 Does anybody have adjustments to the agenda? I guess one thing I didn't think about was the ASCII meeting last time, Shannon brought out the idea about that kind of incentives for the teachers to get vaccinated. So you wanna do that under both correspondence or? Sure. Thank you so much. Yeah. All right, is there any public comment at this time? Much public, yeah. All right, the consent agenda, you have four sets of minutes. If anybody wanna make a motion, you can approve them all as a block or separately. Do we need to name a wall or can we just say the consent agenda? I think we can approve them all as a block. Okay, if I make a motion, we approve the minutes of the block of meeting minutes that are listed under the consent agenda. Do we have a second? One second. Any one favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Yeah, so Shannon, do you wanna at the new meeting you brought up your idea about? Sure, I can do that here. So a lot of, we've talked a lot about COVID and the stress that our teachers have been under. I know everyone who's got kids in the system knows that every time one of our kids gets a sniffle they can't go to school. They have a headache, they can't go to school, might be a COVID symptom. And our teachers are getting the same thing. So they've been using up a lot of their sick time or they may have used up a bunch of sick time. Also, we've been talking about whether or not to mandate vaccines whether to do that for adults now that they're fully FDA approved. We can't do that yet for the kiddos because they're still on emergency use authorization. So, and we have SU employees as well as district employees in our building. So at the SU meeting, I had brought up the possibility of trying to incentivize being vaccinated against COVID by saying, okay, well, if you had COVID, if you had presented proof of being vaccinated or you have proof that you were vaccinated and after that vaccination should have been affected you got COVID and were forced to take the five days off, three to five days depending on weekends and things because you couldn't come back to school. Maybe we can forgive that and not make the teachers take their sick time for that. And sort of you did everything that we could have asked of you, you should, you know, you tried to protect yourself and our students and you got COVID anyway and you shouldn't be penalized for that in any way. And that we could maybe, we had talked about at the SU level making that retroactive. It wouldn't be that hard to say, okay, well, your COVID shots were on such and such a day and here's the proof, you know, the PCR tests that you had COVID afterwards, you know, we can go back and forgive those days and then do it going forward. So that was the proposal that I had put in front of the SU board instead of an all out sort of adult vaccine mandate. So yeah, the discussion there the thought was that we go back to each individual board and find out what the thought is from the boards about whether to proceed with that or not. Does anybody have thoughts about it? Go ahead, Chris. So yeah, I mean, I think in general, it's a, I mean, I think it's a good idea. And I don't know if this probably got brought up with the board meeting maybe, but one question I would have maybe is, you know, at the end of somebody's time like at the end of a teacher's time, did they get paid out at all for their sick days or the sick days just sort of get reabsorbed? Is there any financial liability for the school district for like any payout of sick days? You know, again, I'm, you know, I think it's a good idea, but I just, you know, just thinking of questions that we may need to consider. We don't pay out for sick days, Chris. Yeah, so given them back their sick days, I mean, there's no, is there any other potential liability for the district or the SU? I mean, that would be, that was the one thought that I had was just, is this something that we then turn around and have to pay back to somebody when they retire? But it's a small thing to think about. I don't think it sounds like a bad idea. It does seem like a good idea to me too. So I guess we can express our support at the SU level for it. Yeah, I mean, particularly since it's sick days and not like vacation days. So it's, you know, it's reasonable. All right. The other thing I would say for Board comment would be that we do have two seats that don't have anybody running for them. One in Bethel for the one year term and Chris's three-year term in Royalton. So, you know anybody who might be interested in being a write-in? We should try and find somebody. Otherwise we'll have to appoint them after the fact. So, yeah. Think about it. And if you know of anybody, Shana, you're muted. Sorry. I'm assuming that means that Rodney and Peggy are running again. I was just wondering if we knew all who all was running? Yes. Yes. Great. But we don't have anybody else running at the moment. At least we have a quorum. Yeah. I was a little worried about that. All right. Any other Board comment? We'll move on to the celebration of learning. Yeah. So I can just give an introduction. So every month we're hoping to bring to you a project that we're working on. Next month we're gonna have elementary students here talking about a proposal that I heard today that was just really amazing about chickens on the Bethel campus. That seems to have a really, a ton of planning going on across the grade at the Bethel campus around the chicken. That they're gonna come and share with you. Their proposal was really informational. And so I just provide that as an example. We're hoping to hit all different grade levels throughout the year. And so this is something we'll have all monthly. They kick off our meetings. And a principal is gonna share with you right now. There's a school-wide book read occurring at the middle school. I was gonna have him talk to you folks about. And some of these will be video recorded presentations from students and staff. I know that the elementary students plan to try to come in person next month. They're really excited to see the board in person, which I thought was great. So Owen, I'll kick it over to you because this is the middle school district tonight. Thank you. So just to give a context, White River Valley Middle School plans and selects a book which the whole middle school reads yearly. And it's in order to create a sense of community through shared knowledge and experience and to build that common foundation of prior knowledge. And I'm reading some of this, but it's usually about important social issues. And every student and teacher are expected to read the book through a combination of read alouds and independent reading time. And teachers lead the discussions with activities to help the students understand better and explore the text to make sure they're getting it. And every student receives a copy of the book to keep and extra books are always available at the school. And just so you know, we've ordered a set of books for the board and Jamie already has one. This year's book is the best at it, which is a book about a seventh grader. And the seventh grader, there's a lot of issues in it. But one of the things that we heard from students last year really clearly was that they wanted to have more understanding and support for the LGBTQ community in our school. This book addresses that and several other issues. One of the things that it does is this boy who's the central figure of the book is grappling with his identity. And he comes from a conservative East Indian immigrant family and he's in Indiana and it takes on a whole bunch of pieces and tells a very nice story. At the same time, he and his grandfather have some nice relationship and that's the intergenerational piece and there's an anxiety piece and the kid exhibits some OCD behavior. So there's lots of stuff going on. Last year we read Ghost Boys and you may have heard about it. And that was talking about a boy who had been killed by a black boy who had been killed by a white police officer and then he talks as a ghost to the police officer's daughter throughout the whole book. The year before we did the benefits of being an octopus, which is written by a Vermont author and placed in Vermont the story. And it's about students struggling with or living in poverty and also some substance abuse issues and some family and domestic violence. So these are not easy topics, but they're important topics. And I'm happy to say, I'm proud to say that we're doing this and we'll continue to do it. One of the goals we have is in the future to have students lead community book-wide conversations about this. So we'll be working with that with our community schools coordinator. There it is. Does anybody have any questions for talking about that? We'll move on to the superintendent report. So yeah, you have my report in hand. I just also wanted to give the board an update that around the principal hiring update. So the search committee has called through the candidates and selected candidates for interview. They're gonna be interviewing candidates tomorrow night. I've charged the committee with forwarding finalists, either a finalist or finalist, that they are really excited and clearly believe that they encompass the leadership attributes that we're looking for on the next principal. And that if they're not feeling a consensus around that, not to forward someone. And so I mentioned that because part of the reason why we advertise early is if we didn't feel like we had the candidates that we wanted that we could always repost. So I do think that there's viable candidates that they're gonna be interviewing tomorrow night. And we've scheduled site visits for Thursday, just so you know. We put an invite out to the community for a community forum Thursday evening. And the site visits will encompass meeting with students, meeting with faculty. There'll be a faculty staff forum Thursday afternoon. There'll be an interview with me for an hour and 15 over lunch. And then if we'll be collecting feedback throughout, we'll have Google forums that go out to collect feedback. And then I would be ready to make a recommendation for hire if I feel like we found the right fit. And so I share that to say to the board, one thing I would like us to keep in mind just cause it is a competitive market right now is that if we do find the right candidate, I think it would be who less to have a special meeting next week, even if that's challenging for you to interview and then go into executive session to decide whether or not you feel confident in the recommendation. So I just, I wanted to put that out there because it is a very competitive market right now in regards to securing strong administrators. So that's one. The other thing I just wanted to highlight is, oh, and the panel has got students, Shannon's your board rep. We've got both of your other principals, Principal Bradley, Principal Bowen, faculty and staff and a parent. So it's, I think it does have a good cross-section of stakeholders on the committee. The other thing I wanted to say is that that we've started to publicize that we will have the SU office open, Andrew knows this, but I wanted to share with the rest of the board. The SU office will be open and available during our informational meetings both on the 21st and the 28th. That's on the signs out front. I've also got Ray and Kate looking to put a push-off to communicate to the greater community that if they need access to our informational meeting you can access it virtually that they can come there. So that will be the site that we will provide that from. That doesn't mean, I think it's better if the board's actually all virtual because I think even if they're there I'll go from my office. I think it's just a better presentation. Okay. So I wanted the board to note that. And then the other thing I'll add is, I continue to get into your buildings one more. And today I just wanna put a real shout out to the fifth graders at Bethwell Elementary. The presentation they put together in regards to this chicken proposal was pretty amazing. And there was a lot of research done and forethought and I certainly made my day today. That was great. And there will be a letter coming out tomorrow from out of the SU office that highlights some of the recommended changes from the Agency of Education and Department of Health. It also will provide all of our schools that's current vaccination rates. We are not at 80% at any of our schools right now as far as student population eligible for vaccination. We've aligned to the Department of Health work and thus far, I think it has served us well. I think we can say that we've always aligned to it. So I think that that's the route we would continue to move forward with and just know that there will be an update letter to the community with that. And also all of our students are gonna be provided take home kits over the break and we're gonna encourage them to use them prior to returning. The other good news is, I don't know if you have been continuing to check the COVID-19 data dashboard. We did get over our surge. Our numbers are much more stable and we seem to be in a better place across the SU in regards to COVID-19 positivity. And I'll take any questions folks have. The only other thing I'll mention is that we have, I want the board to be aware that Principal McCracken's been working with his team around navigating some substance use on campus. I think Principal McCracken's doing a really good job with his team to tackle this issue and that one of the things I've asked Principal McCracken is to work with me around addressing a letter to the community that will be coming forthcoming. You'll always get a preview prior to the community around the steps we're taking both proactively and reactively to address substance use on campus. I think it always behooves the school that when we recognize that we have an issue that we're forthright and transparent around it. And there's enough of a concern for me to feel like it elicits that we communicate this with a greater community to let them know that we are aware and that we are taking appropriate action to address it. So I just, I wanted the board to be aware of that too. And I think there's enough of that out in the community of parents that you might catch wind of some of what's going on. A lot of it's rumor and speculation but there is some basis and some unpleasant incidents that have happened on campus. Likewise, we're also playing before the end of the week to meet with all the students on campus and address the issue. Thanks for keeping us up to date on that. Would you like us to figure out a time for a special meeting? I think that'd be great if we could, Andrew. Yeah, then we'd at least have one tentative. Yeah, that would be good. And we can do that in future agenda or seven years for meeting dates later but I think it would behoove us to figure out a date. All right, we can say that for later though. Yeah. Okay, any other questions for Jamie? All right, we'll move on to the principles. So I'll pick up off. It is spirited here. I think that the middle school and high school are following our lead, but today's time for today. I'm not sure if the middle school and high school are quite as cool as they are. So, it's hard I choose to say today and excited about all the spirit going on this week. I would say the addition, this spirit week is that the elementary has asked for donations for our local food shelf. So that's been really nice seeing kids coming in with donations. So we're trying to do some random after crime that's in addition to our spirit week. I would also add that our social emotional team is then looking at some of Ross Green's work and he is super well known for helping targeted level kids who need problem solving skills. So we're looking at training ourselves up on that model and we're doing a book study together right now on that. So slow and I appreciate that one of the last chapters of the book reminds us that maybe it does take like two years for change to like you've seen. So you'll probably be hearing more of that as we go along. And then just we're wrapping up our assessment windows which we're gonna talk about all that data in a little bit. But that's been kind of like a big pro for us and shifting services for kiddos based on this assessment. And then I'll be quiet so the other two can weigh in. You have to unmute if we're gonna hear you away every now and then. Yeah, it's always good to have a kind, critical friend nearby. And in this section and we break it down in these three goals like every month. And I just added the restorative piece in here but I know that Reed's gonna wanna talk about the Green Team and I'll talk a little more in the next two goals sections. Yeah, so we're doing an assembly on Friday kind of second round of our lead them up verification. We'll also recognize students who made the honor roll first semester that information also be published in the Herald on Thursday. Go back to our second goal. You want me to talk about that one? I can talk about how I can jump in on the front end of that if you want. And that the middle school data team is working to tie transferable skills to the pod work we're doing. And we had Chris Ward from UBEI has been leading all of our teams and we've had two really great sessions with him and we're gonna come out of that with some survey questions for kids, teachers, staff, and also parents. We're looking forward to that data coming in. You two wanna talk about the other data pieces and then Reed and I can talk about that last piece about the meeting we had at the end of the week last week. I think just the Chris Ward UBEI accepted what's informing really this whole section and so the specific math goals and the elementary is right now kind of aligned with the implementation of the new math program. So then Reed and I and a bunch of other folks met on Friday last week. We had a half day in service and we met the front end of it and got some subs for people. I think there's about a dozen of us and Jeanne Phillips from Terrent. And on there also helping let us through a conversation about what is flexible pathways for us. Reed, you wanna add some stuff to that if you don't mind? Yeah, so it was a big visioning session kind of looking out to three years from now and what we might aspire to and looking at what that work looks like along the way, starting with where we are at currently and what some obstacles might be towards getting where we'd like to be in three years. And then the afternoon, the high school team continued to meet. We spent the afternoon working on our rollout of our personal learning plans for this year and what that might look like into the future with the help of Ben Boyington, our new flexible pathways coordinator. And going on to goal three, we're, I like that we're spooling up our annual school climate surveys. So that's coming to folks too. That's gonna be out said to all the folks that are connected to the school. And that comes through the PBIS work that we do, MTSS. And anybody wanna add anything to that because we're heading into our benchmark monitoring report in one second, but I just wanna make sure we hit the pieces we wanna do in the rest of this. I would just say that the information from the school climate survey is really important and it's where we actually surveyed kids specifically. Some of you know some of our youngest kids are teachers and then they reach out to families. So I'm hopeful that this year we get a little more engagement in those surveys than we did last year, but it is important information and helps us adjust what we're doing based on that. So if you get it at home, please encourage like that to respond. Yes, thanks. And again, there's our newsletter which we attach each month, and you know that comes out every other week. And Mary Shell, our community school coordinator with her contract began on Monday and she begins on our campus in the Bethel campus tomorrow morning. We're looking forward to welcoming her aboard. And then we move into our benchmark, universal benchmark monitoring data report. So I can kick this off and just remind the board you can go to the next slide that the SU board adopted these indicators for success under our three overarching goals, which we're calling our roadmap for success, which is about forming a comprehensive multi-tiered system of supports that really ensures all kids are being challenged and supported to reach their greatest potential, implementing a pre-K through 12 proficiency-based learning system. That focuses on multiple pathways toward graduation and personalized learning. And then finally, really looking to play off of each other's strengths and supporting each other's weaknesses around becoming a system that's interdependent, but also really looks to try to feel more student voice. And so those we've created indicators, for example, like number three, I believe that that speaks to capstone projects. I can't see my eyes are not that good. But I think the number three speaks to capstone projects implemented across the SU by 2025, which I think would really allow for us to invite our community in and for our community to get a much better sense of what our students are no understanding of what we do. You can go to the next slide. And so part of the assessment framework that Anna's gonna talk to you about is talking about how do we progress monitor our schools and our SU annually to ensure that we're making appropriate rates of growth across the cohorts to reach our 2025 goals of either being at or exceeding the state expectations on our Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium test, those state summative assessments that are aligned to the Common Core State Standards. And so Anna's gonna talk to you tonight about why we assess and the different type of assessments we use. The data that's presented to you tonight should be predictors to how our students will do in the spring on the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium. It's also a way for us to measure individual student growth. And so when the principals talk about doing work with Upper Valley Educators Institute, it's about informing universal instruction. I think it's also getting into best practices around ensuring all students grow, not just the students who need to intermatch their supports, but also our students that are at the top third. And so know that that is the work that's underway across their buildings. I've seen some of the evidence of the work that's happening in regards to that. And for example, like the high school math team, Anna and I are actually meeting with them after break. They had some really good ah-has after analyzing their data and some actionable next steps as an example. So, and those were universal next steps, not just students need intervention or not. And so that's the type of outlook that we're trying to do with this data. Anna, it's all yours. Great, thank you. Good evening, everyone. I'm happy to be here to talk to you all about one of the pieces that we use to measure progress across our schools. And whenever we present academic data, I think it's really important to sort of ground ourselves in the idea of why we assess. You've seen the slide up in front of you and understand and be reminded of the different parts of our assessment framework that we use so that it's sort of clear that the data that we are looking at tonight is not the only piece of data that teachers and other educators in the book building and principals and myself are looking at. There's a lot of different pieces. And so we'll go through a little bit, some of that just to remind us of sort of the larger landscape in which this sits. But there's a reason why we have this data also and why we present it. So we'll talk through that. But I think a lot about sort of a balanced assessment system that provides different kinds of information depending on who's going to use it. And so teachers who are working with students every day have all different types of data needs. And some of that is really simple data like a thumbs up or thumbs down on whether students sort of grasp the concept that was just taught or the direction or anything. All of that is called formative assessment data. And that can really inform a teacher's next move. It can inform sort of the next class period. It can form the next day. That's a lot harder data to collect and share in a forum like this, because it's pretty rapid and they're often, they're moving in different ways. It can be exit tickets that students fill out at, at the high school level, it looks very different. But that in essence is probably some of the most important data that gets collected and used on a really regular basis and informed sort of instruction that's happening. We also have data like this that's state, that's sort of seasonal benchmark data. And that gives us these really important checkpoints across the year. And we're looking at the same kind of information across all of our schools. Thank you. And you can sort of see that will give us information about sort of how whole cohorts their students are doing, whether our sort of our curriculum and our instruction is matching sort of the expectations for the year and provide us information that helps us make decisions sort of system-wide. Though I will say also the assessments that the teachers gave over the course of January that we'll look at the day to day that also has their student level data embedded in there. And so they're able to look at, which standards and which proficiencies our students are meeting, which ones they're still working on, what do we think, how do we think these students are gonna do in the spring on the state summative? And so I think it's important just to know that all of that information is constantly walked out. We are getting better and better at being able to use that information and know what it tells us and maybe what it doesn't tell us and be able to use it in ways that can help them. Again, inform instruction and make decisions about what each individual student needs, what classrooms need and what grade levels and schools need across the district and across the SU. And so let me go to the next slide just to give you a little bit of reminder in some of these key terms, education, we are awfully good at all of our acronyms. And so for today, for the purpose of today and tonight we'll, we talk about ELA or Literacy, Reading and Writing. And so that is one of the main assessment areas. We'll also talk about STAR 360, that's the computer adaptive benchmark assessments that we use with the same ones we used from kind of first through 10th grade in the fall or third through 10th grade on the reading side and so that's common. We computer adaptive means that the questions are adjusting as students answer them so that if a student starts getting a couple of them right, the questions will get harder. If they start missing a couple of the questions will get easier. It's still measuring the same proficiencies but it's a way of really targeting in on what the students know and getting a really accurate measure without having to give each question, each student 200 questions. It's sort of an efficiency way of getting at where student understanding currently is. And then SBAC is, Jamie already talked about that's the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium that's generally referred to as the state summative. And I sometimes just stay away from the particular test because those can sometimes change on us if the state makes a different decision but most often a state summative is part of our general landscape of assessments that we are keeping track of. So I think if you go to the next slide, we've got, these are just a little bit more blown up the academic indicators that were talked about on that roadmap to success. So we are, although they're not assessed on the state summative, we are very paying close attention to grades K through two or even pre-K through second grade and just understanding where their foundational skills and literacy and math are. And we're trying out a number of different tools this year in different buildings with an idea of getting something that will give us or something or a couple of other things that will give us a good idea of where our students are and what's gonna set them up for success in the rest of schooling. And so that's an important part of our work. You'll see a little bit of first and second grade data today, but that is an area where we're still looking to find out what are the tools that are gonna give us the most information about where kids' knowledge is and where they could use some more instruction around key concepts. The next slide, we'll talk a little bit more about grades three through nine. And there are those are the grades that are assessed on the state summative assessment. And so we've got our own goals set around our average scale score, which you'll see a bunch of tonight, exceeding the benchmark, the state benchmark in ELA. And that's based off our current performance, which is across the SU is tracking pretty close to the state. And by 2025, we wanna have our average above the state. And then math, which is tracking a little bit below our goal for that same time period is to meet that state benchmark and be right on par with the rest of the state. And we're thinking a lot about those students who are on the state summative performing at the lowest level and wanting to reduce that number by as much as possible. Our goal by 2025 is in half. And again, we use this benchmark in fall and winter to be predictive of performance in the spring. And I think that's all the sort of the background information. So I'll turn it over to the principals now. They'll talk about the results from again, this one assessment that we've done in the fall and again in the winter. So September and January. And I'm here to answer any more questions or add some additional information as we go through the slide. But I will hand it over, I think to Andrew. So I think I'm just kicking off by saying that this is the whole school in a nutshell right there. So I think it's easier to look at the next few slides. So specific to elementary, I think, sorry, I'm not sure I'm seeing far away yet, of course. So you can read the slides for yourself. It's fine. But what I feel is that my takeaways are is that we've done some great job making growth in grades one through three. Really some amazing growth specifically in third grade. And even though there wasn't a ton of growth in fourth grade, we know that they started off the year above the fall winter benchmark anyways. So we're really happy about, I think the time and effort we've been putting into improving some of our literacy work is showing off here for us. We are just now starting to look more at our writing assessments and how we're looking at writing, teaching writing and assessing writing. So just knowing that what's coming up next. And most recently we did a K to 12 right for the whole school. So trying to turn our attention to that going forward. And I'm happy to answer questions about the specific tables that I think they kind of teach for themselves. I think we can keep on going. Yeah, the next slide is a middle school reading slide. And you can see that our sixth grade and eighth grade our sixth grade made a bunch of progress, which is awesome. Still not matching the state's numbers. And I'm gonna skip the seventh grade for a minute. And the eighth grade has done an excellent job of going past the state standard but also increasing their own scores. So back to the seventh grade, this is part of one of our bigger concerns. The fact that also even that our winter score dropped below our fall score is very concerning. And we've met several times on it and on helping me and the teachers figure out ways to, we really wanna attack this and address this in a way that makes sure that we are making impact on this. And my takeaway on this is that the seventh grade needs a lot of support, obviously. And we don't wanna just like shift all of our focus for one year into one year, but we don't want them to fall any further behind because we know that hurts people in the long run. But then the high school I think is next for reading. So you can see from this graph that progress is being made, that the 10th grade made substantial progress towards expected growth over this time period while our ninth grade made a little bit less growth. Our math department spent two hours on Friday gonna diving into that data and has made a bunch of recommendations for everything from how we do a better job collecting data. We missed a lot of students, both in the fall and in the winter, still have a number of kids who are out sick that we are having trouble catching up with to get the test taken. We saw a good number of students, just students who did well were proficient in the fall who spent less than 15 minutes taking the test in the winter, and there's no way they're gonna perform as well when they're not investing themselves in it with less than 15 minutes. So, we're talking with Honda about the high school testing window because we're squeezed into a week right after the students who spent three days in midterm exams. So it's understandable why ninth and 10th graders, especially ninth graders who are new to the whole concept of midterms are feeling a little bit of testing fatigue there with just how the testing window lines up for them. And I can give just an overview on this. This is obviously a lot of numbers, but I think sometimes when we take some of the numbers away, it doesn't make as much sense, but this is really the key number here is the column all the way on the right, which is the growth rate of each of these grade levels in the district compared to the state expectation for this window from fall to winter. So a one is sort of the expected growth based on what the state expectations are in the fall and the winter. So we love seeing anything that's at a one or above. You see a two or you can see that those students on average were growing at twice the rate that the expectations were. And so I think that's great work. Right around a one is fine. Sometimes when grade levels start already above, the expectation of fall, they're not gonna grow necessarily as fast as they pick up the new concepts. Owen has already addressed the seventh grade. So that's the one place we're seeing something that's below one and the ninth grade as well. We had just, there was a low participation in that and I think that not necessarily alignment for why are we doing this at the high school? So those are all things that we talked about and that we're working on. The other part that's important and you'll see this when we looked at the math as well is that column that's second from the right, the state expected growth, that actually gives you a really good indication of how much we're expecting our students to learn over the course of the year and particularly here from fall to winter and how that changes over time. So as our younger students at the top of the chart, grades three and four, that's, they're expected to grow between 15 and 22 scale score points over those months from fall to winter where in grades eight, nine and 10, those numbers dropped to five, four and one. It's not that, right? It's not that they're not learning a lot in those grade levels, but what these tests measure, a lot of those sort of found more foundational skills the things we expect students to know and so the numbers get smaller. And again, it's not to sort of diminish anything that's happening in our older grade levels, but again, to just show how hard our students are expected to learn particularly in their elementary years. I mean, this will be even more apparent when we look at the math graph where we've also, we've assessed down to first grade. So we can move on to the math information now. Unless there are questions on this, I can pause. Owen. Yeah. I'm just baffled by the seventh grade. I feel like it's same teachers, same sort of setup. They didn't, I mean, they didn't have the excuse that maybe the ninth grade did of doing this with the midterms. Can you comment on what thoughts are going on there or how we're gonna focus on bringing them up and keeping the other, the sixth and the eighth graders going? Sure, to a point anyway, Shannon, because we wanna be careful. And the other thing I want the board to know and the public that I don't want to make any excuses. I think several of, most of you know me, I won't make excuses. I will own this and I don't have an answer in detail for you, Shannon. I feel like, and Jamie and I had a good talk about this a couple of times now. We need to attack this. This is not something that we just look at and say, oh my gosh, what happened? Yeah. So I don't have a lot of detail on why I could talk about COVID and social emotional, but we need to check this and go after it hard. That's the best I can do tonight. I hope that's okay. Yeah. As long as somebody's like really taking this as the canary in the coal mine and saying, oh, there is a problem there. We need to, yikes. We are and we do. And we also have some concern like you're expressing, but we'll come back here and explain where we're going and what we're doing. Okay. This is the general combined math piece. So you get the look at this of like, you know, it's good. It's going up, up, up. Lovely, lovely. But there's some gaps and we go first to Andra. And I think one thing that maybe isn't right in here, but I would say this out loud is that this year we started a vertical curriculum team, which I think helps us not be so elementary specific, middle school specific and high school specific. And I'm hopeful that as that team eats more, that will help some math scores and all the scores that we see each other as, you know, one school. And, you know, I don't think the teachers are so used to meeting like that. So I think that will be helpful. Okay. So I would say, oh my God, that's horrible. I hear my own voice. That we're really happy in the elementary that everybody basically has shown some growth and we do recognize that proficiency begins to taper off at fourth grade. We know that maybe a little developmentally the thing, but we try to like really focus with the kids on how important it is to take these assessments very seriously and that we use them to help direct their learning life forward. So we try to instill that in them. Again, so we're doing our work with Chris Ward through UVEI, specifically the elementary. We're looking at fractions and geometry at the full elementary school and how we're gonna work to improve out those scores. It's historically something we needed to work on and something you can like look backwards and see to the grade level that we need to work on. The foundation was still to work on. Certainly we're not doing comprehensive fractions in kindergarten necessarily, but and then again, that we looked it out like our three year plan with our new math program. So this is just year one and we're just trying to learn the essential components of the program, but year two next year, we're gonna be talking more about the enrichment opportunities and components and then your three is gonna be focused two years out on just expanding our instructional practices. And I think another fantastic piece that's new and exciting for our SU is this math as a second language class that's being offered for any teachers of mathematics. And so I have, you have a couple of teachers that have accessed that. It's a much higher level order thinking class that's really stretching teachers that I think is gonna help them long-term in their practice. So I'm excited to have that continually offered and having more people be able to access that initiative. Sorry, Shannon. Hey, I just maybe for next year because I know we're still like new in some of these math programs. And I would love to see some representation of and I don't know if you shifted a year because as the seventh grade goes up now they're eighth graders or something but like if you could impose like a red line at the end that says this is where everyone was last year because these numbers, to me, short this all looks good but we have these discussions this year and we discuss, okay, we're gonna try to do better for the seventh grade, we're gonna maybe look at at the timing of the testing for the ninth grade because it's locked in there but next year we're gonna have this presentation and we won't remember any of this and whether we were close to benchmark like are these numbers great compared to where we were two or three years ago being closer to the state average? I just, I wish there was some sort of historical perspective. Andra? Yeah, thank you, Shannon. I appreciate that. I think I entirely, I totally agree and it's part of the work that we definitely wanna undertake as we bring more consistency across sort of all the schools and the assessments that we're doing. I think some of it for this year why we have not presented data that way has been because of being in the middle of the pandemic. It can be problematic to sort of present data against a year that has, well, even this year feels incredibly, incredibly disrupted but I know the state has asked us not to do any comparison between sort of with the state summative between last year and this past year and other years and so we've sort of followed that same guidance but I do think, I mean, I do think it's valuable and one of the reasons why we share the scale score now also is that it does give you a sense of where students are heading from grade level to grade level. So if you see sort of a grade level where their scale score in the winter and the spring actually starts to approach what the next grade level is that will start to give you an idea but I understand it's not completely the what you're asking for as a picture and we are certainly gonna be working towards that and there's the caveat just around this year the hesitation to do some comparisons when school has been so disrupted. Yeah, and Lord knows these graphs are hard enough to read like adding more lines does not help but if there was maybe like, hey and now I'm gonna flash this red line this was last year and this orange line was last the year before and see we're actually going in the right direction next slide. I just wanna know and moving forward. So, thank you. How many years do we have star 360 data for? Like if you want to- Do you hear that question Anna? I don't know how far back we can go because after we move that it, Anna do you know how far back we can go? I wanted to pick up mostly merged if that changed that. I think that's it. Yes, I am not exactly sure. I sort of dug a little bit but I've not tried to untangle all of that. We are looking at having some better support around one data database in which it would be much easier to sort of track students as they go through and see how they're doing it both as an individual students and as grade level cohort. So I think that is separate from sort of star 360 but something that sort of looks across all of our data and that's what I'm working on over to try to bring in to capture this data and moving forward. So we move on to the math in the middle school and you thought you had questions before Shannon. So these lines were so far off that green line which is the state expectation and it's unacceptable. And if you see it's still the six everybody made a little growth on their scores but it's not enough and we know this and we see it in the graph of grades three through or in the case of math one through 10 and 12 that there's a gap that occurs in late elementary into middle school and high school and it looks like at the 12th grade it somehow gets closed again. This is unacceptable and we are attacking this hard and fast. Do you have something to share with us as far as I mean like you talked about fractions being kind of a weakness is there other, you know like what are they not knowing in grade six that's showing up in this scale score that they should be knowing like what are we not getting? I don't have that right away here and Andrew but we can get that information for you. I understand what you're asking though where's the gap specifically in what operations or where is it that we're making that gap occur? Yeah, it feels like if you put the elementary headed into the grade six it's got this curve that it's flapping out. So that after like grade three even where we need to be attacking it earlier than six. Well, I do think that the elementary has done that with moving towards a agreed upon program and that's gonna help immediately. I think the middle school needs to do similar and I'm not gonna speak for the high school but I'm gonna say that we need to line all that up and that goes back to that vertical teaming piece that Andrew mentioned and the math piece is I mean, I feel like we picked that up when Jamie showed up. So we're working hard on that and we have good faculty and good staff and tons of resources now and we're moving forward with that. I mean, in our system of board knows in our scope and sequence grade four is really when we're starting to introduce division and fractional reasoning. And my sense is that our automaticity of facts and multiplicative reasoning is not there, right? And so that's what we're working on there. And then that builds into division and then fractional reasoning to decimals and percents. And if we don't have those solid, it is going to haunt us. So I think that what's happening is is that that gap just getting wider and wider. And so Owen and I definitely have had conversations. Owen's been talking with his teachers and I think it's a, this is, intervention is not gonna fix this. I think that that is the takeaway I'd like the board to hear. This is universal instruction. If 80% of our students aren't meeting the benchmark you don't have enough intervention to catch those students up, right? So this has to be explicit instruction, universal instruction, and that's how we're attacking it. Yes, we have intervention in place too, but we won't fix this over time via intervention. One of the things that we didn't really, we were emphasizing reading and reading intervention. It's really year one for us in regards to that. And so I think it's important for the board to remember that. And I think in general, we've gotta make certain that we're teaching math explicitly, making certain we have enough and long enough math instructional blocks, which we do now at the elementary. That was a concern we had. And we have really splintered skills because in some of our buildings and including in RUD, we had several different programs being used at the elementary school until this year. And so a student didn't have a clear scope and sequence in mathematics. And so now we have students who have splintered skills in gaps in their mathematical understanding that we've gotta look at us. So this is gonna be a marathon, but it's one that I wish we had taken on a while ago, but it's certainly one that we're focused on now. When will we get more numbers on this? Do they do another spring assessment or is it just in the fall? Yep, they will do another spring assessment, Sharon. Okay. So I'll be interested to see where those are. And then next year when we have the discussion, again, it's important that we bring up this year's numbers and then show a slide with next year's numbers so we can hopefully see some progress. Yeah, we're needing to catch up kind of with this sort of slide. Like do we have flexibility in the schedule to provide more academic time in general? You know, I do love all the initiatives that we're doing in that middle school, but just anecdotally from hearing my son's schedule, like it does seem like there's a lot of time that's not academic time, which, you know, when we have a deficit like this to come up, you know, is... Owen, do you want to talk about that? That's certainly a conversation you and I have been having. Sure, yeah. We, you know, there was almost... And I'm going to use my language here. There was almost like a grace or an agreement that... Ruth, maybe you did. Sorry about that. There was, my words, there was sort of a grace we gave to ourselves in the middle school and Jamie agreed to it. And I think we need to go back to that of, you know, we can't just try to balance a project-based curriculum with a skills base when there's all this gap. It's unfair to the kids to move them along in their cohort groups without having those skills. They're just going to continue to do poorly and we know when kids do poorly that they tend to further disengage. So I'm with you and we know this and we need to change our schedule to address this and we're talking about it right away. Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, good question. And I think if that's it, we go to high school now and math and then we will go to the growth rate chart. You know, one of the things I've talked about with the math teachers is how the, you know, the state benchmark expects all ninth graders to be taking algebra one. And so when we start the year in September, you know, many of them are prepared for pre-algebra. And, you know, we're asking to take a test on material that they haven't learned yet. The same holds for some students we get to grade 10 and they're not in geometry and yet the test has geometry on them and is expecting that from everyone. So one of the proposals at the math department as pulled forward is breaking algebra one into a two-year program. So you do the first half of algebra one in ninth grade and will allow teachers to really go in depth into the basic skills that, you know, frankly, the students aren't ready to tackle the first weeks of September when they enter ninth grade. So that's a piece of the puzzle is how do we remediate for students not being ready to access the expected ninth grade curriculum that the STAR 360 test is asking students to perform against. How does that, I mean, our goal I think as an organization should be our kids are ready for algebra one. Yeah, yeah. So is this a plan for current students to catch them up? Or is this a plan moving forward because it sounds like if you're gonna stretch algebra one to two years, you're never gonna get anyone to calculus like by 12th grade. Well, we start some ninth graders in geometry. So there's a cohort of about, you know, every year 12 to 15 students who enter ninth grade ready to take geometry. And those students nail this test. We look at their scores and they're often several grade levels above what's expected. But then there's a growing number of students who are struggling in pre-algebra. So much so that we, you know, with the creation of our personalized learning classroom, we've actually basically created a basic math skills class because some students aren't ready to tackle pre-algebra when they get to ninth grade. But their scores are all part of what you're seeing here. Yeah, but this, I guess my concern is the state average, the rest of the state is figuring this out. Like, we need to, from first grade, I mean, I know you're starting out, you're only seeing ninth grade here, but we need to be getting our kids ready so that they're coming in ninth grade ready to take this test. But rest of everyone is ready, why aren't we? I would contend that the state benchmarks were developed before COVID and there hasn't been any adjustment for the loss of learning that's happened over the last 20 months when the number of classes and the number of minutes that students have had to learn math has dramatically declined. Okay, that's fair. So if I could just, so the goal would be that we clearly articulate that we want our students to have the prerequisite skills to access Algebra 1 in ninth grade. That should be our goal. So I'm with you there, Shannon, just so you can, I'm hearing you and I really appreciate it. That should be the goal. I think we are gonna need to do some, a level of like universal intervention to provide our students some access to intervention to get them there. I would not want that to be a permanent thing that we just say that that's what we have. I think if you say your expectation as prerequisite skills to Algebra 1, then 80 to 85% of our students should be ready for Algebra 1, right? And then we may know that 15% may need something different to get them there for 10th grade. But I think any conversations we're having in regards to the math department needs to be, where do we expect our students to be and then how do we backwards design from there? And that vertical alignments, the work that's underway, but I would say in general had not been done well in that. And so no, the goal would be definitely Algebra 1. I think we're gonna need something, a middle ground to get us there. I think it's also ensuring that we're preparing our students and that students have access to universal instruction that gets them ready for Algebra 1 in grades five. And that's where the backwards design piece comes in. And I think in general, one of our goals should be, is our 85% of our students ready for Algebra 1, we're gonna need grade. Yeah, Chris? So yeah, I guess we're ready to follow up on it. So warm too. I mean, so is it with the plan B to be offering like a Algebra 1 part one cohort and Algebra 1 sort of regular cohort and then the geometry piece too? I mean, is that like, are we sort of, I mean, is it like, is that how it's sort of breaking down is it like a third, a third, a third that are going into those different areas or what's the... So there isn't a plan yet. The math department spent two hours looking student by student at what our winter data shows. And they looked at the number of students who are currently in pre Algebra and Algebra and the number of students who are in Algebra who aren't doing well in Algebra. We see the same thing in geometry. And one of the things that we'll discuss is whether it makes sense and there's a rationale for having an Algebra 1A in an Algebra 1B class and doing it over two years. In which case, if that were to happen, we would probably get rid of the pre Algebra class and start everyone in Algebra 1A so that they're actually starting Algebra earlier but taking more time to progress through it. As opposed to the model we have right now is that everyone jumps into Algebra 1 in the same place and if they're struggling to keep up with the pace, they take a math lab class where they get extra time to get support to access the Algebra. If you put everybody into that Algebra 1 part one, then aren't you hamstringing the kids that were ready for Algebra 1 by saying but now you're on a two year track for this class instead of the standard one year. I mean, this is something we sort of deal with at the college level too with things like pre Calc and Calculus or not Calculus but like our pre Calc got split into two semesters and it helped the lower students that weren't ready for like a full blown pre Calc class but then half the cohort though, they're ready for pre Calc and then they're in this class that's just sort of review and then they get slammed the next semester because they expect it to be easy review stuff like what they had before and now you're putting kids on a two year track instead of a one year track. So Chris, just so the board's clear we would have Algebra 1 year long and then if we went with this proposal we would have a two year Algebra section as well. It wouldn't be in place of Algebra 1. So you would have kids testing into one or the other? Or with other data too and teacher recommendations. Right, recommendations for kids but yes, so. And students would continue in ninth grade to be able to take geometry. And so about over a quarter of our ninth graders this year are in geometry this year. And that would continue. Is that just a choice that they have or? Yeah, I mean, whether they choose to do the extra work to be ready for geometry or not is a choice. Or those students that have already passed Algebra 1 say metrics as an eighth grader. Owen might be able to correct me if I'm wrong but I believe students are choosing an eighth grade to push themselves into Algebra so they'll be ready to take geometry as ninth graders. That makes sense. So they could pursue a more rigorous math pathway in high school so that they would get the calculus by 12th grade. This also leads into the concept of flexible pathways which in the traditional modeling we have two students that will enter the high school ready for Algebra 2. They're doing geometry this year. And you know the self-selecting piece, we're very careful and I'm sure that they're doing it this high school at no rate in the Kola math. We're not gonna allow people to walk into something we can predict they're gonna fail. That doesn't mean we would ever deny somebody access to something but if somebody had no skills it would be really hard pressed to get them signed up for geometry. The parents get to weigh in of course as well. So I think we go to the next slide then and are you on this one, Onda, I think? Yeah, so this again is the growth rate compared to the state expectation and I think as was clarified earlier those state expectations have stayed constant over time. Those have not been adjusted for any of the disruptor or lost instructional time. It's not the state taking all the same tests during the year and those are their live scores, that's the benchmark that's been established ahead of time. So we've got the growth rate again. We don't see the numbers quite as large as on the literacy side as we are still getting more familiar with the new materials particularly in elementary school and growing from there. But I think we've got some good growth in some of our grade levels in some areas where we are gonna focus more. And again, in that second to last column you'll see those numbers again, getting quite high for grades one and two. So just a reminder of just the high expectations we have in those early grades around the acquisition of knowledge and skills as assessed on these assessments. That's the data from the academic side from literacy and mathematics reading. Thank you, that is good to get the update. Look forward to seeing hopefully some progress in the spring and hearing about plans to address some of these things. Does anybody have anything else? Any other questions? All right, thanks guys. We'll move on to Tara. Good evening everyone. You have my report. I'll give just a couple of quick updates and then we'll go over the quarter two projection that I sent to you. We received notification yesterday that we have been approved for the local food service grant. So we are really excited about that. We'll get an additional 15 cents per lunch for that. There's a lot of work to be done by the team to break out and identify the local foods and to reduce some of our purchasing to make sure we're increasing our local food purchases. But we're all very excited about that. And I've received all of the equipment requests from all of the child nutrition team to get the federal equipment grant applications submitted. So then the rest of my report outlines the deadlines that are this month if there's any questions there. Otherwise I'll move over to the quarter two projections. All right. Parker, if you could put thank you. So the first side up is the expenditures. And at this point in the year at the end of quarter two we're continuing to look at the salaries, your budgets versus contracted. And we have a projected savings of $56,064 there. And then your health insurance. This is based on the updated enrollment. As you may recall, January is our open enrollment month. And usually by the February invoicing those corrections have been made. So as of the February invoice we're projecting a savings of $17,329 on the health insurance for a total projected savings of $73,393. You can move to the next page, Parker. So this is our revenue tuition. We received a couple of new tuition students midterm. So we are up to $609,625 there. Pre-K tuition, we have two students. So we get $7,072 there. Investment income or sorry, interest income through December we're at $7,829. And then miscellaneous revenue, we've received $5,071. If you haven't received any revenue for rentals and there hasn't been any revenue for the student activities nor their donations. And then the next section is your property tax ed fund. We have a $1 difference there. And then the state tech ed funding that still remains at the 146.6. And then transportation aid, we've received a notification of what we will be getting from the agency. So Red's portion of that is the 173,247. Vocational transportation, we're still projecting that we should see them all of that back. Drivers every investment, we should see all of that back. And we haven't received anything on the adult learning as far as sub grants to Red from the SU. I still anticipate you're receiving all of that revenue. So as of the end of December, we're looking at a revenue shortfall of $38,146. Then we have the 73,393 savings on the expenditure. So projected surplus right now of $35,247. The next section down has been updated based on the FY21 final audit. So we just outlined again the audited fund balance for the general fund for the last three years. In FY20, we had used that 55,479 as an offsetting revenue. And then the lower section, these are the fund balances that were identified in your FY21 audit. So the building reserve fund for Beffo had a deficit of $18,160. The Royalton Building Reserve Fund had a surplus of $85,236. And when RUD merged that formed the Capital Improvement Fund so that combines the two reserve funds for a balance of $67,076. Any questions on that? So last year, part of what got our surplus so high was being able to supplant stuff from the federal grants and whatnot. Are we not using any of, able to do that at all for this year? We plan to do that, but none of those transactions have happened at this point in time, Andrew. But you are anticipating to be able to do some. So we should expect that number to go up, I guess. Hopefully. This report is as of December 31st, yet you're forecasting savings and the health spend. Is that, those results would have been available maybe the end of January? Is that correct? I'm confused. Yes, so we look at this through the end of quarter two and I used the February bill to calculate your annual health insurance premium to project that savings for the year. Is that savings typical or atypical? It all depends because you can have changes in enrollment all through the year if someone has a life event. And when we do budgets, it's based on employment, people who are employed at the time of the budget and what plans they're enrolled in. And again, that enrollment can change during open enrollment. It can change when you have new hires or if anyone has a life event. So you're not seeing any trend causing this change. Is that correct? Correct. Any other questions for Tara? Thanks, Tara. Thank you. Negotiations, Shannon, do you have a talk about that? Sure. So teacher negotiations are ongoing. We have some things that we've agreed on. We have some things that we're not in agreement on at least yet. And so we're continuing to meet and we'll let you know what happens. Thanks. Okay. Under the energy committee. Yeah. So tonight we have our first presentation from EI Services. The current progress to date on the energy audit. They've been here. They've heard you buildings. They're looking for information and then give you an update on what they're seeing as next steps. Hello, how's it going? I'm Eric Lafayette with Energy Efficient Investments. I'm personally based out of Burlington, Vermont. Our company is based out of Manchester, New Hampshire. If you want to pop to the next slide, I'll try to make it quick today because I know it's been a long meeting so far. But we're an energy service company. That's what ESCO stands for. So what we do is we focus on energy and operational savings. And we go through, we do audits on your building and we look for ways to improve the efficiency. So we're looking at lighting. We're looking at your HVAC, your controls, the building envelope, windows, doors, insulation, roofing. And then what we do is we look for federal grants. We look for state grants. And we provide guaranteed savings. We use those guaranteed savings to help finance the project. And at this point, we're just at the preliminary finding stage of the project. So we're going through, we're doing walkthroughs of the face of the places and we're trying to figure out just big picture what are some of the things that we're picking up on and who else do we need to get involved to get more expertise and get more detail as we move forward. So next slide. Some of the success stories that we've had Addison Northwest, which is Virginia School District. We did a major upgrade there a couple of years ago. Bennington Schools, Mill River, Hanover, Manchester, Port Smith and Keen. Each school district kind of has a different approach on how they want to go about energy savings. And I guess I'll get into a little bit more detail on that as we move forward. Next slide. One of our projects was at Virginia's High School. They really looked at more of an all-encompassing project. So they did a lot of energy upgrades, including replacing the boilers. We did LED lighting. We got rid of all the steam heat. We converted to hydronic. We also added solar, a solar system and then new roofing. So that project did not completely pay for itself. They had a lot of capital improvements. So we did, at the same time, we did a lot of ceiling replacements, flooring, and just some items that generally don't have great payback, but it made sense to do it at that time. Next slide. Another project in Vermont that we did where they looked solely at payback was Mill River School District. So they were all about the bottom dollar. And they just were looking for, how do we do as many upgrades and just let those energy upgrades pay for themselves? So over there, we actually did a dry chip biomass plant. So that's a wood chip boiler system. LED lighting, controls upgrades, and then analytics, which is really just diving into the building automation and using, we created a software that kind of combs the DDC system and we look out for anomalies in it. So if we see exhaust fans that are running at nighttime, those are stuff that comes up in our analytics report and it allows us to really dial in the control system to make sure that the building's operating away and is ventilating in a way when it's occupied and we're not utilizing excess energy for no reason. Next slide. So why do we have so much success in Vermont and New Hampshire? We're based out of Manchester or a company or out of Merrimack, just south of Manchester, but we really use local project teams. So we work a lot with Banwell Architects, which is based out of Lebanon. We work a lot with local controls contractors, mechanical contractors, all the engineers that we work with are Vermont-based engineers. And then we're really the tip of the spear. So we're helping lead the way from really the initial concept all the way through completion, construction, and development. So we're kind of your one-stop shop. We handle all the architects, the engineers, the permitting, the estimating, and the bidding process. Next slide. So I'll kind of skip this, but this kind of just says, this kind of shows that if you're spending $120,000 a year in annual energy savings and we can save $20,000 a year, you can use that savings towards a lease and we'll pay for these upgrades. But we'll get into that in more detail as we move forward with the energy audit. Next slide. Just some of the initial assessments starting over at Bethel. You have a school that is constructed in a couple different time periods. You have the 1958 original building and then the 1972 addition. Overall, it's a big school. It has wide hallways. It's got a good amount of space. They're separate cafeteria from gymnasium. The classrooms are big size. So it really has a lot of things going for it. And it, you know, overall as a structure, you know, it's a sound structure. It has had a new roof recently. And for the most part, you guys have done an amazing job keeping your existing systems up and running. But at the same time, they're just way past their useful life expectancy. So a lot of the electrical that you'll see at the school is original to the school. There's mechanical that's original to the school ventilation systems, boilers, heating. And it's great that you guys have been able to maintain them probably 10, 15 years past their normal life expectancy. But it also means there's a lot of energy opportunities. There's a lot of energy savings. So you guys are a great district for somebody like EDI to come in and do performance contracting. Next slide. Some of the opportunities that we first saw lighting upgrades, so converting all the LED lighting. Right now it's fluorescent. Boiler replacements, certainly Bethel has a steam system that is very dated and is not working properly right now. Looking at controls upgrades, ventilation, analytics, which I already talked about, and then looking at doing some capital replacements as well. Next slide. Getting specifically into the boiler room over here, you guys have two very old boilers that are 30 plus years old, which are past their useful life expectancy. They are steam boilers. Part of your building does have a conversion to hydronic, which is a hot water system, which you would typically more see nowadays in what you see more in residential construction as well. Anything that we would do moving forward, we'd be looking at converting the building over to hydronic and getting rid of the steam. Right now you guys are bringing steam back to the back into the boiler room. It's supposed to come back as condensate. So essentially steam, when it cools, it condenses and it turns into water. And then that water comes back to your boiler system at a very high temperature and it gets created back into steam through the boiler and it's distributed back to your guys terminal units, or your guys baseboard radiation essentially. And what you guys are doing now, you guys are actually bringing steam back and that steam is dissipating inside of the mechanical room and it's not getting converted, it's not condensing into water. So you guys are losing a lot of actually energy just through steam. If you guys walk into that boiler room right now, it's probably 125, 100 degrees in there. It seems like it's very warm in there all the time. And that's just, it's a lot of excess heat and energy that's just dissipating into the air. So something that we would be looking at is getting rid of these old boilers and going with either a wood chip pellet system like we did over at Mill River or a high efficient condensing propane system. Next slide. Ventilation equipment. So really your guys school is kind of broken down at Bethel into two separate sections. One section is provided by these rooftop energy recovery units that are 20 plus years old. It's a good system. It's just they're at the end of their useful life expectancy. They are operating right now and they are ventilating the classroom. So they do work. It's just at this time, it is a good time to think about those ERUs getting replaced. But talking about age, those ERUs are relatively new compared to the unit ventilators that you guys have in some of your elementary school classrooms. These unit ventilators are original, I believe to the school, Nesbit. This was common in the 70s as they would install these unit ventilators. At the time, they were mostly electric heat. And then in the early 90s, they converted them all to hydronic, to water source. So that is common throughout the state. I see it all over. What we typically do, so there's a couple of different options here, we can look at replacing these with new unit ventilators. Or ideally, we go back with a central ducted energy recovery system like you see over on the newer part of the school. Next slide. LED lighting, there's just some pictures of the lighting but right now it's all fluorescent. They do some creative stuff with the lighting as you can see on the left by leaving some tubes out just to affect the brightness in the space if you don't need it as bright. So that's some old school energy savings right there. Now everything that we put in is LED lighting. It's auto dimming. So it actually is producing a certain foot candle that we set it at the desk. And then it auto adjust the brightness based on daylight. So if there's a window near it, the light will automatically adjust down and not use as much energy. So there's just a lot of different lighting upgrades that are very possible at the school. Next slide. And then obviously there's capital projects, electrical upgrades. You guys have a lot of panels that are now obsolete. If a breaker were to go on them, I don't know if you guys, I don't think you'd be able to replace it. Certainly in this panel that I found in the back. Kitchen needs upgrades, general floors, ceilings, just some wall and some painting. There's a lot of windows that need replacement. I put that in a capital project because there's just really not a whole lot of energy savings payback when you do window replacement. And then door replacements, just in general, all the exterior doors on the building are past their useful life. You see a lot of starting to rust and daylight. So either at a minimum, resealing them, ideally replacing them and just upgrading the door system there. And then just something I picked on, just general storage, there's a lot of ConX boxes around. So that seems like that's a possibility. Do we look at building some more permanent storage and do we fix up the storage that's onsite? So next slide. I'll jump into the South Royalton campus, which I think when you first show up at the South Royalton campus, certainly when you walk into that front entrance, certainly gives you a feeling of, hey, this is a new and updated school. I think in general, that might be a little bit misleading because there's certainly areas that have been updated, but there's a lot of areas that haven't been touched and really do need some love. So I know in general, they're looking at doing some new additions there outside of us, stuff that I believe they're working with Bandwell on. And same thing, they've done a great job with, keeping all their systems up and running maintained and maximizing the life expectancy. It's just at the point now where a lot of the equipment is past life expectancy. And there are ventilation issues and electrical upgrades needed. So next slide. A lot of the same energy savings, lighting, boiler replacement, controls, ventilation. So a lot of the same energy savings that you see at Bethel can certainly be utilized at South Royalton and are needed as well. Next slide. So just getting into the ventilation equipment, looking over here. So we have a cafeteria. I don't want to get into two specifics here, but my general review is you have a lack of ventilation in a lot of the areas that people tend to congregate the most, including the cafeteria, the library and the gym. Those areas seem to be either not ventilated or completely under ventilated. And those are all things that, especially with COVID stuff coming, we just want to make sure that we're bringing in the right amount of outside air. We're producing the right amount of air changeovers in the space so that we're just providing good occupant comfort. It's just not only about heating, it's about providing good air quality as well. So I think there's definitely upgrades that we can make here at the school that will provide for a lot better comfort in the space and then bring it up to code and get us back up into the 21st century for ventilation. Next slide. Controls upgrades. This is something that I know the school has been working on. I know they just did a pretty substantial upgrade, I believe with Alliance maybe a year ago around this time where they replaced a lot of their unit ventilators. So this is one of the older unit ventilators that's still in the space. So I think either making the decision of whether this district wants to move forward with unit ventilator replacements or going with a different system. But just some of the things that you can do with upgraded controls. So usually when we talk about controls, we talk about DDC, which is a web-based control system. It allows people to access all of your HVAC so you can check the temperature in each room from any computer that pretty much has internet access. I think now certainly with, you'll see a lot with different facility directors as they're being tasked with more and more jobs, especially with the lack of being able to find help at schools, just having the facilities director being able to log on to the computer and see what's going on inside of their schools, just provides that extra peace of mind and may prevent them from coming over on a Saturday and Sunday when it's negative five degrees out to walk through the school and make sure that nothing's happening. And then getting more into specific on the energy side, we look at demand control ventilation. So monitoring the CO2 inside the space and making modifications to the outside air accordingly. And then night set packs, occupancy sensors and trending to really make sure that we dial in the controls. And we're really only heating the space when it's needed and ventilating when needed. Next slide. And then as well, this school has a lot of the same capital improvement. So door upgrades, window replacements, there's a lot of single pane windows around the school, flooring, ceiling tiles, painting, and then just a general kitchen upgrade are all just initial capital improvements that we picked up on our first walkthrough. Next slide. So some of the things that we're gonna be looking at. So what we've done at this point, we've done some initial walkthroughs. We've kind of got an idea of what some of the big picture stuff are. When we go through and we're taking our next steps, we're gonna bring in more specific experts, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, people who do lighting audits. And some of the stuff that we try to do inside of districts is we try to create some similarities and some continuity around the district. So common controls, HVAC controls. So whoever's running the controls at South Royalton, can log into Bethel and vice versa. So there's some understanding of how the mechanical system at one school works compared to the other. Then looking at doing, if we are doing the boiler replacements, going with similar boilers at both schools, looking at if it's propane or wood chip, trying to make a decision between the two schools and then looking at doing bulk buyout at the beginning of the year of your energy use, going with common pumps, control valves, just so stuff can be interchanged. If say an actuator fails at South Royalton and they have an extra one at Bethel, they can bring it over, slap it on, and it's not a call to a contractor every single time. And then the same thing we go for door hardware and lighting, just making sure that as we go through and we're looking at new upgrades, that we're creating this continuity in that there's an ability for a person at South Royalton to jump into Bethel, have an understanding of how the general system works and be able to troubleshoot issues as they arise. So those are some of the things that we're looking at doing for the district. And at this point right now, we've done some real high level review of it. And over the course of the next couple of months, we're gonna be bringing in more specific, next week actually, we're gonna be bringing in some specific lighting and transformer specialists that are gonna be doing some initial audits and getting some initial energy usage of your guys electrical system. So over the next two months, we're gonna be continuing doing that, but those are the areas that we're looking into. Next slide. If anybody has any questions, I'm happy to answer them now, but I just wanna kind of fill you in on where we're at on the process. All right, thanks a lot. Thank you guys, have a good night. Move on to the information for the budget meetings. All right, yeah. So there's a slide deck, principals need to finish their part in the front part of updating their overall information. The business office part's done, the SU part's done. I was just, as soon as the principal was up there, as I was gonna share it out, what I really need to hear is from the board who wants to talk about the financial part. I think you did it last year, Andrew. So we could share that with you. Sure. Cause that part's done. Terry, you can share it tonight. And then you could, if you wanna tweak anything, tweak it. And we should be ready to roll. So is it, I guess let's take a look at the slides if you can share them and then we can... Yeah, Terry, you wanna share that with Andrew? He can give that a review. Like I said, she's updated those. I just sent it. Just one bird person to bring that back. If you wanna do to, you can. That's a, every board's a little different. Some boards don't even feel comfortable presenting it. So, thanks with however, how do folks feel? Chris? Chris had his hands up. Yeah, I was just gonna raise my hands. I've helped with some of the presentations and stuff in the past. And I'm happy to help out again. But this year, I guess I'm sort of in the boat where like what Lisa McCrary had in the past. And on that Monday before town meeting day on February 28th, I'll be traveling. And so I won't be able to make that Monday meeting. But the next Monday, I can do that one. If you all need anybody to help out. But I can't do the Monday, the 28th one. I'll be traveling. You can pre-report you, we know how to do that. All right. We'll take a look at the slides and see what makes sense. Yeah, I'm happy to help out where he is. All right, thanks Chris. Okay. There are notes Andrew on the slide who presented the slide last year. If that's helpful for you. Okay. All right, well, we'll just email about that I guess. Okay. So proposal for revision for the UVM approval. Correct. Reid, are you ready to speak to what you said in the board packet? Yeah, I am. The way Randolph has gotten approval from UVM to do the UVM scholarship is to make it a competitive process where students write an essay. And then a scholarship committee is formed. They review the essays and choose the student they feel is most deserving of the scholarship. It's a different take on how UVM has it set up, but apparently they've gotten the approval to do it and it makes it more likely that the recipient student would be taking advantage of a UVM scholarship because they've kind of self-selected. There are a lot of students who know when they're in 11th grade which is when the decision has to be made and given to UVM. A lot of students at least think they know that they wanna get out of the state of Vermont and see something different for college whether that's urban environment or international environment or whatnot. And yet the traditional way of awarding the scholarship puts no emphasis on whether or not students want to go there or not. And writing an essay certainly is one indicator that students are serious about it. So it would give a financial advantage to a student to do this. So I've included the letter that Randolph sends out. Thanks Lisa for getting that for me. And if the board so pleases we can apply to UVM to implement this sort of program as soon as they approve it. Or we could take the Randolph program if you'd like to see changes made whether that's to the GPA or you wanted to add any criteria, we could do that. Knowing that UVM has approved Randolph's program we probably don't wanna make the expectations any less rigorous than what Randolph's gotten approved. Lisa? Yeah, I just wanted to clarify that and I know it is in the packet but there is a cut score so the student has to have a decent GPA and then we're asking for the students with that GPA and higher who feel like they're going to attend UVM to write the essay. So it's voluntary, they're notified that their GPA is high enough and it was implemented on a year when our students with the highest GPA had already confirmed that they were not interested or even applying at UVM. So it felt like it was a time, the time was right to make that move. We also don't have a standard valedictorian salutatorian process so I just wanted to point out that's another sort of key difference between the two schools. Thank you, Reed. Well, I certainly think this is worthwhile for ceiling. Do we have any details on who makes up the committee approving or just choosing? So the leadership team at the school makes up the committee so that is comprised of the school counselors and representatives from or the department chairs from our academic departments and the names are removed from the essays and they're assessed by that team. Okay. So it's kept as anonymous as possible and the goal is to be in a situation where students are really using that scholarship to the best of their ability and it's really supporting our academically strong students that are going to college. Go ahead, Chris. Yeah, I would just say that I think something like this would be a good idea. I think it would help with more uptake of the scholarship and make sure that it goes to somebody that's really gonna use it. And in some ways for the students, it gives them a little bit more choice and determination as to what they wanna do. And for some students, maybe it won't make them, if it were me, I'd sometimes maybe feel like a little bit expected to apply for it. And now I've maybe feel some pressure to now go to UVM instead of maybe another place that I may have wanted to go to or something, but it opens it up to where it's gonna go to somebody that really wants to do it. And I think that's important to give the students the choice that they wanna make and be able to support their choices. Would there be a situation where nobody, like have you had any situations where nobody applies? No, yeah. Well, since we implemented this system, we have, I mean, we've had years where we've had just one person apply, but we have been able to send someone to UVM each year. And we do have students who like didn't realize that they were a strong candidate and were not considering UVM, but decided they could hang in there in Vermont for a few more years and then go to grad school somewhere else. I think it's been a successful transition for us. It really came about sort of a year similar to last year where I think our valedictorian and salutatorium from White River Valley went to Middlebury and is it Quinnipiac or I don't remember the top two, but wasn't UVM. Does anybody have any objections to doing this? I think it's a wonderful idea because I really wanna see that scholarship used. So do you need us to make a motion or do you? I think I prefer that just in the event because it is a change and I could see somewhere down the line just having it in the notes, I think it would serve us well. All right, I would. So I guess I'll make a motion that we adopt a format similar to what's being used currently in the Randolph High School, pending the approval of UVM that the White River Valley doing something similar would be acceptable. I'll second. Whoops, yep, got it. Any further discussion? All right, all in favor, say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. All right, moving on, Reservation New Hires. Well, you heard we did finally get Mary Shell on board. Owen, do you wanna just give a little background to Mary as a community schools coordinator, which is exciting. That's part of the community schools grant. It certainly was a key position that we've been missing. So Owen, I think Mary's background's pretty extensive. So you could just give a little overview. Sure, and I know Lisa Floyd knows her. Mary Shell used to be Mary Whalen and Mary Shell actually started her Vermont teaching at Harwood years ago and then she went to Twinfield where she and I met. And from there, she went on to Up for Learning, which is an organization that gives student joists and voice really powerfully within our state. She is leaving Windsor High School mid-year, which is very unique and in a pandemic and with so few people to choose from. But their superintendent, David Baker, knows Mary well and knows Jamie and I and knew that this was the right fit for her. Mary has always been a student-centered community organizer and has always moved towards making sure students' voices are heard. And she's always tried to bring kids into the community and the community and to the school. You're gonna be very pleased with her and she signed her contract for Valentine's Day, very nice, and her first day on campus is tomorrow. We're happy to bring her at some point for Celebration of Learning and we wanna do more regular grant updates. And now that we have somebody holding that flag, I think we'll have that happening more often. Great, that's all we got, but that's good. Yeah, okay. All right, do we have any other and any future agenda items? We've got a Celebration of Learning, we'll have a re-org. Wasn't there a pathways presentation? Pathways presentation, yep. Okay, so next meeting, Dave, we should, we'll definitely have the informational meeting on Monday, but we should take another time for a potential special about principal position. When would we get, Janet? I was just gonna say for that pathways presentation, is it possible to get that for both the middle school and the high school? Cause I know the middle school's been working on their program as well. Yeah, I think it would be really good to show the continuity, Janet, across both. Okay. I didn't know, are you guys, is it possible that just don't know how long, an hour was enough in F-Bud last week when we hired a principal. I don't know if you want to try to do it at five prior to the meeting, or if that feels weird or not. Wednesday night's open too, right now currently, for me. Yeah, I could do before the, talking about on the 22nd or 21st, you could do before the informational meeting as well. I should be able to do that too. Okay. Yeah, I can do before the informational meeting on the 23rd, so I think that's what we're talking about. I can't guarantee anything during chore time. I mean, I can probably listen in, but I won't be able to participate per se. I'm gonna send you all an email. And then if you want to send me questions that you're thinking of at a time, if you send them to me, I'll compile them into a document. So the board will have them for ease to take turns around questions you might have. Does that sound good? Sure. Unless there's anything else, entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved. Second.