 What do you think? Shall we go ahead and start? Oh, and there's Rachel. All right, we've got plenty now. So I'll call the meeting to order. It's 6.32. And the meeting tonight, the focus is gonna be primarily on the strategic planning report out from Wynton. And we also are gonna be appointing the auditor that should be pretty straightforward. And we'd need a meeting evaluator for this meeting. Do we have any volunteers? No one's jumping on it. Chelsea will. Okay, so and that evaluation stuff was sent out with the meeting packet. We wanna find one of the evaluation form. Okay, so we're gonna start with community engagement. And before I open it up, I'm just going to acknowledge that we did have a couple of emails that came through. Lane responded to one and the other one, all the board members saw that email. There was no particular question. It was just a community member expressing their views on an issue. And so I'm gonna open it up for community engagement if we have any folks who wanna bring something to our attention. You don't see anything. Looks like the people that we have here are either board members or part of the design. So I'm gonna move on our board management and governance. And I just wanted to check in with folks with the board training as everybody logged in and been able to get started with the policy governance training. Any issues with it? Everybody's on. Okay, perfect. So I think we'll go ahead and start with Winton and the report out on the strategic plan. Okay. Well, it's nice to be with you again. And I don't think all of my team is here tonight as well. So we'll work with the folks that are with us. I just wanna thank the board for the opportunity to present the final strategic plan. The design team members have been working very diligently since early January. We've had upwards to 15 meetings and none of them have been short. And there's always been a lot of homework in advance of that. We received feedback on both past and future direction for the school district from students, from teachers, from staff, administrators, parents, alumni, business owners and citizens. Feedback was gathered using online forums, surveys and directly from administrators and previously from the board. I just wanna kind of set the context that the plan is very ambitious. It provides direction for the delivery of education services for the next three years for OSSD. And as you can see, there are four main goals with multiple objectives. And since I presented last time, we've done some reconfiguration and we're cognizant that there were a lot of goals. We've turned those into objectives with action steps and with benchmarks. And the design team has worked diligently with the superintendent and the administrative cabinet to simultaneously align the strategic plan with the agency of education's COVID recovery plan requirements. The plan provides direction for four main stakeholder groups. The first group is, of course, the school board and the most effective board role will be to monitor the plan progress through your ends policies. The board's end policy role is most prominently identified in goal number one, continued strengthening school culture and climate and goal three, build student capacity to acquire foundational knowledge. The second stakeholder group is the superintendent and administrative cabinet. Their role would be to operationalize and implement the plan and to ensure progress is being made on all four goals and on the 20 objectives. The third stakeholder group includes teachers and staff. They're responsible for the delivery of the plan components to students. And the fourth, and we'll call this the consumer group, are students families in the community. And these partners will enjoy the benefits of the school district completing the plan and will also hold the OSSD accountable during plan implementation. Some of my colleagues from the design team will now take you through the process and explain how each component of the strategic plan was developed and will provide a little bit of personal insight. I don't know, Lane, if you have the ability to project the vision, mission beliefs and the four goals so that board members can see what we're talking about as the speaker is taking us through here. Yeah, I can give it a try. It might be a little difficult during the time that I'm the speaker, but it'll take me a moment to pull up the documents. Well, if you can just allow me, I have it. I just don't know if I'm able to present. Oh, you should be able to. All right. How do I get to that point? I'm used to running these meetings myself, but I don't know how to share when I'm, I'll present. So they change the icons on us since the last time I used Google Meet. So if you go down to the bottom, it's about the fifth icon over. It looks like an envelope with an up arrow on it. That's the present now button. Okay, on the far right-hand side. On my screen, it's on the bottom. Okay. And then there you go. And you got it. Okay. All right. Well, David, the David Roller will start us off tonight with the vision piece. So the vision, and I don't mind reading it to you because it's short and that's kind of the point. So it's a path for all to learn, think, grow, and achieve. In developing this, the design team went through a fairly large number of iterations and many of them were much longer than this, but we wanted it to be a nugget that someday if you ask someone, certainly an employee, what our vision was that they might actually be able to come up with this or a reasonable facsimile. So we're pleased with this version and think it really represents what we want to do, what all of our stakeholders want us to be doing for the community. Okay. Thank you, David. Lisa, we'll take us through the mission. Yeah. So we spent a lot of time distilling all of the information that we got from the stakeholders through the forums, through the surveys and really thought about what the mission of our school community is. And so I think this was the piece that we maybe wordsmithed as a group the most and went back and forth on, but ultimately we felt pretty satisfied that this represents what we hope to do as a school community. And so I can read the mission, although I know you all can see it. The OSSD is a learning community that empowers students of all backgrounds to discover and pursue their unique passions, build diverse relationships and develop their knowledge and skills for purposeful futures and successful adults and citizens as successful adults and citizens. We just felt that even though it's a very long sentence, it really encompassed what we feel our true mission is. Beautiful, thank you. And Haley is set, I think you know that David is a Randolph administrator and Lisa is as well in the middle school. Haley is a Brookfield elementary teacher. Haley will talk with us a bit about the belief statements. So I have the belief statements, which are much longer than the other two. So I'm not going to read them all to you, but they're there. And I think that you guys have seen them previously. So we looked at the belief statements and kind of chose what helps us shape our education decisions and how they're made. It's kind of overarching of how we act every day. And we definitely looked at the survey results to help us pinpoint some different belief statements even they're not really in order, but we did put the educators, we did put that one first because that was some feedback that we received. We really wanted to focus on education and personal learning plans and things like that. So that's the first belief statement. And then there were some other ones that I wanted to highlight the environmental stewardship was one that came out of our survey results. And then there was one other, the transferable skills, G was another one that came out of our survey results that we took into account. And if board members would just remind Brian that it was his feedback that caused this one to become first, let him know that we really did listen to board feedback. All right, Lane will talk with us a bit about goal one. And I just want to share with the board before we jump into this one that we did some kind of late changing. These used to be themes and we were very cognizant of the fact that we had 23, I think goals. So that's a whole lot. So we've turned it into four main goals with a lot of strategic objectives. And so Lane is going to take us through the first one. Yeah, we can't hear you, Lane. Sorry about that. There are four main goals. And each one is kind of codified by the strategic objectives that really define what each of those goals are about. Goal one deals with continuing to strengthen the school culture and climate. And I think if you think about any organization at its foundation, especially if it's a healthy program or organization, there's climate and there's culture. And they support the organization's mission and they enable it to achieve its stated goals. A proper climate enables high levels of human performance by ensuring the faculty, students and families are satisfied with the OSSD and its schools. And a poor climate can hinder achievement while a positive climate obviously can stimulate it. There are five strategic objectives designed to strengthen school culture and climate. Two are focused specifically on climate. The first is ensuring that all students have access to learning resources, materials and the learning environment. And the second is ensuring that our facilities support our learning priorities. Success in terms of these two objectives and powers equity and guarantees that the OSSD structure support our long-term goals. Culture is a little bit different but related. Culture relates to the expectations and standards an organization holds its members to and the values that those expectations inspire over time. Poor performance and organizational failure are often rooted in a mismatch between expectation and stated values. When organizational expectation and values are in harmony a district can excel. Two of the five strategic objectives focus specifically on culture. The first is our work to continue closing the student achievement gap. And the second is to create a task force to study the middle school grade and program configurations. And to me the second is really an extension of the first as it also seeks to improve the achievement gap that exists in this case between students in the middle school grades and the rest of the student body. And a positive culture success becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because members are inspired not only towards their own excellence but also to push for excellence from their peers. The final strategic objective under this goal, the fifth one actually supports both goal categories. And that is to assess school culture and climate from the perspective of students, teachers and families. This information is gonna be important as it's gonna represent the evidence for how well our work in climate and culture is producing the desired results. And there are several popular surveys whose contents can be shaped to measure this ongoing work. And it's hoped that the entire community will participate as these are administered over time as it will give us a means to measure our progress longitudinally. So that's the big one continuing to strengthen school culture and climate. Okay, and I'll just add to that that from the last presentation, I realized that we didn't as overly address the task force to study middle school configurations. We talked about it tangentially, but it didn't have a strong focus in the plan. So we made a change since the last board meeting and that's what you'll see here. All right, Lindsay is going to, Lindsay Hopped is going to take us through goal two. Lindsay is a brain tree elementary parent and business owner. Lindsay, take us away with communications. Yes, I'm not gonna turn my camera on because my internet's not working great but I'm hoping you can all hear me. So thank you all for the opportunity to do this. It was really neat to get to work with so many different people and to be able to kind of learn so much from everybody. I'm gonna introduce a little bit about goal number two, which is improving communication and relationship building between the school and the community. And the main objective is just that to improve two-way communication between families and schools. We had a lot of feedback both in survey format as well as in our individual forums just about all aspects of the communication between families and students in the schools and the desire for parents to sometimes have more intel on what's going on and more understanding of the systems that are used in the schools so that when their children are being evaluated by them they get that. And so it was kind of a big task to figure out how to encompass all of that communication piece into sort of measurable goals. One of the things we learned this year was that the surveys seem to work well from determining things for the hybrid and that sort of stuff. And there were a lot of people that enjoyed being able to have that sort of input and communication. So you'll notice that some of what we're gonna look to do is to put out some various surveys to first learn what are the forms of communication that families are looking for and the school is looking for and kind of how can we make a two-way communication system work. And then from there looking at ways to provide both the teachers and the families with good communication around the learning management system so that again families can have a better idea of how to get onto that system and monitor how their children are doing during that time. As well as communicating the curriculum and learning outcomes and helping families to know where the school stands kind of like the board is looking to have that same information and so trying to provide that information to the families as well. Similarly helping families and students understand the standard-based learning and again how that's used, where the information is taken to how the data is gotten and that's something else that we're looking to enhance that information. And then developing continuity and curriculum implementation across all the schools that was especially something that was sort of brought up at the elementary level and then how that's going to help kids transition into middle school and high school all together. So again looking at some different ways to kind of build that community and network at the elementary levels. And so you'll see that using various forms of surveys and things the goal will be to kind of glean families and students and teachers and staff as to whether or not the communication is working and as to whether or not they feel confident in these systems and that's how the board will be able to hopefully use those survey information to determine if the objectives have been met. So yeah I think that kind of covers most of that and of course on the other side you'll see who exactly is kind of responsible for implementing those things as well. Beautiful, thank you Lindsay. And now we'll move on to Lisa. I'm sure you know Lisa is the middle school administrator Lisa's gonna talk with us about building student capacity around foundational knowledge. And this is one of the key board ends policy areas and you'll see that the board has primarily displayed here as far as responsible for monitoring progress. Take it away Lisa. Yeah so this is one of our larger categories and it really it covers a lot of territory because it's really the heart of what we do as a school. So the very first piece of this goal or implementation step is making sure that we're implementing research-based instructional strategies in all classrooms. So some of these things are going to sound really familiar because some of them the work has already been begun but we're going to continue to strengthen those systems and practices as we follow this strategic plan. So one of the things we hope to do and that we found again aligning with Lindsay's curriculum, not curriculum but communication that she just shared about is create opportunities for families to see the work that's been happening in schools. So providing periodic family nights to educate parents on how they can support student learning and on what's happening at school we think would be helpful in that regard. In addition to that assessing the impact of the initiatives. So for example, we just did a big responsive classroom training last year. And so looking at ways that we can assess the effectiveness of what teachers have learned through a variety of data points. So that maybe discipline data it might be student assessment scores really using that data with our grade teams in order to analyze proficiency and the effectiveness of the professional development that's been happening. And then 3B is vertically and horizontally aligning curriculum. So again that speaks to communication within our schools and really making sure that the curriculum is cohesive and that each piece builds on each other piece and that we create opportunities for students to transfer learning that they gather in one classroom setting to another classroom setting to the world beyond the classroom. This also includes the development of habits of work, heart and mind which I think occur in all of our schools but really intentionally helping students understand when they're using those transferable skills and building those transferable skills so that they're just really well prepared for each phase of their lives. 3C includes increasing the number of students achieving proficiency on the English Language Arts, math and science standards. So in math and literacy this includes hiring district level directors who cover our district K-12 and help work on curriculum with administrators and teachers and help oversee the intervention program. So this year we had a literacy interventionist working with us in grades six through high school and next year we'll also have a math interventionist working with us at the high school and I know that they have interventionists at the elementary level as well. So when we use the data to see that students are not performing as expected and we can work with those people to move their learning forward. So that's really exciting in terms of this foundational knowledge goal. Conducting regular student assessments is a really important piece of this because if we don't have the data to build on or to learn from then it becomes challenging to know which areas we need to support more and then when we identify weaknesses providing professional development so that teachers can gain strength in how to support students in a particular area and build capacity around that as a system and a more targeted approach. Also this speaks to using best practices in the classroom and continuing professional development. There's a lot of detail in this section so I'm sorry if it feels like I'm going through it really, really quickly if you have the written copy I do recommend reading it because we really thoughtfully pulled from the survey and forum data to create this and I think it's really worth taking a look at because I really feel proud of the work that's happened. 3D under this category, so our fourth goal speaks to completing professional learning plans for all high school students right now. We work on this through the student-led conference system but what we learned is that students don't always necessarily know that those are their personal learning plans and so just being really much more intentional and using the language that students hear out and about in the community or in the news in the state of Vermont as part of Act 77 and make sure that they know that they have those plans and they know what those plans are all about and they're really well informed in terms of advocating for their own learning and their own learning pathways. 3E speaks to articulating the completing detailed assessment frameworks and then making sure that each content area and grade level have common assessments so that they have common data banks to pull from to inform teaching practices and 3F speaks to exposing middle and high school students to a variety of career fields, career clusters, secondary planning, post-secondary planning, working with the career center, getting them out into the community to see what is available locally in terms of jobs and opportunities that need to be filled in our community so we're looking forward to that work and 3G speaks to our IEPs and special education services and really moving from a caseload service model which is what we have now where students have a single case manager to a model where we're looking at cohorts so students who have similar needs and those being addressed across the elementary schools in addition to the creation of the therapeutic programs at the elementary schools to remediate behaviors that can sometimes get in the way of students learning as completely as we'd like them to. Another thing that I think is really exciting that we discussed throughout this process is that when an outside placement is necessary for a student that we create an exit timeline so if we have those most serious interventions or the highest level of need for one-to-one paraprofessionals or outside of school placements that we look at how we peel those services back and help our students to become more independent if they're working with a one-to-one paraprofessional or how we get them back into our school system if they have to be sent to an outside placement to meet some need that they have. And then finally taking an annual look at our school board ends and policies keeping community priorities in mind and making sure that the work we're doing really closely aligns with what's expected of us. Great. Thank you, Lisa. Finally, Kelsey Albandia. I think I have it right this time. I've butchered a number of times. Kelsey is a math teacher in the middle school and she will take us through Goal 4. Thanks. Yeah, so Goal 4 is to expand students' personal development skills. And so this goal really focuses on the student and on the social-emotional learning of the student. Like the other goals, this one came out of all the forums and the survey. But really, this one also came out of looking at some of the things that we did in the schools during this COVID era and kind of what good came out of that. And so you'll see when I read some of the adjectives, some of them are kind of from what we did this year that actually worked pretty well and that we hope to continue in future years. So one objective would be to increase mental health supports for students and families. And so that would involve hiring more mental health staff at all the levels of the school, so elementary, middle, and high school, so they can reach more students and reach into the homes as well. Hire and outreach coordinators who can also be in access for these families and then provide some year-long after-school tutoring and kind of that tier two level to help students beyond the school hours. And we're hoping that with this, we'll see better attendance rates, reduction in DCF referrals and those sort of things. The second objective of this school is to help students expand their development of critical thinking skills. And so we wanna hear help students really separate fact from fiction to be good problem solvers and carry on those good conversations in this kind of really tough world sometimes. We think that we'll really see this too when we look at students' presentations during senior projects is a good time to see more students have really come with that development of skills. A third objective here is to increase student ownership in their own personal learning. And so with this, we wanna think about things like executive functioning skills for students and right now the staff at the middle school and high school are taking part in executive functioning training. So we're trying to really make sure that we can help students in that realm and then help students also in the kind of more of the habits in terms of the growth mindset and perseverance in all the schools that are working on that. For D of this, the next objective is to align social-emotional learning standards for students across all grades. So this involves some partnerships with our local mental health agencies like Claire Martin Center and just to have them be more part of our school and to do some tier support in our school. So thinking about like that PBIS systems. Again, make sure that all teachers and staff have training and trauma and executive functioning. Another objective is to provide some age-appropriate wellness breaks for all students pre-K12. And so this is again where it really came out of looking at what we did this year with COVID that we gave all students recess, which really was, it used to be an elementary thing to do. And we found that it was so beneficial for kids in the middle school and high school. And so we're hoping that we can keep that going in future years and give students an appropriate wellness break throughout the day. And then the last objective of this goal is to ensure that all students acquire basic financial literacy and life skills before graduation. And this one really came out a lot in the forums from students and from community members that they wanna see students graduate with some more life skills and some financial literacy skills. And so we hope to incorporate more of that into the curriculum. Great. Thank you very much. And I meant to, well, I'll introduce folks first, but I wanna make sure that the board understands that the items in blue under action steps and here under kind of the accountability. If it's in blue, it means it's something new. If it's in brown, it means it's been ongoing and maybe stepped up a little bit. The other piece that we did in our last meeting is we did the priority voting to be able to, at the top of each one of these goals, for example in four, four A was the highest priority in that goal section and four F was the lowest priority. And again, that was based on the 15 or so members of the design team. And the same follows through with all of the other ones. The other piece at the beginning, the legend talks about roles of board, of superintendent and of other individuals. And then again, brown is existing initiatives, blue are new initiatives. And yeah, I think we're good on that. So let me just introduce the other members of the team. I don't know that many of them are here, but Wilder Grimes is a high school junior who helped us really kind of keep the connection with the student body. Kayla Link is a Randolph Elementary teacher. Richard Hayward, Brookfield Elementary teacher. Gus Howe-Johnson, I think is with us tonight. But Gus is a Randolph Elementary teacher. James Wesselkuch, a music teacher in all the elementary schools. DC Mendez is a high school parent. Heidi Arias is a nonprofit organization elementary parent. You might know her as the director of the recreation department. Jeff Higgins, a Brookfield Elementary parent and Vermont Tech professor. David White is a middle school parent. And you all know Ann as your school board chair. I'm just gonna share with you one final piece. And I had it up here. Let me make sure that I still have it. It's a, I call it a macro view of the goals. This isn't of Randolph and of OSSD. This happens to be in another school district that I'm doing planning. They had five main goal areas, but what it is is it gives you a snapshot. I call it a macro timeline of what's happening in each of these goal strands so that someone on a website can click on this and be able to see that here we are. Are you trying to share that with us right now? Cause it's not, we're not. Oh, it's not coming up? No. Okay. What I'm seeing is the OSED belief statement. All right. Well, I guess, I guess you'll just have to take my word for it. Let me, let me go back to where I was and I'll look, I'll finish here. Does the board have any feedback based on what you see tonight that we should pay attention to before I send out the final plan for you to adopt? There any thoughts you had, anything that happened tonight in conversation that you'd like to address because we're always in a feedback mode. In fact, strategic plans need to be flexible and nimble. And as you go through your annual assessment of how things are, how the objectives are being accomplished or not, you sometimes have to have to make some changes or to have some wonderful celebrations. So any board feedback before we say it's a completed process? Any thoughts that you have? Full of questions. Okay. The first one, I want to thank the volunteers. I know living through strategic planning processes, I certainly can recognize the time and energy that goes into this. So really thank you very much. And for those that are here with us tonight, I have two questions. And my first one, probably more towards the leadership that's here this evening, but did this process reveal any surprising gaps in the current system? I'm assuming that's a lane and David and Lisa question. Yeah, I was actually, you know, I can speak for myself and then the other folks can pipe in. I think one of the things that was pleasing about the process was that the vast majority of what's on there are things that we've identified and a lot of them, you know, work has already begun before the strategic planning process took place. So I think it's very kind of reassuring to see that other people are also seeing the same things that we've been concerned about the last couple of years. Yeah, I'm not sure that there were any sort of puzzling gaps. I was a little, I was a little not dismayed. I don't know, I think I had a perception that we were communicating better than it seems like the community feels like we communicate. And so I think that that is a good message for us to know that they really want more. And so that was good for us to learn. And they want more activities to be brought into the school and to see kids getting out into the community more. So I think that was good information for us. And there was one other point that I wanted to make and I'm not remembering what it was specifically. So David, if you have something you can jump in, if I remember, I'll raise my hand. You're on mute, David. Now you have to hear it twice. I'm happy to add, sorry. The other thing I wanted to share and I had written a note earlier was that the career and college exposure was something that came up over and over again. And I think, I know that each grade level goes to a different college. So like seventh grade visits CCV and then eighth grade typically will visit VTC and different years go different places. And so more of the career education is what people seem to be looking for. So we definitely received that message through this process as well. So my follow-up question is, how do you feel about the buy-in from the staff to take this, really this roadmap that has now been developed and to start with the implementation with the staff that is here now? I feel pretty optimistic. So as Elaine mentioned, a lot of this work has already begun. So we've been looking at using data to drive decision-making for a few years now. And we've got those processes in their beginning phases and people are really, I think appreciating those processes and have bought into them. So I think that as we go through the process of creating professional development that builds on what they already are doing and already have learned since we started going more deeply in these specific areas, I think we'll get more and more buy-in. Yeah, I think it's a well-placed question. And what's nice about it is that we're not, in terms of the strategic plan, there's nothing in there that's gonna require like a 360 degree turn from what we're already doing. There are some things that are gonna add a little bit more to the work that we're engaged in, but there is nothing that we've been working on very diligently that's gonna have to come to a stop or who's that's gonna have to change completely because of this. And because of that, I think there's gonna be a tremendous amount of buy-in. I also think that just through the process, staff had a lot of opportunity to contribute and did, I mean, not just the people on the strategic planning group, which was a good representative group, at every turn people had a chance to contribute and we're listened to. And I'll just add, folks didn't feel too bashful about saying what they thought. So it's authentic feedback. Okay, any last thoughts before we wrap this up for this evening? No, just to mimic the same, an incredible amount of work, detailed work and incredible investment of time and just to thank you. It is incredibly helpful, incredibly valuable. Great. Okay. Well, I'm very honored to work with the school district where my wife spent the 25 years and I've kept her abreast of some of her former colleagues. I was gonna say old colleagues, but I didn't think that would be appropriate. So I'll say former colleagues and I wish you the very best. And I enjoyed so much working with you all and especially with the design team members. So thanks a lot. And I'll sign off now and get this formally sent to you as we wrap up a multi-month process. Take care and have a good rest of the board meeting. Thank you very much, Wynton. Okay. So any other comments after having gone through that process from board members? I'm gonna kind of hog the airway here. So I think it's really important for all of us to think about one of the major findings that just came out of this report and that's communication. We asked our community to share their feedback, to share their input. And I would just be interested to know now as how this information is gonna be shared back out with them, what that timeframe is and the detail behind both the survey findings and the actual strategic plan itself. That's a great question. And as we go into our training for July one of the big things, one of the main goals of our board or one of our main roles is to be communicating with our community. So as we figure out what we wanna put on our agenda, I'm hoping that we'll be working that into what we're doing. Do you have any, do you have suggestions or do you have a vision right off the top of your head that you're hoping for? Well, I just wasn't sure if there was the communication plan already built around this. I guess I assumed that there probably was. So I was just anxious to hear what that timeline was. We didn't come up with a timeline but it's gonna be sort of shared because there are certain parts of the strategic plan as you saw that are more sort of board oriented and then others that are more administration oriented. So I think as we look ahead, we can work with Lane to sort of figure out who wants to share what and who wants to take what on in terms of getting that word out to the public. Any thoughts there, Lane? I think the strategic planning session for July that's coming up is a good place to start to have kind of an initial discussion. And then following that up once the board actually physically adopts the strategic plan, then at that point in time, I've got a strategic planning meeting that is set up for the administrative cabinet in early August to take a look and start to break down the parts and pieces and start to get the plans in place for implementation. So I think those two groups of meetings and getting all the minds together are gonna complement one another as we put things into place and start thinking about the priorities and which parts and pieces to work on first and what's most important. Yes, I have just a quick question to piggyback on that but is this gonna be a public document? It should be. They should know what we're working on. They can't hold this accountable if they don't. Yeah, that was my main thing is if what we just saw would actually be a public document available on the OSSD website for community members to access. Yeah, remember, you guys still have an extra step in the process here is that you actually have to vote to approve and confirm. Right, in that last piece, I believe Wynton's gonna put it together but he wasn't able to show it when he was sharing screen is just sort of a graphic for it and I believe that was one of the things that he wanted to do with the final plan. I'm not sure whether or not he'll actually do that or if he'll just have what we saw in the sort of in that table format versus the fancy graphic. That's what he was attempting to show us. We saw it in the design team but he didn't quite figure out the screen share to be able to show that to us. So all that should, it will be posted on the website. Okay, do we have any other comments or questions? Concerns? Okay, seeing none, we'll move on. We need to appoint our auditor and so we used Father Gil, Siegel and Valley. Unless there's a reason that a board member feels we should change, we need to just go through the process of appointing that auditor. And then, Lane, do we ask you to have Robin set that up or is that something that I do as the board chair? So once the board has voted to stay with the same auditor if that's the intent, then that's something that Robin can set up. My belief is that the board chair is probably going to have to sign to make it official. And so as part of the motion, if you vote on this tonight would also be delegating the authority to sign on behalf of the board for that purpose, yeah. So we're folks, do we have, anyone have concerns about the auditing company that we used? Nope, should I make a motion? I move that we remain with the same auditor for the OSSD. And do you have to add that a little bit? Oh, what was the and? And that you authorize. And then I authorized the board chair to sign off on the contract. On behalf of the board. Okay, authorize the board chair to sign on behalf of the board, the contract. Thank you for the coaching. I second. Okay, all of those in favor. Okay, so that has been passed. And next we're gonna just hear a quick overview of the teachers agreement that Lane and the board members have concluded with the teachers. Yeah, and thank you to the team. We had Hannah and Brian and Megan on the team right up through mediation, which happened on June 2nd, mediation was successful. After, I think it was about three hours of kind of going back and forth. We focused in solely on the salary pieces. It didn't appear at all that, you know, we were gonna reach any kind of common ground on language concerns that either the side said, but the tentative agreement that was reached calls for a two year teachers contract with a 3% new money increase in year one and a 4.15% increase in year two. New money means that their normal step increases that are a regular part of the contract are included as part of that percentage, right? So they get their step increase plus whatever additional percent to get them to 3% in year one, in year two, they get their contractual step increase plus whatever percent on top of it to get them to the 4.15. In checking with what was going on in terms of settlements around the rest of the state at the time, if things had gone to fact finding and then to an arbitrator, they pretty much just look at what other districts are settling at. They don't care about, you know, where a district is in terms of how well paid their staff are or the benefits they have. They strictly look at what those settlements are. Most of those settlements were coming in around 9% or more for two years. So we did very well in the negotiating process. And I give a lot of credit as well and a lot of thanks to the teachers. They did vote to ratify this tentative agreement and it sounded like it was pretty much unanimous after talking with Laura. So I think they're happy. Excellent. Lane, is our budget in a position where there will not have to be any cuts to be able to satisfy that salary negotiation? Yeah, and I give again, Megan and Hannah there that night a lot of credit. We stuck to our guns on that first year, right? Cause that's the budget that you guys voted on last January and the community voted on last March and they kept it right at where we set it, which was the 3%, which was the typical state average. Year two of the budget, that 4.15%, that budget is yet to be decided. So that's the one we'll be working on starting in October. So we should be in pretty good stead. So they did a really good job. Any other questions? Was that your first time through Megan? Yes, that was my first time and it was, what a process. She's still catatonic. I'm alive. Well, thank you for the effort. So then Lane, I know we talked about this, but I'm trying to remember what relegation of hiring authority. So we do have to vote on the teacher's budget. If you want to move it to the consent agenda, that's good. The regulatory relegation, sorry about of hiring authority. We're entering a span of time for the next two months where the board doesn't have another official meeting until August. We're at the end of kind of the hiring season and it's kind of frenetic right now because of all the extra money that came in from Esther. And so it's a competitive advantage if when the staff works in interviews and finds the teacher that they want after they've gone through the background checks and everything like that, if I can just sign them to a contract right then and there. Typically your process, the hiring of teachers is a pro forma process anyway. It's a procedure that you guys follow. There's not really any questions or whatnot about it. So my recommendation is just to help out this process a little bit is that the board make a motion to delegate the authority to hire just teachers to the superintendent basically from now until the board's August meeting. And that way, again, if they're looking at two or three possible positions, it's a lot easier if I can sign them to the contract right then and there when they're with me as opposed to saying, well, nothing's really official until August 14th or 15th through the next time the board meets. Because that leaves a lot of discomfort when things aren't official for a couple of months. And those are usually things that are in our consent agenda anyway. We're just voting it through because we have to. Yeah, that's the pro forma piece. Yeah. So do you need from us a motion saying that we give you the authority to sign on teachers? And then will we still do sort of a consent in August or? You'll still get the presentation in August, the form that Linda creates that shows who the positions are and where they're at. I don't expect that there'll be a lot of them. The biggest question right now is hiring for the ESSER funding. The guidance on how that money can be used has been changing since its inception. So I'm a little hesitant to be doing much hiring from it until that guidance is a lot clearer. So there probably will be some hiring mid-July-ish end of July-ish based on that money. Are there any questions from board members about what this means? This is really an authority that we've delegated over to Lane and we approve his hires, but it's just sort of a formality. It's not, we're not judging them at that point. So what we're gonna be doing is, so we need to make a motion that says we give you the authority to. To hire teachers through the first board meeting or through the August board meeting would be ideal. If you're so inclined. Are we so inclined board? I make a motion that we relegate the authority to Lane to hire or sign the contracts for any professionals that are hired before our August board meeting. Oh, second. All those in favor, passes. Next up is the executive limitations report, monitoring report. So this is Lane, do you wanna speak a little bit about this report? Yeah, this is the second read for the report. So this is executive limitation 2.7. It's related to compensation and benefits of non-unionized employees. So folks that aren't in one of our four different union units. It really kind of relates to the compensation and benefits provided to them, as well as outside contractors. It's really meant to ensure that what we provide is reasonable and comparable to our local markets and that we're not entering into agreements that are in excess of our revenues. It's also making sure that we're not, there's not favoritism. We're not hiring a person in terms of a permanent, forever contract that we're limiting the district's liability out to the limits of what we can foresee in terms of the budget prospects for the next few years. And in this one, I do report compliance across all the different provisions of that executive limitations. We have any questions on the EL report? Okay, so we're gonna, we need to move to accept the EL report 2.7. So moved. Do we have a second? I'll second. Seconded by Megan. All those in favor? That's accepted. Next up we have the monitor. Can I just interrupt? I apologize. But we neglected to accept the teacher's agreement back before we did the relegation of hiring authority. So I think we need to go back and make sure that's noted. So I will make the motion to accept the teacher's agreement as presented for the 2021 to 2023 two-year contract timeframe. Do we have a second? I can second that as well. All those in favor of approving the teacher's agreement for the 2021-23 teacher's contract accepted. Okay, so now we're moving on to, thank you by the way, Ashley. The quarterly facilities monitoring report. Yeah, so I'll talk about this for a few minutes and I apologize, this one came out a bit late. The facilities team was scrambling around it's summer construction season, right? It's Vermont, it's a short season. So there were a lot of things that came up work that needs to be done to get ready for the fall. And a lot of that work is in there. So basically what you're gonna see are a lot of kind of new initiatives in there. A lot pertain to the technical center and it's really about doing the renovations that are needed to support the dental assisting program, the changeover of the graphics arts to the digital media program, an expansion of the electrical core program and some much needed work in an old space in the construction trades program. So there's a huge chunk of new pieces in the facilities report, new initiatives that they're working on to get that work done. In terms of the Raven building, they've been in that building for a year, year and a half now. They've had some time to live in the building and see how that facility space is working for them. And there are a couple of things that they've decided that it would be good to have. And so those are on there, the new facilities report as priorities to try to get done this summer. One of the big discussions that was Henan Bob and Wes and myself, and just talked about the school lunch facilities across the district, much of the equipment that supports that program in each of the schools is coming to the end of its useful life. And so there's a lot of work going on right now to try to replace damaged and worn equipment and to try to get that in place, hopefully by next fall. There is one piece that's a little bit problematic and that is the foundation, the actual building foundation underneath RES. For whatever reason, when they built that concrete slab in there, they didn't use the right materials. It looks like it may have been done for cost saving purposes. So it's quite possible that to get that up to code and up to spec where it needs to be, we may have to do some pretty serious work. We may have to remove that foundation from under that area and replace it. And so we're doing and having some discussions with the state folks that come in and do the inspections to see how extensive that that needs to be. So there's a lot of focus right now in terms of school lunch facilities. And again, just because a lot of the equipment that supports that program across the district is 20 years older, older. So end of useful life. Lastly, there is a little bit of work that you'll see on there that's really related to this middle school concept, kind of creating a middle school within the high school. In the folks, the team over at RUHS, the task force that's been working over there is really working on trying to make like a middle school wing, getting all the middle school classes and programs together in the same place with their own dedicated bathrooms to give them, find that their own culture a little bit separate from the rest of the high school, helps build trust with the adults that'll be a part of that program, gives the kids a little bit of space as they go through all the major transitions that students of that age are going through. And so there's a little bit of work that's been added to help with that. But that's primarily the biggest piece that you're gonna see on the quarterly facilities monitoring reports are all these new additions that are related to those four areas. I don't know if there's any questions in terms of that work at this point in time or other things that may be on there. Is this above and beyond what we have been spending in maintaining our facilities? Yeah, so some of these, we are trying to take advantage a little bit of this year-end surplus to do some of this work. Some of it, depending upon the size and the scope, may not be able to get done in the regular facilities budget and might require us coming back to the board to tap into the reserve funds. Now, those reserve funds have been a concern to me for a little while, not that we have them, that's a really good thing. But we've got some significant amounts in two or three of those reserve funds. And that money should really be going towards supporting the work that we're doing with kids, supporting our programming and supporting the facilities needs that we currently have. That facility's reserve fund was created originally. My understanding was to make sure that we had money available to replace the roofs on the building when their 20 year lifespans were up. And the biggest concern, nobody wanted to really touch those reserve funds because we didn't know how much the cost was gonna be of the most expensive one, which was RES. The cost of that was actually under a million dollars. We were figuring it was gonna come in around 1.5. And so we are currently sitting on over three million in reserve funds in that account. It would be nice to put that money to work within the schools for the schools and maybe get that down to about a million. And part of the work that we're gonna be doing with the strategic planning with the cabinet in August is just that is the creation of a really strong five year facilities renovation plan that ties into the other components of the strategic plan that you guys have worked so diligently to create to make sure that everything is tying together and supporting itself the way that it should. Plus, I think part of the legislative agenda, one of the laws that they're passing is gonna require such a plan anyway as well as the state is kind of reassessing things coming out of COVID and getting a pretty clear understanding that, hey, maybe it wasn't a good idea to have a moratorium on matching funds for doing school renovations and rebuilding schools because now we're in the state of inequality again. So they're gonna be doing a pretty significant study it looks like over the next year or so to get a feel for the state schools as a whole and then hopefully start earmarking some monies towards that work. So this is kind of an opportune time to do this because if that law gets passed, I think it's next December that they have to have that report out. We might be able to take advantage not only of our reserve funds to do some incredible work around here but also matching funds from the state at the same time. So it's kind of fortuitous. Yeah, some of it will definitely be above and beyond what's in the regular facilities but it is needed. One of the other things that we'll talk about when we hit the financials is that when the district brought in the one-to-one program where every student gets their own computer or every teacher has their own computer to work from or work through, there was never really anything built into the budget to make sure that those computers were getting replaced every year and talking with Robin as we're kind of looking at things that sounds like the plan was just to use year-on-surplus when every four years when those things came due. I'm not comfortable with that. So what I'm gonna be doing in next year's budget we'll be talking about the fact that, hey, if we want to always make sure that no kid has a computer that's older than three years then we should be replacing a third of those computers every year and it should be in the regular budget period at the end. And so you'll see some changes. We'll talk a little bit about that when the budget happens in fall. But yeah, so good stuff. A lot of good stuff, a lot of good works that the facilities is engaging in right now that's really gonna have a strong impact on our programs. And hopefully culture and climate, right? Anyone else have any questions about the facilities report? I have teenagers with deep voices in another room. So no other questions about the facilities report. Okay, we'll move on to legislative update, Lane. So I put a pretty extensive update in the superintendent's report just because there was so much. I'm happy to answer any questions that folks may have. Know that at the time of the writing that most of those bills had actually gone over to the governor's desk and were awaiting, either him signing them, rejecting them or allowing them to pass into law without his signature. But I'm not sure if there's specific questions on any of the parts and pieces that were in that legislative update. And I can talk at least on the one that's the nearest and dearest to my heart because it kicks off the budget season that'll be starting up in October was they did increase the property yields fairly significantly. There's a lot of ways to think of property yield, the way they don't want you to think about it even though it's really what it does, it's the amount of money we get for student from the Ed fund. Last year it was 10, 988 next year, it's 11,317, so it's gone up, which is good. So that means that they've got a fair amount of confidence in the money flowing into the coffers for the Ed fund. But at the same time, they're also aware that there was a huge shifts in terms of parents and students accessing homeschooling during COVID to avoid coming into public spaces. And because it's still unsure how much of that is gonna carry over into next year or whether or not there'll be a rebound, the house did a pretty good job of making sure that our equalized people counts, they're not gonna dock any district whose enrollments go down significantly. They're gonna make sure that those equalized people amounts stay at at least 96.5% of previous years. So that's good. So they are really doing what they can to stabilize the school. So I give them a lot of credit for that. We talked a little bit about the needs and conditions of school facilities. That's one of the projects, one of the task force that they put together to really kind of go out and take a look at what are the safety needs? What are the HVAC needs? What are the immediate health needs for schools to get them up to code, get them up to spec so that if something like this should happen again, we are prepared. And so that research will be happening this year. And the hope is, is that they're putting together a couple of other councils like a school building authority council that's gonna take that information and then respond to the legislature in terms of how much it may need to put aside as a budgetary item to be able to support this work over time to get it done. We don't know what the outcome, it'll be a while of the next round of negotiations with the state at the state level for healthcare for teachers as that happens at the state level. I can't imagine that the impact is gonna be any greater than it was the last round. I think we were all kind of up to the same spec across the state right now. So I don't think it'll be a dramatic change. The biggest change we'll get is just the yearly annual 14% increase that we see in healthcare premiums. That'll be the biggest impact. The last piece is probably worthy of note is that they made a recognition as a state kind of the same recognition that we made looking at our own data from track my progress over the last year that there's a real need for some literacy training and support for students to make sure that they're learning to read and write well. And so they're putting together a council that's gonna advise the state board on creating training programs and technical support to districts that are doing this work. So it actually, it's very good. A lot of these things that are happening at the state level are kind of dovetailing in with the needs that we've identified within the district or cells. So I think there's a lot of good work that's gonna be able to get done over the next couple of years. So I think those are the biggies. And most of those, do you think will pass or we'll have enough support? Yeah, I think there's a pretty good shot. There wasn't much discussion at least in the superintendent's group and the VSBA group that I was sitting in on that there was an expectation of veto. What it sounds like if there are one or two of those bills that the governor may not be as happy with is he'll just let the time limit run out on them not sign them so that they automatically pass on the law. So I think there's a good chance that at least at the time that we had these discussions about a week ago that most of these would pass. The other big one obviously is the waiting study that impacts funding for schools and for special education. And so they are moving forward cautiously on that. Again, kind of another study to kind of take a look and present to the general assembly an action plan to start to implement the results of their waiting study that was done about a year ago. So they're really working on the implementation plan right now. Any questions for Lane? That waiting study would work in our favor also, right? My assumption is because a big proportion of it is students of poverty. We generally, we hover around the 40% district wide. Brookfield typically is much lower than that, but district wide we hover anywhere from 36 to 41% in the years that I've been here. And obviously the way the waiting study takes a look at things is districts that have a higher percentage of low income students get a bonus in terms of the waiting for the funding that comes to the schools. So that is the assumption. Okay, so we're moving on to the consent agenda and one of the things in the consent agenda is approving arbitrage, which Lane, if I'm remembering correctly, that's when basically the district borrows money ahead of time because we have to pay bills, but we haven't gotten the money from the state yet or budget, is that correct? They lag, we start the new year, July 1st, they lag behind, usually I think it's around September-ish that we get the first tax payment. So it's just to carry things over until then. Okay, so what we do there is we're approving that they can go out and borrow money, right? To borrow money, to cover things until they get that tax revenue in. And Linda can remind me, I think if you, as part of this one, it's also a motion for you to be able to sign. Yeah. Right, so unless we all wanna go, or a majority of us wanna go in and sign that agreement, we can all choose to do that or we can, in improving it, you can give authority to me to go in and sign for the board to allow them to borrow money to cover bills until we get that money. So we need to have a motion on that, on that particular consent agenda item. Everything else we can just approve as a slate of. I just had a quick question on the professional contracts. When it says replacement, that means that that was a position that hire was replacing a previous, professional teacher, and then new is a new position that was created. Yes, that's correct, yep. Okay, so I'm sorry, I actually, so I'll make the motion about the arbitrage, but then I also have a question on the professional contracts, is that okay? Sure. So I make a motion that we grant the authority to chair Anne Kaplan to sign on the arbitrage, paperwork allowing for borrowing your money on behalf of the board. No second. All those in favor? Sorry, I missed a second. Who was the second? All right, Linda, Kacha. Kacha. Ashley, you had a question on the professional contract. So I have a question on the senior project coordinator. I believe the last two years, wasn't that one a full-time position with, I believe first it was Lisa Floyd and then it went to Tev Kelman. Was that the case or were they split also in the classroom doing something else? They had, and Linda may have more details than I do, but they had a year that it was a full-time position and then they transitioned it back to kind of a part-time, part-time. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if Lisa Floyd's still on, she probably could explain better, but I believe it was a split position. I am still here, Linda. I'm making dinner though, so I muted my camera. Okay. I'm happy to answer the question. So it was a full-time position, previous, so over a year ago. So what we did was separate the position. So Jamie Connor will continue to teach AP Lit and AP Language and we'll oversee some of the PPLs. She's done a fantastic job with PPL in the past. So that'll be 0.5. But then the Senior Project Coordinator will also be a 0.5 Senior Project Coordinator and 0.5 English teacher. And the reason for that is that what I found in the last year that I filled the role was that it was really helpful for me to support students as they wrote their Senior Project Papers through the Senior English class. So by being an English teacher and also seeing the project, but not the person who assesses the papers, it allowed me to give students support in ways that felt really necessary. So decoupling those two positions and then having those people be versatile enough to continue to support our English program felt like a really good combination to meet our academic goals with our students. Thank you. Any other questions on the Consent Agenda items? Can we have a motion to pass the Consent Agenda? This is Katia, so moved. We have a second. I'll second. Seconded by Rachel. All those in favor of passing the Consent Agenda? All right. Okay, moving on to our reports. Those were all enclosed. Lane, you already spoke a little bit about your superintendent's report. Is there anything else you want to pull us in on? For some reason, you're, you're, I think you're muted, Lane. Sorry about that. I'm happy to answer any questions that are in the report. There are a couple of other incidentals that we should probably talk about that are kind of above and beyond as well. I think that, you know, actually take a moment to talk about the elementary kind of the preliminary scoring that's coming out was kind of expected that the elementaries would be lower. We actually had an increase at the high school level, which was really, really good. And then we've got the elementary students that have been scoring about 5% higher per year for the last three to four years now. And then a dip this year because of COVID. We kind of knew that it was coming a little bit because when we did the track, my progress review in front of the board, I think it was probably February-ish, you know, things were down around 10%. And again, a lot of it has to do with, with the students themselves and that, you know, being in school is a much better environment than being out of school at this age, especially with the concrete nature of their thought processes, especially as it relates to mathematics. And the reason that I'm bringing this up is because also included in the board, more just by way of information, the board packet was the recovery plan that's related to the federal funding through the Coronavirus Relief Act. And with this data coming out now, it's actually pretty fortuitous because on Wednesday I'm pulling the cabinet back together to take a look at those scores as much as we can look at them before the embargo was lifted and decide if we need to rearrange and adjust that recovery plan. The recovery funds are specifically designed for the purpose of remediating any losses that occurred over the course of this past year due to COVID. And in my mind, if we've been increasing like crazy the last couple of years and we have a fall off this year, there are some things that we need to remediate. We need to get these students back up to where they should be. And one of the best ways probably to do that, again, it's just one idea that's out there is that maybe a couple of times a week, we've got extended time on learning. The kids are spending an extra half hour on mathematics two or three times a week and maybe an extra half hour to hour once a week on ELA because it's the only way to catch up when you're behind. The testing problems aren't due to disabilities or things like that. It's just the concepts that the kids were unable to pick up on well in the hybrid environment that we were under. And so that's a big discussion that's gonna be happening on Wednesday with the cabinet. So that one's worth talking about. I'm curious, Elaine, are our superintendents or principals sharing across districts too? Just, is everyone sort of seeing similar? They can't until the 14th. The discussions that we've had is I think, I think we're gonna be unusual. I think that you're gonna see decreases at the elementary level across the nation. I know nationwide it's happened. I think we're gonna be unusual that we actually had an increase at the high school. That's not gonna be the case in most places. In most places that'll probably be a decline. So yeah, it'll be interesting to see what we can tell from what happens at the other schools. It's gonna be a little bit difficult to compare the data because there was no real strict requirement on the percentage of kids that had to test. So in our case, we had 96% of our kids reporting in. So we tested every kid. In some cases, the districts might only be testing 40 or 50%. So it's kind of hard to compare that data across districts sometimes unless they were getting all their kids through, if that makes sense. And that should be stated. When the districts do their reporting out, one of the key factors that the federal government looks for is what percentage of kids. Typically in a normal year, if you fall below 95%, you get dinged pretty hard for that because it becomes an equity issue. You're not reporting all your students. Rachel. Yeah, I was just gonna say, isn't that the point of the data is that it's comparable around the nation? No. That you can compare a kid in Vermont to a kid in. Or trends in Vermont to trends in. Yeah, the point of standards-based curriculum, right, of switching over to like the common core, was that in the case of the common core, if every state is teaching the same foundational standards in its core courses, then a kid who leaves here, halfway through the year taken biology can start up halfway through the year in biology in Arkansas and should be at the same place and should know about the same as a student there. The testing was a little bit different in that each state kind of has adopted or created its own testing to meet this federal requirement. So some states have easy tests, some states have hard tests, some states have moderate tests. So you can probably compare within a state fairly well. It gets a little bit more difficult to compare across states. There are some states that are standouts at Massachusetts with the MCAS, that is a very highly rigorous exam. And so they usually get high marks when their students are performing well because compared to some of the other state tests that are out there, that's a high mark to reach for. Ours is actually not bad, ours is probably in the upper tier of rigor in terms of the testing that's out there. So comparing within state, if the majority of a district students actually took the test, you might get some valuable information from that. Comparing across states, you might be able to get some information from it but the validity of it would be questionable. Hopefully I'm making a little bit of sense. I have a question about that. Yeah. Is there any testing when kids switch schools? When kids switch schools like through school choice or through moving or whatever that tests if they're up to speed at the new school or is there any way to track that? I just... Yeah, we have a lot of kids that come in from other schools and that's kind of one of the quirky things and it's one of the things that happens with students that are English language learners. When they move into a school, so if I have an English language learner who has never spoken a word of English in their lives and they move into my school the week before SBAC testing, they still have to take SBAC, right? In terms of the testing that you're talking about, some schools might do that and typically it's placement testing, kind of like some of the colleges do when you're coming in, okay, what math course should you be starting at based upon your skill set? And we were running at the high school, I don't know if we still do to try to make some determinations about which students should be in kind of an accelerated math course as opposed to the regular. But I have not seen that widespread. Again, I think it would be more happenstance just trying to make sure the kid gets the best placement possible given the skill set that they're coming in with. So did I go around the question or did I help to answer it? No, I think there's probably not a concrete way to sort of measure like my child that went to Randolph and then switch schools came in at a lower level than some other kids that had been in that school district the whole entire time. And so I'm just wondering like is algebra one, algebra one across the board, it may look like it is on paper but I'm not quite sure it actually measures up like that. And if there's any way to measure that and if there's data out there that or trace it. And that's what our SBAC scores do. Our SBAC scores are tied to that common core, right? The 43 states that got together to say, hey, based upon the best research and reaching out, they did 10 years of work with the research and they included all sorts of businesses in there too about what was important. This is what the best curriculum for this day and age would look like if you're an algebra two, if you're a math student. And so that's what the SBAC plays to. I think Lisa had her hand up. Oh, Lisa does, yeah. Yeah. Hershey's probably still preparing dinner. Yeah, no, I'm right here. I just raised my hand because one of the things that we've been doing since we started using Star 360 this year is that we've been giving that test three times a year. So we've had students who came in at the halfway point or even we had new students arriving in April. And so that data was really helpful because it helped us understand how we could support them, where they might be struggling or if they needed acceleration really quickly after they got there. So we still plan to continue to use that test next school year as well. And it's just really effective in terms of screening students to see what their needs might be. I don't think that really cleanly answers your question about your student going to another school in their performance. But it is a step that we're taking to use data to help us serve students better. And I'm gonna commend you for that because that is an important piece of it. And when we brought in those testing programs, we were primarily, at least, we're primarily looking at making sure we understood where our students were performing and what we needed to do to get them up the speed to remediate in areas of weakness. So I commend you for taking that extra step and seeing that other piece it could be used for. So just to be clear, I think you said this. The SBAC that's given in Vermont is not the same as the SBAC given in Connecticut. It's not the same test. No, there are a couple of New England states that do the SBAC, right? You had a consortium prior to SBAC. There were like four New England states that all went in and created the same test together and gave it together. But SBAC is a little bit different. There are a couple of other states you might be able to compare to that may use it as well. We can research that. But when this whole no child left behind things started back in 93 based upon a report from 1980, every state kind of created its own thing at that point in time. Because there wasn't a common core. Every state had its own standards and its own beliefs and what was important for students to learn. So they wanted to tailor the testing to show that the students in their state, how well they were performing against what the state said was important or what the state agreed itself was important for students to learn and know. So there's been some evolution of that. Common core came later, probably about a decade after the whole push started in 93. So I guess probably the PSAT and then the SAT would be the universal measure of that in the older grades, like not in the younger grades, but. Yeah, you're better off. ACT is a better, better test for that. ACT was always a standards based test. It was actually looking what students learned in their science classes and in their math classes. The SAT is that now they're a content based exam now, but they weren't always right up until probably five years ago or so. They were an IQ test. They were a reasoning test. And so they couldn't tell you much about what the kids had actually learned specifically in their courses, just how well they could use information to come to conclusions. So the ACT is probably the best exam out there if you want to try and compare across schools. Problem with the ACT is that not a large portion of a student body typically takes it. SATs typically are the test of choice on the coasts and the ACTs are typically the test of choice in the middle of the United States, even though that's changing. So we don't, you know, if we got out most of our kids are staying, staying locally or in the middle of the year, most of our kids are staying, staying locally or in the New England states and most of them are probably taking the SATs. So good questions, good. Making me think of a lot of stuff I haven't thought about in a while, which is good since back when I was a principal. Okay, so I have just one more question. Yeah. At the high school level, is there any sort of ACT or SAT preparation or do kids just kind of take their classes and then also take the SAT? Or is there an offering for any kind of SAT, ACT preparation? That's a, I'll let Lisa, Lisa pipe in if she heard the question. Go ahead. Yeah. And then I'll make an argument afterwards. I think that last year, there were some offerings during callback for students who might have been on a level where they were interested in that, but we've just really started thinking about how to more formally offer support around those things. I think though that one of the reasons why we picked Star 360 was because it is a program or a test that scaffolds up. Typically people see the students who perform well on Star perform well on SBAC and students who perform well on SBAC over time, it's sort of can predict that they would also perform well on other tests. So that is something we're thinking about, but we don't have a formal system right now. And the argument that I'm gonna present goes back to the SAT as a reasoning exam. Right now it switched over to a content test. It's testing what students have learned. So if we've done our curriculum well, we're assessing how students are performing and we're going back and adjusting when we find weaknesses, they should perform exceedingly well just by taking the courses that we offer through the high school. The prep was really important, especially for the SATs because it was a reasoning test. So somebody with really high level reasoning skills can sit down and look at a complex problem and come up with a strategy to solve it pretty quickly. SAT was a time test. And so what the test preps would do is they'd say, okay, here are a series of five or six types of complex problems that you will see repeatedly on the SATs. And here ahead of time is the best strategy to use. They train them the strategy so they didn't have to think it up on the fly to use when you encounter one of these questions. And so it was really, that's what the test prep was about in those days. You can still do test prep and content, but technically if the students have really mastered the standards in their courses that are based on the common core, they should do phenomenally well on the new SAT and on the ACT. So how do the Randolph kids do on the SAT and the ACT? Do we have any statistics about that? Yeah, I'd have to pull them up. They perform about the state average, if I remember. I've got longitudinal data that I present usually every year with the board. We had a year or two that the math scores were declining a little bit. But again, that's something that we knew from our other testing as well, which is why a lot of the restructuring that happened in the last year or so was so vitally important. And again, this year you're seeing your first jump in those scores because of that restructuring. So that's a good thing. But typically they were SBAC for years and years and years and SATs, typically they were SATs they were at or just below the state average. SBAC was typically very, very low for years and years. And that'll be a big report. You'll get to see that. I present all that data usually in October and I'll give it to you longitudinally. What's it look like over the last five years? Does it changed? Okay. So good stuff. And you're interested, which is awesome. And that's a big part of what we're looking at as a board is what can we look out for outcomes and those tests will be our part of it. Okay, I'm sorry. I just have a question that's for Lane or Lisa as well. When do the guidance counselors start working with the students to determine interests like their college plans to ensure that their schedules are matching up with what the college's expectations would be? I'll let Lisa talk that. But typically it starts off at least freshman year if not earlier. Yeah, so Kara Merrill and Bev Taft have wrapped up talking with students. They met with them over the past few weeks either in their classes or remotely to get them registered for classes for the next year. So that should have happened within the last couple of weeks for all students. I know last Thursday, Kara was talking with seventh graders about their electives for next year and they were the last group that she needed to connect with. So it was a little bit late this year just because we had so many schedule shifts related to changing modalities and COVID and all of those sorts of crazy things. But that should have happened for students pretty much across the board at this point in time. So if you're hearing something different, you should let us know. And Ashley, correct me. I think your question was a little bit deeper. It sounded, and this is something that we may discuss. I think I discussed it a few years back, but something that we can revisit is, and something they may already be doing is typically high schools will have a four year planner for the students. The SAT has a really good program for students to go in and take a look at what their aptitudes are and based upon those aptitudes, you know what good possible career pathways are and things like that. I'm sure the guidance counselors are doing that work. But what the four year planner does is, once a student is starting to seriously consider a career pathway or a couple of career pathways, that's the time each year when guidance would sit down with them and say, okay, we've got all this data out there, all this research. This is somebody who's interested in your career pathway. These are the courses they need to take in high school and these are the grades you need to get and these are the scores on SATs that you wanna get. If you're going off to college to be successful in this pathway and they're building that each year, making sure they're taking the right matrix of classes to get them to where they wanna go. It typically gets a little bit more complex in that as students get a little bit older and they start to narrow in if they're going to college, if they start to narrow in on a particular discipline that they wanna study, then it's time to kind of sit down and have this discussion about, okay, what are some good colleges out there that you can afford that are ideal for the discipline that you're pursuing? And now let's do a little bit of research and again, let's see what matrix of courses students that get accepted into those programs take, what are their scores, what are their grades or how are they performing on your standards-based report cards so that the students have goals that they are shooting for and checking in with their mentors on to make sure that they're hitting those goals so that they've got a really good shot at getting into the schools that they want that are really gonna support them and the programs that are registered in. And so I'm, yeah. Typically four-year plans happen at the end of eighth grade and so the students will do the four-year plan and then meet with their school counselor to make sure that they're tracking in the right direction at the end of each school year. So that is typically something that students should expect to see. And in eighth grade, they also do sort of a career exploration essay and research project as part of that. And that usually feeds into Kara's work as our middle school counselor, helping them think about what the courses are, that they could potentially take in high school. Well, I guess that just for me, I guess it goes back to the very beginning discussion we had this evening is about communication and the parents understanding that that's the process that's followed and having access to that four-year planner to make sure that their kids are indeed signing up for the classes they need. So thank you for that update. Yeah, and those might be good nights because we have the title funding that we're using under the title four, you know, the money is to be used to engage the parents in ways that they can support the district in its mission with their children. And that would be a wonderful use is to have the parents come in with the kids through that planning process. Yeah, so there's a lot of good ideas there. I appreciate the conversation on that. I'm not sure that parents know what that process is. So I do think that communication piece is super, super lacking and important to address in the coming future. And I would just enclosing and I'll stop after this, I would just encourage the school to consider supporting, you know, the kids that are on a college track with some sort of like PSAT support, you know, after school sort of idea before school, you know, outside of just a few minutes during the day. I think it's a great way to invest in our kids and help them prepare for that next step. Okay, so moving on, financial report, did you, Lane, did you have anything that you needed to point out in terms of the financials? Are we looking good? Yeah, actually we're looking very good. A lot of it due to COVID, there were things that we budgeted for, we figured we were gonna be able to do that we couldn't. So there will be a fairly significant surplus at the end of this year. Again, when the time comes to vote in March, probably take a good chunk of it and roll that back into the helping the taxpayers out in the coming years. And then, you know, deciding at that point in time if there are other facilities needs and things that we should be pursuing. The only one that's a little bit quirky right now, which always is at this time of the year is the food service. It looks like they're down 117,000, they're not. They just got the first of their reimbursement checks at the end of the year for 61,000. They will be down, they always are. We always subsidize them. They'll probably be down around 35,000, which is the norm by the looks of things right now. Just part of running a program. It's hard for a program like that to break even. But other than that, actually things look really, really good. Great, any questions for Lane on financial? Okay. Board Selfie Val. Shelty. Oh, you're muted. Okay, the agenda was well-planned to focus on the real work of the board. I think probably a five. I think that's good. Board followed the agenda. I think we're doing that. So I would say a five. Meeting was well-attended. I would say between a two and a three because there was 10 to 16 people. We're prepared for the meeting. I think so. It was a pretty quiet group tonight. So maybe three. No distractions. Five. Is this how I'm supposed to say it? Just go through every single one. Yeah, okay. Decision-making processes were understood. Yeah, four. Diversity of viewpoints were sought out and considered. Yes, five. Participation was balanced. Three. Members listened attentively. Four. Meeting participants treated each other with respect and courtesy. Five. Work was accomplished. In an atmosphere of trust and openness. Five. Board actions occur at the policy level. Oh, is this part of it? Yeah. Yeah, that moves on to a second one. This next page, do I do that too or no? That's like a different thing. Well, that's more of a policy governance evaluation. The first one is more of a regular meeting evaluation. I think that just the meeting one is pretty good. So I thought it was good today. So far, we're kind of ahead of schedule, I think. Yes, we are. So maybe we should. Yeah, and maybe, I'm hoping that maybe during our training too, I can get some input into how we might wanna do the meeting evaluations and whether to make it more effective because I think no one wants to do it. And oftentimes, I don't know how useful the feedback is. And if it's just, you know, if we're doing something, we should be getting something out of it. So hopefully we can talk a little bit about that as well. So. I don't think it's awful. I think it's, I mean, I've done it the last two times and I think they're good points. I mean, we know pretty much the one meeting where we got off track kind of just crazy, but for the most part, the key points are useful, I think. I mean, it seems to me, but I don't know. Can I ask a question? Cause it was in the board agenda, but we never discussed it. Was the school calendar, is that a final calendar or is that a calendar that I just don't understand? Yes, it is the final calendar for school for next year. It was sent to the state, has to be there by April 1st. So that's our final. Yeah, that calendar is a quirky one in that because we are the, we own the regional technical center. That one gets determined and voted on by all the sending schools because that calendar controls what all the other schools have to do. So that's a pretty long process. And this year it was a much more difficult process because of COVID trying to get that out there. So. I just included it cause I didn't know if you guys added or not. I think it's on the website but figured you might as well have a copy. Yeah, I hadn't seen it yet. And I did have kind of a question as to the two days, like why they're going for two days and then have four days off. And like what the start to me just seemed a little bit. So the usually It wasn't my calendar. I have to pull off the calendar up that answer specifically, but usually what they try to do, you know, we've been, that was one of the pieces of language that we were hoping to get changed was to get all the PD days front loaded at the beginning. So we didn't have things breaking up but in discussions with the other superintendents and with the cabinet here is what they try to do is get kind of a staggered start to the kids. You know, if they can, it's, you know, it's three days the first week, four days the next week and then a full week after that to kind of ease them back into the transition. I don't know if that's actually really helpful. They truly believe that it is. So I think that's one of the reasons why you're seeing it. There's also under the current contract, there are things that are spelled out about where professional development days, especially those full professional development days have to fall, maybe part of it. But I'm happy to pull it up and look at it with you if you want. If you give me a moment. No, it's fine. Like I said, it just seemed kind of like this the stop start for that to me. It is, yeah, I agree with you. That's why we were hoping to get all the PD days right at the front of the year. So before the kids even start, they're done, they're out of the way and then it's just the smooth year. The professional development's also beneficial to have up front like that too, because you want the teachers using it with the kids in the classroom, right? So it doesn't make any sense to have those PD days at the end of the year because then, you know, they're not able to put it into practice and get the maximum benefit out of it. So when you're saying PD, then I'm equating to the in-service days. Is that correct? Professional development, yeah. Sorry about that. Yeah, beat me up if I'm using the lingo. It's fine. So I have just a process question. So thank you, Linda, for including this, but is this a board function to approve this or no, it's not? Yeah. Okay, because I felt like this coming up calendar was certainly a lot. You're welcome to work on it if you'd like. I was just surprised. I too kind of had initial feelings on it. And I wasn't sure if we had to say, but if they don't, then we don't. And I'll stop talking. Yeah. A lot of people have say's, right? Lane, I mean, other schools, administrators. Yeah. I mean, I start with a basic and then you guys do whatever, do it. So. Yeah, seven different, seven different, seven different schools. So it encompasses quite a bit. Of course, they're all consolidated now. Yeah. So good question. Okay. So we're gonna move into an executive session. Is that for a personnel issue? Yeah. And then can somebody take minutes because Hannah would be the person to do that. I put that the minute form in the packet. And also I need you to stop by tomorrow to sign contracts and diplomas. And diplomas. Okay. Good night, guys. Diplomas. Okay. So switch over to, actually, you guys have to move to move into. Sorry about that. Okay. Chelsea just left the net. We're not a forum. Oh. One, two, three. Yeah, there's five of you. One, two, three, four, five. Oh, that's true. Sorry. Rachel's still here. Good. So I'll move that we enter executive session at 830 p.m. to discuss personnel issue. We have a second. Ashley's in a second. All of them favor. Do we have to, do we have to vote on it? I guess so. You should. Yeah. All right. We're moving in. Now I need you to join the meeting. Do we have anything to say? Nothing. Yeah, you have to declare there was no, no motions. Okay. Do I do that as a care person? Yeah. So there was no motions in the executive session. And do I have a motion to adjourn the meeting? So moved. Do we have a second? Rachel, thank you. All right. All those in favor. Okay. Have a good, good evening. Good night. Thank you. Good night.