 All right, so I will call the meeting to order at 7.01. Do we have any adjustments to the agenda? We do not need an executive session. Okay. We'll strike the executive session number 14. Okay, any other adjustments? And we'll move to the consent agenda to approve the minutes of Tuesday, September 19, 2023. And entertain a motion. It's a motion. Okay. One second. Any discussion? And all in favor say aye. Sorry, who initially motioned that? I'm sorry, I can't. I did. Ed. Peg did. Ed. Ed did. We don't have Peg yet. Yep. All right, all in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. All right. Minutes are approved. Do we have any public comments at this time? All right, then we'll move to board comments. So hear me board comments. Chris, I should have mentioned, I thought I had a task force update on here, but we don't. Maybe we could take up that, or we could still add one if the board was okay under the policy committee. Yeah, I didn't even see that. No, I missed it. I just noticed. I just assumed seven to four when I looked at it was all committees, but. Can we do a task force under 7.5, the building task force update? Mm-hmm. Thank you. Okay. Any board comment? Then we'll onto the celebration of learning. Middle school flexible. All right, I have the honor of doing that this week. Ray, is it possible to present that? Thank you. So this month's celebration of learning is really focused on the flexible pathways and the learning opportunities that program presents here in the middle school. And I wanted to give you the where we're coming from. Nick slide please Ray. So some of our guiding principles are addressed directly with flexible pathways and these tend to drive a lot of the conversations when we're talking about curriculum or programmatic changes or ideas, specifically in flexible pathways. They are working very hard to build and maintain relationships, that support, facilitate, foster, that love of learning. The intention is to have a student pursuing that which they want to know most about. In terms of citizenship, we do in that program stress learning from diverse perspectives. Several student projects require people with differing opinions to work together and come up with a rational consensus before they present a project or a completed idea. And we are working very hard on having students advocate for themselves, empowering them to take charge of their learning. Next one please. Clearly scholarship is addressed there. The intention is to challenge them academically. Projects are usually draft form the first time around and there's a lot of input, creativity added, more resources until they get to finish product, excuse me, product. They are expected to reflect on the stages of their growth and be able to articulate at the end of a project or a unit or lesson how they've changed what they learned, how to change their world perspective, et cetera. Clearly we're working on trying to build self-confidence and efficacy, again trying to build learners who are empowered to take control of their own education and really identify the things they're passionate about. And it is in many cases very highly individualized. Next slide please Ray. Simply a title. So what we're talking about is the White River Valley Middle School Flexibles Pathway Program. I'll pause for just a moment to let Nancy settle because now we're getting into the meat of that program. So what I've brought to present to you in terms of ideas is not an exhaustive list but it is some of the things that are actually going on in this first six week rotation. Students are not bound by a six week rotation. Some of the students that I'll be mentioning tonight are in it for the long haul for the entire year. Tried to divide these up into what are the facets of that program. First and foremost it is an academic learning opportunity and we have students that are pursuing a number of world languages. I had the pleasure and privilege of observing some students working on learning American Sign Language. Was able to communicate with them about a project going on in another school district where the students are reinterpreting common songs like from the movie Grease through ASL. So they're looking at not only just studying but applying and figuring out how to communicate with each other and others. We do have five students currently taking Algebra I. Now that is through VTVLC a program structured for self-directed learning but it is facilitated by a qualified individual who works directly with those students. So it's not five students trying to learn at Algebra all on their own. There's a pretty significant focus on, good evening, significant focus on STEM projects to the projects shown there. While Peg's sitting down just my curiosity, how old are those five kids that are taking Algebra I? Eighth graders. So how old? Still pretty early. Yeah. You're bringing into Algebra I and eighth grade. That's pretty sweet. They'll be. That's what my granddaughter's doing. That'll be pretty sweet for them when they can go for the rest of their math if they pass Algebra I. I don't disagree to put a plug in for work like the portion of a graduate. Ideally a student graduating from any high school, our high school in particular, the more of their trade experience or college experience they have under the belt, the better off they're going to be. I'm driven by that and have been and I'm glad this district recognizes that. Turning back to the projects there, just two cherry picked from several that were there. The roller coaster project was a bit too large to include here. On the left you see a physics experiment in looking at how crazy could a carnival ride be, I believe driven by recent experiences at the World's Fair. On the right, a prototype of a, the moving parts of a Roomba, robotics, et cetera. Next one please. There is a component that the work done should have some aspect to serve in the community and flexible pathways has enabled some of the students to work in a variety of different spaces within the school, not at our direction but by their request. And some of these tie to much bigger ongoing projects. Clearly a benefit to having a mentorship with elementary students. I want to point out the second one, a group of students that worked behind our amazing greenhouse here to weed out the tree nursery, start setting that space up again to reinvigorate it, have a growth season in the spring. That particular organization Regeneration Core will also be working with us as we expand adding stone fruit trees, apple trees, more raised beds. A piece of that is how do we get from concept to actual food production and serving. So we're looking at putting in an herb garden for the kitchen so that our product can actually be used on our campus and in this community. Excuse me. We have the benefit of a PE teacher here on our campus that teaches both middle and elementary classes. So another perfect opportunity for a mentoring relationship. Students can spend some time working as assistants in that PE class. It's a fairly popular choice. The next one please, Ray. Thank you very much. So at the end of it, what are the skills they're walking away with? How does that figure into how a flexible pathway is kind of guided? We are looking at a few examples here. Some of the students, again, at their request, a pretty popular option right now is working in the kitchen. That doesn't mean just working on the food service line. That means going in there and doing some of the actual prep work, learning knife skills, learning food safe ideas and criterion for food service industry. Much of what is prepared for our school has some middle school hand in it, washed and usually with a glove, just putting that out there. Tomorrow night we have our open house. An example of how that work in the food service portion of our school is reflected through a lot of what we do. We will be, students will be preparing and serving apple crisps, apples donated by faculty and staff. Prepared, it will smell wonderful, it will accompany vanilla ice cream perfectly tomorrow. But that will be, again, another example of a student product. Through BANA and the Outdoor Ed program, looking at some, what I call, traditional Yankee skills, how we go from an apple to cider. What does that teach us about preservation? How does that teach us about the history of apple orchards in Vermont? Why is there an apple tree on every abandoned farm? So learning about their history and connecting to it with hands-on experiments. And quite honestly, some of the most delicious apple cider I've had in a long time. I'd even put it up against cold hollow. Tied to some ongoing work with the community, we have a number of beautiful new mountain bikes, not only our students using them at, during their break time, using them in an upcoming mountain biking trip. The students themselves through flexible pathways are learning some basic bike safety, bike maintenance, working directly with people who essentially sold and maintain our bikes. So working with experts in the field. And again, this is done in an exhaustive list, but it's an example of how a student may have a passion idea, a passion project. It's tied to what community resource can teach you more about that. How can we facilitate that learning either through an online platform or working with partners in other schools? I believe there's one more, right, please. So finishing there with the passion projects. For those students who are in a rotation, there comes a point where they've done the bulk of their project work. They've presented, they've had the feedback, they've made edits and corrections, they've worked with each other, and they have some time. I'm not gonna say downtime, but they have time to more freely explore some things. And some of the things that have been taking place, designing and creating jewelry, fine metal skills. They're learning a lot of outdoor education skills, working directly with Bono in her program. We have a host of students who are now walking around with chessboards, and they'll pull them out during break, they'll pull them out at lunch before school, and so you'll see games taking place all over. And the last one is the one I want you to plant in the back of your brain. We're not at the point of me making this official pitch to you, but I think it's an excellent example of where students can take a passion project. Pygmy goats are really cute. We might agree with that, but it's not a totally convincing argument. A group of students took that, goats are cute. What's the value of them? What does it cost to maintain them? What kind of feed and housing do they need? Working with someone who actually raises livestock. What are the issues we're gonna need to know about? What do we need to budget for veterinary maintenance? What are some common issues with these types of this specific breed of goat? And so about a half a dozen students had me sit down and hear a very thoughtful and cited presentation about why this school should have goats. And again, I'm not asking you for goats at this point. I think we'll have that conversation when we look at an overall improvement to the middle school area. But in terms of what that program flexible pathways can be proud of, it's that a student can take a passion idea, find others of a like similar mind, work directly with their facilitator, teacher, outside experts and produce a product that frankly, they can come up with a rather compelling argument because they've thought through a lot of the details. It's not a simply I want kind of issue. It's a, I think we should let's learn more about and what are the obstacles? What are the pieces we don't know about? What started as a passion project is now something we'll be discussing down the road in a grander scheme. So that in a nutshell is where flexible pathways is now. What I would leave with you with conceptually is what can flexible pathways be? We have it a program that is offering learning beyond the classroom walls, learning that is advanced for where a student would typically be and you're right in pointing out algebra one and eighth grade, that's pretty impressive. We have a student that came to us saying, I really want to know more about why was the U.S. in wars? What's our history bent and is currently taking a U.S. history course through BTVLC again on their own technically but with the facilitation of a teacher who's checking with them regularly, helping design projects and giving feedback on their work. So we can expand learning opportunities. We can expand how they see their value in the community and what they can offer in return and tie into a lot of the pieces that this community has going on for it, collaboration with the people who are supporting the mountain biking, architectural design of what a playground could look like. Putting hands on physics projects as opposed to looking at simply equations and working through force and velocity, bringing some play back to their fun or fun back to their learning. Any questions for clarity? I guess, how is this working into the student schedule? Like when is this happening and... So it depends on the student. For some, for example, the ones who are taking their math course through that flexible pathways, that is replacing the majority of their in-class time, their seat time in Ms. Womet's class, for example. In other situations, as part of the essentials rotation, specifically in the sixth grade, they do a six week rotation. So Andy West writing that program uses that time to get them used to the rhythm, the development from idea to project concept to presentation. So they're in a sense trained early on in sixth grade and then other students can access that through other essentials time in that rotation during intervention and extension time, specifically on like a Friday, where we have any number of intervention to extensions happening for all of the students. All right, thank you. Thank you. Jamie. I'm up. How's everyone tonight? Good. So you have my report in hand. One of the things I wanted to highlight is, is that this organization had gone through a lot of work around Act 46 around merging. And so not only did we merge two supervisory unions together, we merged multiple districts. And I would say that there's been a, and then we had COVID hit. And so we, I would say, really the last two years, we've been able to really get to work around a significant focus on instructional leadership in improving academic outcomes. And you know, one of the things I think that really provides evidence of that is a lot of information within your principal's report that they keep reporting out on. But the work that we've done to improve our curricular documents. And so I put a link in the, in my board report that I really encourage the board to go visit. We set out to make certain we had curricular documents in all the content areas across all the different grade levels so that we could clearly articulate to families, actually all stakeholders, what we want our kids to know understand and do. And our teachers worked with the agency of Ed, and then with Anna Adams and the Kayla Martin out of the SU office to create documents that I'm really proud of. And that I think are going to serve us really well in regards to how we look to continue to improve student outcomes. And so I just wanted to highlight that that links in my report. You'll note that a couple content areas are not quite finished yet. But I want to remind you, we moved to an SU-wide report card that are aligned to these indicators and outcomes. We're going to be moving to a middle school report card too across the SU to ensure that we're reporting out on what we want our kids to know understand and do. And so that's really exciting work. And I'm really pleased that we're at that place. And so I just wanted to highlight that. And then I will entertain any questions folks may have. Please note that there's a thought that week of the 30th right now, we do not have any board meetings scheduled across the SU. And so that could be possibly an opportunity for us to hold that full board retreat that we had to cancel last week because we were looking a little thin, unattended. So we'll take that up next Tuesday. But if you look at your calendars and now already know like, boy, Monday's the best. If you could email that to Kathy and I, Kathy Galuzzo and I, that would be great. Cause then we'll try to hone in on a two, a couple of dates to propose next week. Is there may have any questions from the superintendent report? Okay. Then we'll move to the principal's report. Thank you, Jamie. Yeah. I think we should go to the reverse because we can then simply range back. Sure. So first off, I'd like to just talk about the data. So we started our fast bridge assessment recently with the ninth and 10th grade. We just haven't had our data teams to be able to get that information. So nothing bring forward tonight. And then our 10th and 11th graders took the PSATs just recently. In the report, just wanted to highlight the CBL program. It's really stepped up this year. I'm really excited. Some of the things that Jeff Clayton's doing is the wastewater treatment program, veterinary work. We're working on commercial drone pilot licenses for some of the students. First responders and emergency management went to take a class just recently. And then several science students went to work with the UVM program at Lake Champlain. So some really exciting stuff going on. Lastly, building community, which is really important, I think in our schools. And we had our open house, which was a big success. I love that first open house we have in with a concert. And we're the first concert in the state because most concerts and bands aren't ready, but we step up and get it done. It's pretty cool. And this year was kind of neat. They kind of sort of showed what they do in a typical class. And that was really interesting to see them warm up. Like athletes will warm up before a game. And both Joshua and Amber Levitt did a great job. And then we had our outing day, several different events that took place on last Friday. And then just recently, senior games. And yesterday, I was unable to make the building meeting because Mr. Canary said I could go to the senior game because it's kind of important for our kids to go. And then tonight we had a faculty meeting, so I got to go to our boys' game. So get to see the senior games. So good community stuff. Yep, that's it. Do you have anything to highlight? What I would highlight, and I've already talked about flexible pathways, are middle school open houses tomorrow night from 5.30 to 6.30. It is really a celebration of what the students have been doing. They're gonna have many of their own projects on display, well, a fresh cider, things that they've cooked, the bikes that they're maintaining, some of the various things that are going on. So again, looking for ways to engage the community. The only other thing I would highlight is with a lot of support from Central Office, which I greatly appreciate, we have now nearly completed the first cycle of a data inquiry cycle. Really trying to foster that culture of curiosity, as Jamie has put it. We've looked at all of our current targeted plans. We've identified the ones that need updating, ones that need to be reinforced. We found pieces that have necessarily dropped by the wayside. Certain student plans are now back in place. In other words, we've put it in writing. We now have them in place and students are receiving appropriate interventions. We then went a step further, looking at a whole host of academic data to look at. Well, what are the other areas we can support students? And specifically tied to all of this work is a question we'll refer to in a moment. How does this work inform our universal instruction? How can we provide supports for a greater number of people? And coming up very soon will be a report out from a team working purely on the social-emotional data. You can call it behavioral data, looking at what are the hotspots, hot spaces, transition points, behaviors we're dealing with the most, so we can start targeting specific proactive interventions, as opposed to merely reacting to behaviors. And so, in terms of our data, that's the cycle we are now in. And going and passing through and learning some lessons from my partner in the elementary school. And with that. I think the thing I want to highlight the most about this principal report, isn't something you can actually read in the principal report, but it is that our leadership team really helped build it in this week, and I was away, and so that was really helpful. And I feel like this really comes from our whole elementary because it was really coming from the whole leadership team. I think the section I'm most proud of, just because I remember it was so hard to engage community not so long ago, but is really our community engagement section. So we had our open house, it was lovely. Thank you for all of you who did get to attend both campuses. It was lovely to have Health Hub present, have our farm school coordinator starting her job. And I'm just proud to have the fire departments both working with us to come in and do fire education, have barnards reaching out to us about really wonderful enrichment opportunities again to offer our elementary kids. Yeah, and just all the good things to be connected to our community with. And mostly we're gearing up for conferences now. So that's where we're at. And there's a lot more in here too, but I'm happy to answer questions about that. But we are happy to now report out though on the academic report, which there's hard copies at the end if you didn't get one. And so on Friday or half day, the elementary crunch this data with Anda Adams and Michela Martin and really went through, for elementary we went through in small different groups, this process of looking about what are things to celebrate from the data? What are we wondering about? What are implications for our practice? And then next steps and anything else. So I think what I'd love to report out is on that and in conjunction with Pierre who did that with his staff and staff meeting. So just kick it off the celebrations because I think there's actually a lot to celebrate and we're really proud of. K to two test scores show growth. So the percent of kids in the red, which is not what you want is less than 10%. In elementary as a cohort, the math levels are improving. As a group, each elementary grade is made progress from the fall of 22, 23 to 23, 24. And then I'll even let's keep on going to celebrations because middle school to eighth grade math made more progress than had been expected. And middle school reading in French group are beginning with more advanced skills than in previous years. So some growth there. We were gonna tag team this. Tag. That's fine. So we phrase this as wonderings or wonderments. The kind of curiosity questions one needs to ask when looking at a data set. So some of the wonderments, why are we not seeing as much growth in the language arts in the elementary school? I'll leave it there. Looking at specific cohorts, I might see a drop off and how many are proficient in a certain area. Start asking the kinds of questions. What accounts for that? You start getting beyond the just, oh, well, COVID cause. You get to more specific areas of instruction or what interventions were used, how things can be improved as opposed to being mired in things you can't change in the past, if that makes sense. The question did come up though. How did COVID affect this data set? This is a new type of assessment following a year of a state assessment. You know where we've been in the last few years and we are routinely asking the question, how does our data reflect potential missed learning opportunities, lost learning? So again, going back to the celebration of, there was an expectation, in particular grades, we would see a certain amount of progress, X amount of progress and we saw X plus. So we're actually seeing more than we expected. But again, even a positive, even a celebration, one should be asking the question, well, what accounts for that? If we're doing something well, how can we generalize it, repeat it, support it, strengthen it? We are kind of curious why our proficiency bands are slightly higher to higher than the national average. Again, asking a question of a good thing can lead to what skills we're teaching directly, the scope and sequence of how a curricular arc falls across a year. So we're, again, in that culture of curiosity, asking questions not just how do we fix what's quote unquote wrong or broken, but how do we improve and continually improve upon what is going well. Jump into universal instruction. Yeah, so this is actually like a reorder of three different things. It's the so now what? So I will say that we, this is not our end of looking at the data. We looked at it as a big cohort and then we'll be working in smaller grades and at targeted teams to dig into what we need to do universally. And so, see, these were like a bunch of suggestions that kind of came out of a bunch of everybody just looking at what we can do next. So there was a lot of questions about word problems. I thought was what was holding up some of our math scores and maybe if we should teach better problem solving skills around word problems. Talked about conventions practice, daily and regrouping practice, specifically in elementary. We talked about really digging into the categories where students scored lowest and finding specific supplemental work that goes along with that. Vocabulary practice was one of those things to find supplemental work in. And then there was a conversation also about talking to upper elementary students about their scores and about what they need to work on and really making sure that they own it. I knew that goes right along with our student like conferences anyways, but that was a conversation that's had as well. And I think these were more middle school where they'd love to dig into the data more, which I know they're going to compile a list of accessible cross-collectual methods. Can I actually answer that one? You can, because I wasn't at that one. Thinking back to earlier principle reports I've submitted for you folks and things I've said out loud, some of the work we saw made time and space for over the summer working between departments. That has already led to some anecdotal gains. Students that are showing understanding a concept introduced in a mentor book and then generalizing that to how does that apply to a much more difficult text? Or how does that apply to a concept, a social construct or a government? What they're noticing is, hey, well if we're experiencing that has rewards, how can we start looking at the data that would support that and drive a practice that makes it a regular routine? How can I as a science teacher work with my partner Jeff and ELA teacher to remove the obstacle that vocabulary might present? How can he support what I'm doing? How can my concepts support the flow of literacy? We're noticing those conversations are taking place more and more and through this cycle of data, they're asking, well where's the data to support this? So they're starting to change from the anecdotal to the data driven. So I don't point this out as a positive or negative or even purely neutral but it's something to bear in mind. I think many of us in this room have likely heard the phrase teaching to the test. It's what we don't wanna do. We don't wanna prepare our children to just take a standardized assessment. But the question was asked, if we're using this particular benchmark early on and it shows areas our students have not been trained or educated in yet, how do we adjust our teaching so that in terms of the sequence of the year, they're getting to that content earlier without jeopardizing kind of a foundational understanding. So it's trying to find that balance between not wanting to teach to a standardized assessment but having an intentionality that matches where our benchmarks are going to be so that data is more reflective of what they're learning and less reflective of, well they just haven't learned that yet, makes sense? Along those lines, how have we looked at, we have the curricular documents at this point, like how well those correlate to what is being tested? Like, do you guys have a sense for how well those match? That's funny, today's staff meeting, we were working on math, it's not funny, and we were looking at the any unit assessments and that was what was brought up was the, right now our math program online, so Common Core and how we should fold into fold into that our proficiencies so we can know that alignment better. So that was, I think it's the next step, talk about examples and things like that. So I don't know if we have that dialed in as much, but those conversations are happening right now, yeah. How it can occur or echo, I think that's the work, not that we're turning to now like it hasn't been done before, I'm not pretending that, but people having similar realizations of how do these different guiding documents or our senses coincide. So again, finding that balance of, we don't wanna teach to a benchmark, the benchmark should be an assessment of where a student is, the snapshot to help inform instruction and interventions potentially. I'm encouraged that a lot of the conversations are turning more and more into, how do we prove what we know so that we can better get to a point where students can show mastery and show proficiency and how does that align to something that might function like that as an assessment tool. So it's trying to find a way to make it authentic, realistic and that's where our students are. Do we feel on the math side of it? Cause last year at this time, we were talking about some of our deficiencies and on the math testing and grant, some kids do better towards the test and is that really the, how much they understand or know? But how do we feel right now looking at, it still shows that we're deficient when it comes into the middle school on the mathematics and the things, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth. So do we feel that what we put into place last fall is working or do we need to do more to get those, that group was kind of more, we had targeted that group as having issues coming out of COVID and we put more resources and more time into trying to get their proficiencies higher. So I guess the testing here shows that they're still deficient. So do we feel that what we're doing is gonna get them to where we wanna go or do we need to adjust that for this year? So qualifying my answer as I'm familiar with what I've become aware of since I started. So if I misspeak, I apologize. What I have noticed is the assessment data, the conversations they were having prior to the beginning of the school year informed their instruction directly. I have two brilliant math teachers on my side of the school here, not to impugn your, it's just speaking of mine. And they meet weekly and I think you use the word adjust. I think they're constantly adjusting where they are. They have the curricular arc, they have the roadmap of where they wanna go conceptually, specific foundational skills they need to work in. And the adjustment may be how long they might spend in whole group instruction on a particular concept, assessing when they're ready to move on either through an assessment or again, anecdotally. I think where you're seeing probably, you would see more of the continual improvement kind of response is how we're targeting very specific research-based programs for math intervention and working very hard to make sure that that's what our intervention is using the students, looking at the model, a push in versus pull out model. So the adjustment happens on two ends. How do we adjust the flow of the whole group instruction, the universal instruction, and how are we targeting very specific skills in the interventions? How are we supporting that interventionist to do the best work in again, a research-based program? What I've seen is a great deal of support from central office. I know today as a matter of fact, my interventionist was meeting with Bonnie to go over this math intervention program that they're continuing to build. Does that answer your question? Yeah, I mean, I think for the most of it, I mean, you know. Again, the students are making progress and that is encouraging that I believe lends very much the sense that we're on the right path. And by having those constant conversational, continual conversations about what did this week's intervention data look like? Are our plans for intervention aligning to what the student needs are? How do we know what we're saying? And we're turning back to routine data collection. And again, using a research-based program for intervention is what we're driving towards. So I know the goal was last year, we targeted the sixth, seventh, and eighth graders and it was more, how do we get the sixth and seventh graders on target to be ready for high school, obviously. And then give as much extra help to the eighth graders. Jeff, have we seen the eighth graders transition over the ninth grader? Are we seeing any, I know it's early on, but are we seeing any of those deficiencies that are carried over because, you know, we only have less than a year to make adjustments for them? In this eighth grade, you represented this data set, sorry to jump in, is his current ninth grade? No, no, no, no, this isn't the current eighth grade in the fall. Oh, I apologize, I'm just gonna have some testing that you're looking at, yeah. So we're looking at that, but we have some, you know, our fourth period there is a period where a lot of those students get extra support, that's been helpful. You're thinking about the state. Yeah, I apologize. We're looking at that data too. Because I looked at that data set recently. Yeah, I love it. We just somehow, I mean, I'll jump in, you know, I think in general across the SU, what I'm feeling good about, and you'll see it in our SU data, is that our primary grades are showing that we are continuing to be above the percentile that we've set. And so that one question around, why are we higher? We have set our proficiency bandwidth, the percentile higher, to align with Vermont and New England standards. So we are assessing our kids at a higher level than the national norm standards to try to be a better predictor, how our students will be able to perform on the state assessment. And so what I'm encouraged by, Chris, is that if you look at our primary grades, that our kindergarten, like we are continuing to maintain momentum in math around K to one to two, I don't, that I believe is the work that we're doing to strengthen our math instruction at those primary grades. It is, while we also have to continue to work on making sure we're gap filling for our middle school kids, right? And so the long game is, is that we're ensuring our kids have really strong mathematical foundational skills at the elementary level. I would tell you that those middle school data sets, and Nancy can speak to this way better than I, because she was a middle school math teacher, but I would say that those skills really started to break down in the upper elementary. So the students that we see struggling at the middle school level, it probably started around fractional reasoning and decimals and percents, and then it's sort of built from there. And so the key for us is, and it's what Peter kept talking about, is how do we universally make certain we're spending time to gap fill those deficits, with the understanding that maybe not every student needed it, but it's probably good to review so that we have all the automaticity effects. So that's the work that's happening, not just here, but across our middle schools. The good news is, is that we have our teachers coming together as professional learning communities to learn from each other across the SU, so your middle school teachers are gonna be meeting with middle school teachers at First Branch and at Newton to look at what's working, what's not working, how do we learn from each other so that we continue to try to build and gain momentum here. I mean, the other thing is, and I wanna put a real shout out to your faculty, is they really did change their schedule. And the good news is, I mean, that didn't take effect until after the first or last year, but we did gain significant minutes in your middle school schedule to explicitly work on these content areas around math and literacy. So I think the goal is, is that this is our baseline for this year and we're gonna continue to see good gains throughout the year. Yeah, in the seventh and eighth grade, like it does show, you know, above the first grade. We're making gains, yeah, we're making gains. The sixth grade number is concerning and, you know, whether it's something in the transition between fifth grade or sixth grade or something we're doing in fifth grade does seem like that needs some attention. Sometimes it's just a cohort. Yeah, could be the cohort. You know, I would say too, and a real shout out to the elementary school, I think this is gonna help us, is that you do have content specialty happening at your elementary schools now in the upper elementary, being a teacher that's focusing in math and a teacher that's focusing in English language arts. And I think that's gonna really benefit us. I think we're just remembering our intervention to that same thing too. So like an interventionist is just doing math and one interventionist is just doing literacy versus trying to do it all. It's a really focus on their skills. Does the interventionist, they always just work with one student or do they take groups out? No, it's not groups. Okay, it's not groups. Generally, I mean, not gonna say there isn't one or two that need one on one, but we try to do small groups. And like at the middle school, you said the middle school teachers meet with each other. Do they ever go down and meet with the elementary classes, teachers, to see where the students are coming from? We do that part of the transition process, but I wouldn't say we do it during the school year probably as much. But there is a couple meetings at the end of the year before they transition, yes. In the high school too, to the middle school. I mean, you see where your students are coming from and where they are. So you kind of prepare for it. We have had some vertical teaming meetings already and I imagine that's gonna continue throughout the year. Yes? Yes, sir. Thank you. I do like this report and it provides some interesting data. As we continue on with this assessment, it'd be great to like kind of link back to other reports so we kind of get a longer term story. And so we can get see like, well, yeah, that cohort has trouble or there is a consistent something happening in this particular part, you know, like, so that's what I would like to see at some point is somewhere to kind of link it towards an overall arc of how we're doing and what's noise and what's signal, you know? Yeah, Sharon tonight, we've used it for years so you could get even a better picture. This is only year two for us here would track my progress, but we're gonna continue to build on it. Like, I don't wanna switch it so that you said we can get that arc. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just excited because everyone's in a while and the teachers are like graphing their own and the unit assessments and like, you walk in and they, oh, this is what the unit assessment looks like and they're like showing me pictures of how everyone's doing. Like, this is amazing. Like, people are digging in on their own. So, we're good. It is exciting. Now, I do feel like we are finally have the ball like a snowball around momentum, around data in the SU. Like, it has, I do think we are starting to gain some momentum around being, how do you use data as a way to celebrate and to inform our work and not seen as something that we like, it's a negative, right? Like, I would say to you four years ago, I really, and principles can correct me if Andrew was here with me. I really feel like the word was seen as bad. I mean, I remember interviewing here in touring buildings and one of the questions teachers had for me was like, are you a data person? I was like, yes. And I don't know if that was necessarily seen as positive, right? Like, but I was like, all right, we got some work to do here, but it was really seen as like, not used as a tool, more like it was just seen in the negative context. So I do feel like we're building a building momentum. All right, so anybody have anything further for the principles or about data report? Hi. Tara. You all have my report, outlines what's happening in the business office in the month of October. Only update I have since issuing the report last week is the audit has continued and extended in tooth this week, so our auditors are still here. And if there's any questions, and it's going great by the way. Do you have an estimate for when that'll be? They were, they're going in alphabetical order and they were into sharing today. But we fully expect that we'll have them back. Oh yeah, we're still on time. Yeah, target time. It just, because they're new and you know, we're seven entities, it took a little bit in the first couple to like get the way we set up and you know, to get familiar with it also. And then they had some, they had a couple of days where they had some sicknesses so they had to postpone some. All right. Policy committee. You wanna go run? You want me to go? You want me to go ahead? I can't remember. We haven't met since the last meeting, have we? We did, but we, so what we've done is the policy committee is, we're gonna be reviewing every policy over hopefully the next 18 months. We're gonna be looking at bringing boards for possible revisions to policies. And so one of the things I'm working on prior to the policy committee next Tuesday is helping the policy committee see like what policies do we have in the books right now that were adopted prior to VSBA required and revised policies having happened. So meaning, let's say we have a policy in place that we implemented in 18, it's required and the VSBA revised it in 20, cross walking our 18 policy with the 20 policy and making revisions based on the model policy and or changes we may wanna make. And so that's the work that's gonna be happening in the policy committee. So my sense is you're gonna start to see probably every month policies coming up with possible revisions as that group's doing their review. So how many total do you think we're talking about? Well, Ray, do you remember when we created that document, how many policies we have? It means, yeah, that's what I was thinking. I was gonna say it's really not that large. No, and we'll only take up a few, I'm thinking three to five each meeting in the board member, the policy committee will have them ahead of time and we'll make notes and then we'll meet about them. But I'm hoping that we can accomplish this in the next year and a half that we'll have reviewed each policy. Would it make sense to publish kind of the schedule so that people can provide feedback on? Yeah, no, it's a working document that I can share out with the whole board. It's just we haven't settled on it yet. But once we have it, yeah, absolutely. It's hyperlinked, it's actually a really nice spreadsheet. I'm a table guy, but Ray helped me with a spreadsheet. So I'm doing more tech savvy and I think it's gonna serve us well. It was a big joke on the policy committee. Building task force update? Yeah, so ours is actually a bit quite busy. We just met yesterday. So some of the pieces that we were going over first was the ongoing work in the buildings. So the Bethel campus, there's hopes of having both of the wood chip boiler pieces here and installed by the end of November. So that's kind of the target time right now. Everything else has been done or ordered just to wait for a few things to come in. But seems like that December timeline should hit that last, you know, last we talked. It's on a boat, getting ready to be offloaded. So as long as it gets through customs and stuff quickly, then we'll be good there. I didn't catch up with them too much. They're working, they're a little behind on the lighting piece of it. So they're kind of falling behind. Sounded like the contractor they were using was shorthanded and they've fallen behind a little bit. So they're still, they kind of reassured us that they were gonna up the manpower to get the lighting completed in the Royalton campus. And then they were moving over to here and they're working in Sharon or somewhere else still too. Yeah, I mean, they're doing every building, but right now they just have one crew. The goal is that they're gonna be up to two or three. Yeah, so. EI has told me that they're going to have that the subcontractor, their deadline date is by December 1st. So the contractor needs to figure it out. Yeah. I mean, I think for the most part we're pretty good. The lighting end of it, we're falling behind a little bit, but I think. Royalton has some of theirs though, right? They do. They're over half done. Yeah, yeah. And they like them. Yeah. They're lovely. Yeah. Is the propane furnace running? Yeah, yeah, yeah, LP part is all working. Yeah, they're finishing up, I don't know what to say. This week they'd finish up the woodchip silo or next week and then they're just waiting for the boilers to come. So we also talked about the entrance and security and energy efficiency of those entrances that we had talked about before. So there's the two entrances here at the middle school and elementary school, as well as the back, and we'll call back entrance, to the high school. So we have gone through some not really detailed assessments of those and started to kind of throw around a ballpark on how much that would be for all of it. And they will be looking into the, there's a grant through the US Department of Justice that has up to a half a million dollars that they award for different grants to use towards security at schools. So this would qualify and he was going to look into that and see about, it would probably be something that we would be in line for. If I read it right, they do like June, they're June grant so it wouldn't be anything until next June at the earliest. So there are 75, 25 grants so we would have to come up with 25% of it and rough estimates anyways right now we're kicking around for all three entrances to be upgraded or somewhere around $600,000. So it sounds like the grant would cover most of it and we'd be on the hook for maybe 100,000 of it. So as we all came in through, this door here isn't on it but as you can see, we do have some challenges at some of our doors in our schools. So we also were talking about putting in an assessment for both the schools when it came to the doors. We obviously know there's windows and other things we'd like to get to as well which we are going to develop a schedule of that we can use for timeline for five to 10 year projects at school. Non-bonded type projects that upgrade windows, upgrade these things so that we can bring to our yearly budget and so that we'd have a better handle on what money we need to put aside each year to do that so we're gonna work on that. We also talked about the arts and music expansion, possible expansion project that we had talked about as a group a couple months ago. So right now, at least on our end, the project seems to be moving forward faster than we anticipated. So there's been several donors that have come forward. We had kicked it around here at the school board that in order to go to the voters for money for an expansion that we'd probably want to see some sort of donor money that would be attached to that and we had thrown out possibly a third donor match with two thirds of a school match type deal to at least get the conversation and see where that would lead. It sounds like right now that we have or will have the donor match set for this project. And we were just kind of kicking around the numbers of the project somewhere in the $3 million area so they've come up with, you know, or can or will come up with about a million dollars with the donor match, which is amazing. So what we wanted to propose this evening was, well two things, the timeline of kind of how we see this going, but also what we'd like to do is be able to move forward with the project in the sense of now can we start to look at what would two thirds of that look on a bond. So, you know, we've figured out how we come up with a third of this project. So what would that two thirds look like financially for us? How would that look like on a bond note for whatever, 10, 15, 20 years or however we do it so that we can start the next piece of it to say, can we afford it or start putting the data together of this is how much we would have to bond. This is what the effect would be on it. The kind of, we were trying to put together a timeline. The timeline that we're kind of looking at right now would be in November, if we could, would be able to have some of a very preliminary bond numbers on this is kind of what we're looking at on the two thirds end. If we agree or that seems sort of reasonable on the November meeting, we'd like to schedule in Eric to do some presentation in December to go through of what this facility kind of would look like. I know we kind of briefly talked about it before but a little more, let's revise ourself and what that might look like and maybe some of the timelines of what that could look like. And if that went well, at that point we'd be looking to get a board commitment in the January, February timeframe of that we have a commitment to go forward with the project. And then the idea that we were coming up with a committee would be to go for a bond vote in November. We don't really have enough time to get a bond vote together before March. But also you usually have better voter turnout on a presidential election. So we have November coming up. So that was kind of our timeline that we're looking at right now. But we were pretty surprised that we do have some donors lined up and that's great. These are dreams that we've always had, right? And we're also just kicking around some numbers myself. And if we really look at a project like this, I mean, let's say it attracts half a dozen students a year. Half a dozen students a year at whatever, $18,000 a year and if that happens every year, I mean, the project almost pays itself off in 12 years, right? I mean, it's kind of a project that's gonna pay itself off even if you have to borrow some money to do it. And I mean, how many schools in the area actually have a nice music and arts facility that they can advertise and should really put the word? So I think it would be added to the high school on, so far we're doing kind of a really good job of promoting the athletic department, right? And we've talked about that the arts is this last piece to go with the academics and athletics that we need to be able to attract all the students that we can. So I guess what I'd kind of like to know through the board is do we feel at this time now that the arts and music department has done most of the heavy lifting at this point and they've gone out and they've found a donor that has already going to put down a substantial amount of money and then there's other donors that they have talked to or are in the process of talking to that are also very interested in doing likewise. So do we feel good as a collective group of, we've kind of told them before, like if we want to get this thing off the ground we're going to need some backing from the community and we threw out a third. And now that they've kind of said we feel pretty confident about this third, do we feel confident as a board of moving forward on working with the business manager to figure out what would that two third look like and how would we afford that and what would that bond look like? I think we owe them our best shot. I think it sounds fantastic. Yeah, no, I'm very excited about this project and everything. What we discussed about one of the things about maybe doing at the board retreat was looking at this kind of stuff holistically. I think it would be great to kind of have an idea of the arts music and how much that is and what the timeline of that is plus like entrances but also kind of the footing that in with the five year plan, whatever we kind of have. I know we don't have it all right now but kind of having the holistic look of this is what we'd like to do facilities-wise and kind of expand on that a little bit more at our retreat to get as good an idea of what we can as we can for that. So I mean, we can certainly kind of get a sense of where people are at right now on this but also kind of maybe think about just like having an extended discussion about it with everything kind of laid out. I mean, you did a great job of kind of summarizing a lot of it right there anyway. Yeah, the other piece that I guess it would depend on, I mean, we do feel as a committee that the entrance security at our schools is very important and so we're in hopes that we would be able to come away with the Department of Justice grant. Yeah, we do that for 150. So we feel confident with that but we also were talking about is what if we don't get the grant? We also feel that that is a project that should move forward. So at that time, our thoughts were if we didn't get the grant for that or didn't look like we would get it and we wanted to move forward, would we include the entrance security piece of it into the bond with the Arts and Music Center? It certainly makes sense to do them at the same time. Like it's the same. Well, for instance, the high school one we talked about that the high school one, we would probably wait, if this was successful, we'd do it all at the same time because it's all gonna go right in the same area. For the most part, we talked about that the middle school, not to get into too much detail, but the middle school entrance would be completely revamped. So there would be an exterior shell. So if you pretty much where the roof comes out, that would be where the new exterior doors would be. The interior doors and windows would likely be replaced as well because they're just, they're old, they're not efficient, they're not. I mean, the door slams, and you just wondered if the glass is gonna break, right? The elementary piece of it actually is in good shape. So we were just talking about maybe some reconfiguring there, updating some of the entry security. There was some questions about, do we keep the kindergarten door? Is that really something that needs to be there because they already have other egresses? How would we lock the cafeteria door during the daytime and that interior door? So those were kind of things. Not as much money, I don't think will be spent there, but then you have the back part of the high school, which you would have to build a shell outside that would encompass that. But if we were able to be successful with the new wing, then we would build that all as one type deal. But yeah, so we've been pretty busy. Yeah, great work. So yeah, sure, we kind of, everybody take this information, think about it over the next couple of days and we'll pick this up at the board retreat. And maybe we can come up with a way of kind of get a document where we kind of summarize some of the stuff with timelines and whatnot. It'd be great. Plus, I mean, we could put in like, yeah, what bonds would be what our, we've got our reserve funds as well on how much money do we want to take from reserve funds for these type of projects? And so I think looking at it as a whole would be great. And yeah, thanks for all your work on that. And I think we would also, likely this would be kind of a, most likely be a 2025 type project. Was that sound about right? That we were talking about 2025 by the time permits and you know, you get through the whole role of it. Nothing goes quick. No. Although the bonds certainly would have looked better a couple of years ago. Well, actually believe it or not, we were joking about that. And Eric had mentioned that the bond bank rates haven't raised as consistent as with the private banks. As consistent as with the private banks. I think he said, I don't know, 3% he threw out right now, something like that. So. All right. Okay. So WRED finance task force is down a member. Luis Ferrisburg retired after a couple of years of service with us. So we are looking for community member involvement. So if anybody knows any community members, we should outreach and see if there's anyone interested in joining our finance committee. How good do they have to be with numbers? They don't have to be good with numbers at all. No, okay. No. When do you typically meet? The second Thursday at noon. You said noon? It's virtual. And I mostly were, you know, review the warrants, kind of talk about some overall big picture things, but, you know, keeping on top of things, you know. Any questions? Come up, you know, that type of thing. And they would be joining Jeff, Andrew, myself, and Peggy. What's the current finance committee? All right, well. We missed the fund. We'll have to have that on the agenda again next month. You missed the fund building one yesterday. Yeah. I saw that. Policy adoption. First one we'll look at is act to adopt a 20 board civility and code of ethics policy was adopted by the SU board last meeting, right? So we're looking to adopt it for our district now. Actually, you guys, one for the last ones. She just adopted, so it'd be the last ones. So entertain a motion to adopt. That's policy. Seconded. Okay, does anybody have any discussion? I mean, other than to say that there's nothing in here that I don't expect from myself and others. It's, there was no, there was no curve balls when I read this. Okay. All right, all in favor of adapting policy A230. Say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. All right, policy A230 is adopted. And... How much you meant to do that? Peggy had her hand up. Oh, did you have something to say, Peggy? I just have, I mean, my eye still stands, but there was just one grammatical thing that really bothered me that just needs as absolutely being extremely picky. But in the first paragraph, one, two, three, four, fifth line, it says, you know, White River Valley Supervisor Union and its member districts, school board members, there theoretically should be an apostrophe after school districts. Our districts. True. We can do that, but that's not gonna affect it. What? Right, it has no effect, but it makes it proper, I'm afraid. Thank you. Thank you. I couldn't hold back, I'm sorry. This has had a lot of attorney's eyes on it, too. Okay. So next, we'll all entertain a motion to adopt F34, Fire and Emergency Preparedness Drills Policy. Seconded. Okay, is there any discussion on this? Okay, all in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Policy F34 is adopted. Move on to entertain a motion to adopt F35 Access Control and Visitor Management Policy. I make a motion to approve the F35 Access Control and Visitor Management Policy. All second. Okay, any discussion? All right, all in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? F35 is adopted. Okay, on to the discussion items. Start with the draft number one of student support budget. So I'll just start off with giving some background on the numbers, and then I will let your building administrators talk about the actual FTEs and the positions. So we won't know until the end of this month, beginning of November, what the rates are for health insurance that are gonna be filed with the Department of Financial Regulations. So based on conversations that we've had throughout the last couple of months with our V-Hive representatives, they are anticipating a substantial increase due to the increase in medical claims, the increase of costs for medical services. So last year, as you recall, the increase was 12.7% filed. So I started at a 13% starting point for this year on the help and a 5% increase on the death insurance. As far as staff that we use to build your budget for 25, we take the current staff in their benefits, and that's what we use as the base to build your next year's budget. So the staff that are reflected as current staff is as of September 25th of 2023. So it's the staff that you have as of that day, and the benefits that they had is what is used to build this first draft of your budget. So we'll turn it over to the other three. Who's gonna talk about it? I don't know. So the principal and admin section is unchanged. Intervention section is changed just to reflect the actual, and it's not actually a proposed change, it's just a more accurate reflection of what's happening. Guidance is unchanged. The school counselor secretary, something Jeff will talk about. Do you want us to pause and talk now or do you want me to keep busting through it? Go through it. I'll talk through it. Nurse is unchanged. Regular pairs is unchanged. And it looks like a lot, but I just want to remind everybody that includes our preschool parent educators, which I think is really important to note that we have to have them because of the ratio. And because we have four preschool classrooms, we have four preschool parents. Subs, as Tara indicated, is just to match the actuals. MTSS student support will be, what I'm gonna propose was the addition of one. Right now there's a designated one for the middle school, there's a designated one for the high school, and there's a designated support person for elementary. And I'm just gonna launch it and talk about it. And it's a struggle for me sharing that person across two campuses and me across two campuses. So that was just a proposal. Co-curricular directors, I believe that's just really what is actually happening. And then pathway and capstone, that's actual and SAP counselor was a small increase. Is that accurate? That's high school. So I don't know if you want to do questions first or if you want to. Excuse me. I wish I had something to say about. Yeah, so I wrote down some administrative assistant counseling service job description, so I can just pass that around. And with our increase enrollment, I think, and with our counselor trying to do a lot of different tasks, I just feel like he's very, he's not able to, I don't think counsel well, he hasn't been able to meet with seniors or juniors to prepare for college or for life after high school. And he's done the scheduling and his task is more than just a counselor. And some of the role that we're asking him to do is more administrative as stuff than just counseling. And I feel that with an assistant in that position, our recruiting would go up and if you look at our numbers at the high school right now, senior class is fairly small, like 40. And then it goes to 60, 70, 70. And I just feel that increase is really a pressure in the counseling office itself. And so to do the recruiting, to do the testing, and we just did the PSAT testing and the different types of testing that we do throughout, this person could be a great recruiter for us, which, you know, we go to Chelsea, we go to, I'm asked to go to Stratford and then other schools in our district as far as, as well as other schools. We do our Wildcat night. I just think this person would be able to assist in a lot of that extra work. And I don't want our students to miss out on opportunities. You know, that's always a, like, geez, we missed that college visit and this college visit. A lot of our students have needs that, you know, a counselor needs to be with them for that. And I think this assistant could help out. Well, it's early in the budget program, so I guess you're in for now, right? Yeah. Yeah. Until we get more numbers and see how everything comes together. Yeah, yeah. All right, good. It's funny that he said that first. Because that's what I was thinking. I'm like, well, it's early. I mean, it's hard to tell, because I mean, you just don't know what the rest of the budget looks like, but I mean. Yes. If everything's up 11.9%, it might be difficult. Right. I mean, imagining that other things aren't going to be. Just, it's one counselor doing all of that. Yeah. And, you know, just think of scholarships, you know, we're going to talk about the green and gold in a bit, but like, so that committee that he's in charge of to do just scholarships alone is just a lot of extra work. And, you know, with all these new students coming in and the transcripts and working with transcripts and credits and it's a lot of work, right? Sure. The one thing for the board to know, and we'll continue to talk about this throughout, is that with the adjustments of the long range ADM waiting and the changes that the legislature made a few years ago, what act is it here? You know, we'll have to talk about it. 176. Anyways. Sure. Yeah. It's essentially how we've changed education funding to be, to encompass the cost equity waiting model. And so, within your district, the agency right now is forecasting an increase of almost 100 students in our waiting. And so, those are preliminary numbers. These are equalized people. Yes. These are equalized people goes away. Oh, right. But it works the same way. It works the same way. It's your dividing factor. It's to increase tax capacity. That's not the case in old districts throughout the state. I know another district north of us that has lost 100. And so, they're looking at like, how are they gonna address those concerns? So, I will tell you that we are gonna gain some capacity. You know, one of the things we're gonna be monitoring closely is the revenue side of the budget as well. I do, our tuition is up, which is good. And so, I think, you know, as we move forward, you're gonna, in next month, you're gonna have all your FTEs, which is a major driver for your budget. You don't have tuition, right? So, that really drives about 80% of your budget. And so, next month, we'll have a much better sense of where are we at bottom line. I just wanted to make certain, I'm sorry, I went to the bathroom, but do we make certain we emphasize that this does provide a full-time reading and a full-time math intervention is at the middle school level? Is that mentioned? Licensed teacher? You didn't mention it out loud enough. So, I just, I wanna make certain folks know that that is part of those 6.4 FTEs, is so that we do have a full-time reading and math at each elementary school and at your middle school. And it also encompasses some intervention at the high school, but just wanted to make certain folks know that. I think the other thing we just have to be careful when we're going through the budget is, you know, I would anticipate that the yield go down significantly this year. Absolutely. As well as, you know, the state's revenue from the feds on, we'll call the COVID funds are drying up too. So there's a lot of holes in the state budget that have not been figured out yet, which usually will weigh heavily on what that cost for people is gonna be. I get that from the December 1st letter and the tax department. Yeah, so those will be some things that'll be, you know, it's probably some things are going up and some things are coming down. So it's, you know, where does the balance out at? So, when you made some adjustments based upon substitutes, is that based upon the time in which we're using substitutes? Or is that, or did we have to do some monetary increases to stay with recent pay gaps? So that is for utilization in fiscal year 2023. That's how much you paid substitute teachers. So that was what the increase was based on. Let's try to guess more on alignment over the last few years, how much we've actually been using substitutes. Okay, well, I guess, so just follow up. We've bumped up to figure a little bit, but not much. So, I guess, I'm trying to rephrase it. So is that more so on the time in which we're using subs? Or is this, hey, we've had to go from a pick a number, you know, from- It's time, it's not that we're paying so much. You know, so much a day to so much more a day because we couldn't attract anybody, I guess. Quantity of substitutes you are utilizing is driving that number. Okay. And then the SAP counselor piece. So the notes say it was covered in grant funding in the FY 23. Sorry, the 24, it's both years. We've covered that under our extra federal money and that goes away. It's going away. Okay, I just want to make sure that was kind of. So that needs to go into the local budget to maintain that service. And that's not even covering all of it. We'll use some other funding to cover some of what you have for SAPs, but it's to bring at least one of them in. And how does that, how does that item look going forward in other budgets? So, you know, we're losing a portion or we're having to fund a portion of, sounds a portion of that this year, but how will that look in the next three to five years? It will depend on federal funding in the future for us as a supervisory union. Our Medicaid funding, our MAC EPDST funding, which is based on services, which currently is covering some of those services throughout our SU. So it'll depend on what the feds decided to do with Medicaid. If we'll be able to continue, what level of the SU can continue to fund that service for our schools? Because these are always the challenges that we have is, you know, we've had lots of funding that has been pumped into government over the last X amount of years. And now that funding is starting to go away. So that clip's going to happen. Right. So are these things that we've been participating in? These are not COVID funds. I mean, these are Medicaid funds that are pretty predictable. Yeah. I mean, I would say that the need for mental health is significant. And, you know, we're trying to continue to leverage our Medicaid funding and other MAC health awareness type funding to support some of that, you know, frankly, we adjust it based on, you know, the interdependence of the SU, I think it's such as we've tried to do budgeting more so to say, like, you know, when we have a district that's in a real tough financial spot, we may leverage some more of those federal funds as an SU to help support them and adjust that accordingly. So, you know, when we look at the revenue side of the budget, when the board gives us like a target to hit, right? On tax rate, we'll adjust revenues based on trying to make certain we best accommodate all the different districts in the SU with those funds. And certainly with the COVID funds, we've been consciously not funding long-term things. Correct. Yeah, you're pretty much all built in at this point. Well, I just, when it said grant funding, so sometimes- And that was not COVID. Sometimes you take grant funding and you have a commitment there, even though the funds run out in year three, let's say. This is us trying to actually get some things in the local districts that's being covered by Medicaid and MAC funds so that we dunk into a position where that funding goes away and then we just lose it. Okay, well, it's a good start. We'll see how the things shape up over the next. Next little bet. Any further comments on the initial student support budget draft? Thank you, Tara and Jamie. All right, so for the agenda for the board retreat, Jamie and I just did kind of a brief discussion over email and we kind of identified four basic topics that we'll try and cover. So it's gonna be from six to, do we say eight, 30? So we're gonna aim for that for this Thursday. We'll start out with the meal. And so if everybody wants to bring a dish to share, I guess we probably could. I probably don't have time to do a brisket Thursday. Oh, come on, Rodney. Sorry. And if not, I can always get the food. You want to just get there or something? Okay, that would certainly be easier. Yeah, I would do that. And where is the location for the event? Is it? At the SU office. At the SU office? And did you say six o'clock? Yes. Oh, okay. Because it said 5.30 at five. Yeah, so we pushed it back just a little bit. Good, let's go through it. Yeah, Peggy? Okay, I was gonna say I will try my best to get there, but believe it or not, we're trying to do a fourth cut, hey, on Thursday. So I don't know exactly when my life will be my own, but I will do my best to get there. Okay. All right. Oops, sorry. I can't pull that. So the four things that we talked about, I'm gonna pull it up. One was kind of an overview of the facilities planning that we kind of covered earlier. So going into that and looking at that holistically. The task force to address stakeholder feedback on the merger and what is working well, what needs further attention and what ideas the community might have to strengthen our school districts. So kind of getting that an overview of how we wanna structure that and getting the ball rolling on that would be one of the things. Another, and people can certainly, we can certainly either do these or if people have other ideas of things that would be good, we can certainly figure out what makes more sense. One other thing would be a discussion on how to increase community engagement and communication with the community, particularly looking at how to get people interested and participating on the board so that we don't have vacancies in the future and ideally don't have everybody running unopposed every single time. So increasing participation with the board and also interest in running for the board. Well, if you solve that, I think there'll be a lot of people interested in know how we did it. I know. I know. You could probably make a career out of going down to down. Did you run last time? Oh, were you? Yeah. Did you have anybody? No, nobody's been opposed for a long time. And we didn't even have anybody run the previous two. That's why. Well, you guys were short and then I think they were all unopposed. So yeah. I didn't run one year and nobody still ran. I mean, not still nobody ran against me. Yeah. I know. I didn't even run it. Yes, so. And it was just an empty spot, but. So that'll be what the fourth one. No, no, that's good. And then the last thing would be looking at the board, SU board has adopted goals for the SU board. So taking a look at those board goals and how we as a district can further those goals. And if there's any district specific things, we would want add for our own goals. So those are kind of what we threw out as ideas for what to try and cover during the board retreats. If anybody has any other things that I think we should focus on or. So in regards to the facility planning piece of it, is there anything that the board would like to see that I can get ready ahead of time? You know, the theater and music, and I had said this to Jamie when he caught me in passing in the parking lot. I'm fully, I fully support it, but I want them to do it right. So when we get in the funding, like if this happens in 2025, this is going to be there, this is going to be there shot until like 2037. Like this is, so do it once, do it right and get it reasonable. Because again, just in passing somebody said to me, oh, it's not going to have any seating the way they did it. And I have saw nothing. And so I mean, maybe you have, I said it's just going to be a practice room there's not going to be any seating to put on a concert. I said, well, that's not as great as what I first envisioned, but for the kind of money that you're. Yeah, I mean, it's not a performance space, it's a practice space. I know, so what I want them to say is that they understand that, you know, this is your practice space. Five years down the room, we might not be able to fund a performance space and we don't have a performance space in. Yeah, I mean, I think we don't have a theater. We have the gym where we set up chairs and has there ever been any talk of a small theater for both the band and the theater kids where there was chairs to sit and put on a play and for the band to go up on the stage and for maybe holding assemblies. And is this one, is this our chance, if you will, to build something of that magnitude for that kind of money where there's, would you say 70 per class? So a couple hundred seats. And that's all. I mean, I guess it's, I'm on both sides, but I really, really love that. But I also need to say that like five years down the road, if I'm still on this board, we can't be going back to the well and doing that. What do we want? How are we going to fund it? And let's make sure that if we shoot, let's shoot for the stars. I had no idea that you'd said they had that much money committed, so. Yeah, $3 million for a practice space? Well, it's to redo the front entry. Yeah, absolutely. It's to do some improvements in the small gymnasium that we use as our performance space. There is the stage there. To improve acoustics and possibly like, it was really to re-outfit it to make it more multi-purpose and two different rehearsal spaces off the front, but. It gets it aligned better with, you know, inside the building so they don't have to truck from one side of the building, which is in the basement to the other side of the building, which is, you know, a whole level. One way to think about it, Nancy's new construction is 18 months ago, it was about $620 a foot. And so, you know, you're looking at probably almost 20% more than that. So, it doesn't take much to add up to millions. I mean, in another district right now, we're looking at just adding five classrooms and doing some changes within the existing framework, and we're looking at about a $10 million bond. But I can probably, what I was getting to is, you know, I could probably, I know we have some pre-limb drawings for that. We do, we could. As well as I can talk to Eric about setting me some of the additional information of kind of. Only good, well, one, because I'm curious, I really am good. Yeah, so we can put, get that for it. Yeah, be good. And I think just having something that kind of summarizes all the different things we're looking at, so we can kind of look at it all together. And, you know, maybe try and put together some sort of a timeline or idea of a timeline, nothing specific, but you know what I mean. Chris, I can work on something probably Thursday morning, I'll share with you. We can keep adding to it. I just feel the need to mention that embedded in the first floor report was the enrollment numbers, and that 70 that was mentioned is just like a bump, like not all classes are 70, about four or eight, so. 80, 90. 80, 90. They're more around 40. No, but I would take the high school, I mean our recruitment is giving some numbers up. It looked like the numbers were pretty good, other than there was like a wall in the sixth grade class, maybe was, I think, small, right now? 40 something, 45 or whatever, yeah. 47, 41. Yeah, I mean, I think I mentioned this, but it is important for the Board to know, it's the first time I've met you in a very, very long time that we were able to have the most students chose your high school within one of our existing districts in the SU. You would, I'd like that to start to be our common conversation, but that was an exciting celebration, I think, that we're gaining, and I would say to you, and it's probably somebody should talk about more at the SU Board, I think there's really three factors to that, one, the high school is doing a much better job at marketing itself. Two, I believe that there's true interdependence happening among our admin team, that we are seeing that our administrators are working together for the betterment of the SU, and part of that is making certain that our high school is getting a look in our middle school. And three, I would say that there's a real sense of the other district boards to wanna promote your district, and as someone that grew up in Royalton and went through that school system and taught there, that has not been my impression. And so I do think at the full board level at some point as a district board here, we should let folks know that we're seeing that. Because you'd be surprised how many times your district comes up and our school choice board members now, by board members voluntarily, talking about how we need to promote this district and why it's important that our kids really look at staying within the SU umbrella. And there's also a good vibe with the high school right now. And there are some area high schools that are struggling to attract students which are losing out of their district. So I think it's just a great opportunity for us to capitalize on that. And we saw quite a bit of new students come through into the high school this year from others. So. It's your next t-shirt, your jacket. I know. The Wildcats have good vibes. Yeah. I don't. All right, back to the agenda. Do those kind of four guiding topics? Try and spend about half an hour on each. Does that seem like a good agenda? Does anybody have anything else they'd like to bring up or potentially discuss? I have a logistical question. How many of us are there going to be at this retreat if we're going to be bringing food to share? Like, is it just the board members or is? It's all of us, but I said I would get catering. I'll get it catering. Oh, oh, okay. I missed that. Yeah, I said I couldn't barbecue this year so they hired it out. That's what, okay, I heard little discussion going on over there. Yeah, well, not usually, but a couple of times I smoked a brisket. Let's cook. Rodney said, I'm not going to cook. So Jay, he said, I'll just buy food if you're not going to cook. It's time to. We're talking about two days. Yeah. And with, so just kind of going through here. So I'll get, we have the information for the facility planning that we'll get out to everybody. When it comes to the merger feedback portion of that, do we have the old plans for when the merger was going through of this was kind of the vision at that point that we could share the board so that we can see what that. Yeah, I mean we have the articles of agreement and the proposal that was sent to the state. You know, it is a little tricky because there was the multiple votes and so each, you know, there was the original plan that included Rochester and then things were adapted to the bevel one. But at least we could, you know, if we do have, you know, newer members or maybe just to get it up on what that looked like at the time because other than you and Rodney, right? I mean, everybody else was new to that. So that would be kind of helpful. And I don't know. Should we get like leather jackets so you could say we're original on them? And then, and then can we get a copy of the SU goals again so we can look at those? Do you have the... I'll get the SU goals in the merger agreement. Okay, do you want to just email those out like the next day or two? I can do those tomorrow. The other one, we may be coming with it. Great, thank you, Jamie. Okay, seems like we have a plan. Then moving to the Green and Gold Scholarship criteria. So this year, it's been the valedictorian at our school for years. And just Kate and I were both new to the school and we got the UVM criteria and we selected a candidate based on UVM's criteria. And it was not the valedictorian and it had been past practice. So I spoke with the valedictorian and the parents and apologized for that kind of mess up, if you will. And instead, we went with this criteria here. So we're moving forward with kind of like we do for all of our scholarships at our school. It comes to the graduation. We have a small committee and Chris works diligently. It was quite a task this year to all these scholarships and Chris actually does an amazing job of finding more scholarships for our graduating class. I forgot how much money was out there last year for our seniors. But we kind of have a committee for each scholarship and we had a committee for this Green and Gold Scholarship and so we set forth some criteria for that and this is the criteria moving forward. Then we'd like you to consider adopting if you remember we talked as a board back in March of 2021 about providing a proposal around criteria and we shared with you the Randolph version. We're not recommending that version to you. We're recommending this because this has been vetted by UVM and given us the thumbs up. There were some concerns with the other version that we had shared with you at the UVM level. And then frankly this should have came in front of you last fall and I'll take ownership or drop on the ball. We had a new principal and new school counselor and that didn't get in front of you. So we're bringing it in front of you to get ahead of the game now. So just being a little naive on the whole is the UVM Green Gold criteria, is that because that's only applicable to a UVM campus? This is a scholarship that they provide. Okay. One senior at every high school throughout the state. Gotcha. Okay. And it's pretty much full boat, isn't it? It's full boat other than there are some other fees in regards to books and things of that nature. It's tuition but it doesn't have a books or a house. Gotcha. What, do you have to go to UVM? Yes. To UVM. So it says administration counseling, student support coordinator and senior advisor. Is there just one senior advisor or? It is one senior advisor but that senior advisor talks to the staff with questions of this criteria for the candidates. So who is the senior advisor, I guess? Right now it's Reina, Robbins and Nalani Sutton. Okay. All right. It would change. Yeah, it changes. It changes. Yeah, so it's basically whichever teachers are the advisor for the senior class. Got it. And do we define a correct GPA? Yeah, UVM has that. 3.7 or 100. Yeah, 370. And a college level course means like an AP course. Yeah, yeah. Or honors. In honors or honors. Students that go to BTC or Norwich as well, obviously. And how expansive is defining extracurricular activities? You know, we ask our athletic director. We also, you know, know students by the end of the, you know. So athletics, theater, band. Yeah, yeah, community services. Community service. Extracurricular. Drama. Yeah. That looks good to me. I don't have any problems with this. Do we need a motion on that? I would prefer, I mean, we don't. But I like to have it for the minutes so that if this, you know, let's say four years from now, we're all gone. And people are saying, well, why do you not just use the valedictorian? Right. That we can go back to the minutes and say, well, on the board adopted a criteria that aligns with UVMs. We'll have to make sure I like the 11th grade. Parents can just notify it. Yes. You know, don't let the board get out. I may be naive, but doesn't that criteria have to exclude the valedictorians specifically because the valedictorian may not want to go to UVM? We can't choose the person based on that. UVM has to be. So it's awarded to somebody, and then they decide that they're going to UVM. And what if they don't go to UVM and they don't get to award this? They just have rates. Most years it doesn't get used. Yeah. I mean, so I think that's one thing that I do like is that it's opened up now to more individuals that qualify that, like Ed was saying, that may use UVM more often than has been used in the past. You've got a kid that just spent four years, and they want to get into Yale. They get into Yale, but they win the UVM scholarship. And then it goes up in vapor, but then your salutorian or the fourth or fifth kid who's got a 3.95 wanted to go to UVM could have used it. I think that that's not great. I remember seeing all that when I was in high school. Some of the kids that got all the money in, where did they end up, right? At one point in time, they used to let the school go down. Because I know a kid that was number four in her class, and she ended up getting it from Woodstock. They started with the valedictorian, but the valedictorian didn't want it. Yeah, you're not too glad. I want to use that. You can't say, oh, this person can use it. Yeah. No, but they did it at one point in time because this kid did go to UVM with that scholarship. Yeah, that was 25 years ago. That was quite a bit less money at that time. Yeah. All right, so I'd entertain a motion to adopt these green and gold scholarship criteria. I'll make a motion. Second it. Moved by Rodney, seconded by Nancy. That to the handbook. Great idea. Yeah, right now. All in favor? Aye. Say aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right, those are adopted. Is there any public comments? Some things here, and because I'm the general public, can you really combine bond votes for different projects when there's grant-funded dollars and donor-funded dollars? Yes. Yes. OK. And where did the one-third and two-third numbers come for the music project? Why did it happen half, or two-thirds and one-third? I think when we were presented by, well, it's been an idea for, I don't know, a decade or more. I know when it was revisited with our committee, and then we had talked about it briefly at the school board, that trying to get it to be attractable to the community, we kind of came up with informal criteria to saying, hey, we're going to need some donor money or some outside money to make this attractive if we did go to a bond vote. And we just kind of threw out a third at that point, not knowing. I don't even think we even knew how much the upgrades to the facility would even cost at that point, but we just kind of said a third. And then just kind of let them try to line up donors for that. So it doesn't necessarily mean that at the end of the day, it could be funded more than a third, but that was just kind of a target we'd thrown out there for the conversation. OK, and for the treat, you guys are going to talk on preliminary information, what the preliminary component is. And there was mention of a performance space versus a practice space. And generally speaking, the performance space that the community has come to recognize is either one gym at the elementary school or the other gym at the high school. And so this music project is not looking to replace that deemed performance space, is it? No. It would be fixing up the stage in the elementary school, providing practice space off of that. And maybe helping with acoustics. Yeah, acoustics, storage for seating and stuff like that. Major realignment, just safer access because there's a lot of safety concerns and things like that that were raised as well. OK. And we'll see that when we see our November musical, I believe it's November, is that right? That certainly would not be by November. Right? We wouldn't be seeing it by November. No. No, this would be. Yeah, that they would probably present something about that. I apologize. Got it. Our music of 23, not at this future space. Yeah. I was just getting a plug-in for the music post. And then, Jamie identified, this is the first time to have the most students select our high school. And that was attributed to improved marketing, interdepartmental relations. Interdependence, yeah. OK, interdependence, yes. And then a sense of other district boards promoting the White River High School. Are there other community factors impacting students leaving other supervisory unions and coming to our supervisory unions, our high school, that we're aware of? It's a really abstract question, and I'll call that out. You know, you're good. I wouldn't say that they're leaving other supervisory unions. I would say it's our kids choosing to stay within our umbrella. The only place where we're gaining kids from other supervisory unions is typically through Winooski Valley School Choice, because we don't, other than Echo Valley, which is a district just north of Chelsea, it's Washington Orange, we don't really have any school choice districts near us. And so what it can be is through a Winooski Valley School Choice. And what I would say is we have more students entering our high school from Winooski Valley than leaving. It's pretty significant. It's about almost three to one. And they, most of those students are coming to us currently right now from Randolph. Expecting this answer. Thank you. Okay. Peggy? Okay, I was going to speak as public parent. I'm looking toward, I guess probably next year's budgeting or whatever, transportation for students who are involved in athletics. Because I'm looking, I'm wondering how many students from, who live in South Royalton are not able to play sports because they don't have transportation to come home after practice. Or students from Bethel who would like to participate in high school sports but don't have transportation to get home after practices. And I would just like to see us look at that. Because I'm looking at my granddaughter playing soccer this year. And because I can't pick her up right afterwards because of chores, I have to depend on her being able to go to other people's houses, other friends' houses. And sometimes it doesn't work. And she's kind of been, you know, sometimes her coach has stayed with her afterwards. But it would really be nice if you know there are specific times that practices over them to help provide transportation for those sort of things. Well, no, I appreciate you raising this. And I'll meet with our activities directors. I mean, we are, we have public transportation happening later now to provide some transportation. So my hope was practices were being aligned to that better. So it's something we'll look into. Yeah, I mean, they have transportation for kids involved in right after school things. But that, that ends quicker than practice does. Well, right. So I'm curious. Right. And sometimes that's driven by coaches, which I get. But yes, thank you for raising it. It's something where we continue to try to address. And we try to do it some via public transportation. Although I do wonder sometimes though, are we meeting on the activity act on the athletic side, reminding ourselves that public transportation is there. And we should be best trying to accommodate schedules to make certain kids that need rides can use it since we've got it. And I don't know if we're prioritizing that necessarily. So I think it's, it's worthwhile to look into it again. Thank you. No, thank you. Okay. Unless there's any other public comment, I'll move on to new hires resignations. None. That's good this time of year. Yeah. We are not doing the exact discussion personnel. So we don't have any other future agenda items. There was, we need to still appoint a member to the finance committee. And our next meeting is going to be the board retreat on Thursday, six o'clock at SU office. And then our next official meeting. That's in person only. Correct. Yes. Yeah. I just want to make sure that the board, I was saying it just to make sure that everyone knew. Tuesday, November. This one that we're reading right now is in person. Thursday. Oh, Thursday is. Oh, all right. I'm like, that's weird, but okay. Oh, no, Thursday. Cool. Yeah. And the next regularly scheduled meeting is Tuesday, November 21st, 7pm at Royal Ting campus. I'd entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved. So good. All right. Thanks everybody. I do know.