Bruce thanks mrs. Thurm I'll be very brief I know we have a robust agenda this evening and the holidays took up most of the break we sent out a school message communications today regarding the new text message feature that probably in about a month can kick in that there's a lot of families a couple years ago we did a survey and families would prefer many would prefer to receive text messages rather than the emails that we send and so working through our technology department with Eric and with Denise works on our power school we're able to get that in place over the next month so we sent out an informational communication through email today and walk people through how they can sign up for it and get make sure they have the right cell phone number and that kind of thing and there's an opt-in there's federal legislation behind this you can't just send people taxes you have to have permission so they'll opt in for that so we're pretty excited about that opportunity we'll get that going for at the end of the month and then the other piece that I wanted to share is dr.
Ruby and I met with a couple of folks the director from advance and also the consultant Jonathan Casas who helped facilitate our strategic plan three years ago we really we talked about planning kind of a reboot of the strategic plan kind of framing all of the work that's been ongoing and going forward how that might look some of the process and some of the big pieces we have going on curriculum design taking what look at the overall everything and how we bring that and take a call and what will be taught on you in the number and easy to measure so that's really so that's thank you thank you thank you moving on committee report was um Cape okay so we had a jam-packed meeting and I know we're gonna hear from a few folks later with details so I'll give you sort of a big overview on what we accomplished our big task was to discuss the program of studies for the high school and mark Poland is shared with us sort of the big picture focus of how the high school is really transforming itself sort of in in a few different areas one really strengthening their work in STEM science technology engineering and math and then also increasing our focus in global competency and so a lot of the program changes are aligned with those goals and additionally making changes to meet our updated state requirements as they change we have to make some changes ahead of time so just a few of the highlights we heard about a proposal for Human Geography which would be a grade 10 course which we were excited about we heard about some new course proposals in the stem department creating a technology a versus B course which would give students access to different types of technology and we felt like that would really draw a lot of students interests and there are some changes to the math program integrated algebra we learned that really for students to be college ready algebra is key integrated alger and there's a change to the to make one course a two-year course to make sure more students have access to that higher-level algebra to make them successful in college in addition we talked about some change some new courses including AP capstone international business American Sign Language also some changes to the music program and a science research course so a lot of new exciting courses which we think will update the high school and and really prepare those students with those 21st century skills and additionally a change to our PE requirement to allow for the increase in our health requirement which is state mandated and the committee voted unanimously to support those recommendations also Maureen updated us on a program called s team math and we're going to we recommend it using this as a pilot program for the spring semester but what it really does is it individualizes instruction for students in math so it allows students to sort of work on areas of need but also allow students to sort of push themselves and work in ways that they can challenge themselves so we had a demonstration of that and we were really excited and we know when joy thinks it's a good idea it's good for elementary school so we press that and then Maureen also gave us an update on the pre-school ruler project unfortunately she didn't receive funding from the BEF for a request to train local preschools but she's going to continue to look at opportunities to spread that work high school program of studies anything else okay we'll move on to the policy communications update okay so the policy and communications committee met on Wednesday December 19th we continued our discussion on the restraint and seclusion policy that we had moved forward at that same regular board meeting on 12:19 so you guys saw that one we also discussed a lunch charging policy that deals with how the district handles negative lunch balances we opted not to have the board see that at that meeting so that's what that's one of the ones that was taken off the agenda last time we want to have two we want a full month sort of as a committee to kind of go through that one we do the same thing for a possible non lapsing fun policy we're gonna have dr.
Breck with other area districts to see if they have an on lapsing fun policy and what that looks like in the language and stuff like that so that'll be coming forward probably soon but we had a fairly lengthy service animals policy that we had to take a look at that was discussed in committee and it's still sort of in the review process we're getting all of our questions to doctors at Pala this week we reviewed both cave and Brookfield's version of a transfer of funds policy which is part of our work with a 3000 series so you'll see that coming through in the next meeting or so continuing with the 3000's we reviewed Brookfield's version of the credit card usage policy and because of its level of detail and thoroughness over the K versions we opted to we liked Brookfield's version better and so we'll just be updating formatting and things like that so you'll see that next meeting most likely communications we discussed the budget communications and dr.
Brill updated us that the superintendent's spending plan was tweeted out it was added to Facebook and the entire budget binder is available on the website so that looks good there we also talked about the new school projects communication which we'll be discussing more later there's not much more to add on that but Debbie and I did work on sort of tidying up the FAQ section right now it's just those PDFs that everybody's been used to but we're trying to sort of because those documents are getting kind of long we're trying to categorize them and make like a table of contents and things that people can click on to sort of just like find sort of a topic that they can then search under so so Eric is helping us work on that and that should be up and running soon so did I miss anything yep any questions just one I'm with the in we haven't seen it yet so they'll probably the answer will see it but with the service animals policy yeah is that just something that all of the schools now are putting into it or do we actually have instances that are going to be requiring a policy um we do require we do require a policy are the one that um that we're there's a cave version that were there are several K persons that we could potentially adopt so we're just looking through the different versions to see which one is that we like the best so we just have to familiarize ourself with to answer your question is potentially a situation sure I got that right okay moving on oh we have a consent agenda recommend a motion that the board approved the items listed below on the consent agenda is recommended new hires two resignations retirements second any questions discussions I just want to keep her vested Deidre for thirty-three years of service with Brookfield and I congratulate her on her retirement on the 31st officially that's amazing yes very appreciative of her service okay moving on to new business we have the adolescent sleep presentation okay so um I want to welcome dr.
Craig ken Aparri up to the podium he is a pediatrician at yale-new Haven Children's Hospital specializing in sleep problems also he's the director of the pediatric sleep center there where he's built a comprehensive sleep program for children which is the first of its kind in Connecticut he's boarded in Pediatrics pediatric pulmonology and sleep medicine and the goal in his practice is to provide simple evidence-based information to families and physicians and about how to achieve more specifically in terms of school start times healthy and appropriate adequate sleep for kids Thank You Rosa and thank you guys for hosting me tonight never been never appealed before so it's great to be here and I actually I feel kind of bad that you guys can't really see over there yeah no no um because uh there's such pretty pretty slides for you tonight um so this is an issue that I've been interested in for a long time is someone who takes care of teenagers and I have some future teenagers in my house and when I moved to Connecticut from Massachusetts we moved to Guildford about five years ago and I I went for a run at around 6:30 in the morning an event that is not having before or since and I saw some kid just standing out on the street and I'm like ah that's weird why is there a kid out here and then I saw another kid come down then I saw the school bus go by and I'm like oh that's really early so I started working with the Board of Ed in our town some of the start times later and after about five years we moved the start time effectively about twenty five minutes later it's not where it needs to be but I'm going to show you why I think this is an issue that's important for our teenagers and sort of some of the myths that come up when this is being discussed I didn't really talk about the practical aspects of changing start times which I'm happy to discuss if you have questions but they really vary from district to district so let's talk about start times in the in teens so look at this guy right here this is a teenager is natural habitat and see is passed out on the couch there's a phone to his side and the laptop right there so here's our roadmap for what we're going to talk about tonight we're going to talk about teenage sleep biology and the reason why teenagers runs trouble when they start high school we're going to talk about the consequences of chronic sleep deprivation specifically for teenagers but they are relevant to all of us and finally myths about later school start times because I've been to a lot of Board of Ed meetings and there's certain themes that people are concerned about that give that I think are worth discussing so I want to start just talking about well how does pop culture you teenagers right we've watched John Hughes movies movies about teenagers well we know teenagers are lazy right they just sort of sleep all the time and they're argumentative they just want to go off to the Academy instead of staying at home on the more there are uncle moisture farm and they make bad decisions and they're also hungry all the time so hungry they ordered a pizza and mr.
hands class they spent a lot of time in their bedrooms with their devices not listening to their parents or surrogate parents and they go through a lot of changes the thing is so much of this view of teenagers is actually shaped by the fact that teenagers really are sleep-deprived all the time this is from a study from 2014 which surveyed 12,000 teenagers in the US and it showed that 8% of girls and 9% of boys were getting adequate sleep we imagine if your community you said well about 10% of kids are getting enough nutrition or 10% of kids have clean water to drink and you get a feeling for the magnitude of this in this study the blue pie wedge there is for kids getting nine hours of sleep we think that teenagers need eight and a half to nine hours of nine and a half hours of sleep let's say the kids getting eight hours of sleep that's still just a third of kids and it's just it's crazy to me to think that this is just sort of the law of the land here in the United States and as students proceeded through high school this is just showing the percent of girls and boys getting adequate sleep in different grades so you notice that in the in the ninth grade boys tend to fare a little bit better than girls it may be because boys are tend to be a little bit behind girls in terms of purity it may be that boys are perhaps a little bit more careless about getting ready in the morning I have two boys I know of what I speak but by the time you get to eleventh and twelfth grade they're equally sleep-deprived and they're more sleep-deprived probably due to progression through adolescence and the fact that score extracurriculars become more demanding so why are so many teenagers so sleepy so sleep-deprived we have to talk a little bit about the biology of sleep so this is is I want to explain there's two reasons that determine when we fall asleep and when we wake up and the first is easy to understand it's what's called a sleep drive so when you wake up in the morning the sleep drug gets higher and higher right it makes sense a little longer you're awake the sleepy or you are we all understand this and then when you sleep during the night the sea tribe just kind of drop off drops off until if you didn't have an alarm clock eventually you just wake up because you'd had enough sleep as a side bar it's important though that generally if you need an alarm clock to get up in the morning there's a good chance that you're somewhat sleep-deprived but the other part of this is the wakefulness Drive and this is what people talk about when they talk about the body clock think of a signal that comes from your body to keep you awake as you go into the late afternoon into the early evening your seat drive is pretty high but you tend not to fall asleep and the reason is you have this wakefulness Drive that is counter balancing that sleepiness drugs what happens and by the way when you hopefully it's synced up to drop off around the time you go to bed when kids hit puberty the sleep drive shifts two to three hours later right so that period when that wakefulness surge happens happens later so you take kids that were falling asleep you know around 8:00 8:30 9:00 falling asleep at 11 o'clock at night but what happens to our start times in my district in many districts elementary school starts latest middle school starts in the middle and high school starts the earliest so the practical effect of this is we are compressing teenagers sleep opportunities because naturally you could put a teenager to bed at 8 o'clock they're not going to fall asleep and this has been validated well before we had xbox snapchat Facebook etc it's just natural biology so we're just squeezing that sleep opportunity for them so when we're talking about addressing this that there's the first myth that comes about is that kids can just go to bed earlier right we know and unfortunately because of a natural shift that's just not how it works I take care of a kids with very severe sleep problems and I have kids come in that are they do everything right they give their parents their cell phone a clock they're done with their homework on time they go to bed at 9:00 or 9:30 and they still can't fall asleep till 11 or 12 o'clock at night it's just the way that kids are wired so when we have this class here we have a natural teen sleep schedule from 11:00 p.m.
to 8:00 a.m. or 12:00 p.m. to 9:00 we have an average high school start time in the US which is a 804 a.m. we're going to talk a little bit up where we fall in the Northeast and in Brookfield specifically this is a recipe for just chronic sleep preparation and kids they just can't catch up and I'll show you why in a second but what are the consequences of chronic sleep deprivation as you can imagine sleeping like eating drinking breathing clean air is a critical bodily function so when you don't get enough of it where the quality isn't good there's severe consequences and I do I would divide these up into three domains the first is the academic domain the second is the Health domain and the third is the psychological domain so in the academic domain kids that are chronically deprived get worse grades they have increased tardiness they have higher dropout rates and they have decreased complex problem-solving this is literally while residing for schools to solve complex problems right in terms of their health one of the underappreciated effects of sleep deprivation is actually increased weight and obesity we know the sleep curtailment is associated with increased appetite and decreased Society when you eat increased hypertension increased risk of diabetes and prediabetes and most critically an increased risk of car accidents this is a really important study that was looking at two adjacent counties in Maryland Chesterfield and Henrico County so Chesterfield County and these are very similar same mixture of economics demographics but Chesterfield starts at 7:20 and Henrico starts at 8:45 in this along the bottom you do see the time of day and this is a graph showing the rate of car accidents teenage drivers in the community and you can see first of all the Chesterfield kids have accidents earlier that makes sense because the they're driving most commonly rushing to school rushing to after-school activities but also see how much higher the peak is and the kids that have to get up earlier the fact is the biggest risk to teenagers in terms of getting injured or dying is in a car accident and this doesn't just affect your kids it also affects other people in your community because we are all on the roads with teenagers and let's be real here no offense to the students here teenagers aren't great drivers to begin with right and then we added the distractions that we have and it's nothing personal it's just that you're new at driving we all get better at driving the more that we do it there are more distractions they were before and they're tired this is a really significant risk to our kids I think one of the most important things that you need to think about as a community and as a Board of Education when you look at this issue early school start times are associated with a thirty to seventy percent increased risk in car accidents in the community following the psychological effects kids that are sleep-deprived have decreased impulse control again a domain in which no teenager excels increased drug use that goes again to lack of impulse control earlier sexual activity that's sort of hedonic or pleasure-seeking drive this increased I mean we all know we're tired right we're more likely to have that Snickers bar than if we've gotten a good night of sleep and increased vulnerability is stress and also suicidality and this is also really important because suicide is a major killer of our young people and now it's it's the relationship between sleep and suicide is a really complicated one it's not a straight line but we know that sleep of deprivation affects mood adversely and it also increases impulsivity and it is not always obvious who the kids are who are at risk for suicide I had a colleague from Stanford give a presentation where he talked about a kid in Palo Alto who killed himself himself in front of a train and this kid smart popular kid everybody liked and nobody thought he was depressed but he was always the kid that other kids could call up at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning to help them with his homework you know clearly a kid that was suffering so let's talk about what percentage of school districts in the u.s.
start before 7:30 that morning okay so who thinks 10% well raise your hands anyone 25% 50% 75% 90% okay so actually and this is I grew up in the Northeast we assumed school starts really early because it gets dark early and this is partly why this school starts so early we're here in Brookfield we're in the 10% of schools that start before 7:30 in the morning so you may look at your adjacent districts and say is it by the by the way this is based on the 2015-2016 national teacher and principal survey this was US public schools principals who are surveyed you look at the districts directly adjacent to you they probably have start times that are similar to yours but if you look at where you are not where we are nationally we are much earlier again the national average is 804 so really we're on the earlier side in Guilford two we were until we made a change we were we were at 7:20 so we are right here with you so in 2014 the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that no school start before 8:30 in the morning in 2015 the Centers for Disease Control follow the same recommendation and on the left is a is a short list of organizations that have recommended that school start at a 30 or later including the American Medical Association the National Association of school nurses the National Institute of Health the National parent-teacher Association associations that have recommended middle and high schools starting before 8:30 is none just to give you some perspective and the weight of the evidence for this is very strong so here's another myth that comes up a lot of the time so I keep getting a reminder to take out the trash that's not showing up on the screen right one that reminds me a tie my shoes in the morning - this is from we had a very contentious discussion on social media and elsewhere in Guilford about this issue not as nasty as it wasn't Greenwich where it practically came to fistfight at some board's event meetings but this was a common one yeah now we will stay up later since they can sleep in it'll be the school's fault or doesn't work anymore cuz parents take no responsibility for raising their kids anymore right maybe we've all heard these sorts of arguments the reality is later sar time equals more sleep this is from a study that was showing a direct relationship and this was Puli what's called a meta-analysis pulling multiple study of about 10,000 kids this was showing the percent of kids getting eight hours of sleep in a relationship between a high school start time 7:30 through eight fifty five note that the later the school started the higher the percentage of kids getting adequate sleep it's a straight line more recently this is well the top health stories of 2018 some of my colleagues moved the high school start time from 750 to 845 in Seattle Washington which is one of the largest school districts to ever do this the other one was Minneapolis which was the first to do this in 1996 and they just published the results of this and what they found is this this is look at the bottom graph here this is the sleep duration when kids are falling asleep here is 2060 and here's 2017 you can see that the kids are not going to bed any later but there is a significant extension of sleep in the morning here's another myth that's really important you can catch up sleep on the weekends there are very few sees are students from Korea and this is three is one of the few countries in the US where teenager this sleeper product korea-china-japan the kids are really sleep deprived I can tell you in Australia for example high schools always start at 9:00 in the morning and there's a fair amount of research showing that sleep deprivation is cumulative and you can't undo it by sleeping in all the weekends even though a lot of teenagers try to do this what's interesting is during the week if you if you look at kids performance on measures of vigilance in academic performance there's actually a guy named Dean BB who has a fake school that he runs in the summer and he pays kids money to come in and sit through classes that are designed to be boring right he does pay the kids to do this and sleep surprised them and what he shows that performance falls off during the week when the kids sleep in on the weekend the performance improves but it doesn't get back to where it was when they started in school so each week they're getting a little bit worse as they go through this torture summer school that he's devised so they just can't catch up and the other thing is is interesting is a lot of the kids who get this really strong sleep extension on on weekends a vacation they actually seemed at a higher risk of mood disorders and suicidality again I don't know that it's a clear cause and effect but that may show that there's something just regulated these kids that are sleeping all day on the weekends and vacation it certainly doesn't seem to provide a benefit or make them happier or healthier during the week and finally this is this is this is a big one in my town it's probably a big one in your town as well and the idea that effecting changing start times is going to affect student athletes right this is a big battle that we fought in our town in Greenwich this is why got so nasty there because the idea is that well practices are going to be shorter right and kids are going to have to either come out of class or have difficulty making it to their away games so if a couple of things to say that first of all I have to speak against the idea that early start times are good for student athletes so this was actually a study that was in CCMC and this was showing the risk of injury to high school student athletes here in Connecticut base the number of hours of sleep per night so you see the kids are getting less than eight hours of sleep a night had a much higher risk of sports injuries and it's probably doable combination of decreased vigilance right we're tired when I was vigilant if say a fastball is coming at our face or something like that and some of it is just deep performance that degrades when we're sleeping so the other the flip side of this is sleep is an issue that the major league sports teams are actually looking at to optimize the performance of their athletes right so I know someone here was saying their kid moved to Massachusetts they are worried they're gonna become Red Sox fans you know III I'm a Yankees fan and I was in Boston for a several Red Sox championships it was no picnic so lots of sports teams now are optimizing their players sleep to improve performance if you're a high school coach don't you want this advantage for your student athletes they're less likely to get injured they're more likely to perform better college teams are looking at this and some you know high school athletes so this is from an article talking about football coaches in in Texas let me tell you they take football pretty serious down in Texas so this coach said when his high school football players struggle to build strength and gain weight with little improvement Jeff Jordan asked some of their diets and training routines he also asks how many hours of sleep are you getting every night in everybody he said kids who aren't getting results aren't getting enough sleep I think that's one of the most overlooked areas when dealing with kids is athletes how much rest they're getting and by the way Dallas Texas starts at 9:00 in the morning and it's not because Dallas is a hotbed of progressivism right they just never changed the start times when people are going to consolidate school districts they just kept them at nine so they just kept their and this is I haven't looked at the most recent on Connecticut interests classic about a conference but this is showing just that they actually research showing that switching to later school start times create a more optimal learning environment improve student achievement for high school athletes so the Connecticut sports conference is actually supportive of this change and I think you could talk to the people in Greenwich ooh they haven't had a lot of difficulties with scheduling meets or games or anything like that much less than people thought it was going to be so I'll not close with two quotes the first is from one of my mentors talking about early school start times Julie Owens if you knew that your child's school there's a toxic substance that reduced that capacity I learned increased chances of a car crash in May likely that twenty years from now he would be obese and suffer from hypotension you do everything possible to get rid of that substance and not worry about cost early start times are toxic and finally I want to close with a quote from Kenneth drag Seth he was the superintendent actually was Edina Minnesota which is a suburb of Minneapolis Minneapolis changed their start times in 97 and dined at 96 and he spoke at the national Star Times conference last year and he talked about the difference in his high school when they move the start times forty-five minutes later he's like the kids were calmer going from class to class there was less trash everywhere because kids weren't drinking cokes and eating candy to stay awake during the day and he said parents were against it came up to them and talked about the difference in their life and he said if you're talking about changing start times how are your kids in the morning if your kids get up later you will get your kids back because that's what parents said to him they're like I thought my kid was going to be just miserable because he's a teenager but he's miserable because he was sleep-deprived all the time so I think more than anything this is a really important thing to think about as parents and community members is that kids don't have to be unhappy and stressed all the time and one of the ways that we can help them with this is by ensuring that they get enough sleep so right there I've got some information there you can hit me on twitter and ready to take questions from you guys all right so one of the one of the things that when I went to the adolescent sleep health conference one of the things that really stuck with me was it's not just about and you kind of touched on it was it's not just about teens getting enough sleep but getting quality sleep and where that quality sleep comes from is sort of the early hours of the morning just before you wake up because that's where REM sleep is more consolidated so should you just touch on that a little bit so I don't know anyone here well shift worker ever a shift worker I used to be one when I was a resident and the fact is it's not just when you sleep it's also the timing of when you sleep you know I simplified a little bit to say the circadian drive as a wakefulness Drive but there's our bodies have a natural predisposition for when we sleep and when we move through the night of sleep we actually go through different types of sleep so the beginning of the night is when you get that really deep sleep so someone wakes you up to an hour - after you fell asleep you feel terrible you can't wake up and then if you get enough sleep in the morning often you'll wake up out of a dream and you don't feel groggy that's REM sleep and REM sleep is actually when a lot of learning happens where memories are consolidated so during the day we learn stuff but they shown in animals and people that if you short-circuit that REM sleep the neck during the night after you learn something your ability to recall it to make connections in your brain that generate the manner the memories is impaired so when we're getting kids at their desks like 7:20 in the morning they're in a time when their body biologically wants them to sleep so we are essentially cheating them of that opportunity to learn both because they're asleep in the first period class and honestly many of them are and because they're not getting that period of sleep that is so critical to help learn the question your presentation is on middle school in high school what is the recommended start time for elementary students so this is something where it's there's a lot less clarity on it if you have an elementary schooler and I do generally they are pretty early in the morning compared to high schoolers we struggle with this in our town as well because they even get the modest changes the we did we have to move our elementary school start time from 850 to 900 four hours by 9:00 I think there's a couple of issues to think about younger kids before puberty are more likely to just fall asleep when you at the times we put them to bed I mean with that within reason but they don't have that strong wakefulness drive during the night so you could put your 8 year old bed and 8 year old Abedin I'm speaking from experience here earlier or later depending on what your schedule is they have a little bit more flexibility not to Maine where it gets troublesome or art or to issues first of all the safety of having any kid out in the dark but especially little kids if you want if you wanted to say like some districts will move football high school in the elementary schools start time for the sake of argument but then you can't really have elementary schools waiting scores waiting out of the dark at 6:30 in the morning it's a safety issue I would say that the best evidence which is very limited here would suggest that you know I think that you sort of look at the recommendations is that like the best practice would probably be around 8:00 for an elementary schooler 8:30 or 9:00 for a high schooler the thing is practically speaking and this is the decision we made in our town sure it's great to say what we want but it's not always possible to get there so we're kind of trying to inch towards better for me I think that in our town the the the best way to do it would be like a 7:45 start for elementary schoolers 8:15 for middle school and maybe 45 for high schoolers I don't think we're gonna get there because the logistics that we struggle with in our town but I'd say generally elementary schoolers have more flexibility but I still don't think I think it's too early for them to be starting in 7:00 or 7:30 and the flipside as many educators have said to me after when you're looking at the end of the day there's really starting to fade after 3 o'clock in the afternoon so if you're extending their their day they just don't have a lot of focus in the late afternoon so that that's not their peak time for many high schoolers what afternoon is a great time but for elementary schoolers they're they're kind of done with their learning at that point so I'd say dialing in inches so they're done with their coursework by 3:00 we're probably best so a question for you as you've gone to these conferences and yet obviously have built a lot of expertise here how does homework play in that equation I mean I and I speak from experience with my daughters who were athletes and would come home from their meets or their practices and then be faced with a pile homework about a deep and the Apple 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning trying to finish their homework or the papers or whatever so I think it's a really important issue and this this is something for all of you guys to think about as well sometimes are part of the problem but let's be real here I I feel like teenagers are under more pressure than when I was in high school I'm not gonna say how long ago that was but I think it's become harder to be a teenager I think there's more pressure I think that what's expected again just to to college is is more difficult now I looked at this issue a couple of years ago and in terms of homework volume I'm not an educator you guys are experts and I'm not in this domain my understanding was is that for your average high school students the burden of homework is not necessarily increased a huge amount over the years though some did varies from district to district it varies if say AP classes tend to be totally off the chain in terms of homework volume compared to non AP classes I think it is important as a district to look at you know III there's a this guy who spoken when the conference's name truck-sized are in his he's like the father of circadian sleep medicine he talked about the fact that there were really no his kid had to be into school at 7:30 in the morning and there was essentially no limit on how late she was expected to stay up to get her work done right like if we look at airline pilots or truck drivers there are actually rules about how long they have to rest before they take a shift we don't have rules like that for our high school students right like it's kind of crazy when you think about I mean like Jenny must look back and be like now I really wish I I'm glad I stayed up late and worked on my paper when I was a junior in high school like I think I think there has to be some sort of limit I mean in Guilford we've actually looked at trying to limit homework somewhat it's a it's a thorny issue when you have actually a lot of parents and I'm sort of pushing for more work for their kids but I think that one interesting part of this experience is when they move start times later that means moving n times later right nobody has a problem with later start times people have a problem later end times for what they found is that kids don't stay up later which is interesting right you think that well you're just pushing everything back it seems like kids are a little bit more efficient at getting their homework done when they're not so tired like if you've been up since 6:00 in the morning you went to school you are too swimmy you're probably not getting your homework done as quickly as you would if you weren't quite so tired right so I think that is a definite factor but I I'm sure I don't know what conversations you guys have about this I think it is very mindful to think about the stressors on your kids and homework is a major stressor for kids absolutely I was wondering if I could just ask Maddie since you're a student representative I wondered just from your perspective like what that the professor said like what resonated with you and can you sort of share your perspective from experience I get like six to seven hours of sleep per night and I've about three hours of homework but I also have two and a half hours of some practice after school so I don't have a lot of time to do any of my work and getting up at 6:00 in the morning and sometimes 4:30 in the morning for practice is not easy and that early start time at school 7:15 it's really hard to get everything done and try and get a good amount of sleep so I often like I find myself going to bed like midnight a little after in order to get all of my hours of homework done things the experience of many young people who are just trying to do the best right like get all the things that we expect of them and it's really hard I mean I mean I get tired just hearing about that right like we even work and then go into swimming for two hours and then like doing a bunch of homework like is gross we don't do that right like honestly I don't you know your your life is like when I was a resident and I'd pull like 18-hour shifts 36-hour shifts like probably not that bad but like you know that was that was like pretty nuts right you had mentioned the increase in the incidence of accidents and on your website had gone through some of the material and you actually equated it at some point to driving under the influence sleep deprivation absolutely the amount of impairment to drowsy driving is is very similar to driving under the influence and we all we all know we've all gotten the message that driving drunk is bad right it's not that people don't do it but I think that generally it's understood that it's not a good it's a really bad idea but in our culture where we sort of accept a baseline degree of sleep deprivation we don't always recognize for example it for an adult and we are if our sleepers curtail by two hours for two nights in a row the degree of impairment is not that far off from if you skip a whole night of sleep like it's very significant so I'd say anyone in the audience but especially if you know young people there's only a few things that work if you're tired if you're sleepy if you can don't get behind the wheel if you have to take a nap in your car or have some caffeine or have some caffeine then take a short nap and drive home but the most important message is people aren't good judges of their degree of sleepiness especially teenagers who are inexperienced drivers so like if in doubt really your parents may be a little bit man if you call them but they really want you to be safe and I just encourage people to make to tell their kids to make good decisions about this and to recognize that if you sleepy to drive you know there has to be they need to know they can safely recharge the people in their lives and for a way to get home it jumped out on their graph comparing the two counties in Maryland the second peak of for the county that started earlier was right at they were getting out of school on where the accidents were and you need to talk about that when you were going through the data but that's one that are going to be sleepy coming out of school sure in our town there's a road there where the students are tearing out of there to get they all work at Bizness orchards if you urban of Guilford like they are tearing out of high school people know we live on that Street just get it get your kids and your pets and doors right because like they are blazing out of there and you know it's just I think it goes back to to the fact that again we teenagers are kind of stressed I had a lot of free time when I was a when I was 17 or 18 it's not really how it works anymore are there any questions from anyone in the public here just one other thing I'd say so in our town we got a modest change the star jobs we moved the high school later by 15 minutes plus 10 minutes of improved efficiency in the busing our mandate was to do that at no cost right there are lots of different ways to skin the cat here it really depends on your community our community like many communities was cost sensitive on this issue the economics of this are pretty clear that this is if you spend more money on busing that you get back a benefit that benefits all the students like if you get a new teacher that's going to benefit a certain number of students right not every student but it is clear that you get bang for your buck is spending money in this but there are ways to do this with no costs I think I think it was Richfield it's actually saving some money their high school or there wasn't work they recently decided to was it done okay they tabled oh yeah there was one town that saved yeah there's superintendent like me this is even that laughs yeah um there's one town that actually saved money doing this you're bussing maybe really well optimized ours was too so it was hard to squeeze any more optimization out of the bus routes so it's hard we've got a good feedback from the students already I want to get more sleep for the kids in our town I want it for your kids near town to you so thank you for inviting me to speak oh yeah so what does the research say on the minimum amount of change that you have to make for the start time for it to have a worthwhile impact in terms of a return on the investment so it's a dose-response meeting the more that you get the more benefit you will the minimum doses look a lot where we are there's a couple of studies a look at a 15 minute change that did show some benefit in terms of test scores in students mood but it's modest right you know and I before I sign it because I was part of a committee looking at this issue in our town I was ambivalent about it because I sort of like I'd rather get more but we worked on the issue for five years we wanted to get something going there for the center for many of our parents would be better to make one change its instead of two you I would encourage you to do more honestly when I moved to Guildford on my workhorse of science I'm like we're gonna get this done in a year and then I started going to support vet meetings and seeing how things worked which is not it's just it's it's not a slam on boards that it's just the complexity of things it's not just the scientific thing it's also how do you get things done in the community which is much more complicated right how do you sell ideas that are gonna amuse people because changing start times in communities people right by definition everybody's life in town revolves around the start times you mess with it some people are gonna be upset have any other questions should probably have like 20 more thank you thank you for even considering this I think it is an important thing to think about for what it's worth there's some talk about maybe looking at this as a statewide issue which would take a lot of heat off of you guys so that'll take more than a year though take matters in that way yeah that's right that was that was very interesting appreciate you of yeah okay well that actually segues perfectly into our next agenda item a new business which is the establishment of an ad hoc subcommittee recommended motion that the board establish an ad hoc subcommittee to study healthy school start times second we've talked about this for a bit now and the fact that if we even to start embarked on this journey we need to start with an ad hoc committee that would start studying healthy start times if we were to do this I would recommend that Rosa cherish she's done the heavy lifting at this point going to the workshops and bringing this forward we can discuss the makeup of how we would want that that committee to look as well suggestions have you guys already started the discussion or no no no no we brought it forth here Rosa what would you envision to be honest I would envision a pretty large committee similar to the new school project only because is of a similar size in terms of disturbance in the community so I would envision you know three board members at least one administrator can as well a member from a representative from the bus company one from each of the private schools in town definitely at least two or three parents a student definitely a student representative high school and maybe administration from probably each school because if school times are going to be affected on all schools then yeah so fairly large but I think that kind of representation is is necessary maybe include a couple of teachers too yes yep yeah and coaches upon managing a big group like that is yeah you might consider taking pieces of it and make by my visor II groups breathing is he really know that you know where you like for example you want I want I want to get input from the coaches we're gonna run something like I won't get input from teachers you go run that is a kind of a one-off and we can keep your group to the little miners you tend to ten to twelve maybe you start getting to 20-plus people in a regular standing committee yes you need a core group is actually driving and setting an agenda so I think you could structure there's some ways you can structure some of the ones where you want input but they don't have to be in the day-to-day how might I do it you know like for example busing company might be someone you eat at a right time but they don't have to be a standing member of the committee you just bring them in yeah I'm guessing we have an item in the agenda for consultants for this was actually part of my discussion with the folks from an advanced day we actually talked about healthy school start times and really I have to applaud the board for moving in this direction because anything that's going to improve the physical and mental health of our students is what we need to be studying very seriously in thinking about their overall quality of life I mean I can't think of anything more important so it's really very important to be thinking about this and I thank you for your leadership in this area and I look forward to learning more about it together as a community and seeing what we might be able to accomplish yeah the reason I brought up the consultant is because that whoever we hire yeah presuming it gets a approve go push on that and just so everybody knows the mr.
Costa I asked him to pencil in the next board meeting just in case you wanted him to come and talk a little bit about some of the features of the service and some of the experiences he's had it was part of the welcome change and start times back about ten years ago now ken was there at the time and he's actually work with Richfield a little bit and they've gone back and forth similar to the to the experience in Guildford their recent experience and we all know where Ridge Hills table that for now and Guilford has moved forward on it but I've had some very deep conversations with superintendent there and some of the experiences is you know some of the highs and lows what I've heard there as well so there's a lot to this a lot of pragmatics a lot of change so but if the science is there it's hard to argue with that unless he forgets like so it's not their well being against their performance their successes that seemed very strong and with the consult about this and this may actually be a better discussion to put into our budget discussion but I know Rosa had said well earlier that it almost takes a year with the ad hoc getting community responsiveness accept and and buy-in before he would even start a consultant to do the heavy work to so that maybe it's something and well you know maybe follow your lead on this whether we would even need the consultant in the budget your going forward or ready we delay that the ad hoc and get started to get off the ground yep because the consultants more of the technical work right they do they sort of hired out like the logistics for you they will sort of work with you on bail times and school bus routes and stuff but but not as much a community right right and just input which is what we would need to behavior to that yes yes exactly so this year would really about like learning about it learning from all different stakeholders and sort of building a consent yes exactly helping with the process service to the community even talked about they already had up what do we call it thought exchange there's there's a product called thought exchange where everybody could see the input from everyone else and certain ideas rise to the tops through technology so that's all process no and we're always happy from that but they really had some great ideas to help us out through their their local experience just here in Connecticut so what I would recommend at this point is if we recommend and approve the subcommittee then those board members that would be interested approach Rosa and then once in the upcoming you know we can even put you as a standing report on a monthly basis if you have that and then we would just your report as to what the content and the makeup of the rest of the committee is yep does everyone good with that good okay so all in favor aye host now that's your ever-growing Rosa thank you for taking this on very much thank you so if there are any board members interested if you can just let those know directly that would be great okay moving on we have the program of studies recommend a motion that the board approved the 2019 2020 brookfield high school program of studies which includes the addition of AP seminar AP Research International Business SEM technology a 3d modeling and printing stem technology base materials processing tools and techniques orchestra percussion workshop algebra to be scientific research Human Geography and American Sign Language second that was a mouthful thank you no sup Jen got up and walked away everybody oh sure sure she had her mouth full already now it's my turn to talk you know I appreciate a cape subcommittee for spending the time that they did you know that Wednesday or Tuesday before break it was a long time and I can see they bear with me as we went through and I was lucky enough to have our humanities coordinator dr.
Spencer there as well as our stem coordinator mr. Hill to kind of talk to some of the social studies English associate is really and science and math changes and things that we're proposing you'll see it's a pretty robust change there's some real I think it makes sense just for me to kind of talk through them quickly or if anybody has any questions I'm not sure how you want me to go about it I could do either of those sure I'll do a break yeah absolutely I go I'll go really some some there's some basic changes that just were kind of revisions that we need to make just on line with what we've already decided you know conversations about PE and health credits that was a big one you know we talked about this at one of our last meetings the two meetings ago we talked about how the requirement at the Kate meeting was that the state requirement for health is one credit than the state requirement for PE is also one credit starting with a class of 2023 so that's a big change right now we offer two credits is our expectation for graduation for students taking PE and it's really a half credit for health right now for most students we would shift that to align with state expectations to be one credit of health and one credit of PE which requires a reduction in PE but an increase in health as to how that would work so I presented those things they came subcommittee and we agreed that those things to align with what the expectation is for the state needs to happen but what it does is it provides a kind of continuum of wellness and the way we've kind of structured in the way we envision it would work here so you know that ninth graders would take a semester of health starting next year they would take a semester of PE right so then that first year they have a credit of wellness for lack of a better term their sophomore year they would take a half year of PE either semester which actually gives us some options which is nice so through their sophomore year they've taken a credit and a half of wellness and then by their junior year they take that last half credit of health the health teachers are very excited health teacher sorry it is one teacher that we currently employ a teach health we do have some cross certified teachers that are certified in both PE and health that'll give us the opportunity so we're not necessarily looking we're not looking to hire any new staff which was my original proposal we've tweaked that and taking a look at what we offer and say we can get it done with what we have now but there are a health teacher and the other teachers in the PE and health department are very excited at the opportunity to go in from a quarter of credit health in which is essentially 22 classes is all you're gonna get in ninth grade and twenty two classes in eleventh grade so now we're doubling that which is really important given the state of everything that we've talked about and even the presentation from the doctor previously so that's one of the things we want to do to align with state expectations there's a few of the things we changed recently the board talked about we're gonna now work with ship hog agriscience as opposed to not walk so that's been changed in the program studies it's a pretty simple change yearbook used to be a year long class we've shifted it to just a fall semester class which was a great thing for us it made a lot of sense for us to do that because that now gives us opens up some second semester art electives and we can get the work done that way in a second semester for other courses marching band is something that we needed to tweak which we have Ward approved in August I believe and want to make sure that's reflected certainly in the program studies and so those are kind of the tweaks we've added some there's been some straight-up additions that I want to kind of go through really quickly that really aren't changes a program just really enhancements so what we already offer one of the big ones that you know is the Board approved several years ago the senior demonstration project that is a one credit requirement now for students and that are currently sophomores have to complete before they graduate we've explored a couple different options in the senior demonstration project committee and one of the things that's come out of that committee is the possibility of offering an AP capstone sequence of courses so and that would be a way the students could actually earn their credit of senior demonstration project at an AP level it's offered it probably about 10 to 15 schools in Connecticut right now not very many are offering it we've done a I've done a preliminary application just to show interest and College Board has responded and said they're excited and would be willing to you know allow us to teach this course moving forward if you're interested in doing it but it's actually a two-year course this is for a really advanced student first year being would be a junior year seminar course it's a full year course we're looking at to be taught most likely by one of our teacher librarians or live library media specialists and students will explore topics related to you know as we talked about seminar and research the seminar is a really exploration of research and how you're going to do it and the finer points of that there's a pretty well-established AP curriculum for that and then students would then take the AP research class their senior year and actually complete a full research project you know and we talked about AP we're talking about college-level research is the expectation so this would better prepare a lot of our students that choose to take this course for that next level in college if students were to complete those two courses just to those the only two they completed let's say for example they could actually earn a certificate from college more that says they've completed the sequence if they complete this sequence get threes on the actual test because there are tests for seminar and test for research and then they get threes in several others I believe it's for other subjects of AP tests as well they get a capstone diploma so College Board recognizes their efforts and gives them actually a capstone diploma so it's something a little bit different than looking to incentivize kids to take this so that's one way that we've got the senior demonstration project committee identified as a possible way so we want to make sure we included it in our offerings for next year a couple other things the work that we'd like to add as well international business this is something that as we look to explore with dr.
spensser and our global engagement certificate certification competencies the global certificate global engagement certificate is a certificate certificate of global engagement I transpose those a little bit as a new state initiative that actually has a multi-pronged approach that talks about mobile coursework and one of the way one of the requirements is to meet I believe it's a seven credit requirement of courses that have a global theme we currently have things like road language right we have stuff in global themes in our sole Studies department we really want to expand our offerings that not limit students just to one particular discipline so talking about an international business course would be a really great way for kids to get that opportunity and really expand that way and possibly earn credits towards getting the certificate of global engagement so that's something we're interested in doing right now if you choose to do anything beyond intro to business it's you may do marketing you do sports entertainment marketing and that's kind of where it stops this gives us another way to look at things from that different perspective which is nice because not all students want to take sports entertainment marketing we out we can now possibly offer something a little different for them in our musical program looking at adding Orchestra percussion workshop you heard from some of our strings players who were here they really kind of work independently they do a lot of their own work because the band's program as great as the teachers mr.
st. George's and differentiates for those students they end up doing a lot of their work on their own because the music isn't necessarily arranged the same way for a band versus Orchestra offering this for those kids we're hoping might expand some of those programs and give them an opportunity to actually play in an orchestra setting versus just a pen saying the same thing with percussion when I go in to do observations mr. st. George and I watch them teach there are a bevy of kids who sit in the back because they all want to play percussion that's the real that's the driver that's the thing they really like and he has to rotate kids through whereas the student that's playing trumpet or saxophone or clarinet or flute has the opportunity to play every piece that doesn't happen with percussion and so because there's so many kids they're interested in it and our beginning guitar program is great we have a lot of kids are interested in doing that this is also give has another option we could some of those students that may not want to participate in band but want to learn more about percussion this would be a way for them to learn some more about that you know mr.
Hill is also proposing a scientific research course not surprising if you've anybody's talked to mr. Hill you know his level of dialogue is higher than most when it comes to the love science and math and he proposed this after working in Westport for a couple years and they have a similar course and really we have some some staff members that are willing to certainly do that but being a science major myself when I went to college I really had no idea until I took my first science class what scientific research really was high school did not prepare me for that I can say that certainly and having a course like this has designed a student-driven an interest driven where students that have the opportunity to really practice and research it kind of ties in a little bit with the AP seminar course we're gonna look to see what our enrollment numbers are I would say no matter what I talk about here it's that I talk about adding to the program of studies doesn't necessarily mean it's going to run it really is all dependent on student interest and the students want to take it if we had four or five kids let's take scientific research we wouldn't do it we certainly wouldn't run it because we want to be sure we don't compete with other courses as well but it's an interesting thing is going to align to NGSS the science and engineering practices are things that we've talked about you've heard about them from the elementary level and NGSS and things that we continue to focus on and we see overlaps between the science and engineering practices and the mathematical practices in the Common Core State Standards so we're really excited about the opportunity to possibly offer that and then another pure addition would be the American sign language which we've talked about here at the board mrs.
Holley's gotten up front and talked about the the American Sign Language Program I've done a site visit I was unable to go the Thursday before break down to Greenwich but we also had sponsor actual dr. spensser went with mrs. Holly and saw a fantastic ASL program that has offers ASL from one to four which is different than the current program that we saw in Connard so we're excited to offer that there is one thing that we would have to delete from the program that would be digital student that currently is a quarter credit class that backs up against health and which isn't currently a quarter as soon as we expand health to a half a semester course there's really no place of that digital student to fit at the same time we know there's some important skills the students learn in that course but they're also getting Chromebooks in eighth grade and we're starting this conversation earlier so when digital student was first and introduced and I believe it was called skills 21 think of it first started really was connected to the iPad initiative and having students now have this new one-to-one device technology in their hands and how are they going to use it effectively and appropriately we're going to look to take some of those same skills and things that are taught in the digital student course and see how we can intersperse them into other courses to make sure the students still have those well we feel about it they'll have a relatively solid foundation maybe not as solid is that they took this one quarter credit course but we still think that we can meet the needs of kids by eliminating that course and kind of absorbing it into other courses that we teach and we also do something since we change health from half to a from a quarter to a half so we needed to find some other way to so do that so and the last big three really are the areas of human geography which dr.
spensser has talked about a little bit of the Cape committee meeting Human Geography is a course that we would look to actually replace our modern world history course that we've now talked to sophomores we've had some great experience and some positive results with our global themes course which is new for our ninth graders so our 10th graders would take this human geography course it's certainly modeled after you know looking at the AP geography course that we currently offer AP Human Geography and in talking with Stephen Armstrong who was the state consultant on social studies and all the work that dr. spensser has done and she can certainly come up after and answer some questions if you have specifics about Human Geography and what that course might look like but we're excited to offer a different thing for kids and we think it's gonna work out really well stem in stem gen to talk about stem technology a and B we would like to add a little bit to those course descriptions to make it a little more descriptive for people so stem technology a would be 3d modeling and printing and stem technology B would be materials processing tools and techniques so we kind of tweaked those names that the request of Kate when we talked two weeks ago so that when someone looked at a program of studies they saw stem technology and stem technology what's the difference what are you doing you can actually look at the course descriptions and so we add that to those so the students would know and really stem technology B is an existing course we're just kind of renaming it essentially it's an intro to technology class that we current off currently offer but with all the opportunities we have with our laser engraver and with our plasma cutter and all the cat and 3d stuff that we can do we really look to ourselves to offer kids an opportunity for that it's something down the road that we may see as a required class for kids as we talk about project-based learning and the tools and things they might need to be successful in a project-based learning environment of a stem environment they might need to take this course in order to be successful so this is something really piloting and seeing how that goes in the area of algebra - currently though we have some we have students I think we have 19 students in one class and I think 20 in another of an integrated algebra 2 class that exists currently that's generally taken by juniors who take geometry their sophomore year they're not necessarily ready to go into a full algebra 2 class they take any greater mm or two and then after that the path gets a little trickier as to where kids are integrated algebra 2 prepares them but they're not getting a full algebra 2 curriculum and we're finding us where it kind of falls down we take kids and sometimes we put them in algebra 2 if they're ready for that not every student is ready for a full algebra 2 so oftentimes what happens they might go to stats from Michael or a math modeling course they could go a couple different directions but then they're not getting the full experience of really mastering algebra 2 standards this what we're looking proposed is take the integrated algebra 2 class and make that algebra 2 a so this actually becomes a two-year sequence to make sure students by the time they graduate that all our kids are getting a solid algebra 2 foundation right now I can't say that they necessarily are getting an all solid algebra 2 foundation because some kids are getting it when they take algebra 2 that next year after integrated and some kids are going to other courses so they may not get that full algebra 2 experience and we know we talked about success in college and career is really needing a firm grasp on all those standards and really mastering them and this provides an opportunity we're talking we're not talking about you know 197 kids need to take this course but for those kids that do need to take it you know the 40 kids that may need to be in of course this is really important for them to make sure they master those standards across the board because integrated house was really only taking getting about half the standards that they eat an out resume at this point so we need to expand it and then I talked a little bit about health already so that is a lot of stuff and one little one concise as I could be and I'm sure there's gonna be questions but I think this these changes as this continues to happen I'm as daunting as it is and like I said I appreciate that they came so quickly taking time to go through it this just shows the progression that we have we're continually moving forward we're looking to create opportunities for students to offer them the best that's for them to prepare them for life after high school so and they'll be more year after year you'll see me up here again going through the same sort of thing but we're always looking to reinvent ourselves so so we're happy to be here thank you very much there's any specific questions I can answer about a particular course about a sequence about a plan or I'm how to do that and Liz is also here willing to come up and talk about human geography because that is the one that's gonna be required really of all sophomores we'll take human geography next year if approved so all these additions are proposed without any increase in staff except for the stipend the offering time the old that that's a bit already exist so the the only increase that is the American Sign Language teacher that's the only all these all these are based on that the algebra 2a and 2b so then the sequence for these students would be algebra geometry 2a and 2b they could also they could take other day want to take a statistics course they could still take that at the same time it'd be independent I mean we have to have some kids that really say they want to take stats that's fine they could do that but this just allows us to make sure we ever all those kids are graduates are getting that solid algebra 2 curriculum across the board physical education sure classes on the next page yep I thought they were some interesting topics yeah these new classes like adventure education and what you soon well there's it's outdoor education technically and they wanted to change the event for education it's the same thing they're trying to find a spicy way to make it more but these are all existing classes that the kids can take now they just kind of read morph them so it makes you to make it more appealing and I think the best part about this whole thing for me is that you know using our existing staff and the great thing about our PE and health staff is we looked about ok how can we do this and we laid out the numbers to make sure it works evenly that we with the staff that we have now how we can make this happen and it was ok we can do one credit health one credit of PE and that's just what's gonna happen after the kids take their sophomore year repeaters really gonna be an opportunity and the PE teachers didn't really love that idea they wanted to is there any way that we could find a way to make maybe one of these classes a little bit bigger right so that I can we can now offer and their junior year and senior opportunities for electives repeat for those kids that really want to take it that was their decision that's often times that comes to the principal say I'm gonna make these class sizes larger they said they want to do that because they want to be able to offer some of these opportunities as electives so not everybody would be able to take a P elective but some kids if they were interested in it would have the opportunity to take it so it was really impressive that that department worked that hard to see there's some other things they can do that's great so general quick I'm gonna stay on PE for a little short essay this word duck so today we're at 2 and we're gonna go down to one as a requirement for graduation correct have options to do more than the one for an elective yeah so it's exactly so if a student you know once they get there they're 1 credit by the end of sophomore year if they were interested in taking elective they could certainly sign up for the you know they can request it it doesn't necessarily mean they're gonna get it because we have limited staff we probably able to offer a section each each semester we'd likely be able to offer and health goes from Africa correct okay so that means overall the PE health is going from two and a half today down to two correct is there a way we can keep it at two and a half foot more pee in there because I'm a believer in physical education for kids and I get it I worry that we're going too far and and it feels to me like we're reducing the overall space and why why why do we need to do that yeah it would um you know and we looked at that quite a bit because certainly my original thought was that I would in my blue sky world I would add another 1.0 and have another health teacher and we could offer the same thing we have three and half credits of of health and PE and wellness because it'd be its it is important but you know from a fiscal perspective which I'm thinking of and also a feasibility we know that having that one credit of health is it is important and you know that and I think I think everybody agrees that one credit health as if is important right now I think we can get the job done with what we have and so our current you know right now our kids that are I can look at this full of my exact numbers here so our students that are so the class of 2021 so our current sophomores right they actually have a level one point five credit requirements so because they've taken already a half semester a semester already they'll take by the end of this school year they'll take in a full year so they've got their one and a half credits we may be able to and I may come to the board next year and say listen you know we have this discussion we talked about if this if this continues to grow there's opportunities one of the things we're looking to do is rate clappers the YMCA and see we need to offer life saving and CPR and other kinds of courses that could really support kids who are going into you know careers in Parks and Rec or physical education or any sort of you know sports or activity based fields I may come to you and say I really think we need to add something else back to this I just don't know that without requesting more staffing that I could do that right now within the existing structure of you know being budget neutral okay so my question was not about increasing mm-hmm it was about holding the number of hours the same and when I asked that question it was routed and my thought that if you're gonna have two and a half hour two and a half credits required and you're gonna have two and a half credits required in the future that you could do it with the same staffing so I wasn't actually proposing more staff rates I was proposing hold at the same and which would just mean you know cut out as much but frankly my reaction would be if we're gonna lower the number of hours we ought to be shot in PE teacher Sun right and I don't want to go there I think that seems I think you shared with us and correct me if I'm wrong that right now the PE classes are very very large yeah and so what the change that change would do would be to reduce the amount of students within PE classes right that is exactly so right now you have the average PE class size you know I would say you know going into PE we have classes sometimes with 32 33 34 kids in a PE class which nobody complains about my PE teachers are fantastic they do the work it'd be more productive if they had you know 25 to 30 kids you know in those classes across the board of what we're doing at managing the trying to manage the class size they get a little bit closer with that same caveat that we want to try to still offer like to get it to the right class size optimal class size would be to keep staffing exactly what it is and offer no electives but my staff said you know could we push it maybe to that 30 32 level in a couple sections so we can sell offer some electives because they really did a tough time thinking about giving that up they didn't really want to do that they they're torn between the managing you know could we get it back to a 25 26 class size versus a 34 kids in a class but they would choose to have less required and have a more manageable yeah yeah so it's another related item and this is actually me you may tell me now that's long gone okay but when my kids were going through the high school there was a junior requirement it's not a junior requirement anymore so there's the physical fitness test a physical fitness test they have to do sit and reach they have to do mile they have to do I think it's chin up there there's a bunch of different flexibility it's now can be administered in any grade so you can do it at ninth you can do it in tenth and there's a still require it's still required yet we have to report those statistics every year to the state yep so what we what we do now instead of doing a junior which is when we currently do it we do it with our sophomores and if they can't meet there's really no doubt if you can't meet the test there is no remediation for that I mean it's it's it's a data point that we send to the state and certainly when it comes to the school accountability index that we get every year they do rank us according to while our kids do and if you I think if our our population got to a point where they saw a significant gap in an issue whether it be in gender or ethnicity or you know special ed population anything then we'd be cited for that and then we have to work and look at our PE curriculum to see where we are but there's no specific remediation plan for a kid who a student who doesn't necessarily reach it but that being said when the teachers do record it and submit that data our teachers are pretty progressive like they talk about lifelong fitness and they want to work to those you're not write a paper on hope now thank you but one of the things that is interesting I will say is that we found this one - the middle school we did walk throughs and I found the same thing we did walk throughs in high school PE classes when they were doing the mile at the middle school and then again in the fall here at the high school kids remembered their times from previous years it was amazing the way kids remembered it and they looked at to better themselves so it's pretty impressive they're not going to classify this and mr.
Taylor please if you if you just want my opinion you actually need to practice the art of running in order to run faster yeah you can't just show up this year and show up next year and expect you're going to improve here yeah yes that's definitely own opinion that's fine a little bit good question about the senior demonstration sure so I assume the AP capstone yeah if if this were to be completed in time for the new state requirement so it should be air current southwards to be current juniors they would have to start that next year yep what we would do is we'd send one of the teachers to AP training over the summer that's aft it's actually included in my budget as a possible item to send a teacher for ap training over the summer I tend to include those because we like to rotate people in any way I think it's always good to get ap trained so that is thin to our budget and we offer the AP seminar course next year for those anybody interested so the current sophomores will be able to register for the AP seminar and then you wouldn't have the AP research the year after the year after we have ap research yes so does that mean this capstone pair of classes becomes a requirement it's not a wouldn't be a requirement it's a way to meet a requirement so you can meet a senior demonstration project doing that way and it might explode I I don't know it's it's one of those things you can't really I don't know until II get into it but we have quite a few as you know in this building quite a few academics and kids who are really into this and so whether it's scientific research where they choose to do seminar and research combined in AP it could be interesting and the student choice piece that I think is probably my favorite part of the whole thing is that it's not dictated by this is what you have to do and here's the topic that you have to research there's also so much students involved in that I think kids are gonna be interested in doing it to seeing what what they can choose to explore because they want to they want to do it instead of me telling them we're gonna study World War one today we had spoken about capstone a year ago one of the issues was finding advisors to the kids yep topical experts does this ap research or is it too early to say it's it's really it's not gonna require no it's not gonna require advisors because you know that the courses in the two tier sequence is really intended to provide students with a skillset to do the research on their own part of that requirement may be for them to go seek out an actual expert in the field as part of their own initiative and their own work to make sure that they get the right answers and have the experts in the field to talk to that that's my assumption looking very really through the syllabus to see what it looks like you're in the process of forming a program to address those that don't take this Grutter going to d2 I know cable B that came to me be very surprised that I'll be coming before you again at some point in time to talk about the rest the senior demonstration project and what our plans are in the next next two months I'll be coming to talk about that great any other questions thank you very much thank you very much okay so all in favor of approving the program of studies I post thank you again mr.
bland uh okay next we have discussion and possible action concerning district data sharing agreements recommend emotion at the Brookfield Board of Education authorized the board's director of technology to negotiate data sharing agreements with appropriate third-party vendors and execute set agreement subject to their review of the superintendent or as designee prior to execution sake so just briefly what what this is is frankly this is a belt and suspenders motion we have abided by new state law and have adopted several policies under the data privacy legislation in recent months and this is kind of the final step in moving forward on this on how we execute this and operationalize the policies and how we operationalize how we go about doing our business Eric confident our technology director Eric maybe you can come up to the podium at this point as our technology director works through all of those contracts already and it formally brings those either to can or to me and then I execute those contracts we worked with our Board of Education Council and talked about the concept of the technology director directly entering into those obviously with the permission of the superintendent final approval and to give him a little bit more authority over the and that's exactly what this motion is Eric can you summarize for the board kind of exactly a little bit perhaps a little bit more or take me in terms of the actual day-to-day things you do that have to do with a third-party vendor and what that actually means uh short so one of the requirements of the state law that we've talked about in a policy is actually entering into contracts with these vendors several of these are actually taken care of at a state level PowerSchool Google the ones that every school districts use but even deeper than that the district itself has to enter into contract with with these vendors in some cases the vendor themselves creates of term of conditions or they create their own amendment of which we sign they countersign it and give to us those are the bigger vendors for example Google we have already entered into a contract with Google they sent an agreement we agreed to it every other school district in the state has done that as well but some of the smaller vendors some of the software that's at individual schools or that is only used by certain districts this is where the contract comes into play and the contract essentially follows the policy that we approved over back over the summer which is the state law stating that vendors cannot sell student data to advertisers that the Brookfield school district owns the data that upon termination of a contract the data is returned to Brookfield schools or destroyed and proof is given that the data has been destroyed and then also there are rules in there about how data breaches are handled when the Board of Ed is notified when the Board of Ed is notified how does the Board of Ed notify parents there's got to be a certain timeline X number of days depends on the breach is what sets the number of days and that's all written in the contract as well as the state law and then what the mediation is what steps the vendor has taken to handle the data breach along with what data actually got sold in what didn't get sold and anything like that with a lot of experience with talking to the vendors working with other school districts as a technology leader email group that we always every day there's something new about about data privacy and there's a lot of back-and-forth with the vendors so you send your contract are written by our attorney you send their contract they send their amendments and you work back and forth until you come up with an agreement so there's a lot of a lot of back-and-forth between it before it's signed and frankly on top of it to be realistic there are vendors who will say we will not sign this and now we are required by a law to say sorry we can no longer work with you that is going to be true of that could very well be true of some programs that we currently work with now and have been working with for years and this also sets a new evaluation going forward for any time something new is proposed in which data is hosted by them on their locations or if data is hosted by us locally in other words it's on our servers here but if you call for support and they access your equipment they've remote in they are now subject to the data privacy law so there's a lot of components and a lot of back-and-forth working with the vendors to handle just exactly how they see the view of data privacy and how we school districts see it and then how the state sees it it's great time 2% support of that unless they propose changes to our standard data privacy agreement do you run all those changes through our council yes we will and we absolutely should we recently received the final contract from our attorney that we're now ready to start disseminating the standard boiler the standard boilerplate that will be handed out before it's touched edited nothing else it's you know the vendors name will be written in and and you know the blanks filled in and then it will go back and forth obviously reviewed with Council and then as John mentioned with with himself and Ken will be reviewed and then a final agreement made again really any changes any amendments can be can be are okay as long as they adhere to and that's what partners yeah I don't think it would um especially as they get some of these vendors may get very you know nitty-gritty into some of the details I don't think it makes sense to not to not so half there so thou art will prefer Howard boilerplate Kevin that's just a discussion I think usually yep okay thank you very much Eric thank you Eric all in favor aye okay that moves us to full business the first item is the 1920 school calendar recommend a motion that the board approved the 2019 2020 school calendar as modified by the board is recommended by superintendent dr.
John Burroughs okay so we went back after the meeting last week and I say last week there's only been four days actually since the last time we met so that's my my superintendent report was so grateful now that I realized enforceable days so I'm gonna walk through this month by month - some of the changes for everybody and I also um we we also followed up on early dismissal times we did a little adjustment there we had to make and also some clarity on lunch ways at this punk in the air so question first sure is there any difference between the two copies that we have okay all right so the first is October on October 11th I had scheduled a PD day for the for that day we moved that as per board suggestion to October 15th that was partly the intention was to smooth out the week so they weren't disrupted with a day off then back to school on a day off so we've had it we have a longer weekend that weekend of the 12th 13th and then the 14th and 15th for families and students and then the teachers will be in on the 15th for PD also in October Columbus Day is that's the 14th Miranda yes Columbus Day is the 14th we have while we are prepared as an administration to follow the directive of the board and move forward on having school held on the 14th if the board wants to move expeditiously on calendar for next year by getting it approved tonight or frankly in the next couple of months we cannot move Columbus Day to be a non holiday because it's in its five of our six of union contracts and so we have to make up a separate memorandum of agreement that tastes just simply takes time to negotiate and go back and forth and you can imagine depending on the particular agreement how it's written the iterations that go back and forth between five different unions and our board attorney and back course we'll take certainly more than in my experience six eight weeks it just will take that kind of a time so in terms of a pragmatic matter it's not something realistically that we can take off the table Columbus Day for next year but we certainly will if that is the definite wish of the board we will work on that going forward so when I proposed the 2021 we don't we can come to school on Columbus Day okay so Columbus Day still in there okay so that's October trying to just go month by month so it's nice and nice and easy to understand in November we had moved to actually for this year we had done it and it didn't work out with snow day but for next year I proposed that the 27th of November which is the Wednesday prior to Thanksgiving that that would be the district would be closed and that would be the beginning of the Thanksgiving recess the board in terms of looking doing its compares and benchmarking and taking a look at things asked that we reinstate the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and so that's schedule doesn't early dismissal one more traditional kind of a schedule there so that day is back that's November December the let's see the 20th Friday December 20th I had that scheduled as an early release day just prior to the holiday break which begins on Monday the 23rd but since the 23rd is is typically not a holiday because it's not Christmas Eve what we decided will close the the school rather than spend the energy to open the school up for just that one day the thought was to have Friday the 20th be a full day of school so that the calendar indicates that it's a full day of school there so in June with the three built-in snow days the last day of school scheduled for the 18th rather than the 19th now and if there were no snow days at all we don't have any emergency days we would be on track to be out of school last day June 15th so just so you guys know that okay so those are those are the adjustments so every adjustment the board asked to be made has been made with the exception of Columbus Day which I explained if I could direct your eyes to the upper right hand side of the calendar under the dismissal times the word dismissal times there we can I put a call into the bus company because one issue we have with the dismissal times for weather-related dismissal times is we try to compress them artificially frankly and the reality is on a weather-related early dismissal you you can't expect to have actually a quicker dismissal time than you do on the regular early dismissal times when weather is not an issue so what we did is we left the high school at 10:30 and we moved the middle school from 11:15 excuse me from it was at 11:00 a.m.
we moved it to 11:15 as a weather-related earlier dismissal and that that frankly is to just reflect the reality because the buses get home later anyway you can't compress the in-between time with the bus transportation and then the elementary schools rather than sameness 11:30 so this is Munky involved you know okay the launch very clear on whether planned only a few minutes five minutes early dismissals 11:40 is usually now 11:30 know that we didn't change the early just didn't change that planned early dismissals yes we had we had to joy because they were all compressed because the boss were so even on the when the weather is not in climate that was an issue so we want to reflect realistic plus times so that's why that the high school remain the same but then everything else is off of that first bus run so yes we moved that 10 minutes and the same thing for the variant well 15 20s yeah and we worked with Debbie from the bus company she thought she can make that work for us John now that November 27th is a school day you need to fix the paragraph at the bottom about when if there's a school closure prior to Wednesday November 27th that day will become an early dismissal instructional day I guess need to figure out how we would add a day yeah that would be just a traditional I think there yeah thank you for catching that dip and then my recollection of the the conversation about early dismissals and lunch was what would it take to provide lunch and early dismissal days maybe not weather-related but just general early dismissal days I know you said we do provide lunch at Center and huckleberry but what would be involved in providing lunch at the other school that's what we're waiting on we talked to Alfonzo on the 20th of December and told him to get cracking on that and see what we come up with and then we've had vacation and everything else so we don't have that answer yet but it doesn't mean we can't come up with a solution but for now going forward this is what we have if we're able to figure out lunch and work with our principals on that and how that might work then if we can do it we'll do it would it be possible to designate June 15th maybe even some color I might hate to throw too many colors onto the calendar but something and then underneath just a 15th last day of school without inclement weather days just so someone will look at it then if you're trying to plan and so then you've got the to articulate yeah because that could be confusing people last day of school in those snow days right exactly it says it here in red under at the end of the paragraph but that's now granted we're taking out a large portion of that because we're taking out the part about about the Wednesday before Thanksgiving but it's still a lot to read before you maybe we can make this you look at this paragraph movie there's some bullets on it so it's a little easier sure you do that and we maybe highlight it and read on the fifteenth or something like that we can okay any other so do we need an extra sort of give back day though like this year we went to school right before Thanksgiving to save on that snow day so if there's a snow day before November 27th what happens do we have my made-up today we just make the day at the end of it okay so we've lost the Friday before so we made it up on Wednesday so we're even with our days right all right so we're saying next year the 27th is already it snowed already the school day what happens if we have you know closing before then we don't have that day we wouldn't know liked it in my mind typically just added and there's not like an easy save like there is this yeah correct because we had that kind of flex day with that Wednesday before Thanksgiving we don't really have that and adding that day before Thanksgiving made our end date from the 19th to the 18th edition right so we now have that day kind of goes really okay versus beginning okay so we're happy to make those two adjustments we'll adjust the language and maybe the structure of that paragraph to reflect a bit more accurately and then we can put a color on the June 15 mm-hmm if you're comfortable with everything else it looks like something got cut off yeah I do I just printed but yeah we should check that out baby anybody okay see that way okay okay since the the approval or the changes requested really our format versus substance is everyone okay just approving the school calendar all in favor aye most thank you everyone for your work on this thanks for everybody's thoughts and input and Lisa and I can try to get that out of user tomorrow or Friday we're best that off everybody soon as possible okay next we have the capital projects discussion this is just a recommended action that we continue the discussion of the pro-choice capitalist and it looks like this is the updated copy here I can yes can walk you through you should have three handouts in front of you the Facilities Committee members saw it and discussed it tonight before this meeting and our last discussion the board asked that we prioritize the projects in the first year of the plan develop a couple of scenarios for center school based on how much usage the building would have and to get more detailed information about the individual product projects with the holiday break I have email Tecton the next day after our meeting and I just got today the detailed information that myself or our committee has not had the opportunity to go through yes so we are actually as a committee building to have a special meeting next Tuesday to go through the projects in more detail that we'll be able to have a more intelligent discussion with you at the next meeting but in the meantime I'll let you know what what I've given you so you should look at it so the first the one I color-coded the headings was one in black says new school and not repurposing center school which would be the scenario where we're going to occupy Center school for the next three or four years what projects on the plan would we do just for us and assuming that the the facility might be mothballed after that suggests what we would have to do and then we came up with was security upgrades and just a portion of the paving that Tecton had recommended for for that facility and that would specifically would be the parent drop-off Luke pushes narrow and runs around the building and deteriorating rapidly the next scenario with the orange heading is new school and repurpose this center school which has all of these centers school projects on it as you saw last week Carl asked last month and on all of these that high school and middle school are the same and then the blue heading is the no school scenario so if the school project is not moving forward this has all of the projects for all of the buildings [Music] so the no new school has the huckleberry once in addition between that and the [Music] can't see the expense that yes just in the first year 3.7 million more and then the swimming into the school just in the first year I think over time it's another good case yeah another good case you know Facilities Committee really talked about that today you know the building's having outlived their uh their use so are the projects in each of the schools in priority order at this point is that next Tuesday's meeting how do I say well they are that current year ones are in or yes okay so if you're meeting next week is two more review the projects and just go through everything before you officially present direct yes tonight we were short on time and like mr.
post said he didn't receive this until the last minute but one thing I do want the board to look at very closely is if the new school project is not approved we are looking at spending quite a bit of money just to get center and huckleberry hills school back up and running so the it's it's very scary it's gonna be a very scary situation for us as a board to move forward if that new school is not approved because we're going to have to spend millions and millions and millions of dollars both at center and huckleberry because they are so old and they are deteriorate deteriorating and that's a great issue and in a concern so yes does anybody have any questions at all about the facilities and us talking about them next meeting yes absolutely yes if anybody would like to review the plane before that and if you have questions you would like the committee to discuss next week feel free to send them now if you were these are prioritized within the school yes one through five if you were to prioritize these how many is a in the pace plan it's 12 no and that's something that we're also gonna be discussing next week long is that I'm picturing the discussion with agreed and they they're gonna need to know what's the most important that across all this oh absolutely I I want to know what is most important and that is why we scheduled a special meeting for next week to really sit down and have the time to have a good discussion so we can report back to you accurately this is and so I I think since we do need this work we're definitely not doing an approval on this right now so since it is just an action we can just keep it if anyone does have any questions before next week they should direct them to Cannon Eve correct yeah please and also our meetings are always open you can feel free to come and set words when you talk to it Tuesday 4:30 so be the 7th 8th it's the 8th and it's gonna be full offices thank you thank you for breaking this out Ken that's really [Music] what what she's playing how she's planning to run her process carefully I think we've generally given the long writer we had laundry lusts but that she's new witness so I'd be interested you know that we can make that connection [Music] okay moving on to the review of the superintendent's proposed 2019-20 budget and this is just a continuation of the last two times so we had the budget presentation and we can go through it a little bit more we can start with any questions anyone has further I know we had responses and some other questions that were sent in and received and then you just put those there which probably haven't had time to address I guess I have a question we brought it up before in regards to the consultant for the school starts time if wait that needs to be in this budget or if that is something that can be delayed or next budget cycle once we have a year the ad hoc I think it would be very I think it'd be very quick if we moved to you know think about implementing new start times for I mean really even if we did it for the 2021 year I mean that that might be appropriate for the 2021 year if that's the route that we end up wanting to go which would mean that it would need to be in the budget for this next year but yeah I don't know how you how you guys feel about that well another thing I think we if I if I may Jen something we want to think I think I think the board should consider and I just want to put it out there is and again this is preliminary it looks like March 5th will be the referendum for the new school project and our goal there would be to have students into the new Elementary School for fall 2022 so something we really I think as a board can be thinking about is using this as an opportunity to frame this true you know reframe the strategic plan and frame you know a big change with going from four to three schools if that's what the plan is going to be with start times and other things if inevitably that's where we're going to go so I think we could use when we talk about the term coherence we could use the ongoings that are the big projects here in the district to bring all these initiatives together and so that's something in terms of timing I just like to put out there for the board to think about I don't yep that makes sense I was just gonna ask when we look at other examples where they've had success do we know how many years they studied before they had the consultant yeah five years ago first yeah it's usually a multiple year I mean we could hope for yeah III well and that's something that we have with the the new school plan the other piece is you know dr.