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go good evening everyone like to call this meeting to order this is the committee as a whole meeting for September the 12th 2023 it is 18:30 or 6:30 p.m. can we call can we have a roll call please sure U Mr alre here Mr G here Mr swales here miss Z stumbris here R is here Dr Hall here president Brown here thank you Madam Secretary can we stand for pledge of allegiance led by Mr guy hagos and followed by our mission statement read by Dr Hall I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God individual with liberty and justice for all this is yours may no it's it's m don't give me more than what I need Eric okay no public comments the mission statement mission statement oh I said follow take my job from me Miss statement Empower each student to positively impact the world for a bright new future thank you thank you Dr Hall public comments any hearing none go right into board any board updates anybody want to share with us what they've been doing Jamie and I attended the First Responders um meeting this morning 6:30 at high school um brings together representatives from all the buildings plus representatives from each of our uh police departments and fire department uh from CRE was there so um anyway it was a very good update just a couple couple things I'd highlight every room is every classroom is going to have a go bag evacu evacuation kit um this will include um you know supplies like first aid items that type of thing but also like a flip chart that they can it's colorcoded so you could from a distance see you could explain to somebody what the emergency is so you know and uh so I thought that was pretty cool um and good we're seeing that and then on the Evolve weapons detection system looks like we're still waiting on the Grant and to come through and hopefully have that installed next semester up at the high school so Jamie any I missed or no no okay thank you thank you so much both board members for attending that event uh I did see uh what was pretty much conducted at that event there was a lot going on a lot participants there and so early in the morning before the sun came out so you guys it's kudos to both of you for attending that and the GO bags the Evac kit I think that's a really really a good thing you know in light of what's going on you hear all the earthquakes and flooding and fires just just one thing after another so to be prepared in this Capac and it standardizes everything it all communication with First Responders uh will be improved and consistent so right I I see it was a joint effort I see that so that's really good really good good anybody else updates board updates yeah so um the last time that I was at a uh speed meeting they uh what was waiting for us was a like a little magnet and it was actually a calendar uh that had all the special days on it like uh early dismissal or or no school like Institute day and it was very compact uh it it looked really nice um and I was just wondering do we have uh something that we give our students like a calender uh to put on the fridge or anything like that I don't believe in okay uh well I I forgot it in my truck uh I can show you guys after the meeting but it looks really like Nifty I don't know how much it costs um so I don't know what uh what that would be like but it looks really like nice and professional it has their logo and everything um it was just something that uh came up and and I was like oh this looks really useful uh it's always useful to know what is going on at the school as far as early dismissal or uh you know uh and I and I think uh the calendar is very important to plan ahead uh for our students and and parents and stuff like that so uh let's take a look at it after our meeting tonight I'd like to see it yeah yeah okay we can pass it along to miss Perkins to investigate for next year excellent thank you excellent anyone else any board updates okay well I just want to say kudos to all of the board members for being visible in the community unities I've seen everyone out in the communities and one event after another so it says volumes and I heard at least from one person my wife who attended the University Park parade the after marching portion of it she said it was really really great over at the Town Center for kids she had my little granddaughter and also just a couple days ago and Moni that I had to I had to leave after the March as well but she attended the event after she said that was a hit I said wow you know coming from her says a lot so again thank you all of my colleagues for getting out and participating and I do I don't want to put you on the spot bill but I actually talked to you you know months ago about the possibility of engaging with the with the ad foundation with Dr Hunt so I talked to him about it he said he'll love to have you as a face of the board to participate if you could so I'm already doing the insurance committee you're an insurance committee yeah okay yeah I'm already on that committee all right so if anyone that feels as if they want to be a face for the ad committee let me know okay okay to represent the board in some capacity so and they I don't know if he was going to talk about the event they having yeah I don't I don't know if I want to be a face but I know Alex is running the 5K and I'm walking it and I'm been pushed so yes the fund runs this weekend yeah to support our our staff wow i' I've signed up as well so you have two of us so looking forward today I might take my dog so so I know you have a lot on your plate Alex but but consider just again it's uh I don't think it's it's so demanding where you have to be at a meeting every day or whatever but I think just for the Education Foundation yes as a face as a face for that I've been to uh I've been to a meeting once before so uh uh yeah I could I could go I forget what day it is but I could I could get the you and I talk offline on this okay appreciate it thank you so at this point we're going to turn it over to our superintendent for administrative updates great thank you um you might have noticed we've got some furry friends in our audience so I wanted to um to acknowledge them I'd like to introduce our healing pause program uh Mr Dave Hall I'm going to have you come up to the podium along with the new team we do have a new um four-legged member of our our team so I'm going to let you introduce the new team and give us some highlights of the program for this year absolutely thank you very much um first of all I'd like to thank the support Dr kagal and the board for this program and the impact that has had on our students um is really amazing so weome we're really we're really excited about the program and we're we're going to grow it right so that's the goal here um we know that this is about social emotional learning it's about learning learning about empathy and uh building relationships with students I mean they that's the plain and simple fact of why we have these dogs in the school um the program as you know has been around since uh 2018 was kind of like the beginning we want to grow it and make it bigger um and the goal is to have a dog in every school and we want to make sure that we're doing it right right we don't want just uh bring your dog to work kind of thing we want to make sure the program's right we're doing all the things necessary to make sure that it's that it's done right and and then we stay current with our uh we're very the dogs are very they're very high train they're very highly trained and and they're they're vetted uh so that we have titles and certifications and so we're we're really excited about growing the program um and so so some of the dogs um Snickers is our new one from the Middle School that so that's uh Snickers and miss gardo miss gardo is a social worker uh that works at the Middle School uh Snickers along with um biscuit here come from Bard County Florida where the sheriff uh Sheriff Wayne Ivy I kind of discussed that in our First Responders our Sheriff uh Sheriff Wayne Ivy um has a whole program where he re um he rescues the dogs um I believe Snickers and I don't mean Miss I'll speak for Miss gardo I guess but Snickers was found on the streets he was just wandering around um they bring the dogs into the pound they vet the dogs to see if they have because really therapy dog is making sure that we have the right temperament with the dogs so they vet the dogs and make sure they have the right temperament and then the the other benefit of it is they actually have inmates that are in jail train the dogs so it gives something for the inmates to kind of rehabilitate a lot of them end up being dog rumors or vet Texs from the program um and they work with the University of Florida as well Central Florida like for vet veterinary care and those kinds of things so it's really where we get these dogs is I'm proud of that too CU that's kind of like a win-win win and then they give the dogs to um um police departments and I believe we're the first school district uh they're starting to grow the the program down there with other school districts but we're one of the first ones even their own County uh I I was talking to people from their own County who were asking me about our program so that's that's Snickers and Miss gardo are the social worker is I believe there's been a big impact at our Middle School H you know that's Miss papis with and they're kind of veterans in this uh um Miss papis is the uh assistant principal at tala and uh Bella has been part of our program too from the beginning so uh we're excited about the program there uh biscuit and I are kind of been around for a little bit uh we've been around the students since um I I got biscuit back in December of uh 2020 during covid um and then when when students and staff came back from covid and in February of 2021 uh biscuit was there greeting them and me and biscuit so we're really excited the program I want you know guys understand though this program is not just for our school Community obviously there's a lot of benefits for it I do want to offer and I've done in the First Responders meeting we want this to make this a community effort as well um so I doc uh we're doing some things to kind of expand the program one of the things I offer uh uh stickers uh Mardo and I and biscuit we through our through certification in Bard County we actually have another law enforcement certification for we can work with students um in law enforcement situation so when they bring a student in to question them about you know unfortunately like abuse or anything like that these dogs could work in that capacity where we would go in um I know like cre uh Creek police department has a dog as well from Bard County uh but we also want to offer those dogs out for that or anything in the in the community as far as like you know I I pray there's never a traumatic event that happens uh but these dogs would be available uh to go out into the community and do the things so we want to make sure we operate as a team and we were're able to deploy what needed you know within our schools I know last year we were deployed we had some things at the high school uh we had the teacher passed away and then we had a student that was that was uh um shot and killed and so we we we were able to deploy the dogs and had the impact with that so these are um this year too uh so we want to obviously when I go the program I have a committee that I've developed um and we're currently we're working with a vet on Western Avenue VCA uh and not that we're we're not asking for any kind of veterinary services or anything that we're just looking for a committee of people that can make sure these dogs have the right you know not not being a vet myself to make sure that these dogs have the right kind of um um shots that they're medically taken care of and so that that's with this committee that's where the committee looks at those things they're willing to keep all our dog records to make sure that all the shots are up to date all our certifications and all that are up to date so again we want to make sure this is done right um we also with our First Responders I talked to I was at their first responder meeting with the fire departments and what we really want to do is again kind of push another push out uh we're trying to do October is fire prevention month and so the idea is we're going to get the picture with the dogs on fire trucks and then have a uh I have to talk to the principales about what grade they feel like is best um and we'll do a coloring contest with the dogs and again not not the fire department are you know the idea is for safety is that we don't want students young students to be traumatized by the equipment that firemen would have coming into a situation so we kind of want to build that um and then we also were thinking about doing something um next uh semester with the police department as well along with that we do want to grow the program uh come my committee will meet uh coming in like February or March uh I have Bard county has offered me any kind of dogs that I want last time I was there they really push blood hounds that they have they have a their Sheriff down there loves uh he has a big old blood hound named juny um and they really want they really like their blood hounds down there so that last time I was therey they're like you want blood hounds and I'm like well I have to find the right Handler that would want the blood hounds but no so that that's that's the future so we want we want to grow the program we want to do it right we want to make sure there's there's some a dog at every school and I I don't know if you guys want to share any stories or anything but I think there's a lot of impact um we we are keeping deployments every time these dogs are brought out into the school um to make sure that we're keeping data and what on how that that is going so uh again I appreciate I I don't want to talk I could talk all night I'm one of those people uh but I do I do appreciate your support with this and and um if you for whatever reason if you would like us to deploy your a dog somewhere or if there's a situation that's going on please feel free to do that because again we just don't we want it for the schools obviously uh but we also want it for our communities as well thank you thank and I think Miss pepis has a big announcement right oh yeah going to be on Tracy ABC weather forecast tomor morning at 5:15 she's going to be nicew be anxious to see that your alarms hey you guys out to the school to it's possible to see these dogs in action every so she gets to see Snickers but it's been really cool I work we put email BL out before sixth grade open number and then being at curriculum night sorry being at curriculum night um just the amount of parents again coming in looking for Snickers me my kid has talked about him every day I can't wait to meet him so that was really awesome awesome to see that not just the kids are loving them but our parents are too so I appreciate the opportunity to have Snickers these two are friends yeah they're friends they've been playing we thought they would get tired out but I guess not um thank you for the opportunity as Dave said the program is amazing and if you guys want to know more about it or come talk to us we'd love to tell you it it was an awesome nday experience down there in Bard County and seeing the good things they're doing but I don't come in anytime see them in action my kids are crazy Snickers just celebrated his first birthday on Saturday he he's caught up he just celebrated his birthday on Saturday we did celebrate at the middle school on Friday and it was amazing and he probably got at least hundred written messages from kids but we had a banner the kids went crazy so it's awesome I Mary's shaking her head to see the kids and the staff he gave Miss brag some love the other day when she was the little stress so it's really cool so come out and see them in action it's it's been amazing so thank you for the opportunity I will say last year when we had the incident with the student Mr Hall was there and the dogs were there and it would make it made a difference to the kids and the staff after because we were there early in the morning trying to uh be you know console staff members or students it was pretty it was pretty great so we are you know we are keeping qualitative data like um quantity of times are going out but a lot of the stuff we can't talk like we can talk about but the impact that really that they have on students um it's just you like I said you got to see it I was a Nayer at first but when you see these dogs in action what they do with students it is really kind of heart-wrenching like the way they they work there's also a lot of research on the what the dogs do like physically with you but as along with your mental like state so um I do want to mention this too and then I'll be done like I said I can talk all night about this stuff but um I actually this is how cutting edged we are uh I have a lot of schools contact me on how you do this and what's your program like and how how do we get started on this um I since I've been back in August so you know I'm 11mth employee since I back I would say weekly I'm getting an email from another school asking the process of how we do that so my my other vision and that maybe that's kind of a little bit down the line I think it's Dr kagal is we like to be like start a Will County cortum kind of Consortium of these therapy dogs where we can meet we can train we can kind of but we would be the leading force in that so I I that's my fut futuristic if I could say in the future that's like we're cutting edge with this with as many schools as contact me about it it's really amazing so thank you sir thank you excellent excellent I don't know if any of board members want to further comment Dr Cogan allow them anybody else I just want to say thank you again uh good job excellent job I think we may me need to put a spot on our agenda for the dogs to have a turn to say something to next time okay so I just want to make sure so we got who's biscuit biscuit okay who's snicker snicker and Bella and Bella that's the one just turned one oh she turned okay well I'm sorry she must be the oldest all right but good job all of you good job thank you back to you Dr cogins um we just wanted to bring to your attention we had a board policy 6190 that we just needed to make a slight amend amendment to um it was brought to our attention that there needed to be some corrections for that um um for the extracurricular uh activities um instead of 20 hours a week it should be 25 hours of week of schoolwork um that needs to be listed there and students have to have a passing credit to continue working with that so we just wanted to bring that to your attention um we'll bring that to next month's or next week's meeting for your action if there's any questions on that okay and then we'll move on to personnel and culture Dr Eric will be up so try following that act there I know right I gotta all the dogs I figured I'd come up here too since I've got quite a few things up for discussion so um the first thing that we've got is a memorandum of understanding with both the cmea and the Acme uh employee unions on uh mandated training um over the years the state has increased the number of mandated training pieces that all employees are to go through um I can remember 10 years or so um we would have seven training modules maybe at two hours it was no big deal you just kind of knocked them out now we're upwards of 7 to 10 hours of training that employees need to do because of Faith's law because of Suicide Prevention because of DCFS mandated reporter trainings have changed so it's it's become quite a burden on our employees um additionally the time with within their day uh we don't have the time to provide them on professional development days because that time is critical for us to provide training um whether it's curriculum training technology training so the employeers are then forced to then do this training on their own so we've come up with um a bonus payment a cash payment of $115 for each employee to con complete these trainings by the contractual deadline of January 8th 2024 that's the you know a Goodwill measure to say thank you for doing this on your own this is a condition that you have to do um we don't have we realize we don't have the time to give you during the day so thank you for getting this done kind of on your own okay so these are online training classes that correct yeah online modules self-paced okay yeah okay y all right any other questions okay um all right did I lose my order okay the um the next thing is the guest teacher assistant rate changes so last month we brought forth a whole slew of changes to the guest teacher pay rate changes and our teacher assistants were left off um not intentionally um so we've got different rate changes we currently are at $91 a day for our teacher assistance that's $13 an hour so come January 2024 we will be out of compliance with minimum wage um so if we brought it up to $14 an hour we'd be at $98 so being the generous person that I am I'm proposing the extra $2 just to make it a nice even 100 for the daily rate and then long-term teacher assistance would be anyone that's taking over a leave of absence or a vacancy and those people will be working more often um a proposed rate of $150 a day um that is in line with our daily guest teacher rate so uh somebody that is a guest teacher can also work as a guest teacher assistant so if that long-term rate were lower than our daily guest teacher rate we would have a hard time filling some of those long-term teacher assistant rates so we wanted to bring that rate up to at least the guest teacher rate to help fill those positions as well okay any questions kind of sticking in the same air Arena with our Cadre teachers so our Cadre teachers are working every day they're in our schools they're picking up assignments as teachers uh put in absences if there's not an absence on a particular day they're helping out with other building needs what we've had happen is people that were slated to take these Cadre teacher roles have been resigning from those positions because they want to hold out for the long-term substitute teacher positions which the pay rate is higher so to kind of entice uh um some of our folks to take these Cadre teachers we would like to put together some benefits for them uh we're also looking at adding Cadre teachers for the OTL department and special special education department so that they can release teachers to provide additional professional development during the day so those cadr and those two departments would receive some specialized training on top of that um so for the cadres we wanted to keep our benefits somewhat similar to what we offer regular employees which is the uh board paid single HMO health coverage the board paid single dental coverage the $20,000 life so those are all regular pieces that we currently offer to all employees um then we would offer access to the employee assistance program that we've just rolled out access to vision insurance and then they do have access to purchase additional health and dental coverage they will work the number of hours required by the Affordable Care Act to provide access to the benefits um but if they want elect anything higher than the single HMO they have to pay the entire premium so if somebody's really looking for that insurance coverage they know that it's going to be at a higher cost than what we are offering um at the base package and then five sick days um that's reduced from uh a regular allotment of full-time employees um just because the cadr are supposed to be there to fill in for our regular employees so it's kind of hard to say okay we're going to give you the same amount of time off off for our regular employees when you're supposed to be here filling in for our regular employees um and then with our specialized codr for teaching and learning in special education uh we'd increase their their daily rates by $20 so they would be at $180 a day versus $160 a day because again they'll go through some specialized curricular training and special education training to fill in for those departments okay and what it says the cost incurred by offering these benefits is minimal but what's minimal do we the minimal would be um so we're going up another $20 a day for the specialized cge rate teacher and I'd have to get more hard numbers from Ken and the business office on what maybe you could get that in the FYI before next week absolutely okay we'll do all right and then lastly that I have for you this evening is the addition of a family engagement position so the district has received an influx of Migrant families we're seeing a influx um families of from Venezuela um currently we are our registration department has been wonderful in trying to assist the families in registering for school it's becoming somewhat uh of a burden on the registration because there's so much more than just registering for school that goes into servicing these families that have now moved into our community so we're looking at adding a family engagement position and we believe it's going to be we're going to propose a family engagement coordinator position um somebody that can kind of supervise and take the lead on really getting these families some assistance within the community so reaching out to Catholic Charities reaching out to different Villages and different uh resource organizations that provide assistance to our families um so that person would kind of be taking the lead making contact with them helping through of course the registration process but also connecting them with different places in the community to get them some housing some different supports as well is that going to be an administrative position with health insurance uh it's going to be um a coordinator position uh not on a certified level so it'll be a classified level so uh you don't require a light we don't require a license for the position so so it won't be administrative with like a administrative where they'll be underneath that bracket right you're not creating another administra okay yeah and when you say family engagement it sounds when I first saw that just looking at it on the surface here a family engagement I would think more like a community engagement that's kind of what I was looking at but you you are specifically looking for this position to engage with these families these migrant families that's coming in that's your target right there for the most part to help them yes and yes exactly English is a second language families are Spanish speaking families as well so uh families that may have been here too and reaching out for them as well there's there's some other pieces that will go with the family piece like mckenny vento our our homeless Lea on um duties would follow with this person because again there's more support there also our uh DCFS liaison for our foster families there will be some responsibilities there so whole wide arching family connection piece with this position so this is a new position not something you're adding on to somebody it is going to be new and tweaks to a potential existing position yeah but you're not eliminating any other position so it's a new position but you're adding a position right so you're adding a position or are you tweaking a position you're or are you adding responsibilities to a new position so I I think it's a combination of all of the above um we'll be so the way that registration is it's a two-person operation right now with some additional fill-in support um by putting this position into registration it would be tweaking additional responsibilities of somebody that's currently in the department but then also backfilling that person's registration responsibilities um because registration is a whole you know it's it's a whole animal so we don't want to by putting this additional work on somebody in registration then slow down our registration process for all of our other families so we would also increase support there I I would like if we could even any data on what percentage of the population is elll what you know just the numbers that we're talking about that this position might serve I understand it's broad but you're talking about the mckin vento and you're talking about Spanish speaking if we could just have some data in that regard sure to yep uh so I uh I asked for for that uh information a while back Cara you gave me the information it says um it was in the FYI yeah a while back uh so uh it says here we have 193 families in the district that speak Spanish at home uh this includes about 39 students that speak Spanish at home currently 240 of those students are elll students so uh I don't know yeah I'm not sure I'm I'm not sure percentage wise but uh those are the the raw numbers I think it would be helpful to see see the increase or kind of what the trend is that's generated this need is that similar to what it was two three years ago or you know what's changed the numbers are 5% so it's 5% of our population students are they going to only work with Spanish speaking families is that no not necessarily I think the way that we craft the job description is that that person is bilingual that fills this position so they can assist but it's not just limited to Spanish speaking families no it could certainly be uh families that are new to the area that move from out of state that have never been here and they're you know get displaced you know we've got hurricanes that are happening around the country we know that families get displaced and you know they have a family member that lives somewhere in the area but then they get housing here so no it would be a broad a broad brush we paint with the family engagement piece in the FY are you going to put like a dollar amount of what they're going to get the paid so we can figure out yeah it's LED here as I can't I can't log in myw yeah I was going to say down for some 50 50,000 but is that so we're adding additional responsibilities to someone right we're trying to restructure that little miniart okay the registration right and so this new this person who who falls in this uh this job uh gets an additional 50,000 or is is now raised up to 50,000 yeah it'll be a combination between restructuring the current job somebody's in and then providing that additional support in the Registration Department I think it's a cumulative to cost between giving somebody an additional increase and then bringing somebody into registration the cumulative would be 50,000 so Registration Department go from two people to three correct okay with an additional 50,000 yeah wait I'm sorry what did you say what you I didn't hear if registration would go from two to three employees with an additional 50,000 okay so the new person coming in make it 40 and the other person who has additional duties gets an extra 10,000 like that yeah okay yeah I I'm not that that's how it's going to go but I'm just trying no I'll will provide some numbers for you in the FYI this week so you can you can see that all right thank you any further questions thank you thank you Dr yep appreciate it all right is that it for you K doc yes all right thank thank you board members for chiming in on that topic very good need here I guess all right do we have any old business out there if not do we have any new business um I don't know if this is new business well it must be old business you can talk on it's business I know we the um um what is the national invest I I would like to see numbers on if there how much they are quote unquote saving the district and how much we actually PID them umal investigation yes are they paying are we say are they saving us more than we're paying them that's what I want well I know for last this was last year before we um there were 200 students that were in our district en so each student worth as far as enrollment and tuition would be between 14000 so are they saving us but the the hard thing on the number wouldn't be saving us because we get her student corre so we're losing how much they how much we pay them for their service right because when when we don't take a student we actually lose the money so yeah I think I I think I think I think I think the board kind of got lost in a shuffle I think when we first hired National investigation years ago I think we had like a $25,000 contract and then x amount of dollars for every hour they go out and investigate so I don't know where we are with that so that's a good thing good point you to bring up yeah just kind of see update where we National investigations how much we pay on the contract how many students we this year and and I think it's past it's it's more than the money too I agree I mean you got to think of this if if a hundred kids are here that aren't supposed to be in our district and they're in activities or on teams doing sports that's one of our taxpaying families that's losing an opportunity that are paying taxes in our district Park Forest University Park cre and Mony so if they're paying taxes that everybody a lot of people complain in our district that our taxes are high and then if we allow those students in here they're taking away from our taxpaying citizens and you know our families in this District that that's if those kids even play sports or activ or do anything else and take an opportunity away from another student that our family pays taxes on it's it's a two-way street it is about money but it's also about the opportunity that all the kids all the families in our district should have I regardless of who they are that's that's fine I don't don't I want to I I think the anecdotal evidence also shows the years that we have implement the year after we've implemented National investigations and cracked down on on making sure people enrolled are in the district our discipline's gotten better you know the discipline problems have gone away so I think there's a lot of there's a lot of non-monetary benefits to continuing this program so yeah and I think the bottom line again if if you don't live in a district you shouldn't be here just that simple I think that's worth dra line it's a law that's a law that's it so again yeah if you get that information it'll be great and I oh I did Dr M about how many or maybe you don't dror I'm kind of backtracking a little bit how many new families of migrants are coming here cuz I heard Chicago they received like 12,000 since this started 12,000 migrants and so are they coming from Chicago that's where they're migrating out the migrants are migrating out to different areas so how many have we received so far in our district do you have that number roughly 32 we're up to 32 I think before 32 so with that being said 32 right is there any assistance from the state because of it's 18,000 a student and you're you're you're talking 18,000 student times 32 that's a burden that's hard on our district I mean the people in Chicago are complaining that our homeless people are still on the streets and they're giving them education and food and shelter you know housing and there's no money there I mean I understand Chicago's argument I mean there's no money there so that would be interesting 32 right is keeping a track that because that is 100% burden on our taxpayers in this District yeah I guess it goes back to a homeless just take a homeless person and they have the right with the mckenny vento law that says that we have to educate those kids right so indirectly the state does pay the district as the numbers goes up or whatever it depends on where we are because we was at 5,000 students at one time and last time I check we was at like 4500 so and a lot of things is predicated how much money the state gives us is predicated on how many students we have and and if it's based on what tier we're in or or some of that then that that's fine as long as it's taken in account for right right I mean yeah I agree I agree with you 100% so but 32 I'm glad you know got that number but okay doc oh is it on you you're not old it was you you did you did the old new business right yeah so any other new business yeah I uh was actually uh wondering if we could have uh the board if we could have like a map of there's a lot of people that me we don't know uh me and Jamie were new to the board if we could have a map of like uh admin Administration yes an organizational chart yes actually mentioned that the organization chart yeah yeah and I think that's I think for all of us we got a lot of new administrators and things like that so are you talking about starting with Dr C and filtering down all with the administrators and so yeah it would be it would be uh yeah well this is really ask a lot stretchy I don't know if you can put faces to those names that would be awesome that's a stretch okay and then put it on a magnet so make a bit one but that's that's a good idea though just you know as board members goes to different schools and you know you can put the name to the positions and when you hear the names you know so we had a principal come out and assistant principal come out at Mo fog Fest Parade just this past Saturday and I was getting the names all twisted up but so but it's good it's good to know who's who and who's what and keep that readily available organ for central office for all the buildings uh all the above some time we never met the um at least I don't remember not until I went over to cre Elementary the principal of cre Elementary I actually met have went on a first day of school when I went over there so yeah I mean if if you could do like central office and then uh this school and that school and like break it apart that way uh that maybe just go down to the administrative level you okay with that yeah just administrative level yeah and just put one big glass block our Dynamic teachers and other staffs okay uh any further new business thanks Alice Alex for chiming in on that okay we have a reason for close session we do we are going to be going into close session and we will not take any further action after Clos session and the reason for Clos session is the appointment employment compensation discipline performance or dismissal of specific employees can I have a motion so move second move by was that Nelson second by Alex roll call please mam secretary okay Mr gyos I rup is and I Mr alre hi Miss z stumbras i Mr swales hi Dr Hall I president Brown I we all we are now in Clos session about to get there and thank you no no further action until we meet again next week thank you public for joining us
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which his hands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all our lord Jesus may we know the peace and the compassion the comfort of your presence in our lives I ask that you provide this board with wisdom so that we can go about making wise decisions I also ask that your love and grace will flow through every administrator teacher and staff member to every student so that they will know of their infinite value and their infinite value to you demonstrated through your salvation all these things I'm praying here most powerful and self-sufficient made Jesus thank you [Music] future board meeting for September the 26th and October the 10th followed by November the fourth Kingdom history about divisions of agenda I believe we have in addition to donation and that was available on HR you know that's all right okay how to write recognition tonight we had some donations that I'm going to highlight and that will take a vote to approve the first one being a twelve hundred dollar donation from cie LLC for Salford Ag Department we also have a 3 100 donation from uh 3 000 of that being Bingo charity gaming Wabash out and the other hundred dollars Jerry schoenefeld and that's the Northfield wrestling we also have recommendation to approval 400 donation from Rich Valley United Methodist Church and that would be for Northfield robotics appreciate the donations on it I look at the executive animations all in favor approval say aye all right thank you under staff recognition Mr Keith Urban yes tonight we have with us our transportation director Mrs Melissa ball and she is wants to recognize our bus mechanic Kyle highly and so I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to her and we do have some pictures also so if you want me to use pictures first or just while I'm talking about it okay and foreign we have some uh very interesting and great information to share with yourself well we have a magazine school transportation stars and Kyle here got nominated by 13 people in our in our district to be one of the garage Stars featured in the magazine for August um but and truly we do appreciate Kyle so much he and I work very well together um and along with Dr Kim with ordering buses and seeing those needs and fitting those needs and I just want to read just a couple little paragraphs of what we kind of said about Kyle so um Tom Holley is a one-man shot going on his eighth year and people Transportation but 28th as a heavy duty truck and equipment mechanic he attended our Heartland career center while in high school and always had a passion for fixing things adding that he started his career as a mechanic before even graduating high school he he came to MSD of Wabash County when transitioning from the County highway department like I said he was nominated by 13 various members of our school corporation and Kyle had to turn in some quotes and some things that he found important with his job and one of those was that he found satisfaction in solving a problem so that it does not become a recurring issue um and he does learn to talk about that quite often problem solving is one of the key components that um adds to our Corporation so one of the other things is that Kyle has had some interns from the career center to help get them geared towards some heavy duty mechanic work and one of the most recent ones last year went on to also work at standard Tire and Battery and further his education there so I think Kyle is a great component of our community in that way too so we appreciate that in many ways um and he again he is in one manner we found that out yesterday Mr King David had to help go take some buses we had two buses break down at the same time so um if you want to show a couple pictures so a lot of what Kyle does um there is a lot of this behind the scenes so every year we have inspections summer inspections of our school buses the equipment um and he also gets the Heartland Care Center monies prepared for that inspection as well one of the things that Kyle has done the last several years is heat pressure sprays under the buses to you know prolong their life and just also can find some new things going on with them we have just recently added these lists so I'm going to let you talk more about that because that's your Forte so um you can kind of mention how that helps you out the mobile column list that we purchased have just been 100 asset I am no longer up and down on four multiple times per job or per day uh makes pressure washing like that much easier I can imagine everything underneath there instead of just like the edges and sort of in the middle and they've just it's been a lifesaver honestly I mean I I go home and I'm not just feet down at the end of the day so I greatly appreciate it and I appreciate the staff all of them that I worked with have not been a bad person here yet so and Mr T baber Mr Grace yesterday morning jumped in you needed a bus take them to the Fountain area they took it I went back later and picked it up with the record brought it back here when I got back was the one that I was bringing in that was a little bit slow moving so we adapt and overcome you know if we we do what we need to do to get the job taken care of and get the kids to school as quickly and safely as possible so and he shouldn't have said anything about the lift here because it looks like he's holding the bus up with his rings [Laughter] um and that was obviously looking down the bus that he's able see quite a bit with those left so they definitely have been it's just a little picture of him pushing a button to get those in a thin but that's yeah and that can go much higher um and we've recently done some reconfiguring of our garage doors um we put it in two new garage doors and fitted those with high lift openers so I can raise the buses up a full 50 inches with the doors open uh doors closed I can go 57 or so you know and it's that's ample room to be able to do what I need to do and see what I need to see and I'd like to mention one thing too I'm Dr May too but one thing I always really enjoy about Kyle bus drivers will come in or they'll call on the radio there's something wrong with that bus component and I'm sure some of it um and if I was driving too would be the same way like okay this is happening before you should know but he's very patient very professional and just basically tells them um exactly at least on the radio it tells them exactly exactly what needs to be done to do that and so it's just it's it's really really good because there's so many more safety components on buses now that sometimes are very very difficult with all the bells and whistles that aren't necessarily all the fun bells and whistles but just the things to make it safer so we appreciate uh Kim and his patience and endurance and professionalism when he works with the bus drivers and I'll pay you back off of that patience definitely is what I'm very impressed with besides being a very good a great mechanic and very knowledgeable I do appreciate your candy attitude and your positiveness when it comes to things and on I trust Kyle to let me know what he needs and we make sure that happens so and he's working with our new software the software we've had he's getting to use it and his world out there for um inventory and we're excited about that too early I think Melissa for uh doing all the work with this and also asking to bring him here because we haven't done that before and he does a great job so let's give him a honorable all right you guys are welcome to stay but you can go ahead me too my dog's having puppies so we're gonna head down [Music] thank you thank you Kyle won't be as a patient if his wife wasn't tonight all right so some other things um to share I know Mr Snyder had a couple things or at least one thing here so you want to share that Mr Snyder or can we read that that you had on that recognition sure I can share it I think a lot of people know but I just want to mention it here since I was here tonight the biggest thing we've had happen as far as a student accomplishment was Eden Hoover was able to get 1 000 receptions in one thousand Digs at uh the tomahawk tourney in North Miami which was earlier in the season but whenever we have a student reach those kind of milestones in a career relaxation that was it okay and I'd just like to share one thing so that this is from the Northfield and Southwood students so the city of Wabash is running up um running for the two million dollar uh it's the okra Community Development block grant program and thanks to being named the finalists in the states uh preserving Main Street program and we had several of our msdwc senior internships that helped during that day when the selection committee came they were the in-person in-person site visit by that selection committee and basically they waive signs and things like that and so really I believe our schools were the only ones that participated in that I won't read all the names but there were approximately 26 students I will put that on in the papers and things like that and the different places when we send out our information but we just really appreciate the students helping out with that because obviously we're part of that too we have our district goes into the water City Limits and it's just great that our students were able to be a part of that too and we'll wait and see if they actually uh get that two million dollar footprint that's all what happened all right thank you any public comments on agenda items if no I'll entertain motion to approve minutes if you could be reviewed second all in favor approval say aye aye all right we'll move on to claims questions it's a large one for Southridge M4 it said final so I'm sure we've had walked through and all that there's a few things as far as base trim that they need to fill in some gaps for that [Music] second all in favor say aye aye all right payroll payroll reflects our first pay of the 20 23 24 Square I'm going to accept payroll second okay all in favor say aye all right thank you anything under financials tonight just uh the end of the month balance report for your feeling show us where we are at the end of August in each of our fund balances go ahead and continue yeah so we're heading into our last phase before our budget hearing for 2024 and so this phase we like to review what they call form three and form four um as leading up into like I said our budget here and so this is related to levies and property taxes so it's your key Vapor so we'll take a look here I'd just like to take a a dive into our tax rates one thing that we look on when we're deciding uh what our upcoming tax rate will be for our new calendar year is our assessed valuation and so our assessed valuation is something that we as a school district do not control but it does have an impact on the dollars and the tax rates that we may receive in those tax supported funds the levy is the money that we collect uh based off of that assessed valuation and that tax rate we do have some control over our Levy however there are some um legislative things that may control uh uh certain tax rates or certain Levy amounts where we just can't it's not a free-for-all for the school district to say hey I want eight million dollars and then this is going to happen that way so we do have some control over the levees but not total control and then just to clarify uh I think everybody understands is that we do not receive any State dollars in regards to anything operational for our school districts and so our Levy is a fixed Levy and so it is controlled by our assessed valuation and or tax rate so depending on the levy amount that we're wanting so example if we need four million dollars to fund our operational fund balance that four million dollars is going to be received but it's going to be controlled by the assessed valuation that will determine the rate so a higher assessed vibration a higher assessed valuation is going to be an in a lower tax rate lower assessed valuation is going to be a higher tax rate so one area that we always got to pay attention to is our assessed valuation and how that looks historically so this is a 10-year look of what our assessed valuation has been up to the 2023 budget year and as you can see it's increased over about 200 million dollars over a 10-year period of time when we were looking at the potential referendum uh with our one high school project we had a study done that kind of forecasted out with those assessed valuations may look like into the future so that we can determine how taxes would be impacted over that period of time and so the blue represents our actual historical tax rates or excuse me assess valuations and the red represents that projected evaluation our 2024 assessed valuation looks to be coming in about 941 million dollars uh so again a significant increase from the previous years which is good because that lowers the tax rate based off the levy that we are anticipating as a comparison this is a comparison of assessed valuations amongst our border schools and you can see we are second amongst those County schools with Huntington being the largest because there are a long time possible District um the tax rate historically this is our tax rates over a 11-year period of time and you can see right now the green is what covers our operational uh fund and that usually covers around 50 to 55 cents and then anything in that tan or each color represents debt borrowed money paying back in our best service so for 2023 our tax rate was 71 cents that falls in the 10 percentile uh districts around the state of Indiana and just as a comparison for our border schools this is where we would fall as the lowest in comparison to our surrounding school districts so again our tax uh supported funds our debt service and operations that's where our tax rates have an impact uh in collecting Monies to operate those funds and so the main thing that we look at again is our assessed valuation and then we also Factor any tax cap or circuit breaker losses that we may have and so for this coming year the estimation is about 150 000 which means that those are dollars that we will not receive so for example if we're asking for four million dollars we will only get 33.8 billion roughly because we won't select some of those because some of our taxpayers their and then Tiff districts can also impact that because that's not new assessed valuation that we will see so when we build our budget and we look at our debt and operational funds we want to advertise a high rate and a high Levy so that we can ensure that we collect the full amount that's needed to cover our budget uh and so we use a lower assessed valuation than what we anticipate typically which will create a higher rate and that's just to make sure that we cover anything in case things come back differently from the dlgf that we can cover what we need to operate we factor in any potential tax cap losses and then we keep in mind any max Levy funds that we would have in those funds for Debt Service there's no Max for operation fund we do have a Max that is set this year the new Max is 4.8 billion dollars last year it was 4.6 and that's based off the uh maximum Levy growth quotient which by law now a new law is capped at four percent and so if you go to the next slide the the levy growth quotient is based off of the Indiana non-farm personal income growth rates and average uh I believe of six years and we were due for a five percent increase but because of the new law it was capped at four percent so that would be less dollars again that we would have anticipated on a normal basic computer I guess we talked a little bit about this uh during our referendum process we just want to make it clear and understood that the levies that we do receive from our property taxes especially in our operations fund is not enough to cover our expenses and so what we have here that is shown are our actual expenses and our operation fund and what our operational fund with Levy was for that that fund and you can see that on average of those three years it's about a million dollars short and so how do we fill that Gap you fill it in one of two ways we transfer money from education fund to operation fund to fill that Gap or we have to take on some bonding or borrowing to cover things especially if we have long-term projects or more expensive projects on the horizon this just gives you a 24-year perspective on where Bond rates have been we are still in a historically low Market we just finalized our 2023 bonds at just over a 3.5 percent rate so that was pretty good so when we look at what we're advertising for our levies I I have in the left side just kind of what we did in 2023 as a comparison and then in 2024 we are advertising that column there uh our debt service will probably change a little bit it'll be on a lower end uh but that is like something we've used to fill in for the time being because we weren't sure where we would come out with the uh the closing of the bonds and so we will be advertising a dollar 34 tax rate however when it all shakes out we will be in that dollar 10 tax rate uh Market with our debt service probably being around 59 cents and our operations fund being around 51 cents um for a total of a dollar ten for the 2024 budget per year our next board meeting will then be our budget hearing meeting well we'll kind of compile everything that we've went over the past couple months into a little presentation and then we will have our budget adoption for the following board meeting in October any questions with that it's a rationale west side behind that limiting growth quotient so I imagine to keep the max rates lower so then the property taxes are lower would you agree with that elections [Laughter] that's my impression any other questions no so with that then I just ask that you give us the permission to advertise that in our form three so that we can put that on the dlgf website for our upcoming funding here second then all right motion 104 in a second all in favor say aye all right all right we're moving on to what we're going to refer to as a preliminary determination hearing the first one if you're there with me I'm going to read some of this the next item on the agenda is for the board to hold a preliminary hearing on the proposed construction project after a presentation by the administration in your its advisors it'll be an opportunity for you as a public to make comments about the project the notice of this preliminary determination hearing was published as legally required in the Lopez Plain Dealer so at this time I will ask that uh Chris and whoever might explain once again the purpose of a hearing yes so pursuant to Indiana code 6-1.1-20-3.5 the school corporation must hold two public hearings and adopt a resolution to preliminary determined to issue bonds or enter a lease agreement for a project which has a total project cost in excess of certain thresholds these public hearings are the very beginning of this legal process I failed to mention after we go through the presentation anyone that would like to speak about this is that's free to speak um we will now hear from Mr and Mr Keith Williams started yeah so we've had several work sessions and a few meetings to discuss our options in relation to Sharp Creek the board had voted to pursue I believe it was option three which was looking at moving the third and fifth grade grade levels to Northfield while also adding on a cafeteria space at Ultra North Elementary and this is all in relationship to our continued strategic plan obviously a strategic plan number four which deals with facilities efficiencies and items like that so we talked about it many many times and to support the determination and there are no Graphics like this to confirm correct right right um as well um I brought some backup in case it's the same plans you've seen uh very minor revisions to help Dave with some estimating this last time to confirm numbers uh I can give a little more detail Christmas description is about as great as I was going to give but as far as sizes or sport footages if that helps um but but at Northfield the existing CTE program space on the northwest side of the building would be removed that's where the elementary Edition would go grades three through five and then we on the south west corner of the building extend the corridor and create two larger classroom spaces for CTE to live that's the basics of the project and then Chris Merchant the cafeteria Edition be on the west side of the gym at Metro North extend that Corridor to the west to allow students to get there dedicated cafeteria space very simple Edition size for the school Dave do you have anything to add to that ever um no other than along the way as we've been having our meetings and looking at the different options a couple of different times we've been doing some high-level costs estimating uh to give the school system an ideal on the value of this project I think the last I didn't bring a copy with me so I'm going off memory um I think the last estimate we did it was inclusive of not only our costs um but um soft costs and design piece and everything was around a 33 million dollar number um so that that was the last estimate we did and that included a little bit of a chiller boiler upgrade at Northfield to accommodate what we think might be a potential need or additional capacity we're going to need to provide heating and cooling for the additional square footage that would be added to the building hmm any questions no appreciate working with the United States process so far they came from here we'll now hear from stifle [Music] sometimes it would grow yes Jim's going to tell us about the proposed project and how it'll be financed as well as the information about the effect on typical property taxes thank you with that introduction I will try to keep all city and towns made out of my business I'll put it on the next slide so we want to start with your operations fund we're looking at your total tax just as the budget it was introduced we're going to look at your total tax rate the operations fund you can see that with the a b growth it's pushed down your tax rate for operations fund and then with the maximum growth quotient we do figure that in there in our modeling at that four percent where we were anticipating five percent in our prior models so that's changed that little dip and then starting the uh 30 in 2012 we start to assume zero assessed value growth at that point but in the operations we're also just holding the backstroke cursor we're only at five percent at that point assuming that the legislature doesn't renew their hold on that that we give back to someone of a normal World quotient there we move to the next slide we want to add our current debt service rate so this includes the 2023 everything you've done up to that point and you'll see that pushes us up a little over 70 cents we go to the next slide forward the bonds we just sold um fit right in here uh that was the 9 million 955 000 that we just sold we're closing now is October 3rd and you'll see that that brings that tax rate up to that dollar 10 that Chris just spoke about in your budget as a total tax rate and you'll see that we paid those off very quickly to leave flexibility for this project and other Deeds we go to the next slide this is what we propose a 39 million dollar bond issue again that's a very conservative number for what you've just heard from The Architects and construction managers so we're trying to still stay conservative so we're estimating no more than a 30 minute 9 million dollar bond issue staying completely within that dollar ten total tax rate we're structured it right now with the idea that we would hold that rate for a couple years and leave flexibility for other needs you may have um that's the way this is presented to the extent no other needs were were to materialize most schools always have needs but to the extent we could always shorten the payments and close that Gap but right now so the best in working with the administration to leave that future flexibility in there all stayed within that dollar 10 tax rate that will be established this coming year from that that 39 million we would just State cost of insurance and if you recall cost of issuance or the attorney's fees underwriting fees that's selling the bonds rating costs um Title Insurance any of the things that happen above and beyond the brick and mortar and construction soft costs uh we estimate it does be a little over 000 leaving you about 38.4 million of brick and mortar and construction Hearts off cost to go towards the project there are a few items that as you proceed will be in your final resolution after your next hearing and I want to highlight those the first three are what I just covered that's the um the breakdown of the costs next we always have to advertise the maximum interest rate my model is on based on an average of five percent but those rates because we have short-term long-term range up to six percent as a worst case number based on that we have to put our estimated maximum interest cost we show that at twenty two and a half million dollars that again is based on that uh five percent average it has the bottom we just sold that they were three-year bonds the average rate was just around three and a half percent however the one the two-year Bond rates are higher than the 20 year bond rates right now so we're still in that 3 three to three and three quarter range for a 20-year bond issue so again we've got a pretty good cushion in there and that 22 and a half million dollar interest number maximum term 22 years if you remember last time we could only sell bonds for 20 years for more than 20 years but we advertise the least slightly longer in case there are delays we don't have to go back through the lease process so the lease is in place however the lease term once we sell bonds that lease will cease at the time the bonds are paid off so we advertise the lease a little longer to give us that flexibility our maximum annual release payments are the most we would see in any given year and again round it up and conservative because with all of the assessed value fluctuations we want enough payment there that if you have another strong year in the year that this first payment comes on we need to have enough room in that pavement to try to protect your tax rate again those will all pair back down to exactly where the bonds are sold at so that mat when I say six million it's not six million for 20 years and you remember that chart we have high payments in those first two years and then it lowers for the remaining years those will all come down to the actual number of when and if bonds are sold and then we have the maximum tax impact of that uh it's 37 cents on its own but because we're looking at the impact with other debt coming off and structured in around return payment we're looking at zero net increase next slide a couple other things we do have to publish your current debt service Levy this is representative 23 Levy that's a million 514 current debt rate is your 2023 rate of 1766 cents um your there are a couple ratios that have to be included and I think we shared those in our previous hearings but these are all adjusted so the first one is your total debt payments including any projected payments divided by your current assessed value and that comes in at 0.61 percent small and that's a low number as we look at it Statewide and nationally the the ratio that's more important to the bond market is taking your outstanding debt including the proposed new debt and any outstanding debt of any of your underlying or overlapping tax taxing districts divided by assessed value and that's kind of giving the market a ratio of your debt to your your value and that comes in at 5.42 at today's assessed value that is what I would fits in that low to moderate range it's not on the completely low but still the very low to moderate and as far as your peers and Nationwide buyers of your bonds very attractive number uh with the broader markets this legislature asks for but to me this is one real number that they've asked for that means something um and then finally we do have to publish uh 10 years of the estimated Debt Service tax levy and tax rate going forward with this model and you'll see that we do show The Debt Service rate jumping just a little bit in the Years 24 and 25 and then come working its way down but because we're incorporating this in and around your total tax rate we have that tax rate going up a little in debt in the places where your operations has come down so that's why that looks that way but that is this flat outer requirement that we must publish that table as part of this requirement at this point now literally do I have another side no okay there's another slab it's not yours yeah okay I'm sure I'll mispronounce something there but so um at this point I'll turn back on you but these are that this is the same presentation that we'll use in your next hearing unless there's something that comes up that you you need to change or modify but this lays out everything that will be included in the resolution you're considered next week questions again I guess I have a couple so our bond rating stated double A Plus or right so that'll help along with the financial indicators to make it a yes attractive interest rate for us yes you're a double A Plus over a plus the double A Plus represents the state support of your debt and the a plus represents your underlying credit you stayed right where you were I believe you moved up a little bit from the standpoint of having a very strong balances but not enough to move to the next rating level and part of that's dictated by uh other social economic uh local environment not just the school district but you're still very strong and well above above the average in Indiana or in the you know as far as ratings for schools you know that's good news because I guess my second last question is when you're figuring that half a million dollar expense for issuance how is that figured it's not a percentage because you don't know the billable hours for lawyers yeah so so underwriting fee so an underwriting fees which is what you pay us uh are a combination of a fixed um that's not a fixed fee it's three quarters of the fee would probably be going to paying our Brokers so we have to have enough fee in there to get Brokers to look at your bonds against other bonds of the market and then the other part is a management fee for what I do and then there's a risk portion of that so that one's all a variable based on a percentage of the bondage attorneys fees are uh there are hourly but on the bottom on the bond Council side typically they Quote us a flat fee and they keep track of their internal hours but it's a flat fee local attorneys are all different some are on retainers others are per deal and we try to use an estimate in talking to Josh and others trying to get those offices in the rating agencies they Quote us a fee and that's typically based on the type of credit not your rating but the type of underlying security and that is a fee based on size so again that variable cost title work is based on its size trustees are based on a fee for their services so it's a combination of those that we tried to do a conservative estimate not knowing what you said where we are today we want to end up high and bring that down and so forth your firm brings all those costs together and you summarize yes okay yeah and with your last bond issue as a matter of fact I forgot a page for Chris we have that delineated as part of that cost of issuance so Chris has that and bills come in and offset right now I have a rough scratch sheet of all these pieces to get to that number but as we get closer before Bond sales we actually get the final quotes from everybody where are you today what's your actual numbers what kind of reimbursables do you have Etc so we know all of those numbers down very close you just push these bond issuances out into the public Marketplace or does somebody try and Shop them for the lowest interest cost yeah so our our stifle has a full National group of institutional salesmen and then we have retail salesman or Brokers throughout the nation so every year bond issue every maturity so every six months we have bonds maturity and I don't know if it's easier to look at this last deal we did those three years so we had six different maturities we would have broker selling those and looking for buyers at each maturity so it's not like going to a bank or one buyer that says I want to buy this entire package and here's what I'll do for them on a 20-year bond issue we will have 40 or so different maturities and we have different buyers and the one to three year range we have buyers that like the three to five the big insurance companies really want the 15 to 20 year range or the 10 to 15 it all varies the market changes um there's also very we have buyers by size so if you have some small maturities smaller maturities up front on on our last issue some of those maturities may not have as much interest so we have to invest with the rates a little bit and work hard there but then as an example say we have maturity of three million per maturity that brings in a whole other set of buyers and so the more buyers we can get in at every maturity the more competitive that rate is and so we get to push those against each other but it is truly a process of every single maturity and finding different tier buyers for different pieces rather than one buyer that has to absorb everything and we believe that in it in and day out that type of process and what we call underwriting Bonds in the public market yes they're being sold public but they're also being so very definitively at different levels brings that rate down versus finding one buyer for a project yes that answers my question I guess was is somebody working on our behalf to make sure that the broadcast is this economical as possible well my goal is to do that so you want me back but yes but but ultimately I try to keep track of that I'm representing you guys on a stifle side now my buyers the Brokers want you to pay as higher rate as you can pay because it's a lot easier for them to sell bonds so that's where our underwriter fits in the middle and I'm pushing lowest rate they're pushing higher and somewhere in between supply and demand Works its magic based on that underwriter absorbing all that and making sure that every maturity has people looking at it and people calling on it pre-marketing makes a difference we also will as your bond issue gets closer recovering to fruition we start pre-marketing your bonds so buyers on the day we sold bonds isn't the first day they've looked at your deal they they know your deal is coming they know you know the people that don't know work Wabash Indiana have to be contacted people in San Francisco need to be reminded this is the Heartland these people pay their bills etc etc people in Indianapolis or Chicago know Wabash and it's a different sales pitch but it's the idea that we've got to get out in front of people early because any given day today we're in parking before we come to schools there are four deals in Indiana that sold today you want to make sure somebody's looked at your deal rather than it showing up on their stack this morning and they haven't made a decision so there's a lot to go in in there we hope we do a very a very good job at that you know I think you do I appreciate it no this pair just watching do HR now I stumbled through that yeah all right well now I'll open it for public hearing if you have a comment about as a board or willing to listen gain information if not I'd like to thank you for listening to all this you know I learned something I appreciate it uh please note this is just the first step in the legal process no boy action is legally required of this hearing but credit is hearing solely to Pure public comment board will continue to work with Administration and its professionals to look for efficiencies to conserve tax dollars on meeting our educational needs the board will hold a second public Hearing in this boardroom on September the 26th at 6 pm appreciate it all right thank you for all that participating in that it's welcome to stay inside all right next time up is human resources it's very few this evening we have Deb Elliott paraprofessional at Shark Creek is designing to transfer we are Kathy Lyons transferring from cook at Northfield to a paraprofessional position at Shark Creek and Mark Smith transferring from custodian to Ed custodian at Southwood High School now is affected handball I moved to the hotel all in favor of approval say aye all right all right thank you anything tonight from Heartland monthly meeting either next week Mr P Baker superintendent yeah I just have a couple of things I want to celebrate again this might could have been in a celebration and recognition of Staff but uh on August 24th you know that we had our first volleyball game at Southwood on our new gym floor and it was actually worked out very nicely that uh we also celebrate Tom Pinnacle being inducted into the Indiana high school volleyball coaches association so with over 800 wins coach Pinnacle ranks in the top five of all-time Indiana volleyball history so a lot of a lot of fun that night so um Mrs Lewis can share more if she wants but it was a really nice evening a lot of people thought they were there because of the gym floor probably had some people there because of Jim Ford but a lot more of it was because of the celebration of Coach clinical also time does why we're already past the midterms for grinning period for the first nine weeks so we're in the second half of the first nine weeks also on Friday we had a great day with a lot of professional development with different different employee groups but obviously the teachers did a lot with the state standards I read I learned changes and blueprints and resources nurses and codesodians had some various meetings in the morning and in the afternoon we had a great uh presentation To Us by Thomas Blackwell who was once again on target going along with our admission statement of inspiring our staff so we've Inspire our students and so it was really really neat though we don't do that very often as far as having all of our staff members in one room but we did I did have a selfie done and I was in the self at first because I wasn't working out the Thomas Blackwood did a selfie we were going to push that out but unfortunately it was very blurry for all everybody else so his picture was great but everybody else looked like a little worried people here and there also hadn't done just for fun too I on the rolling parade that was Saturday they actually had the retired teachers as a grand Marshals and so I had fun driving a activity bus unfortunately with all the safety protocol just like we talked about with Kyle you cannot stick your head head out of those windows anymore because it only goes so you can't stick your head out but they try to throw candy out and they did that and that was a lot of fun so and there was some teachers from all over not just from MSDS so that was neat to see all them but we had MSC teachers too and that was a lot of fun and also um just kind of announced that uh class reunions sometimes asked for different tours of the building uh so gave a tour uh Friday night to the class of 68.
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good evening and welcome to the Tuesday September 12 2023 meeting of the Ashland zoning board of appeals in accordance with the governor's order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law general laws chapter 38 section 20.
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that's right how are you now for today's starting lineup for Central High School number five eating two [Applause] number one floating on Jeezy [Applause] number seven Dennis magenta [Applause] number 11. [Applause] number 19 Casimir yeah [Applause] number three James Perez thank you number 15 Isaac Vermont number eight Miguel Portage [Applause] number 10 Hoover um Eddie gold number 60 Sebastian Hernandez [Applause] and now for the respawn metal Spartans number six Shane Smith [Applause] number nine Samir Khan [Applause] number five Andrew Oliveira [Applause] number 10 Joe Fresno number three Zach Richard [Applause] number four Kathy facility 24. Shay McCarthy [Applause] number seven Tyler Retton [Applause] number 13 Jack Walsh any goal for the Spartans is number double zero Nolan Garcia [Applause] our great country has persevered because of the men and women that serve our country in the armed forces we invite both veterans and current military personnel to please send we thank you for your service to our country anthem [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] foreign [Applause] I don't know [Applause] over there [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] good morning yeah [Music] thank you foreign [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Applause] oh great job [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh yeah [Applause] all right they're all here [Applause] we go all right going forward foreign the pressure [Music] thank you foreign thank you [Music] thank you ladies [Applause] get ready [Applause] foreign [Music] thank you [Applause] I didn't do that thank you everybody what the heaven I see him bro [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you again [Applause] thank you foreign [Music] that's right to talk about the game [Applause] oh my God thank you [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] everybody else thank you [Music] [Applause] happy birthday [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] oh my God Trevor yeah [Applause] oh boy [Music] how do you know him everybody [Music] thank you [Music] let's go [Applause] genius absolutely out here everything okay [Applause] thank you [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] all right boys all right yesterday no kidding tonight thank you very much [Applause] [Music] thank you America [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] all right thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] oh you gotta come to me [Applause] thank you [Music] [Applause] let's go [Applause] [Music] [Applause] let's go guys [Music] thank you Central goal scored by the number nine Dennis assistant by number seven yeah [Music] those definitely are not their numbers that is like the names there their uniform numbers are there wow well that got screwed up all right [Music] all right [Music] again [Applause] all right guys [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Applause] thank you [Applause] [Music] what's going on [Music] [Applause] thank you Nebraska slots [Applause] thank you [Applause] thank you foreign [Music] because [Music] foreign yes Mario yeah [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you [Applause] thank you foreign [Music] okay come on [Applause] here [Music] nice yeah [Applause] [Music] thank you [Applause] all right [Applause] yeah Jackie oh my God [Applause] it's right in front of me all right stand up [Music] everybody [Music] [Applause] thank you okay [Music] thank you okay thank you [Applause] thank you all right come on everybody [Music] as you can see [Applause] thank you [Applause] [Music] everyone else [Music] Spartan goals scored by number six Shane Smith assistant [Applause] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right [Applause] [Music] thank you [Applause] foreign [Applause] [Music] you know [Music] thank you [Applause] [Music] you can't do that [Applause] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] foreign thank you [Applause] foreign oh my God yes [Music] what's going on again [Applause] oh my God [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you foreign [Applause] thank you [Applause] oh look at it okay [Applause] remember thank you [Applause] [Laughter] [Applause] all right I think a migration [Music] thank you all right let's go red oh God thank you [Applause] [Music] I believe [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] my Jack over thank you [Music] [Applause] oh mama [Applause] [Music] all right quickly [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Applause] thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] on YouTube [Music] Spartan gold scored by number three Zach Ritter [Applause] [Music] there you go pick up a man [Applause] [Music] oh come on [Music] foreign thank you [Applause] here get it [Music] ready wrong foreign [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] oh my God many times thank you on my bed [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Applause] thank you [Applause]
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turn our mics on a little sh excuse me Melissa for one second no uh no Mr dffo okay so you'll do the uh cash balance reportal oh we don't oh okay okay because it says okay all right you ready superintendent okay don't forget to turn our microphones on on the on the mic m is only you should have it only on when you speak then you can hear whoever talking on yours I'll call the rooll for the purpose of attendance please miss Fitzgerald yes Miss dler Mr hayum is absent Mr cillo is absent M marmel present Mr tobox Mr L montin present thank you he minutes of uh August 29th uh can I have a motion on those please I'll move to approve as submitted do I have a second second okay sorry I didn't he uh any discussion all those in favor anyone opposed hey Melissa did you say you had something to fill us in on the uh reconciliation yep so um I met with Jerry the cont controller um in Joanne last week and we we took a deep dive on the cash Reconciliation Report that we present um and I would like to propose that we you know with yep with our meetings moving to once a month that we present a reconciled statement so a month-end reconciled statement because the report that we're giving you right now while it's accurate it's really a snapshot in time and it doesn't reconcile to anything in our system or to the bank statements um so we all agree that it would be a more meaningful report if it was fully reconciled um but that would mean that the report is going to be on a one month lag because with the dates of our meetings we don't have enough time to reconcile the month before because they're early in the month so it would be on a one- month lag Mak a lot sense because I think that makes a lot of sense because um when you get the report you're going to have an accurate up to date um report on the exact F uh finances at that time rather than uh us you approving before they actually are completed well the report is accurate I just want to the report we give you is accurate it's just not it's not a reconciled report so it's you know that ending balance doesn't reconcile to anything in our system it doesn't reconcile to the bank statements it's just like a snapshot in time it's kind of like a soft close but we do a month-end close where everything reconciles and that's what I would like to present especially it's also a public document so I think it would just be in our best interest to present something that's fully reconciled so uh would that be like the first meeting of the next month yeah so if I look at the calendar um so our next meetings on the 26th would would be present in the August month end and then the meeting after that would be no report and then every meeting following would be presenting like it would be so like in November we' be presenting September um December would be October um that would bring us all the way to May and then like our first meeting in the summer I can present like a fiscal year and close you know a final report good uh can I have a motion on that please I'll move the recommendation second second Mrs felle yes I sit on two other boards that require financial performance or reconciliations and we are always one month behind so that it is reconciled and it's an accurate report so I think it's pretty standard procedure rather than receiving something mid Monon that isn't it's accurate in what it's is being presented but it isn't a true end of month statement so I definitely am in favor of that Vivian correct me if I'm wrong so whenever we have a meeting are we two because you said usually it's a month but um you mentioned in our next meeting it would be so if our next meeting is in in September I mean no we're in next September October we're what what con consolidation are we getting August so the next meeting is September 26 we'll have August 30th but then the meeting after that is October 10th we're not going to have a report for that we'll report September at the November 7th so it's not it's not really um B statement I can't I can't get like I have to have the documents um for your packet it's the Wednesday before so like for to get it into like if I wanted to get like the August close into this I would have had three business days to fully reconcile the month end which isn't enough time so it's kind of like it's it's where the meetings fall like if the meetings were the next Tuesday we could totally would be closer but it's just the way our meetings fall would it make um would that makes us have a report at some point that we have more than one reported no okay let me refresh refresh refresh the question so the reconciliation happened every month end yeah so we don't meet every we don't I understand what you're saying it's going to be meetings that will fall into you know the reconciliation is not done so my question is if we have a meeting and there has been two reconciliations before that meeting are we going to get two reports that's my question it makes sense that we get both reports that we haven't received for whatever me month ends prior to that meeting it's just do you understand now I do understand but like looking at the calendar I don't think we wouldn't we wouldn't have a a meeting that had to reconciliations I can I can update the calar I can update the calendar with like the month end that you're going to be getting so when you come to the meeting you know on here like what the reconciliation is but there's going to be some reconciliation then then they're not going to be reported at any point right is that what you're saying we'll have one one meeting that we don't that's the only that's where I see a so yeah we're going to get something better because I I understand but then we going to that's going to be many times that we're not going to do any reporting so I I'm not okay with that if we if you tell me and I'm I mean I'm speaking I'm speaking for me but I um if you tell me that there's going to be a point where we're going to go have more than one reconciliation reported at a meeting then I'm okay with it if you I I don't think mathematically it comes out that way if this does pass would you do me a favor send everybody an email on when to expect it yes okay if it does pass if it doesn't pass we just leave it status quo that sounds good anything further John I just want so Melissa are you saying that the next meeting we won't have a report but then the following meeting we will and then after that every month we'll have it so the next meeting we'll have the next meeting is on September 26th we'll have the August 30th right reconciliation and then on October 10 10 it's not enough time for September 30th so I won't have a report for that one but I'll report September 30th at the November 7th meeting and then after that we'll have one every month every month yeah that's what I'm saying yes yeah yeah so we're going to go just that one month but then after that you'll get a report every month after that because we'll be catching we'll catch up to the meeting time yeah so it'll be only that one month yes that we don't get a report not the next one but the one after after thees to that well wait you you wouldn't be able to because we would never have we're trying to catch up now once we miss that month then we'll be on target to be able to get one every month but but but still it doesn't matter everyone you have a report report so even if the time pass you still have a consol report for a specific month so what the problem I me again reconciliation I understand so you told me that you can give me a report of two different months on well one of them won't be ready won't be ready one of them will be but one of them won't be know but I'm going than that when it's ready and we didn't get it because it wasn't ready at that time I was going to get that one and the one that together that's all I don't think so cuz basically we're two months almost two months behind Mrs yes I would just say it again it is considered as best practice for okay so I okay I okay we're going to move the question all those in favor anyone opposed would you call a roll when you have a moment please Mr I'm sorry no miss m yes Mr toox Miss Fitzgerald yes M Mr L yes motion carries okay handout uh consolidated cash mrso okay sorry I was jumping ahead to the um revolving account I thought you were including that okay so uh the revolving account at the moment has over $3 million in it so my question would be um is can that money go into our um investment account or is it not eligible because it is revolving it's it can't okay I okay budget reports any questions on any of those documents ladies and gentlemen no donations articles public participation see non upgrade update excuse me update on the school opening uh is that you John or the principal okay ahead John uh School opening the last meeting um the last meeting uh principal went over what we had planned for opening uh I do want to say that uh it really went exceptional this year our opening um it all started um the the opening actual opening with the Freshman coming in on uh the Thursday before Labor day where we uh had a reception for the Freshman outside where we had music and the staff uh were all out I'd say at least 90% of the staff was out there welcoming the freshman in if as they get off the bus along with the uh Reggie leaders were there as well in their orange t-shirts and uh it I would say was one of our exceptional years in terms of welcoming The Freshman it's always a great event and it went uh very well this year again our uh two and a half days of professional development went uh very well in terms of uh start off with opening remarks for myself and the principal um which I thought were received very well um but I think that um the professional development this year which prepared us to kick off our uh uh many of our initiatives this year in particular our school Improvement plan and uh some of the uh changes uh that were going to be happening uh throughout the school regarding some of our policies all of that went very well uh time was given to the staff to prepare for students uh I think uh teachers seemed very happy to be back uh students when they arrived on the day after Labor Day um I was uh pleasantly surprised that and I uh purposely that first day kind of stood at the bottom of the stairs Sue was at top of the stairs for the most part we were both and just about every student had a smile on their face we're happy to be back and um so it went very well uh I was we were had prepared um uh early the administ ative team came in very early on that day because we weren't sure what the uh what happen because of the new uh phone policy based on some of the what we were hearing on social media as it turned out um the uh students work uh very very Cooperative uh in fact now we've had uh every day since we've been in session we have had not one single referral to the business office for phone violation everybody I mean a safe office a safe uh space uh but it's gone extremely well uh we're thrilled we're very uh um proud of our students and our parents the students have handled it exceptionally well um and we've had many many comments from teachers uh thanking uh that we be very thankful that we had this policy and saying it's already making difference in the classroom so so we're very thrilled about that that uh I'm not going to say what um don't Jin yourself no no no every every I mean I couldn't be happier staff couldn't be happier uh we were well prepared for if we had to deal with any complications but uh fortunately uh it went well and I think uh many many students I think like the policy as well um so but we had a one remark I remember one remark from one of the teachers that it's great to see students talking to each other in uh in activities that are going on in the classroom so uh thank you for the policy and approving the policy uh it's making a difference in teaching and learning and we're uh happy to report that it's gone well okay John uh the hottop please hot toop project so the hotop project is about 70% complete uh it's uh next Saturday they'll be back next Saturday Saturday to complete the pretty much complete the project and then Sunday they'll be finishing putting all the lines in so next Monday we should be pretty close complete there might be some small little pieces here and there that have to be done but for the most part we expect it to be completed it looks great and uh project overall went very well I do want to say a special thanks to our um director of uh of facilities he was the project manager on the hot top project so we didn't have to hire a project manager or an engineer because of his background and his experience in that area so we saved about 50,000 and we've got a lot of extra things done he comprom he may negotiated with them to do things that uh we're not in the initial bid but we're able to get it done uh due to his expertise so special thank you to Lance Hamill for his hard work and helping that project go so well uh and and uh turned out so successful and throughout the project having to manage the parking uh throughout the that Lance worked with the staff as well and making sure that it went smooth I think it went relatively smooth uh each day with all the students and the staff without lines getting everybody where they belonged and there was quite a few cars and traffic control and everything went very well so very pleased with the outcome and the process in terms of that whole project went uh super well Mr do we have a final invoice uh not not yet but uh we expect it to come in on on a quote okay uh student enrollment John so just I uh asked Brenda to give me an update up to today's date on our student numbers so as of today we had 478 freshmen 449 10th grade graders 431 11th graders and 48 12th graders for a total of 1,766 students um we are bringing in another four 10th graders um because health assistant said they could take in four more students and we have some transfer students that are interested in that area and that being an area where there's high demand uh we'll bring those students in so we'll end up with 1,7 expect to end up with 1,770 students the the numbers the breakdown the class breakdown sure give you that again so the ninth grade was 478 students uh the 10th grade was 449 students the 11th grade was 431 students and the 12th grade was 48 students and as you can see that each year we've been pretty much maintaining our class sizes over the four years which is really exceptional uh much much better than we've ever done in the past so that's driven up the numbers but it's also shows that uh students are uh doing well and are coming back here after year less and less dropouts and so a retention rate for the students has been exceptional D how many did you say were transfers for health assisting for what we take an additional four from what grade 10th uh 10th grade 10th grade okay and they they haven't been notified yet they'll be notified this week so no no but then I do have a question when it comes to this and this is uh I don't know I'm pretty sure we've discussed it before in terms of students that we actually serve now now that um we're not able to get health assisting as their top pick are we um making them a priority first um ensuring that if they freshman that weren't able to get health assisting in their top pick are now in 10th Grade before we're accepting transfer students are we reaching out to those that weren't able to get in the first time around uh we did yes we depleted our weight list for that program before we and still have four openings and medical assistant grade students freshman go through the exploratory no no I understand oh okay I understand but there's freshman that you know they don't always get their top pick and being that Health assisting is one of the popular shops we're not at the picking station we're nowhere near the picking station yet so it would be sophomores that do that have already picked but but that shop didn't fill up last year a medical assistant had uh hundred graders so then um it'll be sophomores so it'll be our sophomores as well fresh I just didn't want that's all was saying oh my b i I misspoke no problem noig deal so in the 10th grade which are last year nth grade when they picked we didn't fill the shop to 132 we didn't I mean 32 we didn't the shop didn't fill medical assistant did fill but health assistant did so um the week they said they could take four more to get it to where they normally were so that's why we took in four transfers because there were openings and no other students wanted it okay okay okay John uh the aviation hanger please uh program Aviation program so the aviation Pro so the aviation program got off the ground um oh yes no pun intended uh uh we um the at this point here we still are uh working on getting the their final buildings uh off the ground for next I mean uh built for next year and um but uh the top priority or process that we were dealing with was it should uh is trying to obtain the aviation hanger out at the uh airport and um I got a call last week that all the paperwork was completed and ready for me to sign in order to uh obtain that hanger uh but the uh bill of sales was put in gts's name uh but it couldn't had to be in Lawrence's name so I contact because we are not able to purchase it based on our uh Charter so the attorney was making a change putting Lawrence on there and then Lawrence would transfer ownership to us after they own it so they're in the process of fixing the paperwork for that and then that will be completed so it's uh uh really very close to us being able to to move into that space um so any questions to superintendent D um superintendent do you mind just going into further detail um in reference to what do you mean um that the program has already has gotten off the ground like what has uh started initiated um so the I know you mentioned a ribbon cutting so I'm not sure yeah that we're not ready for that quite yet but we'll be soon but we started the uh exploratory program started so we now have ninth graders going through there one day a week to see if they would be interested in a long a week term of exploratory exploring the program uh it's down in the lower uh we have our instructor that start Ed his curriculum we have uh we purchased a small airplane that was delivered uh the Labor uh the Sunday before Labor Day so there was a a small airplane in the shop space um for the kids to uh look at get in uh get excited about the program um the curriculum we've contacted uh FAA and we're now in the process of uh getting the full approval of the upper classman programs so we're working on uh the process they say that we have to follow takes about a year which includes everything from curriculum uh trainers tools uh space all of that needs to be finalized and approved by them so we're in that process now officially the paperwork to start that process has been submitted and approved by faaa and uh um us purchasing the hanger or taking over that hanger space is part of that process and um at this point once we take it over we have to submit a plan for converting it into a classroom space so that paperwork has been completed as well so the students are uh ninth graders are exploring the aviation program now and are able to choose uh the program no as a pick so right now all the kids go in each program for for one day and then after all students have gone in explored each shop for one day they will pick um nine I think it is nine programs to explore for one week and then after they do go through that explore after we go through those nine weeks of or them going through all their nine shops so won't be till the end of third quarter then the final first pick of the full program will happen then for the aviation program so it's we're still not till April uh end of March beginning April when we have our final Aviation students that'll permanent be studying it for their career permanently so they're able to explore it though oh yeah they're exploring it now but they're only one day exploratories which I understand so it'll be one day exploratory but they won't be able to do the one week not yet not until they've gone but they're able based on that one day that they Explorer they're able to pick the shop for April no no at the end of the one day when they've gone through so we figure every student has to have gone to every shop for one day at the end of that time period you know what they what about the time frame on that so is five day rotations um will start like after November yeah and then they go until almost like they end up in their permanent shops by April so they'll go through the one day in aviation and based on that experience they'll be able to identify that as a choice the 5day being selected into at the end of the year yeah if that makes sense so so they do one day I no you are you are yeah so so they they all one day one day they choose they pick nine days that they go for five days in each of I mean nine shops in which they spend five days in each shop the point is that they could choose Aviation as one of those nine shops and they'll spend five days in aviation the reason because said be ready until April right yeah for them to select it as their career yeah I know because of the ready that that was going to deter or affect students choosing it no okay all right I just want to ask when there's any when you have a date for inauguration can we get invited on time like the minute you know because if you if you don't know this I'm all for fun I'm missing the fun it's not it's hard when I know of anything that's going on the day before I cannot make a friend because my work doesn't allow me to so I I would like to know ahead of time so I can have fun too okay so we'll make sure we get notice at least two weeks before we plan anything that everybody gets that as you can see we've changed the sound system for these particular speakers back to the way we had it before where one person speaks and then you should be a i I think everyone should be able to hear my voice in there yeah so it's better like that but we are looking at a a upgraded system from this as well um where the speakers where you may have just a microphone in front of you and the speakers will come from up above so the whole Space can hear you clearly and then also it can be streamed at the same time so the complication is getting a good sound here but also not having uh an issue with streaming it out with good sound as well so that's what they're trying to resolve now and once I get that done we'll it'll be even better thank you okay in your packet uh ladies and gentlemen is uh calendar the September calendar report from committees old business district committee priorities policies appreciate a motion on Section b b DD Rules of Order and be DG minutes a motion please I'll move that this discussion all those in favor anyone opposed I see no new business listed here Mrs Fitzgerald I was just wondering when we the date might come years from now or whatever when we will have updated and approved the entire policy we must be close we'll get you that information I'm sure Sue can contact them and I I suppose I'll know when we no longer have any to vote sure we can get that for you but I know it's a long ways off okay it's a living breathing document there a there's a lot of policy the book is like and it just keeps going okay uh table matters uh faculty dress coders are a reason to pull that out of table matters joh uh I don't think we finalized that yet so we still going to get that to you student use of cellular device policies is there a reason to pull that off of uh well we'll continue to give you reports on it so if you want to leave it on there but I I kind of gave you a report today but we'll continue um particularly up in the beginning next meeting we'll get update you again and and then uh maybe for a couple of months we can uh keep it on there VI any feedback from the teachers and now having to implement this new change the teach the teachers love it at least the ones we've I don't I don't think I've heard of one teacher complaining they've had no difficulties with the students that I'm aware of because they've send none to the uh uh to the safe safe space uh so I think it's been good princial zinski just to add to that I think the um you know I sent out a form on the first day just for teachers to be able to submit any questions because sometimes when you develop a policy like that things come up that we don't think of that they will um and U I got like 18 or 19 responses most of them were like thank you no problems at all a couple logistical um questions feedback that helped us um but for the most part I have not I I teachers have actually said Thank you and um teachers have also reported to me as well as other administrators that students are actually saying to them that um it's it's good so so far um we really try we're also trying like in my weekly communication with the teachers I'm trying to give them an update um we also made a very like you know I made it a point to say that we are um all models of this especially if we're asking the students to do it and that also has been going going well um without many issues bill it's the guy with the guy here yeah um so my daughter who lives in Manchester uh New Hampshire has a student living with her as a foreign exchange student when she was in college after college she went to be a nanny in Rome and he was 5 years old at that time his mom said can he come to America and go to school and she lives in Manchester so I talked to him about the situation with the cell phones he said BL Point Blank that in Rome where he goes to school they have the same thing they lock the phones up for each class period and the kids abide by that they love it and in Manchester where he's going to school at one of the high schools like four schools they don't and he says it's really distracting cuz the kids are you know and turning their phones on so it just shows around the world that what we're doing is what they're doing and vice versa so just a point that's thanks for that info yeah anything further okay Personnel considerations no resignations leave of absence retirements appointments job postings I have nothing listed unless you snuck something in nothing Mrs I had a question for our principal are we fully staffed at this point or are we still needing any body yes um we are very close I'm happy to report we have a uh Plumbing opening we have a special education adjustment counselor and we have a library media assistant um we also have positions biot technology and it programming which we've already made the decision to go with the current staff just because we have not gotten that so that's it um we have um and we recently hired HED a health assisting teacher and another Plumbing teacher that are starting at the end of September so other than that fingers crossed we I feel like we're in pretty good shape thank you very good we are interviewing for three of those positions three of those position so we'll be a full if we uh take those candidates very good okay future agenda items there's no need for an executive session at this time the chair accept the motion to adjourn huh no we'll do no we'll do that later okay put it into the next one I don't do that all those in favor anyone oppose no I don't do those
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
yeah call the meeting of the board of education for September 12th to order welcome everybody tonight and we'll start off as we usually do with the Pledge of Allegiance Simona lead us in that with flags behind us thank you in 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 thank you all um welcome to a little bit different format you're going to see tonight as we move forward um so we're going to get right into it uh we're going to go right into the administrative reports which starts off with the superintendent uh I'm sorry which starts off with me uh as the chair so um again welcome this is our first you know school time hello Felicia how are you I just saw that you were on uh is anybody else on with Felicia okay um and Felicia if you want to inject something just raise your hand up or Carol see it if you want to say anything thank you um so uh a couple of things that I'm pretty proud of I'm pretty proud of that we had our meeting on the 28th our Retreat meeting and uh I think that set a great tone uh going forward and we had shipping and Goodman Goodwin uh be able to give us some some board pointers of what we should be doing going forward I was most pleased and I think we'll continue to refine that is the board evaluation I think it's important that we go through that self-evaluation period uh at every meeting at every year once a year and so uh I think that was a pretty successful day I want to congratulate the superintendent on a very successful convocation that evening uh the next day I'm sorry the day before that Thursday a very successful convocation I think we got off to the right foot as a school district this year um I want to again just acknowledge the the work of the board of education is going to be going forward uh we're going to really dive into the subcommittee work which is uh tonight Joe scheidler was a chair of uh policy this morning we had a board of Finance meeting with Russell Bush as our chair of finance and of course Erica is our chair of curriculum so we'll be leaning on our our committees to do more of the work going forward and uh I want to thank the chairs for their help I would encourage the other members of those uh of those subcommittees uh to help them out what we learned with shipping a Goodwin is even though I've been attending the meetings I'm really not a member of those uh those committees so the committee where I'm there to listen and to add support as much as I can but it's the work of the people that are on the committee that's going to be so important in your packet tonight I want to just point out I think this is so important I was talking to the superintendent about it Dr Grossman the vision of a graduate because I think is bored sometimes we we get away from some of the things that the the the foundational things that we're here to make sure happens and I had um I asked Connie to put this in the packet because I think it's great to refer to this especially as the first meeting of technically the school year of the vision of a graduate and what we're driving to do as a team Administration teachers and uh and the Board of Education to make sure that our graduates are a creative thinker communicator a collaborator a critical thinker in a compassionate citizen those five ingredients are so important and that's what we're going to continue to focus on as we go forward now now along with these things on the 24th through 25th at our Retreat meeting we adopted the board's goals and the board's goals align with these things okay these elements So for anybody that's listening to home or anybody that has not seen the board goals I would ask you to go on our website they are posted because tonight you're going to hear from our superintendent about uh his strategy for and his methods for helping the board achieve those goals so I would just ask you to remember that and other than that those are the only things that I wanted to bring to the board's attention tonight okay any any questions for the chair anything I said Felicia you're good okay perfect then I will now turn it over to Dr Grossman for the superintendent's announcements good evening welcome to everyone welcome to your official board meeting for the 23-24 school year I want to welcome Mrs Olson Mrs Le Pain and Mrs Johnson uh tonight who are going to speak about our summer school programming we welcomed our Canton Intermediate School and Cherry Brook primary school preschool students back last week it was so exciting to see our youngest Learners come back to school I just ironic I want to congratulate our can Public Schools teacher of the year Miss Ashley Le Pain who's here this this evening who we honored at our convocation I want to congratulate our canton's parent educator a year at Tyrone Jemison it was exciting to honor those two individuals and I believe it's in October Mrs Le Pain will be honored by the the state of Connecticut at a function at the Bushnell in your package you have a form for the Kent middle school PTO mum sale so if you'd like to buy some mums and benefit the Canton Middle School you could do that if you need any help on how to order it the form is a little bit complex just reach out to Claudia tomorrow and she'd be more than happy to help you out our upcoming open house curriculum nights Cherrybrook primary school is this week 6 p.m to 7 30 p.m Canton High School is this week September 14th 6 30 P.M to 8 P.M Canton Middle School is 6 00 P.M to 8 P.M on September 20th in Canton Intermediate School 5 30 to 7 30 p.m on September 21st which all these dates are listed in your packet we provided for you a calendar of events so if there's things that you have supportive education member want to attend we thought that would be something that would be interest to you there'll be an early release on Friday this Friday September 15th for professional development with a focus on social emotional learning very exciting that the Canton High School Community tag sale I believe this is to benefit the uh can parents for music will be on a mattress sale we'll be on Saturday September 23rd in the parking lot from 9 00 a.m to 2 P.M meetings have been held over the past couple weeks regarding the space issue at Cherry Brook primary school we are working with the town and planning on the possibility of installing module classrooms at the school in the future this is something that will be an ongoing topic and I'll continue to update you at future board meetings and especially at our finance and Facilities committee meeting so we're just in the process of looking at that I would have never thought that with last week's unusual heat that we would have been testing out our emergency system as you know if you're a family member that has a student in the district and we did send the communications to the the board we did Institute a text system last week by a school messenger that it is really quick we don't need to send out voice messages we send out that text and people get it and they were able to sign up so it was a good way of really communicating to the public what was going on within our schools and in a quick way with the text messaging the next regular scheduled board meeting is October 10th I'll take any questions out of the superintendent's office at this time any questions for the superintendent thank you Dr Grossman we move forward with the assistant superintendent's report Mr Bishop thank you chair Daniels in your packet you'll see a colorful sheet entitled uh Canton High School New England Association of schools and colleges report brief if you'll recall last year there was a visit by the New England Association in school of schools and colleges also known as niask they come as a visiting committee to be able to provide an evaluation a peer evaluation of the operations of the school uh it's uh niosk is an independent voluntary non-profit organization it partners with over 1500 Public Schools it's accreditation process is well respected effective and a time-tested methodology what it does is it it engages in partnership with a school to be able to review a number of indicators for Effective professional practice and engages the the school community in reflecting on their practice and then presenting information to this visiting group the visiting group then does some additional fact-finding and investigation Cooperative work together and then provides recommendations and feedback back to the high school you can see on the front the standards that are part of the principles of effective practice learning culture student learning professional practice learning support and learning resources and underneath each of those standards are descriptors of effective practice as well the schools use that to be able to evaluate their their work and reflect on their performance we were very pleased to be able to get results back from the commission of public schools at niask at their June 25th 2023 meeting they reviewed the decennial accreditation report from the recent visit to Canton High School and voted to award the school a continued accreditation in the New England Association of schools and colleges I have there listed the number of accommodations and recommendations for us to continue to be able to reflect on the work of a good school is never done so there are some things that we're excited to be able to continue this good work moving forward with at the end of this year we will have a report brief that we will provide to niask giving them a sense of where we are in our continued work and where we're going with some of our future work um we're very we're very excited about where we are and the high school has done an exceptional job moving forward uh addition I'd like to be able to share how excited we were to participate in the science of reading master class which was uh held in partnership with uh caps and Connecticut Department of Education uh Canton is a number one of a number of districts who are participating in this master class and it continues to support us in our doubling down on supporting effective reading instruction for our youngest planners I'll take any questions if there are any right now any questions for the assistant superintendent I will say this on behalf of the board I took the liberty of sending a um a note to Dr Kidwell and Mr depipo just complimenting them and congratulating them on a great report from the niask visits and uh that they had met um the many of the uh the points that they had they had mentioned in their uh in their overview so I think they did a great job I know there's a lot of pressure and stress on that so I I congratulated on that on that and thank you for the report Mr Bishop okay moving along uh Mrs muskowski oh I'm sorry they skipped over that story so uh welcome uh again uh Simone you're you're now the uh the senior of the group yeah and uh Maggie welcome to your first meeting I know Juliana has a uh has a I hope we're successful there so who would like to lead on the student report um so this year we kind of uh created a new system for doing a student report and we decided because there's three Representatives that make sense for like each of us to kind of tackle one school and like reach out and do the work of like reaching out to the administration there to find out like um events that are kind of less known to the public things that are like hidden gems almost that are exciting to share um so I'll be reporting on behalf of um the Canton middle and high school I'll be reporting on CIS who Juliana will be reporting on Sherry Brook but we'll cover her report for right now great yeah so I think that's a great uh strategy and plan I think the board would be very interested in how that all comes together yeah I'm excited I think it'll be good so to start I'll start with the Ken middle and high school but we have had a great start to our school year we're excited to be back and I'm excited and this year so far we've just had like very smooth transition and we I think one positive thing that we've brought to the community was the bulletin board in the front which I know many teachers saw during convocation um and I'm not sure if you saw it after convocation anyone here but the students added stars that had adjectives on them that represented um our community and the positive advantages that representative um and also yesterday on 9 11 we had 400 United States flags out to represent 400 firefighters that lost their lives so very good uh Community intermediate school started off the 2023 the 2024 school year on a really good note uh some items of excitement are their play on the Taylor Swift swifties being CIS nifties uh sixth graders made a great made friendship bracelets for the third for the fourth and fifth graders and they completed a fire drill and a code red and math has started their first units of multiplicative thinking expression equations and volume and geometry very good yes and I'm just going to read what Giuliana had written um Cherryville Primary School had a wonderful and happy starts the 2023-2024 school year the PTO provided a red carpet carpet entrance for this Cherrywood Primary School students on the first day of school um they also had their first school meeting on Friday September 1st all the staff introduced themselves to the students kindergarteners are recognized as our newest members too the Trevor primary school team and our third graders were recognized as our newest School leaders our new mascot was introduced and students learn about the positive cards our mascot and the positive cards are part of our culture climate and work this year the focus is first week and for the next week's October primary school is to build classroom community and learning routines very good that's a great report any questions for the student reps I think that's going to work well Dr Grossman yeah one of the things that we're going to allow the students to to do is when we do our board walks when we go around on those dates the school that each one of them has so Maggie will come with us on the camp Intermediate School walk so she'll be able to walk with us and then Juliana will be able to come to Cherry Brook and what they may do is switch halfway during the the school year so they could experience going to the the different schools so they can get it from a lens from a student perspective as they're walking with you that's great very good thank you for the reports Mrs miskowski thank you 31 notice a new a new look a new way of looking at the financials with like I think you're gonna really love it because um I think it's a great format uh I did go over the results with the finance committee this morning uh where they accepted the financials uh most importantly um the results as you know we're doing a full year forecast each month uh and it gets revised as we go along uh so right now for the end of August we are forecasting 34 000 in the black overall uh which is a hundred thousand dollar difference from last month so last month we were actually reporting uh a little bit of unfavorability uh but we were able to make some of that up with some of our our staff being none of our items Russell [Music] do you want to comment on today's meeting at today's meeting you know we approved August 2023 financials like Donna said Dominic has stolen my thunder here uh just working off of a new format it's much easier to understand very happy with it and I think the biggest highlight that one dimensional really does appear this time that we are seeing on the page excellent that's good to hear I know we'll dive into that further and also to let the board members notice a little bit of a roller coaster ride we're positive this month I think I just want to compliment you on the report and that it is I think um very understandable I think the board of Finance would be very pleased with it thank you good work on that thank you thank you very much Mr Daniels if I could just comment please do so and one of the things that as you move superintendent coming in that I had to task um Mrs musikowski with was I didn't understand the the budget a little bit when I walked in there was some things that it just wasn't clear to me and I'm a forecast person and I know that the Board of Education wants to forecast out I know the board of Finance wants to forecast out so the the reports that we are doing now really forecasts out to the the dollar of where we're at at that moment in time but also forecasting what our year end would be so one of the things that the Board of Education needs to know is where we are at this moment time and as Mrs misakowski said it's thirty four thousand dollars in the black last month when we reported to the finance committee and to the board Finance we were 65 000 in the red so when you go through the the template that we have with our sheets it's showing exactly what offset to get us into the black and and those are the things that you want to know and how we're going to forecast out for the the remainder of the year so for example if you look at the sheet you'll notice that we know that in substitutes we're going to be underfunded we know that so we're already showing forecasted out a 68 000 loss and substitutes but we know that there's another line item that is offsetting that sixty eight thousand dollars in the red that's what we're calling forecasting a budget and moving forward really trying to predict where we're going to be at the end of the year rather than say well we'll see in a month where we're going to be it's we're giving Real Time Financial reports so I I also have to commend Mrs Mrs Kelsey because it is a complete paradigm shift that we've been working with um Russell on to make sure that our finance committee would understand it and we actually prepped the board of Finance last month that when we meet on Monday we'll be presenting um this way among it so thank you perfect you know I I'd like to say on the flying inches I mean it truly is one of the cores of the board of education's work if you feel uncomfortable and I I have to tell you when I first came on the board it took me three years I didn't open my mouth when it came to finance for the first two years because for what Dr Grossman said this goes back my first stint but it it's something to really uh it's hard sometimes to absorb everything so if you're not feeling totally comfortable I'd open this up to any board member and I haven't mentioned it to superintendent but uh please give him a call because he and Donna can sit down with you and walk you through it uh so that you are comfortable it'd be great to have every board member feeling very comfortable with with the finances especially as we go through the next budget cycle I think that would make things a lot easier so I just open up to every board member to be able to do that okay any questions on what was just said from the finance committee Felicia you're good board members are good I was just going to ask is this this is this page is like the Highlight in my mom that we used to know so we're still going to keep going on yeah great okay so that leads us to public comment so as we go forward with public comment I just want to mention that uh public comment is really for the Board of Education to get input from the public it's it's another um it's another method for us to to be fully transparent with the public on everything that we're doing um but we do limit it to three minutes um because there may be topics some nights that people can go on forever but we do try to limit for three minutes and it's been suggested that we time those three minutes and I try to be a little bit lenient on that but we do we do try to keep it within three minutes and the other thing is and I get this question a lot in public is why aren't you commenting on what somebody says to us as they stand up in the podium and give us comment the reason being is because under Freedom of Information the topics that were asked or the comments that are made or the suggestions that are made are not on our board agenda so we it would not be appropriate for us to comment on that that's why we listen there may be a comment from the chair a little bit back and forth maybe there's a misunderstanding that can happen but for the most part we're just going to listen to public comments and we'll take that back and it may show up in a future date on an agenda uh on something that we need to really address more uh appropriately so having said those things we'll open it up to public comment we'll of course go to our folks online and then we'll go to anyone in the audience that has a public comment sure so if you're joining us online tonight and you'd like to make public comment you can go ahead and use the raise hand feature Zoom it should be on the bottom of your screen and I will call on you by your Zoom name I don't have any raised hands okay so if anybody in the audience would like to make a public comment I'd ask you to stand go to the podium give us your name and your address that's board policy so anybody no Julia no all right I'll say something it doesn't ask me directly what you just talked about right it could be anything that you want to comment on well I just have a compliment to give so so just just give your name for the board and your address um Julia LaCroix team Morgan Road thank you um and excuse me for the name pronunciation I believe it's Mr Amery the principal I just wanted to give a compliment um so I am a I was a student at Kent and I was an employee in Canada now a first-time mom of a kindergartner and I just really appreciate all his effort in making the kindergarten specifically parents feel welcome and you know he made phone calls to every single parent this summer and that was not only one parent but moms and the dads and um just his communication overall the first week about you know when the buses are leaving the school we got an email every day telling us this bus left at this time and these buses left at this time and it was really helpful and I really just appreciated his welcoming to Cherry Brook it's nice you to come and say that by the way those types of compliments there's no time limit you can go on so everybody knows we're not going to limit those just just kidding just kidding okay thank you for those comments Julia anyone else in the in the audience like the comment okay thank you under old business it appears that we have none under new business we have with us Mrs Watson Mrs Olson Mrs laplane Mrs Mrs Le Pain Mrs Johnson and I want to recognize in the audience also Mr Moore our uh principal at CIS I don't think you're here for the summer program but I would like to turn it over to you folks Dr Grossman do you want to um anything you want to say or Mr Bishop to lead this off I I just want to thank the board of education for the support for our summer Academy work that we've been able to uh put in place over the past number of years as you recall um we have previously talked about what the summer slide looks like and what that what that feels like for students if you wouldn't mind going just to the the next slide there that would be great uh we'll be highlighting our K5 Summer Academy our CMS Steam summer academy and our High School Credit Recovery next slide for me real quick but uh the the concept of a summer slide is something that is that is is real that we see in in research and one of the best things that we can do to be able to support our students who are at risk of regression or or challenges and moving forward is to be able to provide them with continuous learning and structured focused continued learning throughout our summer programs uh the board has been a phenomenal in supporting this program as we have grown it from the from the ground up and I'd like to be able to have the opportunity for uh several of our leaders of this program this summer to be able to share with us so if we could go ahead and have um Mrs Watson and Miss Johnson go ahead and stand they LED together our K5 program and be able to share some highlights for our K5 Learning Academy you do have a document in your um in your folder as well with some of the highlights which are up on the board as well okay um so thank you um I'm Chris P Johnson for those of you who don't know me um and we're thrilled for the opportunity to talk to you today just about to report out on Summer Academy programming but also to celebrate the successes that we had in the summer um yes our program is meant to prevent summerslide and help students maintain skills but more than that it's really around pinpointing priority skills for each grade level that will help that student be successful the following year and supporting students to grow in those areas more than just the academics we also focus on social emotional health of students through structured socialization with morning meetings and closing circles unstructured play through recess where we integrate with our extended school year program and our small group work that really is the base of the academics for the program we find that that helps students feel successful more often and we can celebrate those successes that really boosts students confidence and prepares them to tackle hard tasks part of our program also is building and collaboration and creativity through our steam program where students each day engage in Science and Arts and again that's integrated with our extended school year program so we're really proud of not just preventing summer slide but the ways that we're really bolstering students over the summer to feel successful and yes it's summer but still feel joyful being at school this year our numbers have grown so we service 66 students who this year Rose to first through sixth grade we ran 16 total sessions over the course of four weeks they just ran in the morning for four mornings a week um I'm really proud to I think for both of us of the the Summer Academy staff that we have listed here so it's Kathy and myself as directors but we had a handful of exceptional classroom teachers who chose to join us this summer um many of whom were returning for a second or third year in a row which really speaks volumes about how our Educators value the Summer Academy program and what that does for students and we're thankful that after a long school year they gave up their time and talent to be with us half of the names up there are actually paraprofessionals and tutors and I would love to name them each and give them the accolades they deserve but because of the pairs and tutors that we have as part of our program we're able to run that small group work and give that one-on-one feedback to kids on a daily basis and that's why in 16 short sessions we were able to see growth for almost every student who is a part of our program so we're really proud of the team that we had on board can I just say something real quick that team I I had a chance to visit with Christy a couple times I came because my my one of my grandchildren attended I of course I was the uh the driver but the the teachers are so energetic here it is the summer they're so energetic Smiles on their faces kids with smiles on their faces glad to be there I just have to tell you that program is just a wonderful program and you do a great both of you do a great job with it and we'll get to the other programs but I'm just very proud of that program I want to thank you both for coordinating that and taking that the way you did you do a wonderful job um so as Christy said we prioritized uh specific goals on both Ela and math across our four different cohorts that we had um we conducted weekly check-ins with students to collect those data points and you know we kind of talked about the the really the goal of Summer Academy is to maintain skills so we saw maintenance of skills for all students but what's I think really amazing you talked about between 95 and 90 of seven percent of students not only maintained but they display growth um and at least one of the prioritized skills for most of the students it was more than one skill for some of them it was all of them um so we got to see him four short weeks really a ton of growth and I think you know the data points are amazing to work out um what's even more amazing is the conversations we had with both students and parents um you know fans were saying well you know my kid my kid feels more ready to tackle the next school year um even from the students themselves hey how do you feel about summer Academy um do you like it and one kid said you know it it just keeps my brain fresh and I was like no that's literally the reason yes that is and not only that we were we were able to move students along the Continuum of learning very good um so lots of good things are happening behind the scene at Summer Academy so one of our goals is really thinking about how can we be transparent about that and thoughtful about how we communicate that to families and the community so a piece of what we did was weekly Communications to families that participated in Summer Academy detailing the curriculum and special activities that happened in each of the classrooms as well as the themes that all students participated in through Steam through their arts and science projects we also as Kathy said we're collecting data the entire time that's how we adjust instruction and meet students exactly where they are which is why we see that group and we don't keep that data to ourselves at the end we put together progress reports and share those out with families so they can see student growth across all four weeks in ela and then pre to post data each week in math really our big goal in sharing this is that parents can celebrate student effort and the successes that students had over the summer and so thinking about communication that was a big part of the work that we did as well as you can see from these photos the students you know there were not a lack of smiles throughout the whole day um they were happy they were really able to feel successful throughout the entire day um the teachers were able to meet the students where they were moved them along um they were engaged in meaningful tasks meaningful small group whole group steam um you know there were tons of moments for collaboration not no land on each other but you know across programs with esy we went together for steam activities um we came together for recess you know sort of that play component as well and just to just to interject there too Psy is our extended school year program which is typically something that is required by an individualized education plan an IEP so what was what was great was to be able to take our extended school program um as a part of our special education program and then our summer program and be able to have those those two groups be able to work in a really vibrant group was fantastic um so we're always assessing our current state and thinking about how to outgrow ourselves in the service of students so as we think forward we'll be thinking about how to expand the highly trained staff that we work with you know I spoke a lot about that team that we created and we realized the adults that we have in a room really are going to impact student growth um continuing to collaborate as John said between extended school year and our program we're housed in the same building and had the war we can overlap I think the more we'll pool our resources and be effective also evaluating the curriculum and structures that we use each year the needs of our students change so it'll be really important to look at the data from this year and reassess the curriculum that we use I know this year alone we adjusted some of our priority goals and adjusted some of our assessments based on what we knew students needed and we wanted to Target so we'll do that again if given the opportunity and then researching opportunities for extended engagement throughout the day there were certain families that unfortunately didn't send their child to Summer Academy just because of the time frame of programming so being thoughtful about that and thinking about resources within the community to expand some connections may help us and the students that we're serving within the program the last one but overall we just want to thank the board for your continued support and the community the parent feedback was incredible um and you know we appreciated the work that we were able to do as well yeah any questions today were they there [Music] okay yeah Crystal thank you terrific program terrific job you guys did uh is it by invitation to be in the program or open enrollment or High invitation please um that are below the launch Mark in certain areas we know those priority skills that we'll be tackling and so we're looking across the data to see what would be the pocket of students who would benefit from the program that were were provided we had 66 inches in a mile which is great were you sold out was there room for two five twenty more or we didn't turn anybody away um I don't have the exact number on me that I know is more than double that that we're invited to Summer Academy and that's pretty typical that we invite over 150 students and we're getting like I said 66 is the most we've had so far um so we're definitely identifying students who would benefit from it these are the families that are responding yes this works for our schedule over the summer and my child wants to participate and last one if you had X that would make the program so much better what would X be or is it you know you're happy where it's it right now I mean we continue to assess the program and think about it I know that we'll still have meetings kind of looking under what happened this summer and how we want to move forward so TBD we'll go back to you on that one thank you thank you thank you thank you first we have to break for a minute and get the latest soccer score if we could Juliana and I'll get right back to John Joanna uh we won nice who did you play uh and Maggie told me that you played yesterday correct and you beat we just finished today today and who did you beat wonderful and as they were walking off great John you were going to say something I I wanted to to thank both of our our wonderful staff for sharing that and then also invite our Middle School steam staff to be able to share as well that's actually a pain and Miss Tina Olson excellent once again congratulations on teacher of the year thank you thank you um hi my name is Miss Ashley Levine and this is my lovely uh co-teacher Tina Olson um so this kind of came out of a brainchild of talking with Jeff and where are students at what do they need in terms of a summer program and so my crazy brain came up with a summer scene fair and my goal was really a cross-curricular connection where you know any student can really be engaged in learning and have it feel more like fun than learning and so we kind of came up with this whole sort of two-week program where students are investigating they're carrying out an experiment on their own and then ultimately what they were going to come up with was sort of an old school like science fair where they had their trifold board and they were going to be community members there but they were able to share their thinking and share their learning and um so for our first we had two sessions each one was um two weeks long so we had uh two hours or three hours a day 8 30 to 11 30 and we saw 12 students in our first session which interestingly mainly was eighth graders with a few SEC seventh graders and then in our second session we had 10 students and most of them were seventh graders and only a few eighth graders so definitely both had a different sort of feel to them and we were able to kind of focus on some different skills kind of knowing where seventh graders were going to be going and where 8th graders are going to be going in their eighth grade year and and um it was really great program if we go into the next slide we can kind of talk a little bit about some of the outcomes so first I kind of wanted to talk about the seventh graders Comfort coming into the school year it was great at orientation they were giving us high fives our students that were already as part of the program they were showing kids where the bathroom was and it was really great to see that feeling of comfort I know where the office is already I don't need to ask the teacher for it and even in my classes now as I'm kind of going over a few of the things we've already talked about even today I had a student kind of smile like him he goes I learned this already and so it was kind of really great to have that measurable outcome of that Comfort level and so a couple things that we sort of tailored our things around was identifying variables so how and science scientists work and how they think writing high quality procedures and graphing data and being able to kind of learn from an experiment after carrying it out to tell others about what they learned so they were actually able to choose from an experiment from a very long list we kind of tried to tell our experiments all different kinds of levels of curiosity learning and all students were successful in completing a summer fair board and it was just a really great experience for students we saw them resetting their relationship with school and learning a little bit once they realized that grade component was out of the way we kind of saw them relax a little bit they were able to kind of fall into learning and loving it a little bit more and kind of asking questions in a very low stakes way because there was so few students in the class they were able to really kind of ask questions and make mistakes without having that pressure of being in the regular Ed classroom during the school year and our next slide there's a couple of pictures there's some of our scientists so lots of different experiments going on we had bubble gum chewing we had airplanes growing in the classic Cooper towel brand experiment and then in our next slide we also Incorporated some team building activities so getting all students to work together through some you know fun little things such as like our tennis ball game and flipping the tarp and just for them to kind of get acquainted with each other and team build along ways that everybody was working on their own experiments and kind of a segmented way in groups but they were all able to come together for an hour of that day to sort of just have that nice summer fun too kind of almost like a summer camp kind of feel to it and then in our next slide we had the scene fair so both of our sessions ended in a a scene barely invited family members to come in community members to have students just talk science to them what they learned boy was it a powerful experience as a science teacher I'd always wanted to see this happen and I just like my heart best when I saw students having parents chewing um jelly beans but what flavor is it and just really having so much fun and connection with the community and them being able to talk science and really act like a scientist and it was a really powerful experience and so I just wanted to thank all of the the parents and the families that came you know at the end of their session to you know really dive into the experiments of not only their students but other students as well and showing support to everybody and our our Administration who came as well to kind of take time out of their day and it was a great way for students to see their principal again and see their superintendent and have them also do experiments so it was really great and then I think in our last slide we have some future opportunities and before I talk about future opportunities I do want to say how great it was when one student worked that I think you and said where's the rubric what are we being rated on and when she said there is no vertebrate those kids Dove so much deeper interestingly into their investigation and they really played around more and experimented more and I think it truly was because they're just doing this for their own learning and for their own fun and um you know that was just that was very impactful for me to see um that sometimes you know I I get it when you reverse reasons we need all that but um just learning to learn and it was was really great to see students um engaging in that um and so for future opportunities um we would love to expand the attendance we had a total I forgot what you said but about 22 or 23 kids um coming so we'd love to see more the students that attended were um we invited students initially and those recommendations were given from the sixth grade team and seventh grade teams for students that would benefit from an enrichment experience um and then from there we opened it up to the entire School the entire section seventh grade um so that's where you know our population came from so we'd love to see that grow this is just the first year this has happened so um you know we'd love to see that in the future and you know possibly bringing in some of these veteran um scientists to come in next year uh as Role Models or as um you know a little bit of co-leading we have a couple students that were really um strong with their presentations and with their their thought processes and and so it would be fun to incorporate them as peers and peer leaders um and we'd also love to maybe think about partnering with the community a little bit more we have a lot of buying of materials that I think we could reach out to other uh businesses and you know just expand you know their connections between the community and the school that way a little bit and and furthering Partnerships there very good how about questions when are the children notified or invited to go to this and is that enough lead time for their parents to work around their schedules [Music] had about five or six weeks before the program actually actually started to kind of figure out which and we had two sessions for them to choose from and we kind of ultimately figured out that structure so that it kind of gave more flexibility like if there were vacations in the beginning of the summer maybe they could use this type other questions so I would just add that um as you look at next year I Mr scheibler's question is there anything that the board can do to better support you number one and number two is you look for more financing potentially that may not be budgeted the Canton Education Foundation is a great place for both groups to come to help fund an initiative or a project that you have so I'll mentioned that to you but is there any anything that the board you're looking for the board to help you with or support you're in I your support is very much appreciated um I think as we move forward I think you know we'll work you know with Mr Bishop to see right now I can't think of anything glaring that we need you know your continued support and and funding on the program there's no cost to the students so that's right and you know that makes it very accessible to all right um so yeah keep that Education Foundation in mind yeah yeah and being a successful first year program I'm excited to kind of see where it goes and through Word of Mouth students kind of sharing you know summer scheme is fun you know I hope that it would be a great turnout and Mr uh Moore is asking us to invite you next year to come and taste jumping so okay we'll accept that too next year you can come to the summer school Fair thank you yeah thank you the four of you represent why we have the best teachers in Connecticut you represent yourselves very well and we're so proud of our teachers so thank you very much for your time tonight and coming out and taking time away from your families thank you okay questions okay that will lead us to the uh superintendent annual goals so I'll turn this over back to Dr Grossman super thank you so much well it gives me pleasure to present to the the superintendent goals this evening I've been working on these goals since I was hired as your superintendent of schools in January on my off time really thinking about where I believed that the Canton Public Schools should go and with your support it made it a little bit easier when the board adopted goals at your board of education Retreat so in the board packet that was sent out last week I did provide you the superintendent goals for the 23-24 school year so I'm going to go through those this evening and you'll notice that the superintendent goals are completely aligned with the six Canton Board of Education goal areas that we have what you'll also notice over the next few months is when the schools present their continuous Improvement plans that they will also be aligned to the Board of Education goals and then what you also notice in the continuous Improvement plans that the departmental goals at the school level will be aligned with the Board of Education goals so it's a priority that everything that we're doing across the district will align with the Board of Education goals so board goal area one student growth and achievement six of the specific superintendent goals that I'll really be focusing on with student growth and achievement is that I'll be taking a hard look and already have on our student achievement data and our gaps for all our student populations and analyze strategies to improve student achievement with administrative team and data teams already are being formed across the district in particular we will work to improve our math student achievement across all areas that is an area that is a gap within the Canton Public Schools we'll continue to assess our current and future practices in the area of special education Services one of the things that we will work on is working with the canned Middle School administration on the development of the schedule to better meet the needs of our students work with the Kent Middle School administration to participate with his State as a Connecticut State Department of Education Commissioners Network School we've discussed this before that Kent Middle School has offered the opportunity as a school area focused to be part of the commissioner's Network so I will be assisting with that and as Mr Bishop said in his report today we will be working with the Cherry Brook School administration and staff on the implementation of the science reading master class that is a selective group that I asked Mr Bishop in the spring to apply for and with some of the networking that I have in the state of Connecticut the Canton Public Schools was accepted board goal area two Partnerships and Community engagement I could say that we will advance and assist the Board of Education in the development of new board goals we're looking to work with the canned Public Schools community on the development of the new can Public Schools strategic plan with an anticipated release in the fall of 2024 enhance the climate and culture across the district by building positive relationships and increasing presence and the schools so excited to hear that we've already started to hit a positive culture with our kindergarten students that we need to hit our kindergarten students really hard because for some of them it's our first their first entrance into the canned Public Schools maintain a high level of communication and visibility within the community last week hopefully showed how I will communicate with this community maintain the Board of Education policies and develop policies which align with local state and federal guidelines you'll hear a little of that when Mr schadler reports based upon our policy committee continue to develop a clear understanding of responsibilities expectations and communication systems to promote an effective Superintendent of Schools Board of Education working relationship the board will only be as good as I am and I will only be as good as the Board of Education meet with Business Leaders Civic leaders Faith leaders political leaders police and other community leaders to promote the success of the canned public schools that is happening and has already happened and we'll continue to happen board goal area Financial stability and efficient operations work with the business manager to obtain all state and federal grants that are offered to the Canton Public Schools review Financial projections allocations and process used to develop the annual budget it will look different this year than it looked in the past work uh develop a budget that supports the goals the board's goals District Mission and reflective of the economic climate I'm very aware of where we are within the the camp Public Schools community in the can Community regarding our economic climate work with the director of facilities to enhance and the overall Aesthetics functionality and the safety of the prep premises through effective maintenance Renovations and Landscaping initiatives work with the town on possible building projects to assess space issues across the district and work with the Board of Education which is going on right now with negotiations for our Education Association of Canton Canton Federation of educational personnels in UE Local 22 School custodians our learning environment and belonging goal area well we're looking to continue to do is coordinate a community engagement form forms that focus on community needs particularly in the area of Technology safety and social emotional learning ensure the developmental development of thoughtfully constructive effective strategy by school leaders to promote positive in school climate and integrate restorative practices where appropriate I promise you if we don't have good school climate and schools student achievement will not rise so we need to make sure that we have good school climate in schools and most importantly that I take very seriously is to Contin continue to implement and revise the Canton Public Schools emergency operation plan that is our safety plan embracing equity it is our goal to bring to the board and to develop and implement the Canton Public Schools equity and belonging plan I anticipate that coming to the board in October or November support minority recruitment by collaborating with correct teacher and service program that is to increase our teaching staff and a representative of minority population and partner with the state and the correct teacher and surface program participate with members of the staff and the Board of Education professional learning on equity and belonging and one of the things that I really want to talk to our students about is investigate the best the development of a teacher minority recruitment program with current students in our canned Public Schools so I want to start recruiting our own students to be our teachers of the future in the Canton Public Schools there's no there's no better recruitment ground than right here within our schools with our freshmen through our senior students and our Workforce Development I like that new name Erica just so you know we changed that Workforce Development I I will strive to Mentor model professional leadership for our administrative team members and for those of you that don't know I will participate by state appointment in the commission on children on the commission on women children seniors equity and opportunity I chair the commission on children for the state of Connecticut I chair the early the chair of the Cap's Early Childhood State committee and I chair the capital region pre-k through 12 safety and Emergency Management committee so my goal will be to still chair those committees um I believe that's really good for the town of Canton is really good for Workforce Development I'll take any questions at this time on the superintendent of calls questions for the superintendent okay no so thank you Jordan he's asking for any questions very good I appreciate all the concise and very specific things that you have listed I think we're off to a great start I just have one question um the equity and belonging plan is the is that going to be a committee or who's developing right now we're doing it this is um Jones uh our director of family engagement and Mr Bishop are developing this plan and it'll be something that will be talked about at this level and with constituents with the administrative team broad level goals really specific to where we feel we need to go as a district with equity and belonging that's one of the things that we lacked within the canned public schools that we had forums in the past but there was real no focus of what is the end game and what do we want that it's not a mad game I apologize using that but what are our results that we're looking for that are that are measurable that really sets the the work that we need to to do in that area so Mrs Jones has actually been working with Mr Bishop on that since last spring so okay thank you Felicia you good I'm good thank you any other questions yep Cindy sure so under uh student growth and achievement the first section Jordan yes number four about the the talks about Canton middle school and the development of his schedule to better meet the needs of students do you just don't like the school days yeah so so what I've learned from watching the the board meetings last year and then speaking to Mr Bishop and speaking to Mr Moore is that there was talk last year to look at the middle school schedule and it was done during budget season if I remember positions were possibly cut and one of the things that is going to be in Mr Moore's continuous Improvement plan is to look at the middle school schedule so my job will be to assist Mr Moore and Mr Bishop in looking at the schedule that will best suit our Middle School students yeah Mr Moore has been preparing us for that for I think for two years you've talked about that so uh planting the seeds I think so very very good any other questions for Dr Grossman just a comment uh it's a it's an impressive list Jordan it's a comprehensive list and one of the best parts of it it certainly addresses the goals we adopted IT addresses them in a fashion that's that's clearly measurable uh that when we we get to the spring I'm turning the winter end again in the spring uh you'll be able to bring us okay and the the issue you raised it's great to have an equity plan but it doesn't mean anything unless you can see here here are the steps we took in here is how we got there right and that's a theme throughout everything you've written here and I think it's really impressive thank you so what I I miss that and I'm glad Mr scheidler set me up like he's been doing for 25 years is that um I will report back to you in the spring with the the same type of document but it will literally take each one of these and give you one or two sentences of where what we accomplish based upon each one of those strategy areas so instead of a two-page document you'll probably have a five page document that really summarizes each one of these things that we have thank you John okay thank you for that report very good uh let's now move into the um our standing committees and we'll start with Finance if there's any further comment Russell that you'd like to make no I think I'm good okay thank you uh Mr scheidler on policy it's I think Lou mentioned the beginning of the meeting we met uh tonight at 9 30.
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administrative bodies and procedures by adding the following subsection to section 5281d fees the following fees are authorized by this chapter and shall be by resolution of the city council upon recommendation of the city administrator carbon pollution impact fee fee reflecting the social cost of carbon shall be assessed for all newly approved buildings with a connection to natural gas lines that serve the building's primary heating system one the fee shall be assessed based on Total Building square footage according to building type energy use as specified by table CZ 103.1 of the 2021 International energy conservation Code Zero code appendix two the conservation factor of 12 uh sorry 13 kilograms of CO2 equivalent per 100 kilo kbtus shall be applied three the fee shall be in the amount of 190 per metric ton of carbon emissions equivalent and the fee shall be paid prior to the issuance of certificate of occupancy then each subsequent year on or before that date in the absence of retrofitting to eliminate gas connection for primary heating purposes okay so um I would just as I mentioned um just wanted to kick off the discussion so uh I I heard the um you know the author Ken Garber call in at the beginning of the meeting here and kind of encourage us to um consider this because um kind of foreseeing that some of our objections would be around Taxation and sprawl and um you know uh hesitancy to to act on a new development and I would like to share that I don't think that those are the main objections that I have um currently um I would like to kind of um point to the fact that hold on let me just quickly bring up my notes um I'd just like to the point of the fact that um this what's being proposed here I think is a very important Avenue to consider when we think about limiting natural gas and new construction um but I want to be really um clear and um intentional with the fact that what's being proposed is actually quite a complex change to the way the city might run um it involves multiple it could involve you know not necessarily stated here in the resolution but as I see it playing out I think it could involve multiple Departments of the city and the complaining I'm thinking um the billing department um you know planning in in first you know activating that initial charge upon City certificate of occupancy and then the building department you know in um and how to kind of implement those fees moving forward um let's say over a year maybe through an inspection process um I also have questions around you know how would this fee be calculated essentially around energy use and um and so what I'm trying to say here is that you know this is um really important to consider but I think it it brings up a pretty complex potential new way that the city might operate in trying to regulate carbon this way and of course this has been done not only not in Ann Arbor but definitely um there's limited applications of a carbon infuser or carbon taxes I will say um similar to this and so um yeah I just wanted to share that that I think that this is for me a question a lot more process um and I think it's a really important one that I'd like to dive into and of course I want to hear any other questions that that people have um and of course we'll be recording them um but yeah I'll kind of leave it at that and say that I think this is much more so a question of process rather than should we or should we not move forward with it and then what language would we need to reflect that um how to make that a better process for the city to actually implement this and Joe can you stop sharing so I can see the paper yeah probably be easier are you opening the floor for comments yes thank you very much I'm opening the floor for comments and seven back actually probably what we need to do first is have a motion and a second and then open things for discussion and I think isn't that right Joe that's probably yeah prove a second and then open for discussion just to address the formalities sure can we have a motion to to open this for resolution for discussion thank you commissioner Beck and a second thank you commissioner Mercy all right the floor is now open for discussion uh I'm has anyone done any calculation of what this means for the uh how it translates to the cost annual cost to the average building in sort of the range of buildings we might have in the next 10 15 20 years and the second question is um is there any provision for being Progressive um or is there any feasibility of that yeah I love the idea is there anything else no okay I love the idea of being Progressive um I I wanted to share that I had an idea that maybe it could be um the fee could be assessed as a basically a Delta between like if the project we're going to move forward with natural gas then the fee could be assessed as a Delta against what the electrical heating emissions would be and then as the grid gets Greener um that Delta increases but right now it's it might be closer than we think and so that might be a way to you know minimize the impact right up front but of course build in um the ability to kind of um insert the wedge a little bit more um um in future years and just from from my end in terms of has calculations been done or whatnot this uh kind of came through a little a little later it was shared with uh some of the city staff who work in this area and there just hasn't been enough time or uh to get anything on that um in terms of calculations go ahead thank you I'd like to comment um in a couple of regards um first of all I think we should all remember that we passed a resolution and calling for a natural gas ban and um that's not going anywhere um I wanted them to highlight the fact that um Joe sent out an email uh yesterday with a list of measures that could be used um as incentives for Builders Architects and contractors working together to um build energy efficient all-electric buildings that are compliant if you will with the a20 resolution that was sent out to everyone I don't know people have had a chance to look at that it's roughly 25 to 30 measures I encourage you to look at that um just so everybody knows those were reviewed well first of all the entity that put those together is the wolf pack that is a group of Ann Arbor uh residents well Ann Arbor area residents residents I should say that are very involved in environmental issues in general including line five but also climate related activities um so this was a result of a multi-brain multi-meting brainstorming activity I encourage you to look at that those are potentially things that could be done in place of this resolution or in addition to the resolution or multiple uh measures in that list could be combined um to basically try to drive the same kind of behavior where we want to see new new development that's done with in compliance with uh the compliance with the assumptions at the age of zero plan so um I I encourage you to to take a look at that um and um keep that in mind um as we discuss this or potentially vote on it um I think that's all I'll say for now but I may comment on something later thank you councilmember rodina thanks chair McKenna um I have a number of I guess I would say concerns or cautions similar to to the ones that you echoed at the b or that you mentioned at the beginning of the meeting so I would Echo those um without repeating them I I also I guess I'm looking at this and have a few questions um some of them are reflective of the things brought up by the caller at the beginning of the the meeting I I am concerned about um kind of this continuing we have a continued a continual kind of battle between our our joint climate crisis and our housing crisis here in Ann Arbor and that and I do have concerns about the growing cost of housing in the city um and so I would like to see a bit more on what the expected average cost would be for for the average construction um that goes into Ann Arbor um also acknowledging that we are starting to see a bit more of a trend toward all electric proposals coming to council I think in the last uh few meetings we have we approved the um I guess a few months ago now the 79 unit North Maple apartment complex the 216 unit South Town complex and the 228 unit South Forest uh development all of which will be are proposed to be all electric and so we are seeing that that kind of trend and that shift away from um from gas although I will add that some of those are still requesting I actually don't know if any of these specifically are but I I know that I've heard some requests for continuing to have natural gas as a backup generator option um and wondering if that would be an impact of this as well that's a question that I have is if if a building is proposed to be all electric but has a natural backup a natural gas backup generator if that would assess a fee um and similar to to Peck's question I I have a um I guess I would like to know the average cost for uh and or I guess the cost for an average new building in the city um but also by my reading of this um this is only for newly approved buildings um and doesn't acknowledge the kind of continuing climate burden that older buildings have in the city and and I guess the the reason I raise that is because of the uh this isn't just a one-time fee that somebody has assessed when they build a new building but rather it's a continuing year after year fee until they retrofit and so it strikes me potentially is a bit odd that we'd be creating kind of a class of buildings in the city that are eligible for a fee um but some of our older likely less efficient buildings would not be subject to that fee um and so that that kind of strikes me as a bit strange and something that I'd be interested in learning a little bit more about um because as as we move forward with with trying to get our carbon emissions under control here in the city um I recognize that moving forward we obviously want to um do everything that we can but um by kind of creating this additional class of buildings anything new that is constructed having a fee assessed to them but the older buildings not having anything attached um to encourage retrofitting just kind of seems like a maybe a potential oversight here um but finally I guess I will just add that I want us to be very cautious about some of our work in climate consistently kind of being the Stick of the carrots and the sticks uh approach um it feels like often what we're recommending um are penalties and fees um rather than incentives for folks to make Transitions and to get on board and I do want us to continue to get the community excited about doing this work um and that just constantly the fear of being penalized by the city um and so those are just a few of my concerns I see other hand so I'll maybe continue thinking and maybe come back for another round but um those are just off the top of my head thanks yeah I think we should hold the kerosene sticks um that's a theme here and I'd like to hear what other people have on that too um Vice chair harp around me thank you um just to build on that thank you just to build on the exact point um I'm wondering about the commissioner's openness to um perhaps using this resolution as an opportunity to build on the previous resolution that was passed by by the Commission in part to help um identify a range of carrots and sticks and sort of more more precise uh definition or range of options um as as as options to to further explore with um different city staff and and others around the community um so I think I think uh a sort of broader list would be helpful for for a wide range of folks as well and an opportunity to sort of discuss and perhaps weigh in a variety of different options um in addition to that one thing that seems to also keep coming up is the sort of question about the perceived or apparent trade-off between affordability and and sort of move away from fossil fuels as a as a as a fuel source for for housing and I think that's something that the commission perhaps could take up either in the form of a sort of request for what kinds of analysis or modeling might be helpful to sort of explore that um that we might need to sort of ask for from elsewhere in the community or or from City staff or others because I think that's something that that has been raised in a variety of different forums and that's something that we could probably get some data on or a little bit more or intuitive ways of wrapping our heads around that um and and making some choices about what that looks like whether it's in the near term or the long term or relative to other uh price fluctuations and things like that that might be out there um and so that's a question that that maybe is also worth exploring as part of as part of the kind of work that we might do to look at look at some of this um I would say that I would also love to see um some intuitive examples associated with some of the the um uh whereas Clauses for example of what this might look like in terms of costs for like a single family home or multi-family homes or something like that and how that translates um and I think lastly this might be a question sort of later on the discussion um as we take this up what might be the sort of timeline for how we take this up into the future and future meetings relative to the other agendas we have agenda items we have and sort of when what might be the sort of um perceived process for how we might go about that and and maybe Joe or others might be able to sort of lend some insight into that so we have a sort of sense of what what that Horizon looks like and and how we might involve others in the process thanks thanks I didn't see who had their hand up but I'll go with commissioner mursky thank you a couple of other points that I'd like to make uh I think I failed to mention that this list was shared with the mayor uh and with council member Briggs and council member dish in mid-july um it was sent to Missy at the end of July she had already received it from the mayor um as to my understanding also that Derek de la Court received it um in July the one really significant concern that I have is we we all acknowledge and the city has declared that we're in the middle of a climate emergency the a20 plan was drafted in early 2020 it was approved in June of 2020.
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in 2022 York um District came up with a budget and then added to it the tuition you expected to pay to Sarita and that came to 7.3 million there's a law in Arizona that school districts have to pay a minimum amount of tax and that 7.3 million didn't quite rise to that level so the state added another 200 000 250 000 um dollars to your guys's tax bill that they took and then put that money into the general Equalization fund to come up to the minimum qualifying tax rate then the state every year decides they're going to pick up part of the tab um and so the the less state aid for Education that's what we call basic state a they say we're essentially going to pay two million dollars of your property taxes and that is generated off of a student account in a formula and statute and so they picked up two million of it which left the taxpayers in the Continental School District to pick up 5.4 million dollars and so that's what got billed last year for the Continental School District this year you guys figured out your budget and it came to um uh 5.1 million dollars and that's what um what what you guys adopted as a a budget and then consequently the levy when you guys adopted uh your portion of the of the left and then the state said well we're going to multiply the number of high school students you had last year attending uh in other districts and multiply that by the average which is about eight thousand dollars so you owe another um two two million dollars which would have brought us right up to about seven and a half million dollars however this is where the catch comes in they didn't integrate this with all the other formulas so that two million dollars now doesn't count towards your minimum tax and so the state said well no you still have to pay seven and a half million so they're going to collect another two million dollars from continental taxpayers and put that into the basic state aid fund in addition to that because you no longer count those students as your students those students are now counted in other districts you get less basic state aid money so rather than the state picking up two million dollars of your property taxes they're only going to pick up one and a half million dollars of your property taxes which then brings your total tax bill for the Continental School District primary taxes to 7.8 million dollars that's a 2.4 million dollar increase and it represents 44 of what you guys Levy so triple Webby now what does that mean as far as the average taxpayer in the Continental School District um and I mean for that we do have the summary numbers on the page but if you turn to the last two pages of that of that packet that you had you will see a sample uh tax statement that just got billed um just got sent out in the mail um uh last Thursday of last week so they will start hitting mailboxes uh this week okay um so you will notice the average assessed value that's not the value of the home but that's the limited assessed value for primary property taxes in Green Valley is two hundred thousand dollars so I um looked through our records and pulled up the the nearest one to two hundred thousand that I could find um and this is the actual properties that tax statement for this this property and if you'll notice down the second one down the Continental primary you will notice that this this taxpayer has an increase of 126.74 to their Continental property tax um their total increase in their taxes is 225 so the entire when we say 17 tax increase the entire 17 isn't solely due to this new uh this new Levy but the vast vast majority of it is and the the biggest number that's going to stick out on that tax statement is is the increase to uh the Continental primary uh primary taxes but again that's not the total story because that was the increase on the primary property taxes but if you will notice if you turn to the second page of that is the state aid to education and you'll notice for this property the portion that the state picked up dropped by forty four dollars so now the state is is covering less of the Continental District school budget than they have um and then they have in years past so the vix if there is a fix and there is no guarantee there is a fix because the fix has to be by legislative action um as we said the legislature didn't really do the math on this and didn't really mesh it with everything and so over this summer as districts and Ade and uh County superintendents started to run these numbers they discovered this didn't work and there was massive confusion across the state amongst Treasurer's Office tax assembly offices at the at the county levels the superintendents the clerk of the boards and the school superintendents about how all of this this was going to play out and how this was going to work so much so that the legislative leadership sent a letter to the property tax oversight commission which is a division of commission within the Arizona Department of Revenue said oh hey we didn't really get this right we didn't mean it that's not what we intended please could you never mind well it's in state law you can't just never mind state law and so they asked the the property oversight Tax Commission to make a ruling on it um their ruling was um that districts would either be charged the levies is presented in law or the minimum qtr for a high school district problem is is you guys don't have a high school district you never paid the minimum qtr portion for high school students so that was the the X the X extra run me on that so it will take legislative action to fix right um however if they fix it in January first thing they do property tax statements have already been built I mean they've already gone out we've already started collecting the money it would be surprised how many people paid so first day they get the property tax statement but that property taxes have already been collected so whatever fix comes to mind it will not affect this year's taxes it will have to be accounted for if and again it's a big if if the legislature gets it right the second go around fixed in future years and with that I'd be happy to answer any questions to the members of the board like that so in a nutshell seeing what we pay to the state basic fund or whatever and we are also reducing what we get from that design that is correct cool so we're paying in 2 million more and we're getting 500 000 less that is correct is there anything we can do contact your legislator all right um since most of our students in our district that would be going to high school they go to the somebody the school district that would effectively increase what they get because now they have more students well yes in effect so Sarita the Sarita school district is now just going to count that student as an open enrollment and student and so they've added those students into their formulas for establishing their budget because they're just going to count them which is really a wash because we used to get that lunch yes yes so for them it's no yeah it is a washer so we have the high school tuition as part of our annual budget and now we don't but we will continue paying tuition for the rest of this school year I don't think of any intuition so in terms of contacting the legislatures do we do it now or do we wait until January or how are you collecting information or how will we be made aware of progress or not well there again there is um the property tax oversight commission is going to do their their review and the legislative session starts um in in January but I would suggest contacting them now because the the so that when the legislature goes into session and again because the Continental School District is uniquely situated both in its nature and its location right the um the property tax oversight commission did make a ruling prior to this that they presumably had authority to do when people were bumping up against the maximum tax limit right um but and that solved some of the problems for very small rural districts that were already struggling with exceeding the Constitutional cap on school districts right but it did not solve the problem for the Continental Elementary School Districts districts around the state like I said there are there are there are only six school districts by my county in Arizona that pay both this new Levy as being an elementary only school district and are subject to the minimum qtr minimum qualifying taxes and the Continental Elementary School District is by far the one with the largest budget athletic so originally um Justin Williams said that we could tell our families to contact either your office or his office and we are happy to answer questions but we do not neither of us have the power neither his office nor our office have the power to do anything about it um the the fix is going to have to come from the state legislature because they're the ones that wrote it into the state law so when they call us the worse the two million that we're paying in going that is a very good question we know we don't know yet um because the statute that they wrote referenced first of all putting it into State Equalization money but then they changed it to say you're going to put it into County Equalization part which was basically fed into the state Equalization fund but they passed to this bill in the 2022 session right before they passed the budget and then when they passed the budget in 2022 and when they passed the budget in 2023 they zeroed the levy for County Equalization and in fact the state told the school districts this year to remove County Equalization from their chart of accounts now this law directs it to go into the County Equalization pocket but the superintendent's office is not currently operating accounting Equalization pod because there is no Levy for either last year or this year we had 222 000 last year into the state Equalization so it seems to me it'd be a logical to take that money and sit on it as a means of potential reimbursement connection we are going to hold on to the money until um the state's uh the the county superintendent's office directs us with what to do with it yes so it is it is segregated it will potentially be used for that reason to if the legislature so Deans yes so the legislature Associates but if that's changed but the money's still in your hands right the money will the money until there is a County Equalization plot for us to put it in okay good yeah so at this point yes yes and what is your office going to be doing to push the legislature in the right direction um I'm not going to answer that question from this position given the fact that I'm a current candidate for the the position of Treasurer I I will leave those political comments to another day in another time for taking the time to come you're welcome yeah that really helps and I'm surprised that I asked everybody here nobody has called email and yeah and it was on the front page of the paper a couple weeks ago right they're just kidding mailboxes right now so um uh and it it is a substantial that is a substantial yes yeah so it it includes a big chunk of uh the Green Valley um very very and if I if I might add one of the other things too is uniquely situated there is a much higher percentage of residents in the Green Valley area that actually pay their own taxes and it's not paid by a mortgage company so they actually look at it that's about three quarters at least yeah thank you guys thank you very much maybe our tea director could take a snippet of his presentation loaded up separately so that yeah I can email you the documents all right thank you all right well thank you again and with that we'll go to Mr Greg for our district financial report got us all on the edge so I didn't know if you all heard of our taxes are going up thanks Greg um I would want to say it's not my fault it's not about roxanna's fault um so this report looks a little bit different from the ones that you usually see we still haven't rolled over from previous year we haven't finished our end of the year stuff but that all begins here at the end of the month we put our comfort s itself if you have any questions at all about the the board report the board Finance report please let me know I'd be more happy to answer those I'm sorry I moved to approve the district financial report ing yeah thank you go on page 44.
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so this is a culmination of everything that happened most of the slides will go through pretty fast okay we're going to spend most of our time on the pictures at the end which are the most fun so to begin even though we would be presenting regardless this is statutorily required and so we are following statute we needed to have this done sometime between September 1st and October 31st so we're in compliance with statute and then today's report we're going to go through the m o override commitments talk about the override spend over time and then look at the bond project commitments also at this point in time because we are totally expended in the 2015 Authority we really thought it was a good time to figure out the the accumulation excuse me of all the bond projects that have happened since then so this most of the slides and graphs are reflective of the entire body of work that we've done here in Gilbert since 2015.
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that was 55 years and then Saturday morning the class of 78 45 years and so if any classes are interested in tours I love to do that principals can do that also but it's always fun to hear them and really when you do the tour you have to be very very patient because they haven't seen each other for 55 years and sometimes they just want to talk all the time so that's why we have the attention room so we put them in there that's all good so that's all I have for tonight a lot of great things happen at MSD and um love being a part of it all right thank you Mr King favorites that was arriving tonight yes I think it's fair to share this the newest MSD member arrived about an hour ago chance of a pilot oh all right Nate and Chloe yep they both uh Chloe is a social worker at Metro North Elementary and Nate is teacher at White's Junior Senior High School so now we have another one in our family that's great thank you for sharing that I knew that that was that was close yeah [Laughter] well thank you for sharing that uh anything to present from Mr Drake uh no okay I think he found some stuff over I don't know if you saw it I just gave it a quick over and we got testing scores sent to us today well what that was that was a newsletter um that was a newsletter from Laura about a lot of different things but that also included a lot of test scores appreciate the information all right first item new business is school Improvement plans Northfield flights Southwood junior senior highs and we're going to go in that order this time my selected that order because uh just because I did so I guess it's by seniority so seniority gets to go first as far as uh principal here at MSD so all right Mr Snyder you're up all right rather than going through all 30 pages after the other long presentations we have two main goals in this plan though and as I look at the plan everything that falls under these two angles which is academics and environment and so academics like the scores that you just talked about with uh that attendant Laura sent out not that every kid's a test score they're way more than that but that's what we have the gauge and measure ourselves so we look at it and compare ourselves with surrounding districts and the state and so I learned for sixth through eighth grade and PSATs 18 for sophomores and juniors along with some nwea in between there but one thing that um we're very happy with his graduation rate and success after graduation so one thing that Northfield sometimes is a little lower on we're pretty good but because we do have the right room I've talked to you all before we have some people graduate on a non-diploma track or their severe needs students that sometimes affect that our graduation rate for this 2023 class will be 96.8 which is still pretty darn good so we're proud of that and then other success after graduation everything in the state's doing is rolling over to this thing called Indiana uh GPS or graduates preparing to succeed or something like that and so we're trying to change some of our school Improvement plan to that and on that site it says the state average for enrollment or employment after graduation is 85 percent so you look at our graduates either going to college trade school or working 98 percent of our graduates are either in college or working or enlisting in the military or doing something and if the state average is 85 percent 98 sounds pretty good to me so that was something that um we looked at that we were very happy about because one thing that we aren't always we try to be at the state average on everything our SAT scores are right there we'd like for them to be hired but it's hard to motivate Juniors and seniors that are planning on going right to the workforce to get a great score on an sap and in our community here we encourage them but as you all know living is working around here not all of our kids really care that much about their SAT score that's just the bottom line um we get them try to encourage them we're close to the state average I'm talking just a percent or two away but what means more to me is when the state's saying 98 of our graduates are moving on and being successful in other things and so that was a number the other thing is uh environment so that's pretty much the academic piece and you can ask any questions about that if you haven't an environment we're trying to make Northfield a safe place and a fun place just to go to school and be every day bottom line be accessible to parents be accessible to families answer their questions and that's something we really work on honoring those kids for positive Norse honors paying attention being responsive to parents that call student council and Key Club planning on Homecoming coming up here in a couple weeks and fun things for the kids to do that week in regards to homecoming and just making that school environment and experience the best it can be the last thing that goes into all that environment and academics is attendance and that's something the state change I'm used to just looking at straight attendees of course attendance for kids to do well they got to be there but I'm used to just looking at a straight percent attendance which we've always been around 96 to 98 well if you look on that Indiana public website everybody can see the state average is 60 percent and the Northfield average is 61 percent well what they're doing is the state's calculating that now saying the number of kids that miss 10 or less days so what it's saying is 61 of our kids are missing less than 10 days a year that means we have you know 40 39 missing 10 or more days so that's something we're really paying attention to that's been a problem to be honest with you for a lot of the schools ever since the pandemic but a few of them that just want to stay home and that's a possible battle but that's part of school Improvement that's a big part of it so that's the main things we're focusing on in the Northfield school Improvement plan if you have any questions all right thank you Mr Schneider okay Mr we give it yeah thank you Mr key favor uh I think everybody knows but just for clarity even though the white Junior Senior High School is one high school we really have two pieces of our school so there's a residential part and then there's the bridge part that it all falls into the same high school and so what that means for our school Improvement plan is that while we have the same goals some of the strategies are just going to be a little bit different so our overall graduation rate so this graduation rate again this is both Bridge students and the kids that are with us residentially uh has been incrementally increasing the last several years and we just missed this is nothing compared to Southwood or field but we just missed 60 this past year was like 59.7 we really want to get that to um why do we pick 70 67 66 once we break that threshold the state will take us out of a school we're like in a special status not in a good way um of high schools around the state because our graduation rate is so low so but once we can get the 67 that takes us out of a certain type of category certainly we'd like to do better than that but just in terms of our historical Trend getting to 67 percent of our graduation rate would be a significant Improvement we also want to work on our intended trait which honestly this will also and long-term impact the evaluation rate and most of this is going to happen on the bridge cycle you might think well residentially that your kids come to school yes they do that's a very good attendance rate residential but what happens with Ridge because it's a credit recovery program uh and it's it's full of students that historically have not had a good track record of attending school and doing well in school those are the students we try to specialize in but one of the things that bridge staff has been doing very well for the last couple of years is making sure those students are engaged and so they have a they've implemented a process where the students not engaged they're contacting them via email or phone call if that if they're not engaged long enough they will eventually remove them from the roles that a lot of times what happens those kids don't re-enroll anywhere else and so they become job balanced reverse the graduation rate but it's still the right thing to do to accept these kids we are a school of Last Resort but one of the things bridge is doing to impact attendance is to not that they weren't doing this before but even more intentionally following up with kids that aren't engaged on a regular basis try to re-engage them and hopefully create a little bit of success and keep them involved and appropriate so we're really pleased about the progress we're making uh I did know that at the time you wanted to be here tonight not that she was going to speak but she didn't learn just this evening but her grandfather pray about it was 100 years old passed away today but actually Tony it's no big deal we got to cover but we're pleased with the progress we're making but again we really are working to give that 67 threshold okay thank you Mr mcdivitt we'll move on to Southwood Mrs Lewis all right so our first I'm very pleased with how cohesive that sixth or 8th grade group has become I think it really helped with sixth grade moving to the Bell scheduled at September 12th there's no one they've integrated very well this second year and so looking at our sixth through 8th grade team focus is going to be on improving those I learned math and Ela scores and there's always room for improvement looking at this year's scores we really would like to see a goal of at least 50 percent of our sixth or 8th graders meeting that adequate growth status and right now I'm just looking at the data that was coming in from last year or some of the 8th graders of mine were about 46 in ela and about 31 in math and our sixth grade right now is about 69 in ela and 49 in math overall prevention Proficiency in math is only 35 so we have a lot of work to do in math Ela was a little bit stronger right about 45 percent so looking at what we can do with that sixth through eighth grade team we've started to restructure our home run our nighttime a little bit different we've limited clubs and organizations to meet only on Mondays and Fridays that allow us to save through Thursday to focus on interventions academics our homeroom teachers I'm using the phrase or the term accountability partner so our home runs are very small like 10 to 15 students per teacher and so that really allows that teacher to come in build that relationship with the students get to know that student and then come alongside them as accountability partner to stay on top of them if they're on that F list that comes out every week then they can come alongside them to guide them in the direction they need to go or help facilitate giving to the teacher that they need to during the week so that we can improve that and then I'll also be working with our six through eighth grade teachers during professional development and then morning meetings to start facilitating how do we use the data because a big hurdle for our teachers is we've got this data we don't know what to do with it you know we can look at it but we don't really know how to take it from that step that we've we've received it and move it into something applicable that we can do with our students and really start to Target groups of students and work with them on that remediation staff so that's what's coming ahead with our Junior High team starting next month we also are going to focus on attention attendance and graduation rates there's always room for improvement I would love to see us meet that 100 graduation rate this year not quite sure if we're going to get there but that is our goal um attendance we have shifted in our revamping our PBIS program a little bit so that we can have more proactive positive interventions for our students to try to get them to be present in the school we have the handful of students that struggle to get to school but we've been very proactive so far this year a lot of thanks to Mrs Johnson and SRO ladybirdos for really stepping up and taking hold of that to to commit that and provide um before it gets to be too much of a problem for our students also I I like to think of this year as a year preparation looking ahead academic wise I would love to see us start moving to become stem certified we have some fantastic teachers on our staff right now um who really can lead the way with this they're already doing incredible things in our classrooms with this this is a two three year process it's very rigorous but I think we can start that conversation this year with our teachers uh building a live to get that process ready so that we can really Implement that and do what we need to do full steam next year the other area that is an area of preparation for this year Headed into next year is taking a look at what our course offerings are we really need to have something in-house as far as Career and Technical education we have the staff in-house the programming in my opinion is just not quite where it needs to be in order to offer those Pathways in-house so um we need to give our students as many academic options as possible and we need to have that CT component in-house as well as industry certification so just a couple areas where you can start looking at it next year when we start next month looking to what we're going to offer as far as courses and we at Southwest are going to be in a very unique position um coming up where we're going to have some flexibility with our staffing with some potential retirements that we can start to use that to our advantage with your Staffing Within in order to offer and provide our students so thank you very much Mrs Lewis and so I would just ask that you approve these we will come back next meeting to have the elementary come but I'd ask that we have a motion to approve through school Improvement plans all right thank you a lot of work we have a second item of business recommendation to approve Joel Martin as principal at Shark Creek Elementary is a district school safety specialist Yeah so basically according to Indiana code 10-21-19 we have to designate a school safety specialist for the district that is not um a school resource office and so I did send to you a memo basically just outlining some of that and some of the chance that he will complete but also complete with a lot of help from our school resource officers other principals and other school safety Specialists so I just ask that you approve him as our district school safety specialists all in favor of approval say aye all right third item is the overnight camping trip for Shark Creek fourth graders to Camp Tecumseh Brookstone that would be the fifth and sixth of next month so [Music] all in favor of approval say aye all right last item this evening is recommendation to prove the extended field trip for Northfield FFA to attend National FFA convention and that would be the third of November do you know where that is usually thank you to moved exactly all in favor say aye that's the last of Independence in the eyes on the board of always good a little bit too quickly got first reading a board policy 42 30.
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this public meeting is available in remote form and please be advised that this meeting is being recorded and broadcast by waca our local cable television channel as indicated on the agenda notice um the link to the meeting is posted both online and the uh uh telephone first order of business will be to call the meeting to order take a roll call by John trafeden and president I'm Nathan Vanden present hi Stuart Siegel and present okay very good um next item on the agenda is election of officers pursuant to chapter 40a section 12.
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anybody's welcome with me before each meeting and the more input the better um the policies are overwhelming there is an endless list of policies required by state law there are many other policies that we feel are important aren't necessarily required but a good idea and Jordan uh I believe at the uh Retreat suggests that we might want to look at uh a rewrite of many of our policies courtesy of shipping and Goodwin policies that they've written they've taken a lot of the policies that we've had in every other District in the state has had and they've made sure they're in line with state law they updated the legislature as you probably know at each session adds more ads and changes ads and changes as it changes very very difficult to come up with and we've done a lot of work on policy in the last six seven eight and fifteen years and we haven't we haven't been Ableton uh it's it's just too complex so what we're going to propose at the October meeting is going to ask the board to vote on a motion which would set aside Sunset all of our current policies and replace them with uh shipment and Goodman's policies which addresses the endless list of legal requirements in addition to that there are maybe a couple of dozen uh policies that aren't required by state law and all shipment of government doses they provide the state required policies and we're going to ask them ask to to include them with the required policies and if we go that route if you adopt that then those policies the ones that aren't written by ship and government written by us through Cape they'll be referred to shipment a good one for review there's maybe some changes we need to make it's a major undertaking and but well if we go that route it will make sure we're legally responsible and legally protected and our policies will be current because every year they update them and and uh allow us to keep some recommended policies that aren't required by state law make sure they're also in line with with the best practice questions from Mr scheidler I think it's a good move I think that it minimizes risk and it allows us to become current in a lot of ways on policies that you know that are in the Crypt we've never even looked at again so uh it's just too daunting of a task for us to get to every policy and make sure it's updated I think uh Mr Sheldon might have mentioned this but shipping and Goodwin obviously stands behind the policy so if there was ever an issue they defend us because it's their policy so minimize this town risk by the way I just want to mention uh Finance meets at 8 A.M on the same day as our meeting so if you want to make a finance committee meeting or if you want to zoom in that's at 8 A.M Mr shadler's meetings on policy occurs he mentioned at 5 30 on policy on uh board night so those two meetings we kind of get done in one day now Erica is our chair of curriculum what would you like to uh report I know you haven't had a meeting when's your next meeting our first meeting for the year is September 27th at 9 00 A.M and that is here uh yeah yeah that'll be here so I will report back at the October meetings perfect and uh We've formalized these a little bit more so there are there are agendas that are being printed if you want to see the agenda there's also these meetings are open to the public obviously and uh miniature uh very good minutes are being kept if you want to see what's going on in any of the committee meetings if you happen to miss it okay uh on Communications and by the way I want to mention the curriculum is curriculum and technology so we we made the board change uh a while ago so it is curriculum and Technology that's handled by uh that committee on Communications militias are um are liaison into Kira and um public Publications and so on and so forth I don't know uh please is there anything you want to talk about on Communications no update right now um John Kiera and I will be um communicating kind of getting together soon but we don't have anything set right now perfect okay thank you for that all right um board member announcements is is the next I'm sorry calendar of events I did write down in um so in your in your packet um you see the calendar events which is right after back to Grossman's uh goals uh just for your own notes I'm very pleased to say that we've gone to one meeting a month where we can there will be a meeting uh there'll be a month or two where there might be two meetings as we get into the budget so we've gone to one meeting a month and um obviously it's listed here um and I'll make mention that our next meeting is on the 10th just to to mark your uh your calendars and then um there's District events uh that I wanted to um Point your attention to also for your carriers foreign October 4th will be our first walk through um Canton High School so that will go approximately 10 30 to 12 30.
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it assumed that by 2022 that all new construction would be all electric and would be essentially Net Zero ready and here we are in September of 2023 and we're still grasping at I'll say measures that would either be carrots which everybody keeps on saying is preferred um or sticks or a combination of the two and yet we still don't know what our plan is going forward so we're three and a half years into essentially a plan what we where we knew the content and we still don't have a path forward on how we're going to change Behavior relative uh in terms of developers relative to building uh a20 compliant construction so what I would like to see is is action somehow and also a timetable for that action as opposed to just a plan with assumptions that aren't backed up with with clear path forwards to get to the kind of outcome that we want to see um just a couple of other things um just as a reminder we already have implemented commercial um energy benchmarking that's in place and the the threshold uh for that reporting um dropped again this year um The Herd uh or home energy rating disclosure ordinance was passed uh last week and the green rental housing program which also then at least has presented to us last October uh would require Energy Efficiency upgrades for rental properties in order to get certificate of occupancy so there are actions being taken in in other regards and what this is just as I see it is attempting to try to button things up or at least spur action on the part of the energy commission and city council to do something so that we are in compliant with a a plan that city council approved unanimously three years ago that's I'll leave it at that thank you thanks commissioner mursky that I want to share it kind of brings up for me the herd ordinance um and I don't know how close we feel for watching that process but um you know the amount of work that was done for public engagement um with all stakeholders on the part of city council um thank you so much for the work that you did um customer Medina and um and also City staff and trying to understand of course like um commissioner Mercado that was a long time in development and um you supported the development of that um that ordinance from the beginning um but just knowing the amount of work that goes into not just picking the right uh ordinance or the right approach like the right technical approach but how much um collaboration that goes into actually getting um you know the will to make that happen um I just wanted to share that that's kind of where I was where I was going with my opening remarks in the sense that um I think we need to move towards the research that it takes to find out what the correct technical approach is and then also understand that that's going to take a lot of consensus building and um you know going through the essentially the political process to make that that a reality so I wanted to share that um you know offer this and hear comments um what would it look like to use this resolution to um you know kind of get city council to prompt the city administrator to to do this research around um you know maybe it's the carbon fee maybe it's one of these um nine elements that you know approaches that that have been offered to us um because I think that a lot more research is needed and like we maybe can't select the specific approach to make the um the a20 goals happen around specifically around um uh building emissions I think we lost pack I don't know he fell off yeah I don't see him and not in the attendees either so maybe see oh there's got stuff and when he comes back because I know he had his hand up again pull them in then I'd like to say one more thing oh yes go go ahead I was just gonna ask you right uh I I just wanted to let everybody know that there are standard um energy modeling tools to model uh the amount of energy or the energy load the heating load um for new construction um one of the models is actually a department of energy model uh I actually worked with a couple of other people to apply those models to the apartments uh that were that are being built as a part of the village of Ann Arbor development uh Pontiac Trail in duvaren and so some of the questions that are open and I failed to to look up that up um in advance of this meeting um but the questions about estimating the heating load and therefore then estimating the cost of this um per unit is something that can easily be done and some of the questions about how you then would arrive at the at the heating load the resolution could be modified for example to say that we would pick one model or for example the doe model or we would pick three models and average the results of those models and apply the fee that way so I just wanted to assure everyone that there is um and indeed a technical approach to to doing that um and that is something that is uh as I said and certainly in the one case something that's approved by the US government for estimating votes yeah absolutely and yeah no doubt that there are technical models that would work for this but the question that I have is what is the process around requiring that model I mean who's doing that modeling is that City staff is that going to be a requirement I think it should be a requirement of the developer but my understanding is that we don't currently have in Michigan that's not part of the energy code and Ann Arbor doesn't allow you know the the doesn't allow or machine doesn't allow cities to add additional requirements right so right now we don't have energy modeling as a part of the development process and planning process and I agree that would be an absolutely essential move we can't just use Baseline uis for the buildings we need to know what the proposed building energy use is and and frankly um use you know metering and actual data along the way if we're going to actually continue to charge fees in subsequent years after occupancy um but but for me this is a question about process and um and I'm just wondering you know what is it going to take to get those models can I respond to that real quickly yes developers working with their Architects and their engineering firms typically do that in order to establish the heating load in order to establish the mechanical systems so yeah there is an estimate that's that's done that way yeah right I'll just push back on that though because you know that was my job for a decade and um sizing models don't don't indicate um a realistic energy use for the year that those are those two models are not really compatible um so like true energy modeling building energy modeling especially for complex buildings like if we think about you know a new lab building or something a big Residential Building or a mixed-use building those that's a full-on engineering exercise that I know is not included in the planning process right now we're talking about like you know fifty thousand dollar exercise let's say over the course of the the project and I've already seen from the pushback from the original natural gas ordinances that um the developers are not keen on adding any more engineering to their process I mean they don't even want to break like do a base comparison of about their energy their heating energy options are so I think this is a really serious concern uh councilmember rudina thanks uh sorry to keep raising my hand I don't if others have thoughts I know a few of us have been kind of dominating this um one of the additional questions that I maybe have uh and Joe I don't know if this is a fair ask of you versus uh you know I'll take on some of this burden as well um but one of the things that I wonder as we go back to this carrots and sticks conversation is is there a Converse of this that could potentially be effective that um not only has the potential to to move the needle but also hypothetically have a positive impact on affordability by saying are there things that we could be uh could we chat with some of the developers that that we have relationships with in the city should we engage with the planning department are there fees or or challenges to our planning process that we could look at waving in order to incentivize um in this way and actually reduce some of the costs of doing business in Ann Arbor um without adding to the additional cost of of building here in the city um that's that's something that I'm potentially interested in looking at and I know obviously that that potentially comes with budget impacts as well and these are these are trade-off conversations that we have to have but but as the city has you know passed uh a climate millage as we've passed an affordable housing knowledge all of those things are are there ways that we can um it seems clear to me that these are priorities for the city and so are there other things that we can be looking at to incentivize developers to move in this direction um rather than just adding to the cost um acknowledging that uh potentially this you know if ultimately a developer feels like they can't make this shift um is it going to are they going to uh just continue to pay this fee in perpetuity or is it really that high that it is going to require them to make a shift I guess those are all still questions that I have as well I'll just say noting that I see Peck is back I know your hand was raised at one point for you poofed off into the universe so just wanted to check see if everything's good there you are muted right now though I suspect you got yeah thanks yo I think you guys have probably moved on though so join back in the flow but for some reason my internet failed for a couple minutes sorry about that we're still kind of discussing overall so if you wanted to if you wanted to throw stuff out there go for it you're you know well in that case I will because I have a stick that tastes like a carrot no I'm not sure if that's true um but uh I I really do want to weigh in with the others who highlighted a specialty commissioner mursky I guess uh the last one I heard um highlighting how we really are behind the eight ball here and sticks are necessary I mean but if wherever we can we should be looking for carrots and one big carrot is if done right are uh way of doing things will make energy and afford and housing more affordable uh and we need to figure out ways to incentivize demand and efficiency in buildings because that'll drive down the overall cost uh that people will have to pay and you know the other thing is of course to Electrify and it is also cheaper uh than the fossil fuels uh and it's heading that direction especially with the the cheaper technology that's coming online but we would need to show this to folks and the last piece of the puzzle is that we need to for sure going with what uh councilman Medina had to say we need to figure out I think it was you sorry uh we need to we really need to figure out a way to start decarbonizing all the houses and all the buildings in Ann Arbor not just the new ones but I do think if we focus on efficiency and electrification in the end we are providing deeper housing uh and that's important and and if we don't if we really want to make this Progressive I was thinking misinterpreting my comment on Progressive I mean in multiple ways to look at it but one of the things we need to do perhaps is figure out ways that low income homeowners you know obviously get a better deal uh and high income people uh pay more thank you commissioner mursky very quickly I would recommend that some of these questions certainly came up in Burlington Vermont when this uh was addressed in Council um has agreed now to Levy this the sea in terms of how to calculate the heating loads um admittedly Kevin Garber just texted me and said that he consent by email some information both to you Claire as well as to me so some of these questions that were coming up with uh are probably been addressed by Burlington they may have come up with other questions that we have yet not yet addressed that we probably need to and make sure that those uh are viewed from an Ann Arbor lens because our situation may be different than theirs for example the affordability issue maybe more acute here than there so I think you know some of these things need to be reviewed um um between talking about this tonight and a possible second uh reading uh further down the line yeah I'd like to add that I love that idea um I think Burlington's a really good um analogous City and size and of course they have a major our own University as well um I would like to just recognize um commissioner overpack and um your your what you shared about some of the modeling or you didn't use the word modeling but right some of the things that need to be explored I think those are modeling exercises and um from my experience they're quite complex um to really get it right just the the level of complexity around Future Energy costs um you know trade-offs not just the systems that we have today but kind of like you know I I would say even incorporating future climate um and just given how fast um that's changing and how it's impacting folks um you know you can layer on outages and utility reliability you know those are all the things that really matter and those aren't things that we're going to just think about and and decide um there's a really complex modeling exercises and so I kind of will provide another pitch there just to um you know is it possible to get city resources behind studying this I don't think this is something that necessarily our group can do although I'd like you know maybe um that's not the role that we have anymore just doing that modeling exercise I think it kind of just goes beyond maybe our Collective capability uh I just want to be realistic about that and say that you know I had my two cents and why hasn't anything been done I think we're getting to the point where there are no easy answers and the the complexity of what we're what we're facing um in terms of what is the right solution you know if it is a fee where does that money where does that Revenue go um can we use Keras in the sense of reducing development costs um you know we'll turn it over and over and so we really dig into the complexity of of what those trade-offs are I mean I haven't seen that done uh I think it's it was done for instance for heard um I just and how closely I watch that process but for this topic I don't think it has been done I think that that's what it's going to take to have something really viable come to council whether it's um you know something proposed by a council member or something gets passed along from us Michelle Cole and Garcia hi thank you uh I just have a lot of question marks in my mind right now and I'm wondering um you know as we proceed with exploring this as a as a possibility to look you know we're going to be looking at all the different um like what are what are the different components of what uh energy modeling it is you know so like uh commissioner mursky was making reference to I think the load calculation of a building right and um that's something that's pretty much done when you're sizing your HVAC system right you're heating the cooling system and so like what are the other elements that go into the energy modeling I'm very curious about that we have we have University of Michigan we have Eastern Michigan University we have Concordia we have Washington Community College we have a lot of resources here in this immediate vicinity that could possibly be tapped or creating you know a systemized exploration and inquiry that can help to create a um like some kind of a modeling structure uh for us it seems like he could be worth worth the coordination effort you know like who would be willing to take something like that on um you know people in the Building Trades there's people who are you know Engineers there's like this seems to me that that it's very systemizable even though yes like as you said you know every single building is unique right and um but there's got to be some way of approaching it thank you so much for that for sure we're back hello again um yeah uh very good points and I wonder um if we should be thinking of some kind I want to thank Ken by the way I think it's wonderful that uh citizens contribute to this um and I wonder if uh we could do some kind of a hackathon or I don't I'm too old to really know what that means uh but I'm just joking but we should try and engage the public and really getting a wide range and you know on you know including hopefully at those higher education and uh trades and whatnot that you just mentioned uh and see if we can get a range of ideas to add that to the range of ideas that the wolf pack is provided and and really try quickly to come up with the range of of possible solutions and our nodes and uncertainties and what we really need need to know and that would allow us to frame as quickly as possible a set of questions that we could then ask you know a professional to tackle and that professional could be in our our institutions of higher education or it could be a uh some kind of a consultant and we did when we did the work for the University um all the initial calculations were done on campus by students faculty and staff uh and then we double checked everything by hiring a consultant and the consultant was you know over a million dollars but um that gave the a senior Administration confidence uh that the numbers were something today's decisions on uh and that's not a you know even though in that case our initial assertions were all correct I think for the most part um because we had really great group of scientists providing the numbers from the University of Michigan but uh we still I think it's really good to double check everything because the implications here for individual Park pocketbooks and whatnot are high we want to get it right but we do need a process that isn't going to take two years to get there right that kind of bags of public engagement engagement too right right a certain group let's say it's it's one of these institutions how do we know we're getting all the um you know all it takes on who's affected and I think that that's kind of what the public process and the city definitely has um you know public engagement experts and um and and so leaning on leaning on that process could be a nice way to start to you know take this on an Earnest and like I said in a way that really um engages the complexity of of what needs to happen commissioner Coleman Garcia oh do you continue on with what uh commissioner Peck was describing is the process that the U of M went through I mean there are organizational process assets that can be tapped right like what are the formulas what were the you know what what are the you know what were the assumptions you know what were what were the materials and you know that were you know how are they how are they evaluated um so we could use existing material and then build off of what already exists of of from from energy assessments that have already been done at energy inventories and audits that have already been done and I know this doesn't address like you know the the conversation that you're interested in exploring that you um started out are this this part of our agenda on which is the carrots and the sticks but and I'm getting into the how-to part of it or the possible how-to part of it or the exploration part of it but um I just feel that that's something that while we're all here together having this conversation tonight we can start thinking in that way as well so thank you Mr mursky I want to quickly highlight one of the possible measures that are that's in the list that uh Joe sent out and that is uh one option open to the city is declaring a moratorium until these issues are settled out and uh that um yes we'll slow um the development um but it also allows time to settle some of these things I saw Travis shaking his head no there um but this this is what this is what jurisdictions do when they're grappling with difficult questions and as I might find out um do not want to dig a deeper hole and we have to be realistic when every one of these new developments that go into place this is not a window air conditioning unit that's going to last four years for five years this is a commercial grade system that is going to be Heating and Cooling the building for 20 plus years there are boilers in the basement of City Hall that I believe unless they've been replaced recently are approaching 50 years old so when these systems go in place they're going to be emitting carbon for 20 30 40 years and so I encourage everybody again to please look at the list and I encourage all of us to come up together with our council member Liaisons with a plan of what is feasible and what can be implemented soon because I'll say it again and as Peck pointed out we we are we we've known these issues for at least three years and we still don't have even a plan how to get to what is it an assumption in the a20 plan thank you commissioner robek yeah so you know one thing is policy to be a moratorium um I agree we can't take on we can't put in place uh more buildings that are going to be burning fossil fuel for decades to come I think this would just be a travesty um but uh so we need some kind of policy uh and one idea would be a moratorium another one would be a moratorium with a caveat that those installing all electric buildings are Exempted there's no carbon tax or anything associated with that it's just you can build a building but if you're going to put gas in there uh you can't um and I bet you that's illegal so another one would be to put into place a uh initial carbon price um ideal like we first considered that really heavily incentivizes uh electrification but doesn't prohibit gas and then we do the study and two years later we change the policy because either way whether it's a moratorium or something with a lot more texture um it would have to be replaced with uh probably with whatever the ultimate uh set of policies that we come up with uh would be the main thing here is to do something to start ratcheting down the natural gas because that is what's going to really you know cook this planet thank you I didn't mean to depress everyone all right well we can hear from others um I'd like to leave a little time in case folks like to kind of Step In when not much is happening um we can also move on with the agenda oh yes hello councilman Regina thanks I I just have a process question just to clarify moving forward um Joe with the process is the process for this similar to the way that we would operate at Council where you know we're treating this as a first reading but if we were to come back with changes we would essentially be affecting another first reading or um or do we have uh and and we're looking at at least two meetings out um if there are amendments or changes or or is that not the practice we've followed here that would be my understanding if I would go about it um if there's a different way that makes more sense to to you or with your more experience happy to do that but that that's my understanding I just wanted to make sure that folks knew that if there are suggestions and things like that that we can we can bring potential changes um discuss them here and and still folks will have a little bit of time to then sit with it before having to vote on a final approval so and we can also take it correct me if I'm wrong but choose to table for the time being um if because it seems like there's some discussion around you know taking this as is kind of you know in the general Spirit of the the fee kind of structuring going from there or you know tabling it and thinking of some of the other suggestions that are brought up and going down that route um as an alternative um is a is another option Russia I'd like to uh have us entertain emotion right make the motion that we table this discussion um and do much like what we did with the feasibility that the municipal utility feasibility study where we had a small subgroup um review some of the questions that came up um and ensure that those are active on and bring back to um this group questions or answers to some of the questions that have been postponed proposed as well as potential changes to the language of the resolution so I I I make that motion we have a second the table the resolution for now thank you commissioner overbeck all right so we can um now vote on tabling this all in favor of tabling this for now say I and raise your hand all right okay that looks unanimous to me and I'll also vote I so for now we will table this um thank you so much for all of your contributions um if you're someone who prefers to you know think about this or write about it um feel free to reach out by email and we can formulate um a working group that way and we'll also follow up um next month as we think about setting the agenda on thinking about how we can create that group yes Joe yeah and just to uh no I know there's a couple talk a few times about the list John sent it then I forward on I will attach that in the minutes just so that's clear and not hidden behind anything so everyone can see it all right next up on the agenda I would like to um open up the floor for news from our Council representative today at the meeting councilmember Regina do you have anything to share with us no I haven't heard from you in Africa um I uh I don't know that I have any major updates um I mentioned that we had um we've had a number of uh developments recently that that have been approved by Council that were all electric I will also note that the the South Town proposal that was um approved at our last meeting will also be Ann Arbor's first mass Timber building um and it is actually uh being designed to be carbon negative and so that is really exciting uh it is my hope that they will potentially be providing a an example for us to point to when we hear from others that this isn't possible um and so um I I am really excited and looking forward to it and also um grateful that it is a community-based team that has put this proposal together and will be executing it so um I just thought that was really exciting from the development front and um and is relevant to a lot of the work and conversations we have here fantastic yeah congratulations I'm passing the the herd ordinance that's really exciting to hear I know um so much work went into that so that's that's really great Travis Travis do you want someone to talk about the performance transparency resolution that Council passes yeah a year ago or so you guys you guys had all the updates for me um yeah so we did we did pass heard already I didn't mention that because it had come up um and then and council member Briggs um uh I think councilmember Ackman myself maybe the mayor and one other um sponsored uh a resolution to um essentially what we're hoping to get out of this is to provide more data and transparency towards some of the goals that we have set here in the city provide more public dashboards easily accessible on the website um of our of our uh progress towards the goals that we have set for the city and so um that is something that we have initiated and I know that it's something that um is near and dear to commissioner mursky's heart we've had several conversations about it um I suspect that uh once we that this will be a starting point um I I hope that um we'll get something up and available and will immediately hear from folks about additional data points that we can be providing information on and um will continually be progressing in that way but um it is our hope that we will have something um easily easily accessible to the public that is easily understood by the public as well about kind of where we are with with some of our work and um I know that I think the City of Greenville was one of our models when we were looking at it they have a number of dashboards on their site and so there are a number of municipalities out there that are doing this really well um and that we're we're hoping to follow in their footsteps fantastic Joe would you like to provide an update from the energy office yep uh yeah a few things were kind of already covered there by what's been happening um just but just a couple other things um that have been relevant to folks here but I'm just noting and if anyone also for the broader world of just to get more words out there um the we have two requests for proposals out right now um from OSI uh one regarding the administration of the home energy advisor program and the other on the um Community climate action rebates um both things we've talked about here um so trying to get uh word out there if anyone knows any um organizations things like that that would uh be able to fulfill that that RFP is out through events do in October um we're also getting to the point where we'll have some updates on some of those things that will come to the commission once those are once those are ready um and then in terms of General events and engagement next uh next Friday is uh this uh green Fair uh opportunity for folks to get out learn more about um things we're doing here at OSI but also throughout the community on all things um sustainability climate action everything like that um so that'll be uh downtown encourage folks to attend that's all I have for now that's the green fairs on the 22nd correct it's a multi-pronged things it's also a world car free day so there will be uh some stuff stuff going on for that during uh I think that um will be happening in the afternoon and then green Fair itself is happening in the evening they kind of overlap with each other well Hey Joe would you mind sending me those rfps um they're obviously public online right I can I can post them and I feel like straight into my my peeps okay so now we will take news reports yes Vice chair harp um I was just going to add um and mention that this week um there's a series of events going on um called house party um you can find out more at do goodwork.org house party um a number of those are looking at it's a week log Festival it's raising Awareness on the state of Housing and the context of Ann Arbor in the Ypsilanti area in the state of Michigan and the nation at large and there's a variety of events including um Saturday at the Liberty Research Annex at 305 West Liberty there's a um series of sort of myths and and um uh mosques around housing as well as uh uh panel looking Equitable housing and so I expected a lot some of the questions and and types of conversations and even perhaps Pathways to figuring out some answers to things might be the kinds of things that are being explored um during a lot of those events this week is that now near a blank slate it's right across the street like you don't know where the annex is that's what I was thinking we should all go yeah yeah Sunday afternoon the other events though are taking place at studio studio right next door to New York on Packard so not to confuse not that everything is happening down on Wesley yeah they're sorry never there are actually a couple I think one of the locations is that homes and a number are virtual as well um I know that there is one on um race and housing that is in its history in Ann Arbor that's happening kind of over the lunch hour on Thursday that is being led by council member gassy Edwin um and so there are a number of folks throughout the community involved in this and so absolutely go check it out it it's uh a great opportunity to weigh in and to to participate and I know that their hope is to kind of record all of these and make sure that they're archived in some way and shared for the public as well also an Adu tour I don't know if he knows about me but I'm obsessed with ads happening on Sunday okay any other Commissioners with news for us comments feedback okay how about a report from the environmental Commission yes three things happen at the last environmental commission first of all Brian stiglitz uh presented an overview of the new um or actually uh replacement if you will of the environmental manager position um those of you who have been around Ann Arbor for a long time will remember that Matt nodd had a similar position up until about 2018 um when he retired that position was not filled Brian stiglas presented the responsibilities and other aspects of the role to the environmental commission one of the reasons for that is that the person that is going to be hired for this position will be the staff liaison to the environmental commission I know that interviews were held for the position my understanding was there were to be two candidates one dropped out I don't know what the status is of an offer but um that's apparently moving forward the SEC second thing that we did is something that I think I failed to do or we failed to do and that is or maybe it's just something new in the bylaws and that is um the environmental commission did its annual review of its bylaws um Joe and Claire that's something you might want to check into our bylaws if that was something that was added um when some other things were added to the bylaws maybe a year or 18 months ago I don't recall that we've done a review since those last changes for example adding youth Commissioners and things like that so we did that and then the third thing um is that we had updates um from all the working groups and we also had agreement that we're going to consolidate some of the working groups natural features pollinators into a new biodiversity uh working group and um that is going to be kicked off here in the next month or so um so those are the three major activities that the environmental commission dealt with anybody has any questions they can look on registrar or contact me great so now we're going to move to our final opportunity for public input and this is an opportunity for people to speak for up to three minutes if you're watching on CTN please call 888-788-0099 or 877-853-5247 and enter the meeting ID 956-8718-7876 this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and the video feed City staff will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone and you'll hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking move please move to applied area and mute any background sound so that we may hear you clearly and please set your name and address at the beginning of your comments Joe do we have anyone on the line yep um color ending in one three four thank you Mr Lang and chair McKenna Ken Garber again I'm very gratified as a commission took up this proposal um I'm pleased with the discussion there's a lot I can say about the specifics but it sounds like this is not going to be buried going to be seriously considered and there's not much more I can ask than that um I'd just like to Echo what commissioner overpacking commissioner mursky that about the urgency of addressing this problem whether it's with something like this fee or some other measure or some combination um yes uh commissioner Redeemer was correct we are seeing more all-electric projects I too was excited by the Southtown project I've learned quite a bit about it I think it could set an important precedent however I would caution everyone and point out that the projects commissioner radina mentioned South Town 721 South Forest North Maple Apartments these are all rezonings some of the mix very substantial rezonings plan unit developments and they record such a PUD I think they're all three were puds require a public benefit and developers have learned now that if they want to have a PUD approved one of the public benefits has to be full electrification now when it comes to buy right projects we are not seeing the same willingness to go all electric I follow development very closely and I'm not aware of a single buy right project that is voluntarily gone all electric um and to that point next Tuesday at Planning Commission uh the second phase of the Robertson Brothers Village project 120 Apartments gas heated will be up for consideration um this entire project will win complete will be 604 units yes 164 of those the for sale homes will be all electric but that was only because the public directly subsidized that through the Brownfield plan I don't think that's a sustainable model so my point is that uh oh in addition the Sartorius phase two uh is also coming several people on this call signed a letter to Sartorius asking them to consider going all electric they basically wrote back and said we're not even going to discuss it it's going to be gas um 30 seconds so my point is that this is a continuing uh almost monthly issue and that we need to act quickly um I'm certainly not wedded to my specifics um but I would just urge commission to uh to take action in some form soon thank you um no further callers right and now we'll move to taking ideas for future agenda items currently I have uh carbon fee resolution next steps work in group formation for possible modeling the consensus building around what and What needs to be included in that any other ideas yes commissionersky will be a broken record uh green rental housing program uh my understanding was that the basic agreement between City staff and Council was that the herd needed to be acted on before Green Road housing program I'd like to point out for everybody's understanding that the herd ordinance will not take effect until 180 days after its first meeting and enforcement will not take place until another 180 days after that so we need to understand that all of these activities are you know really stretching out in time and I presume that the same apply will apply to Green rental housing at least for the first 180 days and we should all remember that green rental housing was presented to the Commission in March of last year with a resolution of support and 18 months has passed and so we're now again losing at least those 18 months plus another 180 days before that ordinance would go into effect so I really like to get an update on green Royal housing program and the other thing that I'd like to also understand I raised in the last meeting uh as I said we're doing some great things in Bryant that's roughly 260 units we've got lots of neighborhoods lots of uh uh subdivisions um just on that side of town There's a whole slew of them Forest Brook um these are relatively low income areas there's a bunch of them on the north side of town so the question is what do we do with Bryant and how do we rapidly deploy that across all these other neighborhoods thank you so much question harp thanks um sorry it's just a point of clarification how would the um with respect to the Future agenda items so if you know if there's a working group around this the current drop resolution how does that play out in terms of how how that forms and and sort of future agenda items and and how that would come together the great question does anybody have some insight on that maybe yeah two seconds yeah so um we're gonna vote to create a working group or designate certain members to perform research or develop recommendations on specific topics without creating a committee um there's a couple tasks I would have to kind of go through in general um part of that is uh with the working group we would also have to um One have clearly defined tasks um and we would also so they'd be set with that we'd also find a staff member City staff that would be helping the work group um just to make sure that everything is one on task and has that that input there um so there'd just be a a couple of things there that's not a great answer I'm aware um so I can let me just make sure I got everything in place and um we can bring that back up yeah in general be the working group would be working on things they'd present every now and then um and then we'd be able to go forward with recommendations from that but basically basically would be it'd be an item for the future agenda that we vote on it and then and then proceed from there is that correct yeah the members of the committee can be appointed by the chair and approved by the commission so thank you for sure when would uh folks who would be interested in participating on this in this committee um be able to submit their their names um I don't know if there's like a designated time but you know uh commissioner mersky you have a I just had a real quick question um and that is uh we have two relatively new Commissioners but my recollection was we had four openings I'm wondering if uh either maybe the next meeting or tonight someone can say something about the filling of those additional openings great and also want to make sure we answer commissioner Coleman Garcia's question so when would folks be able to um State their interest in being in the working group um I feel like that would be after we agree that we can form a working group um that would make the most sense to me I think we can take that up in the next meeting um we'll put that on the agenda does that does that sound okay Mr Culver Garcia in terms of process okay okay commissioner Mercedes have your hand up for the Commissioners still working on Philly we'll give we'll get you an update soon hey it's saying no more gender items of course you can always email us um we meet to form the agenda about two weeks from now or two weeks ahead of the next meeting so there's a ton of time for you to cogitate and provide additional feedback um all right so we have concluded most of our agenda items and we'll move to adjournment so it is currently 7 33 pm and as chair I declare this meeting adjourned thank you so much
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
thank you please it's pretty thick yeah there's only 36 pages see I think there's one figure that has two decimal points instead of a comma comments all right with that roll call please Mrs Allen yes yes okay governing board information and discussion where we kind of just chat about any thing going on Flora we'll start at your end great we had a full house as usual so we're getting ready for repair conferences since progress reports went out so we did have a good turn a lot of family engagement and involvement so we're looking forward to the good conferences and it looked like Bingo was a big hit CTO grandparents Bingo night was a hit Full House we're excited through my turn um not much wisdom for me tonight I just congratulate the school for getting rid of spot some of the used bus lot in the backyard it was nice to see some of those removed they've been there for a while um nice to have a little more room maybe and the check didn't buzz and the check didn't I was a little bit concerned about our our customer down south but it worked so he was the first one to pay heads off to his nice nicely done that was a nice article in the paper did you see it yeah yeah big thanks to Mr Lane and his group whatever good job getting those buses auction ready showing the Packer asked which ones to chew on yeah that's okay they moved on to the other one so yeah and if you ever walk through with the drainage issue will you please someone give me a holler I'd like to be around which which the the Northwest the valley and not the collapse point one okay that one too okay just give me the jingle if you would if I'm in the neighborhood I'd like to have it have a look okay if you do a walkthrough um I'm trying to get them back out here um the actually The Architects that are doing the roofing are wanting um the same company that did the repair work to come and scope all the drains on all the buildings to see if there's anything that they need to worry about and fix honestly the reason I ask is because I'm a little concerned about flowing water through existing structure so if you're going to take the money and time to engineer it it ought to be as far away from existing structure not within it well it's already it's already in it no I I understand that but if they're going to engineer it otherwise you know to get it and get to get the water from the water should not be re-entering that structure at any time ever as far as I'm answering it's it's I I think I know where you're going you said you said drainage associated with what they're looking at currently the drains drain some down completely under under all the foundation and work their way out now part of the weatherization project um can you pull up her report again we're having a lot more done with that weatherization project than just slapping some paint um are going to be having I'm going to have her pull it up real quick no no no it's not a long cake but I mean it's important I think the entire sport should go um we're having civil engineering done we're having structural engineering done um I think I walked with you and I showed you that crack in the northwest corner of Middle School right yeah so next one all right so structural civil grading and drainage survey yeah um and that's mostly because of the water that comes in through the library ceiling to ground windows so when we get a lot of rain it comes up and over there it's got no place to drain out and we end up getting flooding within the library okay so my question about that is that back in the Stone Age when I first got on the board I was part of that team that did the whole construction project and we fixed well they said that was fixed once so I I really to me it's a little frustrating that this is even an issue because the library was was flooded multiple times prior to anybody here uh even being on a continental I mean it happened right and and I I understand where you're coming from but I but from my point that it's only happened once since I've been here it has happened just the one time right Christy I'm sorry about it your library getting flooded it was just that one in this room here and it happens yeah it the that big flood yeah but we still we have water that comes in under the doors all the time but yeah the main flood yeah so with that that's something that I have to fix I I can't you know I understand but my point is that money was spent to fix it previously so something needs to need and look at the previous design and say hey this doesn't work but we didn't do it correctly or whatever I mean I know genius but water doesn't do this very well but anyway we can talk about it again but but they do they have all of our plans so they have all the the Civil drawings they have all the drainage drawings they have all of our plants plants are going through those and looking through them to see what was supposed to be and what actually is now remember also in these plans there's also another part of our fourth and fifth grade fun right that's supposed to come out that isn't there all right so so they are they are looking at all of our plans they are going to come up with the best possible solutions and the best part of this is the sap phire please give me another one again thank you that's right so the asba thing um last week was uh it was the wall conference they're regular just so you guys know the first or second week of December is their annual conference so we'll get you some information on that if you want to go um I've been several times it's it's very informative but I met some people at this one um the delegation thing is crazy because it's where they set the agenda and what they want the asba to lobby for and the infighting that goes on is crazy it was four hours of nothing but the 76 people fighting over I will you shout type stuff and it was let's let's talk about the intent and then everybody has their own agenda but it was almost immersive to him and then I met a couple other people some of the other like for example Wickenburg they I meant three districts smaller ones that went to four-day school meetings just saying and one of the reasons they Justified it they're saying it on energy bills just I don't know we've never even wrote that just part of it I'm like oh that's interesting so I you know I don't know enough about it but just want you guys to know that because I know Laura didn't know about the law conference so that's um there's probably something in our mailbox here for it and it's on the asba emails that we get from Heidi um so with that okay events for the month um number one I wanted to know what's walk walk and roll at 7 15 A.M and then second of all did on October 20th from 3 to 7 the school Retreat did I don't see it on there is that still on the calendar or not so we are we are going to propose dates for November because that is the the conflict with PTC uh that's the Halloween dags and stuff so we didn't want to compete with them and they use the boardroom to set the stage and set everything I just blocked that day off the schedule so I just right so we are looking at Thursday November 2nd as the tentative date so if you can check your calendars and then ayani will follow up to see if that's a good time thank you 20 21 22 or half days on the calendar Thursday it'll just be at three to four hours okay so okay we had said it for originally three o'clock time but if we could do it a little bit earlier but I know no that's fine everything works so we need to move so far so far so good if we could do maybe a four to seven yeah so check your calendars and nayani will for you can we do it in Santa rear Branch I haven't provided to dinner you have a problem you get the chicken chicken I'm not worried about that one on that day so I'll cook you a burger okay well we'll we'll confirm to see because I would went for the board retreat I would um usually our admin team is part of it as well so if we can that's fine I just wanted to make sure have it done prior to six or seven that would be great but if not just Flex everybody's time foreign [Music] okay thank you thank you and please reach out to me if you have any questions
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
question about it will it will and then go through the detailed Bond spend and this is where my friends Mr John Castellano Mr Albert Dutch over and Mr Trace Toby will help me to go through the details surrounding the spend in each of their respective areas and then at the end we'll just share quickly our tax rate history here in Gilbert Public Schools so the maintenance operations override so again the 15 override was approved first we we received it back in November of 2015 and then we were able to get the extension to a 15 override in November of 2019. so the override is in effect through 2027 phasing down uh one-third from 2025 then another third in 2026 and then totally gone in 2027 if we are not successful in November of this year so in 2023 which is what this report is about it's about our activity in fiscal year 2023 ending June of 2023 the budget capacity generated by the override was 32.3 million dollars and in addition uh the the override is calculated using prior year student counts so we use all of the parameters associated with our budget capacity that was approved by the statute by the legislature but we use the prior year student counts so it's a little bit of a difference from how we calculate other budget capacity items so in uh for fiscal year 2023 this is just showing what happened in 2021 versus 2022 versus 2023 the point here is offering competitive wages to retain and attract high quality staff that very first line over the last four years in particular to include the current year we in we are in we have made it a priority to ensure that we are providing as best we can competitive wages so in 2021 that was the first year in which the 15 override was in play so we received about 11 million dollars more than we had in 2020.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
yeah this is a real real easy one so 4230 seclusion restraint the only thing that wasn't in this document that needs to be updated and we actually did receive some information that said that we actually had a very very good policy but we did not have a time frame so the only thing that's changed is this paragraph as you can see highlighted in just really 24 hours of parent our Guardian must be notified of use of a physical restraint and or isolated time out with their student within 24 hours of the incident and so that is the reasonable time that we have put and typically that's already happened we did not have a 24 hour 10 there so that's the only change there's no vote tonight put on the second reading on this next meeting you can go to like that public comment all right it's Rewards
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
a zoning board of appeals shall elect annually a chairman from its own number and a clerk because our terms start on September 1st this is our first meeting in the new year and thus we have to have a an election um the chairman and the clerk must be members but associate members are also allowed to participate and vote in the election process um any questions or discussion about that are we allowed to nominate members not present today um you know that's a very good question I I see no I see no reason why we can't um however that's not something that is addressed in the statute um it might prove reason for people to make sure they attend the meeting so it doesn't happen to them but I don't know um with all that levity uh being said would somebody like to make a motion or nominate someone to be uh chairman for the coming year I now made John McPherson deserve another term as chairman of the company the second combination okay uh all in favor say I guess I I joined a feather vote I I understand aye Stuart Siegel vote I okay and next we have the position of clerk uh would anyone like to uh nominate someone to be Clerk I would nominate Nathan band to be Clerk is there a second I would second that if Nathan wants that position sure given the fact that we always have the services now of Alvaro or the assistant Town planner I'm not quite sure what the clerk what the clerk's Duties are anymore for us so I guess in lieu of Alvaro not showing up some night you'll have to step in and run the meeting um but I joined to feather and vote in favor of Nathan is Clerk hi Nathan bam vote in favor hi Stuart Siegel also built in favor excellent now that we have all of those formalities out of the way and thank you for um nominating me once again I guess um we'll go on to item number three on the agenda which is the public hearing involving 29 hard work Road and their application for a special permit uh this notice was published in the Metro West Daily News uh over the course of two weeks and I'll read the notice briefly the Ashland zoning board of appeals will hold a public hearing to hear the petition from Michael in my jury raw of the raw living trust they actually are Trustees of the raw living trust requesting an accessory family dwelling unit special permit for chapter 40a section 6 of the Massachusetts zoning Act in chapter 282 section 7.6 parenthesis accessory family dwelling unit close parenthesis and 9.3 parenthesis special permits close parenthesis of the Ashland bylaws the property in question is located at 29 Hardwick Road assessors map 19 lot 01900-0037 in the residential a zoning District um as previously noted before we started the meeting I note that uh Mr and Mrs rare are present and also Steve camoli who is going to be making the presentation on behalf of the applicant books oh sorry about that I will uh Steve okay let me just explain a little bit about the process that we're going to have we we always ask the uh the applicant of the applicant's representative to uh State their case as it were and tell us what whatever it is they would like us to uh consider uh board members will have an opportunity to ask questions thereafter uh once that is concluded we will uh open it up to the public for public comment I see that at the moment we have one member of the public observing the meeting um once that is done we'll members will have an opportunity to ask any additional questions um the applicant have an opportunity to State anything further that he or she wishes to State and then the board will discuss discuss the matter uh and see where where we go uh three members or three people a board members sit on the hearing and fortunately we have three this evening so I John traven Nathan band and Stuart Siegel our associate member will be uh sitting uh on the uh hearing this evening um and after all of that long-winded um be it um Mr gamoli if you would like to um proceed uh thank you very much chairman now nice to see the board tonight as well as alvero thank you very much for a super job and helping our office um get through this process we really appreciate that um so as is stated um Mr and Mrs RAW live at 29 Hardwick Road in Ashland and we're looking to build for them uh I'm a building contractor 29 years in business we're looking to add an accessory dwelling for Mike's parents um who are somewhat elderly and want to be closer to them as they move up from I believe Virginia the uh the addition itself consists of 768 square feet plus or minus there is a separate one car garage as well the addition the accessory dwelling consists of a rear entry um a kitchen living room bedroom and bathroom the architect that we use Thompson Architects out of Hopkins and we do a tremendous amount of work with them they're very professional and this was deliberately designed so that it's basically aside from the new garage it's all in the back of the house out of view from the street um and all on all on one level because the folks are in fact elderly um again we think it's a tastefully drawn addition um and that's about all I have to say initially okay very good um Nathan do you have any questions at this time um I'm hoping the applicant could just walk us through the plans that were submitted so that we can see you know I am by no means an expert in this get a sense of where the addition sits relative to the rest of the house because I'm looking through these plans and I can't quite tell what's original and what's uh proposed to New Edition absolutely I'm not alone in that respect Nathan uh well thank you and and great uh great question uh do you have this um the survey from glm um the engineering firm that did the um that did the work for us there um if if you have that um actually do you have that we have I think a nine page document from Thompson Architects yep and yeah we have a one-page survey from glm okay great so if you look at the one-page survey from glm um you can see the main house um pretty long um somewhat deep that's really right in the in the front or in the in the front center of the plan the addition itself um if you look at and hopefully your screen is showing it it's a darker area first if you look out in the in the back you'll see the Shaded area where the addition is proposed and then the new addition and driveway extension uh to the immediate left of the house could you share your screen Sir with us I don't have it on um my home computer here um elvaro do you have the ability to put the um the glm proposed Edition plan up so we can all see it perhaps yes I'll put it on in a second thank you there once he puts it up I'd be again happy to explain uh what we'll look at what we're looking at okay can everybody see it yes uh thank you perfect um so members of the board uh if there you go and Alvaro can you can you zoom in on that a little bit there you go okay um so for everyone can see that okay um you can oops sorry about that my computer was bugging but now it should be fixed oops keeps bouncing on us okay yeah there we go we can we can see that now thank you Alvaro um so if you see the big block in the middle you can see the word uh words existing dwelling um that's their existing house and you can also see the existing driveway off of Hardwick Road um if you look in the back left corner of the house protruding to the rear you can see the see the addition not to be confused with um immediately to the right of the addition there's an existing patio and to the right of that is an existing open-air deck so that's already already existing this is just a new structure um that's that's drawn in there and then like I said before if you look them to the left of the existing dwelling you can see where the new garage is proposed to be added on and of course the garage to get there we have to connect the existing driveway to the um to the new garage the kind of L-shaped shaded portion behind the white block that's the addition and is the new garage going to be integrated into the existing garage is it basically another Bay on on what's there yeah I'm sorry and this is why your your voice wasn't really clear so I wasn't able to understand what you said sorry can you hear me better now that's better yeah sorry about that yeah the the garage will be an extension of our current garage and for my in-laws to get to the garage they will have to go through our house there's no doorway from their addition into the garage they have to come in through our house through the mud room and then out because it's connected through our mudroom so are we actually looking at two projects then an accessory drop dwelling and a uh an addition on the garage not really um well I mean I guess technically yes because the the the new garage doesn't um lead anyone into the new accessory dwelling it's just an extension of the existing garage on the home are you able to pull up page A1 of the nine page architectural drawings yes I can do it give me one second uh which page sorry page A1 A1 it's it's the second it's the next one after the cover page there you go so on this page you can see the office right there at the front in the lower right hand corner that's the existing house right behind that you can see the mud room and a half bath that's the existing house and the mud room is also our laundry room and then we have a back door there that goes down the stairs to that patio that was in the back so that already exists and we will be connected to them through the laundry room so they'll have access to our laundry room and our mud room and our house in that area and then we'll share that back doorway and does these 700 something square feet that you quoted include the garage space or is that in addition it's in addition so the 768 is uh is just the living area correct okay so then you can see where the kitchen is the kitchen island and then there's a living space the walk-in closet the bedroom and the bathroom off the back of the garage there that's the addition all right I think that's all I have for now uh thank you there's still questions yes uh while we're on this um diagram could you show the um exterior exit that the in-laws would have to the outside not going through the mud room and the garage yes if you can't see it on the screen we'd have to it's on page A4 yeah you want the elevation view or the floor plan view uh you can stop that one that's good A4 um there's a second means of egress right there you see on the left side there's a patio door so there's um really three means of egress technically I mean you've got the stairway going down to the back patio the entrance into the existing mudroom slash laundry room and this um this patio door here that leads to or will lead to some sort of a walkway yeah right now it just goes to the backyard right well that would be one of my concerns would there be a a viable walkway along with you know structures for supporting the uh folks to actually get in or oh yeah so we're planning to put a sidewalk that will go around to the garage into the driveway the patio paver sidewalk uh would would that be a good choice in in terms of let's say God forbid you know they you're in-laws would have to have you know wheelchair access or something like that would it be would you be able to use that type of uh you know help there's not enough patio favors would it be smooth enough and yeah it's the elevation is so much elevation between the driveway and where that interest would be and to get from the garage to our main house it's only two steps right now which we could probably reconfigure if we had to to build some pepper ramp as well okay so you have like handicap access you know planned out or it would fit into this design yeah if we needed to yeah that's why we decided to put the French doors there because um that way he won't have to go down the stairs in the back he can come out that side door and walk around without having to go downstairs okay that was one of my concerns yeah thank you thank you just so you know Mike's father is 89 and his mom is 85 and so 86 so we've thought out this pretty well right that's why the single level and you know designing the bathroom it could be wheelchair accessible if necessary fine thank you you're welcome yeah um I do have a few questions um and I want to just sort of make sure that all of the requirements of the section 7.6 of our zoning actor are covered uh uh I know we talked about the separate um Ingress and egress uh which you just talked about and that would be the the state the patio entrance way am I correct on that okay uh and the there has to also be a connection between the existing house which should be where you're living and the new accessory unit and that is if I looked correctly on form A1 as you said that's found by the mud room and it connects the mud room into the kitchen and the new accessory unit am I reading that plan correctly yes correct okay um one of the one of the provisions in the ACT is that the square footage of the new build of the new unit and exceed 25 of the existing unit or 800 square feet whichever is greater and I guess you said it was 768 square feet so you'd be coming in just under the uh the 800 um square feet is that correct correct sir okay and that doesn't include the the garage the additional garage space correct because that's uh the garage of course is unconditioned space right okay and with respect to watering sewage there has to be adequate provision made for that in looking at the uh the town residential property record card it looks like there's Town water and also count sewer is that correct that is correct um does your house have central air conditioning yes and is the new unit going to be included in that central air conditioning unit or is there going to be a separate um central air unit for that yeah there's there's a separate HVAC system for the accessory dwelling uh really for two reasons on the customer's side for comfort uh on the construction side really an A and A B reason a it would be taxing too taxing for the existing system and B with the new newest energy codes um the accessory dwelling it's actually required now to have its own HVAC unit where is that going to be located on the property um we haven't just officially decided I mean if it's if it's you know we have we have one of two choices and this will be something that the Roz will have to decide in time we're either going to do many splits but we're going to do just a typical ductwork system uh either way the condenser is very small and it will be um it'll be out back behind the addition the one one single condenser and it's a small one probably two and a half feet square okay um have you talked to any of your neighbors about what you're proposing to do yes yes and any concerns that any of them may have may have expressed they've not expressed any to us no okay good I drove by the neighborhood today and it's certainly a lovely neighborhood thank you thank you um let's see is there anything else given the age of um your um your parents I'm assuming that there's not going to be a significant traffic added to the neighborhood no not at all okay uh with respect to impacts in the natural environment I know you had to go before the Conservation Commission to get approval for what you wanted to do and um trying to decipher WPA form five is uh an interesting process but it looks like they they granted you approval and obviously if we were to to Grant a special permit that one of the conditions would be that you had to comply comply with that um okay I don't have anything anything further at this point Nathan or Stu any further questions no I have nothing further none here okay um then why don't we um why don't we open the uh the hearing up for public comment uh and if anyone any member of the public wishes to be heard please um oh Mr desoni you don't raise your hand you know how to use the uh the hand on the screen you're an experienced uh participant in this um Mr desoni we will recognize recognize you for public comment but thank you good evening not sorry for an eye Hawthorne Road and um I want to give I want to give the full credit to Mr Mrs raw for doing this with their parents because it's it's worthwhile to know that the name will carry on with respect for the house is going to have a parental signature around and okay so what I want to ask is about the is about the um George patio is um it's going to be good for three seasons fall summer and spring would it be ready for them in case they're there for the winter is it going to be excess for that that's my only question I'm sorry Mark I didn't quite understand that the question is it going to be no I'll say it plainly but they want to put up open space outside is it ready to be year-round use the addition will be for year-round use yes the deck that we have existing is I mean we use it it's just an existing deck that comes off the back of our house but the addition will be for year round occupancy yeah and and in terms of of um you know weather year-round use um uh Mr Scott The Building Commissioner has reviewed the plans and everything is in compliance with Ingress and egress and all of that stuff or anything to uh you know cover well there'll be a um an overhang soffit um at both uh both uh entry exit points yeah for play users this this would be it buddy what is socket um so uh so a fascia and soffit if you can picture on your house where the gutter is the gutter attaches to uh the fascia and in the piece underneath it's about a foot uh that's called the soffit so it does provide some protection uh from the elements when you're trying to get in and out of the door so it was an outdoor overhang correct yep thank you okay thank you um Mark um is there a motion to close public comment please so moved and is there a second I second that motion okay I joined to seven uh vote in favor of closing public comment hi Nathan van vote in favor hi Stuart Siegel also built in favor of closing public comment okay um we now usually go not into deliberations but into uh discussion while the hearing remains uh open so that we can ask any questions uh as as needed um I I will go first um you know I see no reason why we shouldn't approve this it seems to meet all the qualifications of the uh of the statute 7.6 under accessory family dwelling units I know it's something that's gotten a fair amount of publicity in the uh Commonwealth in the last year or two about increasing housing availability and the Ashland zoning bylaws have permitted this for a number of years now and we have granted applications obviously we would put conditions on it which we would discuss but to me it seems like it's something that we would we would Grant Nathan your thoughts yeah I think this meets the uh the requirements of the Town zoning bylaws I think it's consistent with our past practice to Grant a special permit here um I think and this may be getting ahead of ourselves a little bit but when we talk about drafting the decision I think I view this as two separate projects I still think it's the garage and the accessory building and I think the garage is as a matter of right they could build right it's really just the accessory building piece of it yes that's that's what I've seen the accessory dwelling unit the garage is not really not relevant and accessory dwelling unit right I don't think okay Stuart your thoughts no I I I I agree I would also be in favor of the special permit as presented okay um then what we normally will do um Mr and Mrs raw and Mr kamoli um is we will ask Alvaro to draft a decision uh in accordance with what we've talked about this evening uh and come back at our next meeting to review the decision and to take a vote to approve it uh and our next meeting would be two weeks from tonight which would be September 26th you don't have to be present but you're more than welcome to obviously uh and Mr camoli the same to you um I do think it would be helpful for us at this point to just go over and make sure we have the eyes dotted and the t's crossed for Alvaro to put into the decision and looking at section 7.6 um obviously we would put in the usual conditions or restrictions uh we're only uh additional family dwelling unit can't exceed for people can't be rented out um Etc just basically the qualifications of the restrictions in um 7.6 uh yeah and then under Section 9.3.2 the criteria for special permits um we will all the decision will also have to contain the findings on that um and we have to have a written determination that the adverse effects of the proposed use will not outweigh its beneficial impacts to the town of the neighborhood in view of the particular characteristics of the site and of The Proposal in relation to that site uh obviously previous decisions uh for accessory dwelling units I have included language to meet that requirement and then with respect to the six specific categories Community needs served by the proposal would be um maintaining housing or creating housing for families to stay together traffic flow and safety including parking and loading would be no impact adequacies of utilities and other public services it's serviced by Town Water and Sewer neighborhood character and social structures as the application States it's a single family neighborhood and which architecture would certainly seem to fit within that character impacts on the natural environment apart from what's found in the Conservation Commission that would not seem to be any and potential fiscal impact including impact on Town Services tax base and employment uh your tax bill is going to be raised uh there'll be certain construction employment architectural employment Etc which is a good thing a temporary and there would seem to be little impact on Town services so anybody Nathan understood you want to add anything to that for a borrow to make sure he puts in the draft decision anything else we you need from from us before you start to draft the decision as far as findings that we need to make no I think I'm all set as well thank you okay excellent okay then um I'd entertain a motion to continue the hearing to our next meeting on September 26th so most is there a second I second that one okay hi John Hunter feather and vote in favor aye Nathan Dan put in favor hi Stuart Siegel vote in favor you know we had our our voting all organized so well and we just went boom boom boom Brian not being here tonight it's totally thrown off our timing just me and Stu in a stare down every time we have to make a motion you know waiting for the other one to Blink all right no now that you you've risen to the authentic position of clerk we need to make sure that you're not scared by making a motion but that's all right um very good with that nonsense out of the way uh we had done for this evening with your uh matter Mr Mrs raw Mr can only thank you for participating as I said we'll be back on September 26 to uh finalize the decision in vote in favor then the process is once that's done we have to sign the decision that sometimes can take a couple of days because we do this Museum Zoom but we have to go in person to town hall to sign it you'll then file it with the it gets filed with the town clerk you have to wait 20 days thereafter in case anyone appeals the decision uh after that 20-day period the decision is final and you take it to the registry of deeds and record it and I'm sure Mr camoli knows the drill very well and and guide you through all of that but we are done with the hearing for this evening and we can move on to our next item thank you very much thank you very much thank you folks have a good night take care um next item on the agenda is the meeting minutes for July 25th 2023 um Alvaro sent us all a a draft um I made several small uh changes um Alvaro did you receive any other changes no only the ones that you sent John okay um what I suggested was on page one uh of the giraffco where 17 Loring Drive variance Dash accept decision I suggested that the words accept decision should be stricken the second paragraph under that section uh I suggested deleting the word meeting and substituting the word hearing was opened on July 11th because it was a hearing that was open not the meeting and then on page two on the and I guess it's like the 11th line where it says Mr Forest all motion to Mr ban seconded rather than say to accept I suggested it should be to approve the variance those were the only suggestions suggested changes I had made any discussion about those it sounded good to me okay somebody wish to make a motion to approve the minutes is amended I moved to approve the minutes as amended I second that hi John traven vote in favor ay Nathan Benjamin in favor aye Stuart Siegel phone in favor excellent that is completed and moving on to the final item on the agenda staff updates and administrative matters uh Alvaro anything to report in that category not updates in just to give you a heads up I'll be sending probably the decision by next Tuesday um just because I'm out of our conference the next couple of days oh very good I hope you enjoy your conference thank you um yes dude Mr chairman I have a kind of a an administrative item um when we go through this um when we went through the special permit there's something that was of a concern with me um the letter from the building inspector um the planning office refers to that as a denial letter now there's nothing in that letter that denies anything um I recommend that we change the nomenclature of that [Music] um letter to actually be in something like an Adu um approval conditions and requirements letter because that that's what it really States in effect well but it's the application is being submitted for a building permit which is what is being denied and referred to the zoning board of appeals well that's what I don't understand we're not denying anything no one denied anything well the Building Commissioner did the Builder commissioner denied them a building permit for what they were proposing to do because they had to get the approval of the zoning board of appeals exactly so the letters should not be a denial he should just say it should be he should issue an Adu approval conditions and requirements letter in other words his letter is telling them what is the next steps in the process to get this project approved well perhaps we can talk to the Building Commissioner offline and see what he's comfortable with I know his letters are a little more detailed than um letters from A couple of our prior building Commissioners um he's just really saying hey folks I've got everything that you submitted but there's another requirement here and an addition that you have to meet and the condition is that you have to go before the CBA it doesn't mean that the ultimate you know project is going to be denied I mean that's a very scary word to use well his letter tells told mizra that if she felt aggrieved by his decision she may file an appeal of his determination yeah well he's denying their request I don't read it as denying the request and that's what I wanted to express I don't know how the other members of the board feel about that he he's really the way I read it is he's telling them that they have another step to follow but he didn't take those architectural plans and say denied he never said anything about that he just said hey you got to go through another step well the only reason he asked if they had to go through another step is because he did not he was denying what they requested I'm sure he no the finals the Bible approves many many building permit requests that never come before us um and that he doesn't deny you have to go through another process for the uh special apartment it starts with the denial from The Building Commissioner of what they have filed with him um but let's talk about this with the Building Commissioner offline uh and see what how how he's comfortable what he's comfortable in in doing I uh I must say I don't I don't share your concerns about that but this might just make two cents um any anything else Nathan anything to add or we all said not is there a motion to a journey nobody wishes to adjourn Nathan just requested to be admitted I assume that there are some sort of issue going on on his computer oh Harry is coming back yeah I think he lost his audio I apologize soon it keeps crashing for me here that's that's all right we were I was asking for a motion to adjourn but I also asked him I think you may not have been with us when I said if asked if you had any any comments and what Stu and I had been discussing um my only thought on that is I think a building commissioner's denial is probably a term of art within the zoning process and if we start calling it something else we may run into other issues um and so maybe the issue is just the Building Commissioner needs to be more clear in his letter that it is a denial and that the next step isn't appeal to the CBA that might be a good a good point to get the word Denial in the letter and uh that will then serve as a a clear statement that it's a denial even if he then goes on to say this is what you need to do good point is there a emotion to adjourn so moved is there a second a second emotion okay aye Johnson vote in favor I didn't bend vote in favor I Stewart siegelbone in favor good night everybody see you on the 26th and Waka thank you very much good night all have a good night good night
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you could stay as long as you want Drew will Mr Pippa will have a agenda for us to follow um coaches may be coming in instructional coaches Department chairs but then we're going to go to classrooms Claudia in the next couple weeks will send out an email to see who could come on that day because if we have a quorum we will have to post the meeting as a board meeting if two of you come we may not have to post that because we wouldn't have a quorum but if there's four of you it will be a board meeting that we will have on that day so Claudia will reach out to you is the goal to get as many board members as possible at each walkthrough or it's open up to the whole entire board so if we can get nine board members to come but we know some people have to work that they may not be able to come but if there's a day let's say you can't make it that day to the high school but you really want to go to the high school we could arrange but that will just be a formal walk through we'll if we get enough board members that day Mr dingles will have to bring the board into the conference room call the meeting to order there'll be an agenda and we'll we'll go from there and then we'll adjourn the meeting after that because if there's enough board members we have to do that but I'll confirm that with the attorney about pretty sure okay the only other thing for your calendar in your in your packet is the uh Cave caps convention Felicia and I went last year extremely informative great messages uh great speakers um if you'd like to attend I already um I've already put in my um my registration so I'll be attending and um if anybody would like to attend just make sure you let Claudia know and she'll make sure you're registered for it the board takes care of the registration okay and that's November 17th and 18th okay uh moving on to board member announcements does anybody want to make an announcement on anything specific John anything in your world that you hear about anything that we've missed something we should be going to thinking about great okay Mr Scheider I know this is the appropriate time I've been to uh a lot of convocations a lot more than I care to count up uh and I have to say this year's convocation if it wasn't the most outstanding one I've been to it certainly is a top one or two uh that it's set a tone uh the energy was palpable the excitement was there um it was an exceptionally good way to begin the school year and that's attributable to the the gentleman who organized it and uh I just wanted to to share that thought and to thank you for a great start to the year I heard a lot of a lot of money engaging conversation that I've been to so that's great to hear yeah has he shown you the movie oh yeah yeah oh yeah that's the local rental store anybody that wants if they can get it or we can give you the link online okay okay um board actionizers so just that this is a new item added to the agenda so I'll explain it um this would be for the secretary so this would be Kim that if there was an action item that was directed towards the administration to find out um that that's when it would be reported it would go into the minutes so um Mrs Nardi tomorrow would be working on that and we would get back I would either put it in my weekly update to the board or I would report back to the board next next month um I didn't count any um action items for tonight I don't know if you did um but I don't think there was anything that needed to um come back but I don't I knew that was on the Jenna Camp I didn't have the opportunity to speak to Kim I think that's a bad thing that that's what it is just to bring us back as a summary is there anything that we need to come back to the board in I didn't write down anything that needed to come back to the board um either in a weekly report or next month okay all right uh we move on to recommended actions the first is the uh well it's the consent agenda which uh has the approval of the minutes for June 20th 2023 and August 25 2023 you have those in your kids along with this motion we are also going to and you all have the Board of Education meeting dates uh which is different than what we had before we're going down to that one meeting date for you to uh log into your uh calendars and I think you can see tonight we've streamlined it I think we're on a pretty good Pace uh we should be done here before even uh 8 30 so I think going to one meeting a month and being getting out of here at a reasonable time is uh is is good work by the board and the superintendent and the administrative team so can I have a motion that the camp board of education proved the consent agenda hold on I hope there's a couple of things so we're going to talk about B but there's a separate I have separate motions so I'm gonna go I'm going to run into A1 at it yeah I'm gonna do one at a time so uh motion move the Canton Board of Education approved the consent agenda thank you Cindy so nice here and thank you Peggy for a second any any discussion of the consent agenda all those in favor I proposed that's uh eight we have eight tonight eight eight oh right okay thank you for that all right the second thing that you have here is uh the the um uh Ed z097 thank you seven all right [Music] well Felicia's eight right sorry yeah she can of course yeah yeah okay um the second is uh the agreement for Child Nutrition program do you want to comment in like that I don't know what what's that for again that's to change the the for the name oh right the name right removing uh former superintendency yeah reviewing several people that were no longer employed right exactly it's removing their names through me with the Child Nutrition program it's very basic so the motion would read move that the Canton Board of Education revised the authorized signers of the ed099 form removing prior superintendent schools Kevin the case and adding the current superintendent of schools Jordan e Grossman can I have a motion to that regard thank you Peggy second is Erica thank you very much any discussion on that very basic very simple all those in favor I opposed none okay so that passes 8-0 the final thing that we bring to your attention tonight is the approval of the Canton middle school trip to Washington DC uh which will take place on April 26 2023 through April 28 2023 it's an annual uh trip I I don't think there's any uh issues with that but um any questions regarding that don't just comment really sure Mr Daniels so I asked Mr Moore in in your packet there is a description of the trip the the trip is very similar to a very successful trip to Washington DC in the spring this trip is a three-day two-night trip that that is different than it was prior to coven and what we learned in several surrounding districts did the same exact trip Kent was actually the first one to to do it and we learned that the three-day two-night trip was very successful um for kids some kids that have never been away from home kids got to go to the the see the same spots that we did in a four-day trip and so that is the recommendation by the administration I support it regarding chaperones uh Mr more will be looking at chaperones uh with Mrs Olson I think is the the teacher lead regarding chaperones that will be on the trip looking at teachers if we need parents we'll we'll solicit that also but this is a great trip and I know that this is a trip that our students would look forward to in approving it tonight will allow Mr Moore Mrs Olson to um get it started and start talking to parents and students about it thank you thank you I'll accept emotion at the Canton Board of Education approved the Canton middle school trip to Washington DC from April 26 2023 through April 28 2023.
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so we use about 21.8 million dollars of that to attract and retain high quality employees in 2022 it was about 30.2 million and in 2023 the actual was nearly 50 million so again in 2023 we don't receive 50 million in override funds so that's why we added that second line that's the salary expense within State Equalization mno as well as custom site fund you have to balance out the math so it's in red that shows the contribution the combined contribution from classroom site fund and the state Equalization during those years so then we still continued the social workers and the mental health Council ftes we still continued the two million dollars associated with class size reduction and finally those three items at the end were those items that were committed to by by the district back in November of 2015 this is just an indicator that we've maintained that commitment since 2015 reflective of that first 10 percent override okay so the total then that we generated for last year is 34.8 million dollars the reason it's in red is in order to make the math work you're going to have to subtract the 9.7 and the 25 million dollars okay so I'm going to go on if that's okay okay so then here's our mno override history you can you can see again as I I shared back in fiscal 2016 so remember that the request was authorized by the taxpayer in November of 2015 which was fiscal 16.
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