 Any agenda revisions, comments, or correspondence? Should we talk about Chris right now? Yeah, sure, I've had several conversations with Chris Leopold, a couple by phone and several by email. Chris suggested that there isn't a specific statute that's going to roll on Act 49, articles of agreement, composition if you can start it or not, but he suggested out of respect to the Berlin's head and chance to get together that you shouldn't, the Act 49 committee shouldn't be there unless both all the members have been appointed, shouldn't start meetings. So that's what I suggested to Floor and passed that along today. He was, yeah, he looked at 706B and Act 49 which does talk about appointment of members from each committee from each town. So he said unless you had evidence of trying to not join because of not wanting the committee to function, that would be something else. But Chris and I talked about it a lot and it's really just been people's busy flies and trying to get a meeting in a quorum put together. So we decided to go, you guys had both agendas so we decided to go ahead and have the smaller meetings with the members that came from the Act 49 today and they would be able to participate. We don't have any actions today so it's mostly discussion. And I'll just note along those lines that Berlin is meeting Monday night. I'm part of the committee already. Pete Shover, who just showed up, is willing to volunteer and be appointed on Monday night to that committee and we're still in search of a third community member to serve. Did you ask Corrine by any chance she was? We haven't, I haven't, no. She was part of it before. Do you want to stay with us? I'll give you some copies. Please join us. No, no, no. Come on. It's a matter of record, I'm not appointed. Oh, no, right now, but you would be. I'm here to fill in some of the blanks. We didn't really get this news until, I talked to Bill around four, he got the news around 30 this afternoon, so. So, I don't know if this is jumping the gun, but does that necessitate another meeting on Monday night of this people at the 49th committee? Yes, but we're gonna see a full agreement right now and how we move forward, so that would be part of the discussion today. To do that planning. One last question for you, Chris, is that you guys are meeting on Monday from 5.30 to 7.30? Six to, right, sorry, 5.30 to 7.30. 5.30, yeah. So, if we were to have another meeting on Monday, does your board need the two hours thing? Probably not, and Avira has a commitment at 7.30. I don't know about the rest of the board members. The reason I asked is that we were to schedule a meeting, we were thinking, I'm sorry to Bill this afternoon, is that we would hold the meeting at Berlin since you guys would already be there and if we could possibly not start at 7.30, but like start at 7. I don't know, I'm just, I'm asking you, I'm not familiar with your agenda and your needs, I'm not pushing you either, I was. What would be, so we would have to meet again as. An act 49. An act 49 committee to officially ratify these particles before the public hearing. There's two approaches, ideally. I'm sorry, I don't have my bearings on this. I'm also trying to get our variance. Originally I thought that by the time we had the public meeting we would have the final draft, right? That was our purpose, is looking pretty clear that to have that hearing on January 9th, we have a week, not even a week to get this done. So I'm not saying that we would have final, final, but we would, having that, I think there should be a meeting of the act 49 committee before we go ahead and put this in front of the public. That's just my feeling, but I'm open to, this is not, you know, I don't give orders so I'm here to figure out what everybody, what all the communities want. So we would have a, we would have a January 9th public meeting to take public input on the articles. Yes. And we're proposing that we have another meeting on January 7th at 7 o'clock or whatever time, with the purpose of meeting the group as a whole and having said that we have at least one committee meeting which is incredibly sharp, you know, tight timeline. And if we miss January 9th, are we out of time or then moving forward with these set of articles? So, that's a question, because it's a question. The other thing that I floated to Bill that we had, said before was January 11th, but it is really hard with the agenda and all the meetings you saw the email that Bill sent today with all of everybody's independent meetings. So we're starting to push it, not starting, we've been pushing since we started. So what this means is by the time we meet on January 9th for that hearing of the new articles, it might not be polished, but it will allow the meeting that we need with the public and it will allow some input. And I'd say to Florida Day, I believe you have to be done with your articles by the 15th to meet the 18th. I asked Crystal, hold some time to do a review and publish the warning which would have all the articles independently on them. I'm looking at worst case and most work so that you could have, all the amendments would be done that way and there's time for the review to make sure that warning is right. So we met on the 9th and the other day of the 11th, that those dates could be used for the lawyer to finish up whatever we want him to do. And so what happens if we do not have if Berlin doesn't have 20 representatives? I mean, I'm asking that just because if this scenario is that Berlin doesn't and I can't believe that that would hold up all the other representatives moving forward. No. And so the same scenario is current tonight. So I'm not saying, I'm saying, why not move forward as the Act 49 committee tonight as opposed to waiting for Monday because if the time is going to be even tighter on Monday night and there's most versions here. I'm just saying from a practical matter, we all the other, I think all the other schools have appointed their members, there's been opportunity for appointing members and given our time constraints, I don't think we should wait. So here's where I think I asked the same questions that you're asking right now. When we've found out. And I also had a conversation with Emma Simons yesterday about if we would be holding anybody, if we would be holding Berlin harm or anything like that. What we're doing tonight is a courtesy to the Berlin board because they haven't not appointed their members because they're trying to hold the process. They just haven't been able to meet and appoint their members. So we're gonna go ahead and have a conversation today and discuss the amendments and prioritize those amendments so we don't waste our time today either. Then on Monday, we will do that again, a little bit more informed with the larger committee. So we're not, you know what I mean? We're not holding anybody, but at the same time, we're not saying to Berlin, you know, to that, you didn't, so the thing is that we have zero tolerance right now because if we don't get all of this warned by January, 18, 19, we can vote. So we're hoping to vote on the, well, our last day to approve the new little review, the warning for the vote will be set January 19 and we were hoping to vote for February 19th. So. So does that make sense? So we're not spinning our wheels. We're still moving. This is just a discussion. We didn't have action agendas. It's the discussion needs to happen again on Monday. That's what I was asking. If we could start a little earlier, I would hate to have to go to a meeting, like really, really late. Yes. I'm curious what happens if we can't resolve the remaining issues that need to be resolved by Monday night? We don't have a vote. By next, so if we can't resolve, for me to resolve by next Monday night, then we, there would be no vote, essentially. You're saying? Well, what I'm saying is that I'm hoping to go ahead and have that bullet carry. It is not going to be perfect by the bullet carry, but I don't, if I'm looking right at the amendments that we have, I don't see anything too controversial. There's going to be one more meeting after the hearing, right, of this committee? Yes. I anticipate that we will have some amendments that we're presenting that we're in agreement on and there might be an amendment or five that we're not in agreement on and we're taking input on. And we'll have one last chance to deliberate. And then we need to be done by the 15. I just think that, I guess we owe it to the public, to at least. I just want to say for the sake of saying we don't have to discuss it now. Maybe it's more appropriate to discuss it at the end of the meeting. But I have really grave concerns about what this committee is doing and about the wisdom, whether we actually owe it to the public to put something in front of them or whether we owe it to them to not put something in front of them. Whether that's a better choice to make, actually. And I have many reasons for thinking that. Again, I don't know. I guess, so forgive me for this, but to paraphrase Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, a quote that always stuck with me is that, I don't want to be so busy thinking about whether we can do this, that we don't take the time to talk about whether we should do it. And I think that we've been talking a lot. Should we have the other counter? Nature has a way of prevailing. I think Jeff Goldblum is well in Jurassic Park. But that didn't turn out so well in that movie. We're going to extend the metaphor. You're right. We could unleash the dinosaurs if we choose to do that. Sure. The quote that I was gonna use today is like, my son had a big race on Sunday and he was doing great in the first race and then he crashed in the second one. And Wednesday was his birthday at Academy and I said, I'm so sorry, are you able to ski with your team? And he said, well, mommy, I always watch this hellish skier. And he always says, are you gonna survive life or live life? And I feel like as you, we keep surviving. That's all we do. We keep surviving. Okay, so we're gonna survive it. That's all. We never really, we are trying to do our very best here. I really do not, I was very mature for the alternative. I have some concerns. I am okay with us consolidating completely. I wanted to give the public a little something from the very beginning we have said, let's just at least give it some of each community. We're not asking for too much. So if we could prioritize amendments and he say, okay, there's just two amendments that are really something that we need. But it seems like everything we do is just like, it's the birth minimum because that's all we can do for now and we're gonna do it later. I don't see us picking up as a full new unified district writing new articles of agreement in our first year or second year of operation. We're gonna be whoever that to me gets. They're gonna be swamped with things to do. And I think that we're, yes, I believe what you're saying. I spent, I don't know, I probably wasted 45 minutes of bills time. Is that going through the same thing? I'm like, how do we prioritize today? Does it make any sense? Obviously the easiest thing would be let's just take this article of agreement as they gave it to us. We don't have any more meetings and let's have the organizational meeting. That would be the easiest, for sure. Well, I don't think it's, I mean, whether it's easy or not, I actually think it's the braver and wiser choice to at least to narrow the scope of what we're doing considerably. If not outright, just like discretion being the better part of Val or, you know, retiring from this for the moment to take it up at a later time. So one of those two things, I just think it's the better choice. I'd like to speak to that, whether it's now or later is really, I think I guess I'm asking the committee. I think we should do it now, because we're, you know, why, unless you wanna see, I wanted to prioritize the amendments today. Do you want me to make recommendations to the transition board and transition board ultimately? No, because the transition board. What you say, the new committee that's formed with proportional membership, if that committee adopts amendments, it goes. The transition board has no authority in this matter. As long as they're voted, yes, too, right? As long as they're voted by the committee. Right, okay. So that means we would have to do something in this day, or if it would be nothing, then the default articles would go into effect by the fall. Well, my guess is that a lot of the people sitting around this table are thinking of rush for the resolution board, right? So, maybe some of the board are very much not thinking about rush. Who are excited enough to run, is it possible? I don't know, I don't wanna be the one just like trying to drive this through the ground. So we could start the meeting by approving our minutes from the last time and reviewing the draft, not reviewing the draft and prioritizing the amendments, or we could start the meeting by approving the minutes and moving into discussion of should we even put articles to vote? Yes or no? I think it does mean by working on the articles, because by working on them, we'll know what we are deciding to put a vote on that. And we've assembled this purpose and we should do a little bit of a dissembled vote. That's one. I'm in favor of discussing our options and settling on an approach or trying to settle on an approach, because that's gonna inform how we spend the rest of our time here. We could be here all night and not come to agreement, so that's my concern. Only for each. Good? Yeah, that's what I'm trying to do. And we should stick by that. Yeah, we should stick to that. Yeah, Dorothy? I don't have two minds actually. We started down this road and there are some things that I think are important that we have decided to put here on the article of agreement. And I guess I'm not comfortable with hoping that a new board, at some point elected in March, will actually do some of the things that we presented. I just, I want to say, yeah, they'll do it, but I've had too many experiences in life where somebody that said, trust me, in the end I should never have. So I'm just wary of waiting. Do I just think of some other places where people turned out to be not so nice when it came down to, oh, we thought you would do this. Oh no, now we have control, we're not gonna do that. So that bothers me, that worries me. I think from my experience with all the people, most of the people here at the table and have been in the Act 46, I think I can trust all of them. But I also will say, thank, we've worked on it, we've made some decisions, maybe we should just follow through on those as best we can. Anybody else, Peter, does he have something to add too? I'm a little bit worried that we don't have enough time to do these right. And we put a lot of work into it, and it's just such a tight time frame and these are very important decisions that I do worry about rushing these through without the proper deliberation and the right polish. I'd like to see this have on these. So I'm a little bit of the mind to let the new board handle this and trust that it would be a priority for the new board as well. I can't think of many more important things for the new board to do. And I think this is an opportunity for more of us to have an impact on the articles for the new board and if the new board doesn't like them, they can change them and propose that to the community. I think what is very important given this forced merger that I think our communities we're not happy about being forced into is that they have at least some say in how the new board and the new entity will be structured. And they will have the opportunity to vote on the article. And they don't like them, they voted down. Voting down and it's all, we'll be found as a fault, we'll be found the governing articles. So it's an opportunity to have the input that I think our communities will want to have in this new structure. And I think that having the community vote on articles, they will have some buy-in in supporting what this new entity is rather than having been forced on some entity, it's good in a lot of different ways to move forward with these articles and present them. The communities don't like them, they won't like them. So I think one of my, since we seem to be having this conversation. Yes, though. It's okay, all right, I'll speak to her now. I think one of my concerns is that, and you know, as I've said many times, and Chris at our last meeting, I was really struck by the fact that we reversed our positions from our previous conversation a couple of years ago when we had the 706B committee. Because at that time, and I think it was you, I may be wrong about that, but I can remember like advocating that we needed to put something out to the communities to vote on. And I think it was you or somebody else who said something about how, you know, that the electorate may not be informed enough to kind of, you know, be able to come to a reasoned decision. It was not me because what I advocated was we have options, rather than just say this or that. I said, if we're gonna vote, we're gonna have the options so the community can choose. In any case, my concern really is about that at the moment, you know, there is a lot, it's very difficult I think for just the general voter to kind of keep up with what's happening with the Act 46 process right now. So, you know, there's some awareness that there's a merger being forced by the state. There's some awareness that four of our school boards have voted to join a legal action to appeal or contest that decision. You know, I think there's less awareness of the fact that there's gonna be a transition board. There's gonna be elections on town meeting day for both for local boards that still have to exist for a while and for a new board. There's, and I think we're, so there's a lot of kind of confusion and chaos out there and what we're proposing to do is to take a very complex piece of work. Like, you know, these articles are not easy even for us to come to grips with, let alone a voter in the voting booth to wrap their heads around. And we're gonna say, okay, we're gonna have a hearing on the 9th, we're gonna have a meeting on January 18th, we're gonna have an election February 19th, two weeks before town meeting day. And we know we're contesting the consolidation, but we're gonna ask you to vote on what the articles would be if we did consolidate. You know, and then we're gonna have this, and then the election might be postponed because as it turns out, if we make some of the changes we're proposing to make, that kind of throws a wrench into the gears of when we can have the election for the new board members. It might be postponed yet another month, we'd have another election, then another town meeting with. Because the, and I don't know, I know we were talking to the lawyer about this, but you know, if we amend these articles, and there is a vote on February 19th, there is a 30 day period during which any vote in the state can be recalled. And so if we're within the recall period, it's conceivable that we can't actually act on what the articles say, which is to hold an election for new board members, for the new union board on town meeting day. We'd have to wait till that 30 day recall period expires. And then, then we, then we, then we're gonna have to talk to Chris Leopold today. There are versions that could be accurate that you've had for amendments here, and there are versions that couldn't be. So Chris said, actually if you were to change the configuration of the board, if you're gonna touch article 10, this is where, and if you're gonna change article 10, you're gonna start to get into the place of where you're within 30 days. If his opinion was that you would be more protected, if they, if they were to add an extra member in FY24, and I were talking about this today, that if you were to do that, that since that isn't happening until the town meeting, that election wouldn't happen until town meeting 2020, you could be okay in writing for the original 10. But if you were to do any changing. For now. For now, anything that we're gonna change for this year, budget and or any, because you're on January 14th. And I, I think I brought the warning with me, I hope I did, I had it, it might have been that pile I gave you for, or it's in my book. I don't see it. The electorate is asked at that open district meeting to approve methods for voting and methods for all other items, whether it's going to be Australian ballot or not. And I have my bag. And at that point, you've got that set for this year. If you vote articles before town meeting that affect and change that for this current year, you would then have to wait time to make sure that they go through the petition. So it's a kind of a, Matthew was right, and then the other part is right about this year. It's how you impact this current year and the wait for the petition time period to get into effect, to wait to make sure that those articles aren't petitioned for a recall vote. Either way, they're voting. Up or down. So just bottom line, I just wanted to say that I was in favor of voting two years ago, or whatever it was, because I thought it gave us an opportunity to do two things. One of which was to draft our own articles, really, from, you know, soup to nuts, which is something I don't think we have the opportunity to do here. And then also to take the time to really go out and engage with our communities and talk to them about why we had drafted these articles and what the choice was for them in terms of a vote up or down, a relatively simple vote in that sense. To take the time to engage people and inform people and answer questions and raise a comfort level with what we were proposing. And I don't think either of those things are possible now. We don't have the opportunity to draft our own articles soup to nuts. We only have the opportunity to tweak and possibly super complicate the articles in many ways. And we definitely don't have the time to engage our communities in a way that is going to allow them, I think, to vote in an informed manner on relatively important things. And so the result of that is going to be, you know, people, I feel, not understanding why the vote's being called, not understanding what they're being asked to vote on and being just generally frustrated by the entire process. So my, you know, there's other reasons. I mean, if the complications that some of the changes we proposed would create also I think are challenging. But my preference would be that we really put the brakes on this and consider, I know there's this sort of momentum and a sense of impetus that we put in all this time and effort and we feel a responsibility, you know, but, you know, we came late to the process. You know, we probably missed a window of opportunity some time ago, even earlier last year, to start this process. And I just don't know that we have the time to do it right. The last thing I want to say is that it seems to me when I was thinking about this that there are two things that we've talked about that people seem to feel really, really strongly about. So one of which is school closure. That's obviously, you know, we rated it our most difficult issue when we deadlocked so far on discussing sort of what to do about it. And obviously people are concerned about that and want to put some safeguards in place on that. And the second thing is the local school councils because we're concerned about local representation and voice. So it seems to me like if we wanted, the rest of the changes that are in here, you know, from adding a new board member, you know, I think a board could recommend to the electorate to do a little later time. For example, so we don't have to touch Article 10. And there's other, there's many other changes in here that I don't think are necessary or super urgent that we do right now. Make sure that we get in front of the electorate for them to vote on. And that's why I wanted to prioritize articles today because I was going to say why there's three, actually that I was seeing, but I felt like I had no right to tell you guys which ones I felt that were, but that we could talk about what we've been talking about just the way we did before, like not a table because we don't have time to vote, but just prioritize. Like this could be just a recommendation, this we, you know, we gotta have it. And then, and then put it out to vote, right? Yeah, I'm two years ago, I'm just saying, you know, I think in developing articles two years ago, three or eight months ago, you know, we've been acting futility. The AOE and the state school board have changed the rules. And basically, you know, all through this process, what value would they have had? You know, and I, the deadlines in this, we don't control. And I suspect this is pretty deliberate because we can't make good decisions. I mean, there's good lines in this room is that we've got, we've got lawyers, and we've got, you know, some really intelligent people. You know, I still get very nervous about just letting, and not for the sake of just defeating these, de-forward, you know, saying no to the fall articles. But I do think we have some specific interests that we should probably protect and do the best we can, to at least get in front of those, that future board, they can change them. You know, that, but I, you know, just ethically, I think we've got, we have always had an obligation to do something. I mean, it seems like you've developed some good changes to these. So I think the way that I'm seeing it right now is that we're divided as a board, but we have, at least I'm seeing three or maybe four people willing to look at the amendments tonight and prioritize, prioritize those. And we can make a decision at the end of this meeting on how to move forward for possible, you know, possible hearing on the ninth. I think we're going to try to propose for another article. But let's get into it. Uncomplicate things, I think. In the law, you can have sunset provisions. So if we're truly interested in considering articles, again, with sufficient time, we can have an article that whatever articles are passed this year by the electorate, if any, if none are passed and then both articles will sunset after three years and then new articles made the board has to put out new articles to the community for revoke. And that would do a couple of different things. One is to create time for engagement. It would also give time for whatever articles we're in place to operate for a period of time and see how they operate and if need to make changes to the system. And it forces the new board to propose and work on new articles. So you're basically saying whatever is voted in now will become void and not operational. So it forces you to, as a board, to redo the articles, consider them again and present them again to the community for both. So it really defences on a lot of the concerns here that in terms of engagement and enforces an action as opposed to, well, maybe we'll get to it, maybe we won't. Because in operating, we would not get through it. I'm not qualified to speak to the reality of that, but. Yeah, I'm not qualified even to speak to that and it does scare me a little bit to have to, but I don't know what the issues would be at the time in three years. I have no idea what this board will be dealing with. So just to say that their articles are gonna be shut down until they come up with new ones. Three years to plan. I mean, if the concern is, oh, we can get through them when we have a different board and it's the same concern that forces a priority for the articles. For the others? Yeah. I need to get my bearings, but. Just to speak to what we do tonight, I'm fine going through amendments before us if we can return to the conversation of what we wanna present, but I think we should really be disciplined about it. Stop at eight, which means we have to stop looking at articles at 730 or 715 or whatever it is. Yeah, I was actually hoping for 630. Stop looking at amendments. I was not gonna go because the entire committee, besides our new members, are familiar with the existing articles. I wanted to prioritize the amendments and just see truthfully what can be a recommendation and what are amendments that we really can't wait to have. And then if we're done with that, then we can be more informed to make the decision of how we wanna have a hearing at all on January 9th. I think that is the biggest question for me is what other things we have is like, do we wanna take this to vote and have a hearing on the 9th? So before this is headed. So if we could move into discussion just for order purposes for our amendment, take it to, can I have that before that motion to approve the minutes of bill 1918? It's removed. Did everybody had a chance to read them? Thank you, Matthew, for all that you know. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. I'm staying. I'm staying. Now moving into discussion, where it says 2.1 review draft articles of agreement, what I was hoping was to, if you guys could briefly move into the draft timeline that Bill put for us, and I just wanna just laser point the conversation that we've been having right now. So if you go into hearing of new articles, January 9th up there before that, where is the other date? So if January 9th, if we had the hearing, we need to have, like we said, if you could just highlight those, because that would be what we are dealing with when we make that final decision. So we have January 3rd and 7th, which is the Monday. Have that possible meeting from 7 to 9. January 9th, have the hearing. Warned January 18th, and possibly have a vote on February 19th. So with that in mind, if you could move into the draft amendments recommendations that we had the first page, I was not gonna go through the big document, I was just gonna use the two pagers. So we have the two pagers in finance. This were recommendations that after we had given all our stuff to Chris Gdopoulk, he gave us this. So can I just hold this up so everyone knows what you're working on? Yeah, so this one, the two pages. Two pages, all I did was copy paste what we had, so we just had one document. So in finances, Ben and I talked about C today in the restricted funds. We talked about this each individual for meeting lately, but the forming districts will transfer to the union school district. Any pre-existing specific endowments or other restricted accounts, including student activity, and related accounts that may exist on June 30th, 2018. Any scholarship funds, endowments, or similar accounts held by the school district prior to June 30th, 2018. Having specified terms of use will be used in accordance with said provisions. When Bill and I talked about this today, he was saying that this is already in the law. That's what Chris Leopold advised us of. Chris Leopold said, that we don't need to add it, that it's already in the law. So, Jack, how are you, any questions on that? Okay, so then in article 10, we said effective January 1st, 2018, if we could say effective January 1st, 2020. The Board of School Directors shall be expanded to include one member elected at large for a total of nine. Should be a lot, should be a lot. 11 members. The new at-large member will be elected by a vote of the entire electorate of all towns in the new union district. Votes of the entire electoral shall be counted together for Mingo without being first counted at the town level. The at-large member shall be elected at the 2020 annual meeting of the new union district. So that wouldn't change anything for now. So in theory with the conversation with Chris, we could go ahead and elect our members for operation for 2019 without having to wait those 30 days. So I'm not gonna cross that one out and cross the other one out. Just to refresh my memory, that's just so that we don't have an even member? Yeah, so that we are not five to five, so that we can. What's the year of the first three? 2020. Okay, it's not 2018. 2020. It did not be effective January 2020. He took up one that he wrote for volunteer. That's fine, I just, yeah. And I guess I just copy-pasted what he had sent, so I didn't. And same with the one of all, he just, I asked Chris, I said, don't reword the whole thing for us, just give us some of that. Oh, that's fine. He had that for another district. So as we're having discussion on this, is that something that is not, I thought that was something that we wanted? Yeah. It's supposed to be 10 members also? It's 11. It should be 11. Yeah, 11. It should say it should be written out as the word 11 and 11 members in bracket. And then what is the take on whether this, you know, sort of creates a new electoral schedule? So what Chris told me this afternoon was he felt that if we were out one year that you wouldn't have to wait for the petition, if this were done as a separate piece. So rather than when you say as a separate piece, like? Like, we don't want to lose all of Article 10. Yeah. If we make it a separate amendment, and this is one of the things that I didn't get enough, I wish I had questioned Chris more, because we were going through, we literally had a pretty long list we were going through. Because before he's told me that he thinks this needs to be part of Article 10. So I've got to get back with him and say, can we have this as outside of Article 18? Yeah, whatever number you want, but not, because we don't want to lose Article 10. If we are amending Article 10, then we just put that into that 30 day waiting period for petitions. And that's why it's confusing. I mean, I can say both of you are, the way you both said it was right. I mean, I can't say one's wrong or one's. Yeah, and I thought from our comment, because we did ask that specific question, and we spent quite a bit of time talking about this today. So I spent a time with Chris saying, let's make sure, Chris, if we want to go to 11, and as I just don't want to get to 30 day, because I had laid out a calendar which I didn't bring to you tonight, that I was bringing to you to show you what the difference is if we have to wait 30 days for a petition. I mean, it puts our budget vote almost, I mean, very, very late, almost somewhere in June. So it just, since we're going down this amendment, let's just call this Article 15. So if it doesn't really matter right now, you can just say that'll be Article 15, and we'll have to add one in the next article. If I could have somebody else that has better voice to read it, we can go with yours. No, I'm ready. Okay. I don't want to change my voice for Alex, so. The new board of schools of recognition developed policy and programs for offering in-front district choice to families of students enrolled in grades for which the union district operates multiple abilities as soon as reasonably practicable following the first year of operation. Choice may be limited only where necessary to the legitimate operational needs of the union district in any applicable legal requirements. Policies respecting choice shall consider issues including but not limited to transportation, social, economic equity, proximity to the selected building, unity of siblings, and capabilities of the sending and receiving schools. I had written this, that's just a recommendation. I don't think that we need to make this an article right now, but what do you guys think? I think we do, I think not. Yeah? Okay. Personally, I'm a little concerned about the sentence in italics, is that why it's in italics? This was from Chris Lofold, it's something that he used in a different district. I don't think it should be in italics. Unless he was emphasizing it for some reason, but I don't think we should, in final form, I don't think it should be italicized. Yeah. The only reason I was seeing it as a recommendation is because we're, to me what it's saying is that we're gonna develop policies and programs. So we're not, it's like a recommendation, it's not like an action. Well, but the italicized sentence is more of a constraint or a forcing condition. Yeah, a mandate. It's saying like it's not up to you. You know, you can't limit choice unless it's necessary to the legitimate operational needs of the union district in any applicable legal requirements. And then it gives the reasons for potential limitation in our incentives. Well, what if there are other reasons for limiting choice? Yeah. It may be. It can, well, but it says including, but not limited. And so that's open-ended. It's not, sorry. Where does it say that? It says policies, respect, and choice are considered issues including, but not limited to. And that goes for the one, to the temptation, so to it, not the less sentence. Yeah, but I think, I don't see those two sentences as being necessarily related. They are. They tend to get housed when it starts with choice may be limited only where, then the next sentence talks about policies respecting choice. Policies regard, is that not policies regarding choice? Shall I consider? Shall consider. Let's say shall consider doesn't mean, doesn't say whether those things limit or don't limit choice policy, but the preceding sentence does say that. It does make a specific prescription as to what. Okay, but by, limitations may be come out of these other issues. Scott has something to say. Hold on a minute so it's not a. Sorry, just one question. I'm just kind of puzzled. I thought the whole purpose of, or the whole nature of the merger would be that there's no more barriers. But it sounds as though there are kind of ghost school districts that are kind of collection agencies for the specific schools. Is that the idea? I guess I'm confused by the question. I don't know. Sorry. I'm confused by the situation that created the confusion. Yeah, so can you repeat the question? Interesting. Yeah, I thought that in a merged district, there, the whole concept of choice is sort of irrelevant that basically you have five elementary schools, ES1, ES2, ES3, ES4, ES5, whatever. And a single district in which children attend schools and then it all kind of gets worked out. It's not, there are no longer any town school districts. Basically what you're saying is choice to any school. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, but it's not. The whole concept of choice is irrelevant. So can I give you a point of information from an urban setting? Sure. So if we were in an urban setting, you might see a map of the catchment areas for elementary schools by city blocks or other things while there's still this choice in between. And it's all set by the school board. I don't think that there's anything that requires you to have choice. I don't think there's anything that limits you from having choice. I think it's a discussion either for the articles or for the board. And that's what you're talking about tonight. But when I look at other districts that have one board that have multiple elementary schools, even multiple middle schools and high schools, they have attendance areas sometimes. Sometimes they have choice between attendance areas. Sometimes they have choice among the whole district. I've seen all sorts of different ways that the boards have tackled that. So I think, I don't think there's any assumption either way right now. And I think that's part of the formation discussion process. And I think that whether to provide some context, maybe if I'm lucky I'll get this right. But we had discussed before the fact that without, if there is no policy about kind of who attends where, then it's kind of made on like a case by case basis, which might be overly subjective or even challenging to the system because it requires somebody to actually make a decision in each case. So I guess the assumption I think that we came to was that a board would have to develop a policy around this issue in order for that to function effectively or to avoid problems. Please, anybody correct me on that? Yeah, that's what we said. I was trying to look for it right over a policy that people run, for example, did of how they did a specific amount of students. And Chris and I went at this argument for a little while at two of our meetings. And basically, I'm assuming that we're gonna have five strong schools, right? That we're not gonna just open, I wanna go to Berlin. We're all gonna wanna go to whichever so that, that's what I think that this would be a recommendation to develop a policy. But they can see if they come up with, it still has to be for management schools. Or if they, you know, whatever, however we are schools face up for right now, I'm assuming that we're all gonna, it's a character of our local communities and our strong communities. We all wanna keep our schools open, right? So this is a recommendation on. It's not a recommendation. It's not a recommendation. That's written. It's not a recommendation. Yeah, that's what I mean. That's not one of, but that's what I was feeling that should be a recommendation because I think we would need more information of how we are operating and how we are, what would be, what would make the most sense for all our communities. That would be a hard one to note right now. So I think that the, I tell us that's funny, British, is it's a signal, I think, of saying that there are legal constraints on what you can do with choice. Because it is one district now and to say that just doing from one town to 20, say I want to go to Berlin, it's absolutely creative reasons for that. Because if everything's being pulled, then all the resources including all the educational resources that are allocated to each school should be available to each of the students in the community as a whole. And that's why I think the, the italicized language is, I think, signaling that, saying choice may only be limited, may be limited only when necessary. And it's a hot, it's a, it's a sobering fact that we take into account. And I think there are people with tension issues that would be involved here. Well, I'm a little bit confused by the word, wording of that sentence. And just the way you said it has, I keep going back maybe I'm just reiterating it, but when it says choice may be limited only, to me that's saying unlimited choice. Well, but it makes a limit for these reasons. It provides the mechanism for limited choice, but basically is also saying that you have to have some really good reasons for what limited choice, almost like if you limit speech as a government entity, you have to have some really good reasons for it. It's not probably as strict as that, but it's pointing out that, this entity now that is being created, it's not your neighborhood schooling. And I would suggest that residency alone is not a reason for saying that you're gonna go to this school. We talked about that as one of the factors, and that's why I think that we need more information because there's a lot of things that would come into play in a transport, like we talked about before, transportation and all like, right now if you said pre-choice, we probably would be looking at just the students that the parents would advocate for the kid in the summer that can transport them, mobilize them and advocate for them. So we would, as we're trying to move into more equity, we would be doing that less in my mind right now. So we would have to have a policy of how would we be able to provide transportation across all the schools, before we would be able to say this, right? That's just in my mind. So I think as a state, we have to figure out, even in high school, how to make choice really free choice. You have some choice, but it's not really, I can't say I wanna send my daughter to St. Joseph's Academy, just like that. You know, there's things that you can do. Those political lines are still established. They're not, they're erased here. Yeah. In this instance. So if we're looking, if you look back at your timeline, that we just looked at, to be able to put this out to vote. My concern is that we do, at the moment, we do not have enough money. That this is something that we can put at the end. Remember how we talked about some recommendations that we could give to the board? So we could say, you know, you should develop a policy for choice or whatever we wanna call it, by 2020. We're by, you know, it gives you two years. All right, but that it won't, we don't even know how we're gonna budget together right now. We don't even have a culture of how we budget all together. I think those, that two-year window is already preserved in the other articles by saying that nothing will change in terms of how the classes are arranged or where kids are going to school for the next two years. So I think that window is established, at least in the other articles that they're voted in. I think this article is putting the, again, an obligation on this new board to develop these policies on choice. So is this article a must-have for everybody? Not to me. No. Okay. Chris? No. Garcia? No? Yes. Dorothy? Yeah. If you have a recommendation that suits you just fine. Okay. Scott? I don't know. And it's just, it's not at both because we don't have any actions. I'm just like, you know, like- Stronghold. Stronghold. I don't object to the sentiment, which was to say that the board- Yeah, I don't want to rule it out. That the board of school directors, you know, should. Should, yeah. I don't like the word shall. I think that the language in this is overly prescriptive for me. Overly what? Overly prescriptive. It's definitely meant to go. Would you be comfortable with a recommendation to the board that develop a policy? Would that be enough? I'm looking at- Is that what this says? This says shall. No, no. Shall develop a policy. What I'm trying to do, Chris, is like we said, the other article was article number 15, and I'm trying to say that this is not gonna be article 16. That's just my feeling, but this is gonna move into the line of recommendations, not an article to vote on. I think the lawyer's really saying this because if you don't have something like this, you're gonna be faced with people coming and saying, I want my kids to go to this school, and you're gonna say no. Well, why not? Yeah. Chris, Chris, but like you said before, I think the floor's saying, let's let the board take Aaron. But because what you said earlier is that two-year. That's already said. So, I mean, I guess, why do we need this now? Because at the end of the year, since the board hasn't done it, there won't be anything saying, well, nothing that says, well, we didn't have to do it. And I think it's gonna be disruptive because at the end of the year, you have this two-year hiatus of developing the time to see how things should go out and developing the policy in response to it. I mean, I don't think Chris Leopold would recommend something like this, but I mean, this is a, I don't remember which district this was written. Harwisky. It was at Harwood, yeah. So, is it in effect in Harwood? Yeah, it's part of that bylaw, so that's where it came from. So should it- The inspiration for it. Yeah, right. Should it be reduced to just say that, though? Just to just, the article is that the board needs to shell that first sentence instead of trying to, the other verbiage. Yeah, wait, wait, wait. For President, I think there's a great example of how we have something that's complex enough that the 10 of us can't come to agreement on it. We put this before thousands of voters were maybe doing ourselves a disservice. So can we- So can we under estimate the understanding of our community members? Otherwise, you could do that for any reason, say, oh, we're not gonna send this to the vote because- Well, I don't feel that way about the number of board members. I would have said that two years ago, but under the current context, I just think that we're injecting an incredible dose of chaos here by putting this out within the time frame that we have and the conditions that we have and all the other things that are going on. So that's, yeah. So we've kind of stayed within this time frame of completing the amendments. What I'm gonna do with this one is that we'll bring this back up for discussion on Monday assuming that we have a Monday meeting. I just think there's so many people, the word choice is being thrown around nationally for everything. And so the people are gonna be really interested in this and wanna know what the policy is. And I think we need to make sure that they develop a policy sooner rather than later. And so we'll be quiet about that. One of the things that choice has shown across the nation is that choice actually makes the equity divide greater. No matter where it's been done, we see it happening in pre-K right now. So I don't see this as choice one way or the other, but it is one of the things that actually makes a greater divide and you as a board, your board's a general part of it told me very loud and clear to try to reduce our equity, our gap in our divide, in our senior students. I've seen it in Massachusetts with some of my friends that their kids have, their kids have choice around Cambridge and Newtons. And they have kids that are siblings that can't get into the same Mandarin school as their siblings. So like they are, you know, and then the kids that live in that neighborhood, they're a community like really far. So one is going to Spanish school because can't get into the Mandarin school. It's just like really, you know, crazy. And the parents that are doing that are the ones that can't afford it. And now they're bossing kids from outside of the city to make those schools a little bit more diverse. I just said, so I think it's something that we need to maybe not study, but like think really thoroughly, you know, how much choice we went, how much, you know, I don't know, I just really want the five schools to be the best schools that they can be for their parents. How do we, how do we, in articles, ensure that a board is going to allocate the resources necessary to each school to ensure that there's an equitable education at that school? We haven't talked, we haven't talked about that. We've talked about the word equity a lot, but we don't have any mechanism to ensuring each of the elementary schools. Yeah, and to me that's where it's gonna be a budget culture that is gonna have to be graded and then with time it'll be easier and it's gonna be hard in the beginning. I don't know, I haven't participated in a board like that before, but as if we're gonna stay focused on this particular, does this really need to be an article right now? Considering our timeframe. By the time this means we're not, why shouldn't it be an article? If you... So we'll bring it back because we don't have, we have more that are like, not an article, we'll just bring it back on the 9th. On the 9th? On the 7th, sorry, I had said seven before and on the 7th, I think we have a meeting. Yes, the new article below, I copy pasted the other part of that article about the input on policy and budget development. We had different ways that we wrote the community councils and I think this was Chris's first part of the interpretation of that, the Washington Center Unified, can I have somebody tell us? Sure, the Washington Central Unified Union Board of School Directors shall provide opportunity for local input on policy and budget development. Structures to support and encourage public participation within the Union School District will be established by the Board of School Directors on or before December 1st, 2019. Can we read the poll? Next page? Yeah, not that whole page, but I think that what he was trying to do at one of your input is a sort of, do a smaller take on the community councils. And to me, that first paragraph is not clear enough, I don't know, so we have to do that, but also the other one includes some of the parts that we were worried about. So this article is where I thought we could bring up the community councils, but I don't know how you guys. I just want to ask for, Clarie, what's the purpose of the yellow highlighting? The yellow highlighting is what was, I just copy pasted it from what we did in the article, so when we put it in here, I just wanted it to be complete. So you're saying this was our language? That was the language. And then I guess Chris's response about some of the legal ramifications or implications or something, right? That's where the bullets are? Yeah, so he was concerned on the three less, not the three less, if you look at the, where it says identify student learning needs based on data, established school, based goals, provide input and budget, resource priority, and provide feedback on district policies. Those are the three that he identified as being worrisome, you know what I mean? Yeah. So what I was thinking is... So you're saying these three, the first two sentences, I'm sorry, on the previous page, are what Chris has recommended as language for this article. Yes, but it doesn't say anything about anything. Oh, it doesn't say anything about the sentence? Exactly, that's what I'm saying. So the first event or the article 15 that we had in there? Yeah, so what I was saying is that since there was a concern on those four bullets that we could use, maybe use the last four bullets as school, school board, school... Yeah, so as school board, I also direct as a superintendent to seek input from a school-based council of issues like principal hiring, school district communications, learning initiatives, like we thought there were last school board meeting of how the representation phase could, and family and community engagement, so that it's, say, a little bit more about community councils, or we just say that as school board meeting. You're just picking points of... I was just picking the last part since there was some concern about identifying data and establishing school goals, so I was picking just the last part. And take out the old one? Also because it also increased something in addition. Yes, does that make any sense, or no sense? I just wanted to say community councils otherwise, you know what, that first paragraph doesn't really say, but if we take the other part then we take out the marquee stuff. Can you say specifically what you are suggesting that get added? Is it the second paragraph? These structures may include but not be limited to? Is that what you want to say? So these structures may include but not be limited to school councils that have an advisory responsibility in key areas. Is this where you propose it? Yes. And the last three bullets. So you have the first paragraph and then... The last three bullets. The last three bullets where it starts the school board in May to write a superintendent and then the things after that, as that would be the article. Yes. Okay. I'm sorry, I don't know where we are. So this paragraph is down, followed by this. And this means, this is bullets that are not touched on my shoulder, so we don't. It's a very different one, but... I thought you were going to do the same thing. It's the same, so we'll say. And I can clean it up and say, you know, as long as... Can we... Okay. Can we move the... The first paragraph says that, first of all, it's the wrong year, June 30th. It's got to be at least 2019. And I guess I'm going to ask if we can move that deadline back because it seems to me like an incredibly rapid requirement for a new board theoretically elected in March and constitute sometime that same month to be able to establish local school councils in every community by end of June. I don't know, I'm just wondering about... I was just asking about... So should we say by the next... March? Yeah, or 2020? Or the next... Could be 2020, yeah, that makes sense to me. Okay. And then, is there any of the stuff that Chris has put in here in these bullets? Is that specifically citing problems that he saw in this language? Yeah, that's all those bullets. Yeah, those bullets were where we said him. All of them? I understand. So the only ones that he didn't have conflict with were the four that I'm showing you. But how does taking out these bullets? These bullets are Chris saying, these are limitations on what the school board actually can do. So he was responding to the paragraph that's on top that where it starts to use school district board shall provide timely and sufficient blah, blah, blah, all the way towards this and hiring of principles. That's what was given to him from here down from there below each of those bullets are his reaction to that initial paragraph. So this isn't language that he's suggesting we include in the article. These are his comments. It's his comments. He's saying, here are statutes that govern what a school board can and cannot delegate or can and cannot direct a superintendent to do. He's not suggesting this should be part of the article. He's just saying, like, if you're gonna write what's above here, you should know that there's a bunch of laws in place or statutes that... So this bullets, we send him those bullets. Which bullets? If we identify student learning needs base of data, established school based goals, all the bullets, we send it. What he commented is what Bill is showing here and where he put the statute, that first bullet. Okay. So you're saying the first bullet is from Chris. Yeah, what I'm saying is that if we could concentrate on that first. I'm trying to understand. The bullets are just the dots, right? Just for reference. That's right, yes. I'm trying to understand what came from Chris and why. It's not clear to me, because it's all highlighted yellow. So it all looks like it's all just... I took it out of the document that we send him that black and white. I understand why I'm asking that for the question. I'm looking at Holly, because I thought that we had copy-paste this entire thing for him. And then he added where... So he added the first bullet. He added that first bullet. What else did he add? Anything else? Everything else is stuff that we drafted or that we sent to him? We copy-pasted it from the stuff from Nicole that we had that day. From Nicole? Me. When we did the update of this, the who and the why of school council. So we had it in... I apologize, I just don't remember like seeing these bullets before, but that's probably not in my mind. The language that we're using is pretty much what she gave us. The new SV shall provide a timely and sufficient opportunity for local input on policy and budget-developed structures to support and encourage public participation within the new... Here it says that these will be established by the new board of school directors on or before June 30, 2018. That's why we just copy-pasted it. The structures may include but not be limited to local school councils that have an advisory responsibility here as including but not limited to the new SV budget development and hiring articles. She goes ahead and lists all the authority where we can have or not have authority. So we just copy-paste those bullets. So those are not from Chris. What Chris did is he talked to Bill and Bill put notes on that. Actually Chris, yeah. On pink notes on that. So what I did is like, what I was saying is like the only note one that he did and had having read what he got from Nicole, the only one that he didn't have anything to say that will compromise or make it murky were those four plus discipline hiring process, school and district communications, learning initiatives for proficiency-based grading and family and community engagement activities. Right. So the new recommendation, so here is some part of what could be a recommendation whether it's that the recommendation of the board includes the student board member exhibition. You know, and Chris said, does not think we need to write anything unless we wanted a strong statement, not necessary. Statue allows it to happen already. So what I was doing, I was just cleaning up that. So what Chris McVeigh just said, we were comfortable with that first paragraph in those four bullets as saying enough for community councils or not. We send him that entire thing. Sounds like he's saying, there are certain things you can't delegate, but I don't think this article delegates anything. It just talks about advisory. Yeah. Councilors. I think it was. And that's what we wanted. Councilor had an extra piece in the first set of bullet areas, apology budget hiring or identifying student needs, issues like that, that I think he thought would be on, probably beyond the extra pieces of school-based counseling. And that's what he was suggesting because it does not be, is my impression based on the edits here, not be part of any article or recommendation involving school-based counsel. So based on the expectations for us. And the date didn't come from him either. The date just came because we copy pasted what we had. That was presented to him. That was presented to him. So we can change the date to June 30, 2020 is what you were saying, Matt? Yeah. I mean, he did say specifically, he just said not having the hiring part in the articles. This is in his comment number eight. So this is on page 17 of the, I'm sorry, the other document that includes his comments. And the last centric of the first paragraph, and this plays off of earlier language, he would suggest not to have the hiring part in the articles. But then, so the bottom four bullets, it says the school board may direct a superintendent to seek input from a school-based counsel. Right. On the hiring process. That's why I'm raising it. I don't think that, like, just because there's no comment attached to those bullets doesn't mean that Chris had nothing to say about them. It's just that his comments are contained in there. Well, that could be too bad. I think it was the way that it was written to. So the school board may also direct a superintendent to seek input from a school board. It's still, the power is still in the school board. The school board may also direct a superintendent to seek input from a school-based counsel on issues such as. Can I just ask a question? Yeah. So how is this different than how we do things now? What does this try to drive differently? Because we have, we as a school board are not doing the interviews for the hiring anyways. We have community members involved, right? Yeah. How is this trying to be different than that? Or is it just trying to solidify that? I think it is depending how it is looking for local input on hiring, assuming that hiring the principal is, but sort of sets the tone of that school. So it's not saying that they're gonna be in charge of hiring, but they should be taken into consideration because they would have a good understanding of that community. Okay, Scott. Thanks, Blark. I have to apologize. I know I've walked into this movie practically when the credits are rolling. It's okay, we've been like fast forward ever since. I'm just wondering if it might be possible to fold this, the community advisory councils into that idea of the representative school district meetings, since there seems to be some convergence, some natural convergence there. In which the advisory councils could grow out of the members of the representative body, which would already give them a kind of standing and commitment to what's going on. Yeah, I talked to Susan about this, and you can correct me if I'm wrong. Susan said that she was looking at just this as very separate, not together because they have two different functions. And I think that this community, to me, the community advisory councils is a smaller bike right now considering the time that we have with the trying to do the representation of both, like Brother Borough has it too. So I would, after talking to him, I would hate to lose this window by trying to buy too much and at least give a little something to the communities. That's just my feeling, but it doesn't have to be everybody's feeling. So this is not the community school council that kind of said that, I mean, it's not, it came to the representative. Does the representative serve all year long, Susan? Yeah, the representatives do serve all year round, so there are places where representatives who are elected to the representative committee sort of do create some committees. I don't think they do in Brother Borough, but there are other places where they do. So it could work hand in hand. I mean, I think that your right stuff that it could work hand in hand. I think what you're saying for is that school councils, because it is an idea that's already been floated in merged districts in Vermont, so it's less of a reach given right now where we are in the F-46 process to say, hey, how about school councils? They can be advisory. It's not that big a reach, whereas a representative town meeting is outside the box thinking in terms of F-46. So you're thinking maybe something that's achievable as opposed to something that would be about that. So yeah, if you're being Jeffersonian, yeah, absolutely, they go together. Well, you and I talked about it a little bit on the phone, and I thought that we had said that, because this town meeting represents all of the towns, and this ones are very based on each school. Right, right, yeah. So it says that a little bit. But a representative town meeting, for example, in Brattleboro, they're divided into four districts, so you're like a premier district. Okay. So you could, I mean, depending on how you did the wording, but if you did a representative town meeting for WCSU, you could have the people representing their towns you could divide it that way if you wanted to, or any other subdivisions you wanted. So we could bring that up. Yeah, I think that's the idea. All right, so we'll move to the last page. What was our outcome on that one? So I think for now, we've just, that first paragraph and the last bullet. The two sentences? With the school board may also direct as the president to say, if you're going to counsel an issue such as, and we bring it up to the date. So last bullet, a school board may also direct a superintendent to seek input from a school-based counsel on. Issues such as principal hiring, school district recommendations. And that's just a reminder that the board can do that? It doesn't read to me like a bylaw. It's to me like that. Yeah, in my mind, I wanted to say that school councils should be the principal hiring. They don't have to be all the members, but whoever is in there should be, should participate. And the proposal to make a change should. But it should be. I would recommend removing that whole bit. Which whole bit, the... That all those bullets. Just leaving it at the top two sentences. I mean, the board has that authority, whether we say it or not. It's not limiting that authority. It's not granting that authority. It's not putting any condition or comment on that authority. It's just... Yeah, and really, truthfully, what I'm trying to do right now is just hold my fingernails to some achievable. Yeah. So I am happy to have the first paragraph be, as long as we have community advisory councils. And of course, this doesn't require councils. This may include. But the principle is it calls for local input on policy and budget development. Which hopefully we all agree on. But so should this structure should include local school councils? Can that be a compromise for not including the last four bullets? If you're asking me, I don't want to tie the board's hands and say you must do school councils because we've never done them before. I mean, that's for the board to deliberate and maybe experiment with and then come to a reasoned decision. If we mandate them, it could be a colossal failure. And in this community, we don't want them to vote dishonor for that one. You know, that we're still in the context of community having options to vote yes or no. And community didn't want it to just say, you know what I think this is a good idea. If they can make heads or tails of what they're voting on. If they can make heads or tails of what they're voting on. So far, we've just had. Just saying again, like I... Two articles. So far, we just have two articles. You said about any election. Any election at all. I think that the way this one is going to be structured is going to be orders of magnitude more confusing than anything I've ever seen on a ballot. So I think that right now, we're having a discussion. We're not the actual 49 committee. I hear you, I took all the notes, I'll vote through Holly's notes. And then on January 7th, when we're all together, we will make the final decision on this article so that we can, I really want to get through the whole, we don't have that much more to go. So. So on the second page. But I am prioritizing this one as something we will discuss on the 7th. So I'm not taking it off. Okay, article 8, this is one of. Yeah, let me elaborate this one. The new union board shall have one non-voting member representative of the elementary licensed teaching staff, one non-voting member representative from the licensed high school teaching staff, and one non-voting representative of the remainder of the individuals who staff the union high school and the elementary school voting facilities. These non-voting members shall be recused from any information or discussion regarding personnel, contract negotiations at any time. So the purpose of this article is to burden the back base and the source of factual information for the board. Because we've had the representatives from the teaching staff and the elementary school, the high school and the facility folks who work there. You can get a lot more information about how the system is operating and they're not voting. So they're really, it's an informational position, not a voting position. It's not unlike the student representative which has been part of the U32 board for many, many years without difficulty, I'm assuming. That's a real positive. Imposite. Did you consider the student representative? I would be happy to have a student representative as well. Probably just U32, because I don't see much kids. I think it's a little late for them. And we hadn't talked about that, but I thought, Bill, you didn't say that there was no restriction. There's no restriction statute already at Lawson. Allow us to, so we decided that. There's no court's discretion according to statute. There's no student, there's students. There's no. So I have a real problem with this one, so I apologize, but this is the first time we've had a chance to discuss it because we didn't get to it in our last meeting. The feelings are very strong. The reasons may be very subtle and therefore difficult to describe, but I think it's a mistake to provide staff equivalents on a board of directors as an issue of governance. A board hires a chief executive to run the school and directs the chief executive, possibly sets policy, requires information of the chief executive, could direct the chief executive to engage with the staff and report back to the board on specific questions. I think that it's a confusion of lines of authority and accountability. I think it undermines the ability of the authority of a chief executive and the ability to do the job we've hired them to do. And it just seems to me like sort of turning on his head, you know, the idea of what a board is and what governance is. So I've never, I've worked for, I've served many boards. I've never, a board may always invite in or request or require different staff members to attend to provide reports or to sit in on certain discussions or as a matter of courtesy even. But I've never seen a board that outside of the chief executive has, you know, defined membership for, you know, different levels of staff where they can come to any meeting, they're invited, they get the minutes, the invitations, they sit at the table, they're, you know, we sort of equal participants in the discussion of all discussions. I've just never seen that, and I think for a good reason. So this one really sets me on edge, I guess. Yeah, that's my take on it. Dorothy? Oh, sorry, Scott. Thanks. That's, I think, very well expressed and a very American point of view. And that may be the most appropriate for us since that's who we are. But I should just point out that it's completely consistent with other practices of corporate governance such as in Germany, where labor has an important place at the board table and it seems to work very well. And even though it may not be in our habit or our custom to do that, I don't think there's any sort of, any reason or priority that it can't work. And I can sort of, I don't know, I can see the potential advantages of it in terms of just communication and a sense of solidarity all around and the demystification of what the board and the executives are up to. I mean, I don't think I would object to it as a matter of board discretion. I can see that there would be some advantages to extending invitations to staff to participate regularly. And certainly in certain kinds of discussion, I would imagine their staff would be more than happy to avoid other parts of what the board does. But this doesn't leave it up to the board's discretion. This is a new shell. There will be, it sets it for all time until unless somebody puts a board with the electorate to change it that at every single discussion barring negotiating, regarding personal contract negotiations, which by the way shouldn't be the only thing that I think staff would be recused from discussing. There's executive session, there's lots of things that may come up that would be inappropriate for staff or personnel to participate in. So it's that, but it's primarily, I guess one of the things I don't object to what you're saying in principle, but I do think it should be a matter of board discretion and this does not leave it to board discretion. I like it. I think it's important to have people who are involved in the school or whatever it is we're talking about, to actually be there and hear what's going on. And yes, we can say when you come to the meetings and then report to other people. But again, it's very different when you are actually a member of the board, the same person comes on a regular basis and gets the regular feel of it all, not just a one-time shot. I remember when I first was involved in education, I was a half-time aide at East Montpelier. And I was, when I became a full-time aide the next year, I was amazed at how much I had been missing as a half-time person. It just is not the same. And by having a specified person be part of the board that same person is getting all of the information, not just a little bit here and a little bit there, that's if you would have them come and be members of the audience. So I support it. So I worked for the Cooperative Council Board of Directors and we have a non-voting staff representative. So I've worked for 15 boards, probably a dozen different staff representatives. And I understand the desire to include, offer a seat at the table because the folks that work for us are one of our key constituencies. But I think we should really think carefully about there are some potential drawbacks, especially when we're talking about three seats on a 10 or 13-person board. It is a very difficult role for these people to judge because their interaction with the system is as an employee and we're asking them to operate at a policy level, which is very difficult to do. It's not impossible, but I see people struggle with that. At the same time, you're inviting, you're basically inviting the board into the weeds of operations by having these folks. And the questions you're asking them are going to be operational in nature. And it tends to take the board's eye off the ball, to some extent. Now, of course, anyone, a staff member who lives in the district can run and be elected, right? And so there, when they're elected by the overall electorate, they have a different responsibility, right? Their responsibility is to the system. They must set aside conflicts and recuse themselves and put the school system first. When they're elected by the teaching staff or the other staff, other types of staff, what is their allegiance to? And that's not a trivial matter. So I think we should really consider that because, again, it puts the board and that staff person in an unusual situation and one that's hard to navigate. All right, well, sorry for that. Would staff people be allowed to run for board positions? If you're a resident, a state of residence, you can run for boards right now. And you can still be a teacher. You can serve as a teacher. Yeah, the only thing you can do is negotiations. No, there's nothing even actually saying you can't do that. The only thing that's there is the conflict of interest. You have a legal, once you're elected by the electorate, you have a legal duty to loyalty to the system, which means you must put the system ahead of your other interests or recede yourself from those decisions. And with a non-voting member, it's blurrier, I believe. And I would add to that that I'm a little worried of what this would do to the principal's morale. I would rather, the principal's already invited. I feel like the staff is invited to come any time too. But if we are putting all our, the principals are the ones that are CEOs of each particular school. So if whoever is elected for that board happens to, I don't know, they're not having a good relationship with whatever that principal is. It's not really representing the needs of that particular school or the board as a whole. It's very, it's different to what we do, more separate. I think that if there's any, those issues should go to the principal first, always. And then if the board, the teachers still feel like they wanna come to a board meeting, they're always invited, right? I don't know, I'm making it more confusing. But I just feel like if anything, I'm hoping that those principals are gonna still be attending the board meetings of this full board meeting, all of them. Yeah, so that would be. Do you really believe that all the principals would be attending the board meetings? Well, maybe not all of them, but just like when we have a full board meeting right now and the whole leadership team is together, that's gonna be key to be able to have a culture of sharing resources, right? How else are we gonna do it? So I don't think that, not that the licensed staff is less than the principals, but I think it just makes it a little murky right now because I think they're always invited. Well, the teachers are always invited. And we have sort of broken protocols sometimes at our school to invite them to come and say exactly what they're doing. Like how does the interventions are working? How do you serve your kids? How many kids do you serve? What do you actually are doing? Do inform and educate us as board members? And so what this membership would do, I think, is provide real facts, underground facts of how staff members really work and how the system impacts them because we don't hear that much. And we think the folks who are actually doing work in the trenches and the ones who are best able to inform board members about what we're doing. But what prohibit is the board to asking for? What? Is there anything that prohibits the board for asking? I don't want to give Darcy a chance to talk. We prohibit the board from asking if they decide to ask. But I tend to think that in the policy governance bent model that I think we may be trending toward, the board will not be asking those questions and the board will not be interested in that information that we're interested in results, which is where I think policy governance model really surprises. We set goals, the board sets goals and the CEO delivers those goals. The board has the opportunity to say you can achieve those goals, but you can't do this, this, or this. We have to be pretty specific about that. Do not, otherwise it's free range. And so I think with the representatives from a lot of our constituents, you would get more direct information, more direct information with the government-informed board policy and action, and the actions that they get. You can also, I think, lead to a melding of shared interest as opposed to segregating interest into board teaching staff administration by having this overlapping of membership on the board and working together, breaking right together. When you get to know folks, better by the constants of presence and meeting over time, that's how you get to know people better. Then we give real proof to our claim of transparency and a lot of what we do. Because I think we would use the word transparency on a pretty regular basis without being very transparent at all. So I think that that would help just open up all the process. There are potential constants of interest, but there are board members as well and I think we would trust the integrity of these representatives who would refuse themselves instead of if there's conflict, just like we trust two other board members to refuse themselves if there's conflict. I don't think we would expect any less of them than we do of ourselves. So I think there's a great opportunity with this new entity to behave in a different way. And I think it'd be beneficial to us all. And if it didn't work out, you could change it because they're not voting members. So we're not going to worry about the block of three. So. Well, how would you change, are you talking about changing the article? Yeah, we do. Okay. I guess I was surprised by your comment that you didn't, or my assumption that you meant that you didn't think the principles would go to the board meetings because my assumption was that way. I said I was a little surprised by your comment. It's based on the experience of on the screen, Dan Ryan, he said, and this is going back a long time, he moved to the school district in Essex and none of the principles went to board meetings. He was a superintendent who represented the administration and they weren't invited and they didn't go. So plus it's, are you talking about five different element principles coming to the board meetings probably twice the amount that's suspected would be? And we do this as an official on a regular basis. Sorry, do you mind closing the door? There seems to be a lot going on. Thank you. The other thing I was going to say is, obviously the U32 member would kind of have the opportunity to feel, get the feeling of most of the staff around here, but how would a single member from one of the schools get the feel for all five elementary schools I think by talking to their colleagues, they have enough in terms of curriculum meetings and things like that. And that's it, it's a good work. I think it's at least an opportunity for some representation. Was there any time I'm going to give Matt to have one more comment? Yeah, I mean, I feel like it creates a board that is explicitly too involved in the operational weeds of the school system. And I guess just a sort of hypothetical example. You know, it's sometimes the job of the chief executive to implement policies or practices that are unpopular. And popularity is not necessarily the best indicator of the quality of the initiative or the practice. That's just a challenge that executives face and that they have to deal with. Now teachers can come to the board anytime to express dissatisfaction or to appeal the decision of to publicly sort of object to something that's happening. But it's really different when they're invited to sit at the table for every conversation and to weigh in on everything and to be just casually asked questions about any topic that might come up than if they have to make the decision actually to say, like, this is important enough for me to come to the board. I've tried to work with my boss as much as possible to express why I think this is a problem. It's not getting addressed. Now it's time for me to appeal that decision to the next level up. Those are entirely different dynamics. And so I think that it does feel like enshrining in the articles themselves or the bylaws of the organization that we're gonna have a board that's gonna be, have its fingers deep into the details and sort of operation of the schools. And it's just not something that I really feel is appropriate to the function of a board. So that's my... Chris, what do I just say? I think it's a good idea. I think they bring a valuable perspective. I'm a little concerned that three is a large number, but they are non-voting members. I think that's appropriate. I'd be in favor of the article. I also think that there are times when they're listening to what's going on and something's being planned that they may be able to bring up or what they see as unintended consequences as a result of what the board is doing. And I think that's important too. It's really tough if a board works really, really hard on something and then they realize after the fact that there was something they didn't consider and now they have to go back and rework it. I just really see it as more eyes and more brains on the board and improvement. I think you meant this is where we each pull them again only in opposite directions. Other than Germany, do we have any examples, positive examples of this working? I think it's mixed. I have strong concerns about three that I have no idea what that dynamic's like. Then what? What that dynamic is like. In your situation, did the set number and valuable information that management may not know that? It can happen, yeah. Like I said, there's a wide variety of people's ability to do this role. People tend to last one year because it's so difficult. It's just really challenging. You know, really what I think it's intended to do is provide another voice. Like you said, you know, the board is focused on results and there's certain limitations that this person is there to call out where things might not be, you know, as the board is expecting that they were done or something like that, but I think this is a huge topic that requires a lot of discussion and to put this in front of the electorate without enough deliberation I think is really problematic. You asked for examples of where this works. Scott was right, you talked about Germany, you could talk about South Africa, you could talk about Australia, you could talk about parts of Canada and some of the public participation work in which I researched my doctoral work. You've all touched on pieces that are found in that research. The research has found that governance, if done wrong, it can really explode on you. If done right, it can bring a lot of collaboration and that's just a positive first, so I'm sorry. The second thing I would say is that it's also research that puts a lot of high stress load on the employee that's actually there. Extreme amount and I would say that while we had ups and downs with our Labor Management Councils here, right now we're working pretty well with things coming in and work on it. Do these tend to be non-voting seats that you're describing? I see both in my research because most of the work on the public participation or employee participation in governance is outside the US and there's different roles of voting and non-voting. That's one dynamic that I think for some folks it feels like a second class. It's like a second class. I give you what I can. Without trying to really give you push either way but just say that's what I've seen in my work of the public participation. So where do we leave this one? I think for the discussion at the on the 7th, this might be a chance to have a lot of support. I'm just gonna move the budget. Since Susan is here, the budget shall be approved using a deliberative percentage of the town meeting model. I don't want to reduce that conversation too much. So can we look at the two last ones which I think will not take, the two last ones won't take very much time at all. So do you mind reading those two? Because they're kind of the same. So this is the third paragraph. It says, if a competent judicial authority concludes that any of these articles are illegal for any reason, then that article for part error shall be nullified. The remaining articles for part error shall be deemed. Several both in the nullified article per section of an article and shall be in full force in effect. And with that basically it says that if there's a challenge to the articles and the court says, oh, I think this article is invalid. It doesn't invalidate the entirety of the articles that just invalidates that section that is not to be a legal provision. So I'm a little confused in that one. I kept reading it over and over again to try to make sense of it. So if we are giving our articles to our lawyer to make sure that they're legal, that in theory, this shouldn't be happening and the more important will be the last one, the last article. They are prepared just because they're forcing out. I don't know. Are we doubting that the lawyer is doing this for? So one Supreme Court has five members and a lot of times the decisions are three to two. Four to one. So you can have judges who are lawyers can have different opinions on what a statute means. I mean the US Supreme Court is five to four a lot and a lot of controversial issues. So it just, are lawyers not challenging their confidence or ability to review these, but they can be wrong. And if you're some reason the articles were challenged, this is just a preservation clause which basically says if for any reason any of the articles or part of the article is being illegal, it doesn't impact the entirety of the article, just that part will be put aside. It's often contained in contracts that if any clause is found illegal, then the balance of the contract and the terms of the contract continue. Yeah, I just think it's confusing to put it out there. So I don't, so I'll go with, you guys are the lawyers, so. Yes, it's actually pretty nondescript. Nondescript. In a, I guess, so. Did Chris Leopold comment on this one? No, he hasn't seen it. He hasn't seen any of these on his page. Oh, he hasn't? Nope. He has, I mean he has seen the one on the budgets but because you had asked for the last time that we were together for that to go to him. So we'll review that one with Chris before Monday. Ask another returning name, Chris. Chris, Chris, Chris, Chris. Our own division, maybe. The non-division. Just to prove the point. So the last one is, these articles are shared due to state boards, board and board members of Washington Central Supervisory Union, member panels. By voting on these articles, the voters in the member panels are not leaving any rights to challenge in the gift of legality for the state board's forced merger of order, period of all rights users. And that is basically a language to say, we're doing this because we have to do it and it's not, we're not pushing any challenge to the legality of the state board's order. So it's not going to be a voluntary action to voluntarily merge, that's all that does. Eliminate the argument. Oh, you've already merged. You can't challenge this. I'm fine with that. It's really that we have four boards that have joined a lot today. I think it would be not fair to not say yes to this. But we'll still run it by a loophole. Yeah, we'll still run it by a loophole. Okay, so, Susan, you're on show where you can read it. Chris wrote it, but we don't have it. We did send this to Chris a loophole and he did a little bit of research but hadn't finished by this afternoon. So we're expecting more for him by Monday. You're expecting a letter by Monday? By Monday. On this. There's quite a few issues with it. Okay, it's done. I want to say, I'm going to give you a little information. I, from last, first of all, I'm going to say, don't kill the messenger, please don't kill the messenger. You weren't pulling this end up. I feel like I need to walk out right now. And Susan and I have talked about this. I'm in total agreement with the sentiment because of the public participation stuff that I know that I'm researching. From on statute is not. So Chris is writing new opinion based on the legality of being able to do this through from on statute, even though the state board gave the authority to a municipal board to present to the voters an article like this, to look at representation or budget voting, but it wasn't done. It was done in Title 17 and I could get out more of the pieces. That's why I want him to write you a letter. Because I know for a couple of people around this board, you want to see the legal, his legal opinion. And as Chris Uvallis advised me, it's get the lawyer put in writing. So he's doing that. So I believe the sentiment is really, this is a good sentiment to get people to participate in the process. I think that's great. The piece that is, who has the authority, I should recommend this to the voters. And Chris's read is, it's the municipal board and you don't have that municipal board. Who's the municipal body? Body. Body, not the municipal board. The municipal body. And the body is the new board once they're seated. And you are not that. Not that it couldn't happen, it just can't happen right now. So what I understood from our conversation with Bill today, what after he had hang up the phone with him is that, establishing who is the municipal body. So it doesn't mean that we can't do it, but once we are seated, we can bring it up. We would be the municipal body because the town, that town meeting voting makes us a municipal body of the body. And Chris, he sought counsel from other lawyers by municipal and school. He's been doing some work since we were at our last meeting and talked to him. We were really trying to get him. And he found this, he knows where the statute is that you talked about from Title 17 and election law. And actually talked to the Secretary of State's office today about it as well. So I don't know about the organization, I mean, did you vote on what kind of vote would you make in that case? There is, there is in the warning of you after I was scrambling for it was right here in my head. Or I put it somewhere around here. There's Article IV which determines the date location of the first annual meeting for the district and all the subsequent annual meetings, which shall be not earlier than February 1st and no later than June 1st of each year. Five is determined whether to vote on the district's budget and all the public questions by Australian ballot. Six is determined whether to elect members of the district board by Australian ballot. If the vote was not to go as that, you'd be going to a full district meeting. You can't go to the representational. You either have one or the other right now, you can get to that representational body, but you need the board, you need the new board seated to do it, you need them in place. They have to be the ones to recommend an article, to have a call for an election to do what Susan's suggesting. Susan, this could take the recommendation from the board. It could take a recommendation, it could not take, it could, you could not vote on it in the articles on the 19th. You've got to get that board in place. That's the crib notes. Chris will give you all the pieces in between. Matthew? Yeah, I just wanted to say that I called the chair of the Battleboro School Board today because I had some questions about this. And, you know, she was great. She said it's a, she called them all goofy, but good. Wes said goofy, but good. You know, she said some of the pros are kind of what Bill's already said, which is that it really does, you know, that sort of character of Vermont Town meeting that we cherish of that people can come and kind of have their say or if they want to get involved, they can influence the process. You know, she said it's awesome to see. She did say, you know, it has some, some things that people could describe as drawbacks. I guess they do their town and school board meetings at the same day. So they started 8.30 in the morning and she said they typically don't end until eight or nine o'clock at night, like it's that long of a meeting. She said it can have a kind of delaying effect on decision making because, you know, people agitate or there's, there's 130 representatives there in Bridalboro, capped at 140. She said they usually have about 130. So that kind of, it's just a lot of conversation and a lot of chances for people to raise sort of questions and issues. And that's, you know, that's democracy. And then the other thing she said was they have a real problem actually getting people to run and serve. So like they sometimes have people caucusing in. But anyway, so the upshot is that I'm actually kind of inclined to squirt this, but I also have problems with doing it now because not for the statutory reasons, although I'm interested to learn about that, but because I feel like it's introducing an entirely new electoral process. And again, I just don't feel like we have the time to really share, educate and engage people's questions about that. So it feels, it feels, I feel queasy about trying to put in place and through this effort an entirely new electoral process. With what I imagine will be a fairly low turnout on a random Tuesday in February. Who for people to vote on this, you know. So that's my two cents on it. Peter? I saw you nod. I thought you had something to say about it. I've been nodding quite a lot. That was just like, say something. Hi, it's Laura. Yes. I basically have the same thoughts of Matthew. I think, I wouldn't, I'd like to learn more about it, but I would, I would, in an already convoluted timeframe, I feel like it just adds a little bit of convolution to the process that I wouldn't want to right now. Good, thank you. Yep, what they said. I'm interested. I didn't get a chance to talk to Will today. I said he talked to Chris, we were pulled about this. I didn't, I wasn't aware of some of the legal constraints of who can actually put this into place. Will was the one that actually really helped us dig down the law where it was, what Chris said. Okay. Will was very helpful. But it was Will at first like, no, I don't think that can happen. So I'd definitely put this in the category of something to keep on the back burner and make a recommendation to look at. Yeah, Laura, can I tell you what I was nodding about most recently? Yes. The difficulty in finding an opportunity to talk with the voters, it certainly would be great because it's not just the timeline, it's the opportunity to talk to many people about what it is that this committee's been doing and I'm trying to catch up on. I still think that some of these articles should go forward if possible all the way through recommendations. But it becomes incumbent upon probably this group to talk to as many people as possible and help them understand to the extent that any of us understand what it is with the polls. I'll continue to shake my hand. Okay, thank you. Well, that's great. I just wanted to make sure that we were getting your input to, you know, so yeah, I like this. I like what it does as far as my opinion, to know my opinion. I was, you know, I think it's too much to, but right now it's something that I'm definitely interested. I was happy to hear that one, that we would be the municipal bodies then and we can be considered. I know the sentiment with Ismail Biller because I fought very hard to keep town meeting at Ismail Biller and I know that, you know, petition after petition that came out for Australian ballot and the big meeting that we ended up having at E32. So I sort of know that. So I know that this is something that we definitely need to put out to the voters and that might not share that sentiment that we have that they felt very opposed to keeping that town meeting that they felt like they were disenfranchised from the process and there were just a few people to know of town always making decisions. So, yes, something that is worth looking as a recommendation or as a, you know, something that this board can take later, maybe not our recommendation, but that the board can take later. Is that what we are all agreeing on? So it won't be an article. Correct. I don't think it can be. Yeah. Do you think there's a legal argument? Yeah. Of course it's opinion. Yeah. He's trying to find who is a municipal body. Annie said I have a hard time finding either the transition board or the articles of agreement and maybe as a municipal body. Yeah, and I think very much in favor of keeping Vermont character as it had been before, but we think this out as once we are a municipal body of representative by the county. Do you have something else? Yeah. Well, I was, thanks for that. And I was really under no illusions that this was the kind of thing that given the timeframe and all of that that this was going to be like, yay, let's do something completely different. But I think transition points are the time when structural changes can happen. And so keeping this alive early on in that discussion, I think would be really valuable. And in particular, when you're talking about a five town population, that's what a representative to me is intended to do is to look at larger, we're talking about five towns. That's when it's very different from the argument of should we be going to town meeting or a stalling ballot. This is a hybrid process. So the discussions about why to switch away from town meeting and to a stalling ballot become a very different discussion when you're talking about a representative. So what they're doing is giving the legislative body that is deciding yes or no on the budget more than that two word vocabulary. It's not a chance yes or no. Yeah, awesome. To discuss them. I don't think that the results that would come out of the representative town meeting would necessarily be different in terms of policy and in terms of passing budgets. My guess is that they would be pretty similar based on the battle for experience and so it's been sort of seen in Switzerland as well. And in other towns in the room, but what I do think is different, not so much as the outcome is the culture and the trust and social capital that come out of having a deliberate quality that is operating on it. So that would be nice. Do you have any idea how many representatives we would have? I mean, that would be up to. So the 65 is. The 65 would be up to 150. Yeah, that sounds about right. For Algorah House, it says in their time, in their violence that they have a maximum of 140 plus. They have ex-officio members, meaning the school board, the select board, are automatically moderated, are automatically members. So the idea is to have our own ratio. So it's every once in a while, every 10 or 20 years they go in and check to make sure that their ratio is in. Yeah, and exactly because of what you just said, it would be really important to bring that knowledge to the town so that they understand that social capital that we would be building as a community. Instead of just voting right now, yes or no, something that they don't particularly understand, just feeling like, ooh, I'm giving away my Australian ballot without understanding those other ramifications. The fact that they have recourse anytime, they don't like what the community did. They have easy recourse to it. That was really good to know. But I would just have this visual in your mind. When we discussed this with the legislature 10 years ago, when they changed it to make representation that kind of made it easier for towns to adopt, one of the really valuable processes was just to bring in a pamphlet by Skype. And it's just what Matthew just said, except he was talking to school board members. Just say, how does it work? What are the pluses, what are the minuses? And just, what's it like? And the conversation that you had, and I'm referring to the one that I've had over the years for the temporary follow-up, she didn't say it was super hard to get people to run. She said it was all, they're always in the DC, so they need to recruit for it. Which, to me, that says is there's always the availability to be on the numbers of the temporary people. She said they could caulk us too, like at the meeting table when people said, I didn't mean to delve into that, but it's okay. I'll just monitor the numbers. So, the last, so now that we have gone through sort of prioritizing the amendments, I promise that we will come back to the January 9th. Okay, can I just ask one question real quick? Yes. Because we still haven't talked about Article 4. School, school, school, school, are we, I thought that we- Do we have a plan for talking about that? We were not gonna, but I would like Chris to talk about this this week. I think we're more coming to the next question. Okay, I'm sorry. When you and I talked, and we were trying to prioritize what we would do at this meeting when we were tasked with deciding how to structure this meeting, we understood that to do Article 4 in school closures, we didn't wanna have to do something that wouldn't allow us to vote this as is late, and that we were gonna focus on the amendments, and that we were already protected by those two years. Right. So you can add to that. So I think we talked about just meeting as it is and not, just because we've done a lot on implementing that, and implementing it would be problematic and consistent, I think. So it gives us two years to deal with it. But it's, I guess we do have a discussion about it as the whole committee member if we vote on Monday night, just because it is pretty significant issue that was not resolved. And I didn't wanna put it on the amendments because I didn't want it to feel like there was one article more than we did to prioritize, but I'll let you guys deal with it differently. I see why. Can I ask, how are these articles going to be presented? So pick two, will there only be two that will be put before the voters, that a combination was a, we've been told pretty directly from the agency that if you look at article 14, which is the last article of the agreements, there are different ways in which they would be related. So one of the reasons we're talking about is closure is that some of the articles can be amended by a co-mabled ballot. It's where you look at, you have article 14A1, which is the ones that can't be amended at all. Article 14A2, which is the following articles coming in, amended by a majority of the voters of the new union district, so that means across all co-mingled ballots. And then if you get into three, which is where the school closure one is, you have to have a separate ballot and a separate warning that would be counting ballots at each town to make sure it passes in each town. So by staying in one area per se, let's just say in the only picking areas, and any additional articles that don't affect the articles that were handed to us from AOE, so I got to pick one that we just had that. One on the new union board will have one now by non-voting member, blah, blah, blah. That I would want to check with Chris Leopold that that's not changing the structure and doesn't get into article 10. And if that didn't, then we could do that with a co-mingled ballot. Because what has been the article 14A4, the substance of following articles can be amended by the board. That's the board one. I thought there was another one here that isn't. It's not a thing. The way I understood it from Chris and I might be wrong, and from Donna, was that if we were not changing the substance, especially that one that we discussed today with Matthew about adding the board members, we changed date. We can't present these articles as a slate and then have... Actually, if you're not changing anything within... Within an article, you don't have to present that to the voters. So we can present this at our hearing. At our hearing and say, these are the ones we're adjusting. So those are the ones, and then what we've been told is on the ballot, the full article has to appear on the ballot. Only the ones that are being changed. The only ones that are being changed. And it's highly recommended by Chris Leopold. Unless you want it, if you do it as a slate, either lose them all or get them all or do a he-suget, he highly recommends that you do them individually one-on-one, so you vote each one. So it seems like from article four, those are beyond the initial two-year period. All will be done by the district as a whole. If we're going to change that. Where are you at your article form? Article 14A sub-2, sub-2, sub-2, sub-2. Sub-2, sub-2, sub-2, sub-2, sub-2. So those four paragraphs, the billing closure requires approval of five voters of district in 2001, 2002, and beyond, and in all years beyond, that would be by the district as a whole. It was the individual who closed in within the first two years required each school each candidate to say yes. And this is the real key. I mean, this article 14 is the key for how the voting happens. So what we were trying to do is avoid that complication. What would be the complication of each town? Of having, yeah, because when I talked with the town clerks, they were like, they were. Well, but that is only. I don't believe that's the issue. It isn't the issue that if we try to propose a change to article 4B, it would be part of the slate. And if that got voted down, then where are we? So here's the, you as an articles committee have a, I'm just gonna, since there's whatever the committee were gonna be that's gonna, that may adopt something, you can either do the whole slate of amendments that you wanna do. So either they all go up and down once, or as Chris has been strongly suggesting to all his clients, and I haven't heard anyone saying something different, it is highly suggested each amendment is voted upon. And so if you've got four different amendments that you've, four different articles that you've amended, or three that are amended and one that's new, you do each of those individually, and not the whole slate. Because you have more like, I think the thinking is, and I've heard it by just plain forgotten it, is that you have more like the hood of not having one article take down the other three. So as it is right now, we have four new articles and two that we're gonna talk again about. So we will be voting, so it is if we have 18. You're on board. No, we're just at four, sorry, we're just at four. That's the thing, these are already in place by state, by state board degree. So we learned the issues of that article four because we're talking about our four B, and that's not, in each case, not a change that would require each town to vote separately and terminally, because four B is to vote by the entire district. That's what we're talking about. Beyond the first two years, it's both our discussion was around, and how that should happen. Right? I think you're reading, I just gotta read myself to make sure I'm, I think you're in the right place. Yeah, I mean, the way I look at this under 14A2B, article four, paragraph B, building closure requires approval of voters of district in 2021, 22, and all the years after. So that's after the two years. Right, and that's why, in contrast, is with grade B, and the voter mechanism is different. Yeah, BD is the first two years. Yep. Because it requires approval of the town. Well, this actually goes up each town. Of each town. Including, including, right, so. Okay, so as long as that means that we can just bring that one up, so I just wanna ask, is it possible, again, because I'm confused, but. I think we can just bring that one. Okay. With that one, and if the amendments voted down, then the article as the report goes into that. That's correct. Okay. So I'm gonna add that, and then last to not, so we are gonna have me on Monday at Berlain. So. Matthew. I'll be there. I'm just, I'm not sure I can participate on Monday evening because of a work commitment. Okay. I definitely cannot. Thank you. You're not available. Um, what did you say about that? Let's look at the other list of meetings from Bill before we say. It's the only day without a meeting so far. One, two, that was your calendar, Chris. So that's Romney School Board meeting. That's on Thursday. Yes, it's on Thursday. Oh, sorry. So, on the 8th, there's nothing there. There's nothing on the 8th. You didn't have something, Bill, that we're not seeing. I do not, your purpose is this. Oh, that's true. That's true. You can have a meeting. I knew there was a reason I just got here. Chris, do you think on Monday we could stipulate a one hour meeting? It's still a good day, so my 30 to 6 30. I think so. I mean, if you say so, it will be. Well, I don't know that it'll help. People who can't make it on Monday. Yeah, what time is your meeting, Karen? All night, probably. Yeah, it's going until at least 8 30. It allows more time for discussion. I don't know if that's good or not. I have a question on Article 6. Is this an appropriate time for me to ask for clarification on Article 6? I'm going to even look at it on the block and then understand Article 6 being exceeded. Karen, let's go in there just a minute. I just want to finish because considering the time, and I want everybody to be out of here, so I'll get there promised. I just want to finish this small discussion and have to be able to make sure that we have the schedule. We have talked briefly before about this January 7th meeting. So I know some of the other members of the Act 49 committee can come on the 7th. So I'm trying to decide what. And it's either we do it in the 7th without both of you. I can do it until 6 30 on Monday. But they have a meeting schedule at 5 30. So and your board members, some of your board members, have something before. After that has something at 7 30. So that doesn't matter. I just, that will be done. I can make sure we're done by November 7. Yeah, but that would be too late for that. That's too late. Yeah, I have an international call at 7. So I can't do that. Move it. You can't do Monday? I can't do Monday. I mean, I don't expect the group to wait for my schedule. There's no time. But the purpose of this meeting would be to finalize our approach for the hearing. So the fundamental question is, are we going forward with the hearing? Yeah. Have we answered that? I was going to get that as soon as we could. If we can't have a meeting. I was, you know, after going through the amendments, I'm feeling like, you know, even if we're just putting forward, it goes to vote. It's worth to have the hearing and inform of the draft ones that we were doing anyways and have the hearing. And the hearing would be informative to the benefits. Worth it to go out to vote. It doesn't mean that we have the hearing. We have to be very close to vote because that's not a warning. That's one person. Yeah. I tend to agree with you, but I just wanted to say there is a risk that we get feedback at the hearing that we can't effectively deal with. And I don't know how I don't know the extent of this risk, but I would really hate this to be seen as a botched process that just sort of undermines us from the start. That's my concern. Is the benefit of these four or five or six amendments worth the risk of this not going well? I'd just like us to consider that. If the hearing didn't go well, and the vote we created at that point, say, because of what we've learned and feedback from the community, we should not go vote. Rather than not have to hear it because it didn't go well. When you say should not go forward, do you mean with our amendments that just accept all of them? Just accept the default? Yeah, with the default. You know, I think you'd have to hear a lot of bad things with hearing in order to come to that conclusion. But this would have been initially to take over. Chris, Winters? I'm really concerned with the time frame still and the ability to communicate effectively. For us to do a good job on these articles, I feel a little bit better after talking through today. But I still have a lot of questions. And I'm questioning myself on whether these articles help or hurt. So I have a lot of trepidation about going forward with these. I still think that the new board would make these a priority. And I tend to bristle when people tell me, just trust the new board to do stuff. But in this instance, I'm saying the same thing. I would think these articles of agreement would be a priority for our new board and that they could take the time to do them right. I think that's where I still am. Gosh, for the word. It's sort of a difficult situation. I consider this entire activity to be essentially in service of an unlawful decision. So I guess I'm less worried about a botched process than you are because I consider it a lot better. I just feel like we should try to do the best job we can. And to come up with the best document that we can. So that even if it's messy, you can use an analogy that Matthew used about a year ago. Even if we cross the finish line with arms and legs flying in all directions, if there's something that there, if whatever facts on the ground are being created in a manner that is at least injurious that we can and perhaps even beneficial, then it's worth trying for it. Thank you. Peter? I think proceeding can do little harm at this point. I'm inclined to agree that we're not on an agreement with the act that got us here in the first place. But if we can win all down the articles that we've discussed tonight, perhaps separate articles from recommendations, I think there will be some value to that, even if it's in the form of hopefully guidance to the interim board. I kind of go along with what Scott said, which is we worked hard on it. This is the best we can do. I don't see it's going to make for any new problems. Have you changed your mind, or are you still not doing it? I think it does create new problems, at least in terms of confusion, especially for the public. So I think we have been put in a very difficult situation by a difficult process. The question is whether we'll now contribute to that and add to it, or take a step back and at least not sort of exacerbate it. I think that we've just spent 2 and 1 half hours of discussion. We still have three key articles that we haven't decided yet ourselves. We've probably spent, I don't know how many hours in committee, let alone the hours we spent outside of our committee meetings talking about it, extremely challenging issues, extremely complicated things on which good people can disagree. And yet we're sort of proposing to rush it through and get it out to voters and have almost no time to conduct sort of outreach and engagement and discussion of it. So it just seems, unless it's absolutely necessary, if it's absolutely necessary, then we have to do it. I don't look at a lot of these and see absolutely necessary. I see optional. On one or two, I could be persuaded that it's necessary that we pay stricter attention to those issues. But on some of them, I don't see that at all. So that's kind of where I'm at with it. Anyone want to comment? Because I won't be your money. I feel very differently about the four that we agreed to. I don't think that they're at all necessary personally, but I think that they're good ideas. And I don't have a problem with putting those before the voters. But I feel differently about the three that we didn't agree to, particularly non-voting staff members and closure, and to some extent, the policy on school choice. Those are big decisions. And we haven't wrestled them to the ground. I'm very concerned about putting those before the voters. Yeah, I agree with most of what these guys have said. I mean, I feel a little rushed. Oh, I feel very rushed, actually. Then still coming up to speed on some of this. But I also think that it would be good to get a little feedback from the voters and at least have the opportunity to speak our mind. So I heard you and you're OK, but you can give it longer than you imagine you want. But so far, if I'm coming right, I'm not coming myself. There's more people that want to do the hearing and less people that don't want to do the hearing. So let's go ahead with having our next meeting. And I feel to talk about the four articles that we agreed on, I feel like nothing that we're adding right now is not things that we didn't read in other articles that we meant for other districts. So I'm not as concerned as you are. I think that some of these places took a lot of time to position. Some of them were very rushed and made them at a very crazy time trying to fit into getting the incentives and didn't really have. So there were all sorts of ways that they got to work. But I don't think that, at least on those particular four that we agreed on, is something that hasn't been done in other districts. So I'm not too worried about those. I have concerns with the three that we're going to talk about a little bit more. So you're saying we'll go ahead on Monday? Or are we going to try and make it OK for Matthew and Kari So because my concern is with not being new, I want to hear everybody's input for all of these. So having a third of the membership not there is. Yeah, and I'll also just say that the meeting has to get scheduled and has to get scheduled. But it doesn't thrill me that we deadlocked 3-3 on 4-B. And it's going to come up next time. And two of the three votes on one side of that deadlock won't be there for the meeting. Yeah, and I'm still skeptical in bringing four up because I thought we had an agreement on that. But can we send a doodle poll? It has to be Monday or Tuesday. Monday or Tuesday. So we would have a letter from clearly doubled. I think there's some other members of the committee that were thinking of coming on Monday already. So if you guys are OK finding out tomorrow maybe at some point if we're having a meeting Monday or Tuesday, I just don't know how magically. I want to make sure that there's enough people here. I want both of you here too. But these guys already are not meeting until Monday. But I'm assuming that you have talked to your members about that possible meeting on Monday too. About a possible articles meeting on Monday? Well, Peter is here. There you go. I'm spoken to that one. Yeah. So can we just do a hand vote of who can do what day is here and then how many of you have one more community member? Monday. How late are we on our phone calls, what do you think? It'll be a couple of hours. 7 to 9. 7 to 9. 7 to 9? Yeah. I'm afraid. How about what's Tuesday morning with her folks? I'm just interested. I have to be in Brattleboro on Tuesday morning. So it sounds like maybe Tuesday night might be the 8. I mean, if you have to meet, you have to meet. I just wanted to say. Yeah. So do you have a sense of how many people are going to your videos and stuff? The last one was 158 or something. That's good. The first one. I don't know. I didn't count today. Yeah. I haven't watched it yet. Yeah. It's right on the YouTube. I haven't watched it yet. It's much better than those budget presentations. 158. 103. I brought 150. I know. I mean, Chris is the one who told me this. She goes, hey, you had about 150. It's like, oh, good. I mean, it's easy to go look at YouTube and see what it says. I just didn't look. I looked. Did you get any lights? Yeah. It's a lot faster for me to get the information out that way. Thank you. How are you going to go look? Go look. Okay. 8.15 on the 11, 7 o'clock on the 7th. Okay. Right. 8. 15 minutes to. 8.15 or 7 p.m.? Yes. You don't have to use the entire three hours. No, that's what I'm saying. That's it. It's really good. We're getting 15 minutes, so have a good night. Good night, everybody. Thank you. Thank you.