 Let me see if I can get switched over. So the big thing with the board numbers, we're trying to use the little owl that's up here. It has a pretty sensitive microphone. It also has a camera that will focus in on who is speaking automatically if it works the way that it's supposed to. So the big thing is you can log in through the Google Meet but make sure that your microphone is off because it'll pick up this, it'll use this as a microphone. So let me see if I get this joined here. I'll just give you a packet of materials. Let me make sure that Megan gets a packet of materials before introduction. Megan is sitting at that table, not over there. Can you get a packet? He brought the packets. No, I got those but I just mean all the policy government's introduction and sorts of things. There's the book. Do we have it here? Yeah, it's in the back. Thank you. I can actually, can I get you to write down? Yes, I can. Of course. Sorry about that. I actually had a password in the address. Yeah, well, I don't think that's a problem that Megan has. That's a plug-in that works, you know. Oh, thank you for doing that. Oh, of course. Thank you. You had just these packets. Yeah, there's another piece I'm going to pass around when we get to it. Anytime comes. I can't seem to get my hands straight. Focus on too many things in electronics. Right, I want to make sure. They're using these instead of the plot points. Everything was cleaned and sprayed and wiped down. Yeah. I think I have to write up the wires. All this meeting to order at 6.33. The focus of tonight's meeting, we have a senior profile. So we can hear about the 2020 graduates. Maybe are you going to give us that senior profile or is Elijah Hawks. Elijah's just logged in. Okay. We also have a presentation by Emily Lutherian about equity group proposal. And we are also going to talk about our strategic goals for our 2020 three-year plan. We will sort of start to flesh out and decide how we're going to go about deciding exactly what our goalposts are and what our measurable activities will be. So I need a meeting evaluator, please. I want you to be willing to do that. So first thing we have is our senior profile. So Elijah, are you ready to start us off? I just turned on it. They should be able to. Elijah, can you actually hear us? He's probably trying to get his presentation set up. So Elijah, are you ready to present? Yeah, I'm ready to present. However you'd like me to do that, Lane, I can try to share my screen if that's the best way to do the presentation. Yeah, I think that's great because that way everybody who's attending will be able to see it. Okay, great. And Katie and Lisa are there in the media center with you, right? Yeah. Okay, great. All right, so let's go to my screen share option. We got it. Okay, so you can see my first slide here. So this is our senior profile with some reflections on the achievements of the Randolph Union class of 2020. How's the audio and visual lanes? Everything working fine? Yeah, loud and clear. Okay, great. Well, I'll take the lead on presenting and Lisa and Katie are here who can add in at the end if I left something out. And if there's a question and answer session afterwards, then any one of the three of us may be best positioned to respond to your questions. We'll take a look at the senior class, the makeup of the senior class. We'll also take a look at some of the offerings at Randolph Union that we offer our seniors and also what draws some students from Choice Towns to come to Randolph Union for their senior year. We'll look at the stats related to early college and RTCC enrollment, senior project, some nationally normed assessments, the advanced placement exams, SAT and ACT, world language and industry recognized credentials or IRCs, which are both indicators of college readiness and career readiness that we are looking at. And then we'll take a look at some of the college and career plans for the class of 2020 and then we'll take a look at some of the things we're doing at Randolph Union to improve our academic outcomes with our students, both after stepping in last year and which continue this year. Our senior class last year was 66 students, about 36% of them were eligible for free and reduced meals, about 21% were special education students and 14% of those 66 students came from Choice Towns or towns where students used vouchers to come to Randolph Union. So that's towns other than Randolph Brookfield and Braintree. The four-year graduation rate for last year's group, it's still not official yet because the agency of education doesn't confirm those grad four-year rates until later in the fall of this year, but it's anticipated to be around 89% or 90% and that will probably be a little bit above the state average, which has been typical for us the past couple of years, but we'll be able to confirm that later in the fall when the agency makes it official. One of the things that helps keep Randolph Union students at our school and also draws students from Choice Towns to us are the number of, and the number and quality of offerings that we have both in the curricular and extracurricular realm, which are pretty extraordinary for a school of our size compared to other schools of our size in the region. We have AP classes in biology, calculus, if enrollment is very low, we sometimes offer those courses through BTVL. We also offer English language and composition, English literature and composition, U.S. history, world history, and French and Spanish are both offered at Randolph Union through level four or five and our world travel programs extend across the world, so any student that was with us for the past several years may very well have had opportunities to travel to Japan Germany, there's a typo, Central America and Canada as part of the French program. Our final program includes visual art, music and theater and our athletics also include an array of offerings atypical for a school of our size from sports that are standard offerings like soccer to ones that are harder to find sometimes like varsity girls, volleyball, gymnastics, bowling, bass fishing, we've done a good job at Randolph Union to broaden our offerings to meet the need and interest of a wide array of students. And our drama program as everyone knows is solid and has two to three wonderful annual productions. Holy College and RTCC, those are two ways that students can pursue their individual learning pathways by leading our Randolph Union's traditional high school. They can go to the tech center of course, they can also enroll in early college programs. Last year about 50% of our seniors were enrolled at the tech center and that's typical for a given year historically, about 50% of our juniors, about 50% of our seniors or somewhere between 40 and 50% transitioned to full day programs at the tech center which is a testament to the quality of those offerings year after year. Hopefully that has changed though in the past 10 years or so is the percentage of Randolph Union students who are special education students attending the tech center. Some years it has been as high as 40% or higher and in recent years however that number has come down to about 22% and that's something that we're proud of actually because it means that it's a more representative sample of students who are going to the tech center and a testament to the work that they've done to attract a wide variety of learners to their programs through the variety of their programs through the quality of their academic supports. So we're glad to see that our special education enrollment at the tech center is proportional to special education at Randolph Union overall. Last year was, we had about 13% of students enroll in VAST or other early college opportunities. That's where they disenroll more or less and enroll in college and take freshman year courses and that 13% was around what it's been for the past three years. It's been more than 10% for the past three years. And next year however is a little bit different. 25% of the senior class is enrolling in those kinds of options and we think that that's because over time students are becoming a bit more discerning and they're deciding for various reasons based on what they've heard from their peers who've enrolled in early college options or because of the quality of the programming at Randolph Union like our AP program for instance that they decided to stay here at Randolph Union for their senior year. So last year was 13%. This year it's about 5% of our senior class was taking those off-campus options for their senior year. Speaking of senior year, senior course is an important aspect of senior year at Randolph Union. Here's a quote from a student's journal. She wrote that writing my paper required research learning. This is something I had done a lot of through school and I was most familiar with this type of learning. Making my quilt was much more hands-on. And of course one of the reasons why we value senior projects so much at Randolph Union is that it blends different modalities of learning and challenges students in new ways and it's also a culmination of the kind of academic expectations that we've had of them throughout their time with us which is why the many pages research paper is something that our graduates also often talk about when they come back on alumni day and talk to undergrad about the importance of doing a good job on that senior project research paper. Even though we experienced the interruptions and school closures of the COVID era, all of our Randolph Union seniors completed their senior projects and that was thanks to Lisa and some creative thinking that she did with our panel heads and our panels to help make sure that our students still had the ability to share their work and defend it. And 33% of students scored higher than proficient on one or more components of senior project and I don't know for sure but I imagine that serena with that beautiful cake there was probably one of those students who achieved higher than proficient on one of our components of senior project. Another reason we value senior project of course is that it can contain life parts that one might not otherwise have encountered in high school. This student wrote in her journal, today was one of the most eye-opening days of my life. I spent over four hours at the local food shelf giving meals to families in need. So yet another test into why senior project remains an important aspect of what we do at Randolph Union. National achievement measures are also of course something that we pay attention to in the advanced placement quarter. We may not know if you score a three or higher in an advanced placement course in high school you can and many schools get our level credit for that high school level course. This past year and if there are questions about this Katie Sutton can help answer them later in the presentation. Last year 62% of all students, juniors and seniors scored three or higher and 67% of seniors scored three, four or five on their exams. The numbers of seniors who took those exams were smaller last year. Only three seniors were enrolled. They took more than one exam each and we think the numbers of seniors enrolled in those courses is a corresponds to the number of seniors who were pursuing early college options. We think that if more students had stayed home we might have had more seniors in our AP classes and in fact that's what we're seeing this current year. On the SAT side of things Randolph Union on average last year scored 511 in English and 482 in math. That meets the college and career readiness benchmark of the college board for English which is at 480 but not in math. We came in below that average and we also came in below the SAT average in Vermont overall. We can speculate a bit on that. We certainly know that the number of students who took the SAT was much lower last year than in a normal year in part due to the COVID interruption whereas in most years we'd see 50, 60, 70% of our students taking the SAT. Last year only 38% of our senior class took the SAT in part because there were no spring exams. On the ACT side of things the ACT is another national exam that is used in college admissions and last year was the first year that we asked all of our students in the upper grades to take it including those at RTC and if they didn't want to take it they had to opt out. That's because we want to ensure and the state of Vermont actually wants us to ensure as one of their accountability measures that all we don't yet have the average Vermont composite score to compare to but our school wide average composite score was 17.8 that's a bit lower than past years and that may be because we had many more students taking it last year than in part. And by the way I'm happy to share this presentation with Lane and we can share the data that is behind it with Lane so that people want to dig deeper into it on the board or in the public and share this with you. Which in high school is commonly looked at by colleges as an important indicator of college readiness many colleges that are competitive look for at least two years of world language in high school at Randolph Union because we've had a robust program for so many years 47% of our students last year graduated with at least two years of world language French or Spanish and that's something that we're proud of and that we intend to continue to ask our students to attain. Industry recognized credentials that's what we call IRCs over RTCC as Jason may have already shared with the board last year every senior or at least one IRC program at the tech center and those help give them a leg up as they're applying for jobs or continuing their education in colleges. The picture there is actually a picture that I took on our Spanish language trip to Nicaragua when some of our graduating seniors were actually on that trip. Speaking of graduates one of our seniors wrote in her graduation remarks, we have thought we have overcome and we are ready to take on the world after what it has in store for us so go out there and make us all proud my friends. It is our time and our time that starts now. Again the senior class of last year is to be commended and admired for their perseverance in the face of all those obstacles that the world threw at them during the COVID interruptions. So what were the plans? Well 55% of them enrolled in two or four year colleges the five year Randolph union average is 58.6% so 34% knew of them in college and about 3% fewer of them taking a gap year and we defined gap year as a year away from school with the intention to enroll or begin school after that gap year so our five year average is about 12% last year it was only 9% and so that corresponds with an increased number of student who decided to join the workforce 34% compared to a five year average of 26 and the military enrollment was 2% compared to 3 and one might speculate that that more student could be in the workforce because of the uncertainties about college in the COVID era or because of friends about debt or economic hardship in their homes but those are the college and career plans from last year for the graduation remark the class of 2020 has completed our year we passed in your project our early college and tech center requirements and we're ready and now we're to begin our next steps we have all crossed the finish line that's a beautiful picture someone sent us from the community this summer a full rainbow over Randolph union so what are we doing at Randolph union to help improve our students' skills as they are measured on those national assessments the SAT for example here are a few things that Randolph union is doing with lane support for the district coaches to help improve our student outcomes grade 7 through 12 so this is not just focused on senior year of course but on more systemic and programmatic improvements last year was the first year that our U was truly our opinion 50% of the time of the district math and ELA directors and coaches Catherine and Betty and we had very full collaborations with them last year which was terrific and that has helped us improve our instruction in math and ELA grade 789 and up last year was the first year we had a director of targeted supports to help support learning plans for general education students so that students who are on learning plans but aren't on individual learning or aren't eligible to educate Dorian Barthman is the name of the person in that role last year and she continues with us this year it was a year when title funds were used to hire a literary interventionist to work with general education students again students who aren't on IEPs who don't have a disability and a need of foundational or remedial instruction starting in grade 7 and moving right on up we have students who are joining our school below level general education population and we know that we need to use title funds and other resources to help support them with foundational instruction last year was also a year that saw professional development and curriculum alignment in math with full participation of our math department and some elementary educators as well the same happened in science including elementary educators as well as tech center instructors who teach in programs where there's science standards embedded we also increased STEM offerings last year for applied mathematics and other domains including robotics and other ways that auto and nation center welcomed classrooms into his space last year was also a year we had a full-time licensed social worker hired with local budget not title funds which is a testament to the importance of that kind of support for students to provide individual and small group counseling and case management our efforts to improve continue this year we had a full-time literacy interventionist again to help with students who are below grade level in the general education population as a reader in grade 7 8, 9 and up and plans to hire a S second position and to hire a math interventionist also when title funds are available for that we continue our collaboration with the math and ELA directors from the district and we have an updated math and science curriculum sequence it's quite important that we spent the time and effort to to get everyone on the same page about our about our math instruction we've had a lot of turnover in math over the past couple of years and so having established curriculums that's been well vetted is going to serve our students and our teachers well in the coming years and give us a lot of stability we have that weekly meetings of the OSSD, ELA math directors and coaches as you know our district does not have a curriculum coordinator which some districts do have so in place of that we have every other week a meeting where Lisa and Katie are heads of the lower and lower grades and an elementary principal meet with our ELA and math directors or coaches and focus on curriculum coordination math and English from grades pre-k right on up through grade 12 an additional collaboration this year with the Stern Center for Literacy Intervention we have a weekly junior in New York had in place of upper grade advisory and that I developed with based on feedback from my family saying that there needs to be more focused guidance for seniors and seniors to help them with the demands of those years so that's in place this year we're really excited about that and we also have a new local assessment tool that can assess in math and English grades 7 through 12 and it's aligned with SBAC the tool that's being used at the elementary school it goes up through grades 8 and also grade 9 but it doesn't give us the ability to track students through 10, 11th and 12th grade so with the camera support and with a lot of volition from our teachers we've adopted a program called STAR 360 and that's really well known across the various counties in central Vermont as a tool that curriculum coordinators use in other districts as well so we're excited to be using that this year to chart the right in it and that bringing to the goals of my remarks I can turn it back over to our moderator and we're happy to feel questions if there's time or follow-up in any way that may be in the interest of the board or the public that's here tonight. Thank you very much Elijah. So first are there questions from any board members for Elijah or Lisa or Katie about this senior project profile that was just presented? Hi. So just I got on Do I have to unmute? No. You just got to talk loud because this is the So we're keeping track of this data and we're figuring out ways to improve that data. What are we how are you deciding where we want to be? 70% proficiency VLA math and science on SVAC and Vermont science assessment. That's the original goal. If it's below 50% that's a threshold where they can expect direct intervention from central office. But 70% is the goal given the resources that we currently have that should be reasonably achievable once we reach that we have to take a look at how we got there how difficult it was if we can do more of what we have or if we want to exceed that the resources that will be required to do that. Okay. But he was talking about SAT scores AP classes which all of that is sort of a broad outline of sort of are we feeling good with how our student body is sort of dividing itself out in terms of you know you have a certain number of kids who are going on to college are they scoring where we want them to score are you looking at do we want to trend that up do you feel okay with where they are what kind of what are you looking at to sort of set your goals for all of those benchmarks of what he just went through 30 years of experience and seeing what we were able to accomplish in the other districts that I've been in plus what should be reasonable like I said given the resources that were pumping in to make these improvements I have to kind of go back and review the notes that I pulled together when I was coming up with 70 percent but it had to do with the way that the testing is set up that it's a normalized test it's easy to get a majority of the kids to the 40 to the 50 percent proficiency range it gets a little bit more difficult as you go beyond that and again given the resources that we have and that we're applying to this that is similar to what I've seen in other schools we should be able to get the 70 percent proficiency fairly easily so that same regard to the SBAC which is done at the end of ninth grade right we just heard a presentation about other things that were tracking do we just track those for the sake of tracking those or are we tracking them to use it as a way to assess are we providing the education that's going to allow those students to get to the next stage of their life and are we going to use those or is it just information for us to have it's good information for us to have but more importantly it's formative assessment information if this is the curriculum that I am teaching and these are the standards these are the benchmarks of learning that I want the students to be able to master by the time they get done their 11th grade course these tools provide feedback to the instructor to see if the students are actually meeting those benchmarks and if not they also provide data on what things can be approved to get them there so it's this feedback loop you're doing your teaching you're taking a look at some of the data the data is giving you feedback on the impact that you're teaching is having on student learning and if it's not up to the level that it should be or where you want it to be it's also giving you some data in terms of where you need to focus where we might need to do some training it gives us data if we've got multiple teachers teaching the same class where this teacher over here their kids are doing really great on these three standards this teacher is struggling a little bit maybe as part of the professional learning model as we get those two teachers together to share that information so that they can both be doing well on those standards so it's keeping our finger on the pulse of the learning that's happening in the schools on a regular basis a daily and weekly basis to inform instruction that's coming from the teachers so and these guys may have other uses more about them beyond my I'm a little so that's the star are you talking about the star? there's star 360 and then there's also track my progress that's used in primarily elementary level okay but as we look at the district as a whole we're sort of following and we just heard sort of here are end results for for our high school students and we had so many percentage do and I know because we have such a small population but are we just sort of following that trend and what are we using this data to tell to tell us or to or how as board members if we're looking and saying okay are we are we getting the results that we want and we're going to look at SAT information or do you I mean should we be looking at that's a question for SAT it's a little bit more useful than it used to be and so let me step back because you ask a lot of questions I'll ball into one so it'll take me a second to sort the pieces out first off if the students are doing well in math, NELA and science then we would expect their scores to also go up on ACT and SAT even though we're not directly teaching for that to happen right you give them a good strong foundation in terms of the knowledge and you give them some good critical thinking skills so that they can apply that knowledge to novel situations they're going to do great on the SAT they're going to do great on the ACT SAT for a long time until they changed its formats probably four or five years ago now it was a test of reasoning it was an IQ test so technically it didn't matter up until four years ago being an IQ test how much knowledge you had picked up in school because that's not what it was testing it was testing your ability to reason they realized that that wasn't a real good indicator of how well that students potentially were going to perform in college once they got there I mean it might be a symbol that they're capable but it gave no indication really of whether or not they were really going to succeed once they got there so they changed their format to match the ACT a bit the ACT was always a subject test right it actually tested students on standards in ELA and math and science and so the ACT was always a more valuable test if you were an administrator or if you were a person in a school district because it gave information on how well the kids learn biology and how well the kids learned algebra 1 and geometry it gave information that you could go back to the instructors and say hey they're doing really well in these areas based on this testing but these are areas that are a little bit weakened so they would give you that kind of feedback to let the instructors know where they need to focus a little bit more and maybe find other ways of connecting with the kids around that knowledge and the standards kind of more of a subject based test it tests in content now ELA, math and science so it does have value but I haven't spent a lot of time looking at it since the change because the ACT was always the better of the two for that anyway so it's actually good that they've chosen that they've got all the students that are taking that exam hopefully I hit what you were asking but the goal is if we do a better job of the foundational knowledge which is the board goal and we make sure that we're hitting some of those higher level skills that are so important in today's society the critical thinking piece, all the things that STEM is supposedly about the students should be able to apply that in such a way that they're going to do fine and do very well in the SAT, the ACT and the other tests but no those are not the primary focus our focus as the board has said is strong foundational knowledge and that was the other reason that on the ESPAC and the Vermont Science Assessment was chosen because those are they do go into a little bit of the critical thinking aspect the analysis, the synthesis but they're primarily a knowledge test for the most part, so good questions maybe think about stuff that I wasn't ready for until ends in the month or so so for me thank you for this report however it does not for me paint the picture because there's no data to show is there an improvement from last year an improvement from the year you'll get that from me in the big ends report but they can I mean they can go back and they can revise you know the senior project piece historically I don't think they presented that testing data to you before they have we've worked on this for a few years I agree and that's where I actually the reflect back on this meeting last year and I think that we talked about the same thing showing that data over time because what I'm hearing right now I can read this report and it tells me that 61% of our AP students scored a 3 or higher but in the documentation we heard from Mr. Hawks that was 6 students so again 61% sounds amazing we had 6 students that took that test so and there's actually no reported number on our math scores we talked about history and literature so to me I think that it would be helpful as a board member and as a community member to see the data over time the numbers of students we're talking about and then it goes in my opinion to what Anne is asking if we're setting a benchmark of 70% where are we falling on that so is the money being invested appropriately with the staff we have to actually hit those benchmarks or is it not? my data that you have gotten not you just because of the time frame for the last 3 years is longitudinal data mine when you get it of course we haven't had SBAC so we'll talk a little bit about what the ends report will look like this year and it won't be till November because again they didn't run SBAC last year they didn't run remote science assessment last year so what the folks are doing right up through October is they're using those assessment tools to track my progress in the Star 360 up until October to try to test the kids to see what they learned over the course of last year given that we had that 3 month bump because of COVID and they're collecting that data for two purposes one so I can report out on the ends but more importantly for them is so they get an idea of what the students weaknesses were through the courses that they took last year because of that COVID break and hopefully they can address that this year before they move too deeply into new material especially for courses that are foundational like a math course that builds on itself if they didn't learn a good chunk of the last 3 months of the math class it doesn't make sense to be moving full steam ahead into the new one until they've got information on what the students were weak on last year because of the COVID bump and then doing that presentation this year to the students to make sure that they got those standards down pat but the data that you have gotten from me since I've been here and interpreted it in terms of SBAC and SAT as you get a report on all the APs as well you will see it tracked over time over 5 years what the timelines are so that's one of the things that we talk about we invested an awful lot of awful lot of funding for the first couple of years in the elementary level and we left the high school alone because they were working on the standards the standard based report cards and the graduation requirement piece so you see improvement going on there's been significant improvement in ELA and math at the elementary level they still got a ways to go but I believe if I remember last year two of the schools were hitting 70% already and that was because of the effort that was put in and you can see that in the timelines and so hopefully now that the high school is getting started you know you're going to see the same kind of bump here they go ahead yeah go ahead oh I just wanted to say in response to Ashley's prompt it's easy it is very easy for us to create a presentation if we know exactly what you'd like to hear so if you want to hear stats on AP courses over the last 10 years we have that I have a spreadsheet right here that has probably 400 cells of data in it which we distilled down tonight to present the senior profile for the class of 2020 because that's what we were asked to do and we gave you some comparisons to national and Vermont averages and we gave you some five year averages also so there could be some comparisons to the past trends but if you'd like AP stats for the last 10 years graduation rates the last 10 years SATs, ACTs, senior projects number of eight world language courses that are whatever you'd like if you ask us for it we can present it to you and then there's no guesswork there's no like boy I wonder if they want to know this we'll know exactly what you want and we'll present it to you and like I said I'm happy to provide you with the spreadsheet so that you can pour over the data yourself and then we can do a question and answer whatever meets the board's needs we're happy to provide it with as much transparency as possible and that mimics my question to the board at the last meeting about the ends is that it seemed like there were things that people wanted but it wasn't clear I was just responding to the fact that that data is there I've given it every year in the big you know the superintendent's report but if there are things that you want to see that's the other thing that aren't there let us know but this year is going to be like I said it's a little quirky just because of what happened with COVID last year and we're still not in a regular year and so it's kind of depressing as the high school pulled together they did an amazing amount of good work kind of getting their structure set up and getting ready to go after these problems and start to go on after them and then COVID blew everything up and so you know we missed them we didn't get the testing at the end of last year that would show us what the impact was the hope is is that Track My Progress started through 60 and one of the reasons that we chose those is because they can tie directly to SBAC and so you know the scores that come out of there should give us a reasonable impression of what would have happened had the kids taken the SBAC and that was one of the reasons is because they trapped very closely with the scores that were coming out of the SBAC exams are there other questions from board members I have one question it has to do with the social worker so how do we measure whether that's an effective intervention is there a way that we can do that can we see some some results from hiring that person I have lots of comments but I don't know if you guys want to comment before I do so Elijah the question or Katie or Lisa is the social worker that came in a year or two ago you know if you were measuring results to show that they were effective you know what is it that you're looking at yeah well we can present numbers in terms of numbers of students served but it's actually very hard to represent data on prevention it's hard to represent data on suicide prevention because the suicide didn't happen it's hard to represent data on cutting that didn't happen so if there are particular measures that the board would like us to track these are the mental health in our student community we can certainly do that one set of data that we look at as a school and as a state is the youth risk behavior survey data so we can spend some time looking at that together and we could invite our mental health professionals to come and talk with you about it but in my experience there are some fields in human services where it actually can be really hard to find the right data to track success because success means often that something didn't happen that could otherwise be measured so if there are particular measures that you'd like us to consider I'm all ears one of the easiest things but it depends on the student and the reason that they're being served is if you know the students that are being served is you know discipline rates how often was the student being referred you know for the three years leading up to their years worth of interactions with the counselor and did those go down that's an easy one that could be tracked I'd often argue that our high graduation rate is a testament to our ability to successfully work with students over many many years the whole child both their academic needs as well as their social emotional needs and so that may be one thing that the board can estimate to the original work that's done at school which is a graduation rate that's above state averages but again I'm open to suggestion from the social side in the room or whomever about how we can best track that sort of thing but the Vermont Youth Risk Behavior Survey broken down by school or by district by school within district so that's something we could look at over time as well that's every other year I think it was a last year was the last time yeah cause I saw some data on it another thing we've been doing is looking at attendance and that can be another indicator again in concert with a number of these other statistics we're talking about but in my case as well if we think back a year or two one of the things that we had talked about that was potentially getting in the way of some of the academic improvements in some of the climate pieces that the academic improvement piece that I was concerned about and the climate piece that the board was concerned about was this was one of those components it's one of the reasons that we started to bring into mental health it was about matching the right specialist with the need and there was a big influx especially at the elementary level of students that were coming in with some severe trauma based behaviors and that was not only interfering with their own learning it was also interfering with the learning of those around them and so you know this was the magic bullet to try to help with that and I think it has had a, if you talk with folks they will tell you that the behaviors have gone down that's what I was trying to get at is there a way for us to evaluate the impact that this investment has had if you talk when Erica and Pat and David come in and they talk about the RISE program one of the things that I had asked them to do and it was one of the things they spent a lot of time on in the first year was trying to grapple with just that is what data is going to let us know if this is effective and it may actually be reflected in the data that the special education department has been collecting one of the pieces with them was they pulled together a rubric in their goal which we'll talk a little bit about later tonight their goal is either having students move to a less restrictive IEP kind of a really highly restrictive IEP where the student has to work one on one with a pair just to be able to make it through the day a less restrictive IEP as they might do a 15 minute check-in every day to make sure that they have their homework written down so there's a huge range there but what we'd like to see is they've got this rubric where they've got data that is reflecting on how restricted the students IEPs are so that they can track it over the course of time longitudinally and hopefully what we'll be seeing with the changes that we're making is that in general we're moving from restrictive to less restrictive we're moving from the fives down toward the law and some of it is the goal and then the other piece that goes along with that is are we getting students off of IEPs so those are the two pieces that they're looking at focused on and again that's going to be discombobulated too because of COVID they do have baseline data from the first year that we'll be able to show that it's just baseline data because it's the first year that they'll have it and then it'll probably be not this year but the year after that they'll have meaningful data again Lisa or Katie do you have something to add? I think if you have more questions feel free to ask them if you would like more information and feel free to ask us to provide it to you there's a lot of this that we could elaborate more on for the purposes of the presentation tonight we wanted to keep it to the senior profile but please continue to ask us questions and ask us to come and present one of the hopes I think of using the star 360 program is that we'll be able to track specific cohorts of students and their growth over time any part of a senior profile could be if the board wanted to see it how the students started as seventh graders and then how they grew and progressed before they graduated and I guess one more thing I'd add is that you know to Ann's question at the start we're trying to look at that end goal of college and career readiness which is why we provided what we did for you tonight if a student is choosing one of those different pathways RGCC are they getting that industry recognized credential yes if they are taking an AP exam are they scoring a three or higher so that when they move on to college they can actually get that credit how many of them are going to vast and early college and on the pathway toward college and why are they making the decisions they are in terms of their post-secondary planning do we have the structures and systems and supports in place to help them get there that's why the junior senior academy is so important this year so you know those are some of the things that we are trying to synthesize to with that end game of college and career readiness right and that's exactly I mean that's the kind of thing that we are looking for because we're trying to assess how are we doing with our outcomes and if if I don't know sort of I would imagine even for yourselves and maybe it's I mean education is so hard you can't like well 80% should be doing this but if we are spending resources from the community and we need to justify that to the community oh yeah we are going to ask for a little bit more we are going to ask we want to pay for this specialist to come in we've got to be able to say well you know we are aiming for all of the Randolph students who are in the tech center to get instead of just one IRC they are going to come out of there with three and I don't know I mean that's where I mean I get a little frustrated with well you as board members come up with it you all are the educators you tell us and we can and give us your rationale for why you are coming up with that reason like we are going to say three IRCs because this, this and that and we are using IRCs because we have heard why they are important then we just have to look at it okay well is that a reasonable interpretation of a benchmark and we can say yes because it's probably going to make sense to us and then we can see okay how are we doing are most of our students getting three IRCs or are most of our students scoring where they need to score you know in order to move on to the next stage of their life are they successful if they go up to early college are they passing the college classes or are they getting sent back to the high school how are you measuring those things so that we can say to our community look these are all of the things that we offer we've got kids going in various different pathways we're aiming for this we're putting our resources in here and look this past three years we've seen you know a growth in the SAT scores or a growth in the number of kids who are successful in early college or are excelling in early college but that's part of what I'm looking for so that I can judge as a board member are we investing those resources or not and then we can go out to the community and say okay community this is how we interpreted being ready for the next stage of your life are we on track is this sort of do you agree with us that this is the right pathway that we're going on and we haven't quite gotten to that kind of conversation yet well I'm going to disagree because I put a 35 page report together my first year that explained in detail everything I do agree with you that it doesn't sound like what is there isn't meeting the desires of the board which is why I opened up the discussion or tried to get more specific you know what is it that you there's got to be pieces that are missing here that you really want to see that I'm not aware of let me know what they are and I'm happy to go after them but there was a there were weeks that were spent on putting together the rationale for why the ends were pulled there I was pulling from the research that I was doing in my doctoral studies at the time as well that went into that paper as things were chosen and chosen at the levels that they were so again that's why I'm saying that may not be suiting your needs and if it's not I need to know what it is that you would rather see because that too is part of your strategic planning process if you come back and say hey you know you guys are working on this but this isn't really where we as the representatives of the community feel that things should be going we need to know that so that you know we're focusing on the resources where where folks feel it should be and I think to be fair this time we did ask them to tell us about the seniors so we asked for the senior profile and that's typically we used to do it like in August but since the numbers don't come back we've been doing it in September the last few years another time of year we asked for other types of data so I think you know we have to be fair about what we did ask them to prepare right we'll senior right and that's where part of me is almost questioning is this a good use of our time I think so this is our end product right finally these guys graduate we have a this is a snapshot of like so much so what we have to judge it against how did we do we know how we did but we don't know how we did wasn't were we on track did we hit our goals were we where we wanted to be well we saw the SAT scores compared with you know Vermont's and national you know things like that so you know and part of my standard presentation to folks is you'll see the trends over over at least five years I mean I believe in three year trend lines because the data jumps around from year to year you got to have three years to have an actual trend line that means something but you'll see on that one when I do and I break it down by school and everything when we do that big report but you know I think you're right and if we want something different we need to decide what it should look like maybe at our strategic planning session we can flush that out a little bit more but it just seems like well I guess we're never going to have goals I mean that were benchmarks that we're shooting for except for your SBAC benchmark of 70 percent there are you when we talked about this it was outlined in the last ends is that you have a mission statement which are your ends in there there are six or seven that are foundational knowledge ends you have an adaptability and you have a whole number of ends and the reality is is that not a lot of work was done on a lot of those ends for a long time people were focused on things and good things for kids but it wasn't specifically those ends and so the first year which is why that first report was so blink and long was because I was trying to figure out how to do it all with some stuff that hadn't been done in quite quite a long time so I've narrowed it down to four things that I think are critical once those are accomplished well and hit the benchmark then I'll move on to the other parts of the ends they are science, they are math they are ELA and they are special education these three are the most visible to the outside world because our testing data is published if we do well here the hope is that we're keeping our enrollments up and drawing in more people the ADM counts go up and we've got more resources to pump back into the schools to help us out even further with our programming and the other things that we want to accomplish but until I hit that 70% benchmark in these three areas and until I get my special education percentage right now we're at 22.3% of the students in this district or on IEPs until that gets down to the national average of 14% those are big goals and they are more than enough to work on if you want to try to spread me out over 14 different ends none of it's going to get done or done well so I've chosen those one specifically because they're high visibility they are also foundational if you're doing well in ELA and math that's going to support you in the other work that you're going to do here if we can work with the students that are on the IEPs and get them independent really kind of restructure the program so that they are getting the skills they need so that they can come off those IEPs and be independent then we've got something to work with and then we can go after the whole shebang so it's not that I'm neglecting the other ends I made the decision after the first year of trying to do it all and being scattered that it's not possible that the decision was and you guys can refocus me if you want to say no those four aren't the priority these two over here are but those were the four that were chosen to be worked on until we get to those benchmark and then we bring on more at that point in time it would be too much to try to do it all at once especially like we said part of it's been structure building we didn't even have the structure to do the math in the ELA until a year ago to get those coaches in well it's a good discussion but there's huge pieces here I love the questions too so are there any other questions from the public who are attending this meeting remotely you have questions for Elijah or Katie or Lisa Floyd make sure you turn your mic on if you've got a question I don't see anybody if not we will move on thank you very much for that presentation we really appreciate your time the effort it took to put it together alright next we have a quarterly facilities monitoring report so I revamped this so I've given a new copy to folks which is here just a couple of basic things unless there's questions that come up what's in yellow is everything that's been accomplished since last time it gives you an idea of the work that was done over the summer there's been significant improvements the facilities kind of across the board this summer so it wasn't just the work on making sure that we were prepared to go back to school in the face of COVID but it was also making sure that we were keeping up on the important task of maintaining our facilities in the way that they should be maintained in addition to that if you flip the page over and look down at the bottom starting off under actually that's an interesting one to well we can talk about that too but everything below the third one all those are additional things that we are trying to do to improve the HVAC systems across the district they are not necessary to do we are in compliance in terms of CDC guidance but they are things that will enhance the effectiveness of our HVAC systems especially in terms of filtration a lot of it is putting in new exhaust fans ones that are a little bit more efficient blow the air a little bit harder a little bit faster some of it is sensors we do have a fairly automated system that can keep track of what's going on in terms of where the air is going what the quality is and comes back to a central readout but we need the sensors in place to be able to do that so some of that is for sensors we do have the nurses offices kind of up and running with fans in the window to get the negative pressure but we did go out we are waiting for the grant that we applied for for the money to come in they are actually going to come in and put the nurses office they have a little area they are supposed to put the students that they think they are in fact at a waiting area putting those on a completely separate HVAC system than what exists in the other schools that way there is no cost contamination of air so all those things are happening a lot of it is we are waiting for the grants you may get a request from me depending upon how long it takes to get the grant money to just pull it out of the facilities fund and just get it done and we will get reimbursed what we can from the grants after the fact but right now we are waiting to hear from the grants so those are the big things in terms of oh yeah the well so we did do as you remember we did try to do some work on the well at Brookfield we realized that there was infiltration of saline solution that was getting in there it was actually coming from the water softener we did some repairs of the wells we sealed off the sides so the water was only being drawn in from the bottom and on top of it we pumped the tar out of it to try to drain as much of the saline water out as we could the salinity is way down compared to what it was but it is still not in the place where it would be comfortable for people to drink it's safe to drink but it's not going to taste well a lot better than it did but it will take years of using that aquifer to actually drain out all the salinity that is in there it will slowly go down over time but it will take years so right now we've had them come out they've done a little bit of research if you look at where the field trees there's a nice spot that they should be able to drill into a completely different aquifer out there so we're in the middle of the process of examining that and putting it in a new well so that may become relatively soon for a quest for facility funds for that and you can see what the cost is you know it will probably be in the $130,000 $150,000 range to replace that so other things that are on the horizon any other questions about facilities one question when do you plan to hear from the HVAC grant like you know when you're supposed to hear from it they are hard to tie down one of the problems and I wrote about it a little bit in the superintendent's report is about the reimbursement funds is they are setting aside money and grants for us to be reimbursed but it's always they're setting aside about a third of what is actually needed so you know when they came up with that HVAC grant it was great but the applications and the need was three times what they put in for it so odds are we'll get some but it won't be enough to cover everything and we've got plenty in the facilities funds to cover this the reserve funds I'm getting a little bit worried about the reserve funds because we've got a good amount in there there is talk every now and then during the legislative session that hey you know this might be a way to fill the gap in what can we do about these reserve funds that the schools have and so I'd rather the talk at the end of last year because of that was hey are there ways that we can start to go after the reserve monies that we had still keep a fair amount in reserve but also start putting it to the good use of improving the schools and the programs for the kids and so that's kind of what we're doing that's why you're seeing a lot of this facilities upgrade going on and then the roof that was replaced the entry and all the HVAC equipment that was replaced up there this summer that came in a third of what we thought it was going to cost we thought it was going to be about 1.5 million the 2D gather came in in a half million $700,000 range so we were saving for that for a while so there's quite a bit of money in the reserve funds so when you said that you would ask us for that funding from the reserve I apologize you haven't been through the process so what typically happens is at the end of a budget year end of a school year there is money that's left over for various reasons actually come the next march that money that is left over it's called surplus money that money that is left over it goes out to vote and the voters will vote to put it into one of our reserve funds so that money sits into the reserve fund and those reserve funds have different names on them like one of these facilities one of them is transportation when the town votes to put it into one of those funds they know what we're going to use it for if it's in the facilities funds we have to use it on facilities if it's transportation it's used pretty much to replace the buses as needed that are up there once the town is voted to put it into those reserve funds my responsibility is coming to the board if it's something above and beyond the normal saying hey here are the bids that went out this is the one that we chose this is the dollar amount we're looking for to do this work and if the board approves it we can then access those funds to do that work so what you'll be seeing you'll actually see one of those requests tonight but what you'll be seeing is you'll be seeing a request probably for some of that HVAC work and then you'll also eventually see a request from the reserve funds for that well work thank you next we have a presentation from Emily and Dana about their equity group proposal are you women ready to discuss this with us we actually did put you up front hi everyone I'm going to begin talking about the rest and then I'm going to hand it over as we will be factual and quick I'll also share my screen so you all can take a look at the document that we're working from thank you so Emily and I are here to share our progress in forming an equity action committee and equity focused professional development across the district the following is our rationale that the middle school high school faculty did last school year with the equity literacy institute through a grant that Emily was given we are continuing the equity support in our building but would like to see this work expanded to our TCC and the elementary schools we need to be better at developing continuing to support our BIPOC students along with our white students across the buildings within the district continue dialogue around race increased capacity to have the necessary uncomfortable conversations with our students and with each other is imperative to move forward with this work we would like to continue the equity education amongst staff and faculty as a suggested area of focus in order to build a more inclusive school community we research indicates that equity literacy amongst educators is a significant factor in improving the educational experiences and outcomes of all students especially students of historically marginalized identities RU began to Randolph began to successfully train teacher leaders to facilitate equity conversations in what is called the PLCs the professional learning communities and it's a model that we would like to continue with this work the equity action committee will serve as a district level group supporting the implementation implementation of the professional learning community model throughout the different schools to facilitate PLC discussions at each school this equity focus professional development proposal supports two of the OSSD core values and that's what that was our rationale of starting this committee does anybody have any questions before I hand it over to Emily? Questions from the board? Not so far I don't think Dana thanks. I'm always open for questions you could email me if you think of something in the future and I also continue to welcome any board member to come to school one day and look at the work that we're doing at the high school and at the middle school level through this equity and also my racial justice class you're more than welcome to come and observe any time you'd like. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks Dana for that introduction so I'm just going to touch on a little bit of what the structure of the committee would look like and what our next steps are in the process so we were able to meet with Lane last week and touch base on what some of those bigger next steps look like and as Dana mentioned the equity action committee would really serve as a venue for teachers at the various schools to come back together and kind of share their progress and shape this equity focused professional development from a central place so we are all kind of working from working from the same people there in terms of what our goals are and how we want to approach this professional development. So the committee would really be composed of teacher leaders in the various buildings who are interested in engaging this work and want to serve as professional learning community leaders or facilitators in their schools who would complete some additional training in order to be competent in those different areas the building principles if possible would also be members of that committee as folks who also shape professional development in their buildings and support teacher education and a committee chair who's overseeing it. Our next steps in the process after meeting with the Lane last week is our main next episode is to work with building principles to identify teacher leaders in their buildings who are interested in this work and who have the time and the capacity to pursue this additional training that would happen outside of our regular professional development so the course that we would be asking PLC facilitators to take is through the Equity Literacy Institute which is the organization that Randolph Union worked with to start this work last year and it's about a one month course where it's like a train the trainer model so teacher leaders taking that class would gain the different skills necessary to facilitate groups of their colleagues who might be at different levels of understanding or interest or capacity in terms of their experience with equity focus work and social justice work in schools so really trying to meet the varied needs of all teachers in all of our buildings after we have worked with building principles to identify those teacher leaders we would get them signed up for that course if possible we could begin those PLC meetings this year it depends a bit on the individual schools process for planning professional development but at the very least we would like to complete the train the trainer work this year in this fall and be ready to go with those professional learning communities next year and not sooner in terms of financial implications for this project we are still working on getting comparable numbers from outside districts as far as stipends for these positions go but looking in district with comparable hours outside of our regularly contracted hours we estimate that the PLC leader stipends would be $750 per person and that's with approximately three to five hours of work per month outside of again a regular professional development and that also depends on whether those folks are able to start facilitating those groups this year or whether we're just asking them to take the course this year and in speaking with Lane it seemed appropriate to approach building principles about professional development funds to support this work and so that's really our next step is working with those folks to figure out what our capacity is for this year and what is going to best meet their building needs and if anyone has questions Dana and I can do our best to answer them I was just going to quickly ask whether the building principles had already shown interest in this work being done at their schools and with their teachers Part of that Go ahead Part of the discussion was checking in I have allergies so I apologize it was checking in with the elementary principals to make sure they had the conversation with the staff to get some input from the elementary staff it sounds like they've had some input already from the high school staff I'll be back I got an answer also Emily so what we decided to do was Lane was going to check in and tell them that Emily and I were going to ask for a meeting with them and then the next step where I was going to email the principals this week to see the interest level of Emily and I showing up to the faculty meeting at the elementary school and then a faculty meeting at RGCC to talk about this work also so we're right in the middle of working with the principals and the faculty at all of the schools What would you like from us tonight? So we're happy to answer any questions that folks might have we were really just hoping to provide an update and give folks an opportunity to weigh in if necessary but other than that or anything specific we're kind of working on those next steps with the principals Any other questions from the board? Any questions from any of the public who is listening in to this call? Appreciate the time and effort that you guys have put into making this happen Great thank you so much everyone for the opportunity to share with you and as Dana mentioned please let us know if any questions do come up or if you're interested in learning more about it we'd be happy to speak with you more. Thank you Thank you Okay so next we have the board member replacement process I want to say hello and recognize Megan who's here she's the only one who has submitted an application or resume and would like to take the place of our man off board member who stepped down so that position would last until February where you'd have to run again and I need an update from Lane about exactly where that process is as I understand it we're sort of in between a legislative decision whether select board needs to approve that is that what your understanding is too? I think so but that's the last thing I heard about it so we may need to wait for select board approval before we can actually have you scored in at the town quotes on this alright hopefully next meeting you will be sitting at one of these tables and joining us alright next Lane the budget parameters this time of the year we're getting ready to kick off the official budget season typically October is the heavy month to get started I'm set up to start with the cabinet next Wednesday but this time looking back at Brent's old notes in previous years as an opportunity for the board to kind of chime in a little bit about priorities what its concerns are around budget and I'm going to help you out a little bit by giving you kind of what the landscape currently looks like right now and again that may change quite a bit as things develop in terms of COVID right now the biggest problem is all the unknowns so cost of COVID reimbursement it's kind of like the HVAC piece there were three different funds that we could potentially draw from to reimburse us for the additional unanticipated cost this year for COVID one of them was reaching out the FEMA which we did the other was the coronavirus relief fund which we've also put in the application for and the other is ESSER funds which are a subcategory of CARES the problem in each of the cases is that the amounts of those monies that the state has set aside is always about a third of what the requests are right now for example the coronavirus relief fund is that the state received about a billion dollars for across to help the state out in a number of areas they've dedicated 29 million to helping out the schools in terms of reimbursement there's 71 million in requests of legitimate reimbursements across the state right now so if you take a look at COVID itself in the fact that 25 districts in the state of Vermont and it's cost 71 million between the start of this in March and getting our doors open this year it's over a million dollars a district of unanticipated funds that people are spending trying to keep things up and running the way that they should and it does not look like there is money there to reimburse us for all of it so that's the first unknown next unknown teachers contract for this year at this point in time and the contract that we are talking about is also going to be a one year contract because nobody knows what the landscape looks like next year so the second that we get this put to bed we're going to be right back at the negotiating table trying to figure out the contract for the following year the other piece that I want to remind people of was the cost of health care for the support staff that went up dramatically last year that was the biggest increase to the budget that was only half of it remember that they don't potentially switch on to the upgraded health care plan until January of this year so what we planned in the budget for this year was half of those potential health care costs next year we would potentially have to add the other half to get them through a full year so that's $366,000 just on its own that piece hopefully what will happen is January will come the people that need the insurance will take it and not everybody will and it will be less than we anticipated but we were pretty sure of our numbers based upon the calculations we did and the folks that we checked in and people's family situations and what they were planning to do so that's a big piece there in terms of other ideas the district right now we'll talk a little bit about this when we get to the special education you build structures to support what you want to do and then you go to what's called the adherence level and then you go to the delivery level we've had the funding because the community and the board has been so great over the last two years to build the structures that we need so we've got what we need to move forward for right now there are two potential pieces that should be discussed however especially given COVID one of them is the fact that we don't have a full-time nurse at the two little elementary schools seems like this would be a good time to have that especially given potentially what the staff in those buildings might face if a student comes in showing symptoms so I think we do need to talk about the potentiality of increasing nursing at the two elementary schools by about a half a PTE and then the other outstanding question that is there is when I redistributed the administration at the elementary level making sure that we had a full-time principal at each of the elementary schools there was the request for additional administration yes, because it's a bigger school so those are the only kind of two other pieces out there that paint the picture of the potential budget landscape for the coming years it's a lot of unknowns right now we do have most of what we need in terms of structures to get things moving forward on those four big areas that I talked about the math, the LA of the science and special education for but just too many unknowns we do have plans in place for potential shortage in budget we saved as much as we possibly could at the end of last year so there is a significant surplus supposedly at the end of this year the goal is to take that surplus money to have the town vote in a reserve pot of money called operations that we can put it into and use that to cover any shortages that we may have and then if there is money left over hopefully apply it to the next year so that we don't have to ask as much from the taxpayers and get them through the next year everybody is predicting that the next year is going to be the tough year folks the year that we're currently in was already planned for people already knew what the taxes were coming COVID hit partial the way through so it wasn't as painful but we're potentially looking at a full year under COVID coming up so there are plans in place to try to mitigate things but that's what we're looking at as we deal with this budget season so this is the opportunity for the board to talk about its concerns or its priorities or things that you want us to keep take into account as we're having discussions at the cabinet level any comments right now from board members on budgeted here is are you foresee increasing again for trying to level funds for next year my intent if everything works the way I hope is to keep it level but to actually be able to offset it with some of those surplus funds so that it's actually at least for a year it's a decrease that's my goal the other possibility that we have and this is something that we'll have to discuss as a board across all the reserve funds that we have there's probably three to four million sitting there the other possibility that we have and again we'll have a better picture when we get to January of what things are looking like for next year is because we've got so much money in those other reserve funds and since the town has helped us out maybe what we can do we build that operation fund we take some out of those other reserve funds to add to it so that next year it's a low year for taxes for folks to try to help people out in their time of crisis so there are machinations going on that may help but the problem with both of those two things is going to be communication with the community they need to know what they're voting on and why otherwise when they see big dollar amounts on those up for the vote because they have to vote the amount that goes into those funds they don't want them to think we're asking for more when really what we're trying to do is potentially help them out and how much does it's a state education payment form of payment so we actually pay to the state and we're reimbursed we get a check from the fund that's the state but we also get a check from the town I understand that but I'm just saying it's not necessarily a reflection of how much our budget is because we also we get sometimes more from the state than we pay in but part of it is that if I know say the budget next year is 20 million if I know I've got 1.1 in sitting in that reserve fund then I'm only asking for the 19 point you know whatever or the 18.9 and it will have an impact both on the Ed fund which they'll be happy about and they were pretty upset with me the last two years and being able to get the town to step up to what they provided for the district but it will also help out the local about 33 percent local okay anything else on the budget parameters next we have board governance budget so you guys have typically I've been budgeting $10,000 for yourselves and that's for your yearly eight hours of training that you need to do and for any other initiatives that you have typically what you've spent is between 4 to 6,000 just so you know so this is your opportunity to change that if you have bigger things that may be on your mind and you don't have to make the decision tonight I mean that's not until January but just so you're aware of where you're at and what you've historically spent I think the superintendent in evaluation money went out of that as well any questions or comments about board governance alright next is second reading approval of electronic communication policy we received this last month it may also be in this packet are there any questions for Lane this is a mandated policy any other questions do I have a motion to approve the electronics communication policy then as written I think a motion to approve the electronic communication policy as presented second all those in favor they say aye any opposed okay thank you next we have update about union negotiations so it actually they went pretty well so the support staff has been approved you guys know that they approved it the teacher negotiations went pretty well in terms of contract language back and forth and trying to trade things of equal value that both sides wanted the main sticking point ended up being salary it's still unresolved at this point in time we did go through mediation the next step is fact finding there's still negotiations going on a little bit behind the scenes every now and then we'll reach out and say hey how about this amount we'll reach back and say well I connect with the group that's on the team and is this okay to do as an offer so right now there are two offers that are there I have not heard back again if what I'm told is correct the last offer from the association association was 3.8% for next year for one year and the district offer right now is 2.6% in terms of I think one of the reasons that folks may be coming to the table now is they're starting to get comparables there are other districts that have settled and the settlement ranges from the other districts right now are between 2.5 and 3.1% and so usually what a fact finder does is they go out and they take a look at what's happening around and that's the facts that they use to determine what we should be doing or what's reasonable so we are in that range right now the association is not there was one district that settled for just about 3.2% but the reason that they did that was because they were one of the few districts around the state that actually got a benefit actually their costs went down significantly because of the health care plan and so if you take into account the savings that they got from their health care plan and what they were exchanging with their union on they were actually a 2.78% increase and after fact finding what happens then I'll be in the ballpark but I may not be 100% accurate so if it fails at fact finding the next step is arbitration so arbitrator will take a look at arguments from both sides will take a look at the fact finder's report and say this is what you should do they'll run to refind it doesn't mean that either side has to agree to it so at that point so it is, hopefully it's something that's agreeable hopefully we get to a resolution long before that at that point in time there are two possibilities so without a contract we keep working at we can impose a contract which means that since we weren't able to reach an agreement this is what you will do and for me if we ever got to that stage I would say give them this for a salary increase that's in that reasonable range and then if they're not happy they can go on strike and as long as we are not settled it's on last year's contract usually what will happen is it's sitting on last year's contract so in terms of the salary and all the other potential changes that we've talked about but typically what will happen is once we settle they'll get retroactive for the year on what we settle at so if the increase is 3.6 percent they'll get that 3.6 percent on a whole year not just the part of the year that remains but just to repeat for my own there's still a chance we won't go into it's a good sign that the mediators still work in behind the scenes so there's still discussions going on through the mediators so after fact finding is done before it goes to both parties and then they can try to negotiate around what the fact finder found out and typically we've had a pretty good relationship in terms of just being open with the community typically the fact finder's report is published everybody knows what it is out in the community to know what the fact finder is saying and that way they can kind of evaluate us too the union being reasonable was the board being reasonable what the authors were if they weren't then maybe they should change their tune that's part of it is getting that political pressure in there as well negotiations will continue and then it would go to arbitration even that arbitration stuff you can pull, yeah and again this isn't binding again I'm remembering back my readings in Vermont from about two or three years ago it's not binding which means that even if it goes through arbitrations and people still aren't in agreement then you're looking at it potentially imposing a contractor restraints I think you guys have been to fact finding before more than once I don't think that's unusual here okay next we can hear about an update about special education this may take a minute or two I don't know if it's appropriate to take a break for a couple of minutes because I'm managing technology as well as the presentation so I'm going to have to try to get this set up on the other computer but I'll leave that up to the board's discretion alright I'll leave that for a minute let's get started so we talked an awful lot over probably the course of a couple years now about the academic side of things about the math, the LA, and then science came on a little bit later the other piece that's has been a bit of a concern probably from the time that I walked in the door was special education and I didn't have a way of putting a real good handle on what was causing the concerns I was seeing I knew that our population was much higher than it should be I talked with the administrative team when I came in and asked them basic questions you know what's the service delivery like how do you deliver services to kids you know what outcomes you're expecting and the answers weren't always that clear and so what I did was I spent about two years going in doing direct observations and seeing what it looked like at each of the levels and then pulling pieces together last year and saying you know we've got really good people that are capable of doing a really good job but the structures and the models that we're using to try to deliver these services to kids just aren't working and one of the biggest concerns that I had was just that you know when we started we were at 19% of every student in the district who was on an IEP and every year that goes by that goes up by 1% and it's like okay so what's causing this I mean is it just that we're getting that many new kids each year when a new class comes in and you know not many kids that move out when the seniors move off or is there something else that's going on here and that's a lot about what this examination is and to talk a little bit about what the plan is moving forward with special education because it is one of those ends pieces that are on there so I want to take a look at the raw data the raw data is actually really good because it was the first thing that I had that I was able to take a peek at when I came in the door and it started to indicate that there were probably some problems there but I couldn't quite put my finger on why we have the state findings is in terms of special education the state was three to four years behind on collecting the data on special education programs in districts and handing it over to the federal government like they're supposed to and so towards the end of the summer all of a sudden I start getting this report from 2016 from you know the AOE that has the special education data from that year and then you know two or three days later it's 2017 so they've actually started to pull this data and distribute it which they should have been doing all along and there were some pretty good confirmations in the state data that yeah we do have some problems that we got to deal with I'll talk a little bit about what my concerns are you know as a superintendent as a district leader here and some of the things that we've already started and some of the other things that we're going to add to that kind of moving forward to try to get a handle on this and get things better for kids in the district first thing to take a look at this first graph is this IEP enrollment it's the total number of students on IEPs in the district and I apologize that it's a little hard to see we run around 850 students total not including preschool so you'll see back in 2017 we had you know 160 special education kids we're now in 2021 so this is data for this year we're up to about 193 so we've been adding about 9 IEP students per year so yeah our population is going up but it's not going up astronomically and what you can also see if you take a look at that graph is you see you got a steep little curve and then all of a sudden it's kind of petering out you know nice little straight line we're currently going up around 5 or 6 kids per year in terms of IEP students now what's interesting is that we had a lot of costs and we'll talk about the special education budget in a little while but there were a lot of huge surge in costs in special education and one of the reasons early on when I started here was because we had a lot of trauma students trauma students are very expensive to try to remediate and sometimes if there are challenges that they have are beyond our ability to work with or to remediate we end up having to send them out and those out placements are anywhere from you know if they're in our Raven program they're probably about $30,000 a year they can be upwards of $200,000 to $300,000 a year to send one of those students out so at the very beginning of this there were a lot of trauma students what has changed in the last couple of years is yeah we're getting a couple more students with each incoming class but the disability that they're showing is primarily speech so in other words it's articulation problems it's reading it's writing they need extra help getting those skills and so that has been growing a couple other things IEP students has a percentage of the overall population in the district is this next graph so you'll see if you go to 2017 around 19.5% of the students in the district at that point in time were on IEPs where we're sitting right now is 22.3% of all the students in the district if you take a look at every student in the district you take 22.3% of them they're on IEPs so that's a huge number in terms of state and national averages Vermont is pretty much just a national average typically you'd expect that number to be 12 to 14% so we're you know not quite to twice the national average but we're pushing that number and so we've got to start asking this question why it really there's two possibilities one is that we're getting more kids every year with incoming classes I think that's about a third of the problem we are getting more kids each year with incoming classes I think two thirds of the problem is the fact that the students once we get them on IEP they're always on IEP for whatever reason the method of delivery for services it's not giving students the skills they need to like we talk about to get to a less restrictive IEP and to hopefully at some point come off and so looking at the data in some of the nuances that I've seen of as I'm walking around I'm pretty convinced that this is the case just to take a look at the budget in terms of the special education budget alone during the same time period if you go from 2018 to 2021 on average every year that has gone by that special education budget goes up by almost $400,000 a year okay so if you look at the past four years the special education portion of the budget is up 68% 17% the data it's great stuff I saw it coming in and I'm going hey you know there's something that I don't think is right here but it took those direct observations that allow me to be able to kind of drill down to what the reasons were you know if you average that out too every new student that we have come in right now that is on an IEP who's new the average cost of one of those students is $44,000 per student so astronomical costs here and more interesting here is the SPED percentage how much of the SPED budget is of the overall budget so if you go back to 2017 of the overall district budget SPED took up 14% now coming into this next year SPED is taking up 20% of the overall district budget it's a little more complicated by the fact that 20% means more now 20% of the 2017 budget was much smaller than 20% of the budget that we've got that's running this district right now so we've got these huge increase in costs that are going on yet no real impact it seems and this goes back to some of Ann's points no real impact it seems in terms of improving outcomes for kids so questions at all as we're looking at the data can I ask a really quick question you mentioned earlier that part of this increase was around the students in their language would you expect that that would actually improve with the preschool programs one of the reasons to put in the preschool programs at the time was because it allows for early identification they do get special education services in preschool and again what they're finding is that the students that are coming into the preschool you know it is primarily speech and language issues so you should in theory be seeing them going down with those established preschool programs if we're doing everything else right and so when we talked about there is longitudinal data and we've seen in the past we've looked at the spend data in the past as part of that big program for whatever reason our student spend population goes up year after year that's not how it's supposed to work usually what happens is you have a huge increase in your spend population in your early grades because you're identifying things and as kids progress through the years the strategies compensatory strategies that they may have had that would have helped them manage their disability in the educational environment as the education gets harder because you're advancing through the years sometimes the strategies don't work anymore and all of a sudden you reveal that you have a learning disability but usually you get the third and fourth grade everybody should be identified by that point in time and then at worst it should be steady state appropriately you should be seeing some students coming off IEPs or going to the less restrictive IEPs and the only place where we actually see that decline is after they get to ninth grade from ninth to twelfth grade there is a small decline in terms of spend students so there are some coming off but for some reason it doesn't happen until then and so that's why there's been a big focus on the elementary levels to try to figure out what's happening with these kiddos and give them the services that we need are students actually coming off in ninth to twelfth grade or are they dropping out of the system a combination of both and we're going to talk about that in the state findings here these are the state findings and I color coded and there's red, there's yellow and there's green green means we're doing something better than we were yellow means we're in a cautionary area and red means that the state has said you've got problems here when this data came out and when that data came out it was three, four years of data at the same time the ones that I tagged were the consistent problems so they've been unaddressed for three or four years now we didn't have the data to be able but let's take a look at these and they're kind of important so the first one there post-secondary goals in an education plan that will reasonably enable students to meet those goals so if you're a student on an IEP one of the requirements in that plan is that you have a transition plan you have an idea of what it is that you want to do when you get out of high school and you have goals that are set up in this plan that are accommodated through your programming or through the services that you're receiving that are going to help you get there for some reason 40% of the students in this district do not have that I have a problem with that because this is simply people sitting down and writing it into the IEP and talking about it as a team so this is what I would call there's management, there's leadership, there's different pieces this is a simple management issue this isn't something that should be happening those goals should be here the next piece that I'm also going to call a management issue is that IEPs are supposed to be reviewed annually at the end of each year and then every three years there's a bigger review that goes on with some more testing that comes into play we're not doing horribly but we've got to think about what this means is that at the end of each year 6% of our students aren't getting that IEP review 100% of them should be getting that IEP review that's when you sit down and talk about this is how the student responded to the accommodations that we built for them yes they're working or no they're not and if they're not this is where we change those accommodations to try something different to help the kid out and so 100% of these should be happening every year matter of fact it's a violation of the federal law that they're not so that's a concern to me when I see this and again it's a management issue it's why isn't this getting done are the staff overworked are they not reminded is the adherence piece is that adherence pressure not being applied to them to make sure that this is happening IEP students we go to Elijah's comment on his graduation is 89% used to be 94% well I have a feeling I know why his graduation rates have gone down a little bit they're still very high I mean graduation rates in the nation as a whole are probably close to around 60% you know in the state he's probably at the state average of 89% so it is a high average but one of the reasons that is probably declined over recent years is because we've got a growing number of IEP students every year and a large number of them aren't making it through the graduation of getting a diploma and so the impact he's seeing isn't the general population it's the special education students and so we were flagged on this as we got to get more of those students it's an equity issue more of those students need to be getting their way to a diploma it doesn't matter to me if it takes some four years sometimes five years you know if you spread the programming out so that as an accommodation and italicized and I got to talk about this a little bit under no child left behind when it first came out they had all these benchmarks that people were supposed to meet and if you didn't meet the benchmarks for two years you know you were found in a state of non-compliance if you hit three years your state could literally come in and intervene in Massachusetts they actually took over two or three school districts that you know couldn't get their scores out when the state stepped in things actually got worse than they were when they were being wrong on their own significant disproportionality and I'll talk about what this means and we have a finding right now where the state is stepping in to intervene in terms of special education and what this, and this just came out about a week ago what this means is that disproportionality means that you got one of your groups of students that something dramatically different than normal groups in our case we are identifying white students as needing speech and language services at 3.32 times the normal rate and so they're saying we don't know why this is happening but it's a problem here because it's three times what's happening everywhere else and so there is a plan in place there are members of the special education department meeting with the AOE to try to dig down on why this is going on and to get some training to hopefully improve it but again so that sounds like a case that we're over identifying kids is being needing IEPs so that's contributing obviously to our high rate of special education students so and again I'm not going to go into some of the things I've seen when I dug but I'm going to say that yes there's an over identification but there is also a huge issue of students in speech and language from what I saw in the data last year that have actually gone through significant remediation and now need to exit the IEPs and haven't been exiting now there were a number of students that were getting 15 minutes of service you know once once a week or once every other week and it's like okay if you're getting 15 minutes of service that's not going to do you any good so either you're so good you don't need the services now or you need more to get you to the point where we can remediate you and fix the problem Lane quick question can we guess why what would be the reason to not follow through and get someone off an IEP that qualifies to or should be done is it that the case load is too high they're not getting to it you're asking tough questions that I have the answers to but you might not like them so removing students from IEP is conflict ridden right lots of times the parents have grown up with the kids they know that the services help and they are extremely fearful and anxious and reluctant to see the student come off of an IEP in those cases you need a person who is trained and talented in resolving that sort of conflict being firm that no you know legitimately this student no longer needs these services and having the conversation with the parent and other ways things that might be done to help kind of ease their anxiety a little bit during the transition but we're not going to take them off the services you know cold turkey what we'll do we'll transition them over into our MTSS programming our structured tiered supports for a week or two to help with the transition and then after that week or two is up then they're on their own and we'll check in in six weeks and see how they're doing but you got to have people in place that are able to have those sorts of conversations and they're not easy to have you know it comes down to you know you got the management side you know are you getting everything to work the way that it's supposed to but there's also the leadership side and part of that is the managerial courage to say no when you need to say no and that is not easy for anybody so again knowing what I know which isn't everything it's a smattering of kind of what I've seen over time I think that's a part of the problem in some of these cases but I also think a part of the problem is the fact that the services we're providing and we'll talk a little bit more about this the services we're providing are getting the kids where we need them to be and that was one of the reasons we talked about the restructuring especially at the elementary level last year you know bringing in the cohort model and trying to deliver those services in a little bit different format again we talked about this 22.3% of students are on IEPs state and national average is actually 14% percentage of IEP students in out placements so those are students that for whatever reason we've deemed that we cannot accommodate their needs here and we have sent them to an out placement we're at 5% which is right on the border line of turning into red from yellow the state average is about 3.75% is that the same 5% that's not getting their IEP reviewed or they're out of our I can go into a little detail on this one of the things that was changed last year as part of this restructuring there were two pieces to it the first piece a little ahead of ourselves but that's okay we're having a good conversation the first piece was turning to a cohort model at the elementary level where you've got one special education teacher and two parents and they all work together as a team so that they're constantly evaluating the kids on a daily or weekly basis and adjusting as they need to with some real stringent goals of where they want the kid to be and striving to get them there that's something that didn't really exist they were in kind of this management style where yep kids on an IEP he needs his services so we're just going to provide him the services and there was no real goal to ever really get the kid off you know this has to do with the out placements if I'm sending a student to an out placement it means I'm paying big bucks to help this student you know $170,000 is probably average if I'm paying $170,000 a year then dammit I want to see some results and one of the things that I noticed um as part of how this was provided is our students would go to out placement and never come back and so part of what we tried to change last year was okay if you have a student that reaches this level that they have a behavior or they have a need for out placement when they go to out placement you sit down and you develop a very specific plan with that provider you identify the one or two behaviors or learning disabilities that need to be remediated and they focus solely on that the one or two behaviors that have to be fixed for the student to be able to come back and dammit every 45 days you go back in you have another meeting you see what the progress has been and you change those accommodations to get to the point where you've reached those goals so that the student can come back to school and participate it is an exclusionary practice to send a kid out of district I mean it's the most restrictive you can be and it's not healthy there's times you gotta do it but the goal should always be to get them independent enough to be able to come back and work within the school environment here so are we having a hard time as a district communicating expectations to to consumers of the IEPs to the student and the families or I think in the terms of the out placements and not just out placements but if an IEP is structured so that a student could eventually graduate from their IEP are we not communicating that with the family that the goal of the IEP is to get them to the point where they don't need the IEP is that not set out in the beginning I don't think while it is an unspoken intent my impression because I'm not trying to bash people here we've got good people my impression is that they have never been said that that is the goal the goal of an IEP if it's done properly is so that someday you don't need one instead and this happens in a lot of districts this isn't unique to hear the student will go, they'll work with the teacher there's a structure in place for how the services the teacher provides to the kid in terms of supporting them with their homework or what not but the goal isn't what it should be it's not my job to provide this skill for you it's my job to teach you this skill so that you can do it for yourself I'm going to show it to you and then over the course of time I'm going to slowly expect you to do more and more and more of it so that whether it's a week down the road whether it's a month or a year or two years down the road at some point in time you have that entire skill in your repertoire and you can draw upon it as needed to meet your needs to access the educational environment that's the piece that's missing and that's the piece that's missing in a lot of schools around the country not just here so that was one of the reasons to try to change that focus on the goal piece but the for me kind of looking at this I always talk about programs and kind of when you're trying to build a successful program whatever it is whether it's special education science you've got structure, you've got adherence and you've got delivery in the case of a class the structure is basically you have a curriculum, that's a structure supports the learning you have enough time in the day to be able to interact with the kid to get the kid to move in the curriculum that's the structure adherence means is somebody actually following up with that teacher now that they have the curriculum they're using it on a daily basis as they plan their lessons and interact with kids and then once you've got that under your belt and people are following along doing exactly what they should then you start to work on a really high order thing which is the delivery yeah you know where we've got the curriculum, we're using it every day but some of the lessons go well and some of them don't so as part of our professional learning group we're going to get together and we're going to talk about what's not going well so that we can come up with better learning activities and better lessons for kids so that our delivery of that instruction improves so we're having a more positive impact on kids and so with us right now you know I see some basic management issues in terms of the special education department and that's really down kind of at the structure of level but we've got some pretty big changes that we've got to make in terms of adherence delivery that you really need some changes in our leadership structure so that we've got some leaders that are change agents some people are really good at managing if things are up and running well they can keep it running if you need things changed that's a different sort of personality especially if it's a big change and my biggest concern right now is I don't have those change agents to be able to make the changes I need we've got the structure that needs to go into place and people are trying to follow it but I need somebody not me because this special education is not my role who can actually be that change agent and follow through all the adherence and the delivery and make sure that this happens it seems to me if we're in violation of laws and we've got all those red dots that well the state of Vermont on a whole is doing worse than we are I don't care I don't either that's why I'm focused on this right now those are big problems but a lot of it to redesigning the leadership team it's making sure that that new service delivery model is implemented and the reason to redesign that leadership team is I need people with the capacity that change leadership piece some cases you can build it within the staff that you have I have some staff I can do that with in some cases I need to talk about staff it sounds like your staff is not meeting targets or goals you weren't meeting targets or goals we would replace you but it also sounds like some of those targets and goals have not been made clear and that's the leadership piece that's the change piece is you've got to have somebody who is making it clear that's where the adherence comes from after everybody is doing what they're supposed to it's not a fun job especially if it's not something people have been expected to do before and then it's the fun job the real fun job is the delivery piece things are up and running things are starting to move in the right direction now we get to do the real cool stuff which is the refinement we get to make sure that not only are we doing it but we're doing it now and so the strategic goals are up there for the special education department IEPs that become less restrictive over time and which culminate in IEP removal that's what we're shooting for so all these changes are so that's the measurable outcome and it is measurable because as part of that restructuring last year I did pull the team together they were very good they actually developed a rubric to be able to measure how restrictive students IEPs are so we can put them all together and say on average we're on a scale of 1 to 5 we're at 3.4 right now and hopefully a year down the road or two years down the road instead of being a 3.4 we're more towards the least restrictive we're now a 1.8 or a 1.2 and we can also track this year we had this many students on IEPs taking into account what came in and what left the new class that came in the class that exited we're now down to this many IEPs so that's the goal we've got to get down to that 12 to 14% and some folks that can do that so you're going to see as we get into the budget season when we're talking about some staffing pieces not going to cost any more money but doing some things with the staff that we have to try to get that change capacity in there can I ask a quick question about Raven you said some of our kids are outplaced in Raven how's Raven doing? Raven is actually, especially for the cost is a very successful program if you define it in terms of getting kids through to a post secondary something, I mean they're very much like the tech center they come in, they spend couple hours each day doing the academic component but then it's really looking at small engine repair machine repair that sort of thing it's more of a hands on education so they do fairly well maybe you're seeing better outcomes for those kids as they progress through the students in the Raven program they're in a very narrow band of disability we're talking about some of the students that are going off for the big bucks that's a different category Raven, if this is mild and this is severe they're not quite in the middle of their questions thank you very much the goal is just, you're going to see a lot of discussion and probably a lot of changes this year I'm just trying to give you some background as to why was the goal of this presentation great, okay next we move on to heal monitoring this is our second read of two reports 2.0 and 2.8 I hope you guys took some time to read them over I have a lot of questions and issues around 2.8 which is the interactions between the board and the superintendent are there any questions around these two I know we did first read them and had him speak a little bit about them last hearing none I would like to entertain a motion to approve 2.0 and 2.8 I move that we approve the 2.0 and 2.8 I second any further discussion all those in favor you say aye any opposed great, okay next we have this scholarship investment report do you want to elaborate any further beyond what lays up in our packet yeah more some kind of humor I think financially both of those scholarships are in good shape so for those of you that are new there were two kind of semi-endowment scholarships that we were given probably I think around 2015 one of them sits around $100,000 right now we give about $5,000 of it every year $2,500 scholarship to do students each year the other one so that one's the Aisle Hall family scholarship the other one is the community scholarship that one is significant that one's in the $2,000,000 range so we give out a significant amount of money out of that probably I think this last year was in the $240,000 range it's a four-year scholarship and it's changed a little bit in terms of what the donors who want to remain anonymous expect they used to have a provision in there that they like students to try to pay back 10% if they can just to keep things moving forward they've removed that provision used to be they just wanted to see remote colleges if possible and they've relaxed that they've also opened it up to students because we have so many students that are coming in under school choice now to school choice students one of the things is that they do want to see that scholarship spent that was not meant to be a perpetual so we've been increasing the spending each year we just don't have enough students that earns too much interest for us to be able to liquidate that anytime soon my guess is that the rate we're going we're probably 10-15 years away from being able to do that I don't know the exact reason why in my conversations and they're wonderful people very thankful for the scholarship I have a feeling that they're getting a little older and they'd like to see the scholarship done before things end I think that's a part of the reason but I'm not sure like I said we've been upping and upping how much we're getting out each year and they're still not even making a dent or anything but they're both in really good shape they could be and then there was another outside of those two it says in there there's about $140,000 and $950,000 for the class of 2020 that community scholarship that usually you give out I think it was about $240,000 that we gave out but again we're giving out to students across four years because it's a four year scholarship okay we have the consent agenda but to approve the minutes from our last meeting August 10th we're enclosed we have to approve professional contracts which are closed in our packet and then we have to review and approve the facilities reserve funds so I guess we ought to do them separately so let's first do the minutes from the August meeting there's a motion to approve that move to approve the August minute any amendments or substitutions corrections all those in favor of approving the minutes we say aye opposed alright we need to approve the professional contracts is there a motion to do that then will we approve the professional contracts second all those in favor aye opposed alright so next is the facilities reserve funds can I speak to that a little late yeah so this is kind of what we're talking about we have a couple of reserve funds out there that there is money in that we can draw from at need with board approval the facilities reserve fund I believe because this was built when Brent was here before I came I think he was actually the mastermind across the state of being able to do this which is kind of cool but he put it into place so that every time there was a surplus you could put money in it so that when big things came up like replacing the roofs we didn't have to go out to bond didn't have to ask the to go into debt for it and so it's worked out really well so that's what the reserve fund is there's about three million in there I believe at this point in time give or take a little bit after this summer the money that we're looking for is for two custodial positions for this year alone and it's to help out with the COVID disinfectant disinfecting and cleaning of the buildings every day they've got what they need to do the basics and get the disinfecting done but some of the normal more normal cleaning routines is a little bit more difficult cleaning separate from disinfecting disinfecting is what we've got to have if we've got a slack or something we'll slack a little bit on maybe sweeping the floors or I drain the trash cans every day but the disinfecting's got to happen if we can get these two we'll be able to cover all the other parts and pieces we should be doing as well in terms of the cleaning side of things so you're busting 132,000 which will be it won't be that much that's taking into account if they're in the middle of the supports that face go and they take the family medical available and this is going to be two one-year contracts two one-year contracts any questions for Lane about this do I have a motion to approve 132,000 dollars from the facilities reserve fund to go towards these two COVID employees I would approve those facility reserve funds request for the custodial workers over some important way second all those in favor are you opposed alright great we don't actually pull the money from the reserve funds unless we have to so if we have surplus towards the end of the year that we can use towards it we do that first and then if we still need to you're allowing us to draw up to the 132,000 alright so for reports we have dual reports is there anything to add or elaborate on yeah I hope not thank you but like I said a lot of it right now the network is going down a lot of it right now is just the unknowns it's very hard to plan a budget we can't even get advice from the state on whether are we planning for another COVID year next year or a more normal year and that's not something reasonably that they can probably even answer but it would help we can't get information from them on you know you have these grants that were supposed to be getting some reimbursement from but they can't give us a timeline on when that may happen and so it's just everything is just on our financials in terms of what they are for this month however we're actually we're overspending a little bit obviously on the maintenance side of things for cleaning and disinfecting in pretty good shape and how has the first week of school gone? too quiet I got one parent email so you've logged off playing? yeah it says it's the networks down saying it's trying to reconnect let me see if I can go back on can't be reached I'll see if I can stir up some parent emails for you not that it hasn't you know you know what I got into all the schools but once if not twice last week it was quiet the kids were happy you know what the coolest thing was especially the little kids they were so excited to be back I mean it was like it was it was just special to see the high school high school was very quiet coming through the halls I think it's the masks in an odd way it's kind of soothing to the kids they're not as boisterous you know they're still they're being kids and what not but that was kind of interesting well there's only half of them there too so that could be it I was like goodness yeah I can't get back on wow so I'll share that my son started at RTCC and he can't say enough positive about the leadership the future of the day and I will say that the very direct communication coming from Felicia has been really very nice it's been a very very positive two days in session yeah well it's I think one of the things keeping the back of your mind it can all change on a dime you know there's two districts right now we're going through it in state really I'm not going to say because I don't know which one you know about which one you don't because that will probably be in the news in a day or so yeah across our brook was in the news already yeah in Duxbury that's a I think that may be a different one I saw in the article today it was in the two I know yeah that came out yesterday yeah so just just keep that in the back of folks mind is that you know at any point in time the call could be going out that we have to shut down a school it won't be the entire district and when I say shut down it means we go to remote I think we're already I think we're all mentally prepared well people are the other thing just to keep in back of minds it's been a long summer without a break and people are tired and they're a little more on edge than normal and it's just because people are tired well not the kids the kids are actually kind of cool but the parents and the teachers and what not just a little edgy but I think it's just the stress of the anxiety how will that work when we're in this hybrid model now if you go how does that work for those hybrid kids so they end up all the hybrid kids will be home learning at home the way the MOU worked with the union was that if you get a hit in one of the schools we go to remote learning for at least 14 days and you stay that way until 14 days after the last case has been identified and the whole group would be combined learning all together with the teacher we're split up there's a separate plan I sent out but it probably didn't make much sense when I did it there's a couple of pages long there's the remote learning plan and so that one kind of outlines what a school day looks like how many hours a teacher is supposed to spend doing this versus this versus that that goes into effect if a school goes into remote learning or the whole district has so yeah sports have been going it's been actually kind of neat seeing the kids there's three different practices every day out on the fields and that's before the town Leeds get started they don't like the masks one day the coach had let them out early that 80 degree day they were sucking wind up they're wearing masks trying to run around that heat hey it's frost advisory tonight right yes it sure is I got a soft top thinking on it I apologize alright so next we have some more development work this is our strategic planning goals work Rachel's going to sort of start us off facilitating this discussion so Rachel do you want to put on your volume I'll put on mine I'm going to restart my computer to see if that does it yes but you're still getting a signal oh that's weird at the bottom are we good this kind of comes out of our board retreat in July and we had the four areas that we identified that we wanted to work on or wanted to make kind of our strategic goals the first one was community engagement and I think that's going to be wrapped up in working on the other three so the other three were working on high school academics high school climate and the middle school transition if you all remember and you all probably have the emails Laura re-sent the email last board meeting so we need to determine as a board what our next steps are and working on these and now's the time to do that how do we want to start addressing these issues addressing these issues whoop whoop that's what I meant ideas how do we want to do this we are seeking input from community is that one of our goals or is that one of yes so we are so I think as we address the other three it will be I think it will be in a way that we are pulling in the community to participate in those those processes making sure that our strategic goals are in line with what or how the community if the community feels invested in these goals I think with the information that we glean being at board meetings and talking and reviewing what the going through all the budget planning with Lane and reviewing what reviewing the data that is given to us in our ends monitoring we are kind of in a unique position as board members to identify these so we need to know if our community buys into them and if so can they help us envision how we guide our district in developing them and honestly we want the whole community involved but most of these are going to be people who have a vested interest in the high school climate or the high school academics most of the people who are going to participate are going to be people who who have a specific interest in making that a good thing I would think but I think we should invite anyone to participate any of our stakeholders which means anyone first I think it is really important to include or somehow incorporate like if we are going to talk about high school academics to incorporate the building principles the two high school principles and any other interested teachers in from the get go so that their goals and our goals we are really relying on their goals we see this as a need but we want to you know give them sort of the the means to go forward with them and develop the goals for themselves so whether we just invite them or you know how we orchestrate that investment on their on their part and get certain teachers who are interested in working on this involved right off from the get go I think is really important you've got some real powerful teachers that will be very beneficial and I think for the same thing for the high school climate issue because that is such a vague word climate it is very hard to pinpoint or define exactly what we are what we are targeting there and but I think there is some people who really would know what that means and how to address it I was thinking about it before this meeting I didn't do it so much it was already on the plate but I went onto the CDC website they have a school climate survey that is designed to be given you know it's broken up into different parts it's designed for parents, for kids, for faculty for support staff members the only problem with it is it's a bit long but it would be a starting point to get some data about what it is specifically about the climate I mean you might want to if it's something that the group wants to use I'm happy handed over we can develop a survey monkey or what not to go out with it but I would whittle it down to what you think are the most important questions I think there is about 63 per hour so we need to identify some next steps I think it's important that we don't just talk about this would it make sense to even form subcommittees are there board members who are interested in one are we going to talk about it all together because you're already involved with a group that yeah and that was my other question is that there was a big move I'm sorry that Lisa's gone did not ask but there was a big move as far as that middle school transition goes and there was already a group going with that it wouldn't make sense for us to double the effort or kind of hopefully meld that in right to identify the board's role in that but I don't even know if that's still Lisa Floyd who was here tonight yeah but do you know if that committee is still happening and a lot of it they're looking at the two grades that are here that's the they're calling it the lower house right now and trying to put it on to a real middle school model and see what the impact is and if it's significant enough then we'll come back and revisit the potential of moving to sixth grade here it's hard to tell right now because of the preschool because parents are anxious there's a lot of kids that were pulled out of preschool some are actually coming back now the parents have had a home for a week and they're deciding that had a couple of homeschoolers that pulled them out the homeschool too that are now coming back they figured a week or two is enough but yeah so the hope is is that after COVID declines or is over whichever the case may be is those preschool members go back up and then we have the impetus, the need to actually move those sixth graders over but yeah they're still meeting that's a part of the structure that Elijah was talking about that they were building this year when you say a real middle school model what do you mean by that versus to what they have right now they come over and they're kind of many high school kids middle school is a time of transition in a lot of areas you know it's not just the social transition you're transitioning to a more abstract sort of reasoning that goes along with the learning typically the huge impact that happens in seventh grade but it's about providing the supports to help them through the social transitions to spend a little bit more time on the study skills and the routines that are required to deal with the more kind of abstract thinking that you're going to need to do there's a whole lot of pieces that go into that but there's about three or four major transitions that are going on. Just not necessarily a change because I mean when you said that I was thinking like are they going to change the days set up for the kids or is it just the delivery? Could be all of it you know you do try to get more team for each grade so that they're interacting with the same teachers all year because that builds a little bit of trust when they have to talk more about the social side of things so there's lots of parts and pieces that can go into it. So it can be a pretty powerful model and one of the reasons that we were drawn to it is with the data with last year is you know I kind of showed you that it didn't matter whether it was ELA or math or which school the kids were coming from you know the scores would go up through the elementary level they get the fifth grade the scores would start to drop in the sixth grade they take this tank and in seventh grade they were down here and then they would start to climb again you know through the high school years and so when you see that across all kids from all schools in all disciplines it usually indicates that there's some major structure that you need to be able to help these kids you know make those transitions and so that was one of the reasons we started looking at the middle school piece at the time but yeah you'll see that it's boom and then it comes back up and it's like whoa that doesn't make sense but I went back ten years and the data happened every year for ten years and as far as I can go back and look at the data even when we were on the test before SBAC or whatever it was I guess there's four areas that we're looking at talking about are there is it worth you know stating kind of our desire which area we'd be interested in focusing on individually or is it I guess that's my question are we looking at a board at each of the four areas are we going to do kind of like a subcommittee work well I think really there's three because community engagement is an overarching goal that I think will will address or maybe even achieve once we work on these right through working on them I think don't you or do you think we need a specific community engagement team um I don't know that's a big question I don't know I mean I do feel like community engagement is a huge piece of building community rapport and trust and support so I don't know if that's achieved through fostering these different areas or if it's also achieved through a real dedicated look at how we can improve that community engagement yeah I mean that sounds like a valuable pursuit for sure you know above and beyond working through these I do think that working on these different aspects will support community engagement but I do think there's an overarching yeah we can potentially build a structure that allows kind of ongoing community engagement so one of the processes that we talked about this if it's of value identified the problem you know you've got to define a little bit about what it looks like but more importantly you've got to define about what you want to be what the desired state is and then the discussion after you've identified what the desired state is where you want things to be as you do the gap analysis as you sit down and you kind of talk about okay this is where we want to be this is where we're at what are the things that we've got to put place to get there and that's how you kind of do your goal it's a pretty slick process it can go pretty quick so I mean I think committee work is a possibility I think the idea of using this survey that Lynn suggested in just starting to involve the high school staff is a good idea I mean I think the middle school transition we already have a working group and perhaps you know sitting in on that work would be useful for one or two board members I would definitely be happy to be as I started with them last year so so we're going to go ahead and form subcommittees now to work on each of these areas and how many people should we have on each subcommittee in the four areas we have eight board members is two enough or no I don't know I don't know are we going to actually do a committee for community engagement are we going to wait until we've got some stuff together on these other things I would think that community engagement can be kind of a more of an action plan that we agree on as a group here and then follow through with it right we had talked about the first time when we do this we need to actually target the group that we're looking at that we want to contact not just throw it out there for everybody to comment but if we want to talk to the teachers we physically get to talk with them and not just throw it out there so that's maybe we decide kind of an action plan of how we want to pursue this and then we just follow through with it so if we're tied up with the middle school do we want to have a meeting with the middle school parents and send get the whole list and send them out this survey or whatever we need to do but target those parents or if we want to target the community members we do something like that but I think if we have a kind of an action plan that will cover our community engagement we can just use that and direct it to the other three so how do we do that just starting with community engagement how do we develop an action plan that we can all agree on and vote on do we have one person work on it and present to the group do we talk about it right now is that we talk a lot and not a lot gets done so we can talk about this but I think we need to put pen to paper at some point and say this is our action plan and how do we accomplish that and if we and one of the restrictions on accomplishing some of this is that we have board policies that restrict our interactions we have open meeting laws that restrict our actions as far as just having open conversation or ongoing conversation we have to do it in the confines of a public meeting but you have the right to change those policies if they're getting in the way of what you're trying to accomplish that's one of the nice things about the policy governance is you can slide them policies yes but we have the open meetings that's dictated so do we send somebody to work on an action plan that we present and then discuss at our next meeting do we decide on an action plan talk about it and decide on it right now I mean it's a lot to do when we've already been sitting here for two and a half hours three hours it's a lot to say okay now we're going to sit here and hash out a plan I mean really we should do some committee work I think I think two or three people who want to say so what's next how do we move forward on this before assigning ourselves various aspects of the goals is that we do an action plan for the entire thing yeah for our strategic plan and so that's it probably works best two or three of us sitting down together and figuring out like how do we grapple with this you know how do we what are our next steps and what are we going to do and who are we going to assign and like all those sorts of specifics so we need to form some committees it sounds like one we could start with one and make the next steps committee I don't know that sounds good so we're going to make a committee that's going to figure out the next steps for these three strategic planning goals we have as well as the community engagement one but it seems to me the community engagement one I guess maybe I don't understand the community engagement one the community engagement one won't the transition from elementary school won't they be engaging the community wasn't the high school climate be also engaging with the community so that seems to be like that will be part of the action steps for those particular goals I think it's used as a tool in each of those but I think that there has to be what is the tool identifying the demographic you want to engage how are you going to get in touch with that demographic you know who's going to come up with the questions who's going to put the survey together it applies to each of the other three but there has to be a model it would be helpful to have a model it would be helpful and that's why we've identified it as a goal so a model how you would do the community engagement so is there any support from the one that we met with on that strategic planning thanks to the school district do you think there's any benefit in us basically because I think about how I do strategic planning at the hospital and it feels very different than this and I'm just wondering in the school if it's is she going to be beneficial or is that organization going to be beneficial so we don't just grapple and talk if not as we just learned we've got an extra 5000 bucks for development we could do an extra meeting same thing we did for our retreat from six until nine another evening and have her help us out to make those next steps and maybe that's the most efficient use of our time I think that would be beneficial because I'm not very well versed on strategic plans so I can reach out to Susan the same woman probably do it sooner rather than later so we can move ahead how do the rest of you feel about an extra meeting one night that's fine and I do agree I feel like it would be nice to have we were given all this and it was like here but kind of like next okay great now we have this like how do we and maybe what we could do is maybe give her where we're at right now so she can kind of prepare her presentation to what we're really looking for and then we can still keep moving ahead and not have another four hour meeting meeting about a meeting when she certainly brought structure to that meeting but it would be helpful if she could put some of those meat on the bones for us to then advance and not really walk in with a clean slate where we start we can get a summary where we're at right now with our discussions and give that to her before the meeting so she can have a presentation to help us get to where we want to be if you pick one of those three you're considering the community engagement as well and have her facilitate the process to go to completion for one of them then you should be able to mimic that process for the other three that's usually what you use the facilitator for as you get them to come in they go through the process so you learn how to do it if that's of value it's just a suggestion I will reach out to her I'll give her a call tomorrow if we're agreed as to that's the way we want to proceed can we right now decide so I have a few dates in mind like do Monday nights work this Monday the second always does so should we do a Monday evening are there any first third Mondays not third Mondays did the other Mondays work for everyone I will suggest a Monday evening from like six to nine and hopefully we can do it in person like this alright and do we want to like Langston decide on maybe our most important one and have her be prepared to help us soup the nuts to get that one complete in that time I think we should be prepared to suggest that too her I mean I don't just want to hand her back what she helped us come up with and say okay why not she may have a she may have a she might have been through this before okay well this is typically what I do with you know as the next steps as the now what I think it's an important tree number and again I'm a little bit of my hospital hat on here is that we have a lot of opinions but really I think it does come down to the people who are the true experts on this and while we think about what people perceive and how we perceive I mean to me our next best steps are to have some of that feedback from the people involved and I think even bringing in this external support is a great idea but I think to come in with what we have right now and nothing additional isn't going to be that helpful because she's already heard that she heard our discussion even if you like it sounds like the middle school structure has a lot of material behind it there's a lot of stuff you know that's been happening so that to me sounds like almost like ready for prime time but again my opinion on academics and climate and the high school might be very different from Laura's opinion so how do you present that to an external facilitator I did email the survey to all of you just now so that might give you some data to work on the kind of pinpoint or have just an open forum with some of the faculty here because they'll tell you exactly what it is that they consider climate that they'd like to see changed a lot of it's comments in the halls it's the language that they use a lot of it's the races what I've been finding more is that when they're talking climate it's the racism well the teacher's perception of climate might be different do you have a student council they did away with it for some reason and then last year they had a leadership group that Elijah started up that I think is still in place but it's not a council like that student council but there are a lot of student leaders here that could definitely be a part that are voted in that are represented yeah sometimes student leaders they'll are depends on who is elected are different from the kids sometimes the best way to go about that is connect with guidance and to say we're looking for some balanced students that are straight up and open and honest and good to talk to they'll be able to name off a list of them I just feel like the little bit of that work happen to have a better understanding of the issues for us to be able to successfully move forward and my follow up question to that is the creation of this strategic plan what's the timeline for it to be public and complete well so it's supposed to be a three year strategic plan the last one is 2017 to 2020 so you know it could be 2021 so I think we've got time I agree with you we do need to flush these things out but I think time is of the essence I sort of feel like if we had a facilitator help us sort of think through you know sort of like where do we go how do we best use our resources whether there are teachers our students our community to incorporate them into helping us design you know a strategic plan for the district I feel like we could do more of that preparatory work before we involve surveys or students and all these other things it's kind of like a two part meeting with Susan maybe like that how to prepare and maybe to bring her back when we have the information can I do we have the 2017 to 2020 it's on the website it's on the website and before we had Susan Hulson I gave you guys the link to it it's right there available on the website okay and that was a massive strategic plan there were lots of pieces to that and the board didn't do it yeah that was brand we weren't involved in that we had board goals but they were different from the district's strategic plan there were a lot of good things on there there were a lot of things that was interesting on that that when I came in still got completed because there were a lot of things on there that when I was walking through it was like oh wow yeah this is it was spot on so it was good work he did it was just it was a lot sort of a daunting document to look through because usually it's hard right usually it's like three or four columns and it's a couple bullets each yeah and I think it's a misnomer to say it's our strategic planning because it's really it's district why strategic planning and if you're worried on the timing pieces because it may have a budget impact you know usually you try to align it so that it's in a fairly complete form in case there's a budget impact so that we can incorporate into budget planning so you know if you're trying to get it done this year you'd be shooting for your January meeting January because that's when you're going on the budget as a board if not then you can you know work out this year and we get it you know ready to go for the when the budget picks up again next October a year from a year from here we approve it and we wait for the budget piece after yeah if there's a budget there usually is what are the rest of you think do you know do we want to go ahead with a facilitated meeting or do we want to tackle this some other way I feel like the meeting would give us a little bit more direction rather than kind of the what do we want to do next and maybe just help us help steer us and some valuable you know some valuable insight to kind of move forward I agree everyone on board with that okay I'll I'll get back to you as soon as I chat with her anything further on this process Rachel this could be probably the standing agenda item for January I think that should I think we should be aiming for January board self-evaluation Hannah yes I know this happens almost every meeting we get fives but I I except for me being late we were all prepared it was well attended you know I've been really pleased with how many members of the public have been calling in we followed the agenda we kept on topic we were respectful courteous listen to each other side conversations I'm doing five all the way down thank you very much all right do we have an executive session I don't need to do it I would like to have one I've got a personal question comment all right