 So I'm going to call the meeting to order at 6.04. And the first item of business is adjustments to the agenda. So are there any adjustments to the agenda? Lisa, the one that I sent out, are we saving that for? I think now's the time to share if you want to put that in. Okay, I want to, I sent a letter out to the board administrators in Supervisory Union, Superintendent Bruce, and incoming Jamie Kinarney about a letter from the parents of seniors with some concerns around graduation. So I think everybody has a copy of that. And I think that there's some parents on and students on the call that will probably be wanting to participate in that discussion. All right, thank you. That's the agenda somewhere. So we can add that to the agenda. Lisa was brought to me about the idea of honoring Christine Hudson at graduation in some way. So I wonder if that might be something we could talk about. I'm sure Reed knows that too. And I think that would be well-deserved. I don't know what it should be, but I think that would be well-deserved. She spent an awful lot of time, effort and energy and the board and the community and she deserves to be remembered that way. Yeah. I'm wondering if we could put that graduation item at number four in place of the first public comment. Of course, we would hear other public comment, but I feel like we, looking at the makeup of the group that's on here, knowing that some are seniors and some are senior parents, I wonder if it makes sense to put that earlier in the meeting. Sounds good. Are there any objections to that? Okay. All right. Any other adjustments to the agenda? Okay. Not seeing any. And so that actually brings us to our consent. Is that our consent? No, public comment is before the consent agenda. Can we just take care of the consent agenda first and look at the minutes of Tuesday, April 21st? So I guess that would need to be an adjustment as well. Didn't we already amend and approve April 21st minutes and we had a special meeting on April 28th that those minutes have not been looked at yet. Okay. That is what I was remembering as well. So maybe we'll add the April 28th minutes to the next meeting, make sure we get them out again so that we can look over them. Does that make sense? Yeah. Okay. We'll just put that in the minutes that they need to be reshared and we'll take a look again. So graduation was a topic that was first brought to my attention when I received that letter and heard the concern that I think went out to all of us yesterday. So I haven't had a tremendous amount of time to work with any of that. But I'm wondering, Lisa, if you wanted to share or how we should proceed with this or Reed, if you wanted to tell us a little bit about the current plan. Yeah, it seems it might make sense for me to provide everybody on the board with an overview of where we're at and how we got there. Okay. Thank you. So I think everybody knows that when the governor issued a stay-at-home order and announced that schools would be closed, a decision was also made and announced that they would revisit end of the year activity guidance on May 8th, which was the Friday before last. Correct? And on April 20, April 30th, I made a phone call through Blackboard Connect to senior parents and sent emails to the parents with a little bit more elaboration, announcing that we were waiting for some guidance from the governor before we could make any decisions. By the middle of the week after May 8th, we would announce what our plans were. I realized how everybody wanted information right away as soon as that announcement came out from the governor on the 8th. So I sent a message out to parents that Monday morning explaining that we would be gathering as much guidance as we could. I was meeting with the other Vermont High School principals at 11 that morning and with SU administration at 1130 to kind of see what does this guidance really mean. It became apparent that we'd made some assumptions on a committee that parents would want as much access to the graduates as possible during the graduation ceremony. So we started to narrow some choices and decided to send out a survey to parents, which we did on Tuesday, the 12th, I believe it was. And what we did was we took some options off the table. As of the sixth, our last graduation committee meeting, we were still talking about how we could continue with our plan to use the tent on the green. Maybe we could have families sit together and be socially distanced in small groups of four or five people, since we had 600 seats to work with under the tent. But the guidance on the 8th was pretty clear that any gatherings over 10 people out in the open would not be allowed. So we took the idea of the tent on the green off the table on Monday morning, I went out, is it Monday morning? Friday morning, I went out to the green and took a look at what parking spaces looked like on the green and was working off the idea that maybe we could still use the green and have cars park around the green and watch seniors go up, receive their diploma, have music, have speeches with one person out of the car at a time and no more than 10 people there to make the ceremony happen. When you walk around the green, you realize that most of the trees are below the sitting level of somebody in a pickup truck and there's a whole skew of monuments along Chelsea Street that would prevent people from being able to watch the graduates. So at that point, we needed to look for another location where people could see folks. So we've been looking at locations, nine locations have been presented to the folks working on this. They run a gamut of places. We've narrowed that down to a couple of options. We think we're looking at a location like Hope Field right now, which is across from the cemetery off Chelsea Street close to the school. That location doesn't have electricity. So we've been looking at what the solution for that might be. All the locations don't have wifi access so we would bring a remote mobile hotspot to the location to set that up. With one of our expectations being that for graduates, even with 40 people in the same location, most people are gonna be pretty far away from the stage. And so we think it would be nice for people to be able to sit in their car and watch graduation live through the windshield and also be able to watch it live on the internet from their cell phone if they choose. So that's a piece of the plan. So Hope Field would be a good choice. We also have been looking at the possibility using Bethel Field that's been suggested by a couple of parents that's still on the table. And as a last course, we could use the fields behind the school. The big challenge is we just, the board and some local donors just put in over $5,000 to aerate those fields and receive them. And according to our landscaper, driving vehicles on it would undo all that work. So there's a pretty heavy price tag to driving out on those fields, assuming they're dry. If there was any mud on the fields, the damage could be quite substantial. So we may need to have a dry location if it's wet out and a location that will work if it's not dry. So Hope Field, Bethel Field, the school fields are the three top choices that are being explored right now. Since the May 8th guidance in our announcement last Wednesday, that the survey results confirm that only a couple of people favor a virtual graduation. And very few people like the idea of driving by and being handed a diploma from the car, we decided to proceed with the idea of having everybody park together and get out of their vehicles to pick up a diploma. This part people probably don't know, but on Friday, when the agency of education got wind of plans like this one to have students leave their vehicles, guidance was issued to school saying nobody could leave their vehicle. So as of this weekend, principals around the state of Vermont were kind of scrambling to address the issue of what can we do for graduation if no one is allowed outside of the vehicle? Fortunately on Monday, while 24 principals were on the phone, the secretary of education reconsidered that guidance and he'll now allow one person out of their car at a time in order to walk across a stage. And this is all based on the department of health guidance about limiting the exposure and possible rounds of outbreaks around the state. So that's pretty much where we're at right now. And happy to, I'm interested to hear more ideas and concerns and questions. Okay, thank you for that overview and description of what some of the limitations are. So again, please go ahead and unmute if you're interested in sharing. Oh. Hi. Hello. Hello and your name please. I'm Jen Morris. Okay. And I submitted a proposal. My proposal was the one for Bethel Field in regards to graduation. I'm sorry I called in late and I just caught like probably the last 10 minutes. But my proposal was like the last time I knew that there was only one vehicle allowed per student and the proposal that I submitted was two vehicles per student and I actually submitted a Visio diagram. I'm not sure if you received that and had a chance to review that. But the diagram placed 27 cars, six feet because the state guidelines are saying you have to be six feet in between each vehicle. And so the diagram showed like 27 cars, the length weight of a field, 27 going the opposite way and six opposite way on the other side of the field. And then having two rows but six feet in between each car and six feet in between the back end of the first vehicle and offset. So then, because a lot of families, first of all some of them are divorced and trying to get two parents that could be an issue. Second of all, a grandparent I think would be a huge issue too. And so that was my proposal. And we could, parents could mark the field by painting the lines and making parking spots for every single all 39 students. Their first, the parents will get the first row around the field. And then the second row would be a second ticket for that kid's family to park six feet behind. And then the graduating students, most of them drive and they could park on the opposite side of the field in single walk so everybody could see them. So just throwing that out there. And yeah, it would really suck if it was raining out. But has Bethelfield, was that one of the places that had $5,000 worth of field maintenance or was that just so row field and carpenter? Read your muted. Happens to me at least once a day. Yeah, Bethelfield was aerated and reseeded last fall after the season. So the estimate from the landscaper is $3,500 to $55 of work to undo a parked event on a field. Okay, so just throwing an idea out there. We have a huge field across from our house. Possibility of getting electricity there and we have wifi spot and I don't care if it's raining or not and I don't care if the field gets destroyed or not, there's a possibility we could have it there if that's something anybody wants to consider. And it's a huge flat field. And then do the proposal that I submitted like that. Thank you. I've opened up a spreadsheet and I'm recording a pair of ideas as they come in to follow up on. Okay. Jen, would you feel comfortable sharing that address so that if Reed or someone else from the school wanted to drive out and take a look, they could view that field. Or you could email it later. You don't have to share it in a recorded meeting. We can look it up, we have it on file. Oh, that's true. Okay. And the diagram that Jen did was sent to everybody yesterday. All right. Thank you for that. Is there anyone else who'd like to share? Yes. Okay. Is this Kristen? Yes. Or Alexis. No, Alexis. Bridget. Bridget. Okay. Sorry. There's a couple of pieces here. One is another field that was suggested with Cambridge. The fairgrounds, obviously they are no strangers to having cars driven on the fairgrounds. I don't think we need to worry about aeration. I have not heard back from them yet, but we had also considered that as a location for possible project grant activities. And obviously I figured it would be good to know. So they have been in touch with me. I think, you know, if we had a little, you know, official word behind it, it would be more feasible. But obviously we need to have a yes or no from the directors. But certainly there's plenty of other fields in this area that have been and continue to be used just for parking lots. Can I ask a follow-up question? I drove out to the fairgrounds on Friday to take a look at that. Were you talking about the space in front of like the grandstand or around the track? I was thinking more where people park. I don't know exactly where the electricity runs out there, but if you are approaching from South Royalton, you know, you drive into Cambridge. The first gate. The first gate, there is power out there. So I don't think it's impossible that we could just start parking cars over there. Again, we need permission from the fairgrounds. And I know the seniors submitted a plan, which somehow didn't make it into the timeline, which utilized the fairgrounds. I do not believe that fully complied with the state guidelines because they hadn't received them yet, but I do think the seniors' ideas deserve and need to be considered. And I'm really disappointed that they appear to have been completely shut out of this process. I did not give the April 30th email. I believe you sent it. I feel like we've all had some email issues. But, you know, if I look at the timeline of communications I've gotten, I had an email on March 27th and nothing until May 11th. And it's very difficult to have any idea of the considerations you're talking about and they are a big secret. And I do not understand why it has been deemed necessary to have so little communication with parents and with seniors. Bridget, can I ask a question? On the Tumbridge Fairgrounds, you were talking about parking. You're talking about the parking would be inside the ring where maybe concession stands and rides and stuff would be. That would be location. Nope, can you hear me? Yeah, but because I know that the fields that we normally park our cars in to go to the Tumbridge Fair, those belong to Rob Howe and he uses those for his hay crops. He just rents those parking areas out during the time of the fair. But other than that, it's agricultural use. I thought there was a space between Rob's and where the fairgrounds start. I should have driven out. That might be good to ask and be clear. Yeah, I'm not sure exactly where his land ends. We don't have permission from them yet. Anyway, I think there's enough open land there that we could be creative if we decide to make that choice, I guess is the way I'd put it. But again, yeah, we also would need a green light from them. There is definitely a lot of open space when you take out all the stuff in there when they have fair activities. Yeah, just inside the track itself, there's lots of green space. I'm wondering a little bit about the makeup of the committee that's focused on graduation right now. I mean, I know that you've been incredibly busy trying to run school remotely, but I'm also wondering about the makeup of that committee. Sure, there are nine or 10 people standing members of the committee. The committee that functions every year for graduation. We met for the first time back on March 16th. We have a list of 27 items that make up graduation. We all have an assigned task on that list. Again, up until May 8th, we were still hoping to use the 10th that we had reserved and proceed with a somewhat normal graduation on the green. The most relaxed and open possibility. Again, I denounced to the folks and the senior class that we would have an announcement as soon as possible after that decision. So we rushed through a survey, 26 parents responded to the survey, 15 students responded to the survey. We had the 10 members of the committee. Those members include the high school guidance counselor, the high school office staff, the high school facilities staff, including the co-curricular director. It includes the two senior class advisors. It includes the IT folks for the school, Ed Nichols and Ollie Brown for their role in helping to set up the live feed and other technical support. So it's a committee that gets together and does this every year and kind of has a pretty seamless capacity to get this work done without it taking over our jobs. None of us are professional event planners. Probably the most important conversations I had on May 8th were with our school nurse who's also on the committee who gets used about twice a week is getting updates on what we know about the spread of the epidemic and how germs are being spread. And honestly, there are some of the key members of the committee who are needed to pull this off who are concerned that having 200 people in one space, no matter how spread out they are, still has some very significant risks. And so the one car piece is largely about that. It's also recognizing that for us to put this on, we can't have an event staff of more than seven or eight people if we're gonna also have students get out of their cars. So whatever arrangement we work on we can't have people out of their cars participating in an event, parking cars and directing traffic that exceeds the minimum number of people we need to have for the podium, which would be an MC. We plan to have a photographer there. We need to have someone running the video live feed. So there's kind of a base level. If we have an event in South Royalton, the South Royalton Police Department has offered to provide it with their full support at no cost. So that's a factor. We have an excellent working relationship with them. I'm reluctant to hire constables or sheriffs that I haven't worked with before to pull off an event with a lot of moving pieces that involves so much safety and risk. So that's a factor. And so part of my phone call discussion on Friday afternoon was a talk with South Royalton Police about what guidance they've received from state law enforcement and the Department of Health about gatherings. And I wanted to make sure that the ideas that we were proposing met those criteria. And really the idea we talked about was parking around the green. And I got out and walked out that space and there are 40 spots exactly if we convert some of the parallel parking along, but it's not South Street or Park Street. We convert that to kind of drive it direct in parking. Anyways, when you walk around the spot and you think about all the requirements we have, it's not a good location. And something where we can relocate cars is preferable. So the fields are looking good right now, mostly because of the recent guidance that cars have to be six feet apart. We calculated what that would be, the average car six and a half feet wide. So we need 12 and a half feet per car. So to put all the cars in line together, we need about 500 feet of space to line them all up to watch the event. We can stagger them into first and second rows and take a look at that. We're still gonna need probably about a football field and a half of space for 40 cars. Okay, thank you. I guess I was curious about student participation on that committee, but it sounds like it's a long established practice. Well, and there's a philosophy on the committee that this is an event that we put on for students and it's a gift to parents. Say, this is something that they've waited for for 12 years, sorry, the construction vehicle driving by my house. And that asking people to be doing work on this is not in the spirit that's been part of the tradition of graduation. Yeah, it doesn't mean that we have to stick with tradition, but that's a kind of ingrained philosophy this is something that the school does for the community. And there are surprises and there are things that parents have suggested that are planned that haven't been revealed because revealing them spoil some of the surprise, but it sounds like we're gonna make a list of those things in order to make people feel more trusting and appreciative of the efforts that everybody on the committee has been putting in. Thank you. Yep. Are there other students or families on the call who'd like to share something? Hi, I would just like to say personally, as a child, a senior with divorced parents who isn't under this current plan that can't have both of my parents attend graduation, it's very stressful. And honestly, I'm not speaking for my class, I'm not, I'm just speaking for me here. I would prefer to have to be involved in what is traditionally not been my responsibility if it means that I can have more of my family there. Like I would love to have my grandmother be able to be that I lost my grandfather in November. Like this was sort of one of the boys' thoughts that I was gonna be having who they understand that. Thank you. I think I've had a couple of parents call me with some concerns and I think we're gonna be able to work out individual circumstances that may be a little bit out of the ordinary. So we'll work something out, Alexis. You know, I should take a step back because, you know, part of what's gone on with the planning of graduation is a good part of this actually takes place in senior class meetings. So the seniors actually, I could be wrong, but earlier in the semester discussed in their class meeting who the speakers would be. And that's something that the senior class owns and it's left to them to pick their speaker and make those arrangements. So that's a somewhat important part of this. Unfortunately, we went into the school closure mode and the advisors didn't have any ideas from the seniors. We have actually shared our ideas with them. What? We have actually shared our ideas with them and our communications with them. And also I am aware that this is a part of our, the part of graduation that we have and I don't mean to sound rude, but that's really not what I'm worrying about right now. Okay. All right. Thank you. Are there other, Ray? Lisa, I just wanted to, you know, seems like we have a lot of collars and I wanted to make mention that for them to unmute star six. Thank you. Just a reminder, there may be more people here. Okay. So star six to unmute. And Andrew, would you like to chime in? Yeah. I was curious if anybody had considered using the Bethel drive-in. I mean, it seems like that's a facility that is built for people to have good visibility from the car and is set up for cars to drive on and has power and all this other stuff. Like if you put on stage where the screen is and at the students walk up there that's been a consideration of that. That was on the early list of nine sites. That idea surfaced is actually somebody, community member posted that on their Facebook page on the eighth after the governor's or the secretary of education's guidance came out. Randolph also looked at that site. Randolph decided against it because they got a lukewarm response from the owner and the drive-in's not set up for anything digitally. So in order to use that facility we'd have to bring everything in. Until recently my cell phone wouldn't work at Bethel Middle School Elementary School on my Verizon plan. So there are also some technical issues that didn't lend itself to liking that spot. If we're looking at more than 40 cars though Bethel Drive-in has a capacity for 80 cars and clearly worrying about aerated fields isn't a concern. So that may end up being back on the table. I have a quick question. Is Bridget again? Okay. Is it possible? I'm going to show all my lack of text savvy. I'm relying on you ready to answer this question probably because we wanted to increase access for students. Did we not have a buy or rent some like signal boosters? I'm sorry. I just don't. So like, I hope you get the idea because I thought those might be helpful in places where we were unsure of signal. We said it's okay if I respond. Oh, of course. Sorry. No, no. Bridget, yes, as part of a grant for both at this point for the high school, the middle school and both elementary, there are students who have MiFi devices through the end of the year at least to help with know or lousy internet connections and those could be used to help in terms of the streaming or setup of the event. There's a cable TV company who will broadcast this meeting and we've reached out to them and another about recording the event in case there were hitches with the live stream. Okay. So that would be Orca or whoever. Yep, CVTV is the other one. CVTV, awesome. Thank you. Okay. And that's star six to unmute. This is Grace LaFrancois. Can I bring just, hi, can I just bring back the point of the graduation speaker? The seniors have always been the impression that we were having a graduation speaker. So like we've been talking about it all year, we also have a group chat where we discuss things so that the class officers can bring them to our advisors. We wanna at least try to have this still be allowed. We don't think it's fair to have this just retaken because I guess people are saying we didn't have it together enough if we're all thrown for a loop when we got taken out of school on March 13th. Yeah, we're gonna have graduation speakers Grace. There's nothing in the guidance that doesn't allow us to have a speaker come up just so long as there's only one person up at the podium and they're six feet away from anybody else who's up there. So we have confirmed with the valedictorian that they will give a speech. We still have to talk to the salutatorian and I believe the seniors were sent a survey yesterday asking for speaker ideas, right Grace? Yeah, so we're working on that, but I believe there will be three speakers plus me and one of the things in the principles report is to ask the board if they want to have a representative on the podium or not and certainly the board that's been a tradition to have someone there we could also allow for some words from a board member as a representative if you decide you wanna go that route tonight. Okay, thanks for clearing that up. I'm sorry, what survey got sent out yesterday? I think there's a senior class survey it talked about what to do with the senior trip, senior funds and I think one of the questions towards the end of the survey was who would you like to have as your graduation speaker? There's one name that I believe the officers or that was coming up when the officers were talking about it and so there's a vote for that name and or other suggestions. Okay, I did not receive that survey. So what should I do? You've been on email, right? So there's some tech glitch here. Yeah, actually I'm looking back and the only thing I received yesterday was the timeline for getting our pass and gowns on Friday. Yeah, that's all we've gotten. I just asked one of my friends. All right, well, we'll get that fixed. Thank you. Thank you. Ms. Robbins was having some trouble getting that out to everybody, but I don't know why it didn't go out to all of you. All right. Can I speak? Yeah, just a couple of things on just the emails. A lot of my point River Valley emails end up in my junk mail for some reason. I don't know why. And I can go in there and I can find them, but yeah, sometimes they do end up there. And the other thing too is I've got a couple flatbed trailers that could be used as a stage. They're 48 feet long, eight feet wide each. They're full size tractor trailers. And if you need them for a stage, I can certainly bring them. Or if you want them to do a parade, the students could sit on them and I think you could probably put 20 on each trailer and we could run a parade from Bethel down through Royalton. Thanks, Ron. That's up to our office. This is Jen Morris. You said a parade after graduation. Well, yeah, it's just as a gesture. I mean, I've got to track the trailers that the students could probably fit on the two trailers. I've actually already confirmed all that with Kyle Blakeman, Adam Lyman, the fire department and Loretta about doing that. I talked to them all this again, as a surprise for the students. Oh, okay. I don't say anything. I'm asking on this situation where we... I need to know this because you can tell me the entire question of the plan too. Okay. I was just wondering if the tent is not getting used, what was the budget for renting that tent? Cause that could offset any additional costs, like if some of the fields needed to get reseeded or things like that, it sounds like we've got a little something in the budget that could be used for other things under these unprecedented times. Right, yeah. The budget's not an issue, I don't think. Okay. I mean, I haven't been considering cost as a factor for any of this. Not that I'm not supposed to be watching the budget and make sure that we don't have a deficit again this year, but... But ultimately, using the Bethel athletic field wouldn't really be an issue. It's just recognizing that we might have to reseed it and it might cost a few thousand dollars. But that shouldn't say that we're not gonna use a field if it turns out to be the best location. Absolutely. Okay. Me? Yeah, one of the things I haven't been able to figure out is I asked Ray to take a look at the Bethel fields for the technology side of things. And when he drove out there yesterday, I don't know who the contractors, but there's a heavy construction project going on somewhere in Bethel that's gonna run into the fall. Yeah, the town water. Yeah, so they're using the fields as a staging area for piping and heavy vehicles. I hope they're not driving on the fields, but I don't have more information than that. They're not driving on the fields. I've been going down there. I walk down there pretty frequently. They're not driving on the fields. I wonder if the Bethel town offices could be contacted in order to figure out what the timeline is for that project just based on the amount of materials that I see down there and knowing how quickly projects like that can move. I'm wondering if they're gonna be there for another month. I think somebody said that this project could be going into the fall. Okay. We contacted the town this morning and they said that it runs through the fall. That doesn't mean we can't get the vehicles out of the way and work with them. Right, yeah, for the graduation they might be able to park them somewhere else. Yeah, I mean, there's a big parking lot across the street. Correct, yeah. It could be used, so. Reid. Yes, sir. Hello. Hi, Robert. Yep. Okay. I'm the building and grounds person that comes here and. Oh, you are? Yeah. If you'd like to come up tomorrow and take a look at it with me, I'll do that with you. All right. I didn't know that. Yeah, I'll have to look at my schedule, Bob. I've been in meetings most of the day so I don't even know what tomorrow holds. I'm there from seven to three. Okay. All right. That's a kind offer. Yes. Bridget. And this is kind of illustrating one of the points I was trying to make is that we have so much for resources and knowledge and wisdom here to help make things happen and make things happen well. And I continue to be frustrated that in these extraordinary times I mean, you probably all remember last month I said, please, please start thinking of alternatives to the park. And the answer was, I believe the actual words were, well, we have the tent. And I just, I'm very frustrated. I'm hoping we can move forward in a better, more open, more communicative way because we have really smart people here. We have really smart students. We have people with experience. We have people who know things. And to have this very, you know, nine of us aren't event planners, that's right. No one expects you to be, you know, we have a community. Graduation has always been a community event. And that's what I think probably every single one of us wanted to be. These are extraordinary times. It's okay to reach out to us. Thank you for that reminder. Can I step in to discuss the date of graduation? Of course. So is the date set in stone as June 13th still? Yes, the date is June 13th at 10 a.m. We have seniors leaving the state at the end of the month. We considered a delay, but because the state directive is that we have to provide equal access to all seniors, we can't put on an event after we know that some seniors have left. Okay, that was my question. Thank you. Yeah, and there is a senior with an employment contract that starts on July 1st in another state. So that is what it is. I do wonder actually now that we're thinking about it, could we potentially have like that following Sunday as a rain date if that becomes a factor? Because that's a little bit of a wiggle and honestly, I feel like none of our dance cars are gonna be particularly busy with that. So you're proposing a June 15th rain date? Well, and again, isn't it the 14th? Anyway, and again, like I don't know like legally, I'm not asking anyone to do anything that would be illegal or too much of a pain. I don't know what you have to register to state that kind of thing. I was just thinking, you know, Saturday, Sunday, it's a one day flip. And of course, it'd be odd, 2020 being as it is, it may just, you know, pour both days. So it might be irrelevant. Well, I think it's worth thinking about something to deliberate on. So I'm curious about next steps as I'm sitting here, not a lot of people are unmuting or putting in the comments that they'd like to share. So I'm wondering, Reed, if you could share what you think you might do moving forward. I've got a number of inquiries out to town officials in South Royalton. We've gotten a green light from the town of Bethel. So we have permission to use those fields which are owned by the town as we see fit. I want to confer the changes to the plans with law enforcement to make sure that we're still within the parameters of what they've been instructed to enforce, which I think we are. I have a math teacher running the numbers on the size of the field that's needed to accommodate different vehicles. And from that point, we might want to, you know, start talking about how far away we want people, we're willing to accept people to be away from the action. You know, when we were first looking at a car, car location, it seemed really easy to contain it all at the front of the school. And there are enough parking spots for that to happen. But the new guidance, the cars have to be six feet apart, make that location unworkable. So we just need to kind of reach out and look at bigger locations and make sure they can accommodate things like that. I hear the request from parents to get as many, find a way to allow as many people as possible to attend. I know some of our concern is the safety of everyone involved, especially grandparents since we know this disease is especially virulent with people over the age of 60. And it takes one person getting sick to infect a dozen or two dozen people, especially at a post-graduation type event. And one of the things we know from what we know about our seniors is that many of them have continued in those frontline jobs where they're exposed on a regular basis to everybody in the community, but working in all sorts of different jobs especially retail where they could be asymptomatic carriers or the virus and a breath taken in the wrong direction when you look at the aerosol models where the particulate that can be coughed out can carry good 18 feet. So those are all safety concerns about trying to limit the spread of this virus, not just for the seniors and their immediate families but for the entire community. Those are significant concerns. I mean, that's why we're not in school. And there are people, especially folks on staff who are concerned whenever somebody who is not known to have been tested and been screened comes through the door of the building. So those are the folks that they're gonna be relied on to set this up. And so we need to do everything we can to minimize their possible exposure, not just for their health, but for our ability to maintain our continued operations. Thank you. So are the fairgrounds and the drive-in potentially back on the table? I would say after this conversation and the models that have been drawn up for the numbers of vehicles that unless law enforcement tells me otherwise or the guidance from the state changes that we could look at an 80 vehicle event and try to find the space that could accommodate that. Hey, Reed. Hi. This is Jen Morse again. Is there anything I can do to help communicate with other people? I'm more than, I have a lot of connections and I'm more than willing to like reach out to people to help anyway. I'm willing to help. Yeah, I hear you, Jen. We'll get a chance to talk on Friday. Okay. And so maybe we can kind of refine that. I've got like 12 ideas here from our conversation to kind of flesh out and investigate more and we'll just keep building this list. I know there are more in the letter that Lisa sent around and some more ideas that are behind the diagrams that were drawn up. I'm sure you made some assumptions and had some reasons for why you designed things the way you did. And it might be good for us to talk through some of that. Sure. And just one other question. Do you already have a professional photographer? If not, I know a couple people and I could reach out to them but if you guys already have that lined up then I won't bother. We haven't signed a contract but we have two quotes to look at. Okay, cool. Yeah. Thank you. One other place that I was wondering about just in terms of thinking about our students that is out of our really close communities but at the same time an easy drive would be the Suicide 6 ski area. They have a lot of parking and electricity there too. I just don't know if that would allow us greater capacity as well. And there has been at least one school that made it out on social media where the students received their diploma by riding up the chairlift. Oh, I didn't even think about that. Pretty novel idea, isn't it? That was in New Hampshire. I'm not quite sure how everybody gets to watch the receiving of the diploma and the speeches in that model. Yeah, but it's memorable. Yeah, unless they're getting it on the way down. Yeah, I would think maybe you get to the bottom and you get to a table and you grab your diploma and celebrate. But even then, I mean, I don't know how big the school is either but with 40 kids on a chairlift they'd be lined up over a mile and a half and not get to see everybody, so. Right, that distance piece is a challenge. Yeah, but there is a school that's using Suicide 6. I believe it's a Vermont high school that is playing your graduation at Suicide 6, so they may have some more information to share about that. Okay, and there is a student survey to go out to solicit some student feedback is that limited to graduation speakers or is that a more global survey? No, it has more to do with what the class should do with its funds and the class has been working with the advisors and there are a bunch of options they've talked about, some donations they could make and they've got some quotes for those things and they've talked about maybe giving out gifts to seniors with some of that money or buying yearbooks for the entire class is another option and there's enough money that we could probably do two or three different things with it. Well, we, the seniors are gonna decide what to do with it. Right, do you think it might be worthwhile to hear from seniors what their most valued pieces of their graduation ceremony are? So for example, it could be useful information to know if walking across the stage with their family being able to view them is the most important thing or hearing the speaker. I just think that might give you feedback for the graduation committee that would allow you to craft a ceremony that really meets the needs of these kids. Yeah, and we actually have that Lisa, it is great. One of the cool things is that the parents didn't think that they were that important to their kids' graduation, but the kids in a much greater percentage said that their parents and family being there was important. Oh, that's awesome, thank you. It was pretty cool. Yeah, nobody seems to care about the speeches, but that really is a little bit at the core of the ceremony, but I think last year's graduation was close to two hours, with over an hour of it being a lot of talking and presentation by different scholarships and awards. And we're gonna streamline that this year, so we will announce and present to each senior their diploma and their scholarship and awards at the same time. So that'll all be announced as they approach the stage. Great. Can I ask a clarifying question? Sure, relax us. I'm sorry, I just wanna make sure I'm following this right. So we will still be able to showcase all of the wonderful community organization that are giving us scholarships? Well, I don't know if you remember last year's graduation, but a lot of the people who presented those are in the high-risk category, and having that many additional people at the ceremony would be difficult logistically. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. I know one of the things that, at least a couple of different people brought up, I'm parent and student with the idea of doing a botual ceremony for the scholarships and having it be separate this year, just so we could still, cause I feel like one of the really nice things about graduation is that we get to see all of these community of people that are an organization that are backing us up. We also have pre-recorded messages during the ceremony from that organization. I think that that's a possibility. I think that Harold could potentially run an ad thanking the different groups. I think there's a lot of creative ways that this could be managed. But I hear what you're saying, Alexis, and I appreciate that. All right, I'd like to wrap this portion of the agenda up, cause we spent about an hour on this issue, and I think it's incredibly important. So if there's anyone who has something they'd like to share before we move on by priority of people who haven't yet shared, now's the time to do that. If nobody else wants to go, I have one last point on the class. Yep. So regarding the class money, I know we briefly mentioned this. So the word is that in Royalton, it's not being allowed that we divide the senior trip money because we can't go on a trip with it. But I know that this wasn't the case in Bessel because classes have done it in the past. And I think that this rule should be overlooked, especially this year with these circumstances, not only because it's partly Bessel tradition, but because we, I don't feel like as a class that has spent so much time fundraising all this, we should have to give it all away. Like as donations, we obviously like, we've talked about doing different donations and dividing the money, but we've also been hoping to like save it or set it aside for a reunion next year. So we just want to discuss that rule. Yeah, as the treasurer, I just want to second what Grace is saying. I know I personally budgeted out a couple of different ways we could divide it among themselves and we were told that, no, no, no, you're not allowed to do that. But given the extenuating circumstances, I think it's, it won't really look. I'm not familiar with those rules, but it sounds like something that should be addressed at a class meeting. It does seem like a time when looking at the rules and if the class's desire is to have a reunion with that money since you haven't been able to have a graduation, I think that does make some sense to me. But I feel like that's something that hopefully will be addressed. Is there a plan for a virtual class meeting coming up? There is, we are having all the seniors gather, well, gather in small groups that meet state guidelines on Friday to pick up their cap and gown. So we have over the course of three and a half hours, we'll get a chance to talk with all the seniors. And the survey is designed for the seniors to get the feedback and vote to their class and what they wanna do with their money. And I don't- Is there a write-in option on this survey in case they think of something we haven't thought of? That's a good question. They've been working on their ideas. Alexis, how many, and Grace, how many weeks have you guys been working on this one? At least three weeks, maybe? Yeah, around that. Like that. Okay. Yeah, so it's a really comprehensive list that's got maybe two dozen options on it. Yeah, I'm really concerned because we have come to the class advisors about a lot to like divide up the money amongst ourselves. So I was thinking it's probably a rule change that has to be discussed at a higher level because we've been told that's just not allowed. Okay. Yeah, this is Chris. Chris, yeah. Yeah, I would caution against that because it's a fundraiser that's done for charitable reasons and then, I don't know how it would be intended to be used but to divvy the money up among individuals just for personal use typically isn't allowed under state laws and regulations in regards to charitable fundraising. So I think if there's some sort of group event like a class reunion next year or something like that that it could go towards, so that would be good. But if you divvy it up among individuals then it becomes income that has to be taxed. And that wasn't the purpose of that fundraising. I support using it to support the students but I just caution against using it in improper ways. The money was originally intended just for us to go on a trip anyways. It wasn't intended to be donated and in the past classes at Bethel House separated it. I also will say I did look into that some and since we did intend to use it for to treat ourselves basically and I know in silver at least we were always very upfront about like this is for us we're gonna have fun. We're gonna enjoy our lives. I think it'll be okay. I really appreciate the guidance though. Okay. All right. So it sounds like that's something that's maybe on the table. All right. Yeah, it sounds like if the seniors really that's what comes back from the survey that's what they wanna do. My gut tells me that there's a law against a school account dispersing money directly to individuals for their own use and I'd seek a legal opinion before we would do proceed that way. Okay. But if it's the will of the class you'll seek the legal opinion. Yep. All right, great. Is that okay? Is that in the survey? Is what in the survey? Divide the money above in the class? Was that one of the options? I don't remember. The survey is huge. It may not be there explicitly as an option because it was taken off the table but there are spaces for comments I believe where seniors could indicate that. Okay. Hey, Lisa, I wonder if you wanna talk about the Christine Hudson thing because we're talking about graduate. So what's the thinking around honoring Christine? Well, that was Bridget's thought and she communicated with me and so I think she can eloquently say what the idea was. I think, I agree with her. Okay. It wasn't one of my more eloquent ideas, Bruce, but I appreciate the compliment. It was very much a reflection of how instrumental Christine was both as a board member for Sub-Boilers but more importantly to this group, to the creation of our consolidation plan, her advocacy of the consolidation plan. I'm not sure we wouldn't all be here without her but I'm sure without her we would be here in a different way. And maybe not a better way. I mean, we all, I think, except some of the newest arrivals, Reed, David, if you're there, knew her, talked to her, saw her at games, at practices, on the green last prom when she was not well, you couldn't have asked for a better advocate or champion for our kids. And so, whether it was a moment of silence or a few words, it would be very hard to try to sum Christine up with a few words, but if somebody wants to take a crack at it, it's better at that than me, who was closer to her than me, that I think that would be very appropriate. But just some recognition that we did lose her over the summer and that she was so instrumental to the creation of the Wild River Valley School District. Yeah, I love that idea. When I heard about recognition for Christine, I was thinking about things, perhaps like a flower garden with a bench with her name on it or something like that or a special spot at the softball field. But I do love the idea of a moment of silence at graduation too. Reed, is that something that you feel comfortable incorporating in the event? Just as soon as I muted myself, he asked me a question. Well, that's what I meant. I added that to the list, we absolutely can do that. That's a great idea. Thank you. Thank you, Bridget. I think Christine was the first one to come into my office and welcome me at first week as a principal at the high school. Yep. Did she welcome you or give you hell? Sorry, you don't have to answer that. I'm just... I was gonna decline this. I was gonna tell Christine it was the same thing. Wonderful, thank you. Okay. Gonna get back to our agenda. Thank you all. That brings us to board comment. Is there any board comment? Any member of the board who wishes to share something at this time? Okay, great. So moving on, we get to reports to the board. First, our superintendents report. Just let me tell you that I shared some concerning news with the administrators yesterday that there is a movement around the state to not have a summer program. And we don't know whether it's gonna happen yet or not, but it's certainly in jeopardy. The Southwest Vermont group of superintendents have already said that they weren't gonna follow through and do it. I know that Barry is not or is least talking about not doing it. And Central Vermont school district, Williamstown and Northfield are considering it. And I think probably there'll be a discussion with my Wenuski Valley group of superintendents about the possibility of not having summer programming. There's a position paper that has been written and has come out recently. So I don't want anybody to be caught off guard by this. It's not a done deal. I guess it's a done deal in Southwest Vermont, but not around the state completely yet. But there's just the feeling of risk. And there has been a question asked me about, do we still continue to USDA has extended summer meals till the end of the year, the end of the summer? And does that mean we would no longer serve over the summer or would we serve over the summer? So far, we've put out 20,000 meals throughout the SU just over 20,000 through the month of April. And it's cost us about $74,000, which is probably reimbursable with the COVID money that's coming from Washington or coming from the state to the districts. So I don't want you to be in the dark about this and be surprised by this, but in the last week and a half or so, this has gained some steam that people just don't feel we're gonna be in a safe position. And I know it bums some of the local folks that run those programs out considerably, but I just think that maybe everybody's proceeding with caution and we don't know what the rules are gonna be about the time that the summer program would start, which is I think around the 1st of July. So we just don't have any way of knowing about that. On another note, I will be bringing forward 16 policies for all of you to look at between now and the next meeting and the policy committee has gone through them pretty thoroughly and hoping that we can get, it's gonna have to be published in the paper in the next two weeks so that we get the warning out to people there's all kinds of different policies, the social media policy, therapy dog policy, all kinds of different things that we've been working on all winter. And this will be the final reading in front of the board. So other than that, there's all kinds of things going on, but I think the other thing about the summer meals I wanted to mention is that we've been very concerned about the stamina and being able to have people to be able to carry on those programs over the summer. Those folks work through the vacation in April and have been serving nonstop really since we broke on the 13th of March. And there's concerns that some of them have to go to summer jobs and it may not be available. So I just wanted to throw all that out for you. And you guys should be very, very proud and pleased about having passed your budgets because boy, what a pain in the neck it is with COVID to try to deal with revotes or initial votes like we are in four of the districts. So other than that, things are good. I know that Jamie sends his regards. He is dealing with a real tragedy in Williamstown over the last day or so. We talked this morning or yesterday morning actually about it and he's just gonna be pretty indisposed for the next few days trying to deal with a student issue. So that's all I have unless anybody's got questions. Thank you, Bruce. I muted myself, I'm sorry. I have a question. So that brings us to Tara's report. Oh, can I just ask Bruce real quick? Wendy, think you're gonna know about the school, I mean the summer programs. Are you just gonna keep us updated as you hear more? Yeah, I'll continue to update the board. The next meeting is on Thursday at six. And I hope you guys are not tired of these meetings. They seem to be pretty well attended and it's for information purposes. When Uski Valley was trying to schedule a meeting yesterday to do their take on what they're gonna be recommending, I wasn't on that call because I hadn't something else going on, but I would expect maybe by the end of the week or early next week we would have some idea. The superintendent's group has written a position paper on this heavily influenced by those districts who've already made the decision. And this really speaks to what Reed has been dealing with with graduation. The guidance has come into us so late. You know, it was only like a week ago that we really found out what the ground rules were and nobody really knows what's gonna be, it's gonna be like a month from now. So that's figured into the planning. We, you know, this is all being controlled at the state level and we're the ones, you know, it's kind of trickling down to us. Somebody asked me about the summer program and whether or not we would just stand alone and run it ourselves. I think we'd be crazy to do that because we would get so much media scrutiny and if anything happened, it would be pretty devastating. It would be a circus, you know? So, you know, I just, I think we just need to give it another week or so and find out what people are doing. But there is a significant number of districts that have already made that decision. So I'll keep you posted, Lisa. It's a long-winded answer, but I will. So. Well, I think one of the challenges is that if there's not going to be a summer program, families need to know early so they can make an alternative plan. But the flip side is if we can run one, that does simplify things for families. So, thank you. I appreciate the thoughtfulness going into that decision. So that brings us to Tara's report. My world is insane. We have four budget votes that are trying to come together. We're trying to get four informational packets together and out to communities for those four other boards that need to approve their budget. We're trying to complete the universal chart of account crosswalk because we have to go live with that on July one. We have run into a programming snag and infinite visions. So we successfully rolled two fiscal years for two of the districts. And then after they rolled all the chart of accounts changed. So Rose has been working to try and get all of those corrected and fixed. So we have not rolled any other districts until infinite visions can figure it out on their end. Rose and I have a conference tomorrow with the agency of education to review some of the issues that we've run into with the universal chart of accounts. So that's being delayed slightly. We continuously get requests for information from the agency of education with only usually a couple of hours turnaround time because they need to take it to their multiple hearings that they go to. So we drop everything that we're doing to scramble to get that done for them. Other than that, you know, running staff we're not together as a group on a regular basis. So we're doing a lot of stuff through Google meetings and via email. So I just feel like our business office flow is just off and working to get that re-established with the reopening of central office that will hopefully happen on June 1st. We're still on target for our new payroll person to start June 1st. So we're excited about that. Not sure how that's gonna work yet with the social distancing requirements and how we're gonna do all of that training. So that all needs to be worked out. But otherwise, I'm still trying to wrap up the fiscal year 19 audits at this point. You're now waiting on me to complete my reviews and get my remarks off to the auditors for final corrections. So I can get the final drafts back and out to you as boards for a review and consideration. And I think that's it for my rundown right now that I can think of. Okay, and I know that Jamie had been working on potentially a finance committee idea. Do you have any information to share about that or just we should wait to hear more when Jamie can join us? That I'm sure we'll start after July one, Lisa, when all of the boards have reorganized because it's a member from every board that needs to do it. So you still have to do all of the executive board and the full board reorganizations. Once the last two districts go, you have Jihad and Arsad who has not done that part of their annual meeting yet. So it'll be after all of that happens. Okay, all right, thank you. Any questions for Tara? Well, we have her right here. All right. Thank you. Moving on to the principles report. Good evening. Welcome. Thank you. My Google meeting. I'm not sure where it'd be tonight. I haven't kept track of where we are going back and forth. You received our report and I'd like to highlight any part of that. And it's a little further down in the agenda, we're gonna specifically address the leadership model. Okay. So if you can see, I'm gonna skip that right now for that reason, okay? Okay. So we have two new resignations to report. Mika Sands, who is an elementary world language and culture teacher, has tendered her resignation and she'll be living in Spain next year in an immersion program. Hopefully. She was a, yes, hopefully. She was a huge asset to us. Nancy Pageway, our math interventionist 50% who retired once from 30 years of teaching came back and gave us two years and she's retiring for good. So we are gonna get her for free now on a volunteer basis. We've already talked to her about that. And we need to fill both or not fill both these positions to be determined. And then we have also begun working on a posting for the food service director position that Willie Walker resigned from as of June 30th and our new position, instead of filling a full principles position, which is a coordinator of student services position has been posted and we've received applicants on school spring and we're creating an interview committee. And all of that, by the way, all those new positions Bruce has graciously made way for Jamie Kinarney to be helpful with us in choosing those people. And Andrew has sent out a very nice letter to the South Royalton family and community, families and community, while introducing herself. The food service, like Bruce said, the SU wide I guess is 30,000 meals, but we in the Bethel Royalton kitchens have done the bulwark of all that and they've done a great job and kept very safe. And the summer programs that you heard about that. Any of the other principles wanna talk? I have been at home and not talking too much. So, and I'm not allowed to talk to my wife after five o'clock at night anymore. So I'll just keep going unless you wanna interrupt me. Roll with it. Go ahead. Roll with it, keep going. Oh, roll with it. Okay, the best institute. So this is where, if you're not familiar with this, it is where a lot of the PBIS, which is turning into the MTSS work, is we're sending 25 folks from the Rudd group and we're gonna line up pre-K through 12. And this used to just be a behavior piece, but it's really melded into a behavioral and academic model of support. And you'll see that again in our presentation a little further down in the agenda. And Reed, you need, oh, I will tell you that I'm the middle school principal and I had a nightmare the other night that I lost all of the diplomas. And I used to be a high school principal. It was really an easy nightmare to wake up from because I had no responsibility. I do have a quick question about diplomas and about signing the diplomas. It seems like logistically that could take some time, but we can think about that later. Sorry to interrupt, Owen. I think we're going to interrupt. Yeah, I'm on it. Okay. So the diplomas are in the main office at the high school and there is a separate room for board members to be shown into where they can sit down at a table and sign the 39 diplomas. You'll be alone. You'll need to wear a mask. The building is open from 11 to one. So you can come in 11 to one and there's someone there to let people in. If that time is lousy for you, then just email Donna Birkitt and she is there most days of the week and she will make sure to be there to open the door for you at a given time that works for you. Awesome. So at your convenience over the next three weeks, if you just come in, sign on one of the lines, then they'll be ready to go for graduation. Awesome. Yep. Any other questions? The other thing is to know if one of you want to be a part of the graduation or for safety reasons, we just want to be strict about limiting the number of people up on the podium who are breathing the same air as the graduates. In the past, if there's a board member who has a child graduating, that's the person who that honor goes to. And so I feel like Lisa should make that decision. We don't have to decide tonight. All right, I think, I mean, I don't want to be one extra body up there, though it would be pretty awesome to hand my son his diploma. So I'll definitely hold on that and we'll just see how things unfold between now and then. Great. I think it's also important that you may want to look at these links in our report because there is Andrew's letter and there's a graduation announcement and there's a few other things and it's a good way to see things. Oh, yeah, that's right there about, I'm sorry. It's okay, it's fine. I think good communication is a lot of communication, a lot of the time. So finally, we are mentioning that we are working on plans to reopen in the fall and we don't know what that looks like now. And as everybody knows, this is a new abnormal but the teachers are working hard on creating models that might be completely off campus, partially on campus, completely on campus. So that's a conversation that's ongoing. There's also been a conversation about possibly trying to not use our entire 177 days and using 175, which is the law. We have snow days and using those two other days potentially as professional development for teachers to develop something for the fall. Not happening right now, but there's even a rumor that the state is gonna like erase snow days but it's a rumor. So we know how those work. Go tell everybody. So Lisa, if it's appropriate, the next thing that I see on the agenda is the leadership structure. Yes. Shall we go right into that? Do it. All right, I'm gonna try to present this. Okay, so let's see how I do here. Window and... Raise here, maybe Ray could present it. Oh, nevermind, it's working. Oh, got it. Maybe. Did it, and here we are. Are you seeing it? Yeah, but now if you just click present up in the upper right-hand corner, then it'll blow it up so we can really see it. Thank you. When you get to your slideshow. There it is. Yeah. Can you see it? Yeah. I can read it, very nice. So slide one is, as you can see the, and we'll explain each of these and it's color coded on purpose, by the way. We had an actual classroom teacher taught us some of how to put some of this, like the photos in the background as kind of like watermarks. So I'm going to go down a slide. And so you go back up there and there's the leadership team is the pink, right? The above that, the blue is the admin team, which will be Jamie Canarney, myself, Andra and Reed. And then the pink team would be the principals, the new position of coordinator student support. And there's two behavior coordinators, one on each campus that currently are there and those are occupied by Sandy Tracy and Shane Oaks. And then we are creating an academic version by using some people internally and not adding positions. So they would also be on it. And we would recruit three teachers, three staff members and three students. And you can read the bulleted list. I hate when people read it out loud, but please read that. And we are going to take questions at any time, but at the end would be best. The third bullet just to highlight is a piece that you can see the big systems pieces, finances, operations and maintenance. And some of the thinking on that, being that Andra might have her hands a little full with two sets of faculty and students and parents, that Reed and I are probably going to split those up in some way and that we would be the person that holds the flag on it, but all of us would weigh in on all parts of it. And one of the thinking is, is that there would be a Wednesday afternoon meeting every Wednesday afternoon after school, 3.30 to five. And some version of the leadership team would meet. The next level would be the universal targeted and intensive. And this would be both the academic and the social emotional support teams. And this is very specific to really doing that work in detail about supporting kids universally, and then kids that need a little support for a while, and then kids that need specialized programming, whether it's academic or social emotional. And again, you can read down through that. One of the things we're sure that we're going to do is have data drive our thinking. So this is the beginning of our work. We wanted to point that out too, that this by no means do we think that we're done, but that we've begun. I think I covered it, but Andra and Reed, if I missed something, can you please help backfill for me? You did a nice job, Owen. Thank you. That's a recorded, right? Right? Yes, it's being recorded as we speak. So we welcome questions because this is under construction. We have not included any teachers, students, or staff yet. Oh, I'm sorry to interrupt. If you're done presenting, if you recover and we're getting the picture in picture. Great. Is it gone? Good. Any questions, comments? I think, I mean, I appreciate the level of detail that you've put into the plan so far in such a short time. I'm curious about how all of that will function. You'll have to communicate a lot to make it function well with that many people. We talked about that when we were prepping for this part of the meeting. And we talked about how we really have to get granular and detailed to the point where it's gonna be like, oh, Andra, and it'll be a structure that's flexible, of course, and responsive to needs, but that it might be though, Andra's here on these exact dates and the student of sports coordinator is the other place on those exact dates. And there might be some hot days where it's like both of them need to be in one place. And we have those backup principles myself and read. So there's a redundancy. And one of the things we really wanna do is see ourselves as a learning and growing community where we're going to encourage teachers to take on more leadership. And they already do, of course, in a lot of ways, but even more so. And bringing those 25 people to the best institute is really powerful. And it's well-represented faculty and staff. An example is Janet Brown, administrative assistant is attending that. We really wanna look at this comprehensively and across the board. I have a question, Owen. Seeing your plan in the presentation, I'd love to have that emailed so that I can have a document that I can look at so I can think about it some more if I have other questions. But the other thing I was wondering, have you guys created some, just for practice, some case study scenarios so that it works through a situation or two as a group to just figure out if this situation happens and these people are on these campuses, what's the chain of command? How is that situation gonna happen? You know, like drills of course. So the first point you made, there is a hot link in our principal's report that you have that's in the agenda. I still could email the exact thing to you, but you have already. Okay, that work for you, Lisa? That's fine. And we have not done something like that, scenarios. This is, as Lisa Floyd pointed out, this has been a lot of work in a short amount of time at the same time, you know, doing all the other work, but that does not mean that we're not gonna do that. I also think we need to hire all the players still and once we do that, we'll be able to run through some scenarios. Yep, great. Can, I think it might be, did you put it in the chat, Ray, thank you. So there it is. Yep, it's in the chat. After that, and take it. Yeah, when I looked at the report, I skipped right over that and went to where it said leadership plan 2021. So thank you for redirecting me. Well, you know, one of the things that we have also realized is we've been, so some silver linings here, we have been being trained in how to meet online. It's really, and you know this, Lisa, as a school person, it's really, I mean, we think we're pretty savvy with tech, but we've really had to get into it and it's really pretty powerful. Yes, all right. Is that good for now? And you don't wanna- I think that's, go for it. No, I was just gonna say, if you have questions, you know, you can email Andra. Just kidding, you can email the Rudd principles. Thank you. Okay, hi. Fabulous, thank you. You're welcome. Do any board members have questions of our principles before the principles report wraps up? I guess, although technically that melded into the leadership model, okay. Yes, yeah, we made that transition into 8.1. Yes, all right. Any budget updates? So how are we trending his terrace still here in terms of deficit surplus for this current year? I emailed you all the reports today. I haven't had a chance to look at them, to be totally honest. I worked up until about half an hour before I got to this meeting and here I am. So- Would you like an opportunity to review them prior to discussing them? So I need probably 24 to 48 hours to be able to review them enough to make sense. So if you have sort of an in a nutshell summary to share, that would be awesome. Okay, so looking at the budget projections through March 31st, depending on the only items I took out of the projection were transportation costs for field trips and athletics. Because I was pretty sure those weren't going to happen. Yeah. So I took those out. I do believe there may be some other areas that we could probably reduce some of the budget projections. But based on just using trend and on where you're at in projecting for the last three months of the fiscal year, it looked to be, we were still trending in a deficit. I'm trying to get to the bottom of the page of about just under 55,000. Is this overall financial at the end of the year or deficit for the FY 20 year? It's a projection through the end of FY 20. That would include, so basically we're knocking the previous deficit down by some of them. Is that what you're saying? No, that's just based on your FY 20 budget. So we'd be increasing our total deficit for the year. Even with the year-long budget freeze. Yes, but again, looking at have your principles, look at the projections. I mean, those are just us doing our normal formula that we use for budget projections, which is taking what you've spent, dividing it, getting an average and projecting out for the last three months of the year. There was a shortfall in the CFP, which we already knew about earlier on in the year for grant funding. So that's part of the revenue shortfall. You're not gonna get as much in your tech center transportation reimbursement because we only could claim the number of days that you physically transported students in the second semester. So that's off from what was originally projected. Hopefully some of those revenues will be some of the stuff we can attempt to get back under the COVID-19 cares reimbursement. But my understanding as a Friday is that money isn't coming to us until after July 1st and potentially longer than that because my understanding is that the state has a year to give that money to us. What about grounds and just buildings and grounds? It has that those expenses gone down a little bit and also with supplies, I suppose some of that what would be supplies expenses is probably now tech expenses. So teachers can still teach. Some of those supplies absolutely could come down. I did not take them out and the budget projections because of the fact that you still are purchasing supplies to get home to students. Your custodial and maintenance staff are continuing to work. They have the extra expense for decontaminating the buildings and they're also starting their summer work now. So there is continued expenditures as far as building and grounds and maintenance. So I'm curious, I guess I thought part of the reason for the freeze throughout the year and Bruce, I'm wondering what your thought is about this. So I think the message we had been communicating to teachers and the message that I believed was that that sort of sacrifice of only buying things that were absolutely essential related to safety or our educational mission was going to hopefully lead to a little bit of digging ourselves out of the deep deficit that we had last year. So it's disappointing to hear that we're potentially in a deficit situation again. And I'm just wondering if you could speak to that a little bit. You're asking me to speak to that? Yes, please. I haven't been real close to the numbers with Tara about this. And my impression was because of COVID and also because we closed down the budget in November that we wouldn't be in a hole as a matter of fact, maybe be able to climb out of the deficit. So I'm surprised to hear that it's not that way. But I also know that Tara's being very cautious is what she is always being. So I can't imagine, we haven't done a lot of field trips, we haven't done a lot of sports trips. We've paid our coaches for the work that they did, but nothing more. And that was only, especially in the spring, that was only a partial payment. So I'm optimistic that we're gonna be fine when all the dust settles and we were tracking this and it looked like it was gonna be just fine. And I guess I'm not believing that it's that much different, although I believe in what Tara's saying, so. Okay. And does this report go ahead, Tammy? So Tara, you did say that custodial services, that would typically be done in the summer months or beginning to occur. I don't understand how that ties into the fiscal year, 19 to 20 budget when that would be potentially tipping over to the next year, the year forward coming. Is that, so if summer work is already happening in those facilities, does that have an impact or has that been taken into consideration as to the budgetary details with your projection? I don't tell your staff what they can and cannot do, first of all. My projections are based on what you have spent throughout the fiscal year, what your trend is and what you could potentially spend through the remainder of the year. My understanding is that your custodial maintenance staff is continuing to work and to do their summer maintenance list. So if they're purchasing materials, it is in this fiscal year, not the next fiscal year. If they're purchasing additional supplies, it would be in this fiscal year, not the next fiscal year. They're already being paid to do work. So because students are not in the buildings, my assumption and perhaps your building administration is better to answer this question than I am, is that they are moving forward of doing what they can to fulfill their days and their time? Okay. In the expense report or the projections includes expenses that would be COVID expenses that we should hope to get reimbursement for, correct? And it doesn't look like that was, we don't have any projections for their reimbursement in the revenue set right now, right? I have no idea, Andrew, what we are going to get. I am not projecting anything for COVID-19 reimbursement. Right. I think that, you know, I'm not saying that you should necessarily, I just wanted to have an understanding of, you know, what considerations to have, what, take into account when we're looking at it. Andrew, I will tell you that the latest guidance from the state on COVID-19. I think you'll be right back. So I can tell you the treasury guidance that the only items that are potentially going to be reimbursable or any necessary expenditures incurred due to COVID-19 are not accounted for in the budget most recently approved as of March 27th, 2020, are incurred during the period from March 1st to December 30th, 2020. That is the extent of the guidance that I have at this point. Okay, so things like the hotspots, et cetera, are reimbursable. That would be part of what we would claim. And my understanding that's still being determined is we will get a portion based on what our Title I allocations are for the agency of education. So of the total, I don't know what we will get and what the AOE, because we have to submit an application, submit all of our reports of what will actually get reimbursed. Okay. And how much money is going to be available to our entire supervisory union and then in turn to each of our individual member districts. At least I'm sorry I dropped off, but I'm back now. And what I'm trying to say was we've been told we're not gonna see that money until July 1st because there is a issue that they're trying to sort out. Apparently the guidance that came through had a good portion of that money going to independent schools. And I don't think some of the AOE folks were real comfortable with that. And I think they have united with other states around trying to get a little of that changed. So we've been told that we won't see any of the COVID money until July 1st or beyond. So. So it probably won't offset any shortfall this fiscal year. No, I think they've told us it's gonna be pretty flexible in use. So yeah, I know my fellow superintendents are gonna be claiming the money that we went towards COVID expenses now. But it has to be used by the 2021 school, December of 2021. There's another fund, which is the 1.2 billion that's coming in that has to be expended more quickly. I think it's December of 2020. And then the governor has a fund, which is 4.4 million. And we don't know what all the guidance is on that yet, but it's COVID related. Okay. So I think there'll be a lot of reimbursement that'll take place and it seems to be pretty flexible. But regarding answering your question, Lisa, my guess is that if it's reimbursing something that happened in FY 19, like for the audit, we could probably put it in FY 19 or whatever, not in FY 19. Yes. We'll leave that to Taryn, I figure. Yeah. All right, thank you. Lisa? Yeah. We must have a cash flow problem. Yeah. How are we paying the bills? Well, I think we have money that, I think we have the loan that comes through and then we pay that back, right? Is that the way things are done? I mean, the bills are still getting paid. How they get pushed, Tara? How they getting paid? I have not had any communication with your treasurer that there is a cash flow issue with paying your bills. Well, if you have a $450,000 deficit, how are you paying the bills? Pam monitors that. And as I said, she has not reached out to me in any matter to say that there is an issue with paying her bills. Okay, so that may, if we, that may require a conversation with Pam then. We have a loan out there already? Well, there's a loan that typically gets taken out just to cover tax revenue. So if bills come due before revenues collected from the towns, then it just is something that is standard for school districts to do, is my understanding. So that's always on the warning at our annual meeting so that we can continue to cover our bills. But it's only for the amount of expected revenue, I believe. Taxing, dissipation, though. Right. Yep. Yep. Have we done that? Have we? I believe that we do do that on a regular basis so that we can stay financially solvent or pay our bills, right? Have we? Yes, and Pam has a discretion to pull down any of that tax anticipation, though, as she needs it through the cash flow process. Because your towns collect taxes at different points of the year, that also assist in your cash flow is when the payments come in. We just received the last payment from the Education Fund on April 30th. So that money goes into your bank account to cover expenditures and pay your bills. So there is that, and that gets paid out in three different installments. So that also helps throughout the year to cover your cash to pay bills. We're gonna adapt that situation. Where are we getting the money to pay the bills right now? It would be a combination of those places, Bob. It would be tax revenue. It would be your education spending fund. And if Pam needs to draw down from the tax anticipation note, at any point, she has that discretion and authority to do so. Okay. And I can reach out to Pam and ask her to provide a narrative of how that's going. I'd appreciate that. Thank you. Doesn't the board have to do that, approve that? No, I believe that gets approved by the board on the annual warning. Right, and then it gets approved by the voters. Gives you the opportunity to borrow the money, but doesn't the board have to borrow the money? Who signs an oath? Yes, Bob. We go out every year and we request an RFP for local lenders to provide us with tax anticipation note terms and conditions. Once that's done, and that's based on the cash flow that your district would have as and to when those revenue streams are coming through, then you as a board decide which lender you are going to move forward with to provide your tax anticipation note. And then your treasurer has the authority to pull down that note as they need it. It does not require board approval to pull down the tax anticipation note once it's in place. Okay, I'm gonna check on it. Okay. Thank you. All right. Anything else that was the budget update? Just Lisa, just a comment. I mean, I sat in on one of the VSBA webinars on financials and projections with the state debt. And I think we need to be hyper vigilant with staying on top of our budget and trimming this deficit down to nothing or getting in the black because God forbid we're gonna have to raise taxes. And it seems like that's the direction where things are headed. And it could be 20 to 25 cents increase which is just outrageous. So we've gotta find ways to cut costs. And I know that we're just an uncharted territory. I know that we're all learning how to do this. And I don't know. There's gotta, you know, with buildings and grounds I keep going back to that but we have our custodial staff. We have all these, you know there's nobody occupying the buildings and things need to get cleaned to a certain degree but if they don't have as much work to do then maybe there's a reduction of staff that can happen there. Maybe there's ways to simplify how the grounds are getting cared for. I don't think we're obligated to make sure that the grass gets cut every week. We could, you know, I don't know we've got to think, we got to get creative and figure out ways that we can cut our costs because our educational system is in dire straits right now and it's gonna hit our towns. Right, I'm wondering, I don't know how tight the freeze that we're under is right now but I just feel like at this point in time anything that's going to be spent needs to really be carefully evaluated. So I wanna remind all of you that three weeks ago we sat in a room and we went through every single possible scenario, supplies, equipment, field trips all kinds of different things, wages, health insurance, all those things. It took us two days, all the principals and myself and Tara together and did that. And we were projecting at that point a much better scenario than this. I don't, you know, I know that there are probably bills that haven't come in yet or things that are being anticipated but I'm sure that what Tara is projecting is the worst case scenario. But I remain optimistic. I don't think it's that gloomy and I do that because we all worked on this thing together and covered every possible base we could and that was only three weeks to a month ago. So we haven't been doing any spending since then. I mean, we got gloves and masks donated thanks to David and so I don't know. Maybe there's been some things discovered that we didn't anticipate but I thought we took a very, very hard and thorough look at what was going on. So I'm perplexed by this. I really am. I don't believe, I think the principals have not been spending money. They've been very, very thoughtful about it and I don't know. I mean, I don't have any explanation whatsoever. My explanation to you was three weeks ago or a month ago and it was very optimistic. Right, okay. Yeah, I think what Lisa's point was was regardless of kind of where we like even if we do end up level or save some money like, you know, when we passed our last budget or we passed the budget this year, I mean that was we were presenting to the taxpayers based on the state yield that was estimated before all this shutdown and because the education fund is so down that yield is probably gonna have to change which is gonna change the protected tax rates for what we've already passed. And so next year's budget's gonna be a lot harder because the tax rates are gonna be higher regardless of what we do. So anything that we can say will help. And I encourage you all to read through the projection report. As I said, we stuck with our traditional formula for the projections. There absolutely probably is items that you will cut and not utilize. But as Bruce says, I trend on the side of caution and you're welcome to go through that. And if you want me to take things out and send an updated report, just shoot me an email and let me know. But that's based on the formula that we currently use. And as I said, I only took out the field trips and the athletic transportations and I forgot I also took out substitute salaries because we're not paying substitutes right now. All right. Tara, are you planning on creating like a summary page for us at any point? Because looking at 20 pages of data with every line item is sometimes overwhelming for me but just, I mean, I sent you some examples from earlier this year about how it would be really nice to just have a one-page summary with all the major headings so that I could then dive into different categories that might want more attention. But having- You can do that with the monthly expenditure spreadsheet that Andrew created for us. Yeah. You can look that up by fund, by object, by location and you can drill down on those expenditures. I would love to have capacity in my day to be able to write up in-depth reports for all seven of our entities but I just honestly don't have the capacity to do that right now. So where do I find the thing that Andrew created? Is that one of the tabs? Yep, I send that out to you every month since Andrew created it. It's in the email that I sent out to you all today. It's the Excel file. Yeah. It's the Excel as the PDF file that comes out of our software system of your expenditure report and then the budget projection was also part of that email that I sent to you today. So which tab is it? The by function? Is that the tab? Whichever you prefer to look at, Lisa, if you want to look by function so you're looking at the function codes or if you want to look at it by object versus salaries, benefits, contracted services, supplies, whatever you, as an individual, want to look at that information in because each person may like to look at it differently. Yeah. So that's why Andrew created that. Sorry, Andrew, go ahead and talk. Right. So all the tabs are looking at the same data just grouping it in different ways. Right, right. Okay, great. I'll keep playing around with this and get better at it. Thank you. But yes, the goal is in the future to have much better reports and Rose has been working with Infinite Visions on how to create our own system-generated reports, not the reports that were set up by our predecessors. So she's using her time with Infinite Visions training on how to do that. But again, you have to create all of that stuff manually and we just, right now, we're just at max capacity with all of the projects that are on our plate trying to get everything wrapped up. So in the future, absolutely, things will change. Yeah, looking at these tabs, I think this is really nice. I'm looking at by location, by program, by function, and it's condensing it. So that's what I wanted. So thanks. Tara. Yes? Tara. Why is the projection different now? You were with Bruce and the principals at the same time that they came up with the, basically no deficit and the deficit was taken care of. You were in that meeting with them. What's the different? My projections are based on what you have spent and what is projected to be spent if you continue the same spending trend. That is what the budget projections are based on. What I don't understand- So that would be different than what your principals come up with on areas that they could cut expenditures. Okay. Part of it would be the projected expenses would basically be projecting out from before the shutdown to projecting that through the end of the year and she's only made a few changes for what those differences would be going forward. Correct. It's based on spending trend. And I would also say, I don't know how much you guys went through the revenue side of things when you were doing that initial meeting, but that's down $100,000. So that makes a difference. Yeah. All right. A question, this is Tammy, you had identified, Tara, that this was a spending trend. A trend is usually three net shots in time at least. And so are you, your projections are using a trend from this current COVID era that we are in or are your projections using a trend established through a prior school year, potentially 18, 19 or 19, 20. I'm goofing up my year reference, but I think you get the context. It's monthly. So it's based on what you've spent from July 1st, 2019 through March 31st, 2020. Thank you. All right. I'll look forward to hearing more about that. We do have one executive session remaining on our agenda. And a public comment, sorry. So is there any public comment before we move into executive session? Hi guys. So this is Jen and Bridget coming to you live. Hello. We have another possible location with wifi and a beautiful view. And so we're just keeping you off that we're going to be sending it. But it is the, well, just true value field, which they do drive up events in. We've done some measuring. We think it looks pretty good. We can fit 60 cars. We can fit 60 cars. And then there's parking up at the top. So we're excited about this. Obviously we need permission and chats and all that stuff. But I think it's a possibility. So stay tuned. We will email that to you. Thank you. Great. All right. Thank you. All right. So I would entertain a motion to move into executive session. So moved. What do we need to say? What for? It's for personnel, a personnel matter. So I think we would bring into executive session, perhaps the principals, Bruce and the board. So Lisa, with that, I'm going to stop the recording. Okay, that sounds great. Thank you. And we'll ask the public participant. Right. Do we have agenda items for our next meeting? It'll be three days after our graduation has happened. Oh my goodness. That's hard to believe. Time is up. So if you have things you'd like to see added to the agenda, please let me know. When you get the policies, it's going to be a really thick packet. So please, when you have an opportunity, go through them. We've been through them. They're with, you know, right now, some of them are really boilerplate, but some of them have taken more work than you could possibly imagine. For example, the support dogs, support animals, that's taking a long time. Therapy dogs, that's the word I was looking for. So we've worked quite a bit on them and I'd appreciate it if you took a look. So we're ready to roll when we get to our meeting. So Christy sent us a link so that we could see all these policies online. So those are the current versions? Yes. I've gotten a start on those because I thought that we were supposed to be ready for today's board meeting. I think we're still waiting to hear back from Dina on them. Okay. We talked to Dina about it today, actually. I've been prodding her to get that okay done. I don't think there's going to be any problem. And you know, if you guys want to change a word or two, that's fine. I think the committee has really worked hard on them. Rewrites and additions and subtractions and things like that. So I think they're really ready to go. But the thing is, we need to put them in the paper for 10 days. And that's what we're going to do. I'm going to give Christy the signal to do that tomorrow so we can have them completely worn by the time you meet again. Okay. One thing for next meeting or some future meeting would be, before everything shut down, we were talking about resource changes. And I know everything's kind of up in the air for the fall. But it'd be, I've had some questions about what things are going to look like. And so it'd be good to know what our goals are anyway, as far as we'll be interested in. If we do have this all effective enough, but you know, given school in session in the fall, what are we doing? Okay. So pre-school for the next agenda. Hopefully we'll know more than I then. I don't know if we don't even know if we're going to be able to have one in 10 kids in a row. Okay. All right. If you think of other things that should be added to the agenda, please let me know. Thank you all. Thanks. They're a motion to adjourn? No, no, no, let's stay and talk. Well, I'm going to go make a cup of tea if we're staying on any later. So I make a motion that we adjourn. I'll second it. All in favor? All right. All right.