 So I think we should just get started and I do see that we have quite a few members of the public with us. So if you would just either use the raise your hand function or which I still don't know exactly how to do. I think it's something in participant list. You click on your name. So yeah, if you are interested in making public comment tonight, just raise your hand and then I'll call on you in the order that you raised your hand. We have one other person in the waiting room. So we'll let's start with Beth. Hi everyone, thanks. I just wanted to give a couple of quick observations. First, I definitely wanted to say thank you to all of you. I know that the work to go through identifying individuals to answer these questions and reaching out to them and getting them to actually answer your questions is a lot of work. And so I appreciate all the time and effort that you all have put into it. Last time I had mentioned the importance when doing any sort of questioning of individuals about a topic, having some consistency across who you're asking so that you're making sure that you're asking folks in a way that can get to the real answer you're looking for rather than to any biases that could be at play for any individual. And with that in mind, I had looked at the list of survey questions or questions that you all had put together and some of the responses that you had received and it made me think back and reflect back to that comment that I made at the last meeting. I think as you all evaluate these responses and you use it to inform your thinking and your recommendations to the school board, it is important to keep in mind that what you're getting is a snapshot of information and what you're getting is a perspective. And sometimes depending upon where you sit, that perspective could look different. And I bring up an example in particular in mind to show you a little bit of what I mean. When I was looking at the questions and the responses across all of the different tabs, one that came up for me was some of the questions, Amanda Corses, sorry, some of the questions and then answers from the Montpelier Police Department. I think we've all seen more and more conversations bubble up to the public narrative that we need to think about policing, we need to pay attention as community members to the ways in which police protect and serve our community. And that community oversight of police is important because at the end of the day, they're accountable to the people they serve which is the public. And within the questions and responses that NPD provided, I think that perhaps there were some ways in which some of the questions were framed that didn't allow for a complete and holistic answer by the police department. And so as you go through some of these answers, I'm just asking you to evaluate and think and use critical thinking to think like is the way that this question is framed going to get me to the answer I'm really looking for. For example, one of the questions asked was, has there ever been formal complaint filed against the police officer? As has been both a Vermont and a US conversation, policing has been within a certain structure for a very long time. And that structure has resulted in certain individuals who are police officers to get away with awful things. But it's not about the individual police officers about the structures in the systems in which they're functioning within. And it's important that all of us try to fix and adjust those structures so that safety is really meaningful for everyone. So when that question was framed in the way that it was, what it unintentionally neglected was the very real situation that when it comes to the ways in which policing has been set up in Vermont and in the country, what that has done is allowed for a cultural norm among policing that discourages individuals from filing any sort of formal complaint. I have seen several instances across Vermont where people do not file formal complaints because they've been discouraged by police to file those formal complaints. And if you go back to and review some of the school board testimony, especially at the beginning of the SRO topic being brought up in the summer, we actually did have public comment from people of color. And one of those people spoke exactly to that issue within the Montpelier Police Department attempting to go and report something having to do with racial profiling and then being discouraged from filing a formal complaint. So I urge you to just think about how those questions are framed and what is therefore being left out when we frame the questions in that way, knowing the culture of policing that has long been a part of our communities. And when the answer by MPD was that the SRO has not had any formal complaints filed against them, I would think bigger about the question and perhaps ask if there have not been formal complaints filed, has there been a restorative justice process that an SRO or any officer has had to go through in lieu of filing a formal complaint? Because the impact is the same. Whether or not there's formal complaint filed, we know that in Vermont, there are police officers who have not honored the code. And so as you look at these questions and as you discuss the questions tonight, I'd like for you to keep that in mind. There have been instances in this community with our police department where there has had to be restorative justice brought in but formal complaints were discouraged. So just trying to like fill in the missing gaps, essentially here by bringing up some of then inevitable holes there are when we ask questions in some ways rather than in others. That's all, thanks. Thank you, Beth. We are sort of finished up with the 10 minutes of public comment, if there's anybody else that's here from the public that wants to comment, I haven't seen anybody do the raise hand function but you can go ahead and unmute yourself and speak if you have something that you would like to say. Okay, so I will move on to the consent agenda which is just the minutes from the December 8th meeting which should have arrived along with the warning from Anna. So could I have a motion to approve the minutes or is there discussion or questions? I'll move. I think we should do the move and then second and then if there are discussions we'll do that. Thank you. I move that we approve the minutes of the December 8th meeting. Okay. I'll second. Okay, is there any discussion? All right, Amanda, Mia. Hi. People are moving around in my list as I'm reading. This is a bad way to do it. Zach? Hi. Edie? Hi. Joan? Hi. Catherine? Hi. Here? Hi. And Jay? Hi. Is there anyone else I'm forgetting? I should have just done it based on video. Jen? Well, I wasn't there so can I still? Sure. All right. Eyes or eyes? Well. And Eliana? Just Eliana, okay. Just a die. All right, I think once everyone gets sort of sorted with, if you want to put an asterisk in front of your name, if you're a committee member, then you will sort to the top. And then I can try to read through because some of you have your video off today. All right, so the overview of tonight is that we're going to be reporting back on the work that we did in the past week and a half to seek answers to our questions by sort of the stakeholder groups. And so I think we only have about five minutes per presentation, which means like in the case of other schools, there's, you know, I think at least six other schools that we reached out to and there's four people that collected that information. So I think we're going to just have to try to give like a broad overview. And then some, most of you were able to enter the answers to the questions into the spreadsheet. But if you haven't had time to do that, then please go ahead and enter whatever feedback you received over the past week and a half into the spreadsheet. And that way people can sort of sit with the information a little bit longer and sort through it between meetings. So, and then we also have Libby Bonesteel is here. I'm not sure if she's right here, but she's going to be prepared. Hi Libby. She has prepared a presentation for the committee based on the language of the charge and then also the questions that everybody came up with. And then we've provided some time for Q&A for her after that presentation. So I have students going first and then I'm going to shift to other schools because Jen needs to leave early and then hear from the experts, et cetera, and then community members and then the police department and then MRPS staff. I wanted to offer the students, I'm not sure if you feel good about going first. I know I feel like we're always putting you first because that was one of the agreements, but I just wanna make sure that you feel comfortable with that. Is this, if nobody says anything then we do feel comfortable type of situation. That sounds good. Edie, Eliana, Zach, are you all okay with presenting first or would you rather have somebody else present first and then follow? So yeah, in order to try to stay on task and end on time, I'm gonna get started. So let's hear from the students. Well, I got an email, well, media on the other week and it was, she had overlooked the questions and realized that like the mental health aspect was kind of left out of the students. And I feel like after looking at the survey we made a few weeks ago, I didn't wanna like leave behind any of those, any of that feedback. And so we added a question that says if you could allocate social emotional learning, mental health, conflict resolution resources in your school, what would you prioritize and what problems are you trying to solve with these priorities? And so I was thinking we could make another survey and send it out to the students that was specifically about mental health. And especially since there's already like a million dollars in the budget dedicated to social emotional learning and I think that actually like narrow our focus in the second part of our charge where we're trying to use like restorative practices and stuff and just see exactly what the students need in regards to that. We didn't like, I don't know if EV sent out an email. We, there wasn't a whole lot of communication with the students about getting these questions done but some of them were like not really answerable by the students. I think they were just put in this category and like some of them were just not really answerable. Like will students be harmed if the SRO position is eliminated? Like I just, it's kind of hard to tackle some of them which sounds kind of like pathetic, I guess. Well, not really, but and is it reactionary? Yeah, so I think we were going to send out another survey or ask individuals about the first question on here because yeah, I don't know if they don't have that information but yeah, I just, Edie, did you end up doing that? I just, no. I have not sent anything out yet. I guess maybe all of us were waiting for somebody else to communicate more about it but yeah, we did talk about the questions and we did find some that we thought were more about the students than directed to the students. So we kind of narrowed or culled, I guess or kind of selected our questions. But I also think that just from Beth's comment earlier, I thought that was really important. Like we could have just like reworked the questions to make them more answerable. So I apologize. Please don't apologize. It's, I think you have a great idea of maybe refocusing together, rewording some of the questions to make them more appropriate to ask students to answer and then find a way to gather that information and whether that's through a survey or maybe it's time for you to host a public forum or something like that, where the three of you host a Zoom meeting like this for students to join or something like that. We can discuss possible ways for you to provide more feedback into our next meeting or the one after that. Yeah, I think that SEL and mental health questionnaire is an incredible idea. Yeah, I think that would be very beneficial for us as this team figured out. So extra idea, Eliana. All right. Any questions for the students? Thank you all. Let's move on to the other schools. So that was Jen, Pierre, Mia and myself. Let's hear from Jen first, since she's the one that has to hop off early. Okay, I'm going to kind of read, go to the chart because I wanna make sure I remember everything. Yeah, and I'll just urge everyone to like summarize instead of don't open just because each person has about a little more than a minute. Okay, all right. So I spoke to three different schools, South Burlington, Randolph Union and Stowe area. And I focused on high schools really. So it's interesting, Stowe does not have a resource officer and also Randolph does not have a resource officer. Stowe has a close relationship with restorative center, but they also have a close relationship with the police department and the sheriff's department. So they participate in things like drills and things like that for the school, but they don't have a resource officer at the school. They do include what was interesting to me is they included officers from the sheriff's department and the police department in activities at school and they consider them part of their community even though they don't employ them. Randolph Union does not have a resource officer as well. So as far as truancy, both schools handle that themselves. They send it right to the state's attorney, but they don't have anyone that goes to the court with a kid and advocates for what the kid needs in court. Conflicts in school, Randolph has no SRO, but they have a close relationship with two officers in the police department on text messaging and they will call them in if there's a difficulty that needs backup and they have a good relationship with the police department, but they do not have anyone in the school, except for they do employ SRO, they do employ, I'm sorry, they do employ, sorry, they do employ the police for dances and all the sports and things like that. So they and that officer is also one of the parents and so because they're the parent, the kids see them a lot and they're just around in the school, not in the school just hanging out. Okay, so South Burlington has an SRO. They have one SRO for the high school, which has 900 students. They have two, they have another SRO for the other schools and they're looking to hire a third. They have a close relationship with the state's attorney. That SRO greets kids at the door. He said he has a good relationship with the kids. He spends a lot of time with outreach in the community and not, I mean, he will respond if there's a crisis or anything, but otherwise that's done. I just wanna have you wrap it up so that we have time to listen to. Yeah, okay, that's it. And also just to point out, I'm not sure the South Burlington model because they do have SROs, the questions weren't really for schools with SROs in place. So that was an interesting, I don't know how the cross communication happened there, but all right, Pierre, do you wanna report out from, was it U32 in Northfield or? U32 and across the book. Yeah, so I think both schools, U32 has never had a SRO. So their premises of everything, that foundation for just safety in the community is more starts with a relationship building, that's the foundation. And within those relationships with families and community, they build teams to work on different things. So, mental health is one restored, they have a huge restorative practice, I guess, lens in that community. And you use a lot of circles to really talk about issues. But if there's like any huge, huge problems, basically, they obviously use the state police, but that's something that they haven't had to use in a long, long time. But they have a huge mental health team that have been together for a long time. And they're really, I guess, strong. The Assistant Principal said it. And they work really well together. So their foundation basically is just building relationship with students and community and the families. And they're really good about, if they see like a student struggling early on, they connect with those students, in ways that help them out, basically. So, home business and things like that, basically. So the schools and the community, they kind of consider them this one community, even outside of the school. Crossbrook, they had the Waterbury PD, but apparently the Waterbury PD sees to exist now. So they had like a school resource officer, but now they do not. The last two years, the town itself decided to discontinue the police department there. So same thing, same model. Their model is more the PBIS, Restorative Practice Model. Really just building that foundation for kids to really understand, we have the responsibility for being responsible, being respectful, being safe, being kind, and then again, reaching out to community for any issues that may be. But they also have a huge mental health piece, team and lens, and they've been really, and they also work with, I'm sorry, mental health agencies outside. So Washington High and Mother Health is really big involved in that school. Great, thank you, Pierre. Mia, do you wanna report on? Sure. So I will first apologize, I dropped the ball on reaching out to Barry, but I'll get back on that. When I reached out to the Vermont Superintendent's Association, the Jeff Francis, the executive director there was supportive of the process that we were going through and said that the best avenue to get responses from the resources available within this association is for us to have Libby go and essentially network through her fellow superintendents. So if there are specific questions that we really would like superintendents to answer, it's something that we could ask Libby to go to them for. And the other person that I checked in with is Tina Muncie, who used to be a member of the board of directors, our school board of directors, and was also a principal at a K through eight school and overall her approach I guess could be summarized by saying that administrators and the mental health and social work supports that are at school could definitely handle the particular intricacies of what an SRO does in terms of guiding a student through truancy court, if that was the example. And she also brought up a really good question about what is community involvement? How is our community holding each and every one of our kids and seeing this as something that we do together? I thought was a really a good question for us that she raised. Great, I'll try to be really brief. I just, I would really recommend that people read through the answers, particularly in this section because I think the value of listening to schools who have built systems in the absence of an SRO is really an important perspective. And when I was having these conversations, they were very in depth, they took a long time, there was great answers, but we obviously don't have time to report out on everything. So I definitely would encourage people to go back through and read the full text of the answers. My big takeaways, I talked to a Northeast Kingdom school and I talked to a Bethel area school and the Northeast Kingdom school and the Bethel area school both talked about the truancy piece. There was a question about truancy and home visits. And they both sort of said, we've never felt uncomfortable doing a home visit. And if we did feel uncomfortable or unsafe or felt like we needed a police officer present, we would take a big step back and ask, why are we going to that house? And that if it was a safety issue around an adult that was dangerous in the house, then probably the police should visit on their own to the house and that if it was a question of safety of a child that was at stake at the house and the school was worried about that child, that they would work through DCF and have DCF do a home visit. They both said that they would invite parents to come to a neutral place. If there was any sort of friction with that family and they wanted to do a home visit around whatever concern they had, they would either invite them to come to the school or meet at a neutral place in public. They both, but in particular, Bethel schools have built a really innovative system around restorative justice practices. So I think it could be something that we could look into, but because of their proximity to the Vermont Law School, they've partnered with a group there that help them do restorative justice practices. So, you know, much like we do with the community justice center, they sort of, you know, certain things that sort of rise to the threshold of maybe needing involvement or there's criminal activity involved or whatever, they would, you know, they do call the police, but that they would work through these community justice models that have been built. So anyway, really positive conversations. I would definitely urge you to read through the full text of the answers. So let's move on to experts, et cetera. That was Will, Jim and Mia. I did not hear back from the Vermont Humanities Council. So I'm gonna not report back on that today, but we can start with Will. Hello everyone. Sorry, I'm late. Let me pull up what I found. I had two really good, really positive and comprehensive expert conversations. The first with James Lyle, the executive director of the ACLU of Vermont. We talked on the phone. I put direct quotes are in the form. I was typing this up while we were talking. So with the caveat that he's not himself an expert in alternative models, but it sounds like talking to the schools that have those currently working is a much better thing to do anyway. The general takeaway is things we already knew frustrations about the lack of specific data in Vermont, but there's a tremendous amount of data nationally that he pointed me to. And there's a consistency in terms of the disproportionate impact on students of color, students with disabilities and LGBTQ students. He cited a study called Kicked Out that the Vermont Legal Aid conducted in 2015. It is not specifically about SROs, but it's one of the few relevant studies recently conducted in Vermont. It does list statistics collected federally on not SRO related incidents, but referrals to law enforcement by the schools and demographic information on who is most impacted by that. And let's see, I'm sorry, just glassy on my notes quickly. The big takeaway, so something he repeated several times was that many of the questions, there were a whole chunk of expert questions that together amounted to who will do all of these specific things that SROs currently do. And they list various specific things. And what he kept saying to each of them was that the involvement of SROs is relatively recent. The same people who did that work before we started passing that work off to the police would presumably take it up again. And his understanding was that there's no reason that assistant principals, guidance counselors, school administrators, school nurses couldn't return to doing that kind of work. As they did before, I had a similar conversation with Rebecca Plummer of Vermont League of Montpelier. And I asked a new question of her. I added a new question down at the very bottom that was just what resources local or national, do you consider required reading for anyone charged with this work for evaluating the SRO role? She listed three things, two of which I already knew about. One was the same kicked out study that the disability law project of Vermont League of Laid conducted in 2015. It's about a 40-page PDF. And it's not that long because half of those 40 pages are pictures. And it's online, I put the link in there. So she cited the same one that the ACLU cited. Also, Vermont League of Laid recently developed a myth and fact sheet that's very brief. It's two pages long about the SRO role and what common beliefs and what the studies have thus far determined to be true. That is online and Rebecca sent me the link. So I've got that at the bottom of column E in the same form. She also cited the open letter to all superintendents and school boards that was sent out by the disability law projects on June 23rd of this year, which I believe has already been shared with all of us. So those three things, those were the specific resources that she said were absolutely required reading for this body. She also said she, like the ACLU, she mourned the lack of specific data in Vermont. Well, I ask you to wrap it up because we would need to keep you on a timeline, sorry. All right, she said, she encouraged us to extrapolate that Vermont is not a different universe or a different dimension from the rest of the nation and that she encouraged us to extrapolate from national data available and not to assume that Vermont is immune from the same forces. Can I make a comment there? Great work, Wim. I think the only I'm concerned about is, I think you mentioned that one of your people you talked to said that the role of the assistant principal, principals, nurses and guidance counselors or counselors could be able to take the role over the SRO. My concern there basically is that even like 10 years ago, the role of the SRO in the schools were new, but we're asked to do more with less now. So what administrators are doing in the school, like officers in, I guess we call the resiliency teams, are a lot different now. Again, we're charged with doing a lot more in schools. And so to kind of take on the added responsibility of like SRO duties basically is, where's the time? I mean, like each day I go back to work, basically there's more things going on. Our nurse has more things going on. Social workers have things going on. So, I guess we have to be careful with saying that, hey, the assistant principal or the principal and the mental health team can kind of take that on because that's not accurate. We cannot do that. I'll be honest with you. So thank you very much. Yeah, and Pierre, like your point is sort of echoing what Beth sort of testified at the beginning is that we really can only take these as a snapshot in time from that one person's perspective. And so I think we all need to be listening to all of this with a critical eye and then knowing that future committee work can sort of delve deeper into these discussions and do more of like a back and forth point by point, what's realistic, what's not realistic type of examination. But let's just try to get through the initial, sorry. Mia? Yeah, just to piggyback just for one second off of that, I think that it's helpful to remember that what we are examining is the possibility of undoing systems that have been in place for over a decade. And that is challenging to think about. And so that's, it's really wonderful that we are muddling our way through all of this. And that's just another variation of that same theme of like these are really just, these are all different data points that will help guide us. And the, just to now to get to the responses that I received, I'd never got anything from the Guardian and Lightham where I reached out, referred me to someone who I haven't heard back from yet. So I will keep trying on that. And then I reached out to an acquaintance who is an attorney at the defender general's office. She wanted to make very clear. She's also a parent in the district. And she wanted to make very clear that these are her expressions that are based on her professional experience and not representative of the defender general's office. I just would rather than go through all of them, of course, I just wanted to highlight that she offered a really good model that we could start from as a base point of examining what it might look like that was offered by dignity in schools. So I think that's just one big highlight from those responses. And I encourage everyone to read through the notes. All right, great. So Jim is not here to present from his organizations that he reached out to. So let's move on to community members. Joan, Will and Catherine. I think we probably could just each take like a minute. I think we have five minutes total from what it looks like in the notes. I did the work of maybe others did as well. Looking back at the school board meetings, going back to July 1st and trying to summarize some of the public comment. So we just had one question to look at which was sharing experiences from community members and students. The question was framed as who have been referred to the SRO, especially in particular from people from marginalized communities. And we talked about as a committee in the last meeting about expanding that a bit, not just to people who were actually referred but who may have had any kind of interaction with the SRO. So in the portion of the work that I did which was just looking back at the school board meetings there were several, there was lots of public comment and there were four or five that especially in particular shared personal stories of experiences people had had in response to the SRO and police in general in Montpelier that were shared. And people, I think again it's worth looking back at the meetings and in general, it sort of covered the range of the SRO not being particularly helpful to all the way to really feeling and being harmed in the experience and traumatized in the experience of trying to rectify a situation with the police department. And people shared the feeling of being fearful in the presence of an armed officer on school grounds. There was a parent who commented on the SRO being on the union elementary school playground to mother of two black students in the high school who shared their fear and discomfort being around an armed officer. And then there was a very detailed experience shared of a student of color. It was the parent who shared but of experience of a student of color who was attacked at the library and the family tried to address the situation and were dismissed and definitely did not have a positive experience. And so that's what I gleaned from the public comment. And I think Will and Catherine had some more antidotes that they also collected. Catherine, you wanna go first? I'll just be very brief. I did reach out to several people that I knew had specific interactions with the SRO mainly at the high school level and got a couple of responses that you can see on the spreadsheet. And basically with those people in difficult situations that I think you can read that they were maybe scared by the situation and one in particular terrified of the idea of having to talk to the police and that the SRO being involved making it more of a positive experience because that relationship was there. And then there were just a couple of people that I reached out to that still haven't given me anything but I will continue to try to get more information. It's a little bit difficult. These are really personal sensitive situations that people may not wanna relive or tell even anonymously there may be identifiers. So I think it's just a sensitive topic to try to get personal experiences. Ditto to that. This is difficult work to do, difficult information to get, difficult to summarize without identifying information. I heard a few anecdotes. They're summarized on the forum. The most serious one, there's a general takeaway that I got from all of them taken together. The most serious one that involved in SRO directly was at the elementary school. And I find it interesting in particular because the seriousness had nothing to do with the SRO conduct and the SRO also was not involved in making any disciplinary decisions but they were used a few years ago by the former principal of the elementary school specifically to intimidate an elementary school student who there was an incident with carving a swear word into the principal's desk. And what happened then was a meeting called with the parents and the child and the students. They were very surprised to find the SRO in the room. And eventually the mother was in shock. The father said, eventually asked why are the police involved in this? At which point the SRO took them aside to comfort them and say, don't worry about it. They just asked me here to scare them a little bit. So that indicates a use by the school administration to use the SRO specifically as a tool of intimidation. And that of course would land very differently depending on who that student is. And by all accounts, the conduct of the SRO was exemplary. They did nothing, they stood there. That moment stuck out for me in the stories I heard. My one takeaway from all the other stories which I won't get into or summarize here is they taken together, they indicate significant inconsistency in terms of whether or not an SRO is involved. Sometimes they are, sometimes they're not. That seems to be arbitrary, that seems to be dependent on whoever happens to be on call at the time of the incident. And the SRO is not always involved from that moment forward even if the incident occurred on school grounds and involved current students. So this, and I think that's significant because that's part of the importance of the role that we keep hearing is that the SRO is always present and available for that kind of consistent work. That doesn't appear to be the case from the stories that I've heard. And I would also like to respond to Pierre but that would be a digression. So I will understand if Emma would rather I not. We might have time for digressions later. Let's see where we end up after everyone has presented. So I think I'm next for the Montpelier Police Department and I will, I kind of forgot to mention this at the beginning of the meeting and I apologize but Chief Pete is here to help answer any questions that arise from my presentation of his answers. And then also he has offered to potentially fill the seat of Tony who had to step down and that has yet to be determined. It's gonna be discussed at the board level about whether the seat should be filled or how. So we haven't made any formal appointment yet but Chief Pete is at least here to listen. So thank you for being here, Chief Pete. So again, so much information and such a great conversation that I had with Chief Pete over the weekend and he provided really thorough answers to all of the questions. So I would definitely recommend going back through and reading through all of them. I'll just give you sort of the quick summary. Let me just get to... There was a question about complaints. So Beth mentioned that at the start of the meeting and public comment and there has been no formal complaints. So I think it is important to stress the word formal. We're not really sure and I don't know if there's data collected about other types of complaints that were handled differently but no formal complaints on record about the SRO. And there was a question about whether the SRO could potentially be unarmed and the answer is sort of an unequivocal no that the police department would not support a model where a police officer is in the school without a weapon. There was a question about data and there's just not a lot of data collected. I'm sort of working with Chief Pete to try to figure out what we are able to look at and what makes sense for the committee to see. And I will just quickly screen share what I have and I've put it into the spreadsheet. So you are welcome to take time to look at all of that. So he was only able to give me basically the calls that were made to the three buildings in the district. So One Park Avenue, Union School, Main Street Middle School and the high school. So for the past five years from 2016 to present all of the calls that were made. And so you can sort of, I mean, it is interesting to look through, but we just started talking about like what does alarms burglary mean? Because this was one of the big categories of why people were called to the police were called to the buildings. And that could run the gamut. It's sort of like with all of these categories you wouldn't know any more information until you like delve deeper into the incident report. So there's not, I'm not sure how useful the data is. And we as a committee can maybe look through it and see if there's something we can glean from it. But so alarms burglary for example could be anything from like the alarm tripping or somebody entering the building by accident or it could be actual, somebody trying to break into the building. And we just don't know by looking at just alarms burglary. So I've sorted out on the spreadsheet by school. So you can see like Montpelier High School, MSMS, Union School, and then I have all the data together. And then what I did was I did the call type and sort of did the research of the number of calls per year and the number of calls total for based on those call types. So there was five total dog animal problem calls in the past five years. That's a total of one per year. So I created a couple of charts from the data that you can look at. And again, I'm not gonna sort of attest to the validity of any of this, but it's just sort of a good like at a glance. Alarms burglary was 28% traffic stops was 9.6%. There was an other category where if there was an incident that only happened once or twice, less than five times I just added it together in this category. And this is a chart of number of calls per year by call type. So you can kind of look through there and see what some of the major calls are. This was, I also did the same type of graph for calls per year. And then the other data, which were sort of two Pete and I are looking into, and I'm not even sure if it will be helpful, but there was some question about response and who will respond and how often does the SRO respond versus other officers. So this was the officer badge number of responses for the past five years. And this is, I think I'm gonna have to ask two Pete to get on, but I think 814 is the SRO. And I was wondering if two Pete, do you know is 808 also like the previous SRO? No, actually 807 is the SRO. 807 is the SRO. Okay, because there was SRO activity was listed under badge number 814. So that would be that there's a, what depends on the date range on there. So the context is all, this is. Yeah, I was saying in the beginning, no one's, the context is different. So it depends on the context of the question I can probably give you a more appropriate answer. Okay, yeah. So I mean, it's just, you know, you can see that the calls are pretty spread out across officers just at a glance. So we can work with Chief Pete to figure out, like if there's something that we wanna know from the data, if there's a better way to go about that. I did reach out to the community justice center, which was something that Chief Pete recommended doing. And I think they do keep some amount of data of how many cases are referred to them through, you know, the restorative justice practice, but they didn't have that available for this meeting. So the role of the SRO, that was a question that was asked in primary. The primary role is to ensure safety of student staff and visitors, to handle any law enforcement on school grounds, do school crisis planning, be a liaison for school officials, help deal with truancy issues, provide mentorship and training, and then provide that connection between the community justice center. The SRO also helps to refer, there was a question about arrests in school and they said that's one of the primary goals of the SRO position that they're trying to avoid arrests. And so they really try to, the SRO in particular tries to push cases to the community justice center. What types of crimes, vandalism, sex crimes, domestic violence, narcotics, I mean, it sounds like thefts, it sort of runs the gamut. And I think Libby's gonna present a little bit on that later too. And there was a question about training and I was, you know, Chief Pete provided a pretty in-depth explanation of the types of training that his officers are sent to. So I'm gonna give just a minute, Chief Pete, if there's anything that you would like to add to what I just said. No, I appreciate the opportunity to be here. Just, are there any questions that I can answer for the group? More than willing to do it. I think we can provide a couple of minutes if people do have questions. I also think we need to think of this as like a longer term goal too, because some of these questions, you know, I feel like we could write a master's thesis or doc-trit on the Montpelier Police Department role with the Montpelier Rocksbury School District. So it's, we're not gonna be able to cover everything, but if you have a quick question, we can make a few minutes. Thank you for being part of the conversation. It's good to be here. I would also like to echo the gratitude for having you here, Chief Pete. A question that has been coming to me over the last week or so is particularly around this avoidance of arrests of students, which I think is laudable. And I'm curious what it might look like for any police officer to have that approach and orientation toward students or youth in general, essentially saying like the process that the SRO has been following for however, X number of years, almost to me feels like a pilot program for how we can be orienting ourselves toward juvenile behavior. And would it be possible to learn things from how the SRO approached that and apply that to the force more broadly? Okay, that's a good question. But the entire department has that same focus. It's not just the SRO, it's the culture within the Montpelier Police Department as a whole. And also argues it's a culture within the judicial system within the state. And I think it's enforced by the judges themselves. So I mean, even if officers wanted to go out and this is way, not even the truth, but I'll just go way to the other perspective. If officers, if you had an officer that wanted to respond to everything by just arresting people, those things wouldn't even probably, charges probably wouldn't be approved by the state's attorney's office. So there's a ton of safeguards built in. The judicial system, the state's attorney's office, it's again, this is, I want to again, bring in a context that it's not just the Montpelier Police Department. There's a lot of things that are going on. And but to answer that question, it's the culture within our department to avoid putting people or to arresting people. I will echo a little bit of what Mia said though, because I did hear, oh, Amanda, you've raised your hand. We'll get to next. In my conversation with the Community Justice Center and it was the prior, it was someone who just recently retired. But her perspective was that there was a little bit of discrepancy between from officer to officer that it wasn't totally cohesive, like there's not a definite protocol. And some of the programs that you referenced in terms of like statewide programs to avoid courts for kids, she was talking about that as like diversion and those types of alternatives. And that her preference would be to keep kids completely out of even that level of court system and just have the default be the Community Justice Center. So there was, I think it's still an interesting point in conversation to be had. Amanda? Yeah, thanks. Hi, Chief Pete. So in some of my conversations with the school social workers and school counselors, one of the valuable parts of having the SRO is that they're so tied to our families and the community and what happens to our students, maybe that we wouldn't know about in the community and that information is really important, domestic violence or if a student ran away the night before. So if we didn't have the SRO, my question is can the police share that information with schools knowing that our students are affected? I'm just curious if that's something that you're allowed to do. Oh, you're muted. I think it depends on the context of, again, of the issue. So, and then it's also an issue of time as well. So we don't have somebody first and foremost that would be totally dedicated to, hey, we know this is going on in the schools, funnel this information to this person to compile this information to pass it along. When asked for it, depending on the context of what the issue is, then most definitely we do our best to be partners. We have a very strong partnership with the school system. So, but as far as like the intimacy, I mean, I would imagine that if you, I would compare it to whatever career field everyone here has and that the more you have a tight relationship with the, you can pick up the phone and you can dial somebody and you can get a good answer and answer right then and there when you need it. It's not that they don't want to give it to you. It's just that you have a level of access, you have a relationship and a level of trust in which that you're able to share information and to move forward. So I would liken it to that. Thanks. Will? This, oh, look, I'm muted already. Chief, this question comes from a brief conversation I had with the former Chief Fakos in our previous meeting, but it was in a breakout room. So it wasn't part of a larger thing. We briefly shared our mutual dissatisfaction with the current memorandum of understanding between the district and the city and the facilitators have charged us with finding things that we can all agree on. So I just wanted to read to you half a sentence from the purpose philosophy statement and to confirm as your predecessor did that this is not, in fact, the central purpose and philosophy of the SRO or the department. It is logical that if the outward symptoms of antisocial behavior, juvenile delinquency are discernible at the school level, it is appropriate to implement a program aimed primarily at prevention of this behavior, which is an alarming statement and one that the document you yourself provided us seems to run directly counter to in a way that I very much appreciate, that the role of the SRO is not to be surveilling the students for potential symptoms of future juvenile delinquency and to intervene in some way, which seems like a terrible recipe for profiling. So I suppose, I'm sorry, I suppose my question is, do you agree that this statement is in serious need of updating in some fashion? I'd say I don't know the context and who wrote it or the context and what it was written. I would choose my words differently than something like that. I don't think anybody knows that. Chifico said that he had never seen it in his 30 years of... But to be clear, you're quoting the current memorandum of understanding that's on file between the city or between the school district and the police department. This is the standing agreement. Yes. I think everyone can agree it's in need of updating. I don't think anyone disagrees with that premise. I've heard that from multiple people. Eliana? I was looking around and it says that the state of Vermont has wired implicit bias training for the non-public police department and I read a bit of your statement about that but I was just wondering if you could speak to what that training looks like. I'm sorry, what was the question again? I could barely understand. I could barely hear you. I'm old. If you could just speak to the implicit bias training that's required in the department. I'll help rephrase. So I don't know if you heard it, Chief Pete. Did you hear at that time? If I could speak to implicit bias training for the Montpelier Police Department? So she had researched somewhere that the Montpelier Police Department provides implicit bias training for their officers and she wanted to hear more about that. Okay, I'm not prepared to answer that question. I'm not too sure what implicit bias training look like here. I could tell you what I would do is how I look at implicit bias training is not, to me it's, I don't believe in trainings. I believe in conversations because the more that people can understand where each other's coming from, the more that I think you can get something out of it. So there may be, and again, I don't know Montpelier's, but I don't know how Vermont is doing it. I haven't researched that yet. But to me, I'd rather, it's easy to check off a box and say, hey, here's implicit bias training and this is what this respective community group is like. This is what this respective community group is like. And then to have, I guess, some of the dos and don'ts of dealing with people. And in the beginning, when police agencies were implementing things like implicit bias training, that's what it was. And it's not that the departments created that training as they went out to other places to get that training. Like for example, if you go to the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, they have certain trainings that they can do with implicit bias in certain areas in certain regions of the country. So to me, those types of conversations aren't effective. I think it's something that's more along the lines of understanding each other and having honest conversations and dialogue that we humanize each other. And that's when that training takes hold. So I apologize, I don't know how to answer that question right now. I can definitely research it and get back to you. But as far as how I look at it is basically immersion, trust, and being around each other and valuing each other. So Chief P, if you could look into the specific, the actual training or whoever you contracted with for that training in the past, and just email that to me and then I can email it to the committee. Okay. Thank you. So, Beth, I'm gonna ask you to hold your question for a little bit. And then I think I'm gonna be able to open it up to public comment a little bit later. We have a tiny bit of time here and I wanna get to the staff feedback. So, Amanda. Yeah. I didn't have a ton of time, unfortunately, but I did talk to briefly on the school counselor and social worker at both Main Street Middle School and the high school. And Susan, who's not here today, she talked to the school counselor and social worker at the elementary school and the nurse at Roxbury. I reached out to the guidance counselor at Roxbury and never heard back from her. So you guys can read my notes specifically. I'll be quick. I think at least from talking to the middle school and the high school, it was really clear that they really miss the role that, not the role, the person. And this is a really important point. They all talked about Matt Nisley, who was the former SRO and his skill set and what he brought to the teams and the schools and the students. But they also acknowledged that they were referring to the person and not the role. And I think it's important to say they wouldn't want the current SRO to be in their school and working with them. So I think that's a really interesting point to make that what Matt Nisley brought to them was his trauma training and his de-escalation skills and his resources of the community and his gentleness and how familiar he was with families and how well he worked with teams at the school. So I just thought that was a really interesting takeaway for me was that point. And they just spoke to like, we want more of those skills. And that would be really great. So what else? And I guess also like a concern about, especially at the high school, we work with bigger bodies and when students get violent, which doesn't happen often, we need somebody to intervene. And the concern is if we don't have a relationship with the police or like who is, which police officer is gonna respond? Do we trust them and that they have the skills and know our students well enough how to de-escalate the situation? Yeah, I guess so that was sort of the concern about was who the relationship, cause we are gonna call the police from time to time. Unfortunately, I think, I feel like I'm missing stuff. While you're looking through your notes, I'm just gonna quickly add on the conversation I had with the community justice center person, also committed Matt and Isley for having, he had his masters in conflict resolution and mediation. So that might be what you're referring to like a very specific skill set that he was able to bring to the table that not every officer has. Absolutely, that and he just had a really, the way he de-escalated, he had trauma training that I think went above and beyond potentially what the police have for their training is what it sounds like. I don't know for a fact, it would need to be maybe cheaply notes, but yeah, I think that like sums it up. Yeah, I'm sure I'm missing something, but go back and read my notes. Amanda, when I was reading through your notes, the common theme that kept popping up is home visits. That was one thing that I kept seeing. Yeah, so that, right. So at least for the middle school and the high school, there are home visits that are done and they're typically done, like they're like a wellness track. A lot of times it's if we haven't heard from students and not even from the parents and we're really worried, like no, like really worried. So typically the social workers will go. They don't like to go alone. So going with Matt and I has been really helpful. The middle school social worker said she would go alone if she had to. She preferred to go with somebody else, but she wouldn't want to just go with some random police officer that she didn't know because she wasn't sure how they would react, how they would act in that situation. She knew Matt really well. So she knew to trust him. So it was really like building that relationship and that trust. So she had said she'd rather just go alone. And then another point which I thought was really interesting from a social worker at the high school who said, you know, why doesn't the high school have or why doesn't the school district have a say in who's hired for this SRO position with the skills that we're looking for in the school district and it's the police department that I know that they're employed by the police department but they're also working for the high school or not sorry, I keep saying high school because I work at high school for the school district. So really saying like if we are gonna continue with an SRO, why doesn't the school have more of a say in who's hired? Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much for pointing out what I missed. I did want it, there was one thing that I sort of forgot to present about my other school feedback and it actually touches on that home visit piece because one of the guidance counselors that I spoke to, it was just a complete paradigm shift for them to consider the possibility of having a police escort to a home visit. It was just something that, it's not something that they ever consider. So they never go alone. They bring either the principal or the superintendent or another guidance counselor with them so they do go in pairs. But the big point that they talked for a while on was sort of like they were pondering and considering, I wonder what the presence of a police officer, how that might shift the dynamic because they talked about building trust with kids and families and that if they arrive with a police officer in tow, that that probably will shift that dynamic and could erode trust with the families. And then back to that point of like, well, if I really felt in danger, I'm not gonna go to a home visit. And so, and that they could still call police to go visit a home but just on their own. Is there anything else that's sort of like, if anyone wants to use the hand raised function, if there's something else that you've been sort of pondering as people are presenting and there's a few last words that we wanna say and then we'll get to Libby's presentation. If I may. I don't know how articulate this is gonna come out but I just wanna say like, after having listened to all of these things, this just, it's a lot. It's a lot. I, maybe this is piggybacking off of what was said in the public comment, but just seeing all these different pieces of information really underscores for me that it's really important that we not wait any one of the pieces of information significantly over the others, but instead that, and I think it can get very easy to get lost in data and lost in, especially as we try and problem solve. And so I just wanted to encourage all of us to stay big picture, at least at this point, we're still at a big picture phase and to be comparing the whole of what we are hearing and taking in and reading with the broader vision of like really ultimately what is best for the students and teachers and staff in our district. And I recognize that in order to answer that, we all bring our own biases and that's one of the reasons that we have this information and the information is coming from bias sources and it just, that's probably the heaviness and the weight of what I'm feeling. So one, I just wanted to say thank you to all of my fellow committee members for really wrestling with this stuff and encourage all of us to keep the big picture in mind and that will allow us I think to think what's possible because undoing what is currently in place is very difficult. And so it's hard to imagine what else could we do? How else might we do it? And I think by stepping back and keeping the big picture in mind, like what is truly in people's in our best interests for our community, our kids, our teachers, all of our staff might help us be able to imagine what we can't currently see in front of us. Thank you, Mia. Anybody else have some final thoughts? If you don't mind, I'm gonna open it up. If Beth, you wanted to make a comment but just try to keep it brief. I'm good. Okay. So I mean, we can have a little bit of time to after Libby's presentation to debrief as well. So this is not your last opportunity if you're holding onto a thought and you wanna say it later. But I'm gonna turn it over to Libby and let her do her presentation now. Emma, do you wanna screen share the screen share what I sent to you? Because I can't screen share it. Yes, give me just a second to open it up. So while Emma is pulling this up, Emma sent me questions that she wanted me to answer. She wanted me to address the committee's charge as well as answer some questions from the committee. Thank you. I'm gonna go from the beginning though. Well, I didn't look like I looked through it. So this is what Emma sent for me to answer tonight for the committee and here's the outline. So speak to the committee's charge. The charge specifically is in these categories, the district's primary safety concerns, the historic and current role of the SRO, major successes of the SRO, challenges and other concerns of the SRO and evaluation of the position. And then she asked me to answer some questions from the committee and I hope to have time to answer any free question and answers that the committee might have at the very end. So the first one, going straight down the line, safety concerns from the district. So one of the things that I really wanted to put out to everybody is this Venn diagram. Based on some of the comments that I've heard in public comment as well as some other notes and things and requests of the school board, I wanted to make sure that there was a understanding of the difference between SEBL, which is social-emotional behavior learning and safety planning. Those two things are very different, which is why they have different circles here. So in social-emotional learning, we have significant amount of staff that I think I heard Eliana refer to earlier. It's over a million dollars worth of staff professional learning dedicated to SEBL work. None of that staff would be considered the SRO. This is all school staff and school responsibility. We have significant professional learning going on right now in trauma and resiliency with Joel VanLent and Dave Melnick, both are psychologists, well-known psychologists of Vermont who work in trauma and resiliency in schools and with kids in the field. Our teachers use their contracted PD funds to often in trauma-informed mindfulness practices, all kinds of things. I signed a few just today, actually, of teachers going to classes and coursework around these areas of mental health for supports for students. We also have a partnership with Up for Learning with my friend Lindsay Helman. There's a school board presentation, which I'll make sure you get the link for the slideshow if that doesn't show it, but that's linked to a school board presentation that Lindsay did with Lisa Noss, some students. This is the other guidance counselor at the high school, as well as with Allie, the social worker at the middle school on December 18th last year, almost a full year ago. Around the beginning of the restorative practices work at Main Street Middle School and Montpelier High School and where they currently were. That work has gotten derailed a little bit because of COVID-19. However, work has gotten underway and we do have a partnership with Lindsay and Up for Learning. I think I also link their website there. And in curriculum development, we have an SEL coach, a social emotional learning coach who has truly worked with the district over the last two years in our SEL teams in building prioritized, vertically articulated standards so that we are more consistent with our behavior standards across the district. We have a district-wide SEL team and each school has a SEL group, a team inside of it. So leaders go to the district group and then come back and work with a school-based group. And we have dedicated staff meeting time to SEL issues. And then we also have outside counseling as spoke to the board last night about this. There's free space at MSMS and MHS for outside counselors to come and perform counseling services to kids if they need it during the school day. That's safe and quiet in their own space. UES has a connection to, what I mean by open slots there, is there's a connection to outside counselors that we can only refer parents to counselors who have open slots so that parents don't need to run all around the communities trying to find slots for their kids when they're in need of that. So the district has a considerable frame going for SEBL learning and there's nothing in there that works with the SRO. That's all district work. That's the work we need to do because we have kids that we care about and we take care of. And then the other side of the Venn diagram is their safety planning. It's our emergency responses. So when something is desperately wrong that we also need to handle and work through. And this is where we rely quite heavily with Montpelier Police Department and our relationship with them as well as we have since this year relied with our relationship with our SRO. And that's not glorifying that position in any way. That's just saying that's what we have. That's the system we've relied on for the last 10 years. And that really has to do with our safety planning. It's preparedness, mitigation, and response. It's the high priority hazards. So severe weather, active shooters, armed gunman on campus, which we had a couple of years ago, significant custody threats where kidnapping is a problem. The high priority pieces that we can't handle by ourselves. We need the Montpelier Police Department and other people to work with us to help our families and our kids in these situations. We have our roles and responsibilities clearly delineated in our emergency safety plan book between what the MPD's role is, what the district's role is, who we call, what do we expect? We have threat assessment guidelines that we follow. We rely heavily on our colleagues at the Montpelier Police Department to guide us through threat assessments because that's their level of expertise, not schools. We have evacuation plans and the Montpelier Police Department as well as the Montpelier Fire Department are very well versed in what our evacuation plans are because they will need to be there should we need to evacuate. We have lockdown drills as part of the safety planning and the background check process, which MPD just helps us out along with other police departments to do our background checks wherever people can go and get a slot for that. And then these circles do interact in safety threats, our mental health and our colleagues at the MPD do interact with safety threats sometimes. If there's crime, significant crimes on campus, significant substance abuse, theft, that kind of thing, that's an interaction. Sexual harassment is a big one in this day and age on social media in particular, stalking between kids, grooming behaviors, that kind of thing. We need other people to come in to help us with that. Right now, we have transparency in home visits has been spoken to before and the school district safety team, the school and district, sorry, safety teams. The SRO does play a role in that, which also plays a role in our SEBL work. So while they do interact, there are clear responsibilities for the district in SEBL and then there's clear responsibilities for safety and emergency planning. So I just wanted this type, as I was thinking about this presentation, putting a Venn diagram out there helps me kind of clarify rules or help me as I was thinking about how to clarify these two pieces of perhaps a similar pie, but very different roles and responsibilities. Emma, you can keep going. Did I lose you? I don't know, you're still here. All right, so this slide was shown last night in terms of how much we currently spend on social-emotional behavior learning financially. So it's $1.1 million. And then on the other, the flip side for safety and emergency response, we spend $92,333 currently. This is the $92,000 for fiscal year 21 is less than what we have budgeted for fiscal year 22 because we've already taken out a significant portion of the SRO from that budget. Go ahead, Emma. All right, the next part is committee charge. Some of you have heard this before and I apologize for the wordiness of these slides. I don't generally like that much wordiness. However, it's what it is. So just historically, we've had an SRO for 12 years. It started as a partnership with the DARE program in 1992 because there was a significant substance abuse problem noted at the high school. The problem didn't show any influence or the program, the DARE program didn't show the influence. So the SRO started. We've had three people hold this position in the last 12 years. Primarily the SRO has been housed at Montpelier High School but has worked in all three Montpelier schools as well as helped when we merged with Roxbury. I've been out to Roxbury more than a few times with Matt Nisley in particular. The majority of the SRO time spent at the high school with MS being second to that. And the MOU that you're referring to was written several years ago prior to anyone working for either organization. In fact, when people started coming to the school board that was the first time I had even seen that MOU and it's not signed currently by, I don't even think it's signed by any administration in the district or over at the police department or at least I haven't seen one that signed. So it's not, I can see it's not signed. So I think it was just something that somebody had on file somewhere. What has shifted? So I actually asked Matt about this so because he would have the most knowledge of what has shifted when the SRO position came in. And in 2009, there was a shared social worker between MSMS and MHS. In 2010, the district added the social worker to UES. And then in 2016, a social worker was in each Montpelier building. So there's three full-time FTEs. And for our social work, we actually have four now with our district emotional learning coach. The SRO was one before all the social work came in historically connected to families to outside resources. But now social workers do that. The SRO did not do that. That's the social workers primary responsibility. And social workers can be true counselors now. Go ahead and on. This bullet list here is currently what the SRO does. It's very small writing, I apologize. Try to get it all on one slide. However, the committee did ask me what is the exact current role of the SRO? This is the exact thing that the SRO did up until this school year. And Libby, I just want to let you know that I did put a link to the slide in the spreadsheet that was shared in the chat. It's under the Superintendent Bonesdale tab at the bottom. Okay, good. So everybody can go in and read these pieces. And putting this up there does not mean that we can't build a system without an SRO. Of course we can. That's not a question. And it's not a question that other districts do it successfully as well. Nobody is questioning that, but the committee has asked me what the current responsibilities are and there they are listed out. So go ahead, Emma. So the major successes of the SRO position, according to old youth risk youth behavior survey because we haven't gotten new ones yet, drug and alcohol use has shown a significant decline in the past 12 years. This also mirrors national trends. Over 12 years, two students have been taken out of MHS and handcuffs. Several cases have been diverted to restorative justice and kept out of the court system. In the past three years, anecdotally, numerous families have reported how the SRO helped mitigate emotionally trying situations regarding custody battles, sexual assault, predator-like behaviors, weapons, drug use, that kind of thing. And there's a strong relationship between the former SRO and school administrators, staff and students. Some evidence of this is the SRO would often be the first point of contact when significant safety threats were made. Social workers felt safe making home visits with the SRO, administration could contact the SRO via text and get an instant response if needed. Those are all anecdotal and I recognize that. It's hard to quantify successes in this case because we don't collect data in this fashion. Challenges or other concerns regarding the SRO from the district's position, from the district's knowledge base. We've never had, you've talked about formal complaints, we've never had a complaint brought to the district around the SRO. I did check in with my predecessor who was at the district for seven years and he never heard a complaint either. Now again, anecdotal, but that's what he reported to me. The board meeting in July marked the first concerns for voice to the district. The evaluation of this position is done by the chief of police, it's not in the district's hands so I can't speak to the evaluation of this position. Without the position, MRPS leadership and the NPD will figure out, and we will, we'll figure out how to build a trusting relationship with multiple officers. I think Amanda spoke to that. She spoke to that a little bit earlier. I mean, you're confusing me here, there we go. Because it's my understanding that if we have an event that we need an officer to respond to, that the person who responds will be dependent on who is on duty and who's available at that time. We will need to figure out how to communicate when major events happen within families outside of school hours, that's something Amanda spoke to as well. We're gonna have to ensure that NPD support, ensure the support is there during large events or evacuations and I'm positive it would be. However, what probably wouldn't happen that we would have to consider more as a district are the multiple planning meetings that happen before large scale protests that our students take part in or just community takes part in on our campus. Our former SRO played a significant role in the student interaction in planning those events, particularly when they were student led, much like the Black Lives Matter flag raising, the implementation of those plans. So the SRO was the point person between us and the PD and then just traffic in general during evacuations. The SRO knows our evacuation routes very well, that's part of their job to know them. And so when those evacuations need to happen, he could easily place officers in areas that we needed them. So we just have to ensure how to do that differently. We'd also, and from a district lens, we'd have to figure out how to monitor social media and other sources for threats against the district. We'd have to perform, figure out how to perform residency or well-person checks and home visits. I'm gonna say as a superintendent, this isn't gonna happen without some presence with them. So it just may not happen, which is just a choice. Access appropriate supports when a student breaks the law, potentially increasing in court appearances for students. It's a potential. We can figure out how to do truancy in family court liaison duties and continue preventative patrols around school grounds. Again, that would be very much like the first one and be the person who's on duty and if they're available. And then train MRPS for significance to emergency situations, which we're mandated to do by the Agency of Education. So those are just things that we'd figure out and we would. Certain questions from the committee that I didn't think were answered there. So how many incidents per year is the SRO involved when? There's no real way to determine this through district data sources. So I think Chief Pete gave probably the best data that you could see around how many times an SRO responds. I do wanna say about that data based on MS charts that all of the alarms that are going off are most likely alarms that our staff member has set off because they came in and didn't turn the alarm off. And so whenever that happens, the MPD responds and anybody who's on would respond to that. So my hunch is from that one chart of all the different officers and their responses may directly correlate to the number of alarms that our staff sets off. Sorry, Chief Pete happens though. How is data around the SRO collected and reported? Can we have access to it? We don't collect data on our team members. So I could no more give you data around how is data collected and reported around our social workers or our guidance counselors than I could around our SRO. They've been a member of the team. So we just don't collect data in that way. We have data on students. But we also have a very small end size in that data. And at this board level committee, we can't identify. I think I heard Will talking about earlier. It's hard to put that data out there and not be identifiable. But I did put five years of MHS suspension data in this and there's a link to that along with demographic data as well. How often is the SRO used as a resource to the school? It truly depends on the situation at hand. And slide nine is how the SRO is currently used. So you can access that slide. How many students from traditionally marginalized groups have been involved with the SRO to their detriment? I'm not sure how to answer that question because I'm not from that traditionally marginalized group and we don't have data about detrimental effects of people responding. I don't know how I would answer that question. So that was hard for me. When the SRO is utilized to interview with incidents involving student behaviors or actions, how often does it result in either restorative practices or referral to the criminal justice system? It depends on the behaviors and the actions, the behaviors and the actions against the law. We've traditionally worked with the SRO. And like I said earlier, twice in 10 years has situations gone to the court system. We are currently building our capacity with restorative practices. So again, there's not like there's a chart where it's here's the incident and check it goes to restorative practices, check it goes to restorative justice or check it goes to the court system. It's just not how we've collected data over the years. So we don't have that type of information. What are the current safety protocols? Again, it depends for an intruder or threatening violence at the school. And again, it depends on the situation. We had a threatening parent in the beginning of the year at Main Street Middle School and the principal simply said, outside of the building, you are making me feel unsafe. I'm leaving and going in the building now. And that's what happened. So that was a threatening parent to that principle. There was a lot of cursing, a lot of violent language and the principal just left the situation. There's been other times where we had an individual who was driving around our parking lot this fall and watching practices on a daily basis from their car which was just curious for our school system. So we asked the police if they could check into that a little bit because we weren't sure. So it really depends on the situation. At hand, there's not one protocol that is followed because kids are different, families are different, situations are different. Go ahead, mom. One measure of accountability are in place. Again, that's a question for Chief Pete because by law, I believe the chief could correct me on this. The chief of police is the only person who is able to evaluate other police officers. Do school personnel see the SROs living up to the job description? I don't wanna speak for my colleagues but from the one, the school personnel who I have spoken with, yes, the SRO has living up to the expectation set in our system. Could the SRO be present in schools without a firearm? Again, that's a question for Chief Pete and I think he's been pretty clear on that. Does it have to be the SRO who follows us on truancy issues? No, many schools don't use an SRO for that. We can develop a different process. How can the community support their police department's ongoing training? Say that would be a conversation that you'd wanna have with the chief and the department. What are the current rules and protocols for the SRO's presence on school grounds? Currently the board has directed me that the SRO is not on school grounds unless we ask her to be because of a significant safety need which we've had about five this year. However, all emergency personnel, police, fire, all emergency personnel have access to our buildings and can enter it whenever they need to because we need to do that for emergency situations. If the SRO is in the building about half the time, how are they developing relationships with students? I would say from my observations of the position in former years, the SRO was visible in the hallways, they were talking to kids, they were eating lunch in the cafeteria with kids, they were working with various student groups, that kind of thing. And that's how relationships were built. So I believe I got to all the committees to answer their questions, but I'm happy to take other questions from the committee. Hey, Emma. Oh, yeah. If you want to do the raise hand function, I can look at that, but we can start with Mia. Is that you, Mia? Yeah, I wasn't sure if you wanted to kick it to Edie or Eliana as the co-vice chairs, if your camera's off, but no. Hey, you're back. Hi. And I do have a question. But I also have been talking a lot. So I wouldn't, don't mind, looks like Zach has his hand raised and Joan does. So I can wait my turn. Okay, we'll go to Zach first. Hey, Zach, your microphone is pretty garbled. Zach, do you mind typing your question into the chat just because your microphone is pretty garbled? Yes. Okay, sorry. It's not ideal, but it's pretty hard to hear. Just for the sake of time, let's have Joan ask your question and then when Zach types his question in, we'll answer that one. Okay. Thanks Libby for preparing that presentation. Now I'm looking for your words to go. I'm trying to look at your back. Thanks for preparing that presentation. I want to follow up on your, in the list of tasks, it was a slide about tasks that would have to be handled differently if there was not an SRO, the one about doing home visits. It sounded like you were pretty definitive that without Montpelier Police Department of Presence or accompaniment, just home visits would not happen. I think I heard you say that. Could you just elaborate on that a bit? And I'm sort of thinking about earlier in the meeting, we had a report from other schools that don't have an SRO, how they handle home visits. So I just want to hear more of your perspective of why that would be a definite not something that just wouldn't happen without police participation. I've heard pretty clearly from my social workers and they could correct me, but I've heard pretty clearly that they don't feel safe doing it. And I'm not gonna ask one of my people who are on teacher contracts to do something that they don't feel safe doing it. They referenced the shooting of the social worker at DCF a few years ago to me. There's some legitimate reasons there that I would not force them to do that if they didn't want to. If they felt comfortable going with another colleague, then we could have some conversations about that. But I would not make them do that as part of their job if they didn't feel comfortable with it. Yeah, thanks. All right, Zach, you have not typed your question in yet. Oh, okay. So I'm gonna pass it off to Mia real quick and then maybe we can talk again. There's Zach. Mine's actually related to Joan. So if I may, and I thought I heard Amanda say earlier in the meeting that the colleagues she spoke with would do home visits, but I, so I definitely wanna get corrected because I don't wanna leave this meeting having a... I also wanna make clear that that's an operational decision. That's not a board's decision. I agree. So regardless of whether they would or they wouldn't, that's something that we would work out inside the school system. Yep, yep, and that totally makes sense. And I think the reason that I wanted to raise it here one was because I'm hearing two different things and part of what we're trying to get a whole lot of information and the clarity around the information would be very helpful and I don't wanna leave thinking two different things. So I wanted to get that clarity one and it feels like this is another example of the work that we have to do to imagine what we aren't currently in and that it's hard to imagine that and safety is absolutely imperative, yes. And I appreciate you Libby tossing out an idea that if it was two colleagues going instead of one social worker and a police officer, like that's a good example of, here, this is how we might rethink this. So anyway, my question was mostly just to get that clarity and also to use this as a, I think a really good example of how this is exactly what we're wrestling with. We are imagining a system that we haven't had in over a decade. We're imagining something different. Mia, to just clarify, there was one social worker who wasn't comfortable and one who said she would be more comfortable. So they just, their opinions. Yep, yep, absolutely. Very, very difficult situation to be in, I get it. And so thank you for that clarification, Amanda. Okay, so Libby, did you, was there more that you wanted to respond to that? I'm sorry. No, I'm just reading Zach's question. Okay, so Zach's question is, as part of the project that he's working on, I'm looking at how the police department interacts with students when a crime has been committed within the school, specifically in relationship to sexual assault. And my understanding was that it isn't always the SRO involved and is more of a police department problem. So I'm wondering if there is anything that the SRO does in conjunction with the department like DCF that would differ from the job of a normal police officer? Might be a better question for Chief Pete than for me. That's a great question. That's a great question, Zach. And what I can say is that if a sexual assault occurred and Chief, correct me if I'm wrong on this protocol from your understanding, but in the past if a sexual assault had occurred and the school was the ones who found out or the person, the kid reported it to the school, either to somebody like Amanda or Aliyah or somebody at the high school or male school, then our first call would be to the SRO in that situation if we needed police support in the situation. And if we're talking about sexual harassment or sexual assault, we most likely would need support cause that's a crime. But Chief Pete, I'm not sure if you wanna, if you wanna speak to the department's piece of that. What we would probably do so the department does have a strong partnership without external stakeholders. So in a case like this, especially if it involves youth and juvenile that the SRO might be able. So the student may have warped with the SRO, may have developed a situation in which they have trust and a strong relation with the SRO. So they may divulge this or they've gone through other channels. So if that's the case, we wanna minimize as much contact or conversation about this as possible. So if this was something that was reported to school staff, school staff could relay that to the SRO, the SRO could in turn connect with us, connect back with the detectives and the detectives would continue on that from there. So for something that serious and SRO is not, you know, they're not going to run the lead on that case. That's something that's gonna be done by the detectives because they have to formalize training and everything else and the time to conduct those, that's their realm. So it would move on to a detective, the detective would coordinate with the state's attorney's office with do child forensic interviewing, for example, and then work the case to that effect. So I would say that the SRO at that particular point in time, there may be information that the detectives cannot share with members of the school staff that they can possibly let the SRO know. And the SRO can forward that information in a delicate manner, not the specific information, but kind of give some advice or some guidance as to what that family or that child is dealing with to help foster, you know, to help rally around for a more holistic approach for what's best for that student. Thank you. Jay, you have a question? I do. I'm curious, Libby and Brian, your thoughts on, can the SRO position function significantly if it's not full-time? Could it be a halftime or could it be structured differently and still be successful? I know so much of the success is based around relationships, but I'm just curious on your thoughts around that. Should I give it a go? Yeah. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yes, sir, I can take a stab at that one first. So basically, the short answer to that one probably gonna be no. We would not be able to, you know, if we have one person specifically designated to the school system, it's, you know, because of the ebb and flow of our personnel, our work hours, the shifts and everything else to that effect, it would just probably be impossible to have one person who would do like a part-time for that position. That's gonna be something extremely difficult to do. And then the other part of it is that, you know, the SRO is not a counselor. The SRO is trained in those types of things to do warm hand-offs or to make sure that we don't escalate any situations. No one's, you know, I would never advocate that the SRO was to replace a counselor, but I think that the more understanding and training that they have, the easier it is to humanize and to come into very delicate situations with the very restorative justice and soft hand to go to it. But with, again, and if a SRO was like a part-time, I would not see the amount of time they would have to be there at the school to develop those relationships. There are some kids that may have an affinity away from police officers, understood, but there are some that may gravitate to them as well. And to me, it's one of those things that the majority of layers that you have in there to help somebody to identify a potential problem is better off for the students. Thank you. I have a question around, so the two schools that I spoke to, they talked about a lot of frustration around truancy and how it really doesn't go anywhere and that the state doesn't prosecute and that they can't remember a case that ever went to the courts. So there's been some talk about the SRO role being sort of an advocate through the process of truancy court and stuff like that. And I was just wondering, Libby, what has your experience been with like actually having to rely on that process? Has the state's attorney prosecuted truancy cases in Montpelier? No, they don't do anything with truancy. Doesn't matter if we have an SRO or not. It's letters and then we do a CSP, which is a crisis support plan, which generally the SRO has been a part of because it's lots of community members coming to be a part of that if we need to. And there is no consequence for truancy. As a principal, when I was principal in Essex, I spent one day every month pregnant sitting on long wooden pews in Burlington court system with one case of a kid whose mom refused to send him to school. He had missed like 65 days of school as a second grader and nothing was done. The judge told her to turn an alarm on to get him to school. There isn't anything that happens with truancy and it's not the NPD and it's not police department's faults and it's not the school district's faults. There's no follow through and I don't believe they have the personnel to follow through or a true understanding of what they should do for consequence for parents and guardians. That was the same sentiment of the schools that I spoke to. It's a really frustrating piece. It doesn't have teeth. So the other question I had was around in-house restorative justice practices and I know you talked a little bit about it in your presentation, but one of the examples that Will wrote into the spreadsheet around people's anecdotal experiences with the SRO surrounded a senior prank that happened over the summertime or at the end of last school year. Last year? Yeah, this past school year there was some kids that broke into the school and the alarm was set and the police ended up taking those kids and we're going through the community justice center. That was five years ago. No, no, it was this year. I can talk to you privately about it, but it was at the Montpelier High School and it was like five or six kids this year. So in June of 2020. And the question was from the parent who shared the story, it was about confusion around like when does the threshold, when is the threshold met? And they were thinking like the threshold was met because the alarm was tripped and so the police officer was the first respondent to the scene, but I'm just wondering like in-house does the principal have sort of authority to decide when they institute in-house restorative justice practices versus going through the police and the community justice center? Yeah, yeah, that'd be an administrative call. All right, any other questions? So there's been a lot of information processed at this meeting and I appreciate everybody's attention, span and everybody's input and all the work that went into gathering all that information. I do think we're probably gonna wanna do a little bit of homework between now and the next meeting which I think we scheduled. Let me just look at my calendar for, it looks like we're gonna do every other Tuesday starting with Tuesday, January 12th. So you can sort of pencil that into your calendars and then I'll get back to you with an agenda for the 12th. But between now and the 12th, I know that there's a few articles that were given to us. I'm not sure if Sue and Keisha, I think Sue is still on the call, but I'm not sure if Sue and Keisha are facilitators have, there she is, have put together a comprehensive sort of list of the articles that they want us to read between now and the next meeting. But there's some articles, there's also the feedback, it would be nice if you read all of the feedback that was provided in that spreadsheet. Mia, you had mentioned a couple of other things that we might wanna do between now and the 12th and I can put this together in a comprehensive email and send it to you as I usually do sort of the homework. Much appreciated for the email in advance. Appreciations in advance, I'm up for that email. I also wanted to note that Julia Sheffitz noted in the chat that she'd like to make a public comment. Just wanted to make sure you didn't miss that, Emma. Okay, yeah, I'm looking at the chat right now. So also Libby's slides, the permission sharing needs to be changed to view if that is possible for people with the link to be able to view and I'll hold public comment to the end. I did wanna do just a quick, I know I'm sorry that I'm trying to like stick to the agenda and get us to end on time because like so much of this conversation I think requires a lot of depth and I wish that we had more time to sort of sit with everybody's conversations that they had within the past week and a half and I would love to have, often when I call people, individuals on this committee, I end up talking to them for like 45 minutes to an hour and a half. And I know that happened with Chief Pete on a Saturday morning, I was looked at the clock and then it was like, oh my gosh, we've been talking for an hour and a half. So we can go really deep on this stuff and I wish that we had more time but I do wanna honor your time commitment and that everybody has personal lives outside of this committee and Joan even attended on her birthday last time. So what I'd like to do is just go through the committee members really quick and just sort of closing thoughts, take aways, just a quick one or two sentences. So I'll just go in the order that I see you visibly on the screen. So for those of you who have shut off your screens I'll try to get to you at the end or if you wanna turn on your screen for this part, that would be great. So Amanda. Yeah, I'm just sitting with re-envisioning like what this could look like. I don't have anything specific, just like, yeah, sorry. I'm pretty fried, but that's kind of what I'm sitting with. All right, Catherine. I can care with the fried position in my brain right now but I think that with all of this, centrally we wanna do what's best for the kids and it's definitely looking like some things need to be adjusted, consistency needs to be in accountability, need to be forefront. And I just have great concern for kids who will slip through the cracks and if we don't have a good plan going forward. So that's all I have to say. Thank you. Will? Mostly thanks for everybody. I mean, this is hard, but it does some sort of update and some renewal of shared understanding certainly seems to be necessary. And I mean, mostly what I've said already is that that memo really is terrible. The one that isn't unsigned and nobody knows where it came from, it's terrible. But it's the standing agreement. And it's in my head, it is looming as just the perfect metaphor for why this work is necessary and why we have to renew that understanding in a way that is actually shared and signed and clear and to the benefit of all parties. Thank you. Mia? I mostly want to say, again, thank you very much to my fellow committee members. Say thank you to Chief Pete and to Superintendent Bonesteel for engaging in the conversation. And it's not like we have a whole lot of free time on our hands, but I did wanna just offer the invitation to have more conversation on this topic. And as we wrestle with these, as you all are going through the information and thinking what is possible, what isn't possible, just reach out, shoot me an email. I'd be happy to grab a cup of tea virtually with you and talk this through as we continue to wrestle with it. So I wanted to extend that invitation to anybody on the committee and anybody listening. Joan? Yeah, I thought it was great to just have, even though it was a cursory overview of all of the different information and perspectives that were shared from various stakeholders, including from, I found it really useful to have some of the information about, from experts and other schools to have alongside like what folks in our own community from students to parents to staff have experienced. And there's a lot to digest between now and January 12th. So, and I think I'm gonna really be sitting with how to really weigh the experiences, especially of students, families, parents, caregivers, of folks who have traditionally been at the margins and edges of our community and how that fits in with this big picture. Thank you. Pierre? I also want to echo what everyone else is saying. I think there's been a lot of hurt in this community, just like nationally, but always go back to like number one, we're doing this for the kids. So I always say it's not about you, it's not about me, it's about we, like what are we doing for this community? So I think that this is the start of that. I think that we have to make sure we have conversations that are focused on making good changes for the kids and the students of our community, but we have to have conversations in a way that's productive. So thank you very much for the work. Thanks. Eliana? I thought this meeting was really valuable because we could see like the clear responsibilities of the SRO and like how we can go about like fulfilling them, not necessarily with the SRO. I feel like our past meetings have been good, but it was, we really needed to get to this point of seeing like the specifics of the position. Thank you. Jane? Yeah, I'll just, you know, I'm thankful for everybody's time and all these thoughts, I'll just emphasize what Eliana just said, which I really appreciate that. I think tonight's conversation is really valuable hearing from Superintendent Bonesiel and Chief Pete around real practical applications of the SRO and I look forward to how those conversations continue and how we balance between how the district can manage that position and also how we're looking also at a broader picture at the same time. So thanks. Thank you. So I'm gonna call on some people who have their video off, but you know, if you're in a space where you're not comfortable talking, that's okay. Edie, you're muted. Okay, sorry. I, a lot of what I'm feeling has been said by people. So I just wanna echo a lot of that. I think Eliana was right about this meeting being really valuable. I learned and it was learning that I had to do in order to feel more comfortable in the position of committee member as someone responsible for taking part in making a recommendation about what to do. And also my brain is very fried. So that's, and thank you to everyone here. Zach, Zach made a public or a chat. Sorry about your mic. I don't know. Maybe we can get you an external mic just because my mic is being glitchy. I think it was very useful to hear and see the statistics as well as hear professional anecdotes or personal anecdotes on experiences individuals had. Re-envisioning or re-imagining how policing looks within our community is a difficult subject but extremely important to talk about and huge thanks to everyone here. Thank you, Zach. I'm looking through to see if any other committee members have their cameras off and it doesn't look like you do. So yeah, same with EDI just sort of echo everything that everybody said and I keep coming back to gratitude for this is an emotional and potentially political conversation. It's intense, it can be intense but it feels really, really important. And what I've seen from everyone here is just like such a dedication and commitment to this community and the students in the community and kind of rolling up your shirt sleeves and digging into this work and at a time when winter is upon us and holidays season is upon us and COVID is upon us and there's so many other stressors out there for everybody to be taking the time out of your lives like this and I think it just says a lot about our community. So a wealth of appreciation. I do wanna quickly open it up for public comment again and just try to keep public comment brief. I think it was Julia who had your hand raised and I don't know if there's anybody else that's wanting to speak. Thanks for the opportunity, appreciate it. And I just wanted to underscore what Eliana said and then a bunch of people echoed. It was really helpful to see laid out from Libby the roles of the SRO and what would need to happen in order for a placement to happen. And I just really wanna encourage you all, first of all, to keep students in the center. I absolutely think staff safety is paramount and important but the initial decisions need to be from student-centered places and then we figure out how to keep the staff safe. And I say this as a social worker as somebody who does go into homes has gone into homes of clients. And I think that's just really important to kind of center the needs of the students first. I also think there's a lot of nuance in terms of home visits and in terms of understanding where a family's at where a student is at that maybe there is not a blanket statement in terms of how a district handles something. And I would really encourage the district and the committee to continue to be really creative with solutions to this as if and when replacement is looked at or even updating the systems. And one thing I just really wanted to point out is that on the bottom of the Venn Diagram is sort of to highlight the creativity that can happen. The Venn Diagram that Libby shared, one of the items was that the UES is having a connection with outside therapists. That's actually a project of the UES Caregivers Alliance that's now been expanded to all of the schools in MRPS. And it's cost nothing. It's been an initiative that's totally been run by parents who are also therapists and connection with the social workers at UES and then now spread to the other ones. And it's a great example of how we can really creatively use our resources in this community to meet some needs and to really think outside the box of what's already happening. It's something that we've been told couldn't happen and wasn't doable. And then we figured out how to do it. So I just really wanna make sure that you all are sort of keeping in mind the ways to think outside the box. Thank you. Thank you, Julia. Do any of the other members of the public wanna speak briefly before we adjourn? Okay, do I have... So I'll be sending out an email with the homework before and then just highlight on your calendar, pencil in the 12th and the 26th of January and hopefully every other Tuesday we can sort of plan on that. Do I have a motion to adjourn? So moved. Do I have a second? I'll second it. Okay, Amanda. You were muted, Amanda, but we'll move on to Catherine. Hi, sorry. Hi. Will? Hi. Mia? Hi. Joan? Hi. Jay? Pierre? Hi. Edie? Hi. Zach? Hi. All right, thank you so much. Happy holidays, everyone. Take good care. Happy new year. Hi. Okay, everyone, nice to see you. Hi. Hey, Emma. Nice job. Thank you. I'm gonna...