 I'll call the meeting to order at 633. Do we have any adjustments to the agenda? I guess I do have an adjustment, just so that I would receive this diploma that wasn't signed by the board, and so they wanted the board to sign this. Okay. It wasn't possible, so I'm just kidding. Yeah, we can sign. We'll use this bootcamp. Okay. Shannon and Peggy, would you be able to swing by the school to get signed this diploma? Sure. Sorry, I have to do this after. Yeah, no worries. All right, we'll skip the signing times. Move to the Consent Agenda. Would anybody like to make a motion to approve the minutes of Tuesday, June 21st? Tuesday, June 28th, and Thursday, July 28th. Specials? So moved. I'll second. I'll second. Okay, any discussion? All in favor, say aye. Aye. Aye. Then we're on to public comments. Any public comments at this time? Peggy, you have your hand up? There is board comment. After public comment, there is board comment, so. Do you want that? I'm talking as public and not bored. Okay, go ahead. I'm talking to express my frustration with the athletic registration forms. It is such a royal pain in the tuchus to have to do everything on the computer and still have to do hard paper copies between the scanning and the downloading and the uploading. And I spent 45 minutes today and the thing wouldn't say that. So I'm just calling to express my, probably I'm old fashioned, but I find it very frustrating. So that's my public comment. Okay. Was this for the middle school sign up or which forms were you having trouble with? Sorry, Peggy, which one? When you sign up, it's one program you sign up whether it's high school or middle school. It's for seven through 12. Yeah, I thought the Team Snap worked pretty well last year but I guess ran into some troubles with that or it's against the rules, I guess. Okay, is there any other public comment? Okay, do we have any board comments? I had one thing that got brought up to me so I don't know where we're at in the process or if we even looked at it. So the trails grants that have been going on with the town of Bethel, the school. So the trails are gonna be, some of the trails are gonna be done on town land, some's on private land and some's on the school's land. So when it comes down to the school's land, do we have any liability for the general public using those trail pieces? Have we looked into legality of, do we need to, I don't know, post a sign or do we have to, have some type of extra insurance to cover that or are we covered under some kind of exemption for that rule? It has not been presented to me to present to our carrier. Okay. So that would be the next step is to indicate what the trails are gonna be used for, what parts of the property they're on and then we would submit it to the insurance carrier and they would let us know. Generally speaking, we are covered but we always like to verify it and have it in writing first. Yeah, I know it's kind of a difficult thing because the trails cross multiple private, public and in the school. I know you can't sue like a private landowner if you're on their property. That's just, you know, like, I have to sue all your trails, I go through my property and stuff, nobody can sue me for anything. Like I know there's some state exemptions on certain recreational type things and I didn't know if that falls under that or, you know, or where are we at with that? But somebody had mentioned that, means that that's gonna be moving forward and where. Yeah, it's worth looking at too. I mean, if somebody comes and uses our playground and they hurt themselves. We do have a signpost that says when the public can and cannot be on the playground and down at this moment, I can't recall exactly what the signpost is, but there is a list of signs. Sure. Tara, why don't we visit with Owen about this so then we can report back out to the board next month after connecting with this bit. I have it written down on my to-do list. Great, thank you. All right, any other board comment? And we'll move to the celebration of learning. So we don't. That's a placeholder. I would just jump in and say, for me, a huge celebration of learning was I get to tour your buildings on Friday and spend about two and a half hours with your maintenance and facilities folks. They've accomplished a great deal of work this summer and hopefully, you probably didn't take that. We started to do some trim painting at the Royalton campus. The plan is to do trim painting at the Bethel campus next summer, exterior trim. I think it's freshened it up a great deal at the Royalton campus. The plan would be to do that next summer in the Bethel campus. We're budgeted for both. We couldn't find people to bid on it, but the plan moving forward would be for us to hopefully put together our SU-wide summer painting team that's made up of faculty and staff who have interest in painting, and we would tackle the exterior trimmer painting on each building annually throughout the SU. And so, but anyways, we're able to have a painter come in and do a bunch of the trim this summer at Royalton and then the plan would be to do Bethel next summer. But I just wanted to celebrate a great deal of work being done in your buildings to just freshen them up. There's been some flooring changed out in Royalton. Again, these are all budgeted projects, but the buildings are looking good and setting a tone for high quality professionalism. So I just wanted to put a shout out to our hardworking maintenance and facility staff. Yeah, I would just say that it's being noticed too. I know I walked through the parking lot at one point with one of my kids yesterday and then separately with another kid. And they both independently noticed that all of the backboards and the basketball hoops have gone up in the parking, back parking lot at Selva Royalton. So little things like that are definitely noticed by our students and families. And thank you so much for doing that work over the summer. Okay, well, we can go from that into the superintendent's report. So you have my report in hand. You know, the thing that I think is really exciting for this district and you'll get a presentation from EEI tonight is that we look to have a, what by asking you to consider using some building reserve funds, a plan to be able to move forward with a pretty much a cost neutral project for the White River Unified District that would result in a whole new heating system in Bethel, upgrades to HVAC system, upgrade to controls in both buildings and complete lighting, LED lighting project in both campuses. So Eric from EEI will be here to talk to you about that tonight and where all that funding would come from. You certainly would be leveraging state and federal grants, leveraging reserve funds, but being able to take care of this pretty longstanding deferred maintenance problem in regards to the heating system at Bethel. Next summer would be when we would look to try to do that. So you'll get a presentation from him tonight. The other thing I'm excited to just highlight is Tri-Valley Transit. Principal Bradley and Thomas and I will meet with Tri-Valley Transit. Again, tomorrow I believe it is. In my calendar, it looks like we're gonna be able to have a late transportation, crosstown transportation occur after extracurriculars at five o'clock, which I think is really exciting. And we'll be able to leverage that from the middle school to the high school, but also from our high school, not just back to Bethel, but we're looking to leverage it also up to Chelsea. So that students who attend from Tumbridge in Chelsea could have late busing for after-school activities and also leveraging a bus from Sharon possibly to the middle school directly via public transit. So that students in Sharon that choose to go to White River Unified District Middle School don't have to ride a bus to Royalton, get off a bus, get on another bus, and then go to Bethel on the crosstown bus that they would have a direct bus over, thought being that that would be more desirable for folks. Sharon Academy has leveraged public transit for a long time, at least the last several years, and it's served them well. And so my hope is that we can also leverage it to create more equity for kids in regards to who access after-school programming, who maybe the ride is the reason why they don't, and also be able to do it via public transit, which would be definitely more affordable for the district. So I was excited about that. And it's been just a pleasure working with your faculty and staff this summer. I think there's a lot of work that's laid some really good groundwork for the upcoming school year, both in universal instruction, but also in personalized learning and pathways. And the high school teams have met a lot, and that was not always the culture in our high school that our faculty were meeting and doing planning. I think we had been doing that more at the elementary levels, but I definitely have seen more high school faculty meeting and planning for next school year. And I just also want the board to know, and Peggy to know that certainly there's frustration in regards to the administration or regards to the turnover around the form process. I met with director of communications and technology blue and principal Thomas last Thursday morning for about an hour to address this concern. And I think we'll have a good plan moving forward, but I would also say that we could have done a better job in regards to proactive communication around it. And I'll leave it at that. All right, thanks. Jamie, does anybody have any questions for Jamie? We'll move on to the principal's report. So you have our report. I would just highlight specifically to the elementary to follow up on what Jamie was saying. We have had lots of work days happening even today. Science committee was meeting and I'm excited about the summer momentum from all the work that's gone on this summer. I think it'll feed into many celebrations of learning to come. I would add too, there's an invitation to our ice cream socials. I know that Mr. Thomas just had his amazing event the other night. So we're gonna try to rally and have as many people attend as he did. And I would just add that lots of learning for our teachers going on. And I'm excited about that. So during our professional development days, we have some embedded professional development, but also teachers standing up and stepping up to learn you some outside learning with some new writing programs and other things. So excited about those things. Yeah, so to recap some of the, and I know Mr. Kanari mentioned the same thing, but the high school has met several times this summer, which has been really exciting. We're working on our flexible pathways and we're working on procedures that are in place and going to be in place this school year, which are pretty exciting. Our advisory, we meet again tomorrow to sort of settle on who's with who for advisory and a whole schedule of the whole school year of advisory, which is kind of exciting. We're starting student-led conferences and so teachers are gonna be aware of that and portfolios, we've been doing a lot of work on portfolios, PLPs. Our exciting news, the AOE is working with us for two years. It's a two-year commitment on proficiencies. So they're gonna be coming in on our half-day Fridays to come. And what's really exciting about that is that it's just not one person from AOE. It's one for every department. So I just think this professional development is really exciting. We also talked about the pride in our school. I mean, when you guys leave, just take a look on the side as you drive up that the brown looks phenomenal. I don't know if you remember in the past, but every door was a different color and some was just flaking paint and all the doors are the same color so there's uniformity. We had Carol Sears was here for doing our plants this summer. You get a chance to come into the pavilion which is in the center. Just beautiful, the landscaping is just phenomenal. So again, I think when you start with pride, you start building community. Last night we had a great barbecue with the community. Lots of people, there's almost 200 people there. We had a great evening of just community, just getting together and having food and it was great. You know, it's funny when you start thinking about how do you build community? I mean, you play games, you eat. Those are two great ideas and we had cornhole going with different families just a fun evening. I did bring some packets just of some of the things that we're doing from the start of school and with the community barbecue that we had just an advertisement that we did. So I'll just share that with you. Just so folks know, Owen is ill and he has been for a little bit. But anyways, I excused him for tonight's meeting just so you know. Okay. Does anybody have any questions for the principals? One or two. I saw in a note that Tim Perot is our new activities director which is great. But I'm wondering about the marching orders for that. It used to be called a co-curricular director. It was very much focused on arts and athletics. So I'm wondering what his job role is now. I can take that cause I changed the title. It was actually to expand it even more toward clubs in student leadership and also what you would think of extra curriculars around music, drama, athletics. The word co-curricular can sometimes open us up around liability issues with extra curriculars. It's actually good guidance is not to actually consider it. You don't title it co-curricular. And so, but the activities part was to emphasize this idea of not just after school but also how do we expand programming during the school day? And so the hope would be that he is helping lead the charge to around school time clubs and also this idea of as we implement explorations throughout the day, student leadership opportunities and not that he would be possibly co-doing that with another teacher. So the idea is just more opportunities for kids six through 12 and certainly like you said continue to expand our opportunities in the arts as well. Okay, thank you. We've actually changed that title across the whole SU and defined like what you had but actually expanded a little more. All right. One more quick question, sorry. I was at the celebration the other day for Mr. Thomas. It was awesome and the raffle was so much fun. I think very well received by everyone. So thank you, Mr. Thomas. I have a high schooler. I heard a bunch of people there saying when are we gonna get our schedules? They haven't gotten anything like that yet. They're expecting them. Yeah. And so Nicole's supposed to be mailing those out and we're gonna also hand them out on September 1st first day of ninth grade orientation. So the kids, if they don't receive them in the mail which they should, we're working on that right now currently there was some with the exploration classes. There's been a delay. So we're working on that. And hopefully they'll be sent out. And again, I assure those ninth graders that if they don't come out we're gonna hand them out in the morning of. Okay. Well, one of them I was talking to yesterday was the very anxious 11th graders. So I'm just wondering can we put out a communication or something on Facebook about when to expect them because I think it's getting to the end of the summer. And I think people are used to having them a little bit before now when there aren't so many changes going on. I'm excited about it but I think we need to reassure people they're coming. Great idea. Yeah, I'll do that tomorrow. Thank you. All right. Thanks Shannon. Tara. So you all have my report. We are 45 days post close of the fiscal year. So all of our state and federal and auditor reports are due. So we are visiting the business office wrapping up FY 22 and all of our audit stuff for FY 22 has to be uploaded to the auditors by September 8th. So we're still on target for our September 19th official audit for FY 22. So that's my excitement in the business office. Any questions? I did see that you were posting a job for an accountant. So is that replacing? Yes. Yep. But I've had no bite. So if you know any accountants, send them my way. Is he already on them? No. OK. Any questions for Tara? OK, then we'll go to the policy committee about the social media policy and the verification of student residency for tuition payment policy. So these were included in the packet. Have people posted them? Does anybody have any comments? Hey, Jamie, on the affidavit verification of student residency, how much of that are we expecting parents to complete? That seems onerous. That seems kind of an- You wouldn't complete it because you don't pay tuition. And so that policy as a district, our policy on the developmental policies is that the SU would adopt policies in all member districts. That's why I would ask that you adopt it as well. But this is more for school choice districts. And so if we had a student move in, for example, in Sharon and they're in seventh grade, we would ask them to complete this to verify that it's actually truly a primary residence. We've run into folks having secondary residences and claiming them as primary than asking for tuition. So this affidavit would actually result in parents filling them out one time. It's not annually, unless a residency was in question in tuition paying and choice districts. Okay, I'm not sure that was clear when I just did the family ID stuff this morning. And it looked like I needed to fill it out because I just moved while I moved in district but town to town. So I don't think that was clear, but also it just seems crazy to be asking like, where is your motor vehicle registered? After you asked all the questions about where do you sleep at night and where are you? And it said you need multiple forms. You need the utilities bills. I get it, but if we're actually gonna make lots of parents fill that out, I think there's gonna be a lot of pushback. No, I appreciate that feedback and I can, it's good feedback for me to have. I don't see your Ford facing and what it looks like. And let's see if we can work on that to make that clearer for folks. So thanks for that feedback. But just what the board knows, this really is about school choice and us being on the verify residency and giving us policy to request that this is completed if as a district we have a question about residency. From our perspective, do we have a policy for when a student doesn't have residency and there's question or as a receiving town, if the sending town isn't paying tuition, what's our policy? Or should we develop a policy? So if a student was let's say claiming residency in Tumbridge and you were receiving that student but they actually lived in Straford, what would happen is is that we all work together through this process to make certain that the student, that the right town gets the average daily membership at the right towns build tuition. If a student lived in Randolph, what happens is that we say to the family you have to go register in Randolph, which does happen sometimes. So what they get is a letter from me saying that we're now requesting that you go register in Randolph. I copy the superintendent in Randolph. We give them a time period of when we're gonna disenroll them and then we support them to get enrolled in the appropriate district. And then Ray works with the data managers or directors of technology to ensure that we get appropriate ADM and that the other district gets appropriate ADM. Well, do we need a written policy for that or do you think just what we're currently? No, I mean, I actually think that this does cover that as well for you. I guess what I'd be concerned about would be, if you have some student where the family like isn't responsive and then so there's no known residency and like just making sure they don't not get to go to school or something like that. But I imagine we wouldn't turn kids away in that situation anyway, but. Well, there's also transitional housing, right? So sometimes families are doubled up and then there's a whole statute on transitional housing. So what would happen then is that they actually, the family gets choice in regards to what district they're going to attend. So it's not always cut and dry, but we do have another policy on residency beyond this too. This is more specific to tuition paying districts and receiving districts. So this could impact us in regards to the White River Unified District would need to work with those sending districts to ensure that we can verify residency. Okay. Does anybody have any questions or comments about social media policy or further on the residency one? No, I think it's pretty in line. I guess the old fashioned on me would like to see us probably be a little stricter on it when it comes to electronic devices at schools, but I don't think there's really many cases where anybody really needs the electronic device at school. But that's just me, that's one voice, but. Yeah, and I think that would kind of be a separate policy about devices. Well, I think just being a parent with teenage and pre-teenage kids at the middle school now, high school level is a lot of the day to day issues that happen at school are not just outside social media but inside social media. So they're on their phones in the same classroom as something's being posted, the kid that's there that affects that one there. And you know, so I guess that's kind of where I get to. I kind of would like to see a policy where phones go up. You know, I mean, there's really no instant where a child needs to have a phone in a classroom other than emergencies, calls can come into the offices, they can be communicated that way. Everybody's got calculators and everything else that you can use. I mean, I have to tell my kids from time to time, what are you doing on your phone at 10 o'clock in the morning, you know? And I think a lot of the issues when it stemmed last year and there was several of them in the middle school area and I'm sure they're everywhere but it boiled down to something that was going on while it was in the class, not so much after school. No, I appreciate that feedback and this, but this policy just so we're clear, we'll go underneath our personnel, category of policies. If you go to the SU website, which is new by the way, if you haven't checked it out, there's gonna be a letter coming out for me to the community in the next couple of days and it emphasizes to check out the new SU website too. But this would be a policy that would be located underneath policies in procedures for personnel. This is to really delineate guidance around how our staff should engage in social media, both professionally and then also personally. Okay, well, we'll move on to the task force updates. So from the finance task force, we haven't met this month, we're gonna be meeting on Thursday since Tara had her birthday. I did. You were waiting for your birthday. No, wait, it's postponed last week Oh, last day, so it wasn't my birthday. It was last day, so it wasn't my birthday. It was my birthday. As I guess the facilities task force were gonna be hearing stuff. Yeah, gonna be hearing kind of what we met in July on a very, very, very hot day in the middle school with no air conditioning. And I think we, I think we were all were soaking wet that day. We were sitting there. It was a very humid day. But yeah, we haven't got through it. You'll see the benefits to our work tonight on kind of the recommendations that we have made on the big level. We're still looking at kind of more the intermediate level that won't be a part of this, which will be more of the smaller hanging fruit that also needs to get addressed that we're currently picking away. Okay. Um, the communications and recruitment task force, forget what the official name of that one is. Yeah, we have not met, but we do need to start meeting again now that we have Mr. Thomas in place. And he's been super, super busy, but that's another thing we'll be doing again soon. Jamie, can you get another meeting on our agenda? Thank you. Yeah, no, all that. Kate kind of spearheads that group. So I'll ask you to get it back up and running. Cool. Here in the next month. Great. I know there's a lot of things we were talking about and want to get doing this fall. So we'll get running with that. And hopefully you'll see a lot more of this high school stuff than we have in the past. So. Talk to your task force? Yeah. Okay. So we met a couple of times in August, I think that summer was a real challenge to get, to get everyone to the table, but most recently we had everyone at the table. So I emailed you because it wasn't in the reports, the draft three year proposed plan. We had representation from both site directors and then Haley Zoabride, who's the new SU one planet director. Karen Allen has been representing and Shannon has been there as well. And Renee Hinton who was also on the pre-k test course. So we surveyed parents, we looked at the survey results and kind of tried to talk about like, how can we ease into this to build and make it bigger and better? I think we did a good stab at it. And then we refined it at our last meeting just Monday. So really I can just maybe outline what this year will look like. And then you can check it out in email, which is to continue all the above and keep on expanding. So we said basically to continue early drop-off but look at ways to expand to a possible early drop-off for pay. So continuing early drop-off at 7.30 but looking at potential 7, 7.15 early drop-off. That's something I'm gonna work on. One planet's extending to 5.30 for the school year to include the half days. We're gonna work to cover 80% of the half day in services which I think is not like the first one because there's a childcare conference that they all go to. And then maybe not the last one and then temperature is up in the air too is what I was told because of attendance. We're gonna talk about researching ways to offer some vacation care potentially over spring vacation for this year but that will build going forward. Continue offer summer program and then for this summer to include summer 2023 to cover at least six weeks but work through covering more of the summer through staggering the programs that are offered in each campus. We also got feedback that middle school coverage is wanted and desired. So one planet through licensing can only cover up to sixth grade but I think that's a conversation we have to continue with maybe some of our middle school representation because I think what we heard from the voices at the table and through the survey is it's not really limited to sixth grade that people are looking for knowing their kids are cared for after school or maybe in between sports. And then last but not least for this upcoming year expanding the number of allowable participants in after school program and summer program contingent on staffing ability and attendance rates. So that was year one plan. And so it's in your email and you can look at your year one, two and three. And I think that, and Shannon you can weigh in because you're there for all that the thought was that we would assess based on how this year was going with the specifically vacation care and try to edit your two and three based on how this year goes. So that's that. Yeah, and I think that the plan may change. We may see needs in other areas. We've talked about this in the past and the first time I brought it up years ago it was over snow days because Lord knows there were so many snow days that working parents were having a hard time figuring out how to do that. And that hasn't been a real issue. The last couple of years, but now we've had COVID. So I think this sort of evolves and goes back and forth a little bit. We'll keep asking questions of the parents and I really appreciate Karen's input as well. And yeah, I think that it's a good plan to start to address some of these things. Hopefully we can find the staff to do it. That seems to be the challenge. I think also just recognizing how dedicated the staff are that we have in place right now. And I know that when we start to talk about vacation care they were like, those are the only vacations we get. So I think, I mean, maybe there's work to be done with that and what their benefits are. But then after they said, you know we only get so many days, like four days a year and we need to take a vacation too. But the next sentence was, so how can we work this out? How can we figure out maybe it's one campus for one week and then next for the unit? So yeah, our staff is the best. They're really trying. Great, thanks, that sounds great. Okay. Sorry. I missed all that because I got lost connection. So I don't know what was reported out, but. We just, I think read over the year one of the three year plan and reviewed that and talked about who was at the table and some of the barriers that we're going to keep coming back to the table to review during the course of the year maybe at the end of the year to make sure that the year two plan and three plan maybe needs to get edited. I think that's the biggest summary, the shortest summary. All right, I kicked out when I couldn't get back in. All right. Okay. We'll move on to the revise the date, time and location of regular school board meetings. We're changing from the third Tuesday of the month at six to the third Tuesday of the month at 6.30. So we can do these joint meetings with Sharon and save the SU office some nights. So do we just need to make a motion to revise this? All right, I'd entertain a motion to revise the date, time and location of regular school but I guess it's just the time. I guess I'll make a motion that we change our monthly meeting to the third Tuesday of the month at 6.30 p.m. Okay, second. Okay. Do we have any discussion? Okay. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Okay. Motion passes. Um, so moving on, we still have a vacancy on the bevel board. We haven't received any interest in it yet. So keep reaching out to people. Anybody you know, hopefully somebody will step up soon. Is anybody have any other, anything else to add? I guess, maybe ask Christie to send that information to the town office in Beppel too. Was that posted? Do you know Chris? Yeah, when I received it from you, I don't know. Maybe a month ago, we did post it. We post it to our Facebook as well as it's on our homepage as well. Yeah. I'll ask them tomorrow to see if they'll cycle it to the top again. Yeah. Can we re-post to our school Facebook sites and I will, I mean we can all share it and spread the word that way too. And yeah, that was good. I'd just like to say, maybe we should visit the, and think about actually reducing the number of school board members that we have from six to four, two from each town. Cause this does seem like a reoccurring problem. I think that has to be a, the whole town has to vote on that. So it's not something that we can just do, but in that course the quorum would be probably two from one town and one from the other. We'll make a quorum, but it's kind of a suggestion at this point, but something we might want to think about. Yeah, I guess the downside of that would just be for the SU meetings. It's been nice having alternates and like making sure that we have our three people at each SU meeting. So that might make it more difficult if you only have one extra person. But, something that I can help. Yeah, cause it's almost like, didn't everybody has to show it to be a quorum? I don't know. I don't know what else to do. Nobody's stepping up to take that position and it's always a struggling world and too, but I mean, we always seem to come through, but yeah, it has been right along. Okay, well, we'll move on to the, you got a task force update. Hey. Hey. I sent a presentation to Parker, who's obviously not here right now. Is that possible? You could pull that up. No, really? I'm not Parker. I know you're not. Yeah. I realize that. I can email it over to you. Actually, I can email it over to you. We'll take a minute, but let's get started. Okay. I don't have the presentation in front of us. I'll hold this up. How's it going? I'm Eric Lafayette, the DEI. I think I met you guys quite a while ago, early on. I think it was back in February and haven't been back since. No, Eric, you met with them a couple of months ago. Was it in July? I get confused with them. Okay. June. Okay. So I just wanted to go over the items that I met with the facilities task force and the items that I was asked to kind of focus on this project and the biggest needs being the Bethel steam system and the boiler project over there. So currently you guys have a couple boilers that are past their useful life expectancy. You have an aging steam system throughout about 50% of the school. The middle school still runs off the steam, same as the gymnasium. The steam system is well past its useful life, even the terminal units inside the classroom being the baseboard radiation and the piping. So I have a proposal in an ECM matrix that would remove the steam system and go with a wood pellet system as your primary heating source, removing the fuel oil tanks and going with an LP backup boiler. This would remove all the steam throughout the building. Here we go to the next slide. Does that mean we're done? All right. Well, there's supposed to be an ECM matrix on those slides. I don't know why because I'm looking at them right now. So what we're looking at for total cost at Bethel, which also includes an LED lighting upgrade throughout the school and doing asbestos abatement as needed for the HVAC system. Total project value is 1.8 million at Bethel. There's good amounts of grants and rebates through Efficiency Vermont. You also picked up the state of... Oh, awesome, sweet. Okay, can you blow? Is it possible to get this a little bit bigger so the people in the back can see it? Okay. So ECM, the first measure is removing your existing fuel oil tank. That's for 35,000. The second measure is installing underground LP tanks so providing backup heat to your guys' base. These LP boilers would also pick up the trim season. So October, November, March, April, when you're not... Pellet boilers are very good at going at full steam and providing a lot of heat. What they're not good is at ramping up and ramping down during their shoulder seasons. So that's when we put an LP backup in to pick up those shoulder seasons. This is a very similar design that what they have at Sharon Elementary School right now. Adding a wood pellet boiler with LP backup, converting the building from steam to hydronic, a DDC control system upgrade. So right now, you guys utilize pneumatic controls, which is an air-based control system. They really haven't been installed in about 35 years. Everything now is electronic. So hooking everything up to electrical systems, electric actuators for both your outside air control and your radiation control. So that's what this is. So each classroom would have individual CO2 monitoring so you guys are gonna get alarms if indoor air quality inside of the space goes above 1200 parts per million, which is pretty much just saying that the kids are rebreathing each other's air more so than what guidelines allow them to. So that's what the DDC control upgrade is focused on. LED lighting upgrade. So that's replacing all the fixtures throughout the school with LED lights. Which this is really becoming more and more of a necessity. The federal government has outlawed fluorescent lights starting in 2024. And right now, this rebate of 65,000 for the lighting, I think it's actually light. Speaking with Efficiency Vermont, it sounds like there's gonna be even more money coming out for lighting rebates. They're really pushing to go completely all LED. So this is a number that I'm working on Efficiency Vermont to get updated. And then I have an allowance in here for asbestos abatement, because there's gonna be some abatement needed on your steam system. I haven't completely figured out exactly where all of it. So I have a 50,000 allowance. I am working with the ATC to go through and get further testing and really firm up that number. So right now we're looking at total project value of 1.8 million. We did secure a $250,000 grant for the wood pellet system through the Department of Forestry. And then we're looking at close to 90,000 in grants through Efficiency Vermont. So less the grants and rebates brings the commitment to 1.4 million, 1.463 million. The school district, the supervisory union has agreed that they wanna put 300,000 towards your guys' heating system. That's part of the ESSER application. That leaves the Bethel Royalton responsibility at 1.15 million. With the energy savings of approximately $83,000 a year, if you were to use those energy savings to pay towards a lease, that gets you on a 15-year lease, that gets you $920,000 in capital improvement. So essentially what you're saying is that the money that would have been spent towards energy, towards your lights, and for your fuel oil, because we're gonna be going towards pellets and your lights are gonna be using less, it's gonna reduce your energy bills by $82,000 a year. That $82,000 a year reduction in bills would pay for the $920,000 lease on a 15-year lease, which essentially means you're leasing your lights in your boilerstone. Which means that the White River Valley School District's contribution outside of that is still at $230,000. So this is a number I'm trying to get down and I'm working on the Scopon. In conversations with Jamie and I know the Facilities Task Force is, how do we try to keep these projects as budget-neutral as possible and not have to dump them and dip into the capital funds? So we're looking at scopes of work under the removal of the steam system if there's any radiation that we can save or anything to cut those costs. We're trying to get this contribution as low as possible. So you guys are aware of where we are at in the design process. Over the next couple months, we're gonna further design on it. So I hope to come back mid-October or end of October. We'd have full sets of drawings at that point. Subcontractor costs would be pretty much firmed up at that and I would have hard numbers for you guys to present with actual energy savings. At this point, these are budgets and magnitude of cost numbers that I feel are conservative. And I'm hoping that when I come back to you guys, the savings go up, the costs go down and this project looks even nicer and then hopefully we're signing a contract early November of this year so that we can be buying equipment around December for these boilers which have about a six month lead time which will allow us to get them installed beginning 2023 and have them up for the heating season of 2023-2024. So I'm hoping, so that's Bethel campus. There is Royalton, so if you wanna go to the next slide. Royalton, what we're looking at here for 2023, same thing, LED lighting upgrade. The downstairs has already been converted to LED. So the remainder of the school that doesn't have LED lighting would all get upgraded. You're looking at $26,000 a year in energy savings through LED lighting upgrades and then also looking at finishing the DDC control upgrade. So that would also include the demand control ventilation, looking at the CO2 monitoring in each side of each one of the spaces. On this project, total cost of $344,000, less grants and rebates of $256,000. The school district supervisor union has been contributing for the controls on these projects of $45,000, leaving the Bethel road and responsibility of $211,000. And with a 15 year lease on lighting, your payment would be $19,000 a year and you can expect $27,000 a year in savings. So in this case, you're actually saving $8,000 a year by going with the lighting upgrade on a 15 year lease. Down here are a couple other DCF measures that don't have payback periods with them, but I just wanted to bring them up because they are important. You guys have a library here that's under ventilated. There's a small unit ventilator in the corner that has an outside air grill that's about this big and that's supposed to provide ventilation for the 60 or so occupants that that space is rated for. So looking at doing a new energy recovery unit with dehumidification for the library would run about $250,000. That would get that space up to code from a ventilation standpoint. Same thing with the cafeteria. You guys have a cafeteria right now that has no ventilation in it. So adding ventilation, your library and your cafeteria are your two biggest spots with the lack of ventilation and that's also approximately $250,000 for a new energy recovery unit there. Our plan is to fully develop ventilated lighting, the DDC controls and the Beckel heating system projects. And then, you know, if this is something, these ventilation measures that you guys want us to continue and serious about potentially doing in 2023, we can also provide design and cost estimating on that as well. Whether or not you guys want to move forward with it this year is up to you, but it might be just useful, good useful information for you guys to have in the future. Anybody have any questions or? I guess one question I have is the leases that are based on the energy savings. Is that just basically a standard lease? That, and then we just take whatever money we would be saving for energy, spending on energy and that just goes towards the lease or is there some way that it's tied to the actual energy savings that we get? Well, what we do is we do an investment grade audit, which essentially is a measurement and verification process that guarantees those energy savings, which allows this municipal leasing service to provide a lease on it. So before we start the project, we go through and we do energy calculations on all of your lights and all of your stuff. And then once we get done the project and all the new systems and we go back, we retest it and that verifies that the energy consumption has decreased. And then we follow your utility bills. If we don't hit your guaranteed energy savings and EEI is responsible for the difference. And one of the major things that we do is through this GDC web-based control system is we monitor you guys HVAC system every month. So if we see stuff that's out of whack, if we see exhaust fans that are running 24-7 that really only need to be running during occupied times, it comes up in the report and you guys get notified about it. So part of district-wide is we're looking at doing major control upgrades. So if you guys can actually monitor the air quality inside of your spaces and really make sure that these energy savings, once they're implemented initially, they'll stay implemented through the duration of the lease. Somebody else have questions? Go ahead, baby. She made it. There we go. I think I've asked this question before, but do both schools have generation generators or something? So I live in an area where I lose power a lot. So do we have generator facilities at both campuses to keep things going when the power goes off? Bethel has a generator generator, I don't know about it. Royalty does not. And you'll see on the new strategic plan that the board will get to comment on next month that I propose that we look to do that as like a phase three project. And that we will budget for it accordingly for Royaltyn. Royaltyn or Chelsea are my last two campuses that don't have generators paid. Any other questions? I think the only other questions that I have is just what the financial packages would look like that we could take advantage of for the 230,000 and Bethel and the 211,000. Royaltyn, I don't know, if it's a five, 10 year note and what we'd be looking at. I think that would all come as part of the presentation. How does it work with Eric directly on that? Yeah, there's different lending options. We work with municipal leasing services and Overmont Bond Bank offers some leasing options as well through them. And then obviously your local bank, whoever you guys use. So it does make sense to reach out and shop to see what's available for interest rates out there. I know talking to, you know, they're right around 4% on a 15 year lease right now, talking with municipal leasing services. That was also based on like about a month ago. I know rates of time to come down. So we'll see where they end up in a few months. Do you have any sense for like the most recently passed bill in Congress, the Financial Reduction Act? No idea. Yeah, I don't. I mean, I know there's a lot of money coming. I just don't know who it's going to be coming to and what the timelines are associated with at this time. So keep that in mind. Yeah, there's a lot of money tied to it. I read up on, you know, different electrical pieces. I don't know how it would get into our project or not, but there's definitely going to be opportunities. And there's opportunities right now. And I know, for instance, like at Royalton here, we submitted on a wood chip grant opportunity to convert you guys to like a pellet system with chip like the rest of the schools, because you guys do burn a lot of oil here. Unfortunately, the school is not selected and it's possibly due to some email communication issues with the state of Vermont. But there is more money coming out in these different programs. So one of the big things that the state of Vermont and all their agencies that give grants out is they're really looking for shovel-ready projects. So stuff that the schools know that they need, they have good budgets for and ready to move forward. That's why we were able to secure a lot of money at Tumbridge and even at Bethel had a lot of money because they had a good plan, at least a baseline plan to work from. And so having these things and knowing what the overall capital improvements and how that's going to affect your energy. And, you know, and then our goal at EEI is whenever there's grants out there, we look at all the school districts that we're working with and we see how can we apply those grants for the school districts. So, all right. And I don't know if it'd work here or not, but, you know, if it is an election year, there's, you know, a lot of things going on. And I don't know if this would be Jamie at your level or higher, but, you know, I know the town of Bethel, we just secured some, you know, we don't call them earmarks anymore, but, you know, some money from Bernie Sanders to help us perform work on one road in Bethel. So, I mean, there's always opportunities, you know, I don't know if there's an opportunity to talk to Sanders or Welch or, you know, to see if there's any money that could be earmarked for Bethel or Royalton, but just put your hand out and see, you know, I don't know if that would come from a board member, you know, or Jamie or higher than Jamie, but maybe there's an opportunity there. Yeah, it seems like right now, most of the grants that have been coming out through the state is by the Agency of Education, the Department of Energy and the Department of Forestry for the most part, they seem to be the three biggest ones and obviously Efficiency Vermont always has money. We work very closely with Efficiency Vermont, so if there's stuff where projects are close or borderline making financial sense, a lot of times we'll go back to Efficiency Vermont and say, hey, is there any more money you can help contribute to this project because it doesn't seem like it's gonna go based on the current financials. So those are all things that we're gonna do throughout this. As we get the final drawings and the final energy savings, we submit all that information to Efficiency Vermont and then they come back with their final rebates. But she did call me up and just said, please, please get your lighting stuff into me soon because we have a lot of money for it and it's all first come, first serve. So then I'm hoping that come October, November, I'm coming back and essentially I'm presenting something very similar to you guys. All the funding will be secured, the money from the grants from the forestry will be in Jamie's accounts or at least ready for them to submit application for so that they can pay for the funds. But we're really shooting for that November timeline because if we don't get the equipment ordered by end of December, it's really jeopardizing the projects. Most of this wood-fired equipment that we installed, it's all built in Germany, Schmitt and Frohling are the two major manufacturers of this equipment and they have their own energy crisis over there. So coming up with these boilers right now are tougher and tougher. Jamie, did you have something over there? Yeah, I was just looking for the board to get some further direction about one, just their support around getting this taken care of in Bepple and then two, whether or not they want us to continue to pursue either one of those ventilation upgrades at Royalton. We did put about $250,000 away in each capital improvement fund. Last year you remember from our surplus and part of that was strategic to be able to do this work. And so, Tara, I think you were prepared to be able to remind the board of what we have in those reserve funds as well. So I just, I think just given some further direction about what you want to pursue, how willing the board would be to utilize some of those reserve funds, I think would be helpful to as far as direction, specifically at Royalton, but also just your appetite in regards to pursuing this scope of project that was just proposed for Bepple. So in Royalton, as you recall, when we built the budget starting in 22, in Royalton and Bepple, we started putting in $40,000 a year to fund the reserve funds. So we have $20,000 from 22 and $20,000 from 23 in both reserve funds, plus the $250,000 that we put in from the surplus from 21 in your annual warning this year. And in Royalton, at the end of 21, we had a fund balance of 85,000. And in Bepple, as you recall, we had a negative fund balance of the Bepple Reserve Fund of just over 18,000. So right now, we have in Royalton, 375,000. And in Bepple, we have just shy of 272,000. So if we also choose to use any surplus funds from 22, to additionally fund reserve funds, that number could be increased. Do you have a sense of what the balance might be for 2022? I do not yet. I don't want to speak ahead. I'm still wrapping up grants, so. There we go. Talk on Thursday. Yes. Shannon, go ahead. So I'm fully in support of fixing the heat. I think we're held together with duct tape and bobby pins up in Bethel, unfortunately. And anytime you do a big project like this, it's gonna cost something and it's going to be an investment, but we gotta keep the kids warm enough to keep learning. So I'm just very excited that we've been able to find some grants and some offsets and things. I also think that improvements to our infrastructure in South Royalton are important and necessary. I would support the ventilation projects and hope that we could find some funding to try and offset those. My comment would be, I think that there is perhaps still some lingering discomfort over, this is one of those issues that came up during the merger and I think that there's still some lingering angst over who gets what. So I think doing something to both campuses is important. And I think communication, again, I'm gonna stand on my soapbox for one more minute. I think communication of this will be super important. If we're making decisions around December and January, headed into town meeting, there are going to be a lot of questions and we need to be able to answer them. We need to be able to put out some information to the towns saying, here's the plan, here's exactly what we're gonna do on each campus, here's what it's gonna cost. And then here's what we're gonna get back in energy savings, here's what we're getting back in grants and really make it very, very clear what this is costing because I'm, that has always been a rumbling is the infrastructure in both buildings and how that's going to get fixed since we merged. So that's my soapbox, but I absolutely support keeping our kids as healthy as possible in the buildings. Do we have any legal obligations to fix the ventilation if it's not up to code? No, I mean, there's no authority out there saying that what your fire marshal and your code compliant and your engineers in your building would say is that before you guys do any major projects, additions or other things here is that you guys should bring your existing systems up to code prior to that. Does anybody actually review it and look over it? No, I mean, the fire marshal's are concerned about life safety stuff and they're not, they don't go through each space and check ventilation. But those two spaces, one of the things that I talked about with Lyle and I notice in here is if we did the library, I think it would make a lot of sense to add dehumidification to the space. There's really, I know you guys have the admin area here that has some cooling associated with it, but maybe having the space that could be legalized in the summertime or maybe it's the cafeteria. I think it makes a lot of sense as schools become more year-round use to add that to it. And presumably this would provide some filtration or general air quality. Oh, big time. Yeah, I mean, I don't, that unit ventilator didn't seem to be running when I was up there. I put my hand on it. There was no motor moving or anything. You don't get any ventilation unless it moves, but then like I said, the outside air and take is about the size for two people inside that library, so I doubt it's working at all. So it'd be MERV 13 filtration, which is recommended by the school and we do essentially we design everything to COVID guidelines now that the state put out. Everybody's gotten an education on how important that is for health. Would there be cost savings in doing both at once or could we do like one year and then another another year or? There would be some cost savings if you did both at once. I don't think it would be crazy significant because they are separate areas. If they were duplicate systems where you're just doing this classroom, this classroom, classroom and you're getting a lot of repetitive work, I would say that there'd be a lot of cost savings with it, but because you're kind of in two completely separate areas and you're mobilizing for each one from like a steel standpoint and from like a equipment, there's some savings and rigging. It's probably minimal, like I said. It's probably in that 15% range. It's not huge. But I'm happy what we can do and what we do at a lot of schools is let's just design both systems, price both of them out and have an option to remove one. See where the numbers kind of sugar out at and if we have to, because of budget purposes, remove the cafeteria or remove the library, we can do so. But at least have design in the plan in place to address everything. Hi, this is a community member. Can you guys hear me? Okay, great. So I know that both campuses have use in the summer months and earlier in this meeting, childcare was discussed and potential use of the different facilities. And I don't know how off limits the respective facilities would be while this work is underway and it's cascading impact to those who need to use the facility or are those students who are gonna be maybe at that summer program. And so can you provide a little bit detail as to that as we step through this thought process or will that be an awareness we receive later? I mean, we will get all the classroom work done during outside of the kids schedule in there. I mean, we work in occupied schools all the time but all the high impact areas that, you know all the asbestos abatement, everything inside of classrooms we try to have that done prior to kids coming back to school. And then really the boiler room would be up and running by October 1st when you guys say if you're eating season. So it's stuff that we work around all the time we're very accustomed to it just takes a lot of meetings and just a lot of communication coordination. So Bethel elementary, just so you're aware Bethel elementary that is already hydronic the unit ventilators in there. So we do not plan on touching that part of the school. It's the middle school portion that's all steam that would have pretty a lot of renovation through there. So I would say, you know, half of the school would still be available for childcare services in the summer. And then we, you know, we put up construction walls. We, you know, we separate the construction parking from the student drop off areas and just try to keep those two groups as separate as possible. But we're very accustomed to working in schools over the summertime. Well, why don't we go around to each board member and you can have a say about what you think about the proposed proposed upgrades and then also the ventilation options. So we kind of see what the consensus is. Brad, do you want to start? Well, I support the wood boiler system in Bethel and the LED lighting. I think it really needs to be done. Ventilation, yeah, I think it needs to be done. It's, I'd like to see it spread out, I think, over a couple of years maybe, but I'd like to move forward with these projects. Yeah, I mean, being on the facility committee, I mean, we looked at a very long list of topics at each facility and there's, I mean, we're just scraping the tip of the iceberg here with, I mean, some of them, they seem like, we had a total value, let's say, at each, do you have those figures? There's like four, over around four million in school. But we were, I think Bethel was like four and a half million and here was like three, seven or something like that. So, I mean, we're talking, there's a significant amount of infrastructure renovations that have been pushed off for the significant period of time and especially, you know, over in the Duff-Larion. You know, the LED pieces of as was shown tonight is kind of a no-brainer. It really, you're gonna get your payback on that relatively quickly plus, you know, in a year, year and a half from now, we're gonna have to invest in that anyway. So, and you probably have your greater paybacks right now than we to the last second of the type deal. And then, you know, the heating, you know, we did talk about heating here down the road. You know, obviously the heating near is a bigger priority at this point, but there's also, you know, a path there of grant monies and things like that have been received that, you know, we use it to lose a type deal. So, I think those make a lot of sense. You know, at the end of the day, what we were looking at for figures here, you know, when we're talking, you know, the size of the budget that we have, you know, or smaller in nature, you know. I know with the ventilation pieces of it, we talked in our committee and, you know, we were kind of 50-50 on that of, I think most of it was, we obviously understand that it needs to get done, but we were trying to prioritize this significant amount of work, you know, at least having maybe a breather to then say, yes, we'd like to move forward with this next project or two, you know, and then like you were saying, you know, can we do one one year, one maybe two years later, something like that to get a little breather? Because we are going to have to, you know, sit in front of the tax payers as, you know, as Shannon was saying, and we're gonna have to make sure that, you know, that they understand why we're doing it, especially when you talk about different locations and now that we share a common interest and so it definitely on board with that, I think the ventilation pieces, I would really kind of like to see these projects go forward and see how we're gonna pay for those first before tackling the next ones, but I would like to probably do as much pre-work on the ventilation pieces as possible so that we have a shelf-ready project that we could then say we're ready to go. I mean, efficiency Vermont comes out with ventilation money quite a bit. There's a K through 12 ventilation grant that Tumbridge got 600,000. Unfortunately, Royalton did not get it due to economics. You know, they go to the high poverty schools first. That being said, Royalton has a huge need. So I wouldn't be surprised that there's gonna be more ventilation money coming out. So having something that's designed and drawn and say, hey, this costs 250,000 based on 2021 numbers, like 5% increase, like that's our grant application for 10 or 22. And then you always have that, at least you have that information in hand for any opportunities because there's gonna be more opportunities coming up. Thank you, D. Wadah. David? I mean, I'm certainly in favor of fixing up the Bethel School Building. Certainly needs it. And again, the ventilation systems in Royalton, those, I mean, those rooms are used a lot, especially during the summertime as well as school time. And yeah, I think probably Bethel has to take the first priority, but I think we need to have a plan and say that this is what we're gonna do this year, next year we'll do this, and the next year we'll do that. And each time we'll be looking for monies to try and make it less and less. But yeah, I think we need to do it all. It's just a matter of which we're gonna do first. And I think Bethel has to be done first. Yeah, I mean, there's 50 year old unit ventilators in the elementary school wing of the Royalton campus, same at Bethel. I mean, those two pieces of equipment or sections of the school, it's probably another $1.5 million worth of work between those two sections, getting those off from the old unit ventilators and going with a central ERU. And then the question goes, like, utilize these spaces more in the summer and the season gets longer, do we add e-humidification? But we're not going anywhere, EEI. So if we make these plans for 2023, essentially we're gonna be having the same conversation next year. And it might be looking at the ventilation at the cafeteria and the library at Royalton that we're talking about and maybe a wood chip here next year. And we were also looking for the most cost-neutral projects that we could put in front now. And those were where some of the ventilation pieces right now, we could potentially have monies to put towards that, but we don't now. Other than if we can get it on the shelf, so all of a sudden there's monies available, then we can say, hey, we got this project all ready to go and ready to go. But as far as, you know, sign the check to say we wanna do, you know, quarter of a million dollars with the ventilation, I think we should probably just wait to see if we can have some opportunities, you know, two years from now to do that. Because I mean, obviously this work, we're talking about this for next year, so. Janet, do you wanna, Janet? Yeah, sure, I support all of that. So absolutely, we have to get heating on the Bethel campus. We've been talking about it now for like five years, or longer, Rodney might not know about longer, but we have to do that project. And otherwise, any projects we can do and pay for in a reasonable manner, I support that too. But let's see what the budget says about the ventilation, but I think that if it's reasonable, we should be working on all of those things and back to recruiting and having the best building possible and having the healthiest students in the area. So let's do this. On the Royalton side, there was gonna be excess savings from the LED lighting. If we combined the LED lighting and one of these ventilation things could we use that excess savings for a bond? So that would be basically another 120,000 for 15 years. I think it was 8k. Yeah, no, you can use the additional savings towards other capital improvements in the district. Or, I mean, either way. I mean, or the other thing, I mean, essentially what I'm doing with you guys is signing one contract. So it would be a contract for, right? Because if I sign it with the school district, it would be for both Bethel and for Royalton. So those energy savings on that $7,000 lighting for Royalton could also help fund the $200,000 gap that's at Bethel right now, potentially. All right, yeah. Yeah, so it seems like we definitely have consensus on going forward with Bethel projects the LED lighting. And it seems like the consensus is to design up the ventilation and we'll kind of make a decision on that a little later. Yeah, that sounds good. I want to come back to you guys in November, beginning in November, and say, here are the final drawings. Here's the final price. It's all in line. The savings match where we were better than it, and then hopefully at that point, that grant has come through and we can all be signing the contract end of November, beginning in December, because I really do need to release that equipment in December in order to guarantee it'll be up for heating season next year. Yeah, we'll also have the FY-22 financials in by then, so we'll know if we have surplus funds to do excess stuff this year or not. Okay, sounds good. Okay, thank you guys. Thank you. Thank you. All right, so safety security procedures, this was about after the various mass shootings that we've had in school of all day. Yeah, and I think they kind of, well, they kind of goes, safety and securities kind of goes a little bit with what we were just talking about with facility upgrades and, so it sounds like there's going to be some securities monies available to upgrade, it hasn't come out yet, exactly what we're gonna be able to allow to use money or how you're gonna get the money, but there's gonna be money to be appropriated for working on some security for schools. Now, just for instance, a common practice that is happening at schools now is having a double entry port. So I'll use Bethel for an example. So when you come in the front door, you would have two series of doors to enter. And a portion of that is for security reasons. The other portion is that, is to reduce your heat loss when you're transferring. So it's kind of a one for one. So right now, for instance, if you come in through the gym area, the main area in Royalton, you have that double entry system. In Bethel, we don't have a single double entry system, but it would be your main pieces. So if you have a, so I guess in Bethel we'd be looking at, the middle school entry and the elementary entry, because they're both like that. I think probably here, you'd probably be more looking at upgrading whatever the security piece of that would be, not so much the double entry piece. And I don't know, is there more than one main access point other than- I think here there is a concern because the, well, with COVID, we had the high schoolers coming in the back door and they really parked more over that on the side. And we don't have the video camera system on that door. And then I think the other pieces to that is, what type of common system should we be using for security-wise? And then you have some of the challenges like midday, how do you, like for instance, in Bethel, you get buzzed in, which most of the time there's kind of an insecure window there to the secretary spot. So there's some of those things that need to be addressed, how you would get in and what a common access to the schools would be. The other thing too, and it kind of, again, it just kind of goes hand in hand with some of the things that are overdue at the schools is we have many different points of entry throughout the school. And some pieces, once schools in session, or not even in session, are usually securely locked, but we all know there's doors you can get in and out of. But at the same time, we have doors that just need to be replaced, right? I mean, we have old doors that have either or not, whether tight or have rested holes in them, like we have a couple in Bethel and I don't know so much in the world in ones, but I'm going to visit here soon. So I think we have replacements that need to be done, but at the same time, we should probably be looking to upgrade those security, like, should we have the same type of access security point to get into a secondary door, as we would an entry primary. So I don't know if this would come underneath the umbrella of the facility committee to look at a little more to see, here all of our access points. So that was kind of the first piece of the topic was more of the physical structural pieces of safety that also kind of goes a little bit with energy efficiency. That I think from talking with Jamie that there's going to be money is available. We just don't know exactly how you're going to receive those, or if it will be just arbitrarily spread around, each person will get a piece of it or if you'll have to actually apply for it, but and again, it's kind of one of those, if you have shovel ready jobs, you get the money first. So, you know, if we could work with somebody to do an assessment at each school to say, I don't know, make it up, there's a quarter of a million dollars with doors that need to be replaced, then at least we could have that ready to go. Sort of a great game out. Because I mean, it's not just, I mean, the security piece is nice, but we have doors that just need to be fixed, you know, I mean, or double entries that we don't have don't exist. So, it's just something to think about. And then, you know, I'm sure we could talk about other, you know, maybe overall, we should have an open running discussion on how we perceive the security of our schools. Is there, you know, just throw things into the walls. Are we doing everything that we possibly can to make things as safe and secure for our employees and our students at the schools daily, right? You know, maybe getting into, again, I don't know, like, you know, revamping our, you know, I don't know if we have professional command and see if all of our procedures that we're doing currently are up to date or do we need to do more? Or, so, I mean, I think there's, it's one of those discussions you look and you don't always want to have to, you want to be proactive and not reactive, right? So. Jamie. So we're using Title IV funds this year to bring on a safety, an SU-wide safety consultant. Keith Thompson is going to be doing that work for me. And Keith has already reached out to Visbit to do a refreshed safety audit on each building. And Keith has a really good relationship with the safety commissioner of Vermont and he's reached out to her office for support as well. And so the plan would be, so the tenant plan we have is one, to work with local law enforcement to do tabletop activities again, that align with our Alice training and transition to run hide fight, which has been adopted by the Homeland Security Department. And that's why we're also working with the commissioner of public safety for Vermont is to just make certain that our procedures and protocols are aligned with what their recommendations are currently. And so there's the piece of like, are our safety procedures well-planned and practiced? But in addition to the Visbit audit giving us an audit, which would be more on the physical plan and what their recommendations would be for each building there, so that we do have that ready to go in the event that we get grant funding that comes out, much like we had some ready projects to go, so we were able to leverage grant funding that came out for HVAC, like we were talking about tonight and controls and things of that nature and heating systems. So that's in the work works. And so keeps going to be working with each principal in building safety committee teams, to review protocols and get trainings on the books to do them in person and work with local law enforcement, meeting Orange County, Windsor County, Royalton PD and state police to make certain that we are all in alignment around tabletop activities. And we did have a safety and security audit from Visbit and the third party contractor, David Moody did it. I wanna say three years ago now, so I do have that, if it's something you're interested in seeing. Yeah, that would be handy if we could get a copy of you. I can share that with you. And that's what James talked about. We'll do that to the facility. I think you guys probably remember something when we had it down the first time, is when I first came on board I had Visbit. Is that both structurally and procedurally or is that just structurally? It was pretty complicated. Yeah, it was very complicated. Okay. And David was in the building for a long time. A long time. So I can share that. That's where I like the cameras came from. Yes, yeah, I can share that with you. And that's what Jamie was referring to about keep having an updated one done. It was three years ago that we haven't done originally throughout the whole, that's you. And Jamie, if you want somebody to tag along, I would be more than happy to shadow that or be a part of that discussion team there. Great. Shannon. I'm sorry. So while we're talking about doors and heat loss and security, all things that I'm very interested in, can I also make another plea that we make these doors handicapped accessible? You cannot get in and out of the building. If you've broken a leg, I've tried without help. We need a handicap accessible access point on both campuses, please. We have people who come to town meeting low mobility. We have kids every year who break their leg. We need to have a handicap accessible doorway on both campuses. I'd agree with that. And yeah, I mean, I think it is important to look into security, make sure that we're being responsible for keeping everybody safe. I would say, in this building, all the classrooms have the doors that open up to the outside and we're doing outside education and stuff like that. When my first kids were first going and we're younger, like we used to come into the building to drop our kids off. And I certainly had a much better feel for their classmates and teachers and much more community feel when we were able to do that. So, security is important, but you also do something if we're closing everybody out. And so that's just something to keep in mind. And I think it needs to be a broader discussion on exactly like where we want to draw the line for as far as the staff being able to use their entrances and exits to be outside during the warmer months and those types of things. So, hey, that's all I wanted to say. Does anybody have any further discussion on this issue? Okay. We'll move on to the study committee on unified elementary school. So this is something that Rodney had brought up about whether we would want to look into unifying the elementary schools. Do you want to say anything further on it? Well, I just feel that it just seems awkward the way we're doing it now. You know, as long as we're running back and forth between the two elementary schools and we get to transfer a boss and missing that I just, I feel it would just be more efficient if like the elementary school would say just in Bethel and then this campus was a middle and high school. You could probably cut down on how many buses you have because your buses could do an earlier start for the elementary school then run around and do a second route, pick up all the middle and high school students and bring them here instead of trying to transfer them back and forth. I think it'd be more efficient. So, you know, I don't know if I've kept down on teachers or not probably not, but I don't know. I just feel like it'd be more efficient if we had three campuses instead of four. Maybe still have a preschool here in Oralton, but it could be a drop off point too, but I don't know. And maybe I'm the only one who thinks that way and if I am fine, that'll be the end of the discussion. But I'd like to hear other people's opinion on it. I think it's good not just to, I mean, we should be re-auditing what we do often, right? I mean, so what may have worked four or five or 20 years ago may not work now. So I think it's always good to look at, you know, the elementary piece, but I think we should also probably look at, you know, is the middle school piece working is, you know, or that combination of middle school, high school piece working. And I know there has been some discussion at the middle school end is, you know, does that sixth grade being in middle school working or not for us? I've heard a lot of challenging things. The sixth grade is kind of, which? And I don't know, I wasn't really a part of many of the discussions other than being a, you know, in the public at that point of, you know, when we did combine schools of, you know, why we separated how we did. But, you know, maybe there's an opportunity to re-look at everything, to see how, you know, are things running the way we thought they were gonna run or should we make some adjustments? I mean, I don't think there's anything wrong with looking at things and see if we can do better, right? I mean, I will say one of the things that people were pretty adamant about during the study committee period was that they want an elementary school in that community to stay in. They don't wanna have their younger kids going further away. So I would be pretty hesitant to kind of broach that, particularly, you know, we're still relatively soon after merging, and I kind of feel like it would be kind of going against something we said wouldn't be happening in the merger. So, you know, I would be pretty reticent to try that or discuss that unless there was a pretty compelling reason to do so, and I'm not sure that I see one at the moment. You know, it might be a little more efficient, but I think there is value in having younger kids vocal, and, you know, when you get to middle school and high school, you do want larger class sizes and kind of more opportunities and things like that. I'm not sure that the same is true in elementary school. So that would be my reticence on it. Peggy? I guess my sound is on. Okay, yep, it is. That's a miracle. When I first started teaching school, I was in a middle school of sixth, seventh and eighth grade and children came to our school from five different area schools within Berry City. And there always seemed to be, I came from this school, my school was better than your school. Your school was a poor school, my school was rich school. And there were separations. Maybe by the end of the three years that they were there, they came together. And so when Bethel and Roylton joined together, and I really think they should have kept one elementary school for all, and then in part we wouldn't be having this discussion of, well, that's Bethel's building, Roylton doesn't wanna spend a lot on Bethel's building. And so a lot of those separations or those two different communities, some of that conversation wouldn't be head because we would be one community versus we've got two separate things and now we feed into one. This one might be better, this one might be worse, this school's better, this one isn't better. I think they probably should have been together, excuse me, from the beginning. Whether that's something that should be done now, I don't know, there were promises made to people. And I understand I want my child here closer to home, but yet for crying out loud, it's only 15 minutes away. And it's a very political thing basically. And I've just seen the other part where it was my school was better than yours. And I really never liked that. And it was a feeling that came from the schools, whether they knew they were doing it or not, it was a feeling that came from one school in particular that our school is better than anybody else's. And that carried through when the kids came altogether. So I liked seeing them come be altogether when we joined into our one big school. They were all together as one school. And that was, I think that was better for the kids. That's my comment. Go ahead, Jenna. So I'll, I think there's a couple of things that come to mind with this. I think that absolute, I come from a world of research and science, I love the idea of getting some data. I think if we want to look retrospectively, that's a mess. We just went through COVID. We can't really look retrospectively and say, how did we do with the middle school, the high school, the elementary. But I think prospectively, if we want to say, okay, how are the programs doing? How are we evolving? How is all of that working? Absolutely, I would love to see some of that data. That being said, I'm not willing to sit here and say, well, I heard from someone so, so I need to make a decision. I think we need the data. And I think we need to be really careful what questions we're asking and what data we're collecting so that we can make some of those decisions. You know, we do have some data on math scores and literacy scores that we really want to see go up. And I'm hoping for that desperately, but let's start collecting some data. I absolutely agree, but prospective studies are always better than retrospective. And I don't even think you can do a retrospective study right now, given all the conflict in the last couple of years. So I think that's a great idea to gather up some data and see if there are things that we can be working on. What's working, what's not. And as the elementary principle, I would just say that I think that the parent's perspective is really important. And I get why keep your babies close. On the flip side, I think we should just remember the other stakeholders too and the teacher's opinions. And I do want to say that for the people that go between the campuses or even the teachers when we try to gather for in-service and PD, that that has been sometimes a struggle. I think we've done a good job coming together as one school and two campuses, and it is only 15 minutes. But that has sometimes posed a challenge. Our community members allowed to comment. Yeah, go ahead, Tammy. Okay. I second what Andrew had said when the merger was going on. I was a bystander learning how our communities would or would not work together. And I feel that the communities took a cautious approach forward to gain buy-in rather than forcing a choice. And as Principal Bowen had identified, getting that buy-in, granted, we're just 15 minutes apart. I am a parent that has traveled from one campus to the next in that morning circuit. And it is what it is. And while we were distant when we merged, we are closer because we are today. I'm done. So I would not be in favor of consolidating, keeping those kids close is good. And we grow into a more mature being as we mature through each elementary level, middle school level and high school level. Thank you. So I guess what more do we want to do at this point? I personally wouldn't want to kind of look into combining the schools. I mean, I don't see really, you know, it seems like we're all kind of tippy-toeing around the pool here, but I mean, I don't see any harm in collecting some data, right? And we can agree if we believe that, you know, future data versus past data or what we want to collect, but I think it's, I don't think we would be doing our jobs if we weren't constantly either looking back or looking forward, you know what I mean? Well, I just don't understand what data we're looking for. I'm sure, you know, and I'm sure Jamie could chime in too, but you know, there could be efficiency pieces of this puzzle that we are losing right now on that piece of it. I mean, there's obviously, I mean, yes, as a parent and traveling, you know, you don't want to travel unless you have to, right? But at some point you're going to have to travel, right? If your child is first grade or if they're sixth grade or if they're 10th grade, at some point you're going to have to travel to one of these schools. I mean, but again, I don't know. And I think I don't see the harm in wanting to explore that. I mean, I don't think if we ask to pool data of what we have or maybe circulate a questionnaire to the parents or the community to say, what do you think? How's this working? You know, I mean, that's the only way we make decisions is by getting data. So, and what people might have thought four years ago could have changed. I mean, again, we kind of have the opposite of that of, you know, I mean, four or five years ago, I mean, there was always like that, huh? We're Beth Lillier, Royalton, you know, there's a wall up in the middle and you know, and we are one school family now, right? We're a closer community and maybe some of those walls have come down of, you know, the necessary to have a elementary school in both towns or not. But again, I think as a board member in regards to what board you're doing if it's school or something else. I mean, if we're not constantly looking at these pieces, I mean, we're not really doing a justice for. Yeah, I hate to think that our school has stopped evolving now. Yeah, no, I think that that's fine. And there's certainly lots of work going on. I mean, I don't need any data to tell you that the sixth grade process is a mess. It's a utter mess. I've gone through two thirds of my family have transitioned from fifth grade to sixth grade. And I can tell you it's not working. It's not working with a lot of the kids and it's not working with how you communicate with other schools. I mean, most of the schools in our area are seventh and eighth grade schools. So if you do something, a function, if it's an athletic sport, you're playing seventh and eighth grade kids. You know, you're tired to find the sixth grade. You have wide, you know, you have very large teams of kids right now. Well, I can tell you that, you know, my fifth grade or going to sixth grade probably was not mature enough to handle some of the middle school activities that are going on. You know, I think another year of maturity at the, you know, even though you're in the same building, you're in separate, you know, there's a lot of that going on, you know, and I don't think COVID had anything to do with those, but again, I don't understand why we wouldn't look at all these things. I know that the sports has been looked at and that's going to be different going forward where the default's going to be seventh and eighth grade play, middle school sports, sixth grade is in rec and it's only if there's a numbers issue, will the sixth grade play middle school going forward? So that's evolving anyway. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm looking about, thinking about like what our next step would be. You know, it seems like we do kind of the annual community survey or not broad community, but the parent survey. So we could include stuff on that and just kind of have it as be part of our kind of overall thing. We could try and set something else separate that would do surveys and try and engage community feedback. We could just try and individually go out and kind of gather more feedback from. And I think you'd probably be a little more successful if you broaden the topic. I mean, instead of just being a unified elementary school, is how are we looking at our current situation of elementary schools on two campuses, our middle school and our high school. What is the feedback that we're getting for that? Or we could throw out some ideas and what do people think about these ideas? I mean, it's not, someone says, you never know. I mean, things could really surprise you. You never know. I think people can say that they are for it or against it. And that's all well and good. And I'm happy to get community feedback and board comment, but I will point out that, aside from maybe Peggy, who was a teacher, the folks on this board are not experts in education and there's lots of evidence-based research on when kids should advance and things like that. So I'm not sure asking our community, hey, should the sixth grade be in the middle school is necessarily the way to go. What's working, what's not working for us, I think, great. Let's get some feedback. But what we actually decide on that, I don't think is up to necessarily us or the community. It's a collaboration with the experts who we have running our schools, not necessarily our decision to make. Jamie. So, just what you're discussing, we just did it first branch, right? And it was a two-year process and we unified an elementary and a middle school. And so we'll have real data to be able to speak to you about are there better outcomes for kids based on that work? And that process had started even prior to my tenure. And then we did engage the community a great deal in weekly meetings. And we had an educational consultant support that work. The committee drafted a pretty extensive plan. And then the board decided to take action on that plan. I have not pulled your articles of agreement to even show what authority you have as a board in regards to this. My advice would be that we would probably look to put it to a public vote. But I got to read through your articles of agreement. The, I can tell you that when you're talking about efficiency, I do believe there could be probably more significant efficiency than we realize. I also think there could be more predictability of how we provide programming at the elementary level. And what I mean by that is we still have small cohort sizes that come through each school. And it results in us doing multi-age classrooms not necessarily because we think that that's what's best universally, but at what makes sense for efficiency when we might have a cohort of eight and a cohort of nine, having two separate classes for eight and nine, you could combine them to have a multi-age class, right? And so, what I've talked to Principal Bowen about is is that moving forward, whether that we just need to say what makes the most sense in regards to universal programming and accept that we may have some smaller class sizes in some of our elementary schools because we think that that's best instruction. So, I mean, I think what the board is gonna need to do and I don't think you need necessarily need to do it tonight is just decide how deep do you wanna dig into and research what is this currently what you have your best model and I think we gotta define what best means, right? It's not just financial. It's also, I mean, I would say the primary goal is that we wanna make certain all kids reach their greatest potential, right? So, are we having the best instructional outcomes for kids that we possibly could have? And also looking at the cost analysis of is there also further financial benefit too? And so, we can do this work. For us to do this work, we need support from the board that you'd want us to engage in this work, right? Like, and I think as a board, you need to be committed to it because once you start digging into this question, folks are gonna have a lot of questions for you about the why and as a board, I would say why we were able to get where we were able to get to a first branch is because the board had come to a conclusion that they were unified around wanting to explore the question. And so there wasn't a fractured board in regards to pursuing it, which I think was really powerful and what resulted in their ability to be able to take that step forward around the unification of their elementary middle school. And like I said, we'll have real-time data over the next few years about has that been an effective endeavor or not, right? We're doing it because we believe it's going to be, but it's to be determined. And Chelsea and Tumbridge have come to a good place now, but it certainly was a fractious process getting there. Well, why was engaged with it would tear the whole way? So I can talk to you about that whole journey. Um, Peggy, go ahead. I was gonna say I taught in Berry City for 30 years and for those first 21 years, everybody talked about joining and when the schools finally did decide to join the ones that had the hardest time with it were the teachers and the parents. The children adapted just fine, but it took a long time to get to that stage. It's not something that's going to happen tomorrow. I do believe sometime it will because I think it makes sense, but I don't think it's something that's going to happen tomorrow because politically it just won't. That's the way it is. So we've gotta, we've gotta get as unified as we can before we can talk about physically unifying the two groups. Anyway, that's it. I'll shut up again. Perhaps what might make sense moving forward would be if we had a series of community forums or something along those lines, you know, basically saying, you know, we've been unified this long, what's working, what's not kind of just gaining community feedback on just where we are at this point in time. And if the general structure could be brought up then, what do people think about that? Rather than saying we're forming a study committee to look at unifying, say, you know, word. That would be in the study committee. Well, no, I mean, my thought is rather than going back. That's what you're doing, studying it. Well, as more community feedback of where we are now, is there things people wanna see? We could bring this up as a topic of conversation or something like that, not necessarily, I guess, like, this is what we're thinking of doing, yeah. Well, no, not like the last time that the study committee was just like already setting it in ways, I guess, or whatever. No, I think it's something to look into. You know, they might take five years, 10 years, 20 years. Might never happen, but whatever. I just think it's something that needs to be looked at. Well, definitely, and Jamie had hit it on the head there too, and Andrea as well as, I mean, there's obviously the parent component of it, of how, on their end, how do they think things are working? But there's also the bringing of some information forward to them of, here's what we have been looking at that could be a benefit to us going forward, like, you know, having instruction all under one roof and the benefits of having some of these programs or size of classrooms and instructionally being lined up more correctly, and there could be pieces of that's more efficient, more financially sound, whatever, I don't know, but I think, because there's a lot of times maybe parents that don't know that, you know, like, you know, we are looking at test scores and here's where we'd like to be, or, you know, here's some of the challenges that we were facing type thing. I mean, I think at the end of the day, like we had said that it's all about the kids and educating the kids and maybe not so much on if it's a 15 minute commute. Shannon? So it sounds to me like we're talking about two very different things. We're talking about how now four or five, four years after the merger, five years after the merger, how are people feeling that things are going, what's going well, what might change? And then we're talking about this very specific proposal for a merged elementary school. And I'm not sure that those are two things that should be done together. I mean, maybe, yes, there's a task force to look at what even the thoughts would be around that or what data we should be collecting for the merged elementary school piece. But I think if we wanna like do a listening tour of the community, of the students, of the recent graduates, what works, what hasn't, what would you like to see different, that's great. That's data collection. I'm all for it, but I'm not sure that goes with should we merge the elementary school? I'm not sure how those two pieces fit together. One seems a very specific question and one seems a very open-ended, please give us your feedback question. I agree. That's true. Those are separate things. I guess I'm concerned going in like basically starting the, like when you form a study committee on something, it feels like this is something that I think should happen and we should look into whether it should happen or like how it could happen or whatever. Versus the kind of more open-ended thing which would give people kind of a time to weigh in on whether we should really look into it or if that is not something anybody would really be interested in the first place. Anyway, yeah, if everybody else thinks that this is something that we should do, then we can certainly look into it. I think having the educators, you know, Jamie and Andrew and everybody kind of tell us more about what they think would be appropriate, I think is a good thing, you know, from, I know we keep saying it's only 15 minutes and like it's a short thing, but 17. But like, you know, the difference between having to put your kid on the bus and being able to drop them off on your way to work is pretty big when they're a kindergartner and the bus isn't exactly the most wholesome environment. You know, we don't have bus monitors. So, you know, I think it's more than just like, you know, it's a 15 minute thing or whatever. And I realize some people have to put their kids on the bus anyway, but, you know, with the younger kids, it is a more sensitive subject. So anyway, I'm not sure where to go from this. Would it be more, it sounds like Jamie has some experience and, you know, maybe has looked at some of the possibilities of our school system and sounds like Andrew has probably some knowledge of how things, maybe some positive things of how things will work better under one umbrella. Like, would it be possible for the two of them to put together some sort of small presentation to the board and then at that point then the board could get a, rather than a fracture, we could say yes, we think this is worth pursuing or no, we don't, before we go to the public, you know. You know, what do people think about that? Because I mean, talk about Jamie, he seemed to think that the most important part was the board needs to be 100% bought into the idea, right? So I think the only way we can do that is by getting some sort of information from within on this is what things would look like. Jamie has some past history on that, you know, here's what we would experience and then we could weigh in as a board, you know. Do you have something you wanted to add, Peggy? I was actually gonna say, yeah, if we brought it to a vote tonight, I don't have enough information to say let's form a task force and let's take this to, you know, to take this to the public and see what the, I think that's going to cause an uproar that is just not, not what you want headed into the first couple of weeks in school. I think I need some time to reflect on it and I would like to hear more what our educators think would be the pros and cons rather than us sitting here and debating it amongst ourselves. Yeah, that sounds reasonable. I mean, so I guess if Jamie and Andrew want to think about what might work and might what not work and we can have it maybe not in next month, but future agenda. Yeah, maybe October or November because I actually think it's looking, if you're talking about unifying your elementary and then talking about moving the middle and high school under one roof two just based on size, right? So I think it's a bigger conversation at least around presentation. I don't think it's just unifying the elementary. I actually think then you're talking about unifying a middle and high school which I think could have positives and negatives too. So I would like some time to really flesh all that out and give you a thorough presentation at like the details but also recognizing like a study committee would then explore multiple options. I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all but I think we could get pros and cons and what might be pros and cons both for efficiency purposes but more importantly to me the academic purposes pros and con wise. Okay. Go ahead Peggy. You're muted. Peggy? Sorry, I keep forgetting to hit that button. I said, you know, I've been through this experience in Berry City and I know how extremely painful the conversations are and I would be willing to help with what I can. Okay. Well, I think we've got a path forward then so the administration will think about things and see what they think. Okay. I think we can move on at this point. Setting the date and agenda items for a board retreat. Would people be willing to have a board retreat to kind of talk about overall? I kind of feel like we have done this a little bit recently with the facilities stuff but and kind of what we were just talking about but like the idea with our board retreat in the past was there was a way of stepping back from kind of the month to month issues and look at things as a whole and kind of where we're at and what we're thinking about strategically. Do we want to do a board retreat this year? And if so, when and what we'd like to talk about for it? Anybody have thoughts? I guess just a quick thought I have is that unless we could probably agree to something in August, I think as the school season starts it becomes very difficult to now line up a retreat on a weekend or a certain day of the week. So I mean, I'd be all for it if we could probably squeezed in this month before the school starts, but I think once school starts we may want to punt on that but that's just my opinion as a first year board member. I feel that we've been covering our subjects fairly well and I don't know. I think we're pretty well focused on what direction we're going and I just don't see a need for a retreat. Okay. Shannon or Peggy? I agree. I think we've got a couple of task forces. We've got a couple of task forces working on sort of future directions and incentives initiatives sorry that we want to move forward with. So I'm not convinced that we need a retreat this year and certainly if we had one I'm not jumping on any more task forces at the moment. So I'd like to see one though we work really crazy hard in January, February to get to that March due date. I'd love to see a retreat like in April or May because we get to this point every year where it's August, it's the end of the summer everyone's trying to fit in everything and that's September, October is just so insane. A lot of us have kids in the system. I would like us to think about the retreat more in the spring. Maybe that would be a better time because this comes up every year with are we going to do this or not? And maybe we should be looking at it a little bit of a different time of the year because this time of the year I think is pretty nuts. All right. Well, the other thing is that the SU board is looking to do a retreat this year too. So having two retreats would be difficult. Go ahead, Peggy. Okay, I'm on. I was just gonna say I would love the idea of a board retreat because I would actually like to meet with people in person because I think that makes a whale of the difference in how we relate and talk to each other and get a feeling for how each other works. I like that idea. However, my agricultural calendar does not agree with anybody else's calendar. So it makes it very, very difficult. So I guess Zoom is the best that we could probably do at this point as far as my agricultural calendar goes. Okay. Well, it sounds like we won't do a retreat this year, which is a shame since I was looking forward to Rodney's risk. I know, I was thinking the same thing. Down at Rodney, back on the board, it's risky. Yeah, I can still do a brisket, you know. We can bring it on Thursday night, Tuesday night. All right. Well, I thought it was an agenda item. Yeah, it's brisket, next Tuesday, next month. Okay. All right. So we'll hold off or skip the retreat this year. Maybe do one next year. Look at potentially other times. As far as like, you know, I think if we just, do you want to talk about having like setting one for spring or something? I think that that would be still difficult, particularly for the administration. They have other boards that have their meetings, annual meetings later. So they're still dealing with budgets and things like that in April and May. And plus we have the new board members coming on at that time. So I don't know, maybe June or something, but then you're in graduation season and July, we try and give them a month off. So it is difficult to say what is the best time. So I guess let's just table up for now and we can see what we feel like doing another one. All right. We've done action item 10-1. New hires, resignations. Do you have anything for us? I do. I think I do, I want to say. We just offered 0.5 art speaking position to Nicole. I think it's Lily's for last name. So I'm super excited, it's very late to game, but I respect artistry and the music that worked out in the very early minutes of life. Awesome. We just hired the new choral director, Amber Ledette. So that, for the high school we're all set, except for driver's ed, because Tim Barrow got the activities director position. So we're looking at Yankee driving school and they're looking at getting somebody down here, a retired person that's gonna be able to run our driver's ed, but that's not confirmed yet. So all those phone calls that I keep getting about driver's ed just hasn't been answered. Zoom. So I apologize, my computer died. So we'll technical issue, but do know that the plan would be to ensure that we're able to hire first driver's ed. And if that means we're contracting service with a couple of driving schools, and that's what we would do. Or even work with Tim. The preference would be that Tim would be able to focus all of his energy on activities. But he has showed a willingness to support us here if we're not able to implement a plan A that we would go with a plan B. Okay. Any public comment? Chris, that's the other question I keep getting. Who's gonna teach driver's ed? So you can say they're working really hard on it. Yeah, but that's good to know to not have to worry. I'm sure they're working on it. But parents want those kids to drive to their own practices. I totally understand and appreciate that. What do we currently have open for key positions that aren't filled that we're hoping to fill between now and yesterday? I think we're ready to rock and roll. Yeah, I was gonna say, I think we're ready to rock and roll. We're in pretty good shape, driver's ed. The big gap at this point. So well done by the administration. Okay. Public comment? Hi, community member Tammy Benoit. Regarding the retreat process that you all discuss from my time of taking minutes, I've observed that the most successful time to have the board retreat is the beginning of August. It rejuvenates board members who need that leadership or helps those board members who don't have that leadership. It brings together what Peggy did describe from just an in-person attendance while we resort to a Zoom functionality or Google Meets or whatever it's called these days. If you plan for it, it will happen. But potentially you'll need to be talking about this in December in order to be successful in having it either April or May or August. And then make sure Rodney makes his brisket. That's right. Okay. Okay, yeah, now that is a good point. Maybe we should try and have it as a future agenda item like Jane or something like that. Okay, I don't think there's any other so future agenda items. I guess I can add that as a January agenda item or something. Our next meeting date is Tuesday, September 20th at 6.30 in Bethel. We're finished our agenda. Any motion to adjourn? I'll make a move to adjourn. Anybody want to second that? Second. Great. All right, thanks everybody.