so uh I drove from there here to about a 45 second drive from here about a block away and keep going um so that's that's where we're at now is that we have uh we are currently in negotiations with the developer to purchase and develop the balance of the land for the Ura it is anticipated to have the 60 000 square foot uh public institutional educational training building as well as approximately forty thousand square feet of retail commercial uh restaurants and shopping as well as the 122 room hotel which we are breaking ground on next week these just show some renderings from different perspectives so again the blue building is uh is where the uh the the public institutional educational building is anticipated to go keep going one more so that generally shows just an example of the building could look like again two stories is how it was uh originally contemplated it's uh two thirty thousand square foot floor so sixty thousand square feet total just some additional pictures of the commitment to the public spaces around the building and this is the the term sheet I think it's been going um you know it's been available maybe since February of last year and there's a couple blanks that still need to be filled in and a lot of this information has probably changed since uh the our previous city manager and uh and prior members of atoms 14 were negotiating discussing this so we're kind of starting back from the start but again when this term sheet was going back and forth before my time certainly it was a partnership between the Metro State University Adams 14 and the ccura to develop basically uh 15 000 square feet of educational programming within a 60 000 square foot building and what we're looking for if you'll keep going to the next one what we are looking for is that the CC Ura would like um you know terms or just if there's a need or desire or an interest from Atmos 14 and being part of this building whether it's your the original request of the original assumption by the ccura for a smaller portion or for a larger portion or for the whole building or what whatever Adam's 14's needs are to be transcribed into the the term sheet that that you have in your possession so that we can report back to the ccura and make decisions with the selected retail developer for the balance of the land for what they're going to build what those costs would be and start to move forward with the development of the undeveloped land at Mile High so again really not worth discussing the modular units and unless you guys want Direction on those as well but just any questions you have about the project overall or any uh discussion that you'd like to have about the intent or you know your needs or the use of the Career Technical Educational Services site I'm here to help you with those and or um to continue to work on those terms thank you so much for that over that over helpful I a term sheet so that that's great um and I think um to set a little contacts um and I know this board has not been involved in a lot of the discussions um in fact the the initial ones completely omitted us for much of the time so we apologize for that you know we're to this point where we need to make a decision and and we just have to um like you said uh start from scratch almost yeah um so board members would you like to start with some questions or comments or um I always hate to be the first it seems like I'm the first and the last to ask questions um and I can start if you guys want to formulate some things okay um a couple of of glaring questions for me and and I've asked as the Ura um just an understanding on if we if we do have access to the entire building the 60 000 square foot building um I think that would be awesome um I think in any conversations I've had it's been 30 000 or like a portion of a floor of that building um the other comment or question I would also like clarification on is um this term sheet with Metro State University um is that something that the ccura has has done or um Adams 14 had negotiated like including them I just I feel bad that I didn't know we were in talks or if there was any talks with them so this this uh the term sheet that we have in front of us was apparently a document that went back and forth with a prior city manager who's no longer with the city and members of the Board of Education okay so I can't tell you accurately what level of involvement the Metro State University had in it or if they're even aware that they were included in a term sheet which is why I recommend we just kind of start from what your needs are now and and because I know as far as the culinary program goes when I started about six months ago you guys informed me that why that was a great idea you guys have already invested in culinary elsewhere within your your programming for your school so you know the 2021 study probably isn't relevant anymore for you guys that's helpful as far as the space goes to the building uh the building will be financed and built by the Commerce City urban renewal Authority they will be the owner of the building for a period of 25 years at the end of the 25-year period they'll quit claim the building to the City of Commerce City for permanent ownership and ultimately any requests whether it's for a thousand square feet or the entire building uh we'll have to go through them and they'll likely want to know how it would be programmed and activated to benefit the site and the residents I will tell you that as we've laid out the financial modeling for this program we did anticipate that while the ccura would Finance the construction of the building that the ongoing maintenance there would be some rent paying tenants in the building so that might slightly change the uh the pro forma and the financial structure of the building over the 25 years that the Ura owns it if Adam's 14 desired to occupy the entire building and the Ura agreed to that okay so we would be responsible for like common area maintenance or the cam and then um some sort of lease fee like would there be it's it's unknown at this time we really need to understand whether there's one tenant or multiple tenants because if there's multiple tenants obviously some some rent paying tenants can subsidize lower paying or no paying tenants which is how we'd put together the financial plan up until uh recently when when Adam's 14 acknowledged that they may want the entire building that makes sense yeah I I think that um it would be in our best interest to take the whole building I would just want to know more specifics around around what president Lovato just mentioned so what would that look like for us financially if we did that and what would the impact be but other than that I think having the whole building Platinum is 14 um would be great yeah yeah yeah for me um seeing Metro State University's name on here just sent me down a rabbit hole um because I know yeah I I just um I I know being a lifelong Commerce City resident I've always pushed I mean I think it's the last census said um a little over a quarter of um residents over 25 years of age have a bachelor's degree or higher and I just think of the impacts that that could bring if we did some sort of partnership with Metro State University whether that be like a Metro State University campus in partnership with Adams 14 or or the such um everything like I was looking at their um their programs and and now um they recently lowered the GPA so it's 2.0 I think to be accepted um so many of our students and residents would qualify for Pell Grants and um the Colorado promise like I my my brain was just like on overload um they have a teacher licensure programs which would feed into our um or grow our own program they have um Chicano studies with a cultural competency for Teacher licensure like it just goes on and on I know we met someone from DIA they have Aviation management programs like there's certificates um minors Majors like I it just it blew my mind so I I don't know how I mean it kind of seems like that falls on the district to investigate that partnership and see if metro state is even looking for a northern campus anymore I know I know the war for quite some time um but if that was the case I would think the entire building would I mean it would just bring so much to our entire community and so do we know whose responsibility that would be to look into if their partnership is what they're still or my understanding from prior staff is that uh at the time or years ago that the Board of Education in the Metro District were working together to figure out if it made a fit um that the CCR was not involved in in what that coordination or cooperation looked like we're just building a building yeah yeah [Music] [Laughter] it's right there in the center of the community so the just as a kind of an interlude as uh for our schedule we would anticipate being within a purchase and sales agreement with the developer to redevelop those nine and a half acres at some point later this year it would likely take the most of 24 2024 to go through the permitting process and then 2025 would be likely when this error would be constructed and that would coincide with a a project that right now is valued at about 28 million dollars that the CC Ura the City of Commerce City in Colorado DOT are collaborating on for Highway 2 and Vasquez and that entire area that Five Legged intersects where everyone gets tickets for running the red lights and so that that project is uh that project is expected to be bid out this summer and start construction early next year so it's kind of all lining up now where the transportation Project's expected to start as they're wrapping that up the construction for the retail and for the uh the hotel bar to be open because we'll start construction later this month I'm sorry next month and uh be open hopefully before the end of this year and the Ura will would like a direction or or next steps from this board by our next meeting which is the second week of March so we meet with the Ura on March 13th um as we are currently negotiating a perch uh we have a letter of intent we'll receive direction from the ccra's owner on how to proceed with negotiating that we are now in the process of due diligence on the site it is a 60-day process so in the next uh 60 days some decisions will have to be made in order for the Ura to move forward with a developer to uh to acquire that nine and a half acres and develop and build the buildings um and just the the reason why that's important is um the CC Ura does not have the Staffing or the ability to self-perform the management of a construction of a 60 000 square foot building so the developer that we select to do the nine and a half acres of retail uh we will pay a development fee to oversee the construction management of the 60 000 square foot building at approximately the same time as the retail and there's a big economy's a scale of having them do that while they're out there doing the retail thank you peace any uh Mr amateur Molina any questions or comments So when you say that we would have the building for 25 years roughly um when that goes to Commerce City they could do what they want with this so they could kick us out if they so please you know I I would say that any term trip for negotiation um whether that's less than 25 years or 25 years at the Mark or if it's longer there's there's nothing currently in writing that says at year 25 we have to give the building back to Commerce City empty so certainly any of those terms are up for negotiation okay are you thinking director Molina okay um well and um I I think this is great information I think um if it would be okay with the board I would love to reach out to Metro State and see where we can even enter into conversations with this because I think that's going to make a big difference um on where we as a district will remove um I know you've been meeting with um our staff as well um and part of our strategic plan we have talked about CTE we've talked about middle schools so there's there's a lot of different possibilities that would probably require some changes to the IGA um but I think our first step like for me like I the Metro State option possibility like is just amazing um so I would like to pursue that and then um [Music] of course um so I can in the conversations that we have had and I just want to stamp it in my head so I am clear in How I um how I guide the staff to not only uh ensure that we are looking at the board's Vision but also in what you need in a timely manner um so the 60 000 square feet we are able to use that or to claim that the 60 000 we do not have necessarily to share if we don't want to is that is that what I'm hearing and this is based on today's conversation also last week's conversation so I I wanted to stamp it so I I'm absolutely clear so the the ccura is the owner of the building has no obligations or commitments at this time to any other party except the IGA that we have with Adams 14.
his family were Germans who sought Refuge from Russia planning to start a new life in America he and his family settled down in Oklahoma to be on their mission of the American dream farmingly and raising livestock Carl married his wife Sarah and together it is successfully raised seven children their decision to make the difficult Journey to the united states allow the following generation to pursue their versions of the American dream including me the American dream to get a deal that every citizen in the United States has equal opportunities to achieve success and prosperity through hard work determination and initiative my American dream is to become a Supreme Court Justice we are a nation of immigrants who bring our customs cultures Traditions talents and abilities into this great country so many of our families history were enriched despite the decision to immigrate to the United States Lady Liberty she's an icon a National Treasure and one of the most recognizable figures in the world gives us a little freedom hope as an essential part of our American heritage thank you I'd vote for her if she was running for office I don't know it's good stuff last but not least coming again from the Jepson family Brooklyn Jepson from Highland Junior High have you ever wanted something really really bad so bad that you talk to everybody so bad that you spent hours and hours working on it so bad that you dreamed about it day and night well Martin Luther King Jr in fact he wanted it so bad he put himself in the leader and eventually was killed trying to win so what did he feel so strongly about he was willing to give his life for it I'll tell you what it was equality Martin Luther King Jr dedicated his life to obtaining Racial equality you see he was born in 1929 and during his life things were very different for African Americans than they are today although slavery in the United States was abolished in December of 1865 there were still many negative effects later on in the 1900s when he was a boy he's friends with a white boy whose father owned a company near King's home when he was six years old he had to go to a segregated school for African-Americans and the right Way's father would no longer allow each place he also recalled the racial humiliation African-American sector including one time when he was a junior in high school he had just won first place in his speech contest in Dublin Georgia and he and his teacher were taking a bus back to Atlanta on the way home the bus driver ordered them to stand so that a white passenger could sit at first he wouldn't do it but his teacher said he'd be breaking the law if you didn't to kill babies later he said it was the angriest I've ever been in my life you can see why from a young age his dream for equality became his lifelong dream he worked and worked and worked for the stream to become a reality but the one of the greatest Parts about it was how although the mistreatment made him angry he was never violent in his fight for equality instead he chose to boldly speak up for what was just and right using this by using this non-violent approach he followed his dreams one of his most famous of these non-violent protests was the March on Washington where he gave his speech we know today as the I Have a Dream speech it was extremely powerful and I would like to share some of it with you today so that you can hear about his dream and his very own words I still have a dream it's a dream deeply rooted in the American dream I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its Creed we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal I have a dream that one day on the Red Hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and Sons of former slave owners who will be able to sit down together at the table of Brotherhood I have a dream that one day in the state of Mississippi a state sweltered with the heat of Injustice sweltered with the heat of Oppression will be transformed into an oasis of justice and freedom I have a dream that my four little children were wondering live in a nation where they are not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character I have agreed today that was Martin Luther King Jr's dream I also have my dream is that we will all follow the legacy of this incredible American that we will stand up for what is right so when we see someone being treated unfairly we will stand and fight against Injustice but we will not do it with virus but with dignity if that is what a true Americans do that is what I believe governing board members can you come back up and Brent wait are you here oh there you are I didn't see you now if you all could give the speech again at the same time just kidding just kidding I just want one more time one more hand for these young boys and girls good jobs you guys want to come right here well maybe these folks right here hold your certificate upstairs there you go parents anybody good all right here comes mom for one big step I mean there we go thank you next tonight we have some of our state and National Cheer and palm Champions with us where are they let's hear you guys all right our Gilbert High School team did well coming in second and third in division one Varsity all girl stunton State and Mesquite Heights here our game day state champions division three but can't be here tonight as the Mesquite High girls basketball semi-final is going on right now but with us tonight can I have Coach Shea and her team up here from Campo Verde look at uh listen to all that Hardware clinging I like it Coach Jay you're gonna get a talk I don't know if you know that yeah sometimes we forget to tell people that so but before I go for all of our cheering Palm teams I just want to say um this this is a sport this isn't Just Dance or something people do on the side this is this is something that lot of time you got it back there sometimes they cut me off a lot of time a lot of skill a lot of effort and a lot of concentration I just need you guys to know how much I appreciate what you do because I think sometimes that goes unrecognized in a lot of different Arenas and you're not just there to make sure the Crowd Goes Wild what you do is extremely important I have a friend that owns a dance studio and uh my whole View and thought process on what that looks like and what that does for you as an individual is uh is different and I'll tell you what I'm very very proud of you so congratulations you are the 2023 USA Spirit national champions in show cheer and I'll let your coach talk a little bit more about that and you guys can introduce yourself all right that's a surprise um well yes I can't be more proud of these girls they hit um the mat for two days straight with the zero deduction routine at Nationals um scoring in first place going into um finals and prelims and um we won by over a point so that's pretty amazing to do at the national level and our stunt team went in at in second going into finals and came in at third place at National so extremely proud of the whole entire team they just did an amazing job um all four routines that we hit were at zero so no deductions no Falls no bobbles so that's pretty amazing to do um we also are the state runner-up in division two for show tier and in all girl stunt this year so an amazing season for these girls I'll let them introduce themselves to you in your grade okay I'm a senior and I'm free cayazzo I'm a sophomore and I'm Heather French I'm a freshman and I'm Mia Shea I'm a junior and I'm Sydney Aker I'm a junior and I'm Taylor Rivera I'm a junior and I'm Mia Frank I'm a freshman I'm Eva massiangelo I'm a senior and I'm Kayla de Vera I'm a junior and I'm Nevaeh Beltran I'm a junior and I'm Dakota Zuniga I'm a senior and I'm Mia Gomez I'm a junior and I'm Emma Wolverton and my boys are still recovering from Nationals I'm one of the assistant coaches coach Truman I'm also one of the assistant coaches coach C parents of these athletes are you here please stand up because I know in any sport it's not just about them it's about you two and the time you guys put in so thank them because I guarantee you it's gonna end one day and you're gonna be standing at a board meeting like me talking about the good old times and so we're very proud of you we respect everything you do and we're thankful for you so if you guys would Shake The Boar's hand that'd be great and we'll take a picture thank you congratulations all right guys warm over here taking me I think they should do like a pyramid I don't think our insurance covers that but we got insurance you can get a little lower there you go um okay one two three okay like 23.
um the members on the CCRI will ultimately have to make the decision on the entire building but again at what really starts that question is to get the terms that we can present to the ccra board and and give them the most information possible to make a decision on whether or not they think it's the best move for the community to have all sixty thousand square feet occupied by one user or multiple users so it the entire sixty thousand square feet is currently available but it will ultimately be up to the building owner on uh whether to lease the entire building to one user or to multiple users okay and and for for them to be able to make that determination where yes then it's going to be the 60 000 or or whatever amount that is going to be based on the proposal and how we're going to be using the building or on something else you know the the term sheet has um a couple items in there that are certainly worth their consideration but in my personal opinion the programming uh the programming and the benefit to the community is is top uh priority for the the members of the urban renewal Authority okay and then one last clarifying question um my apologies modern president um and and this is the proposal or the project or the initiation of this conversations is what you need by the 13th of March so we are we're going to be giving the urban renewal Authority board an update on March 13th it would be um it would be great to get some information much sooner than that so that we can present it to them on March 13th if we can't get information the next week or so which is which may be unreasonable then certainly we'll just give them an update that um that we met with you at this board of educational meeting and that we're continuing the dialogue into April okay because one of the things as modern president mentioned with the Strategic Plan and the New needs of the district in the in the New Vision um or the or the very clear Vision you know around students and Community uh one of the pieces of that strategic plan is engagement it's a genuine engagement of the community so no longer we want to be a district where you know a couple of people are having discussions and uh and then the the community because what we hear from the community is that they do not hear um what's going on or they hear wrong information or they get you know uh partial information so we would like to engage in a true um and genuine discussion with the community to see what what is it that they're looking at what is it that they would appreciate uh we have heard some already I think we'll share a little bit of that uh before on um you know making the use of this building in which part of that building will be a community um a place Auditorium kind of a cultural Multicultural complex um and and it can be used by by uh you know where schools and students can come in and present there of course we can have other uh individuals using it but those would be probably the best way to do it is through agreements uh building agreements with the District of which we already have policies um so if we would like to engage in those kind of discussions to see universities or colleges because uh you know those these are all options that we need to explore and engage the community for their buying uh if that is what we propose by the 13 or before then uh how would you think that would resonate with the group um to exchange extend this period and if they do accept and that how much time do you think that would get us to be able to share with you a a final uh proposal if I can call it final but but you know close to be your final proposal yeah you know I can't speak for the board you know it's a 13-member board of very unique opinions and ideas but what I could say is that I'm sure that everyone on the board um you know they understand that we are partners with Adam's 14 and you guys are a phenomenal partner for the city and for the Ura and that we would continue dialogue and negotiations for you know those will take several months um why we're kind of urgent is that we're in a 60-day due diligence period on the property and we'd like to provide some direction of that property to that developer on what the building how the building might be programmed so that we can start to think about what those costs and expenses are going to be to the Ura board so we certainly don't anticipate having all the items negotiated in the next couple months if if Adam's 14 desires to move forward with this we just need some basic terms that we can give back to the Ura board so that they can give us direction to then communicate with the developer how that building may be programmed okay okay well that that helped me if you know for for the leadership and um bill I I think that you received the e-invite for for Tuesday March the 7th the state of the schools um and I hope that you're able to attend if you didn't you know let me know or on your way out talk to Mario you said that you can get one and if I may ask if you can kindly expand that invitation to the board members because one thing we all know um you know Adams 14 um in in the past is the past but today is a new day we're engaging in Str the community to set up structures that will actually be sustainable uh that will ensure that there's High accountability uh you know not only in the superintendent but also the board you know from the community and that that will Mark and make a huge difference and if uh and I would like and would love to be able to have them start uh and hear directly what we are sharing on Tuesday and um because uh it's a new day and we need to start and we're working on on sharing a new narrative and creating a new narrative person in our community and certainly this Center uh will be will be part of that strategic plan uh as we move forward so um that was just a little advertisement on on March 7th and um and you know please uh feel free to share with anybody share the invite with anybody you you seem um you know might benefit from hearing directly thank you and I will see you there um for me um Direction um I I would lean towards wanting the entire building um which I I know is a huge ask but I think we'll absolutely find a use I think as Dr Lydia said I think it's imperative that we engage with the community and even see like what our options are with metro state or or another uh college or university but um that's that's my two cents um board members yeah I definitely agree with that I think that it sounds like what you're asking for is Direction and I think um we're I'm very interested in seeing how Adams 14 can occupy the whole building I know we have tons of ideas especially partnering with nearby colleges and universities and um I mean I'm excited to see where this goes but for sure the whole building I look at the same thing the whole 60k um to use it for for the community and for our schools because we have a lot of stuff going on and we have we're already working with a lot of universities now with some of the programs that we can put in there that would match up to what we already said feedback Partners here I just work oh yeah I'll piggyback on what they said as well the the best interests of the district is um the whole building um yeah and I'm just you know kind of just worried about gentrification but you know yeah thank you um I think from there um well I'll be at the meeting on the 13th but um I I will also work with our staff to to connect with Metro State and and see if we can pick up on those conversations and then hopefully have an update on that portion as well that would be great yeah just just any ideas you guys have about who Partners might be your programming yeah anything we can share with the Ura board to kind of keep the keep the ball moving forward would be very helpful for me yeah and it's helpful to know that we have like the 60 days that like we got to dig down and um make sure we get information to you guys that's right so thank you different we're on a different hat tonight yes yeah well thank you all very much for having me I appreciate your time again have a great night very exciting I'm just um next on our agenda is policy governance um vice president Estrada and I had the opportunity um and and Dr Lydia we met with um Dan Jorgensen from the Colorado Department of Education they did get back to us with the great news that we received additional funding through the easy Grant to continue our um our training and our our learnings around moving to policy governance so um just wanted to run by a few options with with you all um ideally it would be great if we could have um a longer retreat to start just because we have new board members um we are actually operating as a school board should and not having an external manager in our ear um and so I think it uh director Charlotte just pointed out like it's such a different Dynamic and a different way we're going to learn about how it actually applies to our district um so we're all new yeah technically yeah so um Ramona if you can help us find a block of time um ideally for hours um and and they're very flexible we could do it during the day on the weekend just some time to re-ground and and and walk through that and then Dan also proposed that we spend a few minutes during we could talk about during study sessions um not necessarily board meetings because we'll be making decisions but just so this is constantly on the Forefront and we're working through um all of the nuances as we go along um thank you I'm sorry yeah it's exciting news that we get to continue the learning um and then I I know we approved all of the executive limitations um I've been uh I've had the opportunity to attend several um School Board Partners cohort meetings and trainings and um it's interesting to see on a national level how different school boards have implemented this how they've changed in talking to Dr Lauria I think for us the focus is always our community and so we don't even have to call it policy governance we can call it something else and and make this our own and what works for our district so I think um it's going to take a lot of work um another thing I learned was about the 458 policies that we have out there I think we we just have to find a a good way to make this move and to make sure we're covering our bases keeping our community informed um so I don't know if we want to talk about having voluntary meetings where some of us get together and start running through them I think we need to go through our executive limitations and make sure we're aligning to the existing policies um it's just it's going to be a lot and I think we need to figure out a game plan on how to accomplish all that yeah so to start we'll start with the four hour retreat re-grounds 100 each or what I know no yeah I think that's right well I think it's really exciting to maybe uh be able to create something sustainable for feature boards as well yeah um and maybe those future boards can um protect our district a little bit more stronger yeah well it moves us to be a governing body which is what we should be um I I know I I reread um the Killer Bees it was an article that CDE gave us many years ago um and it just talked about how boards and turn around we don't need to be in the weeds we have all these talented amazing people that do the work and and we just need to talk about the how or the what not the how I'm president yes um concerning those 458 policies that you don't need to go through all of those your policies are the the policies that you approved when you approved policy governance and so those are the ones that you would you know go through and make sure that they fit what you want them to fit and then as Administration they the administrators we can go through those other policies and bring them up to dates per kasby you know because they give legal and legislative advice we just got an spu today that had a lot of a minimum so um that's something that administrators can do and then we would bring them to you to let you know that they had been changed so you don't have to do all those 458 policies you do your policies and then direct the superintendent and her staff to do the other policies yeah I think it's more so the alignment to make sure that we're we're covering all of the existing policies in our in our new if that makes sense right um which I think you you did but I think to give us ownership on on that we as a board have to walk through each one and absolutely yes those are your policies so yeah yes yes so yeah so next on the list um Ramona will work with us to find a date we'll start there um yes um just to say um of an idea out there that I'm thinking about I don't know in math and then we'll be uh we'll participate or we'll attend the national board Association um in um April because we're all going to be there and if both of them are there congratulations both of them are there um I believe we could set aside some time if they agree to that and and that is already time that the entire board has has um you know has put on their calendar so um we can we can look for a second date if that doesn't work for them but if that works for them and we're all going to be there that might be some uh sometime in which we can find a place there and then just have the four hour Retreat there love that Disney World we're going to have to confirm with them okay um Ramona do you mind reaching out to um Janet CDE and Matt cashby to see if they're attending that no not at all okay awesome all right do you guys have any questions or comments about guys I'm looking forward to this oh of course thank you for going through this lots of great great work happening yeah um next on the agenda we have the 2021-22 audit and board priorities um do we have a presentation Mr Moss oh I'll turn it over to you thank you if you want don't mind introducing our guests or introduce yourself thank you for joining us good evening my name is Timothy Ajo pelto I'm an audit partner with Hinkle and Company and I'm happy to be here this evening I think we've dug in wayson and our crew have enjoyed our time together and we're kind of blessed and relieved to be at this point and we're almost ready to cross the finish line and get things submitted we usually present either we at at this time we're presenting a draft but we also present uh final financial statements and we like to talk about three things we like to talk about our audit process we'll give you an idea of what we're doing we have some required Communications that are both written and verbal we like to actually be a a warm face to the board and then we're gonna we have some changes to the art reports if you compare them between 2020 school year 2021 school year and this year there'd be a few little changes that we can discuss and then at the end if you have some questions whether questions about the 2022 audit or just what we do in general or you may have some questions with regards to governance or maybe some hot topics that come to mind during the presentation we can discuss those I can address those questions to the best of my ability first of all our audit process our audit process involves planning testing and Reporting when we plan what we mean by planning is we gain an understanding of the district especially since this is a first year engagement for us it's all new to us uh you're you're new to us we're new to you so we're kind of getting to know one another in a in amicable manner we understand the district we also obtain under we're required to obtain an understanding of the district's internal controls their design those controls cover both financial statement as well as compliance controls and based on our planning we develop tests our tests usually involve substantive tests of details testing balances testing transactions and balances both during the school year and after the school year they involve we involve analytics analysts are basically trying to guess what an acceptable range of a value on a particular financial statement item or issue is and then developing predictive tests that say a range between A and B is acceptable and and if it's outside that range we talked to Doug and waste some and others with regards to what caused that variance after we do all of our testing we prepare reports we call those audit opinions both on the financial side as well as the compliance side and we're happy to report that we had no unmodified we had no modifications your reports were unmodified that's all I could probably finish now and we could have a break and have a nice drink of water but um foreign some of our required audit Communications one involves our responsibility under under the auditing standards our basic responsibility is to obtain reasonable assurance that your financial statements are free of material misstatement now just to unpack that a little bit reasonable base Assurance basically means good enough we don't have to test a hundred percent and obtain absolute assurance and then free of material misstatement material is is a bit of a how should we say this it's a it's a bit of a moving Target we do have we have to start somewhere so we we calculate our materiality based on the nature of the district's opinion units and the government as a whole and material is basically an amount of sufficient weight that it would change your mind as to an action that you would do as as far as a board or District management or things of that nature we're also responsible for communicating any significant matters related to the audit uh there were there was nothing unusual that that came to mind we're also required to inform you about compliance with ethical requirements including Independence and to the best of our knowledge we complied with all requirements related to Independence no no changes in the district's significant accounting policies there were also no uncorrected or corrected adjustments that came to our attention as a as a result of our audit procedures uh from time to time Doug and his staff will come up with they'll submit a trial balance to us to get the ball rolling with regards to the audit and we will you know they'll come up with uh they'll for example they'll they'll run the auditor's Integrity report through the cde's pipeline and they may come up with some issues that require further adjustment and we take those and we we test those adjustments as a part of our regular testing and and post those as client request entries but other than that there were no corrected or uncorrected adjustments now we're happy to report there were no disagreements with management during the course of the audit dog uh when we're done here we will shortly get once we're all good with the act for as it stands you did get a draft I hope you got A draft copy of the act for this afternoon we'll get rep written representations for management uh that's that's very much a key uh piece of evidence for us that uh you know we've got full access and all sorts of things related to the financial statements as well as the all the things that go into the financial statements and the compliance reports we encounter no difficulties dealing with management uh Doug and wayson had been very helpful in getting us those things we need sometimes it's understanding what the Auditors need and then they then they will once they understand what we want from them they'll be happy to provide it uh we're also not aware of any consultation with other accountants regarding auditing and accounting matters those it's basically we need to communicate whether or not management went and got a second opinion on a particular accounting issue all right now for some more snooze inducing information uh back when I moved to Colorado and took the CPA exam just to give you a little bit of background regarding how our profession has changed the independent Auditors report this this report right here was I think it was four paragraphs long as four paragraphs long and now your report is with required supplementary information it is three pages plus long so the aicpa which is a standard setting body for those that perform audits of school districts charter schools and other municipalities have again changed the format of the audit opinion such that the opinion is moved to the very front of the report so when you look at the draft act for you'll see that there's the opinion and the basis of the opinion and and when I was a younger gentleman it was it started off with what we do and then about the middle to the end it ended with the opinion and the next part of your audit opinion is the responsibility entails the responsibilities of management as well as the responsibilities of the auditors and then there'll be some other you know we'll talk about required supplementary information and supplementary information in the back like the introductory required supplementary information includes things like the management discussion analysis any pension opeb related issues um budget comparison required budget comparison schedules supplementary information has to do with things like introductory section statistical section all that fun stuff that you put by the by your bedside to eliminate your insomnia so uh the Not only was the financial statement audit opinion updated it was it also applied to the single audit opinion on on your compliance over major programs so with that you know if you have any questions feel free to shoot them I'll stay as long as it takes to get you to understand what's what's going on the long and short of it is it was good enough and we're happy today we're happy to have you right yeah the audience is like we we try to not be the we're not like you're talking about Auditors they come in and just kind of read you the ride act we try to make it we try to make it as pleasant as possible I I know we're an interruption to to Doug and wayson's regularly scheduled programming and I'm sure their 12-month calendar has a bit it will get a bit of a cycle to it with budgets and closing books and things like that so I feel terrible because I think we didn't get the draft until this afternoon so we probably haven't played through this yeah feel free to to send me or I'm sure everyone has can reach out to contact Doug and he can he can ask questions and so forth I have a couple of general ones if that's okay that's fine so with the change in the audit opinion format um it it basically took the qualified and non or unqualified opinion and it separated it out for you to like what you just reviewed to say there's no material right misstatements or um so there's no like very I know everybody always yeah everybody I always pick that one line like okay we're good no we're not gonna look are you're looking for the yeah it's kind of like some sometimes it's like our confirmation responses the the banks don't respond they don't understand that there's an actual date that we're confirming but uh yeah so when you look at the at the report you don't have to flip through all the or read every every letter unless you're really that have that kind of personality but uh you know I have to understand what our responsibilities are with regards to the required supplementary information you might you might get into the second page and trying to understand what Management's responsibilities are but yes it the the opinions that's kind of what the aicpa was trying to get at was trying to get the get you to the meet the turning point of the audit opinion so that if you had you wanted some reason to if you had wanted some background to understand how the how the things funneled into that opinion you could actually read it read in that and all sometimes that's uh covering our our bases I I'm not sure if any attorneys really kind of parsed out the new engagement letter yet but yeah I I personally like it better I think it's more um it gives a better picture in the past 20 years that there have been you know I think that the audit opinion hadn't changed since the early 20th century and in in 2002 that really kind of changed with Enron and MCI WorldCom and it kind of trickled into the the non the non-publicly traded private sector as well as the public sector and I I just remember being in you know it's a bit of a bunny trail but there were what Orange County and California did have a a bit of an issue with some accounting complex accounting issues about in 1993-94 So maybe about 30 years ago so yeah it's not just the the publicly traded entities that get uh read the riot act so so to speak but uh um yeah any other questions um and and again I haven't read through the entire thing yet um but I know last year the year before we did have some concerns around separation of Duties um and I don't I'm just wondering if you addressed that or had any findings in that area I know Mr Moss has worked really hard too Rectify that area that we had concerns with a couple years ago um I get you know you talked about governance and I think a lot of times it's you have to weigh the costs and benefits of how many people do you take on board um sometimes it's it's identifying where you have object you do have objectives in your financial reporting and your compliance issues uh it it's a matter of identifying what those objectives are and what the risks are that you will miss something so to speak so if you for example if you take your statement of net position and you think well how do I um what kind of holes are in a particular line item on the statement that position or statement of activities so with regards to segregation of duties it is a bit of a cost it's kind of a cost benefit analysis uh I've been to some CPE trainings where the instructor basically said you need at least three people in order to in order to have an effective internal control system you really only need at least three people one person to initial initiate a transaction one person to record the transaction another person to review it so when it comes to segregation of Duties that that may that may be all you need but a lot of times people that like the superintendent or Doug that are a little closer to the the transaction processing can bring things to your attention as the board or they can kind of see where yeah we got you know these we probably have a risk here that needs to be addressed yeah a little bit um so I think um since we haven't been able to review this would you like us to direct the questions to Mr moss and then with you and okay yeah kind of example of what he's talking about so no well I had an exam I I was just wondering if the the concern was addressed because I know last time we just had One Financial person that was just as you said like during the entry doing the right review doing the reporting and and I know um I just wanted to see if if that had been documented or found in this audit and you know we've actually got quite a few new new clients in the past 12 months but a lot of times we're you know with the first year engagement sometimes you're just you're trying to like I said you're trying to get to know one another yeah and you're trying to you're trying to develop a rudimentary sketch of what's going on in the organization and some of that we will probably fill in a little more in year two and year three of the contract a lot of times it's just kind of getting the documentation gotten documentation down of who does what uh and one of the things that you as a board might be might consider is uh now Doug you could probably speak to whether or not you get them a monthly board monthly financials packet right so that that is actually a very effective way to it's an effective top side control to mitigate it if you had limited segregation of Duties where if if Doug and his crew are providing you with uh kind of a rough monthly or quarterly financial statements you can review you obviously if you get it in the in your board packet you'll have an you should have enough time to to look at that stuff and come up with questions and see well the why is why are we at 90 percent of budget we're only 55 percent of the way through the year so that kind of Mr Moss does a great job of giving us our yes yes right yeah thank you there's there's always first year challenges that you know a lot of a lot of the stuff we were just we're we do have you do have a CD deadline and a lot of times we just got to focus on this on the stuff to get get the reports good enough to meet the deadlines even with an extension so um Mr moss do you have information on those deadlines like should we expect to need to approve this at our March meeting or do we have a little time or okay it's time to read yeah yeah and then submit questions to Mr okay okay awesome thank you so much thank you you're welcome thank you for joining us this evening thank you um next uh Dr Lauria oh is she still here she probably got called to go meet her baby oh um next is our strategic Plan update oh my god um [Music] Dr Lauria I think you're in a blind spot we could barely hear you no sorry okay can you hear me a little better but not great yeah put it here with people oh there you are right there can you hear me yeah okay I was uh just saying um that I am in front of the room and they're gonna open for us to go in in a minute so I might not finish this section but I do want to set the tone of what is coming Dr McKenna will be covering it will be facilitating or or facilitating the conversation I guess it's the right way to say it uh what we have here Madam president and members of the board is an update of the strategic planning uh we have engaged with tntp and the old Foundation through tntp to go to how the staff go through the process of of the Strategic plan originally um deliverable that they had uh and we had agreed upon was February uh but honestly it has taken us a little longer to really engage with the Cadre which is about 35 individuals um director Zubia is is part of of the group and what you will hear now is what we have worked thus far in also a timeline of where you can expect uh to hear the final um within uh we're gonna come back to you in March in in present the whole picture we're meeting with a team with a Cadre again tomorrow uh to do some work and after that work we're gonna come back to you in March during the board meeting and it's going to be an opportunity for you to see the you know with a little bit more detail than today where we are get your feedback as far as are the initiatives meaning the actions that we need to take on the right track and there are those supporting your goals on the priorities that the camera came um came up with um we have been through an its assessments with a group it's a group um you know really us mostly focusing on the academics and the culture of the schools uh and I've develop their priorities and you will see some of them in after February the 14th when your ends were approved uh we came in and that has been aligned with the work right so I'm gonna um have um Dr McKenna walk you through the process but uh you know this is an opportunity for you to see where we are um and and a timeline of uh what to expect moving forward between now and April great thank you Madam president Madam vice president members of the board cabinet Dr Maria congratulations and a great job so I'm going to start and give you uh a flyover with brevity because as you see up here I'm going to start at the last slide and then go to the front but on the 14th is when we'll be able to take a deep dive into what has been done and then get feedback answer questions with Fidelity as much as you want to get into the work on the 20th we'll have the community input on our strategic plan a lot of us in this room have been working on this I believe we've met seven or eight times and then ultimately it will come to the board on October on April the 11th for final approval and so we're going to start with really this slide right here we started in the fall and you can see that the landscape analysis was done and then we moved throughout the fall and uh through the holidays time and right now where we're at is um outlining the Strategic initiatives and really doing uh very shortly the capacity needs analysis we meet tomorrow and so by the end of the day tomorrow we'll really be able to leverage all of the work that we've done to finalize the board approved ends that you all approved back in February put our priorities in place our objectives our initiatives so we want to walk away from that meeting being able to socialize how we move forward from this point on I will tell you that when I first talked to Dr Lauria about coming to Adams 14 and when Nathan talked to me when I talked to him about coming one of the things that the superintendent said when I asked for the Strategic plan is like that's one of our first priorities because as director Molina said we have to have a blueprint of a path forward and when we look back historically if there was one at some point in time historically it's not there that we can find and so it so the Strategic plan itself is really our road map it's our opportunity to if we have to correct course everybody sees it it's a transparent um document that really provides us Clarity the direction and the focus that we need as a team regardless of whether you're an employee of Adams 14 you're the board member you're a parent you're a Community member or of a student and it's the foundation of this is our vision and this Vision wasn't taken lightly wasn't done quickly because it's really the the everything's built upon this vision and so we had to Wordsmith it work through it and as you can read Adams 14 students graduate empowered inspired and equipped to be who they want to be and that piece will set the foundation for the rest of the work that we have to do and just like any Journey you have to have your North Star and when you look at this North Star that we have regardless of what lens regardless of if it's a lens of a board member if it's somebody in this room it's a parent it's a student I think we can all look at that and and buy into that because what that says our North Star is we're focused on educating the whole child and in order to do that we have to have the wrap around supports that are need needed not just for the kiddos but our community and that's the direction that our superintendent has charged us with having this North Star and then some of the things that support our Direction going towards this North Star really have to recruit really good people you have to keep really good people and you keep them by supporting them value appreciated and growing and so a lot of what we're going to talk about uh when you get the robust strategic plan is not just the staff but how do you develop the staff through high quality PD and then of course really the second bullet is we just constantly have to do an autopsy of our practices our policies to ensure that we're never complacent and we're always focused on upskilling and moving things forward and really having a culture that's Equity based so that all of our kids get the benefit of the high quality education not just academically but social emotionally and then the fourth bullet that I feel like coming into Adams 14 that I feel like we really are building on but we still have a long way to go and that's building a culture of trust and having high expectations for all of our students so what's beautiful like what when you look at this slide I hope that you really give yourself a round of applause because I'm going to tell you why so when you look at the board ends that you approved right these are the things that you approved as a board back in February and when we reached out to the community and to our team if you look to the right basically what you want as a board is exactly aligned to what our community of stakeholders is looking for with the direction that they want to go so I mean that that's absolutely amazing there's a lot of times there could be a disconnect in this case it's not and so knowing that the board ends are aligned with the community goals and priorities and then making sure that as a team we have objectives that we're going to put into place now this is not going to happen this week this month this year some of these things are going to be quick wins some of these things are going to take time a really good strategic plan is not done overnight it's low hanging fruit if it's done in a year or two this is a strategic plan that you know will evolve over time and could possibly be in most cases sometimes five or seven years what you're not really ever going to see in a strategic plan are vendors or supports or Consultants you're going to really see these are our objectives and all of those other supports like connect ad all of the other things that we do as a district with support those are things that just support the work and the objectives that we need to accomplish um and then there's one that is not necessarily um identified you know through the core team but it's still super critical and it aligns with what uh our CFO presented tonight and that is all of these things really mean nothing if we can't physically fiscally fund them right and we don't have longevity uh and we're not thinking about the future and as board members I want to take this time and I speak for the superintendent when we talked about this today to applaud you because you have to make the hard decisions because it's easy to stick our head in the Sands and not think about what's around the corner and think about the now and you all have been willing to really think about long range what we need to do to not just survive but thrive in the Long Haul even if it's been uncomfortable and then the now with a couple of strategic priorities um I'll speak to the second one because I have a soft spot in my heart for the second one but really we're not going to get into the the initiative pieces but they're the how right so develop if you want a priority right it's it's just like we can't you know when New Year's Eve like what goal you know what are your New Year's resolutions they mean nothing if you don't have actions you know everybody like I want to do this I want to do that but then they haven't really thought about how they're going to be able to accomplish that the initiatives are the how of how they're going to accomplish then and of course so this this here is instruction which my colleague to my right would could answer questions about uh robustly and with Fidelity I feel like I've learned a lot from her so maybe I could too um and then of course I think that you know I have a soft spot in my heart for HR so I'll just point this out that we're here right now and you know with Dr bowden's leadership and support we started doing these things under the direction of our superintendent early you have to really have clear updated job descriptions you have to build Partnerships and so when we talk about Partnerships with Metro State we've had our feet on the ground talking about Partnerships three times this year and have already have that Evolutions in place along with five six other universities that have been here or or we've been there as well and then you know growth opportunities for staff remember if you've heard me say this before people staff they're valued appreciated but they have to grow right people valued and appreciated will still go if they don't grow and so that's a big piece of the puzzle that we're working on be you know with the leadership and the guidance and most importantly the support of our superintendent in the board and then this is the last two slides because this again is the flyover we're going to get into the deep heart of it when there's a robust presentation done uh you know in March but we're at the part right now where as I said in the beginning the capacity needs analysis is coming up that's super important making sure that the process the plan uh the feedback is utilized with all stakeholders right this has not been nor can it ever be a few of us sitting in the room making these decisions we have really worked hard to get our community involved in every piece of the the process from the very beginning and you know we're learning we're growing we're adapting to what we need to do so have have we been perfect this whole process uh with intention we've tried to be but we've pivoted when we haven't been and I feel like we're in an amazing spot and then of course you'll see what is going to happen in April uh and then um this is just the slide where we ended just as a reminder for those of you in the viewing audience the state of the schools is on March 7th uh that will be our first annual state of the schools and our superintendent is ready to roll and and share uh what's the great things that are going on in Adams 14 and then just some things we started at so that is a flyover again on the 14th will be the full presentation but you know our superintendent has made it very clear to us to just keep you abreast of the things that we have going on so that when it comes to the 14th you'll have a foundational knowledge of what where we've been and where we're at soup did I miss anything doc grandma [Music] um but I do just want to um just support this uh strategic planning in the processary into the context of quality government hey Doc can you can you go back to what you did before like there you go are you there yeah okay okay this uh earphones are not probably not working very well uh my apologies so what I was saying is um perfect timing because they have not opened the door yet um but um I want to put the process of the strategic planning uh in what we're doing uh in the context of policy governance because what I will be asking of you um especially you know uh in March when we bring the this presentation is uh if you look at just or uh Ramona can you go back two slides I want to say it's two slides or maybe three uh one more no one more one more maybe then there was more than three well that one uh what I will be looking uh you know from the board specific feedback is when you look at the initiative the light blue column um is that or are these um the watch is going to get us to your ends right so this is the feedback that I'm going to be looking for as Jeff said it's not going to be a list of things that we're doing connected as he said it's already uh it's here to really uh address one of the initiatives that is taking us or is directly linked to the ends that you have that you have um set for the district so um you will be getting um this for feedback uh before the 14th we're going to be sharing it with you um in the Friday updates as soon as we have the document as Jeff shared we're going to be meeting with Alexandria tomorrow and after tomorrow we're going to be able to have the final product to start um you know putting it together for you and um I just want to say um also the monitoring piece that we are going to be looking at how we're going to be monitoring is going to be directly linked through the monitoring reports that I will bring so uh everything is it's aligning to also policy governments and um in the transparency most of all just like uh like Jeff said the transparency for you for the community and the ability for the community to help the superintendent accountable even the board accountable on what we said we were going to be doing uh it's going to be a it's going to be a robust structure for for Mutual accountability um I don't know if there's any questions or I'm gonna leave it open for you to make any comments or ask any questions so I don't have any questions um I did have a comment I um it just gets me excited to see how um Equity centered policies or practices are not like a separate section I feel that we're moving in the right direction when we can see that Equity isn't all we do it's not just a separate part of a strategic plan like you know a tool in a toolbox it's more who we are and so I'm excited to see that that is just embedded throughout the Strategic plan so just kudos for that the online feedback form are you guys planning on presenting the results of that and like who responded and how many responded yes yes we're going to be presenting a little bit of oh um yes Madam President we will be presenting um you know the statistics and and um the surveys and everything everything else yes I would just thank you thank you to uh you Dr Lauria and all your staff uh I I really just after all these years that we've been struggling I I feel hopeful I really feel hopeful um for our district um and I'm very thankful that I could be part of this so muchas gracias foreign I killed my microphone um thank you yeah I um I know this has taken a ton of work and I'm so appreciative and so looking forward to having a plan like this is something that we we need um I'm also very hopeful um that is just going to bring our community and our students in we're all going to be on the same page it's going to be transparent we're going to be moving towards the same targets it's just I think it's going to impact us um greatly so thank you all right lastly I look at it about the Partnerships with the MSC going forward I'm I'm honestly really shocked that previous leaderships never envisioned us thank you there so I'm thankful that the future of Commerce City is a lot brighter thank you so we'll have lots of reading uh next for our March meeting we'll have the Strategic plan and the and the audit so um sorry in advance fellow board members and one thing that I want to cure um I mentioned uh and I apologize my apologies if if I didn't hear it uh when you said it but the fiscal or financial well-being those priorities we already engaged with um a different group of the Cadre or a different category in all principles and administrators are in involved in this uh because this is going to be hand in hand with the facilities plan that we are developing uh based on charge that you gave us on um February the 14th so we started already we met with them once uh we're meeting with them again on Thursday and I hope you heard that because I I hope you heard that yes we did thank you Dr Olivia okay okay perfect yeah all right any further questions comments so this concludes our um our presentation unless you have uh any other questions no more questions thank you so much we will um look forward to digging into to all of the information yeah yeah awesome well thank you all for joining us um this concludes our agenda for the evening thank you board members and staff for your time and all of your work our next meeting of the board is a regular meeting and that will be held on Tuesday March 14th may I have a motion to adjourn so moved in a second I'll second thank you Ramona Rocco please oh yeah it's a study session we're just adjourned thank you all for joining us we'll see you it's been a long day I tell you thank you guys
thank you guys well done guys thank you next can I have up the Highland High palm and cheer you guys here and their coaches James is it gesselhoffer guys where are you get over here James geiselhoffer and Ashley Parcell hi Ashley so this is what's what they've done come on over guys don't be shy all right so for cheer and correct anything that we have down here wrong cheers state champions division one all girl stunt five of you correct is that right raise your hand if you're the five all right Palm game day state champions division one Palm where are you guys nice Palm Jazz second in state USA national champions wow see it's okay don't you won be proud and then Palms state champions division one game day all of you guys again give them a huge hand James I'm going to turn this over to you to talk a little bit about what you guys got going on here naturally and and then they can introduce themselves yeah Yeah so basically overall it's just been an incredible season for both palm and cheer they've done so much and put in so much so many hours um and have taken so much time off of just being that normal high school student and they've put in time at practice outside of practice on the way to practice in class which we tell them not to but overall these are just such amazing kids through and through they work hard for everything whether it's a new stunt or even just for within their classwork we've never had any issues with them so beyond their recognition at a state and National level I think it's just amazing to see that they are just truly deserving of it Beyond just the talent so overall a great season and definitely some super talented and great kids also um we thank you oh gosh um so beyond just their overall great state accomplishment um they were super great and went to Florida for the UCA national competition where they placed a third in a division one super varsity as well as ninth in game day out of 60 plus teams so it was a really great season for them um so I'm the varsity Palm coach and we've also had such an incredible season um I'm very proud of each and every one of them and it's true they work so hard for everything that they have achieved we brought home two state titles this year one in D1 Game Day dance and then one in D1 Palm which is a title we've been fighting for for the last five years so it was it was a huge honor to receive that title we also went to both UDA Nationals in Florida where we got second we meddled this in the silver medal against uh 74 Jazz teams and we also placed fifth in a super plus game day and sixth in small Palm we competed against I think around like 70 yeah and then we just got back from USA Nationals and we um brought home another National Title in jazz and a runner-up in Palm so very proud all right we'll just introduce everybody down the line we'll do um Palm verse and then cheer but I'm Maddie Rollin the assistant coach for Palm um I'm a captain on the Highland Hall cats my name's Leah I'm Junior I'm also a captain my name is Katie Watson hi I'm Jersey Smith and I'm a junior I'm Brian Nelson and I'm a freshman I'm Carly McCook and I'm a sophomore I'm Emily Mifflin and I'm a sophomore um I'm Reagan Johnston and I'm a senior I'm Kenzie wing and I'm a captain on the Highland tier team I'm Gabby woods and I'm also a captain on the Highland Hawks cheer team I'm Reagan breinhole and I'm a junior on the two team I'm Kate Allen and I'm a junior I'm Lexi Anderson and I'm a junior [Applause] congratulations to you one more time if you guys would shake hands with the board and we'll get a picture thank you well done [Music] all right coach set them up just like last time just a different School s are we good thank you one two three okay all right next group wait see we got one more you're good ladies and last but not least in the palm and cheer area is coach Kristen grippo here come on here come on up ladies come on up with her is the Desert Ridge High Palm team correct some of them not everybody but what they did was they are the state champions for hip-hop for the State of Arizona congratulations to you guys yes coach I will let you talk a little about your team and then let your team introduce themselves excellent thank you um yes my name is Kristen grippo and I've been at Desert Ridge High School for a long time 19 years teaching dance and we just started Palm last year so this is our second season here as a team and competing these dancers have worked extremely hard we had a lot of hardships going into this and a lot of learning experiences I'd like to say with ups and downs a lot of injuries and these dancers along with their the rest of the company dancers pushed through they've worked very dedicated the entire time at qualifiers we were seven points down at qualifiers and made it in so we were second place after getting that feedback the team pushed really really hard and came through with the title for the small division hip-hop category so I could not be more proud of these dancers for all of their hard work and dedication I'm going to go ahead and pass this over now for introductions I'm Lauren Brielle I'm a senior and I'm the competition captain I'm Emma holthorp and I'm a sophomore I'm Gabby Davis and I'm a sophomore I'm Ava Lopez and I'm a junior thank you like I said again are there parents from the Highland and Desert Ridge folks are they here if you are say hello congratulations back there there you go uh one more time for Desert Ridge High Palm can shake hands and we'll take pictures with the board congratulations thank you [Music] all right guys here we are here we go come on over in the front if you guys want [Music] one more time thank you guys well done [Music] and last but definitely not least uh Dean Kern are you here Dean come on up Don't Go sir can I can I talk about you sure all right face that way and smile it's gonna be great yes sir Dean is a student at Campo Verde High School what grade I'm a senior sir senior he's saying sir because he's ROTC I appreciate that Dean has been offered and accepted an appointment to the United States Merchant Marine Academy he has also been recruited by the dive team to be a member of the Kings Point swim dive team during his time at Campo he has rapidly advanced in Junior ROTC both as a student and leader he is currently the core Deputy Commander in this role he is a servant leader and mentor to over 40 other students in addition while at Campo he became a member of our swim and dive team after four years at the Academy Dean will be licensed as either either a third mate or third engineer by the U.S Coast Guard and eligible to serve on U.S ships where he may accept a commission into any of the armed services Dean plans to commission into the U.S Air Force and serve as a pilot congratulations Dean Brothers yes sir all right [Music] thank you is Dean's family here can you guys stand up please ladies and gentlemen these are the kind of students we produce here in Gilbert public schools and it's because of the great teachers and support staff and administrators but most importantly it's because of you as parents and the support you give to your children in our school district so thank you for everything we appreciate you governing board that concludes my recognitions for this evening thank you thank you congratulations [Music] foreign [Music] thank you Dr McCord we'll move to your superintendent's report 5.01 good evening everyone and again thank you for being here tonight before I get started I'd like to recognize uh some folks here in the audience Trinity are you here stand up it's Trinity batty she is a senior at Mesquite High School and she's also part of the superintendent student Senate and part of their jobs to come and be at some meeting that we have to offer and I just got to tell you Trinity we're going to hold back your diploma this year because I don't want you to leave because we love you thank you so much for being here thank you [Applause] Duncan Cheryl Becker please stand there you guys are hi guys they are Educators in our district and they are also in our Aspire program so they one day aspire to be administrators for Gilbert Public Schools so thank you for being here [Applause] please join me in celebrating our five new A-Plus School of Excellence Highland Park Elementary Neely Traditional Academy Oak Tree Elementary Sonoma Ranch Elementary and Val Vista Lakes Elementary a total of 36 Arizona schools were chosen for the honor this year and we are so proud to have 14 of our schools currently recognized as a plus schools thank you to all of our families employees and students that make our schools such wonderful places to live and learn so a hand to those schools and thank you guys it's read Across America week this week is read Across America week and our schools have invited many guest readers to their campuses to help spread the joy of reading to our students thank you to all those guest readers and thank you to all of our schools for being so welcoming to everyone last night this is our ESPN version of my speech last night our Mesquite High boys basketball team lost a heartbreaker to Deer Valley in the final seconds of the 4A semifinal game we want to congratulate those Mesquite High boys basketball players on a great season tonight our Mesquite High girls basketball team hosts Pueblo in a 4A State semifinal matchup at Mesquite High and our Gilbert High girls basketball team will travel to Dobson to play Dobson High for a 6A semifinal game tomorrow evening the Campo Verde boys basketball team will host Centennial in a 5A semifinal game and the Highland High boys basketball team will host Mountain View in a 6A semifinal game all these games will be extremely competitive and entertaining word on the street is the game at Highland sold out 1500 tickets like that so it's going to be really competitive and a lot of fun to watch Good Luck to all of our boys and girls teams and if they continue to win games will be played on Thursday evening championship games Friday evening as well as Saturday during the day so I think all those will be held at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum so come support our teams and lastly spring break will begin on Monday March 13th and continue through Friday March 24th school resume on Monday March 27th I sincerely hope that everyone has a safe and enjoyable break Madam president or Mrs eugetti Madam clerk president for the evening that concludes my report thank you thank you Dr McCord we're now ready for 6.01 request to speak to the governing board and I'll read the admonition first request to speak to the governing board pursuant to ARS 38-431.02 H the board may make an open call to the public during a public meeting subject to the reasonable time place and manner restrictions to allow individuals to address the public body on any issue within the jurisdiction of the public body at the conclusion of an open call to the public individual board members May respond to criticism made by those who have addressed the board may ask staff to review a matter or may ask that a matter be put on a future agenda however members of the board shall not discuss or take legal action on matters raised during the an open call to the public unless the matters are properly noticed for discussion and legal action during an open call the board requests that speakers refrain from voicing complaints against School Personnel or any person connected with the district as it may impact due process rights policies Keb and Ked are provided by the board for disposition of legitimate complaints including those involved involving individuals forms required for use of these policies can be obtained from the Gilbert Public Schools website and we have four calls to the public tonight we'll start with Mr Scott Glover and followed by Carrie Glover and Richard young and Howard help me with your last name Howard gimsoft is that correct hopefully it is ready to go okay begin the timer good evening governing board and superintendency I'm speaking to item agenda item 9.06 this evening my name is Scott Glover I began teaching at Gilbert public schools in 1996 as a single male with no dependents over the years I've married and raised two boys who have graduated through from GPS I had my two two boys on the GPS insurance plan and I just accepted the fact that over the years I was actually paying for like 2.3 or 2.4 kids but a few years ago we found out that our insurance wasn't going to carry out of state in any real meaningful way I was not thrilled but I was left with little choice right at that time our oldest had a great opportunity to continue his studies at a university in Minnesota and as we all know privates private and out-of-state schools are are very pricey and we my wife who's also a teacher here since 1994 had to keep the dependent coverage for our one child who was still living in Arizona then we had to Shell out about another 3 000 a year for another policy for our child in Minnesota so the current plan kind of actually acts to me as a deterrent to out-of-state travel and study and early on I spent a lot of time on the phone trying to get someone to answer uh or to determine what constituted an emergency and no one could really ever say that so we paid essentially twice every year for for insurance coverage for our for our oldest son so I respectfully encourage you to please vote Yes on item 9.06 this evening this will help people like a colleague of ours who broke her foot while on vacation in the Pacific Northwest and was driven back to Arizona to seek care because she and her family didn't think she would be covered and I could feel Mr McIntosh squirming I know that would have been covered I told her that would have been covered but she was nervous and nobody wants to risk going broke from medical debt so this will help employees worry less when they travel around this beautiful nation of ours and it'll encourage our children who want to spread their wings and seek higher education or jobs out of state the uh the irony of having to worry about losing Health Care coverage and the only Civilized Nation in the world where you can actually lose health care coverages and lost on me or many others so I want to applaud and thank the members of the superintendency and the trust who listened on this issue and we're determined to do something about it and make it better this won't help me much anymore my son graduated college he's fully employed has his own health care but I will gladly pay so that others can have the freedom to travel and study wherever they want and I just wanted to stand here in front of you and say thank you to those who worked on this and I encourage the governing board to pass agenda item 9.06 when the item comes up later this evening thank you thank you Carrie Glover good evening governing board Dr McCord cabinet my name is Carrie Glover and I have been in Gilbert for 28 years I have two sons who graduated from Gilbert but tonight I'm speaking to you as the president of the Gilbert Education Association on behalf of Gea and the 685 Elementary teachers employed in Gilbert I want to thank you for approving the hiring of 12 additional art teachers gea's mission is to advocate for positive working conditions for employees which create positive learning environments for our students currently we all know that the biggest challenge facing Us in education is attracting and retaining highly qualified teachers so last April Gea brought together a hundred GPS employees both certified and classified members and non-members for an event called 100 voices our goal was to determine what would it take to retain employees elementary teacher prep time was identified as the most urgent issue elementary teachers shared their stories about the stress they felt when they didn't have a daily prep and secondary teachers were shocked to learn that their Elementary colleagues did not have the same working conditions the group identified several possible solutions including adding an additional special to the Elementary schedule when I brought this idea to Dr McCord and Mr McIntosh last spring both of them were incredibly supportive your decision at our last full board meeting to give the GPS elementary students access to Art each week research shows that there is an importance for Visual and Performing Arts and Gilbert has always been a stalwart supporter of the Arts ga's my motto is together we do more when an organization such as ours listens to its stakeholders and addresses their concerns everyone wins this decision ensures that nearly 700 elementary teachers will have a planning period each and every day so they can craft the best lessons for our students this time will also help to make their job more Equitable in addition this decision sets Gilbert Public Schools apart from other districts who do not have Elementary specials every day which will allow us to attract more new teachers because working conditions do matter we are special and this decision showed Gilbert Public Schools commitment to their students and to their teachers so I thank you governing board Mr McIntosh Miss betz and Dr McCord thank you thank you Mrs clever Richard Young good evening to the board and to Dr McCord uh before anything I'd like to say I was enormously impressed with the young people who came up here they are a glowing credit to the school to themselves and certainly their families it was an inspiration to see all of them come out I live in Gilbert my grandson is a student in the Gilbert schools but I'm not here because of anything that he's encountered in fact another parent has come to me with a disturbing to them email that they received from the school I'd like to address that very briefly hope that you will look into it and then one other issue it has to do with standards-based grading and I imagine all of you are completely familiar with that here's what it says per District policy and hshash policy the lowest grade a student can earn is 50 in order to ensure mathematical Equity first of all the lowest grade you can get is zero fifty percent of zero is zero that is a peculiar form of great inflation disguise to they intended to disguise sub performance you're not doing any favor to a child you're not doing any paper to society by doing that somebody should be able to recognize he's not doing well and that he's failing a 50 percent handing in a blank paper which it says is possible is not right we saw a stirring comment about uh Martin Luther King and the Quest for equality this is the opposite of it this is to erase equality equality means standing up and earning what you earn not some fake thing and as to mathematical Equity could anybody tell me what that means I don't think anyone can what is it now what does it mean mathematical Equity by giving 50 to somebody who fails practically everything it is meaningless Equity actually in law usually means fairness Equity will intervene when there is no satisfactory resolution under the the ordinary rules of law it is fairness but mathematical Equity is used now in the educational system deals more with the very opposite of equity it's designed to erase achievement it's designed to disguise failure standards uh based grading is not a reasonable way to conduct uh grading there's nothing wrong with a through F I know you've done away with f bring it back I in school got F's and I knew that I deserve them there's something to that if you're teaching a kid to shoot baskets you don't pretend he's made every one you don't put a big funnel over the basket so everybody who throws a ball will manage to score that nobody learns anything from that thank you thank you your type and that is emotional learning program yeah you get yeah in the admonition I read it in the admonition you read it I'm sorry I didn't hear it well then I'll come back and discuss emotional learning okay and Mr Howard and I Pro I apologize if I did not say your name correctly what greetings Howard gimsel g-i-e-m-s-o-e I'm a Gilbert District taxpayer uh first I'd like to talk about is posting notices of board meetings the board meetings were not are have been unacceptable today's meeting was not posted over the weekend and the phone has been busy every time I call meetings shall be electronically on the district's website that's your words your rules if the district's employees do not follow through in a timely manner then perhaps the Board needs to take an active April in personal management what else is being done late what else is being done at the last minute also the Arizona school boards Association commitment to equity troubles me EK students need and should get all the help they need but Equity means equal outcomes and this can only happen if the strong students are not given all the opportunities they can use our community leaders will be among these strong students in years go by be careful what is being done in this District about Equity because it's a loser thank you thank you and that is all of our calls to the repo to the to the public tonight we'll move to seven point zero one under reports Proclamation National School Social Work week March 5th through 11th 2023 Dr McCord thank you madam president governing board members next week March 5th through the 11th is national school social worker week and we'd like to give a proclamation related to that whereas School social workers serve as vital members of the Education team playing a central role in creating Partnerships between the home school and Community to ensure student academic success and whereas School social workers are especially skilled in identifying and providing services to students who face serious challenges to school Success including poverty disability discrimination abuse neglect addiction bullying mental illness familiar stressors and other barriers to learning and whereas local educational agencies Community Support agencies should continue to work in partnership with social workers to address and access resources to support services in helping to meet students social emotional physical mental health and environmental needs so that students May achieve academic success whereas School social workers maintain knowledge of school climate which are necessary for responsible school safety plan and now therefore I Shane McCord do hereby Proclaim Sunday March 5th through March 11 2023 as school social worker week in Gilbert public schools and commend its observance to all in our district community thank you Dr McCord we'll move on to 7.02 fiscal year 2023 monthly budget report for month into January [Music] 2023.
Dr McCord thank you madam president governing board members I will turn this over to our associate superintendent Mrs Bonnie Betts for our monthly budget report good evening governing board members Dr McCord Mrs eugetti this is a short report this evening oh good that's real short yeah that was very Speedy wasn't it yeah um would you like well there we go got it uh well it's on my screen okay there it is thank you just a note this is uh reflex year-to-date activity through January 31st 2023.
so we are sharing with you the following groupings of funds District operating funds Federal grant funds state Grant funds and then a few of the other District funds so most notably and we share this every month is the activity in our maintenance and operations fund and classroom site fund and unrestricted capital so note that our available balance in the maintenance operations fund has declined a little bit showing an expected available balance at the end of the school year of just under 12 million dollars the year-to-date expended in cumbered has increased but also note that our pending revised budget number one we are still reflecting that as a pending because all of you approved the revised number one in February and this activity is reflective through January 31st but that 301 million dollars under the pending revised budget reflects the budget that you all approved in our first meeting in February classroom site fund this budget the revised budget number one reflects the final carryover amount from fiscal year 2022 based upon our annual financial report submittal and then finally understated Capital outlay you can see the year-to-date encumbered expended has increased substantially by about six million dollars from the last report reflecting that our deadline for unrestricted capital requisitions is looming right before uh spring break so our schools are working very hard at making sure they're getting their requests in and getting the purchase requisitions completed reflecting that six million dollar additional spend before I move on are there any questions regarding our operating funds great thank you so these are just the notes reflecting basically what I just shared the Federal grant funds wanted to share all of those it didn't go let's see some reason can somebody help me why the why my sharing is not moving um [Music] yeah are you streaming it up your computer my my yeah I'm streaming up my computer froze there but thank you it's working on my screen it's just not showing on the uh I guess so I got to give it some time to get there okay um so the all of the title title grants that you see at the at the beginning the e-s-e-s-e-a title one two and four these pending revised uh number one figures represent the awarded carryover from the Department of Ed the Arizona Department of Ed so all those are inclusive of the carryover from the prior year as well as the New Year's allocation in addition I wanted to point out the hundred day in-person Grant as well as the education plus up Grant a note that both of those have been we've been notified by the governor's office both of those grants came through the governor's office AC sent assist order was transmitted to the governor's office through the federal government indicating that the proposed rules regarding the spend of those monies were not consistent with the cares act funding laws so the governor has said that any dollars already spent through December 31st of 2022 will be reimbursed but no additional plan spend will be reimbursed reflective of the rest of the year I just want to make sure that all of you are aware of that you can see that in the education plus up Grant what what remained was six hundred and four thousand dollars that we will be giving back but in the 100-day in-person grant we are giving back most of those dollars that was the most constrained funding that we've received where had to be done at each individual school and each individual school had their own allocation based upon their student count so before I move any further on that are there any questions about the Federal grant funds okay I have a question how will that impact our budget considering that we were expecting to be able to spend those monies and now we've had a change so um there has been there's a minimal impact on the 100th day Grant just because of the constraints associated with those spending rules the education plus up the six hundred and four thousand dollars was meant to fund a portion of the second half of the fifteen hundred dollar retention stipend to be paid in June of 2023 so that six hundred and four thousand dollars we envision will come out of the maintenance and operations fund balance okay thank you you bet again these notes are what I just basically told you about and then the state Grant funds so instructional Improvement you can see that our adopted budget was three million dollars and our uh pending revised budget number one has dropped to 2.4 million dollars we um we have anticipated that the instructional Improvement monies which is the Indian gaming allocations that we receive here in the state of Arizona would ramp back up again now that we're out of covid however that has not materialized it is possible though that by the end of the school year that a third allocation payment will be made and we will let this governing board know as soon as we know for sure that that's going to come so we've been receiving about six hundred thousand dollars each payment generally we receive two payments a year last year we did receive three it's very it's very possible we will see receive three in the current year as well the results results-based funding those those payments to our classified and certified staff at the schools that actually earned the results-based funding were paid their stipends today so you can you can see that it's not yet encumbered we generally do not encumber stipends but the next time that we report when we report the February report you will see that those monies are expended and then finally the school safety program you can see that the revised budget has gone to zero there was a hundred and sixty three thousand dollars not spent last year it is uncertain at this point in time whether that carryover will be awarded so we're waiting to hear about that as well any questions on any of that I have a I have a question besides the fact that we got three payments yesterday last year from the Indian gaming what [Music] is that the only is that the only indicator that you have that we might get a third payment this year or has there been some other communication that leads you to believe that we'll get a third payment there isn't anything formal uh out there right now however staff did go and send an email to ask we received a payment in July is it possible that that that that we would receive an additional payment in July and they responded it's very it is very likely thank you you bet okay finally other District funds I wanted to share with you the status of the employee benefit trust which Mr Glover indicated that there's an action item for you to approve the funding of the employee benefit trust for the 2024 school year so this is just a reminder that our available balance is still very healthy and that fund is in a very positive status at this point and that's all I have for you this evening [Music] any questions from board members okay we'll move on to eight uh consent agenda items which are items for consideration discussion Direction and possible approval do I hear a motion for the consent agenda items as presented I move that we approve the consent agenda items is presented thank you Mrs Humphries is there a second I second thank you Mrs page it's been moved and seconded that we reapproved the consent agenda items as presented all those in favor please signify by saying aye aye so on a vote of four to zero they have been approved and we will now move to number nine action items number 9.1 appointment of Jared Ryan as the assistant superintendent of teaching and learning for the 23-24 school year do I hear a motion you want to talk first and then I'll do the motion sure okay um it's with great pleasure we bring before you tonight candidate for assistant superintendent of teaching and learning for the 2324 school year Mr Jared Ryan thank you do I hear emotion I move that we appoint Jared Ryan as the assistant superintendent of teaching and learning for the 23 24 school year thank you Mrs Humphries is there a second thank you Mr Thompson any discussion it's been moved and seconded that we approved the appointment of Jared Ryan as the assistant superintendent of teaching and learning for the 2324 school year all those in favor please signify by saying aye aye so on a 4-0 vote and Mr Ryan if you'll just be patient for a minute we've got two more to go and then we'll let you have a minute to talk 9.02 appointment of Andrea amrick as the principal of settlers Point Elementary for the 2324 school year Dr McCord thank you madam president governing board members it is with our great pleasure that we bring before you tonight as the fourth principle in its existence of settlers Point Elementary Ms Andrea Emrick for the 23-24 school year your emotion I move that we nominate the appointment of Andrea amarek as the principal at settlers Point Elementary for the 23-24 school year and is there a second and I'll go ahead and second that one so it's been moved and seconded that we have we approved the appointment of Andrea Emrick as a principal of Settler's Point for the 23-24 school year all those in favor please signify by saying aye aye and so on a 4-0 vote we approve Andrea Emerick uh 9.03 appointment of Dr Sean genitis as the principal of Gilbert excuse me Highland Junior High School for the 23-24 school year sorry Mr genitis do I hear a motion or no sorry again we would like to welcome and we're very proud to bring before you Dr Sean genitis says the next principle of Highland Junior High for the 23-24 school year thank you do I hear a motion I move that we approve the appointment of Dr Sean tinnitus is the principal of Highland Junior High for the 23-24 school year thank you do I hear a second I second that thank you okay um we it's been moved in and seconded that we appoint Dr Sean genitis as the principal of Highland Junior High School for the 23-24 school year all those in favor please signify by saying aye aye aye so on a 4-0 vote so we now have three new administrators Dr McCord yes congratulations to all three we'd like to hear from them in order so Mr Jared Ryan please come to the podium thank you so much Dr McCord Madam clerk governing board thank you so much for your belief and faith and and me and and the vision that Dr Newman has established for this department that is just outstanding I I hope to be able to move it forward in the ways that you all envision and the way that she has envisioned the team that she's created has made this an easy decision for me to to submit my name for consideration strong academic strong personal and strong Visionary individuals are rampant throughout the department so I'm excited I have to say I was nervous earlier listening to the oratorical students and feared I'd come up right on the heels of that but instead Finance got put in front of this so it worked out well I would be I want to thank my wife and kids are actually here which is fantastic so christening and Maguire and stand up children and Mrs Ryan and and Mama Ryan and Mama Ryan yeah so this is kind of a first coming out in in being here and it means a tremendous amount my older daughter Kennedy is on a softball field right now but um anyway we all know that work in this business it takes a commitment from everybody and my children were back there voting no when you were voting yes but um I think at the end of the day we're gonna we're gonna all do this together and so we're excited to be part of it and I want to thank you Gilbert's a special place gonna call it home the rest of my career so thank you so much next up if we could have the next principle of settlers Point Elementary Andrea Emrick [Applause] thank you I'd like to thank all of the governing board members and Dr McCord and the cabinet for entrusting me with this great community and the opportunity to be the principal of Settler's Point I've been there as their interim principal since Halloween and it has been a great experience the staff thank you to some of those who are here tonight have supported me and welcomed me our parent Community is amazing I look forward to all the amazing things that we're going to do to support that school to make Gilbert Public Schools proud and thank you to my family my husband and one of my daughters is here tonight they've been on this long journey with me and so I appreciate their support and again thanks for this opportunity family please stand there you go congratulations thank you guys and last but not least Mr Dr Sean genitis Highland Junior High Principal one more time for Mr United now previously I want to thank the board cabinet Dr McCord and the selection committee for entrusting me with this leadership role Highland Junior High I would like to thank my wife Angela who supports me in every Endeavor I pursue I love you uh thank you Mom and Dad for raising me to be the best person I can be and all my family for their support thank you Tyler Dumas Krista Cox Dan Johnson and Gene Woods for your guidance and support throughout my leadership Journey we have excellent leadership in Gilbert public schools and I feel very fortunate to learn from the best and many of whom are are in this room our students staff families and admin at hdhs are the best give them a ring [Applause] lastly again thank you for all who came tonight it does mean a lot go canes if we can take a five minute break to mingle and congratulate our new administrators and come back about 7 23.
[Music] watch out we're here foreign [Music] all right thank you um thank you um she saved us thank you very much okay that's fine where I'm here um [Music] okay now we need to get back to our business meeting please [Music] thank you very much we'll move on to action item number 9.04 athletic fee increase for the 2324 school year Dr McCord thank you madam president governing board members uh we asked for your approval night for an increase in athletic fees for the 23-24 school year due to rising cost field trip transportation it is necessary to increase the high school GPS athletic fee to 125 per Sport and the Junior High Athletic fee to 100 per sport thank you Dr McCord so can I hear a motion to approve this this fee and then we'll discuss it if necessary sorry um I move that we approved the athletic fee increase for the 23-24 school year that would be a hundred dollars for junior high and 125 dollars for high school thank you thank you Mrs Humphries is there a second second thank you Mrs page it's been moved and seconded now we'll have discussion anybody have anything they would like to say so I I don't have any discussion points necessarily I just want to let the public know that as a board um we we didn't take this decision lightly we know that times are tough and that people are cinching up their belts more than they have in the past number of years and so this is not something that we just did arbitrarily this is something that we had to do we felt we had to do to make sure that we were able to um cover costs also attract the right Personnel for transportation and things like that and we sincerely think that raising this cost will improve our ability to make sure that the sports programs the transportation all of that can continue we can continue to be competitive but I just want the public to know that that we considered uh the situation that a lot of our parents are in and we appreciate that and want you to know that uh again that we we didn't take this decision lightly thank you any other discussion yeah I appreciate what Mr Thompson said those were actually the words I wanted to say as well but um it has been a long time since we raised the athletic fee it's been at least 10 years to my knowledge and I appreciate that that can be a challenge please if you feel like it's challenging to pay those fees reach out to your administrator at your school and have a chat you know with the athletic director or the principal because we don't want this to keep someone on the sidelines but we do have to pay those costs and we felt this was the best way to do that and um again it's a it's a very difficult thing to do but we haven't raised those fees for a good 10 years so and I echoed both of the previous comments thank you okay if there's no further discussion I'll ask for a vote for the athletic fee increase for the 23-24 school year all those in favor please signify by saying aye so on a 4-0 vote it has been approved number 905 9.05 district-wide wireless and network refresh Dr McCord thank you madam president governing board members we are recommending you award high-tech Network and Security Solutions to purchase Network and wireless equipment and consulting services using one GPA Cooperative contract 22-02 pv-08 technology Services recommending approval of the purchase of network and wireless equipment and consulting services to refresh the entire Gilbert Public Schools Data Network the project was approved by voters in 2019 bond election the implementation will refresh existing wireless access points and network hardware and provide consulting services to guide the best practice configuration during the setup of the new equipment the network refresh project is e-rate eligible with a reimbursement rate of 50 after the exclusion of district office complexes district office complexes are not eligible for reimbursement under the e-rate guidelines total for approval is nine million one hundred and six hundred seventy four thousand dollars or nine million one hundred six hundred seventy four dollars and forty cents e-rate eligible is three hundred ninety nine thousand seven hundred forty six dollars and seventy six cents ineligible I said an e-rate eligible is eight million seven hundred thousand nine hundred twenty seven dollars sixty seven cents with a potential reimbursement of 4.35 million dollars this will come from bond fund 630.
we have our um executive director of Technology Services Mr John Castellano here uh when you get to the discussion point if you have any questions thank you Dr McCord do I motion to improve the district excuse me and network refresh I moved to approve the district-wide wireless and network refresh thank you Mrs Humphries is there a second I'll second it it's been moved and seconded we will now have a discussion if anybody has any questions of Mr Castellano I I did have a question um we're going to use these companies for Consulting who will be the actual who will be carrying out the actual work and will that be our technology team members doing that or what I mean this is a big project every school what would be the timeline and who's going to carry out the actual work yeah absolutely great question uh as Eugenie members of the board Dr McCord thank you for having us here tonight Scott Hussey our leader of Network Services is here so if you get too technical I will get right out of the way and let him answer the questions for you but um yeah so we're super happy to be starting this project if you remember back in 2019 the AV refresh and this were two very large projects approved by the our community members so we're very thankful for that so we've been working with the same company for over eight years now even prior to when I got your supply more than 10 years so how that works is is they worked with Scott and configured our Network seven years ago so all that prior knowledge is there which is great we still work with them on a daily basis but so they will work with Scott and his team on all the initial configuration of all the major switches that does all the network routing in the district so they will do that with the new equipment they will knowledge transfer over to them as well so we gain that there and then the physical they'll work initially with the team on the first few schools we usually do a High School junior high and elementary school and then they'll kind of get out of the way and then Scott and his team will work to install the rest of the equipment so the project roughly will take us probably about a year just like the AV refresh has so we'll kind of follow a very similar timeline and a similar pattern with that so it'll be No Interruption installation meaning we will never interrupt the school day by installing any of this equipment so we'll have to be flexible with our schedules but we'll work early late during the summer as well um to physically get this done so his team's done it before and has had some familiarity with that yeah so we've obviously logistically lay this all out our project manager Jim Woods will work closely with Scott on that and some of our BenQ team will then work with the Scott and his team so we got some things down to a science and a lot of experience with it so that's kind of how we're going to roll this project we won't be able to start it so with e-rate e-rate Works similar to like our RFP RFQ processes so in April then we will submit uh if this is approved tonight back to e-rate who is under the FCC that's who runs the e-rate program and then we will obviously we have to have the money up front right that's e-rate rules so if it proves we can get to order but then it'll go to them for approval of that reimbursement which is in the documentation there are any I don't know dead spots in the schools or places where Wi-Fi does not work as well will those issues be addressed as well yeah you want to talk to that a little bit sure um it kind of depends on the area um with the new Wi-Fi standard it will um spread out further and better and you'll have faster and more bandwidth and more lanes and all that stuff but currently how we sit inside the school is very well covered so there won't be much addition inside the school itself on a separate project we're looking at other things like Press Box coverage and field coverage and stuff like that but that's a separate project but we'll be ready for that kind of stuff with this project okay all right thank you any other questions I just had a quick question um how long does this typically like how many years do we go between refreshes and how long is this equipment quote unquote I know it becomes obsolete very quickly how long do you expect and determine that this will be uh good for our schools yeah great question so our rule of thumb with the network equipment is about seven years when you get to that seven year Point could we stretch some of it possibly but so many things change and a huge addition um for Port space we call that actual spots in the switches to connect the wireless access points to you but so now since the last refresh we've added all the interactive boards in every classroom each of those has a data drop we are looking at the security locks on the doors those also take a data drop right security cameras were added also and those are still going in so those of all need we have an increased need for capacity and then what changes with those also is how those are powered it's all powered over ethernet so that power comes right from those switches so those standards change more power is needed depending on the end device so that's changed so you just kind of have to see how it's going right and how those standards change and how much additional once you're adding because there's a lot more things we could refresh in the district that will need a new day to drop because everything is over IP now it's all over the network so thank you sure can you can you explain to me a little more about how the reimbursement program works so e-rate is a federally funded program uh it's the universal service tax it's called if you look on your phone bill you'll see that taxes on phone bills and that's how that's been federally funded since the late late 90s early 2000s and and that's it's changed a little over years as far as like how they reimburse and what they will reimburse but that's exactly how that program's worked and then the percentage of reimbursement is based on your free and reduced lunch count so right now we're roughly the way the formula works out Gilbert's about 50 percent reimbursement rate so this this project after reimbursement will end up costing the district if I'm getting the numbers right about four to four and a half million dollars correct has there been any discussion about doing this in or is it possible to do this in phases so that it's you know maybe we can do we can do some now and some I mean is there some equipment that absolutely needs to be refreshed and some equipment that we can hang on to for another year or two that doesn't need to be refreshed right now so the usually that comes to how we're paying for it right since it's Bond money bunny there bunny was there and that was approved that helps us at this point because the we're still the supply chain thing is still a thing for certain products and network equipment is one of those products so if we do do it in phases it could continue to push the data out on those so we're just trying to keep in that time frame as far as the logistics go for us is something that we're going to stop work enough court and of course not it will continue to work but um you know if we were maybe using different fund and business Betts could help with this black Capital that might make that a little different on how we decide to phase that in and this is just I don't know kind of related but with all of these data drops with the the cameras and mostly with the cameras do we store that data locally or do we store it in a cloud like a like a Google cloud or something like that or where is that stuff stored how long is this how long are we required to to keep it in how long are we required to store it yeah good question so I'll adjust just the security camera piece um so um those are stored on servers within our Network so all of the elementary school and Scott correct me from this all of the elementary schools servers are in our data center in Guild Republic schools the high school essentially the larger capacity and more bandwidths needed those servers are at the sites and that's where all that's stored now there's a rotation cycle of how long those have to stay at a minimum that video on those servers before it overwrites so I don't want to misspeak to how long that is I believe it was a minimum of 30 days so we could go back 30 days to retrieve any video and that's at minimum so as those get Fuller but that's the rotation of that is there is there a requirement that that stuff has to be stored on site I would imagine that it would be less expensive to store it remotely somewhere store it up and up in the cloud it just depends on that it truly just depends on the amount of storage needed the easy the access to it against speed can be an issue I mean it's not for us but but we have the capacity here in our data center we have a very robust data center here in the coolings in place and all the emergency fire systems in place so it just makes sense because that is already of course paid for and our data center is built out so that was another reason to keep that in-house thank you you're welcome I don't miss each other I just have one more question I presume that also with a refresh comes improved security because that's always an issue yes uh that is always an issue and um while we've tackled security and and a bunch of other projects um you know this security is always evolving and with the new uh new hardware comes new software and new advances a new all kinds of different stuff Wireless standards that have increased since our last implementation so we'll see you know like wpa-3 Enterprise instead of WPA2 we'll be able to take advantage of those kind of things so it's harder to crack and harder to um infiltrator Network all right thank you so yeah we've all seen Ferris Bueller's Day Off and so I think she wants to make sure that nobody's going in and reducing the Numbers number of absences that uh that they've had so yeah absolutely keep those no I just don't want any I don't want any ransomware that's what I don't I want to avoid none of us does none of us do yeah I have one more quick question um so if we're two years down the road and we decide we need more security cameras for whatever reason is there the bandwidth to put those in are we going to have to start from the scratch and bottom up with those absolutely not we definitely when we build these out we build out capacity so we've absolutely done that and like I said we looked at other things that we may Implement down the road and that's yeah absolutely good and it is scalable too um so if we do have a site that over capacitates a certain closet we can add to it very easily you know with a separate purchase but um we'll be able to do those things with this new equipment awesome okay thank you so much anything else okay thank you very much um so it's been moved and seconded that we approved the district-wide wireless and network refresh all those in favor please signify by saying aye aye so on a vote of four to zero it's been approved we'll next move to 9.06 employee benefits trust medical and dental insurance rates recommendation for the 2324 school year Dr McCord thank you madam president governing board members we bring Tina Knight the employee benefit trust internal committee as well as the employee benefit trust formal trustees voted unanimously unanimously to recommend a two percent medical premium increase for the 23-24 plan year this premium increase results in an increase in budgeted expenses to GPS the amount of about five hundred thousand dollars included in the two percent premium increase is the addition of a multi-plan wrap Network to all three medical plans this multi-plan network provides out of the state out-of-state coverage for members that reside or travel outside of Arizona and have an urgent need to access health care today the GPS Health Plans explicitly exclude out-of-state coverage except for the life-threatening emergencies only out of state medical coverage while traveling will be allowed for sick office visits urgent care services and Emergency Services note that the actuarily determined increase to the medical plan including the rap network is 3.2 percent due to the health of the employee benefit trust the two percent premium increase was recommended the potential drawdown of the employee benefit benefit trust reserves is approximately 500 000 in addition the employee benefit trust is recommending no changes to the dental insurance rates for the 2324 plan year uh Mr MacIntosh and Mrs betz are here to answer questions if you have anything do I hear a motion to approve the employee benefits trust medical and dental insurance rates recommendation for the 23-24 school year I move that we improve the uh increase as recommended thank you Mrs Humphreys is there a second a second thank you Mrs page is there a discussion or questions from anyone so how does this because it sounded like you said that currently are our employees insurance covers them for life-threatening situations that happen out of state correct correct what we're proposing is that this would cover and I I forgot the first thing you said but this would cover urgent Urgent Care uh sick if you're if your child's going to college uh at Washington State University and they get strep throat they need to go to the doctor or Minnesota um they'll be covered through our medical plan right now that is not covered and is that is it like typical Insurance coverages where it'll last until the the child is 26 I think is that is correct okay thank you yeah I had a I just had a couple thoughts first I I really appreciate how hard you've worked this is phenomenal that this is such a low increase I mean that is just tremendous um and I I do want to appreciate that coverage I mean if you go on vacation I mean I can see why that woman didn't go to the doctor because she broke her foot not life-threatening but still something that she needed some care while on vacation so I think that's really important that we provide that coverage um just because you know if you're just in Arizona most of us want to go a little further especially when it's hot get out of the heat for a few days so I really appreciate that um I don't know that I have any questions but I'm I'm really really impressed that sometimes when Kev you know medical insurance has gone up 10 or 15 percent in a year this is very very affordable and I really appreciate the work that is put in by our insurance trust and our Consultants to keep it this low does this and again this is just for clarity so this doesn't include anything elective that somebody wants to travel out of state for for some reason in other words somebody can't go to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota from here specifically to get that kind of a benefit so that you know it recovers everything else but not something like that correct yeah that is correct and is is there a committee that approves if there's I'm sure they're not approving if a if a family member has a student in Minnesota and they need to go to the doctor for a routine checkup we're not approving that but if there is something urgent is is there an approval process that happens or is it just so they get their care coverage or whatever is happening out of state and if for some reason it's not covered medically um and they will have the ability to appeal to the employee benefit trust and that trust will hear their case and make a recommendation on whether to approve it or not thank you if I if I could add so remember that we are expanding the network so we have Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona in Arizona so this is a multi-plan network so the individuals that are out of state are obligated to access and in-network provider so I wanted to make sure that that was clear it's not they can go anywhere out of state they would have to go out and look to see which which providers are in network in this multi-plan well thank you for that clarification I think that's pretty important for people to understand I think I would imagine that does not apply to emergency situations and it does not apply to emergency situations that is correct thank you any further questions I just I just had a comment um I just wanted to piggyback on what Mrs Humphrey said I'm very impressed with the low amount in the increase and I also just wanted to State this is mirroring many of the major insurance policies that many other people hold it's not like this is some obsolete thing that we're proposing most insurance carriers if you have an emergency out of state allow you to go see a doctor so I think we're just coming into compliance with the normal insurance policies that are out there for other businesses correct that is correct the the biggest change is what everyone has talked about regarding the in-network access while you're on vacation or you have a dependent who's in a another state for um college or whatever so it just allows them a wider breath of Health Care in that work Blue Cross Blue Shield which in turn gives us better benefits here at Gilbert Public Schools to offer our employees that is correct and I think it's noted this was part of the plan how many years ago three four years ago and and then it was dropped off because as as a self-insured trust you have to mitigate uh all kinds of different things within your planned document in terms of what you serve in court in order to keep the rates down and so at one point the trust thought that we needed to drop this off and and so now we're back to we need to bring this back so does this benefit change make us make GPS more competitive when it comes to hiring new teachers or is this something that are we are we playing catch up to other districts around here or is this some are we are we leading in this regard so when we look back about a year ago our what Gilbert Public Schools costs to employees or for to buy medical insurance was lower than the surrounding District so to answer your question Mr Thompson I do think it's a benefit we do use it to try to attract new employees this new piece of it or the return of the new piece of the wrap is similar to what most districts are doing but the actual cost of medical insurance in Gilbert to the employee is lower than the surrounding areas thank you if there are no other questions I'll call for the vote all those in favor of the employee benefit trust medical and dental insurance rate recommendations for the 2324 school year please signify by saying aye aye so on a 4-0 vote and we'll get to number 10 request for future agenda items if you have anything that you would like to put on the agenda please see Dr McCord or Mrs wood and we'll move to 11 which is 11.01 city of Mesa liaison Mrs wood is not here so we'll move to the town of Gilbert liaison Mrs page thank you Mrs eugetti actually I'm going to be speaking on behalf of President wood also she and I sorry no apologies that's okay um she and I teamed up and we had some really great introductory meetings with the city of Mesa and the town of Gilbert when we met with the mesa city council member Scott Summers we discussed ways that we could reach out to the local businesses and how we could incorporate possible students receiving some type of credit work study credit for working in the local businesses in and around the East Mesa Corridor where our schools reside we mentioned to them that we would bring it back to the administration and let them get take that from there with the town of Gilbert we met with council member kaprowski and mayor Peterson and we discussed how we can ensure that all of our students in schools in GPS work together to provide a strong community in addition we also discussed with mayor Peterson the continued efforts by the town of Gilbert um to keep our schools safe they've got some really great things going on at the town and we're very impressed with that and then lastly I just wanted to just thank the town in the city's support we recognize that we need to work together collaboratively to have great schools in our communities thank you Mrs Humphries the Gilbert Education Foundation and audit committee so the Gilbert Education Foundation I just want to remind everyone that if they have seniors who are graduating this year that they should go check the website because there are scholarship applications available and don't assume that you have to be one of those top top you know 4.0 students they have scholarships for a range of students one scholarship for someone who's worked during their high school years scholarships for volunteers scholarships for most improved students so I think it would be great to go look at that I think the deadline is coming up on those and then the audit committee did meet in February and we just went over some of the items we're doing a remarkable job but of course there are some minor mistakes that we went over and that we're working to correct those mistakes that happen when people are doing things every day so that was it thank you Mrs Humphries um I'll report on the insurance benefit Trust we had our organizational meeting in the middle of February along with the the regular meeting with the staff members and I would like to just say that the the finance staff under Mrs Betts is going to be monitoring the fund balance of the Trust on a very uh regular basis and because we are doing well and hopefully we'll continue to do well and with their monitoring we may recommend a premium holiday for next year uh this will be the if if we get to that point and can do it it'll be the third year in a row that we've been able to give a um premium holiday to the teachers or to the not just the teachers the whole staff and we'll be meeting again next week thank you Mr Thomas so I I think a lot of us in here already know the the good news from the legislature uh that the aggregate expenditure limit was uh was approved is that the right waived was waived and so I think that puts a lot of us um at ease and I think it's going to go a long way in ensuring that uh that our students and our families and GPS are confident that we're going to have the funding we need to make sure that we can provide top-tier education here in GPS that's all doc McCord do you have the meeting dates yes our next board meeting is and work study a brief board meeting and work study is next Tuesday March 7th and we have a regular board business meeting on Tuesday March 28th and in between those two dates would be spring break awkward now we come to our second favorite part of the night after the recognitions the adjournment do I hear a motion for an adjournment I move that we adjourned for the knee for the meeting I'm getting nervous there for a minute do I hear a second a second thank you very much Mrs page and Mr Thompson um it's been moved and seconded all those in favor of adjourning for our meeting for tonight please signify by saying aye aye [Music] so on a vote of four to zero we are officially adjourned thank you thank you everybody that came and watched online
what's the latest you've ever started in the game six o'clock I don't think Shelly's ever been late I've got 20 seconds okay I'm gonna call the meeting to order at six o'clock um I'll take a motion to adopt the agenda I move to adopt the agendas presented my second all in favor aye aye motion carries four to zero go ahead and do the pledge okay um do we have uh any questions on the meeting minutes if not I'll take a motion I move to approve the meeting minutes from the previous meeting as presented a second all in favor aye aye aye motion carries four to zero so we have um superintendent report Madam president members of the board a few things tonight A couple that weren't on the uh report that was posted earlier uh because it just came up today just a heads up there's a new requirement for our audience for the audit that we do for our district and any school district in Arizona that's got to be approved on a roll call vote by members of the board by March 30th however because we moved up our meeting to March 1st our Auditors don't have our report done so we will have to do a quick meeting it could be a zoom meeting where we just go ahead and present the audit report you've had the preliminary presentation earlier but they went through and looked at a couple a couple different issues and so just know that will probably not worry about it until after spring break so sometime after the the 21st but again it could be just very a very quick meeting that could even be a zoom meeting that we just need to make sure we have a quorum and that we have a roll call vote as required under statute so just a reminder on that piece um if you look at uh enrollment we're seeing the same patterns holding steady that we've seen throughout the year so we just continue to monitor that as we we look to next year not going to go into the specific details um let's see foreign instruction we're not having a report uh this month uh do the board meeting being a week earlier and some of our testing results won't won't be available but we did want to let you know that 92 of our eighth graders passed the Civics test a couple different things on that that is a requirement under State Statute um and uh there's some exceptions we a student has as many options as many opportunities as possible through their 12th grade year to pass it I don't remember off top of my head but we had the same kind of high passage rates for those kids that have not passed it at the high school level and so uh I also bring that to your attention because it is one of the objectives within our strategic plan and so we are on target to meet or beat the state average on on that a Civics exam and then we had seven percent of our second graders meets The Benchmark for full gifted testing and we only bring that up the gifted testing range at the national level is a six to ten percent so we're within the within the realm of what it would be at the at the National level did want to also let you know about a meeting we had today with paper and major Clarity uh papers you know is our tutoring program major Clarity deals with College and Career Readiness paper acquired major Clarity back in December and uh the CEO was uh called me because we were one of the few districts that happened to be both clients of paper and major Clarity and I asked them you know why the purchase and and what was going on and as he described what they were trying to do and why they were doing and I said it's funny you should say that we have a process within modern teacher that talks about learner profiles and how can we develop learner profiles from kindergartners all the way up to high school kids and as we talked we realized there there might be something there and so uh they said well why don't we come down and visit with you guys and and see what you're really talking about it's almost like product development today was a brainstorming session one of several that will probably come up um and then based then it was a the coaches and the principals uh and District administration in the room and we spent probably four hours just talking through what we were looking at they're going to come back and and look at some initial product development and then we'll go ahead and take that out to teachers and kids to get an idea of what they think of it one of the exciting pieces is is how Dynamic this learner profile can be what we're really trying to do is is come up with a product that does not require additional work for teachers that is owned by kids and owned by families in terms of this is who I am as a child this is how I advocate for myself because these are my strengths my weaknesses this is what my area of interest is as we as they get older they can put their resumes in they can do letters or recommendations and so we're real excited about the notion that we may be able to work with the two companies together and come up with something that's unique to Combs scalable across the country if those companies wanted to to but also is something that will ultimately benefit our kids and our families but not provide additional work for teachers so just wanted to let you know we anticipate there'll be some additional meetings coming up and uh I think the positive piece for us is both CEOs were in the room as well as seven other product development people so to bring a team of nine people come down and meet with us I thought was pretty impressive and speaks highly of a good partnership and a good relationship so we're excited about that piece we also have kids doing great things the County Spelling Bee is hosted by us and has been for probably the last three or four years and our the winner out of our district was Logan Friday I talked to you about that last time an 8th grader at CMS and he finished first runner-up which basically means if for some reason the winter is not able to represent at the at the state level then then Logan would represent at the state level we also had a cool event on presidents day the dance program CHS Dance Program hosted the azdo High School Dance Festival and what that was was about 300 kids coming to from around the the state coming to our high school for uh a full day of dance so they had an opportunity half the kids would perform in the morning and the other half would go through a bunch of series of workshops with a variety of different dance individuals so whether it was jazz or swing Bollywood Mexican full folkloria hip hop any of those kind of things then in the afternoon they just flipped but to see 300 kids and their teachers given up uh President's Day to come in was was really cool the gym was packed with kids that were dancing we had had them in both gyms we had them in the music rooms and then they were performing and to see them supporting each other as it performed we hope that that will be something that we can continue to do in the future they were pleased with everything we did and so thanks to Andrea Carson in particular because she was the one that really put the event together she had help from a lot of other people we had some of her own staff judging obviously the CPAC was being run by our staff so very very positive we are starting I think there's some young ladies and gentlemen in the room that will be leaving here real quickly after they perform because we have a lot of spring performances both for the high school as well I think last night the middle school went and we have the Elementary Honor Band going tonight so there's a lot of different things going on drama is preparing for the spring musical Matilda so we have a lot of things going on with Fine Arts our booster club had their first annual car show 30 entries 36 cars and one baby stroller I wasn't there so I did not see the baby stroller but it was a good way we had a lot of our our booster clubs so band trap and skeet FFA and theater were there to sell food so overall it was a very positive fundraising activity for the the high school boosters CMS flag football I don't know if they're still in there I don't see this Ridge but they were second they what they are they are they're still in it so they were second division league so they're in the playoffs and the girls of basketball was still moving to groovin okay well they remade the playoffs so that was good news the girl and it was um they were third seed in their division so this was it was you know when you go it's the top team versus so yeah but they made it that far but black football is Saturday and surprise and they are sexing in the whole week so it's a really big deal guys so we'll we'll send us advice uh CTA had a number of uh things happening obviously they're part of one of the bands that are going to be at the the elementary band uh uh performance tonight they also did a fundraiser and raised over seven thousand dollars to help with our classrooms and our students and the Scholastic Book Fair raised fourteen hundred dollars and they are part of uh you may have remembered approving a few weeks back or a few months back the the cameras and intercoms and and they're getting those put on along with a lot of our other buildings uh there are a number of events that I have down there I know that there's many people in the room that are looking forward to the next two weeks after this week because we got spring break so that's always good news I'm sure that'll disappoint some students but we'll have spring break anyway um and then what we want the last thing I want to do I'm not sure if they're here just because some of the confusion but I still want to read off their names if if they're not here and recognize um this upcoming week is uh School social workers week and I'll read off the names and see if they're here and if they are they can come if not I will uh go ahead and just still read a couple things do we have Kristen menk veld from the high school here Lorraine schindle Decker from the Middle School Aaron Gomez from Ellsworth Tanya Thompson from Harmon Angela Albers from Simonton and we do want to take a moment we'd like to thank people for what they do and our social workers especially coming out of covet and some things that are going on in our world today they become critical this year we have the week of uh this week for uh National um uh School social workers week and uh what we see is we need these kids this year it's We rise the theme As We rise and we just want to thank them for rising up and working with our kids I don't know that people understand the full depth and breadth of what we try to do to help families and help kids and this is just one extension last month we talked about counselors and this month it's social workers and the combination of the two do amazing things for your kids and helping your kids and your families if there's issues that are that are coming up it is just something that's done very quietly working with families and working with kids without a lot of fanfare but so so critical for our kids and for our families and so as those individuals work with your kids and your families we just want to thank them because we know without them that's one Cog in the wheel that would really be sorely missed so although they couldn't be here with everything going on we do want to take a moment to say thank you for everything you do and next week an opportunity and thank them more for what they do for our families and for our kids so with that I'll turn it back over to you we'll have the school and staff recognition it's Cruise good evening Madam president members of the board Dr Wyman and distinguished guest it's a pleasure to be here in front of you tonight and thank you for allowing me to present I would like to recognize first um Miss Laura fryer Miss Laura would you stand up I asked Laura at the very beginning of this school year if she would felt like she would be ready to present her band to the governing board and she said absolutely I can take that task on so here she is tonight and our sixth grade band come on up [Applause] so um these guys have been working on um this this music that they're actually going to be performing tonight over at the CPAC um this is um just music that they've been working on together with all the elementary schools and it's just a great privilege for them to be here tonight and so we thank you guys and for this opportunity laughs [Music] welcome [Music] hahaha [Music] [Applause] thank you very much that was great nobody loves us better than Bob though he loves look at him Mrs fryer before you leave could you please come up here Mrs fryer is a person a wonderful lady that I would love to recognize um a little bit more than just what she's done here she is a 0.2 FTE at the ranch campus that is a couple hours a day but I will tell you this lady is here all the time she is so dedicated she stays for staff development on Wednesdays she does after school tutoring with the children who need some extra help or just want to be more in like the advanced band she is phenomenal and I am wanting her more on my campus if that is at all possible in the future so I would like to recognize you I would like you to have lunch on me and I would like to give you a blue Apple award [Applause] now have have a wonderful time this evening and students do a fabulous job I know you will congratulations thank you you would never know this is just her second year at Ranch next I would like to recognize Vita manrique Brown if she could come to the front please [Applause] Visa is one of our paraprofessionals in our resource classroom I want you to know that Visa has been in the district for 17 years nice 10 of those at Ranch and we love her to Pieces she is so flexible and so willing to do whatever it is that we need her to do we when we have families that need translation she's right there to help us translate she will stay after when we have parent-teacher conferences just about anything that we need she is there for us so Vita thank you for being a professional thank you for doing everything that you can do to make the ranch kids special and to help out wherever is needed thank you thank you I also have a blue Apple award for you please take this put it on your desk and enjoy thank you and last but not least if Debbie Mertens could come up to the front please thank you Debbie is another one of those long-termers Debbie and I started out together at what was The JO Combs Elementary School way back when she was my admin assistant I can remember the day of interviewing her and hiring her and then when I chose to become the principal at Ranch Elementary she said I'm coming with you and I said okay that'll be great we'll be quite a team so Debbie has been with us in the district for six seven sixteen years so quite a long time and you know what she knows everybody she she and I start to talk and we say the same thing I mean she knows what I'm thinking and I know what she's thinking and it just works together we are quite a team and I am so thankful to have you on board and thank you for putting up with me for all these years and please have lunch on me tomorrow thank you let me put it down there oh thank you Connor and that is Ranch Elementary thank you thank you very much we'll go to student of the month Madam president board members Dr Wyman our colleagues in the audience I say it every month best time of the day is to be here and do the student of the month so can I have Jasmine acampo come up from comb Center for success and it's Yasmine correct Yasmine okay there you go good job Yasmine exemplifies there you go give her yeah that's good Yasmine exemplifies the best attributes of an outstanding scholar a responsible young adult and a truly kind human being funny bright and always helpful Yasmine is a joy to have in her classes she's a student assistant at CTA with The Kindergartners and does an amazing job congratulations Yasmine foreign [Applause] High School how about Michaela Tanner from Combs Middle School [Applause] look at that is this man Michaela truly expresses all of the traits of responsibility she's definitely a gem in the classroom setting and we are honored to be able to say that Michaela certainly deserves to receive this award and she's a valued student in the classroom congratulations Michaela that was from Mrs lipditch good job could I have Cora Esquibel from Combs Traditional Academy ready you ready Cora is a very responsible second grader she works very hard as a young lady and puts forth her best effort every day when there is an assignment to complete or a task to be accomplished Cora gets it done in a timely manner with a great attitude if Cora says she's going to do something you can count her on her to do it she is not one to make excuses and answers for all of her actions in every situation and Cora takes what she's learned and applies it to life congratulations Cora later could I have Quinn Morales come up from Ellsworth this is Quinn say hi Quinn yeah Quinn follows the rise code by showing respect to others and by using her inside voice she has Integrity Integrity by always following direct directions and she's always picking up and cleaning up for other people she loves learning for engagement and Quinn is a great student in school and she's a wonderful young lady congratulations Quinn [Applause] could I have Max Liston come up from Harman you ready there you go good job good job you guys are doing great tonight Max is wonderful and a hard-working student he's very responsible in class and around the club playground sorry he he always has his work on time and if there is trash to pick up he'll do that too he makes sure everything is put away in the right place and is kind to all others he's always helpful to his fellow students he really is just a fantastic student and we are very proud of Max congratulations Max [Applause] yeah could I have Armando caparron come up from Ranch [Applause] you ready good job look at them Armando is a great leader he always shows wonderful responsibility in class every day by always following the directions the first time he can be counted on to give help a helping hand to other students and all of his supplies are organized and ready for whatever the Day brings Armando thanks for always being a rock star in the classroom that was from Mrs fleegle congratulations [Applause] and finally could I have Nathan Reyes Gillian come up from Simonton Nathan knows the drill Nathan demonstrates his responsibility by completing his classwork in a timely manner and making sure he turns in quality work he also takes his time to help others and reminds others of tasks that they need to complete in order to be successful in the classroom Nathan also shows his responsibility not only helping in the classroom but also for assisting in the classroom cafeteria by offering to help clean up and making sure others do the right thing when nobody is looking he is a great role model on our campus congratulations Nathan hey good work that concludes our students of the month parents if you'd like to take a couple pictures we'll take a couple minute break and then we'll continue with the board meeting thank you foreign thank you [Music] okay we're gonna move along in just a little bit we'll give you one more chance you guys want one more picture okay one more we'll wait you're fine Obama enjoy your dinner okay so we'll go ahead and move on we have governing board updates do you have anything that we'd like to share anything no um so I have one so I know the last like three days I've been making some surprise visits to the principals on their sites um I didn't mean to like get anybody nervous or anything but I know that we have that little thing that our little survey that we do on ourselves and um that was one thing that we needed to do better on so I uh I appreciate you guys um talking with me and I learned a lot I I learned a lot of things that we as board members can do better as well so I appreciate you taking the time with me and um I'm sure you'll see me again so okay um any public comments nope not this time all right so we have um our consent agenda does anybody have any questions on our consent agenda nope everything is good all right on a motion if we could for the we have the contract list in there if we could just move the consent agenda and what the contract list if there's a Minor error found here there that we that you give HR um the opportunity to fix it we've looked at over a thousand times but inevitably with that many people there may be an error so if you could kind of post that that gives them a a ability if there's a missed person that we could go ahead and get them out of contract that would help out so you're talking 7.12 7.12 so should we just move that out you can do it either way you can do it either way yeah okay we'll just go ahead and move 7.12 out of the consent agenda and uh so I'll need a I'll need a motion on the consent agenda with the exception of 7.12 so I moved to approve the consent agenda consent agenda with the exception of item 7.12 as presented one favor aye aye motion carries four to zero so now we'll do um uh seven I'll take a motion on 7.12 Bob do you understand what he's saying I think so um I recommend that we approve item 712 with the Proviso that if there are omissions or Corrections that need to be made HR can do those who can do those as necessary all in favor aye aye that's a motion carries four to zero so now we have um let's see 8.1 discussion and consideration to approve estimate to access a pass capacity for open enrollment acceptance for 23.24.
foreign [Music] I'd like to call the March 1st 2023 regular meeting of the Brookfield Board of Education to order please join me for the Pledge of Allegiance I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay we have all our board members here this evening um so board members we do have some outside presenters here this evening and I'd like to make a motion to uh um well I'd like to move items V which is the board recognition we have an outside presenter and item a under new business to the next item on the agenda does anybody have any objection of me doing that all right I was hearing no objection those items are moved to next on the agenda so first up is board recognition Dr Burrell I'll turn it to you all right thanks I want to First thanks though March Keith thank you Mr Belden the um March is Board of Education appreciation month and like always it's important to acknowledge our volunteer board members for their leadership support and commitment to the students in the hours they put in on a volunteer basis it is it's been a challenging couple of years and this particular board has been in place during that time and we commend we on behalf of the administration and the faculty and the staff we commend you and thank you for your leadership and dedication to the staff and to the students it's greatly appreciated with that we have a Cabe representative tonight Mr Dan krusson he's actually a current member and Veteran member please come on up down to the podium of the Newtown Board of Education and he is going to be presenting the board with a cave Communications excellent award on the going green project so Dan make sure the mic's on for you welcome thank you thank you good evening superintendent perel and members of the Brookfield Board of Education thank you very much for having me my name is Dan quierson as and as super temporal said I am here representing K by in the area five director which covers Brookfield and Bethel and Newtown and a lot of the surrounding towns I am here to present to you the Bonnie B Carney Award of Excellence for educational Communications uh entries for that award must meet all of the following criteria first is the general criteria which includes Clarity of message image and consistency and second is the specific guidelines of readability editing Graphics type format presentation design and value of expenditure so I am very happy to present this to the Brookfield public schools for the educational communication going green Cabe has been honoring school districts with the Award of Excellence for educational communication since 1975.
Teresa Michelle here okay here Gladys here Warren here um Jesse Yeah Bridget here Julie here Ralph he's here but not in the room and Luisa here all right so in the interest of time some um most of the board members were here through the committee meeting so no need I guess for another presentation but I'd like to open it back up for any questions that were carried over or you got anyone had for anyone here in this meeting and then we can move on to um the action item is everybody okay with that yes I have a question that was just talking through and it came into timing so the high school kids they start at School [Music] around seven oh five now seven on five so the middle school is going to start at what time when this from the academy is 7 25 700 but you know the issue is really around you know the start time for the buildings shared components of the school and so we'll have to what that's going to have to change yeah so they'll be bust and separate buses they won't mix we've got the timing of the drop off could be the same or could be a little staggered because I could see bottleneck you know sometimes support chair if there are no further questions before and I just want to make a quick statement regarding the two respect the teams in the background so one I I would like to thank Elaine and his team um we've had some experience working with uh Friar previously I'm glad I want to thank you and your team um every time we're called in for questions you you and your team present these things a very sizable sizable bites that the team and I can kind of comprehend and um help along with you in the city of Danbury make decisions to help continue to move this project forward so I want to thank you and your team for that we look forward to these next couple of phases in our continued world and then secondly Antonio I want to thank you and your team I Know Dan to your left and Tom to your writer here the team and I um genuinely appreciate working with all the folks on your team it's truly been collaborative in nature and the fact that you guys are shepherding this us through this project could be in better hands so we want to thank you for your leadership and Etc and really look forward to the delivery of a First-Class facility and to the point that you made earlier in your presentation we know this is going to benefit all the city of Danbury most importantly on the kids who were going through certain so thank you so much wheelchair that that is it I just wanted to make sure I was on record found an opportunity to thank both research you want to have any other questions I'm just excited I agree I agree I mean I know I missed most of the presentation but I've worked with Antonio before on the high school edition in west side and stuff like that and I know um just a second kind of what Kevin said is that you guys put your heart and soul into this I know you're on uh you know deadlines and stuff like this and we try to accommodate it as best as we can and I like the good working relationship that the board has had you know with with the city and you guys over the last uh years now so um I am excited too this is it's a great uh it's a great opportunity overall and I'm glad that um you know Danbury is doing no one else has any questions I'd like to at least the um motion yes sir motion that the Board of Education authorizes the chairperson of the Board of Education and the superintendent of schools to improve the final plans specifications and cost estimate for phase two of the Danbury Career Academy project and sign the scg-042 forms for submission to the state of Connecticut office a school Construction Grants and review for approval in accordance with exhibits on file in the bbac Orient ation by Warren any discussion uh almost in favor um what was opposed and the abstentions okay do we hear him hi oh sorry about that no problem come on uh anyway um so uh motion motion passes and I'd like to thank you guys again is there a motion to adjourn made by Teresa second by Michelle all's in favor all right all right shortest meeting in history
Board of Education sites and Facilities today March 1st meetings order at 6 05 pm Mike do you want to go ahead and take it away sure excited about everything you've got to show us tonight thanks Michelle okay so uh tonight thank you everybody for coming um we'll see a big turnout just to kind of recap the way tonight was set up so this was our standard sites meeting as it was originally calendared coming right after this though is the special full board and the reason these are back to back is because we are under a tight deadline to make sure Antonio's able to get all these specs up to the state for approval by next week so our hope is today that the presentation will be answer all your questions we will have an action insights to approve the specs with some very specific language that we'll we'll have to read to the worker once we gavel out from sites we will roll straight into a full board where there'll be an opportunity to ask just a few additional questions for anybody who wasn't at sites but then we'll move directly into the action so full board can approve the action item which will give Antonio the uh the authority he needs to then take it on upwards to the state for his meeting so um one item on the agenda today Career Academy phase two the most exciting phase this is construction walls uh all the stuff that makes us start to look like a school so I'll turn it over to Antonio [Music] my name is city engineer and Public Works director for the city of Danbury and I also have some colleagues of mine co-workers I have the architect from Friar here and we're going to I'll take you on as Mike said probably uh everything that you have worked with us on has led us to get to a point tonight where we can actually do the fit out of that of all of the building spaces and you're also going to see a build out for the site including some of the circulations and we also have some reference of color that the school administration has picked we've been working with the school staff and also Kevin's office and all of his administrative folks to get to where we are today so we're very excited to be here so um I'm just going to update you a little bit because uh I think the last time I was here was in September of 2022 so since then A lot's happened um the city actually closed down a building on November uh 22 of 2022 we have already come on in and secured a very critical approval for the zone change um we've also secured some zoning variances that we needed in order to actually build a school as you see it tonight we've also secured EIC approval which is your Wetlands Commission on approval although we're not disturbing Wetlands we are in what's called our Upland review area which required them to actually practice a approval on a permit um we phased one was improved by the state we went out to bed and we've actually rewarded phase one which is in construction right now that was in January of 2023 and uh we are we just on February 22nd of 2023 we actually met with the building committee to do the pretty much the same presentation that we're going to do folks this evening so we've been moving along granting securing and getting approvals for all of the critical aspects of making this school project uh real um just so everybody um you know we're discussing phase two tonight so I figured I could probably give you a quick overview of the way we wrote this project out with the state of Connecticut it is for distinct phases phase one was the demo phase which you guys gave the approval for in September he also pre-purchased a bunch of equipment that has long lead on them so all of that is in reverse okay snooze the harder your project as I mentioned to you phase three is all of the furniture fixtures and other equipment that we need in order for you guys to run your school and educate the kids uh phase four is the technology phase which we always say at the very end and that's where we purchase all of the technology there's quite a bit of it in the school and we usually wait for the very end to buy that so we buy the most current technology available um I'll give you a very quick overview of this building project the existing building is a steel frame building with insulated metal panels on the outside of the building the floors are concrete on top of a narrow deck there's going to be brand new moves uh on all of the buildings the gym Edition which are architect will go over with you is a packery stat on grade steel frame structure and it's going to be an insulated block wall on the exterior so building wise can you start taking a look at the square footage with the addition the existing building is right around 254 000 square feet so a fairly large building the gym Edition is about 12 000 square feet and the new Total facilities per footage is right around 266 000 square feet approximately 33 or 32 000 square feet of this building is going to be dedicated to the board of education and administrative offices so for the first time ever the Board of Education administrative offices will all be in one location where they can really work together and more efficient we'll collaborate a little more than they maybe do now so the the building itself is it's probably the largest School uh in Indian very right now other than our existing High School one of the largest schools that I could probably build for the board of education so having said that I'm going to turn it over to our architect and I will come back and update you on budgets schedules and all of that good stuff so Glenn from Friar associate is here foreign [Music] just a couple things when you when the Friday first started the award approved the education specifications prepared it and uh that's pretty much the the vision that we went forward with to uh to design the building so um I just want to give a kind of a summary as to that and then we're going to go through some PowerPoint slides and and Jamie who uh has been the lead person in the office uh correcting the whip to make sure that we met the deadlines uh and everything on our project she's going to go through the plans um so uh we we're we have the Board of Ed offices in a portion of the building we have the middle school which is about uh just under 62 000 square feet in that uh um part of the building is the main office there's 15 General classrooms there's two art classrooms three science classrooms we have vocal and Van van rooms small group instructions a middle school Commons area staff offices conference rooms uh guidance offices and a variety of storage and Technology rooms on the high school side the academy side it's about 84 000 square feet we have a thousand forty students there they're located uh primarily on the four-story wing which uh exclusively on a second through fourth and on the first floor they there's some shared spaces but we have the main office 25 General classrooms two art rooms four science rooms A Band Room a greenhouse classroom Commons space health and fitness classrooms there's five we have the academy spaces which include the environmental and renewable energy lab Sports and Human Performance biomedical Allied Health or CNA lab Allied Health or EMT medical Tech and engineering and a bunch of the business business Investment Management Global Supply these four classrooms there along with the guidance Career Center again small uh group classrooms offices for staff and work rooms conference rooms and then we have the shared spaces that will be shared between on a scheduled basis between middle school and high school so we have the gym glitches has a seating capacity of 386 on the bleachers the cafeteria there'll be one way for the Middle School three-way to the high school the seating capacity for each wave of about 400 with the media center which has two internal classrooms to the media center the black box theater which has exceeding for 350 um students and then we have the nearest medical facilities which are separate for for middle school and high school but they're in the same local common spaces within the building there's we have six elevators within the building one of which will be new further forward that space there's six stairs again one will be new um that position in the building is center of the building because there's a lot of vertical circulation especially it's on the high school side so it's quite a wide stair a variety of toilet rooms that are both you know the building had existing facilities so they're being reused and then in order to meet the code requirements or we added additional bathrooms shower rooms both at the gym and at the fitness areas storage receiving the kitchen and serving primarily existing but there's some minor tweaks that have happened with that security offices building and then mechanical and I.T spaces the site has a total of 1044 spaces and and those will be dedicated for the board of ed student parking School staff visitor spaces there's a dedicated Bus Loop and a dedicated parent drop-off and there's an outdoor classroom so I wanted to kind of go through the PowerPoint and I know that it's to your backs there I'll do my best to explain things yeah I think I'm just too far away [Music] okay so the site the the main road coming up is here the buses once they reach this point will come down their Road this way and drop off students behind the gym and then continue on we'll again be using this loop around here and and out so there's a number of accessible spots there are also four electric vehicle charging stations this is your Outdoor Classroom and the gym Edition the Board of Ed entrance will be here and there are parking directly across the main entrance to the school is here so visitors will be in this location coming into the building and then there's an entrance here which students will be coming in via the buses and and elsewhere and then there's obviously a number of exit requirements for uh um for code um so that's the uh the the the site there is a a bypass road that comes around the perimeter of the parking so that uh um during the day if the buses are queued there is a way to come back out um as if you've been to the site you know that there's a huge parking lot in the back here which isn't shown on this slide um there's really no scope of work for the project uh back there other than uh make sure our security cameras are are working um but uh that's uh that's a site there is a outdoor existing Outdoor Cafe patio if you will right off the cafeteria so on nice days uh there are tables out there that could be used and it's uh it is uh fenced in with a very nice wall that was existing [Music] 's gonna kind of walk you through the plans this is Page State your package so this is the first floor of the building um stand up we go up in this left corner top Corner you'll see that that is the Board of Ed space for the first floor the Board of Ed takes up the first and second floor in this area of the four-story building in this area you'll see you have your main entrance over here along with and when you walk in you're directly next to the boardroom which has a folding partition that can be utilized to divide it into three spaces two spaces whatever you're choosing is for whatever events you have going on in there the rest of the space is offices and conference rooms and some mechanical systems here and about here is where your elevator is for the high school and middle school your main entrance is down here and off of there you have a Pathways classroom and some more business Pathways classrooms when you enter into the lobby you can either go to the high school main office or go to your left and go directly upstairs to the second floor where the Middle School main offices which we'll see on the next slide also in this area are the nurses they are separated between middle school and high school so there's no overlap there and you also have your black box theater and your gymnasium above that with locker rooms and more toilet rooms for all the assembly spaces uh as you go sorry as you go over there's existing mechanical boiler spaces that are going to be reused and you also have your cafeteria here with the kitchen and then as you continue down these are your health and wellness classrooms and fitness classrooms and then there's one more pathway classroom here the EMT pathway classroom which has um direct through this Corridor out the stairway access to where an ambulance can pull up for any teachings that need to go on there and then this is the second floor so when you come up that store off of that Sarah Lobby your main office Middle School main office is right in here and then this whole area consists of your middle school there's General classrooms your band room and chorus room and as you cross over in between we have the media center and some art classrooms there's a middle school and high school art classroom as you continue over to the left side of the building this is all separated for the high school and then above that is your second level of Board of Education on your third floor you'll see that the high school and middle school are completely separated as there's a low roof in between these are again your general Middle School classrooms and science classrooms up at the top area here on the high school side these are all General classrooms the high school Commons is here and then there is a guidance and Career Center in this Center area on the fourth floor this is all High School there's your some more of your Pathways your Greenhouse and environmental Pathways as well as your high school science classrooms and a few more General High School classrooms uh to take you through we did some renderings of some of the spaces at the top here you'll see the main first floor corridor where you can see logos that have been created with a graphic designer to depict the the concept behind each of the pathways on the fourth floor we also have some walls that also show some of those logos to help direct people and you'll notice from some of the finished boards you'll see that the colors are associated with each pathways on the top right here this is the EMT classroom and you can see over here we there will be an ambulance simulator in the classroom so the kids can experience and go in and do a lot of learning in there then this is on the fourth floor another Pathways classroom the Allied Health where there's also this is where they get to experience working with the medical beds and all the technology that comes along with that this is one of our finished boards which we also have over here showing you the different colors and finishes that have been selected so if you want to take a closer look they're visible over here this is um the Middle School Commons which High School Commons would be very similar there's just different colors associated with the High School versus middle school and it's a very collaborative area a place to go between classes or during your free time there's a lot of chairs soft seating and acoustical panels up in the ceiling to help control the noise that baby kids create this is the media center which is a collaborative space between both the high school and middle school have access to this space from their sides of the buildings this is the a view of the entrance to the black box theater and this is a view of inside the black box theater as you can see very dark from this view but this is for presentations so we have theatrical lighting to help any presenter make their work visible as well as large Springs high above so that they can present and everyone sitting in the bleachers can see the work clearly this is a view of the gymnasium you can see we have the bleachers in the background and this is a view from the bleachers looking towards the platform finished board which is also over here for the colors of the black box theater and the gymnasium and a few of the other main areas of the of the school and last but not least this is the Board Room for the Board of Education we have a lot of warm tones in here you can see the wood paneling on the walls there are three projectors screen two projector screens and monitors all over the walls so anybody in the space Can See Clearly what is being presented and there's your exterior of the building so just a couple things um it was very important in the design that would be able to separate the middle school and the high school students and that was uh she I think pretty successfully the first floor is is you know a lot of common spaces so there's maybe times in the day when um depending on what that schedule is that that could happen but up on the from the second floor up um it's it's pretty much uh segregated so on the second floor the middle school there is is access to the common uh media center from the Middle School site or from the high school site so they're not you know they're not passing one another Middle School's not going into the high school side to get into the into the media center so it's it's achieved that way there is a common stair here from egress um point of view which is the existing stair we couldn't do it really anything about it so we're treating it with hardware and and access Hardware uh so that uh you know on a day-to-day basis you know you're not passing through it but on an emergency we have to be able to exit the exit the building so we're doing the best again on the um on the third floor it becomes real simple there's no way that uh they're they're crossing over um um the the first floor with the uh there's one more yeah okay on the first floor um the cafeteria so this is the main stair that high school students will probably uh go up and down towards the cafeteria um the uh the Middle School side will be something that they're going to have to work out but they can come down this there or this there and coming down the hallway and into the uh queue for the server um and uh the gym high school students using that the the path of travel that's least disruptive is probably this way into the gym and then into the locker room areas so as I said I I think it's pretty much pretty well segregated but um there is going to be some process at times and especially in emergencies the finishes we only brought two finish boards there's actually six of them all of them have been presented to to Kevin and and and uh you know his team um and approve we're in the process right now of developing the uh the plans and specifications for the furniture that will go into the into school technology is also in the works and those are base phase three and four but they're going to come pretty quick on the heels of of this this getting approved that's it uh what I wanted to do now is just pack over our budget so we'll offer a project um so uh in bond restaurant available for uh this project and a couple other projects we have secured 208 million dollar uh referendum vote which had a great support and this school here was allocated 154 million uh dollars of the 208.
this is an annual thing that we have to do uh that just establishes what our capacity is uh with respect to open enrollment you will notice especially for the new board members we do do this on several levels and I'll explain why in a second but we do it based on uh the size of the school that's that's how the sfb determines the size of the school uh grade level ratios and then program ratios like special education English language uh the reason you do on this many levels is you may have situations where you have capacity in a particular school but you may not have capacity in a particular program as an example so even though one of the elementaries may be going ahead and taking kids if they're in like special education the answer may be no because we're at capacity uh likewise even if you're at capacity in second grade but you're not a capacity in fourth grade if a family wanted to come as an open moment we might be able to accept them in one grade level and not the other grade level please note that with any of these capacities there for open enrollment out you know out of the district movement if somebody lives in our district they have every right to Tender schools so we may be at capacity in a program and or a school or a grade level and if we had 10 more families move in with a bunch of kids we would say no we don't have capacity we would have to go ahead and accept them so it establishes that we have plenty of capacity so this will not be an issue I don't believe on down the road it may start to as the as our homes come in but again this is just an annual thing and so I would recommend approval as presented any questions on that yeah I have a question I just want to be sure I'm getting the wording correct it says for 20 23 24 the recommendation excess capacity so those numbers above the enrollments if we have now or the total for that particular school no that would be the total that that school could accept anything above is excess and therefore we would not be able to accept so those numbers are not excess those are the numbers that's the that's the cap that's the cap the capacity because that's the wording just got me a little bit thrown off there okay any other questions okay I'll take a motion oh just before the motion is okay so in the motion is the term of excess capacity required to be part of the motion yes that that is that's the way the language and the law works okay that's what I wanted to know okay so I move to approve at the estimate of excess capacity for open enrollment acceptance for 2023 2024 as presented second all in favor aye aye motion carries four to zero okay 8.2 discussion and consideration approval ongoing maintenance to the cooling tower at CHS I'll go ahead and start and then if you have real detailed questions Mr Anderson can come on down uh basically it is just ongoing maintenance if you're looking at our cooling tower it's almost like there's a filter in the cooling tower and as that filter degrades you have to go in there and and remove it and replace it um there's also some general maintenance that takes place within the cooling tower that ensures that it works at the level it needs to work at UH there is I'll just say I'll call it the filter but there's some degradation of the filter in there so in taking a look at that we went out to get multiple quotes uh you can see there's a wide range we very feel very comfortable with the quote that was presented I did note in there that it was not the lowest quote because the lowest quote did not quote labor and there's a significant portion for labor so our recommendation would would be to use cooling tower products to go ahead and make that correction uh with this we'll move as quick as possible so that as the warmer weather comes the tower is is operating in that in a fashion to make sure that the high school remains cool had any technical questions Mr Anderson can answer but I can give you the bigger overall picture hey um I do have a question how often is this type of maintenance required Mr Anderson ah okay so that's why I don't remember seeing this before for quite a while okay four to six any other questions I will take a motion um I moved to approve the ongoing maintenance to the cooling tower at Combs High School by cooling tower products for the cost of fifty two thousand six hundred fifteen dollars and fifty cents as presented my second all in favor aye aye motion carries four to zero uh just got 8.3 discussion consideration of approval for bid for replacement of the HVAC units at Ranch Elementary School if you remember last fall we had a microburst that came through or hit the high school and and Ranch uh on a Friday night I knocked everything over up on the units up on top of the roof and damaged them we had some same some knockover of units on the high school but did not do the damage that we we saw at Ranch we've been trying to we had the trust which is our insurance company come back and say they would they would give us uh I gotta look at the numbers because I can't remember 141 000 for the replacement of them we've been trying to work with the sfob uh they're not quite end of life and so we were hoping that we could work with the sfob to go ahead and come up with a plan that they would replace them and put in brand new ones um and that the SF will be pick up the the Opera the difference unfortunately sometimes with the SFO being with the change of administration um it's not as easy to work with them and especially change Administration they're going through who who's now going to be running that department and so we're not sure we're still going to try to work with them but as we went got an initial bid we ended up being told that there's a 14 to 18 week lead time out there for that equipment and so we're just trying to get ourselves set up that if we don't think the SB is going to do it or they can't move fast enough then we'll use Bond money to go ahead and get these things ordered and so we've had some initial uh initial dollars associated with it we'll make that decision over the next month uh we hope with this approval that we might be able to get into the queue for them irrespective of what the funding source is going to be and then we would come back to you in April with the approval of the final dollar amount of everything to make sure that that everything's kosher now if it's the sfob it's a perfunctory thing because it's really their dollar amount and and they would pay for it but if it ends up being that we have to do it out of bond money we would just come back to you and and give you the final cost and the final approval but this allows us we believe to proceed in a manner that might get these things in here a little bit quicker you wait until June on the sfob and that means you may not if they go down we believe they can still work and get us through but if they go down we may not get them back up until October and so we're trying to position ourselves to fix them as quick as possible we don't believe it's worth our time or effort just to clean them out and continue to use them because we believe with life of end of life that's going to happen next few years anyway the problem is sfbo sfob waits for true end of life before they replace in many cases so we're just trying to position ourselves we try to work with them and we're still trying to work but we have to fish or cut bait here pretty quick great just a clarification you had mentioned Bond money in the write-up it says accessories funds uh that um it could be well we're looking at we'll look at both because there's a future agenda item what's happening with the Esters dollars is is we're not spending as much in some areas as we think and so they're flexible so we're trying to balance out when do we use Bond and when do we use essers and so as we look at it right now that would be when we come back to you with the final dollar amount we'll we'll identify the specific funding source but obviously HVAC as an issue related to covid and Esther's dollars was something very big across the country so it meets the criteria for esser's dollars we're just trying to balance what do we use in bond money R we have to finish out a bunch of the bond money because we're at the end of the six year window so we're just trying to look at the two and so as we as we proceed over the next month we will make that final determination and then decide where the 90 uh 95 000 is coming from I think that's what it says 95 164 comes from and so I just want to give you the idea that we're looking at everything and then we will fine tune it move forward with it and bring them back in April with the the dollar amount as well as was the funding source and then in those HVAC units what is the normal life for one of those and where are we with the ones that we were hoping to replace that becomes the case and so the SRP would say We'll replace them in three years we think because normally the normally what would happen is the district would put in probably about a 10 percent dollar amount but because we're putting in over half of what it is because of the because of the uh insurance we felt that that would be a real positive way to approach the sfob but again that it's a it is a bureaucracy and so sometimes it just doesn't move fast enough that we think it's in our best interest or they won't do it but but that's why well if you're looking at how it's amortized yeah it's 15 years and they're looking so I understand okay so what if um we we pay this up front and then we they decide that they were going they're going to pay for it would they pay us back or would they say oh too bad you already paid for it we're not no they if they were going to pay us they would pay us back and then we would just journal entry and and free up the capacity again um we don't believe they will pay once we make the decision we don't believe they will pay us back and so truthfully the discussion that we're having is much more about um uh kids and adults in classrooms and what's in the best interest of them in terms of cooling uh we can get the units up and running but because of the potential damage do they start to trip out and go down and so it may be that our decision is that we just can't wait on the sfob and if they don't pass back that's why we have two funding sources that are legitimate to use and we're looking at that 15-year lifespan there it has been damaged in a storm does that not decrease their lifespan so so logic and the SMB are are not you know consistent and I say that realistically I was in another District where it took me three years to get a 30-year HVAC unit replaced because it still worked and you could get parts and I thought for three years to get it replaced um and so we run into that issue with them and so it does take off lifespan but that's not the way they look at there's this formulaic and if it's 15 it's 15.
in 2016 the award was renamed in honor of long time Cabe staff member Bonnie B Carney in recognition of her 47 years of dedication to education focused on Communications with this award cape's goal to identify and honor the hard-working people in school districts for their continuing effort to commute cape's goal is to identify sorry and honor the hard-working people in school districts for their continuing effort to communicate effectively so congratulations for receiving this award and I'm told you also have some honorable mentions as well sure so maybe you could bring this over to Mr Belden and Sean that would be wonderful thank you Dan congratulations board thank you very much thanks Dan and Mr cruison did mention um some honorable mentions from the board of education for excellent excellence in communication through Cabe and that is the district calendar pass that certificate around as well as the covet opening plan and another honorable mention for the Brookfield broadcast newsletter so we have to thank the board for their continued support and making sure we're getting the word out on the different initiatives and ongoings of the school system a special thanks must go out especially because it was a it was more than a honorable mention it was an Award of Excellence the going green project Mrs gramling is the district coordinator for that with hrra so thank you Mrs gramling for everything you do with that project congratulations and the going green projects the posters for this year's um uh poster awards for HRA are already on sitting on top of Lisa's desk right now so that's all all full circle and coming around so um some wonderful Awards there so I will say I saw last year's poster winner on the back of a bus yes and I was uh and it was great absolutely so uh Dan thank you very much for coming this evening we appreciate you taking the time out of your evening and uh thank you congratulations again thank you thank you Dan all right so the next item that we had moved up on the agenda is item a from new business which is the Sandy Hook promise see something say something app for anonymous reporting the action here is to receive a presentation so John I'll let you sure do introductions thanks Mr Belden so I'd like to invite Sandy Hook promise Representatives um Mindy Loeb lob excuse me and Myra Lucci another new town resident up here a neighbor of ours and they've done some work with us and they're going to present on the Sandy Hook promise see something say something app that we are adopting and we've talked about this several times at board meetings we're really excited to get things started this month it is an anonymous reporting system and it's a yet another layer of Safety and Security that we're working on in our schools so I'll turn it over to the ladies thank you okay thank you so much for having us we are excited to be here because being here means that we are onboarding or say something Anonymous Reporting System Program into your schools um my name is Myra Lucci and I am a senior director with Sandy Hook promise I oversee the onboarding and implementation of our program Nationwide and um with me is Mindy love who will be presenting to you we're going to be giving you a presentation showing you how the implementation what the program is about and the implementation process the presentation and the purpose of it is hopefully to answer your questions before you even have them but it might also Inspire some questions that you didn't even know you had so we'll be very happy to answer any questions you have after the presentation again really happy to be here and Mindy blob will be presented to you hello everyone thank you to superintendent and the board for having us here we are so excited my name is Mindy lobb and I work on Myra's team um and I am the um east region account manager um so I will be leading the project and have been working with Eric Conklin the Project Lead so I'm going to start the program overview and I think I'm going to just I'm gonna try the clicker but we'll see how that goes so this is a overview of the say something Anonymous reporting system brought to you by Sandy Hook promise I know a lot of you are familiar we are neighbors um in proximity so but I will tell you just a little bit about how Sandy Hook promise got started um we started in tragedy right 10 years ago when there was a shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that took the lives of 20 students and six adults and two of the parents that lost children that day decided to turn their tragedy into transformation they wanted to make it so nobody would ever have to experience that kind of pain and so Sandy Hook promise was started and its mission is to educate and Empower Youth and adults to prevent violence in schools homes and communities here's a little bit of our reach so you'll see our say something Anonymous Reporting System we have just under 3 million participated students and adults in our program with just under 80 um three thousand tips submitted and of those tips we've had just under three thousand mental health interventions these are our sister programs start with hello and say something and our safe promise clubs so these are clubs that are associated with our program and we are just under 4 000 clubs Nationwide the say something Anonymous reporting system Works in a three-step process step one we want to teach youth how to recognize warning signs and threats especially in social media because that's where frankly our students live these days but anywhere they might be whether that's on the school bus in a grocery store or in the lunchroom and we want to them to recognize warning signs from individuals that might be a risk to themselves or others and we want them to act immediately and take it seriously so this is part two of our teaching and our education we want to teach students to be upstanders not bystanders we want them to realize that they might be all the only one in the room that recognize these warning signs or saw these warning signs and we want them to commit to doing something about it we realize we're fighting an uphill battle um with the saying snitches get stitches so we are teaching students hopefully the difference between saying something to get somebody help versus telling on somebody to get somebody in trouble and last but not least we want them to say something to a trusted adult you're going to see in our training that we emphasize relationships between students and trusted adults we want every student to have a trusted adult in their life and so we talk a lot about who these adults might be it could be a teacher it could be a friend's parent it can be a pastor it can be um you know your grandparent we want you to go to a trusted adult first and foremost but if these students don't have a trusted adult and many of them don't we teach them to use the ARs which I'm going to talk to you about our crisis center but go to one of our trusted crisis center counselors to get help or when appropriate to call 9-1-1 this is our tip management process it is a three-step process step one the tipster which can be youth or an adult submits a tip using the app a hotline or a website step two the tip is received by our nationally accredited crisis center they work 24 7 365 receiving tips they vet triage categorize these tips and deliver it to your school teams these teams are district level teams and school level teams and 9-1-1 dispatch teams that then assess this concern collaborate with our crisis center and then finally provide intervention as needed and as per your current protocol here's the three ways to submit a tip as I mentioned the mobile app which is downloadable via the Google Play store or the Apple Store it is free the website is www.saysomething.net and we have a hotline a tipster must always associate themselves with a school so once you are live with our program then your students and your adults submitting a tip will be able to pick your school from a drop down menu these are our top tip types they're in no particular order but they do switch around depending on what's going on in the world we do see bullying and cyber bullying near the top tip types Nationwide followed by vaping and substance abuse usually but during covet and post covid we have noticed an increase in anxiety depression suicidal threat and ideation and cutting and that has been a trend that unfortunately has stayed higher than usual um when we do have events you know in the world sadly like Vivaldi or Buffalo then we're going to see these tips involving planned attacks going up and that is because people are hyper Vigilant they're looking out for these signs these warning signs and threats so you will see a jump sometimes during those times but all in all we found that only three to six percent of students trained will submit tips so it is a manageable number here's our crisis center I wanted to introduce you to them because they are wonderful as I said we just became a nationally accredited crisis center and this took a lot of hours and a lot of effort so we're very proud of them they are based out of Miami they are multilingual they have a wealth of expertise and experience they are always updating their certifications um and they're just very caring individuals that love what they do and I think this is one of the things that sets our program apart is that you have this dedicated crisis center that are willing to talk with these students and adults whoever is making these alerts they're spending the time to find out what's going on they're going to be be talking with these these students that submit tips just to assess and and get you know the who what where when why how determined when a tip comes in this is a narrative this is a screenshot of a narrative from our system the crisis center is going to acknowledge that tip when it comes in within 30 seconds to one minute of receiving it they are going to review all the details in the narrative from the tipster and this is for the purpose like I said of getting information determining credibility and then they're going to start engaging in two-way Anonymous dialogue with the tipster and this is really because they want to find out two main things is the person that is you know of concern okay and where are they foreign they're going to also categorize the tip as Life Safety or non-life safety in this process through this dialogue if it's going to be labeled as Life Safety it has to fit the following criteria there has to be a threat of substantial bodily harm or death it has to be imminent in progress or just happened there has to be credible information including evidence provided the suspect has to have the means or the intent to carry out the threat and it has to be actionable meaning we have enough information for an intervention to happen right now so when this criteria is present it will be labeled as a life safety tip and if some of them if if it's three out of you know five then the crisis center will most likely depending on the circumstances err on the side of caution whenever necessary they're going to deliver the tip at this point to your teams your district and school teams and this is for the purpose of getting additional information we know that the teachers and the administrators are the boots on the ground and they have more information so we're asking at that point these teams to log into the system review that narrative and the information that the crisis center has already discovered and then act upon the tip and a lot of times that is we're asking for additional information like I said about that student that you know we might not know and also we might want to know some demographics so if it is determined a life safety tip we're of course wanting to get 9-1-1 their law enforcement there quicker so you can provide demographic information and then there will be a clear handoff statement and this is where your teams your district and your school teams will become that front seat driver and it will be very clear and it will be yours then to take and assess and intervene as needed so let's talk about these teams and your teams so this is kind of what we're doing in the implementation process I've started working with Eric to build your District team and your school teams your District team is made up of three to five district level administrators including Eric as a team lead and this team receives life safety tips only your school teams are also made up of three to five School level administrators including a team lead and this school team is going to be built at all schools with grades 6 to 12.
uh remember 208 also charge is is in a bottom costs it's going to actually go out of security bonds um phase one which uh as I mentioned to you was awarded the final cost for construction was 8 million 8.3 million dollars uh that came in three million dollars on your budget as it was estimated so we did really well there uh phase two is uh estimated at 80 million to 79 phase three Declan just spoke a little bit about which is the ffne it's all the furniture that is apparently were allocated at a budget of about 3.3 million and then finally the technology budget was a large technology budget is about 2.2 million that there is a contingency of two and a half percent which is worth about 2.5 million dollars uh enabled a couple of all of those costs with the cross for purchase of land and the building which was you know 57 million we collectively get to about 157 million dollars so we're currently trying to be about two and a half million dollars over budget um we hope that uh the big environment stays really uh good as it did with phase one and we're able to actually hit our Target number of 154 which is what the project is uh was anticipated to come in at um as far as schedule as I mentioned to you phase one is well into Construction I know you can't go into the project but you should see the amount of work that's been done in the last three weeks there's astonishing a lot of activity a lot of work uh the weather's been great so we've been able to kind of get some of the exterior work started so we're going on our way faced news anticipated if everything goes well and we get an approval from the state we're hoping to call into a big scenario at the end of March um our anticipated um well let me talk a little bit about face cream for face cream for uh as Glenn mentioned is currently under design I will be coming back uh to you guys and before board to gain approvals for both of those faces I can go over budgets at that point but those are well into development right now as command pushed a lot of this hard work through he immediately uh have dedicated staff starting our phase three and four so we're well ahead of what we thought we would be with the designer those two faces with everything being and what it is and US hitting the target dates of actually being a lot to go out today we're hoping that the Board of Education will be able to operate and get into their spaces April of 2025.
all right um any other questions if not I'll take a motion I move to approve going out to bid for the replacement of the HVAC units at Ranch Elementary School as presented all in favor aye carries four to zero so now we have 8.4 discussion consideration approval of the purchase and replacement of student computers in 200320 and 2000 23 24. so this is just our continuation of our one-to-one initiative uh the good news and this is back where we talked about essers on the previous agenda item uh where we thought we were going to be spending a ton of money for 700 computers because we weren't sure if the um the EFC Grant would give us the money for computers it ended up at the end of the day giving us that money so therefore what we approved last year we didn't end up using essers money so also oops we got more money for essers So based on that we're just moving forward with what will be a regular occurrence I can't say a yearly occurrence because it depends on what the budget looks like you will see this same type of agenda come back next year because we'll still have enough Esters dollars to to replace again after we get through next year then we'll just have to see budgeting because the Esser dollars will run out in September of 24.
that is what our program is for is grades 6 to 12 right now and they're going to receive both life safety and non-life safety tips and then we're going to work with like I said your First Responders your your 911 dispatch and your law enforcement right and we'd love them to come on board with us and collaborate with us so we look to you to help us make those relationships and build that team and that way we want to train your 911 dispatchers also on our platform how to log in and three-way communicate with our crisis center your teams and and they're all sharing information there so some of the things we bring to the table is our account management team I'm part of that account management team again working with your lead to build those adult teams right to train those teams on our platform our P3 platform to make sure your students get training and we carry out that plan together we make sure you have awareness materials that go up in your hallways in the high traffic areas of your school so students know about the program and they remember how to submit a tip um we give you access to our digital Learning Center which is wonderful it's full of activity guides and lesson plans and other trainings just like the one we're talking about tonight things that you can do throughout the year to amplify the message and it's all aligned to Castle social emotional learning competencies all right our training for students we train our students in two ways right now via Plug and Play video or in our digital learning library that I just mentioned or a live virtual trainer so with the proximity we could also come to your school to train we haven't done a lot of that since covet but right now those are two modes of training um training is usually done classroom style it takes about an hour and um again you know usually done through maybe an extended home room or you know a different block period that you can rotate through and then we also provide information for your parents we want parents to know that this program is coming and what it's all about [Music] sources that you can share with them including a template a brochure and a program overview we have a sustainability team so once you come on with us we want this to be a program that stays with you for years to come so this sustainability team is there for that purpose they're going to help provide ongoing professional development as your adult teams turnover we know there's turnover in education they're going to get training when they come in as a new team member we're going to make sure your students get refresh trained every year we found that this is critical in the success of this program the students need to hear the message more than just one time so they hear it annually our sustainability team puts out a newsletter it's got a lot of information they help you update those awareness materials as needed and then they're just there for ongoing consultation this is a look at those awareness materials these are the posters and window clings they're going to get they're going to go in the high traffic areas of your schools teaching students the three ways to submit a tip and the three steps to our program and our safe promise clubs I mentioned those at the beginning save stands for students against violence everywhere every participating School in our program has a safe promise Club and we found that this is really where the magic happens this is where you get that student voice and the student buy-in and this is really where you start seeing a culture shift in your District these are student-led clubs and so the student voice becomes prominent now instead of adults telling them that this is important they're telling each other why it's important and how it's important through these clubs this club can be embedded into a club that you have that's currently doing this kind of work um maybe a kindness Club maybe an anti-bullying club would be a good fit but if you don't have anything like that it can easily be started from scratch as well with by finding an adult advisor and three to five students that are willing to participate and of course we provide free resources and tools to get that club activated and going this is just a testimonial about the clubs from one of our partners um I think it just speaks again to what I was talking about with the culture shift I'll let you read it but I'll just point out something that I think is great in this quote is that our club has shaped the culture within our school to one of looking out for each other and then students taking leadership and ownership to prevent violence before it happens this is really the magic of these clubs this is again like where you're going to get your student voice this is where you're going to get um students really accepting and living that upstander culture and looking out for each other and making there's knowing understanding that they can make their school a better place so thank you very much for your time and attention that is the end of our presentation and I will go ahead and open the floor up for questions Mindy thank you it's important as we get ready for some questions from the board to thank Eric for his leadership as the liaison with this as well as Dean and Mark in their leadership and excitement to really get the ball rolling and also our youth commission our youth commission was integral in working with the secondary team and moving this program forward and getting us all moving in that direction and we're looking forward to implementation and training and then implementation over the over the next month but I'm sure there's questions for either Myra or Mindy or maybe even Eric or Dean or Mark so I don't know is there any questions I have one um you mentioned that your the team that you have in Miami is multilingual um Can tips be submitted then in any language well I was maybe not any language but multiple uh well actually in through the app there's a translation and Lindsay I want to say they're like 37 languages please do not ask me what they are that's okay but trust me when I say the 37 at the essential itself Spanish English and we do have um another language is spoken presented but but the tips can be submitted and translated um through through the system in various languages all right that's good thank you I had a question um time period from when when a tip comes in and then it goes through the vetting and triage and categorizing and then delivered to our team here how much time goes by in that period that's a great question so it's 30 seconds to a minute what will happen is I'm the crisis counselor is triaging and getting information simultaneously the school team is also being alerted so the school team can get on the system and actually follow the tip as the crisis counselor is triaging the tip and in cases of for instance we had a life safety tip where we had a student it was a first person tip most of our tips are third person but in this particular case the student was saying um I'm going to kill myself I wanted someone to tell I'm not going to tell you who I am and while the crisis Council worked the tip for over an hour I happen to be in Miami at the time that this tip was coming in it was one of my largest districts that I had onboarded with over a hundred thousand students and I watch this Council work with this individual for over an hour during that time the school team was asking questions of the counselor to ask the individual we were getting enough information so that they were able to determine who this individual was so they're actually working the tip together wow that's impressive any other questions I was curious on the uh how often the trainings are like is it once a year is it a couple times a year yeah so the student training is um every year so following the first initial training which is the core training the students who have already received the training are going to receive a refresher training every year and this is crucial because it's part of our sustainability when summertime comes and those kids go off on summer break you will see that there are practically zero tips the kids make a correlation between the program and school when they come back after summer break they really need to be reacquainted with the program so that refresher is crucial now you have sixth graders that are coming in who never have the program they'll be receiving the core program so every year once a year they'll be refresher trained and trained and then as far as the adult that's mandatory for the um for the student training the adult user training we have it available every year we have a series that um new uh adult users could come in and and and to the into this series and and take the class that's not mandatory but the student training is because again in order to sustain the program we need to keep it alive that way we need to make sure we refresh them yes um I just had a question about um basically I was just wondering if you had any plans or regulations set in place um for detecting lies or how often that happens because I know with how young these kids are like especially in sixth grade if they don't fully understand um they might give in tips that just aren't necessarily true so I'm just wondering um if you guys detect those a lot or how long it takes or if there might even be consequences if this happens repeatedly that's such a fantastic question we usually get law enforcement to ask us that question but a few things because there are a couple of things you said there right there is the possibility that a tip is unfounded someone may think that they have a concern that it's real and then when you investigate it it actually is not um that's a normal course of action of you intervening on something that comes to you we always say you treat the tips as if they came directly to us if a student came directly to you you're going to do the research the same way it coming from the anonymous reporting system or coming directly from a student now when you're talking about malicious intent that's a different story it is amazing to me because these are students that are using the system how few of those we get it's like two or three percent you're gonna find our hoax now you have your hoax which is the silly ones um during one training we had a child submit a tip clowns have red hair you know with something silly like that but then we have those where someone might be looking to get someone in trouble it's just really with malicious intent it sounds real if it is identified by the school that someone is interfering with the system like that that is one of the few occasions where we will provide an IP address to try to identify the individual who might be doing that and when the students know this they won't do that it'll be rare that you'll have that kind of um messing around with the system the other time that we will provide an IP address is in the case of someone's life being in danger so I use that example of that young woman who submitted the tip and said I'm going to kill myself I'm not going to tell you who I am well as it turned out our crisis counselors are amazing our crisis Council got that individual to self-identify and go to the school counselor while our crisis counselor is on the phone with her if that had not happened you better believe that we are going to provide an IP address and we're going to try to locate where this individual is so if someone's life is at risk or if somebody is using the the system with ill intent that those are the two times when we will break anonymity other than that we promise anonymity to the kids we would not break it any other questions the questions from the board thank you so much for coming this evening we appreciate it the children that call it a severe threat or a real threat but don't go through them don't stay on the phone and don't go through the whole checklists do those skin that's a great question again so when we we call those tipping and dipping right so some kids will provide a tip and they won't dialogue with the counselor we will try to provide as many pieces of a puzzle as we can naturally if you don't have enough information to follow through then sadly there's not enough information to follow through you can't do magic so our counselors work really hard to keep the tipster on the line to get as much information as possible that sometimes they'll throw some information in there they'll shy away they'll get nervous and they won't continue on the call and you you know we provide what we can and then the school will try to do whatever they can with that information but when you work the tip one of the responses is unfounded or not enough information in that can happen the program speak on when they're training the kids do they speak on anything of sexual violence feature sexual intimidation a lot of things are going on with cell phones today people being put in precarious situations do they talk about that recording incidents so um it's alluded to the different types of tips that you can submit and when you go through our I don't think it was one of the slides why we took I wanna when you go through our app and I recommend that everybody download the app just so that you can see what your kids are going to be using there are a lot of different event types that they can choose from and sexual harassment sexual assault those are all part of that list and also when when submitting a tip individuals can also submit a video a picture something that they see that's alarming if that is submitted and there is any sexual content it's redacted and the victim is always protected if it's the sexual assault follow the we follow the the regulations on sexual assault tips so that we really make sure to protect individuals who might be victims of something like that so so let me just uh broadly yeah obviously we have some interested parents here as well a question that comes to mind with the questions being asked is is there a planned session to actually introduce parents and let them have a good healthy q a about this so we always leave that to up to the the school district we are more than happy to participate in a PTA meeting or to provide you with the tools so that you can introduce this to your um to your parents in whatever way you see fit Communications will be if I was just going to say that as the end part here wrapping up is Mark and Dean will be working through we'll be working on Communications uh regarding this not only to students but to parents should be very aware of what we're doing we're giving access to the kids but more importantly I these are great questions um I think there's going to be a lot of parents who have questions of how does it really work you're right on the money though we're actually working on a program because we also want to be able to provide a training for parents because as much as we want obviously the students who are the ones who witnesses parents witness things too and there are things that parents will not report on because they don't want to be that parent but with a tool where they can provide a tip because they see something alarming they will um so we want to start to also address that parent interest and ability to submit a tip when you see a concern and again you don't want to be that parent and you don't want to self-identify great and the last thing I will say is that Chief belisi and major Frank are on board with Sandy Hook say something app and we'll be working on training and collaboration and we've got everything planned out for for March through April for the spring and then obviously this is a six through 12 program so when as we enter into the spring but then move to Cle s we'll have the middle school and the high school on this and then they're working on some Upper Elementary programming for say something as well it's just not developed yet um so we have a fifth and fourth and fifth program fourth and fifth grade program that we just piloted that'll be available and that one is done live virtual only at the moment so the kids can ask the right questions and as far as law enforcement our crisis center has unbelievable relationships with law enforcement and once they get to really work with the district for a long period of time they have a good collaborative relationship that's unique to that particular District the crisis Center's Arts crisis center by the way they don't work with any other tips other than Sandy Hook promise any other questions all right thank you so much thank you so much appreciate it and thank you all for changing the uh the order of the operations around there thank you and I I do appreciate the patience of everybody to let this go first so we can let our visitors um able to get on so we're going to go back to the normal flow of the agenda at this point and next up is public comment board before I start on public comment at the last meeting we had a uh one of our speakers pointed out that we had a one of our own policy documents would allow more than three minutes all right so I I did spend some time after the last meeting to you know look into that a little bit more one of the first things I did was talk to Debbie and to Dr Burrell and that policy was already under review by the the policy committee because it was so it was pretty out of date so I was glad to hear that that that's under do you have any sense of when that's going to come forward for an update roughly think that's that search into what other districts are doing and we're going to continue our discussion on the 15th and then probably the meeting after they bring it to you okay good um because this one's the what we have is out of date the I did find the five minute reference in there and it's not in the policy per se because the policy is pretty broadly stated it's it basically says we will give the public a chance to speak to us this in the regulation where often the regulations are what give a little bit more detail uh second thing I did was I went back and talked to all the prior board chairs and to try and understand how long the um this three the three-minute standard we have today has been uh in in place and it's been a long time I mean I I gave up after uh got past the year 2000 so that means it's at least been 20 years since we've uh that we've been running on a three-minute standard in our in our group so the third thing I did was I spoke to council and said so how do I deal with this I've got a policy under review um and we're going to have an update uh that we will all vote on right on on how we deal with public comment but uh what should we do in the meantime and his advice was very simple just waive the existing policy for the purpose of the meetings at each meeting at the beginning unless and we either either I do a without objection type of request from all of you or we actually vote on it um and it's just so that there's not a conflict right between the documents and in the in the meantime he's strongly advise we not change our standard until the policy committee brings it forward we deliberate on it we review it and we vote on it right which is the right way to go deal with policy so so um so that's the three bits of input I've done since our last meeting so um so to do any of you have any objection if I go ahead and waive the regulation number 1120 for the purpose of our public comment I'm okay with that um okay well hearing no objections uh uh regulation number one one two o is hereby waft and we'll do that at the beginning of each meeting just you know for Good Housekeeping all right um it was a good catch by Our member of the public who spoke to us about that um the uh so public comment the board does welcome public comment each speaker has up to three minutes to provide input to the board at the start of each meeting a maximum of 20 minutes is allotted for comment on any item that's on the agenda and at the end of each meeting time is allowed for any comment that's within the board's jurisdiction which would include any overflow time if we didn't if we ran out of time in the 20 minutes um discussions of school Personnel individual students or individual members of the board is not considered appropriate um and there's reason for that and I I'll repeat what I said before the board has a very specific especially about Personnel a very specific role um about uh personnel management the superintendent is in charge of operating the district and that includes all Personnel matters and Personnel matters should be brought to the superintendent for his consideration or if appropriate to the the principal in that in the school or the appropriate administrator underneath Dr Burrell the board has a very specific role under our collective bargaining agreements is that we're an appeal route so it's important that for us to be a effective appeal route if there's ever a Personnel action taken that we need to not be talking about them in our board meetings so that if an employee employee action is taken and it is brought to us that we are not tainted by um you know a long discussions in this environment so our counseling I'm trying to channel Dan in this a little bit our Council has cautioned me very carefully to not be talking about Personnel matters in this so for those of you who are going to speak if we get under Personnel matters please understand if I ask you to stop it's because we do have a particular role of the board that we need to keep some Independence and the board is not taking actions over and above what Dr bro has under under his Aegis on Personnel matters so so I appreciate the input but that's an area that we cannot speak about and on students it's just not appropriate I mean to be franked it's we've got a lot of regulations about students and student information that we cannot be talking about them in a public meeting like this so so I'm sorry for going on but that's the background on why that's part of our policy and I'm hoping in any policy update we're clear in explaining the why it's not just the um that here's the rule so with that we do have sign ups um there are I went through the list there are five people who've signed up for public comment that have something to do with uh with items on our agenda this evening we have one of those people also said that they would like to speak in the the end of the meeting and we have one one sign up that is not an agenda item and it will be at the end of the evening um so first up is Mrs Rice and name and address before you speak I'd appreciate it and these timers are the three minute timers just keep your eye on them it's rice three old Hemlock Road having children ranging from 28 to 7 I have been part of Brookfield Public Schools past present and I will be the future I have both typical and special ed kids so I've seen a lot of parts of this district and I've been here a while and I have to say right now we're in a state of dysregulation affecting both identified and typical students the special administrator Administration will continue to cause a mass Exodus of long-term invaluable staff because unethical decisions have been made to protect one including but not limited to the falsification of the results of an investigation of a student I'm sorry you're talking about personality please be careful yes we are a district in mourning mourning the loss of Staff morale and doing what is best for our students when will enough be enough the new school can be a chance for renewed belief in a district where we now have staff and parents dreading the move your new school will be a true success if we can change the negativity that's been brought to the district and retain the staff that we so desperately should value and hold on to I question if that will happen but I want to be hopeful unfortunately due to certain decisions in a time where the news is filled with young children having serious mental health issues we have our Center School without a school psychologist he's on the paper as having resigned he was with us for 23 years and he gave 45 days notice he had contractual obligations but he is no longer with us he left within a week the kids and families he worked with are now not getting the services you're speaking in person sorry every single month yes it is every single month there are people leaving this does not have to be the case we can show support and value for our staff but unfortunately we're going to keep losing teachers powers and support with the current climate the lack of respect they have for staff and parents have changed the whole positive attitude of our district our district once had let's stop filling up job postings in other districts with the expertise of our staff members it's not easy getting up here and speaking people always have something to say and I have recently gotten thrown off the Brookfield septo Facebook page for stating my concerns this is a Brookfield public school district-wide PTO more and more people just like to complain behind the backs of administration but more and more people have been contacting me asking me to help voice their concerns I will keep getting up here until we get it right thank you thank you very much all right next up is Mrs Matthews thank you Monique Matthews 18 Road I'm here this evening to speak about the special education audit I've spoken up about the need for a deep look into our special education system for well over a year as well as took the time to express my concerns in a meeting with Administration yet I am still shocked at the weak proposal that will be presented this evening the order is not at all a deep dive but what another parent sorry the audit is not at all Deep dive but what another parent has said all along that it will just be the Bare Bones plan to uncover nothing in an attempt to say something was done if that's not if it's not done right then it's not even worth doing my first question is that the proposal states that we will be surveying all parents of both typical and identified students I'm fine with a parent survey because I strongly strongly believe every parent should have a voice but a general education parent would likely have no knowledge into the lack of commitment follow through and the administration failures to drive instruction that affects our most vulnerable students by no means am I suggesting that they are not having issues I am simply stating that the issues are much more different recently I had several parents of non-tip non-identified students asked me what is an IEP what is a PPT luckily for them they have never had to sit through one and experience the intense anxiety a parent feels fighting for what their child so desperately deserves to be successful because their legal binding contract plan is not being filed or the lack of proper identification as to why the child is struggling The Proposal does not State the amount of IEPs that will be looked at nor does it State how many classrooms or types of classrooms will be observed I'm sure that the administration will pick the classrooms that are compliant and so the real problems facing our district are never uncovered how will this help fix the broken system another question I have is why the district's focuses on IEEE requests when in reality a parent is not entitled to an independent evaluation at The District's expense if the district has valid testing a huge elephant in the room is why in the world is the audit not looking at outplacements we are spending 3.5 million dollars per year for outplacements and transportation this is a huge number actually five hundred thousand dollars more than last year why is this area not not being a laser focus what is what is the district not capable of providing the audit is only looking at a year back so nothing more than a disaster that the that has been made of the programs for this year will look like they're flourishing here are the questions that I would like to be answered how are parents being picked for the focus group are all IEP and 504 parents getting surveys how is c-rex who is c-rex main contact with the deathstriped are the school leaders involved important and this is highly important that I ask the board to consider the report that c-rec finalizes should be reported back to the district leaders Board of Education and the public all at the same time for complete transparency thank you thank you in your uh in your report later you'll be addressing some of the scope of the sure a lot of that would be good um okay next up is Mrs Calera Aaron sclera 5 Jackson Drive I've consistently shown up and spoken out regarding the issues affecting our special education department for well over a year and a half and sadly looking back the issues I started addressing in the very beginning are still very much issues today while I believe that Brookfield has a legal obligation to determine why we are failing to meet our identified and at-risk students needs Brookfield has a bigger moral and ethical issue to right the ship so to speak I have met so many families and children whose needs are not being met because they hear me speaking out I will continue to show up and stand here and speak out although I still find it extremely anxiety provoking to do so I sat back like most parents do for the simple fact that I was fearful that it would directly impact my children I am taking the risk not just for my child but for the thousands of other children that will continue to enter this District behind my child and they deserve better than the years of misidentification and failure that my child received I hope it somehow gives parents courage to question their children's programming when they are not finding success or struggling through grade level material an audit is absolutely necessary because Brookfield needs to get to the root of why we are failing to meet our students individual needs but an audit will not address the major immediate concern of inadequate leadership in the special education department the new Administration has only further broken trust with parents students and even more concerning and heartbreaking it's now affecting all of our staff we have seen very concerning waves of abrupt resignations and I fear if contracts are renewed we will continue to see staff leaving in record numbers we will soon be opening cles one of the largest elementary schools in the state and we can't retain staff our teachers parents and students of Elementary age should be excited to move in but I fear it'll be a nice new building without the proper supports and capable leadership to help our principals and our teachers flourish by no means am I suggesting the lack of leadership being School building principles as they've always gone above and beyond at times playing disaster control and actually getting my child services when it fell on deaf ears with a special education Administration this is not a special adverse General Ed issue this is an issue affecting all of our students and our teachers in closing I'll leave you with a few comments shared with me from present and past staff members I could no longer work in a district that does not support or meet my students educational social or emotional needs I left a job that I once loved because the special education administrators are dismissive condescending and lack any ability to properly staff and service the children of this District what time okay no no no no no speak how for you getting on oh okay well I mean okay the special education department is the complete it is a miserable app fear that climate stinks we have no support and children have no consistency so many of my students are not getting the services or supports as written in their IEPs I do not know how much longer I can hang on my entire class is suffering I cannot effectively teach all that I have to and somehow incorporate small group instruction why my identified students sit there acting out because they do not have the staff that should be assigned to them our students are completely disregulated and having meltdowns morale in our school is at an all-time low and this will likely be my last year in a school that I once loved teachers and staff are begging us to continue to speak out in hopes that change will eventually happen I think if you were close to being done it'd be okay case it's 21 Meadowview Drive I have been a parent Brookfield for years and now this year we have a special education director referred to us as pokers I have never felt so humiliated and disrespected I will be leaving soon teaching this year has been miserable there's no accountability just complete cover-ups students IEPs are not paid and followed I have never experienced so many young children acting out which is no longer children with challenges it's all of them because I can't run my classroom because Services aren't being met education administrators do not care the kids don't matter and I'm unable to tell parents and fear of losing my job I have been thanked for speaking up oh this is for Aaron I have been from Aaron I have been thanked for speaking up because it validates the special ed education I'm looking at other districts because the special ed Administration is toxic and those are some of the quotes that we've received thank you Bob am I allowed to ask the group of parents in a question nope maybe offline offline you can yeah it'll just um just to the extent you do we should all hear it right so I think that's that would be useful so Mr Korea you're next up in Korea 45 West Whiskey Road um I came to voice um my displeasure with the proposal for um the correct special education program review proposal um I'd ask I asked the board to vote against it if it comes up for a vote or redirect the administration the primary reason is that the proposal doesn't answer the the questions or the assignment that was directed to the administration the administration asks for multiple proposals we have one um the the I'm sorry the board the board asked for multiple proposals so they have the choice we have one um the the board really went through discussions several meetings but having a comprehensive proposal The Proposal is not comprehensive from my understanding the the board the group that helped review proposals worked very hard and actually were given a constraint that the board did not give them and that was completed by the end of the year my concern with that was that that particular constraint that the board didn't give them actually took a couple of proposals out out of consideration because of timing as I think everybody recalls this all started or pushed back on the proposal started in December 14th where we found that the CES proposal was not at all you know comprehensive enough that we brought forward that um the uh the the CES had potential issues in terms of contamination or um conflict of interest and the discussion was you know several other towns have used CES used to others and eventually ended up doing a more comprehensive review and that the board wanted to do with this once do it right it's one shot now now it seems that it's you know let's get this done with arpa funds I think the question is is this the right work to do a comprehensive review figure out how to scope it out and then figure out how to pay for it you know stage it out with Arbor funds on the details of the proposal there's several things that are missing there is no no review of State complaints listed nor from what I understand on public listed websites are now we're having Federal investigations by the U.S Department's office of civil rights so yeah we're covering that those they should be in there if we know there's violations we should cover a review should look into it including complaints that end up not being a violation because there's probably best practices in terms of um communicating with parents and you know communicating what the school needs to do in terms of the law The Proposal overall was about Equity but not lawfulness we need to at least comply with the law I agree with most of what the other parents said about missing pieces there's two specific things one at thirty five thousand dollars I don't know how we're going to be able to do a comprehensive review and the other there's clear defects like the FERPA file review I don't know how you would could possibly do a FERPA file review unless there's a pile of Student Records in the hallway because most FERPA violations you would have to be able to prove a negative and that's impossible so to ask the board to redirect the and I think the thing that needs to occur is to put more parents on in that group that existing group and pull off administrators and have parents come up with what is going to be the an appropriate comprehensive review of parents that have experience as special education parents thank you thank you all right so that's it for uh public comment uh we'll come back to this at the end of the meeting um so I appreciate all the input that you all have provided okay next up is our student representative report hi everyone um so I have a few updates for you all today so the first BHS ptso meeting was held on February 17th and there were about 20 people in attendance they have some great things planned for staff and students so please stay tuned the First Bank of lockers has been removed for the voice for change project their next step is finding a bench and beautifying the wall behind it e Hall passed the digital Hall Pass system will be piloted in the next two weeks with students and staff as a student I'm happy to see a decrease in paper waste and just a more resourceful system being utilized parent-teacher conferences will be held on March 9th which is an early dismissal day for students and student government's March Madness dodgeball tournament will be held on March 10th after school the BHS School play The Little Shop of Horrors will be March 16th through the 19th very exciting news they announced they are bringing back the dinner and a show option for March 18th and that day's performance so everybody can visit bhschorus and drama.com for more information about that as far as uh as far as Athletics um the dance team finished second in the state championship this past weekend and has qualified for the regional championships in Boston Massachusetts next weekend uh Danny carroza Class M state champion and wrestling qualified for the Regional Championship in Rhode Island this weekend um the boys basketball will play home on Tuesday in the ciac state tournament while hockey will also began their state tournament next week indoor track completed their season last week and had a very successful year with many athletes qualifying for the state championship and stay open gymnastics also completed their season last week with a great season for the girls and did very well in the swc championship finally the cheerleaders and I have our state's championship this weekend thank you all good luck good luck questions all right great I've got to tell you that coach hewling was giving me a blow by blow on the track that the track results as they were happening it was a very exciting track meet it really was [Music] okay next up is written correspondence okay Elena Lopez wrote regarding a social emotional learning assessment Kathleen jowdy wrote regarding the covid-19 vaccine Nick Schmidt wrote regarding the covid-19 vaccine policy questions on opt-out cardiac screenings for athletes and school library search issues Denise rice wrote regarding a complaint under policy 1312 Marnie mcniff wrote commending the Sandy Hook promise initiative and the special education review and Irene Korea and Andy Korea wrote regarding concerns with the special education proposal okay thank you next is approval aboard minutes I'll move the board approved the minutes from the regular meeting on February 15th second it's been moved and seconded any issues with the minutes as presented to us okay once again very well done from Florida Thank you Lisa all is right in the world Lisa is back in the office all in favor aye okay it's unanimous so uh superintendent's update all right thank you Mr Baldwin um so really we have uh tremendous uh tremendous and exciting news going on so I look forward to sharing some of this and and also a little bit later in the agenda it's uh a great time of year um so the first thing I'd like to share is that our equity and inclusion subcommittee of the board um we last met in August I think at The Retreat as a full board talking about the direction of the the committee um Amy as the chair and I spoke last week and we're going to be meeting uh in April with uh the core team which includes uh Rosa and Mike and we certainly invite um Anna and Catherine Abrego our new uh MLL and World Language department chair um we're really excited about that you know in upon reflection I think in talking with some of the the members of the committee we probably took on a little too much and um suffered a little paralysis by analysis in terms of the data we were reviewing and so forth and I think one of the things we want to take a look at is what are some real Focus areas and areas of concern that might be out there that we want to work on um and really go deep on that and really recalibrating and going back to the vision at the start of this in the summer of 2020 when the board's Vision was really how do we make the Brookfield Public Schools a more welcoming place for all and where students and families could feel like they belong and so kind of getting back to that so we're excited about that and we'll get the core team together and look at directions so I wanted to update everybody on that really exciting news you'll recall back what was it Keith Johnson and Catherine Abrego brought this to Dean and Anna and me back in the early fall and after April break the French exchange students will be coming over and being with host um whiskey near families and visiting for a week at whiskaneer so we're really excited about that program and I just can't thank our staff enough for being welcoming and open to that and thank you Dean for all your organization there with Catherine and Keith I do have some covet and flu update numbers for you from Mrs laforge our nursing coordinator we're in a really healthy place here in the schools this is as of Monday at CES positive student cases for covid one and four positive staff cases and for flu only two positive student cases that's it at Huckleberry for covid two positive cases and one positive for students and one positive staff and for flu no cases at Huckleberry at Whiskey near right now we have four students who are positive and for covid and one staff member positive and for fluid whistoneer only one case and that's a student and then at the high school for covid there are three students that are positive one staff member that is positive and for flu no reported cases so I want to make sure everybody had that my next report is on next item excuse me is on security really excited about what I can report to you here on security just as a reminder for everybody there are four pillars of security we often talk about structural or the physical parts of the building technology faculty and staff training and law enforcement and in terms of support from law enforcement the training is going on right now this week with our armed school security officer for the evening here at Brookfield High School that onboarding will be happening and then you'll get to meet our new person next next board meeting and that gentleman is I have it over here our new um he's a former Mr Rogowski his name is Wayne regalsi he's a retired Connecticut state trooper and he's really looking forward to getting started and he works to remind everybody the armed school security officer Works underneath the auspices of the police department although they work here at the school and in concert with School administration and staff so we're really looking forward to getting Mr rogalski on board probably as soon as on his own after the onboard he's done by next week and then um he'll be joining our evening Security Officer Rick Ferreira who's already been on board so we're really excited about that the other piece on security I did want to share is our insurance carrier towns have an insurance carrier for the most part called kerma and our insurance carrier had a free vulnerability assessment that they were able to offer us and can organized it and we were able to have all four schools stress tested if you will not only on kind of Staff culture and training but on the physical security of the building happy to report that we've seen a draft report from them that has commendations and recommendations going forward for planning that report is with security it's not necessarily subject to foi so it's something we'll talk to the security task force about in executive session however there are certain things that are public that we're doing with security some of their recommendations for us and nobody was able to get in they were on full lockout they really commended us on that so that work is fantastic um but and this was an unannounced visit the um the really the amazing things that are going on in their recommendations they talked about some physical things we could do door alarms on the doors if they're open or ajar security film on the first floor protective kind of ballistic Intruder resistant film uh more cameras and what was the other one there was another one there that I wanted to share with everybody yes in bollards um you know the the physical stanchion so vehicle traffic can't get into the main areas and so forth and so they recommended we look into that and move forward on that we already have those as Capital Improvements and we just talked about a facilities committee earlier tonight so really excited about that so that's a brief security update and then the last item I have I actually am going to turn it over to um Dr Mann we really want to follow up on something that I think was really important after the um uh report card that we talked about the district report card in the next gen presentation that Dr Mann did last time Joy brought up some uh interesting things thinking about uh homework and study skills and some other things like that and we've done some follow-up with the principals and I wanted Anna talk a little bit about that because it's actually really exciting so thank you very much also based on uh the points brought up by Mrs Greenstein after my presentation on next-gen accountability report last time I wanted to follow up with the board um specifically regarding the concerns about a level of rigor particularly in the middle school and kind of building up to high school preparedness study skills as well as other important transferable skills like time management and how that can be seen through homework and as I said as Joy brought up last time you know preparedness from middle school to high school and then high school and Beyond which is something we're going to be talking about you know with our strategic plan and the Strategic area of focus as we go through it forward so after speaking a little bit more with um Mrs Greenstein about this we've both begun speaking with the principals and to look at areas from kind of a district Viewpoint this is what I'm going to be committed to over the next couple months to year you know I'm looking at things from a district area focus and then and down to the school level kind of you know between the two schools and that kind of Continuum of practice and instructional approaches um all the way to the content areas and grade levels to really think about you know what are the uh and something you're going to hear about with the Strategic plan um is kind of that uh you know those assured experiences in in classrooms but also uh you know meeting the needs of individual students based on their performance in class so I know that we'll be working on that in terms of a Continuum of kind of instructional Focus but also as we move forward uh you know a curriculum review and um thinking about what are we what is our approach to curriculum review and how does that impact the instruction and assessment experiences so I've already spoken with um Dr Mike about how Cape can be a part of this uh you know this kind of oversight and this review as we go forward we will continue to address the learning loss which has been a as we've said earlier main focus of the work that we've been doing doing this year through a variety of ways including specifically enhancing vertical articulation so making sure that teachers are have the opportunities to speak with one another between the various grade levels so that teachers know what they're preparing their students for and ensuring that Mr belanda has shared that he's identified that school counselors between the Middle School and High School have had the opportunity this year in particular to to talk about student skills and have noted as Mrs Greenstein kind of identified that there is definitely need for support with executive functioning and those kind of you know kind of transferable skills and that can be certainly something that we can Target with 9th and 10th grade teachers to see what what the follow-through is now that we're getting toward the second half of the year of this year and so the administrators both building and the content leaders will focus on this throughout the spring and through team and teacher curriculum meetings and Mr Renda also has provided some a variety of resources that are currently in use but also is committed to kind of looking at those and making sure that they are meeting the needs of our students now post pandemic and making sure that we are continuing to focus on this level of rigor so that we can make sure that not only our next Generation availability accountability report card goes up but also we're really preparing our kids for Life Beyond public school and so you know this is definitely going to be something that we're keeping on the front burner and um you know you're going to as I said you're going to see kind of hints of this and reflections of this in the Strategic plan work but I do want to thank Miss Greenstein for bringing this up and so that we have the opportunity to really dialogue about it as we go forward and that's all I had I didn't know if there was any questions or we're okay I have one question just um on security and I apologize if it was already mentioned in the say something presentation but can you refresh my memory when the say something app will when the training is going to happen and when it will go live because I'm probably going to go in the three main points yeah yeah it's smart um Eric has a better sense of the dates but it's all it's all coming over the next couple of weeks yeah um I'll I'll give you some quick dates um but I will say that they're fluid it's all based on um yeah it's all it's all based on staff training and then when we can get the students trained and um it looks like winter finally came so maybe some snow days who knows um right now the target is March 20th to go live but again that's going to be flexible the goal is the end of the month so when would training be uh Mark and Dean have you guys worked on any training dates yet for the students we're still in the staff phase of this yeah I'm sorry to put you guys on the spot but we're not quitting at that that's okay just so everybody understands and Eric and I actually worked in concert on uh Friday afternoon there were some glitches with the virtual online training that we all have to go through the staff that's going to be involved so we're part of District staff their school level staff and so there was some some it was a little glitchy by Friday and so all the staff that are on the different school teams and District team have to be trained before What's called the tip test can be done and then we actually go through the tip test and so while that was supposed to happen this week that got pushed off it looks like till next Tuesday uh or Wednesday as I understand so it's just pushing it off a little bit so that's part of it we're hoping and then next one to two months that students might be able to start using it yes okay yes it's a spring implementation and then we'll really get the kids up and running with it and it'll become part of the fabric of the district probably by the end of the year but definitely as we progress through next year there's no doubt about it perfect thank you thanks Eric I appreciate that any other questions for Dr parole on this report all right hearing none we'll move on um so I would observe that our our public speaker who is speaking at the uh not on a agenda item normally we would put that at the end of the night but since the student and it's a school night um we I think it would be good if we invited him up to speak now so I would make a motion uh well is there any objection to doing that no okay with that without objection then I will add a special student public speaking moment and Kyle you're invited to come up Dr Brew we'll show you how to organize the microphone and make this easy for you all right hi my name is Kyle McNally I'm a fall student sorry my name is Kyle McNally I am a student at West Gainer Middle School in the seventh grade before I go any further I would like to thank our fellow board members here for doing a sped review on our school districts today I am here to talk about my special needs and support in the classroom in the IEP my IEP invite individualized education plan it states that I am to receive five times per week for 45 minutes in literacy class that has been very inconsistent due to Staffing shortages over the past few months sometimes there is someone there in class but they're only for a portion of the class because of staff extraordinates sometimes there is yeah sorry my words you just had to balance 21 kids including all the requirements the special needs students having classroom teacher as well as the other students they've tried their hardest to put themselves in there but it's only lasts maybe two days to a week so it hasn't lasted that long I will say this there are some days when I leave my classroom that I am a seventh grader I'm nervous because my question wasn't answered and I've been confused on the assignment sometimes and that's like difficult for someone like me so we are struggling here at WMS of the IEPs and according to Canada law it is illegal to not follow an IEP it is actually a suitable offense but so at Western Middle School team 7A would like to have a consistent person there to help us so I'm asking the board to consider this and maybe give us some more pairs or even financial support to hire more people from ESS thank you for your time today thank you very much I appreciate it okay so uh we will thank you very much for coming this evening Kyle I appreciate that okay next up is uh subcommittee reports Finance Rosa I'll turn it over to you okay um meeting on February 13th we financial report we are as you know still over budget um this um by about 718 000 slightly better than my report in the previous month in one area where we are slightly worse is in our teacher turnover savings and where we are slightly better than last month is in health benefits as the cost for security monitors can be charged to the RPS or Grant um we have locked in pricing for heating oil and diesel fuel so our overages there are known figures and that is contributing about 330 000 to that budget overrun we also reviewed the pay rate guidelines for special programs such as athletic events testing Proctors and social events like the 8th grade dinner dance the committee had some questions there and requested a follow-up at our next meeting which is on the 13th okay any questions for Rosa I will uh just a bit of news I talked to Mrs Carr this morning and she has asked us to start coming regularly to the board of selectman meeting to give an update on our overruns much like we've been doing to the board of Finance because in the end at the end of the year of the board of Selectmen actually have to vote on the special appropriation to move the contingency money from the town side to the school side for the overrun and they felt like they were not up to date enough on it so I said I would be very glad to go or if I can't Rose I may ask you if you would cover on that but every month at the beginning of each month they have a meeting and I told them we would keep them up and then I sent that out to everybody Ken's latest update just this morning um so okay next is policy and Communications Dan yep we met on February 15th and we continued working through the required policies that need updating so we started with um policy 6162.51 which is the survey policy that we've been working on for a while now and we continued discussing it we want to do a little bit more research and talk again at our next meeting so we're going to continue those discussions at our March 15th meeting um after that we discussed policy 5125 which is the FERPA policy and also policy 5131.911 which is bullying um for both of those policies we will be recommending that we replace the existing policy with cabe's version and we're sending those to the board for a first read on March 15th so you'll see those at the next meeting for policy 5144.1 that's restraint and seclusion Mrs D Nicola Hickman joined us for the discussion and after receiving her input we decided to recommend some new language that you will see when it comes to you for a first read I also next meeting March 15th as you Bob mentioned earlier we had a discussion about our policy regulation and bylaws pertaining to public comment and we decided that we needed to do some research on that so Amy um was kind enough to spearhead that effort and do some research with other districts and we're going to continue our discussions on March 15th and then we ran out of time so unfortunately we had to table all of our topics under communication which was uh the budget flyer the Strategic plan and the Kenwood Lake Elementary School ribbon cutting so we'll talk about those at our next meeting okay thank you any questions for Debbie all right thank you Debbie yep all right so we're now moving uh oh it's I'm sorry consent agenda I'll move that the board approve the items on the consent agenda which are new hires resignations retirements and the January financials second has moved and seconded Dr Brill do you have any comments you'd like to make on the yeah I have two um I'm really excited for Dave Giddings uh he's one of our ABA pairs at CES he is he was with us on a shorter term basis he is pursuing his Finance career and uh he's moving on so we're really excited for him um and Mrs O'Connor while it's great news for Mrs O'Connor our nurse at Center School we will certainly miss her um Beth O'Connor has another grandbaby on the way and has decided it is time for her to retire and she has been with the district since 1999 and of those 24 years 22 years as a nurse is my understanding in terms of her breakdown of time we can't thank her enough for her love stability expertise and Leadership always but especially the last few years all of our nurses with the work through covet and everything else we had to do so we were going to miss her dearly it was a wonderful meeting when she came up to the office and we chatted about things and she showed me a lot of pictures and she is excited so um Beth if you're out there we're thinking of you and really happy for you you know grandparents do like to show lots of pictures to speak from I speak from knowledge there's a lot of a lot of grandparent thing going on this uh this year a lot of that going on um and that was all I had thinking about any other comments from the board all right um all in favor of approving the consent agenda any opposed all right it's unanimous um okay uh so we're moving on to new business now we've done item a already the Sandy Hook promise presentation so the second item on our new business is the Strategic plan presentation I will move that the board approved the 2023 through 2028 strategic plan as recommended by superintendent Dr John Burrell and the strategic planning committee second okay it's been moved and seconded um while Eric's getting it set up let me just make a couple of comments first of all I served on that committee and I I've said this before but I'm going to say it again it was a cool committee right there were like 30 people on this committee and Debbie and I were the two board members on the committee and you really felt it when there's a 30-person committee and you're one you're you're two of them I we were part of the machine that was going on and what was really neat about it it was parents it was students it was teachers it was Paris it was coaches it was administrators there I think we Eric was there for I.T we had such a broad group but more importantly everybody spoke right there was not there wasn't a shrinking violin in the bunch I don't think and we worked in different groups and it was really well coordinated so it was a fun committee to be on I just will say that up front the second I think I got to say is just an administrative thing the strategy is one of the most important things we need to approve right and we'll talk a little bit about the last one John and I talked about that this morning when we met um they last with us a long time they will last past many of our terms on this board they usually five six years they set the stage for it if anybody on our board says I want more time to review it before we approve it we can table the approval right I just want to say that up front we don't have to approve it tonight right if you've had a chance to read it we I will ask after the presentation if everybody's comfortable approving it tonight but I just want to set that up but any one of us could say I would like another two weeks I like another month to read through the material maybe ask some questions that's okay we do that on policies all the time um I'm not hung I'm not trying to force an approval through because this is it's not important that we approve it in this one meeting so I just want to set that that seed for all of you as we're listening to Dr Burrell so John with the with that that comment made I'll turn it over to you to do the presentation on this I appreciate that and I thank you Bob and Debbie for serving for our principals and uh other leaders who are a part of that committee and I'll get to that as as part of the presentation um as we think about strategic action in the in the plans we have it's it's it's incredibly exciting um I'm one who comes up here and talks about the budget and I'm excited about talking about the budget because the budget really as I always say is the financial plan and it's the financial statement of values for going forward and as our plans going forward I really I love doing that I love deploying resources I love working with our leaders and our teams uh to make things really happen and take very strong and strategic action to support our students at the same time with a strategic plan we are this is something we've been thinking about and been on a bit of a pause for a couple of years because of the pandemic there's been so many other things going on and so we're going to take a little walk in history as well before I get to the to the the kickoff slide I want everybody to think about we are always thinking about the future we we don't live in the past we're in the moment but and we're pragmatic but we're always thinking long term into the future and that's our responsibility as educational leaders and our board education our kindergarten class right now is going to graduate in 2035.
so we're anticipating the substantial completion date of mid-april 2025 where at least the board of EDC acting ID our school get familiar with the school and prep for the kids that would occupy the school in August of 2025.
but this way we continue to replace on a regular basis the new seventh grade kids coming up would would get their computers that we would hand them to and we would we would maintain computers up to dates and so I would recommend approval because it's necessary to keep the one-to-one initiative so if Esther's money is not spent by September of 2024 then we lose those dollars it will be spent because of that yes you cannot they will not they will not go ahead and extend it beyond that right there was some talk in Congress of extending it but uh it is not gone anywhere and so as of right now uh actually some of it if if we're looking at Esther's it's not essers but I forget what they call it but one and two uh they ran out last year this year for one and two runs out this September and then three is next September so in some cases that's why we zeroed out one and two because we can't we can't use use that money so we're we're trying to make sure some people are are given districts grief because they're not spending it but I think districts are trying to to Really push it out over the four years and use it in the judicious manner just like we are so we you don't want to buy um you know 3 000 computers in year one to use all your Esters money because that means the chances of life cycle ends all at the same time and then you got a whole bunch of computers well you're not going to have that kind of money to replace 3000 so we're trying to spread it out but we we will spend all the money by the 24th trust by September 24th and then the computers that are being replaced and other Associated equipment what happens to that Mr Redco at or once Google stop supporting them then they go on a disposal list but we'll keep we'll have them in the system thanks any other questions all right I'll take a motion I moved to approve the purchase of 400 student replacement Chromebooks for the 2023-24 school year from esser's funds as presented I second all in favor hi I'm motion carries four to zero 8.5 discussion and possible consideration for pay increase for substitutes based on conversation from the last couple meetings I've brought this back I want to explain what I what I'm trying to do with this I understand that the competition and competitiveness with surrounding districts drives all our decision making and and so substitutes are no different quite frankly than any other position we have what I've tried to do is give a proposal that might address the concern about why to go in the short term why I might go provide a sub in a different District than our district and so option number one speaks to loyalty stipend we can do this in future years but for this this current year we believe at about ten thousand dollars give or take depending uh we would incentivize people to go ahead and stay with us and we would provide a stipend at the end of the year stipend is the easiest way to pay for it based on the way our our payroll system works and what we would do is provide approximately a thousand dollar where we would provide a thousand dollar stipend if you work more than 75 percent of the days in our district for the semester uh that was just a math calculation of me figuring out what is about 75 percent of the time that gets you I think it's 67.5 days and so if you sub for us for 67 days then come the spring at the end of the year we'll give you a a stipend if you were to do this in the fall it would happen at Christmas time it makes it easy because it's a One-Shot deal to pay for the stipend uh and you're not trying to calculate everybody's different pay rate differently and that's like I say roughly based on what we did in the fall and based on who's sub so far this year uh that will be roughly in the ten thousand dollar neighborhood that would account for long-term Subs as well as short-term Subs now the other options that we have there that we can still do is to create the is to increase the substitute base we are arbitrarily saying 15 because that puts us in the same ballpark because other districts quite frankly when you talk about increasing the base it could be five dollars it could be twenty five dollars it's just a dependent on what you want to do the issue that we have with the increase in the base is because we have competition issues across the board and all of our employee groups we would like to be able to maximize the dollars that are available for us within the budget here in the next couple months and bring to you a more comprehensive look at what we do to just to give you an example if we were to go ahead and and pay the fifty thousand dollars for the increase at fifteen dollars we're anticipating getting about six hundred fifty thousand dollars from the state based on on the formula that means we have 50 000 less to do what we need to do our teachers as an example right now Queen Creek is up to 53 and Higley just went to 56.
so just think about what technology was like just three years ago when we could barely think of having a virtual meeting and we ended up running school from home not that it was certainly the most effective thing but the things we do the technology that changes um social mores and attitudes the things that change and change so fast we have to be Thinking Beyond 12 years from now for our current kindergartners because you don't magically snap your fingers and talk about a phrase like portrait of The Graduate when students become freshmen or sophomores here at Brookfield High School you have to be thinking about that all the way from when they enter school so really it's uh it's an exciting time but I want to talk about for a second why do we need strategies in the first place strategies are really important to us they prepare any Organization for the future they guide District actions they provide stability for for organizations and school districts they serve as a common framework or common language they provide and support District alignment both internally and externally and they certainly could help demonstrate the uniqueness of a particular organization or a particular School District strategies are not a to-do list of specific minutia actions in every aspect of the organization they are Broad and bigger picture ideas and action oriented Foci to get us moving in a particular direction and then the big question is well then how do and how do we apply strategies and this this document you can see here to the right this graphic it works back and forth if we're going toward the portrait of The Graduate we've talked about the Brookfield C's critical and creative thinking collaboration communication and change making our portrait of The Graduate that is that is the driving why and what we are doing toward our vision of being a world-class system then we have to get into the what strategic planning what are going to be those action items to get to the portion of the graduate and that starts Pre-K and then we work through a district implementation plan School Improvement plans at all of our schools department and grade level work whether that's in curriculum instruction or programs all kinds of things that go on in the Department's grade level and of course Community engagement and it's back and forth and up and down and always a continuous Improvement cycle and so that is a graphic that helps people understand what we're trying to do with strategies in a strategic plan what I'd like to do is take a step back to when the board voted and approved the the initial strategic plan back in 2016 believe it or not and we it was a five-year plan and then like I said earlier we're on a bit of a pause with the pandemic as we were working toward getting ready for the actions over the last six months and so we had four key strategies in the in the last plan goals for learning teaching for learning measures for Learning and systems and structures quickly going to talk about goals for learning we really had a focus on what do we teach and so we worked on standards-based curricula really going deep on that curriculum but also broadly addressing standards in addition to that looking at all of the different tools Ela math technology social studies Sciences there's so many different curricular tools and programs and course offerings we also had a look at how we were teaching so that's the focus on professional learning really focused on a lot with reading and expansion of instructional strategies you've heard phrases or common strategy of gradual release and responsibility working toward learning targets authentic learning experiences Dr Mann started to talk a little bit about that and of course student engagement measures for learning developing faculty capacity in assessment that was really important that we could meet our students where they're at and then adjust instruction to meet their needs and then beyond that using that data and data teams to understand and look at broader Trends as well as individual student needs and then finally systems and structures there was a lot we had to do back in 2016 to address the prior two years in terms of Financial and Regulatory control really looking to improve all of our facilities they were hurting quite a bit and we put a lot of plans in a lot of investment we ended up with a plan to construct the new school which we'll be moving into shortly always looking toward enhancing security and improving our technology infrastructure we did a lot there is a detailed backup slide in this PowerPoint that has more highlights of some of those things that were accomplishments that's at the end of the slideshow and I will not go over all of that so strategic context preparing the modern Workforce this is what we really need to think about we are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist using technologies that haven't been invented excuse me in order to solve problems we don't even know our problems yet and that's from a former Secretary of Education and this was said about 20 years ago and so we need to and it was when people were talking about 21st century and I've got news for everybody we're 23 through the 21st century so we need to be future focused so a little bit of context and skill when we think about the future of the digital Workforce and the things we need to get our students ready for and those dispositions that will stay with them long Beyond schooling that we could start on um Pre-K the context that I'm going to share with you now these are slides from Jonathan Costa Mr Costa's been with the board several times he's a long time friend of Brookfield he works for Med Advance he is the assistant superintendent there and he's a facilitator for strategic plans all over the state in fact he's working with the State Department of Education on a state level strategic plan uh John went on a nice vacation with his wife and exposures to covet and so he did not want to come here and expose us to covet so he was very considerate but we if he's watching we wish him well so I'm going to share a couple of his slides where he built context for the strategic planning team and I'll share that with with everybody now so obviously the the big goal is to prepare our students for Life Learning and work Beyond School and something the pandemic taught us um is is really the size and scope of the digital Workforce will continue to expand we saw the transition to digital Tools digital learning and all of those things we needed to do virtually digitally and all of the tools that were available to our students the other thing the pandemic taught us and I I really have to say this is how important the school is as a central foundational organization and uh entity for communities it's so important we all lost connection and and we're adults as students we we talk about it all the time how much connection they lost and uh Anna just mentioned it earlier the kind of thinking through the reset the relaunch that we're working on this year and addressing learning recovery and all the things we're doing for them and of course the social and emotional and the mental health concerns we need to be addressing and so we are an important very important uh entity for our students and for our communities and the digital Workforce going forward will be expanding and we learn that having said that we could remember it wasn't that long ago when we're in 3G and to download a two hour film took 26 hours and then when we went to 4G it took six minutes and in 2020 it's now 5G is now the norm 3.6 seconds to download a two hour movie so technology is just rapidly that's why I go back to our kindergartners and think about them in 12 years what it what is this slide even going to look like or will this be irrelevant again Technologies we haven't been invented and solving problems we don't even know our problems yet uh AI artificial intelligence algorithms robots if you're not creative and you can't adapt and you can't critically think you're going to have a hard time in the future this is all about being a problem solver not a problem Creator or a problem finder a problem solver and these dispositions that we're going to talk about the Brookfield season a little bit are key elements of that here's a slide that's of interest that Jonathan showed us from the mckinski McKinsey Global Institute and here it really talks about physical and manual skills through basic cognitive skills to higher level thinking to the softer skills of Social and emotional skills and interpersonal relationships and Technology skills and it shows in billions of hours back in 2016 and what it's going to look like by 2030 and some different models there and you can see that social and emotional skills higher level thinking skills and technical skills continue to increase those needs and so then the big question is when you look at a bell curve what happens when the workforce skill distribution looks like this where our kids are not ready for the future and the bulk of us are in the big middle there but the job opportunities actually look like this and so we need to prepare our students with the Brookfield seas that we'll be getting into in a second with either the high high design and emotional intelligence and Leadership and creativity and technical skills to work on that right side of the chart entrepreneurial skills and similarly bringing that to the left side excuse me to the left side of the chart Jonathan used a great example with the team have you have you tried to find an electrician lately the high skill of any of the high-tech manufacturing electrician Tradesmen that are using higher level thinking using technology also their entrepreneurial skills and their customer service skills those complex Hands-On tests will also be in high demand so we want to make sure our students have dispositions and skills that could cut across all areas so they're ready to go when they leave us for technical education military career college whatever their choices might be so continuing to move forward on that the actual strategic plan development I wanted to walk you through the portrait of the graduate which leads us to the Brookfield seas that we continue to talk about so I have to thank Dr Mann for Designing her little globe with the cap on it as we talk about the portrait of The Graduate we really want to demonstrate this for people visually when we talk about critical thinking we need to be planning and thinking about what does it look like to actually display critical thinking we're going to have to Define that in our district implementation plan as part of our big strategy here creative thinking what does it look like to display creative thinking how about being a collaborator how is collaboration measured we talked at the last meeting during the presentation of the school report card the next gen presentation and we talked about the difference between collaboration and cooperation and so we need to be able to Define that and how does that work with our curriculum communicating in how many ways can communication be demonstrated you know communication isn't just speaking it's listening it's writing it's reading it's viewing there's a lot that goes into communication so how do we incorporate that into total literacy and change making what are the possibilities for positive change so these are some big picture questions we need to be asking when we think of the portrait of the graduate in those Brookfield C's so a little bit about the process Bob talked about it it was really a great team of people 30 uh either 29 31 it was a mixture but we had a mixture of students and para Educators and administrators and teachers and parents it was really a great group broke into many different groups went out into the community did some surveys did focus groups really talk to constituents we also had a variety of stakeholder input through thought exchange that tool probably about a year ago we had put out the thought exchange tool several times collected a lot of input from folks and like I said some surveys and focus groups during the process when the team went out and worked with with the community in addition to that I want you to see that the participants are listed on page three and four of the Strategic plan there is a link within the PowerPoint which will be published for everybody where it says strategic plan 2328 that is the actual strategic plan it has all the details there for everyone it's there I mentioned Mr Costa was our facilitator and did a great job with us a real friend to the district we really appreciate his expertise and I talked about how we're going to be in alignment with the state department of Ed but also with caps the Connecticut Association of public school superintendents has put out a blueprint I've it's been published and I've online and I've shared it with the board probably a year ago or so but we're really in a the Brookfield plan is in alignment with those larger State plans and of course we're strengthening our foundation our original plan those things I was talking about with you earlier in the presentation there was a lot of blocking and tackling and fundamentals there with assessment and reading and curricular tools and and how to properly run the organization and that academic achievement doesn't go anywhere that is a foundation we've worked on we're going to continue to move forward on that with lots of rigor and lots of energy in addition to professional development and making sure we're accountable for results so what are the key objectives of the Strategic plan how do we make the Brookfield C's critical and creative thinking communicating change making and collaboration how does that become a part of the DNA of the school system and so to make that part of the fabric of the school system the team all 30 people over the six month period arrived at four new strategies that are going to build on those four former strategies I talked about and those strategies are full integration of the Brookfield Seas authentic learning experiences digital learning tools and systems and structures I'm just going to break those down and go through that with you right now so strategy one is really about pre-k through 12 defining the Brookfield C's and making sure our students are prepared for life and learning Beyond school getting ready for that in strategy two and I'm going to go into a little more detail on a couple of slides in strategy two the district will meet the needs of our students Pre-K to 12 and go beyond the school walls incorporating authentic learning experiences assured learning experiences that are personalized with personalized instructional practices excuse me aligned with the Brookfield C's strategy three is about technology and digital tools and making sure that when we have conversations and develop curriculum develop learning experiences for students we're always talking about how does how does technology fit into that are there digital tools that can help Advance learning and so we want to make sure we're really focused on that and then the last one is going back to the concept of systems and structures we need to make sure that our systems and structure in the district are continually improving but focused on supporting the portrait of The Graduate to ensure the best quality education for our students so in strategy one full integration of the Brookfield sees the team the 30 participants of parents and students and administrators and teachers and Paras and so forth that were on the team came up with key areas and these happen to be five areas here of indicators of success so I'm going to go through those Brookfield sees they get clearly defined pre-k through 12.