 Time may not be ceded to another speaker. Comments are to be addressed to me, the board chair, or the board as a whole, not to any individual on the board, on the staff, or in the public. Please raise your hand and we'll just speak until you are asked to by myself. Please identify yourself with your first and last name and your count of residence. Please refrain from restating comments that have already been shared. You can certainly express agreement with those comments. Order and decorum shall be observed by everyone. Shouting and profanity are prohibited. As the board chair, I will maintain the order and the form of the meeting. And with that, I opened up public comment. Yes. Hi, my name is Hailey Larry. I live in East Buckfield, Vermont. I have a document that I'd like everyone on the board to look at if you could pass around. It's longer than three minutes. So I have a summary of what this document is. So good evening. Again, my name is Hailey. I am a social-emotional team member at Randolph Elementary and have been for the past four and a half years. My job consists of supporting students grades K through 6 throughout the day, giving positive breaks to students as well as supporting staff in the building with what they need. At Randolph Elementary, I have been able to build meaningful and trustful relationships with our students, families, and staff. On Monday, October 23, my co-worker, who's with me today, and I had a scheduled meeting with Superintendent Lane Millington and others to discuss ways to problem-solve rule 4,500 incidents. The purpose of rule 4,500 in the state of Vermont is to, quote, create and maintain a positive and safe learning environment in schools, promote positive behavioral interventions and supports in schools, and to ensure that students are not subjected to inappropriate use of restraint or seclusion, end quote. When walking into that meeting, it was the pure opposite of problem-solving and strategizing 4,500 procedures. Without explanation, Lane Millington just played a video of an intervention that happened among me and a co-worker and an escalated student outside at recess on September 26, 2023. As the video plays with no sound, he is falsely narrating the situation. He is also falsely stating how the student is feeling, whom he can't even name nor has ever met. He asks for no context about the situation. He just assumes the worst. He goes on and continuously shames my co-worker and me during this meeting that last two hours. I asked Superintendent Millington to come observe my position for one day, but he stated that it was not his role. As a superintendent, it is his role to oversee and collaborate with his staff on policies, implementations, and outcomes. It is his job as the district leader to oversee day-to-day operations out of school. And since this is a developing policy that he is implementing into our building, it is his job to be present and see what my job entails to make sure these policies make sense and are safe for staff and all students so that they can receive a right to their education. As someone who is from this community and has been with these students as well as supported these students and families for years, I am disappointed with how my co-worker and I were treated by him. It was wrong. Lastly, another role he has as superintendent is to ensure a positive and effective work environment which on that day he failed to provide. Furthermore, mine and my colleague's experience in the 3.45 p.m. 4500 meeting yesterday proved his inability to foster a positive and effective work environment under the treatment of staff policy. I will be making a formal complaint. I appreciate audible and physical support for comments, but let's try to keep them, let's try not to do them because if we did them after every comment, which every comment deserves, we'd be here for quite some time. Anyone else? Yes. Thank you. Hi. My name is Nora Skolnick. I am a resident of Braintree and I am a teacher at RES. I am also the vice president of our association. I'm not sure where I'm supposed to stand for it. Okay, thank you. First of all, I would like to express our concern for two of our professional staff who have had their professionalism questions and don't feel at this point supported. And that also describes a lot of how the majority of our staff at RES is feeling at this moment. I wanna thank Superintendent Millington for the meeting yesterday and for some of the clarifications that he was able to give us on the policies that we have in order to deal with some very disruptive and difficult student behaviors. At the same time, this is a beginning. It is a first step and we have a long way to go. We have some asks that we would like the board to consider and we felt the need to come tonight, not only in support of our colleagues, but to work as a community to deal with the situation and to have the board here firsthand what that situation is, since we are the ones that are experiencing this on a daily basis. Our first ask is that we continue to do the work on the action plan, which was a draft and that as a draft, it needs a lot of revision and a lot of work. I think our superintendent would be in agreement on this. Our second ask is that we have comprehensive training for all staff and that training happened during the school day or on paid time and that that training be live and in person. As educators, we know the value of having in person training for something, not watching a video, not having it remote, where we can ask questions, have clarifications and practice some of the techniques that need to be worked on. We also are asking that we have re-entry plans for all students who have been physically aggressive with another staff member or with another student before that child is re-entered into the classroom. At that re-entry meeting or to create that re-entry plan, we need to have all stakeholders involved. That includes parents, that includes teachers, special educators, interventionists and our social and emotional learning team. We are also asking that we have alternative placement options for students that are in district. We have a person in our school who was hired to do this exact position, but we have not yet been able to have that. So we would like to have that as this is not appropriate for all students in our school. Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm gonna go to the one person who can have their hand up and then I'll come back. Lindsay. Yes, thank you. This is Lindsay Hopped. I am calling in from re-entry. I'm calling to just, I have seen that there is conversation around the renewal of the current superintendents contract and I appreciate that there's a large portion of that that is personnel and not something that can be shared. I'd just like to take the time to remind the board to please review the petition that was signed by over 400 district members requesting that we consider non-renewal at this time. I'm aware that the board has spent an extensive amount of time creating new evaluation techniques and I applaud that. I think they will be wonderful moving forward with whomever our superintendent is. But I fear that we are going to move forward with three years of rehabbing a superintendent as opposed to three years of starting to rehab our district and somebody who grew up here and has always been proud of our community. I'd like to get back to that point and I think there's a lot of people who are struggling to feel the heart of our community. And I think some of that comes from leadership or lack thereof. And so hearing what I just heard from a staff member kind of just reinforces more of that. And so I'm just really hoping the board will remember that any one of you holds the right to make a motion to not move forward with further contract renewal and instead start thinking about what we can really do to move our district in a positive place. I appreciate all of you. I appreciate all the time you school board members put in, I know none of us on this phone can imagine the extra hours you put in but please hear those of us that asked you to be there and recognize we really need a change. And we need help. Thank you. Thank you, Lindsay. My name is Catha Ruiz. I am a resident of Randolph Center and I am a special educator at RES. As Nora stated, there was someone who was hired to do the alternative placement and that's me. Hi. When I was hired, I was told that there was a high need in the community and that the wait list and alternative programs are extremely high and that in-house we can create a program that serves the needs for the kiddos that don't really function well in mainstream schooling. When I joined RES, that was not the case. I have had the honor and privilege of working behind the SEL team, including Mike Haley and Sonia, Deb and Natalie. And they are the most professional, amazing superheroes that we have in this community. Without them, RES would fall apart. They are the glue that keeps our community together. They check on staff, they check on students, they create that safe place that school should be for students, especially the students who we have who are lower income and have trauma. Because of the lack of guidance and leadership that we've had in the building, not due to our principal, our principal, Melinda Robinson, has been incredible in helping us and guiding us. We have had situations that make me very uncomfortable working there every day for the safety of the staff and the students. We had an incident the other day due to the guidance from Superintendent Lane in Millington. We were told that we could not go hands-on and that we cannot use seclusion unless it is a imminent threat. The other day, we had a kindergartner walk outside the building towards the Main Street. Now, in normal safe cases, any child, any parent would stop that child and take them away from that Main Street. However, because of that, we had three staff members including myself, the kindergarten teacher, and Mike, stand in the Main Street blocking traffic and hoping that the kindergartner would not cross. That is a situation that no student and no staff should have to be privy to. We were lucky and fortunate enough that the student had decided to take a seat and slowly move back towards the building. But that was the best case scenario. These are things that are happening in our school and we want things to change to feel safe for the staff and for the students. And we ask the board to please hear us. Thank you. Thank you. Yep, someone's pointing me over here. Yes, sorry. So, my name is Lisa Wright. I'm co-president for the support staff. And I'm here to speak on behalf of the Paras. My job as a building para, I go in, I sub, I do anything else that needs to be done. I've even helped Mike and Hayley and whatever else. I have watched and I have witnessed students screaming at the paras, at the teachers. I have watched and I have witnessed where they have picked up a desk, they have thrown it. They destroy the classrooms. Then the teacher has to remove the classroom while the student is still inside being disruptive and throwing things. The paras are the first people that these students go after. I have had, whereas the staff in the office, we've had many paras that have come, they've been crying, they want to quit. And without the help of the office and their supporters, they're still there. But I'm afraid that if you guys don't do something, you will not have any paras. They are the front people. They're the ones that are with these students, 26 hours a day, they need the help. Not yesterday, they need it today. And so, yes. My name is Sean McEnlity, I'm a teacher at RES. I'm a community member of Randolph and I am a future parent of an RES student. My son is almost three. He's gonna start pre-K in our building next year. In my 12 years of working in elementary schools, I've taught in four school districts in three different states. And in my mind, RES stands out in the support that is in place for the students that need it the most. It didn't take me very much time at all when I started teaching here last year to be impressed by Mike and Hailey. RES is incredibly lucky to have their experience, their knowledge, their compassion, their understanding and their expertise. And they bring that to our building every single day. There are no easy jobs in a school and they have willingly accepted the toughest ones. I have been nothing but impressed with their empathy, with their patience, with their professionalism that they bring on a daily basis. They are some of the most loved staff members in our building and that is no coincidence. I hope that they both know that all of the teachers and staff in our school support them, but it breaks my heart to know that their professionalism and their commitment to doing what is best for kids could ever be questions. I've worked with a lot of educators and I can say without a doubt that these people set a high bar of excellence. Before I started teaching, I would not have believed the impact that an individual could have on a larger group, but anyone who spent any amount of time in a school can tell you that's true. And the kids that this team works with on a daily basis and the way that they interact with them play a huge role in shaping the culture and the climate and the mood of the entire school. If you know someone that spends time in the school, then you know someone that's been impacted by the work that they do. I wanna applaud the SEL team for their tremendous commitment to maintaining the dignity of all students, especially when they're at their lowest and that is no easy feat. You would only need to follow them around for a day to see this, to see what they do, to see the challenges they face and the unbelievable grace that they managed to maintain while doing it. If my son was in school today and for whatever reason was struggling, I would not hesitate to trust that either one of them would interact with him in a way that keeps him safe and has his best interest at heart. It feels like the school is at a tipping point and this team and the kids that they serve are at the center of it. It feels like there's a tremendous opportunity here to meaningfully rethink the way that these kids move throughout our system and I hope that we do not fail them. I hope that we decide that they are worth it. This is really hard work and we're lucky to have these amazing educators. Let's listen to them, let's lift them up and let's not get in their way. Thank you. Yes. Yes, my name's Gabrielle Pazzani. I'm a kindergarten teacher at Randolph Elementary. I'm also a parent of a child in Mr. McEnolty's class. I just want to talk about, there's a lot of emphasis from the higher administration on data and achievement scores and helping kids be successful in the classroom. I would like to highlight that that data exists because of the SEL team. They are an integral part of allowing us teachers to continue teaching the content when a child in our classroom is spiraling to a point where we either need to clear the classroom or take different measures. They come in, they deescalate, I can continue, I can engage with my kids, the kids in the classroom are not scared, the child who has had the issue can exit, get back into a place where they're ready to reenter and be successful as well. They are absolutely an integral part of the data that us teachers can produce with our classrooms. Hi, my name is Cecilia Smith. I'm a nearly lifelong resident of Randolph and I also teach at Randolph Elementary School, actually in the classroom I had as a kid. So this place is really special to me and I just wanted to talk a little bit about how lucky I feel to get to work with Mike and Haley and the whole SEL team. Mike and Haley are both highly skilled first responders in our school and they don't only support children across the day and in moments of crisis. These two professionals also help staff members in navigating the emotional terrain of the children we all work with. We have really hard jobs and Haley and Mike are crucial to what we all do. Haley and Mike are integral to the staff's ability to respond compassionately to children in moments of crisis. Both of these professionals have been an invaluable resource to me and many, many others, including people in this room in their professional learning at our school. Haley and Mike, when possible, make themselves available to support teachers when we are struggling with challenging behaviors in our classrooms. Their support of and compassion for both staff and students are a big part of why I choose to work at Randolph Elementary School. There are myriad ways that they help and support our school community. These two professionals are the backbone of Randolph Elementary School. Mike and Haley have our trust as staff. They have our respect. And I would hope that they have the same trust and respect from our district's administration. I'm scared to see you there standing. I'm gonna go here in the orange back. My name is Julie Bristol and I'm a special educator at Randolph Elementary. I am very new to Randolph Elementary School this year. I have lived in Randolph for two years and part of the reason I took a job there was to become a bigger part of the community. I wanted to be able to teach and help children in this community. I think one thing that has struck me and it feels really difficult is the climate in the school. It's extremely challenging. Staff are having such a difficult time coping with all of the behaviors and feeling that they are not having the support they need from district administration. I've had several teachers who have come to me and said, I don't know what to do anymore. And I've been in their classrooms and the behaviors are astounding. Teachers who are in tears almost every day, I had to go in and didn't have to. I was in a class the other day. The teacher was expressing what a difficult time she was having. I said, take five minutes and I will stay in here. There are teachers who every day are saying they don't know how they can keep coming in. They're not sure if they can come back next year. I don't know if people understand what a phenomenal group of people you have at Randolph Elementary School who are pushing themselves day after day to give the very best of themselves to try to support each other. I feel so fortunate to have the team that I have in the kindergarten wing and the other teachers. And I can't even begin to talk about Mike and Hailey and Deb and Natalie and Sonya and the people who are every day in the thick of it with behaviors. I myself have to help with behaviors in my role which takes away from my time that I should be doing paperwork because there are children breaking down all the time every single day. What I would like to see is that there is respect and that there is a sense that the people who work in this school are valued for the work they do. And even if there is the perception that there is a problem with the way that something is being done, what I would prefer to see is that there is kindness and that there is the assumption that best intentions were in the minds of those who are doing the work. I saw some things yesterday that disturbed me greatly in terms of how situations were handled. I would like to see things change dramatically for the better. I have a parent of children at RES and I'm just gonna say that if it wasn't for Mike and Hailey my kids would not be there and they would not be flourishing. For anyone that knows me, I am a resident of Randolph and I'm a foster parent who was adopted. Three of my kids that are RES. I have an older son that was adopted that I actually pulled from the high school which is a different story. My three littles at RES come from a background of trauma. They also are typical young children and they have their slew of issues but each and every day they go to school and you know who they're excited to see besides their main teachers, it's Mike and Hailey. They come home and they talk, Mr. Mike, Ms. Hailey. And they're not only there for my kids but they're there for me and I will say that I had a very negative experience with one of my children in a preschool at Braintree and getting to know RES, I had mixed emotions and I really didn't wanna send my kids to school at all. Coming from a trauma background, fostering them and adopting them and know what they came from to send them off to a building when they've already gone through such trauma was extremely difficult for me. And so my wife ultimately chose to send them and put them in the hands of these educators and I will tell you it's been amazing. Now my kids are only in preschool and kindergarten so they have a long way to go but I will tell you that each and every day it is their main teachers, their paras and most of all Mike and Hailey that help them get through the day and help me know that they are safe and that they're loved and cared about and that I'm cared about and my opinion matters and I will also say that two out of my three at RES have had to go in quiet spaces and to be restrained for various reasons that I will say are no one's business but I'm okay with that because I know at the end of the day they're doing it to keep my kids safe and if tomorrow my kids had to be restrained by Mr. Mike or Hailey, I would tell them to do it because I know that they're doing it out of caring and love. And I will also say the story that someone shared of the child running into the street I would be appalled if I found out that my kid did that and they were not allowed to put their hands on my child to just protect my child. So this is very concerning to me and I will just say again I would give anything to Mr. Mike and Ms. Hailey for everything they do for my children and for the children at RES. Thank you. No hands up online? Okay, yep. Hi, my name is Emily McCall. I have been a lifelong resident of Brookfield and then brain trade most recently. I have a very unique relationship with Hailey. I've known Hailey for over 16 years. We went to high school together. My sister was in her class, birthday party, sporting events. We basically grew up together. My oldest son, Nicholas, had a very horrific childhood that was, it was very dramatic for him. Hailey was his saving grace. We've known Hailey in her professional roles since my son was seven years old. He is now 12 and a seventh grader at Randall. Hailey was the first one-on-one that was able to connect with my son and let him know that he was safe. To this day, they've got a bond like this. The things that I would like to highlight are Hailey's professional experiences. She started with my son at the Beckley Day program. I'm not sure if you guys know what that is, but it's a trauma-informed therapeutic school based out of Washington County Mental Health. The reason that my son had to go there was because he was expelled from kindergarten. Because his IEP, that was done by Ms. Susan, Ms. Lancy many moons ago, did not get pulled over. It was not honored, which we all know is illegal. He was expelled. He went to Beckley Day program and thank God every day, we met Hailey there. She was able to get Nick to the point where he did not need to be restrained. She helped him learn coping skills so that he could regulate himself. I don't know what we would do if we didn't have Hailey in our lives. She followed Nick from Beckley Day program when he was in first grade to Brookfield Elementary where he finished second and third grade. Then she helped him transition to Braintree Elementary when we bought her home. She has been with my son ever a step of the way and I trust her implicitly. I know that her background working at trauma-informed schools, they are taught the safe ways to restrain, the safe ways to de-escalate situations. You're way over. Sorry, I was just thinking about it. Oh, that's okay. Anyway, I can't say enough good things about Hailey and I just wanted to let you know we're here, we support you and thank you for everything you've done. I'm just too sorry. I'll be better. Thank you. Time to go. Do it, yeah. So I'm not gonna stand up. So my name is Sonia Katnott and I'm the school counselor at the elementary school. I'm a resident of Waterbury. So first of all, I wanna say I'm glad that there's a draft of an action plan. I think that that's a really good step going forward and it's an important one that we need throughout our school. So it did state in the opening paragraph, quote, it was created through the input of those who work closely with our most challenging students, end quote. And I just wanna point out that not one member of our social-emotional learning team was part of that, collaborated with that, just part of that process. I also take offense that Mr. Millington has said that Mike and Hailey dysregulate kids and they were treated very unfairly and not collaboratively at a recent meeting that they were at that we had talked about. In my 19th year of working at RES, Mike and Hailey are the most skillful, empathetic team members who create incredible relationships with our students and we are so lucky to have them. I can't imagine working with better colleagues. Thank you. Okay, back there. Hi, I'm Jenny. I'm a teacher here at TCC, but I'm talking as parent to this. I'd like to say my experience from the other side as a child who has been, I don't know, bully's not quite the word, but has had attacks on him and the fact that people, I'm hearing that people are not allowed to restrain children in safe, healthy ways really, really makes me nervous. My son has come home a couple times saying that he's been punched in the stomach. This does not leave bruises, this does not leave bleeding. There's no evidence, but to know that a personnel cannot come and restrain him is very, very, very concerning. Just the other side of somebody who is dealing with, I don't know what's it called, but attack is just really concerning. And then also the other thing is, I have another daughter who experiences that. There are times when kids are dysregulated and the teacher needs to be involved with them and these good children are getting ignored because all of the effort is on these other children who need extra help. And also, Mr. Mike's awesome. My son talks a lot of all the time. Very positive male role model. Thank you. I'm gonna go over here and then I'll be back here. My name is Molly Mullen. I am a forever resident of Randall. Wasn't gonna speak, but I am so moved by everybody. I am a staff member, but most importantly, a parent of two children at the elementary school. And I'd love to piggyback on what Jenny said about 90% of the students in the school who don't have trauma or behavioral issues and how concerned I am as a parent, knowing what I know working at the school, that those kids are severely losing out on an education. Our teachers and the SEL team do a fantastic job of trying to keep classrooms normal and regulated, but it's the kids who have problems that get all the help which in turn pushes the rest of our kids to the side. We need people like our SEL team to keep our classrooms together so that my two children can have the best education they can get. I trust Mr. Sean, my son's teacher and the SEL team to put my kids who don't have behavioral issues, their needs first, and they do a great job, but there's only so much they can do before they get pushed to the wayside. And my son's needs are just as important as those kids. And I will say if the community knew half of what goes on, they would be appalled at what their kids have to deal with on a daily basis, how many times their kids' classrooms get cleared, how many times things get thrown at them. And I think it would be really important that the community be privy to that knowledge when it happens, because you would really see the hard work and dedication our SEL team puts out to try to stop those before it even happens. And I fear that if we lose our SEL team, it's just gonna get worse. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, I'm Megan Westbrook. I am a long-time resident of Randolph, and I'm a parent of three kids at R.E.S., kindergarten, second grade, fourth grade. I'm also currently working in the school as a long-term sub with Special Ed. So I have both perspectives, and I just wanna kind of piggyback on both with Jenny and Molly have said, I think especially what Molly just ended with, which is that if parents in the community, and I'm like looking at the board thinking, have any of you actually worked in the school? Have you subbed? Have you spent any time in any of the classrooms? I really encourage you, go to the school during the day, spend some time in the school. I knew what I was going into working there as like I've lived in Randolph for a long time. I know the community really well, and I have little kids, but honestly, it's eye-opening. There's so much going on in the school, it's volatile at times, it can feel unsafe for staff and students, and this team is amazing. They're so impressive, all of them, and obviously, you guys, like SEL seems amazing, but everyone, parents, like the ladies who work in the front office, like every single teacher is there, and they're working their butts off every single day, and honestly, I don't even know if they do it, I don't know when they come back, like Friday morning after everything that they've done, but I really encourage you, get in the classroom and see what's happening. Our kids, all needs should be met. All kids' needs should be met. I have a kindergartner who was in the kindergarten class that Katya was just talking about, where there was a student who ran from the building. The amount of staff needed to corral that one kindergartner, imagine the time that was taken up, just that one situation, while my kindergartner was in a class, without the teacher, like there was learning lost in that time. So I just wanna say, get in the classroom, sub for a day, just even one day, choose a class and sub, and just see it from your own perspective seriously. Thank you. I think I had someone online. We have someone online. Felicia. Sorry, I have one muting. We can hear you. Okay. We could. Hold on. There you go. She's still here, right there. I'm trying to play a recording. Hold on. Felicia, I'm gonna see if there are other comments in the room, but I'm not disregarding you. Are there other? Sure. I just say that I sense the recording to the board. If they could play it, it probably the audio would be better, please. Logically, I'm not sure how we would do that. You might be able to get it on your phone. That's a good idea. I wonder about this, though. I mean, you're present, but so playing a recording, wow, I'm looking for guidance from board members. I just wanna make sure we're doing the right thing in terms of what we allow for public comment. Great. Thank you for your input. Rachel, did you have something? No. Okay, so are there more comments in the room? Okay, yes. So Felicia, we're gonna just hold on this for a moment. Oh, you may have disappeared. My name's Mike Dooley, I'm a resident of Randolph. I've worked at RES for the last three, two years plus this year. I really only wanna say two things. One is, we have made repeated requests to the special education director who is responsible for training for physical interventions to revisit how the district does that. In the three years that I've received the trainings, not a single training has not involved watching a video. When I trained handle with care for Claire Martin Center, it was a two day training. That's the minimum that someone would need. When I brought to the attention of the special education director that we are no longer certified, I was told CPI does not require yearly recertifications. The truth is, if you call CPI, which I've done, CPI is the one we use at Randolph. Crisis prevention, intervention, I believe. They were quick to tell me that the instructors are every two years and that the district should be providing every six month training and that if the district provides every six month training, we do not have to have a recertification. I've only ever had a video. I have never actually been allowed to practice the CPI moves with a human being. The second thing I wanna say is that the only question Superintendent Millington has ever asked me in the time that I've worked and I racked my brain trying to think of any question besides potentially how are you when he's greeted me is if I would like to watch the tape, the video of our intervention that my colleague alluded brought up in front of my entire faculty body. I am going to look in my email since we do have an agreement from last year with our council looking at you because I'm sure you're gonna remember that we do, we can read email, public comment that we've received. I don't see a reason why you can't play that. It may be the person just was uncomfortable saying it out loud, but we wanted to do a recording. All right, let me see. Just as long as it doesn't go over three minutes because we gave you a release. I'll get my timer. All right, I'll get my timer. We'll do it in three minutes, everyone. I'm probably over doing better since something else started coming in. Good evening board and guests. My name is Felicia Allard. I'm here before you tonight as the former director of the Randolph Technical Career Center and as a parent with two children in this district, one at the elementary school and one at the high school. I'm here because I agree with concerns about the top leadership of this district. Due to my separation agreement, I am unable to speak publicly to my employment history at RTCC, but I would like the board to consider an exit interview with me and this is my formal request for one. I wanna point out that the separation agreement seemed to be the way that problems are solved in this district versus dialogue and collaboration. I am not the first one to be coerced into a separation agreement. And when disagreement occurs again, unchecked, I will not be the last. What I am most concerned about here is that up until recently, we have only heard from a select few voices. I'm pleased the board is reviewing policy to obtain more oversight. However, notoriously missing are the voices of the majority of parents, students, staff, and administrators who have left the district under Lane's leadership. I can tell you that in my 27 years in education, my time in this district was the most challenging of my career. It'd be easy to assume that this is because of the pandemic, but it is not. It is because of the mismanagement of this district, specifically lack of instructional leadership from the top, supervision of district level employees, and accountability for adults to behave in the ways in which we expect our kids to. Now as a mom, I've looked into school choice to allow my child to be in an environment that focuses on learning. It's not normal for kids to pee on the floor. It's not normal for sinks to be ripped off the walls. It is not normal to have the amount of bullying and harassment that exists in these schools. It is not normal for these problems to have grown to the levels that they have. I would make the case that our district leadership intentionally creates divisiveness to keep eyes off the real problem. The amount of upper level disrespect for staff and students is astonishing. No wonder our students are angry, our staff are burnt out, and we've had 100% administrator turnover. I would ask the board to consider what has happened in the last six months. I've been contacted by two separate groups to complete a survey and a petition. This community wants to be heard. This staff, these students, and our community have realized that Lane Millington's leadership is toxic for this district and it is holding our kids back. The root of the problem is at the supervisory level, specifically Lane Millington and Heather Lawler. I would ask that this board not renew their contracts. Thank you. Thank you. It is 6.50 and we have a full agenda, so I'm going to call public comment closed now. A reminder from the preamble I read that the board cannot respond to any, but I will say thank you for being here and we invite you to all of our meetings and to contact us by email. Our board emails are available on the website. So thank you. I'm going to the next agenda item. And you're also welcome to stay. Yes, the sign-in book for anyone who's not staying. Please make sure you sign in. We need public record of attendance. Thank you. It looks like it's over here near this other screen. Do you need it? At this point, if I needed to add something to the agenda, I needed to attend before public comment. It's usually the first act, but since you haven't conducted any real business yet, you probably won't. Okay, because we needed to get a request onto the agenda. That's not there now. So we have the opportunity to write, or did it make it into the packets? This is just where it is. Did the new request that I needed to add to the agenda, did it make it into the, it's going to be there? The main packet. I emailed it. Yes. I think I emailed it to everyone and did not. Okay, so. I'm just going to RTC. I have no request to help. There's a facilities request. Do we have, we don't have it printed? No. Okay, so my apologies. No, thank you, thank you. It's not a critical one. So we had to wait a moment. Could we, only because I'm not sure everyone's had a chance. Yeah, no, it came in late from the facilities so it's probably fine. Okay. If we need to call a special meeting, if it comes from a redemption concert, we'll do that. So we're going to move on to discussing the annual report to voters. This is something that goes in the town annual report and we put it together every year. And in the previous years, we have had help from them. Yes, right, I know we did last year. I don't know if, yep. I was just going to say, I'd like to make, I don't know if I need to make a motion, but I'd like to see if we can move the, or if it's okay if we move the RUHS presentation up just because we do have our staff here and to honor their time and the great idea. I, do I need a motion, I do. I'll make a motion. Great. Make a motion to move back. Up on the agenda, please. I second that. Seconded by Chelsea. All those in favor? Aye. Aye, opposed? Thank you very much. Thank you, Katya. That's very thoughtful of you. So at this moment, I would love to invite the presentation to begin. Join us, please. Give me just a second because I'm trying to load your presentation. Do you guys want chairs at the table? No. You want to stand? I mean, I think we can stand. Okay. We're a small group, but. I'll use my computer too if you need. We'll be right up there. Thank you. Present. I was looking for a presentation in our colors. It's a little splashy, but. It's cool. It is showing up, right? Yep. But it's on like eight slides, and I'm like slide number one. We'll be quick. This is just an overview. Thank you. Thank you. Some of the things that we've been up to this school year. So thank you for giving us this opportunity to present to all of you. I really appreciate being able to talk about the work that we're doing. We still have areas to improve and we are looking at data all the time and talking to our students and our staff and learning the ways in which we can continue to grow. Can I touch this to move forward or do we? You can try. I don't think it'll work. I can try. It's not gonna work. Okay. So we just wanted to do a quick overview of some of the areas that we're really focused on this school year, and then we'll go a little bit deeper as we move into the presentation. So we're gonna talk about increased time on learning, data-driven decision-making, ensuring that we know all students well, the celebrations that we have planned to acknowledge growth and success, and also some of our work addressing student behavior. So increased time on learning, as some of you, well, probably all the board members but people in the audience are aware that this year we switched to a waterfall schedule and what this allowed us to do are primarily the reason for looking at changing the schedule was increasing instructional time on learning. Through the small adjustments in our schedule, we added 47 hours of instructional time this school year, which is a significant amount of time on learning that we've added. And that's not including the instructional time that happens during callbacks, advisories, or after-school programming, and I'll touch on those all as well. So how it currently looks is we have two blocks static in the morning of our seven blocks throughout the day. Then the remaining five blocks rotate. So all classes meet four times. And why that's important is when we talk about time on learning, best practices also increasing the frequency of learning. So you're not having this big chunk of time and if we have a Friday off for some reason that student might be almost five days away, then you're kind of spending the entire class period relearning what you've missed because of a time gap and loss. So that frequency of learning is important in addition to the actual time on learning. Feedback we've gotten from students is that it is a little bit challenging when you have a waterfall schedule where every single day after your second block, your schedule's a little bit different. So it flows through. But what we've heard from students is that they actually, everything's really positive. They like the variety in their day. Teachers have given us positive feedback. At first there was a little hesitation about how this might look. Teacher feedback has been positive in that they find that students are more engaged when they're in class and they're not falling into poor routines of, oh, every last block, the last 10 minutes of class, the pool's almost out. That's spread across all five days. So that kind of helps establish good routines before lunch, after lunch, those kind of times or sometimes we historically have seen legs in learning. Teacher feedback has been students are more engaged throughout the entire time. Plus it's a little less than an hour long block. So they're not trying to stretch out some of this learning into an hour and a half. Extension class, they're also something new this year. And so we're working to support students in ELA and math particularly. We have 32 students in ELA, about 60 in math. Hold my reading glass down here. And these are blocked out as a class that meets four times a week. And these are skills based. They're not a homework help or a catch up from other classes kind of help. These are classes that are populated based on start testing or teacher recommendations. And students can test out of these if they can show that they're meeting proficiency in these areas where they have some weaknesses. Call back time. So this isn't new, I wanted to mention this because I think it's an important part of our school culture and how we do things. So the most recent student engagement survey which just came out about a week ago, 85% of students self-report that I use my callback well. And so what we use this for is enrichment. So AP classes often need that time for providing additional instruction, the science lab to provide that time remediation happens in that time for some students. This is an extension time, but this is a time where students who need the extra support are given an hour a week to work with individual teachers. Again, this isn't calculated into that 47 hours extra throughout the year. This is time that learning is happening but we don't count it in because there's that variability. After school programming is another time where thankfully because of the late buses happening five times a week, we're providing more increased time on learning. And again, this isn't counted towards that additional 47 hours either, but it is happening. So if you look across the school, we're adding more and more opportunities for learning and time on learning. Actually, as I was walking down the hall today, a couple of students were sitting in the hallway and just seeing how much they love this opportunity to be able to stay after school to the biggest draws are theater program and their dance programs. And so we have a number of students participating though that there's 18 students in the dance class and I'm not sure how many in the theater, but it's comparable. So we have a lot of students participating in that which also gives them time to take some of those core academic classes that they might have to choose between theater or algebra or right. So like it gives them more time on learning because we have this additional learning opportunities after school. Again, that's not calculated into it. We're starting our homework club potentially next week as still more time on learning which is how we get things done. So here's a little bit about our data decision data-driven decision-making. So STAR tests are given on a regular basis. Those are tests that scale with the V-CAP or V-CAP testing. They changed the names like three times while they were implementing the new test last year. Formerly, we had given SBAC tests and so STAR is a pretty reasonable predictor of how students will do on those tests. So students who are functioning below proficiency or showing that they're partially proficient in ELA or math with a teacher recommendation are scheduled into an extension class so that they can work on some skill development. At the middle level, we had seven students already who've tested out of that class so they're graded classes and they get tested a little bit more frequently. So there's flexibility so that if there is just an area that they're struggling to learn, they get really targeted intervention with their classroom teacher and then they have an opportunity to go into an elective or something of their choice once they show that they've developed the skills we're hoping to see them develop. The goal is to have students working on grade level. We know at the middle and high school level that the stronger their skills are in math and literacy earlier, the more deeply they can go into science content and social studies content and really immerse themselves in learning and get the most out of their educational experience with us. So it's very important that they have the basic skills developed that they need to fully engage. We have grade level team meetings scheduled into the school day. So our grade teams meet twice a week, one time a week for planning and like how they're going to integrate and how they're going to support students across their grade team and then another time to discuss student needs. So that is a time when they can review data when they can discuss what they're seeing and when they can make decisions based on performance and based on the actual human children in their classroom about how they're going to proceed. There are deeper learning opportunities offered to support skill development in the content and in core classes that we're proud of and we have worked with the community a few years ago. Some of you will remember, we worked with a gentleman named Winston Goodrich and we did a lot of polling and we got information about what the community wanted and we learned that people felt really passionately about math for everyday life or the kind of math that kids need in order to function in our world as well as an on your own curriculum that used to be here, I think 15 years ago it was a graduation requirement and people really wanted that back. Right now it's an elective but with our ninth grade class as they move up through, it'll be a graduation requirement for their graduation year. That's your life school course. Yeah. So they're working on cooking nutritious food and how to get insurance and all of those things that feel so important. The development of Specialized Plum was, so this is something that we're primarily focusing on with our STEM students, students interested in that field, especially since we have such a great resource with the Innovation Center back here. Obviously so much invested, thank you for that. But so we're trying to focus on STEM first and what a Specialized Plum will look like is the student identifies a number of courses within the STEM area where it's not going to be prescribed because we want to have some choice and variability and some opportunities for flexible pathways within that. Within this menu of options, you say if you pick X amount of core courses within the STEM, you could start working towards a specialized supplement in STEM. In addition to those courses, we would look at some higher level learnings and independent learning opportunities, these other things that say, so now that you have this core content, what are you going to do with it? And so hopefully look at some career planning, some job shadows, maybe some informational interviews, potentially an internship. And so you have that career education, an exploration part of that, as well as the higher education planning, like so now this is the career I want, what are some of these options on this menu that you want to do to look at post-secondary education? So when we look at the specialized diploma, it's not just saying, okay, you've taken these five courses, check the box. Like so this is STEM, what can you do with it in our community, what are pathways within that field? So we're excited about that. We think it helps promote engagement, it helps maybe encourage some of those students who are seniors who have enough credits to graduate. But did you know if you took these other two classes, or if you took this other class here, it helps promote students taking more classes than the other ones might not have. And also looking at different opportunities within the field. In addition to STEM, if STEM is something that looks like it's going well, we would then look at humanities, fine performing arts, the global studies foreign language, business entrepreneurship, and then potentially like a self-designed. That's way in advance, I only got two ahead of myself. Focusing on STEM, because that's really what our resources are. Here we have such great resources and a couple of really good instructors down in the IC as well as a lot of our classroom teachers. I didn't mention this in the after-school program piece, because Nassra, Abdel Fattah and Tomzani who are great educators in the IC, they're offering an after-school programming piece. Thursdays and Fridays for students in grades five through eight. Again, this happens after-school. And if you're around, and you're all invited to come into classrooms, come in and see what's happened in the IC after-school. It's just a hub of activity and students and they're making things on 3D printers and laser engraving. It's just a great way for some of these younger students to help them make that successful transition into the middle grades in high school. That place is hopping. I wanted to mention that because we feel that will then help encourage students to explore fields instead. Yeah, one of the things that I found really exciting about that, and I'm not sure if you can see by this picture is we are gradually increasing the number of girls and young women accessing our STEM programming. If you talk to some of our seventh grade girls, they are pretty excited about the STEM programming happening here. And I also am really heartened on Thursday and Friday afternoons to go down there and see the level of joy in the space. I've worked at the school for 23 years. And I have to say that for as long as I've worked here, there's been like fear of the high school, fear of the middle high school. And so to have elementary school age students coming here after school and doing things that they feel passionately about and joyful about that are academically driven is pretty exciting. Also last week we presented in Chelsea, they do this high school fair because they have choice. So Chelsea Tumbridge do a fair and everybody sets up. And we brought some of our students and I was so proud of them talking about the learning opportunities that they have here. And also there's an outrageous amount of swag or merch that schools hand out trying to attract students. And all of ours was made by kids. We have some extra notebooks that have been laser printed that if you'd like I can bring some in so we have some leftovers. But it was pretty remarkable that everything that we were given out was made by our students and designed by our students in the Innovation Center. So another thing that we're working on is advisory programming. If you've had students who've gone through our system and if you've had multiple students who've gone through our system, you may know that our advisory program can be a really important part of a student's day or it can not. And sometimes it depends on just the advisor that you have and we've identified that as an area that creates some inequity because it's so person dependent or for example, you might have a strong advisor who goes out on family leave and then your student has a sub and things sort of fall apart. So we have invested in the Wayfinder SEL curriculum and that has an opportunity for students to engage with career planning, goal setting. There are lessons that are related to SEL self regulation, all of those sorts of things that help us to know what to expect in advisory and give the same tools to every advisor. So every advisory will always be a little bit different just based on the people in the room, kids included. But the things that we can make more consistent help us to make a strong program. Twice a year we give this student engagement survey that we started giving last spring and it asks questions ranging from, do you think about what you're learning in school when you're at home? Do you have conversation with your family about what you're learning about? Do you feel like your workload is manageable? What would you like to see different or what would you like to see improved at your school? And do you have one trusted known adult at school because we know that that's so important. We've taken that data, we're just beginning to unpack it and gone to the grade teams and said, these are the kids on your teams who said they don't have an adult who wants to put in some extra effort to make sure they have an adult. And so we'll give the survey again at the end of the year. We'll also talk to grade teams about, because we can disaggregate the data by grade level. So see if students aren't feeling engaged or aren't feeling passionately about what they're learning or aren't feeling like it's rigorous enough. We can have conversations about how to tweak our work in order to better serve them. This ties together pretty closely with some of the safety programming that we've been doing. Act 29 says we're gonna come in and out through one door. We'll do multi-option safety drills and lots of different things to keep students safe. One really important part of keeping students safe is knowing them incredibly well. So there are reports about school safety that talk about both hardening and softening schools. The softer side is knowing your kids and knowing who's in your building at any given time. And I think our staff does a pretty remarkable job of knowing our students. So we're working really hard on those drills and the education related to keeping our schools safe. Celebrations. So our school year started rather than giant assembly we did by grade levels this year. And so we could target in and focus and have more of a conversation with students by the grade level assemblies. And we thought that was kind of a nice way to start things off and be able to form more of a relationship with students and have them introduce to us and have that be an assembly that was maybe more meaningful to each individual student that was in there by having it smaller. Other celebrations at the core of who we are are student conferences, right? So while that isn't something that is maybe acknowledged as a whole school celebration for that individual student to be able to say this is something I'm very proud of because at the end we want students to be engaged with their learning because they're proud of the content that they're producing. And so student conferences are a really important part of how we celebrate students during our school. We're also planning to bring back end of quarter assemblies for the whole school and then using the Herald and social media to acknowledge academic achievements by our students. Sharing out to the greater community that great academics do happen here and these are the students that we're celebrating. So we think that that's an important piece that we want to bring back. And a big celebration that we're hoping that will happen in January towards the end of the semester is a celebration of opening up the new gym once we have the new mascot mural up on the wall. If you've all seen it, it's already beautiful, shiny floor, bright lights. It's gorgeous down there. It's been, it was a long wait but it's been worth the wait. It's a great space down there. So that's our next big celebration that we'll be having is the celebration of our gym which will be open to the entire community. Yeah, we've heard from a student today who was upset because the floor has gotten a little bit dirty. Ninth grade boy, deeply concerned because it's not as shiny as it was five days ago. So we're also, we know that there are areas of improvement. I mean, we're presenting the highlights real but I wanna be really realistic about the fact that we still have work that we're doing all the time from the data collection that we're doing caring from students to measuring academicians are they can rise to that occasion and we provide supports to address that. We are working to support challenging behavior with empathy, care and education both proactively through the social emotional learning curriculum and advisory but then also reteaching social emotional lessons when a student does what's not expected. So we have a social emotional coordinator who has been teaching lessons. I would say the most used lessons so far this school year are on intent versus impact. So maybe you didn't intend for that to really hurt somebody or for what you said to be upsetting. But if it is, then we need to think about how we move forward. We also are having weekly attendance team meetings. One week we review the data. One of the things we know is that if students aren't here then we can't teach them. So we look at the amount of school missed and plan proactive steps and then next week we pull together different members of the attendance team. It's more of a supportive meeting. How are we going to reach out to that family? Are we going to use our home school coordinator and have him reach out? Are we going to work with other resources here within our school to get those students to attend? More frequently attendance has been a real challenge as we return from the pandemic and there are some really notable successes but there are also students who we don't see as often as we'd like to. So that's an ongoing concern. I think that's our last slide. What about, what about, we mentioned that back at a time period, yeah. I do want to mention, I forgot to thank Bob and watch for all the work they did on that gymnasium. It was just a tremendous amount of hours and effort that they put into that. Yeah, I think you just joined, you didn't have a problem. Yeah, what's the point there? All right, so any questions for us? I have a question. In terms of, because you're collecting data around the academics, I'm wondering, are you looking as we look at engagement and we look at attendance and wanting to engage kids in the school, are you tracking like how many kids are involved in theater stuff, how many kids are doing sports teams and just kind of, and checking, because I know sometimes it's the same kids doing everything to sort of look, are we seeing like the whole community of students getting involved and engaging? I think that having the after school bus or the late bus has increased that cross section of the student population that we're seeing after school. Our athletics and activities director, Nick Bent, one of his goals is eventually to be at 80% or better of students involved in co-curricular activities or after school activities. I believe the most recent number showed a 10% increase. We've been upward, we've been growing in our after school programming or our programming that connects our students to school outside of the school day since the end of the pandemic. I don't know if you've noticed on this media center board, but we have a manga and anime after school club. A couple of weeks ago, they made mochi, they're gonna make mooncakes, they're reading together. We have theater, we have a variety of clubs that meet after school, a cooking club. So we work really hard to help students who are inspired to develop a club or have a little friend group that they want to develop a club to connect them with an adult and make sure that we can make that club happen because we know that the more positive connections are with school, the more successful a student is as a student. Yes, a couple of questions. The student engagement survey, that's so great. I just have a couple of questions about it. Obviously it's not anonymous because you know which kids are saying they don't have an adult. So what percentage of response are you getting? Right now, we are up around 80%. Literally after school today, after things quieted down, I went through and we noted who has responded, who hasn't yet, who's at the tech center. So we cross-referenced the survey with our full student roster and so we'll start really trying to make that 100% because we can't say that all of our students have an adult in the school if we don't get the data from all of our students. So we're working on making that something that's universal. My only other question is that you have so many teams and so many team meetings. Do you, that happens during the school day? Yes. All of those? How do you do, that's a lot. So Cara Merrill is a scheduling guru. I don't understand how her mind works but I'm grateful that it does function the way that it does. So once our schedule is built, Cara looks for how to make sure there's common planning time in the day for staff members on a grade team and she identifies where that spot is and that's where the team meeting happens. I think it's the breakfast burritos that she gets by the time. I know, I've been there. It's gotta be. Yes. About the after school programming. Are there enough adults to help with that? Like who are the adults that help with the clubs? So there's different programming. So we have, yes, so far they're all staffed. I would love to be able to offer more but we do have teachers who tutor after school and so that's really targeted in their content area. We're starting the homework club which will be Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays and that's more sort of general support and a place where students can either be scheduled if teachers see a need or they can drop in. So maybe you have basketball practice at 5.30 but you're gonna be here from 2.30 until 5.30 waiting. You can have a snack and be with a trusted adult who's been vetted by our school system to get your homework done and just have a level of support and redirection around that work. So we do struggle a little bit to find people who want to extend their day but we've been able to. But we've been able to so. What about your summer programming? Our summer programming we want to do more of it. We only had probably at the middle high school level 15 or 20, not a ton. It was 22, 22, okay. So not a lot but we would like to increase the level of summer programming and increase access. So summer programming is like making up classes that you maybe didn't do so well in or is it like summer camp for two? It's a combination. So this year Deb Larry ran a journalism program. So there were some students who needed to spend more time writing and reading and that provided an opportunity for them but it also provided an opportunity for students who wanted to continue to engage with school. Summer vacation doesn't look the same for all kids and sometimes they need a place to be with a trusted adult. We feed them, we care a lot about them so. We'd like to make more intensive summer programming where it really could be remediation, skill development, some of those things but also extension because there's a lot of learning lost over the summer. And we know some kids go home and read books all summer and then they come back to school and they've got a stronger reading level than they had when they left. And some leave school and they don't read a thing all summer, they just hang out. And so you know we work with everybody. And then my final thing, I know I was a little bit critical of the student-led conferences the other day and I do think the value that you spoke to about the student owning their experience and being proud of this and struggling with that and presenting it is a good process and it is a good thing for, it's good. I think what I was trying to say is that I wish there was also a place where you could talk to each teacher about how your student's doing and sort of hear it presented either with your student or without just so you got a feel for how they're doing in math, science, social studies, English, like all of the things instead of just the student presenting it. Something for us to work on. I'm sure that you're not alone in that desire. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anybody else? Yeah, on the attendance, what is the current policy that you guys are holding? I mean, we just talked, I guess the RTCC just transitioned and cut from 20 absences to 10 and put together an engagement plan with parents and folks. I think what's really hard is that we have students who really grapple with anxiety, grapple with a number of my mental health challenges. The issues related to attendance can be from physical illness to worry about a parent and being or a younger sibling. It's just every single story is unique, it seems like. So at seven absences, we send a letter. At 10, we send another letter. Then we send another letter at 15. And all the while at each of these steps, we're also communicating with the family beyond just mailing a form letter and trying to figure out how we get the student to engage in school a little bit more. The current fill-in state's attorney for Orange County. The rule has always been that we file a truancy after David at 20 days absent. And he's really saying when attendance becomes problematic, he'd like to hear about it. And that's not so that we're holding a student accountable in a punitive way. It's because there are additional resources through the Orange County Restorative Justice Network, through, you know, DCF has a bad name, but they have additional resources too. And so it's good to think about how we can wrap around a student and try to get them to engage with school more. So is 20 the threshold for not passing? 20 is technically the threshold for not passing, but if we can get them to re-engage in school and they're meeting proficiency, then they can still pass. But we need to see them. We need to see the work that they're doing, and we need to get them fully re-engaged. So we, oh, go ahead, go ahead. I'm wondering if you can sort of changing your policy on that because it seems like seven assences and just a letter, it seems like it's a bit lenient without actual direct conversation with the parent or guardian. Yeah, so we do have direct conversations with the parent and guardian. The letter goes home because that's an expectation, but we also are in good communication with the family. And we often know what the circumstances are and so we can talk about that. We think about who is the best fit to reach out to the family in some circumstances. It's Kara, our director of student services in some circumstances, it's Colin Andresic. It depends on who we know has a trusting relationship with the family. In some situations it's the advisor. We just know that those twice a year meetings and also follow up in between is something that has meant a lot to the family. And so we discuss who's the best person to try to take the first shot at getting them back in. So I'm trying to describe in really general terms a really personalized process. So my last question, as you've heard, we just heard from the elementary school, a lot of staff just feeling overwhelmed and a lot of very unruly behavior. It's hard to deal with. Middle school and high school staff facing similar challenges or is it a little less volatile at this level? So at the end of last school year, we had a leadership team meeting and we really talked about behavior because last year we saw a lot of volatile behaviors. And the metaphor that I like to use because I taught English for a long time is if those of you who took PE in a public school remember when they would get the parachute out, I don't know if any of you remember that. So when you play with the parachute, if anybody drops their piece of the parachute, it's not any fun anymore. And so we've really talked a lot about collective care and how we care for each other through holding students accountable. Because what gets really hard is if one person drops their section of parachute, kids do what works for them and they know where they can sort of have more flexibility. And so this year, I think we're doing better, although our discipline data, because we pull the data and put it in a spreadsheet monthly and we have had a lot more pink slips at the beginning of the school year, just documentation of behavior. But the reason for that is because we want to be having conversations with students talking about how we need to reset behavior, talking about how we need to know where the boundaries are and when you cross the line, we need to be in communication with family and communication with the student and supporting teachers in holding that line, holding up their piece of the parachute. It's been really challenging, but we're starting to see the number of sort of trivial things drop off. And I'm saying trivial, I don't really mean trivial, but Katie Vincent Roller reported last week because Jason and I have really focused on being in the hallway and making sure students have passes and that they're going to a specific place and they're not just hanging out in the hallway. So that can be intimidating for younger kids if there's a group of older kids sort of roaming the halls and also they're not in the classroom learning if they're just roaming the halls. So Katie Vincent Roller came to me at the end of the day and she said, the cutest moment of my day happened when an eighth grader came scurrying in the classroom and closed the door and she said, what was happening? And she was like, his flight's coming down the hallway and I don't have a pass. So it was just a very innocent moment but they knew that I would ask them, do you have a pass? So we're working really hard to hold students accountable and we have had a lot of parent meetings because we're also trying to really partner with families. We know that's what's best for kids. So how can we work with a family, be in good communication and support their student and making good choices here at school? And Ms. Floyd brought behavior matrix this year to the first leadership meeting and what we asked is that teachers make that first phone call home. Like I said, oh, yes, this is a little level but I'm just calling home to let you know that's what we saw today. It's not something we would expect. So rather than wait until we have this big culminating, oh, your kid has four disciplinary referrals based on this one behavior, introduce the parents right away to what we're seeing and hopefully bring them into that conversation so we don't get to four or five, six DRs, disciplinary referrals, like let's have this conversation with the parent right away about what we're seeing and what we expect so they can then have that conversation at home with their child as well. So we're working in partnership with them. I think that's helpful and just engaging and having those communications as frequently as possible. Better to have a low level one than have this high level, oh, you know, why are you calling me? Because my kid's not on the attention because they have all these things. Why didn't anyone let me know? We're asking teachers to do that and they're SAL coordinator. Then once it reaches the next level then he'll make the phone call and then we will. So we have a stepped process. And we've been working really hard in terms of reading about how we combat burnout and how we support people and care for people. And so we've been working hard to cultivate adult community and when we have meetings bring as much positivity and joy into those meetings as we can. So it's hard work. We have students with a lot of need and a lot that they're working on and we're still into it. So, great. Thank you both very much. This is personally, and I think I speak for some of you that it's just really nice to have a conversation. We really appreciate the opportunity to have a conversation. And the work that goes into a presentation and you've been just putting it on the screen is enough but then having you guys here to answer our questions and just engage with us is really cool. Any time, it's fun to talk about for me anyway. Wayne said eight to 12 minutes and I was like, I'm bored of my friends by talking about school. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you. Love the thriller video too. Oh my gosh, Lauren Clayhouse and those kids are amazing. That was awesome, that was totally awesome. There's a display in the hallway for how to make your own zombie clothes if you need that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you and thank you for suggesting that we move that up. I'm gonna try to fly through what we can like I'm gonna try to start going like this. So, let's back up to the annual report to voters. I think we need to figure out what we wanna do to start getting it together. It is somewhat linked with the draft letter that the ownership linkage committee put together. I mean, it's very, very draft. It's a first draft, it's in your packets. We kind of, the minutes are in there too, just saying we discussed it, but we got together, we kind of bled out everything we thought we might wanna put into the letter. Obviously that won't be in the annual report but I think the annual report can kind of be everything we were trying to put into all of these letters that we wanna then get out to the community. This isn't going fast yet, people, help. Well, I guess the first question is, are people interested in engaging someone to help us put together what will be in the annual report to voters? Someone outside of this group of people. Well, you've hardly written that ourselves. No. Ben has helped us. Last time, Ian, Anne, and Ben. Chelsea and I met with Ben. Yeah, two years we've been doing it, right? Yeah, and we just sort of highlighted the things we wanted him to, and then he put the letter together. He wrote the letter, it was like, wow. So it's sort of like having an AI, right? You know, a piece and it was really great. We tweaked a few things and then we brought it to the board to approve. Yes, so I guess my question would be are we interested in that? It does have budgetary impact because he's now contracted rather than being on staff, so that is something we have to take into consideration, but we can certainly take a vote. We're interested in doing it that way and then if you wanna go for the trifecta third year of working with him. I am happy to do that. If we're contracting with him, I don't wanna have to write the letter myself. Do you wanna make a motion? So I will, yeah, enter in a motion to engage, right? Yeah, he reached out, he was emailing or something. He did, yeah. Yeah, yeah. We'll review this. Don't forget to give us the stuff she just gave us. Thank you. So I second that motion. Who made the motion? Oh, I thought you, oh, I'm making, I thought that was your informal motion. I make a motion to engage Ben, do you want me to last name you? Meryl. Meryl. And Anne Kaplan and Chelsea Sprague to make a letter that goes out for the annual budget. Annual report, reporters. Nice long motion. Do I have a second? Second. Great, thank you, Katya seconds. Thank you. Yeah. All those in favor? I say I am, raise your hands. Thank you, those opposed? Abstentions. Awesome. Ben did reach out to, I think the three of us, but I'll write him back and say that you guys will be contacting him, yeah? Anne, is there an E on the end of your name? Cause I do have different evidence. Great. Complaint procedure, there were last minute, so in the packet is the brochure of the complaint procedure and then there were some last minute flurries of, we should be looking at something else. But we do need to adopt one officially. So. I can just remind the board, we worked on it last fall and then the board had, before we wanted to officially have it in our board binder, cause it's in your binder, I met with Sean at PHRO's office to just go over it and make sure everything was straight and we made a couple little things and then, and then we printed it and put it in the binder, but we forgot to officially adopt it. So. If that's the one we're adopting, then this brochure needs to be changed. Yeah, the brochure needs to be changed because step 10 is where I think we ran into something, the board will make a decision to resolve the complaint. We wanted that fleshed out more in terms of what the decision is that we would be making about, was the superintendent's decision reasonable rather than agreeing with one party or the other. Right. So, in terms of adopting one, it should be the one that is in our binder, it's a separate printed thank you pile board procedure for hearing complaints. And again, I think the thing that we most concentrated on last year in amending was this step seven. Yeah, we just wanted to clarify it to make sure that people understood more clearly what the process was so that, because they were sort of thinking they were gonna get to rehash all the facts of the, and so that's why we went through it to just sort of make sure the steps were clear and people understood what we would be doing in that process. And for ourselves just to remember that if we are, you know, in some things we need to sort of remind the administration not to share too much with us because if it is a controversial thing and we're gonna then need to hear a complaint, we wanna make sure that we're not having, or getting a colored view of things. So, while this wasn't in the packet that went out originally this should be familiar to everyone and new members could spend in your finders. So, I think we can go ahead and move to adopt this although it wasn't what went out several days ago unless anyone has more edits they want to make or questions or concerns. Yes. I, so I'm literally in the conversation we're talking about the complaint procedure. Correct. Yep. I think it's fine, I'll do. Great. So then the next step would be getting rid of all the printed brochures that look like this and making them look more like, well not format-wise but to read this way. And all of the schools, so request the virgin burn. Yeah. Exactly. And then maybe we want, we wanna create a new brochure. I don't know, in the past I don't know who did these score the districts? We have a graphic first. Do we have a graphic first? We don't have a graphic first. Visual work, kind of TCC. A group that would want to do. No, it's not, now it's digital media and they do mostly video. So this is not, it's on the website. No, it needs to be posted on the website too. Because the one on the website right now is littered with typos. Yeah. So we need to have that up. Let's get that down right away. What is that Sam? This is littered with typos? No, not the one that's on the current website. Thank you. Which, which number? Is that the 27? The 27? If this doesn't list the number, so he will know. But it's the complaint procedure. Gotcha. All right, we'll get that updated, thank you. Yeah, I think probably going through all of them on the website, there's a couple with some typos, either a word missing or a misspelling or a letter backwards, whatever. But we should just go through all of them and just make sure that they're as clean as can be. Yeah. So do we need to move? Yes, I will enter in a motion to adopt. Well, I hacked the last one, so I don't know. Well, I'll move to, versus adopting it, so I'll just move to adopt the Orange Southwest School District Board procedure for hearing complaints. I second. Moved by Megan, seconded by Sarah. All those in favor, please? Say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed? And abstentions. Awesome, passes unanimously. Let's see if we can do that as well with the board rules of procedure. And did such a great job last year in getting this to legal counsel and that's actually where it came up about emails coming with public comment and us being able to bring them to the meeting. But we never actually officially adopted them as a whole kitten taboo. So did anyone see anything that they have questions about? Concerns about all these rules of procedure? They think it's missing, and if not, we can have a new date on the bottom if we adopt them rather than 2020. Yes, no? So wait, I'm just, why does it say that it was adopted in October 2022? That's what I was wondering, too. Just this page, you'll notice has the email communications on it. That's what we went to legal counsel about October of 2022, but the entire thing itself was not adopted. That's what I mean, kitten caboodle. We didn't, as rules of procedure of this board, the entire, okay. We didn't adopt the whole schmabang. Then I use a technical term. Okay, so I'll move to adopt the entire kitten caboodle. Perfect. Of the OSSD board rules of procedure. Those also should go on the website. I'll second that motion. Seconded by Sam, moved by Megan. All those in favor? Aye. Do I have a concern? I just wanted to share that in E number one, you have no flexibility to move your meeting at all according to your own policy. So if you're, if there's no flexibility at all, it's like it will be on this day at this time. And I just thought you might want to consider providing yourself with some flexibility, but other than that, no other. Yeah, to change that, we'd have to change, we'd have to re-adopt. Like, we'd have to change this. Well, the option of remote is. Rules of procedure. If we decide we're not gonna meet on the second Wednesday of every month, we're gonna meet on the third Thursday or something like that. We have to go and re-adopt this too. Exactly. And that usually would have, we changed from Monday to Wednesdays or whatever it was in March. That's, yeah. Right. It's usually with the re-organizing. So we can just change it at the re-organizing. But if we change it at the re-organizing, we also still have to go back to this procedure and edit this. Re-adopt. Re-adopt. But according to the VSBA, it seems like an extra step. Well, the VSBA wants you to re-look at this and just re-familiarize yourself because you'll have new board members, you'll be. So this should be reviewed anyway. So this should be reviewed annually anyway. So it's not final. That would be fine. Right. So we just review it in March when the re-organization. Sure, that gets put on the annual agenda. Yeah. Yeah, we should add that. Board rules and procedure are added to the annual agenda for you in March. We'll be adopting that tonight. But I'm not a person on that committee. So March, so this is good until March. So an emotion has been made by Megan to adopt. Sam. Do I have a second? Did you second? Or was that the last one? That was this one. Oh, seconded by Sam. Right, because we got to the voting and then there was talking. So again, may I have a show of those in favor? Please. Aye. Opposed? Abstentions. Fabulous. Oh, and here we are at the annual agenda. So we've just named something that needs to be added. Are there other things people spotted that need to be amended, updated? And if not, I think we can vote to accept it with one more amendment. Yeah, but if there are others, I want to take it personal. The annual agenda? Yes, and that went out as well in very tiny font. So the evaluation committee, when we met the last time we decided we were going to look at the goals three times a year, just to see how the progress is going in the fall and in the winter and then in the spring. So I don't know if we need to add that to the annual agenda. I'm thinking we should, so we don't lose it. To review the eval goals. Yeah. Okay. So I would say the first meeting would be, I don't know, what do you guys think? The survey goes out, it was false. And so we're going to review the goals for this year after June, like after the school year, right? So we'll do that in July. So we'll review them and hopefully have them set by September meeting. So I would say maybe November, February or November, March and May. They have a schedule set for when they do the track progress and the start of 360, which is where the data would come from. I can get the feedback of when that is because it fits in its specific places in the instruction that they specifically want to look at. I can pull that easy enough and get it to you. That's all right. Get the dates when those are looked at. Yeah, there's a window that they do them. Okay, so then those would coincide with our fall, our spring, our, okay. And we can add those in. So it actually sounds like maybe we should go through one more round and we'll make a couple more edits to the annual agenda. And we'll bring it back next. Sounds great. Awesome. Okay. It's really close to 24. Yes, we'll have the annual agenda done at the end of the annual. Okay, so other subcommittee updates, eBell committee about the summary of, take this one and it'll pass half this way and half this way at the end of the meeting, if you could just hand them back to me, according to the BSEA, that's the best way to maintain confidentiality. And then we met a couple times to go over finalizing the goals. The first meeting we had was with Sandra from the VSBA and basically we came up with the goals that are written in here. So like on page two, you'll see blue, like those are the goals going forward. There was like nine of them. So from that list, I compiled the list and we as a group decided that the two goals and the two points of evaluation to focus on for this next year would be foundational knowledge and monitoring and improved community relations. And so I took Lane's evaluations he did of Patty Sprague who's a principal at Brookfield, is that true? Rantry. Rantry. And basically applied it to his evaluation and tried to make it instead of being just these ideas of goals which is what I found the VSBA process left us with, having ones that were more concrete. Like this is what the test scores are today. This is what they are at the end of the year. This is how much they've improved or how much they haven't improved. And so I asked, you know, is the goal specific, measurable, realistic, results focused like every goal ever in this world should be, right? So if you look on page two of this paper, goal number one is improved foundational knowledge for the ends and reading, writing. Page two of what? I'm sorry. Of the, this? Oh, have I not handed it out yet? No. No. One, two, three, four. I was looking at the first hand out. Yeah, that is. You'll be very confused about that. Thank you. So I, you know, I took word for word kind of the evaluation process that Lane went through with his administrator and just said, how can I apply this to, you know, what we're looking for or an evaluation going forward? So I think it's important to note that some of these goals, as long as progress is being made, may take longer than one year. And I wrote that in on the front page. And I thought that was kind of a reasonable thing to add in because not everything can be fixed in a year, right? So what I would like to look at, and we don't have this information yet, Lane was going to pull it together. We just met like Monday. So it was kind of last minute with everything else going on to get the test scores compared or for 2022, 23 to fill them in for the ELA math and science. And so then at the end of the year, we can look and see what the scores are based from the AOE, right? Yeah, you're going to see them tonight. Oh, perfect. At least not here. And then I can have like a solid document. But then things like social studies, life skills and the arts, there's not solid test score results. So what we're going to use for information is how many students have completed the required national standards. And you have that data. So the social studies standards. Yeah, when they created the standards based report cards, the teachers track that as they go. So they'll be able to know if the students are on track to actually meet which required of them to pass those courses or not. Yeah, and that's for social studies. And then life skills and the arts, is there a similar standard? The arts, yes. They actually have been working on kind of creating an updated version of it. The life skills, the standard could be as basic as, you know, because we want all students to have this foundational knowledge. You know, all students before they graduate will successfully complete the life skills course as a requirement of graduation. And that's three different semesters or three classes? So right now without budget intervention, it is the on your own course that is in place now. We had talked about a while back the idea that there really should be three separate semesters at least, one that really is tailored towards the younger students at the middle school, one that's tailored for like ninth grade, and then one that's tailored for 11th and 12th because their life skill needs are different in terms of what they're encountering at those stages in their lives. And so those would require budgetary action or us, you know, agreeing to shift resources to be able to provide the extra staff for those two. But that would be the ideal end goal as to how those three. And some of that information I'll come from, Lisa and the high school implementing the strategic plan that they did with, what's the name? Yeah. Winton. Winton. Winston. Winston. Winston. Winston. It was Winton, it was Winton. So that's where we're at for goal number one. And then, so each of these lists, what the outcomes are that we're trying to achieve and what data will be collected. So I don't know if anyone has any questions about that. Next page, action steps that we came up with as a group. And then for goal number two, improved community relations with less division we thought was a big, a big one to focus on for this next year. So that goal is specific. Trying to develop strategies to promote positive community engagement by a variety of members from the administrative leadership team in our blue and the blue written goals on the summary of the survey. Delegating tasks is one way for Lane to like kind of spread out how to try to get a more positive relationship with the community throughout the administrators. So they're out there promoting that. Another item on the list was identifying our human resources situation and our public relations situation. And looking at that and seeing if hiring that human resources person might be beneficial or contracting with public relations, a public relations person or firm, I guess every other high school in the state does that. So it might be worthwhile. I think some of that work has already started. And then what the positive outcomes were that we decided we wanted to have and we want positive feedback about school activities and the direction of the curriculum from stakeholders. So that's everybody out in the community. Less staff turnover and more student retention and which data would be collected surveys about how healthy human resources and public relations are in the OSSD. And the action steps would be to actually put the survey out whether that would be contracted with an outside entity like a public relations firm or I don't know who else. I don't think the BSBA does such a thing. Maybe they do, but we could look into other options if the public relations thing is really expensive. So having objective and perceptive staff surveys from all of the staff and then also objective and subjective school community surveys put out and we want all of these to be completed by June 1st of 2024. Is that doable? June 1st, 2024. Should be. I got the contract for RPR companies sitting right in my email. And so then that would give us good information for reviewing this because it's not actually an evaluation. We're looking at it, setting goals now. We're looking at last year setting goals now. So it will be a real evaluation in July. Sorry, that's confusing. Does anyone have any question? I just want to acknowledge this is a lot of work. It is a ton of work. It is a ton of work. Yeah, this together. She did a really good job. Okay, it's a lot of work. And I think that anything that is going to change in this district is a lot of work and it needs people who are willing to do the work and put the time in because it takes a lot of time. But I'm happy that we came up with it and I was good to work with our group and to come up with this. And I feel like it's a good document going forward. So what is the next step? I mean... So the next step, so I emailed the group in Lane specifically asking for the test scores for the foundational knowledge, which he said he's going to present tonight. And then to put those numbers in here and then we're going to meet, I mean, it's already November, so we'll meet in probably in February and go over this and see where we're at whenever the foundation, what is that called? What's the foundation knowledge or the... No, the where you get your data from. The assessment. So we've got Track My Progress for the lower grades and Star 360 for the upper. So after you figure out when you get the information from Track My Progress, we'll probably meet in February and then again at the end of the year, like June. Just as the committee or now this starts coming to the full... Well, I was thinking just the committee because it is like its own good thing. But if anybody would like to be a part of it and I think we would welcome more people who want to have these regular meetings and track this information. Well, if it does go to the committee, then you would come and report to the larger board, right? So yeah, but that makes sense that it would... Right, and so it would be on the annual agenda for after we have these meetings and we gather this data so we can report back about where it's at three times a year. So one more to add to the annual agenda. Cool. Yeah. That sounds great. Does anyone have any questions for Chelsea or other members? And if you take it home and you want to read it over and you do come up with questions, I think we're happy to answer them, take them back to our meeting. If something's not making sense or looks like it and it might not be useful information. I would just add we're still gonna do what we've been doing. So we're still gonna get an ends report on each one of our policies because they are basically sort of how we monitor and make sure that things are in place that we need to have in place in order for the district to run well. But we've pulled these two goals out in particular but we're still gonna have our ends report where we look at everything, not just foundational knowledge. We're gonna look at a full ends report. So that's- Right, which is why there's not specific like approved community relations. You could put the policies under their treatment of staff, treatment of staff, treatment of students, whatever. Like you could put them, and then it just becomes so cumbersome. It's like we are already looking at that in the policies. So we might as well switch over and talk about it a little bit differently, I don't know. So it's not to replace, I think I can restate what you're saying. It's not to replace anything, it's in addition to. Recognize that those goals, like if it's a goal on math or the way that we're writing the goals on science and ELA, that would replace potentially the interpretation in the intercorp, right? It would be replaced with what the goals are from here. Does that make sense? Because isn't that the purpose of the interpretation is to say how we've met that standard or how we've met that end? And that we're defining how we're meeting those goals around those areas in this report. It seems like that would be the piece that goes into it. Yeah, well you're working with us to create the goals, which would be your interpretation for where you're going in the piece. Yeah, so it's not actually generating too much more work. It's basically making sure that what we agree to here becomes the interpretation and the standard. Right, right, okay, that makes sense. And we're in dialogue about it. We're not just sort of. Yeah, just a half a week, so I'm not sure. So I don't know if everybody wants to keep, I mean it's not a great time to read through this right now, but if everybody wants to keep these or if you want to just get them back to me, I'm happy to collect them. Or if you want to guide people and see what the results of the survey were. I know I did email it to everybody before I knew that I wasn't supposed to, but there's a little bit, the goals are a little bit different because we had met with the BSVA after I had sent that out and come up with more specific sort of goals. Why have you not, um, send that out to the board? Um, I guess, because in here, it lists some of the responses that were written. This is personnel. It's personnel. Yeah, yeah, it's like, the responses that people wrote in the summary of it, and, right, it's kind of personal. It wouldn't be so freedom of information as to consider it. Would it be such a boring event then? I don't think a person from the general public can come and look at somebody's personnel file. No, but that's why we're in a logisterry amongst the board because our emails are considered public or heard. Right, right. And just to keep it private. Yeah. Because it really belongs in the personnel file. So whatever anyone wants to. But that's the report and the evaluation committee. Thank you. Thank you. So, this one, we should all be careful to. Yeah. Hand back to you. The other we can keep. Yeah, okay. Yeah, great. So, let's just do that one more. Oh, wait, here's one more. Thank you. Next up, the ends committee. Ladies. I don't have anything to update you with. Great. I mean, I do, but I'm not prepared. Okay. Next time. Okay. Facilities committee, which is now two members strong. We have a quorum. We'll give you something next time. In case everybody didn't see the email, Sarah is now a member of the facilities subcommittee. Do we have to vote? We don't have to vote you on, do we? We do need to vote. Yeah, that should. Right. So moved. Okay. A second. Great. So moved by Katya, seconded by Chelsea. All those in favor of Sarah joining the facilities subcommittee? Aye. Visually and audibly. Thank you. Opposed? Does anyone else want to join the ends committee? Oh, we're adding people to committee. Is it just you? No, it's me and Hannah and Megan. Me too. No, Anne. We're very exclusive. Anne, you want to join that one? Yeah, I made her move in. So that also, yes. So Sarah has moved that Anne is now a member and Sam has seconded your role tonight. Clearly. All those in favor? Anne joining the ends committee? Aye. Audibly and visually. Please thank you. Opposed? Extension. Great. Thank you, Anne. Uh, but the facilities subcommittee. Can I just jump on? Because I don't think we touched on this in the last time, losing time here. The letter that we drafted, if people can read that through and send us back some feedback so that we can get that out, I think, because we wanted to get that out by December? Yes. So it's in here, second page. So it's a very rough draft. It's fine. Do we also, so we're going to let you know also. It seems better than very rough. Yeah. Oh. See, see, see, good to go. So if there's any feedback on that letter, just let us know. And we can edit it and then present it in December for approval to female to. To be blasted out like the last one, yeah. And that committee is Katya, myself, and Megan, right? So email any one of us with edits. And we'll make sure they'll put in there. Great. Thank you, Katya, for bringing us back in. Let's see. So, Lane, you had suggested that we put this once we're in the facilities committee topic about if we want to really kind of commit to reconstruction being on the table, right? Yeah, I think if it makes sense how serious the board is. And one of the rationales is it'll change the calculus that we use into determining projects, right? If I've got a $300,000 project that we need to do that isn't quite a matter of safety at this point in time. You know, if the board says, yeah, you know what, given budgetary constraints and everything else like that, we're not really that interested in rebuilding, then I would move forward with trying to get that work done with the funds that we have. But if the board came and said, hey, we don't know if we'll be able to pull it up. We're really serious about examining, you know, rebuilding this building that I might hold off on a project like that. Because I wouldn't want to put $300,000 into a building that's just going to potentially be torn down, you know, two years in the future, you know, if it could be deferred. So I think part of the discussion, at least for me and especially for Bob and Wes, who I think are actually listening in, is just so that we can get a better of idea of what we should be working on and things that we might be able to defer or not, if that makes sense. What's your timeline on that? Which piece? When do you need to know about how serious we are about building versus? I would say sooner than better, you've got an old building that needs lots. One of the big things that we had talked about way in the past that I think is not at a safety issue yet, but it is getting there is our science labs in high school. And that's a major reconstruction of basically an entire way. So I think to move forward, I think we owe it to the taxpayers to get a number. So I think in order to move forward, we would need to hire someone to draw up plans on what we were looking at, right? So we could kind of get some numbers going on to even see if this is something that community would be interested in doing. And if it's not something they're interested in doing, then we need to look at other options. Exactly. So I think as a board, we should get the ball rolling on hiring someone to. I can have that on your plate next board meeting, because we've already been working with somebody to try to outline the study. OK, that would be great. Yeah, I mean, if anyone else wants to work with that or anything. Oh, yeah, I feel like we've talked about it. Yeah, we earmarked some funds to begin the process a little bit. But I think to put real numbers to paper, we have to go to another step. It's expensive. Yes. It's, you know, you're looking probably 150,000 to have that study done. With that coming out of our reserve. Yeah. And potentially just a rough ballpark estimate of rebuilding this place. Talk about that, too. 100 million to 150. We need to start somewhere, though. And unfortunately, I think that expense is going to need to happen in order to. People like to see a plan in place. But it sounds like there's at least interest to make sure that we're willing potentially to spend a fair chunk of money to get that study done so that people have some info. Or we can talk about this. Yeah, this is why we created this committee. I mean, if I may propose that this committee, which is now so robust with two people, then you guys have the opportunity to meet with Bob and Wes and a more concrete conversation. Because I think that in terms of being interested in knowing really what it would take, we're already beyond that. OK. Right? Yeah, we want to know. That's why we have this committee. So we will report the study and back to you at a later date the next meeting. Cool. Bob, are you on board with meeting with Sam and I and Wes and Bob? Yes, I had to get my microphone back on. I'm sorry, take me a moment. Would you ask that question again? I want to make sure I understood it. We would like to have a meeting to discuss future plans for hiring an engineer. Yeah, Wes and I both would be very much receptive to that participation. We have that money, as Mr. Milliken already said, or we have that number, as Mr. Milliken already said. We are prepared to meet tomorrow on this. But I'm telling you right now that we need to press a trigger. If we want the study, let's do it. If not, tell us so we can drive forward on another project, just like Mr. Milliken just tried to communicate. OK. Yeah, we're going to go forward. I'm not sure if we can meet tomorrow, but Sam and I will. I understand. But I'm just pushing you because I want an answer. We'll call you, Bob. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you. Thank you, Bob. Thank you, Bob and Wes. Yeah, I've been on here all this time just to listen for this topic to come up. I'm going to break off, and I think Wes will too. We'll see you guys tomorrow, OK? All right, so thank you. Have a good night. Yep, good night. Awesome. All right. Just in terms of training, there is a, I'm moving on here. There's a budget webinar coming up about Act 127. When we get to the part where we're talking about the conference that Sam and Heather, Lane, and I attended, Sam and I actually attended the budget breakout workshop twice. Scared you, didn't it? Just to understand. It was just about understanding it. But if I could please give the assignment to everyone to register if you are able to. No, register whether you can attend at noon or not, because once you're registered, you will get the 14th. November 14th. The link, thank you. At noon, I believe. And that's it. And do the same thing next Tuesday. And I'm willing to bet we will still have questions after that, and I almost think we should engage Chelsea at BSBA to help us fully understand implications, because there are some timeline things that make it really complicated. When we go to pass the budget, we're not going to really know what the tax implications are for taxpayers. So that's going to be a really fun PR campaign for the board to have to do to try to get the community on board with whatever budget we put together. So in my experience, just talking to her quickly, she's not only I appreciated how she explained over and over and over again what 127 does and means, but also talked about how we might present the unknown. But so please let's start with just go on to the BSBA website, register for the November 14th so that we can talk about it. Some people will have a better grasp on it than others. And it's a live webinar. So we can ask questions or something like that. But please register. Easy breezy. I already did. Oh, wait. It's a live thing we're interacting. So it's not just like we can watch it whenever we want. You will be able to watch it after it happens. But yes, it's a live webinar on the 14th at noon that you register for. They always record from. So I could watch it after. Yeah, but that's why you definitely want to register. So you'll only give you the available recording if you register. Is that correct? Well, you'll get it. I mean, they'll put it in their webinar archives eventually. But to get it kind of right after the webinar. Yeah, right. OK, we're moving on to EL reports, 2.1 and 2.2. This is a second read. Let's start with 2.1 treatment of students, parents, guardians, and community. Lane, you want to talk more about it then? Yeah, it's pretty self-explanatory. But if there's questions, I'm happy to. Hey, take me a minute to orient myself to the provision. Yeah, it's on the back. That's a 2.1. Does anyone have points of discussion? So 2.2, I'm going to highly recommend to the board that this is held in deferrence given the discussion and this that was brought up tonight. And as my right as an employee within the district, I am going to ask the board to get an independent person to come in and investigate every statement that was made in here, because there were other people at the meeting. I am going to ask the board to also investigate the videos and also investigate the reports that were written that describe what was seen in the videos for veracity. I am in a position of public trust. That trust has been challenged, which folks have a right to do. And so the public also has a right to know if that challenge was faithful or not. This was the document that either Haley and or Mike had put together. I did not distribute it to the board. That's my answer that you get. And I will put the request in writing. OK, great. Thank you. You're welcome. So then Chelsea. I have a question about that. Who would we get to look at that outside of person? You'd need somebody trained my recommendation. And again, I don't want to have there be a conflict of interest, so I'm going to give you very limited info. I would reach out to the PH or take his advice. Yeah. And in fact, if I could get a motion to. Connect with the PH. Thank you. Yes, for Chelsea and I to connect with PH or regard. Are we going back to that? Can I just have a summary again of what we're asking, we're looking to investigate, just so the question is clear. Yeah, there's a lot in there that I think needs to be investigated. So just the document. No, the document, the videos, as well as the reports that went along with the videos. So we're investigating these things or we're having someone investigate these things. And what is the question, whether you are in compliance with the policy? I, again, so the logic here being I'm in a position of public trust. That public trust was just challenged. The public has a right to know whether I did violate public trust or whether I did not. What is the standard for public trust, though? What's that? What's the standard for public trust? I guess, like, I just, I did not, I did not opt. I'm being told that I did not operate probably within probably half a dozen of the board's policies based upon what's written here, including EL 2.2, which we're considering right now. So what Lane is suggesting is that we do not, we defer voting to accept EL 2.2 this evening, until we have a chance to. EL 2.2 is retrospective, correct? Like, we're looking, we're looking back at the last school year, correct? So his interpretation would not be invalid based on this new information. Okay, so I don't know that we do need to defer voting on what is retrospective. But this incident would be included in the following year's interpretation, right? That is true. And we can choose to monitor any policy at any time. So given circumstances, yeah, and we can also choose not to monitor this one right now. Except that we have a schedule that says we will do it on this day. Well, we did do the first read when we said we would. So if we want to defer, yeah, we could accept it. Or we accept it because it is retrospective. And then if we want to re monitor this policy, right? Ask for another, yeah. I would think that we would accept it for the past and then we would wait until the study is done and then re request to have it on the agenda again to look at it again. I agree. Does that seem like a process that would be reasonable? Just to keep the policy is on schedule. Yeah. Well, when we review them, we don't have to accept them. True. Or he might be out of compliance. Which is also saying we don't accept them. He's presenting them to us to say I'm in compliance because of these things. And we say, well, we disagree that you're in compliance, then that's also just not acceptable. We have evidence to the contrary. Right. Right. OK. So what do we want to do as a board for policy 2.2? Well, if we accept his interpretation. Right. So if actually in this instance, I would like to separate them and ask if there's a motion to accept 2.1. Wait. We also custom made a motion for you to connect to Pietro. Yes. I seconded. And then we changed the subject. So we need to go back to that. Thank you. So there's a motion on the table. Can I please allow Chelsea and I to connect with Pietro about this? About an independent investigation. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstentions. Great. OK. Chelsea will connect. Great. OK. So now you need a motion to accept policy. 2.1. 2.1. So I'll move. That's treatment of students, parents, guardians, and community. I second. All those in favor? Aye. Automatically and visibly. Aye. Thank you. Opposed? Abstentions. Great. Passes unanimously. I will entertain a motion to accept 2.2 if there is one. Help me. I don't know. Or we could also entertain a motion to kick the can down the road or not approve. Or you can entertain a motion to approve and then you have the days declining in. Right? Right. So still. OK. But I'm not hearing the motion. All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? Aye. Right. So if someone wants to move to accept it, that this would be the moment. So the question, and the question is, do we agree with his interpretation? Is it a reasonable interpretation? Is there a rationale? And is there evidence? Are we comfortable with the evidence showing? Remember, this is a look back. And this is a look back. Yeah. Well, I think given the current situation, but the current situation is not addressing this interpretation because it's a look back from. So the reasons that we wouldn't accept it is if anyone feels that Lane has not either interpreted reasonably or provided enough evidence. Yes, it's still retrospective, but these would be the reasons that one may not would vote not to accept it or vote against accepting it. It's specified that this is a look back. It doesn't say it directly on this. So I'm just wondering, like, how would someone know that we're approving something that is a look back if they needed to look back or wanted to know? There's a definition of executive limitations somewhere in the policy pieces, I believe. So you're always looking at the past year. OK. Rachel's argument was a good one, the logical. Right. And it's dated the 11th. And the new information that you were presented with is dated the 23rd. I think with the confusion, I make a movement to. It was the 11th. Yeah, the 11th. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, I'm with you, but same difference. Yes. So I think with the confusion, we should relook at how it is we are reading the policy for current and the past year. So with the confusion of that, I move to table policy 2.2. And it will be on next month's meeting to review. OK. Any more on the second thought? I second that. More discussion? Yep. I think Rachel's got some discussing in her. I don't really. I just feel like it's been presented. And we either, it's been read, this is the second reading. So either we agree with what he's presented or we don't. And I will probably vote against your motion, which is fine. Because I feel like we kind of have to make a decision on what's in front of us. Because this was presented originally in the October meeting. Correct. And there were no changes made since that date. So no new information pertaining to the date for it was originally presented to us. Does that make sense? Oh, yes. I'm making sense. Also, I was not present at the October meeting. That is what you're going to do. But it was just the first reading. So we didn't vote on it. OK. So as long as you got those materials, you had a first reading. Basically from when the last time we accepted it to October 5th, when it's dated for our first read, is when we're thinking, did we receive the information in this report? Is there a way we can put, when we look at the dates on the actual paper, so we can say, OK. So if situations like this come up, we're not like. But what if something came up on October 1st? And it didn't come to the board's attention. So you wrote this on October 5th. And it doesn't come to the board's attention until December 5th. And he's like, actually, you know what? You've already accepted my interpretation for that date. So now you can't even consider whatever came before October 5th. Do you know what I mean? Well, and remember that you're accepting his interpretation of the policy. So are we feeling like what he's saying when our policy says that with respect to the treatment of paid and volunteer staff, the superintendent shall not operate without written personnel rules that clarify rules for staff, provide for effective handling of grievances, and protect against wrongful conditions. So he's saying, his interpretation is all district employees will be provided with clear job responsibilities, procedures for registering complaints, as well as access to district's human resources protocols. The district will develop procedures and protocols to address unique situations when they occur, so that occurrences are managed in a consistent and fair manner. So that's how he's interpreting this policy. He gives us a rationale. And then he says, here's your evidence. I have an up-to-date teacher contract. He's got the master agreements, which remember those all handle, that's all through the union. It's all negotiated. There's a process for that. And so this is, and the OSUD boards, conflict resolution complaint policy. So that's what he's using for evidence, as well as, does he say anything else? So that's what he's giving us for the evidence to say that he's in compliance with this interpretation. So we have to decide, do we agree with his interpretation? Is it reasonable? And is this evidence supporting that interpretation? If we don't agree with his interpretation, then we have to change our policy to be more specific. Right. That's where we've struggled with, and that's why I keep on saying, we need... That's why we do this. Yeah, and we need to sort of push for the information that we're getting so that we understand and feel comfortable with the interpretation that he's giving us, or we're changing our policies. And that's why we have the first read than giving us another month. Or at that first read, because we've had it since Kyle sent it out, for then to say, not enough for me. This is what I want to see for the second read in order to accept it. So regardless of dates, I think you're right, we can't put dates. But this all has to do with before the first read, and that first read was our opportunity to say, we need more, or we need different. We have to vote on the motion. Yes. So the motion is to push it off for a month. To, yes. So we can vote that down, or we can... Right. It's clear that we're looking at the past, and we need to go forward from that date. But there is a motion and a seconded. So all those in favor of... Tabling them. Tabling till next meeting, 2.2. All those in favor? Audibly, visibly. All right. Opposed? Thank you. Opposed? The motion... Right. Or nay, right. So the motion does not pass. I think just because we say that we accept it, if we do accept it, just because we say we accept it for the period that he interpreted for, doesn't mean that he can't be out of compliance with it now. We could ask him tomorrow to monitor again. So we could actually ask next month that we revisit this police omitted based on the timeframe. From the start of the school. I think with an investigation ongoing, I would... I mean, I'm not sure you would do that, but you're saying we don't have to wait a whole year. We could at any time ask for an EL report out of the timeframe that it would normally come up if there's concern or if there's something that we want to look at. In addition to those that are on the annual agenda that we commit to monitoring. Okay. So then now, I will... So I think that we don't have any evidence of not good treatment of staff prior to that period. There's no formal complaints. There's no any of that. So, you know, to be fair to the process and to what we're looking at, like, even if we've heard scuttle about treatment of staff because there's no solid evidence or information about it. And we just have to... We have to sort of... Do we know that's for sure? Well, I think we need to rein ourselves in here because what we are voting to accept is Lane's interpretation. Lane's evidence of that interpretation. Is that interpretation reasonable? Has he prevented... Prevented. Presented evidence of that interpretation. Is he in compliance? We are not here to vote on whether we think he treats the staff nicely. But it's not... I think we just need to rein in what we're doing with this. Chelsea, what I'm hearing from you is that you may be prepared to make a motion right now to accept this EL 2.2. And that doesn't mean that we can't do the independent investigation and it doesn't mean that we can ask for a different interpretation because we have different kinds of evidence. But I just think this is very tricky. It's very hard and this has been kind of emotionally charged meeting where at least public comment was. And I think it's important, at least for myself, this is dry what we're talking about right now, accepting this interpretation. This is not emotional. This is was he reasonable? Did he provide evidence to that? Do we accept it? And if someone doesn't, that's okay. Okay. But that's... Yeah. I won't say it three more times. Yes. Thanks for bringing it back down. So do I have a motion of any type right now pertaining to EL 2.2? I move we accept policy 2.2 as written with the... Okay. Moved by Rachel. Do I have a second? I'll second. Seconded by Ann. Supposed to offer more discussion. Is there more discussion? Okay. All those in favor of the motion on the table to accept EL 2.2 as written, please visually and audibly say I and raise your hand, please. I'm sorry. Thank you. Those opposed? Abstentions. I did not see some hands there, so... But I did see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So the motion does pass. I have another one. Thank you. I have a motion to... Yeah. Okay. We have a first read now of policy C9, Wellness and Comprehensive Health. Mrs. Heaven, you're up. Yeah. Great. Hi, everybody. I attended a session at the School Board Association conference that we attended that really helped to guide this. This is a required policy that will replace our existing C9. The most significant change is the inclusion of the goals for comprehensive health education, which is required by the states, but not required by the federal government. And this is a required policy by the federal government, all sections except for comprehensive health education. And so it's very similar to our existing C9. The changes that are included are really mostly about the health education, but also a little bit more strictness around healthy snack rules and regulations. There is still room in here to have celebratory food, as long as it's not charged for. But the language sort of says we'll do our best to align it with healthy choices. Other than that, it's very similar to the existing C9. That's it. Oh, you guessed. Okay. I had none. Your turn. Respond to the size. All the fun out of life. No more cupcakes. It doesn't actually say that I adopted the, I had choices that I chose the most lenient language. And so that's if you guys want to look at the one about that. It's at the end of nutrition guidelines. Roman numeral four. We had two choices of language and one was that we will prohibit any foods that do not align with the snack rules and or this one, which I selected, which is to the best of our ability. We will do our best. That celebratory foods are in line. So there's still a little room in there for a cupcake. I don't want to take it. Preferably whole weight. Does anybody have any questions for another? This is the first read. So yep. Yep. Okay. We're at budget parameters presentation. You tell me. I'll try to keep, hopefully I can keep my brain functional because some of the stuff's a little compromised. Kind of the objectives of the discussion that we're about to have is it's mostly about understanding the current financial landscape that we're dealing with. And a lot of it has to do with the act one 73, which was the results of the weighting study, right? You know, the state recognizing that certain categories of student actually require a little bit more funding to be able to get an equitable education compared to the general population. The other thing that we want to touch on a little bit is the budget impact of our contractual and mandatory obligations. There's some weird caps that have come in under the new financial laws that I'll touch on. And one of the problems that we may be encountering is that just the increase in the budget that we have to do to meet what's mandatory kind of puts us over one of them. And so we want to talk a little bit about that. So there may not be a whole heck of a lot above and beyond just, you know, paying the increases for contracts and health insurance and what not to be able to do. So a couple of parts and pieces. The data is still flowing in from the AOE and I think kind of Sam touched on it a little bit. We've got some formulas and things that we need to do to be able to calculate people's tax rates and, you know, be able to estimate what the potential impact is going to be on homeowners. And we may not have those formulas. I believe they said until July. Yet we have to somehow plan a budget without that critical information to communicate to voters. And so that's one of the biggest pieces out there. The data we get comes in sporadically. They're supposed to have it all in our hands by early to mid December under the law. They typically do not. So we might be scrambling around again just before the December board meeting when we talk about budget again and still not have everything we need to make things make sense. So Act 27, we talked a little bit about this. It adds weighting for certain categories of students. You know, some examples of that where small schools, English language learners are low income and it's recognizing the fact that certain students again may require a little bit more funding to get the same and equal educational opportunities that other students get within the district. And so they're trying to find a way to manage that. The other piece that's on the horizon here, which is going to be coming to a close actually in September coming up is that we have benefited greatly from the COVID area grant funding that has been coming in known as ASR, right? Elementary Secondary Schools Relief Fund. We benefited with the work that we did to a tune of somewhere over $7 million. Right now we have about $1.5 to $1.8 million of staff that are being funded by those grants that will dry up. And we have no real way of absorbing them into the regular budget unless it's through attrition. We have people move on. We have somebody who's in a grant position that is well suited for that position and wants it and can move into it. And so, you know, we have this issue that we're dealing with that there may be quite a few riffs. And that would be keeping the staff member employed, but it wouldn't be keeping the position that they are filling under the end. And we had a lot of switches like that last year. You know, the union came in kind of questioning, even though they saw, I showed them all the staff that had left and their rationale why and let them pick and prod with it last year. They were pointing out, well, you know, this staff member, you know, should be on the list. It's like, no, they shouldn't because they didn't leave the district. They're in a grant funded position, so they chose to move into a regular position that was open so that they would have a permanent job. And so there were a lot of switches like that that happened last year. I think there were like eight to 10, you know. We're working on it. We still have a few to do. Yeah. So Act 127, right? What it does is it adjusts the funding formalism and recognition. Like we said that certain categories require a little bit more to be able to get the same education as everyone else. And what it does is it adjusts the number of students we receive funding for. So last year, right, the state said, oh, you got 858 bodies there. So we are going to give you the equivalent of the property yield for each of those students, which was about $15,000 per student. What they're doing with the waiting system is even though we only have 858 students, because some students cost more than an individual student, they actually, what they do is they just add it up and say, oh, all this additional waiting says is that what we really need to do is provide you with funding for, in our case, about 1,123 students. And that sounds really good, right? Because we have this increase in the number of student bodies we get paid by students in the yield. So if this goes up, it would make sense that, yeah, how much we're getting from the state would go up too. And that's not what happens. I'll give you kind of an example. It should hopefully be easy to understand if it's not yell at me. Like I said, I'm a little tired. So we're going to pretend here that 87.5 million has been set aside from the Education Fund to Fund Education around the state. And we're going to pretend that there are only four districts in the state. We've got us. We've got White River Valley. We've got Central, which is Northfield. Williamstown, we've got CVU. And so they go through their waiting study. And for, let's stop, let's stop. This is their numbers from last year in terms of students. And so what the state would do is add up all those students, right? 5,658 would divide it into here. And they would say, oh, that means we're going to get $15,479 for each student. And if I want to know how much I'm getting, I take this much. I multiply it by my $8.58, and I get $13 million from the iPhone. Make a little bit of sense. I'm talking fast, and I know I'm going to get it right. So what's happening under the new system is the waits. So we've got a lot of poverty students here. And they count more in terms of waiting than just a regular general student within the student population. So they're going to give us credit for $1123, right? White River Valley, they're going to get $3,200. Central, they're going to get $1,400. CVU, they're going to get $2,500. And these numbers are made up a little bit to make the point. If you add them up, you get now 8,223 students. I divide it into the same amount of money because the money in the Ed Fund that you're giving people is still the same. Therefore, we're now only receiving $10,651 per student. You multiply that by our $1123, and now we're getting $11 million instead of the $13 million. And so what happens for a lot of schools is as the number of students goes up in a lot of cases, the yield goes down, the amount of money you get per student goes down. And so the impact on our district, and this is a part of talking about the financial landscape, the impact on our district as far as we can tell, because we don't have all the hard numbers yet, is at best we're going to break even? Most likely we're going to lose a small amount, hopefully less than a million bucks. But what we lose through this exchange if we want to continue to have the same services that we currently have, we're going to have to make up, make it up through local funding. Questions on this? Again, simplified model of what really goes on to try to make the point. But people all got really excited. They got really excited last year. Yeah, we're going to have 1200 students that they're going to be paying this for, so we're going to get this huge jump in now. It didn't happen to most schools. Did the legislators kind of go, oh shoot, this didn't work. So we thought it would be, where are they like? Where are they like? I am going to give my opinion, which is not based on anything other than a quick communication with the legislators last year as they were making decisions about stuff. Going to the block grants for SPED cut money. Doing this. Cut money. So it's backfiring against what they were hoping to do? Well, unless what they were hoping to do was to reduce backfiring overall. So important understandings to walk away from based on what I can tell, my limited capacity and kind of studying this stuff a little bit, is having the weights work in our favor by giving us more students doesn't necessarily mean we'll receive a bigger piece of the education fund. We do expect our funding to go down moderately. Because of this, if we want to keep services the same, we're going to have to make it up at the local level. This is the total enrollment in the OSSD. We typically jump up and down, but typically the overall trend is up over time. But for next year, we are down. We had the event of three months of folks from outside of the community piling on death threats to our students and our staff. And a lot of the folks that left when I was connecting with the guidance counselors about it a little bit last year when school choice came up was about the fact it didn't feel safe. And so we have had a decrease in the total student body. It may recover, right? It's been kind of a quiet year this year so far. Hopefully that happens when we get back up. But this is lowering that basic number that they apply the weighting student. Can you break that down by school like where we lost most was it students in the high school? I'm going to talk off the cuff. A lot of the students who were at the high school, I think we lost 15 last year or coming into this year. Most of them were through school choice and most of them were LGBTQ students leaving from what I remember. Our elementary schools over the course of time attended to an increase outside of the events of last year what we're seeing now. Typically at the high school they're either steady or an increase and they kind of switch from year to year. It's the typical trend. I can't see the numbers. What are the What are the So we were at 8.58 last year we are down 2 years ago what were that really high point that's pulling the line up? We had two of those right? Like I said we tend to because we have bubbles in populations and stuff so a lot of our data looks that way it jumps up and down but the overall trend like I said is still going up. On average even with the two down years if you look at our overall trend we're still on average over the course of time adding about 5 students a year to the district. That's what the slope is telling us. So the question is does this trend continue? We keep going like we are. And it does have an impact on funding because we get paid by kids. So let's see if I can explain this one. There is a new 5% tax rate cap so if next year school tax rate increases by more than 5% it's capped at 5%. But what does that mean? That means that the tax rate the school side tax rate not the CLA portion of the tax rate the school side tax rate last year was $1.39 for $100 of the assessed value. So if you got $385,000 home you can use this to figure out how much your taxes would be. The most it could go up because there is a cap on it it could go up to $1.46. We can actually spend more money to give it up higher than that and the state will give us the money but they are going to fix our tax rate at $1.46. Does that make a little bit sense? They are trying to be kind because they realize the waiting study is going to have a dramatic effect on what people's dollars are coming and going. So they are capping it and saying yeah, if you ask for a million dollars your tax rate would go up to about 8% but we are going to cap it at 5%. We are going to give you the 8% in money but what your tax payer will see will not go above 5%. So that is a good thing. Maybe. That is what we get into the complexities that they put into our budgets. They also did this they said as long as long as, so this is true as long as the per pupil spending is $1 before we hit that limit. If that happens this bet is off. Is that based on how much we spent per pupil this year? How much do we spend per pupil this year? I can go up it was about $22,000. Actually take that back it was $22,000 I believe was the threshold. I can pull all these numbers for you if you ask me. It was closer to like $21,000. Now so if you go over the 10% you lose the 5%. You are stuck for anything over 5%. You are stuck for anything over 5%. If you go over the 10% you can still petition to go in front of the review board which they haven't created yet and they don't know how it's going to be implemented yet. The Spanish Inquisition Why did you do this? You didn't do this you get no benefit from the 5% tax this 5% tax cap for the 5 years and the future that it exists. But there's something about if you don't get the 5% cap it goes away or if you do get the 5% cap it goes away. What was that part? That's what you say if you go over the 10% You can never get the 5% You can never get the 5% for the next 5 years So let's take a look at what you're talking about. What a lot of people are talking about is how can we gain the system because if my tax rate is only going to go 5% but I can actually increase potentially on the student side of things up to 9.99% and not violating anything maybe I'm getting free money here Well as far as I can tell the way that the law works is they put this 5% cap in for 5 years but if you play the game you'll lose because you're going to have a cliff year in the 5th or the 6th year So this is our budget We're about a $24 million budget I don't go over the 5% cap I'm right at the 5% cap every year So next year this is how much we'd have to spend this year how much we'd be spending So this is our budget after 5 years It's $30 million $630,000 Let's say I want to play the game and say well you know what there's 3% because there's 3% there that they're giving me for free and they're going to give me that money and so this is what's going to happen with my spending in the district over the course of the 5 years At the end of the 5 years I'm 5 million ahead of where I would have been but the problem happens in the next year when we move into the next year the state is only going to give you credit for this that's what we're operating our district on now and if going into the next year I want to maintain our level of funding I'm going to have to bring over that 4.6 million to get us up to what we've been spending and that's the cliff and so I'm 99% sure based upon what I've read that this is the occurrence So why I'm bringing this up is as we go through this discussion our best bet as far as I can tell 5% or less now we're going to see a real problem where do we stand just in terms of what I call contractual and kind of mandated increases right so these are things that are contractually mandated they have to happen we have an 8% salary increase that was agreed to with the teaching staff and the union like 85 to 90% of our overall budget is staff salaries so that's a huge number we did a 9.4% increase for the support staff their smaller group has an impact nowhere near as big as the teaching salary well we also had a 16.7% increase to health insurance that's coming into place next year I'll go to the yellow ones in a minute we also, this is mandated based upon the students we seem to be a magnet for special education students probably because we actually serve them pretty well we have students moving in all over the place they said they had 7 when I was talking with RES today the staff at RES that moved into first grade alone that were super high needs so we have to be able to provide the services that they need so we're looking at a 3.25% increase there doesn't sound like a lot but in terms of dollars it is a budget these are two things that I'm going to throw up here and say from my perspective they're mandatory but they could be cut if they had to be I do not recommend it the first one is this 6% increase to the facility supply line right keep things clean to keep the buildings running the way they need to and two additional custodians we've talked to some of the board members as we've bumped into each other the bathrooms and things cleaner we need extra staff to do that so based upon that discussion I'm going to say that that's mandatory and then this is a huge one we went out we were one of the few districts in the state that built a full day free preschool for all 4 year olds and we still maintain our 10 hours a week for 3 year olds two thirds of that program is currently a regular budget one third of that program is still being funded by grants if we want to preserve if we want to preserve that preschool program we're going to have to pay for it out of the regular budget so we need four personnel again it's one teacher it's three pairs it's about 247,000 so questions on these parts and pieces everybody's looking either tired or depressed sorry to tell yes total required increase for mandates and priorities well this is where we are this year this is where we need to be next year just on the pieces we discussed without any of the other millions of dollars of asks that have been coming up from the staff to help them meet the ends as they're working on their goals difference of $1.5 million right up at that we're at a 6.65% increase just in mandatory spending so we're over the 5% of cash yes so we got to do what we got to do but this is the the piece that the board I think either needs to have a discussion or just a lull over between now and when we meet on this in December is where do you want to go with this can I find some tricky ways to try to eliminate that cliff I probably can but we're still going to have to pay that money I can probably spread over paying it up over time but I do worry about that cliff and I'm going to try to get Brad James to give me any answer on whether what I showed you is correct based upon the law I believe it as I believe it was mentioned in one of our conferences is that clear but my recommendation is you know don't go over 5% and if we have to don't go over any more than we have thoughts, questions, tears I'm wondering one way to still keep everyone happy is me, like you said we needed two custodians what if we we could live with what we've got one rather than two and would that bring us down to the 5% that based on their salary and I'm just taking a rough estimate we'd probably go from 6.65 to like 6.25 okay, thanks the biggest piece the biggest piece of that is the 8% increase for staff salaries not complaining, well deserved it's hitting an unexpected budget here the second biggest piece of the overall budget is going to be probably that health care increase, that's huge that's another thing I'm wondering is is that if every person takes the health care plan because I know some people take their spouses or you know decline the health care plan these numbers yeah, but these numbers took into account exactly what people were taking this year Robin did the math so it could change a little bit somebody could have a baby and now you're on the family plan but she used the calculations based upon who's on a family plan, who's on a two person who's on a single so that is factored into numbers so good question not a lot of wiggle room it could be up to 10% do you feel lucky I guess is the question can we expect the preschool program to maintain its size maintain its size, it's serving about 60 kids a year which is about the size of a typical class I'm gonna if there's time tonight if not I can show you some data that will show that it's had an impact because our first group of preschoolers that started in that program and they started in the middle of COVID are now in like grades three and four and if you look at the scores for grades three and four compared to what the old three and four grades were in previous years they're up quite a bit so it's having an impact, which is the intent we had a issue here where there was a lot of foundational knowledge the kids weren't getting from year to year and they were moving on and so I call them the pipeline kids you're in sixth grade, you missed a chunk here you missed so many chunks at this point in time I can't fill in all the holes now and you're gonna have difficult learning what you need to learn in this grade the purpose of the preschool was to make sure that all the kids were starting off with a really strong foundation and we did the curriculum work so that when they're hitting each of the grades along the way they're not having holes so what you should see happening is we're still trying to fill in the holes for these kids here that's what the after school programming is about, but you should see a stronger group of kids coming up from the lower grades and slowly year after year moving their way up into 12th grade was kind of a plan so any other questions on budget I did try to abbreviate these as much as I could next time you get to see everything everybody's asking for and legitimately how the process works is we have our broad goals which are your ends and in which are the goals that we're kind of developing here the principals develop their goals to support them they work with the staff to support the goals to support them and then the communication comes back up they say hey in order to be able to do this this is what we need if we're gonna meet these goals that we're setting these are the resources we need and so that's what you're gonna see next time cause you're gonna see all the ass that folks are saying they need to meet those goals thank you for sharing well I have to say about that that's with great news I mean there's one variable to think about is if at all healthcare does get reformed and changed because the fact that you did a 16 to 17 percent 16.7 percent increase this year is there is question around the state as to why that was so high for teachers whereas the Blue Cross Blue Shield pretty standard but good plan that went up by 7 percent this year so there's like questions around why was that so high of course they lobbied really hard for a pretty awesome plan does the agreement on care board not control that cost also that insurance increase also you know how that works I don't really know how that works so just when thinking about this five year cliff and the rate of inflation is there opportunity for that to calm down and for us to get some more control my biggest fear is if we start cutting down in already a tumultuous education time are we going to are we really meeting the needs of the students so and I'm actually quite surprised that our spending for pupil will go down from the the yield yeah I had full expectation that it would go up I knew that because of the change from reimbursement fund grant funding for special education last year which is also annoying the fact that they implemented 127 a year after 173 is also another challenge for a district like ours which is heavy on special education needs and we got inherently in deep the census block grant is every district got the same amount so we're funding that through taxpayer dollars we lost it was 250 to 280,000 with that change going to the block grant that we had to make up on the regular budget wait a minute they gave everybody the same amount of money ah are you telling us how to ask questions yes because nobody's ever asked a question during that I remember oh yes we have good I'm gonna hold you to it the thinking around that was there was speculation that some districts were cooking their special education needs in order to receive more state funding through the reimbursement process why are they looking at testing because the real again I'm jaded in it watching and hearing the discussions the real goal was to cut they started off with a report they started off with a report that led into this act and it basically said oh you all have too many paras you have too many support staff so when the basis that you're starting from is a belief that you have too many staff trying to serve special ed then the logical outcome is if you put something into legislation the result is to try to force you to cut those things they think you have too much of so there was a logic behind it and the study did not draw a correlation between poverty and special education although I think that study was probably not done thoroughly enough but that's neither here nor there what happened to the state's focus on equity? so they packaged the deal as an equity piece so inherently CVU and STO are going to lose money per pupil more significantly than we are but what we didn't see is a community like ours we thought would have gone up more and it's actually kind of state level and if not go down so who is getting more money? who is benefiting? Concord? later in the valley maybe there are some schools that did they showed a couple of actual examples somebody else has to go up Essex County, Caledonia yeah but we got 40% population of poverty actually our special education student numbers have gone down to 19% and 22% of the district but it's still a large number so we should have seen an increase you would have expected it given those two circumstances but it is what it is furthermore they didn't think about the implementation so the fact that this review board put together yet what you're going to see is you're going to see people go over the 10% you're going to see them go for review and what's going to end up happening is the Ed fund is going to end up holding the bag here I still wasn't clear if you go in front of review when do you have to pay that back is it the same year because that wouldn't be possible if your votes have already gone through would it be the next year are they going to take that alone or are they going to do? I don't think they do either it's a it's just an odd thing this is just a recommendation just for fun is that as we kind of talk about school data there's usually a lot that you can kind of dig in into it a bit in the tops of your minds if you're thinking about this stuff if stuff is jumping out as you a significant ask a question write something down what data was surprising and this is the big thing because it comes back to our ends is based upon what we are seeing you know what are the implications for teaching and learning those are the the kind of comes out of the data review now we because when you're looking at students that are taking tests this year's fifth grade is not the same group of kids as next year's fifth grade and so you tend to see scores jump up and down because it's not quite tracking the same kids from year to year so what we tend to do is we look at overall trends right the stuff can go up can go down can go up but what you want to see is whether it's trending up it's trending down or it's trending evenly and one of the things that is complicated that especially in the state of Vermont is every two or three years they change either the years in which the testing is given right it's no longer ninth grade now for some now in science it's eleventh they've changed the test three times since I've been here right they went from kneecap to S-back they changed the Vermont to the Vermont science assessment and they've also this last year they changed from S-back to what they're calling V-cap now used to be call it cognitive so there's been a lot of changes so the trends do look meaningful the tests do seem to correlate fairly well but it may not be perfect because we're looking at data that crosses the dates of these test lines foundational knowledge ends we're going to look at the ones that we have data for currently that's the the English the mathematics and the science social studies life skills and the arts those are things that may change depending upon our discussions that we're having and so we'll get baselines as soon as we finally settle on what the data is that we want to be collecting current interpretation right is based upon what the board's end is and the board's end for English and these are similar for math and science students possess comprehensive knowledge and a core curriculum in the following areas in this case it's English it's reading writing and communication the interpretation that has existed for a while right how do we know if students are actually meeting the ends you know the thresholds that we set and so what we've said is students achieving proficiency in each grade three through nine are within three percentage points of the state average right in terms of English language arts on the B cap critical end will also be considered in compliance if it shows improvement over time relative to the achievement threshold so in some cases if we're below the state but we're moving towards where the state is at we're still in compliance right because this district started out at a very low place about five or six years ago so here is the LA so explain what the chart means here and this is the district wide performance we're looking at all the kids that took the test in the district so this is the percentage that met the proficiency threshold so in twenty twenty one you know a little bit less than forty seven percent of the entire population of the school hit the level of proficiency or higher everyone that takes the test everyone in the district that's taking the test in twenty twenty two this is where it was in twenty twenty three this is where it was we've got an upward trend and what I can say based upon the slope of that trend line is that every year that goes by so let me see if I can say this correctly every year that goes by three point nine basically four percent more the entire student population is hitting the proficiency threshold in LA so it's not four kids it's not four of her four percent of our entire population every year that goes by is hitting the threshold then hit it the year before where do we compare and can I just ask a question do you pull out students who are special ed students this is everybody this is everybody I do have data because we do like to compare how our subgroups are comparing to the general population because what you want to see that that was the whole achievement gap piece you want to see that gap closing but is everybody taking the test or is it a random sampling per grade this is everybody who took our who took the test we're supposed to get everyone to take it so that the federal law is and this is where things kind of fell apart and trying to compare to other districts during covid the federal law is the expectation is at least ninety five percent of your student body is going to take these tests if you do not do that typically they ding you pretty hard for some reason they seem to leave Vermont alone during covid a lot of districts were only testing thirty forty percent of their kids and so when we're trying to compare to them it made it a little bit difficult because we always hit the ninety five percent should we hit the ninety five yeah we always do yeah there is an alternative assessment for students with significant learning disabilities but we don't choose that that's a sign the team does it and my guess is it's probably about five kids it's a very small number so go ahead if that trend line continues up I mean like obviously the ideal goal would be to have a hundred percent not achievable I would think so where does that kind of where is it reasonable to expect that would top out there's like the idealistic goal getting to a hundred percent which is not going to happen where would you expect our district to get to reasonably so I had this discussion in the very first first end report that I did based upon our current resources based upon our demographics and I'm actually going to compare us to the districts around us in the last slide here because it's some pretty pretty neat data there we should at the elementary level we should be able to consistently hit the 70 percent mark which is high for the state of Vermont and at the elementary schools at least two of them are doing it consistently right now they hit that mark two or three years ago and they've kind of leveled out right around the center the high school my guess is given the resources that we have right now given the work that they're doing especially if they really latch on to the behavioral piece and the cell phone piece so the kids are able to focus in class they might be able to hit 70 but I'm going to say probably in the 60 to 65 range now there's always limiting factors that control what you can do the problem with any natural system is that the closer you get to the potential maximum that hundred percent the exponentially more you have to pay to get there and there's actually a little formula that describes it that I crossed over once and so we used to see that at the other you get diminishing returns you can do it but if it took me an extra million to get them from here to here to get the next five or ten points out of them from this point it might cost two million and then to get the next five or ten it might cost four so that's the balancing but I would say elementary that is more than reasonable high school probably 60 to 65 given current steps so in terms of the state and again we're still looking at English the state is in orange we're in blue two things that are important to see that's going on here we are above the state we started out below the state we did we crossed during COVID we crossed the state so there was a lot of darn good work going on by the teachers during COVID because we were dancing faster than the state was during COVID in fact the state and the nation was pretty much going down but even now that we're out of COVID not only are we ahead of the state but you see how the gap is getting wider we're pulling away from them so we're doing a pretty darn good job there's a piece that's going to come up later and we'll see that the question is going to be is do you know what the event was these scores would probably be actually a lot higher if it wasn't for a specific event that happened last year because what happened last year and you're going to see it in this slide is that who was affected high school they lost a month of learning prior to the test they only made up two or three days prior to the testing a lot of days were graved and then they made up the rest of them after the testing so for the first time what this shows you is how far ahead or behind we are from the state so in third grade our students are scoring 9 percentage points higher in terms of reaching proficiency than the state is right 19 points higher these are down for the first time in a couple of years but it's due to the heat piece I feel like I've never seen the seventh grade be above do you mean they're more down than they're they've always been down do you mean they're more down than they were was that a dip between seventh and eighth grade yeah sixth and seventh we've been working on it but then there was a pretty significant falloff at one point in the middle school yeah prior to a lot of the work what you would see is you would see the scores going up until about fifth grade was a little drop and then in sixth grade it was a huge drop it's whenever they go to the middle school it would sit there for a little while and then it would slowly recover during 9, 10 and 11 yeah it was the middle school and seventh and eighth grade that was why we were pushing at that time having a real middle school concept to try to address some of those issues but no they've been doing pretty well we'll talk about where the difficulty is so what I've done just to make a point here is what they're saying is in this last year you know seventh grade was scoring 15 points below the state eighth grade was scoring eight points below ninth grade was actually three points above that was usually the really tough grade for us I know we can't compare directly and I'm breaking your train of thought but we can't compare directly because they changed tests right but those seventh graders who were sixth graders the year before were not below the line why in the world are they below the line of seventh graders and it's not the heat it's the drop it happens whenever they move fourth and seventh there's usually an actual drop but it happens to everybody right every district but we're comparing to the state and it happens to everybody in the state so why is it why are our kids so much more like so much further below because they lost a month of learning before taking the test to the heat I don't accept that they wasted a month's worth of time with teachers in their well what about the ninth grade like why are they above why if it happened to the high school why are the seventh graders so much worse than the ninth graders here's math which was above last year they're below two when you see a constant change like that across the board it's usually due to a specific event right math did the same thing I feel like I've seen this trend in seventh grade year after year after year is not because of the heat we have a problem in seventh grade every district but if it's every district but we're still comparing to the state like if it's every district then we should still be on the average at the end I'll pull up last year's data I'm happy to do that because this is interesting things to talk about but they did one of the other pieces that supports the theory here is the fact that we did research as part of negotiations one year and the research showed that on average it doesn't mean that every staff member was doing it but on average they were missing 20 days per year at school it's not due to maternity I screened that out when I did the study and everything else on average they were missing 20 days of school a year for personal days and sick days and we threw up on the charts and I probably can still go find them there is a direct correlation between how many days the teachers were missing and the students' performance on the test the schools where the teachers were there the most frequently had the highest scores the school that was in the middle had the middle scores the frequency of teachers being out had the lowest scores I remember that teachers have a huge impact in time with teachers in terms of the students so since these are down from the previous year it's worthwhile to take a look at them specifically and so what this chart shows is this is showing on average during each of these years were grades 7 and 9 to work so in 2019 on average grades 7 through 9 were trailing each grade was trailing 19 points behind the state in 2021 this is where they were in 2022 this is where they were and then they dropped during our heat year if we take this data point out these points are in a fairly straight line typically what happens in terms of trying to predict what the future is going to hold is if the data is scattered all over the place like our population was jumped all around and you got the trend line in there that means you can't be guaranteed that the trend line is going to continue to go up typically when the data cluster is close at least for a year or two you can predict that it's probably going to continue in that same fashion in terms of the data on average they're still catching up for the state pretty well same thing for math same sort of standard for it we want to be within 3 points of the state in terms of achieving proficiency so here are our math scores for the entire district so between 2021 and 2023 we see a pretty healthy increase here based upon the slope of the line what it is telling me is that every year that goes by 7.5% more of our entire student population is hitting the proficiency threshold than did the year before I'd like to get some credit for it in the community but the teachers should get credit for it because the teachers have done the work but the two pieces here so you've got the state in orange again you've got us in blue and you see the same pattern states increasing too but not only are we ahead of the state but we're pulling away from it as time goes on same sort of issue oh there's your preschool grades 3 and 4 math is one that would really be affected because ELA work kind of happens naturally because they speak our language and parents talk to them in that language it's really difficult these are our preschool grades so in terms of grade 3 grade 3 students across the district are scoring 17 percentage points higher than the state 16 percentage points higher in grade 4 grade 5 is still above 3% 6 is above by 6 percentage points and you've seen that same pattern 7, 8, 9 which again is new this year are you seeing grade 4 as the first cohort of OSSD preschool students adding up when we kind of got stuff started and now they're in 4th grade so having that preschool does set them up for really good early learning the folks were actually asking the state folks were asking for this data by the way so that they can go after getting preschools across the state so I'm going to be sending this to you so this is the same sort of thing because we had those down years this down year in kind of 7, 8, 9 we want to see if we can tell anything more about it and so we did the same sort of chart and here we are again 2019 on average in grade 7, 8, 9 we were 19 points below what the state was scoring it has been increasing ever since even with that down here science same deal we don't have as much data on this because they've changed this thing so many buddy times we only test in science in grades 5, 8 and 11 grade 8 has actually been our downfall a lot of times in the data consistently and so we're taking a look at that class making sure it's aligned with the proper curriculum making sure they've got good skills in there but you see it's kind of the same pattern what science is happening in grade 8 now? they do a combined it's a little bit of life a little bit of physical a little bit of earth I believe and then it kind of breaks up when you get into the higher grades we have a disadvantage in science when we compare to the state because 50% of our 11th graders go to the tech center and don't have a science class that year and 11th grade is one of the grades they test science and amazingly this last year the biggest increase in scores and I can pull those out separately if folks want to see it was in our 11th graders they went from like upper 20s to 43% proficiency mark so a lot of the work that Vicki Johnson's been doing to try to make sure the kids are meeting all the standards before they go off to the tech center seems to be working miracles but here we are yet we're below the state we're closing the gap we're catching up so we are in compliance and we're not above the state at this point in time we're closing that gap I love this one White River Valley 2022 was the most recent scores that I could find so White River Valley math right central is Northfield Williamstown this is us these are for ELA and this is science and so what this chart is saying is it okay third grade White River Valley 40.7% of their kids hit the proficiency mark central 37.1% hit the proficiency mark OSSD 60% hit the proficiency mark so we can compare to similar demographics to us if it's highlighted in blue that means you got first place if it's in red you got second if it's in yellow you got third we are outperforming our demographic yellow is worse than red yellow is the lowest Williamstown is a fairly wealthy county no they're north and they're one of the sending districts to the tech center there's a lot of poverty so anyway any questions on next time I would request that you make red the worst I was going back with the ribbons that's what I did with the ribbons third is white which didn't make a lot of sense but on the reports we get red is the worst red is the bad right green is good yellow is caution red is alert so the last piece and I think this plays into conversations tonight and why I'm trying to compel the board to take a look into what was said here is because one of the things that we've been working on is we're trying to develop our public relations model is that there's a lot of mental models that exist out there about the schools staff turnover is high kids are leaving the schools in droves there's positive ones too Brangtree is a really great place to be Randolph's the place for your kids to go if they have special education needs because you do a really good job with them so there's all sorts of mental models but one of the ones that has been out there for time out of mind is this idea that our staff retention is horrible I did the data last year I had even the union sit down with me and go through it and they were in agreement our turnover rate last year was depending upon whether you were looking at just the teachers the entire staff at June 30th when we did it was between 7 and 9% which was a third of what the normal average turnover rate is in the nation prior to COVID so here is what the state is saying because the state rates too on their dashboard and again I don't, as soon as we get the 23 data I'll put this up here too but in 2020-21 and this is when things were hot and heavy because COVID was blaring we were in the highest category they have we were exceeding all expectations in terms of staff retention in 2021-22 we dropped a level to meeting like most districts did state-stated meeting Central was not meeting they had no place to go down the River Valley started exceeding with us and a year later they dropped two places so if you add this up based upon a rubric our score was 7, 6, 2 and 6 higher numbers are better we are outperforming our demographic in terms of staff retention as well which is why when I say these face-to-face conversations and trying to get people to come in and talk there's a lot of rumor that runs around behind normal that's what people do accelerated a little bit sometimes by social media but when folks can come in and talk and have direct conversations we get an opportunity to say hey why do you believe that well this is what I've got would you like to see, would you like to talk about this and maybe we can start to change these perceptions a little bit so I'll get off my horse I appreciate the time questions on getting the data for this last one here directly from the state dashboard what they look at is they look at the percentage of your district where the teachers have been there what percentage of teachers have been there for three or more years but again, people gotta ask questions if you hear something concerning and this is to the entire community so I hope I'm on tape somewhere if you're hearing stuff that makes you concerned ask for a meeting, we're happy to sit and talk with you that's all I got, unless there's questions end data discussion that was it all of it was together right so we need to discuss the need for two recommended policies yeah I had asked let me go back and look at this I talked to Pietro maybe a week or so ago when these things were coming up and asked him to create a model policies for them which I do not have yet but I can talk a little bit with the board about what they are to consider if it's something that you do want to do in the last year or so we've had at least three actual faculty members and then a person related to a faculty member asking for our tech center students to go and do construction work there is potential good there and that the kids are getting skills could look like a conflict of interest and so I think it would be pertinent to have a policy depending upon what the board is leaning are yes we will allow this and these are the circumstances where it's appropriate or no we won't because that way we are fair when people are asking the questions because we have a protocol to follow to give them an answer and the answers will be consistent and so that's the first one that's been coming up the second one has to do with a state regulations in the law not quite matching so under the state regs, the AOE regs if a student wants to change their preferred name they are allowed to come into school the school is supposed to keep it quiet and use their name in the system so that folks know but under the law until the student is age 18 parents have the right and so we are potentially going to be bumping into a problem if we don't have a policy on what we do here because as we are trying to get the parents more involved in their children's education and opening up the power school portal which is where all the grades of the nation is held so parents can check in on their students the last thing we want to have happen is a parent not know that their student is asked for a name change and they open up the portal and there it is so we need to have a policy in terms of what we should be doing should we be telling parents when a student is asking to change the names or should we not PHO is already working on a model policy for the state I've asked them to come in a little quicker for us if you can so those are the two I'm just standing up because it's right in my back to sit so I apologize the RTCC policy is that something I'm trying to figure out at what step we are here are we to decide if we think there should be a policy and if so so if there's no policy if there's no policy I will not approve any of those requests because I have no way to say that I'm being fair which is fine no policy, no request if we decide that we do want to grant this at times we need to spell out under what circumstances and what the conditions are so that it's a consistent choice when people are asking yeah no I check this box check this box check this box all these things match I can say yes to you go ahead and do it you may not even want to take it on first of all personally I am way in favor of it just being blanket no but I also think that on the board level this isn't an area yeah that we should wait into making this checklist of when it's okay and when it and when it isn't because policies their job is just to make things consistent so everybody's treated fairly yeah so actually if the board you know you don't have to vote on anything but if you guys as in general just say now we're not interested then it'll tell the page or no one save the money that's not enough so we'll put a technique as a creative procedure if there's no policy you might have to grant it I don't want to be in a position to grant it because it's not consistent but not having a policy is also a policy yeah right and protocols come from policies you know not making decisions also making decisions yeah right so okay so then I think the policy should be a blanket no I just think this is just too because then because that may be lane standing but if it's not lane sitting in that chair there should be some like there our community should be able to have some consistency consistent expectation I really don't want to stretch it out but I feel like you guys need some examples of what's being talked about like Betty Young went to RTCC and said would you like I'll buy the flooring would you like to install the flooring and I'll make a donation to your Arvos fund and they said no but it wasn't meant to exploit them it was like here's a job do you want it so that's just one example or like I want a shed built or I want this or that and I'll you know what's it going to cost I just bought a business and I want the kids to come up and work there right or going to you know we want a sign made or we want you know can you fix my car you know these things are pretty regular they're regular and they can benefit and they could benefit the kids we just need a way to get that conflict of interest piece out of there if it's possible because one that came forward was someone wanted basically to buy a building for us to commit the students would renovate the building and it was just we couldn't commit to that you know they wanted a memorandum of understanding for the loan and everything it was too much you know so it's a big liability as well right so it's not that we never want student projects that might benefit the community or a community member because it might be charitable work it might be good you know win-win that's where it is it's benefiting the community you can also have a second line there's a 501C3 involved if you think that it's a but it should benefit the community not an individual interesting and the difference there I think is if it's benefiting the community then it's like a project right that the kids are a part of and taking ownership of they're not being hired that's where I'm this feels very much like college athletes that's where I feel like it's waiting into the line is too fine because the intent may not be exploitation but it's right for it yes it is we do have a policy that we're not even supposed to be doing things that have the appearance of a conflict of interest great so there's already a policy on that alright let's move on to the next thing I think we need to talk about this some more maybe not right now do you want me to try to have a draft policy just through what PH pulls here because at least that way it's an informed discussion something to I would appreciate to know that if you doing that policy that it somewhere is that it's benefiting the community and not an individual gotcha like they did the piece in front of the fire station that's benefiting the community or a community building structure but I don't like the idea of it being like come build a shed at my home especially if it's an employee because it looks like it's favoritism even if it's an individual right it could be somebody who has connections somewhere not a small dog not a shed at the rec center or rec field that's going to benefit the community to have a structure there are yeah it's going to have to be very specific I'll make a donation for free labor and we also have other well the supplies would have to be supplied by the individual who's requesting the work to be done yeah but it's still free labor so isn't this going to run right up against automotive like automotive relies on having people give their cars for the students to work on but they pay for the service who gets paid the tech side but not the students but they have to have a broken thing to work on to learn to I'm going to be really simplistic here to learn to build you can be given the materials and you learn to build to fix there has to be something broken so it's a little now I'm just making up exceptions and this is why less things have changed in the last couple years they charge for the service just like when you go to the auto shop I really think it's a conversation for another night great well then whether or not we have a policy to start the discussion off of next time from Pietro I'd like it on the agenda anyway for us to continue okay great um down um so thank you board monitoring all those in favor of tabling monitoring 4.4 until next time we will have two policies two months alright the report on the BSVA I do feel like we touched on a little bit with the health policy budget that's the big thing so Lane gave us a little bit of an introduction Tuesday you'll have more in depth and we shall discuss again so I don't mean to go overboard if you really wanted to get out about lunch how was lunch it was dry approval this is the consent agenda we have minutes from the regular board meeting on the 11 corrected minutes from the regular board meeting on the September 13 those two can be together in my opinion and the other two need to be separate I do have a change to one minutes but it's from the executive session it just had 2013 on it rather than 2023 and that's his fault that's the one from the month before that didn't make it into the packet but the one the one that is 1011 here oh wait 1011 right but this is the one previous we still have to correct the date it was the one from the oh 2013 sorry yeah I thought you meant the month it's a good year so you want me to check Sam's date yes going forward please thanks Kyle does anyone have any other updates to minutes great I'll entertain a motion to accept those two so moved second thank you Chelsea all those in favor I thank you passes unanimously so I'm not asking for a post members of the sabbatical committee we need a board member we do we need a board member there's one Kyle did give me copies of one of the requests from a faculty member but I don't think that's relevant in terms of if you're going to be on the committee you have to appoint all the members so the Sheikwin and Matt Revy were the two teachers and then Melinda Robinson was the administrator that stepped out the teachers were chosen by random from those that were interested so we need to approve those and also appoint one of us and no decisions have to be made by that committee before like February and my guess is it's a one hour meeting we don't approve who they have already on there as far as teachers we just appoint a board member to join right you're supposed to appoint the whole committee I'm giving you a recommendation of who to appoint in terms of those three people thank you for clarifying it does say honor before February 1st who wants to sit on that is anyone interested in sitting on that one one hour meeting to choose the winner do we have to make any cuts or anything like there's more than one request for a sabbatical so yes you would be saying no to some people but you'd be saying yes to one oh I forgot to say that there is a cost for the sabbatical right we don't have time to not be here and then we have to pay somebody else full time to cover their position that was in the budget so how many people have requested three so far well they have it only until November 15 two have put in the actual paperwork the third one has expressed their intent I thought in the past it was a first come yeah because it was always only ever one but I think it was like a stated strategy that was the first person to ask gets it so is this the first year we've had more than one person first year we've ever had more than one yeah and I think we added language that it would benefit the district yeah this says it was contract language so it was something we tried to I don't remember if they accepted it or not you'd see it in the contract if it was well how come this says contract language well the work of this committee would be to decide which one is most beneficial to the district like if someone is just taking it because they just want to go on a cruise that's not as beneficial is it maybe something academic I'm very tired the committee would decide what it's you would decide as a committee what you want to consider you know is it seniority is it benefit to the district I have no part oh thank you Hannah thanks Hannah I think you need a motion to afford this hold so moved sure you don't want table this way we have a motion and a second for it to be Melinda Robinson Reby Carlton, Colin thank you and me all those in favor opposed thank you Hannah thank you stay thank you Hannah okay I'm keeping you to that one hour though okay I'm kidding PA upgrade to RTCC Reserve Request so they they're in a position where we had upgraded the high school and now we're in a position to be able to upgrade the PA system within the tech center it's a safety issue not to have it in case there's a lockdown called anything like that they don't have a real great way of communicating we're trying to have them compensate right now with the radios questions they gave one of the sponsors there at the conference had a cool system is there any around where kids with communication yeah so there's the flashing light the strobes you'll see yeah because they're going to need a visual cue it's a safety issue why didn't you cite EL 2.0 as satisfying EL 2.0 as part of your reason for we had it covered with the radios it's not ideal but it's right but you're asking for this money not only because you need to get the boards of but also because it's meeting the requirement of keeping the staff so so we should be getting that in here in this monitoring report that says global all say 2.0 and of course this so you're saying for in reason to add it into yeah let me think on the timing of it of when it became an awareness something's about to shut down when you need that that's Heather oh it is it was the board itself yeah I'll take me and Sam but there there was so well I'm just saying that for me I just think we need to be a little bit more specific to why you know oh there's plenty of money in the fund alright let's just spend it but if we want to be a little bit more the reason behind it is he has to keep everybody safe and that is in one of our main policies so you ought to be citing that I'm I'm getting this system I apologize to miss me but he's supposed to be telling you what to put in there so I'm not disagreeing with you I'm asking if you want the request to come back to recovery just amend it so to be clear we're monitoring we're spending this money he's giving us a reason the reason is in order to keep our staff safe they need to have a decent yeah so this would just be evidence so it's yeah it's evidence and it's the policy move with the amendment to include policy 2.0 which would be right that is unsafe yeah I have a motion do I have a second I think Sarah won that one all those in favor of approving this request opposed unanimous great superintendent's report we've read it do you want to there's incidental from our we meet every two weeks with the union they are interested in opening up discussions about how conference days are managed and so I wanted to throw that out to the board to see if the board has an interest I promise them that I would do that no that's the management issue that's how I feel about it let me shut that down it's fine with me it's a potential change in working conditions which would affect their CDI isn't this the negotiation the proper response if that's the concern is this should be handled in negotiation they were asking for a half day off before that was for half days for conference days conference days used to be a full day off they feel like they don't have enough time they need two half days again I feel like these things have a time and a place to be brought up and every single meeting to have this come to us is not the time and place to have this brought up we also don't set the calendar and that's all that's right no but like I said the reason it's technically a negotiation a little piece is because it falls under what we negotiate about working conditions salary, school day that's my feeling but I want it I want it to be from all of us if that's the case because I'm the one that's going to they're going to go back and say he doesn't like you because he didn't approve it is anyone concerned with that so it might help if at the meeting they're there and they're asking it we have to at the board we can it's negotiations and I did offer to say what we could do because that was the reason I put the email up on the board I asked them to negotiate it with us two negotiation periods ago because it was an issue and there was no follow through but I think we might be able to work out the language before negotiations so that it's sitting there and ready and so that we can just go in and say yeah that's what I'd like to spend the time on alright I appreciate that that's what you want financials they're good we should have spent like 67% of our budgets at both tech center and high school now off the top of my head we still have over 80% of both budgets still left so we are well on the black there's been a lot of spending out of facilities for a lot of like I said older building so they haven't over spent you know their budget yet but they're a little bit ahead of probably where you'd like to be right now what's the reason for being so far behind on the benefit which piece like you're saying that we should you just said we should have spent X amount percent right now why aren't we so far understanding probably because we have staff it's kind of like the grants you know if you couldn't hire staff right off at the beginning of the year and say we hired them in November right we have money there because we planned it out for the entire year but we lost two months that we didn't pay them for because we didn't hire them until November we couldn't hire them until November so that's a big chunk of it that makes sense how I'm explaining that we got money for this much but that's in the budget but you didn't come into here so this is money that's not going to get spent this year would be my guess off off the cuff with a lot of it other questions great okay action items I'm just going to throw some out here and in Chelsea please reach out to Ben if you would to Sarah you and I have some annual agenda edits to make Chelsea you and I will reach out to Pietro please send any edits to the letter to the community to Katya please register for the training next Tuesday the 14th at the VSBA website ENDS committee please let's meet and include Anne Sylvie's committee schedule something with Bob and Wes entertain a motion to move into executive session with or without guests I just have a question about it though so we have guests listening for the first item are we guests for the second item no so I moved to enter executive session with Lane and Heather joining us for the first portion of executive session and then for only for the second part yes that's what I'm saying moved by Katya seconded all those in favor aye okay 10-08 we are moving into executive session