um maybe 20. but you have Wells Fargo advisors you got Metro I.T Danbury Mission Technologies new Vans health and a lot more um I will go back to the fans they have already been partnered with Danbury High School but when we talk about different engagement opportunities we're talking about industry related field trips job shadow and opportunities internship opportunities Village professionals collaborating with our teachers so that they can explain what those employability skills look like so when it's time to teach those kids they're giving 21st century skills and those those businesses come into the classroom to see what learning looks like so that they can tailor those needs as kids come to those businesses too so the idea of these businesses and post-secondary partners having a hand in raising our youth is powerful amongst itself and so you guys should know that this model is super helpful for the city of Danbury it really is it's going to look you in the right direction so all hands on Deck with it and so I thus far uh the energy and help from the staff has been great um we've been chatting closely with the chamber to give us some advice on certain things and they've been helpful too so just know that I've been busy knocking on doors having those conversations left and right you'll see me all around I've seen this Michelle in so many different events and we're always seeing each other but just know that uh I'm here I'm working and if you're ever want to reach out or via email or phone just hit me up anytime so just know that this thing is going to work so that is my skill does anybody have any questions so far that was some intro man thank God I mean you got some uh some stuff in front of you that to handle so I have just two questions so how do you identify a potential partner um you know business that is it based on obviously what the academy is teaching but how do you beat not from you know being not from the area how do you absolutely so looking at our potential offerings for academies and Pathways I started with that prior to coming up to Danbury I did a lot of research on you guys to see what you have Connecticut has a lot of headquarters here in addition to that you guys are teaching manufacturing and everything else too uh so with that being said I did my own research after that I was able to chat with PJ parenti the president and CEO of the chamber and we talked about some of the different industries that needed to be highlighted as well too and so that in addition to other people in Danbury where I was able to get some contacts and kind of talk about the needs of the city directed my focus on who actually targeting your doors and talk to me yeah do you find that the business demographic is is the same as regard for Nationals or other Nationals business demographic or you find that they are very a little different um you you Danbury is somewhat similar to uh Nashville because Danbury is somewhat Urban to me and so I'm used to working in the city so I don't of course not as large as Nashville but I'm comfortable I don't need anything bigger right now so I'm not just aimlessly you know doing it on my own you know I I do have help that that's what I do yeah are you reaching outside of Danbury as well I am I we we need the help so uh we need the talent to stay here in Danbury right there thank you absolutely any other questions for board members Theresa um yes yeah nice to meet you all as well you all have a great night thank you Mr Dean before you leave everyone in the agenda we'll have a meet with we have a joint press conference press release comparable time and City Hall gay mayor of the city to marrying City partners and businesses and Danbury Danbury area Sophie is not already not going to endure they will have a more formal informal introduction school that day one 12 to 1 over 20 seconds see you all there yeah so next on a superintendent report I think it's going to help me a little bit with some updates but I just want to start off by one to take mentioned this earlier Ellsworth Annex his team Antonio his team is here public projects project here they opened up an amazing world we had an opportunity about the classroom which ultimately provides more space on the regular side of the outdoor also have additional Early Childhood classrooms now newly improved Early Childhood classrooms and equally as important our registration Center and updated so when our families enter this school Community they are now entering a professional space that's really representative so I just want to thank you this evening all of the work that it takes the boarding community may not know Itt everyone is meeting behind and certainly between everything from placements everything this meeting Kelly has been about um and I just want to thank everyone I also want to talk about the first week first day before school started and that's convocation and I believe different reports and conversation since 2015 or 2016 and whatever the case this school year was an amazing opening a great day of unity focus and purpose in the school district filled up with our families who did not know we filled up our football field every seat was pretty much taken in the sand in the field we had speakers come in Yours Truly the board chair the mayor here really an amazing day but most importantly our staff was totally engaged in the in the event we were they was sponsored by the bar Foundation about EOG effort later this evening I can't thank everyone enough of their engagement and their New York I also want to thank sta in the bus company for they volunteer to drive our staff at no cost I'm trying to get us in time tremendous help for us very frankly now that's all the cars in the parking lots of like graduation daytime so Karen and her team come to organize bus drops our talk here wants to pick them up going to the school really was an amazing day I also know power of 13 or administrative support team we got thousands of t-shirts and t-shirts in the districts and just hand them out but then someone says well I need a medium not an alarm and the next thing you know you have some very busy days ahead and so I just want to thank you and your team together um next on the list of course we have Transportation which quite frankly can absolutely can help the school district it does not do it smoothly and we had us move forward so I'm just going to ask to provide a couple of updates with Transportation um with Staffing of AIDS also our kindergarten orientation this year with a little different course to speak to those things and then just overall just kind of how it works okay foreign drivers and backup drivers from other districts just to make sure that our start went off very smoothly all of the drivers practice their runs for a couple days before school that made a big difference we also did not have to bus over to St Joe's in Brookfield and that helped that gave us time to do our regular obligations so I think with that and and you really could see I think an extra effort from the superintendent just described one of those but in all the schools that I was out at the first couple days you could see drivers really trying to do the right thing being on time driving safely so we were we are very pleased with the effort of the company and the effort of the drivers we continue to be busy in the office of talent management and we're working at a full pace so far this summer we have brought in an onboarded 159 certified staff members and another 75 or so non-certified staff members and we have 185 substitutes rostered with Kelly Ed um the Caliente roster continues to increase weekly I meet with them every other week to talk about status they are consistently bringing in people for interviewing continuing to build that pool to get us up over 200 as we start to need subs as the fall leans on for us um we still have 28 certified openings that's a lot of teachers particularly at this time of year we still have openings and we continue to lose teachers as do all of our surrounding neighbors we're kind of bouncing folks around from one District to another um we have right now 15 of our teachers on hold meaning they're going to go to another District but we've asked them 30 days while we search for Replacements we're literally swapping in some cases so we're continuing to work at chipping away at those openings the the one most persistent that we're still having a trouble is Kelly's special ed tutors we still have about 60 of those openings as we did last year so um we're still working pretty well at PACE trying to fill out those um all of those open spots we've seen this year about a 15 turnover I think of your teacher ranks and so later in the fall I'll come to you as I usually do each year to talk with you about the demographics of your class I will tell you that the folks that came for a new teacher orientation and Dr cashmere will speak more about this they came for three days of training and cheering and you know lunch with the union and and mingling and getting to know each other and I think it was to Echo what everybody said today it was a really positive start to the year we have some really eager really interesting who are now in the process of integrating integrate I report for now um how many teachers compared to and year to year cheers yeah we're seeing more leaving in the summer this year than we have in the past several years um and and you know it's difficult to figure out why that is right now we've got post-pandemic data so we're trying to figure out you know where people are going but this year we were running about a hundred and about 112 teachers have left us this summer um that's a considerably from what we've been we're trying to figure out why but I do think some of it is post-pandemic I also think and and Mr Watson I have this conversation daily um we're not alone everybody's in a similar boat good evening everyone um I'm going to speak to you a little bit about the kindergarten orientation that we have this year um so we decided to um kind of stagger the start of our incoming kindergartners and overwhelmingly the feedback from our administrators our teachers and our parents and that it has been a very um so just to remind you we have spoken about this in the spring um but our kindergartners came in for basically a meet and greet which is a one-hour meeting an hour hour and a half depending on the goal of the size they came in for a one-hour meeting on the first day of school and that was student and parent so the parents got to come in the building meet the teacher they got to bring in all their materials check out where their desk is Take a Walk of the school see what a bus looks like all those different important things um and the parents brought the students to school and brought them home most of the classes were split up into about three groups in some cases four so it was very small kind of intimate group so teachers got an opportunity to talk with parents um and really alleviate a lot of those pressures of where am I going who's teaching teaching my child um and really kind of ease their transition in then on the second and third day of the school year um the uh the students came in for a half day um and so they were transported by bus and they came in for you know regular morning time and they left around lunch time um and we also received mostly positive feedback on this um and the reason for that is kindergarteners are transitioning off of a lot of them either not being in school CARE program and in the day is long um and then on Friday which was the fourth day of school which was the last day before the weekend we brought in the wall meet and we brought them in for a full day of school so this is kind of a nice transition um we are walking like I said those two half days should it be one day should it be two days you know how should we ease the man really looking back in the backwards plan based on base calendar um we understand that there are some Child Care issues I'm having a day of school I'm more certainly sensitive to those but I will say district-wide there was a feeling not just at the kindergarten level but at the elementary overall of just calmness not having kindergarteners come in on the bus on the first day I think largely contributed to our successful transportation on kindergartners are the most challenging as they've never ridden the bus they don't know where they're going also having um The Kindergartners be transported separately home on those half days the bus drivers got to know the students know who they are and who the parents are it just was a nice soft touch to bring the kids into the school year and from a behavioral perspective usually when we have kindergarteners and some kindergartners are overwhelmed by the day my team tends to get called and tapped on and I will say knock on wood we have had far fewer of those on this school year so we will be looking to Institute a very similar plan for next year like I said we're looking at how many half days is the right amount um but it was it was a huge success and I and I have uh seen kind of a return to a little bit more since prior to the pandemic particularly related my understanding really other districts are handling that in the same way that this is very common practice separately and then some school districts do up to two weeks so half days to transition students in I'm not do that here but it is important that it is a long day a shower day even if you've been in full day daycare or Child Care kindergarten is different right it's more than just playing um and there's a lot of Transitions and there's a lot of building Independence going over rules and Center so it really is nice and what we find is when kids are successful in those first few days it just sets the tone for the rest of the year across not really across the middle yeah [Music] really I know I know the teachers also appreciated having that staggered start a little bit because they love the personalized contacts um and the kids came in they had already met um so as Kim mentioned before we had new teacher orientation uh probably one of our largest ever uh with the numbers that she mentioned and um you know in Russian a lot of our supervisors in content areas I don't want them and getting them oriented to our literacy programs or numeracy programs our stem programs are depending on the content areas that they were in I've been also going over sort of just our general expectations for clear they were a great group of indeed they were very excited to disappoint them they are a large group so we do have our coaches now going to do dividing and conquering and how to provide the best a lot of support to those teachers to get them started with password management making sure they have all the materials at the border and helping them orientate orienting them through the pacing of their first local units it was a it was it was a good experience and a very good moment given the empowerment volume that we were dealing with and having a lot of opening still to fill with interviewing going on in the background so um because everybody said it was a very positive opening I'm going to go to the next Foundation that is equal ity I'm going to conducted in Andy before you get started really is this update really is from last year both of these students and in this one all of the goals are important to this District this is one that we have prioritized you know looking to continue to grow like a job to be race on audience really helps this agenda forward we prioritize affecting the families and partners and Families that help improve student outcomes I think we've made some significant steps since the spring of and I feel like the position looking forward to the presentation updating the board one of the great things that this team has been doing get out of the way so that we don't think about what we have done thank you great so thank you for giving us this opportunity to come in and speak and I am going to introduce all our places we go through as I go through the PowerPoint I'll stop and we'll introduce who's here with us tonight as most of you know I'm Angie and I'm the director of families and Partnerships along with my assistant director Grace Molina and my wonderful team of folks behind me and we will so I wanted to do a couple different things tonight one give you the actual framework in which we work with it we work under a federal framework and a state framework but our goal is the goal that the district community public private sector plus cluster vested interest ing learning and success all the work that we do some may seem kind of like on the outside but everything you do is how can we help families to support their children so that children can reach academic success during their time here in Denver Indiana and so we kind of use a little tagline of engage in power and educate we find that we need to engage our folks and so our family Liaisons are providing that bridge to be able to bring them and give them that sense of comfort create that bridge between home we also at the same time want to empower our families and want to empower our families to take advantage of different opportunities that we want them to feel good about what they're doing how they're doing it because then the ultimate is to educate everyone because families they help educate their children we're also educating teachers along the way too our administrative staff will come to me with questions about families um you know board members have in the past year so our goals under that are to really place to trust and teamwork of the center of the homeschool relationship and that truly is a relationship that bridge School presented and worked on by all of our family liaison is the Crux of what is students success when you have schools that are well rich with families and there's trust and there's that indicate bidirectional relationships within the students succeed we pay for all of our family engagement strategies of high impact strategies and we'll talk about those in a little bit and we invest in Building Systems and structures that enable the work and you'll see that in a second as well as I said you ground our work in the National dual capacity framework written by Karen Mack and approved by our secretary of education back several years ago in 2018 and has since then on revised as well as the Connecticut pool and people partnership guide which Danbury was one of their sites that they spent a lot of hours in as a state department of Ed and its Partners wrote this guy I'm listening to our Jamboree families of what our families want and so we maintain that there's a non-negotiable requirement of every initiative an element of our plan is consciously linked to students so this is the dual capacity I think I showed you this last time and I know it's really really hard to read so if you go to the next slide I really broke down what's so important over the last couple of weeks under um Kevin's superintendent Lawson um gentlemen we now have put Family University throw up of everything we do so all of the work that we do to build these forces 1200 is large and raw a family University everything all of our trainings that we do and you'll see you'll see that in a second everything is under Family University meetings we want families a to the bank B for our all of our families we want that to college and university so here's what we're building with our families and we want to build these four C's and that comes from that green section of that slide capabilities connections cognition and confidence we want our families to feel that they can come and speak to a principal last night I left our new family and Family Faith Center there at Osborne Street and it's been about 20 minutes in the parking lot as Ellsworth had their open house I don't know how many families she had I'm sure that people knows they were loaded with families half an hour second and the families because they feel comfortable now they have a wonderful liaison and that's cool that made those connections and invited those families out we're seeing big big changes in our open houses so we're building the confidence of our families to be able to come out we're also building connections and Grace is going to talk a little bit about connections with some of the work that we've done with tech and then of course there are skills so one of the things that I've always thought about over the years is wouldn't it be nice to have this year-long town in your fall brought out so that everybody can see what we're doing and so this year Grace is this technology rooms it's absolutely wonderful and I can give her stuff and say you can make this look really good and she does and so you'll see and we'll talk about what these programs are in a minute um this is our calendar event this we did probably six weeks ago we changed it three weeks ago and now we've had new partners come in um our nursing father's network is coming in um Pro Dad just come in we've got the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts coming in and so I need to add some more things to this this is a constantly moving document um hopefully next year when we get more of our partners on the board we'll be able to okay do you need to meet now to play in this picture to make sure this calendar our next one so how do we get this information out to our parents okay and so our strategy here is to develop a high level of communication collaboration interaction with our daily Republic School sometimes across confidence and credibility so Mike is going to Dr suleg is going to talk a little bit about the website when we're done with this but one of the things that we started working on about two years ago was What would be a better way to communicate with our families do that we started to talk about wanting liaison that's true based communication but we also realize these Robo calls just weren't doing the trick and after so many Robo Falls how many people just say I'm not listening to the next one it must be the same one right we're all been guilty of that or something so we need to find something that would a um be a little bit easier for families two give families options on how they receive those messages and three that they have the ability to talk back to their teachers talk back to their schools and I don't need to talk back in a negative way but communicate that with their teachers and so we're proud to say that last spring we started to roll off here and square and we have over 16 000 individuals on it so their families now remember when people sign up for PowerSchool they may put themselves the husband and somebody else on that communication trade so right now we have over 16 000 individual repair store so we're really really excited about that uh parents register using power PowerSchool night PowerSchool sinks to parent Square so as new families register it sinks and then breaks almost pretty much every morning sends out an invite to those new families to join parents with it's really important that families join parents where verify their information and then they go ahead and they sign up for the app right now we have 44 100 plus families using the parent Square app this was as of last Friday I think that's gone up and as of last Friday we have 99 99.1 percent of all of our families are contacting by email and text reform if our data department does an absolute wonderful job every day after parents verify they get a notification of Whose phone numbers aren't working who's female is dead or whatever and then they fix those they make sure that they're fixed in PowerSchool and then it sinks back from here so we're really really happy about how this is working we do set up administrators are set up in it the teachers have helped to set up respectable secretaries have set up the actual classes in the school and I do believe they've ordered that you have your own parents career group as well so that's something we can talk to your mature person about uses and absolutely another thing we do with our family and community uh newsletter okay um superintendent from Boston will be doing a monthly newsletter and then Michael office will be doing another newsletter two weeks later um other ways to communicate is uh wants to chat with Kevin which will start at the end of October those are just internal sessions where he gets to be on Zoom hopefully we can do the person and it's just it's give and take dialogue of what families families just show up for that so we have found over the last year that that was a very valuable he felt was a very valuable um meet for um to hear from to hear from them okay so then we coaching our education and resource and I'm going to let Grace talk a little bit about our new promise program that I kind of want to set up how this happened all right we'll just pass it so now it's your gospel so we have been very fortunate through different funding that we receive grants that we have um how to announce tonight 100 school-based family liaison and so I'd like our Liaisons to stand up the wood everybody's here I'd like you to start in the back row your name in your school and just go very quickly let's talk a little bit louder intermediate media school I'm Darrell Florentino and I'm at Danbury High School Diana Sanchez AIS Michael I'm Lori I'm a parent educator for Early Childhood um which is good all of our board meetings we're really really excited to have these folks thank you so very much so um it was a process getting everyone um you know brought in onboarded thank you to our town office to help making that happen if we're missing one or two people tonight but this group meets every Thursday we brainstorm for an hour with problem style different people about energy assistance and then make sure that with their families so we have all kinds of different things really really proud of our family and the work that you've done it's just amazing some days they start off by looking families in then following homes for those children that have us fall out for the day I think some of you do lunch coverage some of you are helping the nurse make calls what am I missing yeah the Parent-Teacher conferences open houses yeah absolutely so helping in the class that students get that extra support as well so it really has been an amazing um the other thing that we have is the Danvers family resource guide that will be going out via parent Square to all of our parents and then later down the road we'll get it out and pay for copies tell our families this is all kinds of resources from mental health to who's at what school to what Recreation opportunities we have in the community Etc et cetera et cetera to really comprehensive so I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the fun we had this summer so I have to say that we ran an exceptional well-run both 21 Century Learning Program in a sensational program we used a lot of our Community Partners so our Sensational kids that were there got to spend an entire week in New Prime Farm education center learning about what that was um and then we also had a camping day so you'll see that kids are actually marshmallows there and the bottom spot I believe that is one of the teachers campers and trucks and his dog and they set up tents we do use those Scholastic lip curriculum with um curriculum and so they're reading during the summer they're doing art all different types of things um the 21st century wrapped around our summer school so famous send their children to a part-time summer school program and then have Care on the afternoon for that as well we built Gardens this summer all kinds of fun things with the Summer with the kids for the summer and it's not just the students but of his families we had families programs going on as well so in Sensational we had 140 and we've had about 220 of the 20 percent yeah other ways that we're supporting families we have a Stop and Shop Foundation that I think I mentioned this last year funded our schools thirty thousand dollars for gift cards to our pantries to be able to buy supplies and stuff through and food through Stop and Shop at their food pantry so hard to surviving the other day and then in order to get children quickly in school we go through the registration process at the face Center and then they go to make a Clinic appointment and the clinics are still backed up that it's two to three more weeks or longer so we've partnered with ritual DNA and we see about 15 kids every other week so we're processing 30 more children to get into so this has been one of our our best programs so this started as a Luke inkling in my mind in a couple of people's minds years ago when we flipped to Google learning and we realized that there's needed help families needed help how do you access powerschoolers parent square and all of those different pieces we had the advantage of using some of the parent maps to Harvard great absolute wonderful people are now Sam and you ping came on as students as part of their project and movie Corporation funded and we have this absolute wonderful curriculum so I'm going to turn this part over to Grace for Grace to tell you all about new prompts and where this has gone started out really slow and then all of a sudden boom we got hit with wonderful registrations superintendent just come out and met our families yeah so thank you and it's been a whirlwind song in the in the best way testing oh my gosh so it's been such a whirlwind summer in the best way um we late and September was here and we thought okay the school Year's starting it's gonna slow down a bit and I don't know where that came from but so as Ann said the promise kind of started as this idea and uh we got together with the Harvard students and before I knew it we have a full presentation so we meet we met with our first group in July we piloted the program in July we then piloted the second round in August and what we found were that families were just ready they were ready to come and sit with us ask their questions and so we brought them in we met here at Danbury High School and we gave them a crash course into everything Danbury public schools we wanted them to walk away with um less questions less doubts and feeling confident and supporting their students and so we we went ahead and put together 17 models I have them listed in front of me so I'm just going to look down for a second welcome to DPS is them meeting you meeting the cabinet extended cabinet and board members uh connecting with their school and a bit more about school safety so they they had a full listing of all the schools as well as had an idea of just what school safety was and what that looked like for them connecting with their family liaison which is where they just were able to find their person at their school uh to connect with School attendance Health policies technology which was such a big module we sat with families we taught them how to use and are still teaching them how to use everything from Google Classroom PowerSchool parents where Naviance Schoology for some parents we created email addresses with them we showed them how to charge laptops you know we really took our time around this model because we hurt our families when we survey families in March and April when we were first putting this program together that piece the technology piece is one of the biggest areas that families just needed that support with so we took our time with this module uh and so we we rolled out technology on day two in the morning and then Extended Learning Program was next Transportation meals social emotional learning so we explain what it is for some and then explain what that looks like in their child's classroom special education Community Resources parent and Community leadership opportunities life beyond High School where we talk about the Career Academy career opportunities for them here at DPS and then we wrap up with supporting your student at home which is our transitional module to module two that's being built out now which will be full curriculum guides for every grade K through 12 in every subject in Spanish English and Portuguese right now this the whole program is offered in all three languages in person and I'm hoping in October we can also offer Zoom option for our families that that's a bit more convenient so one thing that that we learned first like I said families are ready they want to come back in the schools they want to engage oh we give them that opportunity they come they come with their children they come with their questions and um you know like I said they're they're ready to get in there with us we have seen a total of 675 families from July until now yes that was my reaction immediately when I when I look at that and that is also including our returning families because what happened was we came at at the council I had the the opportunity to share a little bit about the program and principals jumped on it I have emails called same day told me I want this in my school during my open house so we were able to condense the program a bit for returning families take out that information that they they already knew update some information and go into the schools and so we've been to Rogers Park South Street uh we're scheduled for Ellsworth for AIS for almost every school now which is amazing so we've seen that many families over just a few months and 97 of our families that we survey we surveyed all of our families but 97 of them said they walked away feeling more confident and competent to support their student which I was just absolutely mind-blowing and that is across all three languages English Spanish and Portuguese we also offered same day downloads for all of these Technologies so the trainers Liaisons who attended parent leaders volunteers who are also behind me um that came in ready to walk parents through the downloading process of troubleshoot when they could or go ahead and give it to myself or the data team to escalate on which was really a groundbreaker for families they walked away with kind of that piece already taken care of for them so they felt more confident starting that that school year we also had many same day sign ups for parent C parents supporting educational excellence and our pep program people empowering people which I think is coming up in a minute so that that's right thank you very good and we'll share about you um empowering people and I have the graduates of people empowering people that are here stand up so this was a great class many of our Liaisons took the course and out of this course they're all responsible um do something in the community so many of them volunteered to become trained to teach the new promise program along with all of our Liaisons we've had that training as well we have a program alone no more we're working with the Danbury Senior Citizen Center to uh use that to work with that program and join together with that program to make sure our seniors are all safe so my cup is a support group for stay-at-home moms they're all working on the organic community garden so thank you to our parents see and our Tech graduates it's the work that right right along really quickly of course we had our parents supporting um educational Excellency both of these programs will run again can't speak our currency is in January and that begins in English Spanish English Spanish and fortunately I'm very proud to be able to offer all of our leadership courses in three languages if Yukon gave us the rights to get translated into many of you came to well-attended by our families we graduated 32 um students from our School Readiness program and now we are including students each a new Osborne hammocks building and the space that we haven't had a street before slots we moved from 56 to 85 spots for the Denver public school our next one we've done a lot of different professional development with our families and with our staff before school started so that was a very important interesting and um movies part of our professional development is and that's it so I know I like flew through but it's been um quite as gray said the world with um and but it's been wonderful you know when our families um last Thursday night with an open house for our School Readiness family I had parents of tears and they have beautiful the building looks they were all fall just didn't go off over the building warring is our family educator that actually helps all those families integrate in Ingrid New York is our director and but I have to this is the group that's really making it happen whether their family Liaisons or folks that have taken the different trainings you're there you're there to help our families [Applause] thank you Lord I remember when we were sitting here talking about the Edge specs for the Osborne so I guess it was please yeah like like you said like Kevin said the building is just amazing just absolutely basic families deserves we're spaced out principles are now using it for meetings during the day so it's great to me so come and see us and thank you one question let's talk about first thank you very much it was a wonderful presentation I go to Staples and they ask for contribution to a school box do we participate in that we were one of the ones that were chosen last year and this year we were able to work with many other community organizations to have those school supplies um from Partners in favor and partners outside of delivery to ensure that students surrounding districts thank you back to me gracefully and thank you so much um you guys love to awfully shy tonight but every meeting I've been with you you were not shy School website update and a lot of other updates to provide helping focused ones and initiatives yeah so I'm just gonna Dive Right In because I know we still have a few people so this process began back in January I believe it was right around February is when this real phase will begin everything from trying to understand what the website was what we had in the old blood what needed to come over now we moved into phase two which was actually figuring out what it was going to look like and we all know what the bullet point looks like um in just a second but we wanted to have a really quick aesthetic and we wanted to get some branding guidelines and Scholars and then phase three have to really have the site development and that was what was really taking the focus of time is we wanted to make sure that the fireframes were correct the pages came out the way we wanted them to the information was put in properly we didn't have broken Pages we didn't have text running off the sides were different and all that kind of stuff and now we are finally entering stage four so um if you go one uh just wanted to show the two different timelines here because the one on the right which is kind of hard to read that was the timeline Lumi had showed us back in February and while the dates are shifted a little bit you can see that the September 30th to 20th approval we are actually in that window for a project of this scale um in a time of worker labor shortages and all kinds of other challenges um it really is a I'm just so impressed that the team at Lumi but also our folks here have been able to get this thing ready to go in right on the schedule um so I just want to give a shout out to Ann her team Grace our communications director Vivian Santos um hi Katina RIT director um really just pushed hard on getting these guys with these guidelines on these deadlines um met and they were like every two weeks it was like here's five more pages proof these Pages turn it around get it back here's five more turn it around get it back so it was really Young's work that got us here so um let's go to the whole program so everybody knows this one um I I compared it I think once to the Las Vegas Strip it's hard to figure out where to look and it's just a little bit cluttered it's hard to figure out where things go um but without further Ado uh let's click onto the new home here we are if you can shrink it down maybe give it a control negative and scroll down a little bit right there right there so this will be your new aesthetic and we are in that Final Phase of approvals now we have another week where we're going to go through home the information make sure things are accurate make sure we have the right locations on the board meetings and all these little fine points that we're going to be going through uh we already did a training for central office department so each department can go in and look at their specific right um You can see this one has so this is a scroll page we have the ability to change the setting right now there's only the two top stories on there for requirements uh we have the ability to make it an automatic scroll so it'll pass Vivian's going to be out and about the school is taking fresh updated pictures that will be uploading to the site we actually have a photographer coming in a few times the big banner features we have a whole bunch of quick quick links here that um found some click on if they're just looking for some um if you go down a little bit we've already gotten strategic plan loaded in here in anticipation of what we're coming be having and then we have a bunch of calendar dates that will be popping up and automatic news stories will populate on this whole page so if you go up to the top again so if you see these navigations in the white bar at the top you can roll over them you can also click on them go to a page that has that menu but I want to go to the district one districts and if you click on Board of Education and if you just scroll down to everybody's name will be there with the email address and I didn't have a picture of the current board so I was hoping we could all hang up for a minute afterwards and take a picture and load it up there so it's up there when we launched it next week and then down the district side you can see that those are all um just all the quick links that we have from news you know security you know documents about in the case of native reach and have everything that's right there for you really excited to have this launch and virtual face of Danvers you know and I can think it's appropriate that we have we're talking about the website right after dance presentation basically because we think about just the first thing people see when they encounter Danbury public schools and in the physical space right it's now it's Ellsworth Annex and if you're ever over at Cottage you know it was really proud afternoon especially during like heat registration times they've been kind of sitting on the curb like you know out on that driveway it's just really it was a very challenging space to have a lot of people through the new annex I mean just everything from you know the way it's designed and also the way just the chairs have been set up the way the desks are organized there's actually the opportunity by the parent wants to have a confidence conversation about their child and talk about some of their challenges process so all of that is just much more streamlined then they can go back and then they can have their have their love testing or any of the other evaluations done it's all private space doesn't feel like they're trying to hide behind little you know cubicle dividers and it's just it's such a great first thing for people to encounter when they come into register um and then of course this is the virtual thing they see [Music] their kids it's going to be a nice little aesthetic and be more importantly easy to navigate so be able to find what they need an operation and find your school yeah sure thank you I didn't get it to say something to him before when I started on the board people say when to what to want you to OK her after when I was on board um but what what you've done from when you first started with this was stuff like that it's just it's just no not as much attention as I like to but I've seen it grow and just thank you to everybody um [Music] but it looks nice and clean see that we have a question about in terms of the um but if you can provide an update so there was a win there was a little bit of flexibility on the delivery date it was really dependent on how how much dampness was underneath that floor when they got under there best case scenario's been done by the end of September they got under that floor and they found out um so take that in combination with a human outdoor temperature they had to go and bring in this massive like truck trailer size humidifier and then they literally pumped it so it would dehumidify and help Drive the floor that lasted for about a week and a half everything went to plan and they actually started laying the new Maple floor we improved the designs floor uh there's a few different parts that come with laying the floor um they have to block on it and do the painting and everything but we're still expecting an October 15th 15th grade level thank you um deductible for it John when you provide some clarity for us last week I met with the assistant Finance director at City Hall to discuss that he asked if we make a special request in other words don't not to make that part of a regular cash flow that we get from the city you wanted to treat it individually we talk about how to do that Monday of this week sent it over to him to process so we're expecting the reimbursement check of 250 000 of that same amount yeah against the mirror the 1000 degree graduate community so I will try to be concise um so um all of the items that are under are tied together first start by positioning that all of the work really has been made possible in the last couple of funding from the bar Grant we did in fact receive another award this summer the one that we applied for we did receive that in July and that was a little over 500 something thousand dollars we had a little bit of carryover from the last year and so um that is part of the money that is used to to fund some of the planning on the transformation works for the high school which includes torture The Graduate work which includes having a large management system to integrate towards of The Graduate track qualities and characteristics it's all part of sort of the larger plan so we've been very fortunate about although sort of briefly through a few notes to sort of explain where we are with some of those items and um you know certainly there'll be more opportunities across the year to go to go more deeply into some of these things so um as you remember and for those who are new and audience we did already develop a Pog Continuum for grade 612 and I will just show you a little bit about a little bit of what that looks like under the link here some folks saw this a little bit more in detail when it was presented in a curriculum meeting we now have an internal site that we're working from that has the portion of the graduate attributes that has all of the middle school and high school outcomes identified definitions um and the various categories so for example uh Ken if you want to click on outcomes Middle School for advocates that link will now take us to uh more visually friendly rubric that describes the different levels of achievement from exploring progressing achieving and consciously pursuing and then the language within is what we're using to kind of guide conversations and to start to think about how do we encourage these practices and skills in the classroom and how do we build activities to support um students even in deepening knowledge their visions some of these areas and so can people go back up to this part of the the work group we'll skip over High School outcomes and achievement and experiments and action for a second our top of the right thank you for a second and so when we got to the end of the year as we were working through this rubric we had a group of teachers that we enticed to come play with us on how to actually Implement some of these things and just begin conversations so um we had a small group of long to kind of take some risks and to have some very honest conversations about what they thought about the rubric and how they think the class of what that could look like in the current courses and so I'm not going to go into all the different experiments is what we call them but Ken if you want to just click on and I won't go into all the personal Reflections because I don't want to put them out there as they were very vulnerable in the group to explore so if you want yes number five if you want to scroll down uh you can click on see episode number two right there lower left just click on number five for an example just a and these are detailed these are layered there's lots of information to their planning bathroom and so don't click on that but if you go down to where it says we observed and these are some of those collections that we got back students enjoyed working together and were more opt to share when they knew they were being assessed on collaboration and not just a finished product so we heard a lot over and over again that it changed the dynamic of the conversation worked um with each other and or you know in the way that they had worked previously independently so they saw it as a different level what we learned the visuals made it a lot easier to understand the attributes of students Point download in other lessons that followed um and made those connections with more collaborator and if you just go to number 15 13.
5 30 is fine 5 30. can we do 5 30. ah okay tell them that we're busy I'm just choosing okay so the next so we'll do I thought at the last parent superintendent we said the next one was going to be a lunch one yeah no we're working on it okay so our next um we'll do a special board meeting on uh Wednesday September 28th at 5 30 and that will be going over superintendent goals Deanna could I ask you to put out a message all of us so we don't forget thank you and for the audience since that is just going to be going into executive session and coming out you guys will not have to be here you're so disappointed no betting on that night so do you guys have anything else that you want to have um on the agenda for next week next month now to now remember it's a long board meeting there's a lot of things to go over just saying no no we don't have any no I'm just we can wait for another name okay let's wait for another time that would be awesome so okay so um I will make a motion to adjourn at 7 22.
um just just one more idea if I can go on and on and just scroll up a little bit higher I just want to get down to the these are students who worked differently when you apply a new rubric even if the lesson didn't change very much so the added layer of the rubric again students interacted um changed even though the lesson contest was relatively the same so it with that conversation that was broken that was powerful and applying the PhD students practices will result in a change in student performance so he could but um over and over again we have these very versions of um these little points of life that we're starting to see in the way that students were driving with their teachers um the teachers all commented that we way more time with this we need to dive deep into this we need to expand our understanding of this um we needed to front load more understanding of this with the students if they started in ninth grade they did the longer scene so so we really are at just the beginning of the war get some involved so the portrait of The Graduate and the bottling with the bar Foundation support as part of that our collaborative work with them and debriefing on them about the processes that we've been in one of the reasons we won the grant is because we with our warnings and our research pitched the idea of working with eight teachers going to the next level more deeply more intensely over the course of the entire year this year as opposed to just experimenting towards the end um and to to dive into standard-based learning and to dig into a series of professional development opportunities um so I'm going to have you just skip to the next slide for a second I can just look at standard space we have the length of the top thanks so we have a we have a scope of work that we've designed with future design school who we've introduced to you in the past to dig into the standards-based work and how to incorporate the Portugal and graduate attributes into the current classes and courses that we that we have that's okay and you can go back and um we'll have to go back one more slide thanks um and so they're going to partner with us to support these eight teachers and engines and professional learnings across the year and again that small pod will start to grow as we build capacity we start to scale from this um we do intend on developing the KING5 Continuum and it's also part of the work um we just created a scope of work plan with FBS that included no less than 40 meetings um for that work and that's just our meetings with them with our district leaders and we'll bring on some Elementary principles to the Target Network as well um so that will hopefully start probably in late October we're waiting for the year to get off the ground we've got a lot of the mission is happening right now to share with everybody and then a lot of this has also to do with the students go for that work you know it's been a Hot Topic lately about how that's going um Instagram has been a massive undertaking um and so we'll talk about that but basically ideas to use schoology because it is a learning management system to track student progress over time and it's a very tricky thing to do when you're creating a non-graded system of giving feedback to students so that happens to a formal reflection feedback and portfolio type work which we're learning how to customize and schoology to be able to create a continuous where our students are developing along it's not a work that a lot of folks are digging into because it's very complicated and that's one of the reasons my bar loves us because we're willing to take that on and that's the kind of work that work to fund and that's the kind of work that they see have a free greater outcomes for kids when you're getting that type of feedback or when they're working in these manners with these corporations with these characteristics in a well-developed world um um because we talked a little bit about the standard space PD we're also as part of our borrower um we're committed to a something called a spring Point visit spring Point visit is really about um us pushing ourselves on something called the indicators of school quality and indicators of school quality are really about doing a self-assessment and pushing ourselves around our mission our positive School of climate and culture um but for the for this rant particularly emphasis is on rigorous and purposeful learning experiences and academic systems our instructional model our curriculum standards systems to support strong instruction in our graduate graduation Pathways how we Empower close secondary choices our College and Career learning sequences our enrichment experiences and our counseling and how proud of all that supported so we will have a visit with this group that will come in and they will help us do a self-analysis on where we are and then there's coaching sessions along the way and there are something called the communities of practice um that will engage with other school districts across the country who are also rewarded the bar Grant and they're also some work in this it's very exciting stuff um it's a lot of work um but we have a great team that's very committed and we're looking for filing that you teachers who want to participate with us this year and now as part of the bar Grant obviously we are continuing to work on the academy development we won't click on that link tonight because that's really just the graphic that you've been circulating so tonight but ongoing work with that and the development of that are about some of the some site visits participating in site visits with some of these Community practices um and in consultation with the national Career College Coalition there are things called Insight on site those are on-site visits and that are highly facilitated to help tease out some of the problems and practice that we'll encounter as field of Academy and then we have something called a Career Academy leadership collaborative and so we're going to be sending out our assistant principals to some of these sites and small learning teams and in between they'll have facilitated professional development between visits so it's not just go out to visit and come back and you do nothing with it there's a lot of homework in between the leadership work that um and then we have a pathway leader in elective development plan which will identify pathway leaders at different High School to start to develop Collective curriculum and to become Liaisons also to work with work that are premiering those two things um and we're also looking uh as part of this work we've done some research on how to expand college credit offerings um just a little bit of a highlight in that we started researching Cambridge International which is if you've ever heard of AP schools IB schools and there's favorite schools well Cambridge is not super popular in Connecticut it's mostly because our college and universities offer college credit yet in that area and our state has not recognized those courses for the accountability of this however we believe we're working with um Bernstein who's the former um former Regional president of the College Board who now works for Cambridge to partner with the state and our area universities to talk about getting Cambridge to be considered um in the model similar to IB and AP um Cambridge is looking for their first school in Connecticut and I'm looking for elective and high quality curriculum to help fill some of these unique areas that we have in high school and Cambridge has very unique electives that AP and ID and some of these other places do not have so we're very interested in partnering with them and it's free for the first five years because they are trying to gain Partners it works more than that I'll update you and see how it goes more to find that and I already mentioned about the monthly coaching sessions okay the one you're all I'm waiting for it's changing everyone's lives right now uh including one um so that is Schoology so um as you know if you have a child in the school system your child has changed over from Google Classroom to schoology and the big question is why the heck would we do that and things were going just slow um and so I just want to be clear that when we talk about the different systems and what we we knew heading into coming folks pandemic we weren't going back to paper pen and we were moving Direction deals for our students in 21st century skills and to be especially with the academy coming that we're going to need a real possibility management system Google Classroom is not a true learning management system it's a Google tool so they are all of those classrooms that are out there that we've created our little Islands by themselves that operate as little independent defense with the teacher and the student when a uh anyone can get invited to to those classes by having um it's actually not super secure actually when you think about it so um that's one that's one issue the second issue is that schoology is works with PowerSchool and integrates integrates with our Gradebook it integrates with navient um with all the systems that we have it's designed to for that integration and pass back and pass through past over time on our building to collect data to see where students are over a period of time in those classes because we can't do that with Google classroom um so we have a Litany of reasons most of them on the back end technology side along with reporting and monitoring um as to why we there are a few big ones out there schoology canva Blackboard that you know and those are kind of widely used ones as schoology or how many 20 million users in the United States it's a pretty reputable program um but it's a huge implementation shift in Danbury and it's one that's going to take some time and similar to when we shipped it to Google classroom in the middle of the night um and all the angst around that and how do we do this and I don't know how to connect and how do I get to my knee um this this tube shall be a process over time that we're going to have to work through and you know we have started to collect in surveys and information from the teachers what are the apps that you are used to using that are not working correctly right now please let us know and we're solely making a way at that information we've had things for example because it is more secure um feedback a little bit a teacher could download and add any Google app that they wanted to into their classroom I want to use this app I want to bring this in it was it was very seamless I didn't need to ask anybody permission to do any of that I just added it in there and the Google tools are wonderful so so we're all used to using those um with schoology there has to be an association so um we have to say I want you to talk to Peridot I want you to talk to Edmodo I want you to talk to Desmos and so as we've loaded several several of those applications in um all the ones that we know teachers like some of those apps rely on other third-party apps to deliver their content and so some of those aren't working in some cases and so it's a matter of take because we have uh security Lockers in our system that don't recognize the website from another third-party app because we didn't form that relationship so we one by one as those come in and we start to work through those um those email addresses and those third credit apps get added to the list and voila things open up so um we're going been at this for a couple of weeks and you know it's a it's such an implementation that you know once you flip the switch on and kids have their courses you gotta you gotta roll and you gotta real fast card and you got to work through it so um for the most part you know teachers I think are missing sort of the ease of the of the uh fluency that they had with Google Classroom um you know my folders were here and now over here or you know for students I submitted an assignment you know where did it go I can't see it um I'm trying to sync my grades it didn't show up well there's a setting in the background in your in your Gradebook that you haven't quite set yet let me show you how to do that so that's going to take some time um and I know um the last part about that type uses the parent side of things and so when I mentioned about the course codes that anyone can can join schoology is a little bit different in the sense that in our back end in our in our student information system has to have to hear an email address in order to have access to that to that course and so we're still working on building those associations just because you have an email in the system in a schoology doesn't mean that they talk to and so our director of technology is going to be working on that and she thinks it'll take about another week or so to get that up and running and then we'll push out the appearance this is how you can make sure that you see your students of course from your um certainly they can look on to their students courses right now with them but having the parent side of things is really what folks want and uh put into order to push that out to make it make sense you can't push that out until that Association is safe lots of frustrated parents strikes a lot here so um the tool itself is very sophisticated it's a highly reputable uh program um it what we're doing with it now are very basic functions you know assignments posting posting content organizing folders um and but the level of depth and sophistication include in school with G is tremendous which is why to it and we'll get there um but we you know we have limited amount of staff we do not have technology coaches Norwalk has seven so we have you know Gina Jasmine you have myself we've had a couple of teachers that we have on time she's actually schooled up that are helping us out have been amazing Rachel Saunders and Amanda Peterson huge shout out because they're helping join after school um so we're working through it um but there will be it's a learning curve for sure it's a learning curve for all of us so but we will get there and we're going to collect more information with information that we're collecting now and then we have information that we'll collect again in eight weeks to see that the number of technical issues come as a little bit more information in the meantime we have several schoology sessions that we're going to be running and support sessions uh for folks who need them but even internally with our leadership staff want to teach your skin for example you help the kids out as much as they wanted was their school they're still put their folders together so it's going to take a little bit of time just a quick question about that um this schoology as a as an entity offer any kind of training or PD for educators or oh yes so yeah um so this started way back last year so we started uh we probably had probably already or 40 maybe 50 integration meetings so very Tech heavy meetings about settings for Missions passwords all that stuff um early on last year and then once we got to a certain open up the courses we developed the schoology super youth group so we invited folks who were generally technologically proficient to come in and get Advanced Training so let's get this started and then try to work through what they had so that helped us kind of prepare how do we roll this out to our staff so they were kind of our Front Runners explorers and this they were great to work with we didn't have a full five Training until May 17th during the department uh Department day so we had a full PD day for that um on that and then we offered different options for flexibilities that you can either do your training asynchronously um where you could do a live person and then you offered some support about 100 Preschool teachers participated in the live sessions and then a lot of folks before they synchronous they said um but everybody agreed that you know you really don't know schoology you really can't know it until you start using it so you can have a couple of hours of training for the basic stuff it's really not really fluency moving around the environment it's kind of like when you go to the grocery store and they've done a reset and store and all of a sudden it like it takes you forever to find you know all your all your items are there and you just they're in different places and it takes you time to figure them out um we did a school getting started live sessions we ended rolling sessions from 2 30 to 4 30 um on several dates um through the end of the school year and then uh more AC furnace training that we offered that we should accept for another group and then um getting started live session we did run another session August 26th we had uh 10 schoology professionals leading um those sessions and we had tons of teachers all the new teachers especially had to be trained so now these are additional sessions that we've designed internally um for after school so on a voluntary basis folks can drop in and learn more about organization or collaborating or how to get their apps to start working um how to create buttons that that kind of put things together for them in succinct ways to get kind of shortcuts on how to build your assignments great books and so on so um it's just it is going to take time it is a process and um you know we're all going through it right now um will you be sharing the flow chart or future changes from the setup changes to Schoology you know the approval process for the courses taking away courses programs to change to change School allergy set up so so the courses so most of the courses are our teachers access most of their course materials in Google folders that they've been working out of so curriculum resources tax sets collections leasing guides our improval holders Google Google tools works with schoology so they there's no they're still accessing the same content that they have been accessing Friday but it's now built into a course taking away some weights is there a process that you want that up or they just we have curriculum methods that the teachers use um that that has been established and over time when there are edits or changes or improvements that we make some of them are small like I think this is a better um selection for for this standard we'd like to do this activity some teachers this year will be adding in ways to increase collaboration and communication and they'll build certain components in and we'll have those conversations department meetings and so it's really about the standards so the standards don't change um and that those are those are those are things so those are kind of the non-negotiables that we have across the school system so we have standards in almost every content area now uh minus some electives that are a little um you know unique course yeah the teachers don't bring on a new course unless unless it is right English social studies like um I decided I'm a teacher and I want to change where I want to add a new course it doesn't it doesn't happen that way teachers teachers have an assigned no that's what I mean the students um in the roster of students well I'm talking about random course never been taught before how does it get out of school so ninth grade English is ninth grade English 10th grade English is 10th grade English all the teachers are teaching the same course what you're talking about the academy yeah I understand I understand what you're saying yes so so we have a something called The Brick here so when we have a brand new course okay we will have um content developed around the standards related to that course but in a in a consistent manner and we're going to be working with some more industry professionals to help with the content pieces so for example um if I if we don't have a lot of folks internally who understand about cyber security for example so we would partner with someone in the industry on cyber security to talk about the big ticket items in in that um and then that we would use some of our practical standards that we have some more iste standards these are Science and Technology standards um there could be some Ela standards in there for writing and we would blend those in with the course conference to develop an elective that leads to verse one to prepare kids technology career to that develops all the other academic skills I will look at those sure the portrait of The Graduate so the rubric that we had up before we talk about Innovation and you talk about collaboration and we talk about um that students make other students feel welcome that those for those types of areas on the porch of The Graduate we're going to give we're going to give you feedback on that this is this is let me link let me talk you through kind of how I think we did with this let's talk about how you work in that a lot of this stuff also plays into the way um you know the soft skills that we want to see students have and so we're not going to say Michelle you know you got an era D in collaboration you're about to call that reader it's really um you know what you're exploring in this area and we want to focus in on how we're going to get you to progressing and these are the things you need you need to do to get there let's have that conversation we still have traditional phrase until traditional grades as in ABCD we have numerical grades our colleges recognize cdcd and numerical grades as well however standard space rating it also gets introduced with uh along these lines so one of the things that we'd like to see more of is that you can get an A Michelle in a class because you're raising your hand you're answering all the questions you turn in all your homework um and uh you you go for every extra credit that that teacher throws out there but when I give you an assessment maybe you're maybe you score a different number and so the A and all those extra credit do couldn't actually be masking where your true skill lies and of course with your ability to do everything or to perform on whether it's math assessment whatever so standard space grading it develops achievement indicators where you look at grade levels you look at levels of achievement for us and you are assessing only on those areas that you're giving students feedback volume three it doesn't negate traditional rating but it's in addition to to help provide more um real pure information about where students fall and they're learning in conjunction with the grade then basically yeah that's what we're working how how to learn how to do because there's not a lot of folks that are that have done it it's complicated right so and it's in some cases it's extra work so for this experiment that we're running with the bar Foundation teachers are going to keep two great books and so we have to get volunteers who are going to want to do that to the benefits of maintaining back in that area so that kids are getting model to be back in addition to traditional race program is available yeah so I presented we presented the portrait of The Graduate um Continuum a few times and we've made that available and that's that is a internal website that we created to house some of the feedback that keep that inside with the teachers who volunteer to work with us so their their personal Reflections are in there which is why it's not external well they're learning to you know be vulnerable and take academic risks and conventional until then oh yeah just going to start off by reminding the rewards where we ended last year the last board meeting about really kind of the state of our Budget moving forward to the 23-24 school year later and at that time we part of our presentation that evening we talked about the shortfall um and we addressed that Gap by escalating I'm Sorry by accelerating our Essa funding plan so we have 11 million plus a million dollars to help build that Gap that we have talked about but this also means next school year 23 24.
it means with that could be a series we've talked about a couple of different scenarios on how we've entitled to kind of manage and recommend s and so we had some initial thoughts and we'll discussion to John you can just kind of walk us through some of this stuff what we're looking to do is is we need a called a wider lens earlier in the process specialist traditionally as we've put together school projects for my conversation for example with a middle school principal might just be about that middle school and what they plan to do the following year and it's it's primaria has been in all places of a central office driven process in which we then bring you the superintendent's proposed budget um the end of December early January to look at uh but with the conditions as Kevin described it's we want to take advantage of really of all the good Minds we have and all the good experience we have here in the district and get their advice early not just on their own areas of responsibility but as the entire district and are getting the what we think will be the very best recommendations uh together when we present the budget that's the objective the advisory committee uh to the superintendent office personnel some community members the board member to have someone from our teacher race Elementary secondary certainly some representation from Nea and the SAA and perhaps among our labor groups after at table so that everyone we share with them the priorities for the district relative to our non-star representative EOG and our vision and Mission and we also kind of Identify some additional guardrails provide an opportunity for them to talk and talk amongst themselves and provide a recommendation for the superintendents and that would be one of probably one of many recommendations meeting of the year to share some of our initial did not know him back with it buendancies advisory laughs foreign so my only feedback to that be that clear expectations are that from the beginning to the advisory committee that is strictly an advisory to the superintendent and the ultimate decisions why would this foreign okay moving on to information um I threw the um standing committee meeting schedule in there just so you know that that's communicated you know out to the public as well this was sent earlier to board members from Tara um it's nothing Seven Stone but it's just a way to streamline the meetings we've had rougher number of meetings the past few years more than ever we've got a lot of things very busy board especially with budget and our health and Facilities and those committees so if there's any you know anything that comes up in the way of you know hey I want to talk about you know can you throw this on an agenda I'm certainly open to um discussion topics you know and and for the regular meetings as well that is that there are the cave education law summaries oh sure go ahead I'd like to just make a career I would like working with Community once a month I think there's been a lot of time here on curriculum and the development clearly so I see that it's only I think three times here I would like be considered based on what would be actually all the information thank you and just to clarify all of our committee meetings meet four four times per year um except for our finance which means monthly and I think our sites and Facilities schedule for eign but certainly there's an agenda topic that you'd like to see at a regular meeting to discuss curriculum just now we touched upon it um it'll I'm sure it'll come up regularly at our regular meetings um sure yeah so I have forgot to mention it earlier on the weekend committed to quarterly updates for po supports undergraduate updates so this evening two years and more time before I'm sorry I can kind of rush through that so is there any other feedback or committees so it is yes instead of saying okay great you just confirmed of course Rachel what the procedure is if you know like a chair of a committee wants to bring another meeting forward what would be the protocol well it's not scheduled um great question um I think you know um bring it forward to everything you and I or that that lays on the cabinet liaison how would you like to handle that probably maybe a discussion with the committee board so oftentimes there's a meeting with the liaison on there requests before folks in there that fall on that Zoom meeting to walk out with their calendars thank you for unlocking it we were trying to provide time and provide them up all right Wednesday would just be a challenge all right um we have I would say midday September 22nd yes it is the same date as the great plane knowing all of that information is in there from my report I don't have in addition to all of our community we've got negotiations we have administrative interviews going on expulsion hearings the city building committing that the Career Academy task force in that last week we feel meetings are beginning um and then trainings and we have a workshop next week that I'm not next week in two weeks and I'm right before our next regular meeting um I did want to mention DHS Geo meeting Theresa this next Wednesday evening through our party just be dealing as well that is in person um there's a cave parliamentary procedures webinar on Wednesday September 8th at noon I believe that's free it's always a good Refresher um and then the cave past convention November 18th 19th uh Cara sent out information that's it for me third board sure [Music] little certainly don't fall down but we heard about getting harder to coordination website in Florida there's not one thing about savings security and I think we're all about that we've had a long time I would suggest that we do a survey with batteries and staff and how they feel about their school receive secure how they feel about the young government but you know I could see something in this meeting you know see well just say we haven't seen it because he came something of course finally locked out ABC's and stuff like that because he was a lot of information here 14 different topics safe secure environment for multiple fog education I think that I'm not saying we don't care about it I think it's just kind of an afternoon so that's my thumb and something else cake just want to say a quick thank you to Mr salastrini and Mr Donovan for the athletic Connecticut thank you from that thank you so much um thank you and how the backup three days and minutes [Music] all the way out okay just not having that man period thank you and a thank you yeah thanks staff ing job handling it is moving on to our executive session executive session potential times of agreement with the custodians maintenance and drivers in terms of one year contract extensions for Paris with possible action and public possession all those in favor I um
desired I pledge allegiance of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all foreign County Schools evaluation and compensation plan for the school year 2022-2023 and the recommendation to a queer teacher appreciation grants for the school year 2022-2023 advisors any discussion welcome Carol yes baby yes Vicki yes Stephanie yes and Steve yes motion carries uh five zeros next I have the consent agenda items for the appointments of Brown County High School ACA appointment instructional technology coach Kirk ratesman in the Brown County Schools bus driver Sarah McCarty 96 per day 180 days per school year full-time with Benefits this is a replacement for capacity shipping do you have a motion to accept the modification to the United related to consent and the agenda items appointments second a discussion welcome era yes Amy yes Stephanie yes yes thank you at this time uh the second edition of visitors and comments from the audience you know invited to speak uh and share information or anything that's not already on the agenda okay and with that we have environment the director of student support services and I oversee multiple programs for the district one of which is early childhood education and the last time I spoke with you all as a board um I talked to you a little bit about the program overall about our sites and about our goals um and our vision story for our attended Early Education in Early Education in Broward County today I'm talking to you about something very specific having to do with the early childhood education center in Nashville um and so one of the uh differences between that site and the other sites is that um it has been a playground before the other school the school's homes for Van Buren and surgical where we plan to put our playground has a bit of playground before it's grass and so it's a ton of Clean Slate but at what used to be Nashville Elementary what used to be the Intermediate School it has an existing space that is behind the brick wall and so um in in turning that space into um a playground that would meet the licensure requirements or Child Care Center we found that we need to do a little work on that wall so what I have for you today are some pictures of the walls which might not have recently been up close and personal with the wall but I have been um and then I have a feasibility study here that we that I'll talk to you about um you're considered for your consideration because we are going to have to uh do something about the wall to bring it into compliance with what a child care center division between Highway and playground would need to be so um before we look at the study let me just foreign this kind of thing uh where the wall is flaking and there are these large chips run the whole entire night uh I had a little one out there actually Madison Miller's son our CEO foundation and the first thing she did was picked one of these up and try to put it in her back he's important that's why we need to do something about the wall we're going to have kids out there um even Mr Austin said that he had some issues with kids at the other end of the wall right so when we talk about the wall we're talking about this as one continuous wall that really starts at the corner of the property and then goes all the way down to the end of that place it's a pretty good experience this is kind of an overview of what kind of looks like out there so this this uh not only has kind of a failing wall here all this is going to be excavated here this is why we're going to take all this out all this concrete needs to come out right here because it's too close to the oh we're gonna loading up heat gravel and it's too close to this is too close here as a fall zone we have so we've got the wall That's flaking and then this fence up here is totally rusted the ends these there are prongs under here you can kind of see they're sticking up they are extremely sharp and if you touch one you can you can easily get pricked and that's a rusty you know and so we have kids that definitely would be tall enough to reach that um so and it's Extremely Loud on the paper I mean I can't this is Peaceful Valley Brown County it does not be a spawned incredible I think it's the only loud place in the entire County that I've ever stood um but it is Extremely Loud and and you know one of the things that that we know from the child care Licensing Laws is that this is supposed to be an extension of a learning space and we're supposed to have quiet zones and we're supposed to have active zones um it's really supposed to be for outdoor education as well as for physical activity it's not just a playground in other words it's like another warning space so um with this in mind um I mean I I looked at the wall with our director of you know maintenance and grounds with Jimmy um we decided that it was probably something that um you know we locally here aren't going to be able to fix this wall this is not a project that our our guys are going to be able to handle um we actually uh decided that in looking at the rules for perhaps using fund dollars to do this if the scope of the project is going to be over 150 000 you need to get an architect to look at it um it's going to be over 150 000 to do that role so um we talked with Mr Michael Chamblee uh and I say we um Madison Miller and I are kind of taking this on together she's a there's a foundation to change champion of Early Childhood in Brown County with all the scholarship support we've been kind of keeping Emily in the loop with what we've been finding um Mr Chamblee when we talked to a couple different Architects he's the one who's gave me be really really interested in fact he said he's been trying to get something done about the wall for a couple years because it is the first thing you see on 46 when you come in when you come in um and enter Brown County and you look to the right you see beautiful buildings but the first thing you see is rested fence and a just a dilapidated so um he has developed a proposal here um and so these are the services that he would provide and they're pretty extensive actually it's not just about drawing what he would do with the wall in fact he has to do it you know um really deciding what the best action for remedying the law situation is um and so basically leaving it and and covering the material might be possible replacing it entirely might be necessary replacing the fencing with new materials or maybe a solid or slated material and then we talked about considering how local artists might contribute to the beauty of this entrance as well so it might serve multiple multiple purposes um um of course I'm concerned primarily about the safety and the sound because we have you know a couple of years to become licensed and um we we need to get this figured out within that amount of time so um Carol just real quick the western part is just fence isn't it the part behind the gas station it's just sense of stuff that part and we and that needs to be remedy as well because the problem is that you can you can see into the place exactly right so when we're talking about building the wall we would actually take it around the corner because if you sit at Speedway in your car you can look in and watch the kids but so and then but and just in your presentation my other concern and and I get with the safety doctor that you're talking about my state detector is about cars potentially running off the road or truck coming off road and having to be a stop Gap you know into playground or into the building so I mean that would be one thing I want under to speak with me yeah this guy too so yeah so yeah we have had one um just because I wasn't sure we had I had to have an amazing with the wall and he said you know this is a project that you you're going to have to he's also said you really nervative test so again this is uh I'm used to doing materials like fixing walls so but anyways I'm learning a lot it's fine it's fun um and and but I'm but I'm very anxious for Mr Chamblee who seems to have a lot of interest and vision for what this could be as an entrance to the community and as a safety um feature you know a necessary safety feature for our playground um and um so yeah this this is a proposal that um it's about a ten thousand dollar proposal well I would assume that this wall was built when we built the school we wanted this this wall is is original is repaired never been touched if this is original to the to the building of that the building it's up I'm excited I really love both you're talking about the sound because it's going to be so loud I love the safety and I also really love working on our entrance so you know we're doing the application of the entrance to our community you know I love all of that so great what was funny is last last word being um uh Melanie was here talking about you know beautifying different parts of the wall That's entrance to the to the middle school and I was thinking you know this is kind of a thing but I think having local artists thinking maybe you know some kind of iron work on the outside the outside doesn't have to look like the inside the inside just has to be safe nothing sharp you know the the outside can be you know something that really and a barrier and a barrier yeah absolutely taller wall actually affects you know I've I have actually done a little Googling on sound barrier stuff and you know it's it's interesting I've said something that's up to Michael and some of that stuff he's gonna I mean that's really his area but you know you know it's possible along a highway there's there's barriers but you also don't want to put a 20-foot structure and it doesn't need to be that but there's got to be some way well that's why because just you you have an open space which actually we as adults have have had a hard time hearing each other I mean the amount of traffic so there's no way that you're a multi-year-old or a four-year-old's voice Daddy can you can you clarify this um proposal is just for the architect to come on to pay for that and then the architect is going to make a presentation yes was that ten thousand dollars is for the feasibility study yes is that what grant money is that or how many like that that is money that is allowable to be extended on and I have to do that with the Capital Improvements bond that we have right now that is a very I mean it's Extremely Loud expenses it's on the chart of what you're supposed to do before you start a project yes absolutely so yeah only for capital projects Mr Shepley is waiting on this on your approval of the contract I told him that I'd be presenting it tonight and that you would have it for your consideration and the next meeting would be difficulty on that um let's get started to do yeah and then he will get started right away um looking at you know he's got in here he talks about he's got subconsultants and he's going to be working with obviously he's not an expert on sound barrier he knows the priorities um I've met with him to that level um and he's uh he understands the timeline that we have for me to get this done um sorry right away okay any questions about that any other questions the only other thing I wanted to say is uh when when we talk the next time also probably the next board meeting I may have that time we're seeking three three proposals for the other playgrounds I mean we have to do that when we're using federal funds to play for pay for anything above a threshold of costs um we have to so I've got two proposals on reading a third one for the helm supports vernica ending here Brian so they'll probably have I'll have um those to share the next time over here is that renovation or so those playgrounds are the ones that are for the preschools that that are yeah okay so creating separate playgrounds yeah that's what we talked about the last time so um but good um the question for you with regards since this wall is going before stating around as far as an easement are you Consulting with the state department yes but one of the things that um he's going to do in fact number two it says here help determine where the self-property line is relative to the highway and then um if we need on the second page it talks about if we if we do need to have a survey but is there I guess the question is going to take in because I don't know because there's always because you've got a boundary between County property and state property right yeah so the question that comes is are there any restrictions that the state may have with regards to the road as far as those times yeah that's why we're gonna you know hopefully they'll have to agree to have Michael do that because that's just that's what he's gonna do he's going to figure that out that's out of my Transportation so in going through and limiting the resources did you happen to have any conversations or contact the County offices to see what engineering firms that that nature they might be using so that there might be an overlap of you know resources and reach out because I know they do have Contract Services sure and they may be and since they'll be familiar with the area Michael is a resident here we're probably reaching out locally he also mentioned that that's what kind of what he would do for us because you know we we know that that um that work needs to be done it's just that this is what he's this is what he does all the time so yeah definitely that we need to be done okay and then the last thing is for as you mentioned that there's going to be a wall that's going to be shared between now School School boundaries and private Parkway so normally when you have projects of this nature as I've seen and I don't know if that's the case here in the state of Indiana but they're a possible to be associated with that and then there is also um if I'm not mistaken they may have a sense of ordering and put on the property line I don't know how outlooks it's going to be there may be some influences with regards to their rights as what can and can be done well we have the the fence there now that's the chain link fence yeah but as soon as you start making the change that it takes big different Behavior well until we have a plan yeah and that's that's what you know feasibility study is that's part of that yeah yep yeah I'm pretty confident that he'll come back to us with everything we need to do to be able to then go through that secure bid process because I'm sure it'll be a project the architectural part of it that includes engineering activities it only includes what's what's on this what's on the stage so I expect that you're going to actually then have to approach someone else after you've got that information that shows up the requirements that's going to be to an engineering okay someone's going to have to decide you know whoever an Architects work with engineers design and design the wall this isn't it this is this is what's feasible to do I mean right now we don't know whether we should replace it we don't know whether we should cover it we don't know whether we just don't know to achieve the goals of safety and sound we just don't really know which direction because we're talking about sound barriers and they have regulations and specifications yeah to what that buried and even just um even you you know there's things you can do to wrap uh offense that can help with that too there's all kinds of kind of low-tech versus you know high tech support barrier something that looks so simple can become quite complex that I've noticed that brick wall when I drive just about every time I think we need to do something about that I don't know what we need to do and that's exactly what Mr Chevrolet says I drive by it every day and I look at I think the grounds are so beautiful then that one was so awful and I could definitely see little kids out there for five minutes and she had a piece of that that brick in her hand all right I'm excited thank you thanks really thank you yeah I'm familiar with uh Michael's work and he's good he's a good yeah he's a wonderful person yep well he responded really well and he had responded right away that's motivated hey what's that discussion items here um [Music] do I have a motion oh awesome one second any discussion welcome Carol yes Amy yes Vicky yes Stephanie yes thank you yes OSHA Karen thanks I know we're not approving what Debbie just said that was just yeah so we don't need to approve anything for her to go to the next step don't ever want to bring something to you as a presentation and then help you vote so I just wanted to make sure I understood that executed items and the recommendation to improve the overnight field trip requests from Robert Abraham to the former military academy on September 23rd and 24th 2022.
good evening everyone uh i'm vice chairman adam grippo filling in for chairman uh prayer jamie this evening uh miss uh jacinsky uh please call the roll here here mr genie ms rosenberg here thank you um paul please stand for pledge i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay our first order of business would like to uh call up uh principal gab to introduce our new representatives thank you i am so delighted to introduce our representatives uh the student representatives are selected each year to represent cheshire high school at board of education meetings the students are selected based on their level of involvement at the high school in student activities or sport and on the basis of academic excellence the student report is presented to the board at its business meeting the second meeting of the month and includes information on academic extracurricular and social activities taking place at cheshire high school monica gailey and michael dejoseph cheshire high school student representatives to the board of education are here with us their first meeting and i'm very happy to just tell you a little bit more about them michael j joseph is a well-rounded and amazing young man michael describes himself as faithful kind hardworking outgoing and adventurous he is a dedicated student who puts a great deal of time and effort into all that he does he's the current captain of the cross country team and a varsity member of the indoor track team he volunteers his time with cheshire lights of hope special olympics and through his church and local food pantry michael truly likes to get involved in his high school and community he's a solid role model and a perfect choice to represent chester high school as a board of education representative monica gailey sets herself apart from the rest she is kind friendly studious outgoing intrinsically motivated in a self-proclaimed bookworm monica's level of maturity and commitment to her education is unmatched she loves to learn to say monica enjoys getting involved is an understatement monica's had the lead in cheshire high school theater productions she's an officer of the mock trial club and she devotes countless hours of volunteer work within her school and community she's truly the total package monica will do cheshire high school proud as the board of education representative [Applause] welcome to the board of education and we hope to see you at many wonderful and productive meetings here this year uh do you have an initial report or anything yes we do thank you oh yeah all right so um thank you so much for having us here um so to start off uh last week the fall sports began last week with every single varsity team winning their first contest which um yeah it's pretty pretty awesome um the girls cross country coach rob shaffer earned his 300th win during the first meet of the year which was last week and many student athletes volunteered their time at the cheshire marketplace that happened last week um the student senate held their annual pep rally last friday afternoon prior to the first home football game so they had it we had it the day before the the first football game to kind of kick off the school spirit and kick off the um the football season um cheshire fall sports captains participated in the league captains council held in new haven and along with that came a guest speaker and the captains also discussed the qualities of being a good leader for the team as well as in the school and just all around in general the student senate will be working we'll be hosting a recycling program for all plastic bottles from football games so basically what this project is is that every football game around 800 cans of soda and water bottles and and things like that are sold and so we're trying to collect all those cans to get the five cents for them to go towards the student senate and and other things like that um so yes we really think that that could be a big a big success at the football games just because so many cans are sold there and also very good for the environment and additionally all clubs in general at the school are getting back into the swing of things getting back into the into the new year and just getting the ball rolling yeah so as michael mentioned um all clubs are starting up again the school year as we're now like three weeks into school and we um cheshire high school is going to have a club fair during lunch on the 29th of september near the end of the month to um just to like spread information about each club each club can sign up for a table and then they can give out their flyers their classroom codes the students can sign up because at cheshire high school we really want everyone to be involved and also um the the fall performance the it's called lost girl and they started having their first rehearsals last week and this week and they're getting that show up on its feet and i think that's all for this month so far thank you um are there any questions um i just wanna it's not really a question so full disclosure michael's my neighbor grew up across the street from me um and he actually interviewed me for a scholarship that he was going for for college you had to interview somebody who was a member of like the political right so and i remember so he called me it was a saturday morning i went over to his house and he is about a year and a half ago at this point he asked me like very pointed questions and at that point you know i kept telling him like it's so important just to be involved in your community know what's going on around you so i really it's really glad i'm really happy to see that you took this role on and that you're here and i know you're going to do a great job so proud of you as i always have been but continue to be so good luck welcome you guys um you it's good to see two new faces and we're going to watch you grow over the year could you just tell us really briefly some of your plans what your what where you wanna where you're heading and um what you wanna study and so we can follow you and pepper you with questions um so i want to be a doctor i've known that for a while specifically pediatrician so i'm applying to a lot of schools like in the northeast area and i don't know where i'm headed yet but that's my main goal [Music] that's good um so i hope to go to springfield college and study physical therapy there and hopefully if everything works out i hope to also run cross country and track while at springfield college so yeah those are kind of my plans after high school [Music] so you mentioned sports and statistics so i'm curious do you happen to know the last time that cheshire high started off every varsity sport winning his first you do oh fantastic it looked like monica might know i don't um mr trufone even said himself he doesn't even remember when the last time that every single fall sport won like won their game in a week so it's been a very long time which is um it's pretty room so then i'm gonna follow that up with mr trifone was not the athletic director when i was in high school oh okay but rob schaefer was coaching cross country okay so you might know it's been like it's 30 i think this is his 34th season i was going to say 35.
and I do believe this is for a cross country oh yeah on a regular basis and with that do I have a motion to accept the uh approved the overnight field trip uh to the Cobra Military Academy with the cross country it's always been a fun sharing with these guys to go so thank you they do well that's good yeah I I would like to look at those proposal for the educational purposes I'd love to check I think it's great it's on a Friday and Saturday so are you saying yeah no I'm just saying for the future okay I just I again I think we're all familiar with it but you mean you would like if it's athletic then it needs to represent and supporting the business on an academic trip it's just that terrible yes yes thank you and the recommendationship with a 1 000 donation from an anonymous donor to the Brown County High School band there are emotions who set the uh one thousand donation dollar donation from an amount of standard to the high school band any discussion thank you thank you thank you very much and with that broke off Carol yes Amy yes and the recommendation to approve the rainy day fund resolution do I have a motion to improve the rainy day fund resolution a discussion yeah the rainy day fund resolution is something that is um required that the school district have on how we are permitted to spend those funds um this has been brought up because as we enter or prepare to enter for collective bargaining season um we are the Brown County Education Association can ask for your ready day resolution um and to see what funds may be available for bargaining um I have scoured the basement of the central office um I have contacted the last three superintendents and we've been unable to locate any rainy day fund resolution therefore you have that resolution in front of you to approve this evening any further discussion or questions I I just know in my memory we did something uh some time ago but I I can't remember what year was probably the teens 2000 choices to 2010 or afterwards so but that roll call Carol yes Amy yes Vicky and Stephanie yes yes thank you I also have a recommendation to approve the resolution defining District boundaries District boundaries for School Board elections do I have a motion to uh a good resolution for defining District Governors for the School Board elections any discussion this resolution has come about because there have been a lot of questions coming from the election board from the clerk's office from community members wanting definitive clarification on where the school board yes so um we did not there there is a lot of unofficial um information in files from previous School Board elections um that say that we followed the boundaries for district one two and three but nothing was was ever approved or in any policy or in any um School Organization plan um and we can say that we follow County Commissioner Lyons even if they change their lines but Brown County schools had nothing on record saying that so this resolution defines that today and anything moving forward Brown County schools has defined their boundary lines to be the same as counting commissioner rights here and moving forward and one clarification on that voting district is not the same as where the kids are physically located which school particular school they get into because uh favorite because sometimes like up north are you saying that other kids that are in District One there aren't some kids in District Two that go to smyrnica or vice versa do you understand what I'm saying the dividing line between where kiddos live and where they actually go to versus it's not devoted yeah it's different yeah okay and at the end of the day it's school choice so there is there are no really hard lines of you live on this side then you have to go to start a car you can't go to helmsburg now some questions can come into play with Transportation but when they're that close we will find a yes forever and family and you can figure it out um so they can attend school that they would like to the the issue arose when someone I I got a copy of it from the clerk's office I don't know where it came from before then but it had the districts where the kids the elementary kids went to school and they took that as the board districts and it's not the same because we changed that depending on enrollment and so that changes but sticking with the districts with the Commissioners it outlines that up so yeah man I thought that one well now the district tests has a resolution it defines that so any other questions or discussion I guess the other clarification I had someone to make but is that you have to live in a district and and run in a district however everyone in the County votes for all of the districts so it's only about residency in it's not about vote and which which is more complicated for the clerk's office to be in precincts but in this case since everybody in the County votes for all districts it's really just about the residency of the person and that's just that's exactly the same as Commissioners right exactly so so everybody in the County votes regardless of what district you live in so I think that's a confusing thing for everybody to learn and to understand and we certainly try to educate folks on that but so I'm really glad to clarify it yeah and I'm glad that we had a situation this year where the commissioner districts because of other reasons changed but so long as we just are following whatever the commissioner districts are then we don't have to go back and we don't want to be in the position of doing that correct anything else Carol yes maybe yes Vicki yes Steve yes okay here I'm going to here is five zero next I have the recommendation to amend the start date of preschool paraprofessional Anna Dent from September 14th 2022 to September 7 2022.
i was there i was there for the four years when it changed from ron mcgreevey to to rob shaver the cross country so oh okay anyway yeah he's been doing it in a while yeah so congratulations to him too absolutely yeah it's awesome that he got to celebrate that any other questions great well uh welcome and we uh look forward to seeing you the rest of the year thank you thank you thank you and um i guess uh you can now kindly be dismissed or you can hang around and hear the rest of the exciting things that we do here so have a great evening be nice to have an audience it'd be great to have an audience um speaking of audience uh we're now at the audience portion of our agenda so uh if there's anyone uh in the uh out in the public would like to speak uh please come up to the podium and introduce yourself okay no one's here this evening um well maybe next time uh we'll uh we'll move on to our uh reports of standing committees uh and we'll go to the uh curriculum report um mrs hamm thanks mr grippo okay so we met on monday um and you have before you emotion well we do have before us emotion um that we'll have to have to act on let me just give you a quick overview if i could um we did under new business discuss um the flexibilities for implementing the connecticut guidelines for educator evaluation for the 2022-23 school year this is actually a um extension of a of our guidelines that have been in place for how many years this is our third year um i really i had thought that the the overview would be included with the notes um and maybe we could send them out to board members the packet that we got i meant the um total packet from the state department yeah and the supporting materials just so you all can read them um but generally um the the committee was favorable the flight um as ms solano explained the flexibilities include the option to conduct conduct more frequent informal observations as opposed to less frequent and formal observations and um you know they uh tend to be more organic less structured not they're certainly structured but less rigid in um in how teachers are evaluated in several different um phases so um it it seemed to make sense to continue with this and so the board or the committee um moved to move this to you all the board of education for approval um uh and we'll i'll come back to the um we'll come back to the motion at the end of the the minutes um for info informational items we simply we discussed um the curriculum and instruction uh summer updates and 120 teachers participated in professional development focused on embedding social emotional learning into academics provided by and many of the sessions were provided by the author and consultant mike anderson he's nationally recognized overall cps had over 200 teachers involved in developing and honing their craft and improving the curriculum during the summer months and then another highlight was the professional development planned and implemented by teachers related to high quality instruction which jeff had talked about in the um in the first meeting of the year so we also went on and reviewed the smarter balanced assessment results again i'm going to refer you to the meeting there's a lot of information there that is um probably a little bit uh more than um we can cover in this meeting there's a lot of analysis cross analysis and and it really was a fascinating discussion um clearly there are some areas where uh this mr hanlon and others are going to look at um in ways of um just trying to dissect what's what what number what the data show and um and as always as we do in cheshire seek for ways to improve um what we do and then we also dove into the sat results from last year um we did see an improvement over the previous year again um um dr gatt is looking into um into the numbers and and specifically with regard to the math but it well actually um evidence-based reading and writing as well and just looking for ways to improve scores and performance so again if i could just uh recommend that you guys go back if you haven't yet looked yeah just watch this section in particular of the of the meeting and then for the fun stuff uh we discussed um dr gad just shared information about a trip to walt disney world and universal studios and no they're not going to be rioting rides the whole time they are actually going into specific um almost like schools or classes um on some interesting things like the imaginarium and um what are some of the other well it's part of their history right looking at some of what the imagineers are doing and looking also at the history over time of how disney has impacted and influenced and what was happening at those points in history right right and it's talking to someone actually about the whole transportation system down there and maybe that would be another area for for someone who might be interested in urban transportation but anyway there that's for another day so anyway um that is that was um the essence of the meeting so um i do we do have a motion before us and that is um we move that the cheshire board of education adopt the flexibilities to fundamental plus you fundament uh flexibility to the fundamental requirements of the connecticut guidelines for educator evaluator 2017 for the 2022-23 school year do i have a second is there a second second andrew second any discussion i just had um two questions uh just remind me again are you in the seed model for the evaluation and then um i know tony would probably appreciate the correction on miss piragini motion on the second page and my last comment is really if the disney trip is structured the same way it was last year it's an amazing experience my daughter went to it being that it was 50th anniversary i think the students will benefit from this highly benefit from this and i think they tweaked the itinerary a little bit but overall the experience is phenomenal yeah thank you faith just curious when is the disney trip fall spring it's uh february 16 through the 22nd the kids 22nd of 2023 it um comes just before the um the break president's day weekend yeah and they will miss two days of school but it's educational it's worth it it is very educational and uh career oriented so i can't see why we would not that we have to approve it but i mean it's it we should be endorsing and supporting them oh wait yeah there we go i i i do have one question so how many years have you been doing at the disney trip or this may be more of a broad question in general like trips that ultimately lead to students ever sort of going down that path either in college or uh just working in general like going to work for disney or something like that do you generally speaking do you have you gotten feedback from students who have taken those field trips and then sort of gone down that path um you know i'm reflecting back on my time as principal there too um i i think you know maybe not always directly that you went to a disney trip and now you're working for them or you went to europe and now you're working there but i think part of our role is to broaden horizons and inspire and these trips certainly do that and you may not be working at disney but that experience may have you may inspire you to be doing something in a field requiring you know imagination or creativity and that's probably more the norm then i went on the trip now i'm going to work there sure no no i understand that completely and i appreciate that i did i had the opportunity to go to europe when i was in high school and uh it definitely had an impact on me later in life working abroad and stuff like that so yeah and it would it started with that high school trip thank you this is the second year of this particular trip okay so nobody's nobody's left to go to work at disney but uh but i appreciate what you're saying about film and anything in general just stuff like that yeah thank you okay so is there any more any more discussion on the motion on the floor um yeah i did have a question um so um in regards to this uh guidelines for evaluation teacher evaluation are these um acceptable pertaining to our existing contracts yes okay so was this was this pre-negotiated or is this how does this work so back in 2019-2020 the connecticut state department of education offered these flexibilities to districts and we have a committee made up of approximately 20 teachers administrators support special ed support teachers every walk of cheshire public schools certified staff and they had agreed to those previously so you may remember that it was brought to curriculum committee and then approved here back in 1920.
to have a motion to amend the start date of the preschool Fair professional power professionals and again uh from this week to last week it looks like a second yeah you two played it out any discussion well I'm glad she started earlier obviously food engineer and with that girl yes yes Steph Stephanie yes yes question carries five zero I had the recommendation to approve the 2022-2023 administrator handbook you have a motion to approve the 2223 administrator handbook any discussion this is just the opportunity for us the the main thing that we changed in here was it's a local decision on what the district defines a certified administrator versus a non-certified administrator so um we believe it is best to include everybody as an administrator and instead when we have separate categories for vacation time or certain benefits that we reference them as you know who works 260 days a year versus 20 30 days a year or a building level administrator whatever it may be and then it was an opportunity to just clean up this document and include in our practice to have administrator sign off on it each year any other questions yes Vicki yes Stephanie yes Steve yes 5-0 as a recommendation to approve the Brown County Schools evaluation and compensation plan for the school year 2022-2023 so I have a motion to accept the Brown County Schools evaluation Compensation Plan as presented for 22-23.
we brought the same information forward to you all in 2122 at that point in time the connecticut state department of education was convening a committee to look at revising the seed evaluation program we thought they might come out with it at the the spring last year but that did not happen so then they had offered for us for all districts to be able to use these flexibilities again this year so we definitely think it's um it's a good idea to do so it as faith pointed out it provides us a great deal of flexibility and authentic um authentic feedback and evaluation sort of loop but it does meet all of the contract parameters that's good to hear we'd have to we wouldn't want to run into any problems there um all right is there any other discussion on the motion okay um read it again yeah go ahead please okay the motion is uh moved that the cheshire board of education adopt the flexibilities to the fundamental requirements of the connecticut guidelines for educator evaluator 2017 for the 2022-23 school year um all in favor it is uh unanimous of those present fantastic that concludes my report thank you um now to me for the finance report and uh as always i happily uh hand it over to mr maciana i'll happily take it over for you mr gripper thank you good evening everyone the board members do have the finance report as of august 31st i will um just highlight a couple of things it's only the second month of the fiscal year and so not all the encumbrances for payroll and our transportation accounts have been entered yet but by september they will be so we'll have a better read on the budget there is no um specific variance concern that we have at this point in time but i did know in this month's report because i think it's important to let you know that our electricity supply rate which we've had locked in since 2018 is just under 8 cents per kilowatt and we've been working with a consultant since january to try and find a new contract to renew and the market just has not been favorable so when that supply rate runs out in december if we don't have another locked price we will find another option and the option always to go back to eversource is there so although we are not um giving up on trying to find a rate that's better than the market rates right now we've seen rates as high as 16 cents per kilowatt hour but we can get a rate somewhere around 12 to 14 cents that is a rate that's subject to change as opposed to the lock rate that we had since 2018.
I still moved second any discussion this appears that it personally bricks and those types of things yeah because we don't we still do not have the information back from niet on the no-cost extension for this year it was um unfair to expect teachers to continue into September not knowing what the evaluation process would look like for them so it is my recommendation to continue as they have in years past and not make changes to the plan the district can cover whatever nit will not extend to us from this year and then knowing that the teacher evaluation compensation committee will begin meeting to really determine what next year and future years will look like because it will most definitely look different about changing the Midstream right now so that's a different yeah any other questions I guess one other just piece I want to point out is that this is what we submit to the state and this is the effect of having effective ly I don't know how that process works so that but that's what the state money and then our niet Z so the teacher evaluation Compensation Plan is a required plan that we have to submit to the Department of Education there are certain parameters that every school district has to follow in their evaluation plan um so they review it they sign off on it and says yeah yes you meet all of these requirements um the tag or the teacher appreciation Grant which is the next thing on the agenda this is the where the Indiana Department of Education provides a state grant for teachers that earn highly effective or effective that is separate from niet compensation thank you your devices yes maybe yes Vicky yes Stephanie yes yes by zero and then I have the recommendation to prove the teacher appreciation grant for the school year 2022-2020 appreciation Grant scored 22 23.
so the important point um besides the fact that we're working to try and find a good solution and i don't think we would lock in for a very long period of time we would just try and lock in for an intermediate period of time you know a year or two at the most but the variance that we would expect after that rate lock expires if we see an increase of about 50 percent over the existing rate would cause a hundred thousand dollar variance to the budget just to give you some context you know certainly something that we would be able to offset by reducing our expenditures in other areas so it's not going to blow up the budget but we never like to see you know variances that large and the impact of inflation you know we know it's going to be there this year we're expecting it and the way that we manage to make sure that we're going to meet our budget is i the board members know that we put a expenditure cap on non-payroll expenditures so that's at 40 of the approved budget now we're going to leave that in place probably through december just to be on the safe side and then we'll continue to assess it as the year goes on and that's the end of the remarks if there are questions i will certainly be glad to take them um vin i i have a question um on the uh the second paragraph or the second bullet point about um covet expenditures you you break out the remaining grant balances and then you kind of talk about a potential seem like a fiscal cliff am i looking at that incorrectly or uh it says mitigate potential negative impact of concerns noted above oh no that wasn't sure what that meant that meant if we if covet spikes again and we have to expend money for health or safety which right now we are not expending any funds for that we would use this grant to cover that and what that the effect of that would be is that we would have less to spend for learning loss through the period of 2024.
I still move D and it's just further discussion so you did change the ratings on this um piece of it so um last year we followed a recommendation because niet's top rubric is a five-point scale while in the department of Indiana Department of Education on their rides or modified rubric it's really a four-point scale so we're trying to break percentages and ranges up between a five and a four and last year um we had a lot of teachers because of a small percentage amount change from highly effective down to an effective so the one change we did make this year was to take those numbers to match more on what the state level did on the four-point scale versus the five um and those teachers should see those ratings go back to their highly effective anything else welcome Carol yes maybe yes Vicky yes Stephanie yes and Steve yes thank you I have something I'm sorry what you're ready for consent agenda yeah okay I was reading okay consent agenda items I have the separation starting with helmsbury Elementary School preschool teacher 84-year effective September 5th 2022 through the appointment of Brown County Schools bus driver Sarah McCarty 96 per day 180 days per school year full-time with Benefits this is a replacement for casting shipping with um the appointment uh the bus drivers Sarah McCarty at 96 today for 180 uh days for the school year good benefits so moved second I'll second any discussion I'm just I'm sad about a couple of these people good folks also we need to do that so it's really sad I work with understandable goes on Carol yes yes report yeah tonight I will keep it short I want to thank um everybody who came out last Saturday and helped make our Eagle classic um our largest event that we do here at Brown County Schools it was an incredible success we had over 1900 athletes come to to run our cross-country course um 68 teams um we were there at 6 00 a.m and um it's just really an absolutely incredible event that this little school district puts on it is heartwarming to see the amount of staff and parents and community members that come out and volunteer for that um truly is an example of a small school relationships that the lifelong impact so thank everybody for the success big Sports caramel yes here um they're across country it's incredible so yeah it's a big deal um this week has been homecoming week um tomorrow night is our homecoming football game we play West um Vigo County uh tomorrow there will be a pep session in the high school and then after school I believe starting at four we have the block party that will be out in the parking lot um so excited for that event this year to be even there last year I believe that each of our schools including the Elementary's all have some have some cited for that and for our kids to be able to have fun tomorrow night at the game and then lastly I am just so incredibly impressed our middle school students had to spend a week at Happy Hollow and although they you know they're they're arriving at school and going home before the end of the school day they're not spending the night or anything um but but I do think that um truly believe that the administrators worked really hard to find the yes so our kids could go out there and um do some team building and um kinds of things from archery to to the zap line to the rock wall to um the Nature Center um it was just really neat to see those kids today I only got to go this afternoon um but I saw so much in such a short amount of time with kiddos that have had a pretty tough last three years with the pandemic and um what school really looks like and it was just really neat to see something not traditional Edition um well I think it was Monday Tuesday so sixth graders and seventh graders got two days eighth graders go tomorrow so eighth graders only got only gonna get one day um I asked the question today to disrespect um like how many kiddos opted out what families talked about and things I know that it really well yeah yeah do it again next year it really was an experience again I think Debbie I think um Gavin Steele um he had the vision for this early on um and I'm sure it will evolve into something and figure it better um as years go by but it really wasn't a really great thing for our kids yeah I've got a weird question but especially with special kids out there or yeah yes even if discipline learn issue involved everyone that wanted to go with so yeah just thankful for the team um for doing that for kids so that's all I have today yeah I need a motion to accept the claims as presented I so hope any discussion to adjourn one second okay uh any discussion follow us in favor say aye aye motion carries thank you everybody used to take
so that's a backstop if we need it for health and safety it's not to say there's a fiscal cliff at all okay so you're saying that if covid remains status quo right um then the the remaining balances that you're showing here would be used for learning loss and you wouldn't be potentially you wouldn't be giving them back uh you would be using them for other qualifying expenses marlene vows that she will not give any of that money back but right you know just to but it would be for expenses that are um health and safety for reoccurring expenses i guess right so it wouldn't be we're not using this to supplement uh something other than the additional i guess uh like the training you said that you were you know you're doing or um or the health and safety expenditures but and if like if this money went away it would just it wouldn't impact our normal you know budget yeah we wouldn't have to cut anything tomorrow right okay this money ran out this money we really focused on as you said supplanting our professional development experiences right or not some planting excuse me supplementing our professional development experiences and um has been kind of alluded to marlene is definitely all over that gotcha the point i was trying to make is that we wouldn't use our operating budget as a backstop if we had a spike but then we had to put up tents and do the intraday cleaning that we had to do the last two years we would use the esser funds so i just wanted to you know give the board a sense that if that happens we still have another place to go outside of the operating budget okay great um uh andrew go ahead how long do we have to spend that money well the there's two pockets the or two we have until september of 2023 and i reported here we had a 63 000 remaining balance there uh it's down a little bit lower now we we did an update last earlier this week it's about half of that so that's good till september of 23 but we will exhaust that before the year is out and then the rpes are funding which the grant was 898 000.
we have 775 000 and and that's still intact um that's good through september of 2024 but we will be spending some of that 777 or 775 000 down this year but maybe half as my is the estimate so we'll have a cushion for case yes something happens okay thank you thank you adam uh so about the energy prices you were talking about before i was just calculating it um using the numbers you said so it was eight cents for the supply not for the delivery just supply okay so are we buying about two and a half million kilowatt hours per year give or take um maybe a little bit less than that okay yes is it does that have we also generate i think a million or a million a half kilowatt hours over at the over the park over the next the dog park at the landfill is that offsetting this is that banked into that two and a half million or that's above and above and beyond yeah this is just our budget for electricity and we do not get any benefit from that oh we don't that contract no oh all the 10 buildings it all goes to town buildings everything everything yeah that's not that's not factored into any of the schools operating budget because that wasn't the way it was that wasn't the way it was set up like 10 years ago when it happened i don't think but that's okay i'll yeah i'll look at that thank you okay supply i mean our supply is coming right now strictly from constellation energy that's who the price lock is with so when that expires we need to replace that you know with eversource or whatever other supplier there are some um you know market variable based pricing outside of eversource that we're looking at but it's getting expensive i was like i think it's like i think for a house it's it's probably around 25 cents per kilowatt hour delivered right now using the eversource standard rate which is lower than any of the competitive suppliers right now yeah it's it's crazy it is well we hope it gets better yeah thank you you're welcome so vin that was so this is just um supply what is going on with delivery delivery act costs actually have dropped a little bit but roughly half of our cost is supply and half is delivery okay um all right so big bugaboo mine because we did not do anything with instructional expenses in our budget this year um they held it zero and now where can you give me uh an oh just explain to me what a 40 cap on non payroll expenditures will do particularly in the area of instructional expenses and what are we jeopardizing if anything well the 40 cap is doesn't mean that that's where it's going to stay for the full year we certainly hope not right so the purpose of the cap is just to make sure if something really goes above budget that we have a sufficient cushion um and what it really forces us to do whether you know our ultimate expenditure is 70 or 80 or 90 is it forces a prioritization of what we need to do so i'm looking at marlene because you know we certainly try and balance and make sure that we're not depriving students of the things that they need in the classroom whether it's instructional supplies or textbooks or other materials that they need to run the schools you know does it have an impact yes but we try and and minimize that to the extent we can and if there are positive variances in other categories that are non-educationally related um you know we would certainly make sure if there's a priority on the educational instructional expense side we would you know send the money and use it in those categories so that's the best answer i could give you uh right now miss ham we um let's hope that the year you know runs better than you know we think it might at this point in time hey um okay you'd go for it no i'll i'll just add that in these days since we started school my first question to every teacher is do you have everything you need what do you need is there anything we can get you do you have enough resources and people say i'm good so if they don't they know they're calling kevin they're calling me they're calling a principal and they're letting us know if there's something they need but we're not oh yeah we did um we've been doing some reading and in a book it's um about thinking thinking classrooms and it's particularly focused in mathematics but there was research that indicated that when you're using an erasable surface that groups are more likely to in a quicker amount of time get information down on that erasable surface and they've found that when you take that erasable surface like a white board so kids have small white boards and you put it vertically that it increases both the volume and the amount and lessens the amount of time that those ideas come out something about the fact that it's not permanent and can be erased and so we just purchased a box of these um dry erase sheets for everyone every single teacher every single classroom in grades one through six and the t was something that the teachers asked if they could have when we were having pd our pd day in august and they're great because you could stick them up anywhere so kids can work in groups so everyone i think was really excited and happy to receive those it's an example you know in in part the point being that if there's a real instructional priority we're gonna make that happen um and it takes some juggling but there are so many pieces and all the you know the whole budget that you know it means you might take a little away from something here but we it's been said we're prioritizing throughout and certainly don't want a short change uh our priority is always what happens in that instructional core what happens in the classroom so uh and just to be clear when i say prioritize it it really is you know the principals and and marlene that are doing the prioritization if if it's approved by them and i see all purchase requisitions i have to approve them all i did see that one for the white board sheets and i said okay because it's not my job to you know as long as people are within the parameters of their budget they you know our staff is really really good about prioritizing and and that's what they need to do and they do it every year and they do it amazingly well so i don't think we're going to hurt students certainly at this point in time i'm not concerned about that you're welcome um can i i guess can i just ask i guess an anecdotal question about instructional expense more about supplies i suppose um as my uh my son is now older right and uh maybe the parents with older students could maybe just knock me down from completely wrong but i noticed that the supply list for the schools uh for uh my son's classes this year were a lot more extensive than they were in the past and i just wanted to make sure it was because of his grade level and not because maybe we're passing on some sort of expense to the to the parents this year where all of a sudden the the supply list was a lot more i just was maybe as they get older they're expensive expected to buy more stuff which is fine but i just wanted to make sure we weren't passing along something that we normally would have been buying for the students no that that's not that certainly is not the intention i think what happens as kids get older is they want their own type of notebooks they want their own color folders they really want to personalize it so we have some generic you know supplies for them at school but most of them want to go and shop for their own things and color code things and have their own highlighters pencils etc but do we have all of that here at school and can give that to students who want need it absolutely thank you so much for the graphing calculator yesterday no just a regular calculator this year tim go ahead yeah so you mentioned electricity before but more broadly with any of the with anything that we're buying whether it's uh energy oil natural gas food instructional supplies is there anything that we uh can lock into or you've decided to not lock into a rate for the upcoming year for whatever reason i mean are we hedging our bets on that i just see these numbers keep going up these are inflation so i just figured i would ask about that yeah we i mean the big commodities oil heating oil diesel fuel gas we look at those you know i have cnbc running in my office and i'm constantly looking you know at what's the price of a barrel of oil the market has not been favorable to lock in any of those commodities right now so those were running pretty much whatever the market price is we're going to pay if i can lock in if you know i mean i think oil was trading around 84 a barrel today so it did come down you know almost 10 bucks over the last you know 10 days but the futures prices are just not that good yet so we're going to keep looking we constantly shop i know that um you know it costs a copy paper as an example which we do buy a lot of every year you know that's been used to be 25 a case went to over 40 dollars a case but yesterday um heather santi who's our operations supervisor you know we have an amazon rep now who um said that we can get copy paper for about 30 per case with this you know new preferred account that we're eligible for so those types of things are just kind of in the ordinary course of what we try and do so if we can take advantage of you know savings like that we always do it sure okay all right yeah i i don't mean to second guess john oil prices i have no idea it's all kind of where it's going but we try and manage the budget you know within what we have and then you know we do try and save dollars where we can yeah okay thank you any other questions okay we'll move on to our our next uh most favorite report would be medical benefits yeah so i got a call just before we came to this meeting from dr solon because i issued the august 31st report so ms jaczanski did include it in the linked agenda but every the board members have a cup okay so i'm going to look at the august report because that gives us july and august and there's a couple of things that i do want to draw your attention to one is that you know our claims for july were 1.1 million and our claims for august were 1.4 million however the august claim does include an extra week um we have a million dollars per month was the expected claim amount that's what's budgeted that's what we have available if you look the first two months of the year we're averaging about 1.278 million so it's higher than than expected and higher than budget however that august does include an extra week and even if you know we were to subtract that we're still running at about 1.1 million in claims per month kind of the good news in this in that if you look at the net change in our beginning uh reserve balance we started the year 1.335 million you know based on the first two months of claims but also considering the adjustments that were made our reserve balance only dropped by ninety one thousand two seventy five so we're at one point two four million dollars as the current reserve balance at a million dollars of claims expected per month that's 1.2 4 months of expected claims so it is early in the year the claims are a bit higher than expected but as the year progresses you know we'll continue to watch this i'm not particularly um concerned about the trend yet we'll have to keep watching it and we'll see how the how the year goes but the good news is that we did increase the budget to a million dollars a month we needed to do that glad we did so our reserve balances is healthy enough that we should be able to sustain the year and the goal if the board members remember is we budgeted enough to cover expected claims and we didn't expect to grow our reserve balance so as long as our claims average a million dollars per month including the stop-loss reimbursements we'll end the year about where we started that's the update um so i just wanted to maybe refresh my memory i've definitely have forgotten how is july a net positive if you look up at the additions on in the section above we had contributions of 2 million five thousand so those contributions come from our operating budget no stop loss reimbursements yet prescription rebates received with two thousand three hundred thirty dollars but that four hundred fifty eight thousand oh eighty 085 those are adjustments when you look at this report you what goes on in the background is there is accounting that takes place there's accruals and offsets so that 458 000 was carried in from last year as an adjustment so that's why we our fund balance went up three hundred twenty thousand dollars in july that's a nice adjustment it is but it's not magic and it isn't um rebates or claims it was just money that was you know the expense last year that needed to be returned to this fiscal year or this claims year so you know there's there's um more coming as we go through the year if claims are high on an individual basis we'll see that stop-loss reimbursement which we expect it to be about five hundred thousand dollars for the year so that'll help buoy the balance so so what do you mean by it was charged last year but given back to us this year what is we were overcharged or what no it was it's it's all the internal accounting that happens in the town it has nothing to do with cigna oh as to the back and forth they they accrue they expense and then a crew forward so it's it's accounting that takes place and i couldn't give you the details donna from the town's finance department is the one that's responsible for those entries but we have to align you know the claims you know with the year in which they occurred so there are accruals that do take place within the accounting for so it's like things that occurred but we're paid oh gotcha thank you tim thank you adam thanks man is there anything going on this year with in terms of cigna and wellness for employees anything different this year that hasn't happened in past years um the only thing that's different and we talked about it when the instructional assistant contract was approved that there is a wellness incentive that now is offered to that group that if they complete three key components which is um they have to go for biometric screening they have to have at least one well visit you know with the doctor and they complete the cigna's online health assessment report they get a reduction in their co-share that they pay to purchase their insurance so you know from a long-term perspective the goal of that is to increase the early detection improve health and wellness so we hope that there'll be a resulting improvement in claims we probably could never measure it but it is the right thing to do and it's the smart thing to do you know beyond that there are a number of health and wellness measures that cigna does on their own you know directly to you know our employees and then we have a whole health and wellness initiative that um i you know i can present at one of the future board meetings we rolled it out uh at convocation this year to all our employees uh it's called the road map to wellness you know that runs for this whole program year and it includes everything from you know having a consultation with the health coach that cigna provides as part of our deal to participating in our walking and other challenges that we do throughout the year thank you you're welcome um so i understand how we went um you know how we came out positive in in july bottom line though is that for two months now in as i recall when we were talking about this don't they they have to meet their deductibles is the logic as i recall was they have to meet their deductibles early so our our rates should have been we're going to see our lowest claims now no because the hsa plan year runs january to december so deductibles reset july excuse me they reset january okay okay so we're really we're coming off the summer months but we're still running hundreds of thousands of dollars in claims over our reserve and that is what concerns me you know we can find rebates and we can have and i'm not going to call them gimmicks they're not gimmicks but they're gifts and those gifts may not continue to appear and i look at that um now we're down to 1.24 and and i have mentioned this to jeff the last meeting my concern is that this is really systemic and and a wellness program isn't going to fix it and i don't understand when we are not going when we will start going to the providers and i mean the hospitals and perhaps even the hospitals in particular asking for cost data because something's going on here and we can't get a handle on it and i i don't know how to stop it and and sorry i guess i'm kind of venting but do we know how much a procedure costs at a hospital or in an emergency room or or what yale looks like vis-a-vis hartford it's just so frustrating that we get hit every month with this i'm not sure which part of that i can address i mean yeah let's unpack it yeah so the providers i mean there's the pro the rates that are the rates that are paid to a provider for any given procedure whether it's a doctor's visit or surgery those are negotiated in advance in our case by cigna so you know that i guess the answer to your question is yes we know what the rates are you know part of the issue is that our employees and their dependents are getting a lot of medical services and i know that we talked in the past about you know what's been happening the last couple of years specifically that's been driving up our claims is these claims that are above the 25 000 threshold you know that don't hit the 175 000 stop loss cap that we cover all those claims and then those that are over 175 we do get stop-loss reimbursement i know it's a frustrating it is frustrating and um i just you know there's nothing like transparency and there have been places where they have actually where um they've gone in and hospitals have revealed their comparative data and wild variations um so which one's right which one's wrong but but i we have we schools collectively and the state government through medicaid have a lot of buying power and i i just wish we would all come together perhaps and maybe we can through our associations do that but start demanding that they reveal some of this to us because right now we're carrying it and as dr solin pointed out these hospitals just racked up how much 1.48 billion in profit 2021.
yeah connecticut hospital 1.48 billion in 2021. so i i just so i there i i've said my peace thank you so so faith i i can appreciate your frustration i know we talked the last time we were just talking about in the parking lot me and you um and i'm not going to be able to articulate this well the details what i guess the numbers that get baked into the rates but my question is jeff irvin have cabe or caps or ccm maybe the state the state would probably be more inherently more political in making anything happen state department of education if any of any of those organizations looked at anything like this what faith is talking about because i think she's probably explained this to you in more detail offline yeah i'm not aware of any particular entity that has addressed it in the fashion that faith is is outlining then i don't know if you know casbo or anybody like that has i mean i know that insurance costs are always a topic conversation among superintendents and business officials around connecticut but you know i think what faith is suggesting is a much more substantial evaluation i would imagine headlines like that trigger some people to say you know how do hospitals in connecticut turn a one and a half billion dollar profit in a year like uh that's a pretty substantial number so yeah is it is it something you either you'd be willing to just bring up to your your your organizations when you're talking to him i mean it could be worthwhile for him i mean i guess i don't think the two of you are going to have the the the bandwidth through your teams are going to have the bandwidth to do what faith had sort of explained to me well there's there's a couple of things that what a hospital negotiates with cigna or you know anthem for a particular procedure no we don't have any direct control over that but i will tell you a couple of things that you know we we do look at you know we did a review last year to make sure that all the claims that were processed were in fact employees of the cheshire public schools so we obtained a report from cigna we went through it you know line by line as a benefit specialist did this and there were no claims that weren't part of you know our employees or their dependents ct prime the board knows we are one of the municipal members of ct prime which provides our stop-loss insurance one of the the initiatives that we have going on right now is a claims audit not just for cheshire but for all the participating members so there's samples that are being pulled of our individual claims at cheshire and a third-party firm has been hired to do a claims review and the purpose of that review is to take the claim that was submitted and paid and validate that it was paid in accordance with the with the parameters of our plan so you know and we've done that in the past you know we we've paid a consultant or we've paid a broker to do that um so this is actually ongoing you know it's it's going on right now so we should have the results of that review in a couple of months the the we net won't necessarily get any money back from that claims audit but it will identify you know if there's a trend of cigna or anthem which are the two providers of the ct prime participants if there's any trends within that data that indicate that something isn't being processed correctly you know we'll be able to address that kind of at a broader level but i will report those results when we receive them faith cut me off here and i can just shut up at any moment but what i what i thought our discussion was was saying it wasn't so much saying joe smith is a is a participant in the public public schools plan and joe smith can incur costs uh and it wasn't saying well we paid a hundred dollar rate because that's a negotiated rate what i thought you were saying faith to me was some hospitals charge a hundred dollars and some hospitals charge ten dollars and why are some of them charging ten dollars instead of a hundred 100 so it's like what you're what i'm hearing you say wouldn't really get to the point that she's making which i frankly i think is probably too big for the cheshire public schools to take on and that's the only reason that i mentioned some of the larger organizations where it might behoove them to do this on behalf of their members if they have the bandwidth and i think like ccm this is very much something that ccm would look at i'm not sure about cave or caps or anything but anyway just mention it and i'm done any other questions for ben to face point i do you know understand your frustration and share i think this has to be elevated to the level of our own legislature and basically the public health committee and the insurance committee somehow too to kind of bring that data forward to all of us so um i'm going to make a phone call but i think each one of us can do the same as well too to see if we can push the envelope a little bit because it is frustrating i completely see the numbers it's outrageous you know even on a personal level too and the fact that we make a profit off of you know sick individuals it's just that's all my my comment is okay um i believe that will conclude the uh finance committee report um so moving on mr martell thank you it's always always hard to follow the medical benefits report but i'll um try to do my best so we had a uh rather robust meeting i'd say on back on monday um september the 12th over at the hummiston school with the planning committee adam grippo joined us as well um really kind of planning for the future which is kind of what planning committee does so key items on the agenda where we were discussing space needs and not there's not an immediate need we went over the current enrollment based on the projection and then where we are as of today at the beginning of the school year essentially to look at hiring a design professional in order to assess our various elementary schools for possible editions of trailers if and when they are needed as enrollment trends continue to go upward um i do want to say that from if i think you can say that we're in we're in an okay place right now but we do have to plan for the future these things do take time so getting a planning firm to come in now take a look at our various properties and where we could site trailers based on utilities and connections to sanitary sewer and whatnot is an important first step in that plan anything that's pretty much pretty good summarization of that okay yes um i don't have the meeting minutes in front of me so i'm just trying to do my best from from up here um we talked about the rfq it was an rfq issue to look at our various school fields um district-wide um community i think understands that bartlett park will be going under major renovation being beginning in the spring so we're gonna lose a softball and baseball field there so where we as a district can help out with space needs on the town side so all of our as as you would say kiddos have a place to play um so unfortunately the rfq was issued and wasn't really favorable in the responses that we received we only received one that really wasn't going to be what we were looking for so vin has been tasked to come back with us with some further refinement of that hopefully being able to get some additional numbers um along with that so the goal is to figure out where best we can help out with space needs um with our at our facilities um our then we went into looking at transportation the deco transportation contract expires in june 30th of 2024.
um so looking at future with bus transportation services about bidding that contract or not buying that contract now that's all going to work um there is the bus facility over on sandbank sandbank road standby sandbag thanks um so there's gonna be a conveyance of that property from the state to the town of cheshire um so that's gonna be about 3.8 acre about a four acre site um so we talked a lot about that and then also there's a federal mandate coming in where buses need to be converted to electric buses by 2034 i believe 2040 or 20 by 2040 the bus fleet has to be zero emission which means electric right now by 2035 we need to be operating alternative fuel buses which could be it could include propane and electric as examples so there is a long-term requirement that we go to zero emissions and so you know planning for that was the goal of the discussion yeah and it's we're lucky in the sense that we have this we have the acreage in order to be able to accommodate this whether we need charging stations or if we need above-ground tanks for storage of alternate fuel sources from there we agreed to have a representative from daco come to our next meeting to discuss alternate fuel buses and what their thoughts are on that because it's going to take time to replace the fleet and so we need to start looking at that because that's going to be coming sooner rather than later as buses have a 10-year life i learned at that meeting i think that was pretty much it we we we did talk a little bit about solar installation at the schools we're looking to get some numbers back on that to see if we are it makes more sense between the cost the actual installation and the power generation i think that pretty much summarizes if anybody else wants to add anything from that meeting any update i will add that um daco uh don davil the president of dako confirmed that he can attend on october 19th at 7 00 pm so i did send a tentative calendar invite so we'll be able to lock that in and i'm working on the rfp which was the agreement to draft an rfp to try and find a design firm to help plan for potential installation of portable classrooms or any other options that might be that we don't can't identify to allow for space highland do little the likely candidates that might exceed their capacity before new schools are built assuming they're approved those are the updates i have since the meeting okay thank you i would just add one quick thing uh update as well on the planning side i just want to thank vin for kind of taking the lead with the rfq on the field updates the field management outside of cheshire high school hasn't historically been the purview of the cheshire public schools we don't use athletic fields during the course of our business at the elementary schools for anything but we're working collaboratively with the town and parks and rec and really want to thank public works for you know getting out there today and sean uh kimball and your support and been working collaboratively today the fields are being updated at uh doolittle and that should follow either tomorrow and or monday at highland as well so we're kind of creating a little bit more space there's still fall season where kids are playing and so i'm really appreciative that we have that close-knit relationship to be able to solve these problems and and support kids in cheshire even if it's not theirs or our issue we work together and and for the benefit of the kids yeah in the community that concludes my report thank you i'm actually i did have a quick question um actually well i guess for then perhaps um so uh we're gonna have uh datco come and i i guess make a presentation on the i guess the future of bus buses or bus fuel or that sort of thing um is because their contract expires in 2024 should we start should we consider an rf um pq no i don't know no not our fp our rfi um for uh to see what other companies are what other solutions there might be or is is it is that something like that to premature at this point there's so much information that's available out there i you know my thought was if we start with um dac kevin de vivo who's the vice president um his dad don de vivo is president he has a lot of experience a lot of information to share about their experience with propane initial experience with electric vehicles incentives so i think that's a good information source for us today actually i was on a it was a google meet with several several people propane the um and i know that you know that tim knows paul wessel from the greater new haven collation of cities i think it is clean cities green cities to talk about what the alternatives are and this the specific highlight today was propane fueled buses and the experience there you know certainly moving from diesel to propane you know from a cost point of view probably would be advantageous right now if we could do it certainly a cleaner burning fuel but you know my thought was if we meet with uh daco and then the next group that we can meet with as part of the planning committee would be this coalition that i had a google meet with at least everybody on the planning committee can start getting a little bit more information about what the options are and then we could determine from there do we want to bring others in or do we want to you know issue an rfp or rfi but there is no lack of information i think you know kind of my understanding you know based on on you know some of the due diligence due diligence i've been doing is that you know propane fueled vehicles they're used regularly across the state of connecticut and across the country they've become reliable their maintenance is easy the cost you know versus diesel or gas well established electric vehicles a little bit more futuristic you know the incentives are not quite there although i i think they will be you know the updating the electrical grid will take some time so you know i think the move to ev is going to take longer but propane is available now so that might be an intermediate move a lot of information that we need to digest before we can make any decisions but you know as we said you know we're about two years ahead of the contract expiration with dacco which i think will give us sufficient time to look at what the options are before we have to go to bid thank you tim uh just adding to what andrew had said just to um i'm not sure if you said it exactly this way but with the state law being 2035 for our alternative fuels and 20 40 for electric or whatever no no fossil fuels no fossil fuel involvement just keep in mind the 2035 deadline if you assume and we have about a 10-year turnover that means we if we if we do this if we build this right into our standard rotation of vehicles that means we're starting this in probably 2025 2026 something like that so it's really not that far off for us to begin this transition and that would start with the contract that presumably will start july 1st 2024 less than two years from now um so that's a state law that is driving us in part and one other side note i was recently reading an article about a study that was done that said uh there is it's it's pretty conclusive that 2.5 particulate matter the 2.5 is the size in particular matter comes out of fossil fuels i think like oil and diesel i'm pretty sure is what it comes from particular particulate matter has a clear increase in likelihood of leading to cancer in people just from the air that we breathe so if you smoke cigarettes it gets right into your lungs but any of this stuff when you're in uh when you're in areas with you know high pollution you're right on route 10 you're going to be getting this stuff you're going to be breathing it and it's not that everybody gets cancer from it but it increases it clearly increases the likelihood of it the particulate matter and i'm pretty sure that propane doesn't have that i don't think i don't think natural gas ch4 or propane ch3 have particulate matter in them it's the other ones um if that's correct then i think even just moving over to the propane with propane would be a great step although i would like to just get over to say solar build the solar arrays lock in those prices and be done with the inflation so anyway just another reason why i would like to get away from the diesel buses as soon as possible thank you how many buses come out of service every year i i don't know that there's a set number um you know generally when they hit that 10-year mark they're replaced by that goal that's okay and so it's not at our cost but they did provide 18 new buses over the last two years you know in our fleet so you know the fleet our fleet is kind of new compared to how it used to be all diesel on the large type one bus is a type two or mix uh mostly gas powered as opposed to diesel so we would have to um say we start changing over to alternative fuels to meet the 2035 let's say we started next year to meet the 2035 deadline and then say by 2030 we would probably be having to look at electric buses to hit the 20 40.
instead i mean just for planning purposes i think that there's a transition period that you know we have the luxury of taking advantage of and planning for but there's a lot of considerations you know as andrew mentioned we've got we've got point eight six acres of additional land at the bus depot that could be developed well let's plan for what we're going to put on it you know we first looked at it as needing additional parking and a better driveway but if we know we're moving to propane well we have to allow for a propane tank if we know we're moving to electric vehicles we need to provide for electric charging stations so you know i think we're at a good place right now that we're planning for the future but a lot a lot to be considered i think was the outcome of the discussion andrew as you said before you had concluded your report [Laughter] from what i can tell is no other standing committees uh policy had to postpone their meeting so they will be meeting i believe in a few weeks um so we will move on to the approval of minutes um [Music] is there there's an emotion on our agenda would anyone like to make that motion mr martelly moved to the board of education approved the minutes from meetings held on august 11th august 17th and september 1st 2022 is there a second mr rosenberg thank you uh there any uh changes or amendments to the minutes seeing none all in favor okay unanimous and all right thank you uh correspondence okay since our um secretary is uh oh thank you uh we received uh one correspondence i guess i'm uh i'm doing the duty of all officers this evening [Laughter] uh we received our correspondence from our old friend mr john bester um and he writes and um uh to the members of the board of education welcome back to the new school year i know you have much to deal with as the year gets underway and i appreciate the efforts you all put into this undertaking i watched the youtube video of monday's curriculum committee meeting and was particularly concerned about reported student weaknesses in the um as i have stumbled across reading out loud weaknesses in the acquisition of reading skills i want to remind you that i continue to have great grave concerns relative to digital literacy versus traditional reading of hard copy materials it's not just student ability to accurately decode written passages but more importantly their ability to comprehend meeting develop empathy and glean truth from untruth in my opinion these skills skill deficits have grown into a significant problem confronting our society it is not enough to skim scan and search for knowledge and call it reading i've addressed the board with these concerns before but feel that my concerns have been met with polite indifference and see no effort to pursue the active and growing consideration of research into this controversy with that said i would like to once again refer to the important research on reading which continues to indicate that students comprehend what they read more deeply and efficiently when reading print materials two links were provided in the email which will be in the public record although students may welcome digital literacy opportunities some students recognize that they are more efficient readers when reading printed materials however many do not i can only hope that these research findings will be considered in future instructional planning and begin to inform the curriculum committee's decision making as it reviews and adopts future textbooks textbook purchases reflects respectfully um submitted john jackbester and that concludes the uh correspondence section yeah go ahead so my daughter's a sophomore and i know she has a hard copy textbook for all of her classes she has multiple paper books that she's reading i mean is this what is he referring to here first of all um there's no digital textbooks as far as i know all of our textbooks whenever we order them sometimes there is a online platform where kids can enter homework they can watch videos there's a component of that for the last few years anytime we've ordered one of these platforms we've always made sure that there's a hard copy book available students are always given the choice of what they want but i i will also say that last year on the curriculum committee we even took it a step further and we had three nights available just for folks to hear what kids are reading in elementary middle school and high school and all of those were about everything that's in hard copy we're not having kids listen to audio books or having them read books in digital print we have everything available in hard copy in our classroom libraries and our school libraries so i would say what your daughter is experiencing is is pretty typical so it's not like you know it's a one for one so it's not like everyone's getting a chromebook and then all the textbooks are available there and there's no because i mean i just covered two hardcopy books with a paper bag the other day which was you know it's kind of a disaster but um all right it's just making sure thank you and mr mr bester's points are very well taken and i i do not disagree with the information that he's shared with us over the years i think we are thinking similarly on that thank you if you could um elaborate that on a little a little bit further i think some of his his particular concerns are um with the introduction of chromebooks at such early ages in the elementary level um especially so um [Music] could you just speak to that sure prior to the pandemic we did not have chromebooks available for every student in the elementary school we only had chromebook cart with a class set that was used as the teacher deemed appropriate typically that was about learning keyboarding skills to write papers to to write excerpts of things so that that could be shared again since the pandemic every student now has a chromebook they're kept in the classroom at some of the upper grades that students are able to take them home as needed again mostly it's for writing you know not that we require every student to write this way on a device they can also do it it's very important at the younger grades for kids to be able to form their letters and practice it's really about seeing it feeling it writing it understanding it there are lots of videos and websites and things like that that are a part of um the experience that that there's information out there that kids can gather so if they're doing something in science they might watch um a video that has to do with an experiment so it's used in that way no longer are you watching the film strip up on you know the screen or the transparency you you have your own personal device to be able to watch some of those things yeah yeah and i'll just add for people watching him my kids are in first and third grade and they have not come home with any uh electronic devices they do come home with books and they're reading out of their books at night well my son in first grade it's more of a collaborative effort third graders reading on her own um i haven't i haven't asked them about what they're using in school are they so they they do use them in school i'm just down to first grade do they use the electronics in school or maybe not in first grade i wouldn't think this early in the year they would really be doing that but i'm not saying it a first grade teacher hasn't you know taken them out and shown that shown the kids how how to use them but he knows already he uses it at home so call me a bad dad but um uh yeah and then also we just had open house uh at norton on tuesday night uh which was part of the problem with having a policy committee meeting open house for norton was pretty important i had two kids demanding i go and i wanted to um but i got handwritten notes from each room on their desks so yeah absolutely adorable and really cute and i loved it uh but there my first grader in particular is he's learning to write um so anyway just wanted to add that thank you thank you okay i'll move on to the most anticipated uh portion of the evening the superintendent's report i know that you'll find this somewhat deflating but i'm gonna keep this really brief and uh save my energy for the next two yeah you promised me right uh anyway the two items i had were uh school modernization and quick update on kovit as much as i hate to say it but uh school modernization uh many residents by now should have received a postcard that we sent in the mail it's an informative piece that was reviewed by our attorney uh because we aren't able to advocate but we have a responsibility to educate and so that um postcard has has gone out if you haven't seen it yet you know look for it in your mailbox uh coming soon to a mailbox near you the other item um you know related to this we uh just issued through the our membership in the chamber uh flyer is pretty much the postcard in a different format that goes out to all the businesses in town so that people can go to our website and see the tax implications they can see more information if they choose again we think it's just important to be informed in this very important decision the town will be making on november eighth uh the school modernization component or excuse me the covid component we track we've changed a little bit the uh dashboard that we used to have on the website formerly had the number of cases that were out students that were out that specific day we decided to shift it a little bit to see the number of new cases per day in a specific building for students and or staff so if you go to our new website there under parent information there's a covid link and you can get go to the dashboard there what we've seen is this week a little bit of a pickup at cheshire high school in terms of positivity the numbers are a little higher there where we had eight cases over the last weekend and into monday four on tuesday three on wednesday three on thursday uh granted there were about 1400 kids in that building and they're very uh active with each other you know they're they're or with the community it holds so that they're exposed to a lot more people but um still very manageable numbers so that you know brings a smile to my face i mean there are darcy's had no student cases this week chapman dodd had one so it means very small numbers really um staff cases again you know kind of reflective of the student case situation is really pretty low um so as such you know we haven't changed any of our protocols or anything like that when it's been a really positive start to the year in that way so that's it in terms of that report because like i said i've got a little bit more excitement in the next two areas you mean the uh next section of the agenda is that you're gonna save it okay gotcha gotcha okay are there any questions uh for the superintendent uh tim cook thanks senator yeah uh so jeff my concern with with regard to kova my concern is the same as it was really two and a half years ago uh just because you get coveted doesn't mean that you're symptomatic have they been serious cases any of them that you're aware of which are aware this year yeah um not my i mean nobody hospitalized um you know if you ask my wife if i get a cold that's a serious case if she gets a man but um the other you know generally speaking it's not like people are being hospitalized or anything like that i think one of the challenges i just did an interview today with a news outlet that um you know the chant one of the challenges here is the wild variability in the way that people respond to some of these things and um it's important obviously to do our best to protect everybody um but you know feel real good about the way things are going and the way things are trending and okay thank you sure um okay uh we'll move on to old business um which was uh the affirmation of the strategic plan um at our last business meeting which was a few weeks ago if i recall or was that a couple weeks technically yeah i guess that was a business meeting right um we uh we were presented with the strategic plan i'm hoping that we all had to take uh had a chance to take a look at it um i guess so what i'll do is i will um start by just uh we'll we'll get the motion on the floor and we can do a discussion after that uh so i'll move that the cheshire board of education reaffirms the cheshire public schools strategic objectives and goals for 2022-2023 is there a second for that uh faith a second um so now we can have any uh discussion if i could just a couple of quick highlights here at that last meeting we had talked about sharing it with our parent community again that was done um according to our data online there were 214 reviews of that people were encouraged to reach out with questions feedback we received one piece of feedback and it was from emailed me directly and disclosed you know i knew that she's a principal in another district a high school principal and really the strategic plan is great you know thanks for sending this out alignment among all the parts is superb i love the chart of high quality instruction um so appreciated that uh feedback there was you know as we went back and had that you know we had had that conversation at this uh level previously in the last meeting as mr gripple mentioned the one page we did change is the top of page two uh where it had said you know indicators um and i think what we we wanted to convey here that those bullet points are really some of our guiding principles for success and that we um we had talked at the last meeting that these would serve as the foundation for annual or you know goals that could even trend over multiple years but this is really the foundational document for the next several years that these are our bread and butter of the cheshire public schools complex thinking social emotional learning our performance standards our vision of the graduate these are reflective of organizationally and as a community because certainly there was a lot of feedback in this process through parents attended every pto meeting in the district across you know from each school anyway with a focus on this specific topic school business partnership our educators our students were involved in the process and so that's that really was the formulation of this document um and now you know the next phase would be to bring you goals um upon approval of of this you know kind of core of of our school system so that's what like i said the one minor tweak we made um so is there any uh comment or discussion um andrew i mean i i guess so any plan right or any strategic plan takes time to implement adopt refine see what works see what doesn't work i mean since we adopted this back in 2011 and further refined 2016 i mean you could watch our improvement our district improve and student achievement and you know i just think it's a really good document i love that it's complex thinking and social emotional learning which i think are just fundamental parts of life and um i think it's a really great guiding document everything needs to be reviewed and gone through and so i did that i mean i'm not an educator so i don't really you know have that kind of foundational where someone like sam would um but i just think it's a really solid guiding principle for the district and i guess that would be my only comment on it to be honest any other uh i just had a quick um i like the competencies like i said before but we did we go backwards and kind of look at our curriculum and see if some of these items are embedded using this almost as a rubric as we do quick room review and evaluation so um the goals that were established in 2011 were really far-flung there were 16.
this has made that uh much more feasible and we absolutely evaluate what we do against how does this support the development of complex thinking in the in our students how does this support the development of sel skills and you know i think that there's um amongst our community the idea that these are you know strong goals and good ideas but the research beyond that about what supports successful employees down the road also is is complex thinking and social emotional learning and i think that's why for us in our lives we see these as is really seminal skills that allow people to be much more successful and so that's we we do look at that in our curriculum we look at that in our daily practices and try and support ensure actually that these things are happening to support the development of our kids sure um jeff i think at the last meeting you may have mentioned that um if this is a firm this this is going to policy for review no okay um well well i i apologize you're you're correct you know carol and i had looked at this it um it would go to policy to be adopted um this kind of circumvents the the policy process in a way yeah wouldn't it be the other way around but yeah tip with the um the plan with the district plans of goals they typically have gone through the board for straight adoption it would be adopted as policy so we were going to go take this and really highlight where does this go into our because the whole document doesn't go in there right um parts of the document would go into the plan so i guess yes and no like the whole thing wouldn't be adopted as policy but it we would have to revise policies specific to our goals okay very good um any further discussion okay um then i'll just read the uh the motion one more time uh that the cheshire board of education reaffirms the cheshire public schools strategic objectives and goals for 2022 2023 all in favor uh it is unanimous okay great great thank you um and let's see for new business uh says uh dr sullin you have some uh new business i do um so chairman paragini who you know regrettably couldn't be here tonight as little under the weather as uh is our secretary miss harrigan um we've talked with mr grippo about the connecticut association of boards of education they have a recognition awards program and districts who've fulfilled certain criteria can self-nominate provide supportive documents and cable then make a decision about you fulfilling the board leadership award or even further you know board of distinction award and so um what you have in your packet is a document that vin marlene and myself uh went through checked off i mean you'll see the first item is board has developed district goals for this year you know this would suffice in terms of that yeah we just did it so um there there are numerous boxes checked off what i would ask of the full board in support of our application for this recognition is that you take a look through this and if you see anywhere where you feel like maybe uh we missed something in terms of like oh well we actually think we actually did do this but you don't have it marked or maybe we didn't do this any place that is marked however particularly if it says you know provide samples or whatever we have those are already available i could demonstrate that we fulfilled that requirement but if you see anything i would ask you just email myself and carol over the next several days because we want to try and get this completed and to cabe in a timely fashion uh the the deadline for them is october 7th uh for recognition at the connecticut association of boards of education and the connecticut association of public school superintendents have hold a joint conference every year in november and the you know assuming that we indeed are selected we would be recognized at that conference in mid-november i do you do yeah i don't have it this is a blank one though are we trying to i mean these have minimums so we're trying to check off every box as much as possible it would be nice but meaning the minimum would uh make us worthy so like level two on the other side we only have one out of minimum of three i guess so we need some work on um level two yeah so the level two on these are for boards of distinction the level one uh would be applicable for a board leadership award it does look like we have quite a few checked off here so that's good news yep but yeah i guess we'll take a look at it in the next week or so looks like please um okay um well as i'm only an acting chair this evening i have no chair report and chairman peregini did not supply me with his so we will uh skip over that part um i'll announce some upcoming meetings um september 21st is the finance committee meeting um did we uh settle on a final date for policy yet we don't we're going to hopefully wrangle people together at the end of this okay all right so well tentatively yeah tentatively uh late september for policy um october sixth will be uh board of education open forum meeting uh that's one where uh public can come in and we sit down we break into groups and discuss issues correct all right that's always a a great meeting so uh great opportunity for uh for those who did not come to visit us tonight to come visit us uh in october so we even the last year during covid we had a robust and lively meeting so uh come on down we're always willing to discuss issues [Music] october 17th is curriculum committee meeting 7 pm central office boardroom october 22nd okay october 22nd board of education meeting 7 30 p.m and uh potentially a planning committee meeting october 19th at 7 pm and that's we have for right now and of course uh for those parents who um uh may have forgotten that september 26th rosh hashanah schools are closed october 5th yom kippur schools are closed in columbus day october 10th schools are closed so just put that on your calendar everyone um luckily my wife reminds me so uh that being said oh oh there's a yes tim sorry if i missed it i was glancing down at this paper that i just got from carol um with regard to the october 6 meeting the open forum is that the one where we don't it's not televised and just parents come and sit down just to be clear on that i don't know if you had mentioned that or not so that's correct yeah so it won't be on youtube because i've forgotten about that part yeah there are no cameras but uh yeah so it's more but just for parents it's more of an informal thing where if you're you know if you're not really keen on being on camera or asking questions in public like that there are people around who would hear what you say but it's definitely um not potentially millions of people watching youtube which i doubt that would happen anyway but uh it's a little bit less formal like not to be that precise but that's about our maximum views usually um but thank you for that reminder yeah very important yeah so if you uh do like to come and speak but are a little shy uh october 6th is the meeting you want to be at um okay um i have we we have nothing left on the agenda so uh motion to adjourn was there a motion sam uh tim second all in favor hi all right meetings adjourn thank you