 Thanks, all. We'll commit the meeting at 6.36 p.m. So thanks, all. Call the order. A couple things before we get to public comment, which I don't think is going to be a stencil tonight. We have a couple of guests. Susan Holson from VSPA and very happy to have Dan French here with the Secretary of Education. Thank you for coming. We are noting that the road deterioration of the roads are deteriorating, so we'll try to get them in early so they can get out quickly. I think we should be able to do that. So public comment. Here at none, we'll go to consent agenda. A motion to approve the consent agenda. I move to approve the consent agenda. I second. Any discussion or items we want to discuss individually? All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? So now learning focus. We have Hope and Emma up first. Is that OK? All right. OK. Great. So we're just following the right road for that. So to begin with, we just have a list of student celebrations. So right now in the MHS cafeteria, we are celebrating our new compost sorting station. And we're doing that by hanging up lights, and it's really beautiful, and it's a happy year. It is really beautiful. I thought you just did a clean up from the dance last week. No, that's a celebration. It's made the cafeteria much more efficient. Yeah, it's good. It's good. And I can talk a little bit about some student activism with ethnic studies legislation. I know that last year I actually helped. I was one of the students that helped write last year's bill, and then it ended up not passing on an omnibus bill. And this year, it's slightly changed, and I testified on it this past week. And I know that Libby's going to speak a little bit on it in her superintendent's report, I believe. Yeah. And so I was able to testify with our faculty advisor from the Racial Justice Alliance, as well as the vice president of the Racial Justice Alliance. And it passed out of the Committee on Education, so I think things are going well, and we'll see what's to come. And we also have Earth Group is organizing a Discover Half-Earth Assembly, and Discover Half-Earth is an organization that is focused on promoting and preserving biodiversity. And they do this in a lot of different ways, and one of the ways in which they help is through education. And so they often organize workshops. And so Mr. Sabo, who advises Earth Group, had heard about it and was interested in organizing an assembly and having them come present to the student body. And so they'll be doing that next week, I believe. So we're having the Pops concert next week, which is just the culmination of a lot of work for the Montclair High School musicians. And it's just a bunch of popular music. It's a lot of fun for the audience, so, yeah. And last week, we hosted the first Music of Color dance, or the RDA hosted the first Music of Color dance, which is a celebration of Black excellence. And it was great. Mercedes Mack is a wonderful DJ. She, yeah. Yeah, Emma and I both went. It was a good time. There weren't many students there, but it still was a really positive environment. And we had a good time. And so we're excited to see this be a tradition and see it how it grows and years to come. So right now, Student Council is working on a new scholarship. It's very new. But I think that that effort is something we should encourage. And so, yeah, we just decided to include that in this celebration. Yeah, it's aimed to use our funds to support student leadership and, I don't know, academic excellence. And last but not least, a member of Earth Group and a sophomore named Napal Perchelik spoke today at a press conference led by 350 Vermont. And it involves the prevention of new fossil fuel infrastructure and two policies and legislation that have been proposed this session that are in regards to that. And so she spoke in support of it. And she did a phenomenal job from what I've heard. So we're proud of her. And we also, it's Black History Month in case you haven't, in case you don't know. And the Racial Justice Alliance is doing so much this month. And we've already had a presentation to sort of introduce the month and explain what we did last year and celebrate that and raising the flag and talk about what we plan on doing over the next few weeks. And so we have Movie Nights planned and optional TED talks that students can go to during Soul and Block. And there are videos that relate to race and microaggressions. And so we're hoping to. And also a movie called I Am From Here. And it's a film that specifically focuses on racism in Vermont and the nuances of it. And I think it's good because sometimes students don't understand how race and racism can really impact their own lives. And obviously, the Music of Color Dance was a fun part of what we have planned this month. And this week on Friday, I know that I'm one of the people working on the questions. We have an activity known as Unpacking Your Invisible Napsack. And that is like a privilege walk in that it asks certain questions of students. And they have the option to opt out. But the way a privilege walk works is that everyone starts in a line and then they'll step forward if they have certain advantages based on race, socioeconomic status. And so for the students who do want to participate and for those who are watching, it's a good opportunity to reflect on their own privileges and biases. And we did it last year and it went pretty well. So we're excited to do it again. OK, so just moving quickly on to the student concerns and needs, it's the same as it has been for a while, which is just the need to support diversity and inclusion in all of our schools. And so we kind of have some questions that go along with this section. So first one is like equity policy updates. And I guess we have some more questions, but I don't know if we're going to be more specific. Yeah, I mean, we were just curious because we weren't present during the first reading of the policy and how it went. And we noticed the edits in the Google Doc and we're excited to see those and appreciated that. And we're also just curious in general about ways in which we can help you all in being the voice of students in the MRPS district. And if there's like a suggestions box or some sort of way in which we can interact with students and get their opinions on certain topics and let them know that what they're telling us will go to the school board. So if there's anything we can do. And just going off of that, this is something that I wrote in the later section. But I'm hoping to send a survey out to the middle school and try and get in touch with students at the elementary school as soon as possible because I recognize that our celebrations are very molecular high school centric. And I know that the racial justice alliance in a few months, once we get through Black History Month and all the fun planning that, and festivities at a company that are planning on working on an equity audit of some sort in a survey and working with a company perhaps to draft up a survey to go out to middle school and high school students to sort of gauge the environment as it relates to equity and. So student perspective. So club action has recently been trying to focus on tackling socioeconomic status and class and classism as it relates to MHS students. And it's a relatively new venture in high schools and for us as well. And so before we really jump in, we're trying to coordinate with perhaps someone who works for a nonprofit organization and is experienced in dealing with issues of equity and inclusion to learn how we can best start a conversation about class and socioeconomic status and poverty as it relates to students in the district and in supporting all of our students and seeing how it relates to the achievement gap, for example. And so I know we met with Mr. McGrath about a week ago. And so we're gonna start working on that. Just to add on to that quickly. The reason that that was like inspired was because of the students in that club recognized that there was a lack of like discussion about socioeconomic tension in our school. Which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. It just means that we aren't talking about it. Yeah, we aren't talking about it. And so that's an important student perspective to have, I think. And we also have a restorative practices student-led group that's operating at MHS. And Emma and I joined it pretty recently because there were actually several groups that had popped up at around the same time. And so some of them will be attending a training at the Unitarian Church tomorrow about how to implement restorative practices and restorative circles at MHS. And I know that our guidance counselors are involved in it. And I'm excited to see what it'll look like in future months. And Emma and I, as well as Miriam Songhurst who's vice president of the RJA are going to a national education conference next week in Jackson, Mississippi. And we're very excited about that. And it relates to race and civil rights and how it, and school closings in Jackson, Mississippi. And so we're excited to sort of share out from that as we get back. And Earth Group is currently interested in working with the cafeteria to reduce food waste and trash and possibly do that by changing the plates we use. And so we're gonna work with cafeteria and the student body to see how that would best work. All right, that's it. That's about it. Go change the world, ladies. Go change the world. That was wonderful. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Very much. That was wonderful. You may check in, you would comment about checking in the elementary school and the high school and the equivalent of their student council. So like the organization in middle school and whatever happens in the elementary school, you might check in. Right. That's a good idea. Thank you. Maybe the crafters actually. I don't think they have that in the middle school. But you could also ask the principals, I don't know, it's redundant. We all, you know, are so long solutes. So the middle school has one and the elementary school has one. And everyone on the board gets all three. So we see student news in that way. No. We should be getting one. So we should get it. I'll make a note on that one. Thank you. Yep. For the Black History Month activities that you're talking about, all of our sunbills for the community as well, are they all for students? I think it's for, it's just for students. Yeah, in the school community. And is it open to all students and is it just high schools and is it all the country schools as well? It's, I think we're working on involving middle school students, but for the most part, like the workshops and the TED talks are for high school students. And not just for specific. No, it's for the high school students. Yeah, it's open to the whole school. And how do you go about that? Usually through announcements and in the solence alludes, there's a calendar too with activities that has been emailed out. And at our first assembly that we had, I think about a week ago, explaining we outlined our activities for the rest of the month. Thank you. Thank you guys. Excellent as always. Before we move on, there are two little points of business I forgot. We're gonna have brief discussions of snow days because we want to give us a quick update because we, there's some board action that might be taken, need to be taken to make sure that we don't. Our kiddos in school the last week of June, which will not be popular. And a brief discussion of sadly, Michael Creuth is leaving us and we will be doing principal search. So, brief discussion of that. So, we'll be the board representative. For Bob Principal Association? Yeah. Great. So, next up we have Susan Holson from the Vermont School Boards Association, who's kind of have to come and tell us about what the BSBI does for us. And she was, I know you were planning on observing the whole meeting, but given the roads, if you could take a seat at the table please, so the home audience can hear you as well. Do you have a big home audience? So, we have a larger home audience than what would think, yes. Okay. So, as Gina said, I work for the Vermont School Boards Association, which I hope you're all familiar with. And my purpose in wanting to come to your meeting today was two-fold. One was to share with you what the SBA does and how we can support you. And the other is you're the second stop on a statewide tour that will be extending over the next six months. I'm visiting a lot of school boards. Mostly to make sure that the services and the supports that we make available to our members are relevant for you and that we know what you're talking about. You know, it squeaky wheels and all of that. And wow, wow, I can't say enough or what I just heard from your students. I think it's amazing. You guys are awesome. So, the Vermont School Boards Association, which in case you don't know is like two blocks from here, we have a dual mission. But it all, of course, is about educating our children primarily in public schools, but the K-8 population. And that mission is, part of that mission is public policy and advocacy work on behalf of Vermont's children. And I have a colleague who spends her days, I haven't seen her in two weeks. She's at the state house pretty much every day, all day at committee meetings. And today is in two places at once, I think, as there were bills on the floor that needed attention as well as things going on in Senate Ed that required her attention. And she's the director of legal and policy services and her name is Sue Siglowski. And she puts out a weekly bulletin for board members. I hope you're all getting it. A legislative update that I think comes out Fridays, typically, to give you an update on what's going on in the state house. And if any action from board members around the state makes sense, we'll try and prod you into that. And the other piece of our mission is to support school boards in the hard work that you do and give you the resources that you might not know where to find otherwise. I am personally responsible for board development. So training of new board members, digging a little deeper beyond the routine consent agenda items. And I am available to come meet with your board. I'd say anytime except I just double booked myself today. So I have to be a little bit careful about that. But we're here and we're a phone call away. We're also a walk. But phone call, email, texting us, it's all good. And if you have a quick question about open meeting law or whether it's the board's job to X, Y, or Z, we're a great resource. So please, you're paying us dues every month, every year. So get your money's worth it. And as I said, my intent was to be here for your whole meeting tonight. But given the fact that I have an hour's drive and what I'm hearing about the roads, I'm going to beg off now and I will come back and just observe a meeting at a later date. Does anyone have any questions for me? Yeah. Does the school board's association employing money that is specialized as the data tracks? We do not have an analyst. We do have a contract database that is available. Right, I'm familiar with that. I feel like a service that would be helpful. I know it can be a little bit tricky because there's a lot of discrepancies between the contracts, but there's also a lot of commonalities and there's ways of getting to those commonalities and it would be a really powerful resource for school boards to have, I think, some better analytics. It's just an idea that the association might actually want to do. Thank you, I will pass that along. That's a great idea. I think as we've waded into the negotiation process this year and thinking about it moving forward, having that type of resource would be really powerful and I know it would be powerful for a bunch of other school boards as well, so we're just floating it tonight. So that you have data beyond your immediate area. Yeah, so we can contextualize the metrics that we're bargaining on and we can make sure that not only our taxpayers, but also our teachers, everybody's coming to a common understanding of where we are within the context of the state. Right. So there are ways that we can do that through the great database that you guys put together, but that seems like a service that a lot of school boards could benefit from, so. I will pass that along. We have a 23 member board, which is comprised of 11 regions around the state, each with two representatives and a president and when it comes to things like our staffing issues and the associated expenditures, that all obviously goes through them, but it's a great suggestion and I will certainly pass it along. Or even if it wasn't at your employee, if it was a contracted service. I'm just. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. Thanks. Thank you. Tita. I'm curious to know, maybe I should know. I'm curious to know if within the organization there's a list of the data that's been, what do you collect and might we see? In other words, I don't even know what it was, what you do that. It's available on our website. There is login protection, so if you don't have the login, I believe it's one login per district, so you should be able to access that. It's a repository of contracts, so we can go through all the different districts and supervisory and contracts. That I knew about, but I was curious, do they keep any other data? My understanding is not much. They have a lot of tools. They have a lot of tools. Right. I was just thinking, between the organizations, it seems like you're the perfect place to have collected data. That's what I was suggesting. Well, in terms of things like collective bargaining, yes. A lot of the metrics and data that support education and provide direction on where we need to be going is really in the bailiwick of the agency. Which, when, with this common chart field of accounts, we'll make these types of data analyses and comparisons much easier moving forward, which I understand that's a big struggle as well. Yeah, there's no standardization of pretty much anything. Yes. Yes. Anybody else? Thank you. So call me. Yeah, thank you Susan. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Have a safe drive back. Oh, no worries. I very much understand it's supposed to get nasty. I think it's starting to get nasty, so have a safe drive. Thank you. So next up, Secretary French. Again, thank you for coming. Thank you. Good evening. Secretary Dan French. I've been on the job since August. I'm not a stranger to Vermont. I started my career as a teacher and I was a principal and then a superintendent for 12 years. Also worked at higher ed in my last job. Worked at St. Michael's College, writing the graduate program for school leaders and also did a lot of consulting around the state on a variety of issues, largely working with school boards, interestingly enough. So I'm very familiar with your work and thank you for it. It's hard work. But other than that, I just thought I'd stop in and introduce myself and if you have specific questions, I'd be happy to have a conversation with you about any issues you'd like. Thank you for the offer. I will open it up to the board. If there's none, that's fine. I have one, Jim. Go for it. I know at one point, I think you had proposed or suggested a statewide school district. Is that dead or is that idea still alive? Yeah, I spent the better part of the morning talking about that idea. The single district is sort of an outcome of a logic model. So the logic is more important to me than the single district. I think the overarching logic was the system itself is too complex and that we need to work at simplifying it. And actually the complexities interfering with our ability to ensure quality and equity across the state. And my hypothesis would be that the complexity is also the chief cause of our relative inefficiency. I took design, what I call design elements of things I would suggest would be key ingredients of the education system and work them out for the most extreme example of simplification, which was the one school district model. So what I'm doing now with that is asking inviting people to contribute to that document. It's going to be turned into a website here shortly as a WordPress blog. I was meeting with a group of higher ed folks this morning to see if they would be interested in discussing the implications of simplification, the K-12 system on higher education. So the process itself is not dead, but it's more of a visioning process than anything else. So I actually have a question. My understanding is that with some pretty major acts initiatives like Act 173, which changes the way special ed is funded, you finance, which I know is a big concern of our business manager. AOE right now has some vacancies and there's some kind of capacity issues in terms of being able to get that work done and get districts the help they need. What's the plan to address those? Yeah, so you bring up several issues. One is we have major policy initiatives at play right now in the state and education. Honestly, I can't think of a time where we've had so many significant issues, significant policy issues happening at the same time. You mentioned 173, which I think will quickly become probably the focus of all your work and all of our work statewide. It's a major reform of the special ed finance system, but also a couple of better changes of how we deliver special ed services and the two kind of go hand in hand. So it's a major piece of work. We have 166, which is early education and that's not done by any means. We're working down a path, rightfully so, of putting some solid investments in that end of our delivery system. But I didn't say we're still not done with refining that. We have Act 77, our personalized learning law, which has a toe hole, but folks are still working through several issues around that. Act 46, so while all of these other things are going on, we're also reconfiguring a lot of our school districts. And then we have major data systems that are being implemented. My tenure in Vermont, I can't think of a time when we've ever delivered a single statewide data system, yet we're trying to do five, we're basically now at the same time. And there are capacity issues at the agency in terms of delivering on those issues. It's been a challenge for me as a new secretary to sort of begin to understand that. I was sort of surprised, because I had heard that over the years that we didn't have adequate capacity at the agency. But when I arrived, we had approximately 25 vacancies and only six were under active recruitment. So part of what I've been doing is really heating up our recruitment process. And at the same time trying to get a handle on what things that we really need to add some capacity to. A lot of our positions in the agency are funded through grant programs, but a lot of the positions that are related to the data systems and so forth are not. And those are ones that would come from the general fund expenditure at the state level. So we do have to beef up capacity in that area, but I'm also interested in making sure that some of the systems we choose are not overly complex for us to deliver on. I think sometimes we shoot ourselves in our own foot by choosing certain approaches. In the case of the business system, it's a very complex idea. We had initially an initiative to create what's called a uniform chart of accounts, meaning creating a, that's not related to the information system. That was just to get every school district using the same, basically, checkbook and accounting system structure. And then, sort of recently, the legislature decided to include with that an initiative to go to a statewide accounting system. So we're trying to do both at the same time, very challenging, and then throw Act 46 into that, where we have new central offices coming online, very complex. So we're in the process, heard a lot of feedback from business managers. We did a, sort of, I would call it almost a pilot implementation this fall with three districts in the state. And we didn't learn much from that. The three districts were relatively inexperienced and hadn't had a lot of experience with changing systems and so forth. So we had to, sort of, refine our response based on their abilities. But now we're faced with, I think, rolling out the system of 42 school districts simultaneously. So we're about to go to the legislature to ask for a delay on some key elements of this. We're not backing away from our commitment to do it. And I don't think business managers are either. I think it's an important achievement if we can do it. But it's important to acknowledge that there's a lot of complexity to it. And we haven't had a lot of history as a state of doing things like this centrally. And I think Act 46 in particular has exacerbated some of the challenges that folks are facing. It was the back offices. The business offices are changing in many cases. Can I ask a follow-up question to that, just while we're on that topic? So the uniform chart of accounts is one issue. The other is the accounting system. Are they both on the same timeline right now? Essentially districts currently, I believe it was 2020. Grant, would you know the exact date? July 1 was supposed to be for both. Yeah, so the idea was that the chart of accounts mandate came out first. And then the system was promoted as a way one could achieve alignment with the chart of accounts. By definition, the new system would be based on the new chart of accounts. And there was sort of a carrot and stick approach. We had some incentives for people to jump on early with that. But it was really challenging for folks to figure out when to jump in. And we have to really have to go back and rethink how we're going to support districts with doing it. We had a different model of implementation. Now we're faced, as I mentioned, with 42 some-out districts. So one of the things we're going to be looking at is trying to push back the deadline a little bit to give us a little more time. Do you think you might set up an implementation team of sorts to help us with this? Yeah, one of the things I did write off was ask the Business Manager's Association for sort of a design team to help us with that feedback loop because we didn't really have that component in place. We're also asking for additional resources at the agency. I think we have the position identified. We're trying to fill that right now. So it's both a question of us building up capacity. It's a question of building up feedback capacity from the field to have that come into us in a focused way as opposed to coming from each Business Manager. And then we've also worked with a vendor to rethink how they're going to support this rollout. So it's been a multi-pronged approach. But it's an important initiative. The good news is there's broad agreement that it should be done. It's just a question of how to do it. And I had to go back and revisit the purchasing decision of the specific system to make sure the system itself had the functionality I needed. I was hearing that perhaps it didn't, but I pretty quickly learned it does. So it's a complex issue. Do you have a timeline in mind that you're willing to share for what you think? Ideally, for AOE, what that would look like? Well, I think we're going to be asking for an additional year. We literally were working on it, starting on Monday with the legislature. So hopefully that will be supported. Thank you. Yep. Tina. I just have to tell you I'm worried. Oh, yes, Tina. Here, you just listed all those initiatives. You told us you don't have the staff to do it. I didn't quite say that. I said it's in vacancies. OK, well. I will leave employment applications. I understand you have some experience at the ACC. I don't need another job. But you need some more people. And what I'm feeling like as a board member is, and yet, we have the timeline. And you're expecting us to truck on. And I'm not seeing how you could offer support. So can you give me some encouragement? Yeah, I think you just heard me say we are going to beef up our capacity, but we're also asking for the timelines to be adjusted on this specific project. But I think it's hopefully something I'll be able to do in the legislative process is bring sort of that lens of practicality as someone who, like you, has been on the receiving ends of implementing things over the years. I know as a superintendent as a principal how to build budgets, how to do information system implementation. So I'm hopeful that I can make an impact on our policy design so that we factor implementation into some of these initiatives. What is the assessment of capacity before we begin to lay in another layer of requirements on the system? It's been a challenge, I think, in the state. I was talking this morning with a higher ed group. We really have an excellent education system in the state. I don't think that's necessarily because of our policy. I think it's almost in spite of it. We've had some really good initiatives, particularly on Act 77. I think the personalized learning is really important. But that was done with a little thought to implementation and support. And so the field has figured out how to do these things on their own. That's not right. So we have to figure that out as a state. And I'm committed to helping inform the legislative process. But I did not establish these deadlines. These deadlines came out from the law. I did not think it was a good idea necessarily to try to implement five major information systems simultaneously when we've never done one. So we're all struggling with this. But I think we all work together and focus on, particularly, I think I was impressed with the business system. That in spite of the difficulties, and there were a lot the business managers really struggling with, I still think I'm going to grant a comment. I think there's still broad commitment to going to a single system if we can get there. Because it adds a lot of value to our ability to provide you better data and understand and inform the deliberations on policy. I'm not suggesting that these initiatives aren't good. I'm just, for example, concerned about my business. Yeah, and I am too. And it's, I think, I guess we're agreeing on our diagnosis of the situation, right? But I'm committed to adding resources. I'm committed to extending the timelines on certain initiatives and bringing some of these initiatives into coherence on an implementation time frame. We'll be watching you. Thank you. It's exciting work. Thank you for coming. This is also a follow-up to Jim's question in a similar vein. I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit more about how you see the agency's role in leading and supporting the implementation of Act 173. Yeah, we have a significant role. You're all familiar with 173 more or less? It's a, you know, it's, I've heard people refer to it as landmark legislation. You know, I think it's significant. It should not be underestimated. I'd put it on equal scale to Act 46. So there's basically two components. 173 is about modifying our special education. So there's two components. One is revising the financial part of it. And that's predicated on the second part, which is a change in the delivery model. I encourage you to go read it. There's two major studies that informed those two branches of the law. UVM did a study on the financial model. Then an outside group at DMG or district management council did a piece on the delivery model of the professional program side of it. Can I interrupt you for one second? Have you all seen the DMG in particular? We've seen, I just want to make sure, because it came out before my time. I went to the board, so I was just going to check it out. It would be worthy of your board to spend some focus time reading and becoming equated. I think it's accessible too. It's not like a lot of reading, but it's really important. You're going to be living this for the next several years. So the financial piece is really going to be articulated through a rule making process through the State Board of Education. And the Agency of Education is the entity that does that work, essentially. 173 created an advisory group of practitioners and stakeholders that give input into that process, including the rule making process. But it's really the agency's role to provide the technical and legal support to help the State Board work through a rule making process. So that will be starting probably the late March time frame, so I encourage you to follow along. So the agency has a direct role there. The agency also has a direct role with identifying, facilitating the supports that will go on the professional side of the 173 in terms of what supports will districts need on a professional development basis to implement what we call multi-tiered support systems on a more systematic way. So we have a role in providing that support as well, though we do that largely through supervising a contract or convening resources for vendors who will provide those services. So those contractors and vendors will be available to the districts? Yes. But that part of it is still where we're really in a sort of a feedback loop with different stakeholders about how to refine the professional development approach. A lot of the energy right now has just been on launching the rule making process. And the mechanics of the financial system, if you're not familiar with that, are significant in that currently you receive reimbursement for special education expenditures approximately 56% of your costs are reimbursed by the state. We're moving to a block grant system, which puts you in sort of a box, if you will, on your costs, but it's, once again, predicated on the practice changing in a certain way. The good news with a block grant, you also get greater flexibility on how to utilize those funds. So you can make investments in non-special ed activities that might theoretically lower your special ed costs. Joe? Yep. I'm still back on Act 77. OK. And I'm glad to hear you acknowledge that there wasn't a lot of support for creating a statewide implementation of that. And I think that Montpelier has worked really, really hard to do a good job in the transition to proficiency. And I know that we've had other schools come visit us to see how it's working. But I know that we still have a long way to go to get to the vision of a real proficiency-based assessment system. And we're doing more and more personalization, but again kind of feeling our way through it. Right. At the same time, I've heard, you know, I know Vermont's really small, right? So I know parents at high schools in other towns all over Vermont. And when I run into them, they ask, how are you dealing with this proficiency thing in Montpelier? Because we hate it at our school. You know, I hear a lot of negative response from parents. And I'm a little worried that the uneven implementation across the state is going to result in a pullback on that. And is the agency, like, I know you have all this other stuff in front of you. Are you able to go back to Act 77 and provide any support? Yeah, I think so. I think largely, you know, I'm a non-voting member of the State Board of Education, the Secretary of Education. And the State Board has been very involved with Act 46. You might be aware of that. They're anxious for their responsibilities to be ended in that regard. And one of the first things they brought up is, particularly the chair of the State Board, Krista Williams, a teacher in South Burlington in high school, they're very interested in revisiting the education quality standards, you know, which is sort of one of the things that Act 77 brought to the table was a move away from school quality standards, education quality standards, like focusing more on output as opposed to input. And I agree with that assessment. It's worthy of us. It's a good time for us to go back and just reinvigorate the entire conversation, not necessarily to repeal it or modify it, but just to elevate its importance. Because I think that's the beginning of understanding a lot of these concepts. And I was listening today with a colleague from the Tarrant Foundation. I don't know if you've done work with them. They're starting to be in a position now. They do a lot of work on technology and personalization, largely at the middle level, but really statewide now. And they're doing some research around Act 77 implementation. You know, they were really framing out, I thought was a useful paradigm that it's, the overarching concept is personalizing student learning, which I think is what everyone in the world is faced with, largely through technology, and it's a wonderful thing, really to try to put student aspirations at the center of our design. Vermont's policy, however, is based on three approaches, and one of them is proficiencies, but the other two are equally important, and personalized learning plans, and the other is flexible pathways. So I think what I'd like to do with the state board's leadership is to elevate the conversation back to quality and put some emphasis on all three elements needing to be in place for districts. We also have other resources we can reinvigorate. We started with, Act 77 was originally passed. We had some resources coming from the Great Schools Partnership in Maine, and we basically gave them some grant funds to do that. I think there are places in the state that have found a way to do this. There's other places that are really struggling, but I think we need to certainly get the state board to elevate the conversation and then really promote a coherent model based on what has already emerged as really positive approaches in many of our Vermont districts and then figure out how to scale them. But I think the issue around scaling is not about proficiency-based grading, which is unfortunately where a lot of people got hung up, and rightfully so, because there wasn't a lot of guidance on it, but really it's- And everyone seems to have done it differently. That's right. Or, and to my painful for me to watch as a consultant is they do the same thing but in isolation and spend all that time not sharing with each other. So I'd go from district to district and oh, you're doing this, did you talk to your neighbor? They've heard, no, we gotta do it ourselves. We do that a lot in Vermont and that's unfortunate. But I think to promote a model where we really need to figure out how to leverage the PLP better, I think it's a really critical pedagogical tool, and the law requires that seven through 12, in my former district we had high school choice nine through 12, we leveraged that at K through eight. So I think there's room to extend the PLP down much earlier with students. And then to build out the flexible pathways in simultaneously when we're talking about proficiency. So I think it's really about bringing all three of those things into focus and balance. And the good news is we've had some districts in the state be able to do that very successfully as a question really is scaling it. And I think giving people the tools they need to do the communications planning as well around it. And so you're saying you see that as work for the state board? The state board is definitely moving in. We've already started a process where they're, we're gonna have two vacancies on the state board. So we slowed down a little bit, but our last meeting they had a general orientation to the regulations that the next meeting they're gonna talk about the how we measure that or plan to measure that under the Every Student Succeeds Act. So for them it's sort of like foundational orientation that they're gonna embark on some sort of conversation. I know they're interested in highlighting the work and going around the state and listening to hear, what are the best practices and what they could do. So I think I'm gonna try to use that as a lever to advance the work and highlight best practice and what does it merge when we've had really successful examples of the state to see what we can do to scale that work better. Thank you. So what do you see on the horizon for Act 166? Yeah, that's one of the more challenging policy areas. When I arrived, the governor has a vision of cradle to career education and it's very common sort of I think articulation of the importance of education today in our society and our world that it's related to economic development as much as social and human development. When I was starting to work through the policy challenges and sort of do an inventory of where I thought my leadership would be tasked the most, I quickly determined that early education was probably gonna be the most challenging policy area. In spite of everything I've talked about tonight, I think that's still true. Largely because there is firstly, in a sort of ironic situation, there is broad policy agreement that early education is probably the most important investment we can make. We have strong research that points to that. We had broad consensus across the political spectrum that early education is vital. In spite of that, we have broad disagreement about how to best do it. And I think 166 is better than Act 62. I also, as a new secretary was, as I was getting up to speed on several initiatives was coincidentally reading 173, the special ed reform bill or law, simultaneously when I was reading 166, I was like literally had them on the desk. And they stand to start contrast to each other. 173 is a comprehensive approach, very well thought out. It's got supports, it's got research behind it. 166 is not well written. It's imperfect in many ways, has a whole aspect of dual agency oversight. I have a series of administrative complaints coming from school districts and from daycare centers that I can't really administer very well because the agencies themselves don't agree on how to administer. So I was talking to a daycare center the other day I started my career in Canaan, Vermont in the Northeast Kingdom and I was talking to a private provider in that region. I said, how's it going? And she said, her quote was something like, the regulations were so overwhelming I almost closed my business. So we can't afford that to happen in rural areas, let alone in populated areas where people are finding challenges to have access to care. So I think there's a lot of room for improvement on 166. Yes, we have to make significant investments in that area. I'm, as the governor is supportive of further investments in early education, I'm very concerned about the current delivery model though and I'm not interested in making investments until we can really get some clarity on the delivery model. There was a bill introduced, Senate Bill 10 in the Senate Edge Committee that I think started a really good conversation on how to improve the delivery model. One element it did was simplify the definition of quality, which I think is really important. What we had previously, there was a multiple layers to defining quality. One is a private provider could be NACI accredited, a National Association accreditation or it could have four stars in the Vermont Quality System or it could have three stars if it had a plan. It basically eliminated that last description and just said, let's have NACI accreditation or a certain number of stars. I think that is a good, concise definition. It allows us to go forward in quality monitoring in a much more proactive and transparent way, which I think would be beneficial to everyone. But the dual agency oversight is really challenging and that's, I feel compelled on behalf of the field. I've heard a lot from school board members, from the superintendents and principals that 166 does not work. And as I mentioned, I have administrative complaints that I'm anxious to resolve but I can't because they're disagreement. So what Senate Bill 10 proposes is to basically the education piece would fall to the agency of education and the care piece would fall to the agency of human services, not have the dual agency oversight. I think, honestly, I think that's necessary at this point. Any other questions, Steve? Just wondering where we're at on the status of the few towns that want extensions on Act 46 to not have to meet the July or July one deadline. We, as a district, we didn't have to wait till our back was up against the wall. We didn't have to wait till we had a huge financial pressure. We were a fairly stable district. We have fairly stable tax rates, fairly stable populations and we were proactive in that and we did it because it was the law and because we knew what the intent was of the legislation and we didn't wanna be, you know, we wanted to basically be good citizens. We worked with Roxbury and came up with a very creative solution that we think helps both towns in the end and we're wondering whether your opinion would be that we need to be offering extensions at this point or whether we can just ask folks to comply with the law that's been, the handwriting's been on the wall a long time. Yeah, and it's a tough one and as you know, we're being sued on it so I'm gonna limit my comments to a certain extent as a name litigant in that process but I believe, well, as of today, there was no decision reached. I believe that was the end of the day today on how to approach this issue. I'm sort of of two minds. I agree with you that, you know, and that's the districts I supported read the law and determined, you know, part of the energy or tension that allowed them to come to agreement was the threat of having the state force us to do it otherwise. So they figured out how to respond to that. On the other hand, I'm very familiar with the work that is required when you merge districts, let alone when you merge it through a force process. So I'm not quite sure why the legislature thought that four months would be sufficient to do that work. So I'm sympathetic to just in a narrow way looking at those districts that might need more time at a legitimately interesting and complying with the law as the state board is forced them to merge. So I think, you know, that I would say is essentially the dilemma that the legislature is struggling with now, how to provide that additional support without necessarily backing away from what was a broad, you know, broad commitment. I say politically broad commitment to move the state towards fewer school districts. So I don't know where they're gonna end up with it, but I am sympathetic to the districts that need more time. I'm worried about opening the larger can of worms that speak on Act 46. I mean, I think your first statement, when I asked you your first question, your commitment to the thought exercise of simplification, consolidation and simplification and therefore raising efficiency levels seems to be consistent with Act 46's intentions and if we unwind it, we're sort of going in the other direction. Yes, you know, I think, you know, my other point would be this is before the courts and I think, you know, there's fundamental constitutional issues that have been called into play and those we should wait for the courts to give us some direction on that before we proceed much further. I think that's an important consideration. My understanding is that we're gonna receive some guys for the court fairly quickly this month, at least one of the lawsuits. So I'm hopeful that'll help give us some understanding of what the context is for a legal standpoint. Any other questions? That's our turn. Bridget. You were talking earlier about outputs and the quality standards and one quality issue that, you know, I always think of this time of year we're approaching the next back season in schools and a few weeks after we turn break and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your views about the aspect, whether you think it's a good metric, whether you know, what do you think it's showing us about statewide system and if you have any thoughts on other metrics, the state should be using that. Yeah, I think it's a great question. You know, back to the point on quality, I think, and I think there's agreement on this that we're at a very interesting point of time, you know, as a state, we've come out from the no child left behind act, you know, we were one of the few states that never received a waiver from that and, you know, in 2014 essentially, labeled all our schools as failing schools. And ESSA, the new version of, you know, the elementary secondary education act doesn't, you know, it's basically, I think it's oriented to providing states more flexibility. So we feel like we have more flexibility and we've created an accountability system that certainly, I think meets our needs a little better. We've yet to sort of really bring that online, but I think it's positioned and it's described in a much more thoughtful way than what was this, if you remember, adequate yearly progress at all. So, and I should back up, you know, it's, people get, I think, confused sometimes, standards, assessments, and accountability systems. They're three different things. So we have the Common Core, which Vermont has adopted. Our State Board of Education adopts standards. And then we have an assessment, in this case, ESSA, which, you know, essentially at the federal level, we were required to do one or the other. Some states were able to build their own and now we've seen some backtracking with that. We grouped with a group of districts that designed an assessment called ESSA, which is designed to measure student achievement of the Common Core standards. And then states are required to have accountability systems, you know, which both no child left behind had this thing called adequate yearly progress. We're not doing that anymore. We have an accountability system that's based on education quality reviews, includes some integrated field reviews, and then a snapshot of data, including SBAC data. So I think, you know, SBAC has turned out to be a pretty good project. We've had some concern recently, you know, I'm a member of the Chief Council of State School Officers or the Council of Chief State School Officers, the CCSSO. There's a group of us that are members of the SBAC Consortium. There's politically doesn't seem to be a lot of will among some of the members to conduct a reliability and validity study of SBAC. So we're really concerned. Some of us that are interested in valid and reliable data are concerned about that. My understanding is that's been pushed back to like 2025. So, you know, we'll continue to use it for the moment, but I'll increasingly have some concerns about its validity. I think, you know, my bias would just start to be thinking more systemically about what is our portfolio of assessments that we can use across the entire state for all schools. I think there's some things we can be doing around personalized learning plans in terms of assessment of some more qualitative measures. You know, are we truly building a system around student aspirations or not? Part of our accountability system also includes a school climate survey component. So we're hoping to bring that online this summer. That's another important indicator for me. And I think there's room for us to have a good benchmark assessment at the primary grades. Every school, I'm not sure what you use, but I'm sure you have a benchmark assessment of some sort. And these are, when I say benchmark, they're usually given three times a year to give us an indication of how students are making progress on math and reading in particular. And there's a series of several commercial products that are being used by different districts across the state. I think if there's room and people are interested, I'd be interested in the idea of exploring having a single benchmark assessment done statewide. Because I think more we can do to put common tools in the hands of teachers, I think the more we can do to share best practices better. It's hard when we bring teachers across district boundaries together, some sort of professional development event. If they're measuring quality, using different tools. And I think the format of the benchmark assessments are so well ingrained. Most districts have them already. I think there's a place there we might want to explore to have a single system. I think it would save us some money, but also once again on this idea of sharing practices across district boundaries, I think it would be helpful to have a single tool set. So I feel pretty good about where we're at in terms of our quality reviews. We're still haven't brought it online fully yet. But I think the ESPEC has proven to be a pretty good tool. We have some preliminary correlation data that suggests it's a pretty good predictor of what it's designed to measure. But I am concerned about the broader validation studies that are now being put off due to political concerns. Anything else? Those studies that you're talking about, are those at the federal level? Yeah, it's really, yes, I'll say at a national level. It's really the group. There's a consortium of states that are behind the ESPEC and it's getting that consortium agreed to agree to fund and support those studies. Okay. Yeah. But you might be like Susan on a truck around from board to board, but we appreciate you. Come, she'd like to see you out on that. Yeah, and I was going to end tonight by saying I welcome to come back. I do enjoy board meetings. I used to report the 56 board members as my superintendent of a large multi-district supervising, but you're geographically convenient for me. So if we could schedule it a couple of times a year predictably, I'd welcome the opportunity to come back. It sharpens my focus to hear from you. And I perhaps can share, give you some insight into what we're doing as well. So I encourage you to take advantage of our geographic proximity. Yeah, I know we appreciate it. We will take you up on that. Thank you for your time. Yeah, thank you very much. Have a good meeting. Have a good meeting. Open up my drive seat. Yeah. Thanks. I'm very proud of you. So entry plan, conversation. Do you want to do snow day? I was going to see if you wanted to do snow day. So let's do snow day and principle then we'll do entry plan and I think snow day. We should take the talk for a long time. No, we shouldn't take long. The snow day, so we're at four snow days. When the calendar was created last year, we, and contractually, contractually, we have 178 student days between teacher, student contact and our contact. And the state's quota is 175 days. Those numbers are just important. So in our calendar, we skidded for 178 plus three that got us to the Friday, June 21st. Thank you, June 21st. You looked it up. June 21st. Currently, we have four snow days and we're in the beginning of February. So welcome to the first year of superintendency with the worst winter central romancy in a while. So that would imply if we were to follow the contracted allowance that students would be coming back that Monday right now. As a former second grade teacher, principal, been in education for our entire life, that's a nightmare for teachers, for students, for families, because that's really late this school year. Yeah, it's really late this school year. If summer camps have started, the buildings are hot, and not much learning takes place. So my thought would be to waive that student day, have the staff come back so we can do some really high quality professional learning. And I think we can because we'll have a very focused idea of what we need to do and by March, we'll know how many days, hopefully by March, we'll be done, how many days we'll actually have that we could bring some high quality people in or we could do some high quality professional learning with our staff for however many days that is. That would give us leeway, if the board is in agreement to that, we still have two more days to play with, not that it's gonna happen. We're gonna have just enough snow for skiers and not enough snow for buses to be unhappy. But. Two more days for kids to play with. Yeah, that would reach the 175. That's required by state law. By state law, yeah. And we still have the teachers doing their contracted work days that they'd have. It's still work out for them. But they'd just be coming back without students. So that's what I would like to do with your blessings. I have one question. Sure. I've heard a rumor in town that some Montpelier parents have the perception that because we merged with Roxbury, we're having a lot more snow days. That would not necessarily be true. It may, I mean, to think back to all four of them, I might kind of pick exactly, Mr. Blight. I do speak to both road crews on the morning as I've stated before. And there has been one or maybe two that Montpelier said they were fine. And Roxbury said, no, we need either more time or we need, we're not gonna get it cleared off. Particularly the ice day is sticking out to me right now. The roads were much worse in Roxbury. They have a smaller road crew. The rain was falling on those, you know, on roads that are different than Montpelier and the salt was just wasn't sticking. Like yesterday in Montpelier. Yeah, and probably tonight. So I couldn't answer with any clarity on that. And it's one year, you know, and it happens to be a bad year. All the superintendents in Central Vermont are struggling with it right now. You know, we... But I think we've had the same snow days as U32, right? Yes. We've been the same. The same as everybody around us. And the same as Twin Field. Well, we've had less than Twin Field. We've been the same as U32 and Barrie. And Northfield has one more than us. Okay. So, those three are really the closest to us geographically. And so the four of us truly work together. The four superintendents truly work together on our calls because often time our lines touch. Yeah. You know, John Pandolfo might know something or Bill Kimball might know something about Berlin and the line between Montpelier and Berlin that I don't know yet. Right. So we're in close contact. And we've had the same as those schools. Yeah. Yeah. We were not impacted by Raspberry. In fact. Yeah. Oh, really? Good winner. I'm happy too. Yeah. It's been extra snowy. Yeah. Couple thoughts. One is if we can do this math one more time. So I understand there's three days that are contract, that our educators are contractually required to serve but that the state does not require our students to come for basically up to three. Our teachers have, our teachers are contractively obligated to have 178 teacher student contact days. Oh, teacher student contract days, right? Okay. They have more contracted days than they can ever in service. Okay. So you're shifting one of the student teacher, you're suggesting we shift one student teacher contact day to a non student teacher contract day. Isn't it early to be making a decision like this? And the reason I ask that is because, let's say we have two more, we may say, you know what, let's go into that next week because now we got three. That's what I was just talking about. One makes no sense at all, but two or three might make all the sense in the world. I don't know, I'm not the guy, I don't study this stuff. One of the things, so Jim and I were talking about this this morning as to whether we bring it now, whether we bring it to the next February meeting or even the first March meeting. Some of the things, the principals and I are getting emails asking because summer camp season is starting. Oh, yeah. And education season is starting. Yeah, so people are trying to make plans. And while teachers recognize that those contracted days aren't going to be waived, kids are a different story. I see. So that's one major thing why I think we're talking about it. Another thing, Steve, is that should we go beyond the two more days? Right, it should be awful, but it's not going to be in the next two weeks. Should be awful. We do have one more day that we could play with in the calendar. Okay, okay. It's the day where it's the half day in service and half day parent conference. We could potentially make that a half day kid day, student day, and that would buy us back one day. So now we're safe, basically. From whatever might. Yeah, so there's some other gears turning just in case if March is miserable. Then it does make sense to get out early on it. I was thinking we may be forced to go over anyway or something. That gives us a lot of cushions. Yeah, that gives us more reason to play. The other thing, and it's not really for tonight, but is to, in the spirit of what Michelle asked about, clarifying how decisions are made or not made, is to be really clear with families about how a snow day is called. What is that kind of a morning in the life of a superintendent on a snow day? Where what are the calls you make? How are these things made? Because the grumbling, I mean, when we put together the merger, it was one of the reassurances we received, which is that, oh no, that won't happen, right? And in fact. Because the factors that go into that are so complex. We have all the teachers who are commuting here from Chittenden County. So Libby did this already for us. Yeah. She did this for us. She did. She provided this in the report to us. Oh, it was. This time? No, no, no. Okay, I missed that, okay. But you could use the bridge for an example. This might be a good opportunity to do some outreach to the community. Yeah. So you guys did this to us. It's a different time in the corner of the bridge. That's a good idea. Yeah, it's a communication opportunity for disfusing some of the stress about this and also talking about how, you know, we know that families are planning. We know this is important to get out early on these things. So we're really trying to lock down that last day of school as best as we possibly can. Yeah. I think letting more people know about this, and you essentially already have it put together. Just to make you feel better, even though they had a three-day or because of a physical issue, Cambridge is working on eight days. Well, there are some superintendents in my Winnieski crew who, I mean, literally they're crying when we're all on the email together in the morning saying, no. Yeah. Thanks. Nobody likes to call us no day or delay. Jim and I were saying that we thought it was important for the board to start gears turning around what potential we could do to make this easier for families. And as soon as they know that they're off, they'll be for the last student day. Do we need to take action tonight? Can we? Can we? If we wait, what is the advantage of doing it now versus after-time meeting day? Families would know, but families would know soon. Family friendly, we're calling principals, et cetera, saying we want to go to wherever we get the 24th or we want to send my kids to a two-week going camp that starts the 23rd. Are they going to be at school that week or not? There's an answer. Because lacking action, short of action, we're now rolling it into the next week. If we don't take an action, the de facto default is it is in the next week. Okay, June 24th, which is the last week of June. Because believe it or not, Andrew, parents are now signing up their kids for their summer activities. I believe that. We're already locked out of three of them. I was talking to a parent in Roxbury who runs a summer camp, and she said, my first week of summer camp is the 24th. Like, what, do I cancel it? Do I, you know, what do I do? On the other hand, even if we take this action back to speed, you can't predict how much snow will be in February. So it'll be in March. Or March. Or March. Or April. April. Yes. Right. No, not even 30th last year. Stop it. Yeah. It's true. A lot. Yes. Jim was on the slopes. Correct. All right, so what would we, do we need a vote on this? Sounds like we should. Do we need to contract this year? This would be a board's decision. Yes. So, if I took the vote, it would still be somewhat tentative, because if there were, well, not tentative as of today. So we could, we could override ourselves. It would be a mirror of motion, right? The motion would be to move to, to waive one of the student-teacher contact days in the contract, basically. Motion, we waive up to three of them, that depending on who gives it. Really? To give, I would say, because then, just to give her a thought. Up to three after the superintendent's discretion. Yeah, after the superintendent's discretion. Oh, okay. That's what, I mean, I- Wait, so she's- For, for a very narrow reason. So it doesn't change, we need to have without- We need 175. We need 175 for the kids. Yeah, right. Okay. So- We have to go to the state if we wanted to waive. Right, that's what I'm saying. She can't waive the kids, so the kids will always get 175. But to, to waive one day at the superintendent, up to three days at the superintendent's discretion for the purpose of maintaining June 21st as the last student day of school. Yeah. That's kind of the decision-making for people. So not for other reasons. Yes. Okay. Do you want to say that as a motion? Sure. I move that we waive one contractual, one day- Three. Up to three. I'm sorry. Up to three days in the contract for teacher-student contact. At the discretion of the superintendent for the purpose of maintaining June 21st as the last day of school for students. First day of school. Is it only that one contract? It's all contracts. No, it's just one, right? No, we get- I believe it's just the one guys at the MEA contract. Okay. That talks of student days. Okay. And you, should the motion continue and use those days for teacher? Yeah. But not to waive them as required days effectively. So only to waive the- I don't know how the contract's written, so I don't know. But yeah. Sure. What Bridget said. The number of days that Bridget does. It's four teachers. Questions. They're not just gone. Give them three extra days off. If it's spelled out in the contract, is it, I'd have to look. We have our contract. Is it spelled out in the contract, though, specifically for teacher-student days? Because if we're waiving that, and then we're saying, teachers, you're still gonna work, but not within the parameter that the contract states, I don't know about that. I don't know that we can require teachers to do that if it's spelled out that clearly in the contract. The number of days that teachers work is required. The number of days that teachers work is required. And the number of days of student contact are- And that's two different numbers. Yes. And this would be a non-negotiated thing. Okay. And Andrew, this is a common occurrence. Oh, it is? Yeah, it's not something we've been unasked before. Each contract's different, though, as we've been requiring. So I just want to make sure that, you know, where it stipulates. There's nothing in the contract about a date of a teacher-student, is that correct? No. A date of a teacher-student. No, there's not. Is it 16 in the teacher role? No, it's a searchable. I think I know what that means. The work here will be 188 days, structured in the following manner. Gentlemen, I'm on page 18. Thank you. 188 days. So they have 10 contract days without students. Yeah. 188 student days. So if those aren't student days, yeah, but to take those days and make them not student days and say that they're going to be used for other things. I can check with the union. Yeah. Can we do that? I've had some conversations with them already about this. Okay. But I can make sure. Could we do that first before we vote on this since we're in the process? What if we just add a clause to this that it's in consultation with the union? Yeah, that sounds great. So that it, you know, right. Yeah. Debra, if you run into any problem, you just back off and we regroup. Right. I'm thinking a big picture. So there would be no student who would essentially bail a grade because their parents kept them home on June 22nd, rather than sending them to school for the very last day. And if it's, or it'll be June 24th, it would be the Monday. But when is that? There is very little learning happening at my last day of school. Correct. I mean, right, I guess you're going to get a random Monday that's going to be the first day of June. That's the whole point. It's not going to be the last year or two. I'm pretty sure we did this last year. I think somebody's talking about June 22. Because they were going to have to come back on Monday. I believe somebody from the union says that you've done that before. Yeah, I think we did it last year. OK. I second Steve's motion. All those, any discussion? Further discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Great. We have our snow day situation. Thank you. Let's clearly do principle search. We have a big committee that is growing. As such, we would like to report the seat to one. So what I propose is that we appoint someone and then we appoint an alternate who may come on if either some of the seats don't materialize or the first person to do a first schedule and we know the results. That's a good point. The criteria would come with it. Michelle? Pick me. Pick me. Michelle, pick Michelle. There's a couple of people who are interested in Michelle and Tina. I suggest we appoint Michelle. Tina is the alternate. Michelle is two high school students. And it was all things high school. Excellent as Tina has done many, many principle search. I don't have any high school students. She doesn't have current ones. Thank you both. Or future ones. I'm sensing something from you. We're either of you two on the committee that hired Mike. We saw the curiosity. I was as well as Carol Paquette. Well, you did a great job with that hire. That's definitely. So that's what I propose. Do we get a motion for that or do we just appoint? I don't think so. Yeah. Sounds great. Thank you both. Are there students on that? It's getting that posting up. Yes, the posting should be up tomorrow. We've got an email in our inbox saying post it. We do have some time to do some broader outreach to try to attract. In a plan. And yeah, exactly to attract a more diverse pool. And hopefully get some, not just more diverse folks, but also supports from a lot of states that are interested. Like last year, we were in crunch mode. And I don't think that we've been able to outreach. I didn't go through different channels, like we do this year. But there's a plan to do that. Great. We did have mostly out of state applicants last time for the principal. Interesting. What has turnover been like? We've had two principals in the past four years or something like that? No, we had Adam funding for maybe three or four years. And then we had Mike for four years. Oh, Mike's been here for four years. Yeah, this is his fourth year. Time flies. I have a daughter who's a senior. The seniors are very attached to him. Because he arrived at the same time that they did. And now he's leaving at the same time. They're very emotional about it. Remember how emotional they were about Adam funding. And they forgot that, like 10 seconds later. 10 seconds later. Part of that is when you get a really, Mike's been amazing. All summer people were like, well, he's not going to be any Adam Bunton. No, he wasn't. He's not. No, he's so different. Great. Thanks for being with us. Unless there's any more comments about the proposal. Thank you, Michelle, for setting up. I apologize. Heather handed out the questions and answers after the fact she handed them out this morning. So they weren't part of the original board packet. And that was my mistake. I simply forgot the board was up to her. So I'm just trying to get to that. Sorry. They're not in the packet. Oh, they were. They were sitting on her. Yeah. Every table. Oh, absolutely. Oh, yes. Okay. So I can just go through here the questions that I received and feel free to ask any additional questions. If I don't have the answer tonight, then I will most definitely write it down and get to the answers you need. So under goal one and opportunity two, it was the long term planning from the board's perspective with the leadership and moving us forward. And the question was, are you guys working on that? Working on a plan to make that happen. So I don't want to speak for Jim, but he certainly needs to speak well enough for himself. But we're in the beginning stages of focusing this work. We've had some very beginning conversations just recently about number one, increasing the equity, equity in regards to the achievement gap that we have for all our students to building district capacity and the racial gender and ability equity. So it's kind of different lens through that work. Three, visioning for the future of RVS in particular and for our facilities, making sure all our facilities are up to date and the quality that we want for our learning environments for students. Those were our initial conversations. And when I say initial, I mean very initial conversations to answer that question. Do you want to add anything to that? Yeah, I suppose to. I mean, we're getting, we might want to add help to that as well because we're getting questions about how we change sex and sexuality. We're also getting questions about drug use, marijuana use, vaping, et cetera. Do you see the legislation report that they do have something up for to extend that vaping, the electronic e-figure out or whatever? Extend the age? But that will be a conversation of the spring and then in the summer we want to really kind of delve into that and one thing we've talked about particularly on equity and the achievement gap has been a subject that we've been talking about for a long time. I think it would be great to really put a plan in place to articulate how we're going to do that, both from a systems perspective and from an investment perspective and use that as kind of a driving force in the conversation with the community next year around the budget and kind of going forward. We talk a lot about this but here's how we're going to do it. And the leadership team is hard at work at that right now. We will be bringing something to the board to share soon throughout the spring. That's a really great way to put it I think because I think we've talked about it for so long now and the kind of the drop approach like we're going to add this little position here three quarters of a position over here. We've changed the curriculum approach over here but it feels almost as if there's not a coordination of best practice has been looked at. We've got an idea. We've done some research. We've got some data. And now here is the strategic plan on addressing equity and it includes a lot of stuff and you're not going to get it all in the first year but it's a big plan and it's more of a package than it is just a drop here and a drop there and that would really I think help our community understand the serious commitment. We've got it going on. That's exactly the kind of approach we need to do. We've spent probably the last sign name of the leadership team weekly and I'd say the last two and a half months every meeting we've been working on developing our scales and what we're thinking about. That's great. And then the health thing is great and I was noticing tying into the gender piece too I think if we can help education and gender equality going together kind of understanding those as a unit and that it needs to be very specifically reflected in our health education curriculum is gender equity. Huge. Yeah. So under goal three my narrative stated that we have extremely challenging needs that our schools currently do not have the capacity to handle and the question was asked what needs are we talking about and why don't we have the capacity? What do we need in order to handle this? Are we outsourced or what? I'm not going to read that entire paragraph to you but just kind of highlight the ideas that we're truly working with right now. We have actually less than most school districts in terms of extremely challenging kids who exhibit extremely challenging behaviors for multiple reasons. And we have less of those children? I think we have less than most children and I've seen in other districts and that could be for multiple reasons as well. However, that's not going away and it's not going to get smaller. And so currently another thing the leadership team is working on particularly the assistant principals because they're often the driving force behind this work is how do we work and support and provide high quality environments for kids who might need something different from our schools at this moment in their lives? Not all the time but in this moment in their lives. How do we build the capacity of our staff so that they can build relationships with kids who are sometimes hard to build relationships with? And all of these things are hard to talk about but they're a reality. How do we build plans for kids and stick to it because we often know that kids who are really challenged and you put a plan in place will bucket really hard at first before it starts working and oftentimes school systems give up? And so how do we do that? That's a big challenge for should our budget be passed with social emotional coordinator to support those plans and support the team and be the person behind it saying yep, this is going to work just give it more time we're collecting that person. So we're putting very basic building blocks in place around this right now. The regional superintendents are all we're all talking about this. A couple superintendents have gone so far is to create budgetary outlines as to how much time, energy and money is actually being spent on what percentage of kids who are experiencing this right now. We've done that. I don't necessarily think it's a great exercise but that's how far people are going to show how much money and time school districts are spending towards this population. And many of us are concerned with the capacity of Washington County with mental health who are people we rely on for support in this area and their capacity to support us because they're over matched right now. And when we need more help in regards to an outside placement or a temporary outside placement or somebody coming to help us they simply don't have the staff or the space for that at the moment. And so then we're with a child who needs something more than we can give them and it's not for the child, it's not for the family, it's not for us, it's not for our educators who are stressed and want to do their best and they just don't know how. So like I said this isn't a huge number of kids right now but it's enough and it's serious enough and we care about all kids and we want to do the best for all kids that we need to put some more thought and effort and plans in place for this. Go ahead Michelle. So we had a lengthy and detailed presentation maybe three years ago on shifting our special education delivery model because we had been out placing those kids. And we changed and that was extremely costly and the theory was that if we stopped without if we resorted to out placement less often and instead created more effective structures within particularly the elementary school to be able to adapt to the needs of those kids that it would be better for everyone because those kids would be more a part of our community our teachers would develop more in terms of their capacity to work with that population and we would save and did save a tremendous amount of money on out placement. But do you think that that model is the right way to go? I agree with that model for 99% of our students. I think there is still 1% that's going to need a different placement than what we can provide and I think that's just the reality. I think it's small percentage. I guess my question is do you think that it would be more do you think it would be better to put a couple more kids in out placement or do you think it would be better to increase our ability to meet their needs within the building? Yes. I would answer that yes. Both of those things. I wonder, so we say build the capacity of teachers a lot. You can hear that out of my mouth a lot. I'm sure you've heard about from other leaders a lot. But they're only so big, the teachers. I know, that's true. And so much they can handle, right? So my question would be in that time frame which we're still working on, right? How much professional support have teachers gotten? How much structural support and grants between the resources have we put in place? Whoever was on the board at the time when we put social workers in each of our schools as employees of ours and not contracted out, I applaud you for that decision because not everybody has made that decision. And at the same time how are we supporting that social worker? Because since they're part of our school employee they now don't have the expertise and consultation from another outside entity they only rely on each other. So I met with a social worker this is really fresh because I just met with the social workers and they quite rightly said we need contact with other people to get expertise that we're going by our gut basically and we want them to go by what the best practice is not to say they're not but I want their gut to be really fueled by what's best practice. I think at least two of them are quite new or quite young. But they came from the world of mental health consultation so they've had that experience. They could probably continue. Yes, exactly. So what's our plan for those three in particular? What's their job description to make sure that we're really clear that they're targeting families and the kiddos that need them the most? We haven't done that work yet but we need to. So I'm hoping the new person that we hire will be in tight communications with our curriculum coordinator because... Why do you say that? Part of the job description is that that person will report to director of curriculum and director of student services. Because not the 1% but the 1.5 instruction is the key to keeping them into that classroom. So they can marry our well aware of what will be that will be a joint endeavor and there will be no silos. We've been talking for now a couple years about first tier making sure that first tier is universal universal design so that we're really doing as much as we can to shift that to shift everything down a little bit. So some kids when they need it so that we can have an intensive intervention. So Libby an hour ago the secretary of french was talking about Act 173 and the shift in implementation for special ed. What were you thinking in terms of the regional work you guys are doing now to implement this kind of work? Like how those two things are going to come together is Act 173 going to help? Yes. It's going to help us. Because we're on top of it. Some districts are I don't want you all to hear that's a special education law. That's a good quality instruction law for all kids and getting support to kids who need it when they need it. Currently the current funding system doesn't allow us to do that to the best of our ability. And so Jim's a special educator and Bridget is the general it creates these silos that Jim's kids, Bridget's kids you know, like things that does not help us. So once everything creates a silos it breaks those down? No, it's attempting to break those down so that we could use the resources that Jim could provide to kids who may not be on an IEP not ignoring any kids who's on an IEP and needs it but could also bring more kids into the service place. So they don't end up on an IEP? I keep talking about multi-tiered systems of support because really that's what that law is about is enabling us to have the funding and the human resource we need to make a high quality multi-tiered system of support model go for everybody. So that's where we're starting with our work and when we come with our plan or package as Steve just said so eloquently that's what you're going to see a whole lot of in that plan is a very little talk of special education but a lot of talk of what are we doing as educators to serve us all of our students in a way that best supports them. What would be a theoretical example of how a student might not be helping out? So currently if a student, a lot of times I'll stick to academics because that's really where I have more knowledge based around this, right? So let's pick a second grader who's having a hard time really understanding the concept of subtraction. A lot of times that kiddo needs more time they need more time, they might need it explained in a different way, they might need more manipulatives in front of them Currently the classroom teachers is responsible, right? For that learning. If the kiddo is on an IEP then the special educator could help a kid but if they're not the special educator can only help that kid if they have a group that has the right ratio of kids with an IEP who also need the same services and others, right? So it's not like a given because we have to do these silly time schedules with special education because of the funding, right? 173 gets rid of that idea so if a special educator, so what we can do we can make learning specialists with our extra human resource to special education in regards to intervention services truly make them experts in how do I teach math, right? and how do I teach reading and how do I teach writing so that we have experts who say oh, this is the profile of a kid who needs this I know how to attack that so let's get the service they need it doesn't matter if they have an IEP or not in place so it opens up the door for us to do that however what I keep saying is I don't want to put more people into a broken system because I don't want it to be Andrew's got trouble in math which we all know he doesn't based on his negotiation skills but Andrew's got trouble in math and so Tina's this teacher and says I taught it he didn't learn it I got all these people to take him out of my classroom and he's not my problem anymore our teachers aren't as blatant as that right? so we want to ensure that we have clearly delineated our tears of support for kids and when they access them and for what before we really start digging into these are the amount of human resources we need makes sense? yes they have also the issue of if you spoke about more time I might need more time and you as a teacher and the rest of the class is ready to proceed on I need more time those two kids need more time and I will catch up but only if I have a little help to catch up and that little extra help can't be neglecting what your prototype standard in the classroom is moving towards it has to be in addition to so we have some schedule to work out so can I help with that one? clarify district values and ensure system and practices match those values this looks like board works again a plan to make that happen and I think that's directly related to the first question I think as a board we have a lot of talking to do and a lot of planning to do particularly in the late spring and summer and I look forward to working with you all on that kind of stuff with regard to Act 173 do you think at some point it sounds like we're going to be receiving all sorts of information related to 173 but do you think at some point it would make sense to provide us an overview of sometimes you provide us updates with regard to curriculum design and policy implementation like how we're leveraging Act 173 I can certainly do that I'm going to give it a little more time right now we've gotten married so we've got an entire track to it she said let me do you mind if I volunteer on that I'm like go go go go be that person so she's got a voice at the table and she's a person who truly understands breaking down silos and helping all kids so I think she's going to be a good person for us to be there when Dan says we're working out the rules they're working out the rules and that's where they are right now we have two years but I think we're ahead of the gang in terms of our planning right now because others are thinking about just the money and we're thinking about service delivery and systems so I think we're in a good spot in regards to this but once those kind of things start to get more ironed out at the legislature and the state board then we can have Mary come in and really explain it great and that's it unless you all looked at that document again and have more questions from me and by all means you can always send them to me too any other questions about it in regards to the policy reading so next the policies I think are second policy reading of the equity policy we've got a the one that Heather passed out is this this is the most up-to-date this has it should say October 2019 on the top October? well October excuse me lots of red there so this is second policy reading so the changes Martha review I read the one we got in our packet and it looks accurate to me we talked about but we also have an alternative to the work out I think the one in the packet was the same as the one that we looked at before and that's why Ryan and I are circling it so great the one that came by email from Ryan in the guy hand language that we tried to track what we talked about at the meeting correct and that's the one that Ryan read oh yeah so you can see that the additional family composition in the third paragraph the the recruitment language which is now just a delegation to the superintendent that was a change I don't love the five to six line long sentences it's a stylistic thing but we try to cram their virgin and run on sentences and we're cramming in a lot of huge ideas in one sentence this is just stylistic thing I think like under three expectations for recruitment practices and professional development expectations for curriculum we could do a better job breaking those into two sentences and more clearly spelling out the subject and the objects so that you're not like wait what is this in reference to again as you're going through it that's just a stylistic thing I don't know if anybody else shares that I'm not going to the mat over it it's just are you talking about just number three he was talking about number four and number three professional development yeah I was wondering if it made sense to maybe to use semi-colons that is quite a sentence it's really a list and I think both of those it's kind of a list by the time you get to the end you're like wait what is this it's like the function of this right now and like a little reminder by splitting it up and just inserting the subject in there again might be helpful but you can play around with some words in my thing yeah but I think the policy is great and I don't want there's very little that I like content-wise I think this is this is really terrific I just want to fill that out thank you yeah I mean I think it's actually not that easy to break up that sentence a little bit clearly needs to be broken up yeah more of a listing yeah that might be there you are that might be a really good way of dealing with it I actually think that could be really helpful maybe the bullets could be strengthen the knowledge and skills needed to identify and counteract their own biases could be one bullet counter counteract bias practices that perpetuate achievement disparities and contribute to disproportionate access and outcome can be a bullet and strengthen the inclusiveness of that environment that would be super clear I think that's a great way of addressing it and I think we can do something kind of similar for the next form expectations for curriculum two like Colin and then blah blah blah so that's kind of one concept that's really cool but concepts are very long I mean where it says and that the curriculum incorporates I feel like we could put a period there and then curriculum something like the district will ensure the curriculum incorporates the voice culture just to break it up so my concern is that these are all really important points and when they're all put together like that they they kind of like blend together yeah I think the content is really really good number five I I would prefer the alternative because it does include a section that says will particularly address impacts on students from marginalized communities the the other paragraph above it doesn't have that anymore I agree with Lisa that the alternative is better largely because at first I liked the upper one better because it was simpler but it says the consequences for students who engage in that conduct but what conduct reference above that to any sort of conduct and I know we were trying to avoid talking about hazing harassment and bullying because it's so uber defined but if you start trying to define conduct for which there are consequences and of which people are targets I think you wind up back at the defined conducts I don't think there's any in between we honestly remember the discussions lately differently whether we were trying to not talk about hazing harassment or we just wanted to separate them out into two different senses so that's why it's in two different ways because those are reconstructed people spend a lot of time on the legal to differentiate between what those three things are so to me it's worth having because the definitions are legally established and I don't think the alternative blends the concepts and I think it's clear that there are different concepts going on that's a good point of conduct conduct is not defined and to try to define it well right because I mean there's some conduct that we're talking about for which there may not be consequences actually but it's still conduct we want to educate about I appreciate your work going from nothing yes great job there's a lot of people involved the big team so then just to be clear we're happy with the alternative as it's presented great that's simple is it ready to go on the consent agenda next time or do folks want to there's three choices it could come back for discussion could come back for discussion and adoption not on the consent agenda or it could come back for adoption on the consent agenda I think those are the options well it could come back let me try this it could come back on the consent agenda with the corrections we have and if anyone objected to them I just didn't know if people felt they were at that point one thing Emma and Hope said that they hadn't seen the changes on the google drive do they have have they been coming to the committee meetings do they have an opportunity to read we had sent they were included after the first round you know what if you could make the changes let's put it let's plan on putting on the consent agenda if you could make the changes soon then I can get it to the RJA and tell them that they have a quick turnaround time and if they make significant changes then when we make the agenda we just won't put it on there does that work we won't put it on the consent we'll put it on the agenda I don't the question I have is you know I think that this is a big deal I think this is a great thing whether it's on the consent agenda or not I think it's worth acknowledging when we adopt it and I would love to hear from Emma and Hope when we adopt this you know their thoughts on it that's what I was thinking maybe we don't have to spend much time but kind of memorialize it rather than just gloss over it we want to we want to wait until March 6th the slate challenge is that our next board meeting is in Roxbury not that that's in itself a challenge but thus far Hope and Emma haven't want to I've offered transportation out there and everything but for their own reasons they haven't chosen to come to those board meetings in Roxbury so we never had them speak for the entire student body no it wasn't in Roxbury no way but he doesn't go to Roxbury either he does yeah sometimes I didn't there used to be someone else used to come to the Roxbury I'm not going to take my place I can talk to them about it maybe since they asked us it would be nice for them if it was to happen at the first March they could comment how they're feeling now that the policy is free yeah that's what I was kind of hoping something along those lines I thought that would be so Tina if we adopted at the next meeting then have them make sure that they're free to comment at the March 6th meeting oh just holding it Heather's got an idea yeah so let's move to March 6th okay Heather's amazing voice thank you uh I think they're probably already frustrated with how slow we can move you just want me to get to the procedures they're done we were clear about the process so we have a quick executive session I think we'll see in this room Libby wants to go my phone is lighting up oh that's how bad it is the conditions are not good I'm surprised you're here at all honestly yeah we'll drive safely