 Oh, the Champlain, not the, not the, where the restaurant is, but the restaurant is. Oh, the castle room? Oh, yeah. One watching. One's in here. Yeah. Yeah, I think it just has like a bit of a lag. I've noticed that watching at home sometimes too. Yeah, and I think that's one reason why they want to do this. You were like, oh, I have a good idea. Yeah. Faster. Boom. Yeah, we can just let it run. And then I can. Oreos signature. For them. Yeah. Speaker is going to be. Okay. I had some people help. Oh, sweet. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's perfect. Yeah. What are you. Yeah, we're just. We're just like on the same target. Harvard. So wait, I want to do your grandkids. I have one granddaughter and she's either. breasts. Is she? Are they here for. My hair is pretty good right now, I don't know what you're talking about. It's a pretty low touch experience between the partners. Low touch? Well, there's not really much of it. Ah, correct. Exactly. It's very sweet and I've got the best of my stuff out there. It's really fun. Okay, so you're excited? I'm excited. How are you? How are you? How are you? Hi, how are you? I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. Good. Thank you. I'm going to get a little more of that intervention then. You're excited? Yeah. I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it. Whoa. Okay. I'm going to do that. Okay. I'm going to get that back. I'm going to do that. No. Okay. Okay. It may be a little bit weird from where I'm supposed to be, but I don't know how to zoom, so that's just what it is. Intermission then. Do you hear us? Yeah, I'll find it. So, everything's all set up. As they say, do not touch. And oh, you have cut the status. Hi. Is it? Is it? Okay, Sheristan, nice to meet you. I'm going to sort of introduce folks in a moment. So you're streaming live, but the camera is not before that. Yeah. You and Justin. Great, excellent. I was wondering, Dustin, that my in-law is lippin', but I'm sorry, Vermont has above-the-grippen, and they've been coming here to perpetuate it. I really appreciate that. Oh, cut. Whatever you want. Maybe David Bowman is my partner in law. He's short, sort of athletic. He falls, slaps, pees. Oh, you're not like me. So, you know, that's what you should do. They, like, put their working plan in t-shirts. You remember your father-in-law? Yeah. I remember talking to him. He was good. Yeah, I think it's allowed you to see. Oh, wow, that's cool. No kidding. That's not them, but that's someone they like right now. Oh, yeah. Finally back. I'm trying to get ahead of the game for a while. Good luck. Good luck. Oh, good. Yeah, I know. Right now it's true. Coco made it a bit, then he C.A.S. Oh, they're going. Right. Yeah. Oh, really? So, people can watch it. Well, that was kind of cool. Yeah. But they're watching live. They've already headed down to South Carolina. Thanks for coming. We'll head. Okay. Oh, they're heading. Oh, that's it. Yeah. Yeah. And so when the meeting starts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're great to meet you. Yep, so you just hit the menu. And the next one's coming in. So they're doing, and the ladies lady, she was CNN's hero, and I'm here to look at the last two. So I looked at her. She did. She did. She did. She did. She did. She did. She did. She did. She did. So she did. She did. She did. She did. They're doing great. So they can go check it out, and it's not so bad, that. What year's and year's thing have you made? So how many guys are in formal one? Yep. The next thing. Of course, they're out there. They have seven guys out there, you know. I'm sure. You're having a nice panel. I'm sure that's it. I'm hoping that jump starts to proceed. I'm going to put the tears on. Yeah. What's the other code player? Show? No, definitely not. Yeah. There's a lot of people there. There's a lot of people. Yeah. I love getting there. Yeah. Good. Good. Smoking. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You just need to watch your knuckles. If you are across that many ways, you have to slow people down for that. All the changes are given up on you. I love you. I love you. They got rebirth. I know. I did get it. But I didn't get so much sense. Yeah. And look, the rhyme came to you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Moogers and my friends are engaged. So that's how you get it. But if my friends do it, I get the target. Oh, that's great. Kind of through that organization. Yeah. Yeah. This is the card. OK. This is the card. OK. Hi, I'm Shirsten, I'm Andy, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Yeah, we're hoping to have a forum and now we're going to have a small recipe and I'll work here. I'll kind of chat with him as much as I can because I've been at school since I was a kid and I've worked here for about a year. We did some of this, that's why I love going to the classroom and making bread with the kids and taking them out to the school garden, taking them out to school, there, gross and stuff and work with the science teacher on curriculum. So there was a lot of plans and things like that. Thank you. Great assignment. There's Joanna. How are you? Okay. I'm going to go ahead and get us started. We might have some more folks who checked all in either because we didn't realize this was where we were tonight. It's a new location for us. We might have some more folks come in. So this is the Ward 5 NPA meeting. My industry is in home and I'm a member of the student community and we're really glad that you're here for us tonight. I want to just thank Pitt and Humvee who are here with CEDO and also helping us to record for Channel 17 so that folks can see this in other formats. And we're going to start by opening open forums but maybe just briefly if we could go around for a nice size group to do that and introduce ourselves. And just kind of say your name and where you live. So I'm Sherston Baum and I live on Dunder Road. I'm Andy Simon. I live on Locust Street and I'm on the Ward 5 Steering Street. Hey everyone, Dustin Smith and I'm up on Howard Street. I'm Dick Vaughn. I live in Milton but I work at King and St. Paul. Jeff Wick. I live on Mountford Field Court. I'm the South District School Commissioner. Megan Fitzpatrick. I live on Sherwood Street. Hi, I'm Gusha Cambriello. I live on Pine and Lyman and I'm part of the Steering City. Killy Clark. I live on Locust Terrace. Robert Crockett. I live at Piper Watch. As you can see, I'm part of the Ward 5 Steering City and I'm down in Red Rocks. Megan Tuttle. I live in the city in the North End but I'm here tonight as a city planner supporting the mayor. I'm going to go first and I love how it's been out. Kilt Wilska and I'm Terry Moecito. I'm Scott Lovick. I'm a member of the Steering Community. I'm so happy for you. Alright, so we're going to, and by the way, just really exciting to be in a school for our Ward meeting. I feel like getting the energy of kids and families and students, we know it was a different location than we normally meet but we thank you for joining us in that excursion and being cozy in the art room here and I've heard a number of people say it's their first time either in Champlain ever or since they were a student here or that sort of thing. So neat to be here for that energy. So we're going to open, open forum and I know there are folks from Perky Planet who want to join us and anyone else who has anything they want to share with us. Yeah, so we welcome you guys to share from there, come up to the front. Does that matter in terms of the taping? Okay. Hi folks, my name is Dick Vaughn and I am the owner of Perky Planet, which is a coffee shop in the corner of King Street in St. Paul here in Burlington and this is Dustin, my consultant and partner in crime. My wife and I opened Perky Planet January this year for the purpose of providing meaningful, competitively paid and inclusive employment for people with disabilities and serve great coffee. You see the problem is that even though the unemployment rate here in Chittenden County is a little bit less than 2%, for neighbors with disabilities, the unemployment rate remains severally high. For folks who are deaf that's 50% or more. For folks with intellectual or development disabilities, that unemployment rate is 75% or greater. So we decided to do something about that. So we opened up a coffee shop, we built it from the ground up in order to break down some of the barriers to employment that our employees make things. And, you know, despite the fact that the unemployment rate is so high among people with disabilities, while the unemployment rate is so low in Chittenden County, study after study shows that people with disabilities can perform at or better than their counterparts with no disabilities. Their attitudes are sometimes better, they're safer, and there's less turnover. And the reason for that is pretty simple. For people with disabilities, a job is more than just a paycheck. A job is dignity and respect. A job is community and friendships and neighbors. And all those things that we need one deserve as human beings. So that's what we're doing. When we open up a coffee shop, we serve some fantastic coffee. And one of the main reasons that we did open a coffee shop instead of some other business is that we wanted to act as a venue for our neighbors to come in and get to know value and respect our employees. Because when you know somebody, it's easier to then respect where they're coming from and to include them into your everyday life. So thank you so much for inviting us out. We're happy to be here and we're there. Come on in and have a shot cup of coffee with us. Do you want to share it with us? No, that was great. You covered that perfectly. Oh, I'm going to see. He sucks up a lot so much. Good job. Any questions we could answer for you? How has the renovation of St. Halstead affected your business? Oh, it's been a challenge. It's been a challenge. We opened up in January on a, by the way, I was a business analyst and consultant for 20 years prior to this. And I will tell you that don't do this. Do not open up a coffee shop on a closed street. It's going to be closed for the first nine months of your existence. It's been a challenge. But we're looking forward to that. Any other questions we could answer for you? Great. Thank you so much for your time. Come on in and say hi. I just want to remind people that tomorrow is an international day of climate strike for students and for workers to raise awareness about the climate emergency. In Burlington, there'll be a rally at City Hall at noon with speakers and music and various kinds of entertainment. There are three marches that are converging on that. Maybe there are more. But there's one from UVM that starts up at the Green and goes down Main Street. There's one from Champlain. I think it's going to go down Maple Street. And one from Burton. That's actually leading from Burlington-Parkham Island. I think at 11. Or gathering at the Burlington-Parkham Island at 11. So I'm preaching to the choir here. I'm sure about the climate emergency. But spread the word about your family, friends, and associates. We're going to say a word. Be back. Feel free to go with you. It's called snap break. It's one of the greatest snack that you're selling. We're going to be great speakers every time you're talking about this. Everybody here again. I'm bringing the apple center to you. Thank you, neighbors. Thank you. Yeah, you too. That's a wire. Yeah. Thank you. Hey, guys. This is the first planet that has ever been there. Yeah, the road's been closed. Yeah, right. We got to stop by. Oh, good. Good. But I'm really happy to be here. Yeah. I'm on this. You know, before that. How do I know the way? I'll see if it's just right. Yeah, I think it's just right. Do you know that? Yeah. Yeah. I do want to ask you something about how we do it. It's very down the line. Yeah, it's just right. Yeah. It's not a winner. Right. Okay. Okay. Yeah. It's just a winner break. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to talk to you. Great. All right. So long as you have a couple minutes. We have another topic. I'm going to talk to you. Yeah. All right? Yeah. Yeah. Another topic I would like to bring up is the pop-up crosswalk on Locust Street. Anybody hear about that? I didn't do it. I want to do it. At the corner of Locust Terrace and Locust Street, everybody across here to go to school. There's no crosswalk coming in here. I'm going to close the snack break, which is a nice little tradition. We should fill that into the agenda going forward. Since you just took a bite of Oreo, give the mic to Mayor Weinberger to talk a little bit about housing policy. Great. Thank you. Thanks for joining the MPA leadership and making the work by MPA work. It's been a while since I've been to the work by MPA. I feel like good to be back. Thanks for having me. You made a chance to talk about the housing work we've been doing since the spring. Megan Tuttle is here tonight. Megan is handing out this pretty detailed handout about this housing work. Megan is our senior planner and has been part of a big team of staff that has been working hard on this since the spring. Some of you may know I spent my whole career in housing before I got elected as Mayor, as an affordable housing developer in Florida, New York, New Hampshire, Vermont, and then came into office really focused on housing. Once I get going on housing, I talk for a long time, but I'm going to try to control myself and just try to keep summarizing 10 minutes what we've been doing since the spring. I'll try to give the big picture theory, if you will, of how we're approaching this and then leave as much time for questions about this, or if you want to talk about other topics, I'm happy to do that too. It is hard in this format to get too far into the details. Each of these five proposals we're working on has a number of details in it. That's why we've tried to create this handout to really give you a sense of what we're thinking. And let me say at the outset that the earth is soft on these housing policies. These are kind of proposals at this point, concepts, ideas at this point. The administration has not at this point come down and said, this is what we think we should do. We're getting close to that point. We do anticipate in October taking, kind of refining these proposals based on the feedback and these MPAs and a work session we're having with the council next Monday and other feedback we're getting. We're going to take this feedback and finalize these proposals handed to the city council in that first meeting in October in the hope that they kind of take that and give us a sort of directional vote as to move forward with these. There will then be substantial additional public process to actually go from these concepts to new ordinances or in some cases a charter change. So that's sort of where we are in the process. Here's what we're trying to do. From my perspective, housing is one of our biggest challenges. It impacts so much of the community in one way or another here in Burlington. It has an impact on everything from our equity policies and diversity and inclusion efforts to make Burlington a place that is welcoming and more inclusive. We don't have housing availability. It impacts our ability to do that. It impacts the ability of businesses. You hear it again and again that the biggest challenges businesses face to growth and to job creation is the high cost of housing and the sticker shock people have when they consider a job here and then look at how expensive the cost of living is. It impacts our ability to provide government services. Certainly if we could grow our number of homes, we could grow our tax base, it would be easier for us to afford our very ambitious social programs. I think getting our housing policy right impacts the environment and that pushing to me is really working very much against our climate goals to push growth and development farther and farther out into the suburbs and excerpts when we know that downtown homes have a fraction. Really 25-30% of the carbon footprint that counterpart suburban homes have. Almost no matter what your issue is, housing is a part of it. We have been focused as a city on this for a long time. The first mayor's task force on housing I believe goes back to the Sanders administration in the 80s. There's a lot of really innovative work and a lot of work that has been done in the years since and a lot of successful work and I want to be clear about that. I think Burlington should be proud of the permanently affordable housing work that it has done over the years. We pioneered things like creating shared equity housing and spun off out of the Community Economic Development Office the Champlain Housing Trust. Right here in Burlington a lot of the thinking that has had national and even international influence started here about how you can use land trusts and innovative ways to make housing more affordable for households that are able to purchase that housing. We have a very substantial federal funding and state funding that we get each year that has allowed us to create a significant amount of permanently affordable housing. We also have an outstanding code enforcement office that has been built up and resourced over the years and that is really something a lot of communities don't have to try to hold landlords property owners accountable and we have strengthened that system over time. And yet despite all that our serious challenge is persistent housing and in some ways they've gotten worse. If you compare the average cost of rent for the average Burlington Render today a study you did a few years ago showed that the average rentor was spending about 44% of their income on rent. That does not compare well to where we were a couple of decades back when the average rentor was in the 30s. This has gotten worse over time in some senses. So given that concern we have been working on this throughout my administration for seven years we had a lot of focus on this with the council back in 2015 and we actually had the council unanimously adopt something called the housing action plan. It was a 23 point plan of initiatives to work on. In a lot of ways they boiled down to kind of three big things and people have heard me give this kind of talk before I will note I've often said in the past two big things but doing all this communicating and talking to people makes me realize I should be really clear that it's really three related but separate things. One is we have continued over the last seven years Burlington's commitment to permanently affordable housing. In some ways we have expanded that commitment. We have basically doubled the housing trust fund during that time which is the local fund that we create to help with housing affordability. We have built or preserved more than 500 permanently affordable homes over the last seven years which is a significant number that compares well to prior periods of Burlington's efforts. We have on the code enforcement side, thank you Andy, on the code enforcement side we have strengthened that system over the last seven years. We've been very fortunate and this wasn't one of my hires. It was one of the department heads I inherited. Bill Ward has really taken charge of the code enforcement office and I think done outstanding work getting more out of the resources that we have in code enforcement. So just to give one example of that and there are many, but one interesting one is we for a long time had this sort of statutory commitment to inspect every rental unit in Burlington once every three years. We were not meeting, we were not even coming close to meeting that goal before Bill Ward stepped into office. Because of changes that we have made because of some policy changes because of some great kind of process flow work. We now for years have been meeting that commitment and we've actually kind of refined it even in some interesting ways. We now have a new system that allows us to focus resources, not just to have a blanket policy of inspecting every property every three years. The properties that are very well managed that score very well in our minimum housing inspections now can go five years without a new inspection. Whereas properties that are more problematic can be reinspected as much as once a year. So we're really focusing those code enforcement resources I think in a smarter way. It has allowed us to do other things like respond to on average code enforcement complaints. To a certain degree this is a complaint driven system. We now respond on average in 48 hours to a complaint. I think that system has really strengthened in recent years. An area that I have long thought Wellington could and should do better. And that was a big part of that housing action plan is on the creation of new homes outside of the permanently affordable area. That is an area where from my perspective a lot of ways the market has been broken by some of the land use policies that we have in place. And we have been, while being committed to code enforcement, while reaffirming and doing as much permanently affordable housing work as we can. We have said, you know, we have a supply problem here too. We need to create more homes if we're going to be able to broadly make Wellington more affordable and change the cost curve. And there we've had some success too. If you compare the last seven years to prior periods in recent Burlington history, it has been a marked uptick in the amount of those essentially market rate apartments that have been created. And not only have we created, you know, one study we did show that in a basically seven-year period before 2012, we only created about just under 70 total market rate apartments and we have created almost 600 in the last seven years. That seems to not only be helping those people who are unable to get into those homes, it seems to be having some of the broader impact on the market that we hope. The vacancy rate has basically doubled. It's still way too low, but it's basically doubled in the last six years. The inflation rate for housing has gone from being much higher than the general rate of inflation to actually being in the last years a little bit lower than the general rate of inflation. It's sort of leveled off and in some sense has become a little bit more affordable relative to the cost of other goods. It's still not where we want to get, still very expensive community, but some sign of progress. I think an indication that we should double down on all these strategies and that there is some sign that they're working in these five proposals in many ways is that doubling down. There are five proposals. Two of them are aimed squarely at the kind of traditional affordability or rent or protection kind of initiative. We are proposing to codify the increase in funding to the Housing Trust Fund by having a charter change that would basically at least restore the dedicated tax that goes to the Housing Trust Fund to a full penny on per thousand dollars of value. And then a second change that over time is pretty significant is it would be done in a way that as there are reappraisals that penny would, the value would rise with inflation, which is something that the current charter doesn't have. So it would ensure, you know, it would stop the situation where every year the Housing Trust Fund gets essentially eroded a little. The value would rise with inflation. The other area that I'm pretty excited about and that has definitely evolved and gotten refined out of the conversations we've had in these two housing summits since the spring is we have, I think, a really strong theory for how we deal with this problem that some people call a split incentive problem with utilities. And what people mean by that is in 85% of our rental properties in Burlington, the tenant is responsible for paying the utilities, but it is the property owner, of course, that makes decisions about weatherization. And that split incentive, you know, it really removes some of the significant financial incentive that homeowners have, for example, to upgrade their homes when they know, you know, like my home when we went through weatherization with one of these 100-year-old homes, we weatherized it, we saved 25% or more many months on our heating cast. We haven't, we've seen very good uptake of those programs in single-family homes. In general, we've struggled to get rental properties to do that kind of work. Our theory for how we address that, which again the details are in the packet, but is basically to make part of the minimum housing inspections, part of those inspections that Bill Ward does every one to five years, his team does every one to five years, will be a requirement that property owners do basic weatherization on all Burlington rental homes over a pretty focused period of time. There aren't very many cities in the country that have required this, Boulder is one that did. I think we should do it. I think it's very much consistent with our net zero energy city goals. We're clearly not going to get to those climate goals that we've been laying out and talking a lot about over the last couple weeks if we don't see much improved weatherization in many of our homes. Gabrielle, for people who don't know, has long been involved in the Burlington Electric Commission and the commission has been a real champion of this net zero energy city effort. Thank you for your work on that. The other three proposals are proposals that are aimed more, are really aimed at that supply issue. One of them is a proposal to make it much easier. We don't have very many accessory dwelling units in Burlington. We have a handful and I know we have the owner of one of them with us tonight. I don't know if Andy, you want to share anything about your experience. Somehow you found a way to get it done. There aren't many people who have. There are just a few dozen of these accessory dwelling units by which we mean these essentially small, they can either be attached or detached, small homes that can be an additional home, additional housing unit on a single family home property. Other cities that these are supposed to be legal essentially everywhere by state law, but when you get into the details of land use policy while they are nominally legal, they are often very difficult or impossible to actually build and be consistent with our land use regulations. We want to change that by changing some parking requirements, by changing some things about the way we deal with lot coverage. We think we can like, for example, Brattleboro and many other communities see significant increase in the number of these homes that are created. The second kind of supply focus new policy is about downtown and transportation corridor parking requirements for new construction. So right now, anytime a new project is built, there's a requirement for a certain amount by, you know, it depends on the power of the town and it depends on exactly the mix of uses in the new construction, but every project is required to build onsite parking. This, we are proposing that we join literally hundreds of cities across the country that either never had requirements like that or have been removing them in recent years. This has really become a movement. We think Burlington should do that and in doing so will bring down the cost of new housing and will essentially not, it is something about kind of government putting its thumb on the scales in favor of this sort of auto dependent kind of economy. To have that kind of requirement, we are proposing to go to a system where really the builders decide how much is needed in that particular location. This should be combined importantly with at the same time we would be removing the requirement for new parking to be built. Let me make sure that's clear. There will still be parking built. It just will not be required. At the same time we are removing that requirement, we will be committing to do the work. It will take about a year probably, but to do the work necessary to impose a new alternative transportation impact fee on all new developments. Please, pardon the interruption. Thank you very much for our Champlain families for attending our open house and curriculum night. We honor your support and hope you have a lovely night. Thanks also to our friends from King Street and Burlington High School for supporting our childcare program this evening. Have a great night and we'll see you tomorrow. I didn't realize it was an open house. I was a little worried when I pulled up in the parking lot. I was going to talk about the same call. Okay, sorry. So basically the last one is about short term rentals. Basically we are concerned that the proliferation of Airbnb units and ERBO units, all these kind of services by which it's easier for people to rent properties on a short term basis could really work against this effort to increase the supply of long term rental housing. We want to get this right. We have a desire not to be overly heavy handed about this. I think there is a place for Airbnb. We certainly don't want to get in the way of people wanting to use a spare bedroom to generate some income. We're not looking to impact that kind of thing, or even if people want to go away for the weekend or on a short trip and have paid for the trip by running out of their house while they're gone, it's not intended to impact that kind of rental. But for units that are really being shifted over from long term rentals to short term rentals on a consistent basis, we think there is a need for some level of regulation there. Many cities across the country have been standing up regulations. We want input on all these things. I'm particularly interested in input here in that there's a real range in the way different cities are doing this, and it's not obvious how you get this right. So input is very much welcome. With that, I will stop and answer any questions or listen to any feedback from a give me on this now, and I'm also happy to answer other questions. So the short term rental policy and just looking over quickly right now, is there going to be a requirement that the units be owner occupied or anything along those lines? I don't know how much of a problem you guys have seen in sort of investor-owned or corporate-owned properties. I know that's a problem in other cities, but... Megan, can you give the quick story exactly where we've landed at this point? Yeah, so that is a really good kind of perspective that we've heard a lot about, is not having the host on site and how that leads to issues of speculative property development, and also just it is an issue of the behavior of people that are renting and making sure that any issues are addressed. So we also did hear though from people that felt that if we required the owner to live on site, that it was not a fair approach to tenants, renters that might also want to list their space on these sites. So the way that the proposal is structured right now is that the host, whether there are a renter or an owner, needs to live on the property, needs to be their primary residence. Yeah, I just want to weigh into that Airbnb harass, I'm sure it is one, because I would think that this Airbnb phenomenon, though it suffers from some of the downsides you suggest, quality of life for those who do live permanently, reduces the number of permanent houses, and those avoid in our other limited options for tourists. In other words, I would think there's a lot of positive tourism dollars and economic activity that allowing Airbnb folks to come in and stay on a temporary basis would promote in the city of Burlington. So I would urge lighter regulation and taking your sweet time before coming down heavy on this. I don't know, and I would also wonder if you just sort of let it reach its equilibrium at some point before you move too quickly. I just see Burlington as such an attractive place for tourism and tourism dollars, right? And I see this as yet another place in the food chain where people can stay if the hotels are booked or if they just prefer that option. Yeah, thanks for that, Jeff. Again, I do find this one to be a challenging call. I will say it feels to me like we should grapple with this now, debate the pros and cons, and try our best. These things are always certain to be subject to reconsideration, but what has happened, I think we should really try to get the policy right now and get it out there now. Some cities that have waited to make regulations have seen, people have ended up getting hurt. I don't know if people listen to the Plan Money Podcast. There was a pretty hard-wrenching story recently about a woman who didn't have extensive education, but she had found a way to really make a good life for herself, fixing up and very responsibly taking care of these shotgun houses in New Orleans, and she put a lot of money into restoring these, and New Orleans actually came out and said these are fine, we like them, and more money went into them, this woman put more money in, and then they totally changed her mind a year later, and now all of a sudden she can't make any money out of these investments. I'm worried about, I think we should figure out what we want our policy to be and commit to it. We are definitely not trying to prohibit the existence of these. I think what's clear to me is we don't want five, six, ten unit buildings just totally switching over and see a very substantial erosion of our permanent housing supply, but between that and kind of no-no regulation, there's a lot of around and we're trying to figure it out. But thank you for the caution and you're right, I mean there are definitely positive impacts, positive benefits of having more visitors here at the same time. We probably have time for one more. Hi. Hi. Are you guys going to do any work with UVM about housing more of your students on campus? Oh yeah, I'm really glad you asked that question because what I have been trying to start this talk off by pointing out is there definitely something on this five bullet, five issue list. We think all five of these things are important and in some sense they've been kicking around for some time and we want a process to make decisions about them and get them done. This is not, there are definitely other very important elements of this housing challenge that are not on there. One is exactly what you've raised, the student housing issue. Another is I did want to make it clear that at these two housing summits that we've been, that we've had, we've had a very strong and kind of organized runners group that's come out and offered a lot of ideas about how we could strengthen our kind of tenant protection, runner protection system and their input as well as sort of looking around the country at these sort of resurgent tenant protection movements that have been getting a lot of energy in New York, in California, in the Pacific Northwest recently. I have sort of added to this homework assignment I've said to the Community Economic Development Office by the end of October I want to come forward to the council with a memo that really kind of asks and answers the question are the things we can do to strengthen our runner protection system. Again, this is an area I think for us that has a long, strong history of and that we have continued to get better in the last seven years but we're really asking ourselves is there more than we should do. The student housing issue is a little bit different. This is an area that has very much been part of the housing action plan. You know, since we, for the last, really for the last seven years we've been working on it. We set an explicit goal of creating, basically building new student beds for half of the UVM and Champlain College students so we're living off-campus in our Burlington neighborhoods. That translates to about 1700 new beds that we, student beds, that we set the goal of trying to create out of the 3400 that we believe exist of students more or less living in the neighborhoods. We have made some progress towards that goal. About 600 new student beds have been built and opened in recent years. Most recently there's about 300 at that 194 St. Paul Street project that Champlain College has built. But we have kind of stalled out on that a little bit. It's been sometimes since we've really seen a big step forward in that and that it's a frustration to me and I know it's a frustration to that woman on your right. Councilor Paul has been very active on this and other counselors as well. We, on Monday, so I really wanted there to be a sixth bullet about the student housing here and I really was hoping UVM would kind of join with us and be part of the Housing Summit and kind of commit to, you know, a couple ideas of what they could have committed to and been part of the Housing Summit. They weren't quite ready to do it in that they are going through a leadership change there. Of course they, you know, they have a new president who's just came on in the middle of the summer just shortly about a month after we had the first Housing Summit. They are completing some analytical work on their own. This master plan they've been working on frankly for a long time but they say they're going to be done with it by the end of the year. On Monday, I think the council is going to approve an extension of the agreement we have with UVM through the middle part of next year with the expectation that this is really the issue between us and UVM right now. We've sorted through a whole bunch, successfully frankly, through a whole bunch of financial issues over the last three, four years. We've got a big infrastructure commitment out of UVM to help pay for all the infrastructure work you've got to see going on around downtown. We've worked through some problems with the, you know, you may have seen some stories about the water billing issues and whatnot. We had, we had a whole bunch of financial issues, kind of like we had in the broader city that we had to kind of sort through. We've finished that work now. This is the issue between us and I am very much hoping that within the next year we will see a new agreement that sees commitment to, I think probably the best strategy that I see happening would be on existing UVM owned land. There are certain areas of their campus that are really zoned very restrictively, very little can be built on there now. I think the city would consider some upzoning of the campus in those areas in return for a UVM commitment to work with third party private, you know, developers essentially that would own new dormitories, new housing on the campus that would, because it's privately owned, it would be taxable. There would be that benefit to the city as well. I am optimistic that the stars are aligning and that there will be some real progress in that area over the next year. Sorry if we got it over. Well, thanks again for the opportunity to be here. I'm happy to come back and talk about other topics sometime soon if there's interest in that. And I do just want to make sure everyone knows that the budget this year included this significant increase in the funding for each of the MPAs and we're happy to do that. We're hoping it leads. I know this MPA that hosted that film series over at Sir Plain Caucus recently. So it's great to see and look forward to hearing what else you're able to do with this, the new resources. Great, and thank you for the opportunity. Thanks so much. Thanks so much, and thanks, Megan, also, for being here. Thank you. Thank you so welcome. The man of the hour here, our host, Principal Joe Restigini, who has just finished hosting his first curriculum night and first couple of weeks of school and managed to welcome us here into this space to have kind of a different atmosphere throughout our meeting. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, and when the question was, should we have it at this space? It's going to be curriculum night and open house. There's probably going to be 600 people in and out of the building. I don't know if that's a good idea, but I think it was. I think maybe that just the positive spirit and energy in the evening was helpful and hopefully got maybe some other friends in the door. So thank you for having me. I'm Joe Restigini. I am your new principal at Champlain Elementary School. So briefly to introduce myself as to how I come to you. My story and education starts with my wife and I, who wasn't my wife at the time, but she was from Montana. And I am from New York. And when we decided that we wanted to start a life together and wanted to become a unit, where is that going to happen? And I was really not going to move to Montana. That wasn't top of my list. And when we had the conversation, she was really adamant about New York is not going to be where she was going to go either. So we literally looked at the fundamental policies and practices of a new place. Where would we want to start over again as a family? And Burlington hit the top of the list with everything that was socially progressive and politically motivated and family centered and all of the factors we checked off the list for Burlington for months. We looked at the map. At that time it was a paper map that we unfolded on a table and we saw a place called Essex Junction and it sounded like the name probably has a train station in it. And so we literally said, let's go there. And so we put all of our stuff in the car and moved to, we started looking at Essex Junction but as happenstance would have it, we moved to the Champlain school apartment literally right across the street from the building here. The first time we moved here one of the things on the list was I was coming back to school to become a teacher and when we lived in that apartment I would wake up in the morning and look out the window and say, someday I would love to be a teacher at that school and Cycle of the Universe has it now that I have really come full circle and I'm now welcome as your new principal. So thank you so much for having me. It's a beautiful love story to be here that is really special to me. I'm really proud and honored to be an elementary school leader and to be also a leader in the community as well. So I appreciate the opportunity to speak in front of you tonight and I also like to have the opportunity to be a part of your planning as we look forward to building a future community. And as you can see tonight if you have the opportunity to walk through the halls it's a great and diverse and spirited population of people who are active and prepared and wanting to do good things for the community. Again, thank you so much for having me. I'm honored to be here and thanks for coming tonight. Thank you. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I don't know if I have any good answers, but I'll try. I have a question. What's your favorite thing about Burlington? Sorry. Thank you. Yes, Mohammed, favorite thing about Burlington immediately was that we love the seasons and all of the things that the different seasons offer. Love the weather in the fall. Love the snow in the wintertime. The spring weather. I'm a runner, my wife's a runner, so we love the bike path immediately like this. But I think the thing that is my favorite thing about Burlington as I've kind of grown up in Burlington is the fact that we are such a welcoming and inclusive and spirited community that every opinion is valued and every opinion is wanted at the table. So I think that's the thing that I would say when people ask me what do you love about living in Burlington? What do you love about being in Burlington? It's that thing. There's a spirit of like all are welcome, truly all are welcome. I'm a new member of the Champlain school community because my granddaughter just started in kindergarten. Okay. But I've heard a lot of talk through the recent years about the school and I know there are challenges here. I know you've gone through a bunch of principles over the relatively recent history. What do you see as the biggest challenges that you're going to be addressing in Burlington? Really I'll start with what my goal is as we start this new endeavor and as I kind of begin my area here. My goal is to build a sense of community and a sense of respect and inclusion so that the challenges that are going to come down the road the challenges that are going to be present and that our president in every school environment won't be as hard. If there's a sense of respect and community in a place if people feel that the principle is as accessible as I hope to be and put myself out there to be then I'm able to answer questions and there is a level of transparency that is required when we deal with sensitive issues and we're talking about sensitive young people as they're starting their educational careers. It's important that the principal and that the teachers and that the school community is open and welcoming and the climate is one of inclusion so that's my first goal is to make sure that that spirit of community is just how we do business. So answer the question. What's the first challenge? What's the biggest challenge? The biggest challenge is to make sure that all voices are heard and welcome and appreciated and that's from your five-year-old granddaughter who's starting kindergarten now to our fifth grade students who are active and will be active tomorrow at the climate strike and to the parent educator who's starting their educational journey it's their first job in education to this veteran teacher who's been teaching for 25 years and to make sure that their voices are equally heard at the table and so that, again, when we go back to that piece where all are welcome, all opinions are needed to be included in order to have a collaborative environment that's the challenge is to make sure that there are people who go home at night feeling like dissatisfied with their experience. Five-year-old to 65-year-old. Another question? I have a quick question. So, my daughter transferred out of Champlain to Indian Arts last year and I'm curious if you have thought about implementing restorative practices or other strategies for getting sure kids are kind to each other. That's a really important question. Burlington School District's adopted restorative practices one of our fundamental schools to do this from elementary school to preschool to high school this is a training that all teachers, all classroom teachers all administrators, everyone has restorative practices just a fundamental practice of what happens in the classroom when things don't go as expected and so it needs to become social-emotional learning needs to become something that's taught in our curriculum as explicitly as reading and math if we do a better job at the early grades teaching social-emotional learning and making sure that everyone is equipped with the ability to advocate for themselves and to have a community that wraps around challenging behaviors and is able to appreciate them and learn from them and grow from them in a way that supports everybody in the classroom we'll do better in our academic learning as well. Where we are right now in 2019 with everything that's going on it's just fundamental that we teach social-emotional learning the same way that we do other subjects in the curriculum and I love the way, the fundamental idea of Integrated Arts Academy that philosophy, that mantra of let's integrate movement and make sure that the arts are part of what the regular elementary school curriculum is that's just good practice that's just meaning kids where they are as learners and I fully endorse it and we'll encourage as the years go by my teachers to install that as part of their practice as well I think that their model, we can learn from what they're doing there we can learn from their coaching model and bring it on board here So we have professional staff out on a recess so part of the way that our new teachers contract work as we went into this school year was that we had less after school time dedicated to staff and professional meetings which means that teachers also gave some time towards lunch, recess, so we were able to staff recess currently with more professional staff and lunch with more professional staff so that there are teachers out on the playground with kids during recess times and this is good for teacher-to-student contact time and it's also an important relationship building time because what it looks like in the classroom right now the classroom time is really rigorous our day is rigorous and we don't get that authentic play time that we might have gotten when I was in elementary school or you were in elementary school so at this point that's having professional staff teachers out with their students in their classrooms on the playground it's just good practice it's just good opportunity to get to know kids to build a relationship with them in a way that's authentic and important outside, playing, doing what they love so my wife dresses me yes, I know you're not yet this is not my go-to outfit I'm not very good at matching clothes and so she picked you out I know you were wondering so it's good, thank you I appreciate that Mercedes, thanks you're welcome thank you so much thanks for having me you're welcome so superintendent Owang I would like to welcome you I'm going to tee up your presentations for you here and you're going to share with us a bit about the 18-19 year review you can use this and try pressing this button and you'll see as much as it happens which is advanced yep let me just have a text yep alright, let's start well, greetings everyone hello happy new year I've been sharing this year review with a number of different community groups and as well as NPAs and every year at the end of the year I do a report that looks at the successes throughout the course of the year in different compartments and it's quite challenging because we get lots of input around what people feel hits the threshold and we have to kind of synthesize that down and I share it with the board and this year after I did it I was kind of reflecting on it and I was really kind of excited about when I started thinking oh my goodness I mentioned my fifth year here in Brompton and wow how time has flown and I started reflecting back on when I was attempting to arrive here those of you who've been around that had some visa challenges trying to cross the border and resolved that and got through but at the same time there were some significant challenges in the district when I was coming in there was some financial challenges there were a lot of budget votes there were some deficits in the budget there were some financial irregularities that were happening that need to be corrected on the school fronts we had some documented safety issues that were being expressed from staff and students there were actual racial tensions we had students leaving schools protesting against race we had some documented discrimination allegations and I heard from the newcomer community as well too in terms of their kids not getting the appropriate supports to succeed we had students I don't know if you guys heard this story before we had newcomer kids who graduated walk across the stage to high school and get their diplomas and then their parents are really excited and then they say they can go to college or some sort of post secondary and they find out that they actually didn't graduate it's not a real certificate so we were kind of just trying to make people feel good and go through and so that was a surprise to me to hear those types of challenges so it was a thing we had to get to at the same time which I didn't know at the time because you know when you accept a job you hear about some of the challenges you go okay great we have eight bargaining units we've installed negotiations with all eight units and so it was like okay well come here you go but at the same time based on my analysis of the district I really thought that we had the essence and the foundations to move forward so we continued to move forward so it gave me great pride to share with you the accomplishments after this past year where I kind of reflect the back and say okay well there were some real challenges but we were still able to maintain some good product for our students and for our community so I'm looking forward to sharing that with you one of the things I'll say I've got a presentation here this presentation is only about six hours long but I will attempt to do it in about 10 or 15 minutes so we can have some conversations but I have put my link here www.btsd.org district superintendent you can go to the website and see this presentation along with other content relating to this information and you can spend more time in detail if you're interested in doing that so I'm not going to spend that much detail on every single slide but I do want to share this with you let's see if I can make this work alright I heard some of the previous conversations and give me questions to Joe and I do want to say welcome Joe thank you we have a new principal here we're happy to have Joe and we've had a great start just to let you know Joe brought some great enthusiasm and some structure to the school so I know that the staff have appreciated so far and I'm hearing from parents they're pretty satisfied so thank you Joe one of the things we established a few years ago was a 2G client old areas we established these three big buckets we had some consultations with what are the things that are important we had to figure out a way to synthesize in a way that we can start taking action through budget and through our priorities and our action plans with our staff and so I call them the big rocks which are these things including teaching and learning eco-opinion culture and sustainable finance facilities so we have three big buckets and so we're able to get a framework around to do that normally if you look at other districts and stuff you'll see everyone has some forms and we didn't have anything and we hadn't had anything for as long as I could look back to finding some of the things we were doing some of the budget things we didn't have a focus this is where we're going to put our energies at the same time the state was developing their own priorities so we were kind of like I hope that they don't come in and say we're doing this now and we're going to do this this and we're going to say wow we can't really do our priorities because the state is mandating us to do these but fortunately we're able to align ours so if you see the green part here this is the Vermont County System requirements and it aligns really well with our goal so academic proficiency personalized high quality staffing goes in line with our inclusive teaching and learning safe and healthy schools environment and culture and then investment and priorities aligns really well with our sustainable finance and facilities we've been working on most of you heard about some of the capital campaigns and things like that the only thing I would say is that the state talks about investment and priorities but I would like that if they would put some dollars to that and say this is a part because they used to have this but I'm not sure how you make that a priority they're not really going to link that to the support to give that so that's a challenge we have with that but I know we've had great support from the community to move ahead with those initiatives so we've been able to continue this thing okay so I'm going to share some of these nuggets in the big buckets the three goal areas so you can see how they kind of align up a little bit so other inclusive teaching learning expanded learning have you ever heard that before that program expanded learning okay that was that kid in the front of the class how about after school you heard about after school alright so after school is part of expanded learning right and people don't know that but that's the model we use and when I talk about expanded learning we're talking about continuing the learning for students beyond the regular instructional day in the summer so we have a number of summer programs that are free for our students summer school we've got special programs for special day students and we also feed them in terms of nutrition and we have our program that's been recognized nationally in terms of deliverables and also we receive all kinds of grants based on what we're producing to keep those programs the same if you look at this here our staff and our director Christy Gilles who runs this is an excellent job looks at satisfaction rates convenient parents use after school and also use the summer also it's part of childcare as well too and 99% of parents satisfaction that's amazing to do that and many of the individuals that work after school in particular and even in the summer usually you'd be up students and also people in the community as well too and that's an excellent challenge one of the things I would say is we serve 1,600 students just for this program 1,600 students that's more than many districts in Vermont just as our top to school expanded so I want to kind of share that there are lots of nuggets in here that you can do for yourself or go into the site and there's more about the program in the first slide and continue learning after school especially many of our kids who access some of these family programs they may not have the same supports at home in terms of the preparatory learning that they would get from our staff okay we'll spend too much time on this but we started looking at some metrics about two years ago we changed our website and created a system of alignment with all our schools have a similar look and started getting into the 21st century and using online methods and started to gather data around that and getting feedback around what we can do better I know it's starting to work because I've gotten communications from parents that say stop sending me these communications so that's good from where we were before people said we don't know anything what's going on now they're like don't send us anymore so that's good improved student support services so have you heard the term for the department we have called student support services anyone know have you heard of special ed okay so special ed is student support services actually is the bigger umbrella that covers special ed it covers our nursing our psychologists the social network guidance counseling people mostly are familiar with special education right but I just want to point to this graphic here these students doing the ribbon cutting and they were doing ribbon cutting for this gagabal pit have you been familiar with that gagabal anyone that is the greatest craze in elementary school right now gagabal do you have a pit yet yeah okay that's the greatest craze right now now these students went on a journey where these students went on a journey with their teachers to develop a plan and a funding plan to acquire all of that and work with our coffee services department in terms of the building of that and went all the way to the end where they were able to provide this for their school playground and so there's lots of learning that went in there and now they have a show if you go there doing recess there's a lineup to play gagabal and I had the chance to go for the ribbon cutting and play the first game with the kids in a third grade that got me out so building education we have tremendous building education programs and one of the challenges we have is that we have waiting lists every year we don't have enough space and those of you who are maybe in your child care there's not enough spaces to accommodate all the parents that want to engage the parents in these programs so we're working on that but our programs have high quality in terms of early end and we know from the research that when we spend a dollar at this level it could be used about $10 so we're trying to focus on the early learners and get them early many of our students who are in the early end program come with special needs so it's critically important for us to catch them early to start doing the work so when they get into grade one we kind of know who they are we know how to do their coding and support and care in the future Burlington Technical School this is probably the best kept secret in Burlington the Tech Center has amazing programs I know when when I was in school when we talked about tech or vocational schools people often talked about low end achievement or kids who need to work with their hands or those kind of comments but our program is very broad ranging we have students from every achievement level and we've developed in the last couple years a human dynamics strand we've had students go into the health professions nursing looking into pre-med through these programs we've got great professionals they're people from the field that work on these there's television and audio production you can go and see a studio we've got a green room we've got a sound room kids learn how to do radio all kinds it's really exciting stuff there and one of the programs that we have the only one in the state is an aviation program you know we have an aviation program at the airport we have airplanes and helicopters we actually had a few years ago going into the FBI we've got a couple of helicopters just not here but I was going to see if the board doesn't have one but it's really great it's amazing to see calling our program to see if they can hire our students there's so much work out there we never have enough students to accommodate the program the nice thing I've seen in the last couple years is we're starting to engage young women in some of these pieces and there's one particular woman I can't remember her name but she graduated program and got employment and she's been helping talk about the program this year there were a couple of young ladies at the orientation and that's why you're here and they said oh because we heard her speak and we came to check it out so that's really exciting to see that it's starting to catch on I want to talk about high scholastic achievement because we have some tremendous examples of high achievement one of the things we've been working on now that we're kind of looking at our data and trying to crystallize this the phrase I have is called so what I mean by that is that we have students who are in the gap traditionally we talk about the gap in North America there are students with low economic special ed and often students of color who are following that gap and we want to raise the bar but what I've been trying to say is that we're closing the gap but we're also raising the bar for all students if you look at international data on achievement I know one piece of score shows that in the U.S. we're 501 which is the average the average is 501 and we're 479 so that means we're below the gap so even if you were to say even if I say okay the gap is comparing to wealthy white students right let's take everybody together we're still below the gap so that's not my bar my bar is to move everybody up because as a nation we're still even below the people who are at the top we've got Singapore, China, Finland, Canada and they're doing tremendous things around nationwide literacy and numeracy so I've been working on our staff to have that monitor we're not just closing the gap we're raising the bar for everyone so these are some really good examples of students who have gone up and have demonstrated their excellence throughout the country last year Jackson Elder last year was a presidential scholar and in the last four years we've had presidential scholars out of Brompton every single year that's amazing two years ago there were seven in the country and three were from Brompton High School that's amazing like I was like what really? that's amazing so there's some really good examples here in this graphic well there's a group right here that won the state scholar ball and it was a team of off emails and they were going around winning all kinds of champions and it was really cool it was like super girl power but it was good to see that they were leveraging that opportunity and we were trying to so there's a lot of good examples of students exceeding here they won the the Vermont brain these are students right from our high school they're winning state and national accolades English learner programs this is a group that we know that we have to give concerted strategic efforts to and I gave you those examples at the beginning about the graduation and how the people were graduating and that was that was not acceptable and so we've made some of those changes we've got great partnerships with our neighboring districts like Newsy people often look to us as in the state in terms of leadership around working with newcomer students and strategies around English language learning and so we've been doing that on number level and able to partner with different groups we've offered all kinds of courses to support and one thing I would say I'll show you this slide about BTC BTC now is fully accessible for you know students now or before you couldn't go right because they didn't have but now we have a staff that's dedicated and we can integrate those students they can have those opportunities we won't spend too much time on this but we've also even gone into technology and family friendly report cards so if you look on our website you can see you can share this with people who might be interested there's some sessions we're having for parents of newcomers to kind of explain the system to them a little bit better and how to connect and last year we had staff engage in using apps everybody has a phone now apps that they can communicate in languages and have to continue to develop those technologies without partners to do that work but the family friendly report cards is really cool because parents can be educated on how to read this report card and then they can now learn how to advocate for their kids in the schools and some of the report card what it looks like is kind of color coded right they'll get something in red if they're in red that means okay they should ask about this because their child's not doing well in this and what should they do go to the school and get a plan to make sure that there's accessible in that area with the graphic of some of our staff I talked about Christy over here she's the expand learning she's gotten us many grants and being recognized nationally for her work we've had national principles of year state substitute teachers of year and fun on so we've got some great staff doing some wonderful things as well too in terms of innovation year ago I think it is now time flies we started this initiative called city and lake semester and what I like about this initiative it already came from the ground up it started with a group of community members connected with teachers and they came and had a proposal around a project they wanted to do that was innovative in terms of moving the classroom out to Burlington using the lake and the science center and different parts of our community to have learning I said no sent them back they came back with refining and got some grants as well and they were able to partner and they established this initiative it's been great I went to the concluding exercise last year when the students were giving their presentations around what they did and it was amazing because the students that were engaged there were a range of students who were doing well in the classroom and I asked them what is different about this classroom this semester than when you were in the high school normal socratic classroom and they said the engagement they actually got to go out and talk to real people and figure out things meaning they started finding different career paths just based on their experience number one young lady was talking about her experience and she was so frustrated she was trying to get through to some government agency she was like I kept calling they kept passing me to somebody else to somebody else and they had to leave a message and I couldn't get in that's the real world, that's what happens you got to find a way and she figured it out and she said okay, she learned from that so they were getting some real life experiences and so we're going to continue with this project and kind of spawn the number of different things I'm part of a consortium at the Harvard Institute and we've been doing some research and learning around deeper learning and equity and we're going to get a chance to profile this group because some of the elements of things they've done is considered deeper learning so I'm going to be excited to share that with them we have the whole consortium coming to Burlington, we're hosting them in October so we're going to get a chance to see this they'll be excited to see that cooking cart created by students as well I talked a little bit about data with an achievement gap we can't develop high yield strategies if we can't assess them, monitor them and track them and some of the challenges we've had is around data collection and that's I would say we take some responsibility for that but at the same time the state hasn't gotten their act together for a long time because they're amending us to use a system that they're trying to implement which hasn't been implemented well so we're not connecting the information but what we've done is try to be proactive we've hired a data systems coordinator to come in and now work with all our staff and look at how we're going to organize what data correctly and work with people like Jill Principles how to use the data with the teachers to do some monitoring and some tracking and that's not working so we can move it forward we also made a commitment to the achievement gap where we hired an achievement gap lead with that person like the champion of achievement and that person is responsible for coordinating with all the other teams and programs and to coordinate the strategies and we had a team at Harvard last summer did this in training with other districts who were interested in the same strategies and think of a lot of good strategies for developing the work here as well so this is just more about the different data pieces and data sources and some graphics of our staff in the classroom using data walls and how they're using data to engage students in the form formative and assessment pieces as well and changing the model in terms of one of the big pieces is high yield first best instruction we have to do that we have to build the capacity of our teachers so we have to give them training so they can support students and so that's what we're doing right now in terms of restructuring the model we're raising the bar okay so the last grouping is sustainable finance and facilities this one will be quite easy because you've probably been engaged in this thank you Burlington for the high school bond which has given us the opportunity to create beautiful learning centers and spaces for the next generation and the next generation of Burlington so we're engaged in that work right now so that's part of our capital plan and we're very appreciative that the three members of Burlington support education in our city and with the capital plan there's more capital planning there's been some work here at Champlain over the last couple of years and if you've driven down Main Street in the summer you probably saw Edmonds all the construction there significant work happening in all our schools at different times and they've got significant work happening there that's going to improve the spaces for that school and the learning and I'll show you in the next graphic here you can see I don't know if you can see from back there but it's a beautiful space I think we'll have to do an open house to show the work that's being done we're kind of just moving and getting it done but I think people need to kind of see it and appreciate it and this space here which is a beautiful new sort of cafeteria receiving area and we can use it for a workshop space as well this used to be called the dungeon the basement and it was not a good space for students to be in here so the work is happening so all the support the community has given us is the results are right here right thank you again for tossing our budget and with all the support just quickly I'm almost to the end here food project we've got one of the best food projects in the country David Davis is the president-elect of the national community of the national food project and he's asked to give testimony to legislation and senate all the time and has an excellent job with this initiative one thing I will read all the pieces to you but I'll say that we speed our students breakfast lunch and dinner and one of the toughest decisions that I have as a superintendent is coming snow days and on snow days one of the reasons why it's also challenging is that I know that when there's no school we have students who don't eat because they rely on coming to school to eat so it's like but Doug has been able to create bag lunches at certain locations in schools and students actually go people are actually going to walk through the schools and get bag lunches so that means they really have a need for it so we're thankfully going to read that I'll also say this is probably one of the best run departments I mean we run this initiative at a profit right and because Doug's department also caters out right you've seen like the food truck around maybe and you've seen that and they cater out to different events and things like that so they generate dollars that we can continue to support the lunches for our students and do other things with it Epocharmic culture somebody asked about restorative practices yes we are a restorative practice district and we're going full on restorative practices and bird practices for me is an opportunity for prevention of bullying and antisocial behaviors but it's also an approach that helps to restore upon this harm right and so we're doing everyone's getting trained at every level and even at Central Office we've got a restorative practice team and a group there's a coordinated group for the district that brings staff together and clients the learning was a summit this summer and training throughout the year and you can see the graphic here we brought all the staff together right the high school we did a full day of restorative practice training and so you'll see some of our schools have really moved to a high level where teachers are doing restorative circles before they even start their lessons in classroom creating a really nurturing environment right and for those of you who had a chance to teach or be in a classroom you can create the best lessons but if you don't have control of the classroom in the environment students aren't going to be ready to learn they're not going to be able to be successful and they're not comfortable in that space so that's what we're trying to do is to balance that out and we know over the last couple of years we've been employing so many strategies our suspension rates have come down right 40% from a few years ago and we'll continue to move on that trend a couple of just highlights there are a couple of events that happen throughout the year that we get really excited about this reading and racism many schools do this so if you see that maybe you might be interested in coming and reading to a class that'd be great you can bring your own book or we can pick one for you and we have a number of staff and a few members go into schools and everyone has a great time usually the students start to see different faces in the classroom we get excited about that we had our second annual Beyond Black History Month and it's a great event we can see other people that showed up because we feed them, feed food people come out for that but the content is great too it's an opportunity to display the learnings from the students from the previous months and they talk about history, civil rights and other sort of social action pieces one of the reasons why I placed it in March as opposed to February is we wanted to make the explicit point that black history is not just for February but we want to move to an inclusive curriculum where it's integrated and someday hopefully we don't have a black history we just have history because it's totally integrated in recognizing everyone's histories so that's the main goal of starting in March to make that point this is the start of continuing student engagement so lots of opportunities for students to be engaged and different pieces here this was a great news story from one of our students that was talking about gender mutual washrooms and locker rooms that we really focused on in all the lenses so this is a good example of students simplifying the treatment that they received in our schools teacher appreciation week graphic is gone there it's a really great graphic and plants and all kinds of things you could blame me so I think I might be out of my way thank you so that's all of the vision statement you haven't seen it called the being creative and courageous people we want you to join thank you we have about 5 minutes for questions maybe a good time any questions I have a comment and I have about 10 questions my comment is I'm from Burlington City semester program I'm faculty at UVM I'm looking at that curriculum as sort of a model for the way that I would love to teach I mean trying to figure out from them how to do this it's an amazing curriculum it's a really innovative program I don't know if you know it or not but there's a UN sustainability conference it's happening in Burlington next week and we're showcasing that and it's a contribution to sustainable education so can you send me a presentation on that we're actually some of your kids are coming to us to talk and share their experiences so it's really great my question is about these I don't know what we're calling it exactly but lockdown drills and I think they're really intended to be protections against active shooters and I'd like to know what your thoughts are on those programs I know my daughter came home last night with a lot of questions that kind of got me concerned and I started doing some research into it and it looks like most of the research says it's probably a bad idea to even be engaging in that kind of thing so I'd like to know what you think about it and are we required to do it by the state or are we choosing to do it yes well we do have some requirements one from the fire department in terms of emergency procedures and things like that and the state that set out some guidelines on that but to go back to the philosophy I'm not really comfortable with some of the old and I say old practices around lockdowns and sort of old term emergency breakouts we're moving we expect the last two years into research around what we need to do the reality of education if you look at the last 20 years that's happened here in North America is that schools are not safe like they used to be and we need to respond in an appropriate way and we've just probably seen communication on this probably we're going to send something out to the parent we're going to use a approach called run high fight around active shooters and emergency procedures and when I saw the presentations from the people who developed it and worked it that's one of the challenges in terms of the shock value to young children in particular when they're doing things it scares their crap out of them because how do we do it age appropriately in a sensitive way to do that and that's really hard different things and we had a chance to see some examples of how not to do it so we're reflecting on that and you'll see a communication from myself or the safety team around where we're going and we're going to have a talk to parents and say hey this is what we're going to do and this is what is going to look like training our staff and we're going to employ this strategy because it's a real thing and I remember I was in I think I was in Tennessee last year maybe before and while I was there there were a bunch of educators and this news flash came out there was an assistant principal principal was away so he decided he's going to do an emergency lockdown because he's going to step up and then do this and what they did was he was outside a gun and then using a flash to flash into classrooms to try to simulate this is a real situation you should be able to respond and it just totally beat everybody out in the classroom because the teachers didn't know it was just a practice students didn't know students were crying and they thought it was real and that was really important and he didn't have any foresight so we spent as I said two years working on safety to kind of figure out what would be the best approach for us in Newfoundland and how do we roll it out in age appropriate ways to be sensitive and we cannot do it we have to do it in this day and age do we have to do it because there's a mandate or do we say we have to do it I think we have to do it because we don't I've spoken to the superintendent from Parkland and the stories they tell and the unpreparedness they say if I knew this or I knew that I knew that it tells you that we have to do something to be prepared for those situations that we can handle in a lot better right it's unfortunate we're dealing with that in education you never think that school is a place I remember once a few years ago I was at a summit and I was sitting next to the minister of education for Finland and Finland was like the scores are really well and I was talking we had a little small circle with like three or four people we were talking about safe schools at that time some shooting came out of something we were talking about safe schools and he was shaking his head he was like I don't understand he goes I just don't understand how you would put I'm giving his accent it's safe in school together like he didn't get it like safe schools we call it we said safe schools what do you think schools are not safe but based on the track record we have we know it is a it's a threatening spot in schools so I think that we have to do something to prepare our staff to protect our students and have our kids in a situation where they can respond if something were to happen not going to help people I have been the principal in a school where there was a shooting in the parking lot I've been a principal in my neighboring school right across the street there was a shooting in the school so I've seen the effects of when that moment happens how people react and you don't know if there's going to be another shot and what should you do you should be sending your parents coming they're coming through the line of fire and you know and so you can get pretty chaotic so I believe that we do have to do some preparation and try to have conversations with our students and staff hopefully something that we'll never have to respond to other questions any answers I have a question so I think I mentioned before my daughter goes to A.A. and I was curious if you could tell us a little about your magnet assessment I know that it's been a long time coming there are really unique schools and districts looking to kind of assess and I even know that a board member actually affected a vote about supporting the magnet schools at one point because their legalty assessment hasn't been done and I was kind of like wow this is really affecting policy so I was wondering if you could do an assessment of elementary schools because we want to include schools like Champlain and the magnets so we want to see if okay what's happened over the last 10 years what worked what didn't work but my perspective what worked we should be calculating and integrating to all our schools it's good for those schools probably when we do for that school and I know some board members have even talked about oh maybe we should have a tech magnet and this magnet but for me it's kind of doing the analysis and finding out what are the pieces that are working so we can do them for all our elementary schools I'm not against magnets at all but it has to be the right approach and have the right resources and the right strategies and often we get from our schools you get this divide and conquer thing the magnets got that and we don't have that so I really want to be able to say to parents yes you know you have a choice and if you go to Champlain you're going to have a great standard of education and if you go to Edmonds you're going to have a big choose to go to you're going to have a great... we don't have that right so we need to do that so we do have a staff task force the board is working on a committee task committee to kind of do some review and do some analysis on that so I suspect that will take pretty much the year to go through and then I would see hopefully some recommendations to superintendent and say hey this is what we're going to do we're going to be able to support Joe in doing this and doing that I know my previous experience we were fortunate enough to be building new schools and every school that we had we didn't call them magnets we called them a theme so it's a difference in terms of integrating we had an arts team we had a technology team we had a sustainability team and one of the differences was that the principal got the principal was hired and said okay this is going to be the theme the principal either had some of that background and could be a champion and then the orientation is to invite staff to come and join that focus right so teachers got to go if they wanted to be part of that you know an element of it as opposed to where we are it's like okay we just can't turn schools into that easily because one we got to deal with some contractual stuff through the contract and people may not want to change their practice right but I found it more effective when we had people who volunteered said yeah I want to be part of that so I would hope we could do analysis on entry schools and be able to at least find if I were to go through and did an analysis and say okay these things work let's pick the three top things that work except all our schools have that a coach a theme coach or whatever it is that comes out and do that so that would be exciting to see when that analysis gets completed I think we do have a lot of potential in Bronson I think there's community support in Bronson so I think it's something that we could actually do where in some communities it kind of gets divided on that I think we can do it thank you it's kind of prerogative to ask it's maybe something that everyone else knows so if it is just in brief is there anything that you're able to share either from the board perspective or your perspective superintendent in two years from now the hiring process for the VHS principle or what your thoughts are I know that we're just finished that conversation about where it's coming from no two years from now we have a board has a policy on hiring so it could be changed by then from the other boards that come on but we would follow whatever policy that the board puts in place I think what's important to the board that's come through is that there's a level of community engagement right around what the elements for a principle would be what their staff input in terms of what they feel they'll meet and then there's some student engagement based on the age those are the key things that have gotten from the board that I think would probably carry through even if they changed some of the elements Jeff do you want to comment on that? I think that's well said if there was some specifics about the question that we didn't answer that you all didn't answer go ahead and say it but I think I'm really excited about the team we have now we've had some really good hires besides Joe Joe's one of our great hires and everyone's also a great start this year we've had a really good start personally this is probably one of the best years here in Burlington that we started one, definitely because we were able to get a two year contract so we didn't have to deal with negotiations to start the year and we had really good principals who spent the time until summer to prepare so we met over the summer and got ready so the school and our caretakers got a good job with all the construction and things some of the schools we saw in the summer and you think it's a war site but I think we're off a really good start this year in terms of things moving on in the right direction so looking forward to some good success this year thanks so much for spending time with us thank you, thank you what a great group thank you thank you for sending me to the first place I went I just had to show up oh good, I'm glad you get made for us for technology I'm going to make that be out of your way but in the meantime Jeff Wick, full board member can I turn it on superintendent stick her out for a couple minutes excellent we've got the the real deal here for the soup and the principal I'm just a school board member who have to say that's right well the truth is I am here for you tonight I really appreciate the principal thank you for such wonderful things from the Champlain community I was a Champlain elementary school parent for 11 years this is the first year my kids are in middle school now I'm really sorry I missed the harvest fest that's a tradition we used to call it apple fest back in the day when my old students were young wasn't it a good one? it was awesome the property was filled from the back to the side, to the garden area there was a bouncy house the fire department was here the roads and police department was here one of the tactical vehicles was dropped up in a couple hours did you have the corn on the cob? you were Sarah and Ethan Brown making the homemade apple cider that was a don't tank a homemade don't tank situation were you the guy getting died? thank you superintendent that was a really comprehensive presentation so I'm not sure that I have a whole lot to add I'd open it up to you school board of burlington school district matters and others I would open it up to you and I'll try to answer questions best I can I've got folks who can back me up with some facts here so I recently heard that the pre-K force they had recommended some work at IRA and that was kind of turned back and I wondered whether there was any more there would be more engagement on that there will be, that's still very much a work in progress we have not solved that problem yet just this past Tuesday night we had a board meeting and the facilities director presented to us some additional options so everything is on the table right now and we're trying to figure out what the right thing is yeah that was I can communicate with this there was some tie in with that I was just trying to understand the sort of drop off area that was planned and I didn't know whether there was anything going forward independently of the pre-K stuff you mean the district has been thinking for a few years how do we improve the drop off situation I haven't actually heard the latest I don't know if you want to take just a second or two if there is a latest but there may not be that still might be in the oven yeah there's no action in any of those I think when the board stopped we put a halt on the plan so that kind of got into the consultation phase to go back and start looking at the options so last Tuesday as Commissioner Wick said the director came back and said okay we've been doing some work and this is the next option these are the options that we have now and the board is considering that so there's still some more work to do that so I would say that that's a good question to bring up again the consultations did you mention that as a variable our principle not like the principle but the principle of the thing will be community engagement whatever's going to be on the table we want to make sure to engage the community make sure it's as palatable as possible and so you expect that community engagement will be over the course of this coming year is that right? well you know truth be told I'm not as close to the facilities committee so I'm not quite sure but I'm happy to look into what the timing on that is and ask our director Spalding as well so I can get back to you on that but there's nothing imminent okay gotcha any other questions I hope it was hot last year of bilingual programs starting up in the school district do you know any further developments on that? we have an expert yes so just to give you a little bit of context I think probably maybe two or three years ago I brought the notion of bilingual program to Burlton and the board supported it and we had some exploratory dollars from the budget to look for it and just recently last year I think we performed a partnership with the French consulate that was willing to give us money and support and try to find staff and resources to develop the big challenge in implementing any bilingual program is getting certified teachers that can do it because I know if you build it they will come and I believe that Burlton would have the freedom to understand bilingual programs but if we can't sustain it and we got to the way I would implement it is a gradual release when you start off let's say we fix Champlain first site and they said okay Joe you guys start off with two classes because we need two partners grade one let's say then next year we have two more classes so that group goes to grade two and then you can build and put it on but that means you have to make sure you have the staffing to accommodate that I did put out a release for interested people who may have a language if you have certification great but we're also having conversations with the agency and some of the other colleges to see what they can do I believe I'm talking about communications we may have a community event probably in November got a long list of people who are interested to come with people together and to have a conversation around what could be a possible next step and also we are really identifying people who will be interested in going through some kind of process to get accredited so you can have a cadre of teachers in order to do it otherwise starting a program you can't stop it that's where it's at so we're still at that stage but we'll have some kind of event probably in November for people to come together and say okay this is where we're at is space in our schools so we've got limited space in our schools I believe when we launch a program this is going to expand I was going to put this in my update but we're actually growing in enrollment we've got about 175 more students today than we did last year at this time so we're getting more students from somewhere and we put those kind of programs and it attracts more people as well too so we've got to deal with the space thing and we have a capital plan around that and we're just starting so I have to consider all those kind of things before the final piece because I don't want it to fail I want it to be prepared in a way that we can just gradually produce so that's where we are at that point so if you know anyone who's interested look for the announcement and please show up okay there's some seasonality about the board work we're just entering into budget season budget planning season so come October that's when it starts we graph the budget that we approve in January and as you know it gets voted on in March so that's one of the things the board will be working on over the next few months also negotiations with the bargaining units begin because last year the state mandated that our contracts could only do one-year contracts so unfortunately we have to go back to the table and that also starts up in October and I'll be personally involved with that again maybe you didn't even hear about last year's negotiations because it went quite well didn't you make the paper? papers love drama there was no drama so we got it done on time so I'm very proud of that thank you any other questions maybe I was wetting your appetite for questions I do have a question about that negotiation so we're about two years out now from when the teachers were on strike back then you heard a lot of cries of being disrespected, unheard, undervalued and then negotiations a year ago very stark contrast and ended with a picture of people shaking hands I guess I'm just wondering from your perspective what happened over the course of that year that sort of allowed for that stark contrast and what's happened since then and what you anticipate is going to happen and the negotiations going forward and from your sense not only from the board's perspective but also from the administrator's perspective what's working and what do you think needs to continue in order for us to not end up again where we were two years ago now well I think the composition of the players changed and I think that made a difference and so I think you're right so I'll jump in on this one save me on this one both sides the players did change and both sides wanted to achieve success and achieve it as quickly as possible both sides wanted to lay a foundation for future collaboration and so both sides sort of said okay let's get it done and that was the mission I know that was the mission of the board going in to make sure we can do something to demonstrate that we're receptive and so I think Chair Wick and the team did some things and they were able to see okay we can do this and then we're able to get to settlement quickly and so on the internal side because the players have changed it also allowed myself and now I'm interested in that to have regular conversations with the new president and others talking about oh what can we do and other things that we can do so trying to build that rapport I only wish because of legislation I can't be here if we had two or three years in between it would give us enough time to believe about those relationships and you would solve some of the the nitty-gritty things before you even got to negotiations by the time you got to negotiations do you know what we're about and do you know what would be the main things because it's so quick when you sign a contract when you solve a contract you think you've got a hold here and once you resolve it you're here and so really technically you have a matter of months and you start again and part of it if anyone's been here involved in the negotiations part of it is the posturing both sides have to do that doesn't help you've got to hold up this and hold this and then but I would say that just to sum up I think the players changed the negotiations they had and the one really overreached too much so that we could get to a resolution so another board took that strategy hoping that in the next that they could recognize that and we can have a fruitful conversation going forward you asked a part of your question was looking forward well interestingly enough as you probably know the legislature has sort of removed or is in the process of removing the healthcare bargaining from the local level to the state level and so there's this state bargaining going on regarding healthcare which I think is either in mediation or arbitration but this will be an interesting new development when we go to that table locally in all likelihood healthcare bargaining will not be on the table it'll be the other stuff what kind of impacts that will have negative or positive to having some other healthcare deal struck at the state level I don't know if that'll be a positive yet but I'm anticipating um continued more of the same in terms of relationship the relationships are positive one element that people don't actually realize for I would say that our Burlington educators often um want to strike a deal and settle on a certain piece because we're Burlington they also have um responsive to the state and sometimes they're asked to do things in in supporting others in the state so even though they're ready right you know they're asked by their state um level to you know take on certain pieces that locally they're like we don't even want to do that but they have this you know because it's Burlington they have a lot of attention and when they do negotiations they compare to Burlington so they have that responsibility so we try to keep that in mind that yeah okay it might be posturing about this particular thing that really isn't that important but it's important to their organization and they have that responsibility so that's a burden that they carry as well as well as we carry that same burden on our side because the Burmont school board associations and the board members they say okay what are you guys doing because everyone is going to be looking at what you've done in comparison so all those things come to play I don't know if people get that when they see you know the board and the um and the teachers going at it but sometimes there are bigger things at play not really about the local issues it's like the bigger issues and so that's a piece of context that people can try to kind of look out for and see okay this is what's happening thank you super then that was too easy Joanna you must have a tough one for me come on I know I actually presented a bang this very soon I really appreciate all of you supporting the climate strike just say that oh yeah I won't go on my rant about deforestation, burning amazon fish, depletion competitive issue firms probably don't think it'll last long thank you everyone thanks so much thank you so much thank you so much cheers cheers cheers and then there's the fight this morning cheers cheers cheers cheers so here I'll show you how to shut this up this is the live stream so this is the on off button press that press that up and then it says stop And prompt, select yes. Oh, so you press that. And then you select yes. So you can move it over. And then you press it again to do that. Pat, how are you? Do you have some technical difficulties? Yeah, this is like... Oh, this is helping. She's a BHS student. Oh, are you working for Johnson T? Yeah, you start now. I try to develop like the videotography internship for the NCA. Nice. And they just do this. Very good. I have my middle school graduate from the NCA. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, and they'll be like going out and interviewing. Actually, Humvee is going to interview some folks at the faculty that's coming in. Oh, good. You know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, they're good. All right. Nice to see you. All right, so we're... So, press yes. So we hit yes. When props are meant by pressing... The event one. Okay. The chat paradox should put ready. All right? Does it... You see any ready up there? The upper right. We're stopping.