 Okay, actually, I think we're ready to start. So I will call to order the monthly Roxbury board of directors meeting at eight, or 632. We need to do roll call, all right? So Jim Murphy presents Jill. Here. Anaket. I'm here. Andrew. Here. Emma. And welcome. Bridget. Ryan. Here. Mara. Here. And Jerry. Yeah. Welcome again, Emma, to your first board meeting. Very happy to have you on board. So public comment. I'm not seeing any members of the public on the screen. So assuming we don't have any. Anna, you don't, you're not able to see anything. I am. Am I correct? That. Okay. Good. So consent agenda. Do I have a motion to approve the consent agenda? So Bridget moves. Do I have a second? Second. Who's that? Andrew. Yep. Okay. All those in favor. And again, we have to do the roll call. So I'm just going to go across screen gel. Hi. Anaket. Hi. Andrew. Hi. Emma. Bridget. Hi. Brian. Hi. Mara. Hi. And Jerry. Hi. Great consent agenda approved. Thank you. So now I'm on the board discussion and I'll. Send it over to Libby to talk about policy monitoring reports. And COVID-19. Policy monitor. I'm just happy to take any questions if you have any questions about those monitoring reports. Any questions or comments about the monitor reports. Look like it. Okay. Good to go. Good. So when I was working with COVID-19, I actually made a pre just a quick slide show to use this talking points here that I'm going to share my screen with. All right. Jim. Can you see my screen? I can. Okay. Hold on. Let me. Get the presents. Mode here. Move my pictures of you all. Okay. So this is a little bit of where are we now? not have all the principals on the call tonight, just so you know, but I'm happy to ask them any questions you want to. I gave them the night off tonight, which they are well deserved. So, let's see. First things first though, it's teacher appreciation week this week. So we have to say that we very much appreciate all of our teachers. I know I love them dearly at this point in time. They're doing a rocking job. They're positive. They're staying with us, sticking with us and sticking with our kids. And I'm very appreciative of our teachers. So I just have to put that out there, that little plug out there for our crew. So I have this split up in a few different areas. So let's just talk about access to buildings first. We still have essential employees only through May 15th. We did increase this to include all custodial staff. We started that on Monday. We did send with them any kind of the exemption form from Visbit that said, if you have one of these exemptions, then you're still paid and stay home. We have two custodians. We took advantage of that, not advantage of that, we needed to stay home. So for the major, large majority of our custodial staff are in the buildings during the day on their summer hours. And they're primarily getting a head start to all the cleaning and things that we do over the summer, which is actually really great. We're excited to see how fast the wax seals the floors. Cause usually in August, when it's humid, it takes forever to do that and we're rushing. So we're happy that we can get in early to do that. They're also doing some things like painting of classrooms and we have some classroom shifts that we were making and all that kind of things. So that's all gonna get done before summer, hopefully this year, which may be able to give some of our custodial staff a summer vacation, just in case they can go somewhere. And that's a big change from their world. We're gonna phase in our food service to take over for the administration who's been doing food service starting May 18th after the stay at home order is hopefully lifted. And our principals have been working tirelessly along with Jim Birmingham, who's an all-star to do that food service and myself and Andrew LaRosa, Grant and Deb Garrett have been doing a lot of that work too. So food service is gonna start taking over for us on May 18th, which I think will be a good thing that happens. They also will be able to get that exempt form, should they be exempt for any reason. Let's list it on that form. Administrative assistance and the rest of the central office staff will have access to the buildings May 18th. Most of them work in a way that can stay physically distanced from people. So we'll give them the option if they'd like to come in to do their work. A lot of them have been struggling with photocopying and printing things out that have to be hard copies for records and things. So they're eager to get back into the offices. So that will be lifted and they will be involved in on the 18th. We're currently working on a plan to get teachers and other staff into the school. They left pretty much in a hurry. So they still have tons of things in classrooms and needed supplies and things like that. So we're gonna work on a plan to do that. We're watching closely about what the guidelines are for the amount of people in a space at one time and we'll most likely have a phased in plan where groups, grade levels of teachers or groups of teachers will be able to come in at certain times. We still have to figure out how to get students their belongings without having a mass of students coming into the building, high schoolers and middle schoolers left things in their lockers. They're still full. So we have to figure that out and we have not figured out how to do that as of yet but that's on the list of things to do. We do have to follow all the guidelines. There's a link, you'll get this presentation afterwards and there's a link for those guidelines. If you haven't seen them yet set out by BOSHA and basically it's an overview of what is going on right now. Each person who comes in the building has to take their temperature upon entry and write down what that temperature is. We are providing masks and gloves. I believe Dev Garrett just ordered about 8,000 masks for right now and future. We're also sadly looking to get masks for our teaching staff that have insignias on it like MRPS insignia on it for potentially next fall which is kind of like a funny yet not funny kind of thing. And then we have to maintain physical distance of six feet and do that training with the PowerPoint. So all of those things have to be documented that our employees are doing and we're following those guidelines. And I'm happy to take questions at the end of this. So if you have any questions then please write them down and at the end, the board, I'm gonna ask the board to discuss many things. So please write down questions for any of this. For the remote learning, just a reminder to everybody that this is still very much crisis mode learning and we are fully recognizing that this is not the way we wanna do business for our students and our families but we're still in that crisis mode of learning. The feedback from families has been largely positive. It's a little like the Goldilocks syndrome. This is from my husband. He's like, it's kind of like you're in Goldilocks right now. People think it's too much or too little or just right. And that's really where we're standing now across the board, across every one of our schools. We have sent out some parents surveys at the elementary school and got some good feedback from our elementary parents but it's really dependent on individual families and what their ability is to support the situation and what their job situations are and what their stress levels are and all of those things are coming into play right now. I think most of our teachers are in a pretty good place and are handling the situation well from what I can see and what they've reported to me and what my principals are reporting to me. The technology needs is a significant stress on our system. Before going into this, our infrastructure was not the most stable and this is just proving all the gaps and holes in our technological infrastructure. And in addition, we were talking today about our network administrator basically not doing the job they've been hired for for the last couple of years in the need for a network administrator and we have a bit out and we haven't gotten any takers yet. So we have some major infrastructure needs and this crisis has just amplified that completely. We are getting Chromebooks that are being returned and they are completely unusable for a variety of reasons, including dropage and looking like they've been hit by Wiffleball bat and things like that and none other reasons too. Some Chromebooks are just crap it out because they're old. We're attempting to order more. Most of the Chromebooks in the world come from China and every school district in probably business in America are also trying to order computers right now. So they simply do not have them in stock. And so this is a really slow process for anybody right now in terms of ordering more technology. For our IEPs and students with IEPs they've been amended to match distant learning needs and our special educators have been in touch with every family in order to have those IEPs amendment and following the guidance from the AOE around that piece. In terms of attendance it's not on here but I did ask the principals about what the attendance is. It's almost 100% at the elementary schools both Roxbury and Union as kids accessing. At the middle school I believe it's like three or four kids that we haven't been able to contact and at the high school it's about 10 kids that haven't had any contact. So all in all I mean that's not all kids accessing every opportunity that we're offering but pretty much we're able, we know or we've had contact with at least most of our kids we can say which is very positive news. For the end of the year this is a big question on a lot of people's minds we are waiting guidance still for the rules of what we can do that is not coming out until May 8th. They've held true to that May 8th date even though they've got a lot of pressure around that. So when we know what we can and cannot do we will let everybody know. We do have a committee at the high school compromised of many people, many different constituents to talk about graduation and what we're gonna do for graduation. And I know they have some very special plans around banners and how we can celebrate our seniors in particular this year. So it's a big time in their life and we're sorry that we can't do what we usually do for them. So we're trying to make that as special as possible. My hunch is that they will say we have to follow social distancing rules and right now it's what 10 people in a space. And so that's gonna be very hard to have a traditional graduation. So we're gonna have to think outside the box with that. Unless this guidance changes, which it could it could May 8th or it could later. I do recommend that we end the year with 175 student days which is what the law is Vermont Law is in our contract, we have 178 contracted student days. I would recommend that we waive those three student days and keep them available for us for professional learning for our teachers which we very much might need as I'll talk in a minute. So that would make June 16th the last day of school for students. And again, that's with guidance the agency of education could do something with that as well and I'm not sure if they are if they will or not because it has to do with contracts. So June 16 would be our last day of school for students. I am in close contact with Jeff O'Hara at part two considering potential summer childcare and we're again, we're waiting for what we can and cannot do for that. We can use CARES money to help that and help some of the costs for parents around childcare. We haven't made the decision to do that yet but we are waiting to see what we can do. We've even floated ideas of can we start the summer programming with part two early? Can we start it maybe June 1st instead of waiting until school is traditionally out so that we can get parents some much needed childcare especially as the economy starts to open up a bit. So we're working on that and we're very cognizant about that need. Again, it depends on the guidance and the rules that we're given by the state. The same goes with ESY which is extended summer or extended school year programming for students with IEPs. It's undecided. It was supposed to be placed at Union this year and the building will be ready to go but it will be dependent on what we can do with physical distancing. And again, we probably have to amend a lot of IEPs if we can't to do that and work in collaboration with our parents. So that's for end of year, what we know so far. And I'm very aware that a lot of this is like wait and see and I'm as frustrated as that with that as many people are. So I just wanna put that out there that we're ready to go and we're ready to make plans quickly as soon as we get that guidance. Planning for the fall. This is where we have completely pivoted to from the leadership perspective. We are strategizing big time right now for what fall might look like. Dan French, the secretary of Ed has stated multiple times on different phone meetings that myself and my colleagues have been on that school will not return as normal until a vaccine is ready. He stated it multiple times. And I don't know if that's him speaking as the secretary of education or just speaking as a person who is following the news just as much as anybody else is. I'm not sure where that's coming from but they have not given any guidance around what school could or should look like. I don't believe they're planning on giving any guidance for quite a while. Almost too late for us. We need to start planning now. What we're doing as I said before what we're doing right now is not good enough for our students and for our colleagues and for our teachers. And so we need to really truly put in a plan to make it better for learning and for our families. And so what we've started as a leadership team we started talking about different structures we can do but then we decided to pull back a little bit and start talking about our four pillars which I've come to this board with before our theory of action is that if we have evidence for collective responsibility and collaborative practices we have evidence for high quality instruction for every single student. We have a guaranteed and viable curriculum. And if we have a timely system to enrich, intervene and remediate with evidence that it's actually working for our learners. That's our theory. If we have those four pillars in place then we will be able to move mountains with our learning and our kids. So that's what we're standing on. So what I've charged our leadership team to do I kind of, I jigsaw those. So different leaders are taking different pillars and doing a whole lot of research right now as to what could those pillars mean with three different scenarios. No to low physical interaction, some physical interaction and a lot of physical interaction. And so right now we're doing the research component of that what could that look like in those three different scenarios. And then we'll start once we have an idea there we'll start filling in the pieces and we'll start we'll move towards an actual action step and look at what are all the challenges that we need to solve hopefully soon. What are all the challenges we need to solve so that we have a solid plan in place that everybody feels good about coming into the fall or as good as we possibly can. So we're doing a lot of research right now and a lot of talking and a lot of collaborating at the moment very high level brainstorming. We hope to have some ideas down by like the second or third week of May. I realized we're kind of in the second week the third week of May to bring in some teacher leadership into that puzzle and then to bring in some parents into that puzzle and so start bringing in other constituencies so they can say start asking us once we have some details and hey, what about did you think about because we need voices saying that to us so that we think through all the different pieces that this could mean. I am planning 100% that school will not be in person as usual in the fall. It could be some in person but it will not be as usual and we need to rethink what that looks like. And in order to do that as I'm just kind of stating we just need significant time to plan and prepare which is why I hope and wish we get guidance sooner rather than later as to what that could look like. Our teachers quite rightly go off during the summer and we don't have them to talk to them as easily. And so we need to have time in June and a plan to say, hey, we're offering this throughout the summer so you can take advantage of it and professionally learn. Couple days of in-service they're gonna do it for us in August. So we really need to take advantage of all the time we can right now to get our teachers and our administrators prepped for what the plan is. So that's what I can say about planning for the fall. Again, a lot of it is up in the air because we're working kind of blind right now but I think it's good work and it's necessary work for us to keep moving forward. So then finally the financial impact. The finance committee just got a lot of information from Grant and he's still on the line here if we have questions for him. As most of you know, the Ed Fund prospects continue to look incredibly bleak. We're basically on a financial cliff right now and there's a potential for much higher tax rates than predicted when the budget was passed. We have not gotten much guidance other than financial picture looks bleak. We've gotten that message loud and clear but we don't know what they're going to do, what the legislators gonna do. But what I can say in the positives is that we have a very strong fund balance and that can see us through this situation. We are in a much different and better spot than many districts across the state because of our excellent business manager and his financial conservativeness throughout this career. But we are talking about just so where can we save? Where can we do? Where can we hold some money back? So just in case or if the board says you need to save a certain amount of money so that the board feels better about our financial position. So right now we're in these three buckets right here. Construction projects from the general fund are on hold. We're using this lens of health and safety as a measure to whether we're gonna spend that construction money or not. And currently we're estimating a savings from that lens of about $100,000. We do have projects that we're looking to move forward on but most of them are within the health and safety lens. We're discussing right now about the basketball court at Main Street Middle School, how it floods. And part of our plan was to fix that problem and Andrew is working with contractors right now with bids around the basketball court. So that's a major project that we would still like to move forward on. However, we can put the holds on that if the board wants us to. It's not part of health and safety. It's just a good thing to do. We have put a hold on the UES auditorium fixing up that space. And we've put a hold on several other major construction projects that weren't health and safety. So things like the stair tread at Montpere or at Main Street Middle School. Those are things that Andrew will be looking at to make the decision of do we need to do this for safety reasons or not. With hiring in the budget that was just passed we had a weekend custodian that's temporarily on hold. And that's something that I would like this board to discuss. It's approximate savings of about $20,000. It has significant ramifications for the community to access the building because in order for us to see that savings that means that the community would not have access to the buildings on the weekends unless they are paying for it. We still have custodians needing to be in the building during that time. So we've had considerable discussions about that cost to communities when they want to rent our space. Now on the other side of it, community members may not be able to rent the space because of physical distancing guidelines. I don't, we don't know that yet. So if there are rules around organized sports and athletics or 10 people are last or things like that then I can imagine that our rentals would be considerably down as well. So there are ramifications to that. So I looked to the board to discuss that piece and whether or not we want us to continue to have a hold on it or would you like us to go search for a weekend custodian, which we will do. The RVS had part-time custodian we've had in our budget. That person transferred to a full-time position when we had it at the high school. So we haven't had a 0.5 custodian in quite a while at Roxbury because we haven't been able to fill the position. So it's been up on school spring but we haven't been able to fill it at all. And what's happened is we've had custodians do a shift out there to make sure that the custodial needs. So somebody has been going out there to do Roxbury's custodial work on a regular basis from the custodial team we have currently and that has been working out okay. We've tried to fill it, we can't. So if we can't fill it and we've been working and it's been working for us then we could just not fill that position next year or stop attempting to fill it because we still haven't been able to do it. And that's an approximate savings of $28,000. Our third grade teaching team, one of our third grade teachers which is in your packet recently resigned to take a new job and our third grade class sizes are such that we could just not hire another third grade teacher. If we did that our class size would increase from 15, I believe to 20 to approximately 20. I have those notes to make it exact but I believe it's about 15 to 20 which is still well below our policy in class size, our max class size for a third grade classroom is 25 I believe. So we're well below that if we're averaging around 20 in a class and that would save us $97,000 if we were to do that. Field trips, I'm imagining, Grant and I were talking about this earlier today, we're imagining that field trips will not look the same as it does next year because kids just won't be able to do that. We have to figure out transportation, we have to figure out, I don't think kids are gonna be making as many trips as they usually do and we budget over $60,000 for field trips alone. So if those field trips aren't happening because of transportation and ticket costs and all that kind of thing, then we would save a significant, probably not all of the $60,000 but it's just a significant amount of that. So that's where we are in terms of thinking of if the board would like us to really look at buckets to where we can save money that's currently budgeted for and it would move into our fund balance to further beef that up, then those are the buckets that we're looking at right now. If the board would like us to save more money, we can certainly look in more places but these are the ones I think that make the most sense for us at the moment. And again, all of them we could, we could put all of these on hold if you say no, where I think we're good, then we can do that as well. But that's what we're thinking about right now. And so I leave it up to you to ask any questions or discuss some of these slides. Stop sharing my screen, discuss anything you'd like to discuss. I'd just like to point out, just listening to that again that I am again just so impressed by all of the administration, all of the teachers, people working together as I'm listening to that thing, I'm hearing like we are still collectively in crisis and that that isn't stopping, but I'm also feeling a profound sense of gratitude that there are people who make this look like the response is easy. And I know that that is because, I know that that is because there's tremendous efficient work and outstanding competency happening that make it look like, oh, and this is just how respond to crises. So I just want to like, I'm very, our kids are lucky to be in our district with the people who are working for them. Thank you, Mara. That makes me feel very good. Yeah, I mean, I want to echo all of that. Yeah, you guys have have and continue to do a fantastic job and it's just very impressive how on top of this event, and I know the situation is both unprecedented and you know, quickly, quickly moving. So, you know, really appreciate the great work. I mean, I do have both a couple of questions and comments. Yeah, I mean, if the measure is truly a vaccine, then I think we can count on just a unusual start to the whole school year, but an unusual entire school year and maybe an unusual start to the following school year. Yeah, and that may change too. I mean, if they find a drug that takes care of the worst cases and treatment becomes something, there may be change of guidance of that, but kind of with that in mind with not knowing, how does some decisions like hiring a third grade teacher come into question and what is the class after next year's class look like if we are going to be liking the situation where he might have a larger class coming in and also just in terms of class size, how do we make a determination on that if we have something where there might be staggered attendance or splitting the days into groups of half coming in the morning, half coming in the afternoon, et cetera. Yeah, sorry, I muted myself and then I started looking for enrollment numbers so I could get you the exact numbers. And I can still do that. Grant might be able to pull it up a little faster than I can. Grant, I'm going to answer this question. If you can search for those enrollment numbers, that would be awesome. I know you might have them too. The third grade teacher, so what I know is that our models are predicting for class size that it's starting to get smaller at the primary levels for UES and moving up, right, the numbers that we're getting, it's starting to plateau at UES and then move up through the grade levels. And I talked with Ryan specifically about this position and it would have to increase significantly to reach those class size numbers. So if the max is 25 and the class size policy, which I believe it is, and the ideal is 20, then we, sorry, I think the class size numbers are coming at me right now. Then we have a significant amount of time to go before that happens. It's not, I know that the third grade team does not want that to happen and I don't think Ryan would necessarily want that to happen as well. However, if I'm thinking about this in terms of the board seeing the financial information coming at them right now and if there are areas that we can make decisions around this right now that don't cut our teacher salaries, don't cut our administrators, like don't hurt people specifically, that might be a place that we can look at. That's the way I'm thinking about it right now. It doesn't necessarily hurt kids in any way other than having a few more kids in the classroom. I guess kind of a follow-up question in terms of, and I hate to get the idea of like resourcer cuts, but for like direct support to the students, if you were to kind of tear the personnel that is really needed to deliver, are the classroom teachers at the top or is it just tough to make a call like that at all? Right now it's really hard to make a call like that. Like we don't know what it's going to be. I'd say yes, in terms of who we need, who we definitely need to support our kids regardless of the environment in which we're teaching in our classroom teachers and our special educators, absolutely. Now, like you said, though, we may be in a different world, we may be remote, we may, so the board may say, if you're in a remote world, it might be easier for us to have smaller groups of kids because you're going to be doing more one-on-one and it's a little harder to schedule that if you don't have the kids right in front of you and all that kind of stuff. So that might be a different way to think about it. But yeah, they're just putting some things on the plate for y'all to chew on. So I just want, can I? Oh, go ahead, Jim. Yeah, go for it, Bridget. I'm just going to ask if anyone else. So, I mean, on the budget side, I think I just wanted to try to step back and refer folks that are watching or concerned to give some of the things that confirm me because I didn't not normally a voice on the board for trying to do things like increased class size in the elementary school, which I think is generally a bad idea. But I think we're all concerned to given the deficit in the ed fund and the uncertainty around how that gap is going to be made up that districts are going to be put in a position in a couple of months where we're forced to make cuts that we don't particularly want to make. So that's, and I don't know if that's going to happen. I feel like none of us know if that's going to happen. The gap's going to have to be filled some way. Hopefully it's going to be filled with some federal funding, but it clearly, it seems pretty clear from the numbers that it can't be filled by raising property taxes but the increase would just be too staggering to fill the gap that way. So that's, I mean, I think that's why we're having this conversation is to see if it's responsible at this point to preserve some flexibility in the budget for the next couple of months, but until we see what choices we might have to face in July or August when the legislature decides how the ed fund is going to be handled for the coming year. And I do just echo the point that you just made Libby, which is that if we're actually in a remote learning world having another classroom teacher might be incredibly important because 20, trying to teach 23rd graders remotely feels like an impossible task. But laying off people at that point also feels like something we do not want to do. So I do think trying to preserve a little bit of flexibility and space in the budget in this time of uncertainty is important and I appreciate the thought that you've all put into trying to identify some of those buckets where we could hold off on spending for a few months. I had a very specific question in terms of thinking about the fall and the kinds of things that might be a board concern or areas where the board can be more helpful as opposed to sort of figuring out the curriculum. And one question I had is, is there a world, particularly kind of in the low or moderate physical contact options, is there a world in which we need more physical space? For example, to provide childcare while a lot of buildings are in use on a split, is there a world in which we might need more physical space and should the board be thinking about that? They're very well could be, but I don't know how you can get it. So I've thought about that as we think about different structures and we're just throwing ideas out right now. But if we think about different structures that have been suggested to us like an AMPM scheduled for elementary students, students, well, for a full-time working family an AMPM schedule would work. We need childcare for the PM or you need childcare for the AM. And so where would we do that? So would our high school, does that then affect our high schoolers so we can move elementary kids in the high school? That's been suggested to us. Like it's, so I, yes, we probably, I don't know how we're going to get around it and what we're going to strategize, but know that whenever we make a plan we're going to try to make the plan that makes the most sense for all of us. So that AMPM model may not make a whole lot of sense because we know that the majority of our families are working full-time. So we're going to try to figure out ways to make it work in a different way that could help working families as well. It's going to be tricky, but I don't know if, I don't know where we'd find more space and I don't know how we would, how we would outfit it for kids. I've also thought about how we could use if we could use part two for childcare, where could we, could we use North Branch Nature Center? Could we use, could we use other spaces in our community? But what happens when it rains and when it snows? You know, like there's lots of different like what ifs still up in the air around that? What about VCFA? We'd have to outfit it. I think that's the kind of thing where the community understood that that was the, that was what needed to happen for schools to open in some fashion, that the community might be there for us. So I don't think we should rule out the possibility that we could access other space. Oh yeah, I haven't rolled it out. We needed it in the community in New York. Yeah, all of those things are still like flying in the air right now, right? And we don't have a structure, we don't have our rules and guidelines yet. So we're just, we're just putting out ideas right now. I have a question. First of all, what was that, Jim? I just said go for it. Okay. So first of all, yeah, just at going the gratitude that everybody else has expressed, you guys have been doing an extraordinary job in these extremely difficult times. With regard to those decision points that you just put up and I don't have them up in front of me, but I don't think you showed us the number because Andrew LaRosa is probably seeking that number for the gym retrofit that you mentioned. Oh, it's not the gym retrofit. It's the flooding outside. It's not the inside gym. It's the outside. The outside, okay. So it's the pavement jobs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, sorry. Okay, and the thinking there is that that can help prevent further damage in the future, which can reduce costs for us in the long run and not having water in the building. Yeah, and Andrew's looking into it right now. He's got bids out. So that was one that I gave the go ahead to get bids and see what happens. And from Andrew's perspective, he's not sure what's gonna happen construction-wise. I mean, people could be desperate for work and therefore accept our bids and really get at it, right? Or they could be overwhelmed with work and say, we don't have time to do yours. Or they may not be able to get the supplies they need and the workers they need in order to do the work. So they were not able to do. So there's like so many things up in the air right now. Already, he did have a meeting with a contractor concerning the basketball court at MSMS. So I think there has been some interest with the bids that were put out for the basketball court. My general thought is that it never hurts to explore what options are out there and understand what the costs are going to be. But I think that we should be cautious right now when there is so much uncertainty. At the same time, we play, not only do we provide these critical services to the community and provide this education, which is an amazing, which is just a fundamental service for our community and our state, but we also spend a lot of money in the community and in the state and that supports a lot of other jobs. And so in some ways as a board and as an administration of this institution, during these tough economic times, I feel like there are some responsibilities that we have to balance there as well. So it's just thinking off the cuff there. And go back to Jim's question about third grade enrollment. Grant wrote that for the foreseeable future, they will come under class size maximums for the foreseeable future. Even without the teacher? According to our modeling data. But again, is that the right, it's the question, is it the right thing to do right now? No, absolutely. Jill. Thanks. I just had a couple of quick questions or comments from Libby's presentation, which was really helpful and I really appreciate it. It's nice to know that there are those options. You mentioned the group that's getting together to sort of plan out knowing we don't really know what the guidance is yet, but for fall and our direct instruction teachers, part of that group. They will be right now, it's very high level. So right now it's the leadership team with our two district wide instructional coaches and Mary Bechtel and Sarah Berger, who are part of the teacher's contract. The idea is that we get very high level and get some ideas down on paper and then bring our teachers in to get some other more meat. We need them for the meat and we need the administration to work on the bones and then we need the teachers to bring in the more detailed thoughtful questions. And so that's the plan that we're gonna use going forward and what are they gonna need in order to build their capacity to continue to work in a different world? They are not happy about that having to work in a different world. They're not looking forward to that. So we have to be really thoughtful about how we present it and what training we provide to build people's capacities and confidence. Well, I'm pretty, I'm just pretty impressed by how quickly this was all stood up as the crisis happened so quickly. And so having a few months to look ahead, once as you said, the picture gets a little clearer. I think they definitely probably have a lot of lessons learned and also suggestions that, with the wisdom of what we got thrown into might be helpful. The other thing is you mentioned, you mentioned a network administrator, but it made it seem like, is that a vacant position or? What we did was we, this was before Mike, Barry and I got here, we contract out for a network administration in the company that we contracted out. Let's just say we didn't decide to renew their contract for next year. So we need a new one. We need to contract that out. And most places that person has kind of been built up as an internal employee over time, it's kind of the person who works behind the curtain, and make sure that the network runs. We would like to continue to just contract that out to somebody so we don't have to worry about it. That's what we budgeted for, but we just don't have any takers yet. It's out to midnight. We just don't have any takers on that contract yet. Okay, thank you. And then I just, one last, I guess it's a comment. Couple months ago, pre COVID, we were having meetings about the middle school and the building and it seemed like we were one of the possible options was that we really kind of needed to Marie Kondo, that space that Pam was reflecting that there was probably some better use of some of that space if we had the time to like remove furniture and things like that. And I'm just wondering if that's something maybe the board could get folks together or parents in a few months from now or maybe with the custodial staff to like help create some more space because it does seem like space is gonna be what's in demand. So I just, it's nothing we can solve, but I just wanted to throw that out there because I know that having the building open and empty for a long period of time is normally a really hard thing to have. And so if there is anything that we can all do to mobilize to reach off of the library or hog out some of the classrooms, maybe there's an opportunity there to do that. I know we're doing that at the state where we have a chance of going clean up. And one of the things that we are gonna tell teachers when they do, when they are able to access the building and the classrooms is clean out, clean clean. Teachers like to hoard, stop hoarding. Like stop doing that because I think that will, you're right, that will increase our state, our space capacity. Thank you, that was all I had, thanks. Hi, mothers, Brian. Did you guys get a question in Liberty? Yeah. So I hadn't thought about it too much before, but this discussion about the third grade numbers and how big classes will be next year, I don't have any idea how we would forecast or predict it, but has the administration been thinking about students not returning in the fall? So depending on how things shake out with the safety precautions in whichever format we ended up going with, I could see some families saying, I don't want my kiddo going to school in this environment. We're going to homeschool this year. Do we have? We're anticipating an increase in homeschooling. We are anticipating that. Actually, Jim and I were on a webinar the other day as a panel members and another superintendent said that exact same thing. Dave Young said it. So I wouldn't be surprised if there was an increase in homeschool numbers. And another thing that we've also talked about is just sending a survey that says, do you want us to provide remote learning opportunities for your kids? If we had enough numbers of that, could we assign some staff to be responsible for that, which lowers our numbers in the classroom? And that's kind of one of those scenarios for the more contact. Like if we could limit by a bit, would that be good enough? Because there might be some parents who said, yeah, let's keep going with this remote stuff. As long as it increases a little bit in terms of what it is and what's offered. So that's definitely on the table and part of our larger planning document. Great, thanks. Great, others? Emma? So because I'm new, I may not have this background information. Maybe you all already know, but I'm wondering what the budget deficit is projected to be in light of COVID-19? Like how much funds are we trying to raise with these cuts? Yes, Grant was having internet problems. So he is in and out with the finance committee. The people who are just in the finance committee can probably say that we're actually not, we're not registering a deficit from COVID-19 for this school year, for the 2020 school year. Because we have lots of savings in other areas. So when you think about the fact that we're not hiring substitutes right now, teachers aren't going on field trips. There's no spring sports. We got a credit towards transportation. When you put all of those things in a bucket, then we're actually, we're actually right now predicting to be better off than we would have been if we'd been in traditional school. So if we were to make cuts now for next year's budget, we'd really be looking at the budget. We'd be padding the fund balance for the next years, for our next budget round that we're gonna go into, which could be significantly harder than previous years. But do we have any projections? Are there any projections of the deficit that we're gonna be working with or not yet? We don't know. At the state level in the Ed fund, it's 150 million for FY 21. And that's after 70 million in FY 20. But the 70 million in FY 20 is covered by draining the reserves and interfund loans from like the general fund and other loans. But that's at the statewide level. Yeah, we don't know how that's gonna sugar down to the districts yet. Okay, I did have one other question earlier on in your presentation, you were talking about IEP, students on IEPs and that contact has been made with every student on an IEP, is that correct? And I was just wondering what the definition of contact was under for that presentation. So it's case managers have called the, so when we say we're making parent contacts or team of contact parents, they've called to agree upon a distance learning plan. So that's what the guidance was for that. So the team would call, the lead special educator would call the parents and the family and child if it was an old enough child and decide on what the services are gonna look like going forward collaboratively. And then that was written in what we're calling now because we don't have enough acronym DLP, which is distance learning plan. And that may influence what happens down the road when we're allowed to be back in school that services may need to be made up because they can't be done right now. And so that was all part of that distance learning plan and was documented. As far as I know, we have only one family that we haven't been able to contact for who has a child on an IEP. And so we've gotten a DLP written for all of our other cases. And written and signed virtually somehow by the family. Yeah. Maybe I have a question about the expenditure or the last slide where you had about $205,000 worth of expenses or savings listed and in that the weekend custodian line and one of the things that you mentioned was that that may significantly impact the community because they use it on the weekend. Yes. So with the, you know, we're unclear about the guidance of what's gonna be allowed, what's not gonna be allowed and that guidance, we don't know when that's gonna come and how that's gonna shape up. What's the timeline in terms of hiring the custodian? If you work to hire it, how long can we wait? And, you know, is there any overlap or anything? I will tell you honestly, Aniket in my almost two years as superintendent of Montpelier Roxbury, I don't think we've ever had a time where we don't have a custodian position open school spring. So custodians are actually a little easier than say a teacher because you can hire them on at any time. And so is there a, the drive and the push would be to have a weekend custodian on staff when things like basketball start because there's such a need for court space if basketball can start, right? So that would be probably where that weekend custodian comes into effect, the biggest for the community anyway. And we were really, we paid last year something like $45,000 in overtime costs to our custodial staff because of the building usage. And so what we're trying to do is eliminate that cost, right? So with a weekend custodian, which would go a long way to doing that. And so it just has ramifications. Do we need to make that decision tonight? No, not at all. We can wait on that. We can wait through the summer and see what happens in the summer and see what the guidance comes down as. It's in the budget. So officially we could hire somebody on July one because that's when the fiscal year turns over obviously but we don't have to. Any other comments? And then I guess the question is do we, do we have any, how do we want to deal with kind of the proposed, I don't want to call them cuts, but the proposed suspensions in spending that we're not committed to. I'm okay, just letting the administration go forward. But if others feel we should take some sort of action, I'm happy to entertain that. Tim, I'm not sure what you mean by letting the administration go forward. Do you mean keeping this thing on hold for a short time? If we had any objections to her, to the spending decisions they've made, I just want to pose that question to the board and make sure that we're okay with the update or whether we want to kind of weigh in specifically on that in some way, shape or form. And to be clear, those aren't decisions that have been made yet with the exception of the construction. They are, but they are things on the table. So I know the board is hearing all the pressures from the state. And your primary responsibility is the finances of our district. So I wanted to make sure that you knew that there were some options that we were thinking about. And I would love, because I very much value your opinions on whether or not we should move forward in some of those or not. And my inclination is that they all look prudent to me. And I'm okay just leaving it as an update without weighing in specifically, but if others feel differently, I think now's the time to speak up. I mean, there'll probably be other times, but now is a good time while the ideas have been shaped. Jill? I agree. I felt it was helpful to just have those laid out and they do seem, I think prudent is the right word. And it seems too early to know what the right answer is for the hiring for the teacher position because that will depend on if there are guidance that say you have to have a smaller class size or offer distance learning. So it's nice to know that that's an option. And I also appreciate the lens of those are things that could happen without impacting a currently employed staff versus the other way around. And the custodial piece, it sounds like we don't have to decide that for months. So I think that that was a very helpful update. And until we know more, there's probably not much you can do about the position ones. Thanks. The third grade teacher, if we wanna hire, if we are going to hire the third grade position, we wanna put that out there sooner rather than later just because of candidate pools. Then it doesn't seem like we have the option right now to do it. I would be, I mean, that would be the only thing on the list that I would be concerned about moving forward with is not hiring the third grade teacher. I know that historically, you know, groups of parents fought pretty hard to have that teacher added. And so at the very least, I would wanna make sure that we all went into that decision, committing to it not being a precedent, but just being sort of a stopgap measure. Good. So I don't love that we just got the information and we're trying to make reactionary decisions right now. So could we get that? I appreciate that it was presented. I guess my general thought is, could we get that presentation? Can we take a look at it? Can we consider it a little bit more? Talk with community members a little bit maybe and continue this discussion next time. I understand that if we were to proceed with some of these things that it would be good to move sooner rather than later, but two weeks doesn't seem like it would make or break things for us. Yeah, I know. And I didn't mean to apply this to the end of the discussion, but I didn't wanna give people the chance to weigh in and my guess is this will obviously evolve, but I think that makes a lot of sense. And first of all, yeah, I share Emma's concern, but I've also seen, I mean, I've got two big financial concerns that I think just are very real and with the caveat that I am a robust supporter of spending on what our schools need to thrive. But one is the possibility there might be some sort of clawback next year because the financial situation is so bad where the districts might just be mandated to make some sort of cuts, which I think is a distinct possibility. And then regardless of that the year after next year, you know, without a probably significant federal bailout is going to be a tough, tough year. And, you know, the more we're in a position to, you know, any dollars spent now, not spent now is a dollar we don't have to worry about accounting for when that tough time comes. So, you know, I, you know, we have to, we just have to exercise approvals that we, I think prefer not to, but I just wanna make that point. And yes, yes, Andrew, I think we can certainly come back and visit this, you know, in two weeks in, you know, in June as this evolves. And I'm sure we'll be happy to share the presentation. Yeah. And I just wanna add to that that, and I appreciate Andrew's point that I do think it's good to have a little bit of time to, for us to process these things. And I would also add that as school board members our role that, you know, we potentially have here is to try to advocate for clearer guidance, faster guidance, more certainty from the state for how, what choices the districts are actually gonna face in terms of roles that we have versus roles that the administration has, that's an area that we can be active in. And it's pretty clear from what we're hearing that one of the big challenges for the administration is trying to plan without any guidance. And that's not anyone's fault. No one knows how, no one knows how to plan the situation and we're all dealing with this. But trying to be a voice for getting a quicker idea of what we're gonna have to deal with will be the best thing we can do for our district, I think. Yeah. I agree. I couldn't agree more. Thank you. Emma. Would we be able to move forward and advertise the position and then make the decision on the hire later, you know, put some wording into the, into the job posting that says that we're not sure what our budget will be. Yeah, so our, we have rules that we have to just contractual rules. So anything posted has to be, I believe 10 to 20 days or something like that. So, I mean, you have to have a certain amount of time. So we could post that position just so we get candidates into the fold and then decide not to hire it or just, or you know, whatever. So we can certainly do that and we have some time to do that. That's a good point, Emma. Yeah, so we can do that. There was one other thing that I was wondering if, if you've posed it, and this is like a sticky situation, but to the staff, to all the faculty, if there would be anyone that would want to take a year sabbatical unpaid, you know, maybe somebody who's really not into distance learning or something like that. There might be more takers in that than we want right now. We have not posed that, but we could put that in our big list too. Thank you. I was just gonna say that the state has a hiring freeze right now for, you know, some would argue better, some would argue worse. A number of offices, including the one where I work, we have proceeded down the road with, you know, advertising jobs and what have you. And we went forward with some interviews letting people know, but you can only get so far. So, you know, at the beginning, might be worth it if you guys don't, I know you guys are stretched really thin, but yeah, I mean, I think that the big contextual question here with regard to us in the financial situation is whether federal dollars can be used to cover revenues. And right now they cannot be. So if there's a change in law or there's a new law that allows for those federal dollars to cover lost revenues and we, so there's just so much financial uncertainty there. But I think in terms of advocating at the ALE level for some of the things that our superintendent is asking for, that seems like we could probably do that sooner rather than later. I know legislators are already advocating to use those federal dollars to make up for lost revenues. Excellent. Any other comments? Otherwise, we can move to our next agenda, which item, which is, I set my agenda down somewhere, I cannot see it now, but I believe it's moving into executive session and board training. James, I think I should have said this earlier, but I did wanna ask that we add to the executive session a brief discussion of contract negotiations. Yep, we can do that. So why don't we get, we need a special emotion for that, which Bridgette is uniquely gifted at. Lots of people can do this one, but I don't, do you want me to do that one? Yeah. I move that we find that discussing contract negotiations in public session would put the district at a substantial disadvantage. All right, do I have a second? A second. That was Andrew. Okay. Andrew, yay or nay? Yay. Emma? Yay. Bridgette? Yay. Ryan? Yay. Mara? Yay. Jill? Yay. Anacet? Yay. Okay, and Jerry? Hi. And so now we need an actual motion to go into executive session for the purpose of what is, what is board training under? I'm not sure that. Ryan, do you know that one? Board training for executive session. I don't know on the top of my head. I'm not sure why that falls. So we've had trainings from our attorneys in the past that were in executive session because they were legal advice and they were directed, it was a training, but it fell under that part of the public records law. I believe the one we did with Susan Holston last year was in executive session too. From the VSBA. I'm not sure that it was. Was it? Okay. I could. I mean, we were, it was, there wasn't anyone there from the public, but I'm not sure we went into executive session. But you wouldn't have the statute memorized, would you? I have not memorized, but I can pull it up fast. 16 VSA. Not 16. I think it's three. The three was not in executive session, at least not all of it last year either. Right. They can't, they can't all. What's the content of the training? Equity and diversity, DIS. Libby, some time last year provided us training on the similar topic that was in open session. Unless there's something that would somehow identify staff, personnel or students, this training should probably fall in open session. I agree. Yeah. And I think that's right. And we just stay in open session and can we use our motion about contracts later? We can, yeah. We don't have to do that again. We can use it later. All right. Well, let's, I don't see a reason to go on executive session either. Yeah. I don't think it fits an exception. No. Yeah. No, we're not evaluating personnel, not legal advice. No, we're not getting legal advice. We're not talking about contracts. We're not negotiating anything. Should we start then? So I think we can start tomorrow whenever you're ready. Again, thank you. Thank you for doing this. Yeah. Absolutely. My first question. Oh, but I asked Anna and she is the wrong person. Libby, as host, could you make me co-host so that I can share my screen? I can as soon as I figure out how to do that. Yeah. Oh, crap. More make host. You are, I'm changing the host to you. You have the power that you can mute us all. I have used that power on me. I occasionally have. Okay. So we're doing a kind of base level diversity, equity and inclusion training. My hope is that this can kind of be a multi-session thing that we can do as a board. And then we can stretch that over a period of time. We don't have to like fit it all in several months. We can look at six or eight or even a full year. But I'd love to look at doing something like a maybe five or six sessions over time to dig into some areas where we can do diversity, equity, and inclusion work in practice rather than only in theory. Because a lot of what we'll discuss in a really initial session is mostly theory. So that is put forward. And I will, I'm planning on taking like my hope is like 40 minutes, something like that. Does that feel okay for folks? Yeah. Okay. Awesome. I like the idea of having this piece part of a multi-part presentation because I think something we need to have a continued discussion on, and I think best learned over time. Yeah. And I will point out something that I think all of us already know. And that is that the response to COVID-19 that's going to take place now for the next one to possibly three years is going to disproportionately impact marginalized students, marginalized families, and marginalized community members. And so the more in touch with that we can be, the better we can be at making financial decisions and making, you know, personnel decisions and just making educational like thoughts. Not we specifically, but people who work in the district can be at making some decisions that are a little bit more mindful of the varying impacts. So that's that. And I'm going to share my screen with you. And Jim, are you able to see my screen? Yes, I can see your screen. Excellent. Okay, so I just wanted to do a quick, like here's what we're going to cover and learning content for the evening. It's going to be really quite structurally basic. We're going to first start with what's termed the four eyes. And that is a way of understanding how bias and discrimination and oppression operate so that you can then figure out how to intervene, disrupt and rewrite. So we'll do that first. Then we'll talk a little bit about how implicit bias operates in humans so that we can think a little bit about how to interrupt that personally. And then we'll end with a little bit of discussion about what are diversity, equity and inclusion and what pertinence do they have as we talk as a district moving forward. So there's your kind of scaffolding for the learning and we'll start with the four eyes. So the four eyes of oppression are really intended to help us understand that the way that we operate together happens at different levels. So there's a video that I'm going to show you here that artistically, I don't know. Okay, I wasn't expecting it to be so efficient. And then it was. So let us back up and listen to this nice person explain things to us via Legos. Is it just me or the sound's not coming through? I don't know. The sound's gonna, yeah, the sound's gonna come through. Okay, let me fix that. Okay, let's try that again here. Oppression. It's a word that's often used as a blanket term but there's actually a whole lot more to it. There are four interlocking aspects of oppression ideological, institutional, interpersonal and internalized. And it might seem like a small difference but it's very important to be able to distinguish between each kind because understanding oppression is the first step to fighting it. Let's start with the core at the heart of every form of oppression, ideology. Every system of oppression comes from the idea that one group is somehow better than another. Ideological oppression starts when the dominant group associates positive qualities with itself and negative qualities with the marginalized or othered group. Ideological oppression describes the deeply ingrained social group of inequality. It's the larger overarching idea that leads to the isms. For example, the idea that black people are dangerous is ideological racism. The idea that poor people are lazy is ideological classism. Ideological oppression leads to institutional oppression. Institutional oppression is the way that systems and institutions manifest the dominant ideology. Institutions control access. Who is able to get to what and how? This includes legal rights, police practice, access to medical care and education, public policy, political power and media representation. For example, when women make two thirds of what men make that's institutional sexism. When a building is constructed without wheelchair ramps that's institutional ableism. All of this leads to interpersonal oppression. Interpersonal oppression is probably the easiest to recognize because it happens all around us. Interpersonal oppression is the way that people play out discrimination and violence on each other. It can take the form of microaggressions, jokes, stereotypes and harassment. For example, when a student is bullied for being gay it's interpersonal homophobia. When a Muslim person is told that they're a terrorist it's interpersonal Islamophobia. And all those forces, ideological, institutional and interpersonal lead to internalized oppression. Internalized oppression is the way that people with marginalized identities internalize narratives of their own inferiority. It's what leads people to feel less than. This is the end goal of oppression. The oppressive party doesn't need to exert force any longer because the marginalized group is enacting oppression on itself to maintain the status quo. It's important to remember that it's never a marginalized person's fault that they feel internalized oppression. It's simply what happens when someone faces negative stereotypes, low expectations and ongoing discrimination. So for example, an immigrant feeling embarrassed about having an accent is internalized xenophobia. When a trans woman feels that they can never be a real woman that's internalized transphobia. So to review, the four eyes of oppression are ideological, institutional, interpersonal and internalized. Each of these types are interconnected and completely supported by the others. They can never exist on their own and can even be seen as a cycle. Now that you understand the different kinds of oppression you're even more equipped to fight it. Don't forget that any effort to dismantle oppression should aim to address it at all four of these levels. Thanks for watching. Video is kind of just a icebreaker if you will to kind of get a base level discussion going in your brain about what are ways that I might have seen those things exist. I'll offer you also a couple of examples so that we can think a little bit about like how does this apply to MRPS as a district and as the people that we are that create the district as. So ideological oppression is gonna be like the basis for all of the other oppressions and those things exist in humans often in a cultural fashion. So often we'll be carrying messages that we have learned from culture over time or from media over time or from being taught such that they just become part of how we imagine the world. And some of those things are gonna be like stereotypes that are ideological and some of those things are going to be implicit bias and we'll talk about that in a moment but there's a big difference between ideological oppression that you know about can think about and can observe and ideological oppression that is happening inside of your brain because your brain self-programs to work faster and then you don't necessarily see the processes it's moving through and the ways that it might be biasing actions. So we'll talk a little bit about how we get at the implicit part because it's a little bit more insidious than things that are spoken and known and things that we understand to be kind of shared stereotypes. The institutional part is broad. It's everything from our physical facilities to our data management systems. It's our laws, regulations, guidelines, handbooks. It is our layout of spaces. It is our curriculum choices. All of the things that are the structure systems and institutions that help us live day to day and do the activities that we wanna do like learn and educate or even play sports or whatever other activity that is, all of those pieces are institutional pieces that we have in place to make those things functional and they're all places where institutional oppression might show up. And I use the word oppression because it is helpful in being broad that it, you know, I don't have to say like and that's racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, like there's an infinite number of isms and oppression covers them. But I will acknowledge that many of us have many identities that are privileged identities. And for people who have privileged identities, sometimes they hear the word oppression and they kind of shut down a little bit. They're like, oppression. Like we're not living in Stalinist Russia. We don't have oppression. And so I just wanna offer that if that word is causing tweak or tension for anyone, a learning tactic that can be sometimes helpful, at least as far as imagination, is imagine that you're a lobster. And this is gonna be, there's a point, I promise. So you imagine that you're a lobster because lobsters don't stay in the same exoskeleton through their whole lives. Over the course of the time that they live, they develop many external shells. So at first, what happens when they are growing and changing is that they run into the shell that they're physically currently in and there's friction and it's tight and it feels uncomfortable. And that may be some of what we experience now is the twinge of learning something new starting to feel uncomfortable. What then happens is they break out of the shell and there's a period of time where they're vulnerable or their body isn't coated with something new yet, isn't protected. And that is a place that learning goes next, a place where you feel a little bit vulnerable, a little bit uncertain, a little bit like, even sometimes feel like worried that someone will trick you or that someone might take advantage of your vulnerability. So understanding that that vulnerability is gonna be there and that those feelings might be there is a great way to hang on until you develop that new skin, that new exoskeleton that's gonna fit your new understandings and you'll be able to be flexible and move around in the world with the new information, the way that you move around in the world with old information. So I just like to offer that framing for discomfort because it's not easy to talk about like, well, what do we need to do to make the world less sort terrifying sometimes, especially when we are the grownups who have to make the decisions for the environments for our youth. So that said, that moves me into the interpersonal concept and the interpersonal stuff is the stuff that we often think that we recognize already when we're talking about the issue of diversity, equity and inclusion. And that's going to be like hazing, harassment, bullying, et cetera. So we know that kids picking on each other, we know that a teacher intentionally eliminating a child, those things are all things that individual people or groups of people can do to one another. So that's the interpersonal component and it's really easy for us to understand things like I know what name calling is. Microaggressions, if you're not already familiar with that term basically means little stuff that happens on a day to day basis to marginalized people that causes little abrasions, nonstop emotional abrasions. And one at a time they don't seem like a big deal but you almost wanna imagine it like fine grained sandpaper that if you rubbed it over your skin for hours and days and weeks, you would be very raw and might even sustain damage. So that's how we wanna understand microaggressions and that can be just to give you some examples, things like for people who are LGBT, an example might be if someone walks up to you and you're a person who identifies as a woman and you happen to have a partner as a woman but people say to you right away like, oh, what are you and your husband doing for Valentine's Day, right? Like this assumption that who you are is not the norm and isn't expected. Another example is that often people will do that backhanded compliment thing where they'll be like, wow, you are really assertive for a woman. And that's like, oh, okay, that was meant to be reinforcing and supporting but actually what that does is reminds me that you don't see me in the way that I'm trying to project myself because of gender. So that's an idea of what kind of microaggressions can look and sound like. And then finally is the internalized piece and that's the way that as the video mentioned, over time, if oppression is really lengthy and stained, people start to produce oppression in themselves. And sometimes that it looks like believing themselves to have some kind of stereotypical weakness or problem. And sometimes it is believing that the other people in your shared identity group or community have that issue. So an example in the video was that over time, if we tell trans people that they are less than and that they aren't really the gender that they know themselves to be, over time they come to question like, do I know myself? Maybe I'm somehow wrong. Maybe there's something wrong with me. Maybe I'm sick because the other people are telling me that my sense of self is incorrect. And another thing that we can see is kind of like, so there's a long-term stereotype, for instance, among men that like, there isn't any good reason why men should want to be working with young children. And so a man who wants to become a preschool teacher and elementary school teacher, sometimes people will question. And other men who also even are interested in the same things will have a triggering sense of the same questions. But why do you want to work with young children? Even if they themselves know why they want to work with young children and that they're exceptional educators the same way that anyone else or even mediocre educators, we have those, that's a thing. That sense that even people who are like you and share your identities and interests, you start to project the dominant ideology onto their motives and onto their identities. Those are all like internalized oppression. So all of the intervention strategies for making things more equitable involve hitting all of these spots at once. So let me just show you this tool. This would be an example of something that we would do in a further training. And that would be to go over action steps for making interventions. So for instance, in this form that you see on your screen, the personal gets at what are the ways that I can rewrite my biases and stereotypes, discomforts and confusions about any identity even if it is one that I hold myself. So an example there might be maybe you go to the movies and you always tend to see movies who have the same sorts of actor in it or have the same sorts of storyline. And maybe a thing that you start to do is go and see films or watch TV shows that have different kinds of characters in them. That's why representation matters so much in TV and we talk about that, how it can be really groundbreaking for instance for there to be a person who has a major role in the TV show who also has a visible disability because it's a normalizing factor that makes us start to replace the implicit bias messages that we've learned so far with new information that is particular to people. And that story understanding and normalization is what helps us rewrite the brain pieces. You also wanna think of this as, there's a theory called windows and mirrors that lots of educators are familiar with and that is that the world around you, if it reflects you, if you can see yourself in it you feel affirmed and you feel like you're really there. So an example of that might be if you're watching commercials and commercials never have people who look like you in them, it can start to feel like you're totally erased and are you even really in the world or even valid if you can't be so normal as to be sold a cell phone. And then there are pieces of that that are also about windows into other people's experiences. And that might be for instance, an elementary school library that has, maybe it has the books that are about all kinds of different people's stories. So maybe even different family structures different genders, different ethnicities, different nationalities, different traditions, different walks of life. So an example that I came across a couple of years and was incredibly impressed by, I believe the title of the book is called The Tin Can Man. I might have to look that up. But the concept was that it was about this boy who sees a man on his block who is always collecting tin cans out of people's trash or out of people's recycling. And he gets to have a conversation with this person about like, well, why do you do that all the time? And the person talks about like, well, for me, I'm having a really hard time financially. So this really helps me that I can trade in these tin cans. And there's an opportunity where that child goes and talks to parents. And the parents are like, yeah, actually that man used to live in this building. And there are some things that have gone really wrong for him in his life and in the ways that we deal with people like that, such that he doesn't have as many options as other people have. And by the end of the story, you're able to see this person as a full person, rather, even if you have not yourself experienced unstable housing or a lack of financial flow. And that window into other people's experience that humanizes them is critical to making it so that we remember them when we build our structures and we remember them and honor them when we interact as humans. So that's the personal. The interpersonal is a little bit about like intervening in situations that harassment, rising bullying might exist. So that's a lot of scenario practice. And a lot of speaking up is often what the internal and interpersonal stuff looks like. The structural is again, like what the institutional would have been and that's looking at what have our forms say? What does our database say? You know, and you wanna imagine that as shifts we've made before, none of this is new. So an example might be when we first realized that not every child who comes to school is being taken care of by a parent. And so we stopped using the word parents and started saying parent or guardian or even started moving toward caregiver, caretaker because it was more accurate for a lot of people and that's a way of creating inclusion and not other folks and making them feel like they are outside and not considered. And it changes how we imagine those people might interact with the people who take care of them. So that's that piece. And the last is the instructional. The instructional in our world of education gets at the ideological because a lot of the ideology that we learn, we learn through media and lessons that we are even exposed to in our schools. So if our instruction is more inclusive and more responsive then that changes the ideology of coming generations and can also rewrite our own ideology. So that's the four eyes. It's super fun sociology 101 experience. Congratulations, you're on your way to a master's. The next part is just about recognizing and rewriting implicit bias. And this part is about how your brain even operates to create this environment of unfairness in the first place. Sometimes people are jerks and I don't want to take that away from the reality that sometimes people genuinely do believe they're better than other people based on identity and sometimes people intentionally make rules that are created to exclude others. That is not, not a thing. But it is also not the only way that we create inequity among ourselves. We often create inequity by putting things out into the world that come from our implicit biases and aren't really examined. But don't mean that we're a bad person and oftentimes are even things that are counter to what we consciously believe and try for. So I first want to give you an example of how that operates. So it takes just a moment and you can respond in the chat. If I told you to sort cards in a deck by hearts and diamonds and clubs and spades and then I told you to sort them by clubs and hearts and diamonds and spades, which would go faster? The first set or the second set? And you can respond in the chat. Hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades. Yes, the first set and why? Why would the first set go faster? Color, perfect. So that is what you want to understand about your brain. Your brain is designed to not have to think about as much stuff cognitively as it doesn't need to because there's too much information in the world to process. And so your brain is excellent at creating fast ways to get through decisions and tasks. So often what it will do is it will recognize rules and patterns that otherwise you might not intentionally put into place to try to do things faster. Your brain will do it for you. So here's an example where your brain is automatically gonna sort based on color and that's gonna be faster than trying to sort based on the actual shape. And you can see that born out when the color element is taken away as a possibility. And so you're forced to do it based on shape and all of a sudden the process slows down a lot. That is a process that's called associations. And your brain links things together and the more closely it associates things, the faster it can move. And so it learns over time to associate in such a way that you actually aren't even conscious of it. And I'll get at what that means here in a moment. But what I want you to understand is that without associations, your brain takes longer to do things and thus it automatically is gonna make those associations to speed things up, which means that one of the things that's key to how we can start to undo some of the damage is to slow things back down again, to take things apart that ordinarily we might do automatically or without a lot of critical thought. So if you haven't heard of it yet, Harvard has this amazing series of tests called the Implicit Association Test. And what it was originally designed to do was tell us information about how closely our brains connect concepts. A really innocuous example of how that happens is that they'll do an example where they have flowers and bugs, nice words and bad words. And they do a test to see how quickly you can match up different words. So just like we did with the hearts and diamonds and things, at first what they might say is, we want you to push the left hand button every time a flower or a good word comes up and we want you to push the right hand button any time an insect or a bad word comes up. And so you take that test. And then the next one they say, well, this time you're gonna hit that left time button any time a flower or a bad word comes up and you're gonna hit the right hand button any time an insect or a good word comes up. And what we end up finding is that our brains connect good words and flowers like that's a connection, flowers are good, good things are good. And so that goes a lot faster than when we're trying to put them together based on not having that rule available to us. And a lot of folks are not sitting there thinking intentionally bugs are bad and bad words are bad. And so they are similar, right? Nobody spends their time thinking that way. So that's a way to understand with examples that are kind of not socially charged, how your brain operates that way. But it also ends up translating to how we deal with one another. So another example that they do in the test is they show you photos of different types of people and they're usually sketches so that they're not of a particularly like a distinct person but more of an imagined person. And showing these images of people who have all kinds of different physical traits, they do all of those images in similar ways that they do flowers and good things. So they might say, we want you to associate words that mean weakness and images of women or words that mean strength and images of men. And then the next test might be, now we want you to do that same button push with words that mean strength and images of women or over here, words that mean weaknesses and images of men. And then you're able to actually measure with help of a computer, how fast your brain connects those different word and people categories. And there is an overwhelming data set that tells us some things about biases that we're all holding even when we don't necessarily believe or want them. So in that example, the vast majority of us will connect women and words of weakness and men and words of strength faster than we can connect women and strength and men and weakness. Which means that our brain has to do more work and anytime our brain has to do more work, that's an indicator that we would need to be paying more attention or investing more energy in order to make it do the harder job. So let's just review some basic stuff about implicit bias. Number one, your brain makes bias connections automatically. You don't turn it on, you don't make it a manual decision on your own. They happen without any kind of switch that you flip of your own. They happen involuntarily. So you are not choosing to make the connection. As a matter of fact, they're normally not even conscious. So a lot of connections that your brain is making and ways that it's creating decisions happen without your awareness or intentional control at all. Like there are factors that your brain is weighing that you are not cognating about. And that can be really weird to think about because a lot of us like to feel that we have control over all the things that we're thinking but our brains are way more powerful than that. And if they weren't that powerful we couldn't do all the things that we can, but they are. And so what it means is sometimes the computer is doing things running in the background that we aren't selecting intentionally in front of us. And those things aren't available just by thinking about it. So you can't just sit in a space and think, I want to think about what my implicit biases are because they often aren't at a conscious level and maybe never have been. So what really works there is learning what the biases look like or sound like. And then once you have examples you can start to observe for places that they might be taking place in your own thinking or places that they might be taking place out in the world. An example I like to give of that is sometimes like you learn a new word and then for the few days after that all of a sudden you're like, oh my God I heard this word everywhere, where was it before? It wasn't that the word wasn't there before it was that you didn't know it and you didn't know to look for it. And so that concept didn't register for you at all but all of a sudden once you've learned about the concept you're like, oh, I can see where that's happening all around me. So that's an example of kind of how implicit bias works. If you don't know that it's even there you cannot just think about it. You can't just bring it up out of your brain. You have to be taught what to look for and then make changes based on that. And they're distinct from your known biases, attitudes and stereotypes. So I am a dog person. I adore dogs. My known bias is that tiny dogs aren't dogs to me. I don't consider them dogs and I don't like them. That's my known attitude and bias. But what might be operating in the background for me is something like dogs, big dogs are dangerous. Even though I actually don't believe that personally that's not my belief, my bias that's not even my experience of big dogs. But over the course of time enough messages have got into my brain that say big dogs might be dangerous beware of dog, that sort of thing that that is operating in my mind even though I don't hold that conscious belief. And that can happen the same way about people you get the same messages over and over and over again. And so they end up actually being in the background of how you feel, how you feel physically when you're in the presence of people or how you are thinking about the people even if you don't actually, if those things don't rise to consciousness. Thinking about thinking is literally meta and also meta, right? Like it's a little bit like this is a lot of very theoretical stuff, Mara. And then we are going to get to the last theoretical here in a moment. The last thing I wanna emphasize is that everyone has implicit biases. It is not possible for brains to program themselves without them, you just can't. So we all have them, they may differ person to person culture and culture community to community based on the messaging that you've received. But you have them regardless of whether you are conscious of them or not. And so one of the things that we know from the data and that honestly we could probably say that we know historically and anecdotally even if it makes us uncomfortable is that almost all of us worldwide regardless of our own identities, prefer. And prefer doesn't mean like better. It means that have more positive ad attributes associated with them. We feel better about them. Those pieces come into play for people who are whites, who are men, who are straight, who are cisgender which means that you have the same gender inside that we might expect based on if we saw the label on your birth certificate. So if your birth certificate says female and you've always felt like a girl or a woman you're a cisgender woman. And if your birth certificate says male and you've always felt like a man or a boy you're a cisgender man or boy and able-bodied. And there are many other identities that are also in that area. We can think about class-based in that upper middle class is the preferred is the ideal. And then there are all of the other identities in the world that are not those. And so among them people of color, women, queer folks, trans folks, disabled folks, folks who experience poverty. In our country, often people whose native language isn't English. These are things that are dichotomies that sometimes you might guess but that you might not realize are operating within you especially if they are things that you actively disagree with. And remember that some of this stuff's internalized. So I identify as a queer woman and I still on that test have taken it several times and the data comes back that I prefer and associate good things more quickly with men and straight people. Even though I love my identities and literally work my professional life around them. So that's what I mean by things that are happening in your brain that you might not be conscious of and things that are collective. And when they're collective, that means that sometimes we produce a world that reflects that even if we don't believe it. And that's the worry that we get into with schools as an institution is that we can sometimes inadvertently build schools, build classrooms, build environments that reproduce that preferred mindset, the dominant mindset even if we are not actively trying to do that which means that we actively have to try really hard to undo or not do those things in the first place because they're unconscious and they happen automatically if you're not slowing down a little bit. Okay. Now we will watch this one quick video here from a New York Times series. There are more videos in the series. They're awesome and they're short and I would recommend that you watch the other four but we're just gonna watch two. And the first one that we're gonna watch is about understanding what it is that we're talking about about the ways that our brains automatically use associations to make decisions in the world and to inform our actions. And I think that there may be an ad and so we might have to sit through it. It's almost always for IBM or Verizon. So I apologize in advance, if that's the case. I'm not gonna sit up here all day and make- Let's look at how to measure bias in ourselves and in others. Here's Dela Chug from NYU. We sent emails to real professors in real universities. They contacted over 6,500 professors at random from 260 American universities. We sent them an email that looked like it came from a real person asking for a meeting to learn more about the PhD program in that university. But we randomly assigned whether the fictional person sending that email had a name that sounded male or female and sounded white, Chinese, Hispanic, Indian or black. What we found that is if you were a white male, you were far more likely to receive a response back than if you were in all those other categories put together as a group. Some of this could be explicit racism, but it's far more likely that in many cases these professors are just busy. They can't respond to every email they get. So they kind of let their subconscious decide for them. And that's where their biases come through. Research shows that our racial biases are often more about who we choose to help than who we don't. And we tend to help people who are similar to us. But you aren't 6,500 randomly selected professors. So how can you figure out where you might be making similar unconscious choices? First, there's a well-known test online you can take that can help show you biases you hold. Or just do an audit. Whatever data you have, whether it's formal data in a computer or whether it's just data that's sort of anecdotal, look at the data. For example, I met this fantastic executive in Silicon Valley. He takes great pride in being someone who actively tries to achieve gender balance on his teams, knowing that Silicon Valley and tech are skewed heavily male. So he looked at his professional social network, his Twitter, his LinkedIn. He found his network was far more skewed male than he expected. So there is a place where he could actively work to shift that and that's what he's been doing since then. So this is not a scientifically exact self-audit, but it can still be useful and you can audit anything. So maybe start by taking that online test for bias. Maybe check out whose emails you're applying to. But you can also audit yourself for implicit bias by asking a friend to observe you in the real world. If you're a teacher, have people look at who you call on most in class, whatever your interactions are. One practical thing that people should do is take stock of their friends. It would be very useful for people to actually make lists of people with whom they spend time. Look for patterns. That's the audit. That's the assessment we can all do. Next time, some people's... The next video in that series is about like hanging out with people and getting to know them personally and that being a way to take apart biases. That is a really good idea. I just want to like, since the end of that video seems to imply that maybe we can fix everything by just like having a bunch of random checkbox friends. That is not going to help. And no one will like it if you walk up to them and you're like, hey, I want to hang out with you so that I can have a Latino friend so that I can like Latino people differently. No one wants that. So that implication is there in the end of that video and there's a whole video to address that but since we are not watching it, the idea is the exposure to more different kinds of people makes you have a more complex understanding of lots of different kinds of people. And that being said, those interactions should still be genuine. The little last piece here, it can also be true that you feel a little bit of resistance and even if you don't, the other people that we may work with on committees as we try to make decisions to shift things may feel like, no, I don't make these decisions. This is not something that I do personally. And it's important for us to recognize that some people may not be in a place yet to realize that biases are operating implicitly but we can reinforce with them that these things aren't intentional. It doesn't make you a bad person. It makes you a human with a brain. And if you're a human without a brain, you can't, people, you can't exist. So humans with brains have biases and that's okay as long as we examine and correct for them. So that's where this idea of slow down comes from. And I'll give it another requisite like 10 seconds and if it doesn't get it to act the other will move on. I always want to be a teacher with everything going on. We've had to alter our classroom settings. We have to transition into virtual learning to make sure that the education is continuing. We're here and we're ready. Verizon and the New York Times are offering 14 million students free digital access to times journalism. In situations where we think we might be biased, we should probably slow down and maybe eat some breakfast. No, really. Take this study of judges handing out parole in Israel over three sessions in a day. They'd have a morning session presumably right after breakfast. Then there'd be a mid-morning snack and then they'd have a second session. And then finally they'd have lunch and they'd have a third session for the day and that would be it. And they'd judge more harshly the longer they worked. They would hand out criminal sentences that were more harsh over the course of each session. Then they'd have the break and they would be more lenient again. If you are one of the folks who are unlucky enough to show up in front of the judge near the end of the session, they are more likely to be punitive. Bias creeps in more easily the less focused and fresh we are. Haven't had a break, hungry, tired, working too fast. Your subconscious might make a decision you don't agree with. What we want to look toward is figuring out systems where we can look at a resume or we can look at a work product and we can know what we're looking for, be slow and methodical as we're doing it and frankly be aware that we might have a bias that comes into play so that we know the correct word. And this really matters. For example, in medicine there's been research showing that sometimes black people get prescribed fewer painkillers than white patients and that they sometimes get more amputations than white patients in similar situations. But some doctors have also found ways to improve. They were told race can be a factor in treatment and recommendation decisions unless people are careful. Every one of those doctors, regardless of their implicit bias levels was able to self correct. So we actually can when we're making decisions where we have time, we can correct when our conscious values and when we're internally motivated to do so. So slowing down seems to help and slowing down and being more aware might help even more. Next time. Next time is a different training. So I just also wanna give you this kind of anecdote. Sometimes folks are like, I didn't create this situation and I don't wanna have to deal with it. But we all live in the world that we create and if we don't wanna live in a mess, then we have to clean it up regardless of whether it was our mess to begin with. And that means we didn't write all of the policies that had ever been in a handbook. We didn't write all of the curricula that have ever existed. We didn't make all of the laws, but we do live under whatever exists currently. And so it's our job to make whatever changes and do whatever observation needs to be done now. Last piece here, diversity, equity and inclusion are words that we toss around a lot. So I wanna create some clarity around. First of all, diversity is a simple fact. It exists, it's real, period. There are differences among us. Equity is a question of how's the deck stacked? When we look at how we treat different people and how different people experience the world, what different experiences are they having and what's causing them? And then the inclusion piece is the action orientation. How do we act in response to knowing that we are different and knowing that often those differences are treated inequitably? How do we create an environment that corrects for that? Understanding that because of our implicit biases, unless we consciously include and bring people into the process and expand to fits, we will unconsciously exclude folks. So I'll start with just diversity. These are pictures that I pulled from our websites. They are pictures of our kids right now as they exist in our newsletters. There is diversity of all kinds in every one of these pictures. There are youth who have abilities and disabilities. There are youth who have different genders, youth who have different family structures, youth who come from a lot of means or way less means, youth who have different ethnic backgrounds and different skin colors and they're in school with us right now. So diversity is there, period. So the thing about like, well, what do we do about diversity? Diversity already exists. There's already differences in humans. So we don't have to have a conversation about like, how do we diversity? Because it's there. Now we can ask questions about when we see a lack of diversity or a small amount of diversity, what in the equitable area might have been going on that created a skewed system. But diversity in and of itself exists and we sometimes create policies, procedures and environments that take away from serving all of the diversity that we have and then we can sometimes put things back into place that better serve the differences amongst all of us. Equity is also kind of a really specific concept that is different than equality. So I'm sure some of you have seen this image before, the idea of equality is everybody gets the same amount of something or the same access to something or we all follow the same laws or the sameness concept. But as we can see in this picture, the same supports don't do the same things for all people. So an example in our classroom might be, if you pick a teaching method and you teach it to every kid, that's equal. Everybody is getting the same information the same way. Equity would be about the fact that we actually know that there are differences amongst learners. So that means that in order for them all to get the education that we value, we might have to deliver it differently to different kinds of kids in order to get the product that we want. This justice concept at the end gets at the fact that sometimes we put a structure in place that is the problem in the first place. And so putting new rules or new structures into place to try and overcome the barrier can sometimes be mitigated by removing the barrier in the first place. So that can be something for us to look at too. If we're running into a situation where, wow, everybody seems to have different access or people being treated differently, is there some kind of barrier that is creating that environment that we could remove and then we don't have to do equity follows naturally. Something to think about. And finally, the inclusion piece is how we choose to go about creating new environments that work for everyone. So on this kind of sheet in front of you, there are different ways that we do that. One thing that we can do is we can just exclude people, right? You could just say, all of the people who do things the exact same way and think the exact same way and operate the same way, we serve them and everyone else exists, but we don't serve them. Segregation is a concept of everybody needs to be served, but maybe we'll make a special place or a special time to do that. So an example I've given in sex ed classes is sometimes what we do is we say, oh, okay, we'll, if you want to learn about genders and sexualities that aren't straight and cisgender, you can do that in our other sexual, sexes and genders class that you can take after school. That would be an example of segregation where we make information available, but we say you have to go somewhere else to get it. Integration might look like, okay, in our sex ed lessons over the course of the year, in our health lessons over the course of the year, we are going to talk about the differences for use of color or for youth who have disabilities or for youth who are LGBTQ plus identified, but we're gonna do it on LGBTQ plus day or during Black History Month, right? That's the idea of like, yeah, we're all gonna do it, but it's gonna happen in a way that's kind of like a separate within the whole. And then the way we get to integration is where we start imagining all of the needs all of the time or at least more of the needs most of the time. And so the sex ed example might be in every single lesson, we mention how these things maybe apply differently to folks with different identities or different bodies. And in other areas, that can be like, imagine a library, you could have a section of the library that has books on a particular topic, or you can have books on that topic that are with other books that are related to other things. An example there might be for a long, long time in a library like Dewey Decimal Systems, there were only two categories for putting books by and about Black people. And one of them was basically like slavery and one of them was like civil rightsy. And that was it. And so you ended up with books by Black scientists on chemistry that ended up in like the civil rights section where no one looking for chemistry would ever go to look for that book. And so inclusion starts to look like, where are we putting all of the people in all of the relevant places all the time? So last image is, this is the Grand Canyon. Geologists surmise that many millions of years ago, the place that is the Grand Canyon or the Colorado River was a flat place that had a little meandering river through it. What happened was over a long period of time with little sand particles, with drop by drop of water, with wind breezes moving through over day after day after day, that became the canyon that we know now. And that is how I want us to imagine doing diversity, equity and inclusion work. It's little actions every day by different people all the time. We are never going to revolutionize the entire system and fix everything overnight. But if we imagine that the constant upgrading and the constant relentless asking of questions and opening our minds chips away at the barriers and creates a new reality, then that's the direction that is for the healthy and positive for us to be going in. And a reminder about the COVID reality is that when we're under stress and going through trauma, all of this stuff becomes even harder to do. And that is one of the reasons, in addition to the fact that systems are unequal in the first place. Systems are unequal. And then in this time, we're thinking even less about equitability because we're just in panic mode. So as we make solutions in the coming couple of years, it'll be good to keep reorienting ourselves to the fact that this work still needs to be done and is less likely to be done effectively if we are rushing or making fast decisions or if we are in panic mode. That's it for me. And I did not keep it to 40 minutes, but I kept it as short as I could. Yeah, thanks Bar. That was super helpful and super informative and I'm excited to give more sessions. Any questions for Mara? And then you can move into executive session. Questions or comments? That was excellent. Thank you so much for doing that. Yes. You're such an engaging presenter. You definitely are in the right place. You should see me when we're not on Zoom. Thank you so much. That was great. Yeah, it was fantastic. Mara, send me the, make me the host again. Working on it. Do you know how to do it? Yeah. Okay. The breakout room. Do you want to, oh, we already made the thing to go into executive session, right? I think we have to move to go into executive session. Yeah, we don't have to move to go in, but we did the, we've established the basis. I think the only people that need to exit are, well, we go into a separate room, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I believe that we enter executive session for the purpose of discussing contract negotiations. Do I have a second? I'll second it. Okay, for etiquette. Ryan, Mara, etiquette. Hi. Barry. Hi. Andrew. Good, we are in executive session as soon as we hit the join button and I'll appear there.