continue to close the achievement gaps. The other thing with the benchmark assessment is, as you move up the grade levels, it gets more complex and it's harder to move up to the next text level in regards to meeting the standard. As compared to in the primary grades, you can start to go through text levels fairly quickly. Sorry, Lindy, I just wanted the board to have that context. No, no, no, that's great. I appreciate it. And then two questions. First one, is it typical for the Star 360 to have significant difference in results from the benchmark assessment? Yes, because it assesses different areas. Okay. That's great. Jamie and Bonnie, I'm looking for... Yeah, I mean, what I would, what I'd let you know, Jenny, is that the Star 360 really focuses on fluency in close reading. So a student reading complex text, being able to comprehend complex text, and then be able to within the moment, apply what they comprehended. Where in the Phantasy and Penel benchmark assessment, you read an entire book and then the teacher asks you some comprehension questions. I would say that the depth of those questions are not the same as the Star 360 questions. So I think that, you know, how we utilize this data is about how do we inform instruction. So if your students are doing really well on the benchmark assessment but struggling with Star 360, then as an educator, I'm saying, I need to get my students into more nonfiction texts, close reading, and trying to up vocabulary because that's probably what's getting in the way. And so that's why both of these assessments are important, but that's why we need to analyze the data because what we should be doing with this data is using it to inform instruction. So that's what I'm looking for our teachers to be doing with their principles at that building level when they're seeing those discrepancies. Great, thank you. And then my last question, just to confirm that both of the Star 360 and the benchmark includes the virtual as well. Yes, Star 360 does, the benchmark doesn't, is the slightly different given virtually, but it assesses in the same way, meaning it's just a different text at the same level because of what is accessed digitally. But yes, all the virtual kiddos are in there and assessed as well. Thank you. And I'm just gonna repeat something that Lindy said. I don't wanna explain away the results. In fact, I will say that we're working very, very hard because not enough of our youngsters are proficient. We really want every single one of our youngsters to be proficient. That being said, we have some really, really tiny groups in this data. For example, there's groups that are as small as four youngsters. So one child that either goes up or down could give you this great fault sense of, wow, we've improved by 25% or we've dropped by 25%. And really we're only talking about one youngster. I think across both campuses, and Lindy, correct me if I'm wrong, I think we only have two cohorts that are 10, 10 or more. Everybody out, all of our other grade level groups are four, five, eight, and those are really, really tiny numbers to draw really any conclusions from. So we just have to be careful about how we look at that. And then Jenny, to one of your questions, one of the things I look at that helps me get a handle on our kiddos is, I compare, I would agree with everything Jamie said about the two assessments, but I look at how did a youngster do on their baseline assessment in winter versus their baseline assessment at the end of the year? So instead of looking at 360 compared to baseline, I do look at baseline compared to baseline and star 360 compared to star 360. Because that way you're looking at comparing the same sets of skills and types of activities. I don't know if that helps, but. Yes, it does. Thank you. Carl. The question I would have, I mean, I was going to make the point that Bonnie made that because of our small population, some of those indicators move really, really radically. But the question I would want to know from Bonnie and from Lindy is, given what you see in those test results, is our budget and is our plan giving you the tools you need to correct that? Are there things we need to change? Should we be hiring a math tutor? Should we be hiring a literacy tutor? Should we be having mandatory after school? I don't know, what do you guys think? How do you take these numbers? I see this success as those that are having, where students are having the most success is teachers who have implemented things with the most fidelity. They have taken every piece of information given to them from our literacy coaching and they have implemented it. Not offensive, not personally like, okay, this is going to make me a stronger teacher. So for example, I met with a teacher yesterday and we poured over data together for an hour and a half. And she restructured using something that the literacy coach Amy Toth had given, how she was changing her guided reading group or small group instruction. That's what I'm looking for is that's how we're using that data. We can see where we still need to make growth as well as the other piece of the puzzle is bringing the literacy interventionist to the table at the same time. So we're using shared language so it doesn't confuse kids and we're goal setting for kids. So in six weeks, we should be seeing this much progress in this kid and this is how we're gonna help this kid get there. And I think that's a piece that Jamie has encouraged and asked us to do as instructional leaders that we haven't always done in the past. So that's how I see this data be helpful. And the board has given you all the tools to do that to the best of your ability. You don't need anything more from us. That's the part that I wanna worry about. I think this is great. I'm really glad that we're drilling down into this that we're looking at our kiddos and not because we wanna improve test scores but because we want better outcomes. Because I don't hear any of this conversation being about test scores. I don't want to be talking about test scores but do you guys have everything from us? Do you need to get the outcomes you want? I think one of the things I would add, Carl, I concur with everything that Lindy had said. Time is really a function. Time is one of the resources I think that most, that most every, with which most every school struggles. So, and when you mentioned tutors and you mentioned interventionists, they all do great, great work. What our numbers say to me is that given the number of youngsters we have who aren't reaching those proficiency levels, and I agree with you, it's not about test scores. It's about, is a child proficient and will a child be able to use reading, writing, and mathematics as tools for however they wanna craft their future? But when we have as many youngsters who aren't proficient as we have, we need to address what we call our tier one instruction. So, not hiring tutors and people to work with youngsters after they've started to fall back, but looking at our tier one instruction and saying, why isn't what we do in the classrooms with our classroom teachers having a positive effect on more youngsters? And we've come a fair distance in literacy. The board's heard the number of materials that we've been able to buy, the professional development we've been able to do. We have to continue that effort. And when we in a minute explain our mathematics, talk about our mathematics piece, you'll understand that we have a tremendous amount of work to do there also. So, I would say we're not lacking anything that the board can give us. We just need to look at what we're doing in our tier one instruction, in our classroom teacher to student instruction. We gotta look at the data and figure out what is it that we're doing that's efficient and what is it that we're doing that's not efficient? Thank you. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, effective, not efficient. I just think that goes back to Echo Bonnie to a long-term plan to continue to supply funds for professional development and coaching and continue. Like, it's not necessarily in hiring more tutors, but to make all of our instruction better to invest in teachers to use Jamie's line that he uses frequently, which means professional development. Absolutely, thank you. Jenny. Yeah, I just wanted to, when Lindy was talking, a light bulb went off in my head and just wanted to note that I can personally attest to teachers changing things around. I see more of it as my daughter's doing the virtual schooling and for one of her classes, her schedule has changed a couple of times this year. And I know the teacher personally, and she always explains what she's doing. And really seems like that's really the reason behind it is to really think about how they can do it most efficiently and also kind of getting some kids to class that didn't quite seem to be that kind of thing. But other than that, just wanted to kind of throw in that personal acknowledgement that I've definitely seen throughout this year. Good, thank you. Further, any further questions on literacy or can we move on to math? Let's do it. In our math pieces, I would say we've seen a little bit of a bump, which is great. We've seen some students make some gains, but not nearly enough. And basically shows us that we haven't regressed, but we definitely, to go back to what Bonnie just said, really need to take the time to invest having stronger universal or classroom instruction of mathematics, excuse me. And that's why we've started structuring our half days around professional development for staff in mathematics. And it's just gonna continue to be a focal point and a point to start to roll out just the way we did with our literacy initiative to start making true gains. Yeah, and one piece I think is important. I wanna state this really, really clearly. When we talk about our tier one instruction needing to be strengthened, it has nothing to do with teachers working hard, teachers having their hearts in the right places, teachers wanting all kids to do well. We just need to focus on professional development that lets teachers understand there are more efficient ways of doing things than what we're doing at the moment. Jamie's been really clear about the fact that he expects all youngsters in our district to learn and be proficient. And we just have to crawl around what it is that we do and what it is that we ask teachers to do that can be that can be bulked up in terms of how well it meets the needs of youngsters instructionally. And that talks about vocabulary and strategies and materials and approaches, all those kinds of things. Carl, first to the name. Same question as about ELA, Bonnie, math, do we have, I mean, especially as you're our SU math guru, do we have the math tools? Is the board giving you everything that we need to support our kids so they can be successful? I'm hoping the answer is yes. But if it's not, please let us know. Well, I think it's our plan of how to leverage our grant funding for that upcoming year to make it a focal point. So we have that. And I think the other thing to emphasize is we're not continuing with this model where people do one day of professional development and then that's it. There's no follow-through, there's no this. There's a continuous model of improvement and feedback and accountability around implementing those things as well. Yeah, and that's, I mean, and this is not an issue for now because it gets to professional development, but certainly some of the stuff in the equity policy or I'm sorry, the anti-racism policy talk about requiring professional development. So we're certainly going to need to be thinking about how we're going to manage that pot to include equity and math and literacy and all the things. And I'm sure we'll do it wonderfully, but it's important to, you know, sometimes I think we have to be careful that we're not saying we're going to use this particular asset or pot for this thing because sometimes we wanna say, well, it'll solve math literacy, it'll solve equity literacy, it'll solve literacy, you know, equity and we're spending the same resources in three places but it sounds like y'all are really on top of this and that is awesome. Amy? Yes, the top of the page where it says winter of 2019. That's a typo, it is for winter 2020, I just caught that too, I'm sorry about that, that was fast fingers over here. You literally can't believe the conversation we had, Amy, about is it winter 2019 or is it winter 20? Or should we fall 20? What comes first? Like no idea, it was like an hour. Maybe we went to FY, yeah, there is a problem. Well, that's why we were left because we were toying with FY, but anyways, it is the same timeline as I explained before, so thank you. Carl, one of the things I will say that I will just add to your question in terms of, you know, have we not been given any tools? Or are there tools we haven't been given? Obviously we've been given a lot of tools. One of the tools I think we have to give teachers is a handle on the current research. There's been a lot of really good stuff that's come out the last five to six, seven years about how youngsters learn mathematics, about what strategies are more effective in helping youngsters develop their engagement, their love of math, their ability to think through mathematical situations. So I think that's one thing that we really have to figure out a way to get out to teachers. And then the other thing I think we have to do is to dispel this myth that, Jenny, I'm gonna pick on you because I know you're an engineer. That there's only a certain few people who are born under the lucky star to understand mathematics, and they go on to be engineers and architects and yada, yada, yada. Most kids, given the right environment and the right instructional approaches, can become very, very strong in mathematics. We just have to believe that when we start putting our classroom environments together and when we start designing professional development for teachers. The goal is all these kids will do well in mathematics, not just a select few. I know one of the things that schools look at who are really, really committed to this excellence in mathematics is they look at their junior and senior classes and they say, how many kids have taken an advanced math course out of our junior or senior class? And many of them, most of them, when they started to do that look, they had very few kids. So their goal is to every year increase the number of kids who are taking advanced mathematics. Not because there's anything magical about advanced mathematics, but because it demonstrates an ability of a young adult to think abstractly and to problem solve, which are two skills they're gonna need regardless of what future they choose for themselves. So those would be two things I would just add to your question. To go back into what I was saying then, I would love to see some programming that would integrate that kind of mathematical exploration and outdoor exploration. If we could find a way to tie those things together and make a curricular statement that said, we are going to show these particular proficiencies in math through these particular expressions in outdoor education, I think that would be super meaningful. I think that would be a thing that would drive families that have school choice to say, I wanna come there because I want my kids to learn about life and about skills by walking through the woods. And I think that if we could put that curricular package together, there's grants and there's funding that would support us being able to develop these alternative ways to educate these skills in our kids, in our particular blessed environment of outdoor classrooms. I mean, we could jump in and be great. Yeah, and to be honest, I don't see that as being hard to do, but I'm going back to something Lindy said. You need to have the time to get teachers steeped in the understanding of both outdoor education and the mathematics they're trying to teach through outdoor education. That's the key right there. Let me just tell you, if I may, that I went to a very good elementary school that did woodworking from kindergarten all the way through ninth grade. And there is no better, I don't think, skill involving mathematics than learning, using a tape measure, cutting lines, geometry, all these things in a very, very practical way. And I have to say, it's one of the losses that I think that we don't have some sort of basic carpentry program. I mean, as I said, we were doing it in kindergarten using saws and all that kind of thing. And it's just such a clear transfer between math and sort of outdoor stuff. Jenny, I know Amy next, sorry. Sorry I jumped in, but I did. No, sorry, I didn't mean to still have my hand raised. Oh, you didn't? Okay, Jenny? It's not related to outdoor education, but I feel like one thing that Stockbridge does a lot of, I'm not sure if we really talked about it, is in terms of relating, mathematics is with cooking. I know at least in the older grades, I'm not sure about, well, I'm sure they probably do in the younger grades, but I know my daughter's teacher does a lot with cooking and even bringing that into word problems and stuff like that. So really, I think the biggest thing is making it fun, relatable and stuff that they're gonna use, doing math without even realizing they're doing math, I think makes it more fun for kids. So I think there's like two components that are key here, right? Like there's the piece of them being engaged, whether it's outdoor education pieces, which I've seen teachers use really well with mathematics or cooking, whatever the case may be, but also the need for very explicit instruction. Like you mentioned, Ethan, you're talking to the daughter of someone who teaches woodworking for a living. So trust me when I say I understand measurement better than I wish I did some days, but that's a very explicit form of instruction that happens. You phase that in, right? You don't just go to the saw to start cutting, well, some folks do, but it doesn't work very well. So you have to step into that. And so some folks have started using, some teachers have started using different ways of implementing that hands-on approach to mathematics, which is essentially all ideas wrapped into one. And, but it also requires very explicit instruction. So students understand the connections we're assuming they will get as adults, but we have to be really, we use it to teach fractions. I say teachers use it to teach fractions. All hands-on ways of doing things, not just stand and deliver the way some of us may have learned. I'm not sure if somebody else had their hand up with them. I wonder if there's anything to be gained. I mean, you have a lot of these kids might be going home and they're doing, you know, they're working on the snow machine or the four wheeler where there's mathematics, definitely an adjustment and wrenches and sizes and all these things. And I wonder how much teachers are engaging students to find out what their background, home background experiences and what possible areas there because certainly there's a lot to be learned by, I mean, that's how I learned carpet was I just, I just watched and I saw people doing stuff. And I same thing with, you know, I just watched people picking up stuff. And I just think, I'm wondering, there's something where you're not having to train a teacher. You're just being aware of what the kids bringing in with them already, the kind of knowledge they're bringing in with them that then you can translate a good teacher, a quick teacher, an innovative teacher can translate into, well, you know, that's just like what we're talking about here. Right. So I'll just jump in. So, Ethan, I think that's formative assessment. And so we use that to inform our instruction and that's what our teachers do. And then what I would say is the biggest concern I have around mathematics right now is any classroom you walk into have a different routine or approach to teach mathematics. And so we don't have a common approach right now like we do in our literacy block. And so I think the literacy data and the math data could just speak to that. So what we're looking to do is engage our teachers in deeper content area knowledge so they feel confident in teaching mathematics, specifically in elementary school. I would say 80% of the elementary teachers I've ever interviewed or met with, they typically get into elementary education because they love to teach reading, literacy, and writing, that is their passion. And a lot of them have math phobia. Well, what we're gonna be looking to do is how do we increase their confidence and expertise to ensure that our students have clear concepts and milestones throughout each grade? And one of the curriculum downfalls we have right now in the SU as well is we don't have it specified to you. At the end of kindergarten, our students are gonna no understand and do these things in math. At the end of second grade, they're gonna know and understand and do these things at the end of second. So that work in that foundation is what we're gonna start jumping on ASAP with this assistance of Bonnie. We have some teachers throughout the SU that are very interested in mathematics that are gonna help the leaders in this. And I would look for part of Onda's job as we bring in Onda Adams is how do we make certain that we're leveraging our professional development time across the SU strategically while also not overtaxing our educators because you can't do it all at once. And so we're gonna need to make certain we create momentum and keep momentum with literacy while also backfilling our expertise in math and ensuring that we're addressing the whole child socially, emotionally and in regards to outdoor and experiential ed. So that's the work ahead. And that's frankly, that's why you pay me the money you pay me and your principles and your other administrators is to coordinate all that. Quick question. Is there a fontis and penel from mathematics? Well, yeah. There are some good math programs. There are good math programs. Following up with Carl's question. I mean, is this something we should be looking for? Maybe, you know, maybe we can do it just with our homegrown, you know, sort of stuff. But is there down the road in a couple of years a math program we should be bringing in? Part of your revenue in the CFG, the federal grants is to purchase new materials for next year. Because clearly we've seen some success with fontis and penel. I mean, whatever. What I would say about that Ethan is that as Jamie said, is the follow up to something he said. Most of our elementary teachers are more confident and have deeper skill levels in teaching literacy than mathematics. A couple of things you'll hear me say, Lindy said me say this a number of times. To take Jenny's example of cooking, your example of woodworking or tearing down the snowmobile. I don't think you can, I don't believe you can teach mathematics. You can lead youngsters to discover mathematics and they can build on their discoveries. I don't believe you can teach them. If we teach mathematics, then all we're asking kids to do for the most part is memorize some formulas and some rules and this and that. How many of us remember how to find the volume of a cylinder? Probably not many of us. What we want to do with this mathematics initiative is to really help teachers understand this is how you kindle this fire for understanding. That's all mathematics is. Wanting to make sense and understand something. Wanting to make sense out of and understand something. So whether it's cooking or woodwork or building a fort or there's all kinds of mathematics in those activities, but you have to know your mathematics and you have to be comfortable with youngsters doing hands-on learning. That's sort of the challenge for us in the first year or two of this math initiative that we're hoping to take on. Carl. Um, I think that's my my I raise my hand because what I'm concerned about is, you know, are we, is our professional development around these things, you know, chasing the worst worst statistic or is it, you know, do we have a plan that's, you know, more holistic to help these kids, you know, you know, figure stuff out? Because I mean, you know, Bonnie's commented with the volume of a cylinder. It's the it's it's pi r squared times the height says nerd boy because I was the dorky kid that was a math kid. And I understand that our thinking is that we need to encourage kids to, you know, learn things in a practical environment. But what I'm worried about is that finding that link between, this is what we want to do in a perfect world and this is what we can actually do with our resources and the budget and what we have today. I think about how we talked about, like as we said earlier, our biggest point about the merger was, you know, it'd be, well, we'd say it'd be the tax breaks and we've proven that part. But it was also world language. And it was taking a long time to figure out how to integrate that. And what I'm interested in us understand or thinking about is how do we figure out when we identify these problems ways that we can, you know, a pathway to affordably implement them. So Carl, I would just say that's how do we best leverage our federal grant. And so that's part of why we restructured at the SU was to ensure that we had the money in Title II for coaching in PD and then also in Title I to fund supplies and, you know, make certain we're funding our interventionists appropriately. And one of the focuses within the grant will be mathematics, which hadn't been a focus prior within our strategies. So I'm hoping that we can leverage our grant funds and then the incoming answer to funds to accomplish a great deal of this work without it falling on the local tax base. Okay, and it's not going to be balancing mathematics again, social, emotional learning because our kids as, you know, the president or the president as the governor, the governor of Vermont was saying are in a not good shape. Yeah, and luckily a lot of our kids have been back. So I think when we look at our recovery plan, we'll see that we're a bit ahead of the curve because we've had most of our students back five days a week. I was amazed to see that 20% of students still haven't even stepped in the classroom yet. Yeah, that scared me too. Thank you for your work on getting everyone into school, by the way. Yeah, are we ready to move on? I think we're good. And Jenny, you good? I'm good. Amy, Amy. Good. Megan, you still there, Megan? I'm good. I'm good. Thank you. Yep, great. Thank you very much. Administrators, appreciate it. Let us move on here. Sorry, I've got too many screens going. All right, Rochester High School Building. This is pretty quick. With no David. We are waiting on one a butter information from one a butter address, which hopefully I might get tonight if I have the right email address. Before we submit, both I think the wastewater has been submitted. Jamie, is that correct? And the subdivision is all just waiting on this one address for the final plan to be put in. The next step, obviously, we need to talk about, we need to talk about a listing. That's going to be something we need to get into as far as figuring out how we advertise this property. If we do, we seriously intend to do that, which I think we should. But that's not our agenda for tonight, but that's sort of the news so far. Amy, you want to say something? You can go for it. Yeah, I was just wondering if we should start doing an inventory of items in the high school that we expect to retain at any property transfer and what we expect to let go or what we would like to sell in the meantime. I think, yeah, what do we have for inventory lists yet? I mean, I've never seen one. It seems like could we have custodial staff start to do that an hour a day, start making a list of what's in every classroom, everything that's a saleable asset. Is that possible? Is that how this should be handled? I think some of it has, I just have to think through strategy a little bit and Bonnie and I need to talk about that together in terms of, that sounds like a good idea in terms of someone's use of time. I just have to think about that more logistically in terms of making sure we're cleaning and things like that as well. Some of it has been started, like I'll give Ray and Larry lots of credit because they have inventoried quite a bit of e-waste items versus tech items and things of that nature. So that's definitely moving in the right direction. Can we, it'd be great if we could start seeing those lists. Sorry, the e-waste list is the fun list that's been circulated right now, meaning things that aren't functioning at all and are unusable and maybe Ray has better technical terms than I do on what e-waste is. And the, I do know that the library, the high school library has been open to, this was obviously pre-COVID, but local librarians from all over, meaning public libraries, had the opportunity to come in and look through and take what was good. And then we have, so now that's kind of at a point that what's left there has been left there. There's no local resource that would like to access those books. We're talking about dumpster time. Dumpster time, there's also a Follette, which is a company we use to purchase books for our library, is interested in coming and doing an inventory and they will box up what they can take and give us cash for it as well as sell some things as consignment and then what they can't take, yes, you are right about the dumpster or probably headed towards the dumpster after that point. Is it possible that by our next meeting, April meeting, we could have a inventory list to be looking at so that we could make some decisions? Of the library or of the whole building? Whole building. I mean, obviously, this is the next step. We can have it started. I just, I want to be honest, that all of it being inventory by April are probably, but you're right. How much? How much? How much? And I think it's because it is, it is absolutely, as Amy's pointed out. This is the next step no matter what we do, whether it's going to the town or whether we're going to sell this building, we need to know what's inside it and we need to make decisions about that. Amy? Oh, your hand's still. Sorry. Oh, I'll go here. Okay. Sorry. Is the board, does the board feel good about, we'd like to see wherever that list is. Ray, do you have something to add to this? About what you found in there? Kind of. I mean, for example, just this week, EC fiber determined that it would cost a couple hundred dollars to get access to the elementary school building. So that's merger expense and we'll be covered by that. But there are other services that, depending on who takes over the building, we may or may not be able to easily split. Fire, heat, telephone, things like that. All involved conversations. Yeah. So we definitely need to not let this wait too long. What's the next step for you, Ray? Can you give us a list or is that something for your friend, Jamie, who comes down to give us a list of, I mean, we need a spreadsheet of this whole process because we've been so focused on the engineering part and the surveying part. But this is going to be. I mean, so what I would do is I'm going to reach out to Lyle. It's not the first school that's been liquidated and say, what have other districts done to liquidate their assets? And there's got to be some, my sense is there's probably some folks that do that and come in an inventory and then say, this is what you could get for these. We could sell them. And here's here's what you would gain for revenue. And so I would all look to Lyle to say, what have other schools districts done to liquidate their assets? And how's the best way of God going about that? And my sense is there's companies that can do this inventory for us. And it's not even going to cost us to have our employees do it. And I'm very interested in that. Well, no, I just think, yeah, I think it's, Amy, very glad you brought this up because I think it's absolutely the next step we should be active on. So we're prepared for whatever the eventuality is of this building. And we've taken care of the outside, now it's time to take care of the inside. So can you, the administration and Jamie, have something for us by our next meeting? Yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to have Lyle on your agenda anyway because I want to bring in Lyle and the gentleman that I talked to you about, talked to the Stockbridge community about in regards to best maximizing S or two funds. And efficiency Vermont funds and finding efficiencies within the building at the elementary level and how we might be able to do significant work and upgrades to that building without additional cost to the tax base. So I was going to have him at your next meeting anyways, but I will add this topic to the agenda in addition to that. And that's it, if we could have just a piece of paper, Ray, even with what you just told us that this is this $200, this unknown cost, this unknown cost, this unknown cost. Lindy, we've assessed, these are the things we do know that are in there, library books, this is, in other words, let's start a running list of inventory and then we can add to it as it grows as we know more because there may be some things in there that somebody just goes, Bing, that, don't touch that or something like that. But we just, it's just part of our process here. Yep, good. Carl, I think you had your hand up a while back. Sorry. No worries. I dropped from my laptop. So on my phone, do you hear me? Yes. Okay. Yeah, no, my thinking is that organizing and figuring out how we can best, I mean, it's going to benefit both the town of Rochester and, you know, the district, you know, organizing how best to dispose of the assets. I, someone had said, I think it was Jamie, you know, that lockers, for example, are a huge thing that people want or don't want. And, you know, understanding how to do that, I think that moving forward with really drilling into these details, because regardless of whether we're using the high school building next year or not, or whether we've disposed of it, we can dispose of the lockers or things that are assets. Figuring out what those things are and being proactive and then being able to tell our taxpayers what we're going to be able to gain in terms of revenue, of revenue by disposing of these unused assets is important. Oh, good. All right. I think we've, I think we've covered that. Thank you very much, Amy, for bringing that up. I think we're ready to move on to seven for food service. So we've talked about this at the local board. There was a presentation done at the full board. The full board wanted to bring it back to the local board. Terry can talk to you about the conservative figures in regards to what we believe we could save our son. In regards to centralizing food service, I'll give you for updates again, because not everyone was at the SU meeting, is that Tara, Bill Bonsignore, who oversees the USDA foods program that we've been getting complete reimbursement on. And I all met with our SU food service staff prior to the full SU board meeting and talked to them about the concept of, if we were to centralize, the focus really is about capitalizing on each other's strengths, but also coordinated menu efforts, not meaning that you can't still do a special Friday, you know, let's use what's in the garden meal, but coordinating overall our menu efforts to learn from each other. I think there's certain schools right now having more success with others based on their menu planning, but then in addition, bulk purchasing in order to make certain that we are really capitalizing on our ability to bulk purchase. Right now we purchase at each local district. Now, do we still have the buying power of someone who is a food service contract? No, right, provider. No, part of how they're able to do their work at a much more efficient cost is that they can buy for all their schools. We're just going to buy for the SU schools, but still there's going to be some savings realized there. And so, Tara can talk to you about what we're projecting. I feel like these are solid numbers. It's probably not going to be as much as maybe you would like, but at least they're headed in the right direction. I think in general, this is a start to a much more frequent and longer conversation around food service, sustainability of food service, quality product, and how do we do it at a most efficient cost, keep the product up, make certain we have the connection to fresh fruits and vegetables in our community gardens, make certain that it's tied into our curriculum in programming, but also make certain that it's not coming at the cost of personnel. And so, that's really my focus around this. I just thought it was important for folks to know. My focus is really about how can we do this at a rate that is manageable so that it doesn't result into us getting to a point where we're having to do staff because we're using that to supplement food service. And so, that's kind of why I keep bringing this up and wanting to have the conversation. We don't think centralized into the SU is going to be the end all be all for us. But I do think it is a really important step for us to take to try to find some efficiency because right now, we're struggling with that. Now, certain programs are still in the black. So, I think there's things to learn. My food service program in Tumbridge is still breaking even and or making a little money at times. And so, that's a positive. So, what's going on there that we could better implement across our SU in a wider scale? What do you need from us tonight? Nothing. I just want to make certain you're okay with me continuing to have the conversation. I'm not looking for any action or anything. I just want to make certain you're not getting annoyed with me talking about it. No, I got to say personally, I was game with this when you talked about it with our last meeting and then that the full board passed on, I was like, I don't know, let's go. So, Tara, can you give them a sense of what we were projecting? We could save for our set alone if they were to. For our Tumbridge package, we're looking at potential savings of $18,930. And that comes from the, as Jamie was saying, the ability to purchase on a larger scale for all eight of our buildings versus each individual buying on their own power and also doing common menu planning, which will help with not buying a lot of overage for inventory where some of our smaller schools, you know, they got to buy a case of chicken. By the time they get around for the second round of chicken, it could potentially be freezer burn. So we reduce waste because we're purchasing on the grander scale and getting what's actually supply and demand out to the schools versus having a lot of overage and inventory. And also really capitalizing, as Jamie indicated, and if you were in the meeting with Bill in the SU meeting, capitalizing on our food service team's strengths. I mean, we have some food service team members that are phenomenal at the paperwork side of it, where others, it's like their worst thing that they have to do. And just to have that ability to work together and to do that, it saves time on them working outside of their contract to get all this paperwork done and all the rules and regulations that we have to follow. And there's a lot of stuff that we have to do during the summer that's not part of what their contracts are today. So to really have that flexibility and to be able to do that, I think overall, and just the compliance pieces alone, we'll see some pretty good savings. I'm very curious, Tara, when we think about that, I understand the bulk purchasing piece of it, but what we've developed, certain local kitchen have developed recipes and meals that their kids like. And what I wonder about is, will we still, when the bulk purchasing works out, will the local facilities be able to say, we want to make our side pizza because it has this and that in it and we'll get that particular sausage or that particular vegetable combination or whatever, or will it be all like, is your vision of money saving that the SU says it's going to be Taco Tuesdays and the tacos are going to look like this and they're going to be flavored this way and you'll get them. There are very specific rules and regulations around what actually has to be compiled in those meals. And where schools have particular recipes that are their students' favorites, those recipes could be shared with other buildings throughout our supervisor union because I'm sure if kids love it in Rochester and Stockbridge, kids are probably going to love it and share it in Stratford too. So to have that ability and perhaps they don't have the options in their building now to make those kind of purchases if there's a certain kind of sausage that tastes better than others. So no, I'm not going to micromanage what you have to pick off your product list. And just so you know, I'm so passionate about it, I'm doing a meatloaf throwdown, March 26th at the Chelsea School. So I've challenged all the cooks, superintendent, cook, throwdown and that's happening March 26th in Chelsea. So and if you want to look at footage when I was younger and skinnier, there is a WCAX clip of me doing a throwdown with my cook from Williamstown. You can probably find that on the web somewhere. I went on set and did a cookoff. So stay tuned with that. But those are the types of things we need. We need to market our food service too is what I'm saying. And we need to make it fun and enjoyable. And I think we are doing that well in certain areas and not in others. And so that's one of the things I'm looking to do too is like how can we learn from each other to make food exciting, enjoyable, and a real experience for our kids? So I hope the meatloaf throwdowns help with that. Amy. Yeah, question about the bulk buying, like your example with the chicken, with the bulk buying all go to a central location and then be distributed out to the schools or the supplier is able to... Yes, we have delivery sites. So if we as a supervisory union need to order 15 cases of chicken breast. We order 15 cases of chicken breast. Say Red, Royalton, Bethel needs four cases, but Stockbridge only needs one. That kind of thing. Where each school would buy one case of chicken, they're not going to get the same pricing that we're going to get at 15 cases of chicken. So that's the way these food service product companies work. The more you buy, it's like when you go to Sam's or BJ or Costco, you buy in bulk, you save money. Right. And the supplier is able to distribute it to various sites. Okay. Yeah. Good. Food allergies. Good question. Jamie's not there. Tara, do you talk about that? Yes. Food allergies would still be documented in track that each of the individual campuses as they are today. Cool. So yes, just sun butter instead of peanut butter. It's the short of that one. Yes. And Rod just ordered sun butter versus peanut butter too. I think it's just a matter of what you choose off your list. And I actually think the majority of our districts are sun butter districts anyways. Not that it really matters today, but. And while he's out of the room, I'll say that I'd say it to his face too, but he needs to come to Stockbridge or Rochester for a chili cookoff because I'm the reigning champ from the PTO. I think meatloaf is Jamie's specialty. So I think that's why he picked the meatloaf. Ah. I was going to get a little trash talk. This is wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful. Also means we can move on, I think. I would like to just go around quickly to the board and say, are we all game with this? Jenny, are you good for Jamie to go with this? Yeah, that sounds, that all sounds good. Good. Amy, are you good? Yeah, but for him to continue and to investigate about this and talk to us more for sure. Thank you, Megan. I completely give Jamie my whole heart. I think it's a great idea. I'd like to hear more about it. Okay, Carol. Yeah, no, I'm completely on board. And as a matter of fact, I will totally challenge Jamie for both meatloaf and I forget now what Lindy was saying that she would make, whether it was chili or whatever. I'm kind of the reigning chili champ. So I will take you down. I believe that. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good, thank you. I believe that's normally in February, non-COVID time. Bye, everybody. Great. Good. Jamie, you have our support. Please go forward. Jamie and Tara, I should say, sorry. You have our support. Please go forward with this and continue keeping us updated. Good. Where are we? Got it. Fun, fun. How's it going? I emailed you all the audit with a little cover memo outlining the high points. Not sure if you have any questions. I didn't receive any specific questions, but my hope is that you can accept the audit so we can get the finalization process done and get the documents out to the necessary parties that we have to get it to, the Agency of Education and the Vermont Bond Bank, and also get it available to your residents. Do we have any questions about the audit? Jenny? I do not. Amy? I know I haven't had time to do a full review, but I have no questions, and I think we can move to accept it. Carol? I have an issue with the comments around the food service program. The Management Letter talks about how we have no budget, we just have a fund transfer, and how that's inappropriate, and we should have a budget. And the idea that the SU response to that was that, well, we will sort out an answer, and it's going to be happening here, I'm concerned that, especially because we have unallocated budget surpluses that may or may not be restricted funds, that we're kind of sloshing around a lot of money. Do we have a response? The audit remark about the budgets is because there isn't a formal budgeting process completed in food service similar to the way that you do your general fund, and that was their recommendation. And that's one of the items that we're working towards while we're doing this process of centralizing is determining cost versus revenue for each of the individual food service programs. As far as surplus, I got a little lost on your last comment there, Carl. So if you want to clarify that, maybe I can attempt to answer it. Well, no, it's the idea that we cannot, we don't need to budget for food going forward because there's going to be an SU food budget versus the idea that the audit's report that we've traditionally ran a deficit and an unbudgeted deficit and the audit reports that we should probably have had a budget in the past so that we wouldn't necessarily be running these random deficits. What I'm interested in is the response around why we didn't have a budget and then certainly we're jumping ahead to comments around the audit, but why we didn't have a budget and why when they're defaulting, when they're slamming us for basically saying, we just had an unidentified fund transfer to the food service, we should feel comfortable approaching a budget that doesn't have any kind of food money in whatsoever. It seems to me like the auditors are saying we should be really digging in and analyzing and budgeting for our food and the advice from the SU was like, don't bother putting that in the budget and okay, we'll let you put 20 grand of transfer into the budget, but somehow that this was all going to be covered. I'd like to understand what the differences are between those two positions. So one, none of the districts sat down with their food personnel and built a budget. Historically, Carl, that's not okay. And so what we'd be looking to do is if you give us permission at the SU level, is to finalize an SU level food service budget. And so Chris LaCarna was at the last full board meeting. He is the CVSU Chief Financial Officer and I had mentioned that we created an MOU with the CVSU. Chris has provided us with templates on how to build a food service budget. And so what we're looking to do is to execute those templates. We want to run it at the SU level for a year and then at the end of that year, we would retroactively build back the districts in next year's budget. So you would budget accordingly based on the outcomes of us executing that SU-wide budget. And so it doesn't mean we're not going to budget for it, but we weren't going to charge you an assessment for it because you haven't agreed to do it yet at the SU level. So every year you will be assessed based, so next year's budget at our SUD will have a built-in assessment based on how we did in 21-22's food service. So once we execute this, then we will build that into your local budget next year and then we will assess that money out and then come the next fiscal year, we will assess that money out. And so every year we will be assessing based on that, it's retroactively. We got that. Now we went over this. We've gone over this now, you know, twice in the policy. I think you're just saying that they didn't see budgets before in the audit and so they think we should have budgets. We're going about it in a slightly different way as opposed to having budgets. We're going to do it this SU way. Well, that's what I'm hoping the board agrees to, but we don't know that. If the board doesn't agree to it, then we will have an ARSUD budget just like Chris's recommended we do for the SU. But you're absolutely right, Carl. It's part of why we get in trouble with food service is that we weren't using a standardized process to build food service budgets. Okay, so we're going to be using that food service process to build these budgets in advance of adapting said budgets. Yes, part of what concerns me and part of what I thought, I don't know how well I expressed it, at the last meeting was the idea that we are going to say, well, we're going to see what we spend this year and we'll figure out how to budget for it next year. That we're rolling estimations forward versus we are looking at what we're actually spending. Carl, Carl, I just want to be clear. We went over this last meeting. We talked about it as a board and we went over this meeting. We made a decision. No, we made a decision as a board. We made a decision that we were going to put some money back in, and that was the decision of the board. So I don't know that we can talk about this again. No, you're missing my point, Ethan. I'm sorry. I'm obviously expressing myself poorly. My point is to Jamie is that this budgeted amount that we're looking at, the thing we're looking at going forward is not going to be a we're putting a blank ticket or a blank check forward, and then we're going to catch it up by covering our deficits. We're budgeting and we're going to be actually thinking about when we put forward a budget to our taxpayers that that money covers what we think is the best estimate that we think that our kids are going to eat for the next year versus the idea that we're going to let a program cover our expenses and then we'll figure out how we'll pay it back later, that our budgeting for food is not going to have a skip year where we say we're going to see what happens and budget based on that. We're going to budget based on our best. I'm sorry, Ethan. I'm trying to explain myself. I know we're going to budget on our best guesses for our skip year and say that next year we think with this program change is going to cost us X so that we're budgeting for it and we're not saying that this year we're not budgeting for anything and that next year or two years from now we're going to look at where we are and then we're going to recoup that money in like a back bill. That's what I'm trying to get an answer to, the idea of accurate budgeting versus back bill. This is what Charity explained this when we got it. She was the one she understood it and she said it's a fairly standard factor. Carrie is not our business manager. So, Carl, let me try and just simplify this. First of all, we're not just going to pull random numbers. We are using all of the data that we have been gathering for this current fiscal year on what is being purchased throughout all of our individual districts, what it cost for salary and benefits for all of our food service staff in each of our individual buildings and then we are taking what we get for projected revenue based on the reimbursement rates that we get from the state of Vermont and the federal government to determine what our needs are going to be to have a SU-wide food service program. At the end of FY22, once this program has been established we will then be able to set the parameters for what is necessary for the school district's individual assessments based on non-program revenue that we can get. So, we have to know what the food program can substantiate on their own before we can assess what the districts have to kick in, which is why you need that first year to establish the parameters of the program. Does that make sense? And I totally get that, but my point is if I was saving up for a Disneyland vacation next year I would start putting away money now and we are saying that we are going to have a food service program that is going to organize everything in the future. That brings in monthly revenue from state reimbursements and paid meals so this program brings in its own revenue on a monthly basis. Absolutely and traditionally that revenue has not compensated for the cost of the program which is why we've always had to backfill it. Carl, I guess the only thing I can say is is that I totally understand you don't agree with the strategy we used with this and I totally respect that but I can't speak other than to say we just disagree in strategy and that's okay. The other part of this, Carl, is that we have talked about this as a board and we've made a decision and you may have your individual opinion but we've actually moved on from food service we're in the audit and I think it's time to put this to rest and if you disagree with us you disagree with us but we talked about it as a board and we agreed upon it as a board. See, Ethan, I certainly understand what you're saying and I'm putting that piece of that to rest because we did in the past. The point is if you look at the management letter comments from the auditor that we're just sent to us now those comments indicate that our food service plan and the way that we're dealing with it isn't good. Because Carl, you guys never budgeted. The current, yeah, that they're saying the way we did it. Certainly we have not yet accepted that audit as a board but to indicate that my concepts and ideas are not relevant because we've dealt with them in the past ignores what the current audit that we have yet to accept says about those so things. No, and Carl, we are addressing the recommendations that were made in the management letter with this program. Sure, we are. We absolutely budget it. We can. We absolutely all. Oh, we need to stop. That's a bit and we're centralizing the food service program as recommended. Sharon, stop. This is not a productive discussion anymore. I want to stop it right now. Okay. Certainly that's not acceptable. I can withdraw from the conversation. And if you ask me to do that as the chairman of the board, I will. My point here. I think you're making a good point, but I think we're going around in circles and we're not the time to talk about it. If you want to bring it up, we have accepted, we have proposed a budget, we have voted on a budget. We have. This is not a question about the budget. Well, then it's a policy there's a principal question going forward. This program has not been approved. Bring this to the full board and bring this argument to the full board when we talk about it there. That's what I think we're done with it tonight. That's what I was trying to do. But, you know, this is fine. I will, you know, I will happily withdraw from this conversation. And, you know, y'all can can can can continue because obviously I am, you know, a a a lone object. No, it's not that. It's the procedure. Carl, you like procedure and you do it in the right place. We're not talking about this in the right place. Okay. If this is an issue, then let's bring it up before the full board with which is where this is going to get approved anyway. I everybody's heard your point. Why is it? Okay. Everybody's absolutely right. You're absolutely right. I've heard your point. We have not approved this. We think it's worth trying. The board has already agreed that it's worth going ahead to try this new way of looking at it. In a year, we may totally disagree with that. And that may put us at home. You may be able to say to us at that time, we should have listened to you and put a full number back in there of the full budget. Now that is the but that is a decision of the board to make. And we made that decision of last meeting. When we put that extra money out. So we hear you. This is not about the this. I think you're misrepresenting my issue and this is not about the extra money we put back in. But sure, I will drop the question. Move on. Good. I think we're done. That question would be Ethan, whether or not the board is willing to accept. Oh, accept them. Accept. Yes. That's it. We need to go through that. Thank you. Do I have a motion to accept the 1920 audit as presented by our business manager? I'd like to make a motion to accept the 1920 audit as presented by our business manager. Do I have a second? Second. I need discussion. Being none. I'll do a roll call. Amy. I. Jenny. I. Megan. I. Carl. Okay. There we go. I have my phone to work. I just, I abstained. Good. Ethan. I. Let's have it. We accept the audit. Thank you. So now I will let the auditors know that the audit has been accepted and upon receipt of the final audit I will email it out to all of you. We will post it on the website and then if anybody wants a physical hard copy of it just let me know and we can request bound copies from the auditors or I can generate a hard copy here from the electronic version. They are one in the same. Good. Thank you, Cheryl. Much appreciated. I know that was a process as we heard about at the full board meetings. Sir, I've lost my agenda. It's the warning. So I think really at this point the warnings drafted other than based on the outcomes of the articles of agreement vote tonight. And so I just need to know when you guys would like to schedule a special meeting to take up the warning and then of course we would add the annual mailer and how we want to go about that. Those would be the couple agenda items. I would say there's going to be an agenda item depending on what we learned tonight about. We're going to have to talk about that. So that's another agenda item. I would say sooner rather than later I would say next week. My advice would be let's do it next Tuesday. Next Tuesday. That's what I was going to suggest too. We could do that but we have two other board meetings already happening. So you guys could roll but you certainly wouldn't have terrorized assistance because we got Sharon and we've got Straford next Tuesday. That's not useful because we're talking about bulletins. What about Thursday? Thursday alert. Wendy is not Thursday. I have an equity and diversity training from 60730 on Thursday. I'm crying. The 4th or the 11th? The 11th. Sorry not this Tuesday but the... What about Monday the 8th? Just next Monday. Correct? Monday is all right, right? Monday is good for me. I don't see any. I can do that. Jenny. That works. Monday the 8th works. Oh Monday works for you Jenny or you work? I'm sorry I wouldn't go in there. Monday does work. Good thank you. Megan. I'll make a work. Thank you. Okay Monday it is 6.30. Same time and we're going to talk warning and we're going to talk vote results of the vote and we're going to talk about well this is the third thing we were going to piggyback. Your budget mailer. Your mailer. My mailer. Thank you. Good and Jenny you and I will get together before then. Yeah. Do you want us to try to get you some prices? Prior to the quote and then you'll have that. I've got prices from last year but yeah if you want to tell me some other ones that'd be great. I'll show up some other ones. Excuse me. All right. We have no action. We've accepted the audit. We have no new hires I assume. No new hires. Well except for the big one. And and uh Andra I keep getting on. Wanda without the W is how I'm remembering it. Good thank you. Because I had a lot of people in the day full meeting on the Andra Andra. Well I butchered that all up. I'm sorry. Yeah thank you. We have an Andra and yeah. Okay I'm going to go to public comment then. Thank you. All right. Let's work down our list starting with Sherry Colton. Do you have a comment for the board? Hi everyone. I have a comment and then a question. Or I guess two questions. So Tara and Jamie correct me if I'm wrong but anytime an accounting practice of any any type of entity gets an audit like you guys do. And there are suggestions made or pieces of clarification that need to be made. There is an existing accounting 101 process that allows you to explain things such as changing from one budgetary platform to another when it comes to something like this food service piece. It's a simple explanation that happens as a response to the audit that you get. It's not a bunch of magic and having to put a bunch of extra numbers in there. It's just an explanation just as you gave us verbally. Correct? Yes that is exactly what I had to do. I had to provide responses to the management letter. Perfect. Thank you. The other bigger question that I have is as a parent with two kids in Stockbridge and three kids that have moved on from Stockbridge I am continually concerned about the level of proficiencies and I'm particularly concerned because I have two kids currently that I augment their education with private tutoring from a previous board member. Why are we continuing to have to do stuff like this? My kids and many other kids as we saw in the numbers tonight are not meeting proficiency levels but you want us to support putting time, effort, money into an outdoor experiential program rather than putting more efforts into getting those math and literacy numbers up to an acceptable level and I do understand that four kids in a classroom makes those numbers skew extremely fast. But I'm staying out of pocket for a situation that was addressed with my boys almost two years ago when a teacher stood in a hallway in front of a principal and said blatantly in front of other people oh by the way your boys don't know how to read at a kindergarten grade level. Tell me that's not wrong and why I'm having to fix that out of my own pocket but we're continuing to talk about adding experiential and elective opportunities when our kids aren't meeting standards. And yes I'm emotional and passionate about this because I was told when my daughter went my oldest child who is now 25 years old when she transitioned from Stockbridge to Whitcomb as a middle schooler in seventh grade she'll probably never graduate by that school's guidance counselor. She graduated and had no problems and aced her classes did a Stafford program and now she's a specialized occupational therapist. So it wasn't this is an issue it's a huge issue but you want me to support an outdoor experiential program no get those kids the programs they need to push math science English the things that they're going to use in order to move into middle school and be prepared not ill prepared as most of my kids have been. I'm not an educator I praise educators because they do what I would never even attempt to do. Lindy knows this I'd say it to her all the time but there is something wrong when we're accepting that kids are only 50% proficient. This is a public school it's not a magnet school so why aren't we focusing on the basics. Thank you. Gotcha Cherity and I would say I hear you you know your point point taken as far as priorities so I don't know if if Jamie wants to respond to that. Or not. Cherity I would just say that I too think we have a great deal of work to do and I've been trying to emphasize that in my reports and I know the public doesn't always get to see the written reports and part of why we're trying to reallocate our federal grant money from being what I thought was pretty top-heavy at the SU level around how we were investing it and investing it out into additional professional development trying to focus on math intervention and ensure that our teachers have the tools they need like we were budgeted to purchase new math programs at both Rochester Stockbridge Unified District campuses in order to ensure that teachers have the tools they need to educate in math consistently. Those concerns are my concerns too and you know I'm constantly in conversation with principals about how we progress monitoring all students each individual student to ensure that they're making appropriate growth and so no even though at times if it doesn't seem like that that's the focus of the conversation at board meetings know that that's what certainly the focus is offline not in board meetings but in my admin team meetings and in my regular meetings with principals and teachers so thank you for bringing that up and I couldn't agree with you more the key foundational skills are crucial in the elementary grades for student success all the research shows that by the end of the fourth grade if students are struggling their trajectory for dropout is significant so thanks. I just wanted to add in really quick that this has been a thing that when Michelle Richie when I was on the board you know 10 years ago when she became our principal one of the things that she brought up was this idea that the board should try to be tracking with the middle schools that we were sending our kids to you know trying to get feedback from them as to what our kids were lacking where we're strong in when they came to Bethel or Woodstock or Rochester because Rochester was a K through 12 at the time um Rutland wherever um and we were trying to you know incorporate that into our our curriculum work and I think it's been a board priority at least for me um you know going forward in that um I also would say that it's you know trying to understand how to create a uh a program that identifies with all the kids in the area is a complicated issue and it's one that we have as a Stockbridge board also been pushing to Montpiler to you know Sandy Haas and uh uh you know uh Dick McCormick and and and encouraging our families to encourage the the legislature to try to try to uh address that because again the idea that you get a good education in in your K through 6 school but does that translate into a good transition into the uh 7 through 12 grades has been a problem that we've been talking about you know when I've been on the school board for you know over a decade 15 years um Julia I just want to make it clear that I I hear you as a chairman um I would only and I think this is very much Lindy's point too when she was talking we were talking about outdoor and experiential learning um we have to see that it helps the basic course of education we have to see that it's something that certain kids many kids really get something out of being outside and that it may help them but that's certainly something we're going to look at at this program level of is it actually helping the basic elements of education and if it's not and I think we'll get that feedback from the teachers and we'll probably get it from the students we'll certainly see it in the testing um that they seem to see say that this is something that can help it can help students focus they can help students be engaged in education an outdoor education program um and I think you're making it very clear that we're setting it to a very high standard that it needs to do that if it's going to be part of it needs to be helping this what you're helping these basics and if it isn't well then maybe it's not something for us but that that's a standard we have to look to so Ethan I just want to ask the question and I apologize I'm not trying to be rude to anyone by asking this that but so does that mean you see that the kids are can be used as sort of a guinea pig to see if this program will work because that's not fair that's not fair to them that's not fair to your teachers that's not fair to their education and that's somewhat what you just explained we'll see if it's worth it I don't want my children in that scenario I would much rather petition to have my kids wavered out and get school choice then allow my two kids to be utilized as guinea pigs to see if the program works fair enough fair enough thank you charity uh further comment Janet Whitaker do you have a comment for the board no I'm all set thank you thank you Janet join mellis do you have a comment for the board no I'm all set thank you thank you Karen Rubin do you have a comment for the board um you know I think I just want to echo charity's concerns I'll be completely honest when my son left Stockwood Central School he and the majority of his graduating class and it was a pretty big one that year um and of course the parents do talk to one another but most of those kids graduated that class is what we were reported with between a fourth and a fifth grade math skill level that set him up to have a very very difficult um academic experience going into his middle school and it with a lot of hard work from his middle school and his high school teachers and academic counselors and and um you know his his support group um and you know I hate to say he's he's one of those kids who would is actually thriving with this current situation he is finally just now in the last couple of months of his senior year feeling like he's become a confident student and it's been very painful to watch him struggle all of these years with that much of a deficiency in his um grade school academics um I just I know that we can't focus just on test scores but we also can't expect these kids to go into other schools um leaving Stockwood Central and be behind the eight ball and there were years where I would ask the teachers and I would ask the principals you know does he need to be tested can we get him tested it wasn't until I actually met up with another teacher from a different school who said have you ever put it in writing have you ever used the word do diligence and put it in writing that you wanted him tested and it wasn't until that happened that we did get him tested and we did realize where his deficiencies were and they were the ones that were reported from when he left Stockbridge um and that was unfortunate because it was a struggle that he didn't need to go through um so I I appreciate that our kids love being out in the nature I appreciate that we're teaching them how to um value our world and our environment I really really do and I think it's incredibly important as we move on for you know just sustaining life um but they cannot be expected to be competitive in their next round of academia if they're not able to fully grasp uh the standards that they need to leaving elementary school and going into middle school so I just hope that that will always remain a constant in your minds that it's just as difficult for kids to enter into that next phase of their life and even more so if they don't feel that they can be amongst their peers confidently um so I just ask you guys to always keep that in the forefront of your mind when you're presenting us with having to decide on whether we're going to support one of your your initiatives or not so thank you if I may just speak as personal note for a moment Karen and charity um I was a special ed poster child as I often say um I left uh my elementary school which actually went through the ninth grade um of very unprepared uh and and went to a high school where there wasn't a lot of support um and I figured it out um really on my own in a lot of ways um but I really do hear you I really do hear you and I looked at those numbers and I was um to be honest a little disappointed I was a little more a little disappointed even though not to numbers and all that I know we're turning battleships and increasing teaching proficiency and what Jamie's focus and all this is good but I hear you I really do know what it feels like to go on to another school and um and not know what you're doing and the terror of sitting in a class and just sitting there and going I have no idea what I'm doing so I you're being heard please by me I will tell you thank you um and I believe that's it Lindy and Maddie we have no phone callers thank you very much for your time those of you who commented and spent time and uh Ethan Janet just raised her hand I oh sorry Janet yes go ahead Janet well I mean I I I also I feel really bad I mean of course I work at the school now but I had three kids go to the school I went to the school and I feel really bad you know when I hear the Karen's and the charities and um but I guess as a parent I always wondered you know could I have done better should I have put my kids somewhere else should I have you know a lot of shoulders and and I I know even I struggled when I got out of Stockbridge school one thing I think that really can be hard for kids is it seems like we're always having constant change and I think that what we need is some consistencies in the teaching staff and um you know just that would help and not having chaos going on a lot and it does seem like we have a lot of chaos a lot of times in this town and I don't think we're immune I think it happens in other towns I don't think it's fair you know always say that it's Stockbridge um so I just kind of wanted to throw that out there um because I too as a parent my kids were not you know super studious and I always will wonder but I think they're turning out just fine so that's all I have to say thank you Jen thank you thank you for all your comments all right uh future agenda items I think we've already done that for next um uh we're hoping yeah and we give you some instructions for what's our next meeting I believe our next meeting will be Tuesday a formal meeting uh not our next meeting but our next regular meeting will be Tuesday April 6th 2020 at 6 30 p.m by Google Meet um our next regular meeting will be next Monday at 6 30 uh March 8th and I will entertain a motion to adjourn I'd like to make a motion to adjourn I would like to second that now that I'm back online excellent thank you all in favor signify by saying aye aye thank you all very much have a good night everyone good night