 So, I think we should move forward. So, welcome everybody to our RCCC board meeting on Monday, May 10th. Hard to believe that we're here in May. This is crazy. But I will call the meeting officially to order. And it does not appear that we have any guests in attendance. So, we can go right ahead and move toward to our agenda item number three, Felicia, and I'm going to turn the floor over to you to talk about the dental assistance program. Sure. So, yeah, I've been reporting on this all year. I'm happy to report that the program has been officially approved by the agency of education. So, that is a positive step in the right direction. We actually have a little bit of funding left in this year's Perkins grant for some equipment purchases to get that program up and running. And then the, I think it's the 22nd. I have to have my time grant in, which is the grant that is your mark to fund the salary and benefits for this position. Now, at this point, we've advertised for a month and a half maybe. And we have yet to have an applicant from school spring. And I'm thinking that maybe due to the nature of this field, we might want to think about some other avenues for how we advertise this position. So, more or less just kind of putting that out there. I don't have any grand ideas yet, but my thought was to touch base with Chris Wilson and try to see what networks he has available. Potentially, we could push there. Officially, I tell that grant is, is official though. I suspect it will be agency of Ed approved the program. Can you all hear me? Okay. Can you all hear me? Okay. Okay. I assume the of education approved the program that they will probably approve the time grant to sort of how it works. It's the same, same folks. So, other than that, we do have right now, three or four students that are interested in the. Invading to. If we're gonna run it. So. That's all I've got the dental assisting program. Great. Well, congratulations, Felicia. I think that's an exciting. It's one of the ones that I think will bring folks in from outside of our area, which is, is one of the key components to us raising our enrollment. I think there's quite a delay. Isn't there? I'm going to change my wifi again. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Log out, log back in. Yeah. Okay. So while Felicia does that, I don't know if there's any questions about this program, perhaps Lane could answer if there are questions about the dental assisting program. Yeah, we actually, I can talk a little. Oh, go ahead. Okay. Are you good? Did you want to, did you want to ask a question? So I just opened that up to ask if there's any questions about it. Can you hear us? Did anyone have questions? I can hear you. I'm just apparently don't have very good wifi right now. Okay. All right. I don't think there's any questions. I was going to suggest that you also, I can give you connections to Northeast Delta dental. And I'm just wondering with their connections, they are the premier dental insurance. I think for Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, and they might have some sort of connections back to the schools that could be helpful to you. And I'd be happy to share the marketing folks that I know there. That would be terrific. Thank you, Ashley. All right. And let's move on to our recruitment enrollment and retention portion. And again, I think I'm going to turn this over to Felicia. Sure. So I am currently working with Vermont radio group digital division under the guidance of Nathan Wright, who is a local person here in Randolph to develop some outreach and marketing strategies for next year. Well, they're actually starting now, but going into and through next year paid for through the gear grant. And this marketing strategy is really about trying to make connections with community partners, swaying the community to understand sort of the importance of career and technical education as not the old vocational center, but as a really viable means to make a decent living right out of high school. So we have started work with him. They're actually producing right now videos for our fall recruitment because we'll be changing our recruitment strategy, as we had mentioned throughout the year. We kind of didn't get that totally up and running this year as quickly as I would have liked to, but we needed to this year to kind of get things in line. So next year we'll really be starting in the fall for recruitment and which will be tremendously helpful in terms of knowing what programs are going to be offered, hiring practices, and also just really being able to target programs where there might be low enrollments in the spring versus trying to do all of it. So that is a pretty exciting thing to be able to do. Most technical centers have an outreach coordinator and Randolph does not. So this is kind of in lieu of that position that many tech centers have. I don't think there's such a delay. I don't. Sorry. Okay. I think that's all I've got on that one. All right. Thank you, Felicia. Are there any questions on the outreach initiatives that Felicia has shared? All right. Well, we are just moving right along. So now we're on the RTC senior profile. Okay, I'm going to attempt to present. Let's hope it all goes well here. And I'm assuming you can see this. If you would just let me know verbally. It would be great because I can no longer see you. Yes, we can. Fantastic. So this year has been kind of a unique year. Because as you are all well aware, COVID-19 impacted a lot of our outcomes in different ways that we probably some expected and some maybe didn't. But we'll start with just talking about who our seniors are. We have currently two students from U32, 26 from Randolph Union, 14 from Williamstown, six from White River and six from Northfield for a total of 55 students. One of the areas that we've always been really strong at is having students enrolled in non-traditional programs. This year of our seniors, we have four female students or 20% of our female seniors that are enrolled in non-traditional programs. Those include and these are just examples of non-traditional programs. But this year in particular, we have students in auto. We have a female in our diversified ag program. We have two in construction trades. 11 seniors or roughly 20% of the senior class is on a student services plan, which is an IP or 504. As a center, our junior class actually raises that number quite significantly. But for our seniors, we have about 20% of our population that's on a plan. 19 of our seniors or 35% are intending to go on to some post-secondary training or education. And I was given a list of which schools, but I didn't have enough space in this to give you that information, but I certainly can tell you what schools. We also have one that's intending to go on to the National Guard and then 16 who have been in a cooperative or work-based learning placement this year, who will continue to work for the employer that they're in with right now. We also do have two juniors that are planning on attending early college programs and one application that is pending. So industry recognized credentials. This is probably one of the most notable things that technical instructors can provide for students is the opportunity to get a leg up in their industry by having relevant credentials to get in the door. And every one of our seniors earned at least one industry recognized credentials this year. And the reason for that is that we had every student across the center participate in basic life-saving. And so we did that in the fall in our hoop building and every single student acquired their BLS credential. In addition, advanced manufacturing has been working on their OSHA-10 certifications. They are, I think, about one week out from completing those. Automotive technology students have been credentialed in Vermont State Inspection, and soon they're going to be starting on their ASC testing. The Education Services Program has acquired the Vermont Orientation Training, Mandated Reporting, FEMA Multihazard Training for Child Care, Partnering with Families, Abusive Head Trauma Prevention Training, Pediatric First Aid, Intro to Early Childhood Licensing, Basic Specialized Care Training, and the Level 2 students have acquired all of the education hours and the work experience hours and the portfolio that they need to apply for their CDA, or their Child Development Associate. That is a license with the state of Vermont. The health careers students have also acquired their BLS for health care workers. They've also completed Mandated Reporter Training and Certification. They've gotten their stop, the bleed credential, and very soon, I think at the end of this month, they'll be testing for their LNA exam. Again, a licensure exam. Diversified Agriculture Program students have acquired their certification in their Game of Logging, which is a chainsaw safety program. And then soon, they're currently practicing, and they'll be working on their Tractor Safety Credential as well. Construction Trades and Management has acquired their OSHA-10 certification, and they are currently in process on completing their NCCER Industry Certifications this month. Most of the seniors are done or just about done, and I think the juniors are almost there as well. The Electrical Program has also acquired their OSHA-10 certification, and they're going to be taking the Level 1 Vermont State Apprenticeship Exam. So essentially, that program, that one-year in program, is equivalent to the VTC apprenticeship program. The same test will be given. And that is actually free and offered by the state. The diesel program has acquired their OSHA-10 certification and are also starting their ASC testing throughout this next month. And earlier in the year, but didn't make it to my slide, they also completed a whole bunch of SB2s, which are different programs and certifications that are pertinent to their industry. The Criminal Justice and Cyber Security Program has earned their FEMA Active Shooter certification, which is What Can You Do? I think that's the name of the credential. And then they've also been participating in CyberStart where they earn badges. The Culinary Arts Program have earned SB2 certifications in Workplace and Food Safety, and then they are going to be getting their Serve Safe Sanitation certification in the next month. So dual enrollment. So these are courses that may be concurrent enrollment, meaning that the program instructor teaches the course at the college level, and the students have their program teacher as their college teacher. Or it may be that they are participating in courses that are offered through colleges like CCV or VTC or other partner colleges to earn credits like the health careers, for example, are doing anatomy and physiology. We have currently eight seniors who have earned dual enrollment college credits. As a center, 11 students participated this year in dual enrollment courses for a total of 38 credits that they've earned. Two additional students took a free remedial CCV math course, but credit was not awarded. This number, just for your information, is down from last year. And if I had to beg a guess, and we can talk about this afterwards, students were really struggling with the idea of taking more online courses given the hybrid nature that we were teaching in for half of our year. And so ACT work keys. This is the testing that we do as a whole center, and it's required for our Perkins plan to be looking at our academic progress. Jason Gingold before me started to beta test the work keys testing in 2018 and 19. And he tested for, I would say, a year and a half. They did not test last spring because of the COVID. And we did not test this fall. It really was more like January when we did our first testing. We're supposed to basically test prior to or at the start of their time with us and at the end of their time with us. There are two tests that students participate in. One is workplace documents, which is a writing test, but it's relevant really more towards documents that you would see in industry. And then the applied math. We also did administer that as well. And that is, again, relevant to industry. So there are questions that you might be encountering in the workplace. So at this point, we are awaiting our results from January. And then we will also be administering another round of this testing in June. We really kind of struggled with getting students out on work-based learning placements for some of the year. And I think a portion of that was that employers were hesitant to have students into their workplace or their policies and procedures and protocols didn't allow for it. But even so, with that struggle last year, 29 students participated in work-based learning. And this year we still had 22. So I feel pretty good about what we were able to accomplish given sort of the roadblocks that were placed in front of us. We also managed to continue our guest lecture series. Now in a typical year, we have over 100 guest speakers that come into the center and students will see them in our work-based learning lab. This year without being able to have our community partners into the schools, we had to do everything remotely. And due to the nature of our schedule, it pretty much limited us to Fridays. With that said though, we still had 34 guests come and speak to students either about their career path, about their college or industry. And these are some of the people and folks that were represented in those. So honors and awards, normally at this time of year, I think we would know who our NTHS nominees are at this moment, we are actually accepting nominations. And last year, I think we had 22 seniors that earned National Technical Honor Society status and 18 seniors who also earned the Technical Excellence Award. I imagine if I had to beg a guest that those numbers will be a little lower this year. I think in large part due to the fact that with hybrid and remote learning models, some of our students who are really hands-on learners may have not come to school quote unquote that day, which really I think impacted their attendance. So we're anticipating lower numbers this year and really targeting those kids that powered through even the remote learning and the hybrid learning models. We're also having our induction later this year. That's scheduled for June 15th under the big tent behind the school. Some of the things that we want to continue to work on, these are goals that Jason had prior to me, but still are very much relevant. Number one is just to continue to build our system to make sure that students see a pathway either into career, into college, or the military right out of school. We really have a goal of 100% of our students knowing what they're going to be doing before they leave our doors. And I think we're pretty close to that, but there are still a few kids that get lost in the shuffle. So we want to make sure that we are providing them opportunities to figure out what exactly it is they want to do and the pathway to get there. We want to be able to continue to amp up the college and career lab next year. I think we're going to go back to a model that had been used some time ago where we have Jason Finley and Jen Joles teaching courses to the kids on career life skills, college prep, and all of that kind of information that helps them to make sure that they're doing what they need to be doing in order to take that next step post-secondary. We're going to continue our work with Mark Perna, who is the person that we've been working with not only on the career trees as a tool for understanding career pathways and career development and understanding what options are out there in the industry, but also Mark Perna is our recruitment, enrollment, and retention specialist, and he's helped us to develop our timeline for that to ensure that it's a seamless model that includes the career trees, but also includes how do you keep kids? So for example, I think there's room for growth in our second year programming. We will also continue to mentor and give professional development to staff to increase our dual enrollments for one, but also we really had a very little participation in our CTSOs, which are career student technical organizations for students. This year it was just hard because the reality is, you know, we couldn't do these events that normally are statewide events in person, and I think folks just really didn't want to participate virtually, so it was kind of an unfortunate situation. So there's definitely room to grow on that next year. And then we want to continue to improve how we deliver career education. As you all know, I revised the pre-tech program this year, which I think is a critical component. Prior to my time here, that position also had a leg in outreach, but it wasn't really an effective model. So as we move into the next couple of years, a couple of things that we're going to be doing is in the Perkins Plan that I've developed, we're going to be going back to having a middle school summer camp. I think it's critical that we start early with our students in the local area, you know, teaching them about what we offer and what pathways are available to them. We also need to look at how we reach out to the middle school locally during the school year to get kids in there. And we'll continue our Challenge Day, which is for girls to experience non-traditional programs. And the last thing that is I think critical is to just note that I am looking seriously at how we do academically, not just because the Perkins Plan requires it, but because we have some growth to do on our end to meet the end's policy. So one of the things that we will be doing one way or another, and it won't be next year, but the year after is to add a science integrationist at the Tech Center. Next year, I've already partnered with RUHS, at least to get the Randolph Union students into a half-year science class, their junior year to prepare for the state testing. But we need to be able to do that equitably to all of our students. And I guess with that, I'm just going to come back to you for questions. Here we go. Did you hear all that or was it a jumbly mess? Okay. Good. That was great, Felicia. Thank you so much. It was a great presentation. Are there questions from the other board members? All right. Doing a good job, Felicia. You guys are easy. So the next, do you have anything additional from your directors report that you want to talk about? Well, let me just, I'm going to scroll through and just I'll pull it out. I think there's a couple of notable things. Number one is I want to just invite you all. Sorry, that's my son's ATV making noise. On Thursday, June 17th at 7pm, we're going to be having our annual recognition night. So I would love for you all to join us with that. Currently our enrollment for this year has not changed. We are still where we were. Let's see here. And I wanted to go down to next year. Hold on. I got to find it. So next year, we currently have a total of 169 applications that are in our system. That is up significantly from last year. 19 of those are on submitted. So we have to take those right off the bat. That means the students started them, but didn't actually follow through to submit them. But we do have 12 incomplete applications, which means that the partner school needs to supply the documents. We have 16 complete applications that just need us to make decisions for acceptance. We already have placed 102 students in their first choice programs. We have placed 11 students in their second choice programs. And we have eight students that are waitlisted. Those students are pending some sort of decision based on the situation that's really individualized. It might be that their first choice wasn't available and they're not really crazy about their second choice. And we're still kind of going back and forth with them about what they might like or what might be a good fit. It may be that we have a student whose grades are going to determine their acceptance. That they're kind of on the fence and where they're at with their program that they're currently in. We also have four ineligible students, which means that we have declined acceptance for them for next year for various reasons. Pre-tech applications aren't even counted in this. Those are a totally separate process. And I think at this point, I believe the last I heard we had 10 applications for that. And actually, this is probably a good point for me to just note that we changed the pre-tech program for next year so that it would now be a year long program half day. The reason for that was really just trying to accommodate all of the other academic needs of the students like driver's ed and courses that would really be impacted by the semester system. So we think it's a better approach to do that that way. And it's been well received by the partner schools, Randolph Union included. And I think, you know, without reading through this whole report, you can see what schools the applicants are from. We do have two new positions that are we're having to hire for. I shouldn't say new positions. We have two positions that are now vacant. The diversified agriculture teacher is leaving us to go teach in another career and technical center. And then our pre-tech exploratory teacher is moving to the warmer climate of, I think, Virginia. So I told him he could pack me and take me with him. But other than that, we're just working on our state recovery planning with the district. And I know that there's also going to be sort of a separate leg to that for career and tech. And those meetings are going to be happening over the next month. That's all I've got for you. Thank you, Felicia. Before we move on to the consent agenda, Lane, I'm going to look to you to see if there's anything from your superintendent role or the financials that you want to share. You're on mute, Lane. Sorry about that. No, I just I was saying I didn't want to make sure we don't run out of time here. I think there's kind of a longer term project that we've got to work on that Felicia and I kind of dealt with over this last week in terms of trying to hire replacements for the positions that she just mentioned. And one of the problems that we've got is that the CBA, the contract with the teachers controls initial placement on the salary scale when a new person comes into the district. And we don't have any leeway the way that it's written. We can't move somebody up if we feel they're a little bit more qualified to try to obtain the best person possible. And I'll try to give you a couple of really quick examples here. If I've got a teacher at the elementary school or an RUHS, their placement on the salary is dependent upon their degree and how many years they've been teaching under their license. So let's say I've got an elementary teacher with a master's degree with 10 years of experience. When they walk in our door, they're placed on the master the master scale. And they're placed on step 11 right because they've completed 10 years for an RTCC teacher who also has a master's degree in 10 years of experience. The way the contract works is I would have to pay that put them on the master scale but only put them on step five. So while the RUHS teacher, the elementary teacher would be making about 62,000, the RTCC teacher with equivalent experience and education would be making 53,000 about $9,000 less. And it gets a little bit more complicated when we consider the fact that most technical training that these instructors receive, it's based on hours and certificates, right? They don't usually play in degrees. They play in certificates and hours. But if we took somebody who is coming in the door without a degree but has the equivalent hours of somebody of coursework hours of somebody with a master's degree and also the 10 years experience, I can only place them on the bachelor's step and then on step three of that. So that person, even though they've got equivalent experience and education, I'd be paying $45,000 to which is $16,500 less than the RUHS of the elementary teacher. And we're having a real problem with this. This is the first year that we've kind of encountered this because of this discrepancy between how the contract considers teachers at RUHS and the elementary schools versus RTCC. So this is something we're going to look at. We'll be out of a contract negotiation year next year, but as part of the budget process, it's critical enough that I might try to engage in a side agreement with the union. There will be a budget impact to it, but at least it'll make us competitive in making sure that we're able to attract and retain highly qualified people at the Tech Center. So I just wanted to put that on the radar because it is going to be a big project to work on between now and October. And I would just add one piece to that, which is when you have somebody that comes from another Tech Center, like Harvard, and they come to us. I was a behind multimedia teacher. If I came here every two years, I thought down there would count for one, right? Lane, if I'm reading it correctly, similar to some industry, even though I've went in education. So it's really a, to get a qualified teacher who has experience, it's a real drawback. And we're building, trying to build powerful programs here. And I talked a little bit at the very beginning of this year about, you know, kind of general goals, at least for myself for this year. And one of those goals was getting the right people in the right positions. And this one's going to be particularly hard to be able to meet that goal unless we change this. Plus the fact, I mean, you know, we're a Tech Center, we value technical education and I worry about the message that it sends. And this isn't any of our faults. Looking back, this language has been there probably for 20 years. But it's really come into a head because we're looking at a couple of high power people that we wanted to hire and are having difficulty because of it. So we need to address it. Thank you for bringing that up, Lane. Thank you, Lane. That was a nice explanation. I appreciate that. I'm sure the rest do as well. What about the financials? Anything of note on that report? So financials, we'll talk a little bit about this with the, when we talk about the district financials as a whole. Actually, in really good shape around this time of the year, you would expect to see about 16 to 20% left in terms of what we can expand. I think we're in the 30% range right now. So there will be a little bit of a surplus that hopefully Felicia can put to good use with some of the discussions we've had with facilities about some of the renovations. We're structuring some of the classrooms like turning the graphics art classroom into the dental assisting program room. So we're in really good shape. We also, they are able to access some of the S or two funding. And so that was built into the recovery plan that I sent over to the agency of education so that they can take advantage of that to help support them as they transition back from COVID. I don't need to interrupt, but I can see that there are other people in the other meeting waiting for us. So, just a reminder. Okay, so we need to look at the consent agenda and I would like a motion to approve the minutes of February 8. I move to approve the minutes from February 8. Thank you, Hannah. Can I have a second? Okay, thank you, Anne. If all in favor, we could just raise our hand. Okay. That was unanimous Robin. So are there any other questions or anything else before we adjourn? Is there any reason for an executive session? There's just a personnel update, but I can do that in the board executive session. Okay. Well, Felicia, thank you very much. And we'll go to the next meeting. Thank you all. Thank you.