 All right, starting the meeting of the Montoya-Rochbury School Board of Directors at 6.31 p.m. Just have a couple of quick agenda adjustments. We are moving the net zero discussion to the next meeting just to give the facilities committee a little more time to noodle on language. And also just adding an action item to the student representative's piece under board business. We do intend to select two students. And again, thank you to everyone who stepped forward. It was really great to see the interest, which will meet a quick executive session to discuss that. Emma? Can we also bump the student rep section of the agenda to the top so that the students can then leave and don't have to wait for both? Whole meeting? Yeah, definitely. We can totally do that. Thank you. So we'll move that to just right after the learning focus if you don't mind. Waiting just a little bit, Jim. I don't think it'll take very long. So first order of business, public comment. And again, just to reiterate, you know, the purpose of public comment is for the board to listen to input from the public. We are in a listen only mode that doesn't mean that we're not hearing you. It doesn't mean that we don't have reactions or follow up, but we just don't react in real time. And again, the input that the public gives the board is extremely important in letting us know the concerns of the community, getting feedback on things that are working, concerns that they have, et cetera. And also, we just really appreciate the feedback because we know it can be both a time commitment and also just sometimes hard to come up and tell stories that might be sensitive or personal, which oftentimes happens. So with that, I've not seen anyone in the room. I think we have Miriam who's a student. Anyone on Zoom who's interested in public comment? I don't. Okay. Thank you. Moving on to Consent Agenda. And then we'll hear from the students. The Consent Agenda does not take very long. So do I have a motion to approve the Consent Agenda? I move to approve the Consent Agenda. Do I have a second? Second. Any discussion or questions? All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Thumbs up. Nice. Okay, great. So as per our agenda amendment, student representatives, and I believe we have three applicants. Emma, do you want to give a quick summary? It looks like we have at least one of them here. Yeah. Yes, we had three really awesome applicants and I'm super excited to hear from them and they each submitted a letter of interest. Zach and Merrick have been amazing student reps this year and are graduating and moving on. And so there's some big shoes to fill, but it's been really great to have student reps back in the fold. It was a practice that we had done years ago, but then it had sort of... It just died for about two years during COVID. Yeah. So since the pandemic, we got it going again with Merrick and Zach and it's been really awesome having you. But since they're leaving, it's time to appoint a couple of more student reps and the intent would be that their term would be for one school year. And so we can talk about sort of onboarding in that process with those two students when they're appointed. So I thought we could give time. It looks like Miriam's the only one that was able to show up today. I know that I did hear from Anna that she was not able to come, but maybe give Miriam some time to address us. Yeah, no, absolutely. I'm going to come up and just please introduce yourself. And happy to...we read your letter, which is fantastic, but happy to be here and able to see you. Thanks. It's good to be here. My name is Miriam. I'm a freshman and my pronouns are she, her. Here at the high school, I do three sports. I do cross country and Nordic skiing and track as well as being involved with the earth group and a couple other activities. I'm really interested in this position because I have had a passion for the past couple of years for uplifting students' voices, particularly on the issue of climate change with the Vermont Youth Lobby. We organize the rally for the planet every year. You've probably heard about it. I think I'm sure you understand because you're presenting this position, which is awesome and I appreciate the opportunity so much. But I think students' voices are incredibly important because we're tomorrow's leaders and also today's leaders. We've been standing up for a lot of things that we care about, particularly here. I really appreciate seeing the board which impacts our lives and our time at school and what we do here at school so much. I appreciate seeing you guys care about what we have to say. It's great. I also wanted to say, I didn't mention this in my letter very much, but one of the things that interests me the most about this position is the opportunity both to represent students and our perspectives and our needs and ideas, but also to raise awareness and share information about the school board to help students get involved and make it more accessible. I've only been here for a little less than a year, but other than the track project, which I got involved with because of sports, let's say the school board doesn't come up in everyday conversation. I don't know why. I have no idea why. It makes sense because your procedures are maybe not super accessible to students, but I think it would be great to see more students get involved here. It was great to see, I probably wouldn't be here or wouldn't be getting involved if it weren't for this position. I hope that in this position I could help more students get involved. Thanks. That's awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Any questions for Miriam? Great. No, thank you so much. Thank you, Emma, for all that you have done to continue to facilitate this and American Zach as well. I didn't know if you had any questions about the time commitment, because I know that you are very involved in all of these really important things that take your time. I just want to make sure that you're comfortable with the commitment of a couple meetings a month in the evenings. If you had any other questions about being on the board? No, I'm definitely comfortable with the time commitment. I got some information about that shared in the email. I see this position is really important and I would be happy to focus on this. Thanks so much, Miriam. I'm excited to hear about your work in the Vermont Youth Lobby. I've been following that initiative over the last couple of years. My question for you is it sounds like you are really dedicated to student voice and clearly see the value in that. I'm curious what you might do if you were to be in this position, how you would ensure that you'd be casting kind of a broad and wide net to make sure that you could bring as much student perspective to us as possible. You know, students from different backgrounds and interests and demographics and just how you would really kind of tap into the student body to get a broad perspective. Yeah. I would hope in this position to get more involved in all sorts of things across the school community, going to different clubs and sports teams just as a starting point. I also know that the idea of listening sessions, which I know has already happened this year and maybe that could be expanded to hear from students. Yeah, I don't think, I mean, I certainly don't know everyone in this school. It's a small school, but I don't think I know everyone yet. But yeah, I'd be interested to hear American Zach's ideas because I don't know a ton about the school board process that I would learn. But yeah, I think getting involved across the school community, hearing different groups' ideas and also just trying to cast as wide a net as possible to hear students from different backgrounds. Okay, thank you. Another question? Great, thanks again. Again, really appreciate the interest in terms of kind of our process for choosing. We do an executive session, which basically means we make a motion, we meet privately so that way we can discuss applicants and it's not the public. And then we'll make a decision and we'll get back to everyone who applied. I'm planning to send an email out tonight, so I'll let you know tonight right after the meeting. Thank you. Awesome, and you're welcome to stick around for the meeting or go home or whatever. Will it be announced after the executive session? Who's been selected? Yes, it's just not sure if Orca will still be here for that. Oh, so we're not doing the executive session, right? Right now. We'll do the executive session later. And we actually have to make the appointment in open session but we have the discussion in the executive session. So yeah, I'll be in touch. Thank you so much. Thank you. Great, thanks Maria. Excellent, and again thanks to everyone who applied. Jim, food operations, yeah, floor is yours. Great. Well, thanks for having me. It's been feels like a long time since I've been to the school board since the early days of the pandemic that I can remember. So I appreciate the opportunity to come back and tell everybody just, you know, what we're doing. I try to sort of paint a picture of what what food service in our department looks like. So I've got a presentation that is really just sort of a framework. It doesn't contain all the information, but it's there just sort of to keep me keep me on track here. So we'll start with that. So the first page here, my name is Jim Birmingham on the food service director. I am also an American Culinary Federation certified executive chef is what the CEC means there. I have been the food service director for the district since the 1819 school year. Yeah, we came together. Right. So this is my fifth year here. I did one year. I worked in the food service director in the Northfield district the last year that Roxbury was a part of that district. And so I came came along with it. And so, yeah, I really, I appreciate the opportunity. We could hit the next. Libby's hitting the slides for me. We'll just spend one minute on this because I wanted to share this because this is sort of where my philosophy on. Management leadership comes from. I very often come back to this list just to get for prioritization, just to sort of keep me on track when I have questions. You know, how do we proceed coming coming back to this idea? I find helpful. So this is a book. It's maybe a little dated now 2006 book. Danny Myers really famous New York City restaurant tour. He has this concept of enlightened hospitality, which I've embraced that I really have found has worked for me. The tenants of it. We'll just talk about it really quickly. But the number one thing of enlightened hospitality from my perspective as the district director as a leader is to put the staff first that the employees that I have working for me, the staff that we have in our kitchens to me are the most important people in our in our kitchens and and without them feeling good about what they're doing. Sort of believing in what they're doing. They can't really effectively serve the second priorities here right are on our list as customers or guests but in our world as students right. And so in order for the staff to serve the students, they've got to believe in what they're doing. And then I feel like the rest of these things fall into place. The community aspect of hospitality, you know, working with our suppliers and ultimately, you know, in a business setting, we would talk about investors in our setting. We talked about the budget and trying to, you know, live with work within our budget and not exceed what we've been allocated. So I share this just to sort of give a little bit of an idea into little insight into how I approach leadership. And also I'm going to use this as a framework for the rest of my presentation will sort of go through each one of these as a point. So we can hit the next button here if you would I alluded to this already. We've all had an experience in service industry with with somebody who didn't believe in what they're doing a disgruntled flight attendant or a waiter or a server who didn't believe in what they're doing. And that it's obvious right really impacts your experience you can really you can see it. And so imagine how that translates into the lunchroom, you know, if our if our staff or serving our students don't believe in what they're doing don't believe in what they're serving. It's going to be it's going to show on their face the kids are going to pick up on that and it's going to be it's going to have a real negative impact. So for me putting the staff first recognizing that there are our greatest our greatest resource you know it comes from ideas solutions. The staff is really the number one thing for me and it's where I put my priorities first whenever a question comes up. Can we do this can we do that the first filter that I use is how does that go into affect the staff. They're the most important people and I really feel obligated to be sort of watching out for them and keeping them first and foremost in my mind. So again, sort of backstory sort of philosophy on things we'll get into some real numbers I think and real world about it now so we hit the next button. So the next few slides just talk briefly about the different positions that we have within the food service department at MRPS. So the first one here is our food service managers we've got a food service manager one each at the high school Union Elementary School and Main Street Middle School. You see on the slide that that's new from the 1920 school year so that historically all of the food service production and historically means before the 1718 school year was when that changed. It was the director who's here for one year who started this change from historically every single bit of food that was served in a school started its morning at Montpuller High School. Every carton of milk every can of fruit started at Montpuller High School got put in a van and then shipped to each school every day and every night there was an order. What do we need to move the next day incredibly inefficient way to do it. And when we were doing all the production at the high school putting things in a van and moving them around town we're not making friends with anybody in terms of quality. We've got to put quality first and so bless her heart Heather did a really good job that one year that she was there with this element of it is that she broke away from that and managed to start having the production happening inside each one of those schools. We now we have deliveries that go to each school each day not each day but you know on our on our delivery schedule for our ordinary purveyor we move some things from the high school. But really just to try to get some efficiencies that we can buy one big case of celery and split it up you know so we do that when it works for us. But when we can buy our three cases that go directly to a school that is a lot more efficient for us and so that started in 1718 I came on in 1819 and we had a manager at the high school. And then we had a manager air quotes manager at the main at the middle school and the elementary school who were only you know budgeted at less than six hours per day. You know they were managers and title only you're not really empowered at all to make decisions not empowered to do their ordering and sort of own their domain own their kitchen. And so one of the first things I recognized was that in order to continue on this path of getting away from sort of centralized commissary kitchen and into scratch cooking on site. One of the things we really were going to need was sort of skill people who believed in what they're doing we needed like a manager in those schools and so we expanded those positions added to the food service budget. The two positions full time positions with benefits at Main Street and at Union Elementary School so that persists to this day. And so those are our three full time school year long positions that come with benefits. The job duties for the managers I'm going to sell it short by trying to talk about it really quickly. You know but I you know they lead the production they're in charge of production for breakfast and lunch the production the service the cleanup. They sort of provide the the what's the word they're in charge. Right. They're they're out to make sure that those things happen. They're coordinating production service and cleanup. There's this culture of food safety and sanitation that they're responsible for in each one of the kitchens. Critically they're responsible for ordering food and supplies whether that's again you know send me a bunch of celery from the high school or send me three cases of cheese hamburgers from our ordinary purveyor. They're doing that ordering each day. They are also responsible for cash the cash register and deposits that come through their cash register so they're handling money in the kitchens each day. And then a real critical thing that our managers do is they coordinate with other departments. I think the most critical thing that they're doing is coordinating with the nurses office. You know that we have students with dietary restrictions and you know deadly serious allergies in all of our schools. And so I think a real important piece of their job is communicating with that part of the that part of the school to make sure we're providing you know what we need to for all of those kids. And then there's other elements to things you know arranging catering events through the front office and things like that. So our food service managers are full time schoolier positions right so we can switch to the next slide now. At the Roxbury Village School the food service coordinator is different there so we did that. Titled that position a little bit differently at Roxbury because they're the critical element of the cash register and the deposits is not part of that position. Tina does that for us you know handles that element for us at the school and so that's one piece that's not hint not part of that position. And it's also a 5.75 hour a day position so we're going to find as we get to the next slide to that most all of our positions in food service are 5.75 hour day positions and that's strictly. So that our positions come in at less than six hours so that there are less than 30 hours per week so that we don't have to offer them health care benefits is really what that comes down to. Through the Affordable Care Act it says that you know employees who work more than 30 hours a week are entitled to that entitled to health benefits. And so I don't know if that's when it started but this is one of the elements that we where we see that in our in our budget is that our coordinator and all the food service assistants are budgeted at 5.75 hours per day. The Roxbury Village School coordinator does a fantastic job. There was really a lot of turnover over the first four years that we were operating there and she's really brought a lot of stability to it and really been a godsend. The thing that we should recognize about the food service coordinator at Roxbury is that it's solo production this you know this this employee works by themselves. She puts out breakfast puts out lunch. We'll talk a little bit in a minute about the other two programs that happen there the fresh food and vegetable program and after school snack. So the food service coordinator is very much like a food service manager except that they're working solo so they don't have a team to manage and they're not being tasked with handling cash and doing deposits and that sort of stuff. The ordering for Roxbury all of that comes through the high school. We don't ever generate enough a large enough food order at Roxbury to warrant the purveyor bringing the truck out there. So all of those supplies are delivered here and then we repackage them and ship them out there on our own. So the Roxbury School of School is the one food service coordinator that we have the next slides of our food service assistance. This is one that I definitely sell short by trying to list there what they do in just a few lines on a PowerPoint slide you know preparation production preparation service and cleanup of breakfast and lunch sort of wraps it up. But definitely there's a lot more that goes into it in terms of knowing those students recognizes those students interacting with them you know day by day. And I think that that's the that's like that personal element that they love you know the food service assistance I think that the staff at that level they really like that element getting to know those kids seeing them day by day. You know come back to the idea of those kids who have special diets special requirements to get to know them recognize them being able to take care of them quietly and seamlessly you know really comes down to the caring and sort of the way that these the staff feels about our students and it's really obvious in the way that they talk about them and the way that they treat them in the lunch line what you know high regard they have for our students. Preparation service and cleanup in the schools here in town we're using a point of sale system where kids are entering a pin number into it until we have you know cashier duties is part of what the food service assistance do here in town. And then again food safety and sanitation would come back to that every time I can. It's the most important thing we do keeping food safe. I actually just had a job interview with somebody the other day and it's a question I ask of every single out. What's the most important thing we do to keep food safe and at hand washing not put anybody on the spot hand washing is the most important thing that we do. So food service assistance we have 10 positions budgeted at 5.75 hours per day three of those positions are currently vacant tough time year for us to be looking for help. We've had a few people leave as we've gotten towards the end of the year. All of them we at the beginning of 2023 all of our positions were filled. Here we are a few months later we've got three positions open all of them were people who have left citing the moving out looking for places that they could make more money and get work more hours. So we've got 10 5.75 hour per day positions in the budget. We have two four hour per day food service assistant positions they come in 10 to two and help with service. We have one of those that is in the budgeted for Main Street School and another at Union Elementary School. So those are they're good positions I like always feels good to know we've got that person coming in no matter how crazy our morning is felt feels good knowing that we've got the cavalry coming in at 10 o'clock. We have a handful that's too many if we have a few food service substitutes who we apply who we employ sporadically. You know some of them we you know come in once every couple of months and then others we use you know three or four days a week when we're trying to fill in you know position that's vacant like we are now. So we do have a few food service assistant substitutes that we also employ. So. So. Briefly I want to talk about this formula that we use meals per labor hour. This is a measure that I use to look at how much production we're expecting to come out of the kitchen. You know how much work or is a way to sort of put a number on how much work are we asking somebody to do. So meals per labor hour the meals are meal equivalents a lunch counts as one meal three breakfasts count as two meals and three snacks count as one. Don't worry about that just understand that it's a complicated spreadsheet meal equivalents. So labor meal equivalents divided by labor hours gives us our meals per labor hour is a way that we can measure how much production has happened in a kitchen. The bottom of my slide there shows some different thresholds that sort of it's a national standard that I'm looking at here. There's this with conventional service and that's not using all convenience products not using disposable service where things like that. Which is what we're doing conventional production for a kitchen that's serving up to a hundred meals today per day. Your meals per labor hour should be someplace between eight and ten two hundred and one to two fifty twelve to fourteen so on and so forth. So when we get to the next slide I think this will make a little bit more sense. So meals per labor hour. I'm going to go over and point at this for a minute. Is that okay. Yeah. So meals per labor hour. So I figured this went fully staffed. So this is what we have budgeted for our schools. Right. And so I switched units on you from that slide to this one. We talked earlier it was meals per day and I did my average my spreadsheet on meals per month. I like the big numbers five thousand meal equivalents per month at Montpelier High School. Which means that they're doing two hundred and two hundred and one to two hundred fifty to three hundred meals per day. Which means they should be in the three to fifteen meals per labor hour range. The reality of our budget puts it at nine main street middle school. We're serving about thirty seven hundred meals per month. It's interesting to see the differences. You know what the big difference at the high school is that students get a second chance at breakfast. We saw a lot more breakfasts here because of the schedule. And there's a lot of kids and there's a lot of students in the school this year. At Main Street breakfast is doesn't have that second chance. We don't do quite as many but we're serving thirty seven hundred meals per month. This is an average over the course of the middle of the year. Which puts them in that range should be twelve to fourteen. They're doing eleven and a half. Roxbury we're serving about nine hundred meals per month. Which puts the range at eight to ten. And at Roxbury our meals per labor hour is eight and a half. So that's right in that range but on the low end of that range. And then at UES we serve forty three hundred meals per month. And our meals per labor hour while the range sort of the national standard guideline twelve to fourteen. Our range is at nine point five. So can I ask a clarifying question? Yes. At UES and MHS are we under budget? Well actually MSMS too. Are we under budget or over budgeted? What does that mean to say that we're not over budgeted? This means that we are over budgeted on staff. Okay. That we our staff is only doing nine meals per labor hour. When to meet the guideline standard we really should. We really could probably eliminate a staff member and have thirteen to fifteen. Okay. So what this is what this I use to show with this with this slide is that we've we've built the resiliency that we need sort of into our program into our kitchens. We have a handful of substitutes. It's difficult to get them on the short on short notice. It's it's what's the word? It's it's like it's a lot. It's it's the staffing looks like it's more than it really should be. But then when you think about a kitchen that has five people in it and each one of them has their six holidays and their two floating holidays that work. There there goes five weeks of time right there. And that's before we get into sick days or our two weeks worth of personal days in that you know per two per person. So I use this to demonstrate that I'm not overworking anybody. I don't pull this out and use this with the staff. I don't want to have to say senior not working hard. I can show you with math because there's a whole lot more that goes into it than just this. This is an oversimplification of it. And you also have to recognize is that you know our numbers might when everybody's at the high school we're only going to be at nine meals per labor hour. But if somebody's out at the middle at the elementary school we move somebody over and we do a lot of that shuffling. Around there's it's rare that we go an entire week without somebody missing work one way or another. And so this is the sort of the math that I use to justify the staffing level that we have in each one of our kitchens. There there's unique elements of each one of them as well at the high school. We have our sandwich deli bars. We've got a staff member who makes sandwiches to order during lunch service. And so that's that's one of the things that you know skews our numbers some you know at the middle school. It's a nice tight little kitchen. It's a nice compact little space and it cleans up pretty quickly at the end of the day at the elementary school. There's a lot more space and it doesn't clean up quite quickly. I think one thing to recognize the dish machine at Main Street Middle School which is a lemon. Don't get me wrong but it cycles in about 90 seconds whereas the one at the elementary school takes two minutes and 15 seconds which is an eternity when you've got a stack of dishes. So the numbers are what they are. I think that it's how I justify the budget that we use for staffing. And I think that it demonstrates that we're not asking anybody to do anything that's unreasonable. And I think that we can see how we've built the resiliency that we need sort of daily in order to absorb those student sort of staff absences and such right into the right into our budget right into our program. So I thought that this is an important thing to share because it sort of gets into the sort of the nitty-gritty of how do we how do I really justify what it is that we're doing in the budget. Questions about meals per labor hour. Does the math that you have up there does that include the three vacancies that you listed. No that is when we're fully staffed. So this is based on full staff. This is based on full staff. One thing that I have I can demonstrate with my spreadsheet but it would be too much here is that with one person missing. We still don't exceed that range in any one of our schools. So we've got one person out at the high school. We're still within that 13 to 15. So even when we're down one person that gets us into that comfortable sort of guideline range. And are the vacancies spread out among the schools or are they at one school. They are spread with you in a couple schools. I got one vacancy at Main Street Middle School and there's two vacancies now at at the elementary school. One of those vacancies I have a substitute filling for the most part you know four or five days out of the week or so. And then we are also actually the third person's last day was yesterday. And so we actually just worked it out today how we're going to be able to do a little bit of shuffling from the high school and take advantage of the staff that's still there to fill in and support the support production where we need to. Again the staff is the most important thing to me and I think that it's important that we're trying to transparent about supporting them and that they know that when they come up short if we're going to find somebody or I'm going to be there. Maybe I've sold that short I spent a lot of time in our kitchens covering for production. So we talked about the staff. So now the next thing on my list is the students. The next group that will provide hospitality to right is the students. I really like to say that the cafeteria is the largest classroom in all of our schools. It's one room that everybody visits every day. And I think that that's an important thing to recognize about our about the cafeteria. I love the students who say what's your favorite part about the day and they say lunch. I like those kids. It's so much fun to be their favorite part of the day. It's like a really cool thing about working in school food is you get to be some a lot of kids favorite part of the day. So I think that's that's the like the great thing about working in school food for me. This is so much better than cooking for rich people in a hotel. I can tell you that. So we'll hit the button here. So I think it's important to recognize that there's zero student cafeteria debt in our district right now. When the there's no student debt or no student cafeteria debt right now. You know in 1920 in the 1920 school year when they went to universal meals we stopped sending notices about any negative balances that were there because it just seemed inhumane. And then one year went by two years went by three years went by this year we got to the beginning of this year. And we were able to say we're just going to zero out that debt. There's no debt. There's no way for students to amass debt in the cash at the cash register even if they try students can purchase an extra meal purchase an extra item with money that they already have loaded on to an account and students that are on free or reduced meals. They're able to access to get an extra milk or an extra fruit. If they don't have money on their accounts which we don't expect that they will. In each of our schools there's a principal's account or a partner's an education account that we can tap into at the at the point of sale. So when a kid comes up or a student comes up who has a milk and doesn't actually have money to pay for it on their account on their account. That's a free or reduced meal student. We can charge that to a partner's an education account or a principal's account here just so we can make sure that there's no cafeteria debt anywhere in our schools. It's sort of an important thing for me. It was the absolute worst part of school food was telling people that they owed us money. And so I really feel good about that and that we've gotten to that and we're going to stay there. The way we have structured our charging policy is such that we're not going to create student debt. But we're at the same time we created a mechanism for students who might not have those opportunities to be able to tap into those same things with the partners in education accounts at Union and Main Street and a principal's account here and at Rocksbury as well. So the programs that we serve meals and food through here are listed on my slide. The National School Breakfast Program, the National School Lunch Program, the Fresh Fruits and Vegetable Program and After School Snack. After School Snack happens at the Rocksbury Village School in conjunction with the CVSU Bridges Program that administrates the after school program there. The Universal Free Meals we'll talk about here in a minute do not apply to after school meals. Those are charged the way they always were. And so for the after school meals I claim for federal reimbursement the free and reduced price meals and then we bill CVSU Bridges for the balance of the paid and the reduced price meals that still need to be covered. So that comes out of their contract. Just for information it's $1.04 per snack, $1.04 that we get per snack. The next line up from the bottom there, but nope we're going to stick on that one. The next line up from the bottom is the Fresh Fruits and Vegetable Program. This is a program that again we're running at the Rocksbury Village School. It was a program that ran there for years until the 1920 school year when everything sort of fell apart. We have not done Fresh Fruits and Vegetable Program there until this year. Fresh Fruits and Vegetable Program it gives us the opportunity to get a reimbursement through reimbursements serve fresh fruit and vegetable snacks to students in their classroom outside of meal time hours. It's got to come with some educational component as well. So the Fresh Fruits and Vegetable Program we can do a whole hour presentation just on that. It is available for schools that have a free and reduced percentage of 40% or greater. They gave away all the money to all the 40% or greater schools that had money left over and so they opened it up to schools that had 30% or greater free reduced percentages which got Rocksbury into the pool. So we actually just started that in March. We've only just gotten that back up and running. And it's really been a great thing. It gives kids the opportunity to interact with Fresh Fruits and Vegetables. And on our end we get to basically just claim direct reimbursement. If we spend $40 on berries we claim that $40 back. So it's a direct reimbursement program. Fresh Fruits and Vegetables. National School Breakfast Program and the National School Lunch Program we're required to offer in all of our schools every day that we're open. These are the meals that are universally free. You see it on the slide there. We get $2.25 per breakfast and we get $4.33 per lunch. So I think we can just talk a little bit about that and the free meals because I think that's a really interesting thing and it's unique to Vermont. I don't think Vermont's the only state but there's not many others and I don't know of any off the top of my head. So the state of Vermont has us operating in what they call a provision to base year which doesn't really mean anything to you. But what's important about that is that the state of Vermont is paying for the paid meals and the balance of the reduced price meals. So go back years. We had free and reduced eligible students. Those meals reimbursements were claimed through the federal government and then the balance of the reduced price was paid for by the state of Vermont and then the paid kids just paid for their meals. The state of Vermont found fund balance money for this year and initially it was not a sustainable source of money. They found it for one time and what they were going to do is continue to pay for the reduced price meals, the balance of the reduced price meal value, but now paying for everybody's meal, all the free meals, oh sorry, all the paid meals as well. So every student's meal is free. Not every student's meal is being paid for from the staying pot of money, but every student's meal is free. And I think that that's just, it's a wonderful thing. We'll see in the next couple of slides the impact that that's had on our sales. I just think that it's great. It's like one of the things that we've always wanted and now we've gotten here and now we're signed up for a second year of universal meals. You know, it's hard to unring a bell and it kind of feels like there's momentum behind it. It's a few months, a couple of months ago now, I got to testify at Farm to School Day at the State House to the Agriculture and Education Committees and I could see from both of the, in both of those committees in the House and Senate, all of them, that there's a real taste to continue this. And that the, the thing that they, that there was concern about at the legislative level was that they were, they ended up, they're paying for a lot more meals than they thought they would. There's not nearly as many students have been approved for free meals as the State of Vermont hoped. I think that, you know, because meals are, meals are universally free, people were not motivated to complete those applications. But I also think that people are making more money and this, things are different in the world now than they were in the 1920 school year when we'd last really had to do applications. Historically it would approve 120 applications, something like that. This year I've approved about 35. But everybody's still getting their free meals. It just means that the State of Vermont, that more of those meals are ended up in the state's pot than in the federal government's pot. And the legislature across the street was expecting something different. And so I find this very interesting. Presently, students can be directly certified for free, for free meals by qualifying for three squares or reach up. The SNAP or TANF, you know, they talk about federally, three squares or reach up. A family that has students that qualify for, for three squares or reach up automatically qualify for free meals. They don't have to fill out an application. It's what they call directly certified. Those programs, the threshold for those programs is 120% of poverty. Starting July 1st, the State of Vermont has gotten in on a pilot, a federal pilot where now in the State of Vermont starting July 1st, Medicaid eligibility is going to become a category that can give students their free meal eligibility. Medicaid, that threshold is 180% of, 180% of poverty. So I think that we're going to catch a lot more students in that directly certified net. And I think that's going to keep the state out, you know, keep, make it feel more sustainable for the state house. So I just think that that's an interesting element about it. That there being paid for different places, you know, the free, the free meals and the paid meals that money comes from different places. And so it's been a little, it's been interesting to sort of watch how that happens and be part of administrating it. Last year, it was just a meal and we had a piece of paper and we kept a tally, which was really easy for us. And so we just have to say we serve this many lunches. But now we have to use our point of sale system where students enter their pin number because we need to know what their eligibility is. Because we need to claim those meals, free, reduced or paid because of where the money is coming from, different, different pots. Jim, can I jump into the free reducing is also huge for Title I and Title II funding. So we need, we need to figure this piece out or the legislature needs to figure this piece out because it could directly impact how much money we receive in Title I. Because that's how it's, that's how it's calculated is by free and reduced lunch population. So they have to figure that piece out. There are some districts who have lost 60% of their free and reduced lunch population because of the universe, because they don't have to fill a paperwork. So it's, it's significant that a significant challenge that I think is can be overcome. It's just they have to think differently about how they hand out that Title I money. I think in looking at the numbers they feel that this move into the pilot of using Medicaid to directly certify students will have a greater impact on those numbers than any effort we can to put a push to fill out more applications. Yeah, yeah. I hadn't heard that yet so that's great. But that's not a direct Medicaid eligibility doesn't make you automatically get the free and reduced lunch or it does so that you don't have to do the application. Starting July 1st we're joining the pilot. So the potentially broader swath of people that don't have to necessarily do the paperwork. Sounds like it. The list for the next year will come out on July 20th. I'll generate the direct cert list based on that. And early in August we'll send notices to every family that's already on the direct cert list that they don't have to fill out applications. It's part of our timeline with the free and reduced process is notifying the directly certified families. That way they can just disregard the applications entirely and carry on. So put this under students because I think that it demonstrates sort of that we're doing a good job and that the students are sort of buying into it. So it's been weird the last two years and it's hard to it's like apples and apples. It's really hard to compare the numbers 1920 is just sort of out the window. It was just too much to even try to comprehend. So I like to go back to that last, you know, air quotes normal year. The first year that I was here are total meal revenue reimbursement set year. You can see 473,000 called 474,000. We went through 1920. It was really difficult. We get to 2021 and it did not get much easier for us. You might remember at the time we were sort of sidled with a lot of really inefficient and difficult styles of service and methods of service. And we did not sell many meals. It was a difficult year. And so in the 2021 school year, you can see that we only made about $307,000. That was a difficult year for us. Last year, we got back to ordinary service and we got to keep our universal meals. And you see that our revenue from 2021 to 2122 went up 189%. We almost doubled our revenue. And so that's looking at it there colloquially and looking at our production records and such. We're serving a lot more meals, like 20 to 25% more meals in a day. Where a busy day used to be 180, 185, a busy day is now 200, 225. That's just me thinking about the high school. But we're definitely serving more meals and we see that in the numbers as well. Month to date, we're at 97% of last year's revenue. So last year we really killed it. We served a lot of meals. We served a lot of meals that got counted by Tally. I've always been a little afraid that our numbers were sort of juiced by the fact that we were doing it manually. And not to say that we committed fraud, but it was an inefficient system. And another thing about last year is that our revenues last year actually put this in the wrong place. Last year they were giving us 447 per meal. Actually the numbers were greater last year. This year the numbers, they're giving us 433 per meal. So we're actually getting less, 3% less per meal. But our total revenue is only down 3%. So that tells me that we're doing well with our sales. We're holding study. And that we're on track to be in a similar place that we were financially last year to this year when it comes to revenue. I think when we get to the expenses slide, our tone might change a little bit. But things are doing well for us at this moment. I feel like we're serving a lot of meals and we're continuing to serve a lot of meals. And we're seeing that in our revenues. We're seeing that in the number of meals that we're serving. So we've, well I guess questions about that? Questions about sales? I was thrilled that you covered this. I had a whole lot of questions about how the last couple of years have gone. If you've sold more. Sorry, Jim, I didn't ask you. I know, go for it. I know my kid now gets breakfast and lunch and loves that she can get breakfast at like nine between classes or whatever. So I also wondered in the context of staff, like how that impact staffing or it maybe it didn't, because it sounds like you still have to run the POS and you've got to still like sort of manage what's going out. I didn't know if it changed staffing or allocation of staff because the payments at the POS are not. That was the most significant difference is that we now have to have somebody manning the register and doing it for real where we could fudge the tally sheet a little bit in terms of how we did that. And so that's been a big change for us and we didn't use a point of sale system at all, you know, from when we shut down in 2020 until the first day of school this year. We didn't use our point of sale systems at all. So it was a whole new thing. We actually started with a new system and got a bunch of good training with them at the beginning of the year. And it's been a good seamless process for us of getting that role in and our reporting has really gone pretty well. So it has been great and the universal meals thing I feel like is having the intended effect of more kids are eating meals. Thank you. On the previous slide there was something at the bottom about student feedback. Could you say a little bit more about that? You know, it's probably one of the things that we can do better, but I thought that we'd talk a little bit about how we sort of think about our menus, where that feedback comes from. And so the biggest thing that we do is look at our sales, look at production, and we can see what's a big day, what's a less popular day. Breakfast for lunch, lots of meals, barbecue, chicken sandwich, and not so much. And so, you know, people vote with their pocketbooks, right? And so that's a big way I think that we do, you know, think about catering our menus from one day to the other, from one month to the next to sort of how do the students react to these. We also, you know, are interacting with students in the cafeterias daily, you know, and just like seeing the looks on their faces is a big part of student feedback and items too. I occasionally am asked to meet with students, students have questions or students want to know if we can do this or want to know why we do that, and I'm happy to do that. And actually, one of those recent meetings, as far as I know, has led to a survey. So there's a survey that's being run sort of, administrated by a student group at the middle school. So that's another way that we're doing that. So, yeah, it's one of the things that we work towards to try to cater what we're doing, you know, to match what it is that the students are going to be looking for. And balancing that with what meets our standards and what, you know, what works for us economically as well. All right. So just to, you know, go through this framework from enlightened hospitality. We've talked about the staff. Now we've talked about the students. The next piece I think is the community. And, you know, sending kids home well-fed from school, I think is probably as big a thing that we could do for our community as any. And I feel that sort of having a program that our students take advantage of and where our participation is right around 50% district wide, which is a lot, which is solid. And so I think that that for me is like the big thing, you know, having a program that the community can be proud of, you know, food source program the community can feel proud of, you know, being the part of the day that the kids look forward to. I think that for me that's a big community piece. But then I also recognize, you know, that we've got these four kitchens that we're operating that we maintain in all of our schools. And that in many ways those are community resources that we administrate how they're used. But it's certainly one of those things that we, you know, help out community partners from time to time, whether or not that's people in the school community or just in the community at large. So I think that, you know, we have these kitchens which are definitely community resources. I'm really proud of the culture of food safety and sanitation that we have. When you go and look at our numbers, they historically been in 98s, 99s, we've even had a bunch of hundreds on our health inspection scores. And so I think I feel really proud of the sort of the focus on food safety that the staff has in the kitchens day to day. And I also really feel good about the way that we work with other departments, the facilities department especially, you know, to keep up with those things and make sure that those physical plant parts of our health inspection are up to par as well. I put it here because I think it's an important thing for a lot of people in our community is zero waste. The pandemic was a terrible, terrible time for zero waste. And as we have gotten past that, it's become something that we've been able to put more and more effort into. When you go through our kitchens, you'll find essentially zero disposable service ware being used, whereas a couple of years ago, because of where we were at with pandemic and such, we were sort of forced into using that. And so that's one of the things that I think is one of the real positive changes that I sense is we're coming out of the pandemic is getting back to that. Some of those things that we were able to focus on historically like zero waste, you know, being a thing that's really important to a lot of folks. And so that makes it something that needs to be important to us. And so that's a good example. I think one of the things that's really been a positive as we've gotten sort of moving out of the pandemic is that we're able to focus on some of those things that we weren't quite so able to focus on when things were so crazy. So we've done the staff, we've done the students, done the community. So the next one is our suppliers. We're serving a lot more meals. We're buying a lot more food. And that's a good way to make good with your purveyors, right? And so that's the way this part falls into place, I think, is that the busier we're doing, the more business we're doing with our purveyors. And so just to show a handful, the different places where we get food, the first one here, the Vermont Food Directors Association, we have a contract with Performance Food Group. So as a self-operated SFA, School of Food Authority, as a self-operated SFA in Vermont, we are members of the Food Directors Association. Every self-operated SFA in the state is member of the Food Directors Association. We bid our grocery bill, our contract, all together. So that, in fact, while we're hundreds, dozens and dozens of little contracts and little stops for their truck, they talk to us as though we're their largest buyer. And so we are able to buy at their highest tier of purchasing, which means that we get the best prices of anybody that you could get from our purveyors because we're members of the Food Directors Association. We've got a couple of people who work as volunteers to administrate that group. And every five years, we put the bid, the contract out to bid. Last, we're in the second year of the newest bid, the newest contract with Performance Food Group. And so that's the company that, up until a few months ago, they're a Reinhardt food service. They're a partner now, they're a Performance Food Group. So those are the trucks that you'll see pulling up to our schools early in the morning on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. So I think it's an important thing for you to understand that we're a member of this large buying group, a statewide buying group, and that gives us the ability to purchase as though we're a much larger organization than we actually are. So that's a big part of where our food comes from. I would say that 95% of our food comes from the Food Directors Association contract. The next thing there is USDA commodities, which happen two ways. Brackbox Foods and DoD Fresh. At the end of each school year, we're allocated money based on how many meals we serve. I'm pretty sure it's 28 cents per lunch. At the end of the school year, they say, you've got 28 cents per lunch, which last year I think worked out to about $38,000. And so we got a $38,000 fund, sort of USDA funding money, and they have a catalog of brown box items that we're able to purchase from. Frozen strawberry cups, ground beef, diced chicken, chicken strips. It's a long list. I shouldn't have started because it goes on for too long. And actually, this last year I've been part of a statewide USDA Foods advisory group where we sort of worked with the state to try to pare down that list to make it easier for us to work with. It's one of the real difficult things of managing school food is learning how to administrate those USDA Foods. The order for the 2023-24 school year was due on March 5th. So it's a long-term thing that we're doing there. So we have about $28,000 worth of brown box items that we buy that we sort of allocate through their ordering system. Any of that money that we choose not to allocate towards brown box goes to DoD Fresh. DoD Fresh is a program administered by the Department of Defense, which I don't quite understand, which moves fresh fruits and vegetables around the country. That's a program which locally is administered by Upper Valley Produce at the White River Junction. So that's a company that has a contract with DoD Fresh to administrate that program. And so we're able to use some of our USDA commodity money to bring in some fresh fruits and vegetables through DoD. But we do usually put most of our commodity money into the brown box items because those are the center of the plate items. Those are the items that have the biggest impact on us financially. A little there about local producers. It's one of the things that we work at and definitely working to increase is buying directly from local producers. So a couple of ways that we do that and work within the procurement regulations, we have our informal bid process that we do. Informal only because it's less than $25,000 total value of the bid, which just means that we get to pick who we ask for solicitations from as opposed to having to put it out there to the public. So a couple of examples of informal bids. We get our maple syrup from Templeton Farm, just up the uptown hill in Eastmont Piliar. So we get our maple syrup from them, but we did that through an informal bid process. And then we also just signed a contract for, I think it's a thousand pounds worth of ground beef that we're going to buy throughout the school year from the Gaylord Farm in Watesfield. This is a way that we use the procurement regulations to try to keep some of this federal money locally. And then micro purchases is another thing that we do. I think the best micro purchase example I can think of, I guess Dog River Farm is one of the places we do that from. And then we like to buy rolls and some sliced bread from the Maggies also. So that's some of the examples of the local producers that we work with. Cost of goods. Cost of goods, it's no surprise, right? Cost of goods has increased dramatically since 2020. I put the range there of 20 to 40%. I bet we could find some things that have an increased 20%, but I came up with 40% when I did the math on milk. We serve a lot of milk. Five years ago, a crate of 50 milks was like $9.72, and now they're like $14.50. So the cost of goods is real, and that increase has been a challenge for us. And we definitely see that in our expenses. I wrote there, we will talk about it too much, but the supply chain has been an inconsistent thing. It's been a difficult thing. It's gotten a lot easier this year, but it's been one of the real challenges of the pandemic. All right, so we did the staff, the students, the community, our suppliers, and now the budget. The short story is that the reimbursements that we get do not cover the expenses that we incur to operate these programs. It's sort of just the way it is, I'm afraid, that, like you say, we get $4.33 per meal. We could use Roxbury as an example. If we serve 30 lunches there, we're talking about less than $130 worth of lunch revenue that we've brought in. More than half of that is gone to salary right away before we buy one speck of food. And so I think it just goes to show that as we sort of move through the pandemic and move through the great resignation and seeing the impact that that's had on hiring and on wages and what it's taken to compete in wages and that we see the increase in the cost of goods, that expenses are going to continue and the reimbursements are not going to cover them. And so that's no surprise to you, the school board, each of the last two years, and it's possible the same amount was for in 1920. I can't remember exactly. But we budgeted $110,000 each of the last two years as a subsidy for school food to make us whole so that we can pay our bills. In the 2021-22 school year, there was $110,000 budgeted. We only needed about $7,000 of those dollars in order to make us whole. I think that that's an anomaly. Last year, we had an interesting thing where we were short two managers through the entirety of last year, went through the entirety of last year with no manager at Main Street Middle School and the manager at Montipier High School was out on a long-term medical all last year. And so I think that $7,000 subsidy is a bit of an anomaly. Our revenues are holding steady. Our costs are in line. I heard from Christina just yesterday that when she went and looked at our numbers for the year, she saw that our expenses were sort of in line with where they should be with the budget and that it appeared that we were not going to be, not going to exceed the $110,000 that's budgeted for subsidy. And it appears that that's an appropriate amount of money to have budgeted there. And so that's really how I think about things. I sort of use that as a framework here so we try to hit on each one of those things. We've left a few minutes here in the agenda. I'm happy to do my best to feel the questions. So I've heard that one of the best benefits of the free lunches for everyone is to reduce or eliminate the stigma around free and reduced lunch. And you mentioned that it's impossible to accrue debt at the POS. Is there any other way that the free and reduced lunch receivers can be identified or does that completely eliminate the stigma around it? There, how do we say it? In the cafeteria, everything that's in the cafeteria can be included in a universal free meal so that there's never any question in the cafeteria about can I select this and is there going to be a situation at the register? We offer all the items in a vending machine away from the cafeteria to try to eliminate that stigma. But I think that the systems are set up and we go through an important training at the beginning of each year about the importance of the privacy of that and that there is a non-overt way that students can be identified that the cashier can read a code that's on the screen that they can identify the student is appropriate to use that principal's fund for an extra item or whatnot. But for the most part, universal meals has had that intended effect is that there's no scenes at the register anymore about you can't have that and you're going to have to put that back and can I buy this? None of that. So it's one of the things that I've actually gotten questions from students want at the high school level students want that they want to be able to buy stuff find an extra item or get this or that something above and beyond at the register but I always come back to the equitability of that and that I don't want that in the cafeteria once we went to universal meals I knew in my heart that we were going to eliminate all the cart sales because they can't go together if we're going to try to eliminate that stigma and eliminate that overt identification then we're going to have to eliminate all the cart sales and so we moved all of that to the to the vetting machine and sort of removed from the site. Okay, thank you. Scott has a question I don't know if Scott you're in a position to say it or you want me to read it it's in the chat. Read it? I'll go ahead and read it. Is there a mechanism for families to contribute for paid meals even though the state is covering the cost? I don't think this is the answer to your question Families can put money onto accounts that their student could use it to buy a second meal or a milk or an extra fruit or something like that but I don't think that's the question. I think he's getting at more of can families contribute to the larger pot? Yeah. And it sounds like the way to do that is through pie. Right. Yeah. Is through MRPS pie. Part of the education. Yeah. Yeah, I think that that's the way that is going to benefit the students on the ground who need it. I think that a donation that goes to food service is really difficult to administer. And so yeah, if somebody was interested in donating that to the partners in education or the principal's funds in any one of the schools I think that would be the best way that I could think of to contribute. Well, you mentioned earlier on that cafeteria staff hours are capped just under the 30 hours required under the Affordable Care Act to be given health insurance and I was just wondering how that fits in with the mission of putting food service workers first. You know, it's just simply a budgetary thing. We could decide to give everybody a dramatic raise, give everybody all the benefits. The difficulty is that the reimbursements will never be able to cover that. So if we gave, we've got 17 employees, if we gave them all family benefits plan, we're talking about $20,000 per year per plan, you're talking about most of the reimbursements for the year. And so basically, I want that for everybody. I want more money for everybody. I want health care benefits for everybody. But I also understand that that $110,000 subsidy that the school board is kind enough to allocate for us, we need to be careful of that and that we could keep piling onto that and at some point it's just not going to make sense to operate school food independently anymore and we'll end up, and we could find a contractor to do it for us. And I think that that's the hard part is that we want and want, and I do, I want that for all of my staff, but I also recognize that it's just not financially sustainable. The reimbursements would never cover it and the reimbursements aren't able to cover it and I don't think that it's fair to the taxpayers of Montpelier to ask for more money than we're already asking for. Is that fair enough, Zett? Yeah, I think that, that definitely answers my question. It's kind of on a related question. So what is the average hourly rate that we're paying food service workers? I don't have the average in my head. So I'll say that the published starting wage for a food service assistant is $15.25. I put that right in the ads. I'm not hiding that anyplace. That's the question. The average is tough to say, you know, it's tough to come up with an average. I think if you eliminate, you know, like the, how do we say it? I would say that most of the staff are making in and around $16 an hour based on their seniority and increases that they've gotten over the few years. I think like the biggest sort of group that we have have been here for five or six years or so. So I'd say that's sort of the range where most of our staff are falling at this time. And I think that's a good point to follow because we're waiting for ratification to happen of the MRE SSA contract, that the wages of food service workers will be aligned to a certain status in the instructional assistance contract. But I can't give too much information about that yet because we're waiting for ratification to happen. It would be a significant pay increase. And following up, yeah, you mentioned that a few employees had been left, essentially speaking either a higher pair or more hours. And you might not know the answer to this, but what do you think is the biggest driver of the desire to move on for more compensation? Is it the actual compensation or is it benefits? For instance, if they were getting, because benefits can be, yeah. It's not the benefits. It's not the benefits. It's not the benefits. Most all of my staff, you know, are getting their health benefits through the state and are really careful about staying within a threshold so they'll continue to get those benefits. And how do they get them through the state? Like their doctor dinosaur, yeah. Is the coverage adequate? They're satisfied. I would say that the biggest driver, I think, is probably, if it's not the hourly wage, it's the summer. For some people, having that summer off is great. And for other people, it just doesn't work. And the two who have left recently, I think that that was part of it. I found a job that's going to employ me through the summer and I need to start now. I'm sorry, but I have to go. That's the springtime at school food. It is interesting though that we employ a lot of food service employees through the summer with our facilities department. We have in the past. Yeah. Yes. There's an opportunity there that we can't guarantee for anybody. But if someone really wants to, we can find a way. It's a lot of painting that needs to be. Yeah. So yeah, there's a lot of different motivations at play. Yeah. Well, I first want to say thank you for coming. And we've never met before. So I also wanted to say thank you because I believe during the height or the very, very challenging moments of the pandemic, you and Libby were the only two people who came into this building and it was. That's a little bit of an exaggeration, but it was fun to get to know each other quite well. To get food to our families. And I just think that's a really powerful thing that you prioritize that. So I want to say thank you for that. Yeah. I also have my understanding anyway is that over the last several years, the quality of the food has gone up. At least anecdotally, I know when my who's my now fifth grader was starting kindergarten, we asked someone, you know, how's how's the food? And the answer was hmm. And these days it's, we don't get that same reaction. And my kids are very excited to eat the food and to, and it's nice to see the, you know, Vermont grown show up on the, on the menu as well. So thank you for all the, all of those efforts. Thank you. I have long been curious about why it, why our food service is run as an independent enterprise and rather just not as like a department of the district. You know, it, the thing I can't seem to square is why are we, we have special education. We have general education. We don't expect any of them to make any money. Why aren't we just saying food is a critical part of school, just like books and teachers and everything else. You're singing my song. You know, I guess I don't have the answer to that. It's, I've just sort of accepted that that's the way of the world. And I sort of believe that it's somewhere in the legislation about how the, how the, the budgets and such happen. It's got to be. We're not unique. That's what I've heard. Yeah. I just wasn't sure if you could provide any kind of context for. As I understand it, I think that I, I feel like I can say that it, that we operate as an enterprise fund because we have to, based on the way the state tells us, we have to organize our finances. Okay. After school program is in the same enterprise fund. Right. That's true. Okay. Well, I think we're the only two. But yeah, I really like to talk about that. The nurses office doesn't have to charge for band-aids. No, it's, it's a good question. It seems like it's tied up in this point that, you know, Merrick was raising and I thank you for asking, because I was going to ask that same question about, you know, I understand it's a real budgetary conundrum that we're not, we don't offer health benefits. The reason we don't is to make sure that our, the budget stays closer to reimbursements than, than it would otherwise be. But if we didn't think of ourselves of having to meet that reimbursement threshold, maybe we would then feel a little less pressure to not, you know, to not that we would go completely crazy with the budget, but feel a little bit less pressure to, to be so close to that reimbursement threshold, which then ultimately what it seems like is, like the, the food service workers in our district are carrying the, the brunt of the budget, which feels not great, but. Yeah, no, I understand that for sure. Yeah. It doesn't, it doesn't feel great. And it's sort of one of the situations where we're asking people to work and ask people to work harder and ask people to work more to help us without really being able to do much for them. And I think that, you know, it's one of the sort of the tricks to this sort of environment is that, you know, raises are given, you know, based on the crew time, not on merit and things like that, you know, like, and so I think that, you know, it's, it is definitely one of the challenges of school food is that it's about the money and about how that affects people and how they're, how they work and, you know, how they think about things. You know, this idea of acting your wage, you know, is something that we contend with. And you can't blame somebody at the same time for standing up for themselves in that same way. So I recognize that and I do the best I can, you know, to create a work environment of sort of rapport and respect and to be able to listen to people and recognize the issues that we can and do the best we can to put people in a situation where they feel good about what they're doing so that they can have a, you know, a genuine smile on their face when they greet those students. And I would add on that, having worked in a district that did contract food service out, we do not want to do that. It's much more sterile. It's much more less community oriented. You don't have a gym, you know, like in your world, you have somebody offsite from a large company. The food's not as good. You know, like there's several things. Like we, we don't want to lose this thing that we have going on because it's such a better quality. I hesitate to even bring it up, but I really feel like that's the thing that I feel like in my job that I'm like, how to protect us from is to sort of see that that's like, we could do that, but this is what's down the road. And so I feel like a responsibility to sort of protect us from that reality. And that comes, that's minding that from subsidy. Yeah, no, it'd be good to find out the kind of the genesis and the reason for the way it's structured, the way it is, because it does seem like we'd have more flexibility on particularly kind of compensation structures if we did it differently. Yeah, you know, I like to say we generate more revenue than any other department. Yeah. It's Seiji. One last question. I was just wondering, what happens to the free and reduced lunch during the summer? Is it still an option for those families or? Our, not anymore. During the pandemic, there were some waivers that were put in place that allowed us to do it. Things, there was a waiver around non congregate meals, which meant we were able to give students meals and they could take them home. Whereas now in the summer, summer programs, they have to be eaten on site. That was one element of it. We, our free and reduced percentages in the town, in the city are not high enough for us to earn those, the seamless summer option grants in order to have those meals paid for. And when we were, when we were able to do summer meals during the, during the, those pandemic summers of 2021, did we do it three times, 22? Our numbers were low. We would serve six or eight meals. And we started each school year, $7,000 in the red. The summer meals are available in town. You know, whether it's through any of the programs at the churches or through the day camp, you know, that happens during the summer at the pool. There's universal meals available there. And I think that there's meals available through the rec center. But the bottom line was that summer meals did not make our school food programs stronger. They were a drain on it in terms of, because it just, we didn't sell enough meals to warrant the whole production. And we lost money. A comment and then one more question, which is just back to the hours thing. One of the other things that I was going to one, was wondering about was if we're, if we're capping people at that 5.7 hours per day, would we benefit as a, like from just operationally of having them there longer, but based on your meals per labor hour, it seems like no, we don't need more labor hours. Right. And the trick is we need four people there during service. You know, we don't need four people there all day. Yeah. You know, we need one, two people to get it started and three people to clean up. But so it's, if we were saying, well, let's take those hours and divide, you know, take those five positions and turn them into three full-time positions, we wouldn't have enough hands to do the register and the service and then the dishes. And so that's one of the catch 22s of this, is that we need those sets of, we need so many, you know, a minimum of four sets of hands in our kitchens to get service done. And so it sort of makes it difficult for us because we need a lot of people there during the middle of the day. We can't just consolidate it. Right. It's not like manufacturing or, you know, it's about that service time. Yeah. Which is a good example of that balance that you need to strike and that we as a board also need a strike between taking care of our people and being budget wise. Right. Yeah. I can appreciate that. So my other question is, what can the board do to help you with your job? You know, continuing to have that subsidy in the budget is the biggest thing that I think we can ask for, is that's going to be what makes us whole? Really, and I think that that's where we're going to be able to find the money that we might need to increase wages or do what we're going to need to do to, you know, strengthen this program for the future. But I think that $110,000 is the thing that we need from you. And it's there and now it's up to us to work within that. And I think so long is that $110,000 is enough, then I think that you're doing what you need to do and that the rest is on me. Yeah, and I really hesitate, and I feel really strongly about that because like I said, I really feel like a big part of what I'm doing here is protecting us as an independent SFA. And so that, like, respecting that subsidy and the contributions that the taxpayers are making is an important thing. Excellent. Further questions for Jim? Ah, Emma. Yeah, I just, I also want to echo the thanks for you coming and just watching you present about the work that you do for the district. It's clear that you're, you know, very fluent in your job and it's a thing of beauty just to see like how knowledgeable you are about everything that is related to the food service of this district, so thank you. And it's also clear that like some of the questions that I came into tonight that when you're presenting and answering your questions, this is only the tip of the iceberg for my understanding of what you do and so it's clearly super complicated and there's lots of sort of like if this, then this sort of topple effect of some of the questions that I had. And, you know, definitely sort of making sure that everyone that's employed by you and by the district you know, feels valued and supported and whatever we can do to help that. And then there was like littler things like, oh, you know, I've been to other school cafeterias and there's lots of variety of little snacky items or ice creams and things like that and your answer was very in line with the values of this community around not having a lot of Alakar items and so I think that could be like an easy question in people's minds, maybe students minds and then there's this, you know, very clear, you know, equity based reason for doing things that way. So I really appreciated that answer. I do think that moving forward, you know, you had mentioned that some of the costs have risen 20 to 40% of things and so maybe it is time to sort of reexamine that $110,000 in line with the community values and if there's anything that you would, you know, if we need to increase that line item to support you operating the business side of things in a way that is aligned with the values of the community, I think that that's worth exploring, you know, as a board. Seem to compare to what Cross and we get there. So I mean, so far we're doing okay. I appreciate that. I won't forget that. I'm wondering if there's some way that we could explore the idea that was brought up around maybe the school running, you know, having the food service as opposed to the way it's set up. I really think it's part of statute. I think it's out of our hands. But, you know, we can ask Rosie. Is that Rosie Krueger? Yeah, that's my understanding of it and really, and it's important to remember that, you know, the whole program is costing us about $610,000 each year and we're putting in $110,000. And so you're talking about a huge increase in what we're, you know, we're talking about getting out of national school food and take it in house. You're talking about a huge amount of money. And so, yeah, I think that if we can continue to sort of incrementally work the way we're working with what we have, I think that's definitely the place to start. And I appreciate everybody's sort of understanding and so the sentiment behind everything. And, yeah, it's a big part of why I'm in this community doing this because of this sentiment, I think is an important part of it. Yeah, go for it. Food waste. Have you, I know that we have a homeless, you know, problem in our Montpelier. I don't know what's happening in Roxbury as much, but I'm just wondering if you've worked with any community partners to, you know, work with our food waste to help us. That was one of those pandemic challenges for a long time. We had a relationship with another way. And then one thing led to another pandemic and they stopped doing that. They don't want to do it at all. And so now when we run into that where we have leftovers or we have things that we need to move on, we have a community action in Barry and the food shelf there. I have just a relationship as a former colleague with the chef there. And so when we have leftover items that are usable that we are looking for an outlet for, we're able to take, use Chef Joey in the community action capstone program over there in Barry and they pack it stuff up. Whether they go through the food bank or goes out in meals on wheels. But that's something that we do from time to time. So a lot of times we're trying to incorporate our waste back into what we're doing. We make a soup or something out of a salad bar or what not. But when we do end up with items that were sort of stuck with donating or losing a lot of those things, which is rare. It doesn't happen very much. But like a snow day before winter break, we ended up with a bunch of extra milk. And so a lot of that milk went to capstone. I have two compliments and one boring question. I was at Northfield when you departed and it was devastating. I'm a staff person because I had never seen so many staff people consume school lunch before because it was so excellent. So now being a member of the MRPS community in my child goes to Roxbury. We love that you're here. Thinking back to what you were saying just about the importance and value of the space across from the students. I just want to give some props to Marion out at RVS who is so loved. Her door is covered with love notes and hearts and she is just like the happy shining face. She is the first face typically that the kids see when they come through the door and it has the ability to change a kid's day like first hood in the door. So we're super grateful for her. So thank you. And then my boring question is just what does that fluctuate rate? Is that set once and at the beginning of the year and or does that fluctuate at all to reflect the increase in price of goods or you just kind of stuck with it at the outset of the year and it doesn't try to counterbalance some of the economic forces. It is set by the federal government late in the school year for next school year so pretty soon we'll find out what next year's reimbursements will be there's some action with the USDA. There's actually just a survey that went around so they're like actually starting to study about how to study the problem but it's a long way down the road. So, yeah, is that the answer? Yeah, it does. And then one other question is just thinking about woes of staffing that occur. Is there any coordination with our career center in terms of doing some recruitment out of, you know, they have a really fantastic culinary program? Is there any other work kind of trying to connect with students there? I actually had an intern spend the entire year with us in the 19 2020-2021 school year. Yeah, David was a student at CV at the career center and he spent his whole year with us and he bounced around and went from school to school and the staff would argue over him I want David, I want David. And it was great. It was sort of a particular thing that sort of worked for David. I think that you did not a lot of 16, 17, 18 year olds sort of see the utility of school food as a future profession. But it's certainly an idea and certainly something that we have done to some degree with success in the past. The other people are the enrichment programs that are run here at the high school have significant cooking elements to them that Sam Bromley is into and those guys that Jim works closely with and flex pathways with one student from Roxbury using the Roxbury kitchen for his own business now. So Jim's got a lot of connections to the teachers and what they're trying to do. And there's a couple of CBL students who come and help out I just was thanking somebody this morning who's over at Union. And so we definitely have had that from time to time. All those things are great when you're the manager in the kitchen with 300 meals to serve. You kind of want the right help. And so that's an element. I mean that's part of it. It's easy for me as a manager to be like I got you a volunteer. But that's not the right help. And so I think that's part of it. David was the right help. And with time you know our CBL students get into a routine and they can spend a period and help us out some. But it's not what we need. Yeah. Thanks. Right. I'm not sure if you're who has the the exact answer but in the 2021-22 year when only 7% of the 110,000 was used does that go back to the general fund? In the 2021-22 if there is a reasonable increase hopefully, we all hope and somehow food service workers contracts are tied in with some of our other people does that change the 110? We might need to in the next budget year. That's yet to be seen because we have to place people and it's a process we just haven't had time yet to do that 7,000 we did decide to keep it in food service didn't we? Once it's in food service we're not allowed to move it back into the general fund I think that's come up in budget discussions. We kept it there just in case as a safety valve for the food service because with the universal free meals we just weren't sure what was going to happen and more normality and all that kind of stuff. Thanks again. Thanks for your enthusiasm and just the quality brought to the food service has been palpable I was here before you came and other people there didn't do a great job but certainly since you've been here the quality of food service all my kids are much more much more enthused about school food than they used to be as you stated it's a big part of students days and also their health and nutrition so we really appreciate all you do and the enthusiasm and great work you bring. Thank you very much. So next we are on to Board Business we did the student representations oh again we've got the net zero is off so retreat planning I can go or you can go do you want to put the thing on the board? I think as we discuss this I wasn't here but I think Mia kind of led a conversation about what we want to achieve with our two retreats also we've got two dates pegged on the calendar July 14th and August 9th I believe is the second one for half days and I know that everyone and I'm in this camp doesn't necessarily have all their summer things planned so hopefully those days continue to work and we definitely understand if one or two folks has something come up in the summer that interferes I think our big goals for the retreats the first day I think we really want to get the indicators done we set out our three priority themes we've got kind of the mission and vision rooted out and really just getting the indicators for those three themes that we want and I think a goal that Mia Libby and I have are that we go into that first retreat and reuse the time to get those indicators piled down instead of spending kind of two hours figuring out what an indicator is and how we want to measure it et cetera so set out some materials and then Mia is putting on the board kind of I think some thoughts to frame it up so I think we really want to kind of go in for an indicator there's kind of three main things that we want to think about the first are the smarty goals and I set around kind of a reminder of what the smarty goals are because I get to about A and forget it but it's strategic measurable ambitious and realistic which are kind of checks on each other like you want to you want to push the envelope but not to the point where it's not doable and not realistic time bound so you've got some timeframes for these inclusive and equitable and then we want you know indicators that are evergreen just meaning that they are durable that they're not indicators that are very specific for something we want to just accomplish in the next six months or a year but that a variety of they can be applied to a variety of factors and do not need to be updated frequently and then this is really kind of implicit in the smarty goals which in the M but I think it's worth calling out because we really want to make sure that they're indicators that we can measure progress against in a way that's reasonable and you know there's generally kind of two ways to do that either something quantitative or you know something descriptive that's kind of easy to point to you know so as we kind of you know tee up for that first first retreat day you know really think about you know the three themes which are you know closing the achievement gap safety and communications and yeah safety and as well as and you know kind of communications and community engagement what indicators would look like that have these you know these qualities you know and we've kind of brainstormed a little around what some of those might be but really give them thought the other thing that we might want to consider doing is maybe assigning like a people to focus on a particular theme kind of split up in threes so that way you know we've got three people doing a deep dive on each of the three themes if that makes sense just so yeah so people have really given thought to one theme instead of you know thought to all which sometimes means that your thoughts are a little a little more like scattered and you know maybe not as in depth so those are kind of some ideas for the first day to add Mia and then we can open it up Jim you're saying assigned it to people prior to the retreat is what you mean yeah so give some pre-thought to it exactly so like you know Lynn Emma you know and Seiji could look at closing the achievement gap and you know kind of come in with the idea that they're really going to thought to what indicators could be you know UI and Kristin could do you know community engagement you know and then Rhett Scott and Jill could do you know Seiji Wellness and VA so I think we'd like to hear from you all if that process makes sense or for missing something or for missing something or if you I think another way to think about this is take a time machine two months into the future and it's just about July 14th and if you were to like think about getting yourself into the room with the rest of us for this retreat do you feel ready to be able to name indicators of progress and if not what do you feel like you need in order to be able to do so yeah yeah and this is the top of the question I mean because we don't want to get into the the retreat and kind of be like what's an indicator is that an indicator or is that a goal so we have the three are we calling them goals or values three goals priority areas yeah could you pull up the other thing I drafted I think this will help be a helpful visual aid which is I took we have a lot of notes from the various different conversations that we've had about this so far and this was my best attempt at putting it all the where we've landed so far all in one place thank you so here's what we have is vision and mission we've named this as our approach if you keep scrolling we have listed the values but we haven't done the work to define them yet but what we are planning on focusing on and again you could say no actually I don't think we could do priorities and indicators unless we've defined our values would be something to you know but what our proposal is that we spend retreat time in this section here where we have these three priority areas and what we haven't done yet is further defined what we mean by close the academic gaps what we mean by belonging safety and wellness and that's why those have like random letters that's why we haven't done that yet and then we haven't named what an indicator for each one of those looks like or what maybe three to five we might land three to five things that to us indicate we are being successful in these three areas so this is where what we're proposing we spend our time on in retreat half day one is that and then also we don't have any goals for 2023 to 2025 and again I was just kind of picking that as a time frame because it seems both like enough time for us to get some work done but also not so far ahead that it feels hard to be like set a goal for it so that this is what we would spend our time on in retreat half day one and just to clarify it's a priority indicators and then the goals would be the second one or do you do both of the first two we're hoping to do both on the first retreat half day because the second one the second half day is the work planning is to say these are the goals we've set for ourselves what's the work we need to do to get to get to these goals that's the hope anyway so the goals for 2023 to 2025 are different from these um indicators yes and priorities what we're saying the way that I think about this is that the indicators what are evergreen like at any given moment in the future or history of MRPS this is something that tells us whether or not we're being successful in this priority area it wouldn't necessarily mean that we're there yet and so we would say to ourselves ok if we're not there yet what is what do we want to do in the next two years to try to get there that would be the goal like action steps or that's the work plan is for the second day will be more action steps I think we could consider goals to also be action steps I think it would and then the work homework prior to the retreat would be potentially to assign a few of us a couple of us to each of the priority areas right to start brainstorming language of indicators that's what we're proposing yeah and we want to know from you all if this seems doable if it seems like we will get there well I know I'm thinking kind of a loud here um I mean yeah yeah no no could you just I mean I wonder if it makes sense to really focus on those indicators because I think and if we're going to also define the priorities too then I think I think the goals of the work plan can be the second day and I think a lot of the work plan will be will be kind of those action items which I think will look kind of like goals Jill I was just going to say that I appreciate this structure I really like it because it will set us up for success and using the time wisely and I also appreciate the idea of giving us each one priority to focus on because I think I would I'm pretty overwhelmed with like work and things like that like so I feel like that is a very manageable and realistic ask so I appreciate the structure that you guys have built because I think it's we're not starting out day one what are we doing what's a goal what's a indicator and then we'd spend the whole morning so thank you for doing that and thank you also for making it really easy for us to figure out how to prepare and I think Jim what you just said of holding off on the goals until day two we'll actually make it a little bit clearer in our minds like we won't have to be trying to decide if what we're naming is an indicator or a goal we'll just be like okay we're just answering the question what is it that tells us we're being successful in this priority area yeah I think on day two we can be like in the next two years to move that ball forward and there could be as we're discussing things on day one we could sort of capture we don't know what this is called yet maybe this is a goal or maybe this is a whatever like a parking lot and then we'll be thinking about it because a lot of times we might like sleep on our day and the goal might become more clear rather than just okay it's 1130 and I'm hungry and so let's just say this is our goal well that's the irony is you know I looked for a long time at AOE and free reduced lunch is like a major indicator of academic it's like the fundamental like how it's one of the main socio-economic groups that we measure progress so as we were talking about that say as like a light bulb I'm like is that impacting how test scores are being reported out or how schools are being measured for success you know maybe inadvertently or not because that bucket of students is not being captured the same way that it was it's kind of pretty major repercussions of that that maybe weren't I think it I'm still incredibly supportive of what's going on it's just sort of an unintended consequence but another good lesson indicators matter right yeah so I just want to make sure we can't see Scott on the screen and I want to I don't know if he's got his hand raised or anything okay great I think one thing that would be really helpful would be to know the metrics that are being captured by the behavior dashboard or I think that's a name from that Michael yes yeah yeah yeah that's actually by July 14th yeah knowing what what data is captured might help us determine what indicators we can really call out in our light agreed I was just we're communicating telepathically I was seeing that once we kind of have those indicators it might be nice to have those kind of perfectly because we could think about what sort of other data we need we kind of have some baseline like how are we doing and we might be doing really great on that but we might you know there may be some gaps to fill and that could kind of inform the goal you know a month down the line so so we'll panorama that will be something that we can access an interface with to possibly pull you the board will not have access to it I have access to it yeah absolutely yeah got it great Scott have you read this form I didn't I didn't manage really quickly I'm curious about the goals is there a ration out for being a two year time period and not a one year time period just seems like yeah seems like unless there's a strong argument for being a longer time period that one year at a time just seems like it would make more sense yeah again the thinking I had there was just you know give ourselves enough time to get some work done but not go too far out in the future but we certainly could choose one year instead of two years that was just that was I already could do both I mean there could be we could give us the option of you know there's some things that we feel we can do in a year there's some things that we feel we want two years for kind of depending on the ambitiousness and the feedback and how realistic we are I think if you go much beyond I mean I think the the limit of one years is there some things that you might really be able to kind of like see out in the future and want to do but one year might not be a realistic time frame I think if you go to three years then sometimes you're looking a little too far out on the two years is that that is the time frame for the continuous improvement plan however we're halfway through so it's not like we would be totally aligned if we set 2023 to 2025 goals we would actually be a little bit we would be alternating but it is I mean it might make sense then to do one year this time and then next time set a two year timeline so that we can be aligned with the administration on the continuous improvement plan Somewhere along the way we had talked about doing some work as committees to talk about our you know the work that we can do within each committee to help achieving the goals or the indicators so I'm wondering if it might if it might be possible between day one and day two for each committee to have just like a half an hour meeting so that they can be like brainstorming on the indicators and the priorities of what they might want to do for work I know it's during the summer it's going to be rough I mean would it make sense to have them meet afterwards I mean I'm a little I mean like honestly I'm a little worried about the fact we have two summer half-day retreats because I think the more we try to put stuff in the summer the it's just a tough time to do to do work one to get people to focus and two to actually get people there because we all know I would propose like doing it during the day two but it's we're all on so many committees that it doesn't make sense right too much of a puzzle but I think it's possible to do there's three to four weeks between the two I bet we can I bet we can find the time and even if not all members of the committee could join for each of those meetings you know if it was really just a half an hour anyway it might be nice to try to make the effort if we can't do it we can't do it and we don't have to decide tonight we could see where we land at the end of day one and say oh yeah this is something that we think would be useful to do so let's try to make that happen yeah I think we can do it that'd be great but I just know summer summer stuff so Seiji asked said one thing that would be beneficial to have is data from the behavior dashboard are there other things that as you think about I would need to name an indicator of success within academic achievement safety belonging wellness or community engagement that you feel like is information you would benefit from in order to be able to do that forgive me if this does exist somewhere but I would want to know what the administrators or leadership might suggest as indicators under those things not to put homework on but you know it seems it would be I would I would that would be my first place to try to find out what we think those indicators could be that would be connected to what you know yeah no I think I think that makes a lot of sense so and at the very least I think we'd want at least one administrator in the room to say maybe not so much or maybe you wanted this see if Jason can make it see if Jason can make it I was kidding well I don't think we would need them are you asking for them to join the retreat no I just think so for example if I say okay I think between now and July 14th I would want to dig into the theme of closing the achievement gap because I do think that's I'd be happy to go wherever but that my very first question would be what are some indicators you guys would like us to look at we may have other ones we may but I have to believe that you have some thoughts on that so I meant like ask ahead of time as a committee or whatever and we have some that's what I'm thinking it might even exist somewhere already some board meetings that are coming up that could be a question you could ask at the data presentation that's in mid-June for example yeah okay perfect yeah anything that doesn't add more work just takes it from where we've already gotten it or can't right yeah and yeah you have to come up with kind of everything you need tonight because we've got some time and on kind of do people like the idea of one priority it sounds like we have at least a yes from Jill do we want to maybe name people at the next meeting give some people the time to think about what you want and if not we can do kind of one two three around the room we'll be like PE class yeah so why don't we why don't we just put a little time on like 10 minutes on the agenda next time to to name those formally and then they'll give us you know a couple months for people to think about it and if people wanted to meet in groups you could like even warn those and just have people meet for half an hour hour beforehand and do some brainstorming anything else we want to talk about and and we'll we'll have a couple more discussions before the end of June a couple more quick discussions just to make sure that that we've got you know new ideas or whatever but yeah I definitely want to make sure we all want to make sure that we use the time well because we want to wrap this process up and be able to use it as a as a tool to get our work all right excellent special thanks to Mia for putting those in very organized Google Docs yes it's very important so policy monitoring we have two policy monitoring reports travel reimbursement and D3 responsible technology use I don't want to approve the two policy monitoring reports F1 travel reimbursement and D3 responsible tech use second any discussion I was in favor any opposed great and then we need to go to executive session quickly and for the student reps to have a motion to go to executive session for the purpose of discussing the appointment of student representatives so moved second discussion in favor any opposed great