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so move second i have a motion on the floor by mr nunes a second by dr jenkins on the motion any further discussion chia hearing none all in favor opposed motion carries unanimously this time all entertainment chair will entertain a motion to approve the executive session minutes of september 14 2020.

one i'd like to call this meeting of the dartmouth school committee to order for monday october 5th 2020. would you please stand for the pledge of united allegiance of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all well good evening everyone it's uh nice to be back i guess in person uh seeing everyone's smiling faces uh mr tebow on on the big wide screen over there uh roll call please miss gentler here here here here here thank you very much as a reminder for governor baker's otter suspending certain provisions of the open meeting launch up to 38 section 20 the public will not be allowed to physically access this school committee meeting members of the public can access this meeting via our live stream at youtube.com forward slash dhs tv media in addition the event will be rebroadcast in dc tv channels 9 and 18 on the following days wednesday and thursday at 5 pm friday at 6 a.m saturday at 8 00 am sunday at 2 p.m the school committee reserves the right to implement additional remote participation procedures and will notify the public of these procedures as soon as practicable uh once again thank everyone thank mr galisha mr parotti in the background there for uh putting this together i feel like i'm i feel like i'm in a regular tv studio here absolutely so typically at this time we allow 10 minutes for public comment for anyone wishing to speak on tonight of any on any of tonight's agenda items um if you do not if you have not already i had the opportunity to review our agenda and submit an email to uh kate genther or kathleen genther at dartmouthschools.org we ask you to do so now at this point in time kate do we have any comments on any of tonight's gender items no thank you very much at this time i will entertain a motion to approve uh the regular session minutes of september 14 2020.

so mr chairman with the stipulation that they be held until the matter for which they were intended is complete second i have a motion on the floor by mr nunes a second by dr jenkins on the motion any further discussion j hearing none all in favor hi hi opposed motion carries unanimously uh in addition i'll entertain a motion uh i guess we'll have to take these separately because we do have regular and executive session so uh our regular session minutes of the joint meeting with the uh select board of for september 21st 2020 so moved second i'll give so we had a motion on the floor by mr nunes a second by mrs amaral on the motion any discussion all in favor post motion carries unanimously and last but not least chair will entertain a motion for the executive session minutes of september 21st 2020 so move mr chairman with the stipulation that they be held until the matter for which they were intended is complete second i have a motion on the floor by mr nunes a second by mrs waite on the motion any discussion uh chair hearing none all in favor posed motion carries unanimously thank you very much uh my fellow colleagues for that at this time i'll turn it over to dr gifford for a presentation this evening on tonight tonight for the dartmouth high school ap report right thank you mr chair i'm very happy to have mr tebow the principal here tonight to present that report as you recall we invested some time and energy and money into having mass insight help us with the advanced placement program last year and we have some positive results to report and i will turn it over to mr tebow to do that good evening mr tebow hi good evening you hear me yes yes yes all right perfect so i'm going to go ahead and share my screen okay um so tonight i'm here to present on the advanced placement um results from this past school year i just wanted to start off by saying you know thank you to the school committee thank you to dr gifford for allowing me to present this evening i have to admit that i'm extremely excited to be talking about something that's not related to covet 19 for the first time in many many months so um thank you for having me and i really appreciate the opportunity to uh present this evening so tonight i want to start by just saying that it really uh truly takes a community um so i'd like to offer special thanks to um you know a number of different people or groups of people within the dartmouth high school community but i want to start with our students our students have really risen to the occasion over the past a couple of years um we've challenged them to take the most rigorous coursework available to them and we've um we've you know really pushed them to uh to stretch themselves and reach beyond their comfort zone and i think you'll see in a few slides here that that they've truly risen to the occasion that they've done just that i also want to thank obviously the dharma school committee as well as dr gifford in central office because um last year or two years ago at this time now we came to you looking for your support in order to partner with mass insight and i think that they have made a huge um having them as a partner has been a huge benefit at dartmouth high school so i certainly um you know appreciate the support from the school committee as well as from central office and dr gifford in addition to that i wanted to recognize the ap coordinator at dartmouth high school which is our associate principal rachel chavier she has done a fantastic job in terms of providing leadership to our lead teachers and to our ap teachers and and um just our students as well particularly this past year uh through the uh pandemic and then um again i don't wanna miss anyone so you can certainly see the slide here it really does take a village in each one of these groups even if i didn't uh you know go into detail each one of them has played a critical role in what you're about to um hear tonight in terms of our results and the status of our ap program so just to begin a little bit with why advanced placement coursework matters um because it does matter um and again this is not in order of importance but first off it provides our students the opportunity to earn valuable credit and or placement in college um students who earn a qualifying score which is you know it can vary from institution to institution but generally speaking a three or above um earns um you know some college credit and so that's one reason why right another reason that ap is important is because it supports students in mastering rigorous college-level content and skills our mission at dartmouth high school is to ensure all students are college and career ready uh at the end of their four years at dartmouth high school and there's no better way for us to demonstrate that uh than by seeing a number of our students participate successfully in our in our advanced placement coursework obviously from a student perspective there's a benefit in that it strengthens their transcript in the college admission process i'll speak to that in just a second but in my opinion this perhaps this last bullet is perhaps the most important reason why we um really promote advanced placement coursework and that is that it can potentially unlock student interest and passion in a particular college major or a particular career field and so that's really um you know what high school is all about is providing students an opportunity to find themselves find the the areas that they're most passionate about and we're really confident that advanced placement coursework is an opportunity to do that um so in terms of the collagen uh admissions perspective this is a recent survey that was done by the national association of college admissions counselors and they rank a number of different um factors that go into the consideration to admit or deny a student entrance into their to their college and the first the top three all are strengthened by advanced placement coursework if a student engages in them first one being grades in all courses the second being grades in college prep courses of course college prep meaning you know ap is exactly that college prep and then finally the strength of curriculum and the thing about advanced placement coursework is it's nationally normed right so while honors level coursework is great there's a high degree of variability from high school to high school even within a high school there's variability advanced placement coursework offers a standard and a norm that really sets um potentially a student's transcript apart from from their peers the other thing although it's not tied directly to advanced placement coursework i want to point out and just because you know in the hope that some parents might be watching tonight um and some students certainly we get hung up a lot of time on class rank and i would just point out that in the top 10 factors ranked by college admissions officers you can see class rank is down near the bottom of the of the top 10 list here and significantly so so i just point that out because i know that students stress about class rank and i can't stress enough that while important it's not even up in the in the top a few factors here that are considered by college admissions officers when admitting a student so let's take a look a little bit at um i thought i'd give just an overview about the dartmouth high school advanced placement program and starting with this we offer 18 or last year i should say we offered 18 different advanced placement courses across virtually every department with the only exception being our world language department and i'm happy to report that this year we've added ap spanish um as a course offering once again so so this year every department is um you know has some advanced placement coursework that they offer i think it's important uh that's an important point to to emphasize because it shows that there really is something for everyone at dartmouth high school you know we have a number of art advanced placement courses as well as you know um you know across all of the other areas as well and and certainly when folks think of ap a lot of times we forget some of those elective areas like art or or world language for that matter where our students you know some of our students really find themselves and their passion in those areas as well and at dartmouth high school i'm proud to be able to say we offer a tremendous variety of ap courses across all departments last year we were able to offer three new advanced placement courses at dartmouth high school they included ap calculus bc so we had always offered ap calculus a b um at dartmouth high school but last year we opened up a section of bc for students or a couple of sections actually and again we continue to offer ap calculus pc this year and i think that that speaks to some of the work we've done to kind of expand our coursework so that students can in their senior year get to that point and be successful we offered we also offered ap physics uh for the first time at dartmouth high school an ap seminar we were able to offer last year as well and all i'm happy to report all three of those courses continue to to run this year as well so as we've expanded here you'll see the enrollment in a second and how dramatically it's increased over the last couple of years as we've expanded enrollment to our most rigorous courses to our ap courses we've also had to expand um and build capacity within our teaching ranks and so i'm really proud of this as well that last year for the first time um eight new teachers were teaching advanced placement courses and um it should be noted that it takes a couple of years for a teacher to really uh get their legs under them in terms of teaching ap coursework which is why i kind of i thought it was important to point out this fact that we had a number of teachers teaching ap for the first time um and again something that speaks to the concerted effort we've put in to kind of really you know build and expand our ap coursework that's a good segue into the next uh part of our report here which is our participation trends at dartmouth high school it's been a a major focus at dartmouth high school to really expand our enrollment specifically though looking to expand our enrollment to students who might have been underrepresented in years past so we were specifically looking to encourage students who would not have taken an ap course without that added push and i'm happy to to show or to share this slide here um which shows kind of that's that flat you know for a few years there is very flat and then over the next over the last two years you can see that we've made a steady increase um and a little bit later on in the presentation i'll share with you this current year's uh projected um and i say projected because until i sit for the exam i don't really you know um like to to count them in this number because that is the end goal of the advanced placement program is to is to take that exam so i wanna while the numbers have been increased across the board i did want to take a second to give a shout out and highlight a few departments that have really taken to this message and really taken to helping us um you know push the message that with effective effort every student can be successful in an ap course um because we're really pushing back hard against the mindset of some kids can and some kids can't we really believe that if you know 90 percent of our students or or around there somewhere there abouts are going off to a two or a four-year college when they leave us then what better way to demonstrate they're prepared for success at that next level than to have successfully completed an ap course while they're with us the english department is an outstanding example of a department that's really taken that message to heart and has really been the tip of the spear in terms of our efforts to expand our ap enrollment you can see all the way to the left it says english language arts on this uh graph here on this chart here rather um and that that's just a combination of both english language and composition as well as english literature and composition those are the two ap courses within the english department so that all the way to the left is the total there and you can see that in the school year 1718 we had 71 students enrolled in english ap coursework and this past year we were able to get up to 183 and this comings the current school year we're in where over 300 students in ap english classes so that um you know enrollment increase has been dramatic um and it's it's been profound and it's really a tribute to the effort of our teachers in the english department led by um our english league teacher will higgins so we're extremely proud of the english department for for taken to this effort to make sure that we're democratizing access to our most rigorous coursework our mathematics and computer science ap participation is another area i wanted to highlight again you can see a similar kind of trend there in terms of the increase from 65 students in our math and computer science courses um three years ago to 111 this most recent this past year and again there's another significant increase that um is currently underway at dartmouth high school specifically in our ap stats program where up to 70 students in three different sects three or four different sections of ap stats we continue to offer calculus bc as i mentioned our computer science principles ap is also uh dramatically increased at around 60 students enrolled this year so again we continue to look to grow our ap program but our math and computer science department has certainly done a nice job of helping us uh to increase our enrollment and then finally and this one is near and dear to my heart being a former history teacher myself our history and social science department has done a nice job as well in terms of increasing their enrollment um 84 three years ago up to 149 this past year and um you know you can see that there's still areas there's some areas actually that kind of were in decline government politics uh is one example but i'm happy to report that this year because of our efforts in the spring we're actually up to about 60 students um this year in government and politics um and we have an eye miss javier and i already met with all of our lead teachers to review this data and kind of formulate a plan for where we need to continue to grow our programs and for this coming year we're really looking to target ap human geography and ap psychology those are two areas that we know um we can grow and we use different data points to kind of determine that one of them being the ap potential report that is put out um through the psat that we take every spring or every fall rather and so we know from those numbers that we have students who are still on the sideline who could be very successful in human geo as well as ap psych so those are areas that we're looking to expand for next year so with increased enrollment we will we should always express expect increased um performance as well right we should expect that you know we're not just dumping kids in and then they have a lousy experience and don't perform well we're consider we're very concerned about the results as well but i want to caution everyone that when you increase enrollment you know the enrollment increases first and then there is some lag before you start to see the results and the reason for that is because where teachers are getting used to teaching a more diverse student population in front of them right if you just make ap about the elite students who are high performing um you know those students tend to learn in spite of us but as we're pushing students who otherwise wouldn't have been an ap to take on that challenge it's a little bit more challenging for for teachers as well and so that's you know a couple of years in our teachers um you know the performance catches up to to the enrollment but i'm happy to report as i move on through here and show you the performance our performance was very strong again last year as well so here are our qualifying scores over the last three years you can see the steady increase um looks kind of like a nice staircase there um again 277 qualifying scores three years ago and we were up to around 370. for actually i i when i originally created this presentation it was in the summer um in july when the scores first came out i'm actually happy to report that the 374 is up to 378 because one of the things that our ap teachers can do or could do this past year during the pandemic they got a copy of the student sample they could review it and if they thought there was a discrepancy if they thought that the ap exam needed to have another look taken they could request that and so some of our ap teachers did that and i'm happy to report that four students whose um exams we asked to be readjudicated were and they actually bumped up to qualifying scores so that that number is currently around 378.

so move second i have a motion on the floor by mr nunes a second by dr jenkins on the motion any further discussion chia hearing none all in favor opposed motion carries unanimously this time all entertainment chair will entertain a motion to approve the executive session minutes of september 14 2020.

so again you can see that as enrollment has increased our qualifying scores have also increased which speaks to that belief that we had students who were more than capable of doing well on an ap or in an ap course who were sitting on the sidelines so it really just validates the efforts that our teachers and our our counselors and also quite frankly our families have put in to really push uh students to challenge themselves and take the most rigorous coursework so we're proud of that again i wanted to highlight just a couple of departments you know while we are proud of all of the departments again the english department um leading the way here in terms of the qualifying scores um three or above you can see uh just a few years ago was 54. we were up to 118 this most recent year again you can see english language and composition has had a dramatic increase as enrollment has increased and then english lit slid back a little bit last year i'm not overly concerned because as i mentioned we had a number of teachers teaching the course for the first time um as well as you know increased enrollment and so a much more diverse um student enrollment student population so um overall very satisfied and um very proud of the job that the english language arts department has done again um history and social science uh another example of some some strong results here just three years ago qualifying scores and this past year up to 119 again that 119 actually is a little bit higher because two of those scores i mentioned that got re-adjudicated were actually in in history and social science so that's up around 121 currently so again it speaks to the strong performance of our students and our teachers and could not be prouder um of them i do want to um give mr reed our ap uh our social studies lead teacher rather last year he um he's actually becoming kind of a uh uh a utility player for us last year we had our teacher who usually teaches world history was out on um uh parental leave last year so he he jumped in and taught world history for the first time and you can see did a fantastic job at just by looking at the qualifying scores there this year with the retirement of miss vicente who was a long time ap psych teacher mr reed jumped in and is teaching ap psych for the first time this year so i told them no pressure but based on those world history numbers we're expecting big things out of our psych program as well so um i thought i would give a little shout out to mr reed because we certainly appreciate his efforts um last year so that was kind of a general overview i wanted to talk to you specifically for a few seconds here about for a few minutes here about the mass insight partnership because as you know a couple of years back when we asked to be able to partner you supported that and i think at the time you asked that i come back and report out on how the partnership has gone so um last year in addition to having a pep rally for our ap students at the start of the year in the spring we did our or just before um the pandemic actually we had we did a recruitment fair and we talked to the students about the fact that our partnership with mass insight along with the outstanding teachers and opportunities at dartmouth high school really lead to ap success we really believe that and i think that you'll you'll agree um with some of the numbers we have to share tonight first being 430.

so mr chairman with the stipulation that they be held until the matter for which they were intended is complete second i have a motion on the floor by mr nunes a second by dr jenkins on the motion any further discussion j hearing none all in favor hi hi opposed motion carries unanimously uh in addition i'll entertain a motion uh i guess we'll have to take these separately because we do have regular and executive session so uh our regular session minutes of the joint meeting with the uh select board of for september 21st 2020 so moved second i'll give so we had a motion on the floor by mr nunes a second by mrs amaral on the motion any discussion all in favor post motion carries unanimously and last but not least chair will entertain a motion for the executive session minutes of september 21st 2020 so move mr chairman with the stipulation that they be held until the matter for which they were intended is complete second i have a motion on the floor by mr nunes a second by mrs waite on the motion any discussion uh chair hearing none all in favor posed motion carries unanimously thank you very much uh my fellow colleagues for that at this time i'll turn it over to dr gifford for a presentation this evening on tonight tonight for the dartmouth high school ap report right thank you mr chair i'm very happy to have mr tebow the principal here tonight to present that report as you recall we invested some time and energy and money into having mass insight help us with the advanced placement program last year and we have some positive results to report and i will turn it over to mr tebow to do that good evening mr tebow hi good evening you hear me yes yes yes all right perfect so i'm going to go ahead and share my screen okay um so tonight i'm here to present on the advanced placement um results from this past school year i just wanted to start off by saying you know thank you to the school committee thank you to dr gifford for allowing me to present this evening i have to admit that i'm extremely excited to be talking about something that's not related to covet 19 for the first time in many many months so um thank you for having me and i really appreciate the opportunity to uh present this evening so tonight i want to start by just saying that it really uh truly takes a community um so i'd like to offer special thanks to um you know a number of different people or groups of people within the dartmouth high school community but i want to start with our students our students have really risen to the occasion over the past a couple of years um we've challenged them to take the most rigorous coursework available to them and we've um we've you know really pushed them to uh to stretch themselves and reach beyond their comfort zone and i think you'll see in a few slides here that that they've truly risen to the occasion that they've done just that i also want to thank obviously the dharma school committee as well as dr gifford in central office because um last year or two years ago at this time now we came to you looking for your support in order to partner with mass insight and i think that they have made a huge um having them as a partner has been a huge benefit at dartmouth high school so i certainly um you know appreciate the support from the school committee as well as from central office and dr gifford in addition to that i wanted to recognize the ap coordinator at dartmouth high school which is our associate principal rachel chavier she has done a fantastic job in terms of providing leadership to our lead teachers and to our ap teachers and and um just our students as well particularly this past year uh through the uh pandemic and then um again i don't wanna miss anyone so you can certainly see the slide here it really does take a village in each one of these groups even if i didn't uh you know go into detail each one of them has played a critical role in what you're about to um hear tonight in terms of our results and the status of our ap program so just to begin a little bit with why advanced placement coursework matters um because it does matter um and again this is not in order of importance but first off it provides our students the opportunity to earn valuable credit and or placement in college um students who earn a qualifying score which is you know it can vary from institution to institution but generally speaking a three or above um earns um you know some college credit and so that's one reason why right another reason that ap is important is because it supports students in mastering rigorous college-level content and skills our mission at dartmouth high school is to ensure all students are college and career ready uh at the end of their four years at dartmouth high school and there's no better way for us to demonstrate that uh than by seeing a number of our students participate successfully in our in our advanced placement coursework obviously from a student perspective there's a benefit in that it strengthens their transcript in the college admission process i'll speak to that in just a second but in my opinion this perhaps this last bullet is perhaps the most important reason why we um really promote advanced placement coursework and that is that it can potentially unlock student interest and passion in a particular college major or a particular career field and so that's really um you know what high school is all about is providing students an opportunity to find themselves find the the areas that they're most passionate about and we're really confident that advanced placement coursework is an opportunity to do that um so in terms of the collagen uh admissions perspective this is a recent survey that was done by the national association of college admissions counselors and they rank a number of different um factors that go into the consideration to admit or deny a student entrance into their to their college and the first the top three all are strengthened by advanced placement coursework if a student engages in them first one being grades in all courses the second being grades in college prep courses of course college prep meaning you know ap is exactly that college prep and then finally the strength of curriculum and the thing about advanced placement coursework is it's nationally normed right so while honors level coursework is great there's a high degree of variability from high school to high school even within a high school there's variability advanced placement coursework offers a standard and a norm that really sets um potentially a student's transcript apart from from their peers the other thing although it's not tied directly to advanced placement coursework i want to point out and just because you know in the hope that some parents might be watching tonight um and some students certainly we get hung up a lot of time on class rank and i would just point out that in the top 10 factors ranked by college admissions officers you can see class rank is down near the bottom of the of the top 10 list here and significantly so so i just point that out because i know that students stress about class rank and i can't stress enough that while important it's not even up in the in the top a few factors here that are considered by college admissions officers when admitting a student so let's take a look a little bit at um i thought i'd give just an overview about the dartmouth high school advanced placement program and starting with this we offer 18 or last year i should say we offered 18 different advanced placement courses across virtually every department with the only exception being our world language department and i'm happy to report that this year we've added ap spanish um as a course offering once again so so this year every department is um you know has some advanced placement coursework that they offer i think it's important uh that's an important point to to emphasize because it shows that there really is something for everyone at dartmouth high school you know we have a number of art advanced placement courses as well as you know um you know across all of the other areas as well and and certainly when folks think of ap a lot of times we forget some of those elective areas like art or or world language for that matter where our students you know some of our students really find themselves and their passion in those areas as well and at dartmouth high school i'm proud to be able to say we offer a tremendous variety of ap courses across all departments last year we were able to offer three new advanced placement courses at dartmouth high school they included ap calculus bc so we had always offered ap calculus a b um at dartmouth high school but last year we opened up a section of bc for students or a couple of sections actually and again we continue to offer ap calculus pc this year and i think that that speaks to some of the work we've done to kind of expand our coursework so that students can in their senior year get to that point and be successful we offered we also offered ap physics uh for the first time at dartmouth high school an ap seminar we were able to offer last year as well and all i'm happy to report all three of those courses continue to to run this year as well so as we've expanded here you'll see the enrollment in a second and how dramatically it's increased over the last couple of years as we've expanded enrollment to our most rigorous courses to our ap courses we've also had to expand um and build capacity within our teaching ranks and so i'm really proud of this as well that last year for the first time um eight new teachers were teaching advanced placement courses and um it should be noted that it takes a couple of years for a teacher to really uh get their legs under them in terms of teaching ap coursework which is why i kind of i thought it was important to point out this fact that we had a number of teachers teaching ap for the first time um and again something that speaks to the concerted effort we've put in to kind of really you know build and expand our ap coursework that's a good segue into the next uh part of our report here which is our participation trends at dartmouth high school it's been a a major focus at dartmouth high school to really expand our enrollment specifically though looking to expand our enrollment to students who might have been underrepresented in years past so we were specifically looking to encourage students who would not have taken an ap course without that added push and i'm happy to to show or to share this slide here um which shows kind of that's that flat you know for a few years there is very flat and then over the next over the last two years you can see that we've made a steady increase um and a little bit later on in the presentation i'll share with you this current year's uh projected um and i say projected because until i sit for the exam i don't really you know um like to to count them in this number because that is the end goal of the advanced placement program is to is to take that exam so i wanna while the numbers have been increased across the board i did want to take a second to give a shout out and highlight a few departments that have really taken to this message and really taken to helping us um you know push the message that with effective effort every student can be successful in an ap course um because we're really pushing back hard against the mindset of some kids can and some kids can't we really believe that if you know 90 percent of our students or or around there somewhere there abouts are going off to a two or a four-year college when they leave us then what better way to demonstrate they're prepared for success at that next level than to have successfully completed an ap course while they're with us the english department is an outstanding example of a department that's really taken that message to heart and has really been the tip of the spear in terms of our efforts to expand our ap enrollment you can see all the way to the left it says english language arts on this uh graph here on this chart here rather um and that that's just a combination of both english language and composition as well as english literature and composition those are the two ap courses within the english department so that all the way to the left is the total there and you can see that in the school year 1718 we had 71 students enrolled in english ap coursework and this past year we were able to get up to 183 and this comings the current school year we're in where over 300 students in ap english classes so that um you know enrollment increase has been dramatic um and it's it's been profound and it's really a tribute to the effort of our teachers in the english department led by um our english league teacher will higgins so we're extremely proud of the english department for for taken to this effort to make sure that we're democratizing access to our most rigorous coursework our mathematics and computer science ap participation is another area i wanted to highlight again you can see a similar kind of trend there in terms of the increase from 65 students in our math and computer science courses um three years ago to 111 this most recent this past year and again there's another significant increase that um is currently underway at dartmouth high school specifically in our ap stats program where up to 70 students in three different sects three or four different sections of ap stats we continue to offer calculus bc as i mentioned our computer science principles ap is also uh dramatically increased at around 60 students enrolled this year so again we continue to look to grow our ap program but our math and computer science department has certainly done a nice job of helping us uh to increase our enrollment and then finally and this one is near and dear to my heart being a former history teacher myself our history and social science department has done a nice job as well in terms of increasing their enrollment um 84 three years ago up to 149 this past year and um you know you can see that there's still areas there's some areas actually that kind of were in decline government politics uh is one example but i'm happy to report that this year because of our efforts in the spring we're actually up to about 60 students um this year in government and politics um and we have an eye miss javier and i already met with all of our lead teachers to review this data and kind of formulate a plan for where we need to continue to grow our programs and for this coming year we're really looking to target ap human geography and ap psychology those are two areas that we know um we can grow and we use different data points to kind of determine that one of them being the ap potential report that is put out um through the psat that we take every spring or every fall rather and so we know from those numbers that we have students who are still on the sideline who could be very successful in human geo as well as ap psych so those are areas that we're looking to expand for next year so with increased enrollment we will we should always express expect increased um performance as well right we should expect that you know we're not just dumping kids in and then they have a lousy experience and don't perform well we're consider we're very concerned about the results as well but i want to caution everyone that when you increase enrollment you know the enrollment increases first and then there is some lag before you start to see the results and the reason for that is because where teachers are getting used to teaching a more diverse student population in front of them right if you just make ap about the elite students who are high performing um you know those students tend to learn in spite of us but as we're pushing students who otherwise wouldn't have been an ap to take on that challenge it's a little bit more challenging for for teachers as well and so that's you know a couple of years in our teachers um you know the performance catches up to to the enrollment but i'm happy to report as i move on through here and show you the performance our performance was very strong again last year as well so here are our qualifying scores over the last three years you can see the steady increase um looks kind of like a nice staircase there um again 277 qualifying scores three years ago and we were up to around 370. for actually i i when i originally created this presentation it was in the summer um in july when the scores first came out i'm actually happy to report that the 374 is up to 378 because one of the things that our ap teachers can do or could do this past year during the pandemic they got a copy of the student sample they could review it and if they thought there was a discrepancy if they thought that the ap exam needed to have another look taken they could request that and so some of our ap teachers did that and i'm happy to report that four students whose um exams we asked to be readjudicated were and they actually bumped up to qualifying scores so that that number is currently around 378.

now 430 were the number of students who took advantage of either an ap saturday study session that mass insight offered or took the mock exam um that mass insight offered to our students and so that was 430 uh students who would not have otherwise had those experiences and one of the nice things about their saturday sessions is our students get to learn not just with other dartmouth high ap students but they're exposed to ap students from across southeastern massachusetts um and so i i think that that's a tremendous opportunity for our for our students at dartmouth high school to be able to have that experience they also get experience to other ap teachers from across the commonwealth as well um and it it's on topics that ap teachers from across southeastern mass say hey i could use some additional support on this topic or that topic or i might not get to that topic um and that's how mass insight identifies what the saturday study sessions will be so again that was the benefit of being partnered with mass insight as well i do we do have we reviewed the data in terms of attendance data and this is an area that we're focused on improving this year uh those saturday sessions they started out high the second session was not where we'd like it to be in terms of attendance so that's an area that we're focused on this year the nice well i guess um i think it will be easier for students to attend um obviously it's not going to be in person the saturday sessions anymore they're going to be virtual um for this school year and they're going to be spread out over a week as opposed to just one day so i'm confident that our attendance will improve and that our students will continue to benefit from from those sessions and certainly from the mock exams which provided our students good feedback that they could then use to prepare uh in the in the closing stretch towards the ap exams in addition to our partnership with mass insight for our students our teachers benefit as well and we had 16 teachers who took advantage of the summer long institute in july of 2019 now so those teachers were able to attend the week-long institute at bridgewater state um with no out-of-pocket cost you know at dartmouth um one of the nice benefits is that our teachers do get a thousand dollars for professional development um each year but this partnership is nice because it doesn't require any out of pocket cost not even upfront so our teachers were able to enroll for the summer institute um at no cost no no additional cost to the district other than our partnership fee um that we pay um but again our our teachers get to take advantage of that week-long experience they hear from the best ap teachers you know across the the nation they oftentimes have sessions that are led by the authors of the ap textbooks um so it's really a phenomenal experience for our teacher teachers in addition we had teachers who were able to enroll in the pre-ap institute which is um you know training geared toward making sure that the pipeline is strong so students in honors and college prep level courses have real rigorous coursework that prepares them so that it's um they're ready to be successful when they get to the ap coursework this past summer uh so the summer of 2020 obviously had to be virtual um but we had 10 stu 10 teachers rather who took advantage of the week-long summer institute this year as well so over the course of our uh you know we're just starting our second year with mass insight here we've had about 26 teachers who have taken advantage of the ap um summer institute uh professional development opportunities so again that's to a benefit to the benefit of our students in addition to the week-long institutes mass insight also offers us the two-day workshops in october and this is you know traditionally has been two days where teachers can get out of the building get away from the hectic pace of the day and really focus on their own professional learning it at the high school level it's extremely difficult to find good high quality content specific professional development and that's exactly what these two day workshops offer for our teachers it's content specific ap professional development and i have never you know i've worked now this is being my third school that i've worked at and all three i've been fortunate to partner with mass insight i have not met a single teacher who does not come back and rave about the experience that they've had at these two-day workshops the networking opportunities in addition to the professional development uh is world-class and so we had 12 teachers who took advantage of that last year again this year will have to be virtual and it will be two sessions for each night for a week so our teachers will have an opportunity to still get the professional development it will just be split out over a week and it will be virtual part of the the fee um that we pay to mass insight it's a fifteen thousand dollar fee um each year but a portion of that comes directly back to us so five thousand dollars comes came directly back to us in the first year and those funds are used to support ap coursework so in year one with that five thousand dollars it went for smart tvs for our english language uh arts department and again it wasn't to watch tv but it was um a cheaper alternative than projectors and so it allowed them to uh chromecast and share students could share their screen so that they could present so that they could co-construct essays and and things of that nature um and so that was how english language arts spent their portion of the five thousand dollars um in science we identified ap physics as a priority since it was the first year that that course was offered got some lab equipment um specific to ap physics and then math opted to um bolster their supply of graphing calculators in year two we don't get five thousand each year it's a little bit less that you get back but you get three thousand dollars back this year that we're now and again math opted for additional graphing calculators in science we're targeting ap chemistry uh for some additional lab uh resources and equipment and then english supplemented um some some text resources uh for the ap courses in terms of uh our stem related ap courses at dartmouth high school and that's how mass insight defines their partnership with us they they support our stem related including english courses obviously but we had a 25.6 percent increase in exams taken at dartmouth high school this past year in math english and science um courses and just to put that in context for you nationally ap courses ap exams in this these areas were down 14 so we saw a dramatic increase um in our ap exams taken and to put into a national context there was a significant decrease because of the pandemic so i think this really speaks to the commitment that our students have the support we got from families as well as from our ap teachers that when we went remote in the spring without any advanced knowledge our students really dug in and stuck with it um and i think that speaks to the test uh that speaks as a testament to that it takes a community um approach that i talked about at the outset of our of our presentation here in these same areas we saw 21.6 increasing qualifying scores so again that's something to be proud of and that 21.6 percent just to put it in context again nationally there was a decline of 7 in qualifying scores so our students really um outperformed the nation um and obviously built upon an already strong ap program that we had at dartmouth high school and and they did it in the face of the pandemic which i think just is something we should all really be proud of real quick just the future of advanced placement at dartmouth high school one of the key messages that i hope folks will take away uh from tonight um and from our you know our students as well as our um you know families at home is we're continuing our push to democratize access to ap there's a lot of reasons why you know from a more moral ethical standpoint i think we owe it um to our students to make sure that the demographics in ap closely mirror the demographics of the school as a whole right in other words we're not we're trying to make it so that it's an inclusive ap program it's not reserved for for the few but we want to do it strategically and we want students to really be thinking about a four-year plan um too often we still see students waiting until their junior and senior year and trying to cram as many advanced placement courses as they can and that's a recipe for for failure or you know to struggle certainly we want students right in ninth grade we have ap computer science principles that is a very accessible advanced placement course and we encourage students to really consider dipping their toe in in the ap water their freshman year and that's a course that's available to to our freshmen from there we expand as you can see 10th grade there's quite a few additional offerings obviously 11th and 12th grade have the most but really we push students to be thinking about over the course of your four years you know um start slow and kind of build and and you know everyone's able to handle a little bit different right um we want people to push themselves but we don't want it to be so much that you you have four or five aps in a year and then you're over stressed and it's not manageable for you so we encourage students to really be thoughtful and this ap at a glance sheet that you see here is in our program of studies it's hopefully a helpful tool that parents and students can use um when they're planning their course of study we're also we've worked hard to minimize or eliminate prerequisites whenever possible um a lot of times and it's not uncommon um to see at the high school level where we put in place barriers to our advanced coursework and we we really have worked hard to remove those barriers um we have a supportive school a supportive environment we have the pace period available really what we need to recognize is that students who are willing to put in the effort can be successful in an ap course it's the effort that leads to the achievement not some innate ability not you know um not anything else and then finally we've really um push and continue to push this can do mindset can do over can't do um so often you know we we talk all the time at the high school about the fact that your mindset uh ultimately leads to your success or to your failure and that can do mindset will always triumph over they can't do so um or really continue to focus on expanding our ap program and then finally this is uh these are this is the projection for this current school year it's just over 800 though that could have dipped in the first month we always do you know we we try and push kids to stick with it stick with it stick with it but you know we always lose a few at the very beginning um typically so i can update this number but we're right around 800 in terms of um student enrollment in ap courses at this for this school year so we're extremely proud of that and again it shows that concerted effort to really push our students to take the most rigorous coursework that's available to them one other thing i should have mentioned was at dartmouth high school we were very proud to find when we talked with a representative from the college board that dartmouth high school actually had the second largest increase in ap exams taken this past school year in the entire commonwealth of massachusetts so while we're extremely proud of that we shoot for first place at dartmouth high school so we're hoping that this coming year we might just hit that target but we're extremely proud of our students for sticking it out this this year again we continue to build capacity with six new teachers this current school year uh teaching ap for the first time we have two new additional ap courses that we offer this year i alluded to already ap spanish language had a great meeting with ms chavier and miss um mrs souza our ap uh spanish teacher our lead teacher in the world language department and that's a that's a goal of the world language department to really strengthen and expand our ap spanish program in the coming years we look forward to supporting her work to do that and we also added ap research uh this school year as well and then finally before i answer any questions there might be we're looking forward to offering the ap capstone diploma uh program at dartmouth high school and um for folks who might not be familiar with what that is it's just an opportunity again for a student to earn a credential upon their graduation that shows they are really an ap scholar they've taken ap seminar and got a three or higher they took ap research uh and earned a three or higher and in addition to that throughout the course of their high school studies they earned three qualifying um sorry four qualifying scores on additional ap coursework this really speaks to what i said just a few slides ago though that you really have to plan if this is a goal of yours we support you um but you have to plan for that over the course of four years no one's going to achieve the this uh in one or two years so um really pushing students to be thoughtful and to plan that over a four year period finally i think you know share some conclusions with the committee i think it's safe to say that the advanced placement program at dartmouth high school is stronger than it has ever been um our team our ap team has already identified a number of areas for growth and we have plans to make sure that we continue to grow grow our ap enrollment and to continue to um improve our the number of qualifying scores that we have we're excited to be offering the ap research and diploma program and feel that it really aligns the district has focused uh over the past several years on future ready students and i think that the ap research program really is so tightly aligned to that there's no more authentic work than having a student be able to take ownership of a topic they're really passionate and interested about and doing high level research while they're in high school i you know i don't i don't know of any other program that would better align with the district's initiative around future ready students and then finally i hope that this point resonates the success of the dartmouth high school ap program is truly a reflection on the efforts of every teacher at dartmouth high school as well as every teacher within the dartmouth public schools ap is the end of the line but when students get there they've experienced a number of teachers from pre-k all the way up through their ap experience that have prepared them for the rigors of ap coursework and so we couldn't do it without every single teacher of dartmouth public schools and we hope that they take as much pride in the the data that we shared tonight as our ap teachers do at dartmouth high school with that being said i'm happy to answer any questions that there might be well first of all thank you uh mr tebow for a well thought out and a well informative presentation um i know i just learned a lot and clearly our our partnership with mass insight uh has paid dividends over the years uh so i thank you for that so at this time i'm gonna turn it over to any of my colleagues that have any comments or questions i'm not sure if anyone would like to start or mr nunes said thank you mr chairman thank you uh mr tebow and i agree with you it was nice hearing about something besides covert uh and being a sounding board for that so thank you very much for that a couple of basic questions uh with the students taking these classes and you know getting the threes the fours the fives that they get they get a chance to get college credits i.e they don't have to take certain classes when they get to college is that how this is going to work and how many classes you know can how many credits can they get towards their college education or does it vary oh okay yes so so i apologize because i'm on a little bit of a delay here um i'm listening um through the youtube feed but um so to answer your question mr nunes it does vary from college to college um and so you know in some college in in many state um college and universities that three is an acceptable or qualifying score three four or five but it does vary from college to college and um what the amount of credit that they get you know it would depend from one institution to the to the next would be would be the answer but it certainly does save money um for students who earn qualifying scores because they can go right into more advanced courses i mean i guess does somebody have an opportunity to almost take care of you know one semester of college in overall in the long run or pretty close to a whole semester 30 credits this is priceless this is i had a student who took care of a year a student who took care of a year my brother got a year so for a student who was extremely motivated who planned out their ap courses you know um like i suggested starting in their freshman year yeah they could certainly earn um a number of college credits and um you know when they enter be pretty pretty far along okay thank you and the last thing just to complement the teachers on everything they do i know a number of years ago i was here on a weekend there was something going on and you know i was here and went to leave and there was a one of your teachers had signed in and that and this was like nine o'clock on a saturday or a sunday night and that teacher had a full classroom of students you know going over things for an ap exam so not only were the students dedicated but on you know giving up a a saturday night or a sunday night but you know the teacher was here too so you know again my compliments and my thanks to all the teachers that you know work at this and the students because it's not easy i mean when you look at what you know it's always amazes me when you see the students you know when they're graduating what they've done you know with co-curricular activities and clubs and still taking however many uh ap classes so my congrats to everyone and thank you dr jenkins so i'm sure mr tebow's probably waiting he's hearing from from mr nunes so should i should i go ahead or should i wait i think i'll i'll go ahead because while he say thank you my question will then come through i think so that's reasonable all right so i i also want to say thank you i think um you guys have been doing a great job i am particularly impressed by your outreach to um get students who might not normally uh consider enrolling in ap um to do that and and i like that um i thought the report was great um one thing i might like to see if we ever do this again is the number of students participating because like you said we do have a number of high achievers who take multiple ap classes and so the real sort of measure expansion should be the number of students taking aps um and and that's i'm really particularly concerned about that democratization so i'm glad to see you focusing on that um and i'd love to see that um i have two questions um the first question is i was glad to see that computer science has moved down to first year i'm wondering if you've considered moving any of the other ap courses for first year students like gopo you know i teach intro to american politics ap geography or ap psych many of the history social sciences could potentially be available to year students and i'm wondering if you guys have considered that and then i'll wait jonathan can you just repeat the question again i do so the comment was i'd like to see the numbers broken up a number of students participating which would be great no the question is whether they've considered expanding some of the history social science classes to first-year students it was gopo geography and psych so if if the question was have we considered expanding it um so american government and politics did expand this current year that we're currently in that we just started um and i don't have the slide in front of me but i want to say it was like 20 students last year we're up to 60 um this year um you know and and certainly so what we do when we look at the expansion of ap programs is we take that ap potential report um which identifies students that are likely to be successful and it lists every course that a student is likely to be successful in and we look at those numbers and let's just say if the number is a hundred that means there's a hundred dartmouth high students who have demonstrated that they are likely to be successful on that particular ap course or in that particular ap course we use that as kind of our benchmark and and we kind of say how do we get there um and we we we identify we share with the students those ap potential um letters and so the students know hey you know i demonstrated that i could be successful in these four courses and then we pushed the students to enroll in at least one of them if they if they weren't going to enroll in any of them um you know and obviously some of them do enroll in multiple courses i mean i'm happy to uh i don't have it off the top of my head um but i'm happy to provide the number of uh unique students who participate in advanced placement coursework i can certainly share that that number with you um because i think that that's the foundation of of one of the questions that dr jenkins was asking that was one the other it was the other was a little bit of a misunderstanding like the the way we do it now relies on psat scores and the psat happens sophomore year what about opening up eight more ap courses to first-year students because they can only take one right now so it's the first opening to freshman students is that yes right so so right now we have the um computer science principles that's open to freshmen and that's a conversation that we do constantly have um with our lead teachers every every you know annually we review and revise the program of studies um and so if you went back to look at an old program of studies from just three years ago there were virtually no 18 in 9th or 10th grade i think there was you know it it might have been just us history um as a 10th grade option very very few um and you can see from the at a glance sheet that was included in the presentation we now have a number of them in 10th grade i know we still only have one in freshmen um we're working on it there's you know um in a previous school i was at we convinced the ap stats teacher for example to allow stats for freshmen because it's a very different type of math and it's it's accessible for students and reluctantly we we got them to be able to to agree to that and then when we followed up you know um some of the most motivated students were those freshmen because they felt like they were you know uh they were special that that was a special opportunity for them so they were very motivated and eager to demonstrate that they were up to the challenge so we're always looking at how we can expand um ap and by expanding i don't mean just the enrollment but how we can make more courses accessible in the earlier years um so it's not all backlogged into the or shoehorned into the 11th and 12th grade years i'm good thank you dr jenkins this is wait yes so i have some comments as well as a question or two um first i also want to uh congratulate you and the high school staff for expanding the ap program i have two students who are at dartmouth high both are doing really well one is a freshman taking the freshman program um i think it's a lot of credit to the staff who say i don't just want the students who may get a five but i'm like i really want to bring in all these students who are excited about the subject and i want to you know stimulate that excitement so i think that's fantastic um also another comment having been a i taught ap us history i think having that kind of training that the student the teachers are getting over the summer and in that october workshop is it's game-changing so that is fantastic that you're committed to that through mass insight i think that's you know great i also want to compliment the staff in the spring um i don't know how many i assume everybody saw but the video that the ap teachers did for the students who are about to take the ap exam was adorable it was so great it was you know so cute and positive and you know we got teachers you know it was again it really translated well and kids got to see their teachers who they missed at home and i thought that was a great send-off in this kind of wacky time we had now the questions i have are two one you had mentioned that you're trying to minimize the prerequisites for some of the ap classes i look at ap calculus and i think about how to get there um so i'm wondering i know there's been some combinations um so i guess so one of my questions is when you say you're limiting the prerequisites how are you especially for those a b now we have bc for the calculus how has how has that kind of changed the formula for getting there and the second comment is i'd just like to say i'd love to see macro economics come back i think it's a unique course that's there isn't anything like it in the offerings and you did offer at one point i taught it so i'd love to see it come back so that would be my second so i'll tackle the second question first um i too would love to see ap economics come back um we had the one thing you can't do though is you can't um i'm very hesitant to put someone who's not comfortable teaching it in a position they have to teach it right because we want the kids to have a good experience and to absolutely be prepared for the exam and um in my experience if you force uh uh you know i just wouldn't want to force a teacher who's not up to it uh we did have some conversation because again when we look at the ap potential report economics is one of those that we absolutely need to get back in so so we'll continue to work on that um because i agree ap economics really um you know is an area that uh our students would benefit from in terms of um the prerequisites i should clarify that when i arrived at dartmouth high school three years ago that in the program of studies there were a lot of prerequisites like a student must have an 85 or above in an honors level you know core so you know it was a lot of those types of prerequisites in our in our courses um and you know i don't think i'm sharing state secrets when i say that grading is somewhat arbitrary at times and so it's those kinds of prerequisites that you know were um or teacher recommendation was another prerequisite that existed quite often those are the prerequisites that we've worked hard to eliminate so we haven't changed you know course pipelines we haven't changed um what courses or what course progression students should still move through so much especially for for things like ap calculus right or eight you know um things of that nature the prerequisites that we rarely work to eliminate are the more subjective ones like you know teacher recommendation or a certain grade in a certain course um as a prerequisite those are the types of prerequisites that we've worked hard to to eliminate because as we know there's a number of reasons why a student could do poorly you know they could have something happen in their life you know in their sophomore year and maybe they didn't that grade they earned didn't really demonstrate what they were really capable of you know those kinds of things so um those are the prerequisites that i was referencing that we we've worked hard to to reduce or actually to eliminate really anything else mrs white no i think i i think that you know really concludes i guess i would just again looking at the i am curious about the progression to those again that math because i i find that the way that we've had math structured and you know with students i know we're doubling up now um as for allowing some students to double up in the algebra geometry as they get into freshman year but again i'm i am kind of curious about the pathway to get to that you know bc senior year and where that actually happens with the math i mean the other ones seem like you know you could take a uh you know uss3 course or you know other ones but those need a progression so that's what i was kind of curious about how a student gets there i guess so it so in the math in the math pathway specifically we have um an advanced algebra geometry uh course that's available for for students in their uh freshman year we also have um an advanced uh course you know if there are juniors who need to kind of progress a little bit quicker and then recently we actually just i just met with mr lauer and mr gill and ms chavier recently to talk about offering and i know um if mrs oliveira is watching she'll be excited about this because her and i have had conversations for a couple of years at this point now but offering a uh summer math course that's not remedial and not um to recover credits but but a course in the summer that helps students advance um you know so that they can get to the to the top of that uh math um you know pathway as well so um that that's currently where where we're at awesome thank you thank you i i mean i don't really have any other questions my colleagues uh asked some pretty comprehensive well-rounded questions i just want to thank you for this presentation it is encouraging to see the program grow and and the value of the partnership that we have so that's it thank you mrs amaral yeah i will just echo my colleagues comments and statements mr tebow you know looking back from 2016 through currently 2020 i think the numbers speak for themselves with the increase of student participation in ap exams um i'm thrilled um i have a freshman here at dartmouth high she was a little reluctant to take the computer ap course but i'm i'm hopeful that uh she will get on board with uh at least one of the other ones come sophomore year but that being said you know one of the things that really echoed to me in uh your presentation is um and and i think it's i think it's extremely true and you hit the nail on the head and i think that's what makes dartmouth public schools such a uh a great experience for our you know for our students as well as our staff is you said the success of the dhs ap program is truly a reflection on the efforts of every teacher at dartmouth high school as well as all within the dartmouth public schools so i think that i i couldn't have said that better myself that just goes to show you you know it's a it's a team effort and you know everyone helps our students get there so uh kudos to you mr tebow as well as um to your team and to all the teachers here in the dartmouth public schools thank you for a great presentation thank you all very much i really appreciate the opportunity thank you thank you thank you sir thank you all right uh next up we have a resolution 21-01 request for unpaid leave i'll turn it over to dr gifford thank you mr chair so as you know you received a request from um one of our tas in the building um requesting an unpaid leave um the original request she is she is out on leave right now the original request was not able to be granted by me because it is not something that's in their contract so they do have um she does have so to be consistent with the contract i was not able to grant that um because they do have certain items that they're able to request and be granted an unpaid leave for but that was not one of them and she did take advantage of the item h under article 9 which says other leaves of absence may be granted by the committee i believe you have her letter um so if you were to grant the leave it's been suggested by mr smith that that leave is granted through the end of the school year not like from this day going forward for a year but through the end of the school year and we have no problem with that miss mill has been a wonderful employee it's just if i was to stay by the contract it wasn't something that i was able to do sure understood any of my committee members have any questions in regards to this uh resolution dr jenkins we are provided with a resolution do we need to read the full text to the resolution is that why we were given it or can we just make a motion sometimes you have to read the right we don't i'm just sort of asking how we proceed i don't really have a question about it yeah no that's actually a very good point i i don't know if it's necessary i don't think it's necessary i know when um i know when we do msba resolutions and all they're very explicit and we have to read them but we can certainly just have a motion to approve it okay so then mr chair i will make a motion that uh the committee approved resolution 21-01 which is granting a temporary unpaid leave of absence miller um for the remainder of the 2021 school year as requested and in accordance with the dea assistance contract i second that so i have a motion on the floor by dr jenkins the second by mrs amaral on the motion any other discussion mr nunes yeah thank you mr chairman quick question uh she does state in her letter that you know if uh we either have to go fully remote or if we're able to come back fully in person uh she'd like to request revoking this request is that something that's out there for her yes okay thank you yes i'm good thank you dr gifford any other further discussion jay hearing none all in favor aye aye opposed ocean carry thank you thank you next up under old business superintendent's update on the start of the hybrid phase of school dr giffen okay thank you yes um as you probably know we had a successful start i say every day is a new day so um last week when we brought our students in our pre-k peer partners k12 and grade six i know a number of us were at all of the schools to see them come in and um it was really first of all it was really joyful to drive through the coming to work and seeing kids standing at bus stops it was almost like wow you know it was very very very good so um we had a good start um teachers were extremely happy everywhere i went uh the i just have to give shout out to every building the um as well as transportation the nutrition department everyone that worked so hard in the planning that went into this i mean if you saw some of the pictures on our facebook page of kids getting their lunches and all of that but just to see the number of staff members that were out to greet students as they got off the bus and or appearance drop them off etc so we had a we had a good start and um we'll see you know every day's a new day so i think with um with that said i just have to once again give shout out to mr kiley and and his assistant lauren because the transportation as you might know is a bear to plan for they're not only planning for what's happening right now but thinking ahead of when students continue to come in and um even though you you ask people to provide their information in a timely manner the day before when we still get 50 emails of changes is pretty much crazy i guess as you know but they've done a fantastic job of trying to accommodate all of the families so that went pretty well we know we'll have bumps as we go along but we're here to try to solve those um so what i will say one of the things i want to say also is that as we move forward i want folks to understand that we we will have people that are sick and we already have had folks sick with normal flus or whatever it might be or stomach aches etc our process is that the nurses will if it's someone in school the nurses look at the symptoms that people might come up with take caution abundance of caution perhaps send students or staff home always the recommendation is to have a test if it's certain symptoms they they let us know what's going on um if a test were to come back positive which as we know we had one that we thought was we're still waiting the negatives and all of that we are in complete and always frequent contact with the board of health with chris mishu we let them know what's going on they advise us constantly we cannot give out information about staff the only thing or students so what we do is we provide a general comment to the staff that might say if it's a particular school a member of our school community has tested positive and then we are in contact which i confirmed tonight mr kylie with chris micho with the board of health we assist in any contact tracing that might go on we might say uh that staff member was in a room with so many so many students etc or a bus etc and then they will do the contact tracing alert with families so i just want to make that clear because we've had questions about why don't we giving more information we cannot give personal information we will give again general information that there's a positive case we follow all protocols and we give out what we can so i just want to make that clear for people we don't even say if it's a staff member or a student it's a community member a member of our school community and let the process um be followed through so i just want to make that clear but we're on it so i think speaking about that now going forward i think our plans are very uh well thought out and being implemented as far as being in school and um we're well prepared day by day for these things that will come up because we know they'll come up people are sick every day you know and and we just take those precautions that are necessary um we also wanted to address we had some questions about when kids are absent so um that's a that's a tricky one because we thought for example the elementary students we would be able to put um into our virtual academy but we're really going to analyze that because we don't want those we don't want that to be a shuffling ground either for kids if it's let's say they're sick and they're out two or three days but then they're back again so um i talked to mr tebow today about the high school plan and i've actually i'm waiting for um some comments with mr dome but we think that pretty much we'll treat a lot of it as a normal illness students are out ill and with other things that teachers will continue to maintain their google classrooms assignments will be able to be accessed especially at the high school for example they'll be able to bop into if they were on quarantine i'm speaking of something like that uh be able to bop into the pace period to get some help etc and of course when they do come back um have plenty of time to make up assignments and and reach out to their teachers so we're looking at it like that and and a lot of our situations as you might know are are case by case we analyze what's happening we speak with the parents etc so not only with that but even with students now being maybe having a fever etc do they come back do they not come back so it's it's a lot of it's case by case but i just want people to know that we're prepared we understand the scenarios we understand the process we're in constant con constant contact with the board of health all right so the other thing i wanted to address was i guess our biggest challenge right now of course is um again the techa issue so i've asked mr galicio to speak about that because fortunately or unfortunately he's had to take a huge he's playing a huge role in in tech coordinator if you will um beyond any role he should be taking as we know he's he's extremely busy it's it's beyond but um because of his real positive attitude um he's really but he's been able to really get a good handle on teca itself and analyzing and trying to support the middle school guidance counselors as they support our teachers so it's not all bad but there are some bumps and grinds and so i'm going to let mr galasha kind of speak about that just to give everyone a brief history just you know in august in july the department of education uh realized that the state was going to need an online alternative to those students they're staying home they compiled a committee and they came up with some recommendations in early august the models they came up with were independent self-paced learning like ingenuity and certified teachers that would teach kids with uh an online program like teca there were two other companies that were sharing that so the mad rush went to to do that we went on on august 4th a few days later it was decided we would go in a certain direction and on the 11th at our school committee meeting dr gifford presented the relationship with ingenuity after looking at ingenuity from a middle school standpoint we felt that it was not um independent self-paced learning was would may not be advantageous for middle school level students they might need a little more attention and we switch gears to techa which is a certified teacher one of the difficulties at the same time we created our own program thank you tracy oliveira for creating a program of our own virtual teachers for our elementary school students with our own curriculum that we're very proud of the it was cost prohibitive to do that at the elementary middle school level because you need multiple grades and multiple subject matters to to do that so techa was a good option we came in fast and furious with teca i think part of that is i've learned a lot and i think when we do techa in january it'll be a lot smoother there's a bumpy road trying to get the find the contacts at teca who does what and in fairness to them we came in very late there but also there were a lot of technical issues in the sense that they mentioned that the chromebooks would be sufficient for those students to use but some of the technical issues didn't play very nicely with the chromebooks so we resurrected the pcs around around the buildings um boosting ram redid their software and got getting them to those families i've been visiting the families at their homes it's been very nice i don't go inside social distance on the front lawn but able to provide other chromebooks that might be because the products that they use have a lot of flash and java which don't play as nicely on chromebooks as they do on a pc that has a processor etc so we've we've played through that we have 54 students at the middle school that are currently working in that and with access to the console now i'm able to monitor as the guidance people are able to monitor these students as they progress we're noticing that they've got to play some catch up with with lessons the the clock began when they began the program i still have technical issues i deal with these families unable to print the machine is not working properly i'm still having access issues trying to either remote access or also bring them another machine we don't use the old pcs as much anymore since all the kids have chromebooks in the district so the pcs are available we just we kind of frankenstein them as we call it we take parts from many pcs to build a good pc and we provide those to the students i mean to the to these students so i'm still working through the technical issues um i've learned a lot in the process the kids are working the program is quite um quite intuitive it shows where the children are in regards to their progress um i think we've learned a lot about techa too that may not have been completely in the literature that we really have to be an active role in the process of techa in regards to monitoring these students and checking on their work it wasn't as much to push them off to some other teacher there is a teacher out there and some of the feedback i've gotten from parents in the in the program are changes to the the techa program in regards to the number of times that they meet the number of live lessons and such like this the structure of it which i'm going to provide to techa for updates in their program but this was their program for those students that are currently doing it this is what their program does perhaps a re-evaluation for next semester may be in order we've had some teacher some students some families that have reversed and gone back to the hybrid model they've reconsidered the structure of what we're doing in the schools the cleanliness of the schools and they've opted to get out of the remote version and go back to the hybrid model when it becomes available but with that any questions i'm a wealth of knowledge when it comes to techa and virtual learning you and me both mr galicia yeah that's right that being said first question that i have is where the dartmouth public schools is allowing families to revert from from tecker if they've made that decision and i know that's kind of based on desi guidance and recommendations that um there are we are allowing families back into the hybrid program um initially those those like past couple weeks but it's getting to a point now that the continuity of your education is going to be disrupted if you have if you jump over from this point forward so i understand that to make that uh mention here but i really feel the middle school and the guidance department should examine the the students in um situation to make sure there's not you haven't done half of a year at texas you should be on it right on an in strictly individual basis right with that said i'm gonna you know i'm gonna speak up a little bit here i am disgusted at the way that the department of education sold um or investigated some of these remote programs i have family members in another school district that opted to go for tekker one of the middle school and one at the elementary school and i don't know how clear it was that teca made this or whether it was techer or was it was pearson or whether it was the department of education but to have i think a lot of families and i can see a lot of families frustration in dartmouth that there are only two 30-minute live lessons a week per subject and out of those two 30-minute live lessons one of them is recorded wow so there's only one 30-minute live lesson i have got a huge fundamental problem with that when we are selling this we're trying to like offer this as a solution to dartmouth families that don't feel comfortable for one reason or another to send their students into the hybrid program at the dartmouth public schools in shame in the department of education for not making this clear up front there has been poor communication coming from them in addition to techa in in um pearson the conversations that we had with them after school started with techa should have taken place weeks before weeks before this baloney that we're dealing with right now that every district in the commonwealth of massachusetts is dealing with because of their lack of guidance and lack of communication is outrageous i really hope that come the spring semester that the department of education and commissioner riley in the department the board is much clearer with their alternatives to remote education because i'm telling you right now this is completely unacceptable for the students and families of dartmouth and the students and families of techa students across the commonwealth of massachusetts it may be a very good program as a alternative you know for those students that may not want a traditional education for whatever reason but they were inadequately prepared for covid19 and for all these districts signing on board so i want to thank you mr galashaw and the central office team and for the guidance staff at the middle school for making house calls for you know getting involved as much you as you have because i am as a parent as an educator and as a school committee member i am extremely disappointed with this decision um i feel as though um we've had better success the high school had experience with with edge annuity so they hit the ground running mr gill knows it he knows his kids and the students at the high school are familiar with self-paced programs and the guys department does they knew to check in teca gives you the impression that they take it from here and it truly is edgenuity 1.2 it's it's just a step up from ingenuity it is an independent program such as the ieps mr oliver um one thing i developed realized in the process they they say they do iep services they don't they do they'll do accommodations in regards to a large print or something but that's not really accommodating an iep so we we learned we've we've talked to um special education teachers within the middle school to make sure the ieps are addressed within those students that have them in our 53 54 student i think the biggest problem i'm sorry in one second dr jenkins i think the biggest problem is that i don't think the dartmouth public schools nor many other schools realize the time consumption and the burden that this program because looking at it now and i can't speak for dr gifford or anyone else is that it may have been worth a while to try to figure out something else because this is extremely time consuming um i i've heard from my niece and nephew who are in another district who's in teca their teacher one of their teachers has 48 students and they can't meet the 504 obligations right we're sorry we can't meet him so i'm extremely frustrated from a number a number of levels dr jenkins so i just want to reiterate that because i think on social media a lot of people were saying that these issues were the result of oh we just we decided too late um i have a colleague who's in plymouth they decided like the week after the guidance came out and their students were added into tech after ours right so this is not an us issue it has very much been a techa issue they are they were overwhelmed i think and completely unprepared for the volume of students and they had major difficulties handling and processing it and and shame on them too because then they simply started the classes rather than adjusting and saying hey maybe we'll delay we'll do some other stuff i do also though as a teacher want to i think push back a little people are saying oh well people who are you know in the online learning at the middle school and the high school are doing so much more work than the students at the middle school of the high school and i think that's because they forget that when you're in a class right and you're that's like work that's time on task and so yes you are going to have more reading or things to do because you're not sitting in the classroom you're doing more reading because that is your time on task so there's this misperception i think that it's too hard but i think parents are forgetting that if you spend x hours a day in a class and you're not having that live instruction all the time students have to be doing something and commonly that is reading something or doing assignments or things like that so i mean i 100 agree with you that i think this was this is not an internal problem this is an external problem and i think it's it's really important for people to understand and it goes up the food chain between the late guidance with deci and the the tucker being completely overwhelmed it's it's not been a good situation but there hasn't been much we can do about it yeah no i just wanted to say um we had considered doing techa for the elementary schools because we needed someone to take the students from there and i just want to give credit to the professionals within our ranks here in dartmouth the elementary school principals that got together to talk about it and tracy oliveira who got together with them and and dr gifford of course and mrs roy uh miss roy and uh to talk about it um because the the program we created here we should sell to other people it was a proper program we missed ms oliveira was able to find five teachers that would take over the virtual program we set them up in an area of quinn elementary school um we equip with all their information their equipment and such um and they are hit the ground running and they've gotten great reviews it's our own program so we're gonna bottle it we're gonna sell it to someone else but you know i'm so happy that they got together to examine this rather than just jumping into techa and it is that blind faith and and as you said mr oliver just in in desi to say they suggested this program but it really wasn't tested it wasn't proven and it wasn't explained in great detail of what it was so um but uh i just wanted to mention that i'm so happy of the program that was designed that was designed at the elementary level i've heard mentioned that one to you i have heard i don't know if my colleagues have but i have heard no complaints about the elementary school different compliments yeah nothing but positivity nothing but positive feedback in high school it's just yeah and at the high school the high can i follow up one thing i also want to give kudos to mr gill um he has been doing a ton a ton a ton of work and we have one child an ingenuity he has really done a bunch of work i'm sure you've seen some of it to really get that all going um he's super responsive and he's doing a really a really great job so kudos to him on that what's the news yeah thank you mr chairman uh just to follow up on what you're saying with with destiny and everything else i mean i think to say that they dropped the ball would be a complete understatement i mean when the in all seriousness when the governor shut everything down the end of april you know for the for the school year type of deal i think at that point in time it kind of became obvious to everybody that what was going to happen in september was not going to be pretty as far as you know we're going to be able to get students back into the classroom and that and all the different guidances that they came out with and you know we'll have something next week we'll have something next week we'll have so you know next week next week next week became the middle of august when they finally came out or just beforehand when they came out you know the end of july and they said well by august 11th we need your three plans type of deal and how you gonna do it and everybody at literally at the 11th hour is scrambling to find you know what you're going to do and who's going to operate it if we're not if if somebody can't be in school then who's going to operate and how we're going to do operate it i think it goes back to a little bit to what mr tebow was saying and he's his presentation on ap is the work of the teachers and the administrators in this system from pre-k to 12 that have done the best that they can to get this program up and to get everything up and running whether it's students and hybrid and i've talked to you know parents you know that are students in the hybrid in elementary and middle school you know sixth grade i mean that's the only one that's bad everybody is thrilled the way the hybrid has worked so far they're thrilled to have their kids back type of deal and you know and again shame on desi because they personally they dropped the ball from day one personal opinion i agreed thank you mr lynch do you have anything else on the re-opening no i think we're good so i i do have a couple of things if the committee would just entertain me for a few minutes here um first of all i i think we've all said it many of times but i i honestly don't think it can be said enough the monumental tasks that the [Music] the staff and faculty here at the schools at dalton public schools have done i'm still proud of the decision that we made as a committee um to do a slow roll um i think it was i truly think it was the smart idea um i think we're we're we're slowly rolling things out and things are coming together i am extremely i'm i'm really pleased i'm happy to be a datmon school committee member i'm happy to be a dartmouth parent um and i'm thrilled to have these professionals working for us that being said i know that there's been some some uh scuttlebutt on social media there's all let's face it there's always scuttlebutt on social media right um we got and not social media but just general comments from a year from as we all know parents staff members students talk to us about just the safety the general safety of you know making sure that our kids are our students my daughter included uh will be safe in the doctor public schools when they um when they're back in in-person learning um i think i think it's important to note that you know first and foremost um i think we all agree is that it's student safety is the number one the number one priority i know that i had a i had an email yesterday that um after uh it was notified that there was a potential or there was a positive case here there was a uh a list i don't know if it was in the standard times or mass live one of those and it had the list of communities and it said dartmouth zero and someone said well they're not being transparent well it was because it was because of the cut off the deadline i i think it's safe to say that this committee and this administration is extremely uh you know we're nothing but transparent and we're going to continue to be transparent um with this community one of the things i'd just like to just touch base on with mr kylie is that um there's been some back and forth about um and of course a lot of this comes from our staff stopping uh concerns being in the rooms about heating ventilation air conditioning and air exchange i had a camera i had the opportunity to have a conversation this afternoon with mr kylie and obviously the perfect solution right now is that all it's warm enough all our windows are open we're able to circulate the air in addition to our our unit events that are in our air circulators they're in most of the classrooms but i think it's important to note that we're diamond schools are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on hepa air filtration i know we spoke about this a little bit but i think it's really important for the people at home to know and the parents to know that come the time in which we can't have windows wide open and it's 30 20 degrees outside that you know we're going to have hepa filtration in all our classrooms uh we have the electrostatic sprayers um can you can you just talk a little bit about what we're doing proactively mr kylie to to keep our our students and faculty and staff safe sure so as you said mr oliver i mean we're committed to providing air purification in the rooms at this point i would say that it's very challenging to acquire air purifiers especially ones that will work effectively in a classroom environment smaller units are more readily available but i ordered some air purifiers in i think early july [Music] and they were supposed to be in in september and now we found out they're going to be in in march so that gives you an idea of the type of you know backlog that these companies are facing and obviously those may be of no use to us and we might end up canceling those but we at this point have acquired 60 air purifiers and distributed them on a priority basis to the nurses the isolation spaces the staff members who have physicians notes indicating that they should they should have an air purifier and then classrooms and other spaces that don't have windows so we're prioritizing those areas and at the same time making efforts to acquire more uh air purifiers so that we can outfit all our rooms with with uh air purifiers that do have hepa that multi-stage filtration including hepa so that is sort of an ongoing process and our hope is that by the time it is we're into heating season in which it's no longer feasible to keep the windows open that we'll have those in place how are you doing certainly as soon as we can get them so that's what we're working on there and you know we've we've worked on the ventilation in terms of tricking the uh i think i may have discussed this at a prior school committee meeting but um essentially tricking the universe to take more outside air again good measure for now but not a measure that's going to last forever um because when it gets too cold out if we do that first of all it's going to be too cold in the rooms second of all we're going to freeze the pipes and we're going to just break the whole system so so there is a point where that you know that can't be done um and it's it's a ways off still so um but but good filtration is certainly something that we're you know efforting to to accomplish in all the rooms at this point you mentioned uh you mentioned sprayers but really it's about disinfectant so it's about um well it's about good hygiene first of all right so the hand sanitizer available in all the rooms and around the buildings that's an important step because that helps keep us from spreading our whatever germs we have all over things um but then disinfectants can be applied in different ways wipes um we've delivered 600 and i don't know i just looked now i can't remember i have so many different things here you know 621 tubs of wipes around the district for folks in classrooms we've got disinfectant spray in every classroom so handheld disinfectant it's not lysol but it's basically like a lysol disinfectant um kills sars it's epa less than kills sars cove too which is this um we also have the electrostatic sprayers which we recently we got in last week and we're setting up we had a little glitch with the chemicals that we ordered and the right quantity not coming in so we've had to sort of reinvent that process and go with a different uh product so so we're working on that but we do have the product yeah we do have that product we we have it in concentrate form so we now have to set up a little differently the way we're going to be the way we're going to be addressing that in each of the buildings but we're in the process of doing that so that we can spray or classrooms nightly so we've worked with um i've spoken with afscme the custodial union regarding the opportunity if it becomes necessary for them to work overtime in order to uh be able to support cleaning of the classrooms with the sprayers i built monies into the uh the c the coronavirus relief fund uh grant that we received to support that so to support those staff members working overtime to make sure the classrooms are clean and then obviously during the day uh we've shifted staffing so that there is more custodial coverage during the day that they can keep keep track of the high touch areas and try and maintain clean you know cleanliness throughout the buildings during the day so it is awesome to have kids back i mean it's it's been so long you know six months in these buildings empty is too long but um but it does it does present all these additional challenges and i think we have a good plan in place and what we're finding is that like like our kids we're learning every day you know and we're learning about okay did we think about that plan correctly and we'll adjust and then and uh as we go and you know make sure we provide the safest environment possible so well thank you for the thank you for the update this is welcome so i just want to say this is great i think it's fabulous but i'll say it to our home audience the single most effective thing that you can do is follow guidelines for preventing community spread right when the disease is not spreading in our community it's going to be less likely to spread in our schools i'm a little nervous there's been some uptake in community spread and i'll tell you i may have lost my temper a few times i've seen people socializing and it takes everything right there's an article in the new york times that play date that you know just one friend that's what creates community spread if we want our kids in school then we've got to be responsible for that as a community we need to wear masks we need to stay away from each other it's hard it stinks but if we don't do that then our kids are not going to be able to be in school so it's on us and we have to do all those things but those things are way more effective if covet is not getting in the front door and that's on us to do and i think people are letting their guard down and now is not the time because i don't think i know my kids would be crushed to go to school and to have to stop going to school again so i think we as a community need to pick it up and we need to do better to make sure that our kids and our staff can be safe and be in school excellent point mr news yeah thank you mr chairman i think and to piggyback on what dr jenkins says and i know we've talked about it before but the the onus is is on the parents is on the students if you're not feeling good don't come to school and you know as as dumb as it sounds i mean if you know the student if your son or daughter gets up in the morning and they've got a little bit of a temperature type of deal don't pump them full of advil or tylenol and say well now they're down to normal because as soon as it wears off in a couple of hours they're in trouble and we're in trouble for 24 hours if it's a 24-hour bug keep them home please you know help us help you help everyone and we'll all be better off how i like to help us can all right um actually i'm going to shift away all the you know from the safety because i have another kind of point that parents have brought up you know and again i want to get back to what um mr oliver said earlier is i am really proud of what dartmouth has done and is doing and i'm really proud of the model um the every other day hybrid i think you know i've talked to families and friends who you know they're in schools a week on two weeks off you know in their joint remote um and i and again i think with teaching and learning to get back to what dr gifford had said you know back when we talked about the plan at its onset you know this is this model this plan is you know best serving our students to really keep them connected to their teachers um and to their classmates into the content but with that said um i do have a number of parents and i'm just just so we can answer this because i'm sure some of you are getting the same like email over and over again why can't we on that opposite day that the kids are at home why can't they zoom into their classrooms i i for me you know when i look at this as an educator i want educators to be focusing on the students that are in front of them because i think that you know they're going to do the highest quality live instruction that you know method but i think if you can you know speak to that a little bit more just because again i keep finding that same question why aren't we zooming in why aren't we why can't we do that and i think you know i think the way that we've you know we're going forward is you know all i'll say is we we investigated it with the middle school it would have been a different model because um the technology wise it was it was going to be a big undertaking to do that but also if the teachers are teaching the same lesson so to zoom in on the hybrid day i guess they could change their entire thing but it's just something we decided not to do um they're also not condensing if you will the standards and teaching almost double that's that's what we've asked them to try to address things because kids are going home to be able to work on um the projects and all of that and the reading assignments etc so you know it's just i don't know if you have anything else to say it's just kind of the model we chose can i add to that i know so i have a lot of my colleagues in higher ed who are doing the high flex we call it in higher ed which we say is the worst model of education there could be it has been really really really difficult it's not you just zoom in that's not how it works you have to completely redesign the entire curriculum to integrate there's technological issues so like you know they've got five different things up trying to figure out and then they're not really instructing to the kids so at least from a higher ed perspective when we don't have to do like you know we're doing three hours a week high flex has been a real really sort of disastrous on very many levels so people think it's like oh you just zoom in that's just not how it works pedagogically i think if i could follow up on that too the other thing that i'm saying is people saying well are they only getting half the instruction and i that's also not true because people assume that the teacher is just up there lecturing all day but so much of teaching is about providing instruction and then working independently to learn and reinforce and practice what you've learned and so what we're just doing is separating that right you're getting the the live instruction in class and then you're doing the independent reinforcement and practice of those lessons so we're not giving them half of the instruction it's just half of the instruction is happening in a different place i think that's really important because that's the other thing i say oh they're only getting half the school year that's that's what's happening that's not happening it's a little difficult yeah and just you know just to piggyback on you know that i've had you know again you know i've been trying to kind of explain like you know model lessons to to parents that you know again and there's there's time that's lost by kids coming into the classroom you know and there are certain things that you know you're going to want to use your manipulatives in class with your students who are right in front of you if you're doing a lab or so you know something else whereas you know there's going to be so much loss for the the kids that are i mean they can't do the lab so they can you know and they've gained skills during remote learning where they can potentially you know do breakout sessions or work in a project at home with someone else in their class so again i'm really proud of what the model that we came up with i really you know again as i go back to you know other people are saying well you know my kids are going to zoom in i just think oh that's not going to be that great you know so again i just feel like you know congratulations one of the things we did um do i know when i went around the schools the elementary level um have the kids come in on the morning meeting so they just touch base um say hello to their friends so uh that was when i talked to a lot of teachers last week that was very successful so that was one i mean it's not the all day but at least it's a touch base i think that's good yeah the mornings yeah yeah and i just want to mention what you talked about with the uh data or whatever a data point i don't know if you said it was in the standard times or something about the number of cases so just to make it clear for folks um deci requires us if we have a confirmed covert case to call in that information they just ask um whether it's a staff or a student who we are and what school so we did that of cour you know last week we had um one i'll just say once again a member of our school community that was positive but that member of our school community had not been in our schools at all up to this point so there was no close contact et cetera but that was reported to deci then we had the second member of our school community that was positive we've reported that we brought it to the board of health they did any contact tracing which was as far as i understand very very very minimal um since then we've been told that was a false positive we're waiting for those results so desi with that data it's every thursday that's updated from my understanding so that was not reported until october one and so it's every thursday that was september yeah there's 30 at the date exactly yeah which was zero so we corrected the false positive so from what our reporting is we should have one community member now being positive for the next round because i talked to them today about the yeah that's so thank you for clarifying yeah we we don't hide it we do what we're supposed to do i have no doubt any of my fellow committee members have any other questions yeah well i mean i'll go i um i wrote a bunch of scattered notes here typical of me um one cute thing i saw her on social media a positive thing on social well media was a shout out we had done uh for um a member i think she is a uh grade two virtual teacher and her her goal and i i'll paraphrase summarize uh i'm not going to verbatim but her her goal so what is your goal her goal was to um get a job you know obtain a job in education during a pandemic which i thought was was funny so and there were some comments on there from presumably uh parents of students that were just you know accolades of we love her so clearly that's going well i've heard from a lot of families about that my own experience remote you know i have a fifth grader at de melo and um shout out to mrs colbeck it is she i'm very fortunate that my little fifth grader my baby sorry fifth grader is an independent learner she's really motivated so i'm i understand i i i recognize that i'm i'm lucky in that respect but she is having the most amazing time and you know she i'm lucky again to work from home as well so i'm fortunate to be able to do that and she'll come out and she'll hug me on her break you know so it's been just such a great experience she though she loves it but she's excited to go back and uh but i have been hearing from families who are like it's next week you know put on the brakes and we mentioned this earlier um is there any sort of case by case i think you alluded to it or have we cut off any if maybe their family member is sick or if they've had reservations based on a new diagnosis and one of you know they're having reservations about sending their kid back is there any chance that they could go full virtual or is that just a no um moving forward i don't know if there are many we haven't had a no yet i mean okay so it's a case by case yeah we've had a handful of folks but it's been kind of back and forth so it's kind of evened out the numbers with the virtual um you know we're trying very hard folks might have to be on a waiting list of some sort if it comes time because logistically we might not be able to fit people let's for example and this is another big complaint against desi they're racking up but a number of my colleagues as well you know they had us create this model of education according to certain guidance only so many kids in a classroom six feet so many kids on a bus etc etc so you work and you plan all of that and then for those folks that didn't based on also how many folks were not coming back so okay those kids are in hybrid um excuse me remote etc so and all the districts set some kind of guidelines like we tried to do um at a at a grading period you could come back or and the elementary really was stay in it all year because unless there's some certain circumstances really no need because they're on the same curriculum we hired the teachers etc but now desi a number of um from what i understand colleagues have had parents then complain to desi when the district said i can't fit you in my cohort we've already done and dusty's has said we cannot legally hold them out of coming to school um and i know it's back and forth either way to virtual or here so all i'll say is once again we haven't said no to anyone about a switch but sometimes it's pretty difficult to make yeah yeah we just work with everybody to the best it's great no i think that everyone's done a great job monumental task um in terms of the techo with um the special education i i have heard parents and i've read some comments and i've heard from some parents of course they all you know um that they there there are some generic sort of modifications uh obviously it's not anything comprehensive or personalized individual um how are we specifically handling that because i can just imagine that is um really stretching the limits of of of who we have to help in those areas for those students so how how has that been going right i from my middle school conversations pretty well they have one specific special education teacher assigned to grade six and it's mostly the agreement grid b grid services that they're working on so i know check in with those kids etc making sure that's happening um and i do understand that the other grade levels have special education teachers working with those kids and especially with the related services so we don't have that many um so my conversations with the middle school uh that it's being accounted for and dealt with excellent i'm not saying it's perfect no no i wouldn't i wouldn't expect that um you know this is certainly just crazy um let me see have there uh have there been any sort of concerns or complaints around i don't know have we we've had a couple of cool days have there been any concerns with kids being too cold in the classroom with the windows open or anything like that no i well i haven't heard anything no good not not yet we're preparing for it in my head yeah we're a lot better lucky yeah yeah we wear layers for now um and then in terms of and i'm sorry if i should know this already but um a picture a picture came across my facebook timeline of my son on i forget what you call them my son with uh disabilities uh during probably an ot or pt session with some classmates an old photo gosh you must have been in second or third grade on um oh i can't think of what you call those little things on wheels that you just the scooter boards scooter or something um are those is that equipment sensory rooms is that equipment able to be used for the students that are in there and how are we accounting for keeping all that stuff clean i'm thinking of some items we've purchased like the smaller items we've purchased extra but also the bigger ones we've told and actually it was in our mou about cleaning equipment that we have cleaning product there so let's say let's say a swing for example a larger swing that it can be used but we've made it clear there's no way that we can be on a schedule with a custodian coming running around every single time a student uses it so right there's cleaning product available for the teacher to wipe it down if they um i know um one of the at the pre-k k at cushman she's got the monitors assigned to cleaning some things so i guess it's all hands on deck really but but the equipment is usable good yeah that's and as you know with the regular classrooms especially the elementary we bought like shoe box full of various items for their kids so they have their own boxes of their own items yeah if you will yeah um no i think i think that's all i have i i just yeah i commend everyone um the the i'm thinking of littlest learners i saw a picture as well on social media with the desks and the mat next to the desk to show the space and those children don't know any different and and the colors are so bright and i'm sure that the the um the feeling and the of the emotion of the the cheer and the welcome you know from the teacher is probably wonderful so it looks it looks good so thank you thanks thank you thank everyone that's it thank you mrs amarillo you're welcome all right it's next up under new business uh request a vote to approve utilization of school choice funds and uh mr kylie will handle this or what would you do yeah uh first before he does this i just want to provide a little update on our enrollment right now um so we have 109 school choice students right now 32 in grade 9 30 in grade 10 23 and 11 and 24 in grade 12.

so again you can see that as enrollment has increased our qualifying scores have also increased which speaks to that belief that we had students who were more than capable of doing well on an ap or in an ap course who were sitting on the sidelines so it really just validates the efforts that our teachers and our our counselors and also quite frankly our families have put in to really push uh students to challenge themselves and take the most rigorous coursework so we're proud of that again i wanted to highlight just a couple of departments you know while we are proud of all of the departments again the english department um leading the way here in terms of the qualifying scores um three or above you can see uh just a few years ago was 54. we were up to 118 this most recent year again you can see english language and composition has had a dramatic increase as enrollment has increased and then english lit slid back a little bit last year i'm not overly concerned because as i mentioned we had a number of teachers teaching the course for the first time um as well as you know increased enrollment and so a much more diverse um student enrollment student population so um overall very satisfied and um very proud of the job that the english language arts department has done again um history and social science uh another example of some some strong results here just three years ago qualifying scores and this past year up to 119 again that 119 actually is a little bit higher because two of those scores i mentioned that got re-adjudicated were actually in in history and social science so that's up around 121 currently so again it speaks to the strong performance of our students and our teachers and could not be prouder um of them i do want to um give mr reed our ap uh our social studies lead teacher rather last year he um he's actually becoming kind of a uh uh a utility player for us last year we had our teacher who usually teaches world history was out on um uh parental leave last year so he he jumped in and taught world history for the first time and you can see did a fantastic job at just by looking at the qualifying scores there this year with the retirement of miss vicente who was a long time ap psych teacher mr reed jumped in and is teaching ap psych for the first time this year so i told them no pressure but based on those world history numbers we're expecting big things out of our psych program as well so um i thought i would give a little shout out to mr reed because we certainly appreciate his efforts um last year so that was kind of a general overview i wanted to talk to you specifically for a few seconds here about for a few minutes here about the mass insight partnership because as you know a couple of years back when we asked to be able to partner you supported that and i think at the time you asked that i come back and report out on how the partnership has gone so um last year in addition to having a pep rally for our ap students at the start of the year in the spring we did our or just before um the pandemic actually we had we did a recruitment fair and we talked to the students about the fact that our partnership with mass insight along with the outstanding teachers and opportunities at dartmouth high school really lead to ap success we really believe that and i think that you'll you'll agree um with some of the numbers we have to share tonight first being 430.

32 in grade 9 yeah you said 32 32 and grade 9 and 20 yeah i know i figured we were their best bet i don't know so 109. we'll take it thank you so in um in the spirit of your conversation that we had uh i think last year regarding school choice and the desire to um bring at least large school choice expenditures to the committee i wanted to make sure that you are aware that for the last this is the third year that we've been funding the lease cost of our one-to-one initiative chromebooks uh from school choice so it's just under eighty thousand dollars seventy nine thousand seven hundred and twenty nine dollars and thirty two cents that we um had planned on funding from school choice funds and hope that you'll support continuing to fund from there so we bring that forward tonight right now there's uh 550 300 and 87 cents in the fund so obviously we can you know can we can support that through this at this point and so it's for your consideration and discussion and we'd be happy to answer any questions you might have about that it's the final year of the lease page i was just going to say are these dollar buyout leases or fair market value um jonathan are they dollar buyout leases off i think so dollar buyout a fair market just out of curiosity yeah we own them once this is done excellent thank you i'm not i think it's important i know that uh several of us had that conversation last year regarding school choice funds um uh anything anything i think you know over ten fifteen thousand dollars we ask you to bring in front of us so i appreciate that you did that um so uh chair will stay in a motion mr chairman make a motion that we authorize the uh expenditure of school choice funds in the amount of 79 hundred twenty nine dollars and thirty two cents uh for uh mr kylie's memo second motion by mr noon second by dr jenkins on the motion any other discussion john so if we've got 109 students that's another 545 000 coming in this year on top of this so be good yeah okay thank goodness thank god for small favors yeah actually that's a good question on on the discussion just out of curiosity um actually i'll ask after the vote all in favor opposed motion carries unanimously when do we receive because i know it's a reimbursement program mr kylie so it's based on october 1 numbers yeah we receive it gradually throughout the year so it's it's paid in gradual increments thank you used to be used to be december in march when i was in when i was working i used to be like december and march but who knows what they've changed okay but the money we're receiving this year is based on last year's numbers right okay dr jenkins so i would like to we don't have to have this discussion tonight but at some point in time sort of have some discussion about what our plans are for that money i mean i personally i don't necessarily see it as a rainy day fund i mean it's raining right now right and so if we've got you know 500 000 in there when it's like pouring right like this would be the time that we use it or i would like to see us use it more regularly and aggressively to do things i mean that's part of i think why we have it is to do some of the nice things like mass insight and chromebooks and stuff like that um in our lab across the yeah i mean this is this is great stuff and so for me that's part of the reason why i voted for school choice so so we can have funds to do the sorts of things we don't normally have so i'd love to have potentially some conversation about what our plans are for that money maybe down the road because i don't necessarily want it to be savings to backstop stuff i want it to be i mean we should ask the town when we need that stuff this should be stuff that doesn't mean good good stuff for our for our schools you know and maybe the the springtime as we look to um you know what the spring is going to bring us after the january 1st we might need it how do we how do we support you know how can we do above and go above and beyond what we were doing to support students mr kiley i think that we would expect this upcoming budget cycle to be particularly challenging and a good opportunity to utilize some of those funds in a way that we haven't in the past but just so you it you may recall that in january we brought to you um i mean january seems so long ago with all that we've been through at this point but um we brought to you a list of expenses that we had either already expended or planned for school choice so i agree it should be used for those things that really can you know supplement what we can do otherwise and things like funding the istem program which i'm not sure you know how much of that we'll be able to do this year but hopefully we'll be able to do it in some form the lots of professional development that comes out of there instructional technology support again funding one-to-one computing strength and conditioning programs um renovations in the buildings that we wouldn't otherwise be able to do lots of stipends for staff to do things that are you know really extra uh special for for kids so i mean those are some of the things that we had planned on using it for and had used it for in the past and i think will you know certainly continue and hopefully uh funding is such in the fy 22 budget cycle that we can still just you know use it for those extras that's my hope i wouldn't i would agree thank you mr chairman personally what i'd like to see if we're going to you know use this is kind of use it not in an operating budget type of deal but all you know one-time things or certain initiatives because i mean if this money of it dries up i don't want it to be a but a budget plug so that if it dries up now we're scrambling to to plug that hole so personally it's something that i would like to you know like one time thing you know we're making payments on the chromebooks well that's fine because we got them type of deal and things of that nature and the list of mystic kylie just went through i'm good with those but that's just my my two cents on the matter sure i have no problem with the committee's uh you know input look we can maybe put this on the agenda in the next month or so and we can have a further a little bit more of a discussion on it yeah i mean it may make sense to wait until we know what the state budget picture looks like to have that discussion but sometime yeah yeah for the end of this month yeah yeah i'm going to hold my breath no no no no no can at least stop you know start a conversation about it and then wait to see what the numbers look like yeah thank you next up everyone should have received in their packets a proposed school committee date through december 2020 any comments questions concerns about the dates that were provided to you i'm good with them good i'm good we're all good that's fine we're good easy enough i think i just lost my agenda thank you uh in the next up superintendent's uh update okay a couple of things once again non-covert related which is nice um the middle school honor society had an induction last week i think you may have received the poster perhaps in your pocket of the number of students i think it was 37 students so i was able to attend that virtual um ceremony and of course laura gardner did a nice job as usual with those students and preparing that ceremony so that was nice the high school honor society virtual induction um will happen october 15th at seven o'clock so i'm sure you'll get some information on that if you want to check into that one as well uh we also have an announcement from gene sheridan our director of food neutra of nutrition that we were awarded a grant in the amount of 65 307 dollars it was from the massachusetts executive office of energy and environmental affairs and this is um really to keep fo folks eating so her plan is to purchase machinery to be used at quinn in the high school it's about sealing packages and food transport and increased refrigeration at de melo and carts and other materials like that so it was funny because she sent us the baker polito announcement and she hadn't even been told she got the grant yet so now she has been so that's good um also just wanted to provide a quick update of our sports program i'm really happy that we were able to let kids play and and you know again we every day is a new day so we've completed two weeks of practices and advancing to game competition this week for field hockey soccer and volleyball golf has played three matches and we are what one of the things i like that um we're doing is we're kind of keeping all the kids because we don't know what might happen especially with with covid cases you never know about quarantine etc etc so um in a couple of the programs where we'll have a velocity level as well as two jv that will split the season and each play some games volleyball included three levels two competitive and one developmental so keeping kids there um and cross country will be competing in meets with all the team members football starts tomorrow believe it or not with cheerleading and unified basketball as you know that's in the planning stages for whatever they call it the wedge season the fall season the floating season and everybody has a name and as far as music updates and i mentioned these because of course um these were programs we started even before we started hybrid and getting kids together and you probably saw some as you came in remote learning instruc instrumental and vocal classes are going well and of course ian says the teachers have done a great job which we know and elementary and middle school general music classes have adjusted to the remote format he's been working with teachers to produce some nice online resources for students for remote and of course they were very happy to get their k2 students back marching band has been divided into three smaller ensembles for the fall season to meet the state guidelines and percussion and wins groups just completed their first two weeks of virtual evaluation which you probably again i always step on mr news's toes i think i'm good our color guard program just did the first video performance and um we've been invited to participate in something mr nunes a live streaming event in october uh with some of the top marching band programs from across the country so those are just some of the fun highlights other than like i said excellent what happened thank you dr gilford welcome quick question uh around sports are we uh are we allowing fans in the building for any kind of games okay that's been our our decision that we and i hope you support that because i know a couple of communities are now starting to do that and it was a little pressure but yeah to have to be responsible for masks and then contract tracing i think our our goal should be to provide a program for the kids and not have to worry about those i 100 agree with you i ask you that because my daughter's uh playing uh you wanted to come no no no volleyball and and i guess there's a scrimmage against new bedford um next week and she's telling me that new bedford is allowing fans yes um which you know i i'm that's kind of it's kind of disappointing yes we're not from what i understand from andy christophuli we when we said no fans all the other districts followed suit and now with a little pressure from powers that be they've switched it and he let me know that last week and i said no our focus is on keeping our kids safe we do not have the personnel to maintain you know to watch everything and i just have serious concerns that our teams are going to be playing if the you know in new bedford in a red zone right now where where they're where their cases are so you know i would ask you to you know have a conversation with him and put a little pressure on your badge because i i disagree with that and i'm surprised that meyer um you know i agree allowing that i agree i have nothing else uh anyone else for the good of the community go to the committee uh next meeting uh next meeting what's up october 19th yeah monday october 19th 6 30 in the dartmouth high school media center right tonight here yeah and there's no executive session tonight so a chair will entertain a motion to adjourn so moved second motion by mr noon second by dr jenkins on the motion any further discussion go past it's been so long you

now 430 were the number of students who took advantage of either an ap saturday study session that mass insight offered or took the mock exam um that mass insight offered to our students and so that was 430 uh students who would not have otherwise had those experiences and one of the nice things about their saturday sessions is our students get to learn not just with other dartmouth high ap students but they're exposed to ap students from across southeastern massachusetts um and so i i think that that's a tremendous opportunity for our for our students at dartmouth high school to be able to have that experience they also get experience to other ap teachers from across the commonwealth as well um and it it's on topics that ap teachers from across southeastern mass say hey i could use some additional support on this topic or that topic or i might not get to that topic um and that's how mass insight identifies what the saturday study sessions will be so again that was the benefit of being partnered with mass insight as well i do we do have we reviewed the data in terms of attendance data and this is an area that we're focused on improving this year uh those saturday sessions they started out high the second session was not where we'd like it to be in terms of attendance so that's an area that we're focused on this year the nice well i guess um i think it will be easier for students to attend um obviously it's not going to be in person the saturday sessions anymore they're going to be virtual um for this school year and they're going to be spread out over a week as opposed to just one day so i'm confident that our attendance will improve and that our students will continue to benefit from from those sessions and certainly from the mock exams which provided our students good feedback that they could then use to prepare uh in the in the closing stretch towards the ap exams in addition to our partnership with mass insight for our students our teachers benefit as well and we had 16 teachers who took advantage of the summer long institute in july of 2019 now so those teachers were able to attend the week-long institute at bridgewater state um with no out-of-pocket cost you know at dartmouth um one of the nice benefits is that our teachers do get a thousand dollars for professional development um each year but this partnership is nice because it doesn't require any out of pocket cost not even upfront so our teachers were able to enroll for the summer institute um at no cost no no additional cost to the district other than our partnership fee um that we pay um but again our our teachers get to take advantage of that week-long experience they hear from the best ap teachers you know across the the nation they oftentimes have sessions that are led by the authors of the ap textbooks um so it's really a phenomenal experience for our teacher teachers in addition we had teachers who were able to enroll in the pre-ap institute which is um you know training geared toward making sure that the pipeline is strong so students in honors and college prep level courses have real rigorous coursework that prepares them so that it's um they're ready to be successful when they get to the ap coursework this past summer uh so the summer of 2020 obviously had to be virtual um but we had 10 stu 10 teachers rather who took advantage of the week-long summer institute this year as well so over the course of our uh you know we're just starting our second year with mass insight here we've had about 26 teachers who have taken advantage of the ap um summer institute uh professional development opportunities so again that's to a benefit to the benefit of our students in addition to the week-long institutes mass insight also offers us the two-day workshops in october and this is you know traditionally has been two days where teachers can get out of the building get away from the hectic pace of the day and really focus on their own professional learning it at the high school level it's extremely difficult to find good high quality content specific professional development and that's exactly what these two day workshops offer for our teachers it's content specific ap professional development and i have never you know i've worked now this is being my third school that i've worked at and all three i've been fortunate to partner with mass insight i have not met a single teacher who does not come back and rave about the experience that they've had at these two-day workshops the networking opportunities in addition to the professional development uh is world-class and so we had 12 teachers who took advantage of that last year again this year will have to be virtual and it will be two sessions for each night for a week so our teachers will have an opportunity to still get the professional development it will just be split out over a week and it will be virtual part of the the fee um that we pay to mass insight it's a fifteen thousand dollar fee um each year but a portion of that comes directly back to us so five thousand dollars comes came directly back to us in the first year and those funds are used to support ap coursework so in year one with that five thousand dollars it went for smart tvs for our english language uh arts department and again it wasn't to watch tv but it was um a cheaper alternative than projectors and so it allowed them to uh chromecast and share students could share their screen so that they could present so that they could co-construct essays and and things of that nature um and so that was how english language arts spent their portion of the five thousand dollars um in science we identified ap physics as a priority since it was the first year that that course was offered got some lab equipment um specific to ap physics and then math opted to um bolster their supply of graphing calculators in year two we don't get five thousand each year it's a little bit less that you get back but you get three thousand dollars back this year that we're now and again math opted for additional graphing calculators in science we're targeting ap chemistry uh for some additional lab uh resources and equipment and then english supplemented um some some text resources uh for the ap courses in terms of uh our stem related ap courses at dartmouth high school and that's how mass insight defines their partnership with us they they support our stem related including english courses obviously but we had a 25.6 percent increase in exams taken at dartmouth high school this past year in math english and science um courses and just to put that in context for you nationally ap courses ap exams in this these areas were down 14 so we saw a dramatic increase um in our ap exams taken and to put into a national context there was a significant decrease because of the pandemic so i think this really speaks to the commitment that our students have the support we got from families as well as from our ap teachers that when we went remote in the spring without any advanced knowledge our students really dug in and stuck with it um and i think that speaks to the test uh that speaks as a testament to that it takes a community um approach that i talked about at the outset of our of our presentation here in these same areas we saw 21.6 increasing qualifying scores so again that's something to be proud of and that 21.6 percent just to put it in context again nationally there was a decline of 7 in qualifying scores so our students really um outperformed the nation um and obviously built upon an already strong ap program that we had at dartmouth high school and and they did it in the face of the pandemic which i think just is something we should all really be proud of real quick just the future of advanced placement at dartmouth high school one of the key messages that i hope folks will take away uh from tonight um and from our you know our students as well as our um you know families at home is we're continuing our push to democratize access to ap there's a lot of reasons why you know from a more moral ethical standpoint i think we owe it um to our students to make sure that the demographics in ap closely mirror the demographics of the school as a whole right in other words we're not we're trying to make it so that it's an inclusive ap program it's not reserved for for the few but we want to do it strategically and we want students to really be thinking about a four-year plan um too often we still see students waiting until their junior and senior year and trying to cram as many advanced placement courses as they can and that's a recipe for for failure or you know to struggle certainly we want students right in ninth grade we have ap computer science principles that is a very accessible advanced placement course and we encourage students to really consider dipping their toe in in the ap water their freshman year and that's a course that's available to to our freshmen from there we expand as you can see 10th grade there's quite a few additional offerings obviously 11th and 12th grade have the most but really we push students to be thinking about over the course of your four years you know um start slow and kind of build and and you know everyone's able to handle a little bit different right um we want people to push themselves but we don't want it to be so much that you you have four or five aps in a year and then you're over stressed and it's not manageable for you so we encourage students to really be thoughtful and this ap at a glance sheet that you see here is in our program of studies it's hopefully a helpful tool that parents and students can use um when they're planning their course of study we're also we've worked hard to minimize or eliminate prerequisites whenever possible um a lot of times and it's not uncommon um to see at the high school level where we put in place barriers to our advanced coursework and we we really have worked hard to remove those barriers um we have a supportive school a supportive environment we have the pace period available really what we need to recognize is that students who are willing to put in the effort can be successful in an ap course it's the effort that leads to the achievement not some innate ability not you know um not anything else and then finally we've really um push and continue to push this can do mindset can do over can't do um so often you know we we talk all the time at the high school about the fact that your mindset uh ultimately leads to your success or to your failure and that can do mindset will always triumph over they can't do so um or really continue to focus on expanding our ap program and then finally this is uh these are this is the projection for this current school year it's just over 800 though that could have dipped in the first month we always do you know we we try and push kids to stick with it stick with it stick with it but you know we always lose a few at the very beginning um typically so i can update this number but we're right around 800 in terms of um student enrollment in ap courses at this for this school year so we're extremely proud of that and again it shows that concerted effort to really push our students to take the most rigorous coursework that's available to them one other thing i should have mentioned was at dartmouth high school we were very proud to find when we talked with a representative from the college board that dartmouth high school actually had the second largest increase in ap exams taken this past school year in the entire commonwealth of massachusetts so while we're extremely proud of that we shoot for first place at dartmouth high school so we're hoping that this coming year we might just hit that target but we're extremely proud of our students for sticking it out this this year again we continue to build capacity with six new teachers this current school year uh teaching ap for the first time we have two new additional ap courses that we offer this year i alluded to already ap spanish language had a great meeting with ms chavier and miss um mrs souza our ap uh spanish teacher our lead teacher in the world language department and that's a that's a goal of the world language department to really strengthen and expand our ap spanish program in the coming years we look forward to supporting her work to do that and we also added ap research uh this school year as well and then finally before i answer any questions there might be we're looking forward to offering the ap capstone diploma uh program at dartmouth high school and um for folks who might not be familiar with what that is it's just an opportunity again for a student to earn a credential upon their graduation that shows they are really an ap scholar they've taken ap seminar and got a three or higher they took ap research uh and earned a three or higher and in addition to that throughout the course of their high school studies they earned three qualifying um sorry four qualifying scores on additional ap coursework this really speaks to what i said just a few slides ago though that you really have to plan if this is a goal of yours we support you um but you have to plan for that over the course of four years no one's going to achieve the this uh in one or two years so um really pushing students to be thoughtful and to plan that over a four year period finally i think you know share some conclusions with the committee i think it's safe to say that the advanced placement program at dartmouth high school is stronger than it has ever been um our team our ap team has already identified a number of areas for growth and we have plans to make sure that we continue to grow grow our ap enrollment and to continue to um improve our the number of qualifying scores that we have we're excited to be offering the ap research and diploma program and feel that it really aligns the district has focused uh over the past several years on future ready students and i think that the ap research program really is so tightly aligned to that there's no more authentic work than having a student be able to take ownership of a topic they're really passionate and interested about and doing high level research while they're in high school i you know i don't i don't know of any other program that would better align with the district's initiative around future ready students and then finally i hope that this point resonates the success of the dartmouth high school ap program is truly a reflection on the efforts of every teacher at dartmouth high school as well as every teacher within the dartmouth public schools ap is the end of the line but when students get there they've experienced a number of teachers from pre-k all the way up through their ap experience that have prepared them for the rigors of ap coursework and so we couldn't do it without every single teacher of dartmouth public schools and we hope that they take as much pride in the the data that we shared tonight as our ap teachers do at dartmouth high school with that being said i'm happy to answer any questions that there might be well first of all thank you uh mr tebow for a well thought out and a well informative presentation um i know i just learned a lot and clearly our our partnership with mass insight uh has paid dividends over the years uh so i thank you for that so at this time i'm gonna turn it over to any of my colleagues that have any comments or questions i'm not sure if anyone would like to start or mr nunes said thank you mr chairman thank you uh mr tebow and i agree with you it was nice hearing about something besides covert uh and being a sounding board for that so thank you very much for that a couple of basic questions uh with the students taking these classes and you know getting the threes the fours the fives that they get they get a chance to get college credits i.e they don't have to take certain classes when they get to college is that how this is going to work and how many classes you know can how many credits can they get towards their college education or does it vary oh okay yes so so i apologize because i'm on a little bit of a delay here um i'm listening um through the youtube feed but um so to answer your question mr nunes it does vary from college to college um and so you know in some college in in many state um college and universities that three is an acceptable or qualifying score three four or five but it does vary from college to college and um what the amount of credit that they get you know it would depend from one institution to the to the next would be would be the answer but it certainly does save money um for students who earn qualifying scores because they can go right into more advanced courses i mean i guess does somebody have an opportunity to almost take care of you know one semester of college in overall in the long run or pretty close to a whole semester 30 credits this is priceless this is i had a student who took care of a year a student who took care of a year my brother got a year so for a student who was extremely motivated who planned out their ap courses you know um like i suggested starting in their freshman year yeah they could certainly earn um a number of college credits and um you know when they enter be pretty pretty far along okay thank you and the last thing just to complement the teachers on everything they do i know a number of years ago i was here on a weekend there was something going on and you know i was here and went to leave and there was a one of your teachers had signed in and that and this was like nine o'clock on a saturday or a sunday night and that teacher had a full classroom of students you know going over things for an ap exam so not only were the students dedicated but on you know giving up a a saturday night or a sunday night but you know the teacher was here too so you know again my compliments and my thanks to all the teachers that you know work at this and the students because it's not easy i mean when you look at what you know it's always amazes me when you see the students you know when they're graduating what they've done you know with co-curricular activities and clubs and still taking however many uh ap classes so my congrats to everyone and thank you dr jenkins so i'm sure mr tebow's probably waiting he's hearing from from mr nunes so should i should i go ahead or should i wait i think i'll i'll go ahead because while he say thank you my question will then come through i think so that's reasonable all right so i i also want to say thank you i think um you guys have been doing a great job i am particularly impressed by your outreach to um get students who might not normally uh consider enrolling in ap um to do that and and i like that um i thought the report was great um one thing i might like to see if we ever do this again is the number of students participating because like you said we do have a number of high achievers who take multiple ap classes and so the real sort of measure expansion should be the number of students taking aps um and and that's i'm really particularly concerned about that democratization so i'm glad to see you focusing on that um and i'd love to see that um i have two questions um the first question is i was glad to see that computer science has moved down to first year i'm wondering if you've considered moving any of the other ap courses for first year students like gopo you know i teach intro to american politics ap geography or ap psych many of the history social sciences could potentially be available to year students and i'm wondering if you guys have considered that and then i'll wait jonathan can you just repeat the question again i do so the comment was i'd like to see the numbers broken up a number of students participating which would be great no the question is whether they've considered expanding some of the history social science classes to first-year students it was gopo geography and psych so if if the question was have we considered expanding it um so american government and politics did expand this current year that we're currently in that we just started um and i don't have the slide in front of me but i want to say it was like 20 students last year we're up to 60 um this year um you know and and certainly so what we do when we look at the expansion of ap programs is we take that ap potential report um which identifies students that are likely to be successful and it lists every course that a student is likely to be successful in and we look at those numbers and let's just say if the number is a hundred that means there's a hundred dartmouth high students who have demonstrated that they are likely to be successful on that particular ap course or in that particular ap course we use that as kind of our benchmark and and we kind of say how do we get there um and we we we identify we share with the students those ap potential um letters and so the students know hey you know i demonstrated that i could be successful in these four courses and then we pushed the students to enroll in at least one of them if they if they weren't going to enroll in any of them um you know and obviously some of them do enroll in multiple courses i mean i'm happy to uh i don't have it off the top of my head um but i'm happy to provide the number of uh unique students who participate in advanced placement coursework i can certainly share that that number with you um because i think that that's the foundation of of one of the questions that dr jenkins was asking that was one the other it was the other was a little bit of a misunderstanding like the the way we do it now relies on psat scores and the psat happens sophomore year what about opening up eight more ap courses to first-year students because they can only take one right now so it's the first opening to freshman students is that yes right so so right now we have the um computer science principles that's open to freshmen and that's a conversation that we do constantly have um with our lead teachers every every you know annually we review and revise the program of studies um and so if you went back to look at an old program of studies from just three years ago there were virtually no 18 in 9th or 10th grade i think there was you know it it might have been just us history um as a 10th grade option very very few um and you can see from the at a glance sheet that was included in the presentation we now have a number of them in 10th grade i know we still only have one in freshmen um we're working on it there's you know um in a previous school i was at we convinced the ap stats teacher for example to allow stats for freshmen because it's a very different type of math and it's it's accessible for students and reluctantly we we got them to be able to to agree to that and then when we followed up you know um some of the most motivated students were those freshmen because they felt like they were you know uh they were special that that was a special opportunity for them so they were very motivated and eager to demonstrate that they were up to the challenge so we're always looking at how we can expand um ap and by expanding i don't mean just the enrollment but how we can make more courses accessible in the earlier years um so it's not all backlogged into the or shoehorned into the 11th and 12th grade years i'm good thank you dr jenkins this is wait yes so i have some comments as well as a question or two um first i also want to uh congratulate you and the high school staff for expanding the ap program i have two students who are at dartmouth high both are doing really well one is a freshman taking the freshman program um i think it's a lot of credit to the staff who say i don't just want the students who may get a five but i'm like i really want to bring in all these students who are excited about the subject and i want to you know stimulate that excitement so i think that's fantastic um also another comment having been a i taught ap us history i think having that kind of training that the student the teachers are getting over the summer and in that october workshop is it's game-changing so that is fantastic that you're committed to that through mass insight i think that's you know great i also want to compliment the staff in the spring um i don't know how many i assume everybody saw but the video that the ap teachers did for the students who are about to take the ap exam was adorable it was so great it was you know so cute and positive and you know we got teachers you know it was again it really translated well and kids got to see their teachers who they missed at home and i thought that was a great send-off in this kind of wacky time we had now the questions i have are two one you had mentioned that you're trying to minimize the prerequisites for some of the ap classes i look at ap calculus and i think about how to get there um so i'm wondering i know there's been some combinations um so i guess so one of my questions is when you say you're limiting the prerequisites how are you especially for those a b now we have bc for the calculus how has how has that kind of changed the formula for getting there and the second comment is i'd just like to say i'd love to see macro economics come back i think it's a unique course that's there isn't anything like it in the offerings and you did offer at one point i taught it so i'd love to see it come back so that would be my second so i'll tackle the second question first um i too would love to see ap economics come back um we had the one thing you can't do though is you can't um i'm very hesitant to put someone who's not comfortable teaching it in a position they have to teach it right because we want the kids to have a good experience and to absolutely be prepared for the exam and um in my experience if you force uh uh you know i just wouldn't want to force a teacher who's not up to it uh we did have some conversation because again when we look at the ap potential report economics is one of those that we absolutely need to get back in so so we'll continue to work on that um because i agree ap economics really um you know is an area that uh our students would benefit from in terms of um the prerequisites i should clarify that when i arrived at dartmouth high school three years ago that in the program of studies there were a lot of prerequisites like a student must have an 85 or above in an honors level you know core so you know it was a lot of those types of prerequisites in our in our courses um and you know i don't think i'm sharing state secrets when i say that grading is somewhat arbitrary at times and so it's those kinds of prerequisites that you know were um or teacher recommendation was another prerequisite that existed quite often those are the prerequisites that we've worked hard to eliminate so we haven't changed you know course pipelines we haven't changed um what courses or what course progression students should still move through so much especially for for things like ap calculus right or eight you know um things of that nature the prerequisites that we rarely work to eliminate are the more subjective ones like you know teacher recommendation or a certain grade in a certain course um as a prerequisite those are the types of prerequisites that we've worked hard to to eliminate because as we know there's a number of reasons why a student could do poorly you know they could have something happen in their life you know in their sophomore year and maybe they didn't that grade they earned didn't really demonstrate what they were really capable of you know those kinds of things so um those are the prerequisites that i was referencing that we we've worked hard to to reduce or actually to eliminate really anything else mrs white no i think i i think that you know really concludes i guess i would just again looking at the i am curious about the progression to those again that math because i i find that the way that we've had math structured and you know with students i know we're doubling up now um as for allowing some students to double up in the algebra geometry as they get into freshman year but again i'm i am kind of curious about the pathway to get to that you know bc senior year and where that actually happens with the math i mean the other ones seem like you know you could take a uh you know uss3 course or you know other ones but those need a progression so that's what i was kind of curious about how a student gets there i guess so it so in the math in the math pathway specifically we have um an advanced algebra geometry uh course that's available for for students in their uh freshman year we also have um an advanced uh course you know if there are juniors who need to kind of progress a little bit quicker and then recently we actually just i just met with mr lauer and mr gill and ms chavier recently to talk about offering and i know um if mrs oliveira is watching she'll be excited about this because her and i have had conversations for a couple of years at this point now but offering a uh summer math course that's not remedial and not um to recover credits but but a course in the summer that helps students advance um you know so that they can get to the to the top of that uh math um you know pathway as well so um that that's currently where where we're at awesome thank you thank you i i mean i don't really have any other questions my colleagues uh asked some pretty comprehensive well-rounded questions i just want to thank you for this presentation it is encouraging to see the program grow and and the value of the partnership that we have so that's it thank you mrs amaral yeah i will just echo my colleagues comments and statements mr tebow you know looking back from 2016 through currently 2020 i think the numbers speak for themselves with the increase of student participation in ap exams um i'm thrilled um i have a freshman here at dartmouth high she was a little reluctant to take the computer ap course but i'm i'm hopeful that uh she will get on board with uh at least one of the other ones come sophomore year but that being said you know one of the things that really echoed to me in uh your presentation is um and and i think it's i think it's extremely true and you hit the nail on the head and i think that's what makes dartmouth public schools such a uh a great experience for our you know for our students as well as our staff is you said the success of the dhs ap program is truly a reflection on the efforts of every teacher at dartmouth high school as well as all within the dartmouth public schools so i think that i i couldn't have said that better myself that just goes to show you you know it's a it's a team effort and you know everyone helps our students get there so uh kudos to you mr tebow as well as um to your team and to all the teachers here in the dartmouth public schools thank you for a great presentation thank you all very much i really appreciate the opportunity thank you thank you thank you sir thank you all right uh next up we have a resolution 21-01 request for unpaid leave i'll turn it over to dr gifford thank you mr chair so as you know you received a request from um one of our tas in the building um requesting an unpaid leave um the original request she is she is out on leave right now the original request was not able to be granted by me because it is not something that's in their contract so they do have um she does have so to be consistent with the contract i was not able to grant that um because they do have certain items that they're able to request and be granted an unpaid leave for but that was not one of them and she did take advantage of the item h under article 9 which says other leaves of absence may be granted by the committee i believe you have her letter um so if you were to grant the leave it's been suggested by mr smith that that leave is granted through the end of the school year not like from this day going forward for a year but through the end of the school year and we have no problem with that miss mill has been a wonderful employee it's just if i was to stay by the contract it wasn't something that i was able to do sure understood any of my committee members have any questions in regards to this uh resolution dr jenkins we are provided with a resolution do we need to read the full text to the resolution is that why we were given it or can we just make a motion sometimes you have to read the right we don't i'm just sort of asking how we proceed i don't really have a question about it yeah no that's actually a very good point i i don't know if it's necessary i don't think it's necessary i know when um i know when we do msba resolutions and all they're very explicit and we have to read them but we can certainly just have a motion to approve it okay so then mr chair i will make a motion that uh the committee approved resolution 21-01 which is granting a temporary unpaid leave of absence miller um for the remainder of the 2021 school year as requested and in accordance with the dea assistance contract i second that so i have a motion on the floor by dr jenkins the second by mrs amaral on the motion any other discussion mr nunes yeah thank you mr chairman quick question uh she does state in her letter that you know if uh we either have to go fully remote or if we're able to come back fully in person uh she'd like to request revoking this request is that something that's out there for her yes okay thank you yes i'm good thank you dr gifford any other further discussion jay hearing none all in favor aye aye opposed ocean carry thank you thank you next up under old business superintendent's update on the start of the hybrid phase of school dr giffen okay thank you yes um as you probably know we had a successful start i say every day is a new day so um last week when we brought our students in our pre-k peer partners k12 and grade six i know a number of us were at all of the schools to see them come in and um it was really first of all it was really joyful to drive through the coming to work and seeing kids standing at bus stops it was almost like wow you know it was very very very good so um we had a good start um teachers were extremely happy everywhere i went uh the i just have to give shout out to every building the um as well as transportation the nutrition department everyone that worked so hard in the planning that went into this i mean if you saw some of the pictures on our facebook page of kids getting their lunches and all of that but just to see the number of staff members that were out to greet students as they got off the bus and or appearance drop them off etc so we had a we had a good start and um we'll see you know every day's a new day so i think with um with that said i just have to once again give shout out to mr kiley and and his assistant lauren because the transportation as you might know is a bear to plan for they're not only planning for what's happening right now but thinking ahead of when students continue to come in and um even though you you ask people to provide their information in a timely manner the day before when we still get 50 emails of changes is pretty much crazy i guess as you know but they've done a fantastic job of trying to accommodate all of the families so that went pretty well we know we'll have bumps as we go along but we're here to try to solve those um so what i will say one of the things i want to say also is that as we move forward i want folks to understand that we we will have people that are sick and we already have had folks sick with normal flus or whatever it might be or stomach aches etc our process is that the nurses will if it's someone in school the nurses look at the symptoms that people might come up with take caution abundance of caution perhaps send students or staff home always the recommendation is to have a test if it's certain symptoms they they let us know what's going on um if a test were to come back positive which as we know we had one that we thought was we're still waiting the negatives and all of that we are in complete and always frequent contact with the board of health with chris mishu we let them know what's going on they advise us constantly we cannot give out information about staff the only thing or students so what we do is we provide a general comment to the staff that might say if it's a particular school a member of our school community has tested positive and then we are in contact which i confirmed tonight mr kylie with chris micho with the board of health we assist in any contact tracing that might go on we might say uh that staff member was in a room with so many so many students etc or a bus etc and then they will do the contact tracing alert with families so i just want to make that clear because we've had questions about why don't we giving more information we cannot give personal information we will give again general information that there's a positive case we follow all protocols and we give out what we can so i just want to make that clear for people we don't even say if it's a staff member or a student it's a community member a member of our school community and let the process um be followed through so i just want to make that clear but we're on it so i think speaking about that now going forward i think our plans are very uh well thought out and being implemented as far as being in school and um we're well prepared day by day for these things that will come up because we know they'll come up people are sick every day you know and and we just take those precautions that are necessary um we also wanted to address we had some questions about when kids are absent so um that's a that's a tricky one because we thought for example the elementary students we would be able to put um into our virtual academy but we're really going to analyze that because we don't want those we don't want that to be a shuffling ground either for kids if it's let's say they're sick and they're out two or three days but then they're back again so um i talked to mr tebow today about the high school plan and i've actually i'm waiting for um some comments with mr dome but we think that pretty much we'll treat a lot of it as a normal illness students are out ill and with other things that teachers will continue to maintain their google classrooms assignments will be able to be accessed especially at the high school for example they'll be able to bop into if they were on quarantine i'm speaking of something like that uh be able to bop into the pace period to get some help etc and of course when they do come back um have plenty of time to make up assignments and and reach out to their teachers so we're looking at it like that and and a lot of our situations as you might know are are case by case we analyze what's happening we speak with the parents etc so not only with that but even with students now being maybe having a fever etc do they come back do they not come back so it's it's a lot of it's case by case but i just want people to know that we're prepared we understand the scenarios we understand the process we're in constant con constant contact with the board of health all right so the other thing i wanted to address was i guess our biggest challenge right now of course is um again the techa issue so i've asked mr galicio to speak about that because fortunately or unfortunately he's had to take a huge he's playing a huge role in in tech coordinator if you will um beyond any role he should be taking as we know he's he's extremely busy it's it's beyond but um because of his real positive attitude um he's really but he's been able to really get a good handle on teca itself and analyzing and trying to support the middle school guidance counselors as they support our teachers so it's not all bad but there are some bumps and grinds and so i'm going to let mr galasha kind of speak about that just to give everyone a brief history just you know in august in july the department of education uh realized that the state was going to need an online alternative to those students they're staying home they compiled a committee and they came up with some recommendations in early august the models they came up with were independent self-paced learning like ingenuity and certified teachers that would teach kids with uh an online program like teca there were two other companies that were sharing that so the mad rush went to to do that we went on on august 4th a few days later it was decided we would go in a certain direction and on the 11th at our school committee meeting dr gifford presented the relationship with ingenuity after looking at ingenuity from a middle school standpoint we felt that it was not um independent self-paced learning was would may not be advantageous for middle school level students they might need a little more attention and we switch gears to techa which is a certified teacher one of the difficulties at the same time we created our own program thank you tracy oliveira for creating a program of our own virtual teachers for our elementary school students with our own curriculum that we're very proud of the it was cost prohibitive to do that at the elementary middle school level because you need multiple grades and multiple subject matters to to do that so techa was a good option we came in fast and furious with teca i think part of that is i've learned a lot and i think when we do techa in january it'll be a lot smoother there's a bumpy road trying to get the find the contacts at teca who does what and in fairness to them we came in very late there but also there were a lot of technical issues in the sense that they mentioned that the chromebooks would be sufficient for those students to use but some of the technical issues didn't play very nicely with the chromebooks so we resurrected the pcs around around the buildings um boosting ram redid their software and got getting them to those families i've been visiting the families at their homes it's been very nice i don't go inside social distance on the front lawn but able to provide other chromebooks that might be because the products that they use have a lot of flash and java which don't play as nicely on chromebooks as they do on a pc that has a processor etc so we've we've played through that we have 54 students at the middle school that are currently working in that and with access to the console now i'm able to monitor as the guidance people are able to monitor these students as they progress we're noticing that they've got to play some catch up with with lessons the the clock began when they began the program i still have technical issues i deal with these families unable to print the machine is not working properly i'm still having access issues trying to either remote access or also bring them another machine we don't use the old pcs as much anymore since all the kids have chromebooks in the district so the pcs are available we just we kind of frankenstein them as we call it we take parts from many pcs to build a good pc and we provide those to the students i mean to the to these students so i'm still working through the technical issues um i've learned a lot in the process the kids are working the program is quite um quite intuitive it shows where the children are in regards to their progress um i think we've learned a lot about techa too that may not have been completely in the literature that we really have to be an active role in the process of techa in regards to monitoring these students and checking on their work it wasn't as much to push them off to some other teacher there is a teacher out there and some of the feedback i've gotten from parents in the in the program are changes to the the techa program in regards to the number of times that they meet the number of live lessons and such like this the structure of it which i'm going to provide to techa for updates in their program but this was their program for those students that are currently doing it this is what their program does perhaps a re-evaluation for next semester may be in order we've had some teacher some students some families that have reversed and gone back to the hybrid model they've reconsidered the structure of what we're doing in the schools the cleanliness of the schools and they've opted to get out of the remote version and go back to the hybrid model when it becomes available but with that any questions i'm a wealth of knowledge when it comes to techa and virtual learning you and me both mr galicia yeah that's right that being said first question that i have is where the dartmouth public schools is allowing families to revert from from tecker if they've made that decision and i know that's kind of based on desi guidance and recommendations that um there are we are allowing families back into the hybrid program um initially those those like past couple weeks but it's getting to a point now that the continuity of your education is going to be disrupted if you have if you jump over from this point forward so i understand that to make that uh mention here but i really feel the middle school and the guidance department should examine the the students in um situation to make sure there's not you haven't done half of a year at texas you should be on it right on an in strictly individual basis right with that said i'm gonna you know i'm gonna speak up a little bit here i am disgusted at the way that the department of education sold um or investigated some of these remote programs i have family members in another school district that opted to go for tekker one of the middle school and one at the elementary school and i don't know how clear it was that teca made this or whether it was techer or was it was pearson or whether it was the department of education but to have i think a lot of families and i can see a lot of families frustration in dartmouth that there are only two 30-minute live lessons a week per subject and out of those two 30-minute live lessons one of them is recorded wow so there's only one 30-minute live lesson i have got a huge fundamental problem with that when we are selling this we're trying to like offer this as a solution to dartmouth families that don't feel comfortable for one reason or another to send their students into the hybrid program at the dartmouth public schools in shame in the department of education for not making this clear up front there has been poor communication coming from them in addition to techa in in um pearson the conversations that we had with them after school started with techa should have taken place weeks before weeks before this baloney that we're dealing with right now that every district in the commonwealth of massachusetts is dealing with because of their lack of guidance and lack of communication is outrageous i really hope that come the spring semester that the department of education and commissioner riley in the department the board is much clearer with their alternatives to remote education because i'm telling you right now this is completely unacceptable for the students and families of dartmouth and the students and families of techa students across the commonwealth of massachusetts it may be a very good program as a alternative you know for those students that may not want a traditional education for whatever reason but they were inadequately prepared for covid19 and for all these districts signing on board so i want to thank you mr galashaw and the central office team and for the guidance staff at the middle school for making house calls for you know getting involved as much you as you have because i am as a parent as an educator and as a school committee member i am extremely disappointed with this decision um i feel as though um we've had better success the high school had experience with with edge annuity so they hit the ground running mr gill knows it he knows his kids and the students at the high school are familiar with self-paced programs and the guys department does they knew to check in teca gives you the impression that they take it from here and it truly is edgenuity 1.2 it's it's just a step up from ingenuity it is an independent program such as the ieps mr oliver um one thing i developed realized in the process they they say they do iep services they don't they do they'll do accommodations in regards to a large print or something but that's not really accommodating an iep so we we learned we've we've talked to um special education teachers within the middle school to make sure the ieps are addressed within those students that have them in our 53 54 student i think the biggest problem i'm sorry in one second dr jenkins i think the biggest problem is that i don't think the dartmouth public schools nor many other schools realize the time consumption and the burden that this program because looking at it now and i can't speak for dr gifford or anyone else is that it may have been worth a while to try to figure out something else because this is extremely time consuming um i i've heard from my niece and nephew who are in another district who's in teca their teacher one of their teachers has 48 students and they can't meet the 504 obligations right we're sorry we can't meet him so i'm extremely frustrated from a number a number of levels dr jenkins so i just want to reiterate that because i think on social media a lot of people were saying that these issues were the result of oh we just we decided too late um i have a colleague who's in plymouth they decided like the week after the guidance came out and their students were added into tech after ours right so this is not an us issue it has very much been a techa issue they are they were overwhelmed i think and completely unprepared for the volume of students and they had major difficulties handling and processing it and and shame on them too because then they simply started the classes rather than adjusting and saying hey maybe we'll delay we'll do some other stuff i do also though as a teacher want to i think push back a little people are saying oh well people who are you know in the online learning at the middle school and the high school are doing so much more work than the students at the middle school of the high school and i think that's because they forget that when you're in a class right and you're that's like work that's time on task and so yes you are going to have more reading or things to do because you're not sitting in the classroom you're doing more reading because that is your time on task so there's this misperception i think that it's too hard but i think parents are forgetting that if you spend x hours a day in a class and you're not having that live instruction all the time students have to be doing something and commonly that is reading something or doing assignments or things like that so i mean i 100 agree with you that i think this was this is not an internal problem this is an external problem and i think it's it's really important for people to understand and it goes up the food chain between the late guidance with deci and the the tucker being completely overwhelmed it's it's not been a good situation but there hasn't been much we can do about it yeah no i just wanted to say um we had considered doing techa for the elementary schools because we needed someone to take the students from there and i just want to give credit to the professionals within our ranks here in dartmouth the elementary school principals that got together to talk about it and tracy oliveira who got together with them and and dr gifford of course and mrs roy uh miss roy and uh to talk about it um because the the program we created here we should sell to other people it was a proper program we missed ms oliveira was able to find five teachers that would take over the virtual program we set them up in an area of quinn elementary school um we equip with all their information their equipment and such um and they are hit the ground running and they've gotten great reviews it's our own program so we're gonna bottle it we're gonna sell it to someone else but you know i'm so happy that they got together to examine this rather than just jumping into techa and it is that blind faith and and as you said mr oliver just in in desi to say they suggested this program but it really wasn't tested it wasn't proven and it wasn't explained in great detail of what it was so um but uh i just wanted to mention that i'm so happy of the program that was designed that was designed at the elementary level i've heard mentioned that one to you i have heard i don't know if my colleagues have but i have heard no complaints about the elementary school different compliments yeah nothing but positivity nothing but positive feedback in high school it's just yeah and at the high school the high can i follow up one thing i also want to give kudos to mr gill um he has been doing a ton a ton a ton of work and we have one child an ingenuity he has really done a bunch of work i'm sure you've seen some of it to really get that all going um he's super responsive and he's doing a really a really great job so kudos to him on that what's the news yeah thank you mr chairman uh just to follow up on what you're saying with with destiny and everything else i mean i think to say that they dropped the ball would be a complete understatement i mean when the in all seriousness when the governor shut everything down the end of april you know for the for the school year type of deal i think at that point in time it kind of became obvious to everybody that what was going to happen in september was not going to be pretty as far as you know we're going to be able to get students back into the classroom and that and all the different guidances that they came out with and you know we'll have something next week we'll have something next week we'll have so you know next week next week next week became the middle of august when they finally came out or just beforehand when they came out you know the end of july and they said well by august 11th we need your three plans type of deal and how you gonna do it and everybody at literally at the 11th hour is scrambling to find you know what you're going to do and who's going to operate it if we're not if if somebody can't be in school then who's going to operate and how we're going to do operate it i think it goes back to a little bit to what mr tebow was saying and he's his presentation on ap is the work of the teachers and the administrators in this system from pre-k to 12 that have done the best that they can to get this program up and to get everything up and running whether it's students and hybrid and i've talked to you know parents you know that are students in the hybrid in elementary and middle school you know sixth grade i mean that's the only one that's bad everybody is thrilled the way the hybrid has worked so far they're thrilled to have their kids back type of deal and you know and again shame on desi because they personally they dropped the ball from day one personal opinion i agreed thank you mr lynch do you have anything else on the re-opening no i think we're good so i i do have a couple of things if the committee would just entertain me for a few minutes here um first of all i i think we've all said it many of times but i i honestly don't think it can be said enough the monumental tasks that the [Music] the staff and faculty here at the schools at dalton public schools have done i'm still proud of the decision that we made as a committee um to do a slow roll um i think it was i truly think it was the smart idea um i think we're we're we're slowly rolling things out and things are coming together i am extremely i'm i'm really pleased i'm happy to be a datmon school committee member i'm happy to be a dartmouth parent um and i'm thrilled to have these professionals working for us that being said i know that there's been some some uh scuttlebutt on social media there's all let's face it there's always scuttlebutt on social media right um we got and not social media but just general comments from a year from as we all know parents staff members students talk to us about just the safety the general safety of you know making sure that our kids are our students my daughter included uh will be safe in the doctor public schools when they um when they're back in in-person learning um i think i think it's important to note that you know first and foremost um i think we all agree is that it's student safety is the number one the number one priority i know that i had a i had an email yesterday that um after uh it was notified that there was a potential or there was a positive case here there was a uh a list i don't know if it was in the standard times or mass live one of those and it had the list of communities and it said dartmouth zero and someone said well they're not being transparent well it was because it was because of the cut off the deadline i i think it's safe to say that this committee and this administration is extremely uh you know we're nothing but transparent and we're going to continue to be transparent um with this community one of the things i'd just like to just touch base on with mr kylie is that um there's been some back and forth about um and of course a lot of this comes from our staff stopping uh concerns being in the rooms about heating ventilation air conditioning and air exchange i had a camera i had the opportunity to have a conversation this afternoon with mr kylie and obviously the perfect solution right now is that all it's warm enough all our windows are open we're able to circulate the air in addition to our our unit events that are in our air circulators they're in most of the classrooms but i think it's important to note that we're diamond schools are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on hepa air filtration i know we spoke about this a little bit but i think it's really important for the people at home to know and the parents to know that come the time in which we can't have windows wide open and it's 30 20 degrees outside that you know we're going to have hepa filtration in all our classrooms uh we have the electrostatic sprayers um can you can you just talk a little bit about what we're doing proactively mr kylie to to keep our our students and faculty and staff safe sure so as you said mr oliver i mean we're committed to providing air purification in the rooms at this point i would say that it's very challenging to acquire air purifiers especially ones that will work effectively in a classroom environment smaller units are more readily available but i ordered some air purifiers in i think early july [Music] and they were supposed to be in in september and now we found out they're going to be in in march so that gives you an idea of the type of you know backlog that these companies are facing and obviously those may be of no use to us and we might end up canceling those but we at this point have acquired 60 air purifiers and distributed them on a priority basis to the nurses the isolation spaces the staff members who have physicians notes indicating that they should they should have an air purifier and then classrooms and other spaces that don't have windows so we're prioritizing those areas and at the same time making efforts to acquire more uh air purifiers so that we can outfit all our rooms with with uh air purifiers that do have hepa that multi-stage filtration including hepa so that is sort of an ongoing process and our hope is that by the time it is we're into heating season in which it's no longer feasible to keep the windows open that we'll have those in place how are you doing certainly as soon as we can get them so that's what we're working on there and you know we've we've worked on the ventilation in terms of tricking the uh i think i may have discussed this at a prior school committee meeting but um essentially tricking the universe to take more outside air again good measure for now but not a measure that's going to last forever um because when it gets too cold out if we do that first of all it's going to be too cold in the rooms second of all we're going to freeze the pipes and we're going to just break the whole system so so there is a point where that you know that can't be done um and it's it's a ways off still so um but but good filtration is certainly something that we're you know efforting to to accomplish in all the rooms at this point you mentioned uh you mentioned sprayers but really it's about disinfectant so it's about um well it's about good hygiene first of all right so the hand sanitizer available in all the rooms and around the buildings that's an important step because that helps keep us from spreading our whatever germs we have all over things um but then disinfectants can be applied in different ways wipes um we've delivered 600 and i don't know i just looked now i can't remember i have so many different things here you know 621 tubs of wipes around the district for folks in classrooms we've got disinfectant spray in every classroom so handheld disinfectant it's not lysol but it's basically like a lysol disinfectant um kills sars it's epa less than kills sars cove too which is this um we also have the electrostatic sprayers which we recently we got in last week and we're setting up we had a little glitch with the chemicals that we ordered and the right quantity not coming in so we've had to sort of reinvent that process and go with a different uh product so so we're working on that but we do have the product yeah we do have that product we we have it in concentrate form so we now have to set up a little differently the way we're going to be the way we're going to be addressing that in each of the buildings but we're in the process of doing that so that we can spray or classrooms nightly so we've worked with um i've spoken with afscme the custodial union regarding the opportunity if it becomes necessary for them to work overtime in order to uh be able to support cleaning of the classrooms with the sprayers i built monies into the uh the c the coronavirus relief fund uh grant that we received to support that so to support those staff members working overtime to make sure the classrooms are clean and then obviously during the day uh we've shifted staffing so that there is more custodial coverage during the day that they can keep keep track of the high touch areas and try and maintain clean you know cleanliness throughout the buildings during the day so it is awesome to have kids back i mean it's it's been so long you know six months in these buildings empty is too long but um but it does it does present all these additional challenges and i think we have a good plan in place and what we're finding is that like like our kids we're learning every day you know and we're learning about okay did we think about that plan correctly and we'll adjust and then and uh as we go and you know make sure we provide the safest environment possible so well thank you for the thank you for the update this is welcome so i just want to say this is great i think it's fabulous but i'll say it to our home audience the single most effective thing that you can do is follow guidelines for preventing community spread right when the disease is not spreading in our community it's going to be less likely to spread in our schools i'm a little nervous there's been some uptake in community spread and i'll tell you i may have lost my temper a few times i've seen people socializing and it takes everything right there's an article in the new york times that play date that you know just one friend that's what creates community spread if we want our kids in school then we've got to be responsible for that as a community we need to wear masks we need to stay away from each other it's hard it stinks but if we don't do that then our kids are not going to be able to be in school so it's on us and we have to do all those things but those things are way more effective if covet is not getting in the front door and that's on us to do and i think people are letting their guard down and now is not the time because i don't think i know my kids would be crushed to go to school and to have to stop going to school again so i think we as a community need to pick it up and we need to do better to make sure that our kids and our staff can be safe and be in school excellent point mr news yeah thank you mr chairman i think and to piggyback on what dr jenkins says and i know we've talked about it before but the the onus is is on the parents is on the students if you're not feeling good don't come to school and you know as as dumb as it sounds i mean if you know the student if your son or daughter gets up in the morning and they've got a little bit of a temperature type of deal don't pump them full of advil or tylenol and say well now they're down to normal because as soon as it wears off in a couple of hours they're in trouble and we're in trouble for 24 hours if it's a 24-hour bug keep them home please you know help us help you help everyone and we'll all be better off how i like to help us can all right um actually i'm going to shift away all the you know from the safety because i have another kind of point that parents have brought up you know and again i want to get back to what um mr oliver said earlier is i am really proud of what dartmouth has done and is doing and i'm really proud of the model um the every other day hybrid i think you know i've talked to families and friends who you know they're in schools a week on two weeks off you know in their joint remote um and i and again i think with teaching and learning to get back to what dr gifford had said you know back when we talked about the plan at its onset you know this is this model this plan is you know best serving our students to really keep them connected to their teachers um and to their classmates into the content but with that said um i do have a number of parents and i'm just just so we can answer this because i'm sure some of you are getting the same like email over and over again why can't we on that opposite day that the kids are at home why can't they zoom into their classrooms i i for me you know when i look at this as an educator i want educators to be focusing on the students that are in front of them because i think that you know they're going to do the highest quality live instruction that you know method but i think if you can you know speak to that a little bit more just because again i keep finding that same question why aren't we zooming in why aren't we why can't we do that and i think you know i think the way that we've you know we're going forward is you know all i'll say is we we investigated it with the middle school it would have been a different model because um the technology wise it was it was going to be a big undertaking to do that but also if the teachers are teaching the same lesson so to zoom in on the hybrid day i guess they could change their entire thing but it's just something we decided not to do um they're also not condensing if you will the standards and teaching almost double that's that's what we've asked them to try to address things because kids are going home to be able to work on um the projects and all of that and the reading assignments etc so you know it's just i don't know if you have anything else to say it's just kind of the model we chose can i add to that i know so i have a lot of my colleagues in higher ed who are doing the high flex we call it in higher ed which we say is the worst model of education there could be it has been really really really difficult it's not you just zoom in that's not how it works you have to completely redesign the entire curriculum to integrate there's technological issues so like you know they've got five different things up trying to figure out and then they're not really instructing to the kids so at least from a higher ed perspective when we don't have to do like you know we're doing three hours a week high flex has been a real really sort of disastrous on very many levels so people think it's like oh you just zoom in that's just not how it works pedagogically i think if i could follow up on that too the other thing that i'm saying is people saying well are they only getting half the instruction and i that's also not true because people assume that the teacher is just up there lecturing all day but so much of teaching is about providing instruction and then working independently to learn and reinforce and practice what you've learned and so what we're just doing is separating that right you're getting the the live instruction in class and then you're doing the independent reinforcement and practice of those lessons so we're not giving them half of the instruction it's just half of the instruction is happening in a different place i think that's really important because that's the other thing i say oh they're only getting half the school year that's that's what's happening that's not happening it's a little difficult yeah and just you know just to piggyback on you know that i've had you know again you know i've been trying to kind of explain like you know model lessons to to parents that you know again and there's there's time that's lost by kids coming into the classroom you know and there are certain things that you know you're going to want to use your manipulatives in class with your students who are right in front of you if you're doing a lab or so you know something else whereas you know there's going to be so much loss for the the kids that are i mean they can't do the lab so they can you know and they've gained skills during remote learning where they can potentially you know do breakout sessions or work in a project at home with someone else in their class so again i'm really proud of what the model that we came up with i really you know again as i go back to you know other people are saying well you know my kids are going to zoom in i just think oh that's not going to be that great you know so again i just feel like you know congratulations one of the things we did um do i know when i went around the schools the elementary level um have the kids come in on the morning meeting so they just touch base um say hello to their friends so uh that was when i talked to a lot of teachers last week that was very successful so that was one i mean it's not the all day but at least it's a touch base i think that's good yeah the mornings yeah yeah and i just want to mention what you talked about with the uh data or whatever a data point i don't know if you said it was in the standard times or something about the number of cases so just to make it clear for folks um deci requires us if we have a confirmed covert case to call in that information they just ask um whether it's a staff or a student who we are and what school so we did that of cour you know last week we had um one i'll just say once again a member of our school community that was positive but that member of our school community had not been in our schools at all up to this point so there was no close contact et cetera but that was reported to deci then we had the second member of our school community that was positive we've reported that we brought it to the board of health they did any contact tracing which was as far as i understand very very very minimal um since then we've been told that was a false positive we're waiting for those results so desi with that data it's every thursday that's updated from my understanding so that was not reported until october one and so it's every thursday that was september yeah there's 30 at the date exactly yeah which was zero so we corrected the false positive so from what our reporting is we should have one community member now being positive for the next round because i talked to them today about the yeah that's so thank you for clarifying yeah we we don't hide it we do what we're supposed to do i have no doubt any of my fellow committee members have any other questions yeah well i mean i'll go i um i wrote a bunch of scattered notes here typical of me um one cute thing i saw her on social media a positive thing on social well media was a shout out we had done uh for um a member i think she is a uh grade two virtual teacher and her her goal and i i'll paraphrase summarize uh i'm not going to verbatim but her her goal so what is your goal her goal was to um get a job you know obtain a job in education during a pandemic which i thought was was funny so and there were some comments on there from presumably uh parents of students that were just you know accolades of we love her so clearly that's going well i've heard from a lot of families about that my own experience remote you know i have a fifth grader at de melo and um shout out to mrs colbeck it is she i'm very fortunate that my little fifth grader my baby sorry fifth grader is an independent learner she's really motivated so i'm i understand i i i recognize that i'm i'm lucky in that respect but she is having the most amazing time and you know she i'm lucky again to work from home as well so i'm fortunate to be able to do that and she'll come out and she'll hug me on her break you know so it's been just such a great experience she though she loves it but she's excited to go back and uh but i have been hearing from families who are like it's next week you know put on the brakes and we mentioned this earlier um is there any sort of case by case i think you alluded to it or have we cut off any if maybe their family member is sick or if they've had reservations based on a new diagnosis and one of you know they're having reservations about sending their kid back is there any chance that they could go full virtual or is that just a no um moving forward i don't know if there are many we haven't had a no yet i mean okay so it's a case by case yeah we've had a handful of folks but it's been kind of back and forth so it's kind of evened out the numbers with the virtual um you know we're trying very hard folks might have to be on a waiting list of some sort if it comes time because logistically we might not be able to fit people let's for example and this is another big complaint against desi they're racking up but a number of my colleagues as well you know they had us create this model of education according to certain guidance only so many kids in a classroom six feet so many kids on a bus etc etc so you work and you plan all of that and then for those folks that didn't based on also how many folks were not coming back so okay those kids are in hybrid um excuse me remote etc so and all the districts set some kind of guidelines like we tried to do um at a at a grading period you could come back or and the elementary really was stay in it all year because unless there's some certain circumstances really no need because they're on the same curriculum we hired the teachers etc but now desi a number of um from what i understand colleagues have had parents then complain to desi when the district said i can't fit you in my cohort we've already done and dusty's has said we cannot legally hold them out of coming to school um and i know it's back and forth either way to virtual or here so all i'll say is once again we haven't said no to anyone about a switch but sometimes it's pretty difficult to make yeah yeah we just work with everybody to the best it's great no i think that everyone's done a great job monumental task um in terms of the techo with um the special education i i have heard parents and i've read some comments and i've heard from some parents of course they all you know um that they there there are some generic sort of modifications uh obviously it's not anything comprehensive or personalized individual um how are we specifically handling that because i can just imagine that is um really stretching the limits of of of who we have to help in those areas for those students so how how has that been going right i from my middle school conversations pretty well they have one specific special education teacher assigned to grade six and it's mostly the agreement grid b grid services that they're working on so i know check in with those kids etc making sure that's happening um and i do understand that the other grade levels have special education teachers working with those kids and especially with the related services so we don't have that many um so my conversations with the middle school uh that it's being accounted for and dealt with excellent i'm not saying it's perfect no no i wouldn't i wouldn't expect that um you know this is certainly just crazy um let me see have there uh have there been any sort of concerns or complaints around i don't know have we we've had a couple of cool days have there been any concerns with kids being too cold in the classroom with the windows open or anything like that no i well i haven't heard anything no good not not yet we're preparing for it in my head yeah we're a lot better lucky yeah yeah we wear layers for now um and then in terms of and i'm sorry if i should know this already but um a picture a picture came across my facebook timeline of my son on i forget what you call them my son with uh disabilities uh during probably an ot or pt session with some classmates an old photo gosh you must have been in second or third grade on um oh i can't think of what you call those little things on wheels that you just the scooter boards scooter or something um are those is that equipment sensory rooms is that equipment able to be used for the students that are in there and how are we accounting for keeping all that stuff clean i'm thinking of some items we've purchased like the smaller items we've purchased extra but also the bigger ones we've told and actually it was in our mou about cleaning equipment that we have cleaning product there so let's say let's say a swing for example a larger swing that it can be used but we've made it clear there's no way that we can be on a schedule with a custodian coming running around every single time a student uses it so right there's cleaning product available for the teacher to wipe it down if they um i know um one of the at the pre-k k at cushman she's got the monitors assigned to cleaning some things so i guess it's all hands on deck really but but the equipment is usable good yeah that's and as you know with the regular classrooms especially the elementary we bought like shoe box full of various items for their kids so they have their own boxes of their own items yeah if you will yeah um no i think i think that's all i have i i just yeah i commend everyone um the the i'm thinking of littlest learners i saw a picture as well on social media with the desks and the mat next to the desk to show the space and those children don't know any different and and the colors are so bright and i'm sure that the the um the feeling and the of the emotion of the the cheer and the welcome you know from the teacher is probably wonderful so it looks it looks good so thank you thanks thank you thank everyone that's it thank you mrs amarillo you're welcome all right it's next up under new business uh request a vote to approve utilization of school choice funds and uh mr kylie will handle this or what would you do yeah uh first before he does this i just want to provide a little update on our enrollment right now um so we have 109 school choice students right now 32 in grade 9 30 in grade 10 23 and 11 and 24 in grade 12.

when a child is absent which happens a lot i have to prepare their stack of work for them to complete without any adult instruction the gap is getting wider and wider the high students are holding their own we are actually holding them back they should not be getting they should be getting four lessons a week monday tuesday wednesday thursday now they're getting two maybe three our struggling kids are sinking they're not internalizing what is being taught and all the kids are behind from missing the last quarter of last year this is not good for anyone i don't know for sure but i'm guessing the online kids are not faring well either please check with an online teacher i'm speaking for myself here i have friends on all the campuses that have expressed similar feelings but i'm speaking for me hybrid is not going well for me hybrid is the hardest thing i've ever done i truly have had days where i felt like i was on a verge of a breakdown i am a 30th year teacher i taught kindergarten for 20 years you can handle a lot when you teach kindergarten um i the last three weeks i have worked over 65 hours a week i'm tired i'm fractious and i'm worried sick about the kids i have thought seriously about trying to use my 730 hours with some kind of long-term disability leave something to get me out of this but i'm not going to do that i owe it to the children and i owe it to my peers to to work through this my blood pressure is high i don't sleep and i worry that this stress is going to cause my health an issue the hybrid is terrible but my loyalty like i said to my students keeps me going everyone i work with is in the same boat last weekend i was talking to my sister and she said lee it sounds like you're in trouble and i said i am in trouble but i work with a whole bunch of people who are in trouble look into the eyes of your staff look into the eyes of your staff and you will see people that are beat and broken and hurt their love for their job is gone as you know um or maybe you don't know i have kids from 7 10 in the morning when the buses arrive until three o'clock i have a 15-minute lunch break and a 30-minute special slash prep every day i usually walk to the office to check my mail and use the restroom during my prep so that diminishes my prep to 20 minutes there is so much parent communication today i printed out 75 pages of jojo which is the online app and that was for one of my sections so you know it's spaced and it's lots of information but still 75 pages um so i um there's so much parent contact having to go on i leave work after 5 30 every day and i take home so much work that cannot be possibly be graded during the school day i truly hope that we are working towards an alternative i keep looking at the numbers and i've tracked them when i can um and i don't think that ducey even set an attainable goal for us i track like three days at a time and boom we're past what i thought 24 was the grand number now i i think it's 10 i'm not sure but anyways so i don't think we're going to reach it it's not all good that's what i just wanted to make sure and i'm not here i'm not being a whiny butt i swear to you i am not i'm doing my job but the plea is for your help the plea is for your support we need to figure out a way to get our kids back to school four days a week i know there's risks i know that at the beginning of school we were worried about losing teachers but i tell you i've heard that several teachers who are going to at the end of this year try their hardest to find a different option if i wasn't retiring i would be doing the exact same thing so i i guess there's a blessing and a silver lining for me but that's that's not for everybody and that's sad you're going to lose a lot of good teachers if this really continues i just i don't i don't know what to say i don't have answers i i don't even have the energy to be on the committee or the time to be on a committee to help come up with answers but we've got to start looking the risk in our town as what i understand it is so low compared to the costs that um we're paying with our children and our staff um please think about what i'm saying i'm not attacking anyone i'm asking for help the kids need you to guide us back to school and your staff needs your help as well thanks thank you thank you thank you does anybody have any comments it's on the agenda correct correct okay any other any other call republic okay i want to say something i just want to thank everybody that came here today i mean i do i want you to know that the four of us sitting up here is all voluntary positions and you know most of you know i have kids in the district too and i definitely want to get my kids back in school but i appreciate everybody coming out and voicing their concerns because that's what makes a difference so i just want to thank everybody i don't know if lee left but i definitely appreciate her thank you um at this time item six information discussion items um superintendent's report please so you have a superintendent's report on your desk um cobin 19 update the metrics are out they continue to be in the moderate risk range for just one of the three uh benchmarks which is the the one that kind of people have talked about the the cases and last week it was at 24 which is cases per 100 000 that equals about 56 cases or so that occurred in the in the county last week i'm sorry on the week of september 13th there's two numbers that aren't highlighted those are numbers that that's what the estimates are for the next two weeks so tomorrow morning data will be released it should be about 24 again and then the week after a week from tomorrow data should show that it's 28 or so and that could go up just because that's what the um the cases are reported to date and that information you can see the cases per day on the back of that sheet it shows you what day this is coming off the department health services website and so it was 57 cases the week of the 20th and we're up to 66 cases right now the week of the 27th and obviously we're in the middle of this week now it hasn't been re-updated very well the enrollment as of yesterday our 40th day adm projection was 2056 adm our 40th day adm for last year was 22 18 so we're down 162 adm uh it's for the most part equally spread throughout this the school i think del rio is up it says 60 lost to 60 adm i think that's a little bit um it's a little deceiving just because they lost a large class and gained a small class so part of that is has to do with changes in the different cohorts coming through and territorial is down 36 adm but it is actually more bodies than that because a good portion of that is kinder so it's actually probably closer to 50 60 kids that are that territorial is down uh staff members of the month um we recognize our staff members of the month this morning um at territorial was kate fletcher who wasn't available because she was at work on thursday and had her baby on friday so i want to congratulate kate fletcher on the birth of her son but she was um the teacher and and she um took on a class that was twice a week it was in person and another group of kids twice a week it was um online so she she really took one for the team there we have alandra mendez was a staff member at territorial of the month our teacher at del rio of the month was daryl and rock and our staff member was paula meyer at heritage it was laurie miller um was the teacher of the month and our staff member was nicole curtly and at heritage or i'm sorry at the high school it was their teacher of the month of bernie boris and our staff member of the month was mary ellis and with bernie when we went in there she was actually she has a class where she takes our center's kids and those are the kids that are the have the highest disabilities the the most severe disabilities and she was teaching them how to cook in her in her kitchen so that's that's the kind of work that she does and why she's um deserving of that um and she was very excited to be honored to be um as they all were to be the the future of the money and again the mary ellis was our staff member of the month we have our asba county meeting and annual conference the county meeting is october 28th both of these in our annual conference is the first week in december both of these are being held virtually the and i think there's some did you end up voting annie i think the county representative was one of the votes yeah i think i did two different okay good good so if you are interested in attending either of these which again would be virtually please let karen know and she can get you signed up for those um i know that that uh typically we have one or two that go to the annual conference i can tell you that i went to the law conference which is actually really good um in person a little bit difficult virtually and so um you know i'd say you need to be really um interested if you want to do the annual conference virtually um prop 208 i know that we talked about this last time and penny asked me just to kind of put it as a reminder um as a as a qualifier i'm not telling you to vote yes or no on prop 208 all i'm giving you is some factual information i recommend that you do your own research and make your own decision on prop 208 um prop 208 is invest in ed would place an additional three and a half percent tax on earnings over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for single filers and five hundred dollar thousand dollars for joint filers as an example if someone made five hundred thousand dollars they would pay no additional tax if they made 500 and as a as a couple if they made 500 1 000 it would be three and a half percent on that thousand dollars so be 35 dollars that they'd owe an additional taxes so it's not three and a half percent on the whole amount just on the amounts above those thresholds the district's lobbyist estimated that this would result in 1.6 to 1.7 million dollars in revenue for the district the proceeds from the income tax increase must be used for staff salary increases does not include administrative salary increases along with cte programs and other teacher mentoring and retention program so it's very specific on what it could be spent not on administration so that's pro prop 208 again do your own research and make your own decision on that which you think is best and just as a reminder our governing board meeting for november has been changed to november 5th so that it's not interfering with election night and i encourage everyone to vote and they've actually extended the date to later in october to register so if you're not registered please register to vote and whatever you do whoever you vote for please just vote any questions anybody's questions thank you mr schultz oh i forgot two things yeah yeah the rate the most important things um we had uh information came out uh recently about the high school dropout and graduation rates now these are for 2019 the class of 2019.

the final change i'd like to highlight is an increase in the 403 b match it is currently set at 800 we would increase that to 825. this is a one-year contract for the 2020-21 school year the costs in this contract have been included in the 2021 budget and i would be happy to answer any questions the board members may have thank you mr taylor does anyone have any questions none at this time i just have one clarification and i i know you said a one-day insurance holiday which you're referring to actually it's insurance premium yes i'm sorry thank you for clarifying that you're fine it took me about a year and a half to figure that one out when i was first on the board so yeah appreciate that thank you any other questions or comments do i hear a motion mr president i move that we approve the the 2020 2021 master teacher contract as presented a lot of 20's in there there is sorry do i hear a second i'll second thank you mr alexander thank you mr hubbard all those in favor signify by saying aye aye opposed the eyes have it thank you appreciate everyone's efforts on that yes thank you mr alexander thank you now moving on to the next action item it's a motion to amend level a b and c salary and wage schedules reflecting sally and salary and wage increase once again mr uh jason taylor assistant superintendent of hr technology i'll turn the floor over to you this morning we are recommending a base salary and wage increase of 2 percent for level a b c and some level b d positions this will include all administrators and permanent support staff coaches salaries outside of the bargaining unit will also receive an increase of two percent this will be retroactive to the first employee work day on or after july 1st 2020.

yeah that's definitely number 21 though are you sure yeah i see running back to wall tech wait a minute if you are number 21 or related number chico porth gave me the roster i'll give you his home address just reach out to me following tonight's matchup it looks like ben weldon it's a good bet because ben walden's number 24 and i don't see a 24 on the bench we don't know so anyways once again back if your internet cut out that was not a mistake that was our technical difficulties we apologize for that and now bates trying to play it out to evans evan's got brunel sprinting he leaves it behind him a little bit a good trap made and he'll get it to cachovia who tries to work it to mazza now evans steps into it his hair is just extremely long he's got another quarantine cut [Music] all right chico ports off the hook this time for now that's definitely a one though right no it's a one it's a one all right if you're just tuning in we are into the second quarter about two and a half minutes in 20-minute quarters yes that's right quarters and devin doe back alongside brennan mclaughlin behind the mic dude colin evans just ate that and it's kicked out longmeadow will play it in they turn it over kicked out by sweeney and now brunel trying to step into one he works it intended for mazza oh and now kokovia brunel playing it back for weldon weldon loses control brunel stops it and he'll give it back to uh i believe that's mazza correct yeah he just drilled kikovia with the ball that's kind of funny they finally call it out they should make whistle masks for the referees because he keeps having to pull it up to blow it and he has to use it a lot more than usual so i'm still wondering like how much time you have to wait you think when they're kicking do you think they could put like a little like thing yeah like a slot uh well no because then that would violate the protocol and we're all about the protocol i mean yeah they can make a built-in whistle that'd be interesting just like something or just something that makes a noise like a mouthpiece that's connected to the mask and or like a little there's definitely i feel like my brother had a coach who had like a handheld whistle that you could just press and it would go so maybe something like that yeah or maybe an air horn now i'll be a little loud but all right if you'd like to go into business with us definitely reach out we will patent that idea as soon as possible yeah i need some more cash in my pocket too i think we'd make a bank oh high school refs who need whistle masks they're not income to us yeah not just in western mass but around the country and what i'm learning now in economics if the demand is high we can sell higher so we would make enough money and i could leave college which would be perfect timing with midterms and everything would work out everything would be fine great i'd have money i wouldn't have to do midterms i would just join grey horse and that would be it and then i'll be just living a happy life and you will live in my garage why would i live in your garage because it's my idea and you will be a college dropout i won't be a college dropout you'll be a college dropout yes with a lot of money and you will just be a regular common college dropout but once again back to the soccer game thank you for hearing our sales pitch apparently it's your sales pitch yeah uh yeah i was just kind of trying to be respectful there and kokovia will play it to brunel oh and kokovia will regain it he looks like he's got a lot of hair going i feel like he's been in the game the whole time he's he's gotta be a little gasped not a head not rocking a headband i think that's got no and as you say that oh oh he got us got us looks like that's cortina and steven's going in the game which looks like gumaras is coming out and i might have missed the other guy that steven's gaming for 14 minutes left in half number one quarter number two and our score is one nothing long meadow so i couldn't tell you what just happened there to have la metal get the ball uh yeah we're just gonna say there was a foul we're gonna oh yeah gotcha so we have a report in that you can only kick the ball so far and that's why there's a whistle yeah these rules are something um definitely should have done my research before this now mazza ooh a little move there some guy had a little flash behind the um bush over there and it was really screwing me up and bates can't quite get there and i'll roll out and see i feel like that should be a foul and yep i got it okay i'm catching on not a boy looks like we're learning something here just tuning in once again 13 minutes ago in quarter number two one nothing our score devin dobeck alongside brennan mclaughlin and jamie rook behind the camera thank god it's not brennan uh we did golf yesterday brennan missed a hole in one because he was on the camera and i feel horrible for the kid who got the whole one hey because brennan had a chance to capture it and just pull the brennan hey i got a time lapse of this swing it's still on video it was basically like eight pictures because it was so fast that that was all we could do to slow it down well he's lucky he got proof so or the proof was him pulling the ball out of the hole which made mass live yeah so yeah but point is brennan pulled a brennan so thank god he's back on the microphone i'm gonna have to film golf again so i don't hopefully that improves definitely check that out on lcat should be up if it's not already within the next day or so definitely a little humor there um as long metal plays one through they're gonna get a shot off here walt zach makes a great play number 10 puns and moves on hey you like he like did a little shimmy there yeah i think he was trying to make a little tick tock okay i don't ever say that again a little tick-tock that was calling goodiness there we go now we got him yeah see that's that's what i'm gonna do for the second half gotta learn their names there you go i'm still trying to get our guys because it's very hard that they shrunk everything yeah especially and then the mass too like it's not helping the cause kirkovia plays it for cortina like i know rin tool because he's really owned us hockey ripped our hearts out in hockey like every year so he's kind of there and longmeadow playing it up stepped into by sweeney and cacovia comes away with it mazza plays it back to waltzak and he's gonna kick it the other way mckechnie evans kicks it out now stevens sends one to cortina lets it go through them mazza trying to play it back and they touch each other but they let it fly and mazza [Music] couldn't get it to i believe that's bates no that's not bad nope not bates that is he's very far away um he was number 15 oh that's gianni guyer ah yeah wait when did he come in the game well he's been so far over there he's probably been in there a while we just missed it yeah that's this is something longmeadow looks dumbfounded about what just happened [Music] oh the man big cheese page in the house yeah um very casual strides i should probably ask him if he has a spectator pass because we are all about the protocol and if he doesn't we'll boot him out here i'll just call sergeant bruno see like and we'll get him out of here it's like more no right there there's nothing that he could do like he had to run into the guy the way he was running like that just that's just unfortunate not ideal and it's played it'll be a little too strong i don't think metal will get there i'll let it go a little extra get his steps in waltzak will play this one yeah that's fred corn in those games steps in over there there's a lot of longmeadow fans that are running around i think they're long i don't even know they're running around the gate it looks like we had some people sneak in over there yeah that's definitely not hashtag the protocol but yeah sergeant bruno i doubt you're tuned in but we got we got them they're right there let me see them maybe they have spectator passes i mean maybe from their athletic director and now mazza comes away with the ball i saw his brother hunter today at franconia hunter purchase a new driver on facebook congrats to hunter on that nice used nike driver yeah nike driver yep that's crazy nike doesn't even make clubs anymore hunter is just a classic vintage guy he's got good taste you know that dude that could be expensive and make some money off of that i don't know about that but well like later on like 30 years down the road i mean yeah if you want a wall piece but i don't think anyone's going to be swinging it in 30 years never know hunter will probably swing so hard it'll snap yeah he's um he's not a small guy i would say he's not tall but he's he's very strong yeah that's yeah if you know hunter you know what i mean definitely miss mazza in the spartan backfield on the football team and that will conclude my hunter mazza segment and we'll once again get back to soccer i apologize i'm a little nostalgic with football not being in the fall definitely more of my forte yeah well it's not really my forte i kind of do the same thing in every sport talk when i need to talk and miss home ones i mean that was my first time doing that sport so and to be quite honest no one knew it was a hole in one until we actually got to the hole and longmeadow walking in waltzak trying to get out of there that's ballsy to just dive in from the leg like that hey dove right in front of good irons i was trying to put some pressure extend their lead to two and mazzle will play it and that is moreno playing out wide that's geyer seems to be a little fist or hand checking over there oh and that will definitely be a whistle yeah cairo is very aggressive over in that corner and oh walter steps into one longmeadow coach visibly frustrated with that yeah that was good irons again with that for sure seems like every time llamado's on the attack it's good irons that's the center of it probably has something to do with that is it an attack yeah i know but it seems player seems like he got he's he's got a nose for the ball five thirty six and counting down in quarter number two score one nothing long meadow then a pretty even game spartans have a crossbar and a half they hit the football crossbar make a field goal earlier technically where it was at us uh that was longmeadow and then yeah they dung one off the side of the football i mean yeah that's the closer you get the football and stevens now he's chased down and the longmeadow cuts him off shielding the ball very well and they just just need a break and they just hit the turf for a few minutes and they're back up no that was fred corn with a terrific defensive play on stevens and it's touched in oh touch back and then what would mike say oh my gosh mike moynihan definitely did a great job with girls soccer last year probably not tuned in up at bowdoin right now i'm sure he's got work to do so he can be my dentist one day um he's a big baseball guy up there too you never know it could be but anyways where i was going with that is mike would say a sh i believe there's like three different categories of boots which is how far someone kicks it and he would have a certain one um i'm going to go with spoot i think spoot's the big one [Music] and it's going to be sent across field probably not advised to go all the way across the field but what do i know we're just the commentators and i have not i've seen much soccer in my day i've seen some of my brother but then he decided that he would rather play hockey so haven't seen soccer in a while still trying to adjust to the coveted rules the last time i was around soccer is when i played in like what fifth grade definitely managing uh with the exception of a few monologues that have been a little off topic but i'm sure our viewers are enjoying i hope i hope let's just say morning i'll get knocked down should be a foul but as usual matt as usual it is well they didn't call it that time so then how would it be as usual because it seems like they've kind of relaxed the whistle a little bit i don't know if you're watching the same game but well in the beginning of the game there's a whistle like every other second i think i'm going to start an instagram poll are the rest relaxed and longmeadow they scored but i believe that means offside and or touching i think it's a touching penalty it's very interesting remember that a touching penalty would be something and it's knocked away mckechnie gives a little look to the left look to the right and then passes it right down the middle and that was a touching penalty long metal ball too bad there's not a penalty box that thing would be full they'd probably call me out in the field and i'd put a few toe balls right in the back of the net everybody be sleeping on the toe ball but let me just say it's the knuckleball of soccer nobody knows where it's going i think i'd break my toe i'm nasty in gym class with it they don't know they don't know where it's going gonna miss the gym class days though yeah mr taking jim as a senior for fun oh me yeah and then corona had other ideas well let me just tell you it's all in the toe how did you do online gym i did not oh i had to write like a little thing a little reflection of what i did each day so i just go on hikes and then say i went on a hike and it was good and the weather was nice and that would be it oh that was uh touching you're not allowed to touch so like how many games does the soccer team play you think like 10 because i know the golf team has 10 matches i'm gonna probably say a few more you can't touch it with your hands up um i don't think you can touch it with your hands but apparently you can in this scenario 40 seconds to go half number one longmeadow clinging to a lead and clock bleeding out there seems to be some confusion and spartans just almost turn it over immediately so played back to waltzak he's way out of his net but apparently oh we're gonna get a whistle oh he's he's a little flustered down there i can see why that would be a problem because you're not allowed to touch but it looks like time's running now probably costs long metal goal but we'll go to half score one nothing lancers we'll be back for the second half action hopefully the spartans can get their act together and bury a few we'll be back on okay me and we're live back here at east long meadow high school as half time lancers lady song metal one nothing devin dobeck alongside the loud breather brennan mclaughlin okay you're not just i heard i heard you too debatable whoa thank you for tuning in if you're watching from home on the road wherever you are but please do not watch and drive because that is what we call illegal especially with the hands-free policy and we'd like to wish a happy birthday to colin goodine's nani happy birthday to nani thank you for tuning in we appreciate it oh you love to see that hope it's a good one and unfortunately i'm not gonna uh pull for the lancers tonight so as much as i want to wish you a win in this one hopefully the spartans come back and uh destroy the lanthurs the lancers rather oh i'm just happy i finally learned his name midway through the second quarter it took me a little bit and ball is booted away by waltzak brunell a lot of action going on right now it's so fast well i'm trying to say names brunel and you can't you're not allowed to kick it you're not allowed to kick the ball no that was a bust of an idea okay you were one for one with ideas now you're one for two okay darth dude i can hear you breathing right now i'm not breathing oh how you talking breathing through my mouth like a human being oh so you're a mouth breather handball you can't do that especially metal ball especially with kovid you can't do that like that's a big no-no even though they've been touching the ball um yeah we're gonna need freeman to sanitize that spartan coach is visibly frustrated yeah his arms have been in the air for good not exactly sure what's going on and longmeadow misses the net that one was close yeah luke almost scored there for longmeadow luke um um zylok i think someone tried to tell me luke luke i think someone tried to tell me how to pronounce it and i still didn't get it luke s yeah it's been him and good irons on the attack for la meno given that they are the attack men but i think they're called strikers brennan maybe know your soccer okay on the scoresheet it said att and i don't think that's how you s yeah well if you're from britain you say striker are we from britain because we'd be calling it football right we actually were and then we had this thing called the american revolution maybe read a history book brennan and there was a lot of other things but i won't get into it because i'll save that for the kids to learn once school resumes in person well they're still learning online but hey all i'm gonna say is if you're one of the young ones out there you just learned something that not even a freshman at holyoke community college knew there was this thing called the american revolution 1776 when the united states declared independence and won the revolutionary war years later and yes so you are smarter than the average college freshman slash brennan mclaughlin i'm still lost by that because if it figures figures all i'm going to say well why why do we call ourselves americans then if we're technically not from america oh goodness gracious yeah i'm just going by your logic the ball goes to longmeadow and they'll play it in on wall tech he'll swallow that one up swallow that one up yeah brennan maybe also read a thesaurus for once in real life jeez uncultured swine i'm commentating with and longmeadow playing it up intercepted by sweeney what was that breath that's what it sounded like sounded like a cow it's me when i am just devin catching the vibe yes okay good talk and longmeadow plays it cut off by mazza we're going to go mazza a mazza b and mazza c returns mazda a which one's massive b and which one's massive c the 11 is a and c is is obviously luke mazza obviously i'm pretty sure 11 is enzo and the striker is sonny yeah exactly striker yeah we got it all right s11 is enzo all right we got it now no eleven's not end zone 11.

lastly our teachers at azusa high school are finalizing their smart goal for this school year the goals emphasize common form formative assessments writing strategies and the use of engaging technology strategies thank you thank you jacob and we have the sierra high school representative alex arkenberg yeah hi good evening board members cabinet and superintendent ortega sarah just finished her grading periods and students grades have been posted for parents to view in the parent portal teachers have been meeting with parents to discuss grades last week and will continue this week our re-engagement committee has been working hard to support students with staying connected and attending classes miss sainz community liaison and mr lopez campus aid along with the help of officer conwell from azusa pd have been made have been making home visits on fridays to check in and support students in the coming weeks the team will be delivering hygiene kits which have been donated by the assistance league of covina the team's goal is to continue to make connections throughout the school year and that's all i have thank you thank you alex we can go ahead and we're going to go ahead and move to 8.0 report action of closed session matters at this time we have nothing to report we'll go ahead and move down to 9.0 general functions and 9.1 cobit 19 update dr dana mitchell good evening um i have three updates uh this evening the first one is that um think together yesterday think together opened up uh neighborhood learning hubs for our k-12 students uh they there are seven sites dalton valley dale lee foothill center azusa high and gladstone high school and each site has the capacity for four classrooms of 12 students each for a total capacity of about 336 students they are open from 7 30 to 2 30.

i'd like to call this meeting to order please and thank everyone um for for attending we really appreciate your presence um stand for the pledges of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you at this time we would um entertain a motion to adopt the agenda as presented i'll make a motion to adopt the agenda thank you all in favor aye aye thank you at this point we are um we do call to the public and as a reminder um the we are limiting today the call of the public and most of the time affect all of the time that i know of 30 minutes for everybody to speak three minutes per person and just as a reminder personal attacks on board members personal staff other people in the um attendance or absent individual individuals who address the board are discouraged policies and they i can read them out if you need them are provided by the board for disposition of legitimate complaints including those involving individuals on conclusion of open call to the public individual members of the board may respond to any criticism made by an individual who has addressed the board otherwise we are not permitted or allowed to respond to your comments they are usually directed to the superintendent okay so we do have one person who filled out a um participation it's there's another one coming okay um so i call on joni roach please did i promise that right joni yes bro okay thank you first and uh foremost don't want to apologize for the last board meeting that i came to i was upset it's been a couple of months back but i was upset because the schools weren't going to be opening up so i want to get right to this this actually started with me finding out that there was quite a few students that the hybrid online system was not working then i found out that 50 of the students are failing we have kids that are quitting we have straight a students that have kept straight a's all through school that are now wanting to quit they don't want to they don't want to keep going they're getting frustrated at this point i didn't know if this was true because i had watched uh mr scholl's video where he said it was going great and uh i had contacted the board of education the state board of education i've contacted the governor's office and i contacted contacted our local legislative representative for district number four and from what i understand is it is a problem fifty percent of the kids are failing and from what i know the teachers don't know how to solve it they don't know what to do there are some teachers and this is an attack on the teachers guys and this is not attack on you but i don't think that you guys have been given all the information after what i watched from mr scholl's video last night i also they're also just totally amazed they're like yavapai county is open our numbers are fantastic they're always going to flutter a little bit but we are doing great the schools should be open and it is up to you you are the governing governing board for this superintendent you are the ones that are going to make the decision whether or not to allow him to continue to keep these schools closed and this is causing major problems for these children i've had comments well why don't the parents get involved some of the parents don't know there's reasons why some parents don't know some of these kids are in domestic violence situations we have homeless kids right now that we're bouncing around from house to house to get them to school and putting our money together to make sure they have books but the but the hybrid learning is messed up and it is i said if it's it's the entire district it's not just chino valley it is our entire district 50 of the children are failing and that's what we're here for right to make sure that these kids can have the tools that they need to succeed in life and right now we're not doing that closing these schools would be detrimental not opening this school up on the 19th would be horrible for these kids it's not just the parents we're looking at the kids i've called everybody that i could call i'm recording this today because i've been asked to record it today i'm needing you as the school board members to vote against him keeping the schools closed on october 19th we need to open the schools continue the online learning if some of the kids need to and want to stay home and the parents are more comfortable or they have problems let them continue you know but we need to get it fixed these kids are failing and i don't know if you guys have been told this but they are failing the superintendent of yavapai school district told me it is absolutely 100 true he said the only thing you can do is go to the school board members and speak i have i sent some some stuff out last night i have messages after messages kids getting information okay sent to them and then it's deleted kids being online and getting their homework done and the homework and then it's not getting sent to the schools i have one child that was on top of everything and got an email that he missed 13 assignments and three tests this is a huge huge problem and it's not the teacher's fault but it has to be taken care of so please do please vote right today please your community depends on it thank you joni thank you i don't know what order these came in but i think next we have casey perkins hi hi casey it's right you just lit time with it okay i'm just here as a mom i want a good education for my kids um i keep hearing we are very concerned about health and we're very concerned about all of our um all these standards that we have to follow here's another scenario for you my daughter's on the bus on her way to phoenix to volleyball 102 degree weather no ac on the bus and they're telling them to roll the windows down and keep their masks on if we're really concerned about the health our kids would have been on the bus with um ac so here they are being forced to do it i said absolutely not don't you dare put that mask on there's girls on the bus about ready to pass out and we're talking about safety precautions for covid covet's here we know it it's going to be here it's just like the flu so in two years three years four years we're still going to get coven and it's still going to be here so looking at these numbers that i was handed at a meeting yesterday they're going to be the same are we going to pull our kids from school in a year from now because these numbers are still they're fluctuating a little bit they're no we have to get back to normal our kids need it i have good kids my kids are involved in everything and they're struggling my daughter not so much she was in the beginning but she struggles getting a hold of teachers it's the first week back at school and i shouldn't have to have a meeting with the principal because the teachers are not responding she had an f in yearbook 97 98 99 all because of the hybrid is not helping the kids you can't get a hold of teachers some of them you can some of them are amazing but then my son can't figure out how to maneuver through things he is struggling this isn't working for our kids if it's really about the health and not about the money to get back from the kids that you guys are losing then we need to look at this because again four times my daughter went into school twice to volleyball sorry twice to volleyball twice to school she temped high your guys's standards say she has to be sent home and she was told go back to the car sit in front of the ac and come back in and retap not okay so if we're really worried about that and it isn't about the money with these kids take the precautions seriously and they're not being taken seriously it's about the education of our kids and a lot of these kids need school they need the teachers because they don't have the support of us they don't have parents like me like the parents that are standing back here they don't have that and that's what we're here to fight for is for the kids that don't have the parents to do it so we need you guys to make the right decision and think about what is best for our kids because some of you may have kids in this school but it is about what we're asking and not what you guys think is best for our kids it's our job to parent and it's our job to tell you what's right for our kids and it's important so you guys need to figure this out and you need to make the decision based on what's best for our kids not what's best for the money coming into the school because those grants are not what it's about it's about raising good humans and raising kids that have good education and this education is crap we've put a lot of faith in you guys and said you were dealt a bad hand towards the end of last year okay we get it we sent our kids back to school it's still a rough deal okay we're going to push school back okay we'll put a little more faith into them but i'm not going to i'm going to pull my kids at home school if you guys continue this and that's the vast majority of this i have a sister that's in this school that she can't homeschool but i'm sure she would love to be able to do that because it's not okay the kids need to be in school and i don't know what it's going to take but maybe thinking more about if your kids were here because it's just another virus and it's just here i walked in and saw no mask on the security and the safety of people if it's really that serious then a mask should have been on and we should be leading by example we shouldn't we should be sending kids home if their attempts are up it's about education and taking it seriously because our kids education isn't number one here it's the money that's coming in and that's how us parents feel and we shouldn't have to be fighting for this we should be able to know that you guys are looking out for what's best and that's not what we feel like that's all i got for you sorry thank you lindsay thank you i'm sorry for the wrong name thank you okay it's lindsay thank you lindsay thank you so basically my feelings are pretty much the same i know a majority of kids are failing and it's not working my kids aren't some of the kids that are failing they're doing fine but they're struggling they want to be back in school they want to be back with their friends yesterday we had a meeting with mr scholl and we were told about how many kids were sick last year with the flu virus it was one of the worst flu scenes you guys have ever had no precautions were taken for the flu our kids were allowed to come to school we all got sick just like every other virus we get stomach flus from school we get colds we get everything um then the numbers are not going to reach his benchmark there are schools in yavapai county who are already open full-time without any problems camp birdie has been open for six weeks full time no problems i had i had a list i don't have it with me but there's nine schools in yavapai county that are open full-time right now trinity which i know is a charter school is has been open for six plus weeks no masks no social distancing no problems whatsoever um i just our kids need to be back in school there are so many kids struggling so many kids failing this hybrid system is not working for them the kids are struggling the teachers are struggling the parents are struggling it's it's not working and i'm not blaming teachers i'm not blaming students it's a mess the way that it's set up they can't it's just my kids are doing fine but there's so many kids that aren't so it it needs to change and it needs to change quickly or i can definitely see a ton of people pulling their children because we've been looking at this light at the end of the tunnel knowing october 19th was the day that our kids got to go back to school full time and they just took the light away and we don't know when it's coming back so we tried to stick this out as long as we could knowing there was a date in the future that we were going to get back to normal and you just it's been taken away and honestly the virus isn't going anywhere it's going to stay just like casey said so are we going to do this for three years or are we eventually just going to dive back in like we're gonna have to do we cannot do this for three years it will not work so we at some point have to dive in and move forward so i hope that you guys make the right choice i hope that we can move forward get our kids back in school or the district is going to lose a lot of children shortly i've heard preschool valleys getting ready to start full-time again after fall break too they're a much bigger district than us their numbers are way higher than ours i don't know for sure if they'll stick with it but that's i've heard from multiple parents that's their plan they're coming back full time after fall break we need to do it too our district is smaller our numbers are much lower and our kids need it probably more than them we're a lower income district the kids need to be in school so thank you all right thank you thank you so much linda okay ellie sotelo thank you um i'm oldier montero's mom i am a single parent i cannot do homeschool my child is struggling he is failing after being a straight a student throughout his whole entire life he is a sophomore he it does bum me out i can't stay home with my children like most parents can because i don't have that other extra income coming in so i have to work full-time i took a couple hours off work to be able to be here today um and i would like to see this school open back up for those who are struggling and my child is one of them um my daughters who are 11 years old they're in sixth grade they go to mingus charter school and they are opening back up full time starting october 19th with restrictions obviously which is great i don't mind the restrictions we can take all the restrictions and precautions that we need to take but i do ask that you open back this the school's back up we need it the our children need it not all of us can stay home and homeschool we don't have those options i don't have those options so i would really like my child who's always been a straight a student to keep his grades to make sure that his grades are up and not see him fail okay thank you thank you so much okay and ali aren't hi hi there hi my name is lee arendt and um i wish that i was kaylee mcinanny right here because i would speak to you a lot better but i am going to read um a letter that i wrote so please forgive me if i'm nervous um i teach at del rio i am this is my 30th year teaching hybrid is not going well for our kids the kids are not retaining what i am teaching um i cannot keep the pace that admin had originally thought we would be able to tackle to their their original plan was for hopefully pie in the sky for us to teach two lessons a day per subject and then let the kids practice those two lessons a day at their home day this is absolutely impossible we are darn lucky me if i get fifty percent of them to return they're at home work when they do complete their work it's wrong it's not right um when they come back empty-handed they're behind and so they're not prepared for the next lesson many children are home trying to navigate this by themselves this is too much for a child under the age of 13.

we don't have the information for the class of 2020 yet it's just too soon a huge congratulations goes out to the class of 2019 into the staff of the high school the 2019 graduation rate was was actually that's uh messed up it's 91 not 21 91 over 91 percent almost 92 percent was the graduation rate the county's graduation rate was 81 and a half and the states was 79.2 so it's over over 10 percent over the counties graduation rate as a whole and almost 12 over or 13 over the um state's graduation rate on the and so higher the better the dropout rate which is you want the lower the better the dropout rate which is the number of the percentage of kids that actually just don't finish the four years was 1.56 percent while the counties was 2.85 and the states was 3.93 so we were less than half of what the states was and well below what the county's dropout rate was uh this would not have been possible without the hard work of the high school staff but all the the k-8 work that was done to get to the high school is um an important foundation that led to the success huge numbers fantastic news of the work that they're doing at the high school so these are again the class of 2019.

we we call this meeting to order you're asking mr russell would you like to lead us in the pledge i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you tonight we have a short or tonight i'm used to saying that it feels like night it's still dark out this morning we have a short agenda dealing with the teacher contract has everybody had the opportunity to review the agenda and does anybody have any questions do i hear a motion mr president mr president i mean we accept the agenda as presented do i hear a second second i'll take that as a ding third all those in favor please signify by saying aye aye opposed the agenda is adopted now is our moment for public comments i believe no one signed up for public comments so we'll we'll move to our first action item our first action item is to consider the 2020 2021 teacher contract mr jason taylor assistant superintendent of hr and technology will will do the presentation mr taylor the floor is yours thank you this morning i'm presenting the 2020-2021 master teacher contract for your approval on september 21st 2020 through formal bargaining a tentative agreement was reached with the united teachers association of center grove utag in regards to wage and wage related benefits that would be included in this new agreement on september 28 2020 the utag membership voted to ratify the contract in october 22nd a pre-ratification hearing was held by this board some key key items in the agreement are a two percent raise for all teachers and this includes row advancement and a point four eight percent increase to the salary schedule a one-time stipend of one point five two percent for the top row an increase to eca's of two point or two percent as well and then some changes to the eca schedule um and positions listed there and finally some changes to health care which would include an average employee increase of 1.4 percent the district share increase would increase by 8.1 percent and we would provide a one-time insurance holiday in february of 2021.

i will bring the revised statement of benefits for your approval to the october 22nd meeting and the salary changes will be updated at that time these salary increases have been built into the 2021 budget thank you mr taylor do we have any questions mr alexander no questions for me i do uh just just because it's not listed and you verbally said in some d give an example of what's a level d uh you guys might be familiar with mr zarrow he actually is a level d employee for us in the technology department but he does work a perm more permanent schedule he'd be one that would be included we also have some activity rates that we change dr long has security officers that perform extra duties from time to time for us we may look to change some of those we'll bring all that in october so they may be another level it could be or it could be just more hourly folks who maybe their wage rate has fallen behind what the the competitive rate is and so we look to adjust those at the same time but anyone who's like a standard working a lot that just happens to be in that level of employee if we go ahead and make those changes any other questions or comments do i hear a motion mr president i move that we amend level a b and c and i think i need to include some d some of those d's as jason mentioned uh wage schedules such that other employees will receive a two percent wage increase effective july 1 2020.

yeah the whole entire yeah i'm feeling it i'm going to go on a limb and say that mr kukovia is providing the beats i can't even hear myself speak right now so i apologize if it's a little loud i mean i am right next to the speaker and all i can hear is vibrations coming out of my mouth oh it just got louder it just got even louder [Music] and we welcome you back spartans trail along metal one nothing we've had a pretty even game thus far though um and the goaltenders will switch nets and it looks like dante bates is now in the game for the spartans number 16 almost definitely gonna have to get to know these new faces and numbers just the mass it's the mass are really doing a number on me right now and mazza plays it up evans and giving chase 21 let's see who 21 is 21 for long meadow no our team oh our team i can't see so if you find it we'll get back to you but 21 on the spartans checking into the game um i don't see it 21.

11. all right is sunny oh we got it 11 is sunny once again confirmed we're getting multiple reports here about names all right so wait so sunny's on sunny i don't know we're just gonna call them okay i don't know no sonny's a striker we're just gonna go with maddie and joe's on defense and then there's just another master named luke okay so sunny is a is 11 or no no oh my god sonny is three all right all right we got it now you're killing me sonny is three and enzo is 11. let me think enzo 11 both ease bam got it and luke is five all right we got all the masses sorted out so sorted you're awful at least i knew about the american revolution don't even get me started you know what you just made me genuinely angry i forgot people laugh when they're angry once again brennan failed the class oh good preschool not knowing i know you you do not oh wait no no no oh you don't learn emotions in school oh really i feel like i feel like you just figure that out maybe if you go to like whatever school you went to i mean what preschool did i go to first step ah well you probably were sick that day then and so the spartans will build the wall [Music] shut out president trump happy to hear he's covered free and asymptomatic is does he still like have coveted but he's like i don't think it goes away that quick right i was just back in the white house so that's gotta mean something yeah i was trying to figure that out this morning but you know me things typically go over my head no comment but yes so yes comment all right oh and it gets kicked in waltzak dives on it he almost got a spike to the face but we got ice so we got ice but actually we don't because of hashtag the protocol so no ice that would have actually stunk if colin got kicked in the head oh and the ball goes across the field and it will be kicked up oh boy who is that goodness 17.

okay i'm starting my meeting okay and we have adrian back yet our turtle screen hey all righty everybody is here it is seven o'clock and so i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to open the open session portion of our meeting uh the october 6th board of education meeting for the city of visit for the for azusa unified school district now uh we're going to do things a little different tonight because i am a firm believer that we should bring our people up and we have a vice president who has not been able to lead a meeting since she has been vice president and i feel it's important that she has that experience and so for the rest of the meeting i will go ahead and i'm going to hand this over to uh vice president ariana's uh board member vice president and she's going to go ahead and take over the meeting and please be patient good luck thank you president bibles bogo for this opportunity for me to go ahead and lead this meeting for today we're going to go ahead and start open session um and i want to go ahead and welcome everyone on fellow board members cabinet and all of you guys watching at home thank you for joining us tonight on october 6th as we begin this meeting now we're going to go ahead and move to the flag salute lika has one of our students from magnolia that is going to go ahead and lead us in the flag salute and we can go ahead and put our attention to the screen and we can go ahead and do that do our flex thank you hello unified school district board members and families please join me for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance of the united states of america and to their republican thank you for for that we now move on to uh roll call we'll go ahead and do the roll call of our board members we have we have a board member yolanda rodriguez pena president we have shinolin cruz gonzalez here we have board member adrian greer yeah and we have board member jerry bibles vogel present and myself gabriella arianis i'm here thank you now we move to approval of the minutes i'm sorry approval of the agenda do we have any motivation to approve item 4.1 so we have the first motion by uh remember yolanda regis pena can we go ahead and move to do we have this uh your screens up you guys ready to vote response okay it passes 5-0 okay we can go ahead and move to 5.1 this is an opportunity for the public to address the board on closed session agenda items not closed session i'm sorry on open session agenda items the individual speakers may be allowed up to three minutes to address the board and any closed session agenda items our openness session agenda items to address the board please raise your hand while in zoom attendance lika do we have anyone in attendance we do have attendees i've seen no way yet but let's just give it just a second okay [Music] we have no raised hands for public participation okay as we see none we can go ahead and move to 6.0 comments and requests by the board we can go ahead and get started with um we'll go ahead and work a little backwards we'll get started with a board president bibles vogel we can't hear you there all right i thought i i clicked it um i apologize i don't have much to say other than fantastic job everybody's working very hard to be successful getting all of the online services taken care of and getting food out to our students so you have nothing but my heart all of our employees all of our parents all of our students everybody our entire board staff thank you for everybody what everybody does thank you okay we can go ahead and move to a board member adrian greer evening everyone uh just uh one quick very quick announcement that um this month's uh coffee i'll be holding it on thursday october 22nd at 6 p.m and so again as always i'll share that out in various channels but wanted to make sure that i shared it here okay thank you and we have next board member uh cruz gonzalez good evening no comment tonight thank you and do we have a board member rodriguez pena yes hi good evening everyone um i first of all wanted to congratulate um one of our teachers marie sims for her being one of the 10 honorees educate educator teacher of the year um i'm going to congratulate her um i also had the opportunity to go to the um with with uh mr darren howard mot and mr ortega our superintendent and latasha and i went to the warehouse to look at all the ppe uh that they do have for for our students and when they return in our staff they have quite a bit of ppe items which is like the mask gloves sanitizing sanitizers um plex the glass and then we went on to some school sites we went to a middle school elementary and a high school to see how how the desks are going to be separated you know by six feet away how on the floor they're going to have um the little stickers that have you know six feet apart you know if students are going one way and they're going to cross each other and the other side is not going to be succeed they'll have to go like all the way around i just kind of wanted to see um you know what would happen or how's this going to look in the future so i just want to thank mr ortega to take taking his time and mr darren howard from ot and latasha for for taking me on that tour i also went to several back to school nights not been there of course online and it seems like the middle schools and the elementary or all the schools they become very creative in advertising their classrooms and their school in in the school and what they're showing you know what they're about in a different in a different manner and um i kind of like people have like mo emojis and they have like they're sitting at a school desk and i just think that everyone's doing a fantastic job on that and the most important thing that i do like is that i'm not running around from school to school or looking for a parking so it's great just sitting here just clicking every every class on here so yeah it's good and i would like to close in memory of yolanda um and and also um she was one of our messengers and johnny garcia one of our groundsmen that passed away and recently passed away i'd like to close in memory of them thank you um i would also like to go ahead and congratulate marie sims from asusa on being recognized by a teacher of the year by leico um it's always great to to see our teachers be recognized for their exemplary uh you know uh and their passion that they have that that they uh that they portray and what they do for our community um i other than that i have nothing else to report we'll go ahead and move to 7.0 comments and reports by superintendent cabinet student board members we'll go ahead and start with superintendent thank you uh like uh like some of you have noted um i ought to wanted to congratulate maria sims our teacher at azusa high school for not only being our district teacher of the year but now being recognized and named as one of lakel's top 10 teachers that is amazing we are extremely proud of maria uh the impact that she has on on her students uh on her colleagues and the community uh and what an honor for azusa unified school district to have one of its teachers as a as a top 10 being recognized in this manner i also would like to thank um publicly miss yvonne morillo president of csea and csea itself for allowing me the opportunity to learn from one of their members and helping and helping me get an inside look into their work yesterday morning i was able to partner with monica pringle monica pringle is currently the secretary for the adult school and she has been doing that for 13 years monica oversees and and handles uh many day-to-day operations like emails uh assisting with phones workflows uh purchasing uh communicating with district departments and staff and then she also does um other things like uh we went outside and we hung up some banners and fixed some other ones and we folded pay warrants and stuffed envelopes and put them in boxes uh and all along i was able to have a conversation with her uh right now they're working on some big projects uh they're moving enrollment at the adult school to an online platform um so a positive if you will of uh of the pandemic that we're currently in uh and she's working on on that um i'm really appreciative of monica to allow me uh to shadow her uh for lack of a better word to partner with her it just really was helpful to get some insight and her willingness to do this with me and spend that morning with me as i looked over her shoulder as she was working on stuff and just asked her a million questions she was very grateful with her time and so i appreciate that so so thank you thank you monica for allowing me that opportunity um i just want to end my comments by sending my condolences uh to the families of yolanda boseniere larry woodruff and johnny garcia who all passed away recently and were members of our azusa team thank you do we have miss latasha jamal yes so first i would like to share the condolences as well as um share in the appreciation and gratitude for miss maria sims um i would like to use this opportunity to continue to thank our classified staff um district-wide as well as specifically in the business department um i want to shout out the maintenance and operation team all trades um especially um for the work they've been doing with the power washing and organizing the classrooms to get the six feet uh apart as well as we're trying to get our kerber pill up so i just want to thank them for seeing the vision through and continue to work for that effort and i also want to shout out our nutrition services staff we've been having lines wrapped around i know we're getting complaints about traffic and we're trying to work on that but just to see um the poor of support that the the staffers jumped in to help our community and the fact that we're having lines it shows that there is a need and i'm just happy that um the district and our staff is able to meet the needs of our community thank you thank you we have mr jorge ronchio good evening board of education and um community members it's always an honor to be in front of you all um yes our hearts are heavy um as we express our condolences for our recent losses very tragic i want to report to the board that i was able to attend back to school nights for our elementary schools and middle schools i've always wanted us to push ourselves to find some silver linings and one of the server linings and just covet is essentially the accessibility and being able to move from schools to schools so quickly and be able to see just the wonderful work that our teachers are doing um and be able to go through and just interact with teachers and watch teachers in iraq with our families um it was it was seeing full rooms what i would have imagined been a whole auditorium full of families but it was virtually just being able to access our schools and so i want to thank our our administrators our our teachers and our classified employees that made this possible i also want to um echo in the um celebration of maria sims um truly an amazing honor to have a laco top uh teacher that is that is truly a special um honor and a testament to the hard work that uh maria does but also what our all our teachers are doing so thank you maria um and then i want to close with a um a shout out to our csca employees as well um i appreciate all the work that our csca employees are doing day in and day out at our schools and our offices so a big shout out to all of you thank you great thank you and we have uh dr dana mitchell good evening i also wish to express my condolences as well for the loss of our staff members as you um all know we do have a college and career readiness program that we partner with azusa pacific university and i wanted to report that last week we were able to uh kick off our champ program which stands for college headed and mighty proud for our fourth graders in our district and we are beginning with murray valley dale paramount and magnolia and this year it is all virtual and uh the mentors meet with the fourth graders and they're able to um put their assignments uh into uh the teachers google classrooms the teachers put those assignments in there for the kids and uh they're able to uh to work on that with their mentors and the the first assignment was um just all about getting to know one another they meet every tuesday and they have about uh 25 minute sessions to learn about college and explore college majors they are still going to they're planning to have a virtual um visit data apu which will be in november and also they're also planning to have a virtual champ graduation so we're excited to report about that thank you thank you and do we have student board member destiny contreras from gladstone high school to report hello um students at ghs are getting ready for club rush on october 12th asb is doing a great job publicizing the clubs via instagram this week gladiators chose four students to represent them on the school site council there is one freshman one sophomore one junior and one senior to help the principal make decisions that will impact the school this year there is representation from our health academy rotc volleyball and the badminton team we are identifying as well a group of 12 diverse gladiators to participate in a student advisory council for the district to give feedback on how we can make our schools better in the district we would like to highlight the work of miss parmar who is doing a really good job with hands-on learning in distance learning and we really appreciate the work that mr enfante is doing running asb thank you thank you destiny and the next student that we have is from asusa unified i'm sorry asusa high school and it's jacob vasquez hello everyone my name is i'm the student board representative for azusa high school so first off azusa high school has just completed their wasp visitation it was a very successful visitation and the watch team provided excellent recommendations to move forward with dr gomez we will be sharing the final document with you in the near future our high school is actively trying to keep students engaged in in class this week we will be having our club rush activities many of the clubs are working on videos to promote their programs please check out our instagram site also coming up in the next couple of weeks is ours usa high school academic awards night we will be recognizing students that maintain high gpas with our silver and gold awards this event will take place via instagram on october 14th at 7.

and we had a chance to uh visit the sites on friday as they were getting the finishing touches ready and going through and and talking about their protocol and then we had a chance to um to visit the site yesterday and um walk the classrooms and uh the sites and and see the students and so that was that was great so uh students are uh enrolled uh families enroll them online and they're prioritized by individual need we have our nutrition services team that's delivering the student meals to the sites and they are think together is following a protocol for in-person programming that does align with the los angeles county department of public health also the county department of public health has issued a reopening protocol for youth sports and this is an opportunity for students to participate after school in training conditioning and skill building activities it's not sports uh in the same manner as prior to covet 19.

when a child is absent which happens a lot i have to prepare their stack of work for them to complete without any adult instruction the gap is getting wider and wider the high students are holding their own we are actually holding them back they should not be getting they should be getting four lessons a week monday tuesday wednesday thursday now they're getting two maybe three our struggling kids are sinking they're not internalizing what is being taught and all the kids are behind from missing the last quarter of last year this is not good for anyone i don't know for sure but i'm guessing the online kids are not faring well either please check with an online teacher i'm speaking for myself here i have friends on all the campuses that have expressed similar feelings but i'm speaking for me hybrid is not going well for me hybrid is the hardest thing i've ever done i truly have had days where i felt like i was on a verge of a breakdown i am a 30th year teacher i taught kindergarten for 20 years you can handle a lot when you teach kindergarten um i the last three weeks i have worked over 65 hours a week i'm tired i'm fractious and i'm worried sick about the kids i have thought seriously about trying to use my 730 hours with some kind of long-term disability leave something to get me out of this but i'm not going to do that i owe it to the children and i owe it to my peers to to work through this my blood pressure is high i don't sleep and i worry that this stress is going to cause my health an issue the hybrid is terrible but my loyalty like i said to my students keeps me going everyone i work with is in the same boat last weekend i was talking to my sister and she said lee it sounds like you're in trouble and i said i am in trouble but i work with a whole bunch of people who are in trouble look into the eyes of your staff look into the eyes of your staff and you will see people that are beat and broken and hurt their love for their job is gone as you know um or maybe you don't know i have kids from 7 10 in the morning when the buses arrive until three o'clock i have a 15-minute lunch break and a 30-minute special slash prep every day i usually walk to the office to check my mail and use the restroom during my prep so that diminishes my prep to 20 minutes there is so much parent communication today i printed out 75 pages of jojo which is the online app and that was for one of my sections so you know it's spaced and it's lots of information but still 75 pages um so i um there's so much parent contact having to go on i leave work after 5 30 every day and i take home so much work that cannot be possibly be graded during the school day i truly hope that we are working towards an alternative i keep looking at the numbers and i've tracked them when i can um and i don't think that ducey even set an attainable goal for us i track like three days at a time and boom we're past what i thought 24 was the grand number now i i think it's 10 i'm not sure but anyways so i don't think we're going to reach it it's not all good that's what i just wanted to make sure and i'm not here i'm not being a whiny butt i swear to you i am not i'm doing my job but the plea is for your help the plea is for your support we need to figure out a way to get our kids back to school four days a week i know there's risks i know that at the beginning of school we were worried about losing teachers but i tell you i've heard that several teachers who are going to at the end of this year try their hardest to find a different option if i wasn't retiring i would be doing the exact same thing so i i guess there's a blessing and a silver lining for me but that's that's not for everybody and that's sad you're going to lose a lot of good teachers if this really continues i just i don't i don't know what to say i don't have answers i i don't even have the energy to be on the committee or the time to be on a committee to help come up with answers but we've got to start looking the risk in our town as what i understand it is so low compared to the costs that um we're paying with our children and our staff um please think about what i'm saying i'm not attacking anyone i'm asking for help the kids need you to guide us back to school and your staff needs your help as well thanks thank you thank you thank you does anybody have any comments it's on the agenda correct correct okay any other any other call republic okay i want to say something i just want to thank everybody that came here today i mean i do i want you to know that the four of us sitting up here is all voluntary positions and you know most of you know i have kids in the district too and i definitely want to get my kids back in school but i appreciate everybody coming out and voicing their concerns because that's what makes a difference so i just want to thank everybody i don't know if lee left but i definitely appreciate her thank you um at this time item six information discussion items um superintendent's report please so you have a superintendent's report on your desk um cobin 19 update the metrics are out they continue to be in the moderate risk range for just one of the three uh benchmarks which is the the one that kind of people have talked about the the cases and last week it was at 24 which is cases per 100 000 that equals about 56 cases or so that occurred in the in the county last week i'm sorry on the week of september 13th there's two numbers that aren't highlighted those are numbers that that's what the estimates are for the next two weeks so tomorrow morning data will be released it should be about 24 again and then the week after a week from tomorrow data should show that it's 28 or so and that could go up just because that's what the um the cases are reported to date and that information you can see the cases per day on the back of that sheet it shows you what day this is coming off the department health services website and so it was 57 cases the week of the 20th and we're up to 66 cases right now the week of the 27th and obviously we're in the middle of this week now it hasn't been re-updated very well the enrollment as of yesterday our 40th day adm projection was 2056 adm our 40th day adm for last year was 22 18 so we're down 162 adm uh it's for the most part equally spread throughout this the school i think del rio is up it says 60 lost to 60 adm i think that's a little bit um it's a little deceiving just because they lost a large class and gained a small class so part of that is has to do with changes in the different cohorts coming through and territorial is down 36 adm but it is actually more bodies than that because a good portion of that is kinder so it's actually probably closer to 50 60 kids that are that territorial is down uh staff members of the month um we recognize our staff members of the month this morning um at territorial was kate fletcher who wasn't available because she was at work on thursday and had her baby on friday so i want to congratulate kate fletcher on the birth of her son but she was um the teacher and and she um took on a class that was twice a week it was in person and another group of kids twice a week it was um online so she she really took one for the team there we have alandra mendez was a staff member at territorial of the month our teacher at del rio of the month was daryl and rock and our staff member was paula meyer at heritage it was laurie miller um was the teacher of the month and our staff member was nicole curtly and at heritage or i'm sorry at the high school it was their teacher of the month of bernie boris and our staff member of the month was mary ellis and with bernie when we went in there she was actually she has a class where she takes our center's kids and those are the kids that are the have the highest disabilities the the most severe disabilities and she was teaching them how to cook in her in her kitchen so that's that's the kind of work that she does and why she's um deserving of that um and she was very excited to be honored to be um as they all were to be the the future of the money and again the mary ellis was our staff member of the month we have our asba county meeting and annual conference the county meeting is october 28th both of these in our annual conference is the first week in december both of these are being held virtually the and i think there's some did you end up voting annie i think the county representative was one of the votes yeah i think i did two different okay good good so if you are interested in attending either of these which again would be virtually please let karen know and she can get you signed up for those um i know that that uh typically we have one or two that go to the annual conference i can tell you that i went to the law conference which is actually really good um in person a little bit difficult virtually and so um you know i'd say you need to be really um interested if you want to do the annual conference virtually um prop 208 i know that we talked about this last time and penny asked me just to kind of put it as a reminder um as a as a qualifier i'm not telling you to vote yes or no on prop 208 all i'm giving you is some factual information i recommend that you do your own research and make your own decision on prop 208 um prop 208 is invest in ed would place an additional three and a half percent tax on earnings over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for single filers and five hundred dollar thousand dollars for joint filers as an example if someone made five hundred thousand dollars they would pay no additional tax if they made 500 and as a as a couple if they made 500 1 000 it would be three and a half percent on that thousand dollars so be 35 dollars that they'd owe an additional taxes so it's not three and a half percent on the whole amount just on the amounts above those thresholds the district's lobbyist estimated that this would result in 1.6 to 1.7 million dollars in revenue for the district the proceeds from the income tax increase must be used for staff salary increases does not include administrative salary increases along with cte programs and other teacher mentoring and retention program so it's very specific on what it could be spent not on administration so that's pro prop 208 again do your own research and make your own decision on that which you think is best and just as a reminder our governing board meeting for november has been changed to november 5th so that it's not interfering with election night and i encourage everyone to vote and they've actually extended the date to later in october to register so if you're not registered please register to vote and whatever you do whoever you vote for please just vote any questions anybody's questions thank you mr schultz oh i forgot two things yeah yeah the rate the most important things um we had uh information came out uh recently about the high school dropout and graduation rates now these are for 2019 the class of 2019.

i can tell you that the counselors and administration at the high school hustle to get those kids graduated and so it's a lot of kudos go out to the staff at the high school any questions about that question no all right okay thank you mr show um item 6d financial report okay so right now with our m o we are at 1.51 still available that's actually pretty low for right now but a lot of it is because of the covered expenditures we've had that will eventually be moved into various grants that we get for covid our capital we have 10.10 percent left and our adjacent ways is at 60 percent available it's the bus lane completely done at the middle earth so minor finishing work but the lanes being used the the fences are out there some rip rap that needs to be laid down but uh and so we're trying to figure out we're hoping to maybe put some automatic gates up so that the drivers can't get out when there's kids on the bus so sometimes the gates are being left open and we need to work out a system for that but it's um fantastic fantastic thank you um item seven approval of the consent agenda we skipped one right student activity student activity fund report not a whole lot to talk about with student activity anyway they just have a few encumbrances nothing major everyone's still in the black so that's good [Applause] thank you okay now [Music] okay [Music] item 8a additional girls basketball coach um mr schull i didn't know that hannah combat worked our hms ad was going to be here do you want to address kind of the need for the the extra girls basketball coach so we're having uh you know female support for the protection of our two male coaches we wanted to bring on a female staff member to make sure that they were just covering their bases and making smart choices and we talked about this position and you know phrasing it in a way that if we had two female coaches for a male sport we would do the same thing in that situation so it's a half stipend for 750 being offered to the assistant coach supervisor for bus trips away trips and locker room supervision um are we going to be able to have middle school spark we're we're hoping hoping right i think that's a good place like if the aia says that we can have high school sports so do they say we couldn't have middle school sports no but there's no one to play necessarily okay so you know we're not just having the practice we just don't know yet okay yeah sorry i have a kid that's like dying to play for her and i know that there's other kids that are dying to play i'm meeting with the tri-city middle school athletic directors thursday afternoon i was waiting for the outcome of this meeting so we would have something to tell them but it does sound like they are hoping to have some sort of season where they would allow their online kids to come and participate as well as well awesome all right well i hope that that i hope that happened nope this is an action item i appreciate emotion please promotion to approve the additional girls basketball coach all in favor all right thank you okay item 8b personnel report there is a supplement so make sure that you refer to that as well looks like we have about eight new classified we have a couple resignations two certified changes um looks like two four six eight nine class um [Music] ten classified changes actually and then a slew of coaches um coming up for and some of those are at heritage for we have a change on it on the assistant coach we have a couple we have the girls basketball coach and wrestling coach at the middle school and then we have the ctso stipend stands for current technical student organization so that would be like ffa and skills usa and ffcla which is the colony arts student organization so those have to do those are the cte organizations that these teachers supervise so that's what the ctso stipends are for okay any questions you know appreciate a motion to approve the personnel report and supplement i will make a motion to approve the personnel report and the supplement all in favor thank you item 9a um annual financial report rebecca please okay so fiscal year 1920 is now closed thank goodness um so we're looking at some numbers with our m l there was some variances within you know increases decreases within certain functions overall our m o we only increased 1.7 percent of our expenditures for regular education for a special ed we increased 4.9 with our expenditures and then and then our capital our capital expenditure increased by quite a bit by um like 99 but that's because of the additional capital we were able to have from the reinstatement of capital so overall we did we ended the year really well have any questions questions anybody that is what was the total carryover to this year it's about 800 000.