 All right, it is 6.31 p.m. on Pelear High School. Let's, we're gonna call this meeting to order. We don't need to do roll call, right? Nope, no more. So, we are going to start with public comment. Do we have any public comment, please? You can submit, there's a microphone there for you. So, my name is Lisa Burns. I've had kids in the school system since elementary school. They've gone through a union middle school and one just graduated from high school in June and another will be a junior. And I've already spoken to Livvi and written my comments, but I'd like to address the S or three money and I do understand, I did get the memo that in fact, decisions are going to be delayed on that because of potential more funds. But I would like to put in a pitch to you on the school board to consider making a public statement about how you feel that money should be spent. And I've listened to the podcast and read everything that's out there about the windows, the two union and main street middle school in. I have read and understand the limitations that come to this, what adds up so far to about three and a half million dollars. Specifically, at this point, I'd like to speak about the over two million, 2.2 for S or three. And this money, I believe the spirit behind it is to mitigate what happened is happening because I refuse to speak about COVID in the past tense, what is happening with COVID. And parenthetically, I know that some of you have kids in the elementary and in the middle school. I don't know if any of you have kids in the high school or not, but I think that there has been tremendous learning loss and I have spoken to a lot of people in the community and I think largely parents and students in the middle school and elementary school felt like the year went as well as it could given the horrendous situation that was dealt it. At the high school though, I have also spoken to a lot of parents and students and also just community members. And those community members that weren't aware of what was happening at the high school were shocked when they did hear it and the other parents and the other students largely were extremely underwhelmed and disappointed with the school year. And just in case any of you don't know, the high school students were offered zero, five or 10 hours of in-person schooling, not per day, per week. Additionally, they were offered one and three quarters hours of internet-based teaching or three and a half. Halfway through the school year, that block of time was deemed too stressful and non-productive, so it was called discretionary. So that's what our kids got and when I ask those kids and those parents, most of them say we covered 25 to top 40% of the curriculum that was on the syllabus presented on the first day of school. So I leave that as tremendous learning loss and I know I only have a few minutes here, so I'm going to get to my point. If you had a student, let's all of us imagine we had a student that was a freshman in the 2019-20 school year, they missed a half of school year. Everyone did, around the country, around the world. It was a fiasco, the electronic learning, even our school board and our administrators admitted in letters to the parents was a failure. Next year, your student has moved up this last school year and was a sophomore and they got zero, five or 10 hours of teaching per week, not per day, per week. And now they're coming into their junior year and they will, if we listen to what is planned for this S3 money, there's going to be a study of where the learning loss is to determine where those resources need to go to help those children. And I say, then you will have used up three quarters of their high school time not teaching and I'm not blaming these teachers at all. I think Montpelier High School has some of the very best teachers there are and the students are some of the very most involved, smart, dedicated and interested in learning. It was a failure of administration and decision making that they did not get that education. And now the federal government is offering money with the stipulation that minimum 20%, which is I think about $450,000, go directly to learning loss. I would like to suggest that that is not even close to enough. I think that our students need tutors, they need summer school. I was told that summer school was not possible this year because there wasn't a teacher who was willing to teach it. I say if you offer them $5,000 or $10,000 for a summer school course, you will find people. I think the spirit of this money is to help students who lost. And these students now, and even your students in the middle school and the elementary school, in the elementary, if this goes another year, will have lost three, not lost, but had impacted three-fifths of their entire time in the elementary. Your middle school students will have had three-quarters of their educational time in the middle school disrupted by this, and your high school students will have three-quarters of their time. I think this board needs to stand up and say we want the money to go to the students, to the teachers, to teach, to make up this time. And the windows at Union and the middle school have been a problem for decades. And I think it sounds like there's a lot of money coming and some of it can go for that. There's capital fund money, but there is nothing that's gonna make up for if these kids go through another three-quarters of their education time in anyone's school with the kind of opportunities, academic that they had last year. So that is what I'd like to say to ask you all to consider at least making a recommendation to the superintendent and to the community that you feel like we do need to address learning loss in a real way. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And the other public comments. Or in person. I'm gonna move on to the consent agenda. Move the consent agenda with the exception of the superintendent's report. Okay, let's, do we have a second for that? I'll second that. All right, all those in favor? Hi. Any against? All right, the superintendent's report. One, Libby, I wanted to say thank you for sharing the feedback that you've been getting in your, using the report as a venue for doing that, sharing the feedback that you've been getting. The ESSER, and then you also mentioned, on the ESSER money, and then you also mentioned the mask, you sort of what your expectations are for masks. And I just said, this is just, I think probably just my ignorance. My curiosity is around why the AOE would say that we couldn't do anything, anything stronger than their guidance. I would understand why they would say we can't do anything weaker than their guidance. But you know, if there's any kind of insight you can provide, we don't know why this, okay. I probably just because they were getting feedback that we were making, school districts were making more strict rules. I see. Do you think it would be, I know that you're anticipating getting new guidance because things are changing every day around COVID. Do you think it would be helpful if this board were to write a letter to the AOE asking or encouraging us to be able to make the decisions that we think we need to make for our community? Cause then I think we need to have a discussion on whether or not we want to do that. But I'm just curious to know like from your perspective, if you think that that would. I think that's always the board's prerogative. And I know the letters that the board has written in the past to government officials from AOE to the governor to everybody have been very much appreciated by our staff because they're always very much in support of our staff. I don't know if it will make any difference in this. I don't think it would make any difference at the AOE level. Yeah, okay. Right now, I think we'll get the guidance tomorrow, I think. So it's, I think it's already written, you know. Got it, maybe a move point, but. I think anytime the board wants to show support in a public way for educators, educators are always very happy to do so. Yeah, I understand. Can I ask a follow-up question to that? And with regard to this specific, this specific scenario, what do you think support would look like to our educators? I honestly don't know. I haven't spoken to our educators, our specific educators in a long time, so I don't wanna speak for them, but I do have an optional meeting with them next week just to hear what they're thinking about. So I can get back to you on that. Okay, sounds good. That would be helpful. That was it, just wanted to ask those questions, thank you. Do we need to approve the superintendent's report? Yeah, so now I move to approve the superintendent's report or accept whatever it is as part of the superintendent's report. Is it approved or accept? It's accept, right? I think it's accepted. Yeah. Is there a second? I'll second that. All right, all those in favor? Aye. Aye. Any against? All right, thank you. All right, we have. Do you mind if I, I don't know. To me, it feels like sometimes when we have public come and make content comment, I sometimes wonder like how well-versed they are in the structure of board meetings. And I know I've heard feedback from people who have come to make comment to us and I've been in the boat sometimes where I'm making comment, where I don't really understand like, okay, so what's the, what is done now? Like now I put this, you know, really articulate and passionate statement to the board, you know, what are they going to do with it? And we kind of are just like, thank you. And then we just move on with the agenda. And so I just think it would be nice for people watching from home and just people who might watch in the future work at and for our audience member who spoke today, that just to sort of know the structure of how public comment works. And, you know, I know that at the beginning of your statement, you asked for individual, I think what you were asking us for individual board members to speak. I would actually prefer that collectively you wrote a letter to the public and said, you know, we are behind, we have had educational loss and we're putting money to it. And it's serious and we're addressing it. So that's another thing is like, what is our role with SFQs? Because that was a question that had come up earlier. Yeah, so public comment is, and this, I think you're not actually asking me that question, are you asking me to clarify for me? I think it would be nice for you to sort of clarify just in general for the audience, you may be super well versed in how these things function, but I just think in general, it's probably good practice when we have a few people that come and make public comment so that they don't feel sort of like a deflated sense of like, well, that. So the board doesn't typically, with regard to public comment, the board doesn't typically, it's the practice of the board not to engage in public comment at board meetings so that we can keep these board meetings moving on time and progressing forward. If you wanna reach out to individual board members and the board at large, that's fine. The board can't respond together and engage in a conversation via email because we would break open meeting law if we're not warning that. So typically the chair of the board is the policy of the board that the chair of the board speaks on behalf of the board. And so if there is an issue that board members would like to address at an upcoming board meeting, we can reach out to the chair of the board, reach out, you know, come together and say we'd like to add this as an agenda item and then we can address it in a public space at a future board meeting. So with regard to S or three, there's a lot of opportunities to weigh in and engage in discourse. Libby, do you wanna, you've really been kind of leading up our public comment on the S or three funds. Do you wanna elaborate on that at all? I don't because there's not, because we're in a holding pattern right now. So going forward, it may change. So I don't wanna promise something that's not may or may not happen because the plan isn't in place right now. Just knowing that we have to do some thinking. Okay. Sorry. That's all right. We're gonna be talking about S or three at the next board meeting, is that correct? Okay. So at that next board meeting, we'll be discussing these issues and members of the public are reaching out to members of the board. Members of the board were representatives of the public. It's on us to bring it up at future board meetings when we're discussing those topics. So the, and again, the point of keeping public comment confined in this way at board meetings is so that we can progress on time because if we don't do this, board meetings can drag on late into the night. And frankly, these are voluntary rules that are very labor intensive. And I think everybody takes them very seriously, but to be able to get to the broad range of issues that the board needs to get to, we need to stay on track at these meetings, which isn't to say that we're ignoring the public and ignoring the way in during comment. It's just if we engage in a back and forth, we could be here all night. So I do think something we've talked about is how to create more venues and space for public engagement. And I think that is something that we're working on and we can improve on. So I hope that's helpful. Thank you. Thanks, Andrew. You're welcome. Restorative practices and capacity building plan. So I have asked Bill Dice to do his inaugural presentation to the board tonight. He's got a short presentation and this presentation isn't meant to go into a huge amount of detail. However, at a previous board meeting, there were questions raised about the restorative practices work. And so Bill is the person who heads this work up. And so this is simply the building capacity plan for the capacity building plan. Sorry, for this year around restorative practices. That's the purpose of this presentation. So Bill, take it away. Thank you for the meeting and hello everybody. This is not another of the speech. So if I had seen nervous, maybe you get it, okay. Anyway, so maybe you get it? Okay, so when I thought about presenting this, I just wanted to cover the basics. I want to talk about restorative practice, what it is, why we need it and how we're going to implement it this year. Fully understanding that most of you probably have some familiarity with restorative practice. So I apologize if some of this is stuff that you already know. So to begin with, we have an SEDL team of social emotional behavior learning committee, which is comprised of, well we have an SEDL lead or coordinator, we have a BCBA on staff and we have several social workers on staff and they can provide us with a core group of them. But what restorative practice is, in its essence, and you'll hear me refer to it as RP, restorative practice is a social science that studies how to build social capital and achieve social discipline through participatory learning and decision making. We use RP to help reduce violence and bullying improve human behavior, strengthen civil society, provide effective leadership, restore relationships and repair harm. That's a cumbersome kind of fancy way of simply saying RP is a tool to give adults and children action steps that align with core beliefs and our core beliefs generally, well, certainly in this community, in this school and the people that I interact with, the core belief is a default setting to kindness. But oftentimes when we're confronted in an emotional level, that belief is challenged in a way that's difficult to maintain in that moment. So RP give you some tools in those moments. So that's what it is. Next question is why do we need it? I think I touched on it a little bit. Negative interactions, so when they do occur, a couple of things happen, a lot of things happen actually, but two that I'd like to touch on is there's emotional damage and there's community damage. There's emotional damage to the participants involved, generally walk away not feeling too good about it and there's community damage. If you think about children in school, if there's some sort of interaction that's negative, the community at some point is in their own mind, is maybe taking sides. So I would consider that somewhat of a damage to the community. Other things to consider is that the research clearly shows that consequences and rewards are only reliable for shaping behaviors that are simple physical tasks or rudimentary thought. So an example for that would be, I would really like to see the floor in my child's bedroom at least once a week. That is a physical task and it has proven that whichever way you wanna go, a reward or a consequence generally will work in those scenarios and have the desired outcome. But once you introduce anything that is mild or above rudimentary thought, you can throw consequences and rewards out the window. They're not effective. So the question becomes emotions, empathy and resilience, do we believe, do we collectively believe or are they cognitively complex behaviors? And they are. So consequences and rewards are not going to have a lasting impact. So an example of that would be the same kids over and over getting all the stickers on their sticker chart, right? Meanwhile, you're trying to impact other students in a different way and they're not getting any stickers. So that would be just kind of a simple example of that. So that's why we need it. We're trying to impact a complex thought process and restorative practices gives us a tool to that. So how are we going to implement restorative practices? There's gonna be three directions we take. We're gonna use internal and external resources and the three things that we wanna touch on, obviously students and student development, staff development, and then at a committee level. So in order to do this, the student part, we've been able to secure some money through the Department of Health. They have a grant that comes out each year and Libby had the wonderful idea of adding this into it. And we're gonna partner with the middle school and high school. We're gonna partner with a group by the name of Up for Learning. I didn't put that in here, but Up for Learning is a group that works in a lot of different schools in developing the principles of RP working alongside of the youth in those schools. They have an action research project, which I believe is a culminating event towards the end of the year. And it's called the Youth Participatory Action Research as a vehicle for change. And they're going to meet bi-weekly, so one week they'll be at the high school, next week they'll be at the middle school and vice versa throughout the course of the year, meeting with a team of students to help develop these skills within the kids in our buildings. So that's the student work. Next slide. So the staff work. All staff members will engage in training with John Kitta, along with consultation time. He will be in front of our staff members for roughly two full days of training this school year. He will focus his time on making sure participants walk away with the following common understandings. Using the restorative practice tiered fidelity inventory tool. We'd like to make sure that all of our staff members are using it with fidelity in the way that it's intended. Circle Keeper Training. If you're not familiar with restorative practices, Circle Keeper Training. Circles are a proactive way to build community with the participants. So teachers would lead that in their classrooms. The principles of RP, they would also have academic circles and hopefully we could get to some advanced RP practices, both proactive and restorative practices. Then we get to the committee level. So in this case, Montpellier Roxbury Schools will be partnering with Joelle Van Lent. I think she's well known around the state and the work that she does to support the ongoing work of our SEBL team. She'll have time to work with the curriculum subcommittee that is meeting throughout the course of the year, individual school administration and be a lot of time during staff meetings at each school. So she'll be making trips out to all of our schools. Of course, she brings a wealth of knowledge and experience with regard to SEBL curriculum and trauma informed practices. And she'll use that knowledge to help teachers improve their practices as well. How'd I do? That's all I got. Jazz fingers. Yes, questions. Yeah. Yeah, it's just. Yeah, it's Bill's move. I have a word. I'm sorry. So Bill, I think a lot of us can speak this language and understand about curriculum and embedded and staff meetings. I'm wondering if you can give an example or two of literally what would be an example of something that would be done at a staff meeting or at the elementary school. That's an example of restorative practice so people can see a little more concrete with what their child would experience or. Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. So I think the way to tackle that would be to look at two scenarios. One would be a proactive approach and then the one that would be a restorative kind of approach. The proactive restorative practices. Everybody, a lot of people that are well versed in this know about the circles. And that's an intentional way to build community in your classrooms. To get people to share, to open up and to talk to each other. Not about the math, not about the science, but in a safe way about a prompt that doesn't elicit bad feelings in some way for some students. And that's, it takes some understanding as far as what an appropriate prompt can be and a lot of us would come to those scenarios with bias and think, oh, the question I'm asking is fine and not understanding why is somebody shutting down. So is that intentionality in building not just the interaction between teacher and student but the interaction between student and student. And if it's one thing that we know about schools and if we want to decrease those negative interactions like bullying and all those other things is we need to get the students to see each other in a more humane way sometimes. So that's what the proactive work of RP is about. The restorative piece comes after a negative incident happens in school. So when I was an assistant principal, when I started as assistant principal, I didn't have this as a tool. Although I kind of fell to it naturally. What you wanna do when you're trying to, when there's a negative interaction, there's harm. There can be physical harm but every time there's definitely emotional harm and a lot of schools around the nation deal with that physical piece and that emotional piece through a consequence which we know if you believe the research doesn't particularly work. I mean think about this. Can you discipline somebody into caring about somebody else? Is that something that you believe you can do? Generally doesn't work. Otherwise you would dole out one piece of discipline and that child would be fixed. There wouldn't be no more interactions negatively. It just simply doesn't work. So in that case the reactive piece of RP is an invitation. It starts with an invitation. You don't force kids to have a conversation and say you will apologize. You will like this person. Again, that won't work. There needs to be an invitation and that may take some time for feelings and emotions to calm down. And you give voice to each person with a moderator in the room and each person is given an opportunity to share what happened, what they were thinking, what they've been thinking since it happened and what do they need to move forward. So there's some guiding questions for these scenarios and each side gets to go through that same thing. And you can give them the questions ahead of time to think through it. And I've led these types of discussions and I've found them to be powerful and I've led these types of discussions with students that have trouble with the cognitive ability of emotional control and it has been powerful. So it gave me a tool to kind of help build the capacity of greater understanding, resilience, compassion. So it's kind of proactive and reactive approaches. I just want to say, I think it's just awesome that we're engaging in this and working on it and building this capacity and building these skills among the community. Because not only for this, for the reasons, in my mind, the reasons that you all stated on the why slide all are in the service of creating an environment in which everybody can be learning, right? And that I, anyway, I just first wanted to say, yay, that we're doing this. And then I have a couple of questions. The first is, do you yet have any way of measuring progress for this coming year? Like, how will you, a way of knowing that, okay, we've done this plan, what you laid out, the how, for nine months and how do we know we've gotten somewhere with it? I don't have that for you today. And that's an excellent thing to push towards me and towards this group. There will be a metrics to kind of quantify this work. So that's an excellent prompt. And I know it's hard because it's not like you can say, well, we're 50% better at it. What if I even, right? So we start trying to put a number on less tangible items and so that's gonna take some development for sure. Yeah, it's tricky. Another question I have for you is, how could we involve our broader school community, caregivers, families, the community, because as we know, what happens outside the classroom has a big impact on what happens inside the classroom and vice versa. And I could see this being incredibly powerful and going and far more successful if we also have, are building up those skills beyond, not that our schools can't be everything for everyone, but if there's some way of bringing the community in on this work. I'm curious if you have thoughts on that. So the scope of this work so far is, this is our first step as far as developing the capacity of staff and students. I think what you're describing falls more in line with the restorative justice which reaches beyond the school walls. And I'm not as well-versed in that. That's not something that's part of my experience. I do know that there's a regional group that does that type of work. I know some of the people that work on it, but it hasn't been my experience and it works at that community level. Yeah, I guess that's not exactly what I'm asking. I'm asking if there's a way to help students grasp these concepts better and maybe the answer's no by involving caregivers and maybe it's a thing that we could be doing to work with our caregivers' alliances or something like that to help build up the skills of the people who are also taking care of the kids when they're... Yeah, so that certainly could be a part of, I could see that being a part of a re-entry meeting if there needed to be a re-entry meeting at a particular time for a student off the top of my head. That rings a bell with me. I think what you're suggesting me is something that we should consider more that we haven't considered it fully yet. Yeah, so thanks for bringing us in. I just think you're excited. Yeah, yeah. Because this is very cool. John. I could just add, I've found that I'm a middle schooler that when you say, how was your day? Fine, what'd you do? The same thing. But if you say, what was the circle question? Or you ask about what they did at Circle, then all of a sudden a lot more comes out. I definitely found that. I sort of stumbled on it, it wasn't. But that kind of thing. So I think when the message comes home at the beginning of school year about what they're gonna be doing, I feel like that must have prompted something about circles and that has definitely been a more enlightened conversation than just it's fine. And one last question that is totally okay to not have the answer for tonight, but if you think about these restorative practices and how they're intertwined with the learning that happens in classrooms and what we're working on building back to and beyond from the impact that COVID has had on all of us. I wonder if there's more, like what more could we be doing that we don't have the resources or time or I realize we have limitations. But in my mind, this feels very connected to the quote unquote learning loss and building up both of these things in tandem with each other feels like we could go even further with them. But like I said, it's totally, I don't even know if I have a question in there. The question I guess is what's next or what more or if you could have if you were king of the world for a day for this, what would be your ideal? Yeah, so for me, I think this is part of the recovery plan. I think students in order to make up for losses are going to have to, there's more that's gonna have to be done. And if it's one thing we know about learning is that students will learn more if they can be in a relaxed state of mind, calm and available and not in a stressed state of mind or tense and unavailable. If you think about the stress curve, we want kids in a place where they're not overloaded with stress but we also don't want them way on the other side where there's disengaged. So community building and closer relationships with adults and peers will bring them into multiple settings in a way that they are more available. So I do see this as a tool to help students state of mind to be more available for the learning that they need to do. Does that? Okay. Thank you for the presentation. Fabulous. And I'm really excited that we're sort of delving a little deeper. I know that you've already done a lot of work in the district around a sort of practice and professional development and training. So it's great. I'm wondering kind of similar to Mia's question about more being student centered as a district is one of our beliefs shared community values. And I'm wondering like what part of the plan is student centered, student driven? How are you incorporating student voice into your restorative practice plan? Just reply. The student voice piece will definitely be headed up by our partnership with public for learning. That's their specialty and that's why they've been brought in by no means an expert on all that they do. But that is in their real house and that's why we've partnered with them. So what was the other part? There's something else that jump in on that. Could you repeat the first part of your thought? Just like how will students be sort of centered in this plan moving forward? Will there be training for students or how will student voice be incorporated in the plan? So through the up for learning. That's how that student agency student voice partnerships with adults and then the action research project will be incorporated for the student piece. Do you have any idea of what could you explain to us what you think or what you've discussed with them in terms of what up for learning will do for the students? Yeah, so I know that they'll have, what I believe they'll have is a site-based student sort of preliminary team or core group that is a part of this practice and this learning. They're not gonna teach it to the entire school. That's not gonna be their scope. So they'll have a core group. How that group is selected, I'm not fully aware of yet, but I will make sure that we have representation that's fair and equitable for all students in our schools. So that will be at both the high school and the middle school. And as far as their end of year action research project, I'm super curious about that too. And I haven't had a chance to ask them exactly, what does that look like? Is that they're looking to increase their voice in some sort of social change of some way would be my assumption. But I haven't heard any concrete examples from them yet. Okay. I have some of the work that we did before because we've worked with up for learning for a few years now and we had a board presentation two years ago. Yeah. Buy up for learning and the students and a couple of guidance concerns, social worker. And I know some of the work that they're talking about in the middle school in particular is that the circle work at the middle school was rather the adult driven as they started out learning this process. And one of some of the feedback from the students was we wanna drive that. We wanna name the questions that we're asking. We can come up with those. You're asking stupid questions adults. We want it. And so I know that it's training students to think about what our community builders and how do we do that work together to, so it's like student leadership opportunities. And then here at the high school, I think it drives more in depth to eventually, not yet, but eventually having student panels in that piece as well. We've also talked with Carol Plant at the restorative justice center in Montpelier. And she's working with our flex pathways department to get more students to be on the student restorative justice panels as a flexible pathway for our school. So it's feeding into lots of different pieces, but it's definitely bolstering student voice in how we build community here and how we repair that community and how we navigate together through these tough waters. But up for learning does a lot of work around that piece. So for this plan, for around restorative practices, is up for learning contracted for the full year to focus just on restorative practices or do they have multi-focus? No, it's just restorative practices that we're working with them on. Okay, yeah. And it's just at the high school and the middle school at Roxbury or Elementary. Right, Joelle's working across schools, but not up for learning, up for learning. It's primarily in middle school, high school, endeavor. Great, thank you. Any other questions for Bill? I have one other question. Yeah, please. Do you know the monetary value of the Department of Health grant? I do. That we've secured? That we have secured? It has, well, I didn't secure it, that it has, this is a part of it, right? This is one portion of it. Yeah, for the putting up for learning piece, 23,700 dollars. It is enough that was awarded. Okay, thanks. And John Kidd's on top of that, right? John Kidd is on top of that. So up for learning is the primary recipient of that. So a condition of the health department grant is that the work must include the students. So we can't just have training for teachers and then send that to the department of the condition of that as it needs to be with students. And up for learning works directly with the students. They also have to be a large part of the grant of, so it helped out in both ways. Got it once. So Joelle's getting paid for out of local funds because they actually denied Joelle's training. Yeah. So we're paying for that out of local funds, okay. Yeah, we tried. Yeah. All right, any other comments, thoughts, questions on this? Just thanks again. Thank you so much, Bill. Especially for coming even before it's fully formed and everything. Yeah. It's great to hear. Thank you. Appreciate it, Bill. Thank you. Yeah, we look forward to another presentation. Clearly. Clearly. So it's been broken. Well, it's going to return to our leadership team. We're all sitting together and still watching a board meeting right now. Probably soaking a fire right now. What do you want tonight? Yeah. I believe pictures of cornhole are being sent to me. So go Joelle. Oh yeah, go get it on that. Thank you. I appreciate it. I appreciate the time, you know, driving all the way here from the Principals Association. I feel like you could have come. Be a Zoomer's for the benefit so you like this new world. I've never tried to be in person. When I heard it was in person, I actually relaxed a little bit as I was in person. Thank you. A notification from the screen time. Oh, thanks, Bill. We appreciate it. So next item, we're a little bit behind schedule. I just want to point that out for this crew so that we can, I don't want to rush us, but it would be nice if we can finish on time this evening. So discussion and action item, approve visioning committee charge. Does anyone want to take the lead on this discussion? I was absent at the last one. I could because I'm the member of the equity committee where we drafted this. So we'll back up one step. So at the last board meeting, after hearing a lot of comment and have discussion from the public about the visioning work, we delegated to the equity committee to name the purpose of this restart to the visioning work because as we all know, it was tried just before COVID about a year and a half ago. And so now that the restart, we'd like to go back out to RFP for a facilitator. We pretty much agree that we need a facilitator, but that we wanted to give potential facilitators some kind of understanding of what they would be pitching us on. And that was where the idea of naming what the purpose of the visioning work is. So that when we go out to RFP, we have something to ground it in. And we delegated that to the equity committee. And this is what Amanda and Kristen and I drafted after looking through the historical documents of the previous go round of the visioning work, including the proposal that the previous facilitators had shared with the board and thinking about and also considering what we heard at the most recent board meeting as well around this effort. So I guess I'll just read it out loud for the benefit of those who might not have it in front of them. The draft as it's written is the purpose of the MRPS visioning work is to establish a vision for what an exceptional education within MRPS looks like, including how to ensure all students from Roxbury Village School and Union Elementary through Montpelier High School have equitable access to resources, a diverse and creative curriculum with the district maintaining financial sustainability. And then just the next paragraph down is the MRPS school board seeks facilitation of a broad community engagement process that effectively captures the voices of students and community members often underrepresented. So that's what we're discussing today is whether or not this board agrees that that is the purpose and what we would be asking of a facilitator of the visioning work. So I was a little bit confused and maybe off base. This came to the surface at our Roxbury board meeting, correct? That was the most recent one, right? Yeah, the last board meeting. And I thought that what we were discussing at that time was the language of the merger agreement was sort of coming to a head with a date that was set for that we would not be able to close any of the school buildings under the merger agreement until a specific date, I forget what it was, June 30th. And so that was causing a lot of questions to bubble up in the community, both in both communities, Montpelier and Roxbury. And so I guess I thought that it was less of a broad like visioning, which I think is work that it sounds like has been sort of needed for the school board for a long time and has been sort of like pushed to the back burner. And I think that that's like super important, but I wonder if it might be, to me, it sort of sounded like a separate issue to be discussed. And maybe like a separate committee. Like there's the vision for our district and then there's sort of this more immediate pressing concern around the language of the merger and what the future holds for the physical buildings and such. So I don't know if there. I don't believe she did. As of last week, when we met as a committee, she hadn't heard back from the lawyer. Yeah. And Jim, I'm not gonna ask. Jim and I were speaking about it. And our hunch is that in order to change the merger document, you have to open up a new study committee. You have to open up a new act, like 46, your work, 46 committee. And the other piece that we were discussing is that while I understand the perspective of the worry around that language, it truly is a mood point because of our budgeting cycles. So we have to have our budget in by December for next year, right? So it truly is a mood point and there aren't going to be any votes to close school buildings by this June 30th or next June 30th. And so the question being is it worth opening up a new, if that's exactly what we have to do, which is an assumption, a new act 46 merger committee. And Jim's taken, I don't wanna speak for him, but I'm pretty solid on this one that Jim's take was that has not worked the board wants or needs to do. Right, I agree. I think the question that Emma's asking is, well, is more like what is it that we're gonna be establishing a committee to do and hiring a facilitator to do? Is that right? Yeah. And what I took from the discussion at the board meeting and from looking at the historical documents was that we first have to figure out what our vision is as a combined district. That hasn't happened yet since the merger happened, like a real vision for what, and we can play around the language here, but what an exceptional education looks like. And then we will base any decision about what to do with our buildings on that. And if we decide to do something with our buildings without having that, then it will feel very piecemeal, it will be very piecemeal, we'll just feel that way, but it'll be very piecemeal. And we might have a further repercussion down the line that takes us in a completely different direction because we didn't have a cohesive vision first. I do, I am concerned though that I'm just throwing this out. What an exceptional education looks like to you isn't necessarily what an exceptional education looks like to your neighbor, right? But one of the interesting things about public education in this country is that there are a lot of differing perspectives on what the purpose of education is. And therefore, what an exceptional education looks like. So I am concerned that this charge, it's broad enough that I'm not, I'm a little concerned that it's broad enough that it might not yield a fruitful outcome. That's my number one. I'm just voicing, I'm not saying that's the case, I'm just throwing that out there, Jill. I actually had a really different reaction because I do feel like, we all have spent a lot of time talking about this and I think we keep sort of putting the cart before the horse and I do think we need to kind of have that community discussion, which I don't think has happened since the merger. So I kind of like that idea, whatever the adjective is, whether it's exceptional or something else, but I do think we need to have the conversation and I feel, I really like what you guys have come up with because I think we have to make those parameters and those decisions and then I think that is where we sort of ended up at the end of that conversation was and the buildings are one of the resources that we will allocate based on that vision. My only question is whether, rather than listing the buildings in the vision, if we say the Montpelier and Roxbury communities or something like that instead of listing the buildings themselves. So I have a follow up question to this. Did this group, so we're not the first district in this country or world that does encounter this situation, right? There's lots of communities that have gone through similar exercises to this and processes to this. Did this group look at other examples to see what kind of like framework yielded fruitful outcomes? I know that a lot of districts in Vermont are working with portrait or graduate. You know, it's a group or something. And whether or not the group wants to take on portrait or graduate or not, but that's a process that I know lots of people are working with currently in Vermont to a lot of success. I know that Essex Westford when they had their merger before, as we were going through our merger, I think. Probably when you... That's a much bigger district that merged and they went through an enormous community process as well. I don't think they use portrait as a graduate, but they definitely did huge, really did, I'm not positive, but... Can you explain what portrait of the graduate is? Yeah, it's simply a protocol to have the conversation of what you value most out of your graduates, like the picture of what you imagine every graduate of our system to the skills, the interpersonal and the academic skills that you want, and it's like a, it can't, like it's good. It's tools. Yeah, yeah, I agree, thank you. So it's created and it's a way to guide that conversation and that process. The district has never done something, I mean like Montpelier as a district doesn't have a statement of that, like all graduates from Montpelier... To my knowledge, no, that conversation has not happened. It could have happened before me, but in my tenure, it has not happened. The vision statement that's on our letter head was written by the board, kind of, please, when we merged, like we need a vision statement on the letter head, kind of. I do seem to remember one. I seem to remember like a graphic that went along with it. The board did used to have ends, like ends policies waiting for me, and when the merger happened and all the new policies had to be rewritten, those were not adopted again. So I do know that there used to be ends, but that is more policy governance language and the board decided, I think, at the merger time that they were governance by policy and not policy governance. What I'm imagining was not a board document, it was like a district thing. So what Andrew, what you were saying, and Libby, the tool that you're referencing, those feel like the things that are up to the facilitator. I think it's up to the facilitator to run a process that helps our community all come together to define an exceptional education for exactly the reason you're stating, Andrew, that what looks like an exceptional education to you is probably different for me, and it's the facilitator who will bring all those inputs together and help us coalesce them. So I guess what I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about this in a very applicable way. I'm thinking like I wanna make sure that this process results in fruitful outcomes. And so I'm thinking like, I see what you guys put together here. I have no personal qualms with the way that this is organized in terms of like a general vision for what we want, but I'm thinking like, how do we turn this into reality? So I'm thinking like what is the scope of work for a facilitator look like for this? And kind of building on that, so I guess it's just my take on what happened at the last meeting. So my take was that I thought we talked about you bringing language about more of the scope of the committee and not an actual charge. And I thought I remembered us talking about so language that we could use to hire a facilitator, and then once the committee was formed that the committee would draft a charge and bring it to us. Well, yeah, I didn't realize this was the charge. What I thought was- No, it was just a purpose. A purpose, yeah. We did private, it would be the purpose in order to help the facilitator understand what should be in the proposal. And in terms of scope, we could go back to the earlier proposal and maybe build on that scope. It was a scope, it was in detail, but- Right, the proposal from the previous facilitators. And- Yeah, because we had told them, I mean their proposal was based on our input. Yeah. So Jerry, thank you, purpose was what, that's a word I remember from the meeting is that you were going to define the purpose. So we could maybe just change the language from charge to purpose. It says purpose here. I think what you're talking about there Emma is right under the heading there is approved visioning committee charge and what you're saying is approved visioning committee purpose. Correct. Yeah. And I think then the charge is just that it's the committee is charged with seeing out this purpose. Well, I thought we had discussed at the meeting that the committee would have an opportunity to write a charge that they would bring to us for approval because then they would have time to really think about kind of the question that Andrew is bringing up, like how do we, as a committee, with this professional facilitator, how do we think the charge language should be written for a fruitful outcome? Like the SRO committee, I think part of the reason why that was so successful is that the outset we had like a pretty clear scope fleshed out. It was like a two page, like this is the scope of work, like this is who. And- I don't think the committee came up with that though. The committee did not write the charge. You guys, we wrote the charge. Yeah. Which is fine. It was just my understanding at that meeting. And I think, Jerry, did you have the same understanding or? Yeah, I thought the committee would come up with the charge and we were just going to come up with the purpose. And when, and the facilitators would help facilitate that. Creating the charge. Yeah, just bringing that, because the committee was going to include community members. And yeah, I mean, I'm not sure. Now I'm not questioning my memory. So I'm not sure. And just as the Roxbury, the lone Roxbury representative here tonight, right? Kristen's not on the call. Is that right? Do you feel, I mean, there was a lot of public at the meeting and that was sort of what drove prompted us to say, you know what, it's time and at the next move we'll write the purpose and we will try to move this process forward. Do you feel like this will leave them satisfied? Do you think it sort of speaks to what their concerns were? I think they're two separate issues actually. I mean, there are two separate issues that were coming up during that last meeting. They were confused about, they thought we were doing something to close the school, which was just, it was completely misunderstood. So there was a lot of fear about they're gonna close the school because of a social media post saying that's what we were doing. And then separate from that is, was just, hey, we want to be involved in this visioning process. We want to know what's happening. And that part is, yes, they're happy that community members will be involved. We're not making decisions without consulting people and that sort of thing. So yeah, what I remember as in landing was we just needed something to head up the RFP, essentially that we would then, then we would get a dozen facilities writing proposals to us that we get to choose from and say, and they would probably include somewhat of a scope of work when they did that because that is, in my mind, as somebody who does this for a living, part of their job is to say, oh, this is what you want to happen. Here's how I could see putting it together. And then we look at that and say, you think you can do that in three meetings? You're bananas. Oh, you think this is gonna take 20 months? Oh dear, you know, so we, yeah, exactly. So I guess I have a couple of questions. I guess my general thought is, what actions does this purpose catalyze? Does, what are our next actions here? Writing an RFP. Okay, so this group's gonna write an RFP. What group? This committee, the visioning committee. There is no visioning committee. Okay. So what, right now, I wasn't at last week's meeting. I'm seeing a visioning, I'm seeing a purpose statement for a visioning committee. Right? For the visioning work. And we have yet to establish a visioning committee. That's right. What are our next steps? Do we need to establish a visioning committee? Because I thought, I'm looking at the agenda here, approve visioning committee charge. So maybe that was a little bit mislabeled. What are our next steps? Are we establishing a visioning committee? Are we charging them with drafting an RFP? Or are we, you know, like what? Great questions. Okay. I mean, I thought where we stood was, define a purpose, hire a facilitator, which I don't know, launch a process to hire a facilitator. So I don't know how that would be handled. And what about? The board needs an RFP. So either charge me with writing an RFP or one of you volunteers who write an RFP. Yeah. Yeah, that's where we're at. And then once we have a facilitator, then we would talk about committee composition and stuff like that and move forward that way. And then once we have a committee, I would like to see the committee write the charge and bring that back to the board for a vote. Wait, so will you break that process down again? Write it down? Is that what you're saying? Will you, will you, will you, sorry, I'm writing it. Will you say, will you take out that process one more time? Does that sound right to other people who were at the meeting? Yes. 9%? No, I think you got it. I think you got it. I'm struggling with charge and purpose because I feel like how to charge a committee without a charge. So, but if we have a purpose, I do think the board as a whole needs to own this initial step. And I don't think we can form a committee until we have our facilitator. And they're like, here's what I suggest. Six to eight members made up of, you know, I don't know. Maybe that's part of what that initial group does. But I do think we're going to have to own the purpose and RFP. Yeah. Yeah. I think what you articulated makes sense to me. I just feel weird that like at the very end of that is, then there's a charge that comes back to us. But I get that I might, I'm just discussed, I think, at the meeting, the idea of having the committee help to write the charge, you know, to be able to like take some time with the facilitator to dream up the perfect language of a charge and not to have us sort of try to do that on the spot. Yeah, I think, so I think we need some, whether it's an existing committee or a new committee, if either we're going to charge, we're going to ask, would we write the RFP? And if she does that, we're probably going to want to review it. So we need a group to review it because we're not going to do it all as an entire board. I mean, we could, but it will take forever to get done. And... I don't know, this is me as a gig. I think she'd be an excellent speaker. Oh, no, no, no, no. I think she would be an excellent speaker. Obviously I will do whatever the board asks me to do, however you know what I'm saying. I think, I think just... Does that interest, don't we have how much interest we had here? I think that's one of our bosses. We're going to be hired for that, so we're going to be a guy. So I think we do need, whether it's the committee that actually is, whether it's a visioning committee in the end, the final committee or it's a committee that works on pulling together the RFP with or without Libby, probably with Libby to some extent. And I mean, we also need a committee to review proposals after they come in. So just to catch you up, Amanda, we're moving from the language of the purpose to what are the steps of our process that we're going to follow next. There seems to be general agreement that the language of the purpose is fine. We just want to make sure we get our steps of what we're going to do next in lined up. So. And to clarify that we're voting on a purpose that we are using for an RFP process. Yes. And not a charge as written in the agenda. That's true, yes. Okay. So next steps would be have form a committee to work on an RFP. Can we all agree on that? Or just one or two people. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Trapped an RFP. Do you feel comfortable doing it? I mean, the equity committee, do you feel like you can take a first one on it? No, the equity committee needs to do the next thing that we're going to do on our agenda, but I'm happy to take a crack at a writing an RFP and I will ask you for some assistance. So I will ask you for some assistance. Me and I will write an RFP. So I will write an RFP. We can do that. Okay. And then the step after that is review proposals. As you said, Andrew. Yeah, and I think, I do think that the RFP should have a, I just want to get on the same page about this. I don't think you have to have like, perfectly ironed out scope of work, but I think it should be a general scope of work. Oh yeah. Like that's pretty critical. Do you think it needs to be more specific than the second paragraph here? Yes. Okay. So, but again, I think that there's probably a lot of examples of similar RFPs out there that we don't have to reinvent the wheel with this. No, I agree. And so through the BSBA, through the Vermont Superintendents Association. I think we can identify similar contracts that have been put in place and similar RFPs. So, I don't worry about that. Yeah, okay. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it, Andrew. They got it. They can Google it too, you know. Okay. And then I hear what you're asking is, who's going to review the proposals as they come in? Yes. Yep. That's a very good question. That's a good one. Which committee? Frankly, we could just start with drafting the RFP, get the RFP out there and at that point in time, see where we are. The best RFPs that I've seen include a rubric, the winning proposal, it might not be the right word. Sure. The accepted proposal will have the following pieces. Yes. That would be awesome. And I think if that happens, if we can do that, then it makes it for an easier board discussion. Yep. Yeah, I agree. Do we want to request, you guys drop the draft RFP and then send it to the board for the board to discuss this before sending it out? Yeah. Okay. Sure. So why don't we, I don't know that we need to flush out this entire process right now. I think I'm just, I'm proposing this. What do people think about, Lydia and Mia, thank you both, draft an RFP, bring it back to the board. At that point in time, the board will review it, the board will approve it. And at that time, the board will make a decision about how we're going to be reviewing the proposals. Does that seem reasonable? That sounds good. So do we actually need to vote on this or can? If it's not a charge, I don't think you need to vote on it. Yeah, so we can, I mean, I will sort of echo, I actually also had a similar reaction to the words exceptional education, so just for what it's worth when you're considering the language for the proposal. RFP, R-S-P, R-S-P, R-S-P, R-S-P, R-S-P, R-S-P, R-S-P, R-S-P, R-S-P, R-S-P, R-S-P, R-S-P, R-S-P, R-S-P, R-S-P, R-S-P, R-S-P, R-S-P, Anyway, so. Okay. You know they are here to learn, right? Well, really, thank you, Mia. Am I the only one who thought maybe we should stay away from listing the buildings? Am I the only one who had that reaction? Although, I think it's fantastic. And if I'm the only one who just has that reaction because my kid's school isn't on list, that's fine. Oh, we can rock that show. I just wore it because it's not about that building, it's about the students in Montpelier and Roxbury. Yeah, I don't see why we can just say all students have equitable access to. So I'm not committed to it. I'll just share that the context, we had the same conversation with the equity committee level. And the, it was, Roxbury was named, was the only school named in the original purpose of the, from the proposal, from the facilitators, not from the board 15 months ago. But it seemed like between that and that there's a lot of heat around, as we move forward, not, not having the intention at all be closing the Roxbury school, it felt valuable to include the two elementary schools as a way of like, this is where they begin, and then they work, you know, and then the high school is where they finish their tenure with us or their educational. Yeah. Okay, that's fine. Journey with us. You guys put that into that and that makes sense. Amanda, did you want to add anything around that? Or the purpose at all? Or in general? Bless you. Bless you. Thank you. And I think I was going to say something before, so that's okay. I just, it's okay. But I mean, I guess I can say now that I have my, so I, yeah, I mean, I think it's important to name it just because, because specifically we had the families that were worried about something and that this is the bigger, so like, I think we do want to name them all to make sure that they're all included. And then I just want to offer that I could also be an I for the RFP before it comes to the vote too, just, but not necessarily, but why not? All right. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. I think, I think we have a plan, but it's everybody else there. It sounds good to me. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. And now we're ahead of Stingy Linder. All right. Well, we leapfrogged at that time. Just before we move on, I just put on the newly agenda document, potentially September 1st to bring that to, no, next board meeting. Okay. Board meeting after that. Okay. Just that way. Sounds great. So people aren't expecting next board meeting. Yeah, no, I don't think that's me. Next board meeting's full. Yeah. And yeah. I think that, no, no, no, I appreciate you setting those expectations for everyone. It's helpful. Yeah, I think that's a really quick turn around, less than a month to pull that together with everything that you and others have going on. So thank you. Policy monitoring. We start this by moving to accept the policies or the monitoring reports, sorry. We can also chat about them if anybody would like to. Anybody has any questions or thoughts? I don't know if it was a new practice, but I appreciated having the actual policy language with the monitoring report. That was really helpful. Do you need a procedure? Yeah, it seemed like it wasn't just the report and that was it. There was actually, yeah, the procedures and the policies right there next to it. So I could see the whole picture. So I found that really helpful. Same. Thank you for including us. All right. Thanks, Anna. Yeah, thank you, Anna. That was requested at the previous board meeting a few months ago and has been happening. Great, yes. I understand. Well, not all of our policies have procedures. So that might be the new thing that you've noticed. Okay. Yeah, it's very helpful to see how they become action. Maybe it's always along your board webpage. Those things are on your board webpage too. Yes, yeah, we have all of the policies on our webpage. If anybody wants to... And procedures. And procedures, thank you. If anybody wants to review those at any point in time. It's been very helpful for the policy committee. Okay, so just drive on motion to approve the policy monitoring reports. Do we have a motion? I'll move that we accept the policy monitoring. Hold on. Jinx, do you want me to coax? I second. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? The ayes have it. Okay, I move that we adjourn. It's 45 minutes in advance of the time. Oh my gosh. Good. I just think it's a board chair. Yeah, it's clearly. It's the management of the meeting. That's what it is. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? To adjourning. My daughter, who I'm going to just go home and catch a half hour early, not eating junk food. Thanks, everyone. Honors, thank you. Thank you. Thanks, my daughter. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Jerry. Thanks, others who join. Thank you for providing the time. Thank you, everyone. Good night.