 All the meeting to order at 6.15. There are any adjustments to the agenda? Prove the minutes of Tuesday, November 22nd. It was a regular board meeting. So moved. Second. Any discussion on the minutes? Bring them to move. Fourth correspondence slash communication. Now we'll have time for public comments. We have a public on tonight. Everybody's on virtually, right? Well, yeah. So on your screen, could you raise your hand feature if you'd like to speak? I'll call on you. Do you have any public comments? I'm sorry, I do. All right, thank you. All right, so Jamie, you're actually your reporter. So you have my reporting hand. I just wanted to highlight real quickly. It's in the report, but we had our first WRVSU community conversation. Evening last Wednesday at the South Ralton campus of the White River Unified District. And some of the public that were there in attendance tonight. So I want to thank them that did come out for joining us in the two way conversation. Our next one will be in January. They're all during the second Wednesday of the month. And so, and we're hosting a community conversation at each one of our operating districts this school year. And so my goal is to continue this right through next year. And there will be one at Granville Hancock Unified District for next year. I just want to mention that for those board members. By the time we got this up and rolling was December and we didn't want to hold one in June because we were worried about attendance. But we'll restart it again next fall. And so that was advertised in the Herald. We've got fliers out in all of our communities. And I hope that some of you will consider joining in your different roles. So I just wanted to highlight that the other thing I just wanted to mention is that of course we're in the thick of budget season. We will meet special meetings this coming month that we will be talking about and all your local districts to either finalize budgets or certainly after we finalize budgets with warnings adopted. So just and also act on your summer 23 projects through EI is going to happen this month as well. So January is going to be busy. They don't need to be long special meetings. We'll have all of our work done ahead of time. But do know that we're going to need to leverage some special meetings this month in each of our districts that I have town meeting happening in March. Okay. Otherwise, I just wanted to highlight. You'll see a report that came out through RAISE office around average daily membership and equalize pupils that I found really useful. I hope you did as well. RAISE also been working on a project to secure population projections for each one of our operating districts. So that we'll have those by spring to continue to use those to make informed decisions. We're doing that through NASDAQ, which we've joined for the first time, which is a consortium of New England schools and part of what they provide are some population and spend projection. So those will be forthcoming this spring. I want to thank board member actually Davis who just joined us tonight for really helping me spearhead that connection around using them. So I'm hopeful that it's going to give us solid meaningful information, but you also have an ADM report that Ray put together and that will address if you have any questions on that report during his report tonight. And I'll take any questions folks that any questions for Jamie. Okay, thank you. A lot of continuation of things we've talked about in past months around our work in literacy and math. Our work with a new report card that had its first outing in early December at the end of the first trimester in the elementary grades. I think one piece that is worth going over verbally is the additional information that we received from the agency of education around what they're calling VTCAP Vermont Comprehensive Assessment Program. That is what is replacing ESPEC and NECAP before that. So that's the state summative that will be taking students in grades three through 11 will be taking in in May of this year. And we don't have full view into it yet. Ray and I should be trained sometime in late January and be able to train also the rest of our school-based folks soon after that. It is going to be a tight window. Usually that training happens back in October and November. So we're not getting trained for a couple extra months and so all of that will get scrunched in, but hopefully it won't be too different from previous years. The agency of education does share that they chose CONMEA because of the accessibility of the portal and the parent and caretaker facing information. So hopefully all of that will make it really easy for folks to see the information and hopefully make it easy to use. Again, we'll be using that. We'll be testing in May across our grade levels. And I think that's probably the most important thing. So I'm happy to take any questions on other chapters as it's come up for folks. I actually had quite a few people mention that they didn't really care for the... Well, they didn't understand the proficiency. But before work hours, what elementary... There was conversation that I hadn't been able to... Yeah, no, that's a whole different... I don't know if that means a more clarification to the panel. Yeah, I definitely had to have a discussion with my ex about why our kiddo was getting 1s and 2s and things like music. So it was tough. Okay. Yeah, no, that's helpful to have. I think there's... As we shift more to proficiency thinking about how we are really clear about what the end goals are for students at the end of the year and how we measure progress at those trimester marks. So the guidance that we gave is that you are assessing kids on where they should be at this time of year. And I think that's a skill that we will continue to have to develop to know exactly what does it mean. If the end goal is to be able to count to 120, what is the expectation in December versus March versus June on getting towards that? And I think folks are still learning about how to sort of dial that in because it has been more of a shift for some people this year. So I think that's helpful feedback. Our plan was figuring that anything new is just... You do have to get used to it was to survey our families and caregivers after the March report card to get all that feedback. So now when you see from sort of December to March, you've seen what growth has happened, what's different, then sort of get that feedback. But I'm certainly also happy to talk to folks now if there's anyone who would like more information or would like to talk through sort of their experience of it. I'm more than happy to do that sort of one-on-one. And we can tell people that we will be, you know, sending out roughly back home for everyone to get through that. I think it just makes sense not coming up from the next school year. That's really helpful. I'm sure of that. Yeah, it moves. Andrew? Yeah, one question I did have on the proficiency-based report cards is, is there going to be basically one set of proficiencies for first grade and second grade and one set for third grade versus, like, these are the fall third grade proficiencies. And these are winter third grade proficiencies. Because presumably if it's the former where these are the third grade proficiencies, like when you first come in, the students should be in ones or twos because you're just starting on these proficiencies. And by the end of the year, they should be up to threes and fours versus, you know, if these are the things they're expected to have known at this point, then they should be at threes. And so, yeah, I think depending on what the answer to that question is, like, training the parents about or informing the parents kind of what to expect would be good for these report cards. Yeah, that's great feedback, Andrew. I appreciate it. I think we could do a better job of talking about how we think about the assessment. It is one set for the end of the year. And associated with each proficiency, we have something called scales, which would tell you sort of what that progress towards that would look like. So that you would, you would know sort of if you're making what we would expect is sort of developmentally appropriate progress versus like, oh, we might actually have a gap in skills or knowledge here that we want to have more attention to. And the report card is a way to say, okay, if we had it, you know, so that's, that's where I think if you have, we either have an assessment at this time, in which case should be blank or have an A in it. Or we have enough information to say it is, you know, on on track for meeting this proficiency by the end of the year, or we've got some, you know, this is bringing us some questions, we're going to bring some more resources to bear on what we're doing on instruction in this area. So I think all of those pieces are part of what the report card can help communicate. And we can do a better job of helping families understand those pieces, as well as the teachers for whom this is new for some of them for sure. And I'm going to say, I think part of this shift is to make certain that we are teaching and communicating what our curriculum says, and holding ourselves accountable because the report card should be a communication tool on what we expect students to no understand and do. I think part of what we're still honing in and on is training up our faculty and staff to have a really good sense of where within that end of the year proficiency, what is it that we expect students to be able to no understand and do in November. And then again in March, and then again at the end of the year, of course, that's what it states. And so I think it's still us calibrating that internally to which I expected some growing pains on as as we're starting to actually use our curriculum documents to communicate. All right, anyone else please I would encourage board members though to encourage families if they have questions to reach back out to their school and or reach out to central office so we can help folks with that. Thank you. So just some highlights from my report. So that the spotlight that I focused on this month was the new definition of special education, which now is actually the same definition, a federal definition. Unlike before, Vermont had its own definition. They're now following the federal definition, which also then Vermont needed to include their own definition of specially designed instruction, which they hadn't had before, which I think is, which is actually outlines for families and special educators, what specially designed instruction is and what it's for. Unlike before, there wasn't a real definition for it. At least now it's it's clearly outlined. So I appreciate that part. Also just wanted to highlight that we just submitted our December 2022 child count to the AOE. And the last piece is Michaela Martin, our intensive programming students support coordinator and I. We're still going into schools and doing trainings. We only have a couple more schools to present at for regarding our multi tiered system of supports. We start tomorrow at the high school with our next session that's focusing on accommodations modifications and specially designed instruction and what it is and how they can start incorporating it in their unit planning. Any questions? So you all have my report and outlines what's happening in the business office for the month of January throughout payroll and human resources as well as it comes payable for Johanna getting all of our annual reports out. We submitted our first quarterly newsletter to all of our staff last Friday, so the team worked hard to get that out. So that was an informational piece to everybody about what they need to know and important reminders from the business office. And then it's budget season. So I don't know what that means. And then FY 22 audit update. Don't do that now. Yeah, we can wait. Okay, perfect. I in my packet that went out to all of you is our annual financial management questionnaire, which tells you who does what and how throughout the business office. So if there's any questions on that, if you guys are good, I will ask Kathy to sign it as the board chair. Any questions for terror guys. Hey. Okay. First, I'd like to go through the regular report. So today, actually because of the study on Friday, I actually got the update for our student information system to have the exports for edu climber, which we're hoping to soon be able to use as a data dashboard. So we have lots of assessment data that we're looking to have in one place and be able to refer to that over time. Talked about the report cards. We also talked about this deck population projection. And then in my regular report, I had a bit about a extra report, the new one about a couple things. So what I never understood coming into this position was how short the window really is. So this year it's 916 through 1014. It's only 20 days long, right? There's 175 school days or whatever around that number. And it's a short window time for the fall for this reason. The numbers have to build up towards equalized pupils, right? So the window happens. We get the first look at equalized pupils last week. Budgets are built, tax sheets, and then voting on budgets, and then the public votes in March. So it's a very short window. And that means if a student joined us prior to the window and left or joins us any time for the rest of the year, they don't count in the ADM. So that's all sorts of information. And then I'm going to pop down to some graphs, which I think is what people are really interested in is what do the numbers look like over the past so many years. So I mentioned last time that our ADM was up 2%. The count, the total number of students is actually up two and a half. And the points, which is what really matters is up 3%. So the difference is we have students who joined us outside the window or a guest student or exchange student. They count in the total, but not for the points. And when you look at the chart, here we are at 17, 18 on this end. And it's generally pointing upward towards the right, that COVID thing. And one last chart I want to bring your attention to is the number of students we're enrolling internally and externally. Now the district changes from Act 46 changed what grades we operate at. Basically, it's 120 ish students who are now attending outside the issue. We have more tuition students these days and before the reorganization of the tuition students one in seven attended an issue school. Any questions? Yeah, I, I think this report is invaluable for a number of reasons and I appreciate you pulling the information together and make it coherent so we can understand it. Both at the district level. And at the issue level. A lot of organizations success, whatever it is, it's a numbers game and we need students. We need students to attract students and we need students to pick us rather than homeschool. Nothing against homeschooling, but I think we've got a lot to offer or a competitive public school or private school. And I think I find some reason to be fairly optimistic that we're moving in the right direction. If you look that trend in that last chart that you're showing there, we're moving up though it's going to take us a few years to match. fiscal year 17. But it's, it's not only so that that our average cost per student can be maintained and be in a reasonable ballpark, but also every student that is not in a tuition classroom. But it was with us saves us considerable amount of money. And those monies can be best spent improving our educational outcomes and and what we're offering to our students. And I believe this is all of ours important. Be aware of this and figure out together with our administrative team how we can keep the arrow going up in each district school we all each district has its own challenges but I, we can't do without this information and thank you for providing this. Sure. No problem it's hard to know what's of interest and what's minutiae but we had a snow day on Friday if that had happened during the ADM window it extends the window out. 20 operate. Any questions. Policy committee update. We had a meeting right before this meeting we moved the slide policy forward still be coming up to board so we can move it out of committee so it'll be coming out to individualized boards to talk about. And we have a couple of new policies that are going to come to us next month that we'll be bringing to you I'm sure. Negotiations Council. We had our first initial meeting and we're working on giving a second meeting schedule. I would like to put a note out I don't have it on here but the superintendent evaluation committee have sent a note out to the V SBA and I'll be sending out a note for you guys to get a meeting together on that front here shortly. Discussion items. Draft number three of the 2324 budget. So you guys have the full budget and Tara also provided you with the revenue page. Which looks similar to last year. And also provided you with what the assessment breakdown would look like based on the assessment and I can have her talk to those but I just what I wanted to mention to you is, is that again like we highlighted last month. We're not able to add on to FTE and professional staff and the special education budget. Full time special educator and then a full time 504 case manager, but speed up budget decrease. And that is due to us realizing a decrease in added district tuitions based on intensive needs right so if a student is struggling at our schools due to social emotional concerns. One of the tools we may look to is an added district placement right to get specialized therapeutic services. We built a nine through 12 program last year. And so what that's resulted in, and it is us not needing to place students out at the rate we were, and also as resulted in us being to bring back some students. And so we have that type of programming at the elementary middle and high school level now. So, I just wanted to emphasize yes you're seeing a decrease that's not a decrease in staffing actually there's an increase in that budget up to FTE. If you look at the SU budget around fiscal services curriculum, my office technology. And then you look at the special ed. And you combine those the savings and special ed in the increase to the fiscal services and the rest of the operational budget for the supervisor union. We're looking at an increase of 16,467 so I want to just, I'm really proud of my team's work on dialing that SU budget in. I'm proud of that team's work to be able to bring us forward a special ed budget that I think is going to really do a good job of serving our kids, investing in the right places where we saw that we had some gaps. We'll do it in a fiscal manner as we're looking at local district budgets, where tuition increases are for our school, some of our school choice districts. We are seeing some local district budgets that are high. It was important for me to make certain that the SU budgets were not impacting those local district budgets. And for some of you, you'll see a decrease in assessment. And for some of you, I think you'll see a real manageable increase in your assessments. And so any questions on the overall budget picture before Tara walks you through your assessments, because it is our hope to take action tonight so that we have these firm numbers for your fourth draft in January for your local district budgets. And we haven't been having any feedback. It would be a surprise tonight if folks didn't feel supportive of the budget based on our last couple months. Any questions on the overall budget before Tara breaks out how the assessments work. It's like we're good. So the central office assessment, as you may recall, those who have been on the board for a long time and those who are new to the board are calculated based on your FY23 preliminary average daily membership and your FY23 October 1 enrollment. And it is an average that we take of those two. And that is what determines your assessment for the central office budget. So that's why you'll see a little bit of shift in the numbers there. So the first page is the FY24 member assessment allocation. It gives you the comparison for FY22, 23, and 24. And like Jamie said, overall, the three districts go down, three districts go up based on your shift in ADM and enrollment. And then special education, that assessment is purely used with just the ADM. So again, you'll see there, there's a shift free up, free down. We bill out the central office assessment twice a year. And we bill out the special education assessment every month because we have more special education bills. So we try to build that out monthly. Any questions on the assessment, guys? Hearing no questions or discussion on these, do I plan to have a motion to approve the budget? Quick. Remember we have to have specific motions. Are we ready to make a motion, guys? Yep. All right. Tara has a specific wording for you, Sarah, if you're down for it. Tara, you speak for me very well. Okay. So we're doing it in two motions. We're going to accept the central office first and then the special education. Everything you hear, Sarah, Tara says you just put an S in front and it's Sarah. Okay. Love it. So the motion is to approve the fiscal year 2023 2024 White River Valley supervisory union central office budget and the amount of 1,978,426 dollars. All right. And do I have a second on the motion from Sarah? I'll second. Any discussion on the motion? All right. Hearing none, I'm going to do a roll call, guys. So we'll start with Bill up in the corner. Okay. Andrew. Yes. Yes. Baggy. Yes. Will. Yes. Shannon. Yes. Tammy. Yes. Ronnie. Yes. Did I get everybody online? So she's gone. And Cathy is a yes. So unanimously we voted to approve the budget. So the next motion is to approve the fiscal year 2023 2024 White River Valley supervisory union special education budget and the amount of 7,784,076 dollars. So that is moved by Sarah. is moved by Sarah. Do I have a second? Second. Any discussion on the motion? All right, hearing none, we'll do a roll call again. Bill? Yes. Andrew? Yes. Sarah? Yes. Maggie? Yes. Will? Yes. Shannon? Yes. Tammy? Yes. Rodney? Yes. And Kathy is a yes. So unanimously, the special ed budget passed. Thank you guys. Thank you. So you all received a copy of third and hopefully the final draft for now of the WRVSU strategic plan. There's one typo I noticed. Mary Shell's name was spelt wrong. I didn't say Mary. So fix that. Otherwise, I personally feel like each revision we receive good feedback and strengthen the plan. I would tell the board that I think part of the idea would be that we get this adopted and that it is a living, breathing document that we could revise as we go. But I think it is important to quantify the work that we have going on. And it does give folks a sense of the direction. I think it's an important document for us to have available for new families. I think it's an important document for us to have for our current staff and our students and families that we currently serve and also for prospective candidates that might be considering coming here, right? Fits really important. I think this plan does a good job of highlighting the belief system and the work that's happening across your schools. At that level though, I'll leave it for you for discussion. All right guys, any discussion on the strategic plan? I personally thought it was really good work and I appreciate all the hard work that went into it to get this to the document that it is. And I'm excited to move forward with it. Tito, if there is no discussion, I'd entertain a motion to adopt it, Andrew. Yeah, the one thing I wanted to say was it kind of reminds me a bit of the proficiency report cards that we're giving out to the staff and just that, you know, like kind of lays out what we want to have SU have, you know, done over the next five years or whatever. And I think it'd be great if we could get like a yearly progress report or report card where we see like, you know, we're progressing on this one or we've, you know, we kind of get an assessment of where we're at on each of these as we go throughout this five-year plan. I like that. So, you know, I think if we could get that on the calendar for some time so that there's kind of like a set, how are we doing? Jamie's nodding so it sounds like something we can do. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I think that's important. Any other questions or comments before we call a vote on this one? Are you hearing none? Do I have a motion? I make a motion to accept the WRVSU strategic plan for 2022 through 2025. My second motion. Any discussion on the motion? All right, we're going to do the roll call, guys. Here we go. Andrew. Yes. Sarah. Yes. Bill. Yes. Tammy. Yes. Bill. Yes. Maggie. Yes. Shannon. Yes. Tammy, right? Tammy. Oh, we did Tammy. All right, I'll start. All right, guys. And Kathy, yes. So strategic plan passes unanimously. Great, thanks. I will do a communication blast out to folks. I'm also working with our communication quarter, Kate McClain. We will get hard copies out into our buildings and in some key places in our community. I think it's another opportunity for us to be sharing the work that's happening to then engage in conversation. All right, so we'll get to work on that. Tammy, if you get some to our board, we can put at least some strap or, you know, put them in the library in places where people go to read, you know, and read them. Awesome. Thank you, Sarah. Same in numbers. Once I get those final versions, I'll bring to the board games. Great, thanks. Audit update. So we have received the first draft of the supervisory union audit, and I'm working through it with the auditors making final corrections, and you should see your draft of it at your next meeting for review and hopeful acceptance. Nice. Any questions on Tara about the audit? Yet I do. Tara, how was working with them this year? Was it, did it work? With a different auditor, it's brought its own challenges. Is it the same company or a new? The same company yet, but our auditor, who's been with us the last three years, left our HR Smith and went elsewhere. So we have a new auditor that's new to RSU. So she didn't have a lot of the historical knowledge of our supervisory union. So, you know, bringing her up to speed on all of our changes that have happened over the last couple of years, that was a challenge, but. But they weren't jerks, were they? No. And we are going out for RFP because this is the last year of that contract. So I will be getting the RFP out. My goal is to have it before I leave here on Wednesday out to the market. Nice. Can you take the bus contact, right? Yep. I got the last piece of information I needed for the RFP for the buses. So that is, now I just got to finalize it. Jamie does his final review and then we send that out too. We'll have lots to talk about in January. It's going to be very busy. All right. We have one last chance for a public comment tonight. Oh, I watched the bus. Oh, yes. Oh, sorry. Do you want me to take it? Yeah, because you went to the training. So I went to the training that was put out by the agency division that is monitoring the grant. And actually it's not a grant. It is a rebate. The feedback that I received in the comments from other districts and schools throughout the United States is that they have run into challenges with obtaining bids and making the deadlines for the manufacturing of buses. So there is a lot of feedback given to them on that and what the chances are of extensions. And then the other comments were that some of the bids that have come in far exceed the rebate amount. So schools are now being challenged with trying to find local funding for the additional cost of the electric buses. So we will most likely be partnering with Woodstock. I don't know their new merged name off the top of my head because they Is it? I thought it was Mountain View. Oh, thank you. I knew it wasn't essential anymore. They also were awarded the rebate as well. And they when I spoke to Jim Fen who is the business manager over there two Fridays ago, he was awaiting some additional information from Green Mountain Power. And then Butler Bus who is currently both of our transportation contract. Is working on the bid qualifications for the buses. So what I would say to the board is I'm not asking you to take any action on this because I don't want us to lock into pursuing it right now. And so we're going to continue to do our research and update you every month at the SU board level around what we're learning and what we're finding out before we act on it. So that's why there's there's no movement around action on this. We have not budgeted for having to purchase vehicles that weren't part of the rebate program. So we're going to do all of our research and continue to come back to you with information. More to come. Every month, yeah. All right guys now back to public comment. Sorry about that. Is there any please raise your hand if you have a public comment before we finish up our meeting? Doesn't seem like we have any public comment. Everybody thank you for joining us. It's great to see people coming out and hearing what we have going on. We really appreciate it. Designations and hires. Any other future agenda? So the policy committee will have some policy to put in front of the board. And one of the draft policies that we are working on is a board member conduct policy. I mentioned that I'm going to report in procedures. Some of our district boards have adopted procedures operating procedures and some have not or you did adopt the BSBA model code of ethics for board members. The idea would be that we create a policy that really says this is how we do business as board members within the SU and what the expectations are. So a draft of that will be coming in front of the policy committee next month. So I just wanted to mention that and there'll be opportunity for discussion on it at your next month's agenda. You also have, do we do the social emotional reports SU one? Just to note that your district meetings, you will be receiving your social emotional behavioral reports as part of your data report in January. Our next meeting is Tuesday, January 24th. Everybody has a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Kathy, I think this is the shortest meeting we've ever had. And we started 15 minutes late. I know. All right, guys. Do I have a motion to adjourn? I'm moving to adjourn and happy holidays. All right, thank you. All right, guys. Thank you. Thanks everybody.