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uh we did look at pushing just the school schedules back but our partners in the shoots baron levered at those elementary schools it's not feasible for a whole host of reasons to push their schedule back so really we have these two options that we're pursuing and school committee does expect to you know gather feedback and make a decision for the next school year the first week of march so why are we talking about this now if it comes up all the time there's certainly not a short supply of other things to work on a really good article about gel meadow last month in the new york times again there's a hyperlink to this in the document that's in the chat but one of the things that we're recognizing is we've already made tremendous adjustments this year to schedules to start times and we're more flexible than perhaps we thought we were and we've learned a lot you know some lessons of what's working some lessons frankly what's not working one of the things that we are hearing is that what is working at the secondary level is having a later start time and so we think it is an opportunity to pursue that it is a short timeline to make that decision but it's that we have now data back uh mostly qualitative we'll get quantitative next week about how this is going and how it's impacting our students on a daily basis other communities are doing the same um i see those questions i'll probably get to those in the uh after there's only a couple more slides um in northampton they made this change uh for the next school year they voted um last month and you can see proposal a and proposal b are flips to their start time schedule or their schedule with the elementary starting first and this was the overall results i think this is all on their website over i i it's a public document every single stakeholder group in northampton uh advocated for having the elementary schools start first given the data and what they're hearing from secondary school students and so this is the aggregate data but it was true among students parents guardians as well as staff members and and they opted for proposal a oh i should say um i can do this while this slides up um that um there's eight metro west districts who also made similar changes of pushing the start time of their secondary schools back the year before so that we're not the trend setters or the the only people looking at late start times again across the country many people but within massachusetts we've seen a shift to this in the last two or three years here are some of the local implications on logistics in the schedule so the elementary schools it means we'll have earlier bus runs probably again about 20-25 minutes earlier than what they were previously as stated earlier we are looking and engaging with our after-scare programs about additional hours and perhaps additional demand because this missile looks about 240 245 again basically the elementary level everything pushes up about 20 or 25 minutes both in the morning and the afternoon at the regional schedule we're looking at a later dismissal again around 3 30 our transportation department's working on actively get it fine-tuning these numbers but this is where we are at this point we are looking at revising the schedules to reduce transition times in other words keeping the same amount of instructional hours but reducing the non-instructional hours to shrink the length of the day so students can get a get out a bit earlier part of that is looking at our bus schedule i will say that we are looking to reduce pickup locations and reduce the number of bus stops primarily at the regional level but we've dug in and we're looking at the elementary level as well what we notice compared to our partner districts is we have many more stops for the same number of students and many of these stops involve three bus stops each 200 yards away from one another with no crosswalk or no danger no excuse me cross street uh or no dangerous pickup our school committee policy lists how how many miles we can ask students to walk to a bus stop which is i believe two we're nowhere close to that and we are looking to you know three reasons one it'll reduce the time between the two runs the elementary or on the secondary run the second reason is it's consistent with our local peers third reason is environmentally when you start and stop all the time that's adding a lot to our carbon footprint and finally we look at equity and we look at students living in high density houses and how long they have to walk versus single family homes and right now what we've discovered is we have some inequities that we need to address in that regard as well so we are looking at pickup locations which would contribute to perhaps shrinking that time between the runs certainly athletics is a huge deal as ms stewart can attest to and all of us on the line can attest to and high school in particular is looking at some dynamic schedules where the end of the day might have more flexibility where right now athletics don't start before before three o'clock and we think we can either maintain that or adjust it a bit where athletics might have to start a little bit later but not as much as what we originally feared not as much as what we thought about in 2011 and 2012 when this came up so we we do think there'll be a low impact on athletics and you know many thanks to sam mickey talib and others at the high school who are actively looking at kind of more creative schedules and how to make the end of the day have more flexibility the way the beginning of the day does now right now so students typically get there at 8 30 classes start till 7 45 can we build in some flexibility at the end of the day at the high school to make that happen we believe that we can we also are concerned about staff schedules we want to make as minor changes as possible to make sure that we can offer instruction and safety throughout the day so we are actively looking at what that would mean and we had a staff town hall last week and i continue to receive feedback on that topic so we are looking to engage the larger community for those who don't know i'm not going to read the whole list but cpac is a special education parent advisory advisory council bpac is a bilingual parent advisory council um pgo's parent guardian organizations we are engaging our partner districts in shootsbury and levitt we care deeply about their input on this i'm not the superintendent i don't work for those communities but they partner with us they share bus runs which saves everyone as a to everyone's financial benefit um so we are having town halls like this we are having some focus groups with some of the groups i mentioned earlier uh we're having some surveys i'll talk about that in a second and we're looking for this engagement to happen you know essentially let in the next month so it's it's a big push at this point in time but we think it's the right push this needs to be updated a little bit uh which i need to do this morning but you can see that we have a date schedule for a focus group with cpac we could get bpac and some of the other groups on there i know marta is working with the pgos and the family center advisory group but we are continually doing feedback cycles with staff with the community and we'll have a survey out on wednesday afternoon which tries to get quantitative and qualitative feedback from all stakeholder groups students secondary students families and staff members about this idea and about why they think the way they think and what are potential barriers to either of the options that we're looking at and finally these are five professional groups who are endorsed at 8 30 or late start time for secondary school and you what you'll see again in the in the presentation which the hyperlink has is the link to their position papers um so this one i will read because i think any time the american medical association the center for c disease control american academy of pediatrician society behavioral medicine american psychological association all come out with position papers on something i think it's incumbent on us to at least explore what we can do here uh and how we can help so i tried to be succinct with that um because i think as i said at the beginning i wanted there to be much more question and answer than uh presentation and so i think we'll have a two to one ratio of that today so that should be good and let me remove this from there and open it up for question uh feedback and comments so i see that there's one here is the 905 the bus arrival time or the school start time what would that look like for the ending time um so again we're we're hoping to get that as close to nine o'clock as we can and we are envisioning that we students would head straight to class instead of having that kind of bubble time that they do now and that would be much more on the back end so we are shooting for about a 3 30 3 35 end time again those are things that are in progress um in terms of exploration depending how much we can shrink the bus routes um and we think we we've made some good success of some of our longest ones now i think we have a couple that are this year would have been slated to be over 50 minutes and we're we're all under 50 minutes at this point we're seeing how close we can cut it but you know i think roughly nine to 330 is the general uh idea and we'll see if we're able to get there as we redo bus routes [Music] and at the elementary level again we're thinking about 240 245 because we're starting that much earlier so again at the bottom right you can just post a comment or a question and we want to hear from from the community from all of you appreciate you coming in in the morning any thoughts you have that you'd like to share with us or any questions about this we know it's a very large topic that would influence everyone well in giving people time to put in some questions we want to note and acknowledge that the earlier start time at the elementary level may be welcomed by some we know that how late our elementary schools start is hard for some families right now and for others it will create challenges and that's the same true at the secondary level there are early birds who are up at six in the morning uh even though their circadian rhythms probably are uh wake up would say different on a medical uh document we know there are students who get up earlier and so we know that it's it's it's imperfect there's no way to solve everybody everybody's sleep cycles but we think this may be worth exploring are the elementary schools prepared for after-school programs will they be free so we're fortunate to have our three providers um in our in our district all of them do use subsidies so it would be extending the day perhaps by 20 or 25 minutes and we would imagine that that same the same providers would be working in the same way as they do now and i'm just going to go in order of what i see what is time frame making decision this and how will the union be involved many elementary parents reliance on aftercare babysitters after care programs need to have time to plan that's exactly right so the time frame making decision i think was one of the earlier slides but the school committee plans to vote on this in the first week in march and you know this would be perhaps impact bargaining with our union if we change schedules um and that's why you know again dr kavara is connecting with the aftercare programs for exactly the reason you said to make sure they have time to plan and can build capacity elementary dismissal of 245 is really early for working parents elementary school students so there'll be sufficient room and after school programs for those who need it and again that's where uh working with our aftercare programs to expand it is something that's on our list and is actively um in place right now in general the aftercare programs do well the more students who attend the more capacity they have so um we have not had a problem in the past with overcapacity at after school programs the challenge much more is when it's under capacity in terms of their ability to run effective programming i really like the whole idea it makes a lot of sense can you comment on why we require athletics to adjust somewhat to the new schedule so i don't know if mickey sam or victorio would want to uh jump in but i will bring them in and then they can choose who uh jumps in on this one yeah i'll take that um so really the only reason why athletics can um needs to make sure require athletics to adjust somewhat to this new schedule um we typically have practices at three o'clock or 3 15 however when we travel to games student athletes need to be there around three o'clock so we normally have to sometimes get out early up 2 20 um right before we normally get out this year so next year would have to be the same you'd have to get out early and leave block four earlier than normal and um sammer mickey would you like anything you want to add on that one okay sounds good and making elementary school start earlier make the end of the day earlier parents are offering work schedules around 310 dismissal when employers expect a nine to five workday and then this continues i think uh how are you reaching out to major employers like umass and amherst college to ensure their employees will be supporting the possible change that's a great question i'm going to put that on a list of things to do um to reach out i think we do want to reach out to employers and i think you know that we're you know between umass amherst college and and the districts i work for those are the three biggest employers in town and it's a great idea and we'll take that advice and be able to and put that into place thank you how would the support affect course offering scheduling i'm concerned with the current situation where we only have math and language arts language one semester versus across the whole school year it certainly could um it's a related but different conversation and and some of that is really around covet and looking at cover the reason we went to a block schedule at the high school this year wasn't around a larger question about the schedule it was about how do we reduce the number of exposures possible exposures that kids have we don't really know at this point what vaccination rates will have for students under the age of 18 as many of you know the vaccines aren't going down that young right to the people that young right now and we don't know what that's going to look like in the fall so we may be in a situation we want to explore the block for a whole host of reasons northampton for instance does have a block schedule has for many years and has had they've had a lot of success with that i'm not ready to make that determination but i think you know well i'm optimistic around vaccination um you know the fact that there are trials going on for children under 18 is fantastic we don't know exactly where we'll be when we get to fall so there's some of it's the general schedule and some of it's actually around covid and understanding what the implications of running a schedule are and what are potential exposures that need for quarantine so we may still be in that world in the fall sorry to be pessimistic perhaps on that but that is that is part of our thinking does the condensing of the middle school high school affect a time students have to eat lunch i've heard you're considering allowing only 20 minutes for lunch is that healthy for students so i've not been part of any conversation in which we're expect we're considering 20 minutes for lunch i'm happy to disavow the rumor uh but i'm glad you brought it up that um it's really around transitions how many transitions do we have during the course of the school day if we are still considering a block schedule that's fewer transitions than if we're in a seven drop one schedule throughout the day and those minutes add up so it's i've not been part of any conversations about lunch um already had one situation this year where school committee voted on something parents started planning and everything changed with union negotiations no question just sharing the concern thanks for sharing it how can you can you speak more to athletics to be affected especially winter sports how would this affect children's ability to attend after school help and athletics so um perhaps i'll get our um uncle diego in this um our team here um and if you if there's more to add you know particularly with the 3 p.m um start time for athletics now and what potentially it looked like in the in the past yeah so right now students are typically affected on by this so they aren't penalized though if they have to come to practice um late uh so they can still stay after school during any of those times as well and just let their coach know that they're gonna be late just so they know where they're at mickey sam anything you want to add in terms of some thinking that is currently going on about on this topic so i'll just add that the flip start time is one factor but the schedule that we're in next year would um we're mapping out both types of schedules a seven drop one and we're mapping out a four by four block which is what northampton's using and with the four by four block we actually get all four blocks in by three o'clock which allows the flex blocks that often exist in block schedules to occur between three and three thirty which would allow flexibility for students across the high school whether they're athletes or whether they do out or they do which is our alternative learning program where we really promote experiential learning internships uh classes so with the block we do get that extra half hour from three to three thirty if we go with the seven drop one and again this is just you know the covet certainly has implications for this but um the seven drop one would actually require all six classes to meet and that sixth class wouldn't end until 3 30.

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good morning everyone this is superintendent mike morris and thank you for joining us for this morning family start time town hall really appreciate you starting your day with us you're starting part of your day with us we're going to kind of what we're going to do is just do some introductions we'll go through some slides but the bulk of the time we'll say to end by 10 if not a couple minutes earlier we'll be really focused on q a and getting questions out so i'm mike morris i'll turn it over victoria to introduce herself hi my name is victoria stewart i'm the athletic director for the high school in middle school and diego hi my name is diego sharon and i'm the principal at the middle school and mickey hi i'm mckeeker mackey assistant principal at the high school and derek good morning everyone my name is derek shay i'm the principal at crooker farm and sam hi i'm sam cameron er the interim assistant principal at amherst high and marta we're just doing quick introductions hi this is marta guevara director of student and family engagement and and uh i'm going to have these guys fade into the green room for a bit because we're going to do some slides but before we do just the way to put a question or comment in the chat is the lower right hand corner you should see that there's a little empty box and you can put questions or comments in there so just so everyone feels comfortable if or if you do feel comfortable just saying what i'm finding is once people can put something in there once then we don't have to deal with technical challenges later what's your favorite ice cream flavor i know it's weird to think about ice cream this time of year but people put in their favorite ice cream flavor i'll do so myself this one at flavor is really good i think it's called oh i'm going to blink in the name it's been a couple months since i've been there but if you are able to put some comments in the chat then we know that you can put things in your chat not everyone's in the mood for ice cream that's okay but just wanted to at least give everyone that thank you very much carrie um not my favorite flavor but i'm glad you're participating so we just want to make sure that everyone knows how to put questions in again because much of this hour will be listening and responding to questions much less about presentation one other thing as we're getting organized and going that i'm going to put is the presentation for today it's going to go out um thank you oh now we can see in some other ones pair sorbet that sounds good i've not had that one um we're just going to put the link to the presentation uh also in the chat so if you are looking for um looking for that you can follow along i'll be presenting it but it's it is a public access document so people are willing to access it that way as well all right at this point i'm going to pull some of our good folks off they'll be back on later responding to questions but i'm going to put the presentation up and they'll be in the green room during this time and share my screen and there we are i think this will make it a little bit easier to uh to view so again today's topic is about start times uh so i'm going to go over some some background uh some history and then what's being considered this year i think it's really worth noting before we get to the next slide that um this is not a new conversation in this community this kind of comes up every couple of years there was a major effort in 2011 to 2012 with a 50 some odd page report that was incredibly well done and everything that's in the report is still true now there's more data to back it uh but there was plenty of data then as well so this is not a new conversation in in this community are many communities in massachusetts it is something that we are exploring for the start of the next school year and we'll talk a little bit about why in a second so just starting with the research and implications of later start time for secondary school students in particular in our district secondary school starts in seventh grade so the first bullet point students are like more likely to get adequate sleep what research would show about two-thirds of three-quarters of the additional time that folks get if we have a later start time that students get will be dedicated to sleep i think there's some uh some myths out there that if you start an hour later that the kids will just stay up an hour later and and evidence shows that you know about three quarters of that they'll spend sleeping in about 15 or excuse me 25 percent of that they'll spend staying up later um so it does actually involve more sleep secondly the outcomes seem better few things in educational research are as clear as the benefits of later start times for secondary school students you can see some of the implications there there is a reduction in tardiness and absences which links then to the outcomes and finally there's a reduced likelihood of car crashes this is a very serious statistic and and i think it's worth noting not just car crashes driving to school which said in the slide i saw some some increasing evidence over the weekend about research about uh car accidents uh later in the day or even in the evening as students have been up for an extended period of time uh the link that is in the chat um if you click on the research the reason it's in green at the hyperlink there's about eight or ten research articles for those of you who like to read academic research i find it really fascinating on this topic and then there's a cdc chart that also kind of talks about some of the other well-being implications about physical activity social emotional health and others uh this is uh was a slide put together by a colleague of mine um on the cape and coming from research this really fascinating piece about the circadian wake up time you could see that as students get older they are naturally going to wake up later we're having a student town hall by the way on wednesday i'm going to try to get some some quantitative data as well some qualitative data from our middle school and high school students on this topic i'm really curious what they tell me you could see that ideally we can't start school at 11 o'clock or i we can't meet that ideal start time for our older students many of you are parents and you've recognized that as students as typically as students get older they do need to sleep later and so what we realize is that with the wake up time that we have in our current situation uh for our secondary school students they're not only losing a little bit at the end of their sleep cycle their sleep cycles literally being interrupted five days a week that if they're naturally going to sleep till eight or nine o'clock and they're waking up between six or seven uh that's that's rem sleep that's high quality sleep that our students need that they're not getting so our current situation is that prior to the school year our drop-off time was about 7 30 at the regional schools and class first bell ring 7 45 our first bus pickup is 6 37 to make that work we have seven buses that have a first pick up at the regional level before 7 a.m and all there's buses bus stops in each of our four towns at the regional level that start before seven in the morning it's not just shoots bear and leverage at the elementary our bus drops are about 8 30 and we have five buses that start with pickup time before 8 o'clock the current school year with the covet impacted schedule we have this 9 o'clock start time at the secondary schools and one of the reasons frankly we're having the conversation is that i can't have a conversation with a middle school high school student where this topic doesn't come up uh often in the lens of are we really going back to a 7 45 start time next year because of the implications that they're experiencing uh with the later start time so just some quick data we have more of it but i didn't want to overwhelm with the number of slides last year the 113 days that school was in session uh at the high school seven percent of students were the average average on an average day seven percent of students were were tardy daily uh i think it's also worth noting that that was increasing throughout the year in other words the month of september that number was a lot lower and as we hit winter that number was steadily increasing so i think it's almost under reporting uh the level of tardy but seven percent a lot of students to report on a daily basis additionally anecdotally staff and students report lower engagement in those eight period classes the first period class of the day and that's true at both the middle school and high school so we have a couple options for next year one is we could revert back to our prior schedule start at nine excuse me instead of starting at nine go to 7 45 for the secondary schools and same schedule for elementary the other option we're pursuing is to flip the time so that means the elementary before the would be before the secondary schools and that would mean buses arriving around 8 10 at the elementary level so that's about 25 minutes earlier 20-25 minutes earlier than uh currently they currently do and secondary school is about 905.

so there are more implications with athletes who have to leave school early that in the block they would you know if they have to leave at three o'clock they wouldn't miss an actual course and so those are just some of the factors um that certainly contribute to this entire decision yep and uh really good clarification by ellen thank you and i should have been more clear in my comments that vaccines one of them i believe is is available for students 16 and older however high school has a wider age range than that so we don't exactly know what the fall will look like with that but it's a really important clarification i don't want anyone who has a 17 year old thinking that there there's not any options in the future in terms of vaccines so thank you ellen for that my apologies for uh not being clear all right we'll give um again we we have plenty of time on this topic um and so give it a couple [Music] a little bit of time if anyone has additional questions that come in while people are thinking marta do you mind just speaking to i know i spoke a little bit to it but if there's anything you want to add on the after school programs or aftercare programs i wondered if you're able to comment on that because that is a very real concern for elementary families yeah so we are fortunate that we have our that we work so closely and so well with our providers we already have a preliminary meeting with current providers and we're meeting again today and so uh we're we're really uh very positive about the possibility of being able to support as many students as need be and so we have to consider many different other options so it could be you know by our option and and other matter so we're excited whichever way the community and the school committee obviously you know vote for this and and we will be ready thank you so much dr gilbert just positive piece of feedback so for your high school folks oh and i'm sure we'll get a lot of feedback on this when we do the survey as well um just about the impact of that schedule so thank you um mr shea since you've been quiet and we're waiting for some more people to perhaps ask questions any thoughts from the uh elementary lens that you have um or any lens any lens you'd like to offer you've worked at both the the high school and at the elementary level so you've got a good um good thought on that yeah i well i hesitate to offer my bias on the high school piece given that i've got two children who just barely struggled to make it through 7 45 starts for the last four years it's not an easy thing for um young people could be up at the crack of dawn and then heading to school um but in terms of elementary school look our buses arrive right now anywhere between 8 25 and 8 30 and so i hear you say that the buses would be arriving closer to 8 10.

oh i just wanted to check the bass we're over here very different what i usually do the book here fellow officials i'm just giving you advice for what you're doing again some officials really look at it always [Music] okay [Applause] why quality [Applause] [Music] okay [Music] morgan charlotte all right [Applause] oh [Applause] oh [Applause] [Music] [Applause] oh [Applause] all the way back [Applause] all right [Applause] oh [Applause] girls oh [Music] on the side [Applause] [Music] [Applause] from here there you go looking at it [Music] [Applause] one shot [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] yes [Applause] over here [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] girls [Applause] hey [Applause] [Music] please [Music] all right [Music] [Applause] oh [Applause] oh [Applause] go [Applause] come on come on [Applause] [Music] oh [Applause] oh my god all right [Music] all right [Applause] and five seconds stay back [Applause] hey [Music] me [Music] okay good do you have any more dates this weekend [Music] boys all right [Applause] right here [Applause] every time all right [Applause] pop [Applause] hurry up [Laughter] there you go my wife [Music] oh um here's what you get [Applause] they're getting [Music] oh [Applause] oh [Applause] middle [Applause] [Music] [Applause] oh [Music] my god [Applause] [Music] go go go go go go go go girl [Music] number five [Applause] oh [Applause] oh come on girls [Applause] [Music] huh [Applause] up did you ask her um [Applause] oh [Laughter] [Applause] quick [Applause] oh okay [Music] okay foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] great yeah [Applause] great [Music] three [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Applause] oh [Applause] all right [Applause] [Music] wow [Music] you know [Applause] run [Applause] wake up [Applause] 13 113 [Music] thank you [Applause] what [Applause] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] make the password [Applause] 13.

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uh we did look at pushing just the school schedules back but our partners in the shoots baron levered at those elementary schools it's not feasible for a whole host of reasons to push their schedule back so really we have these two options that we're pursuing and school committee does expect to you know gather feedback and make a decision for the next school year the first week of march so why are we talking about this now if it comes up all the time there's certainly not a short supply of other things to work on a really good article about gel meadow last month in the new york times again there's a hyperlink to this in the document that's in the chat but one of the things that we're recognizing is we've already made tremendous adjustments this year to schedules to start times and we're more flexible than perhaps we thought we were and we've learned a lot you know some lessons of what's working some lessons frankly what's not working one of the things that we are hearing is that what is working at the secondary level is having a later start time and so we think it is an opportunity to pursue that it is a short timeline to make that decision but it's that we have now data back uh mostly qualitative we'll get quantitative next week about how this is going and how it's impacting our students on a daily basis other communities are doing the same um i see those questions i'll probably get to those in the uh after there's only a couple more slides um in northampton they made this change uh for the next school year they voted um last month and you can see proposal a and proposal b are flips to their start time schedule or their schedule with the elementary starting first and this was the overall results i think this is all on their website over i i it's a public document every single stakeholder group in northampton uh advocated for having the elementary schools start first given the data and what they're hearing from secondary school students and so this is the aggregate data but it was true among students parents guardians as well as staff members and and they opted for proposal a oh i should say um i can do this while this slides up um that um there's eight metro west districts who also made similar changes of pushing the start time of their secondary schools back the year before so that we're not the trend setters or the the only people looking at late start times again across the country many people but within massachusetts we've seen a shift to this in the last two or three years here are some of the local implications on logistics in the schedule so the elementary schools it means we'll have earlier bus runs probably again about 20-25 minutes earlier than what they were previously as stated earlier we are looking and engaging with our after-scare programs about additional hours and perhaps additional demand because this missile looks about 240 245 again basically the elementary level everything pushes up about 20 or 25 minutes both in the morning and the afternoon at the regional schedule we're looking at a later dismissal again around 3 30 our transportation department's working on actively get it fine-tuning these numbers but this is where we are at this point we are looking at revising the schedules to reduce transition times in other words keeping the same amount of instructional hours but reducing the non-instructional hours to shrink the length of the day so students can get a get out a bit earlier part of that is looking at our bus schedule i will say that we are looking to reduce pickup locations and reduce the number of bus stops primarily at the regional level but we've dug in and we're looking at the elementary level as well what we notice compared to our partner districts is we have many more stops for the same number of students and many of these stops involve three bus stops each 200 yards away from one another with no crosswalk or no danger no excuse me cross street uh or no dangerous pickup our school committee policy lists how how many miles we can ask students to walk to a bus stop which is i believe two we're nowhere close to that and we are looking to you know three reasons one it'll reduce the time between the two runs the elementary or on the secondary run the second reason is it's consistent with our local peers third reason is environmentally when you start and stop all the time that's adding a lot to our carbon footprint and finally we look at equity and we look at students living in high density houses and how long they have to walk versus single family homes and right now what we've discovered is we have some inequities that we need to address in that regard as well so we are looking at pickup locations which would contribute to perhaps shrinking that time between the runs certainly athletics is a huge deal as ms stewart can attest to and all of us on the line can attest to and high school in particular is looking at some dynamic schedules where the end of the day might have more flexibility where right now athletics don't start before before three o'clock and we think we can either maintain that or adjust it a bit where athletics might have to start a little bit later but not as much as what we originally feared not as much as what we thought about in 2011 and 2012 when this came up so we we do think there'll be a low impact on athletics and you know many thanks to sam mickey talib and others at the high school who are actively looking at kind of more creative schedules and how to make the end of the day have more flexibility the way the beginning of the day does now right now so students typically get there at 8 30 classes start till 7 45 can we build in some flexibility at the end of the day at the high school to make that happen we believe that we can we also are concerned about staff schedules we want to make as minor changes as possible to make sure that we can offer instruction and safety throughout the day so we are actively looking at what that would mean and we had a staff town hall last week and i continue to receive feedback on that topic so we are looking to engage the larger community for those who don't know i'm not going to read the whole list but cpac is a special education parent advisory advisory council bpac is a bilingual parent advisory council um pgo's parent guardian organizations we are engaging our partner districts in shootsbury and levitt we care deeply about their input on this i'm not the superintendent i don't work for those communities but they partner with us they share bus runs which saves everyone as a to everyone's financial benefit um so we are having town halls like this we are having some focus groups with some of the groups i mentioned earlier uh we're having some surveys i'll talk about that in a second and we're looking for this engagement to happen you know essentially let in the next month so it's it's a big push at this point in time but we think it's the right push this needs to be updated a little bit uh which i need to do this morning but you can see that we have a date schedule for a focus group with cpac we could get bpac and some of the other groups on there i know marta is working with the pgos and the family center advisory group but we are continually doing feedback cycles with staff with the community and we'll have a survey out on wednesday afternoon which tries to get quantitative and qualitative feedback from all stakeholder groups students secondary students families and staff members about this idea and about why they think the way they think and what are potential barriers to either of the options that we're looking at and finally these are five professional groups who are endorsed at 8 30 or late start time for secondary school and you what you'll see again in the in the presentation which the hyperlink has is the link to their position papers um so this one i will read because i think any time the american medical association the center for c disease control american academy of pediatrician society behavioral medicine american psychological association all come out with position papers on something i think it's incumbent on us to at least explore what we can do here uh and how we can help so i tried to be succinct with that um because i think as i said at the beginning i wanted there to be much more question and answer than uh presentation and so i think we'll have a two to one ratio of that today so that should be good and let me remove this from there and open it up for question uh feedback and comments so i see that there's one here is the 905 the bus arrival time or the school start time what would that look like for the ending time um so again we're we're hoping to get that as close to nine o'clock as we can and we are envisioning that we students would head straight to class instead of having that kind of bubble time that they do now and that would be much more on the back end so we are shooting for about a 3 30 3 35 end time again those are things that are in progress um in terms of exploration depending how much we can shrink the bus routes um and we think we we've made some good success of some of our longest ones now i think we have a couple that are this year would have been slated to be over 50 minutes and we're we're all under 50 minutes at this point we're seeing how close we can cut it but you know i think roughly nine to 330 is the general uh idea and we'll see if we're able to get there as we redo bus routes [Music] and at the elementary level again we're thinking about 240 245 because we're starting that much earlier so again at the bottom right you can just post a comment or a question and we want to hear from from the community from all of you appreciate you coming in in the morning any thoughts you have that you'd like to share with us or any questions about this we know it's a very large topic that would influence everyone well in giving people time to put in some questions we want to note and acknowledge that the earlier start time at the elementary level may be welcomed by some we know that how late our elementary schools start is hard for some families right now and for others it will create challenges and that's the same true at the secondary level there are early birds who are up at six in the morning uh even though their circadian rhythms probably are uh wake up would say different on a medical uh document we know there are students who get up earlier and so we know that it's it's it's imperfect there's no way to solve everybody everybody's sleep cycles but we think this may be worth exploring are the elementary schools prepared for after-school programs will they be free so we're fortunate to have our three providers um in our in our district all of them do use subsidies so it would be extending the day perhaps by 20 or 25 minutes and we would imagine that that same the same providers would be working in the same way as they do now and i'm just going to go in order of what i see what is time frame making decision this and how will the union be involved many elementary parents reliance on aftercare babysitters after care programs need to have time to plan that's exactly right so the time frame making decision i think was one of the earlier slides but the school committee plans to vote on this in the first week in march and you know this would be perhaps impact bargaining with our union if we change schedules um and that's why you know again dr kavara is connecting with the aftercare programs for exactly the reason you said to make sure they have time to plan and can build capacity elementary dismissal of 245 is really early for working parents elementary school students so there'll be sufficient room and after school programs for those who need it and again that's where uh working with our aftercare programs to expand it is something that's on our list and is actively um in place right now in general the aftercare programs do well the more students who attend the more capacity they have so um we have not had a problem in the past with overcapacity at after school programs the challenge much more is when it's under capacity in terms of their ability to run effective programming i really like the whole idea it makes a lot of sense can you comment on why we require athletics to adjust somewhat to the new schedule so i don't know if mickey sam or victorio would want to uh jump in but i will bring them in and then they can choose who uh jumps in on this one yeah i'll take that um so really the only reason why athletics can um needs to make sure require athletics to adjust somewhat to this new schedule um we typically have practices at three o'clock or 3 15 however when we travel to games student athletes need to be there around three o'clock so we normally have to sometimes get out early up 2 20 um right before we normally get out this year so next year would have to be the same you'd have to get out early and leave block four earlier than normal and um sammer mickey would you like anything you want to add on that one okay sounds good and making elementary school start earlier make the end of the day earlier parents are offering work schedules around 310 dismissal when employers expect a nine to five workday and then this continues i think uh how are you reaching out to major employers like umass and amherst college to ensure their employees will be supporting the possible change that's a great question i'm going to put that on a list of things to do um to reach out i think we do want to reach out to employers and i think you know that we're you know between umass amherst college and and the districts i work for those are the three biggest employers in town and it's a great idea and we'll take that advice and be able to and put that into place thank you how would the support affect course offering scheduling i'm concerned with the current situation where we only have math and language arts language one semester versus across the whole school year it certainly could um it's a related but different conversation and and some of that is really around covet and looking at cover the reason we went to a block schedule at the high school this year wasn't around a larger question about the schedule it was about how do we reduce the number of exposures possible exposures that kids have we don't really know at this point what vaccination rates will have for students under the age of 18 as many of you know the vaccines aren't going down that young right to the people that young right now and we don't know what that's going to look like in the fall so we may be in a situation we want to explore the block for a whole host of reasons northampton for instance does have a block schedule has for many years and has had they've had a lot of success with that i'm not ready to make that determination but i think you know well i'm optimistic around vaccination um you know the fact that there are trials going on for children under 18 is fantastic we don't know exactly where we'll be when we get to fall so there's some of it's the general schedule and some of it's actually around covid and understanding what the implications of running a schedule are and what are potential exposures that need for quarantine so we may still be in that world in the fall sorry to be pessimistic perhaps on that but that is that is part of our thinking does the condensing of the middle school high school affect a time students have to eat lunch i've heard you're considering allowing only 20 minutes for lunch is that healthy for students so i've not been part of any conversation in which we're expect we're considering 20 minutes for lunch i'm happy to disavow the rumor uh but i'm glad you brought it up that um it's really around transitions how many transitions do we have during the course of the school day if we are still considering a block schedule that's fewer transitions than if we're in a seven drop one schedule throughout the day and those minutes add up so it's i've not been part of any conversations about lunch um already had one situation this year where school committee voted on something parents started planning and everything changed with union negotiations no question just sharing the concern thanks for sharing it how can you can you speak more to athletics to be affected especially winter sports how would this affect children's ability to attend after school help and athletics so um perhaps i'll get our um uncle diego in this um our team here um and if you if there's more to add you know particularly with the 3 p.m um start time for athletics now and what potentially it looked like in the in the past yeah so right now students are typically affected on by this so they aren't penalized though if they have to come to practice um late uh so they can still stay after school during any of those times as well and just let their coach know that they're gonna be late just so they know where they're at mickey sam anything you want to add in terms of some thinking that is currently going on about on this topic so i'll just add that the flip start time is one factor but the schedule that we're in next year would um we're mapping out both types of schedules a seven drop one and we're mapping out a four by four block which is what northampton's using and with the four by four block we actually get all four blocks in by three o'clock which allows the flex blocks that often exist in block schedules to occur between three and three thirty which would allow flexibility for students across the high school whether they're athletes or whether they do out or they do which is our alternative learning program where we really promote experiential learning internships uh classes so with the block we do get that extra half hour from three to three thirty if we go with the seven drop one and again this is just you know the covet certainly has implications for this but um the seven drop one would actually require all six classes to meet and that sixth class wouldn't end until 3 30.

we certainly have teacher meetings in the morning but i think those teacher meetings would perhaps switch to the afternoon and i agree with dr gabara we have a very healthy strong after-school program uh here and i certainly believe in and would hope that they would be interested in um if they needed to add further students to the to the after school roster thanks um just piece of feedback about the middle school the way the middle school schedule has been shifted this year for um i wanted to share and so we'll give another minute or two um certainly if there's more questions and we may get a bigger crowd in the evening because for those who don't know there's a 6 30 uh same same kind of thing different link but the same slides everything else will be the same about it also this link that everyone's on on the youtube is good indefinitely so if someone missed this session and you want to share uh this link and you found it helpful you know please do share either the link to the presentation or the link to actual this live stream we'll go for another minute or two i know people still um perhaps finishing their coffee and other things so give people a second um and see if there's any other comments that come through thank you thanks for that comment and um you know i think what we found this year in addition to all the other things that make the paper perhaps more often is that um having a little more focused time and fewer classes is making a difference for our students and we imagine that would be true in person or in the current virtual format that we're in so really appreciate all the work that um staff members those on this call those not on this call teachers who contributed to the drafting of those schedules um you know i think it's obviously a hard situation this year i don't want to minimize that but i do appreciate the thoughtfulness of our educators to come up with the best possible kind of schedule design given the situation um just another comment i'm not going to read them all but um yeah um yeah it's interesting about the sports i mean i will say that some places uh and i'm cautious of my word than this but i think i want to be transparent about some places have for certain sports uh who have made a flip uh some of the sports do happen in the morning you know based on availability of um facilities if they're not using our facilities at the school um and you know i guess that is an option you know for those students but i think the big thing for me is it's an option you don't have to play a sport and i'm saying this as i played sports in high school and college i care deeply about athletics and making a huge difference but when i think about all students um you know the reason we're engaging in this is because we think it'll have an impact on all students and for students who wake up early you know great maybe they're doing some of their homework in the morning instead of staying up late at night but you know the evidence is pretty clear on this one all right since i don't see additional questions or comments coming in again you know i'll put my email address in here please feel free for those of you who are more comfortable sharing confident you know feedback that's not uh so public please feel free to shoot me an email if you want to shoot the school committee an email i'll put that email address on here well or questions you know please keep them coming we appreciate you starting the day with us um again if you think of other questions you can shoot that email you can also join again we'll be here at 6 and hope everyone has a great day um thank you very much um oh that's one more comment uh thanks renata but thinking about math and language yeah that's exactly right and that's something some of the conversations we're having about does that work for all students and how do we do the math and um and and literacy my question above was not addressed um sorry i'll go back if i missed one oh sorry kerry i missed that one um it's our way to do a four by four block that allows for math and language across the years problematic students students can go fully without math they only have fall and then the spring so i will defer to our particular high school folks sam and mickey on that topic if you have anything you'd like to add yeah i can i can speak to this there's several different ways to do a block schedule um one version is an a b block which does allow for all courses to meet all eight blocks all eight blocks to meet every other day over the course of the year that's certainly a schedule where um if you know if there's strong if you know if what community values is having courses all year then very often that's the block that people go with if instead um the community you know the majority and you have to choose like what's your value and what are you creating because every schedule has strengths and weaknesses and so the four by four block that runs in a semester format that's exactly what you lose is that continuity but but if you're trying to reduce the focus at one time for students then schools tend to opt for the semester so those are going to be the conversations that we have to have it also when you look at key float and you look at how many students a teacher has it once variables that that stem from those kinds of things this is and there's a lot of literature now that you can read about studies on the blocks and all the different kinds of blocks there's also four by four blocks with semesters where school districts will choose um high need courses both at the ap level and at more of the remedial level or level where students might be somewhat behind so for example they might year long block uh ap bc calculus and they might year long have like an algebra course or ways to do that and that's going to have to be a conversation when we choose next year's schedule that will have to also involve stakeholders thank you mickey that's a incredibly helpful answer and one that i definitely couldn't have said in the level of detail that you did so i appreciate you saying that and i think that brings up a really good point to perhaps end on is you know we started engaging this conversation late this fall uh we are going to um school company's gonna have to make a decision before every bus run is created we don't frankly know exactly who our students uh are going to be next year so it's hard to like really have firm bus runs when we don't exactly know who's going to join us we don't know who the kindergartners are and we don't know the transients in and out but we're trying to get see if we have a general sense with these general parameters and we will have to work out details like mickey talked about over time and engaged stakeholders throughout um do we know how teachers union feel about this that's why we're having you know we started our first engagement was with teachers with educators last week and so we'll continue to do that um if you see look towards the end of the slide deck there's additional engagements with each school staff uh starting next week we'll have survey data so we're gonna have a tremendous amount of information about how teachers feel about this and we'll continue to engage that that question i think give you a second i'm scrolling down to see a couple comments um but um i think time will tell when we survey folks um where where how people feel in the community and that includes teachers i want to thank everybody for joining us this morning again back at 6 30 if there's additional questions or other people couldn't make it this morning um mandy joe this survey will be up for all secondary students to complete so seventh through twelfth grade students we are trying to think about a way to engage upper elementary students when we get down to the primary grade levels just developmentally it's a little hard to engage students in this dialogue but we are trying to think actively about ways to engage upper elementary students but the survey itself will be for seventh through twelfth grade students and all staff members and all families in the district um sorry if i wasn't clear about that before it's a really really important point we have engaged too mickey and sam um i don't know if sam you want to mention some of the engagement you did on the front end because i think that's helpful to you are you talking about student groups student groups yeah so um we have a student advisory council that we've been consulting with and then um a poku group that also we've surveyed and so we're getting a lot of feedback from them and their thoughts and superintendent morris will follow up with them as well so we're gonna we're gonna keep working on that for sure yeah so carrie i see electives sacrifice for a degree in the block schedule i'm going to make this probably the last question you know um but i'll you know my short answer and mickey and sam can expand on it is we've had a block schedule this year and we've offered you know the same similar elective we've had even more modified block schedule than we would have potentially into next year we've offered uh the slate of electives that we typically would mickey sam anything more that you want to say on that topic i just want to mention that um the electives will be broken into quarters no matter what schedule we go with and so in a block schedule you actually have eight blocks instead of seven um so depending on the five core academics and whether or not some of them need to be year long or not it can actually increase elective offerings for students thanks becky thank you uh very much again thanks for joining us for this call um thanks for our folks who are really busy for uh joining the call us at derek marta sam uh victoria diego mickey appreciate you being on this call and uh you know be on the lookout for our survey wednesday afternoon we i think we're giving folks a week to do it it's actually it's a very short survey uh this time around hopefully that's enough time we are doing presentations um in spanish it's being dubbed so something that will be like this will be sent out uh the slide deck is already available in spanish so we are trying to send out all this information and hit as many stakeholders in a busy time um and an unusual time as we can uh but the more you can engage have friends say oh is was interesting if you're around at 6 30 you might want to do it it would be cold it's not not a good night for the bonfire or whatever else people are potentially doing at night i'm not sure what that is these days uh please please do help us with that and we'll be in touch with that data all the data we collect as well as these videos is always transparent it's always shared with the public and really good feedback and some next steps for us to to do based on your ideas have a good one thanks so much

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so there are more implications with athletes who have to leave school early that in the block they would you know if they have to leave at three o'clock they wouldn't miss an actual course and so those are just some of the factors um that certainly contribute to this entire decision yep and uh really good clarification by ellen thank you and i should have been more clear in my comments that vaccines one of them i believe is is available for students 16 and older however high school has a wider age range than that so we don't exactly know what the fall will look like with that but it's a really important clarification i don't want anyone who has a 17 year old thinking that there there's not any options in the future in terms of vaccines so thank you ellen for that my apologies for uh not being clear all right we'll give um again we we have plenty of time on this topic um and so give it a couple [Music] a little bit of time if anyone has additional questions that come in while people are thinking marta do you mind just speaking to i know i spoke a little bit to it but if there's anything you want to add on the after school programs or aftercare programs i wondered if you're able to comment on that because that is a very real concern for elementary families yeah so we are fortunate that we have our that we work so closely and so well with our providers we already have a preliminary meeting with current providers and we're meeting again today and so uh we're we're really uh very positive about the possibility of being able to support as many students as need be and so we have to consider many different other options so it could be you know by our option and and other matter so we're excited whichever way the community and the school committee obviously you know vote for this and and we will be ready thank you so much dr gilbert just positive piece of feedback so for your high school folks oh and i'm sure we'll get a lot of feedback on this when we do the survey as well um just about the impact of that schedule so thank you um mr shea since you've been quiet and we're waiting for some more people to perhaps ask questions any thoughts from the uh elementary lens that you have um or any lens any lens you'd like to offer you've worked at both the the high school and at the elementary level so you've got a good um good thought on that yeah i well i hesitate to offer my bias on the high school piece given that i've got two children who just barely struggled to make it through 7 45 starts for the last four years it's not an easy thing for um young people could be up at the crack of dawn and then heading to school um but in terms of elementary school look our buses arrive right now anywhere between 8 25 and 8 30 and so i hear you say that the buses would be arriving closer to 8 10.

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i already everything okay thank you all right rolling through here i'm on number four um oh that's you again oh yeah the district prepared to welcome all students in the building at this time or has the district had to bar students coming back in person if they were originally registered to be solely virtual because the district has to limit the number of students coming back into the schools to ensure so yeah i forgot about that one yeah yeah at this time we are a hybrid or staying hybrid at this time number five jackie beers a kindergarten teacher at the annex i would like the board to consider having the parents of in-person students complete the club for their child every day and not just on sundays teacher and staff are required to complete it every day and for the health and health and safety of all i feel that students should have the form completed every day as well symptoms and conditions can change on a day-to-day basis and they should be documented on a daily basis so we are doing that yes we are doing that that that went out this morning number six katie lira um 623 mountain avenue hello my name is katie lira and i'm a librarian at lamont annex in lafayette elementary schools i've been in the district for six years and i also live in balboa i'm concerned about the rising cases of kovic within our community in town and even more concerned with the number of students who are going home daily from our schools because they display signs of illness i truly believe we're all trying to do our best as a district with the temperature checks hand washing masks and so much more but we are still having students go home sick every day as a specialist teacher i see every single class in both the lamont annex and lafayette every time i receive an email letting me know a student is going to be virtual because they're sick i do some mental math did i see that student this week did i go to their classroom did i see their sibling teaching in person has been stressful as a specialist teacher i am alone in the classroom with up to 13 students plus students online and i'm trying my best to engage with students and create a dynamic create dynamic lessons while adhering to safety procedures it is complicated and stressful and i do it four to five times a day back to back five days a week building a building i worry about being exposed to covet as well as exposing others potentially as i go to each classroom i see students being escorted to the nurse science going up on classrooms doors that a room is being sanitized and my stress increases the vaccine is here teachers and staff will hopefully get it soon i along with most staff would feel better about teaching if we waited until we were vaccinated please consider going virtual until staff and teachers are vaccinated the next one is from kristin martinez from the child study team we are writing on behalf of our child study team we are a multi-disciplinary team consisting of individuals with different responsibilities or backgrounds but one common goal we work not only for our students with special needs but other general education students within the district who need specialized support as well it is imperative that we make ourselves clear we want our students in person however we want this done safely and unfortunately we do not find this to be the case at this time we would like you to listen and understand our roles and backgrounds on the cst we consist of learning consultants social workers school psychologists occupational therapists speech and language therapists and behaviorists we have numerous responsibilities that we would like to share with you we travel between multiple buildings in a day or within a week our related service providers ot speech therapists as well as behaviorists work with students one one or a small group up to five students from multiple classrooms and buildings our case managers psychologists learning consultants social workers hold iep meetings meetings with building representatives or administration supervisors supervisor meetings i'm sorry or administration supervisors meetings with teachers and are working with in a variety of classrooms working with the staff on behavior programs completing observations and providing individual small group counseling our case managers and related service providers conduct one-to-one evaluations with students and young children not yet enrolled in the school as well as new students who transfer we do not have classrooms but caseloads our caseloads are ever changing as students are referred to the cst and evaluations are conducted we work hard to see every student individually and collaborative and collaborate to identify the least restrictive and most appropriate classroom setting for our students we support our students teachers and community with this understanding in mind we would like to outline some of the issues we face so that hopefully we can find a solution our goal is to continue to provide services with the knowledge that we are accounted for when making decisions in regards to our staff safety currently many cfst members are sharing rooms many related service providers pull groups to the same room this makes con contact tracing very difficult at the annex up to four related service providers are expected to pull groups to the same room at the same time that means up to four groups of students with each group pulling from multiple classrooms with that being said if there is an instance where a classroom is being sanitized does that mean the therapy room should be sanitized as well that has not been the case all cst staff work in multiple buildings we are not necessarily identified as being exposed to coded when a positive case has been reported we have found that we tend to find this out directly from our families after the quarantine time has passed some buildings have tried to assist in keeping track of where we are with a signing book however this is not in every building with this new policy of removing classrooms for fogging many buildings no longer have space for evaluations to be completed in general there is a lack of space in some of our buildings staff is being told not to congregate in the lunchroom there are lots of teachers and classrooms that need to pull out for example dra testing blanket testing cst evaluations related service therapy sessions which leads to more people being in the hallways or stairwells stairwells on the floor we have spoken up and have implemented certain procedures within individual buildings however because we travel that only goes so far we write to you today because we need district-wide procedures for contact chasing to protect those professionals who work district-wide number eight uh this is from diane pavlichko 120 west franklin street at the last meeting the question was asked if anyone knew why the two teachers listed on the agenda were leaving their position dr gallagher answered that it was for better paying more money i can assure you that at least one of the cases money had nothing to do with her reasons for wanting to leave three years ago i stood in front of the board for the same reasons i'm writing this today another good teacher that made a big impact on my kids is once again leaving bamboo both have felt the administration creates a toxic environment they don't feel appreciated or that their voices are heard it's a bit like deja vu for me for the teacher in 2017 and the current teacher neither had anyone from the district reach out after they submitted their resignation why is that does no one care the teacher i speak about today didn't get any type of response to her resignation nothing not anything from her direct report or hire no one asking why she's leaving no what can we do to keep you here no counter offer to keep her here not even a good luck best wishes nothing what a terrible way to treat someone who has worked here for six years in 2017 i spoke up about the need for exit interviews i learned recently that these are being done by the superintendent or assistant superintendent with no one else from the district or boe present is that true if a good number of teachers leave due to conflicts with upper administration why would we continue to have upper administration conducting exit interviews without anyone else present of the five teachers that my eight-year-old son had here in balmer three have left the district and only two remain that's really sad we have amazing teachers here in fabric it hurts me to see so many of them leave especially when i know how wonderful they are it's a shame the way they are treated year after year we need this to change i challenge the board to ask themselves going forward how can you help change the toxic environment going out in our schools what's going on number nine this is from c del ponte a teacher in the high school we are the members of the english department at the bambook high school there is no denying that the school year has been difficult for everyone and we would like to offer our take on our experiences we know that being in the classroom is the best possible place we want to return to normalcy but teaching in a building where students and the majority of staff remain unvaccinated in the midst of a pandemic is not safe and has the potential for tragedy as the number of those infected with kovid continued to rise and the number of students returning to the classroom continues to drop it is increasingly obvious obvious that the live classroom is not a healthy environment for teachers students and staff we are concerned for our entire community thank you for listening and acknowledging our concerns number 10 christina pemberton seven jill court middlesex members of the board as a teacher one of my top priorities is safety i strive to create a safe classroom every year for my students this year i knew my priority would be the hardest thing to achieve given the circumstances coming back to in person learning in january has proven in just five short school days that this is not safe i do not feel safe every single day i see other classrooms being evacuated for covent symptoms i see students being shuffled around with their materials to find a safer space than their own classroom parents are continually sending students to school sick and they are endangering other students as well as our staff and their families i am scared every morning that this will be the day that my class needs to be evacuated and i will be putting my family at risk i want to protect my students and family i do not want to be the reason anyone gets sick or loses a family member i am taking every precaution to protect those around me i wear two masks every day i wash my hands frequently i practice social distancing as much as possible which is a struggle being a teacher of the youngest learners i do not make unnecessary trips or put myself in high-risk situations the safest place for me during the day is sitting in my car to eat lunch being a teacher of our youngest learners puts our teachers at the greater risk and being here for the last five school days has proven that teachers are already quarantined and students are being sent home with symptoms every day i would like the board to consider going back to virtual learning until the staff members can be vaccinated and the transmission numbers go down this is the only way to protect our school community thank you for your time number 11 catherine ryan 163 cheerio she's a teacher in the district dear board members i'm writing to you i am worried about my safety and the safety of my students and colleagues the numbers for coded are at an all-time high and us teachers aren't vaccinated yet there are more students than ever in our rooms given that more than half of the cases of covet are asymptomatic and easily spread we have to assume we have double the cases we already see the information about the new more dangerous strands suggests that children are much more likely now than ever to contract clovis and get sick or pass on it and pass it on our students are doing traveling sports eating out seeing extended family and friends because of these reasons i feel unsafe in school please consider either going back to remote learning or substantially increasing the safety measures for us in the classroom most businesses even grocery stores have bought plastic partitions to protect their employees when they can't distance we need those we also have enough students that when we walk through the classroom we cannot remain six feet away from the students special teachers special teachers still travel from room to room possibly spreading the virus to many classes in a day we don't have ventilation in our building where we are asked to be around others for more than six hours at a time there's nowhere to eat lunch and i've simply stopped eating lunch there are multiple exposures and cases already since returning and there's no evidence that we won't have more cases the longer we're open i miss normal school and i understand the difficulty we are all in with facing the challenges of this year ultimately the most important thing should be the safety of our students our staff and their children and families please consider sending us back to remote instruction until teachers can be vaccinated or until the school can be outfitted with more safety measures like plastic barriers and better ventilation at least let us go home to teach when the students aren't there or consider limiting in-person instruction to those students most in need such as special education students or english language learners i appreciate your time and thank you for your consideration and protecting us all number 12 joe goldan a teacher at somali school um your board of education members i am writing today because i feel there is a need for better communication about the district's protocols regarding over 19.

i don't know what what everyone else thinks but well i agree with terry um i kind of i'd like to see maybe a a meeting convened around maybe nine nine and a half percent i think with this new variant um it could kind of come on us real suddenly and i wouldn't want to wait to 10 and i can't even imagine going to 10.1 or 10.2 yeah yeah i think i agree with terry and joanne we have set that far so we can as we approach it let's have a conversation yeah so it sounds like people would like to it we'll call a meaning if we get to 9.5 yeah that's fine five point seven five yeah and then the next question is when will that meeting occur uh i think thank you that suggested monday nights well that was when we had the metrics coming on monday but they're coming on friday now so um i mean it could be anything saturday morning you could do a saturday morning again if that works for everybody well we just don't need an hour presentation on the numbers we can just debate and discuss yeah if you're making decisions on friday does it make sense to have the meeting thursday thursday night you know for reaching nine and a half and you have to make a decision at three on friday we should probably meet the day before you have to make that decision sounds good yeah yeah that's that's reasonable yeah that's reasonable nancy if we're projecting that way early in the week you and i can touch base and then call a special meeting okay my only limitation is i uh work in the evenings so i might i will try to be there i beg borrow and steal to make the regular schedule meetings but just so you know i'm not i'm not blowing you off if i don't show up okay and maybe we could consider unless it's too late because maybe staff and uh dr thiele you guys can get a chance to go home and take it from there and that's in the office provided that it happens i'm okay with having a 7 30 meeting as long as we're not going to go through all the metrics you know and we could commit to getting done within an hour i think it's possible then potentially let's look at you know later time i'm open to that that would be very helpful because at this point it would be a zoom meeting anyway right it would be if the numbers are that high it'd be a zoom so it doesn't really matter 7 30 6 30 whatever yeah yes giving people opportunities um nancy mentioned that she works later i would prefer that because i can i'm i'm working later to it so let's give everybody if it's a if it's an extra meeting and everybody's okay with it we can push it back a little bit commit getting down within a period of time and call it a day yeah i agree yeah if if we start to get back up into that range i'll make sure that nancy and i connect and call special meeting for a thursday evening yeah get home so the only thing is we're going to have to have we have to have somebody even if we're in here too we have to have somebody there because it's a public meeting either oh that yeah yeah but yeah i get because i know you've got you've got your business you know everybody's working so it fortunately everybody's working so yeah i know it's a problem okay what's that because back earlier i mean i'm okay with that i was trying to be oh but by the regulation the superintendent has to be present on site so that's fine i don't mind being here for that that's that's what i'm here for so well hank we think you should be with your family too just like we do i thought it was going to be helpful to everybody but if it's not i'm okay i don't mind at all i don't mind at all all right uh i think that's all that i had for return oh dan has so in fact a different topic before we move on um on the the presentation i know illinois announced today region eight's moving to tier one does that change anything with the sports or with our i just want to know the implications of tier one uh no there's really no difference between for us tier one or tier two it's when we exit the tier mitigations that's the the really only difference between tier one and uh phase four is that all the all the sports are able to be played which really puts basketball back into the mix once we move to phase four that's really the key difference right now is basketball and once we move out of the tier mitigations then basketball can return and i also know isn't tier one groups of 25 or under can meet does that mean that we would be back in person as a as a board if when moving to tier one tomorrow yes yeah if we moved to tier one then we could come back and hold a board meeting because the whole board could fit and we could still host uh some visitors uh so yes that does change for us as well as a board all right sorry to backtrack you i just wanted to check questions thank you anything else anything else i can answer move to saliva testing and i'm going to turn this over to scott and gina gina i think you're talking and you're on mute okay sorry having trouble there um so tonight we're going to talk about saliva screening or saliva testing um and how we would like to move forward with saliva screening in district 99.

a second round of cares funding which is spread amongst fiscal year 22 in fiscal year 23. so these numbers in fiscal year 21 i've updated those uh to represent the savings that we've experienced while students and staff are in our remote learning phase so savings in the in fiscal year 21 are coming in the areas of substitute costs ppe supplies some classroom supplies contracted transportation and food service as well as transportation salaries and there's also some adjustments to revenue in lunch sales and athletic activity club fees but as you can see with those adjustments are that has reduced our expected deficit from the adopted budget which was 5.9 million and with these um updates we are expecting our deficit for fiscal year 21 to end around 1.5 million dollars so this does help our fund balance moving forward so as dr sparlin said we are going we're expected to end this fiscal year the current fiscal year with just about 19.1 million dollars and taking those uh assumptions and projections forward we are expecting to end fiscal year 26 at 39.8 million dollars thank you christine all right moving on uh earlier this year the board directed the administration to present a plan that would cut five million dollars from next year's budget in doing so we identified three priorities those were one maintain a quality climate for learning for students which goes uh which goes with our goal over the past four years of trying our best to balance the budget with minimum minimal effect of the education of our students two find efficiencies with our current practices and three to find reductions that are sustainable so tonight we're going to present budget reductions and cost savings in six key areas those areas are district administrative budgets district administrative positions staff reductions due to declining enrollment secondary reductions lessons learned from remote learning and other so starting in the area of district administrative budgets uh this is an item we've we've talked about already uh briefly but lease drivers education vehicles currently vehicles are rented on a daily rate of 22.50 or approximately 675 dollars per month per vehicle switching to a lease for the six vehicles used for driver's education would have cost approximately 266 dollars per month it would result in about twenty nine thousand four hundred dollars savings the next item is reduced maintenance budgets here here we are proposing weekend building checks be reduced to one day per weekend except during the cold months and this is an item that will need to be collectively bargained as it is in the ocma contract but if it is an estimated at a thirty two thousand dollar savings the next item is restructure benefits uh one of the more innovative ways to reduce our expenditures is through entering into a direct contract in relationship with a major medical provider in our area this innovative approach to negotiating rates directly with the major medical providers as opposed to relying upon blue cross and blue shield to negotiate on our behalf will allow everyone to benefit our employees will receive an unprecedented enhancement to their medical insurance the major medical provider will see an increase in their share of business and the district will save approximately 285 000 next year from a reduced cost for the services provided this is a major project that has been in the works for some time does not require any mousse and is in the final stages of preparation for a launch this spring which will also generate additional savings this year as well the total savings for that is approximately 285 000 a year the next item is renegotiate property and liability insurance we worked with brokers to negotiate savings with carriers to reduce the annual premium and we were able to save one hundred thousand dollars yeah the next item reduce technology professional development we have been doing more training in-house and plan to continue this practice for the future and the last item in this area is eliminate dream box is it up there now yeah i'm sorry one second from the original list yes reduce uh technology uh lemonade dreambox yes and the final item in that category is to uh to do that this is a supplementary supplemental elementary math software program that has not had widespread use it's title one schools could still use their money to continue it the use if needed or wanted and that would be 54 000 and that comes the total district administrative budget budget reductions uh totals 526 thousand two hundred dollars all right slide nine is reduction to administrative positions the second area of cuts in re in regards to reduction in uh as district administrative positions uh we've identified eight positions that would be eliminated which will provide 661 500 in savings annually those positions have been shared with the board and are not listed this evening because this is an informational presentation and those discussions have not been had with those employees at this time what is important is that we feel that we can save six hundred sixty one thousand five hundred dollars by making those changes so i tend the next area we looked at are staff reductions due to a declining enrollment it is important to note that we have had a declining enrollment in elementary first in time and for the past few years we have reduced fte in the area of elementary's teaching staff to coincide with that declining enrollment it's also important to note due to our declining enrollment we would be making this recommendation even if we weren't talking about budget reductions the board has set class size divisors and we follow those class divide those class divisors when creating sections during staffing the reality is when you have fewer students you have fewer staff this reduction equates to a 2.1 million dollar savings the next item is in regards to re reductions to the secondary level that are not due to a declining enrollment in this category we feel we can find the amount listed by looking at efficiencies looking at some of our schedules and making some adjustments where kids are not affected reductions in this area equate to 914 thousand dollars okay now we're going to transition to lessons learned from remote learning uh the first item is stop printing student planners because we will be one-to-one at the secondary level we want to train students to use a digital calendar instead of a printed calendar we estimate those savings to be approximately nine forty-five thousand dollars the next item is reduce subs reduce the need for subs and associated costs during a regular school year much money is spent on paying to do internal coverage when subs are unavailable this is very very costly and during remote learning we utilize google classroom for teachers to post assignments and learning activities the same practice could be done when we are back in person and then since the instruction was provided by a certified teacher student supervision could be provided by a teaching assistant or dean assistant at a much lower cost even with hiring an additional teaching assistant at each school to cover classes and reduce costs the estimated savings is approximately three hundred thousand dollars a year all right next i idea is to move to four days of in person and one day of online instruction and the 21 22 school year a couple of years ago when we were looking at a cost savings we looked at the concept of a four-day school week many schools in the western united states have done this for that very reason for cost savings tonight we are not proposing that rather propose the idea of four days a week in person with one day fully remote during remote learning we utilize new technology and instructional practice to instruct students now that we will be one to one for junior high and high school students we could have four days a week of in person with one day of digital learning scheduled for these levels students would continue to gain experience with digital and independent learning and the savings will be through reduced transportation and energy costs of approximately 491 thousand dollars a year and the last item here is the idea of moving gold to a hybrid model of instruction with in-person and remote options so the gold program services around 50 to 60 students the acronym goal stands for granting opportunities through alternative learning what we are proposing here is to provide even more opportunity or what could be thought of as an alternate plan of learning for students in this program students at goal complete their work online in a self-paced fashion the need for many of those students to be physically present doesn't hold true anymore with today's technology the suggestion here is to modify the current program and to assess and place students in hybrid or in-person learning based on the student individual learning needs those students who demonstrate they don't need to physically attend school to be successful would be offered the ability to complete their work remotely as long as they are meeting expectations and being successful we we we believe we can save around 280 by making those modifications and the totals the total from lessons learned from remote learning is 1.1 million dollars all right slide 13 highlight savings and what we've we titled other areas the first is reduce high school operating budget by 10 percent that would be athletics and academics we've talked with high school administrators and they concur with that recommendation that would be a 86 000 savings uh the next item is offer retirement center for eligible employees uh one of the ideas to reduce our expenditures is to look at ways to better incentivize teachers who may like to retire but can't for insurance reasons when this issue was last studied during the 1819 school year it was discovered that each of our teachers who could retire but had not yet declared their intent to do so had district medical insurance with dependents covered under the plan so they are currently up there are currently approximately 40 teachers who are eligible to retire but have not decided to do so of these teachers all but three have dependents covered under the medical insurance with a well thought out incentive to address this need and with participation similar to what we had during the 1819 school year it's estimated that savings could be 50 000 dollars for this one fy 21 budget it's important to note that this is a conservative figure and that the savings could exceed the 50 000 mark but it is believed that the savings would not be less than fifty thousand dollars and the last item in this category titled other areas is utilize staff retirement savings and this is simply the difference between retiring staff and refilling those positions at 374 thousand dollars slide 14 the slide shows the totals from each of the six categories that we've identified totaling five million seven hundred and one thousand dollars seven hundred one thousand seven hundred dollars at this time i'd like to open the forward to discussion and eventually direction from the board on your thoughts as our intention is to bring the list of cuts to mitigate the deficit to the board at the february 8th board of education meeting for approval let's start with tony do you have any thoughts that you are questions yeah i took some notes while dr smiling was going through it and i just want to say first of all thank you to dr sparlin and all the other people who i know had to help find these savings um because it is a huge relief when we were confronting another six million dollars worth of cuts to to have such good suggestions come up and such a very detailed lengthy list of good suggestions um and that i think you incorporated dr sparlin a lot of the things that we were hearing from the community the last time we tried to cut and things that we've seen in letters from the community so i want people to know that information gets through people are using that information to to look for ways to save money and then just to say to the public you know as we go through this and we have the discussion about how this is going to come out that when you look at all these cuts it's really the best we can do but still less special education assistance i know some of those folks and it's very hard for them to do their job right now and i think it's going to be harder once we make these cuts less subs that's been an issue for a long time in schools not being able to get the sub coverage and what happens is sometimes people are pulled that are reading specialists or they have some other job to do and then the kids don't get that service for the day and then the four days a week for school i'm not happy about it but i see why that saves money and i see why that's a way in a school district like ours where we really need some money to to find a way to get to get through this this situation so i think it's it's a pretty solid package and then there's some things that i was just like yay no more paper planners so thank you dr sparlin and all the other people that are involved in that well thank you tony it was a team effort so appreciate it brent uh i don't want to totally echo that but appreciate all the work that's been put in to this it's never fun but i i have to say again while none of this is fun or easy i think this is one of the more straightforward and reasonable plans that we as a board has have looked at when we started talking specific to budget reductions um i i think i'm good with with everything on here and i just have an ancillary comment regarding um what was the math program and it doesn't matter what it's called i guess my my only comment there is if we've identified systems that are not used in every building meaning that they're not preferred or most effective are those should those programs continue right and i understand if we get title one funds to pay for programs that's great but then what we end up is with is we end up with 20 to 50 programs and if we were to ever lose that funding then we have to make a determination on what to move forward on and it just seems un unmanageable and so it's just an overarching comment that i think we should make sure that we're only implementing the most proven programs in the district and if they work in one building they should work in another and i think it would make things simpler for teachers as they move between buildings and simpler for administration when we're trying to determine which programs are implemented for which students of need allie i got a couple questions so i'm looking at the least driver's ed vehicles so my concern there would be i guess five periods a day of driver's ed i know most leases have mileage restrictions so we worked with our current department chairs on what that mileage should be and they recommend it excuse me 12 000 miles and what they what we would do just like we do with the buses is swap them out swap the the cars are being used a lot to more local drives then so we would just monitor that we stay within those parameters over the three years and then um the restructuring of benefits always freaks me out the reason and again i'm sure you guys have been done a ton of work but i worry about limiting choice for some families but i'm sure you guys will address that and then underneath the number three the decreasing elementary teachers i notice that it says without changing class size caps right but i would maybe caution the board that when you start implementing a lot of these changes in class size like it also is class minimums especially at the high school level like that could affect some classes even running so i guess i guess i would i would want to know maybe from the high schools what classes this could potentially affect right like i wouldn't want to drop an ap course that was low this is just elementary well i mean but it's gonna if we're making these cuts across the board it's gonna affect everybody because these ones these ones your ellie at the 20 the elementary that's due to the declining enrollment in elementary so what that meant with chant without changing size caps that actually just means maintain the current divisors that we use for k2 and 3.5 and by utilizing the same numbers that we've utilized over the last couple years um it results in reductions well because what concerned me about that was then when we got to the high school it said they were going to reduce by 10 percent so that'd be a quick way to reduce at a high school too oh that was the uh that was their operating budget okay yeah that's where it's eighty-six thousand academics uh well but that affects kids right so when we start cutting ten percent of the high school that affects kids um i mean all of these things obviously affect kids in some way shape or form but that one just a little bit more directly for me like i guess my question would be how much did we save on paper at the junior high and high school levels alone this year i guess it'll depend if they have devices and time and our chromebooks get delivered and i'm gonna i'm a hard no on that four days a week once we get back to regular school thank you but i appreciate all the work you guys did thank you yeah just a couple of items um the timing impeccable timing with declining enrollment that helped out immensely without having to make a vote on a reduction to that magnitude i would want to make sure that um the recommendation for goal um is something that is really a strong recommendation from everybody involved in moving gold students to a hybrid at home digital curriculum um that program runs for a reason and i i guess i want to understand the the methods and the reasoning behind or thinking that that's a good idea to move to a hybrid scenario if not out of necessity for for the gold program um and lastly uh christy i believe i heard you state that on that one of the early slides you started to include evidence-based funding back into the projections yes that's correct would it be too much work if we as a board could just see what that looked like flat without annual increases so flat fiscal year 22 23 and then come back in 24.

in our best case scenario we would be returning secondary students to five days of in-person instruction sooner rather than later our first determination of trying to do that was last thursday or i guess two thursdays ago january 14th after that last board meeting so that time has passed we were not able to bring students back or at least made the choice not to and they have remained in hybrid so our next opportunity to review is this thursday january 28th so we'll have additional conversations we we continue regularly to have conversations with dr nibalski and the bartholomew county health department as well as the officials at crh columbus regional health we'll continue to look at the data that we have available to us and on thursday we'll communicate with the public as to where we stand for next week so if we would make the decision to change on thursday and bring secondary students back into the building for five days every day of the week in person instruction that would start on monday february the first so that is our situation now we'll communicate to the public where we are next thursday this slide is always on there in terms of what our responsibilities are based upon spread within the community this map is of the state of indiana and is the most recent one comes from last week we were at a 2.5 those who follow this map pretty closely will note that it is much less red than it has been in the past so that's a good thing perhaps the state is going in the right direction with with numbers of cases as we look at our numbers for this week per capita rates continue to go down the positive test rate has continued to go down the hospitalizations at crh have continued to go down so everything trending in the right direction and we think that we'll be at a 2.0 most likely when the numbers are crunched for wednesday so just a a forecast for us in terms of at least the numbers that we look at that match up with the state we'll see if that is the case this we put in front of you all the time as well this was the second grouping of recommendations in terms of instructional model options and extracurriculars based upon color designations of the counties and then this last slide for covet 19 is just where we stand today with number of cases so since monday august the 10th 469 positive test cases now you can see that is 279 students 141 support staff members and 49 teachers or 2 percent 12 and 6 percent of the groups that they make up so that's not a total it would be 49 teachers mean 6 percent of our certified staff members have tested positive i always put this in here in terms of just that that quick change that happened uh october 2nd was the friday leading into fall break we had 29 positive test cases by the end of that month we had 82 and since that time we've had 387.

congratulations to both of you and thank you very much i assume brother and sister yeah so who's smarter in latin it's the competition thing but you admitted it and she was three inches no right as long normally we would ask mr walker to you know give us a few words when he comes but you you guys have a lot of different awards that were listed there is there one that you might want to like point out as being that you were more proud to achieve than the others i mean i was particularly proud of the publications contest award because i made that publication of awareness at scantia which is our state's publication i served as ijcl editor last year now and as our current high detail editor i moved up to ijcl first vice president so that's been exciting i was really proud of that awards that's a lot of work in that publication and it felt good to be recognized for that and are you both are you seniors this year yes we are got it do we have school plans already uh i just put my deposit down for butler university congratulations yourself oh well congratulations to both of you outstanding thank you there you go man miss green we're gonna hold on to the other uh they want to get a picture of you guys patrick push this way right there thank you for coming out this evening have a good night thank you all right item three we have patrons registered for comment uh miss green nobody commented this evening okay thank you and we can move to item for the consent agenda of dr todd terrell thank you for your consideration this evening we have 4.01 which is the regular business meeting public hearing of the board of school trustees held january 13th the minutes for those meetings we asked for your approval 4.02 the crown point high school band quit equipment purchase and then 4.03 the personnel agenda and 4.04 the voucher registered checks as listed in board docs for your consideration thank you dr terrell you put a recommendation to approve the consent agenda as presented to a motion to approve so removed uh moved by mr smith and second by mr did we have a segment mr baby uh questions or comments from dr terrell all those in favor signify by saying aye aye opposed that motion carries 4-0 and we have a couple special well we have a special hire in the personnel agenda and uh um coach bazia and his wife barbara joined us tonight uh to be our new football coach starting as june 30th correct so mr drill do you want to introduce uh coach to us and then we'll ask coach if he'd come up and say a few things and introduce his wife to us as well sure to crown point high introduce coach pizza comes to us with a wealth of coaching experience both in indiana and illinois taking his porridge team to the state finals his team that would crossword the state finals and several playoff experiences so it was we're really excited to have him on board and i'd like to introduce thank you bill uh just to say a few words first of all we are thrilled to be here tonight we're extremely excited uh to be part of the crown point community it's one of the few jobs that really piqued my interest you know as a further on my career and this is just a tremendous opportunity for myself and my family i bring today my top assistant coach my wife bart who you all see throughout the years and she does a terrific job of doing a lot of things off the field that really help our program and uh i'm humbled i'm excited and uh i couldn't be anymore after i guess i'd be remiss to uh uh if i didn't point out the professionalism of the committee and all the things that went along with that they were just outstanding very professional and uh made it very easy to go through the process but uh we're excited i'm excited to meet our student athletes and uh uh excited to make you all very proud to be a part of our crown point community as we uh unleash the bulldogs for the 2021 season thank you thank you thank you coach i'd also like to uh uh say to thank you we had heard the the process and thank everybody putting the time to the hiring pro you know the hiring process through the interviews and um i know you guys spent hours on the first round and hours with the second round and um you know as a board member appreciate the work and effort that went into firing hiring the the right coach for crown point so thank you um does anybody else have any comments before we uh move forward to action items this evening well me let me hesitate real quick to say generally coach and um barbara if if you guys like to you know take an opportunity to to leave that'd be fine with that you don't have to tell bill twice those reporters got to stay where those two guys go [Music] thank you thank you all for coming you lost half the room that's all right okay action items 5.01 approval to apply for and receive the walmart community grant science stem education of colonel john wheeler middle school or at i'm sorry at colonel john wheeler middle school mr hartman um middle school this is uh purchasing a 3d printer in supplies between teacher at uh thank you mr hardman you've heard the recommendation to to prove to apply for and receive funding an amount of 1500 from walmart community grant program for science stem education at colonel john wheeler middle school we have a motion to approve so moved moved by mr angel second by mr babjack any questions or comments from mr hartman i'd like to thank everybody involved including including mr lewandowski obviously all right all those in favor signify by saying aye aye opposed motion carries four zero thank you miss rob at 5.02 is approval of construction management and design services the 2021 projects miss dowling thank you mr president before you today these are the construction management services agreement with the skillman corporation as well as the design and architectural services agreement with gibraltar design mr conservas and mr thompson are here today obviously we all know dion and jim yes they're fondly known to us from skillman as well as gibraltar these agreements cover the construction project that you all approve the petition referendum process on for total construction in the amount of 214.5 million and these are the agreements that fall in line with that for all of the design construction management etc so the percentage fee of essentially i took the overall cost that was listed and divided into a percentage based on the construction so that's where the number came from just for your own information as you can see there's skillman corporation gibraltar we've worked with for a period of time they've continued to work with us when we were doing small scale two and three million dollar projects worked with us through our entire district assessment so we knew the things that we needed the most and so we would like to continue to work with them through the new this you know big changing moment for the corporation as well so the administration would recommend approval of the construction management services agreement with the skillman corporation and the amount of 5.45 of total construction costs and design and architectural services agreement with gibraltar design in the amount of 5.85 of total construction costs mr president i don't know if mr source or mr thompson have any anything to add i'd just be happy to answer any questions okay let's move forward we'll get to it and see if anybody has any questions at that point okay for the recommendation then for ms dowling to approve the construction management service agreement with the skillman corporation amount of 5.45 percent of total construction costs and design an architectural service agreement with gibraltar design and amount of 5.85 percent of total concussion construction costs do we have motion to approve so moved second moved by mr babjack and second by mr angel and now do we have any uh questions or comments or uh my comment would be to both these gentlemens and their firms obviously we had great working relationship with them we were talking these kinds of dollars on a project not just the dollar amount itself but it's the confidence that when glitches occur or issues arise that they're hands on and they're there to answer our questions and take care of those in a timely fashion and as part of the overall project so that goes into this agreeing to work with these two firms and these individuals so on behalf of a board member of 16 years i greatly appreciate that relationship i look forward to obviously working with you on this large substantial project that the school corporation is moving forward with yeah mr angel i'd like to echo that with the fact that we've had some smaller projects along the way with the you know not necessarily a small project but things like the learning center that it just always seemed to go very smooth and the product at the end is exactly if not better than what we expected so and if people didn't realize that was a time crunch sensitive project and i'm telling you there was thoughts two months prior or month out that and things were never going to be ready but somehow they delivered so once again that goes to having that relationship to where we know things are going to be done the right way and in a timely fashion so thank you looking forward to seeing this one get started a lot of stuff that's been a long time coming so and i also appreciate that you guys are here for this is our fourth or fifth meeting that we've had and you guys are always here make yourself available for questions so appreciate that too and the direct questions may come about as these projects get started but so don't think you guys are quite off the hook as long as it's involved in these done at a minimum we also have a graduate um that's looking to building conflict and we've not developed but he's a former graduate of the front points of possibly five so um that's exciting as well we need taxpayers that are involved personally as a parent i'm obviously excited there are three businesses registered various schools so very exciting and we're greatly appreciative of the opportunity awesome brian would you like to add anything uh brian smith from oh just excited about the project thank you guys for for all your work always done a great job so i'm just excited to okay let's move the vote then all those in favor signify by saying aye aye aye opposed emotion carries 4-0 and as mr baptist said thank you guys for joining us this evening the 5.03 the vm project funding acceptance ms dowling thank you mr president the school corporation specifically karen told our director of transportation partnered with south shore clean cities to apply for a grant for an electric bus the grant is for a 75 reimbursement so we have to put out the full cost before we can be reimbursed so the cost of an electrical bus is estimated to be four hundred and nineteen thousand six hundred and sixty three dollars we make that full purchase out of the operations fund and then file for a reimbursement we'll receive 75 percent of the cost which is estimated to be approximately three hundred and fourteen thousand seven hundred and forty seven dollars in return i would also add that part as part of this we are getting a full assessment done of our fleet to see where we can identify other areas where electric buses or alternative fuel are feasible and we'll continue to work with south shore clean cities but we actually will be to my knowledge the second electric bus in the state the first in northwest indiana um so with that the administration would recommend acceptance of the volkswagen diesel emissions environmental mitigation trust award in the form of a reimbursement grant for 75 percent of the purchase price of an electric bus thank you miss don you've heard the recommendation that's presented by ms dallin we have a motion to approve so moved by mr smith and second by mr babjack questions or comments from be the mr the use of this particular plus the next uh action item i think there's specific use would this just be a difficult toolbox used for transporting children yes it will be i would say it's probably more likely to be in the more local routes so it's not going to be used for extensive travel because of the recharge needs but it is going to be used on the regular daily bus routes fantastic any other questions or comments from mr now let's take a vote all those in favor signify saying hi hi hi opposed the world carries 4-0 and then 5.04 is the award of the transportation district vehicles ms dowling thank you mr president we had two vehicles within the transportation department one predominantly used for transporting additional materials that come with some of our extracurricular activities such as robotics and drama athletics band orchestra where it's not feasible due to the size of the equipment to put it on a school bus it's more appropriate to use this large van to be able to transport things in mass second piece of this is a van that transportation's been using to essentially jump start vehicles things to do with buses and essentially should probably be a truck but we repurposed a van and so the area that houses fuel is actually on the interior and over time as you might imagine that has the use i think the fuel has made its way that the vehicle no longer works as efficiently as it once did both of these vehicles are over 20 years old and just simply aren't uh are no longer usable for the purposes they were intended so miss toth went out and did obtain quotes for the vehicles that's contained within the recommendation these are normally on a you know we don't normally replace these in a 10 to 12 year schedule like we would do with regular maintenance vehicles or with school buses you can see we get a lot more life out of them than just your standard usage so the three quotes of there's three quotes from the providers one quote for each vehicle so there's a 2021 f-4250 as well as a 2021 ford transit van the low quote on that was from sutton ford in the amount of 72 000 307 20 and the administration would recommend awarding the vehicles quoted to sutton ford at that amount of 72 000 307 20.

ulta matrix oh yes um this is for technology this was a payment for our new wireless system that's going to be integrated um and mr gibney i believe that's in all buildings is that correct wireless access points yeah this is the wireless access point project and this would be for all buildings anyone else okay we can go ahead and move on to prepays for december we have prepays for the month of december dated um 12 1 through 12 31 2020 i'd like to point out a couple that were unusual on here you'll see on voucher number it's about halfway down eight zero seven seven seven the total is 360 472 dollars and 28 cents if you'll remember back in april we took out a tax anticipation warrant it was right at the very beginning of cobit and there was all kinds of buzz that we may not receive our entire distribution for the spring and possibly the fall so i tried to be proactive we went ahead and we did a tax anticipation warrant for the operations fund we did not have to use that money we were very fortunate and we did receive our full distribution for spring and for fall this year so this was just basically the repayment on that so of course the total prepays for the month of december are going to be considerably higher and then of course as usual the biggest payment is for to the insurance trust so total prepays for the month of december 2020 700 479 and 28 cents did anyone have questions about the prepaids okay are we ready to move on to the spray glory claims okay all right we've got regular claims dated today january 25th 2021 i will first ask anyone if they have any questions before i pointed anything out we've had we've had some renewals on here so there's going to be some things on here that you do not see on a regular basis so if anyone has any questions i'd be happy to answer those no okay so total claims dated today january 25th 2021 total is 199 972.25 and are we ready to move on to the fun report okay all right so in your package next in your package should be the fund report ending balance december 31st 2020 in education 841 826.10 ending balance and operations one million four hundred forty four thousand sixty six dollars and ninety five cents total for all funds at the end of twenty twenty seven million four hundred seventy six thousand six eighty four sixty three and then last in your financial packet you should have the depository statement of bank balances again the balances for the banks there at the top minus any outstanding checks the total for fund balance for all all banks is seven million four hundred and seventy six thousand six eighty four sixty three if you compare that with your funds fund balances they balance to the penny i'd like to submit for approval thank you very much next item on the agenda are the personnel reports which are posted online and the door of central office so that is the end of the consent agenda if there are no questions or comments can we get a motion to approve the consent agenda it's like give a motion in a second all in favor all post motion facets next item on the agenda is reports and our first is dr french hey good evening so i'm going to be brief tonight just wanted to mention a few things so um first of all we have nwea testing happening and just to kind of give you an explanation of that so next to istep and i learned that nwea testing is our important testing as a district and the difference between istep and ilearn where they focus on achievement in wea focus on growth so you could have a second grader that it will show that they're reading at a 10th grade level vice versa if you have a sophomore that's performing at um elementary math level it will show that too and it won't track that which is why we take it three times a year and so that helps teachers more than any other you know major assessment to help them instructionally to know how to teach kids and so we're in the middle of our winter testing we're wrapping that up this week it's taking a little bit longer because we're working with hybrid schedules and virtual students who are trying to get their come in to do their testing so that's just a teaser for next month when we have the results so and then the other thing i wanted to mention was this winter we worked with the building principles to identify a teacher innovator leader in each building and basically this is a teacher who's you know already going above and beyond to try innovative things with technology in their classroom um and so it's basically giving them a platform to kind of showcase the things that they're already doing in their classroom and meanwhile support other teachers in their buildings and act as a resource so we're excited about this and they're going to continue to do that throughout the semester so kind of a two-fold goal there but that's all i wanted to mention and i'll have more data for you next month okay i think it will be cool thank you next is the superintendent's report yeah so uh in your pack this month i had just a general some general updates pertaining to the 2020 financial year end as well as the 2021 budget or if you could pull up that slideshow so these documents are actually in your in your packet i think they're the last last page like that but i just wanted to kind of just provide a kind of a 10 000 foot view of our 100 000 foot view of our financial finances here um so the first thing um that i do throughout the year is i track the revenue that we receive for all of our funds and track this against the amount that we expect that is expected or that is budgeted for when we're doing the budget each year so i wasn't a part of doing the 2020 budget but i pulled [Applause] the expected revenue amounts off of our 1782 budget order or 2020 and so if you if you start with the education fund i track the state distribution each month so that's the tuition support payment that we receive from the doe and then miscellaneous revenue could be any of those miscellaneous revenue things that we would receive for education fund typically like student fees reimbursements from the state for like summer school things of that nature and you can see the totals at the bottom in the red you know we were projecting um you know 12 million 858 and you can see that we ended with 12 million 488 so obviously we took in less obviously we we made some adjustments even throughout the year to account for that in our budget with our budgeting freeze reducing staff through attrition over the over the summer and so even moving forwards into 2021 we are going we we were much more conservative with our revenue estimates because we don't want to end up in a situation um to where we have a large shortfall so that's something that we we monitor and kelly and i talk about frequently on the right hand side you can see pension debt we don't receive any property tax funds for that all of that is through the local income tax you can see what what was projected the top 195 just over 195 000 you can see that in total we actually received 248 000 so um we actually uh collected a little bit more than we anticipated there so that's a a real positive and that's a good thing uh moving on to debt service for the next slide please moving on to debt service um obviously that's one of the funds um to where the dlgf is going to make sure you collect what you need to in order to make your debt service payments and so you can see these are all funded through property taxes through excise tax commercial vehicle excise tax financial institution tax and local income tax and you can see that throughout the year we receive typically it's these funds and two draws so the june draw and also the december draw and you can see that property and excise tax we've collected more than what we anticipated and then you can see for a couple of those smaller other sources we've received less than what we expected but overall we ended to the good up 116 just over 116 000 in that fund moving down below that the operations fund again kind of the same thing um mrs romer had mentioned the payback of the tax anticipation warrants so one of the concerns um obviously in 2020 with the pandemic is that there was going to be a huge shortfall in property tax funds and some of those other revenue sources that we rely on to fund our operations within the school district so greencastle issued some tax anticipation warrants to potentially make up for that shortfall well in reality we we see that while we didn't collect as much as we had hoped to the ending the amounts that we collected in total weren't nearly weren't nearly as bad they were almost what we what we expected although there was a slight shortfall in just under 500 000 in total some of the revenue transferred or excuse me revenue for the operations fund because there are are expenses for instance such as my office and my salary that can't be paid out of the education fund and so those those uh salaries and benefits of that nature transferred to operation so we make a transfer um in 2020 we made a quarterly transfer to help with those costs um so you'll see that revenue there as well but you can see that we actually shorted it because based on the revenue that we received in education fund we collected less so therefore the 15 rule in order to stay below that amount we we made an adjustment in december so corey if you could move on to the next slide so just kind of some talking talking points in in total i'm just kind of looking at at the trend and kind of how we how we end the year we've seen we've seen a steady decline in revenue the last three years and until 20 we've seen 2020 we've seen expenditures go up so one of the things i do is compare total collected revenues total expenditures in order to look at expenses versus excuse me to look at revenue versus expenditures and uh 2017 2018 and 2019 year end we overspent in our education fund most recently in 2019 by over 400 000 but if you notice in 2020 um we actually um ended roughly my numbers aren't it's hard to read here on this page roughly 59 000 to the good so we didn't dig into the deficit any deeper so anytime we were looking at not replacing staff members putting in the spending freeze in october and just making those adjustments that's helped us avoid an even larger shortfall than what we than what we typically would um because if you notice um 2019 total expenditures versus 2020.

to make that happen our first pickup of our earliest bus is 6 37 in the morning and we have seven buses at the region whose first pickup is before seven in the morning our elementary buses ballpark about 8 30.

so moved second motion by mr nunes is second by mrs way on the motion any further discussion she are hearing none all in favor aye opposed extensions motion passes unanimously thank you everyone uh i'm not sure if uh do you think we can sneak in the spotlight on dartmouth high school before the uh the 6 45 public hearing or would you like to what's your pleasure mr tebow um we can i don't want to put you under the gun if you want to if we can we can certainly take up some other mat some other matters could you just because that way i don't rush i don't want to miss anyone absolutely oh it's fine many members okay thank you so um under old business we'll continue on with a covet 19 update i asked dr gifford if she could just brief the committee on just the the district's progress and um just how how the district is proceeding and how we're handling um you know the cases and the proven 19 as well as uh where we're at with our plans our hybrid plan i mean and remote plan so i'll turn it over to dr gibbs sure thank you so we don't have a lot of new things to talk about tonight but we will mention a few i mean nothing major and earth shattering has happened to shift our plans right now so we do continue obviously to meet with mr misha we have our standing monday meeting i think last week we had three or four meetings plus as we say our phone calls but this morning we talked about how some of the kind of a little decline in the numbers and nobody knows why that's happening i mean we're hopeful but we seem to have made a very good decision with the after holidays i think we did holding back a little bit and maybe we've gotten over that holiday spike if you will a little bit so as we as you know we continue to keep our dashboard updated every friday the nurses maintain an ongoing list we can look at every day as they add folks in we did have a number of cases over the weekend as as i've let you know and but things are in order and people have been notified and the quarantining is continuing i'll reiterate once again that we do follow procedures and protocols the nurses use their judgment according to the cdc guidelines of what symptoms how they could result in either the child goes home etc and but everyone has been absolutely wonderful and taking great precautions our plan right now of course is to return our high school after this week on february 1 back to hybrid method i think the kids are probably ready to come back and see their their um peers sports have been going well again um i did check with mr chris of fully today as you saw as you came in the basketball team was playing so fingers crossed that we can keep that going we have spoken with mr mishu as well i think i notified you before and we will be supporting the town for vaccine clinics here at the high school and he will be sending the information out about that we have one starting thursday night and it's obviously a very controlled phase one and those folks that should come will be notified and they register etc but we're offering a lot of support we've also reached out to our secretarial support and asked if folks want to help blogging people in etc so custodians i believe as well so we're offering a lot of help there and also i just wanted you to know that a lot of folks have been including mass including area we were just speaking about this round tables superintendent roundtables have been petitioning the governor to include educators in phase one of this rollout we still have a couple more months i guess phase two by the time we got to the teachers or so because the first group in phase two is over 75 then over 65 como bil bill i always say i say co-mobility all the time morbidity um so we did i as the president of our roundtable colony i reached out to my folks and wrote a letter on behalf of our group and we sent that off today just petitioning to see um what might happen so that's kind of um the covid world do you have anything other than that that's pretty much it the covered world but we're we're hoping as we said plans are for the high school to come back next week okay so to piggyback off of dr gifford's uh comment on her advocacy with her superintendents group with um really pushing the kobe vaccine i would i would just like to say you know i i've been doing as i'm sure all the three of you have been doing kind of keeping up with where we're at with the uh the phases with the covert vaccine vaccine phases and i i just got to say that i am truly baffled and bewildered that are that teachers are not included right now in in phase one i it just it boggles my mind i i was able to have a good conversation with glenn kutcher the president of mass association of school committees this afternoon and i wanted to get his perspective on it and he he said that their executive board has also voted to push it up to to request that the governor push it up do what they can to push it up to phase one um i i think as a as a school committee member and as a as a um an educator myself that it is really despicable that we are still we're pushing teachers and school department staff off to phase two and i think the state and and i think this um the office of the government of the governor um we can do better we can do better we owe it to our teachers we owe it to our staff um you know we there's a lot of there's a lot of staff members that i'm sure that some of you you know and this isn't unique to dartmouth this is across the state that the staff are just like parents and just like students there's a lot of nervous staff and like mr coochie was saying from masc is that if we if we want to truly get students back into the buildings full time in some type of normalcy in schools we have got to get our educators and we've got to get our our student in well on our staff at the very least vaccinated and included in the first phase i think that should happen sooner rather than later um so that's just my two cents um i have a couple of other things uh my thoughts with covid19 update but anyone else want to share anything uh mr nunes yeah thank you mr chairman uh a couple of questions uh in a comment um dr gifford with uh mr kylie with i'm assuming that we're going to be using the colin lynch activity center for that now we're going to have once it's complete we're going to have to go in and deep clean that and disinfect it there's going to be cleaning necessary yes so that'll we'll take care of that when that's done okay yeah it will uh just so you know from a financial perspective so we've we're working as dr gifford said with um with the department of the town department of health um to provide support both administratively secretarial staff and custodians those uh monies that they earn will be supported through the town's covitt grant so we won't be born by our budget it'll be our staff helping out and we're happy that our staff are you know seem to be very willing to you know to assist in this and and you know dr gifford and i have been trying everything we can to try you know to help uh in that process um as has the high school so um so but just so you know we won't i wasn't on the hook for the money i wasn't worried so much about the the the financial part of it it was you know the deep clean after and sanitizing and it's definitely an additional burden our staff are already especially our cleaning you know cleaning staff are already doing extra duty so now it's extra extra duty yeah so uh what just you know what time is that scheduled to run approximate that's the clinic the clinic yeah four to eight and then a set in the future they'll be doing more and more so they would be in the evening of four to eight and then they're planning on some saturdays as well and um he'll be push putting out that schedule once he's sure of that so what's what does that do to uh you know the schedule for the gym with athletics and music and besides throw a monkey wrench into everything yeah well we've had mr chris fully in on all the meetings and we've had to keep him calm a little bit but he's been really cooperative and working to use the middle school gym or whatever else that needs to be done we just felt you know it's it's something that we need to have happen the community needs and whatever we can do we will do so you know the band folks they kind of use up any other room anyway but um andy is is working really hard to reschedule whatever needs to be done okay yep and i would just add mr flint uh and i exchanged emails today um and his line was that they would be able to figure it out in terms of the music part of it so thank you and my last uh thing mr chairman at the moment is you were talking about you know the conversation about getting teachers and talking with masc and such and i'm just wondering if a letter was sent to you know the governor and you know to the governor and to the state department uh the commonwealth's department of public health from us just saying you know we you know to you know force not force bad choice of work urge urge the inoculation of teachers in phase one i mean sure there's an issue out there right wrong or indifferent you know who knows how much vaccine you know we're getting we're supposed to be getting we don't get you know that that type of deal but all of that aside i totally agree with you that you know the teachers and faculty staff custodians i mean just about everybody that works in a school should be on that first uh first round of vaccines so i mean if there was a letter from this committee sent to the governor and to the state you know massachusetts department of public health sure on behalf i think that would be wonderful that's a great idea you know so i i you want to almost do it like a resolution you know you know you know i'll make a motion that we send a letter to uh to the honor to the honorable governor charles baker and to the massachusetts state department of public health to urge that teachers and school employees be included in phase one i second that the vaccine okay thank you mr nunes i have a motion by mr nunes a second second by mrs amaral um to draft up a letter to to send to uh honorable child speaker as well as department of health um and um no i think it's important i think we owe it we owe it to do what we can to support to support our educators mrs waite no i was just saying if we can also you know send a copy that letter to chris markey as well i think it would be you know as our rep and you know certainly his you know spouse as a teacher in the schools and i'm sure he has you know just the same level of interest and you know kids in the schools but um you know he's our advocate so i'd like to see that letter going to be uh yeah yeah no i'm good all right thank you very much so on the motion any further discussion hearing none all in favor hi hi opposed motion carriage unanimously thank you everyone for that uh so let's uh circle back now the time is the official time is i have uh 6 48 so at this time i'd like to open up the the public hearing on school choice for the 21 22 school year i don't know if i need to gavel that mr nunes is that necessary no sir thank you um so during the uh the public hearing this is just to be typically um though if we had an audience or if we had anyone for public comment um they could they could have certainly sent this in was it posted um posted properly and and putting the paper etcetera it wasn't there everything was given proper notice and all that dr giffords yes i did see it in the standard times last monday yeah you still get the paper edition okay um and just uh just beautiful [Laughter] and just to confirm with our uh with kate gunther uh the recording secretary have you received anything in regards to the public hearing on school choice any input on that i have not received any public comment on that matter okay thank you very much so with that if uh i don't know if i should keep it open for a few more a few more minutes or is it even necessary we can we can if there's if there's comments that come in we can pick the comments up at the end you know that that type of deal i mean i'll make a motion we close the public hearing for uh school choice for school year uh 21 21-22 thank you so i have a motion by mr nunes uh to close the public hearing on school choice for the 21-22 school year and i have a second by uh mrs amaral on the motion any other discussion chia hearing none all in favor aye aye opposed abstentions motion carries unanimously so uh thank you everyone for that and now uh is the time where i will um i guess i'll turn it over to dr gifford and she can do the introductions for our spotlight on dartmouth high school are you ready i'm ready yes so we mr tebow is here tonight to talk about the high school we did have a little conversation with some of the principals you know normally it's called spotlight on kids and we felt um a little bit like they they weren't able to really showcase a lot of what was going on given the situation so i i told the principles i said just pick pick some things that are happening in the school no matter what it is how people are supporting kids with social emotional or the staff or the lunch program anything that's happening in the school so i don't know what to expect tonight or uh in the future when the other folks come we don't have any students here but who knows so mr tebow thank you uh dr gifford yes um yeah so the segment's a little bit different than it's been in the past in the past it's been a spotlight on kids and we've been asked uh the principles have been asked to select one you know group or activity within the school and really highlight um our students and so this being a little bit different way especially at the high school where we've been remote for two long stretches of time um you know rounding up kids uh would probably be challenging so we talked about as an administrative team really taking this opportunity um uh you know spotlight on dartmouth high school is kind of being like a state of the school address if you will because one of the things that i think um you know i was here in november and mrs amaral uh expressed that i looked like i had been through the ringer and certainly i think that a lot of educators feel that way this year but i think it's important that we share that despite the feeling and despite how hard it has been our kids are still experiencing a quality education and we haven't canceled a single thing some of the activities some of the experiences our kids are having might look differently but because of the hard work of the educators in this building our kids are still getting a quality education and so i think that's really the theme i hope to kind of present here today um i i tried to organize uh the state of uh of the school address here in five big buckets one being academics certainly the social emotional and school counseling piece being a second major one student activities and athletics technology integration which um has been critical uh you know this year and then finally highlighting faculty and staff um as well and then obviously i'll be happy to answer any questions we have as we go academically and dr gifford has mentioned this many times and it's really all aspects of school this year but it's that idea about being fluid and flexible um being able to kind of you know embrace the uncertainty if you will because that's the one thing that every educator can be certain about is that there is a definite lack of difficulty as we move through the pandemic so i'll talk a little bit about that we also again despite the pandemic we've launched new high quality academic programs this school year uh including project lead the way for computer science um we've also added to our ap uh programming with ap research um you know so so there's been a number of you know i guess my point here is we're not just treading water we are continuing to progress and again it would not be possible without the quality of educators that we have here at dartmouth high school and then finally in terms of under the academics umbrella uh record ap enrollment um which i know i presented on a few months back um but i'll touch on that as well so at the high school as you know we've had um you know fluid and flexible has been the name of the game we have our hybrid model um and the educators at dartmouth high school have been extremely flexible and open-minded you know you'll recall that when we started with hybrid we had a plan where it was going to be in person uh and then asynchronous and what we found very quickly and adjusted and pivoted was that you know with quarantining and with contact tracing and all of these different things um we we needed we felt we needed the ability to make sure that our students got live instruction every day and so um we're very grateful to the educators at dartmouth high school who have been able to do that balancing act and it is a balancing act to have you know 10 to 15 you know kids in front of you physically and another 10 to 12 remotely through google meet what we found as the numbers started to increase was that we had more on google me and less in front of us at times and i'm hopeful that as you know dr gifford alluded to earlier the director of health uh mr micho has said as the numbers you know the numbers are starting to come back down it seems like hopefully that trend continues because we want our students who are in that hybrid model to be in person when they're supposed to be in person we very much believe that that's you know having students in front of us is the easiest most effective way to teach our educators have been extremely flexible and compassionate uh towards students um understanding that it's been difficult you know and and with the numbers the need to to remain remote has occurred at times remote instruction which is what we're in right now um has most definitely been the most efficient uh and easiest way to um provide instruction this school year i've spoken to teachers i've spoken to students and it's just that ability to focus your attention on who you know um with all your students in one place is definitely easier and more efficient is my microphone off oh too close oh i'm sorry sorry mr galesha and then finally we we had to create a third model of instruction um which is our virtual learning academy and i just want to um when we were doing the planning in the summertime it was 40 students who initially identified we're up to 156 students who are fully virtual through ingenuity we have 156 students which is about 15 percent of our total student population and we've really been able to do it um we take pride in this high school that we're very efficient with how we've been able to service these students edgenuity i think provides a very cost effective option for us assistant principal mr gill all of our school counselors all of our lead teachers our librarian emily goodwin pam king as well as most just recently we added um support from a substitute mrs lenz who had been subbing in our building who's going to provide some you know uh outreach and coaching of kids through edgenuity but that's been it and all of those people are doing this work with their other full-time job still going on i think that that sometimes i hope that that doesn't get lost on members of the community i know it's not lost on anyone here on the school committee or at central office but those folks all continue to do a full-time job in addition to this third model of instruction that we call the virtual learning academy we do have a handful and only a handful of that 156 students who want to come back to hybrid so we'll be probably transitioning in the next week or so you know with the start of term three uh semester two term three will transition probably six to ten students it's looking like back to hybrid learning but that still leaves 150 um students in in the program and again we're very grateful to all the folks that i mentioned um for their work in supporting our students who are in the virtual learning academy as well this is really exciting and uh um again i think it speaks to the to the good work that goes on here at dartmouth high school on a daily basis we have 38 um students um that number actually is a typo i believe it's 58 students who are in the ap research class with mr higgins a couple of different sections there but ap research is one of the ap capstone courses what it does is students who complete ap research as well as ap seminar and at least four additional ap courses over the course of their four years at dartmouth high school that allows them to earn a ap capstone diploma which is just one more credential that our students have it's one more way for our students to strengthen their transcripts as they apply to colleges and universities across the country but more than that the quality of the authentic research that they're doing i have here just some of the some of the research questions that they're going to be conducting original research around to what extent is there a relationship between socioeconomic status academic success and the working habits of teenagers that's that's one example um to what extent are microaggressions prominent in dartmouth high school um to what extent does cellular devices affect a student's academic standing and what demographics specifically and every single one of these research proposals that our students have done are high quality questions that are of personal interest to them that they are passionate about and again that's very much in alignment with the district's uh push around personal uh personal pro uh blended funded personalized and project-based learning sorry i i usually have that in order there um but the research that they'll be doing is right in alignment with the push the district has had for the last several years around that so we're i'm excited uh to see the the 20 minute presentations that the students will have to give once they've conducted their research so that's exciting in addition to that project lead the way is another example of a high quality program that we've launched this school year i want to give a shout out to our first year computer science teacher mr bosworth who we stole from a neighboring district as well as a third year computer science teacher mr brian giat both of those two gentlemen attended virtual training through project lead the way this summer in order for us to be able to offer it and again the the benefit they have from being able to network with other teachers across the commonwealth really across the country uh is second to none beyond that there's a tremendous benefit to our students our students who complete project lead the way courses uh get the benefit of a strengthened transcript because project lead the way like ap is nationally recognized and you can be awarded college credits for completing project lead the way courses colleges also also offer uh preferred admission to students who have completed project lead the way um and you know so these are just some of the benefits that our students will be getting from from our launch of project lead the way um i want to thank director of teaching learning tracy oliveira because she did a lot of the heavy lifting with preparing the grant last year for for project lead the way and also obviously she's done a lot of the heavy lifting um pretty much all of the heavy lifting this year because we did um put in for uh projectly the way grant to expand to our engineering pathway as well so these are again just an example of a couple of the exceptional high quality programs we've launched this school year in the pandemic um again i i think context matters here record ap enrollment i'm not going to talk too much about this because i presented on this exclusively a few months back but again i wanted to remind folks that our continued push to students to stretch themselves to challenge themselves has shown up in the numbers and i did want to just mention that it's not just the same students taking more ap courses the number of students the number of unique students taking an ap course is increased over the last several years as well the other piece of data that i would share kind of to spotlight here is that one of our big concerns is always around making sure ap enrollment mirrors student enrollment so that you don't have certain populations of students who are left behind it's an equity issue and so i'm happy to report that in the stem related ap courses we offer our black our hispanic and our asian student populations are all at or above the actual um their actual enrollment in the whole student population so uh again that that's promising um and it really shows that commitment that we've uh embraced over the last few years to really push all students who are passionate and want to um take on the challenges and support them to make sure that our ap enrollment mirrors our student enrollment our the second big umbrella here that i want to talk about was our school counseling and support services um certainly one of the hidden uh challenges of dependent you know we talk about covid19 and we talk about physical illness but the mental toll that the pandemic has taken on students um goes unnoticed sometimes um you know and i know it's something that the school committee has talked about um the last few times and it's something we're certainly mindful here at dartmouth high school and again i just want to give a huge shout out to our school counseling staff our school counselors as well as our school social workers and school psychologists they are very much aware of the impact that the pandemic is having on our students and they've really taken some steps um enhanced community outreach um and also i'll talk in a second just about you know kind of a creative and unique way to address social emotional um wellness here at dartmouth high school which is going to be to introduce a therapy dog um over the next several months so just in terms of the enhanced community outreach mr mcgrath and mr wright have taken um you know the school counseling site under their kind of wing and have looked to enhance it this year kind of streamline it clean it up so if anyone out there would just go to our school website under the school counseling tab at the top you'll notice it's kind of a one-stop shop there's um online appointment slots you can use students can use while they're remote to sign up to meet with their school counselor right from the school website there's also you know the program of studies there's a host of different resources that are up on the school counseling website which mr wright and mr mcgrath as i had mentioned had been working collaboratively to kind of revamp but also um the school counseling department provides an update as part of the dartmouth high school community update every week so weekly they're sharing out information breaking it down by class um you know and i know sometimes communication is difficult and challenging but hopefully members of the community are aware that that that um update i send it out every friday between 3 and 4 30 and every friday there is information from the uh school counseling department it includes um a a padlet which is just a digital you know curation board if you will it it has resources that you go to that our school social worker workers and psychologists kind of put these different resources that can parents can use students can use to help support social emotional wellness they're right there and readily available again we're in the midst of a pandemic and i think sometimes when we start to say okay just one day at a time we can lose focus of kind of the big picture our students are continuing even though they're going through a challenge there's no doubt about that and even though it is a struggle for many of them they are still very much thriving and excelling um our students are being accepted to some of the best colleges and universities across the the country here and this is by no means i couldn't fit 50 different college um logos up on the screen unfortunately so i just put a few up there to kind of give a sampling or an idea but we have you know university of oregon on the west coast you know brown university right in providence and and in between everywhere in between uh the nation um we also have students in our senior class who are planning to join the um services so go into the world of service one student in particular that i'm thinking about is tracking towards the coast guard and potentially the coast guard academy um you know so our students continue our senior class continues to to be very much uh very busy planning post-secondary their post-secondary lives which is a good that's normal right that's what we would expect seniors to be doing at this this time of year so we're very proud of our senior class we know that this has been a year unlike any other for them um but where we know that they are rising to the occasion persevering and that they will be successful so this is augie um and um auggie is a therapy dog he um was adopted by mr gill uh assistant principal gill and uh last spring so actually right around when the pandemic started was when mr gill adopted the dog and the um auggie underwent training um private training lessons um he has earned uh or passed his um good canine citizen course and then there's a number of visits that the american kennel club requires in order to become your the you know earn your therapy kind of like student teaching if you will um so auggie has has visited school on several occasions already but with faculty um you know and again that's the other piece our faculty have have worked extremely hard this year but the pandemic's been a grind on them as well um and so they you know we've had auggie visit a few afternoons um particularly particularly on fridays and also on our half uh early release pd days and our faculty have absolutely fallen in love with him i joke that i want to come back in another lifetime as a therapy dog because everyone clearly loves loves them so um we're excited for augie to be taking the next step soon though which will be to work alongside kathy thomas on select days it won't be every day but on select days and um you know kathy has really stepped up and and is excited to be working with augie and to really start to use augie as a therapeutic support for students with anxiety with stress with all of these different issues that we know through a lot of different research studies that that dogs have profound calming effects on people that you know just the act of petting a dog lowers your your blood pressure and it and reduces anxiety so we're excited um there are a handful of schools in the state that you you know high schools that have therapy dogs already in play and we are excited at dartmouth high school to be able to start using augie as well student activities and athletics uh again these look different than what they did in the past but not only are our student not only are athletics ongoing music theater company um the fine and performing arts they're all they're very much thriving um you know as we continue sure adjustments have had to be made particularly with athletics and music but our students are are continuing to rise to the occasion and have experiences that are similar if not the same as um they were pre-pandemic terms of our performing arts um you know our band didn't miss a beat um in the fall it was virtual they didn't have the same experiences unfortunately of being able to travel down to metlife stadium obviously that's an experience that can't be replicated other than to go there but nonetheless they earned a national championship through u.s uh bans the same the way they would have um you know had it not been a pandemic year um our theater company stepped up and did a performance of a wonderful life a virtual radio show so again the easiest thing in the world to do would be to sit there get stuck pout and say this is lousy but that's not the kind of kids we have it's not the kind of educators we have at dartmouth high school and they've continued to innovate um and to inspire quite frankly as they figure out new ways um to get things done our indoor percussion season is well underway i know mr angst is uh working with with uh our student musicians and preparing for that um and we're excited we're excited for those opportunities as well as uh you know as we move forward here our clubs and activities um which uh fall under the direction of our associate principal miss javier chavier uh i'm excited to share that you know this fall we actually introduced five new clubs so again we're in a pandemic but our students continue to be engaged and continue to look ways to connect to dartmouth high school beyond just the traditional school day some of the clubs uh include things like the diversity equity and inclusion club the stock market club we have a political science club that formed what else am i missing here uh oh esports how can i forget esports so esports is uh huge across the the state um it's probably unfortunately going to be more work for mr galashar as we continue to to go down because it's more technology uh you know it's specific to gaming but again the passion that our students have for it as well as mr bosworth um mr ghiat and mr peratti who have come together and kind of collaborated and have this grand vision for our esports offerings down the road is tremendous so again i highlight that beyond that we've continued to do things like spirit weeks it just means double the fun so if you've never worked in a high school you can't truly appreciate what it's like to wear your pajamas to school particularly when dr gifford shows up at 6 45 in the morning and it's the one day you've actually jumped in and said you know what i'll wear pajamas today and then you shake your head and say oh no so i had to explain to dr gifford that morning why i was in you know plaid pajama pants um but the students appreciate when the faculty and staff participate you can see some of the pictures up there of of uh students and staff participating and it just means hybrid model just means it's double the fun because we get to do it for each cohort of students so beyond that um we some of our popular traditions uh are coming up you know the senior superlative it's not gonna be a dance um for obvious reasons but the senior superlatives are gonna be showcased and highlighted it's gonna be um virtual it will be through collaboration with mr pirati and the dhs tv media production program um it will be kind of like an emmy's show style um that they're producing and will be premiered i believe the date is february 26th um that the the premiere of that showing will be but i know that our senior class officers along with mr peratti our senior class advisors um are working extremely hard to to get that up and and going so shout out to mrs bringham and to mrs taylor for their work in making sure that that that gets done athletics again i have to give not that he needs any more credit i think uh he gets a lot of it um but my good friend mr chris foley our athletic director of the year here um he gets he deserves a lot of credit because in the summer time when things weren't opened up yet and the state was releasing guidance you know it seemed like every day and there was different guidance every day he really put together a plan dartmouth was one of the first if not the first one of the first high schools in the area to offer strength and conditioning for our students and that got you know people forget had been really shut down and our students were able to get outside get moving and get active see people all while having a lot of um enhanced safety protocols in place so we appreciate that very much and then that kind of led into a very successful fall campaign our we had seven competitive teams that were offered in the fall along with three organized team activities including um you know we provided um one of the organized team activities was unified basketball it was important to mr christophole and i um that you know if we're setting up athletics um for our students that are we not forget our unified um athletes because that's just a very tremendous part of our school community and so that was one of um the organized team activities that was offered in the fall we had two very successful teams in the fall as well our girls volleyball team um finished the season perfect was an sec champ conference champion uh and our girls soccer team was also the sec champion this year as well so the fall was very smooth with a very few covid related issues and winter athletics is underway we did have to pause that's more because of the surge in the community and and not to do uh with you know in team transmission or in school transmission but again we've resumed winter athletics it's underway going smoothly at this point with plans for fall 2 and spring athletics in the very near future so tech integration at dartmouth high school as you can imagine [Music] we wouldn't education wouldn't be ongoing right now if not for technology that's one of the silver linings that i think will come out of the pandemic is that all of our teachers uh have improved their ability to integrate technology into their instruction tremendously um you know we we probably made a 10-year leap in 10 months time and that's not an exaggeration um there were a number of teachers in march who weren't using google classroom i can tell you now we have a hundred percent you know and that was very quick um but beyond that they've also integrated other tools like flip grid and kahoot and quizzes and neopod and play posit you know there's there's too many to list but there's a tremendous amount of digital tools and resources that our teachers are using um thanks in large part to our our its jen thomas who's been phenomenal in supporting and coaching um our teachers up but again the credit belongs to our teachers for taking the risk and not being afraid to say to our students let me figure that out i am not sure what's going on you know and and i think that that's important for students to see as well that we are lifelong learners and that it's okay when we make mistakes or when things don't quite go as planned and we have to figure those out that's part of of being a learner uh one other just to back up one other second i do want to also thank mr galashar and all of the tech support folks because we continue to upgrade the technology infrastructure at the high school as well as the you know hardware that they use um this past this current year rather where you're able to get smart tvs like the one we're using for this um meeting here and i think that there's enough of the public who hears tv and they think movie and that's not you know the tv is really a way to to chromecast to project instruction there's a lot of different uh ways that the tv can be used it's really an instructional tool at this point and in many cases it's cheaper than if we were installing a projector um you know by the time you mount it and all of that you know um replace bulbs and whatnot so we have um outfitted the entire english department um with with smart tvs like the ones you see here where they can project you know students co-constructing paragraphs and writing peer editing and things like that so thank you to mr galashar on the tech department because i know um every additional tech comes with additional work you know so it's not lost on us i wanted to really thank the faculty and staff they are our number one resource by far our most precious resource our teachers um the pandemic has been challenging for them in addition to the anxiety that um they have about the virus being present they also are learning new technologies they're not sure what uh model they're gonna be in in a week you know so their world has been turned upside down and i don't think we can thank them enough um you know and i i also want to acknowledge no one pushes them harder than me um and so i recognize the fact that um as i'm thanking them you know tomorrow i could be asking them to you know look for a way to improve on something or a way we can support students more that's not lost on me um though the tremendous job that they are doing uh and the commitment and effort that they've put in i want to particularly recognize our our support staff they've been our unsung heroes and by support staff i'm talking nurses secretaries our counselors and our school social workers um our security monitors and our custodians our custodians have been phenomenal working additional hours um you know the question can devote well we have to deep clean our custodians deep clean every day pretty much they use the the uh electromagnetic sprayers every single surface that gets touched in our building gets washed pretty much daily um you know so when when there's nothing more satisfying than when you hear mr misho talk about there's no evidence of transmission in the schools because that's what i view as our number one job is to keep our students and our faculty safe and the fact that we can say that is in large part because of our custodians keeping the buildings clean but also our nurses and secretaries and all of the support staff really working together um you know throughout this pandemic so we appreciate that and then finally i i just think you know again our our staff is not living they are living day to day get through it one day at a time but they're continuing to progress as well our its gen thomas was just certified by google um as a as a google certified coach she's already a good google certified educator um you know uh we have teachers like melissa pavlik who this summer understanding we were going to be in a remote learning model went out and got credentials as a ck through 12 certified educator again just a couple of examples rachelle lemieux and marcia vieira our ap stats teachers putting in extra hours virtually through our partnership with mass insight so it's them and the author of the ap stats books because the rest of the teachers in massachusetts are tired and tapped out but our teachers are going to those workshops and have you know tremendous access so um again a huge shout out and very appreciative of all of the effort that the educators here at dartmouth high school are putting in and if you were to ask me you know i would say that the state of dartmouth high school has never been stronger and i am very proud of the work that goes on here on a daily basis even in spite of the pandemic and so with that i'll answer any questions no thank you very much mr tebow for your presentation that was uh very very thorough and uh very very informative informative um thought with you mrs waite any thoughts yeah um you know first excellent you know it's so great i have two students a freshman and a junior here so you know another one will be up in two years and um you know i'm thrilled you know i i can't you know say enough by you know the attention the um just you know the compassion you know my else freshman struggled a bit you know and and i feel like the patience and you know just the hands-on approach the diversity of the lessons it's just it's it's been great so i i'm really you know i'm you know i'm really grateful to your staff and to you so so i'll start with that and then also say you know you're bringing in the juniors tomorrow for the psats and i you know i know that was you know not part of the presentation but you know one part was talking about the seniors who you know and all their accomplishments i think in the context you know i'm starting the college search with my daughter and i just you know i know what you know these seniors have gone through you know they haven't been able to see their schools in many cases um you know they're applying and and the teachers also have been writing recommendations you know i'm sure many of these teachers are writing you know 30 40 i know i was in that position you know recommendations helping these kids um you know so it was a to get these seniors through these accomplishments was not you know was not an easy task for the for the seniors themselves or for your your staff so that's you know they have to be really you know really applauded i think you know more so than most classes that go through because it was it was a tough game and then you know for the psets tomorrow i'm so grateful so you know thank you you know my daughter will be taking those um you know a lot of these kids it's been hard they haven't had a you know a psat or a test since you know sophomore year some of the seniors couldn't get sats you know i've heard tales of kids flying you know the different cities so um yeah it was great that they you know the whole school is making that you know that everybody's coming together for that because it's these kids are nervous they haven't sat for a test and you know it's uh it's something so so thank you um and then um i think i'll say the research you know again i'll get back to that one of the things i love that mr higgins is doing is not just about those students it's really including all the students in the school i know that my my freshman son got a flurry of emails that he can kind of participated and think about these questions and i think so it's not even just for the research students themselves but to be you know a part of that and thinking through you know what about my cell phone use and you know wait my opinion matters which freshman loves their opinion mattering so again like so many things you know considering continuing to see that the training that's going on with all the other burdens that you know the staff have had and that they continue to be excited about you know their profession is you know it's it's it's really means a lot you know and the kids they feed on that and you know i can see you know again everything from you know different things are happening it feels like a very given the circumstance an active campus i mean the dogs coming into the school i mean that's you know i think my dog was like you're so cute like i mean my daughter was so so it's just you know so many um it feels very alive um and active and you know it's it you've done a great job here and your staff so um thank you and i guess the only questions i would have would be you know looking at the head and i know it's hard to say because we don't know what the landscape is you know with covet in the next months but um as you think about those culminating senior activities in the junior banquet the prom what is the planning i guess you know around that and what are the thoughts right now are we thinking that there will be because i imagine that there are members of the class who are starting to think about those things and parents and they usually have their planning for the all-night party and so i'm kind of curious about concern so we've we've met um ms chave myself the senior class advisors and the senior class officers have met a couple of times um for different things uh but we scheduled for the first week of february a a meeting to exclusively discuss end-of-year activities um you know i said this to the senior class last year and i said it to the i will say to the officers this year as well these activities are about them they're not about me um they're not about you know any of the adults really here it's really about them i mean and and obviously their families who have supported them through 13 years of education so we try and do everything we can to to tailor to to what they want within the guidelines obviously you know if there are limits of 50 people on social gatherings it's not going to be a dance i mean that's just not it's not going to happen um and our seniors know that our senior officers know that um you know so so that's not a surprise to them so they've been thinking what might things look like i will say this that um the parade was a huge hit last year um i think regardless of whether in a pandemic or not it's a nice event for the community i got several emails not just from senior class parents last year but from you know um i don't want to use the word old timer because i don't want to offend anyone but it was class of 1958 i want to say or it was it was a it was a while ago it was well before i was born let's put it that way um but he had watched the parade from his front porch and he emailed me to tell me you know what pride he took in seeing the current seniors um doing that so i think there are a tremendous opportunities if we use a little imagination to still honor our our kids and still honor their accomplishments knowing that you know um and if we can have a full in-person graduation that's the preference because trust me you know when you're as large as i am and out of shape as i am you don't want to be standing in the same spot at the podium for 12 hours for three days in a row which is what it took to make the graduation ceremony so personalized last year so if there's an easier way to do that i'm all for it that's great well thank you i appreciate it you're welcome thank you mrs wade mr nunes that it was a friday the first day we filmed last year was a friday because the saturday i mean you don't think of it when you're standing straight up and down on the same spot sure yeah 12 hours yeah your knees too it's a lot thank you mr news thank you mr chairman i don't think you left any stone unturned you know very very very well done thank you very much for doing that a couple of questions i have uh i kind of miss and i don't know if we still get them or they but you used to have i like on the bulletin board out front like the students college acceptance letters and i always used to enjoy reading those to you know see where they where where our student not so much who the student was but the different colleges that they had applied to and have been accepted at so we don't do the college letters anymore we've switched it a little bit we do a pennant with the college logo on it um and we do we also include students who are going off to the armed services their branch of the armed service and put that up there as well as any student who might be going directly into the workforce who you know um wants to be recognized um and we do do that in the spring um last year was up when the pandemic started and so i know actually mrs flor was working today she's got the artistic flair there she's the one who creates the um the the penance and so she was working on them today so that those boards will be getting updated in the very near future um with with that okay i just yeah again i just love to see you know they're not only going to colleges around here you get the university of houston's the you know ucla you know argon state oregon university type of deal notre dame so i always enjoy watching those uh i'm glad to see the use of the smart tvs and no we're not watching movies so that is good question i have uh the students that are totally remote via ingenuity type of deal and and this is not a knock or anything of that nature but how are they doing academically i'm glad you asked that question so the students who are putting in the hours are doing fine they're doing it they're doing very well the students who are struggling if there's a direct correlation between they're not putting in enough hours and what their grade is that's why i had mentioned we added um you know a qualified you know someone who we have full confidence in um mrs uh lens who had been subbing for us she's working with mr gill and we've shifted to a um a daily report so we get daily you know mr nunes did not log in yesterday mrs lens calls that house the very next day and says what happened um we had been doing it weekly week you know um but a week is a little bit too much time um but we've you know when we're doing the outreach we do find things had a fully remote student who had covid that went through the house so he didn't log in at all that week that makes sense to me um you know so so we have um outreach in place now to make sure that we're monitoring them um because we still have plenty of time you know that's that's the thing is we have plenty of time for for the students who are not where they should be to still catch up um you know but we're finding that students are putting in who are putting in 25 to 30 hours which is what you know they'd be putting in here yeah those students are doing remarkably well um it's the students who are putting in less than 20 hours a week who aren't making enough progress it's almost you know you you know you put in the time you're doing fine if you're not you know that type of deal okay thank you very much sir you're welcome thank you mr chairman thank you mr news ms emerald yeah um you know i i certainly could sit here and and like have a laundry list of wonderful things that you're doing i i i'm quite impressed a fan of of your leadership of of your administrative team of the sort of equitable compassionate approach that you have with each student i have um all the faith in the world that when it comes time uh you'll you'll let those voices of of all of your students kind of speak to what can be done for those special you know ceremonies um i love the fact that auggie the therapy dog is here and mr gill is again i said the the your your whole administrative team but he's he's he's wonderful um we do have to work with him mrs amaral so and i know he's home watching right now so he's funny he's and i wouldn't say through the ringer i think more that emotional kind of drain that i was feeling it was like that mirror i was sort of seeing myself in you so but um but yeah no i um just thank you for your leadership and uh we're lucky in dartmouth to have you at the helm here at dartmouth high school and so i really don't have anything else to say i certainly could go through i did make some bullet points but it's just wonderful great job and and thank you for all that you do and thank you to your staff and thank you for thanking your staff and pushing them as well you know it's it's they they are certainly more than deserving we're in it together this is you know we're we're here for you and them and um yeah it's just our community is in this together so thank you that's it well said welcome thank you mrs amaral there's not much more that i can add that my fellow member committee members have uh already said just a couple of notes uh here that i have yeah i'm really thrilled to see first of all really nice over really nice big high level overview of everything that's going on at dartmouth high some of the things i'm really happy to see you know the fact that the clubs are still going we had introduced you introduced five new clubs um you know i'm thrilled that um we're at the place that we are with technology in the diamond public schools especially at the high school i have no doubt that was a big undertaking with mr galesha and his crew as well as you know just uh working in conjunction with you and your staff and to make things uh as successful as possible especially with um i believe i i believe there's you have an integration specialist here at the at the high school level so i'm sure they're playing a huge role in trying to work with work with your staff and i just i really i'm thrilled to see with the with my background and technology the investment not only with the monetary investment that is being made but also the investment with the professional development with the working you know working amongst uh colleagues and bound i know there's a lot of collaboration going on so i'm really thrilled and i'm happy to to see that that's taken place because i honestly don't think that um a lot of what we're doing right now in some way shape or form i think is going to be around in the long for the long term i don't see us going back rolling back too much uh with that so so you know i'm really thrilled uh to hear that once again uh the the fact i love the idea of a therapy dog you know i think we this i don't know if you were on the committee at the time yeah um that when we approved the policy we uh this is the campus yes so it was uh that we recreated a policy right therapy for therapy dogs and i'm thrilled that we're able to do that and we're continuing that and i think it's just as important you know as it is for the for the students but um yeah you know i i i'm really concerned um for the most part i know can you speaking for my daughters as well as um you know just a lot of my um my daughter's friends in generals and just speaking from as an educator that kids are for the most part they're resilient students um and a lot of students are resilient um but i do have concerns about the long-term impact that this pandemic is is taking on on you know the adults um and you know not just not just teachers and faculty and staff in the schools but just parents every everyone so i think anything that we can do to support and i want i'll echo um mrs amaral's comments data you know i thought it was very i thought it was really nice and um a nice gesture of you to to recognize all your staff because this truly is a team effort um just a couple of questions here first question would be i know last year during when you presented i don't know if it was your school improvement plan or something else in general but there was a program in place that you had i don't know if it was the flip program um so you know i talked one of the things they just wrote here what types of safety and i know you talked you spoke a little bit about that tonight mr tebow but what types of safety nets are in place for those students are that are really struggling um and you know and what will happen and you know what are we doing to support them so yeah so that's a good question so we still have the flip program in place we usually start it up right around this time because it's it's the end of first semester which is when we start to be able to forecast you know uh someone's not looking like they're going to pass for the year in a year-long course so i i've already met mr mcgrath is uh the gentleman who oversees the flip program for us along with uh special education teacher um mrs catherine moniz they're both um interested in doing it again and they've they've met a few times already to make tweaks to the program but that uses ingenuity um and one of and i think this speaks to mr newton's question but edgenuity is a fantastic uh curriculum but students require um pushing a little bit because it's really you it's the motivation piece if you're motivated and put the time in you're successful i the the program itself has a lot of built-in accommodations you know for students who might have learning difficulties but it's the motivation piece and what i've found in multiple school districts is that when students know there's an adult who cares about them who's monitoring them they are more successful and so that's the the role that mr mrs moniz and mr mcgrath playing the flip program is that they get the kids set up they build out their individual pathways and then they monitor them as they progress and follow up and sometimes it's you know what kind of like pulling an elephant across a stage with dental floss but you know you do whatever you're gonna do to get that particular individual across um we've had kids who we've extended into the summer time to do that uh and certainly again we appreciate uh mr mcgrath and mrs moniz you know because that that means they're also extended out you know into this into the summertime as well so that's that's one of the safety nets in place we also um obviously this school year as well allow for retakes and revisions and and um you know that that's not uh you know that that's a pretty significant change um and it's one that we put in place because it's again a matter of equity you can't have one you know u.s history teacher allowing for retakes and another u.s history teacher not allowing for it then it's a matter of luck of the draw who do you have so that's the reason why we really pushed for the school-wide policy but again that's a safety net for for kids you you didn't do as well as you had hoped that first time you have a second time you have to self-advocate you know and many of our students do and are and have taken advantage of that as well excellent well thank you for that one last question is i know back when we were in august september when we were talking about our different plans and all that that we were going to look to allow and i know we've been kind of very fluid with this and maybe i'm not sure if this is a question for you mr tebow or dr gifford um and you know specifically i guess we can just ask the high school right now um the intercession is coming up semester two is going to be starting soon have we been flying no we've to some extent we've been flexible with allowing students to come in and out of or not come in and out but transfer from say ingenuity at the high school at techer from at the middle school level um and coming to a hybrid situation is that still the case so we have not denied anyone coming going into the vla okay coming out of we haven't had like i said we've only we have six to ten students and we held to semester um two which starts february first um as the starting date it just makes more sense grading and everything so okay um you know that's that's kind of the the plan and um like i said we've had more want to go in for a variety of you know reasons and we've been able to accommodate all of them i i think that's wonderful and you know i think that's a great thing that we're we're willing to be that flexible so uh i thank you on behalf of um everyone here on the committee thank you for your presentation and um great job well done thank you thank you thank you next up i'll turn it over once again to dr gifford for an introduction i'm excited to um to hear about this of our new town youth advocate um so uh doctor giffords oh she's there yeah let's see i've been eating popcorn i know oh yeah there she is hello hi everybody can you hear us i can hear you doctor okay all right i will introduce you so i'm really delighted to introduce our youth advocate dolores joseph uh we did hold two meetings so far with her zoo meetings one with our secondary leadership team and one with our elementary leadership team just to break the ice get to know each other and hear from dolores about her ideas of how she can help our schools and also be able to now set up some she will continue to move forward and and schedule meetings with counselors etc so she was a delight to meet and um we heard about our 15 year old son in the background doing his work so with that dolores i will turn it over to you all right well good afternoon everyone good evening it's not afternoon anymore it's just been a long day thank you so much for inviting me um my name is dolores josephs and i am the new youth advocate so i've been in this position maybe a month and a week and a half or something like that so um getting used to it but enjoying it so far so a little bit of history about me and my background i've been doing social service work for over 25 years so i am kind of dating myself but i do love it i have worked in the new bedford area for several years at child and family services i was the adoptions director at one time i also worked for the csa program which is the community service program that does wrap around work um for youth under the age of 21 in the area i also did a little stamp with dcf so i was an area program manager with the local dcf office here in new bedford um stepped away just a bit from this work and decided to just do some substitute teaching because i was still debating whether i wanted to go and get my certifications to be a school adjustment counselor while debating that and still wanting to work with children and families this opportunity was presented to me um i applied for it and i am so very happy that i did i love advocacy work i love working with youth and families connecting them to resources in the communities providing supports to them even trying to do some groups i know in the wake of cove but things look a little different and we have to think outside of the box as far as how we want to present services um or programs to youth and families so um working with the school department and other community partners i'm hoping to within the next month or so to get some of these things off of the ground to start offering groups or support groups programming to youth and families and dartmouth so the position says youth advocate and i think we had a discussion about this on friday that the title is a little deceiving even though the title is youth advocate my role and responsibility is to provide supports advocacy guidance and services to not only the youth in dartmouth but also their families so it doesn't necessarily mean they have to be attending a dartmouth school because we have several youth who attend schools that aren't located in dartmouth so i wanted to be extremely clear in getting my message out to as many people as possible to let them know that i'm here to be a support to residents of the town of dartmouth so that's my lunch bill on that i'm actually going to be meeting with the school department with the outreach staff on friday very excited about that to hear about some of their ideas working with the previous youth advocate and what they would like to see moving forward in this position i love collaborating with different community partners and because i've worked in this area before i've gathered a lot of resources i want to be clear i am not the person to actually do most of the work my job is to connect to services but i am able to do some bridge work for youth and families while we are looking to connect them to services so case management connecting them to mental health i'm doing check-ins with families talking them about the crisis center maybe going to the crisis center with them following up with them after they've had visits to the crisis center and seeing what their needs are and what the next steps are i also want to showcase and to let people know that there are other resources that are outside of dartmouth that families can take advantage of too that's for free my goal is to try to keep the youth advocate website updated on the town of dartmouth i know it's slow moving i'm doing a lot right now but i have posted some things on the sites that i feel could be beneficial to our youth and families in dartmouth and the school department has graciously offered their web space to promote some of these articles trainings or um food pantries for our youth and for our families so i'm looking so forward to this collaboration i have great ideas for the future i a lot of lofty ideas and i know things take time but i just wanted to get myself out there because this position has been open for almost two years so you know out of sight out of mind so it's getting people to know that there is a person located at town hall if they have a question um need support not know where to go they can always reach out and call me i may not have the answer right then but i promise to find out for you in return calls or try to figure out solutions for youth and families i think that's my little spiel for now so any questions well first of all thank you very much dolores this is chris oliver the chair of the committee so i want to thank you and for taking this opportunity and this time to introduce yourself i know um i think what this is just a wonderful support service that is offered for the for the town of dartmouth and i'm thrilled it sounds like you are a very collaborative person and i can only imagine that um you know the the school department as well as the town the town in general i i hope that we can use you as in as another support to to continue to you know support the families and support support the youth of dartmouth so i hope this is the beginning of a long relationship uh with you and i'd just like to welcome you to the uh the town of dartmouth and thank you for taking this opportunity uh to me to speak to the committee as well as reaching out and setting up meetings with the um with uh dr gifford and her team so i'm going to turn it over to my colleagues now for any questions or comments this is amarillo yeah hi dolores so thank you time to i've had the fortune to work with dolores in other capacities and you know your warmth and your knowledge are are an asset to this position and anyway uh when i heard that you were you know you you took the position i was thrilled and i just think it's just any way that we can out of the gate sort of build bridges build partnerships and help our community is is um is a good thing and i'm just you know glad that it's you and and look forward to the partnership as well so thank you thank you mr nunes thank you thank you hey dolores i'm john nunes and uh welcome to the town and uh wish you good luck and one question i have uh put you on the spot a little bit but what do you see as the biggest challenge right now facing guy youth one of the biggest challenges faced right now um with this pandemic um the fear of you know the unknown what the future is gonna look like this vaccine that is getting ready to roll out and people um having maybe some reservations about whether they should or shouldn't and also for our young people i was talking to my 15 year old and they got a different couple the other day he goes to vote um asking him about what are some of your fears what are some of your concerns you know being a young person and this is so unprecedented and his response to me was that he wasn't really concerned about himself but he was really worried about his peers and if they were to contract um covert 19 what would be the outcome so i think that is one of the biggest fears but also something that we don't really talk about a lot there's a lot of food insecurities that are going on right now people may not be talking about it but that is a huge issue especially for our young people if they're doing hybrid or remote models some of the food that they would get during the day has been eliminated because they're not at school but i'm so happy to know that dartmouth and some of the other schools too are providing programs that children are able to get meals but food insecurity not knowing what's going to happen with this virus and with the vaccine i think are some of the big issues in trying to provide information to the public about the vaccine what it is what it doesn't do who should get it who shouldn't get it which i don't want to say who should who shouldn't that is a personal choice but i think being very transparent with people and letting them know um the ins and outs of it i think that is one of the big issues once we can get past that and get back to some sense of normalcy which i'm gonna be honest i think that the way that we are doing things now is going to be incorporated in the future and that we've learned a lot now that we've had to use a lot of technology to get information out to people and to educate our our youth so i feel that's one of the positives that has come out of this if they're we can say a positive is that we've learned to think outside of the box as far as how we present services to people how we get people more engaged so i can see some of these things being carried over oh excuse me my allergies have runny nose being carried over um into the future so food insecurities and the fear the pandemic and the virus i think are some of the big things right now thank you good luck thank you thank you i'm sorry thank you i apologize hi dolores my name is mary waite first of all i just want to say i'm so grateful that you're here and i'm so thrilled i know that we had some conversations i'm a member of town meeting um you know there was a real commitment you know by a number of members to make sure that we still kept this position and i'm so glad that you're here you know you couldn't come at a more important time you know for the kids in this town i mean we know the you know the the stress that this pandemic has had on so many of our families and so many of our kids um you know and you pointed out you know just you know so many of the factors food insecurity you know and things that we don't they don't talk about among themselves in simply you know coming back and trying to socialize and finding spaces and not and feeling you know can i even socialize with someone when i you know i have a math and my safe and so there's there's so much anxiety there and you know to have someone you know you know as um kathleen mentioned to be a bridge you know you know to create that connect that connection to um and for families who don't always feel comfortable necessarily going to the you know school counselor to have someone else to theirs of support you know who you know maybe they feel you know is more neutral that can kind of you know report you know send them the resources and make those connections for them i just i think it's great and you have you come with such a strong reputation and clearly such a strong set of skills that yay thank you thank you thank you so thank you very much to all the uh my fellow colleagues do you have any questions for us or you have anything else you want to share we thank you once again for giving us this opportunity uh to listen to you no i think that is all and i'm so grateful that you've allowed me this opportunity to speak before the school committee i am like i said looking forward to our continued collaborations i know this is only the beginning so i'm very excited about this role and also what i didn't mention but dr griffin and i we had a conversation um with some of the other leadership is that during the day i know the schools do a lot my husband works for the school system free time league field so i do understand about the responsibilities and everything that you have to do during the day and now with cove extra things you need to do so i'm here as a support so when school gets out i'm still here so know that you can refer families to me if something happens at four o'clock five o'clock because the counselor or a school member is not in the building people can always come to me at town hall also what i want to stress to you and which um everyone here probably knows as far as confidentiality i don't want people to be afraid if they come to me that i'm going to just tell everybody about john doe came to the office today things that happen stay there unless it's a matter of safety and i need to report that but i'm very clear up front when i speak to people that what we do here is confidential unless it involves safety then i have to report or say something to somebody so i want people to feel comfortable coming to me not to think that i am going to let their neighbor know or one of the teachers at the school no unless there's some type of communication between us and they've said it's okay for us to collaboratively work to try to provide them with resources thank you all right well thank you thank you once again nice very nice meeting you dolores we wish you the best thank you thanks delores thank you thank you everyone have a lovely evening thank you guys bye take care bye-bye seems like a wonderful uh yeah she does wonderful asset to the community so looking for breath of fresh air yes yes well uh well very much needed yes very very much so so that's exciting so thank you for making that happen dr gifford next up under new business we have uh our school choice uh vote to participate the 21 22 school year um before we get started with that i'll just ask um ms gunter have we had any uh emails come in regard from the public hearing side none have been received on the topic thank you very much so before we get started in any kind of discussion i'd like to turn this over to dr gifford or mr kylie and whoever wants to share some of the numbers and uh what we're doing here and what your thoughts are and recommendations i'll talk about the numbers that we have and then i'll let mr kylie talk about the the money and the financial of what's been going on so currently i believe you did receive this but just in summary currently we have 110 students enrolled in our school choice program and i'm looking and seeing that it seems 25 of those are in senior class so when we do take the vote i know we've never set a number and etc but um with seeing that 25 would be going out i would like to then be able to um we usually take 30 or 40 a year but i would like to build that number up to make sure that we still have around 125 students or so so just to look at that that there'll be some going out and then hopefully we get the applications and and folks come in so that's all i really say about that and kylie can talk about the finances sure uh so i provided you with a little detail that talks about what we've spent through the years through this program i i think probably the most important thing though on that list is that i can't imagine where we would be in this pandemic if we had not had this program and been able to invest in one-to-one computing now the town as i've told you has been very helpful through the pandemic in terms of uh you know providing some of their grant funding to support uh technology purchases and other purchases that we've had to make but we weren't starting from scratch you know and and mr gallashaw through the last you know few years has has put together we started in a pretty good place during this pandemic technology-wise now they've definitely come through and supported us and put us over the top so that we can continue to offer high-quality education um despite the challenges but um i i just don't i don't know if we would be able to do that without having done this um so i just think that that's you know illustrates how important it is thank you mr kylie so as from looking through uh the uh the finance sheet here since it's in inception um i think it's actually really very impressive um the amount of money we were able to take in and some of the some of the items line items that we were able to um to spend it on and i i would wholeheartedly agree with you as far as the one-to-one computing that i don't know you know where we would be without it um and i don't know if that's something that we could even remotely afford right now um i without school choice funding so with that i will turn it over any discussion any comments questions uh that anyone may have um before i give my final thoughts yeah i just actually had more of a you know a question because i agree with my my colleague mr oliver you know i i think the resources are needed you know this is just a reality you know and i guess but a question i had as i think about the students that we're bringing into the school you know looking you know through the four years how many students do we send evoke um staying in other schools from eighth grade because again like i think that's you know another consideration is that you know we're also paying out you know so so how i mean staying we're not you know that's that's a different story but you know bristol aggie you know so how many students do we have you send elsewhere that we're also you know subsidizing i don't have the number in front of me do you i don't either no we could certainly provide you with the bulk and aggie and role yeah i know so there's also school choice yeah i was just i was just doing other districts because it's not just that some students let's go there yeah right so we do have a sheet we usually keep on all of that and and the trend each year and how many have gone out from eighth grade so we'll get that to you and i think just as part of the conversation you know if you know we also have to you know say hey you know we're we you know we high school is a different entity than middle school right the way it's set up and we you know we're running a lot of very diverse classes and you know in order to run those we do need to have the population in the seats and you know we're in a you know a dip a little bit you know population-wise so at least in the high school right now so again you know just uh you're thinking through this i mean i you know my daughter being you know in dartmouth has liked meeting some new kids and you know especially actually she has met um some of the students that are in her class she had you know met before through theater programs and you know and that's so she knew them coming in you know from westport and new bedford so again she's actually liked having some you know some of those students in in her classes adding some ideas so just you know another you know a little bit of a silver lining there too i think so anyway but um no i i you know i i support this so thank you thank you mrs white mr nunes anything dad no not really mr chairman i think everybody kind of knows where i stand on this anyway so which is just me personally i mean don't get me wrong i absolutely thank you for this mr kylie the uh the revenue and i think you to to go back and look at this is you know it's all student-based yeah this is everything going to students you know school setups ice stems innovation you know the innovation lab i mean i remember when we got right that grant from the state we were one of two or three high schools that got that that's right public schools yep you know type of deal public schools again the rest were you know private vocational and colleges type of deal and we needed you know the rest of the money to to get it up and going and that's been a godsend and that's fantastic and and such so it is great to have this me personally again it's philosophical and my vote is no but that's me fully fully respected mr nunes thank you this is amarillo you know that um i i do you know the value in the um what we have here in this this you know very um i had the word just escaped me but this you know all the projects that we've been able to to fund as you mentioned uh most notably most costly the one-to-one computing um and yeah i just that you just can't underscore that enough that this money is needed and we wouldn't have it otherwise so yeah i don't really have anything to add i have uh i know initially in in my pre-pre-uh on the school committee tenure it was quite controversial and yeah and and all of that and and some folks felt a certain way about students coming in and occupying spots on teams and i think if uh i don't know that there's been much of that in the last years and and these students are they're good kids and um they just want a good education and um agreed i've i've uh i've i've not witnessed anything negative and and i think they're well received and well recep you know like you said it's the one they're just one community and i think it's wonderful that we can we can give that to them um so that's all i have to say okay thank you very much yeah but you know separate from the financial standpoint and the the fact that this is a great opportunity um to bring in some more revenues to help directly support our students it goes right back to the students i think it's also a nice opportunity to um for more diversity and more inclusivity at dartmouth high school so that that's really all i have i am i am in support of this again uh with school choice so uh the chair will entertain a motion uh to approve school choice for the 21 21 21 22 school year second i'll make a boy so you got to make the motion of it make a motion i'll make it much more confusion i s i'll second the motion i have a motion by and a second by mrs amaral to approve school choice for the dartmouth public schools for the fy uh 21 no i'm sorry fy22 school year which would be next school year beginning in september any other questions yeah quick question mr chairman do we need to put a a number of students with this week you don't usually we don't usually okay i i i'll be losing 25 i have 110 so i usually want to bring it to 120 125 somewhere in there that's fine so i'll just that's fine and i think you know i think it goes without saying with the simple fact that you would have let us know that um mr tebow and his team is comfortable with continuing with these types of things you know once those kids start coming in and they do a nice job to spread them out throughout the classes so as you've seen in the past the classes haven't become overly large sure through any of this so yeah okay we need the kids now very much on the motion any other discussion it's your hearing none all in favor aye aye uh opposed me abstentions none so motion passes three to one good thank you we've already had people call okay uh next up uh dr gifford i'll turn it over to you for the 2020 annual report yes i i hope you've all read it um you need to yes but once again i just want to thank the entire team for their contributions for the annual report and i think it showcases the district's work very well um similar to what mr tebow did tonight i didn't say anything to him but it was a fabulous report so you would have to vote on accepting the annual report and um that will go to the town perfect any questions for dr gifford in the annual thought chair well entertain a motion to approve the uh annual report so moved second motion by mr newton seconded by mrs wait on the motion any further discussion it's a nice job yeah yeah honestly yeah detailed and i'm pretty detailed good uh i agree good point i know that takes a lot of time enough for it miss ganther pushes the group so yeah it's a lot that's a lot of questions it's a lot of collaboration all in favor aye aye aye opposed all right motion passes unanimously thank you for doing that that was thorough thank you next up on the agenda in a new business is just a quick little discussion on mcas i'm i asked archer gifford to add this to today's agenda i know that we kind of spoke about this a little bit in the past but once again uh in speaking with mafc um you can see that uh i sent you i asked dr gifford and ms genther to include the resolution language i'll just start off by saying when i first found out that the department of education was looking to even have mcas in some way shape or form in the springtime i was just appalled our teachers and our educators and our administrators have more than enough to do during this pandemic between the safety between the anxiety uh between all the stress and emotion that's going in right now it just i i am bewildered at the fact that we're still that this the department of education in in the um legislature still would like to move forward in in in this as well as commissioner reilly and the department of education so i asked um reached out to masc once again and i asked what their thoughts were and at their um the annual um the annual meeting uh they they took a vote um to uh pass this resolution and you can see that the um with the delegates in attendance at their annual meeting um where they stand and i would just like to just get this committee's thoughts on this and whether or not you this is something that you would like to support once again this would be something a resolution that we would vote on that would go to um our congress our our congressmen as well as our senators and um as well as governor baker and commissioner riley um so uh just uh i am i'm absolutely opposed i know they're looking at correct me if i'm wrong dr gifford a um a cut back version or a different little bit you know um not as in depth and but i'm honestly not sure how much um data they're going to get out of this um and and i think it's just an unnecessary burden um on our teachers on our students um in as you can see with some of the language here that you know i think at least once again for this year and really moving forward there's a lot of controversy around this type of mcas and high stakes testing i know that um from what i'm hearing and dr giffy can chime in is that their concern is that and i think this has actually been made public in the in the um in the media is that if we were to do away with it for another year is that they're afraid that it wouldn't come back yeah so i i i think i think there is a lot of politics at play with this um those that's just my thought um but i'll be happy to hear from my from my committee members and um your thoughts uh i don't know if you want to sat down on this end yeah sure yeah no i'm i am in support of of a root of us sending a resolution like this just to send the message like you said how much data is really going to be obtained i know their plan is like you said to stream you know changing it up a little bit but still going forward with it uh but i would love to see them uh students in the graduating class who missed the the 10th grade to do similar to what was done last year you know it's not just giving people a free pass it's sort of like looking at those students and seeing what the trajectory was what their grades were teachers know administration knows their their their transcript knows how they've done or their potential and then making that competit you know modifying that their um whether they're graduating or not based on like a different set of like determinate factors not solely on the mcas like having a son you know with with uh significant disabilities anyway a separate conversation it's always just been so foolish to me to to his worth in you know taking and you know anything other than auditing classes in a higher ed you know situation because he can't necessarily obtain a diploma you know is just ridiculous and it's it's uh anyway um so yeah i'm in support of of of this it's mr nunes thank you mr chairman i'm one who from the get-go has not been in favor of the mcas testing not everyone tests well okay uh and to hold uh students accountable at any time uh you know for testing you know do you pass do you not pass you know are you gonna graduate you're not going to graduate what's your diploma going to look like et cetera is wrong more so than ever at this point in time with what's going on i mean you know we've been talking about mr tebow was talking about and you know mrs thomas mrs joseph i'm sorry was talking about you know the social emotional issues that the students have because of the pandemic and such you know and not knowing what's going on you know in 10 minutes never mind come march when i've got to take you know in this the mcas test and how are you going to administer that test because you have a hybrid situation what do you do with the students that are fully remote how do you handle those students type of deal there's too many balls in the air as to the logistics and that and along with that i mean i think we have to look at not only the mcas but i'm not sure what we're doing but i think we have to look at all the different testing that we're doing with our students right now again you know you know most of them are in a hybrid situation some of them are fully remote and i'm talking middle and elementary levels type of deal i mean do they you know is their education complete that you can give them any type of a test that is going to completely identify how well they're doing this year i don't think so i mean you know it's been almost the year that this has been ongoing you know i mean they lost three months of school last year you know and then this year you know they were late getting in just because of trying to get everything going and then come back you know and they're in every other day which is fine and then we've had situations where classrooms and we've shut down for two weeks because of the spread of the virus you know these students unfortunately i do not think no disrespect i know our teachers are working diligently but i don't think it's fair to anyone whether it's mcas the star or whatever it is abcs to be giving our students any type of testing that says you're either going to graduate or you're not going to graduate you're going to promote you're not going to promote in this type of a situation so yes thank you mr news sorry guys this is wait stole my son so no i mean i you know i i wholeheartedly agree and i think you know when i look back and uh you know dessi's argument was again diagnostic that they thought this was gonna be diagnostic and all i'll step back and think you know the culture that's been you know created in every school around mcas is that we have a big you know in you know we take the teachers are talking about it for like months ahead of time you know we're sitting kids down you know we're having rallies and do your best you know here's gum this you know you know all of that you know so if we tell the kids this year i mean beyond the class time that this is a waste of class i mean every moment that our kids can be in the classroom and their teachers i think this year is precious you know so i don't want to see it sacrificed to this but also if it's just diagnostic so then what are we telling how are we going to frame that to the kids so you don't take it seriously this year or we stress you out by saying you take it seriously i mean it just doesn't you know and then and if we say it's diagnostic it's not serious spending they're not going to take it seriously so it's not diagnostic anyway because they won't take it i mean the whole thing just seems an exercise in futility really like and it's a it's an unfair burden you know that i can't imagine many staff are saying please let me test my students and go over how to interpret you know it's just not you know i haven't been a high school teacher i can see there was a time you know if you have 10th grader you want to make sure i understand the philosophy behind it you want to make sure that they you know pass a certain yardstick it's not just reliant on what you know there's a big argument that you want uniformity and all that and and i get that but we are seeing a trend away i mean right now sats have dropped the essay questions i mean that just happened i know my daughter was like that well i see the essay question the subject test as well um and there's some move question about you know whether or not sats are you know in the college board we talk about you know what is behind the college board is panicking you know i mean there's there's that but um a lot of schools right now are turning to be test optional and you know may continue so i know tufts and many other you know institutions so again like i think you know we're entering a new phase maybe that and at the very least i think this year we've gotta honor the reality that's in front of us so that's that's awesome excellent way to yeah to read it with that um be it resolve that masc rejects the call for the students of 2022 who missed their 10th grade mcas testing to be required to make it up in the 2021 school year or ever we demand those students be held harmless for not taking the mcas and that their graduation requirements shall be determined by locally controlled voices of the school committee in school administration within the remaining graduation requirements of the commonwealth of massachusetts additionally additionally we reiterate our call for moratorium and all high stakes testing for the 2021 school year so all students can benefit from their time being focused on direct instruction and we urge the legislature to enact a moratorium on high takes high stakes testing of three years chair will entertain a motion to approve that resolution so moved second motioned by mr nunes a second by mrs wait on the motion any further discussion j herring none all in favor hi hi hi opposed motion carries unanimously we could just ask um your office dr gifford if you could just drop like we did in the past draft up if we could have um miss guenther draft up some letters and we'll get those um signed and off to our all the appropriate parties okay thank you thank you uh you're going to sign them or not you're going to sign them i'm certainly signing them the letters that we've talked about tonight yes second to uh on our behalf for both just to confirm uh for both the mcas as well as the um the vaccine for moving up teachers bringing up the teachers yeah vaccines yeah i'll be happy to do that so much about mr news the second that motion taken by mrs amaral on the motion any other discussion all in favor aye aye thank you thank you thank you mr nunes for bringing that up no problem uh next up uh superintendent's update dr gifford a couple of things in addition to everything we've been talking about tonight but the district received well if you recall we do a tier focus monitoring the old cpr audit etc we have to civil rights special education etc and we've been on our last pieces of civil rights and one of the things that we had to do was show that we are providing professional development along the lines of racial equity discriminat inclusion nondiscrimination etc so what we did was we and then we'll have to do more i have a feeling this will become part of the mandated training before too long with everything that's going on everywhere but for now it's up to the districts but deci required us to do something so what we did was we sent an article out to the staff we provided staff time either through a staff meeting or a cpt meeting etc read the article about implicit bias and then take it's from harvard the impact association test just to self-reflect and i mean we don't collect the data or anything like that obviously it's just the results you know go to desi and they saw i i don't know if they'll compile the whole thing across the state or whatever but anyway we've done that this this week or so and and the schools are providing time for folks to do that pre-k and case screening we've been organizing that i think i updated you on the other day and um the k th the cuneigon portal will be opening for registration in early february so folks can be looking for that and we look at our numbers of the number of students that what we think the trend has been of um over the last three years or so of the decrease in the number of k students so we're going to have to see what happens whether folks will opt to put their student in k when they should have been in k this year or if they're age appropriate go to first grade we hopefully recommend that they do go to k because there's so much learning that goes on and with this year of craziness that we don't want them to miss but anyway we'll be looking to that and see what people are going to be doing as far as registering for the kindergarten and i just wanted to mention one more thing and then i'm going to turn it over to mr kiley if he has a few updates as well but you'll hear more about it on the february 8th meeting we invite the student that was chosen for the francis galicia memorial scholarship in honor of mr galtrow's dad over at the south coast collaborative and unfortunately we couldn't have a luncheon you know we did a nice celebration last year the superintendents go the principals and talk about the student that they chose um the students get a one thousand dollar scholarship so we've invited i'm i'm waiting to hear from mr tebow if the student and their her parents can attend our some way the february 8th meeting to be recognized and it's it's a nice award so we did a virtual ceremony and it's what we did like everybody else but it is what it is so that's all i have for tonight thank you dr gifford so just speaking quickly to um food insecurity jean sheridan and the cafeteria staff have been doing a great job i just wanted to update everyone that they're continuing to do food boxes weekly so it's on thursdays now while school is in session so any students who are learning remotely or are quarantined for some reason or you know unable to be in school can uh collect a seven-day food box at the middle school we've added evening hours so we have a daytime hours and evening hours for our families so make it more accessible and they're continuing that program so you know we're trying to address that as much as possible and we're continuing now as we you know we've come back into the hybrid mode to send students home with food for the day when they're out of school so that option is still available so i just wanted to make sure the community understands that that's still you know still out there and we're trying to address that food insecurity as best we can do you find our students at the middle school level are they taking the you know i think that was a little bit of an issue before where they weren't necessarily all taking the food you know do you find that most kids are taking the food it's a mix it is a mix you know i mean students have particular tastes and you know it's sometimes they don't eat all day even yeah right right but there are a lot of students who are taking it yes yeah and is it every week that boxes go out yes every week seven day meal box that has uh fruit vegetables juice um breakfast lunches lots of different types of things some hot options cold options you know pizzas pancakes french toast uh hamburgers cheeseburgers stuff like that really just just a lot of food i know because it is yeah it's wonderful and just out of curiosity uh about yeah a ballpark of what do we give you yes so right now now that we're coming back into hybrid uh we're you know estimating less than 100 each each day um each week sure um when we were just fully remote uh we were give we gave out 400 and something boxes um so that was significant for sure but we're still we're giving out more food now than we were when we were fully remote obviously because now we're giving it out in school to kids so um yeah it's it's been successful and it wouldn't be without um you know the effort of gene and and rick ferreira and his team assisting with the logistics and of this whole thing it's it's been good effort there's a i just you know i i see it um i see there's a lot of great collaboration going on so it really is you know that's an all hands on deck situation and everybody gets it so yeah yeah no it's good that's excellent i just had one other yeah sure brief item um just wanted to thank lauren pusey in my office she was been working with the um with the town's energy consultant kathy stanley and we just received the check for eighteen thousand dollars for uh air purifier rebates so yeah so they so we just got that and uh so i was pleased with that a little little discount on those air purifiers that are all over the place we'll take what we can yeah wow that's great is that ours or does that go back to the toilet i have i have a exploratory email that uh hasn't been uh responded to yet i'll let you know [Laughter] fair enough mr kylie thank you uh under report of the chair i really don't have anything um to add um i know it's gone a little bit longer than uh on the agenda so uh no i i that's all i really um i really don't have anything tonight anyone else i just have um that you know we just got an email from um miss kane that deca results are in so they're they haven't announced yet but i guess they're going to announce on wednesday um you know who's i guess the top seven finishers go to state so i have two kids who are very excited so let's see but um yeah so something to look forward to on wednesday she will announce that she said um at 2 15.

now those numbers have been fluctuating daily uh up and down uh for it's we not every student jumping out to dl there's a lot of students that are feel good and are coming back in and want to be part of hybrid because the dl part's not working um working for them hello mr uh is not working for them so they had to go about and do that but you'll see that they are pretty even as we go through first thing we did was we made a video that mr larose had put together uh with a cameo from myself and dr martins in the beginning uh we're going to play this now we're going to be showing this with kids and as we go through in our mentor flex for the first week and we'll explain what that is in a little bit uh hopefully this works and uh the technology will show it but it's just a quick little video welcoming our students back and showing highlighting some of the changes we've done to the we just want to building back our patterns that are coming back into hybrid starting on february 1st which will be the start of the second semester when you come in the building you're going to notice that there's a couple of things that are different including some stairwells that are one way a whole lot of hand sanitizer stations so remember practice your social distancing and always wear your mask let's go take a look inside [Music] do [Music] so [Music] so [Music] my [Music] i hope to see you soon remember keep your maps on use the hand sanitizers and practice your social distance have a great day thanks again to uh mr rosa for working on that and making me do my cameo in one take appreciate the efforts there um we're gonna go over a couple things just to talk about the different levels of the building uh one of the things i forgot to mention with the cohorts is probably the average um class size coming in in a cohort is about seven uh there are some that are like two and there are some i think our largest one is around 15 kids uh in one class just because of the way it's split up on that one class on that one given day um so you know the average is about seven uh for for kids per class so we um this is kind of the stuff we're going to show the students when we hit mentor flex uh there's some part important parts to it that we want to show we'll go through it kind of quickly um level one whether it's g level one or or d level one we talked a lot as an administrative team for trying to come out we did this early in the summer with one-way hallways as well as certain one-way stairwells uh down and up stairwells um we couldn't we could figure it out but it was uh really daunting for a student if they had to go from one place to another and when you have connections like this it was difficult to to have them one way our hallways are far enough or wide enough that students can pass comfortably as long as they're not gathering the other thing you have to notice is um grab-and-go meals that we'll talk about in a little bit but coming in right from outside the gyms where the parent drop off and pick up will be over here there's going to be a grab-and-go station both for breakfast and for lunch any dhs student can grab a breakfast on the way in go to their room put up their shield and eat their breakfast if they would like and on the way out they can any student can grab a lunch coming right through this gym and out to their car to drive home or getting picked up by their parents so we encourage all the students to grab one on the way out even if you're not going to eat all of it that day you know it may have some nutritious snacks in there for you to have so grab something on the way in and grab something on the way out that's level one oh nice shot john it's animated uh the gym entrance where they can be dropped off grab-and-go meals level two uh we have grab-and-go meals at the black box for any student who's driving and is parked on the black box side along with our mini buses who'll be dropping off there uh they can come in and grab a meal uh on their way in and on their way out at the black box entrance the cafeteria with the big x on it is closed uh the vending machines are not operational so there's no reason for students to go in there there's a couple of things going on in there one it's where we stored all of our extra chairs and desks that we pulled and file cabinets that were pulled out of teachers rooms to make room to separate the desks are down there it looks like a huge garage sale and the cafeteria staff basically for the district is preparing lunches they have a whole assembly line that they do the lunches for the district right now and put them on many and send them out to families that need them so the cafeteria is closed before during and after school level three uh it's the same way that we talked about as i mentioned earlier these hallways being one way but there was no way to get people out of here and coming around quick enough without having them walk nine miles a day so we decided with the hallways being far enough that they could go traffic could move smoothly both ways again this is how our students will be entering through the front where the buses are going to be dropping off and picking up so grab-and-go meals will be available right here on the way in or the way out there's also another entrance over here with no grab-and-go meals but right here there will be cafeteria staff handing out meals on the way in you want to grab a breakfast go to your for the first week your mentor flex for the rest of it your block one class sit down before 7 put your desk shield up and eat that is fine and at the end of the day at dismissal walk right out this door grab your stuff find your bus which we'll talk about in a little bit uh and don't eat on the bus but find your stuff on the find your bus go home and eat when you get home we don't want to make messes on the buses and you have to keep your mask on level four there's only two of them uh for d and c uh what's going to be interesting is i think a lot of kids don't even know that this uh students may have never been in this stairwell before but this is going to be the up stairwell coming through here and a down stairwell going through here on the front so if you're going to go to c you're going to go through this stairwell in the back you made it one directional and then you can come back if you are looking for uh d5 c5 is the same thing you can go through the up stairwell and then down here freshman on your way in i will tell you this there is no d5 and there is no pool okay so don't go looking for they tell you to go to d5 or try to find the pool there is no pool at danbury high school do not buy a pass for the pool do not get a discounted pass for the pool there is no pool okay that's just a little tip from mr donovan here our water fountains are currently shut off but the bottle filling stations are open uh so if you have dr martin's hold up your water bottle i just saw you take a nice if you oh it's a bubbly i didn't see that it's a if you have a water bottle that you would like to bring in these are there it is filtered um water stations that you can fill up your uh their sensor you don't have to push anything you can fill up your water bottles here i recommend that everyone bring in a water bottle uh and use those filling stations they're located all through g uh they're down uh some places around the building they're not everywhere though but g is the one that has them the most okay stairwells as we mentioned in that you saw in the video are one way this is the main one that comes in right off the bridge and it's that the down stairwell we're doing this because we felt that it was important for um the traffic to go one way in the stairwells uh you know when we have everyone in those stairwells get crowded especially this one because everyone uses this stairwell so if we have just a down sterol and i think it'll take everybody including our seniors who have been here the longest to try to figure out ah this is only a down stairwell uh oh i'm gonna just go up one flight now we're gonna try to make it so that they it's one way so you're not passing other people uh on the stairwell going the opposite direction we're gonna see how this works for a while and we're going to go with that there's the one-way traffic signs the down only on the floor it tells you which way you're supposed to be going in or out you'll also notice that they're the blue arrows throughout the school uh tell you to keep right during while you're in the hallway flow with traffic uh try to stay as far off to the sides as you possibly can look out for the hand sanitizers and i will give you a heads up about this one the pumping station on the hand sanitizer is like that long and if you put that all the way down into your hand you will have enough hand sanitizer to last you for a week so you only need to do a little bit of a squirt and rub it in because if you push it all the way down it's going to go all over you so be mindful of that if you're using one of those our mask policy dps the board has a mask policy that you can go look at i didn't want to print it all up here it just basically says that all students and staff must wear face masks at all times while it really doesn't indicate what they are if you want to wear a face shield you have to wear a face shield and a masks the mask is the big part you just can't wear a face shield if you want to wear both you most certainly can't but you have to have masks on at all times the only ones that are not allowed are masks with valves on them they are not allowed to be worn into the school so masks on at all time from the moments you get on the bus until you come in to the moment you get off you know there's a lot of discussion about mass brakes and depending on the word you're going to hear the most is density and depending on the density of the classroom a mass break can actually take place in the classroom especially with the shields and if people are working quietly but mass brakes will be given throughout the day if a teacher feels it's going to be there up to them if they think hey we need a mass break we've set up tables outside in the courtyard i know it's cold but if everybody wants to go out and get some fresh air they can take a little walk out there again remember we're dealing with numbers in a classroom of like seven so uh a lot of these can take place in there when you have your shields and your your um at three feet apart our with the shields and all of that we were rated at about your average classroom i think it was 24 kids could fit into it because all the stuff we pulled out so now we're talking seven so i think they're gonna have assigned seats they're gonna you can use their shields and they're gonna be spread out through the classroom so if you're working there a teacher can say put your mask down uh take a couple of breaths because sometimes they do get a little uh you know they do start to irritate a little bit but that will be up to the teacher it was kind of impossible for us to come up with a schedule of who needs a mass break and when because of the fact that i don't know when the class needs a mass break the teachers know better if they've been doing a lot of talk and they may need one if they're just sitting there they can pull their mask down so one of the things we're going to be talking to the kids about how to wear your mask it's not just good enough to have a mask masks must be worn properly it sounds kind of ridiculous that we have to go over this but this is how a mask should be worn uh not like this and not definitely as under the chin this is for not only your safety but everyone else's in that's coming in the building so wear your masks and wear them properly please whoops the self-assessment part this is uh where we need help from the students and and parents you know we are not going to be uh temperature checking people on the way in there's been a lot of back and forth about that but uh our medical staff does not believe that that's going to be helpful to us so we are not going to be temperature checking so you we're asking that parents and students do a self-assessment oh where'd the self-assessment go oh john my self-assessment disappeared well the self-assessment anyway talks about everything that you've heard before it's not anything new you know if you feel that you have a fever chills cough shortness of breath fatigue anything like that it um you know stay home and it doesn't mean that you have covet it doesn't mean you have to to to run to the doctor immediately but you have to stay like that uh at home for at least 24 hours after the symptoms have stopped if you call your doctor and say any of those symptoms they're probably going to send you to get tested at this point but you know it's up to you as parents and students to say yeah i'm not feeling good i think we're going to stay home today which leads us to an attendance question that people have if my son or daughter was scheduled to come in for a hybrid wasn't feeling you know we did the right thing here and we said hey we're going to stay home because they're feeling a little bit and they go to school remotely does that count as an absence no it does not the teacher will just tag them remotely what we do need is we need the parent to notify the school we need to notify that the the student who's supposed to be in hybrid is not going to be in today you know you know and may be working remotely the teacher will code that correctly but we want as the school to know because if you happen to be at work and they stay home you may not have known they stayed home and you're not going to get the the robo call that you would normally get for an absent because we are treating the remote present as present in school so if they're not feeling good it's no penalty for it just stay home uh give us a call and just say hey you know we did the right thing we're keeping them home for uh you know today tomorrow whenever uh but they're gonna be on classes and uh we'll be grateful if you could do that because that would be a big help to all of us if that could happen uh classrooms some of the stuff we've done there's our our favorite senior mr larosa who did graduate from here but many years ago uh we got these deck sheet desk shields uh there's enough for each student that will be in the class so if the largest number in that classroom is say 16 students at one time the the classroom has 16 deck shields you know we felt this was better than giving each one each student their own and have them walk around with it bring it home and bring it back it's only made of corrugated cardboard and a little plastic shield we figured that they would break up pretty pretty much um pretty easily so what we're trying to do is just preserve them as long as we can so they're going to stay on the desks and when kids come in and out they can do that cleaning supplies as you saw in the the video each room has a tub of wipes right now paper towels and a spray the spray is a spray that can be used in school without gloves it requires one minute of contact so if you spray a desk down um you can wait one minute and wipe it up you're good to go we can ask any student that wants to do that if they want to come in and spray their desks down teachers to spray their desk downs and then have students wipe them down in between classes it's just one way to make you know take another precaution there so we're going to be doing that it's students safe we don't have to worry about using those chemicals in school the bathrooms we have extra custodians on during the day that will be cleaning them regularly we have a sheet that they uh check out that they've cleaned that bathroom so we can monitor if they've been cleaned you know we are gonna monitor the bathrooms for density it's a word i said uh again so we're not hanging out in the bathrooms we're going into the bathrooms we're doing we have to do we're going to wash our hands and then we're moving along so we're not going to close certain bathrooms we don't like to do that uh and you know make kids go to because then we're gonna have a more density in the bathroom but we are gonna tell students come on let's go let's move along don't hang out in the bathroom but that's so we'll try that part of it so what happens if you are ill during the day you notify your teacher uh your teacher is going to call down to the nurse's office the nurse will meet you either at the nurse's office door or direct you to what we call the coven room which is located across from the nurse's office attached to the media center they will do their assessments they will do what they have to go through and from there they'll make a determination if you're going to stay in the covered room or if you're going to go into the nurse's office the reason for that is a lot of students go in and out of the nurse's office every day for reasons that aren't coveted like medicines and things like that so we didn't want to contaminate the nurse's office so there's a separate room where kids can wait and uh within 30 minutes we're hoping a parent can come pick them up or whoever can come pick them up so um the less time in the school the better and then from there we go through contact tracing uh you know as you saw they were closing down classrooms and if you've read anything this is our first time coming in but you've seen you know new fairfield brookfield newtown going in and out of school it's going to be the same thing so you're you know you may have to check your emails and listen for those robos that come out that uh your son or daughter uh through contact tracing was in a room with someone who may have tested positive and we will look at things like that so the contact racing begins at that point that'll be done with the administrators and the nurses at danbury high school all right so the first week we're coming back we are going it's a little change of a schedule we are going into mentor flex from 7 20 to 7 55 each morning for the first week 7 20.