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so always looking forward and always trying to be proactive so we can get into that you know interview window as soon as possible ahead of the market which is then you know the teaching labor markets so get these efficiencies figured out make sure we're set for the following year especially with those staffing requirements based on everything that's going on yeah absolutely thank you and chief financial officer miss dolly well i was going to say i've had enough to say already this evening from the agenda items i wanted to add to one thing that mrs pasquez said while going over preschool through the course of this capital project it eventually will be at a point where we will offer that program in every single building which is not very common you know throughout the state to have preschool offered at that level but currently we don't have the space and so once we get to that point this will be a program that will be offered and seven elementary buildings will keep kids more into their home schools which is part of inclusion and a million other things but it allows us to connect with kids so much sooner and it's a really great thing for this district to be able to accomplish but you know that's in that three-year window because we need to create the space and do some other things before we can get there but we're starting that's the most important part that's all right just to follow up on that preschool these same documents we receive is what's going to be posted online very informative that's all mr president thank you mr superintendent of schools dr terrell this evening i have several things we want to bring to you first one as we look at the possibility of snow coming in it gave us motivation to get out the message a little bit sooner than we had anticipated doing it in the middle of the week but that is using e-learning days versus just snow days where kids are just off and i know we've had just for monitoring social media some questions about why not just have a day off of school so one of the things we just want to talk about is for where we are right now we already have a half of our students at the secondary level who are ready to have e-learning day anyway if we were to call a school off tomorrow for as an example we're not saying we are calling school off tomorrow we're saying if that would already be accountable i already have the lessons planned for them we've worked with the teachers and we've worked through this in the fall with them to get us to this point where we feel really good about being prepared for that um and so part of the reason too is if you remember back to the beginning of the school year we delayed that start of school to give teachers time to prep so we have already moved back the number of days that we have to have the end date what that would be so what we're trying to be really conscious of is to make sure we're not adding any additional days to the end of the school year so this would enable us to continue to be able to count it as a day of education just like when students are at home learning we understand it's not the same as being in person one thing i would tell you that the directors can back up for me as well is because of what we've lived through for the last 10 months we're a whole lot better at doing that now than we were before so we feel really good about what what we're going to be able to do for our kids there but just wanted to give kind of a little bit of information about the e-learning days excuse me an update for covid uh we've had some questions from people saying can you tell us how long is this for the model we're in right now when are we going back with full for our secondary buildings what's that look like uh wish we had a date for that we just simply don't it's too fluid right now we're i think we're in a good spot we're seeing the positivity rate dropping in our county which i think is a really good thing we just don't know what's going to come around the corner as i mentioned before there's also a possibility of close contacts for our kids maybe changing a little bit what that could look like we don't have any verification that that's going to happen but that will play a part of this as well so for right now we're going to just continue to work through it and see where we are we'd hate to say we're going to stay for the whole third nine weeks and everything looked really good you know in the next couple of weeks and then we've committed to that so we're going to continue to plan rest assured we'll give ample warning if there is going to be a change for right now as we see it we're going to be staying as we are moving forward with that any questions at all that i can comments that i can make sure i address for you guys it was one of the conversations we had dr terrell regarding uh some of the doctor from the state part of that i think with the con or the contract what was that conversation that we had that regarding that about some of the restrictions might be changed yeah so one of the things they're looking at um is when we look at the number of positive cases we've had in our district like in that november december window there where we ended up having to go totally remote because of staffing concerns we had 60 positive case with cases within our district and that could be students that could be staff combined together out of those 60 cases we had 1920 some people it had to be quarantined as close contacts we saw nobody have the transmission within our buildings at all but it still impacted 1900 kids 1900 people who had to be removed or quarantined at home with that so one of the things that we're looking at now is several other states have looked at students and said you know if they're if they don't have any symptoms and they've been in close contact now they're okaying them to go back to school as long as masks are worn as long as they go through whatever the protocols that are set in place so there's been an indication that the state of indiana is considering something like that and that as a next move coming for us that would really help us because again we haven't had that transmission within our buildings so that would really help us as we continue to move forward with it okay thank you yep projects uh you've heard a lot of information tonight about our projects i just want to give just a couple of a thing a couple of updates for you as katie mentioned we made it through the remonstrance process which a period of time that we had to go through i appreciate our community and their support uh with the projects as we move forward one of the things that katie and i met today and both dion and jim were on that call with all of our group that we're going to be working with from financial advisors to bonds to architects to construction company and as we continue to work through that we're going to continue to work out a way for you guys that we can keep you up to date with that regularly at our board meetings of course but there are going to be other opportunities for those updates as well just want to make sure that you guys are comfortable with where we at where we are at and what that process looks like as well you know we're really excited for crown point schools and i think uh scott babjack mentioned you know it's about time everybody's so it's like overdue we need to get this going um you know one of the things that dion brought up to us to katie and i as we were meeting with him and scott cherry a couple weeks ago was how excited they are not just for our school corporation but for our community at large the number of people how is going to impact our economy our local economy the number of people who are going to have great employment opportunities because of the projects as we move forward with this so it's not only exciting for us but the excitement and what we're going to be able to continue to do for our community at large as well i think is a benefit that i hadn't really thought of as we move forward with this and so we're just really excited about that as well so those are just a couple of updates with the projects we hope to be able to bring site recommendations and those kind of things to you information on on that in the next coming months weeks months so that we can stay on schedule with that as well as you can imagine it's rather complex exciting times but complicated and long hours involved with us as well so we appreciate all those who are getting ready to really jump in and get going with it so last area is strategic planning and that was part of what heather mentioned so friday um olive cabinet uh we all met with hardy murphy sandy cole and allison howland who um allison has worked with mark g and fermi and our counselors as they've been going through that you asked a question about um a support program and part of that has come out of what our counselors are going through with their work with allison fortunately these three individuals are all from iu so they all have a common bond and working relationship already but based off of the evaluation and audit that we had that you all ordered this past school year towards the end of the year and then this summer from our earliest conversations i talked about the fact that there's going to be things that the board has to do as well as what we have to do to get us in a good spot so we've taken this to that next level now and really looking at common language but looking at what is our strategic plan for crown point schools and we want to make this something that's not just we filled it out and we put it on the shelf and then annually we'll pull it back out and make some adjustments we really want it to be kind of that living document that change in flight document where as things come up we make the changes to to get to where we need to be so in the next month or so we're going to have an opportunity for all of you to participate with cabinet and with our three individuals here from the university to work through and just kind of set the expectations of what strategic planning needs to look like here in crown point schools we're going to be working on a common language mission vision but then for the board where i really hope this goes is then we allow that vision and mission to really work through and come up with what are our board goals and those board goals should probably be something that are pretty consistent year in and year out but that we tweak every year annually and then from that what are the metrics that we want to look at so we can make sure that we are actually achieving our goals or at least moving in the right direction with our goals so i think it's going to be a great opportunity for all of you we were talking about it today and cabinet meeting and we're excited for it it's going to be a lot of work but we really believe like it's going to put us where we need to be we're good and we want to get to where we're great and i think this will help move us in that direction the other part of this is we'd like to jump in and get this all done in the next two months this is going to be a long process it's going to take a year it may take a year and a half or more but i think it's more important my experiences has taught me that it's more important we go slow and get it right than it is that we get it done and so i think it's going to be a great opportunity we look forward to that opportunity to work with all of you and really set up those board goals as well sounds good and that is all that i have for you awesome thank you dr terrell uh more statements of appreciation recognition no we didn't just just in case it's not it's not on the agenda this evening but i'm going to slip in real quick here if we have any other business old business any ideas to discuss that that you know um brian were you able to hear that uh wasn't on the agenda this evening but i'm just going to slip in the opportunity for any old old business is there anything you'd like to bring up okay when i looked i didn't catch it the first time either so i just uh i didn't have anything myself but okay well let's just move forward then to board statements appreciation recognition um uh brian how about we start with you mr smith well first i just want to say thank you for accommodating my my issues here dr terrell and diana thank you for making the community so let me zoom in i miss everybody um just want to say thank you to everybody it's an exciting time i mean that's uh everything i heard tonight is just i'm just excited you know thank you brian oh mr patrick anything yeah i think it um dr terrell's it's safe to say that bill darrilla and russ were the kind of the leads on that the hiring of coach bazia yep um and and then the committee as well that was a part of that um i want to say thank thank you to all of them i know we touched on it a little bit tonight but we had a chance to is the first time i had a chance to talk with coach bazia and his wife tonight and what i had said to them was i felt it was very important that obviously he's a great coach you know the credentials will speak for themselves um his credentials speak for themselves but what the feedback that i've heard that's most impressive is that both him and his wife are are great people and that's the that's the foundation for you know something like this when you're looking to rebuild a program and get people involved in the community so thanks to bill and russ for leading that charge and i might mention so mark the infirmity and artie akiwa and who matt michaela were the the other three who were part of that and all sat through the two hours with each individual for the first round and and then russ and i held the second round so a definite investment in time but i think they would all agree with and tell you that good process and we believe we really came out of it with uh with a great uh candidate and now a great coach as he continues to lead us forward rumor has it already was looking for his helmet he was as a matter of fact they all told me they were ready to run out of the room and go hit somebody just what i heard unfortunately it was the end of the day so they went home clarify that is not a worker's injury yeah anything else mr baby nope mr angel so first of my accommodation i just have a statement um combination is to alexi westfall the girls state champion wrestler uh so congratulations to lexi on winning her state title in wrestling is she's part of our bulldog program but she obviously has that they have the girls state tournament as well and she was a state champion so congratulations the other thing is is i mean think about this we hire a new football coach we have a preschool uh program coming that will be probably top notch and then which nothing less than that and also we have a building project that we're starting forward with so how i'd like to compare this is a lot of people might think we're just content and that's the word that i'll compare maybe the bears organization and bears fans to where you go eight and eight you get four free agents and like one of them's a c and the rest of these but you're content you keep the same things in place move to adjourn so but i mean i just think it's a good comparison so i can just tell people when the public that's listening that from point ever since i've been on this board is not content we know things haven't gone perfect with e-learning hybrid learning but we're always looking to improve in those areas that we may not be a 10 out of a 10.
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it's a reminder the public can access us via the dhs youtube channel at this time chair williams attain a motion to approve into executive to approved a motion to go into executive session uh to provide an update with respect to collective bargaining with union personnel and not to reconvene so moved second motion by mr newman second by mrs wait on the motion any other discussion chair hearing none all in favor uh actually roll call please chris oliver yes kathleen ameral yes john nunes yes mary wait yes thank you very much everyone this meeting is adjourned you know what there's a lot of good stuff i know i was thinking the same thing
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if you show up at 7 20 and want to start eating your breakfast your teacher may have an issue with that because class is going to start so if you want to eat breakfast make sure you're getting there with into class with enough time to do that lunch looks like this it's on the way out it's right by the doors all you have to do is just grab it as you go by and you can take it on that bus or you can eat it before you have to come back for practice but there is no eating on the buses and it doesn't become it's a nice little snack for you right before you have to go out and do whatever you do in the afternoons mr salvatrini would you like to talk about what's going on with athletics yes mr donovan thank you very much and welcome to everyone uh just we're going to talk just a little bit about athletics normally uh by this time probably late january early february we're about three quarters of the way through a normal winter season but uh far from normal this year as everyone knows uh we're just starting up our program we're actually taking baby steps the state gave us the okay january 14th to start winter sports and the school district gave us the opportunity to follow that and last week we started virtual classrooms practices and virtually and for the next couple of days we are going to be outside conditioning as best we can with the with the weather teams are open i suggest to the parents if you are your child is interested or freshman out there go to the danbury high school webpage it's right up there right there you want to look for your coach the coach of the team that you're interested email that coach and we'll certainly uh get information to you about where to go who to be and the times again it's a little different uh school we don't start practices this year until three o'clock uh there a reduced schedule as an example basketball we normally play 20 plus games they are probably going to play 12 this year uh we actually we have swimming we're running virtual swim meets uh we have boys and girls indoor track outdoors so they're working outdoors with the hope that we may have some indoor track mates outdoors so that's how we're gonna attempt to do that we have boys and girls basketball wrestling and cheer are going to practice but those are two sports that were deemed high risk by the department of health they're they're allowed to practice but not compete in any activities we also have ice hockey gymnastics and uh we're moving right along on february 1st when everybody comes in for the hybrid uh we're going to begin afternoon practices at the high school uh all athletes wear masks all the athletes have check-in we have self-check-in monitored by our two athletic trainers and it's similar to what mr donovan said at the beginning of the day we're just checking athletes anybody has to answer some questions they don't feel well etc we're going to send them home we did pretty well in the fall we uh we almost made the full season we had a couple of issues near the end and a goal our goal this year of course with winter is to do the best we can to get the kids an opportunity to engage with their coaches and their classmates i can't tell you how excited our coaches were today to actually meet some of their athletes again for the first time in months so it went well today we had a workout outside today in 30 degree temperature we had about 140 kids and we're looking forward to build on that although it's going to slow tomorrow we're told so hopefully the snow gods will stay away for a few days until we can get back him inside and do our normal things again i uh hope that you if you're interested you check on that website uh together we're going to win and we always talk about that as athletes so together as a high school we're going to beat this and we're going to get back to normal as soon as we can so if you're interested in sports give us a call we'll get you involved as best we can mr dominic thank you sir appreciate that i appreciate all you've done trying to manage this ship and keep it going in the ever-changing world that we have going on right now but i i do appreciate on behalf of everybody all of your efforts this year trying to stay stay with this so thank you all right school closures uh what will cause it to happen obviously a snow day which i put in there uh you know that will cause it to happen but when we're talking about covid and uh things like that what will cause the school to close well we've done a lot of work with looking at our substitute numbers and our staff numbers and trying to come around how many teachers could be quarantined before we would have to close school or if we have a spike in numbers or something like that before we'd have to shut it down each night we're going to be monitoring that activity to see where we are and we're close contact with our staff with regards to what's going on with them but there's definitely a number when we come back we're taking this risk uh that it may be shut down again at some time we are not doing what the middle schools are doing where they're staying in their classroom um you know for the day and but they're in school but they're staying in one classroom we're going to switch classrooms the administration and i had a lot of discussions about this and just felt that you know the getting up and moving and the socialization part is um is good for the kids and that's why one of the main reasons that we want them back in here uh is to to get them to see other people and get out walk around even if it's just waving to a friend in the hallway so we're gonna go with that but with that puts us at risk for more teachers being into quarantined uh which could cause problems for coverages and things like that there are some teachers that are out uh that have uh some medical maybe conditions or some condition that won't allow them to come into school at this time so what we're going to do is we're calling it a virtual classroom in reverse in which the students will go to d360 like it's you know 3a block and the teat will have another teacher in there and their classroom teacher will will google me in and be projected out so so they can do work so for that class they'll be on all distance learning um it's not a large number of teachers in our school it's less than five percent um but just so you know that it does happen and if a teacher is out sick that's how we will cover it in class we even if it's asynchronous we will have teachers or substitutes or whomever go in there and monitor the classes while they're out um miss daniels would you like to talk about peer tutoring sure mr donovan um hi everyone my name is ms daniels i'm a level 2 assistant principal um essentially uh we have a history at danbury high school of trying to support our students through tutoring programs and allowing students to connect and so we didn't want to lose sight of those opportunities for students to connect during the pandemic and also uh receive supports um as they may be struggling with distance learning due to whether it's lack of sleep or just looking for extra help or a way to connect with a student um we came up with the idea as a group to do the peer tutoring program which is virtual and online students have the opportunity to go into a google classroom using the code sign up to meet with another peer and they essentially connect to work on academic coursework so we have opportunities for students to receive supports in math english their course subjects they can also do just a group study and we are also looking to increase the translation support we have translation services for our students as well at the time we had um 164 students signed into the google classroom we're now at 179 and we have about 20 pairs of matchings matches between a student to student um for the tutoring program we are hoping to expand uh this has only been our third week i think of opening or trying this out so um we have been seeing some growth and we hope that you would encourage your child um to join us if they are struggling and would like to receive support um the times are monday through thursday three to eight pm um however students sometimes might schedule out outside that time frame which is also available if they'd like to work on the weekend but that's um a little bit about our peer tutoring program thank you ms daniels excellent job in getting that up uh parents that can be found um you can be found there's a google classroom for it and all the teachers have posted it so they should be aware of it if not they can just ask their classroom teacher because it was all posted uh through their google classrooms but excellent job and trying to support our kids once again some important up upcoming dates tomorrow is the psats and we're going to have it snow is not coming to later please not till later so we're going to get our about 400 juniors coming in to take the psats so for the rest of the school it's an asynchronous day which means that they will have work to do they will have to answer the attendance question but there's no live meets or instruction like that our teachers are going to be proctoring a large part of them and for the rest of the time of the day they are going to be in um working to set up their classrooms to make sure that they're all ready for the virtual part and the in-school part and checking everything so that they feel ready to go when we start this friday uh january 29th semester one ends we're halfway through the year which was the reason why we waited uh until february 1st to have our students come in you know the district decided they were going to do a roll out starting with elementary then middle and they asked if we wanted to come back in on the 25th we didn't think it was smart to bring our students back in uh to meet their you know especially a lot of them half of them are semester classes for one week and then switch classes all over so we said we'll later one it out for one week more and then we can start fresh semester two uh that being the blue cohort uh february 4th the orange cohort first day is coming into the building we're starting with mentor flex for them so they can get the tours and the ids we bought blue lanyards for the uh the blue cohort or orange lanyards for the orange ones the staff have all white ones so when we all get back together hopefully very soon we'll have a nice orange white uh and blue lanyards coming around the school that so and we're going to want and expect students to wear their ideas once we get them all out to everybody uh dl students we will set up times in the near future or have them up front uh on their lanyards you're just you're a cohort as well so if you're in the blue cohort but you're on dl you're still in the blue cohort so we will have that that you can come pick things up like that also uh if you need to pick up materials for your second semester or drop off materials you can do that with the safety advocates in the front of the building more information about the dates and times of coming out can be found in a letter that was sent today even a nighttime pickup for the for if you have to get materials or things like that please come in and get them so you can do it we're looking for a march 1st virtual spring conferences and school fair this just believe it or not is to start letting our the 8th graders in danbury know what danbury high school is about and i think it'll be very very beneficial for our freshmen now at that point to see what offerings we have at the high school so they can start picking their classes as we go forward uh and march 8th is the snow date for the virtual conference that we'll have there where we will have teachers available to to talk to in conferences but we'll also set up times with dhs to talk about curriculums and offerings within their departments you know pretty much in closing i'm going to look at the additional question sheet i did answer them three that i have that are new are all blocks of flex now mandatory and both in person at home days not in person days if you are on an in-person day and you're feeling really good about what's going on then you don't but we really want the at-home students and the other cohort to check in with their teacher like i said it may be just a five-minute check-in just say i'm in a good spot with their teachers you know it's tough to say the word mandatory we'd use it don't tell them but um you know we can't make them go there's no grades involved with it but it'll help them get a better understanding of what's going on so i think if using the term mandatory and mr donovan said it helps you get them on because we really can't do it then i suggest that we do that how do students get extra help when they don't understand something that's the first place they go is flex first place they go is contact the teacher have them sign up for flex sign up for the teacher's flex and then if not uh they couldn't get in there and stuff there's the peer tutoring miss daniels just mentioned there's two great avenues that you can go down but flex is the number one time that you should be able to go there you're talking about half the kids okay um our students allowed them in-person meetings for extra cooker clubs robotics and math teams the districts coming around that we did use we had robotics up and going i don't see clubs like the math team are are probably going to stay virtual but something like robotics that has to actually build robots we're going to look to get back up banned things like that as we get going here uh in the second semester as far as the buses how will the seating be spaced uh is it one student per seat families can be together um you know they try to go every other end diagonal it depends on the number of bus but if everyone's facing the same way i the windows will probably be cracked if not opened a little bit to get an airflow uh and masks much stay on must stay on they're gonna try to space out students on the bus from my understanding our numbers are very low on buses uh so they'll be able to space them out pretty good and they're going to have the bus drivers please have your child just listen to where the bus driver tells them to sit because they're not doing it to be mean they're doing it because we need a specific spot for them to go like i said as a one student per bus hopefully now it is but families can sit together so if you're a brother and sister or coming out of the same household you can be in the same seat as somebody else uh with that the last part i'll talk about is expect the unexpected you know we get it with wi-fi outages whether it's stamber high school danbury xfinity or google they're going to happen and we're there's no reason to panic we all know what we're going to do with them we all figure out what's going to happen if it happens at denver high school and we don't have wi-fi then if you're at home you know your son or daughter may be sitting there going you know hey i can't get out i can't do this and if it continues to happen and if it's a big problem then you're gonna get uh notification from the school that it does one of the coolest things that that we look at is if you can just google it it's it'll tell you when google's down or google's having issues so if your son or daughter can't says i can't get on then you can just go google that and say yep you see a big spike that says they're running into error error problems and can't get on then yes something's up it doesn't hurt for you to try to send an email to the teacher to ask if this class was down but you know just expect that we're going to have the tech issues we're going to have quarantined staff which means that the students are going to be back to virtual teaching just like they are now like i said earlier we're getting good at it we're getting much better at the tools that we have for it i think our teachers are doing a great job with that so uh expect that to happen snow days i had a question about snow days before i'm not sure what's going to happen i think the district is not going to give any more snow days now i think we're just going to go remote and uh i don't know about tomorrow but uh it looks like there's something on the horizon for sunday so we may be able to try that out on monday uh and lastly and kind of what i'll close with is communication's key if you have uh a problem or a concern or a question reach out to the counselor reach out to the administrator reach out to the teacher you know we ask that you go to the teacher first uh before you just come straight to the administration not because we don't like talking to you it's just that i don't know what happened so then i got a back trace to the teacher so try to resolve whatever the question or or maybe with the teacher and then bring it to administration or the counselor uh just because it'll save us all time we can get the resolution to it a lot quicker but communication is key feel free to email your child's teachers at any time if you have a question about something they said or something that's going on and let us know and with that did i make it i was trying to shoot for under an hour and it looks like oh we did it we just got there you know it's a lot of information that we went through rather quickly and i'm sorry for that um but if anybody has any more questions or anything like that you can always reach out like i said to everybody else with that i can't wait to see some of my juniors here tomorrow to take those psats get to bed early bring your calculators and pencils uh and for the rest of the hatters that are coming in i'll either see you on the first or the fourth and
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i'm going to also stay home take care of that person we did not extend that particular part of ffcra we feel like we are able to with our current dollars to take care of individuals again having to stay home because of their situation related to covenant 19 but not then another person's situation with coven 19.
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so i think with these three things that were announced today the building project the hiring new football coach that we we're here to make those improvements when we deem necessary and dr channel touched on it with the strategic plan that's continuing to move us forward to reach those lofty goals that we have for ourselves and for the corporation so i just felt that it was a strong meeting tonight and all the cabinets responsible for that and all the way down to every employee teacher bus driver custodial worker because it's all part of the entire community in the process so thank you and i'd be remiss if i didn't forget the one that keeps us board members in line that would be diana green because you know uh sometimes members forget passwords or forget meetings and diana make sure that we're in attendance to make sure we have quorums and everybody's on on tap so thank you to diana as well thank you mr angeline it's funny you just mentioned that because we don't obviously talk about what our thoughts are but for you know recognition before we get here and i heard a phrase this evening after 40 years the crown point community member unleashed the bulldogs and it was like i wanted to mention in this part of the meeting myself that that just rang a bell that that's just not coming from a football coach but it's coming from you know a cabinet and teachers and principals that as mr angel just said are you i don't know they're kind of always looking to get better not not just settling so um you know the big projects taking place with the buildings and everything i i couldn't agree more when i heard that this evening i said that's that's that's exactly what uh you know we want to hear as a um as a board from our community our school corporation so it's kind of neat i don't know if it surprised we haven't heard that one in the past but um two other quick things we have uh mr g and fermi uh just uh dennis bunda making progress are you having a book published soon okay well i'm gonna ch it does i'm gonna i'm gonna follow up on that one see we'll see where it stands but uh that'll be exciting when when he gets that completed and then um uh i don't i don't think mr zubrigan was ever directly affiliated with the school system but we had a gentleman uh dixie uber again who passed away last week he kind of took care of the older the older kids of the community he was a commissioner of the softball league and um he has a field named after him over at the uh off of 109th the one of the fields is named dick zubringenfield and um yeah i just wanted to mention that i i didn't know him well but everybody that knew him loved him when it was very sad to see him gone he lived a a great life and um you know just wanted to pass our condolences along to his family who are also uh they're a community family so we'll miss mr zuber again um anything else from anybody if not i'll look for a motion to adjourn someone second moved by mr angel and sucked by mr baby all in favor saying bye bye saying aye aye aye all right opposed lost carrick's four zero
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so this resolution specifically addressed those pieces i outline and i would ask for you to approve that it is retroactive to january 1st or the beginning of this semester so if we've had somebody already out and we have because of those reasons we will be able to continue paying them and not take days away from them all righty so before i move on i guess i did have i jumped on that one too quickly doctor said we do have letter e um the uh claims for january 25th total a little over six hundred thousand dollars uh payroll for january 15th that was about two and a half million dollars that was a regular payroll that covered the dates of december 28th through january 8th and um when we have two meetings in a month we just have less claims so if you remember last time we had more money and an extra set of claims in there so a little bit less for this time so those are the items i have letters a through g for you all right if i could i'd uh entertain a motion for approval of items five a through g as they've been presented to us thank you mr brian is there a second second i'm sorry thank you mr graves are there particular questions of dr roberts for any of these items will you check on kathy for me please thank you appreciate that reminder all right kathy you've heard the question i think dr said anything else to add or questions okay all right thank you you might go ahead and mute yourself kathy for the purposes of the vote okay i'm sorry yeah i do have one quick question regarding f the ff sorry cr yeah um was the original act i noticed in this one it says 10 work days rather than 80 hours yeah it was it was 10 work days up to 80 hours the intent of the legislation was to pay you for the day that you worked you know so a person works seven hours a day you're going to get paid for that seven hours a day um four hours a day for whatever the case might be recognizing that eight hours is maybe the typical or or understood 40-hour workweek so it covered that time but it was my work day we wanted to make sure and clarify that here um and and stay away from the 80 hours which is a possibility if that's your work day eight hours a day but but make sure it was understood to ten work days yeah good question all right there are no other questions i'll call the vote those who approve items five a through g as presented to us if you signify by saying i i i all right any opposed there you go thank you all right miss heine your turn thank you dr chet i'm requesting recommendations as presented thank you very much i'll entertain a motion for approval so maybe thank you miss day hof dwyer is there a second second thank you miss wheeldon any questions of miss heidi all right all those in favor of the human resources recommendations as presented to us if you'd signify by saying i i i those opposed all right there you go thank you miss heimi this input or review any comments questions you'd like to share after hearing such a rich exciting meeting it really was a lot of stuff mr graves anything all right miss fielding no i'm i'm i will be at your virtual event i'm really excited about the c4 program thank you very much good good yes i've been thinking about mr bryant's question about the east team and the role of athletics in our community and i'm so glad that we're able to and this is technology related as well that we're able to share that with folks in the community who are so used to being a part of those programs and cheering those programs on to be able to safely participate from home and watch those and i think it means a lot to people and i'm glad we've made the effort yeah you're here thank you dr bills no i do not all right mr bryant i don't i appreciate so much everything that we learned it was i'm just so proud of all of us so thank you very much our next school board meeting is we will be here and as a teaser for how cool is going to be we will have our education hall of fame winner announced and a reception at that time so with that before you gavel out doctor if that's okay if i just was on the education hall of fame winner and we we have reception up there but we are still working on what that could and might look like in this day and age uh so we'll continue to have dialogue around what we can do to appropriately celebrate and i think we can publicly state kathy you're on here would you want to go ahead and state the education award winner please yes it's mrs scott from columbus north high school that's awesome kathy is the school board representative that leads that committee does a great job with that from from year to year and and uh so led that group here recently and susan scott columbus north assistant principal long time educator for us uh she's outstanding glad we have a chance to recognize her and we will do that in the best way that we possibly can monday february 8th all right thank you so i told you it'd be a teaser and you all will be here have a safe safe evening thank you very much for being here i'll call this adjourned
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the january 26 2021 meeting of the independent community police oversight commission will come to order ms deness can you do the roll call i certainly shall win jackson present okay commissioner walton president commissioner altman president vice chair todoro president commissioner mary i see you okay commissioner phillips president commissioner carter yeah okay and let's see commissioner burch present and our new commissionership president okay and we have council member song and council member ram lawyers preston as well okay we have a quorum perfect and is there a motion to approve the agenda moved is there a second well second all in favor any opposed none hearing none um so i want to introduce our new commissioner makaya ship who is our our youth member she's a public policy major at the university of michigan she's already had a paid position as a field organizer for rashida talib she happened to meet um representative talib uh during a public policy fellowship that he was that she was able to gain while she was still in high school um makaya worked alongside um other paid workers who were all adults mind you she directed social media initiatives she engaged never voters and first-time voters and created some youth voting campaign videos she's also gone to lansing to lobby state representatives and she was recently featured on an nbc segment on first time voters and it's called bipac gen ziers are voting for the first time and hoping to decide the fate of their swing states the video is about five minutes long so if we get done a little bit early i'll show it to you guys it's quite impressive and if not i'll put the link in the chat um she's she's done a plethora of speaking engagements she's quite compelling as i'm sure you'll come to know and we are very some of us have had a chance to interview her and speak with her multiple times and we are very excited to have her on this commission because we certainly need um the perspective of young people and we're actually expecting to put her to lots and lots of work so we're happy to have her for that as well so welcome makaya we are very grateful that you um decided to join our commission and we hope that it's as rewarding for you as it will be for us because um we're going to ask you to do lots of stuff so thank you so much for joining is there anything you'd like to say having sure sure um i'm super excited to be here um i definitely plan to definitely follow through with the work that i'm put towards um i'm definitely going to be consistent i have a lot to offer i feel like um different perspective and i've definitely been introduced better than i can even introduce myself so thank you for that um and like i said i'm just excited to be here well thank you very much so now is the time um in the process where we can have public comment denise do you see anybody out there no no at the present time there's no one okay um so what we'll do is we'll move on and then if we have time at the end which i suspect we will um we can have some time for public comment at the end okay if there are any callers um you guys had a copy of the november meeting minutes we did not have a december meeting sorry can i just check something is it public comment or public forum it's public forum i misspoke and for that i apologize just because i know it gives us different roles i wanted to make sure that very different rules it is a public forum and um and we will engage in that at the end of our meeting if anyone uh calls in thank you for that it's important for us to say it um everyone has a copy of the november meeting minutes is there any discussion any corrections of those or is there a motion to approve them as they are no move second second thank you all in favor of approving the november meeting minutes any opposed already thank you they are approved we have some old business so i wanted to talk about our training so um we need to start making sure that we let denise know all the training that we've done so we need to make a report of what we did in 2020 so if you could forward her any 2020 trainings you've done that you haven't yet if you could do that this week that would be very helpful and um and and you could do that intermittently as you complete a training in 2021 you could send her um a note and say hey this is what i did this is who i did it here's the date um and i wanted to talk a little bit about what training entails because training could be formal classes at naco training could also be reading so we all have a reading list and i know i've given some of you guys books i've dropped some of them off at your homes but we have a bunch more in i have a box because we got multiple copies we have lots of different titles but we have multiple copies um and so if anybody needs to borrow those to read those that certainly counts as training there are journal articles and i'll try to um uh link you guy uh i i can send you guys a list and if you um are interested in i'll just send you the pdf i don't want to try to send the pdf of 60 articles out um but but that certainly counts as training um sarah and i went to a training on friday i think given by the game i think it was friday but we definitely went uh given by the american bar association and georgetown university and it was about active bystander intervention for police and if you've taken an intro to psych class you know the term bystander intervention it refers to the concept of when you're in a group um it's very hard to intervene in something that's going on and so we have lots of incidences where everyone's standing around and nobody's doing anything and it's not because people are uncaring it's not because they're terrible people it's because overcoming um being able to take a step to intervene is actually quite challenging um and so in the training they talked about an incident that was quite salient there was a senior officer and he was arresting an individual and he did several things wrong while he was in arresting the individual and there were lots of junior officers watching him do this and none of them said anything to him because he was a senior officer and they put the suspect in the back of the police car and they proceeded to take him to jail however because he was handcuffed incorrectly he was able to bring his hands to the front of his body and because he had not been searched correctly um he retrieved the gun from his waistband that the end that had not been discovered by the senior police officer and he moved the partition and shot and killed one of the police officers who was taking him to jail that's a huge problem because all of the people who were watching the senior officer saw that the the the person had not been um searched correctly and at any point any of them could have said something but they didn't not because they're horrible people but because it there's a culture not just in policing but in medicine in teaching in whatever in the united states that makes it more challenging to intervene and so um this program has been put together it was used in new orleans um when they were under a consent decree so they're kind of motivated to do it and they called it epic which is ethical policing is courageous and what they did was frame it as if you step in when you see an officer or your fellow officer doing something inappropriate you are helping the officer it is not that you are being disloyal you are actually being more loyal because you are potentially saving them from getting fired you're saving them from getting killed so they have this very salient example um it was also it's also currently being used in baltimore and is also being used in some other um mid-size cities that are not under a consent decree to some great effect and um so we went to a talk and we heard a lot about the program and um i was very interested in it because it's one way to promote culture change within a department from kind of going to the us versus them mentality and and sort of loyalty is not snitching thinking about loyalty within the police department as being protective of each other so i ran the program passed a bunch of police friends of mine um who who thought it was useful i got a chance to share it with chief cox i'm sure he hasn't had a chance to look at it yet because there's a lot there's a volume of information out there on it um but but i was able to um to have a talk with jerry clayton about it and um i said you know you don't have to read all of this i know you're super busy just let me know what you think and um he called me and we had like a two-hour conversation about it because he was so excited about he's already signed up the sheriff's department and he himself is actually going to be trained so we'll get to see what it looks like locally um and and see how it does at least in the sheriff's department so all that to say even going to something like that is certainly training right we learned about options for police this is not necessarily oversight right this is not something that we would participate in it's something strictly for police um but one of the jobs that we have in terms of oversight is thinking about policy and thinking about how to prevent some of the incidents that we see so of course complaint review is a huge part of what we do but i think that thinking about policy and thinking about prevention is probably equally important to complaint review and so in that vein we learned about some strategies that are being used around the country to be useful and then we also did a training last thursday with corey mills of the police department on kind of showing us what their implicit bias training looks like um and so if you do any of those things if you go to a training on your own if you attend a session somewhere else um all of those things count as training um and and if you ever have to pay a fee a 10 fee or 20 fee to attend a training or something that's certainly something that's covered within our training budget and so denise could pay for it or you could get reimbursed for it probably it's certainly easier if she just pays for it but um so i just want to make sure everybody understands kind of the things that can be involved in training i think everybody needs to do a certain amount of nicole training but there are so many other things out there and i'll try to do um when i hear of things even if i'm not going i'll try to put them out in email in case anybody else wants to sign up i i found out about that the able or epic program at the last minute i think i signed up 20 minutes before it started um but if anybody has any opportunities like that we should definitely share them among the whole email list and i will give everybody makaya's email she's got an eggpock email address now um so that she can be included in those you guys have any questions about training or thoughts know i i have a uh i wonder uh how many had attended the um the presentations by care michigan around about 12 weeks looking at the history of racism and resistance in america and if anyone did not see that i believe that the recording is on youtube i probably at one point i might just send a link to denise for anyone who wants to go and look at some of the topics that they had covered it's just amazing in view of what is happening what had happened and what would happen is is to have an idea about what's really uh going on it's it's uh it covers many many many topics from different areas and i would encourage anyone who has a little bit of time just to look at some of those i remember you [Music] making britain making us aware of that in the fall and i'm looking at youtube now and i see um quite a few links to some of the talks that they did so it looks like they put quite a bit of that online correct correct correct um and just choose any of the topics that you feel uh you are interested in you don't have to go through every one of them but you know it covers really um the the the history from way back from the 1600s and up so denise is there a way to um do the chat in here because i there's um one of them the history of racism and resistance in america i copy the link address but i don't see i guess maybe if i i don't see let me see if i can open up more no hold on uh console minimum wally has his hand up i'm sorry go ahead um councilman while we're trying to figure this link thing out good evening and thank you um and i just uh wanted to ask denise if it was possible um with the agendas if we can change the public comments of public forums so it can reflect and we get better used to using that term sure future agendas and i just wanted to welcome makaya to the commission uh it was really hard to get you approved just kidding um it was unanimous in one in in one vote uh at the council table so uh we were excited to have you here um so quickly after that approval last week and um looking forward to uh what you can add to this dynamic group um so welcome in and uh thank you from from the city for for serving on this commission thank you council member song and then commissioner carter everyone um tomorrow it sounds like tomorrow's going to be like a marathon of interesting policing workshops so tomorrow there's the one o'clock four stats oversight webinar i think denise had sent that out to everyone so i'll be on that at one o'clock and then the school of public health is hosting uh policing as a public health issue webinar from four to five that's um easily google googleable that's free um it looks really really promising so please don't let me be the only igbo person at these things and if i am i will be happy to share and report back out too thanks thank you i i never know sometimes until i see somebody else ask a question i'm like hey they're from ann arbor that's one of us okay excuse me lisa are you able to share now i have a q a but it's only only hosts and panelists can see the questions so i have that ability i don't have just the standard chat button that we use right i don't either okay well don't worry about it i have the um history of racism and resistance in america like on my screen and i can send a link to everyone um afterwards okay [Music] commissioner emma uh mary has her hand up and on your muted uh you mentioned some some place yes just now the second place at four to five they have some can you repeat that please it's uh the u of m school of public health is hosting a webinar called policing as a public health issue i can send you the email with the details anon because i was i sent that one yeah that would be good thank you i shared this with at cds our last council meeting too so hopefully we can see other council members join us so thank you for sharing that commissioner carter that's her handout i was going to um say that some i think it was sarah that sent out uh something from the police chiefs association yes had a lot of very good information and there was about an eight minute uh video that was also really good uh awesome but you know i'm going to have to get with denise because i think things are being i apologize i have a couple of different email accounts and i have not i guess these announcements are being sent out on the icpod email yes so i'm gonna have to figure out what i'm doing wrong because i'm not getting that email and you can tell me the preferred email you and i seem to be able to email okay correct he can email and i got the what sarah had sent out but all these other things i am i'm not getting um it would be easier for me is there some kind of a policy about not using a profession another professional email no there's no policy i think in the beginning we all wanted to have separate email addresses because they were made public and you might not want your professional personal one out there um but but whatever email address you want to use is the one that we will use and so if if you can just tell us which one to use and we will follow your direction oh however city attorney slay is weighing in on that yeah hold that hand okay okay okay um so this is for the benefit of foia and i know this um commission more so than others can probably appreciate that uh transparency is required for the police but it's got to be transparency required for all of our boards and commissions as well in the event that we get a foia that says i want all police or any epoch related business from dr jackson to stephanie carter we'll have to go through your personal email account to pull that out and that's not the most comfortable or the best practice and so i would encourage all of you to use your ipoc emails and if anyone needs help doing that i'm sure miss denise is at the ready to get started and that encourages that supports the transparency that we're asking um of our city partners as well um in addition to that um francis and lisa we've all been working really hard to try to come up with some procedures for you and we have discovered with the help of our fantastic it department at the city that the best way to transmit documents for when you're doing complaint review is to be able to log on using your city account um especially during the times of covid um when we're not going to be able to really get in a room and show a video or something on the big screen but logging on to the a2 central our city centered web page is going to allow you to review the confidential documents that you'll need to do if you are signed up for complaint review so i would encourage all of you to use that if you do have right now an arsenal of xbox related emails um in your email i would recommend that you forward those to your yourself at ikpak that way if there is a foia we can be 100 compliant with it and okay and the ability what we want ultimately is to maintain the ability to review um attorney slay was referring to complaint review things but that could include body cam footage or um reports that um that we need to review in in assess in in the process of a review and there was a time when we would all troop down to the police station and sit around in a closed room and do that kovid obviously put a stop to that but i think one of the things that we talked about was that if anybody's involved in doing complaint review it's going to be more efficient if we can continue to do it remotely going forward um the system and and so we all have a2gov email addresses and they can be reinstated they were sort of dis they were put on pause for some time but they can be invigorated and renewed and um um and thus we can sign on to a server with those and we can do it asynchronously which means if somebody has to do it at 3am they can do that they have to do it at 2am they can do that such that we can all be ready and prepared for a meeting having seen all the confidential work uh you know the products that we need to see um and so denise is in the process of restoring those um email addresses for everyone and um so that we'll be able to use these these servers even though we're not working from a city computer and that'll provide some security um and allow us to do it probably more efficiently even after covid it just was too challenging to troop down to the police station and get everybody in one place at one time and you know we had those discussions about trying to do that between nine and five and and that was not really appropriate for a volunteer commission so this is going to work a lot better for everyone and so everybody's a2gov emails will be restored and if you haven't been using them we can start using them and we can figure out how to streamline the password process um because that was not easy but we can do that and everybody will be on the same page so um any other thoughts about training any imminent trainings anybody wants to share right now um before we move on all right oh i'm sorry go ahead council member ram lawyer thank you cher um i just while we're on the issue of emails and communication um stephanie had brought up thank you um i'm just wondering at what level are communication sent to council members um there is a lot of communication that occurs between commissioners much that probably will will stay at that level but is there a threshold at when communications are shared with council members because that sometimes uh i don't hear things until some sort of action is needed by council and i'd rather be more abreast of of what's what's actually happening amongst commissioners um so i know it's a little awkward you could take it offline some other you know but wanted to address it at this point you know just put that out there can you tell um what kinds of stuff you haven't been included in that you'd prefer to be included in like do you want training emails yeah i guess that's the a conversation we can probably have you know at a later point but i don't really receive any emails um you know on on matters unless there's a particular issue that that needs to be escalated uh but just on more of not to say you don't get a million texts from us yeah well it no not a million it's not too bad it's it's definitely we had some time off there and it's good to be back um but i guess is there anything that the commission would want us to be aware of it's it's more of that i just don't want to be stepping on any toes and and being presumptuous i just but i also don't want to be left in the dark and i'm not sure where that line is i think on the big picture things um we try to include you guys um like the next item on the agenda is talking about um well actually a few items down we're going to be talking about the budget and that's something for which we will need you guys expertise as we're getting it ready um and so and obviously we have a meeting set up to kind of talk about that um you know even before we get started with it so certainly those kinds of things if you want to know about training stuff we can include you in that um i think it would be helpful i mean i don't need to know who's going tomorrow to do something per se but um i just feel a little probably not as well in tuned with with the ongoing some and i just you know and i don't need to know it you know i i want to be respect be respectful and i guess we can we can take it again uh as a conversation with with leadership and councils as to what and denise of course is to what level when the commission what type of communications will come to council just as an ordinary you know but i think right now what i'm asking for is more to what degree i don't know okay well i guess we can talk about that tomorrow yeah all right anything else on training so francis is going to talk a little bit about the standardization of the complaint review process and if you could francis maybe back it up a little bit and talk about why we even have to go through this so um you know when we first started we were going round and round about trying to put together a uh process of how round robin grouping commissioners were going to review reports and we had a flow chart and everything but we never actually reviewed any complaints and so then we went through some different changes with the uh police department administration personnel and um lasts i guess it's it's actually over a year now but in the um fall of 2019 we started working on another process that seemed to streamline things better and um the police department were providing us a uh spreadsheet which was their summary sheet of the complaints as they came in and um that that was working pretty well until we went into quarantine with um covid and some other things came up and we got um kind of stopped for a while there and then when we did start up again the spreadsheet was missing information it didn't quite look the same there were some questions there and then um some other folks at the city um tom crawford started meeting with us more regularly and some additional questions then came up um we've had um assistant city attorney slay working with us more closely over the last four months or so to to come up with a process that doesn't change and what i mean by that is what i was just discussing and how we started with the flow chart and then that hit a road bump and then we hit more road bumps and during this whole time there's never been a process that everybody followed um personnel would change and somebody would interpret something differently and we hit a roadblock again and so right now what we're trying to do is come up with a process that is agreed upon by the city the police uh the city attorney's office and dick poc that is going to be in place so that when the day comes that many of us are no longer here anymore um it's still the same process um we need that uniformity to make sure that every complaint is going to be reviewed in the same manner so this isn't just about us reviewing complaints it's also about the parties involved in the complaints and everybody should get a fair share shake and everything should be reviewed in the same manner and so um it's it really is something that needs to get done um for the betterment of our process and for our success um so where we are now with that is um we've met with um assistant city attorney slay and uh the deputy chiefs um and we we are very close to coming up with something that is more formalized it also dictates timelines so we're coming up with um for instance this spreadsheet will be given to denise and therefore us the same date every month we are coming out and it's going to be on the blank date of the month denise should receive an up-to-date spreadsheet and that spreadsheet is also going to be set up in a way that can be shared with all the commissioners so that regardless of the information managers who are actually reviewing the complaints and seeing the file in its entirety this is something that'll be set up in a manner that all commissioners can review the information that's in there let me jump in for one sec francis um one of the things the city wants to start doing is making sure that there are only three people at this time who can see all of the confidential information on any particular case i think that um that causes some problems for us particularly as we are there are some of us who have more experience i'm reviewing cases than others and it might be better for us to review them four or five at a time until everybody gets kind of used to the process but for now we're restricted to only having three people and those three people who get all of the information on any particular one case are called information managers um and so although there will be many people reviewing complaints three people will work on one case three people on another case and so that's what francis is talking about when she's talking about information managers yeah that thank you for catching that um because i did forget to refer back to that is something that um this city is asking that we go back to that was originally discussed when we first started um but uh we we thought that we would be able to move away from that um but they are asking that we do follow that which is in the ordinance so you can find more information about that um in there so we want to make sure that if you're not an information manager the commission as a whole is still being updated on all of the complaints so that you'll see the complaints how many we have what they are about you know is it something that came out of a traffic stop is it something that came from an accident is it you know how was um is the complaint about that the officer is rude or is the complaint about that the officer mishandled private property um those are the kinds of things that we would be looking to try to make sure the commission as a whole is aware of those things and what we're looking at so that we can look at patterns in practice and that's really important for us to look at that's why everybody needs to be able to know what all the complaints are about even if you're not reviewing the details of each case and one of the things that the commission will get as a whole also on there is you're not going to see the officers names but you are going to see a number so um the the uh professional standards has given each officer a random number so it's not affiliated necessarily with their badge number or anything in their file but each officer does have one but information managers see the names right the information managers are able to see the investigation in its totality minus lean information because that's one thing we still don't have we still don't have that ability to see um lean information and i think as much as that seemed to be a huge hurdle in the beginning it turns out not to be so much a hurdle for us now because most of the people who file complaints are regular they are people who don't have any criminal involvement at all they're not um i think i think the perception was that it was going to be mostly people being taken to jail who had complaints against the police but that's not what we've seen at all we've seen um citizens who have complaints against the police and so there isn't lean information associated with them so it turns out that that's not such a huge barrier for us we did have one uh body cam that did need redaction because you know there was a driver's license was held up in front of the camera so that has to be redacted but then we also had another case where it needed no reduction at all anan you know i was wondering like in the last year we've been meeting you know virtually pretty much and i don't have any idea in this year how many complain the police have what kind of complaints we have it's been a full year you know and is that information available like if i say what was the situation in 2020 how many complaints the police had what kind of complaints i still don't know i i didn't know either though yeah i'm sorry to admit that we just got that full 2020 information doesn't make sense like maybe we can have a monthly report as a mem as a commissioner like in the month of january the police have three complaints and this is their nature right to get more than that you know yeah you know or or like like they were all these uh you know black lives matter the demonstration and i will have fully no conflict with the police that happened but i don't know if somebody asked me my answer would see i don't know and it doesn't make sense like you're on a police oversight commission and you have no idea how many complaints for a whole year how many complaints what the nature what happened during i mean there's something missing what we're doing yeah so that's and that's exactly what we're looking at and what that was is you know um how things were presented to us and then in some cases that that spreadsheet um wasn't necessarily there might have been stuff on there that we as commissioners couldn't share with the public so that's where now we're coming up with this process to make sure that the police are providing us that spreadsheet in a way that we can put it out there and that we we're not the public we'll be commissioned you know what i mean you can't share this with the public but we're not the public you know what anand we had a very long gap where we got no information from professional standards so i could not answer the question either and i could not tell you how many complaints there were i would say that there were 22 complaints in 2020 but that's wrong and i know it's wrong but the spreadsheet i had in front of me said 22 on it um i think it's actually closer to 38 but we did not get that information and so we had a huge lag in information flow from professional standards to us um we have not reviewed body cam footage in months i'm sorry we haven't reviewed cases in months um there has been a standstill on that and part of of the reason why um francis has been working so hard to make a standardized process that cannot be changed by individuals is precisely because of that yeah thank you i i agree that one of the things is is if if we weren't asking and saying we want the spreadsheet we weren't necessarily getting it and that's why it's so important that we have a process in place where they know the police know that on you know the x date of the month this report has to go to denise did we not get i remember that we got in the past when we were meeting face to face we used to get complaints and this is how many complaints and yeah there are and this this is their nature not necessarily we reviewed them because that took a time yeah for them to yeah but we would see the cases but they say you cannot review them now because they have some information our confidential we cannot show it to you and they have to clean it up and there but we saw complaints but like in the last year we didn't see anything i think we could um we could just make a standard agenda item that we just say how many new complaints since the last month and how many there are total we just do that every month going forward um but from september to december that number wouldn't change because we didn't get information it makes sense because that's basically our major thing is to you know look into the complaint of the police in the practice of the police you know that's that's what we're there for and if that's missing it's a big chunk of our work yeah no i agree with you we we were doing that you're right in january and february because i remember we were giving those updates at the meeting and we were going back and forth with the spreadsheet and then it just kind of you know didn't work that way when we were in quarantine and once things went through so i think that now that we're really getting our um dug into getting this process in place we'll be able to go back to that okay commissioner asmr are we the ones who are going to basically have the items that we are going to ask the police to provide uh whether it's number of complaints the type of complaint etc etc the progress of each complaint um so that can be standardized so when the police are providing us with the information um that is the the form or formula that they would be using every time they are addressing these uh incidents uh because i see over here is like chief of police is the one who can update us on this status it's just an ordinance over here right of of these incidents uh because what if we have to contact the complainant about what is really happening with their with their um you know if we don't have the information if we don't have the data um and if it's not standardized uh we can't uh really analyze the data in a way to say that was a bias no bias this or that so we need really to make sure that the information that we get is enough to make some kind of judgment even even as preliminary as uh it is or as as brief as it is right the um the information managers are going to have access to the entire file so you're going to be able to sit down and actually see the original complaint and the the officers names and all of the investigation done by professional standards and you're going to be able to review that the information managers are the full commission will not is not able to see everything but the the information managers will be able to put together their recommendation from their review and share that with the commission and and i think if if if i understand what you're saying muhammad um one of the parts of standardization is um making sure that all disseminate all information is disseminated the first time so for example there was a case with two officers and we only saw body cam footage from one officer and we're wondering where the other one is and they say oh we'll have to go back and get that that that should now be ready all the time the first time and so when you review any case you should have all of the information at hand every time without us having to say well yes we would like to see the body cam from both officers so um if that's if that's what you mean that's part of the thing that francis is also trying to um uh standardize so that when we ask for body cam footage that means all of the of the relevant body cam footage um that when we ask for reports that's reports from all related and and that we're not going to have to piecemeal okay in 30 days then show us the next thing okay in 30 days show us the next thing um and and so that's part of what we hope will be improved by this process yeah we don't want to be we don't want to continue to be in a position where we're getting information only if we ask for it yeah because then you're you if you know it's kind of the situation of you don't know what you don't know and i think we did have some assumptions early on that a bunch of information would be provided because that's how it was done in the past right um when we transitioned uh it became obvious that that wasn't the case and so now we're trying to write it out so that in 50 years from now when we're all you know sunbathing in florida and other people are doing this job then they will always get all the information all the time um chief cox did you have a question sorry i did not have a question i was just going to demystify a little bit of this stuff we had a total of 29 complaints in the year 2020 so if that's helpful um yes i just wanted to provide that not a mystery not a whatever 29.
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well good evening i'd like to call this meeting of the governing board to order today is tuesday january 26th i'd like to start with item 1.02 a moment of silence followed by the pledge of allegiance led by mr carr do you all please join me in a moment of silence please join me in the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you mr carr we're at 1.04 a roll call miss wilson would you please do the honors miss laurie wood here dr charles santa cruz here mr reed carr here mishy the eugetti here ms jill humphreys here mr president all boar members are present you have a quorum thank you mr wilson we're at item two approval of this evening's agenda item 2.01 is there a motion dr santa cruz i move that we approve tonight's agenda thank you mr carr is there a second second thank you is that miss wood mr jetty any discussion seeing none then we will vote on the approval of this evening's agenda all those in favor please signify by saying aye aye those opposed the same motion carries five zero item three is the superintendent's uh recognition and awards item three point zero one dr mccord thank you dr santa cruz governing board members tonight we'd like to recognize several students and staff for some of their accomplishments of late tonight we want to talk about the district spelling bee winners eight students will be representing gilbert public schools in the regional spelling bee hosted by chandler unified school district on february 16th and this will be a virtual b for this year's winners in order first place was arien rivera torres from playa del rey fourth grader second place was sammy martell a sixth grader at val vista lakes third place was tyler mantanona from canyon rim a sixth grade student fourth place was regan van patten from patterson a sixth grade student fifth place was mckenna johnston highland junior high seventh grade student sixth place was trigg jackson and eighth grader at greenfield junior high seventh place was trenton hales a junior or an eighth grader at desert ridge junior high and eighth place was mason smith and he mason is a fifth grader at neely traditional so congratulations to let's give them a hand to all of our spelling bee winners [Applause] next congratulations to caitlin blackburn a campo verde student who received the lanny williams award for student athletic training aides this award is given to the top three students in arizona for their work in sports medicine congratulations to caitlin next we have congratulations to ty thompson ty is a mesquite high school student he's a senior who received the 2020 ed daughtry award for 34 years the ed dodgery award has been one of arizona's highest individual high school football honors and is awarded annually to state's most outstanding high school football player so congratulations to ty he's going on to his i think he's going to oregon to play quarterback there and represent not just mesquite high but gilbert public schools so congratulations to ty [Applause] we'd also like to acknowledge and thank the generosity of the community gilbert public schools was selected to be the recipient of the 2020 barnes and noble holiday book drive as a result of the book drive the barnes and noble bookstore located at san tan village received approximately 899 books for our students we look forward to distributing them district-wide to our students and staff and we appreciate barnes and noble for their thoughtfulness and support of our community so thank you barnes noble [Applause] and last we have these are winners of the innovation grants these are staff members from the gilbert education foundation this is funded by those who contributed to the power of one campaign so thank you for everyone who contributed from sonoma ranch teacher tasha cermelli for a herb and spice garden desert ridge high school teacher robert laplante for an e-sports lab town meadows teacher laura fernell for non-fiction library update gilbert elementary louise heyman for reaching zen project superstition springs elementary kerry norton for a radical robots project playa del rey elementary carrie ledco for artfully me project desert ridge junior high patty can contil for a new stem class gilbert classical academy nicoletta alfaro for a gca wellness center gilbert classical academy judy ingle for a vitamix nutritional cooking project patterson elementary heather alfrey for calm and connected campus through mobile mindfulness carol ray ranch elementary addie lafferty beakley for projects spicing up learning for students with autism sonoma ranch elementary patty munley for sonoma student podcast building community with technology at the ranch gilbert elementary scott frankum for a microscopically speaking project gilbert classical academy pierre o'brien for an outdoor wellness area mesquite junior high haley mercy for a stem in sports a golf unit south valley junior high linda levy music with technology project elementary anna parra for where in the world will i go project gilbert high school alba alvarez stewart to create the giving closet and last but not least gilbert elementary maribel medina for dual language spanish books congratulations to all of our innovation grant winners we look forward to seeing all the great things you do with those grants and how they impact our students please give them a hand dr santa cruz that concludes my recognitions for this evening thank you dr mccord we'll now move to item five request to speak to the governing board we have five requests this evening could we please go ahead and play the recorded message i'm ahead of myself dr mccord i apologize superintendent's report all right this this won't be long uh just yesterday we sent an email to parents and staff about returning to full-time in-person learning on monday for february first we appreciate all the time and effort everyone has put into hybrid learning while transitioning back to full-time in-person learning it's important to remember to adhere to all the mitigation strategies we have in place to create the safest learning environment possible our teachers and support staff have done an incredible job educating our children in order for that level of learning to continue we have to be responsible for individual actions to help stop the spredakovic 19.
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good evening players parents fans and community of columbia unit school district number four my name is scott horner athletic director here at columbia unit school district four i would like to provide an update from the athletic department in regards to return to sports here at cusd4 as many of you know the ihsa has just recently released a timeline for sports and their return and as of right now this is all the information that i have available exact schedules dates and times are being formulated and i hope to have that information available in the upcoming days there's not a perfect plan available but is my hope that we spend our energy on what is good about the plan and keep in mind that sports are back here in columbia let's be encouraged by the news here's the timeline for columbia middle school volleyball season games can begin the week of february first as we have already began tryouts this week with an end date of march 6th boys basketball games will begin the week of february 8th with an end date of march 13th with girls basketball to follow shortly after that track and field at the middle school level is still undetermined at this point but we are hopeful that we will have a season for middle school track and field the timeline for sports at columbia high school as complicated as it is winter sports which include cheer basketball and bowling may begin practices as soon as possible with contests beginning seven days after each player has practiced in each one of those seven days with an end date of march 13th traditional fall sports at columbia which i must add will include no state series also basketball in the winter sports will have no state series as well as bowling with cheer being virtual again traditional fall sports will have no state series which include boys soccer football and volleyball for boys soccer start date is march 1st for practice with games beginning again after each athlete has had seven practices with an end date of april 17th football may begin practice on march 13th with an end date of april 24th games beginning on march the 19th volleyball can begin practice on march 8th games may start seven days after that with an end date of april 24th again let me repeat traditional fall sports there will be no state series boys soccer start date march 1st end date april 17th football march 13th end date of april 24th volleyball march 8th with an end date of april 24th that moves us to our traditional spring sports which include baseball softball track and field and girls soccer all of those sports state series is to be determined the ihsa is working very hard to figure out a possible schedule as to when there could be a state series for those traditional spring sports of baseball softball track and girls soccer knowing that they did not have a state series last season their start date is april the fifth again beginning game seven days after that with an end date of june the 19th players and parents please keep in mind that should your season start soon you will still need to have a physical waiver in concussion form and for the high school athletes a drug consent form on file in the office before you may begin practice or tryouts updates will be made available as we get them on the athletics website you can also find updates on the ihsa website at ihsa.org and of course we will post as many of those updates as possible on all of our social media channels expect information in the coming days in regards to spectator limitations and other covet guidelines those items are still to be determined also remember that all this information on season start dates will only be pertinent should region 4 move to tier 1 or phase 4 mitigation currently we are in tier 2 mitigation where we can have no athletic contests outside of girls and boys bowling because they are a low risk sport stay tuned for updates as they become available feel free to reach out to the athletics office at 618-281-2512 and i will give you as much information as i have thank you you
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alrighty welcome back to columbus east high school here on the bcsc youtube page we will take a look at the home team the columbus east olympians who are ranked 22nd in the state according to max preps the columbus east olympians are having a fantastic end of the season run winning five straight and becoming outright hhc conference champs for the first time since 2006. they have an overall record of 12-5 and 7-0 in conference play like i mentioned the lady o's are on a five-game winning streak picking up those five wins over conference opponent starting off the winning streak was a win over madison seymour and a thrilling upset for the olympians over bedford north lawrence and they picked up wins over new albany and for the conference championship they picked up a win over jennings county looking at the lady oh sectional draw they will play 11th ranked east central and the winner will take on a very well coached martinsville team so a pretty tough break there if you're an olympian fan they have to play the two one of the top ranked teams in the first round of the sectional vladios faced eastenders at the start of the season and lost 51-45 and i'm sure coach brown and the ladies are looking forward to that game as they were leading up until the fourth quarter and just let the games slip away late in the fourth quarter looking at the stats in the conference championship game corinne gravy had 16 points albany speer had seven sage stall had 16.
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is requested as shown here salaries this is benefits a smaller increase in maintenance support services and instructional expense so without further ado i'll jump into instructional expense this budget category includes a number of items and you'll see them here in this pie chart on on the right special education tuition and special education pupil services which are typically consulting services you could see account for 49 and 17 respectively of this particular overall budget category which is about 5.8 percent of our of our total budget request and then instructional supplies textbooks new and replacement equipment staff training library periodicals media testing and adult ed supplies all included in the instructional expense category as you'll see in this next section so these are the specific categories that we just talked about and what i wanted to highlight is this particular this particular column here which is the change from the current year's budget and you could you'll see that the total increase requested is about seventy four thousand three hundred twenty dollars it's about a one point six percent increase the just the broad explanation we've held flat on most of these account categories because we need to make room for the large medical benefits increase so these line items from instructional supply textbooks software library curriculum media library media supplies testing and adult ed supplies we've held those flat to this year the only areas that we're looking to increase modestly are replacement equipment and new equipment which you know we reduced in recent years again because of budget constraints so we're looking to increase those by twenty five thousand dollars each in this budget request and moving back up to the top staff training there's a twelve thousand four hundred dollar increase that's primarily dedicated to some of the work that needs to be done you know as we're operating in you know the remote learning mode um and in some ways you know we need to make up for staff training that we couldn't do this fiscal year and in a few minutes you'll be hearing from ms carey about pupil services increasing but that's partially offset by decrease in our place tuition line for special education services this is a piece of information that we share every year and i know that it's kind of a busy slide because it has a lot of detail so across the top here you'll see that these are our special education costs by year starting with 1617 through this budget request 2122 and you see that the categories we've we've broken out include you know certified personnel teachers non-certified personnel as primarily instructional assistants employee benefits purchase services the you know one of the large items that you'll hear more about is the tuition for our place students which is two million dollars for next year um instructional supplies uh transportation is a large portion of of this particular special education piece of the budget because the transportation is highly specialized for in many cases for individual students really what i what i do want to point out is if you look at all the budget categories that make up special education for next year it's about a 19.4 million dollar budget request it's about 24.8 of our total budget for next year 78.4 million and you could see that is consistent with prior years the special ed portion of our budget is about 25 of our total budget historically one line lower you'll see that the projected number of students that have an individualized education plan that's what the iep stands for you'll see that that is expected to increase over this year the percentage of total special ed students as a percentage of students is about 13 percent and you'll see that's increased from about 12 in that range five years ago and then you'll see here broken down the expenditure per student the um you know before i turn it over to miss carrie i can pause here for some questions but um robin ann has you know has quite a good presentation in store for you so i'm just gonna stop sharing my screen we could take some questions and miss carrie will then start presenting her screen and then we'll come back after she's done um ann i see your hand up go ahead thank you adam um my question is from the previous slide actually then all those lines that have no no increase or that are flat with the zeros in them yes so do we really need to have some of those categories filled well and my and my second question that sort of goes along with it is is a 25 000 increase enough for things like uh replacement equipment and such because we have so you know we've deferred some of these costs for so many years now i'm worried about having no increases anywhere i'll i'll begin by answering that you know those are the trade-off decisions that you know were made you know with the superintendent and ms solano as we as we built the budget you know you have to you know we try to come in with a reasonable number 5.5 percent is is a large budget request even though half has medical benefits we think we could get by with an uh a request that's parallel to the budget for this year you know are there trade-offs that are being made in doing so are there things that you know we won't do or or won't be able to do that we'd like to do i think the answer to that generally is yes but it will keep we'll be able to keep the school district moving in a good direction and i don't know marlene if you wanted to add anything to that and and that holds true by the way on not only the instructional but even the replacement equipment and the new equipment um you know we always at the end of the year look to see where we are in all our budget categories and if we can find some money because it wasn't spent in other categories those are typically the places we will allocate but from a budgeting point of view we're we're trying to balance you know what we need funding medical benefits and the things that we can go without i would agree with everything that you've said then okay thank you i'm i just really mostly want to express that i'm very concerned about this budget because of the medical benefits emergency that we find ourselves in i you know i feel like this budget does not move us forward anywhere because we're worried about uh taking care of those uh medical benefits reserves so that we don't you know run below what we're uh putting in that we're putting in enough so that we don't run out of money in those in that account um but that's not the way a school district should operate right we should always be moving forward we should be investing in um what we need to do to to teach our children in the future next year the near future and i you know i look at this bare bones budget on top of a bare bones budget from last year and on top of a bare bones budget the year before and maybe the year before i've lost track of how many years in a row um we haven't adequately funded uh a lot of areas that we need to fund and um i will be most likely suggesting that we um put more in our budget as we move forward but thank you for that thank you ann uh tim you had a question thanks adam uh yeah just uh with regard to ann's comment first about not moving forward i do personally feel as though not as though this was like a conscious decision that anybody wanted to do it but i think that the teaching staff and the other staff are making leaps and bounds in terms of technology this year not that it was a conscious choice but um i think it is it's an opportunity to learn um but my one question was it's an opportunity to learn what that i think will benefit us benefit the school system into the future what's my point with regard to the iep students so the number jumped up over the last couple years and i'm wondering if that's the two reasons that go through my mind is new students coming to town or is it a new measurement for students or is it both or other things i'm just curious did you want me to answer that i mean i kind of go through that in my presentation okay that's fine that's fine all right thank you okay all right um faith go ahead thanks adam um just so i get this um 60 66 of instructional expenses is in special ed correct roughly yes and those are essentially services mandated by the state is that correct so they're almost a fixed cost well yes you have to provide the services you know it i guess you can i know that miss carey's going to cover this tonight and so i don't want to step on um her presentation but you know the outplays tuition yes those are students that we absolutely can't um provide the services needed in district and there are a lot of services that we do provide in district that prevent us from outplacing even more students right so yeah i'm just i'm just trying to to put it all into perspective yes and then okay so then to follow up on anne's this is i'm going to tie this all back but what is the rate of inflation this year roughly in in instructional plot supplies do we is there is it roughly corresponding to the cpi or is it does it tend to be excessive especially when you get into textbooks and and um a good question and i i don't know that it's it's any higher than any other inflationary you know measure that you would use i i can speak certainly for you know instructional supplies that are more commodities paper and and pens and pencils um and some of the other instructional supplies you know those are on a state bit and those have been flat to last year from what we're seeing yeah i don't know if textbooks um also are in that same range marlene have you seen anything that is cause for concern next year no the only thing that we need to watch carefully is a lot of the software programs and things the companies gave them to us free in march when we went into covid and so people got used to some of these and some are going to enhance learning as we go forward and some we're not going to need anymore so some of those were free and after this is over you know we'll have gotten used to it and we'll have to pay for them um i don't know i just bring this back and i'm with ann i i am concerned um at you that we are cutting into basically the bone um and i don't know what to do about it i you know i really seriously i mean we're also looking at if this budget goes through as is a one mil increase for the town and i know my my job is to look at the school but i also do think of the taxpayers and they're gonna also get hit with town expenses so we are slowly seeing our fixed costs rise to the point where it's crowding out the essence of our district and you know i um you go to something like a mandate and i am certainly not saying we we go after the mandates for the special ed kids but golly there are other mandates that that the state is is imposing on us that that we have to fight back because it's just it's gonna we're gonna eventually get to the point where one percent of our budget is for for on non-fixed instructional expenses and that's it it's a scary scary trajectory we're on and i don't know how to stop it but i just want to voice my concern there uh we're we're almost in that rock in a hard place place so that's all off my soapbox thank you faith um uh from for from my point of view uh before we move on to uh robin's presentation um but mine i guess is uh the other side of the coin on uh on equipment i think it was new equipment and replacement equipment um you had identified 50 000 in newest expenditures uh between the two categories and i was just wondering if you had earmarked what specifically those increases were going to be for is it is it for like uh you know computer replacements or broken down equipment that that we heavily use i just wasn't sure if you had identified what that was for yeah for the most part it's going to be items that go into the classroom furniture for students you know so desks chairs same thing for teachers so it's not it's not computer equipment that's in uh in another category you know which we'll talk about under support services so this is more items that are specific inside the classrooms i would say is the best way to describe it it doesn't have anything to do with ppe or anything like that no no no no so this is like cap we're talking about uh equipment over 5000 like controllable equipment or is that kind of the definition there is that well it's going to be everything from furniture to you know some of the smart board replacements that we have to do it's just items that are you know common across across the classrooms in the schools outside of you know physical desktops or chromebooks those types of things are budgeted in a computer capital equipment account and you mentioned smart board replacement are you speaking about uh fixing or repairing the current smart board technology or phasing in the the newer technology that i believe you showed us i think last year even the year before that yeah this is fixing keeping what we have running and what's the estimate on on the new equipment like per classroom i don't even know if i mean this is not something maybe you're prepared to talk about but just as like you know what ann was talking about moving forward that was certainly a piece of equipment that we were talking about uh as you know about moving forward and advancing technology in the classroom and i wasn't sure if that was um something that we need to at least look at and prepare for for even this year or even next year it it's been an ongoing discussion you know within you know between our technology support group and our our curriculum group led by marlene um we probably will make a you know capital budget request when we're ready to do that because you know you're talking about replacing you know 300 learning spaces with you know a piece of equipment that depending on you know the size screen that we buy can be in the three to five thousand dollar range so okay we're not we don't have that included in this year's budget or the capital budget even okay thank you you're welcome um mother let's see marlene uh uh all right so is that a request from tavin marlene is that okay all right yes a request from the public to keep the budget um numbers presented so that they could see what we were referring to oh okay can you see it now yes you can okay perfect all right um i don't see any further questions so we will continue on thank you okay continuing on means that i will stop presenting and turn it over to robin and carey and hopefully i do this right i have faith you have faith you taught me well let's see can you see it yes and we could see it and we can see you yeah good good okay all right so um i'm thank you for having me here tonight to present our special ed budget and i'm just going to give you some background on our department on our students and our um what what we do you know on a daily basis basically you guys had a very good presentation on last year we did lots of showcases on some of our programs so i'm hoping i can give you some additional information and answer i don't want to forget about tim's question either so let's go ahead oops okay so this is our oh it's stop to present is it still presented yeah this is our team here um when i sat down to do our presentation i thought about everyone that makes up our team and makes up our programs and and really um really is what what uh makes us who we are um and at the last minute i added students and parents to that because they are really an essential part of our team um you can see there's a variety of different people here that make up our special education team and everything from nurses to aba instructors to social workers to ots to pts so we really have a nice a nice team here that really works together well um in supporting our students um you probably are familiar with this slide i showed it last year when we did our showcase on highland school in the aba program so this is our continuum of services um and what what shows is that we have services that are provided in the least restrictive area and then we run the whole gamut all the way to the most restrictive when i use the word restrictive i'm talking about how far away we are from the general ed classroom so the least restrictive setting is your general ed classroom with no special ed services that's the least restrictive and then your most restrictive is at the other end of the continuum where you're looking at things like homebound outplacement small settings so our self-contained classrooms in the district are designed because they provide intense instruction for our students those students have shown that they benefit from being in a smaller setting where they're they can have specialized instruction um and then we have the resource room support which really can vary a student can spend very little time in the resource room or they can spend their core subjects in a resource room and then they spend the rest of their day out in the general ed setting so this is a combination of resource and classroom setting it still involves specially designed instruction and it usually focuses on those core subjects it can also focus on study skills it can focus on those executive function skills that are that some students need to be taught explicitly and directly in order to be successful so depending on those areas of concern those areas of deficits will determine how much time a student spends in that resource room a majority of our students can be serviced through a resource room and through our inclusion programs so at the far end of the right you can see the fully included that's where we have our students spending a majority of their day in that classroom they might uh be in a co-taught classroom where a special ed teacher comes in and co-teaches with a general ed teacher they might be in there with the support of a special education um instructional assistant um or um and they might be in there also they would also have a lot of accommodations that would help support them there so that's that continuum of services and it's all based on the students needs and um the specialized instruction they may um may require so we started talking about numbers and here's where people were interested and had questions so this only moved this out of the way i got my camera let's move this up here so on this um graph you can see that our numbers have steadily been climbing um this is pre-k through eight students so it includes our elementary students our darcy students and our dog students and you can see that the numbers have been climbing so we're just a little over 350 this year um one of the things that i do want to point out on here that um we are seeing in our kindergarten class in our kindergarten students that are coming in the past few years we've seen a trend of students that are having a difficult time separating from their parents and coming into at the school setting um so some of our kindergartens have required um more more support um we typically see this with students that are very young and haven't had a preschool experience and so this is all new to them it's an all-new environment with new expectations and with um with with um the academic demands that that are required for a kindergarten student um so some of that climb i see um is that's one of the trends that we see with that um the other thing that we're seeing is as this as you've heard in the past the social emotional piece has been um really impactful on our students um and so we're seeing more students that are being impacted by anxiety um and so it can be it a lot of times it exhibits itself in the classroom for very very young kids it could be much more on the anger side more anger or aggression and on as the kids get older it's can be more withdrawn it can be um more of um school um a lack of a you know a decrease in attendance we typically that's a big sign when we have someone who is is um all of a sudden or over time is showing um increase in absences then there usually is a social emotional component to that the green line that you see drawn here i i i was in thinking about these numbers i wanted to kind of see for myself where when the dyslexia law came into place that was in the 2015-2016 school year and that's when the state required us to identify students um with dyslexia and so over the course uh since since that um ruling was put into place that mandate we have spent a lot of time on identifying looking at the tools and how to identify students with dyslexia so i think that some of that may have had some impact on those rising numbers we are catching students that are showing characteristics of dyslexia at a much earlier age putting in those interventions and i i see students get exited as the elementary supervisor we were seeing students be exited from special ed um by the time they were reaching sixth grade fifth grade so it's um a good thing that's been in place that we've been doing okay okay when we take a look at our grade 9 through 12 students with ieps again we do see a bit of a rise um the the the green line that i'm showing you there on the end there was a new mandate that came in and started in july of this year and that's when the uh the state determined that at previously our students that qualify qualified for transition years those are your 18 to 21 year olds um they would once they turned 21 they were then exited from special education with this new mandate that came in july they're saying it's now mandated that we have to keep our students that are eligible for those transition years through the age until they turn 22 so that happened in july so now instead of exiting a student at we are exiting them at their 22nd birthday so you i think we're going to see a little bit of a rise in that because we're now keeping our students we have students all the way down from three-year-old three years old all the way up until their 22nd birthday that's the range of students that we're providing services for some of the things that we have seen over the few years and we've talked about this in the past is most of the um the many students that are being identified at this level when you get to ninth and twelfth grade it's usually social emotionally based um it's due to maybe hospitalizations um and it's due to again students attendance is something we're looking very closely at and um and the impact has it has on those academic um academic success so that's our students from 9 to 12 and that includes our students that are in those transition years those numbers do okay so if we look at the total number of ieps we have a little over 500 about 556 students in the district right now that we provide services for which runs about 13.2 percent and if you compare that to the state the state we're looking at is the state average is 15.6 percent we've always kind of flown a little underneath what the state is but as in the state and across all districts we're seeing that steady decline that you can see in this here okay here's our out placements everyone's always interested in this slide so we can see that our out placements has have have actually dropped and part of the reason why i think that has occurred is you can see those two lines i placed into the graph the orange line to the left that indicates when we um put our bridges program in at doolittle so the bridges program um is a self-contained program that services kids with um that are typically impacted by anxiety and or um trauma and so we were able to provide an appropriate program within district um that our students are we were able to pull some students back and at the same time we were able to service students that otherwise would have been placed out um same thing then in 1819 school year we it we then added the middle school bridges program and also the rise program at the high school so i think these ins district programs has has affected in a has resulted in a decline in those outplacements because those programs are able to provide the services that the students need and we don't have to look at outside these are students who are typically placed out we typically have exhausted all of our resources within district we have gone to some of our most restrictive programs that we have in the district and we are still are unable to meet the needs of the student and that's when we have to look for outplacement um at that point the student is usually not benefiting from having access to to models to appropriate um peer age-appropriate peers and so um they really really need a more intense program [Music] once a student is placed in an out placement school we do continue to always look at when they are ready to return to the district we look for improvement we work with the outplacement schools and services and in trying to um to identify goals and objectives and identify strategies to help those students gain the skills they need where they can then come back into the district come back to our programs and benefit from being around their age-appropriate peers okay so i spoke about our in-district um programs that we have and the these are all of them right here and you guys um most of you were part of our showcases last year where you're able to really get some detailed information on each one of these programs these are our pre-k all the way up to the age 21 22 now so i'm going to talk a little bit more about those so really you can categorize these into three categories so we have our intensive programs that you see listed here so your pre-k your pre-k k aba your highland aba your light dodd life skills program and your cheshire high school life skills program so these are programs that are designed for students who require intensive specialized repeated instruction they're typically self-contained they have very small student student to adult ratios um so in many cases the students that in these programs oftentimes require a one to two a one to one student teacher ratio and so that's they require this the um the support of instructional assistants um to help reduce that ratio and to provide that more intense instruction so we do work on daily living skills in those programs there's typically behavioral needs and aba strategies apply we design our programs and our objectives and the tasks in the academics that the students engage in are functional and they apply to their daily life and they would be practicing and doing them in their daily life we r heavily we have a heavy reliance on data collection it's the data collection that really um allows us to able to see the small the small pieces of growth that the students are showing and then to be able to adjust if we need to adjust make adjustments in uh in order to improve um the growth um at this we also these programs are supported by your therapies your speech your language speech and language ot your pt and of course counseling and then some students are able to participate in adaptive art music and gym there's a lot of a technology that's applied and students in these programs many of the students that um requires all of this intense type of programming usually fall within the autism spectrum or they have multiple disabilities intellectual disabilities or even traumatic brain injury and so that's the intensive programs okay we then have our on the other hand we have our therapeutic programs so earth sorry i got to keep moving myself around there it's blocking so our therapeutic programs we have the do little bridges the dodd bridges the cheshire high school rise program the cheshire high school new start program and the hummuston alternative school so these programs are heavily embedded with counseling and with therapy there's lots of behavioral supports here it's the focus is on those social emotional supports that student needs again we are looking at a small student-to-adult ratio and again there's a lot of data collection to determine whether students are making progress also a big piece of this um these programs is the collaboration that occurs not only within our school-based teams but also with the outside providers so many students who are working with therapists or counselors or social workers outside of the school our school-based teams reach out and communicate we try to be on the same page and collaborate so that the student is getting a nice wrap around of services and everybody is consistent in what they're focusing on we're not contradicting each other many of the students that are identified and benefit from these programs are your students that are dealing with anxiety depression trauma ptsd mood disorder emotional disturbance or school avoidance okay our transition programs this those are that's our bridge to life our college life and our community life programs these are designed for our 18 year olds up through their 22nd birthday um we focus a lot on employment skills daily living skills those executive function skills social skills recreation skills and college courses both bridge to life and college life are located on the qu campus and that allows us to for one thing the students are with age-appropriate peers um and it also allows them access to age-appropriate environments and so um and they engage in different activities on the campus our college to life students spend time and actually take college courses at qu as well as the courses that we provide through our college life program and then there's also um employment opportunities and and work opportunities for them our community to life program this year is located at the park and rec um they we used to refer to it as the yellow house program but they have moved over to the um park and rec and that focus is largely on daily living skills and also on recreational skills okay so when you think about special ed and in cheshire we are very much aligned with what is happening in our district goals um we are have a heavy focus on the social emotional learning there is a strong emphasis on the castle standards the restorative practice ruler responsive classroom mindfulness all of the different strategies and the supports that general ed teachers are using we also support through special education and then also the complex thinking is another focus that's right aligned with the general ed and the way we focus on complex thinking in special ed is we're focusing on standards-based ieps so we're ensuring that we're setting high standards for our student students and that they're having access to the to the general ed curriculum we practice inclusive inclusive we have inclusive practices we try to um have stu we we look to have students participate in generally class classrooms as much as possible by providing them with assistive technology in our co-teaching situations there's lots of we we plan collaboration time between our special educators and our general educators so that the professional development that is being provided for general it is also provided for special ed so they're very much aware of what it's going to look like how it's going to be presented in the classroom and that way they can then make the adjustments that they need to make or the accommodations they need to make or to provide the instruction that students with disabilities would require in order to be able to benefit from the generalized curriculum so i think that all of those those practices that we do have in place it's is what has really enhanced our special ed program and has allowed us to to do so well on our state mandated testing okay so we always compare the derby this is the first half of derby because i couldn't fit everything onto the screen but we have cheshire over here uh where is it right here here is cheshire and when we look at just a couple of things to point out when i look at cheshire first of all you can see this this information is from 1819 so it is a couple years back but it's the most recent that i could get on everybody from um off of the state website so you can see and typically things don't change a whole lot from year to year when you're comparing them to other towns so you can see we're we're falling in this at this point we were 12.3 percent you can see as you look up and down the row for the ident students identified on ieps we're kind of falling right in the middle in there and i will show you another the rest of the chart the other thing um that i wanted to point out is when you look over at out placements way over here we are we were ranked fourth in the state as far as having the least amount of out placements so i know that that's always you know looking at that number is really concerning when we look at the cost about placement but we really are um we really do keep our students in district and we're able to do that with our programs that we have here so i'm going to go to the next one so here we're looking at some additional information from the rest of the dirk um and again i look at those percentages so we're kind of falling we're not the lowest but we're not the highest and um we know that the out placement is um we're in good shape with that so then what i did is i took um because i wanted to see you know if i took dirt b and i took those towns that were fairly close in population in numbers and enrollment you can see all these are all pretty close to us i wanted to kind of focus in on those to kind of really look at them so we can see that our numbers here they they kind of we've fallen again right in the middle we're looking at farmington newtown simsbury and south windsor here um so here we we're at 528 at this point and you can see we're kind of falling in the middle there when i go over here and i look at the outplace rank again we were fourth and then when we compare it to those towns that are similar in size um there's a little bit of a variety there it's uh it varies varies um so in looking at um let's see what else that i want to point out to you let's take a look at and we look at staffing students per staff and we have our sped certification our certified um specialist that we have in the district you can look at that in comparison okay all right so in comparison across the state when we look at and we break down our disabilities so you can see in the first column when we look at all the disabilities we are in the light blue the state is in the darker blue we are our percentage of students that are identified as special education is slightly lower than than what the state averages if you look across the graph you'll see we're kind of right in line with all with what is we are seeing as trends across the state when it comes to the students the percentage of students that are identified under each of the um the categories or each of the classifications um one thing that kind of struck me as i looked at this one here and where you're looking at the intellectual disability we come out at point um it comes out almost at point one at 1.0 you'll see that there's nothing there showing for the state and that's because on my chart it was so small it wouldn't show up it's actually .05 um so you know what accounts for us having a higher number of students in district that are are identified under intellectual disabilities i'm going to go back to tim's question about are we seeing a growth in numbers because of people moving is it the mandates i do think that part of the reason why we do see that piece with the intellectual disabilities is i think we students come up through birth to three i do think that students that families moved to chester for our education you've heard dr solon say that over and over again and our special education families moved to cheshire because of the programs that we have in cheshire um and so you know i you know i'll field phone calls at least three or four of them a year of people calling and we're looking at moving my child has autism intellectual disability or some other disability what do you have in your what programs do you have so um i do think that um that is a piece of it these are some of the recent improvements that we've been able to do through the budget through our budget system so we've been able to you knew a couple years ago we added three new school psychologists which was really uh impactful on helping our students and reaching all students not just the ones with ieps we added a special education teacher at darcy just last year and the 0.5 board certified behavior and analyst we also have over the past few years have expanded that bridges therapeutic program the rise program at the high school and then we also have expanded our transition program so now we're looking at the three transition programs at two at qu and then the program at the park and rec program with the community in life so those are things that have really enhanced our our programming okay so while this year we do not have any new proposals we're not proposing a new program we're not proposing additional staffing we are very concerned about the pandemic and the impact that it might have on students i think i've heard the number 20 of our students is out on is on remote due to parent choice or because of maybe there might be a health issue within the home and for their protection their students are staying home those students at some point will be returning back to our classrooms we do know that the pandemic is causing um the impact it's having on people is a lot of isolation a lot of um there's stress there are families that are having difficulty making ends meets because of um their job in employment situations so i am concerned and as a department we are concerned about when those students do return to school what are their needs going to be what are we going to need to help them transition back and also while we are while some students are even out on remote we are seeing some hospitalizations we are concerned about the change in the mandate so we now have to provide services up through 22 so it's another additional year of services that we will have to have to um provide um appropriate programming and so at this point i we're really asking and hoping that we'll be able to continue to support our programming um the we have programs that have been set up they've been put into place they've shown success and my hope is that we can continue to keep them um in the resources that they need at the level they are at at this time and so that we don't compromise the integrity of those programs so our hope is that the board of ed and the town council will support our budget so that we can maintain the high quality of education that we're providing through our special education department does anybody have any questions um well i'll kick it off because no one's oh there it is okay tim tim has a question i'll let you kick it off go ahead thanks adam um yeah thank you thank you for the presentation i had to step away for a few minutes with my kids i apologize about that uh you mentioned that there were uh kids entering into k and getting ieps there are they are they continuing on with ieps in general or after kindergarten oh because that's right because what you said was it's the kids who basically have um uh what's the word separation anxiety type or separation i forget what the the term is and my son is it do those ieps continue past kindergarten are they for for some for some but um for some we are seeing that we are able to they've made the growth we provided them supports they've made the growth and we then have been able to um reduce services and or access so um we there's a lot of work that goes in place before they get identified the team's work that each school-based team works to provide those um srbi services beforehand and so what we do is we put intervention strategies in place and we go through the tiered interventions before we end up at pbt when we get to tier three of those interventions it usually involves support service staff are very much involved in helping those students to um to with the behaviors and to help acclimate to the classroom and to provide the supports that they um that they require so in some cases it does result in an iep and then over time we are seeing that we can reduce those services unless of course there's an underlying disability in some cases we do we do find that there's more of a learning disability that's involved in it and so then we we're providing more academic support with that does that answer your question yeah yeah thank you thank you um you had said something that rang a bell in my mind um basically i was wondering about truancy in relation to in relation to the pandemic i don't know if this would be a question for you if you have a larger if your group if your group of kids is you know a larger uh is more representative or has a larger percentage of kids who kids with truancy issues than the broader student population um you said something i was just wondering in relation to the pandemic one of the things that's been a concern for me is you have some students where there is a problem and you have a lot of students where it's not a problem and then you have a lot of kids that are probably borderline and i'm wondering particularly in relation to pandemic if you've seen an increase and if there's anything that you've found that's helpful in addressing it um so usually what i see in special ed is is more the school avoidance and it's there's usually a social emotional reason and that's the that's that's what's really impacting the student in their engagement in school um what i've been hearing um from our social workers school psychologists and counselors for some of those students who coming to school um raises their anxiety they're flourishing and doing very well on the remote learning for some students who don't who may um who have difficulty with executive function skills and that is you know organizing themselves get making sure they're following their schedule signing on to um to google classroom when they're supposed to be on there getting their assignments done there's less of a connection for them and so i do see that some of those students are are struggling more um we do the staff does a lot of work in reaching out to those students who are not engaging and um and of course we're always looking at tweaking the supports that they have to try and get them more engaged um so i think i think you kind of see both ends of it with remote learning so in relation to the in relation to the positive that you were talking about um is that is this something that could continue into next year or if there's any legislation or anything in the hopper up in hartford if you could get that back to us and you know i personally would try to say something about it advocate for it because i mean if it's an opportunity where it benefits some kids i think it would be worthwhile to keep it as an option for you to think about and the parents to think about in the future i don't want it to just go away if it's something that really is helpful yeah i think that you know what as far as benefiting them i think what we're seeing is is that they're more engaged because they don't have to engage in that social piece but i do worry about them not engaging in a social piece so now they're very isolated and while they're able to get on and do their academics and um do it comfortably from their home their what their what's being what's can also be impacted is that social emotional piece and we know that we are all we're social animals and that um you know for a teenager to be in their room and be on a computer and while they're doing very well academically that's really not where we want them to be socially as far as going forward and thinking about whether or not remote will be an option into next year i i don't know that i think it will depend on whether the where we are at with this pandemic um but my hope is is that we can get all our students back into school because um i think that's better for them i think the instruction that they can receive is more engaging and i think that the relationship and the connections that they can make are um are much more beneficial sure no that makes total sense to me i'm just thinking in terms of options depending on the specific student specific situation i mean options i think are probably a good thing i think what they're doing is they're kind of avoiding those students that are doing well remotely because they don't have to come to school and they don't have to engage in that and what causes them anxiety is is you're kind of avoiding what the issue is and so so when those students are mandated to come back to school are that's where i'm concerned okay because it's very difficult yeah yeah um yeah and i just want to say uh the uh you had mentioned dyslexia as one as one uh concern and the opportunity to exit kids from their ieps while they're still in elementary school and i just want to say that's great yeah yeah we've done a lot of work with dyslexia and i and it's you know all of our staff is trained in in reading approach um in one or or two of the programs that are typically recommended and we're seeing good growth with that and so it's really very promising and it's really nice nice to see those students make those gains um so i i get a question about um which i don't know um if um something that comes up all the time is when we talk about out placements and we talk about the cost of an outplacement um so just to give you an idea um you know our out placements range anywhere from 50 60 000 a year that's the tuition for a student to attend an outplacement to close to two hundred thousand dollars a year so it depends on the intense needs of the student it depends on how what the supports are that the student needs and what type of program the student needs so it can vary i think if i were to you know so your average is somewhere in between there probably around 80 80 90 000 a year for one hour place um andrew you're up thank you well robin great presentation i really appreciate thorough and learned a lot but i have a question for you so with the outplacement is it less than 20 students out of the 4 200 district-wide that are outplaced yes yeah we have a small number of students that are outplaced okay the change from last year to this year did any of the additional staff help to relieve or to keep that number down that we added last year in the budget the additional staff prevent outplacements um the so i i think that our programs allowed us to do that so having having you know the bridges program the aba program um the bridges program at the middle school and the programs at the high school and the alternative i think those programs do help to keep our numbers keep our numbers down for our placements absolutely okay and then one one final thing with the state mandate of adding the extra year to 22.
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Uh mute everyone. Just make sure you're muted until it's your time. Good afternoon everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. I am Mr. Davidson. I am the principal of the freshman academy. This event, the freshman forum is typically just for freshmen, but given the circumstances this year, it's a little bit different. So, we're excited that you all could join us today. We have an excellent program ahead of us. Um, and it's really to raise awareness about teen and teen drug and alcohol use. Um, it's usually at night just for ninth graders, but this one um will be recorded live here and also put on the website for you to view at a later time. Um, the guest speaker I'll introduce soon. Um, first of all, I want to remind everyone that at the end of the program, um, you'll need to click on a link in order to complete a survey so we can collect information about you, um, to use, uh, for future presentations so we know who's actually here.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
um so i i just want to clarify that with you thank you and you know what um we could we could do one better too because sometimes we have complaints that we don't investigate ourselves and so the numbers might be a little bit different if it's like an internal police complaint and it comes to us that's not one that we investigate so that wouldn't show up in our numbers either right and those are those little uh things you'll see when we finish the process and we provide it to you you'll see that too that if a complaint comes to us that is more of an internal um denise immediately forwards that to the police you know she'll make a note of it that we received it and that it was forwarded to the police for investigation but we do not have um we are not authorized or empowered by our ordinance to do um internal complaints to review internal complaints council member rome lawyer did you have a question too yeah um thank you um the information managers uh i apologize but are these static the same three or a few subsets of three is the whole commission rotating rob robin it's not the whole commission but it is a subset so there are maybe three let's say francis bonnie and i are on one particular case and then muhammad and anand and francis are on another one and then jude and makaya and i are on a third one kind of how it was originally thought to to be done but kind of uh didn't didn't take root yet um um and different people have different interests and reviewing complaints yeah not everybody was comfortable with reviewing complaints because they didn't have the training and experience so um that the names i'm sorry are the names going to be privy to the information management so the police officers are just the numbers assigned to them if they're going to see the names as well we will see the names okay and also we'll have a um a chart that we fill out now that we we're sort of getting caught up we're almost there um where we can say who the information managers are for each case and the reason why that becomes important is because denise needs to know and the police need to know because they need to know which body cam footage which uh which commissioner should see so they they need to give us access to those files but they wouldn't want to give me access to a file that i'm not reviewing for example so they will only want to give access to those information managers so we're going to have a chart that everybody has access to and everybody can see who the information managers are on every single case okay well thanks for um everybody who's been involved in that trying to do this type of work it's it's um it's been a commitment um the attorney's office will send counsel you know every month or every other month it seems like every month you know a list of all the cases that the city is currently in litigation with and and it's confidential information that we receive and i would just ask maybe you all can lean on the attorney's office to model something like that for this commission so once a month you get an update you know this one is sustained this one was unfounded this is these are the ones that are active and you have a dashboard of what's going on with with the cases and the investigations and where they are in in that process and you know uh the attorney's office again already does this for counsel with the matters that we deal with so i just was gonna throw that out there perhaps maybe someone will get picked up and maybe something will be done or maybe it's already being done that way we actually are working with tom crawford to make a dashboard that we can make public on our website okay and and so we are negotiating with what information can be included on there to the public obviously it'll be numbers of police their unique identifier number that's been dreamt up by the system um but we're trying to make sure that it can be substantive but um we've had many requests including uh you know mlive that we put that information on our website and so we're working on how to do that and make sure that it stays updated cool so you got an output that's looking out as well as something that's internalized you know obviously uh some confidentiality to it uh and and just lastly i this is like one of the things that i would as a council member would be interested in seeing as denise reports out to the commission you know on a regular basis this would be this would be a an item that would definitely interest me good public information just a good practice to be transparent about that um yeah so we'll we'll continue to keep you posted hopefully by next month's meeting we'll have something more substantive that's prepared in draft for you to review um if we're ready to move on we could talk a little bit about the next item which is potential budget cuts um tom crawford asked he didn't ask us but he meant to he he forgot us again to ask every city department to come up with um a um a state and impact statement to indicate what would happen if we had a five percent budget cut what could we not do with a five percent budget cut and so jude is our budget guru and um she started working on that question um and we there were a lot of ways that we thought about approaching that the question itself and um i think um our response is due fairly soon so we will provide a response to the city fairly soon do you want to jump in here yeah sure yeah um it just and and guru is just a laughably generous time um so yeah we were asked about a five percent cut to the budget and there was a very specific template that we were asked to kind of give back impact statements in and and uh try as i and we could it it's really trying to cram a you know square pagan for a round hole with that format because it really was designed more for sort of city departments you know the the igbo being the only commission with the budget it was kind of difficult so uh we've actually written up a statement instead just kind of explaining the case for it i certainly can cut and paste and cram it into that format but it doesn't seem to make any sense to do that for the sake of it so we're checking and seeing will just our statement work in lieu of that uh you know kind of in love that specific format but we are um trying to to push back as much as possible on a five percent cut for our budget uh just simply because even though uh for a variety of reasons one of them is our budget is a hundred and fifty thousand dollars but only fifty thousand of that is really in any way within our control because the rest of it is shared city costs for things like i.t and everything that that all departments have to share their cost of and then um you know our personal costs and things and we really don't have any control over that so really our actionable section of the budget is about 50 000 uh so if we were going to try and come up with a you know the 7 500 cut within that budget to to be five percent of the overall we'd really be taking a hit of 15 to our budget if that makes sense if that works out that way uh so at the very least i would propose that we should just be looked at to see if we could cut 2500 of our uh discretionary budget the budget that we actually do have control over um but that still is quite a big chunk to us um one of the things that that you know i also want to point out within that is the amount of money that we're returning back to general funds um not in any way to try and claim that you know it's rollover funds because the city doesn't do that and we understand that but just really is demonstrating we don't spend funds unless we have a reason to this commission hasn't likely spent funds it hasn't i'm waiting to get back the exact numbers for this year here today and admittedly it's been a very strange year but um i still think we are yet to see a year with a quote unquote normal sort of budget time for higbock which is why i am quite pushing back quite heavily on the idea of taking a five percent cut going into next year that's sort of my stand on it right now um [Music] and and of course i i support that i'm not sure i know that every penny matters from every department i'm not sure twenty five hundred dollars from igpak is going to be um that helpful to the city but i understand it could do something um but we have been so responsible with our budget and we have not spent a penny on um we've not spent an unnecessary penny but we've also saved the city thousands of dollars when we didn't have an administrator for several months francis and i became the administrators we didn't have a temp we didn't have a substitute we didn't have anybody so there were no expenses as far as that went um we didn't do because of covet of course we didn't do training in the normal way some of us did virtual training but but that was so scaled back um we did community outreach in a whole widely scaled back way and so we just didn't have the expenditures um in this year's budget we will return quite a bit to the general fund but we also did that in the 2019 to 2020 budget we returned you know tens of thousands of dollars back to the general fund that we didn't use um we were able to go to a conference but we drove um and so we just paid registration fees and um so we've been very frugal and i think we have always thought about spending money with an eye to spending the taxpayers money and being responsible um for that and so i think what's going to happen is that now that that we may be able to do more training hopefully in 2021 our fingers are crossed and this budget um that we'll be talking about is for 2021 2022 so keep that in mind it's not for this budget cycle um hopefully that will include vaccines for the entire world and we'll all be able to do what we need to do vis-a-vis training but also outreach um and so we expect that we probably will use all of our budget and that we might spend more than we have spent in the past and then the subsequent year kind of go back to the middle because we will have there's a bunch of things we need to make up for like a bunch of people who could have done training last year did not do training um because of kovid and so um we we are pretty sure that we're going to need every penny of our budget this year um and and so i i i think our position is gonna be that we need to hang on to our little twenty five hundred dollars worth of money council member ram lawyer yeah thank you um appreciate the the the time commissioner uh walton has put into this she's been helping us from the start with our budget and has done a great job um you know explained it very well that you know the discretionary part of the budget would would be affected greatly by this and i just remember during the formation of the commission and when the task force first asked for a budget they had asked for one percent of the um overall budget or something to that effect that amounted to over three hundred thousand dollars um that that obviously wasn't granted in a much smaller budget was was put in place as a placeholder they really didn't know how to come up with that number because the commission hadn't convened or anything so in some sense it was an arbitrary number that they selected of 150 000 to put in as a placeholder and since then it's been you know uh hasn't been a consistent go of things and we don't really don't know what it's going to cost for a commission to do really its work and the commission has shown itself to be extremely good stewards of the taxpayer dollars and not do anything ridiculous with with the money and very careful with any any type of spending um so these are very good points another point that was brought up was that the the police contract you know gave the the police two percent raise at a time where um you know we're asking for departments to take a cut and executive level to have a freeze so i think a strong argument can be made if we can find the money to pay the police two percent increase and we we should be able to not ask for uh a cut to this commission so i will be advocating for no cuts to be made we'll see how that goes um but things are looking decent um you know the federal government state government aids cares act money came into the cities coffers offset a lot of other type of income that wasn't generated or didn't come in through parking revenue and such but i think we need to stay vigilant and remain good stewards of the money and hopefully there won't be any cuts and there won't be anything like that uh what i at least right now what my my fear for the city and other is that the subsequent years we really haven't really felt the effects of what's going on now until probably fiscal year 23 fiscal year 24 is we're going to start really seeing the the the effects of what's going on right now with the city's budget um but is the surplus that's been left over for the last couple years it's do we have an exact figure on what those numbers were i know the first year wasn't a full year maybe for the commission and and all that money's been given back i don't know if anyone's got it at their fingertips you know what i'm i'm going to try to do an estimate and i'm going to reverse engineer it and just look at what we spent that year it wasn't a full year but also when we asked that of the city um they came back and said that we were not considered a separate entity then so they just didn't keep track of that number and then um and and so they didn't keep track of it until this year and so we can see how much we've spent thus far in the fiscal year which is pennies but um and so we can guesstimate how much we're not going to use this year how much will be returned but um we we don't know for the previous years because we weren't considered separate is what this will be our only year that we actually have right reliable numbers yeah and it's not you know i think we need to spend so i can see how much we spent as of december 2019 but we weren't considered a separate entity so when that money got returned to the general fund in 2020 they they couldn't tell us what that number was because i asked denise did all that research and then um we can see how much we've spent thus far and we could guesstimate what we'll do between now and june and then we can see how much will be going back this year but um you know it's um i i do think i'm very glad you brought up the point of the police i think it's a really tough argument in the community to say we have such a tiny budget and you want to cut that but you gave you know police officers a two percent raise and you did it in a time when you knew the the the potentially hazardous situation the city would be in due to uh the tax base being shifted and that was a conscious decision and so you want to us you know to contribute twenty five hundred dollars seems probably not it's gonna seem logical to most citizens so um we'll we'll see how that goes but i have full confidence in jude and i think that we have crafted a very strong argument and we will submit it and we'll see what happens um and we'll keep everyone posted and also dude you were going to make an ask of everyone tonight anyway yeah i was yeah i'm just going to before we move on i did want to make an ask there is still work that needs to be done on the budget just in terms of the city isn't necessarily tracking our budget you know and holding us to what we said each line item would be we have flexibility within that but it is still really good to have an idea so we don't overspend earlier in a year and leave ourselves short later in the year etc so i would love to get from people um thoughts and ideas for how the budget should potentially move around this year or if there are specific trainings or projects or other things that are going to have more of a cost one thing i already know is that we definitely need to shift around internally and have more money going to that outreach there's nothing there wasn't enough in there this year if this year had been a normal year so i definitely know things that need to move around already but i i you obviously i i only know what i know so i'd love to hear from you anybody else if you can shoot me an email in the next say two weeks and let me know of things you're thinking about or know of and then i can see what i can do to piece everything together and so if you guys think of things that you might want to do particularly outreach folks if there are things you want to do that you haven't been able to do and you anticipate being able to do them in in late 2021 because the budget year starts in july so let's hope you know lots of people have vaccines by september what kind of outreach would you do um is there training that you would want to attend in person somewhere um we we know that lots of trainings are going to be done virtually so um the international association of chiefs of police um i think um that's the link that sarah sent us yesterday um some trainings they do only for our police but other trainings they do for the whole community and they've got some very interesting trainings um this fall um i think everybody should think about nicole training um and i think everybody should try to attend the conference at least once because um there is nothing like being in a room with 500 other people who are thinking about nothing but civilian oversight and you really get steeped in the understanding of the principles and the techniques and you learn all kinds of crazy things i think francis was in one talking about how to tell when the police show you body cam footage if they've clipped anything so like she's got some really high level skills and we went to consent decree seminars and we heard um crazy amazing attorneys general from all over the country and so i think everybody should try to do that if it's in your ability to do that at least once um and i know most people weren't able to do that so that's something i think we can all think about and one other reminder just with nicole is if you do want to get the certification through them you have to have attended a conference so that's something to bear in mind as well if that's something you're working toward yeah and and then do so many hours of seminars so i think we went in 2019 and then i got certified this year because i kept doing more and i know other people are on that pathway too so um but so there are lots of things we can do virtually and lots of things that we can do hopefully in person one day but sometimes even the virtual things have a fee and so understand that we have a training budget and it's very important to use it because everybody needs a certain level of training so that um you know that the public has confidence in our competence um the 2020 any questions about that [Applause] about spending money training budget items can you know while he has his hand up like just real quick i just you know make making sure that there aren't any needs that this commission has has thought about that need to be addressed but we're afraid to ask because of of of the budget was was there anything that we're keeping ourselves from doing because of the budget i just want i want to be aware that we're not constricted in the work that that needs to be done because of the fear of of that so i make sure that there isn't that that that hanging over and choking off work i i think one one of the issues that we might have which might cost us a little bit of money is to retain uh a uh legal counsel or or a council yeah that that that was in the ordinance in that ordinance so if there's going to be any chunk of money probably would be over there i don't know when we are going to need that but eventually we will need that whether it's towards the end of this fiscal year or next year or so and that and that would come as a budget amendment to council that would require eight votes so um you know in the unfortunate instance that that has to happen uh we we're well aware of that that tool that the commission has to come back and ask for because outside counsel is expensive i mean you you just initially anything is going to cost twenty five thousand dollars minimum for any any kind of outside counsel you know so thanks for for bringing that up okay it's 7 10 and we're coming to our last item on the agenda which is the 2021 meeting schedule which i know denise sent everybody i'm i'll post it on twitter and facebook as well um and it just kind of lists all of our meetings and indicates that as of now we still expect them to be on zoom due to um the virus um our next meeting is february 23rd and then march 23rd um always as always the fourth tuesday of the month um [Music] and it looks like and so the schedule remains consistent i wanted to point out that when we were originally seated the plan was for us to meet every other month and i remember a few people thought oh there's no way we have so much work to do we can't do that we have to meet every month and i know last year in january of this year we met we had some interim meetings i think we met a couple times in the middle so we made a two-week mark and then we kept going and so we we didn't have a meeting in the month of december which i think was probably a well-deserved respite but people did do training in that time period um so that was really useful um and so i just wanted to point out that this schedule has us down for 12 months and so it looks like we're so we are scheduled to be on once a month however it is absolutely reasonable if this commission feels like we should miss a meeting in august or something so people could breathe we should talk about that if we should decide to miss the december meeting or something like that so the schedule as it is is us on the fourth tuesday of the month but this is something that this commission can decide um and so if we decide that we should miss a meeting we should probably talk about that a few months in advance but certainly that is something that should be dictated by us um and i think there is some um great value and everybody taking some time to do some self-care some people are probably better at that than others um and so to take a month off in the summer or a month off in in december at the end of the year um is entirely reasonable um council member song you mood you okay okay thank you this isn't in regards to the schedule it was um and it's not on the agenda so i'm not really quite sure where i can bring this up but at uh two council meetings ago there was a discussion with chief cox and staff on banning facial recognition software and there's been some community interest um on taking a look at that and uh council uh member medina and who's on the human rights commission liaison for that commission and i were interested in seeing if there would be interest in on this commission and doing a joint effort and taking a look at potentially introducing a ban um because i i know dr jackson knows this well the research on how the technology doesn't work well we don't use it chief cox and we there was no consideration for using it but as as you know as you've mentioned in this meeting a couple times now that we don't know what the makeup of council will be in the future of police of this commission and just because you know technology changes doesn't mean um well we know that in its current use it doesn't work well it's used uh it works and it's used um you know to target people of color and i i brought this up because i'd like to see ann arbor actually just kind of demonstrate how progressive it can be when in massachusetts it has a statewide ban after there was a ban in five municipalities so chief cox has resolution language um i'm just trying to figure out what the path would be for this commission and if there's interest in exploring this you guys probably know i'm on a tour a speaking tour so just about every week i give a talk somewhere and i talk about what oversight looks like in ann arbor and this is one of the questions i get and um i was at a meeting with an awful lot of lawyers and um one of the things they suggested is that the aclu has some of the um best research on this and that they would be just happy to come and talk to council about this and i know most people here are probably familiar with the facial recognition software issues but um um largely artificial intelligence has trouble distinguishing um between people of color and so you're much more likely to match someone than you would part of it has to do with um algorithms that didn't include um african-american latino asian faces in their their databases in the first place um but we've seen things in detroit they have you guys are probably aware they've had a couple of really bad situations because facial recognition software it's never intended to be used as you know a standalone um rationale for arresting someone but often people use it and work backwards from there and so there were people who were arrested who when you look at them and the perpetrator look nothing alike and those people's lives are turned upside down because of that experience and so um you know until ai and facial recognition gets a lot better it just seems like it will disproportionately harm underrepresented people um and and so this i think is the big um and we know federally it's still being used right so we know it's used federally on the federal level with ice and housing people have mentioned that yeah they're very concerned about its use even in ann arbor for tracking people and i know i've had those conversations with some of you individually about how it's used in different places and how it might be misused even unintentionally um council member ram lawyer you had your hand up is this or is it yeah i'm speaking a lot tonight sorry um uh just with the the calendar um yeah i did the notice that we got that that usually is published for the public i'm sure maybe denise has already done it so it can just be organized uh so it reads from january sequentially down to december it's a the copy that i got just kind of kind of jumbled up a little bit are you looking at it in preview mode because i did the same thing and then as soon as i opened it it's actually arranged in three columns and it looks fantastic yeah i was gonna say i had three columns yeah yeah all right well then i'm seeing it in a different layout so then we'll post it on the website too so that yes meeting dates are always on our website but also i'll post this on facebook and on twitter in this form um but it but um i guess i could share my screen it looks fine okay and then just the one thing is just as we just experienced in december uh getting together uh between them in the holiday season is extremely difficult i i know we're going to make these calls as we go but i'm just looking at that one as a really you know i'll make them uh and you know i'll make them but it may be one that it'd be hard to get all of us corralled at that time but that's all after i get a vaccine i am going somewhere warm and tropical and i'll zoom in if you want me to but i think everybody's leaving after the vaccine yeah we get one this commission is like virtual we are out you're like you have a vaccine you could meet in person we're like we have a vaccine that means we can leave we don't bill you now for our considerable time so we won't do that thank you um i think it is fine to to bring up the um facial recognition software commissioner often yeah i really would like to to i know um any of the data that these companies are are generating are based on one type of group of people and and then they start spreading that across the the board uh the the across the world and and that by itself uh does not do justice even if there is some kind of benefit of using the software if it were not inclusive and have enough data statistically uh verified data that this one software can or cannot distinguish between individuals i i think i would air on on on side of of caution i'd rather not uh recommend it but also what we need is if we have information from um aclu or so if they can provide us you know invite them have them just explain to us whether it's as a seminar webinar whatever uh tell us what's really happening and if they have the data um i think we should follow the data uh it is you know it's it's not it's people who are in science sometimes always have data and this data is coming from one particular group of people and we think that it applies on all one size does not fit all well said i and i didn't mean to i wasn't dodging your question um council member song i'm certainly happy to work with with you on this and um if anybody else is you can shoot an email um but i i think it's probably um it shouldn't be a tough thing to do at this time the police don't have the capability of using it they don't use it so we're not taking away any of their tools and so it might be a good time to think about um you know banning it until and unless it becomes proficient at recognizing all faces equally and i'm sure that'll be a few decades um there a way that i could form a subcommittee then or is that is there how is how would how are issues organized within the committee so we've done that before we have a subset of people who work with the hrc for example they were working on trespass and so we often form subcommittees that don't exist to study something new or to do something new and so we could certainly do that okay because i have i have the massachusetts aclu's language that's what the ordinances were based on um that the five cities in massachusetts had passed their ban and then that went up to the state and now it's a statewide ban and it was also in collaboration with the le the electronic frontier foundations work so um i had sent all these links to dr jackson last month so if there are other nerds i guess is one of i'm policy nerds who would like to jump into this world with me and then travis will find folks in hrc i'd really like to get a jump on this um so why don't i send those links to everybody and copy you and then anybody who's interested can reply back yes that'd be great thank you wants to do what i know lots of people are doing lots of stuff already but um and and but if um if you're interested in this as well we have people working with hrc working on the crew report also so and i've already talked to eli uh so um ellie savitz and and senator irwin about this too so there's it won't be a difficult path i i hope it won't be so there's interest and there's already um precedence so we can we can just copy massachusetts all right thank you so much i'm sorry back to calendar no no this is a great topic for our commission this is part of thinking about how we prevent or or perpetuate really good policing and and this stretches across policing obviously lots of different areas so thank you certainly we're happy to participate in this is there anything else that anybody wants to add there we should always have a section here and we might i didn't print the second the back side of this paper but um we uh if there are general comments that people want to make i understand the outreach committee did not have specific comments that they wanted to make this time but if there is anyone else who has an issue that they like to raise questions they'd like to ask something of which we should be aware gracia othman do we have to make a motion to accept the our meeting scheduled for this coming year or for this year or it's just information yes you go to me i'm sorry yeah yes it would be wise if you voted on the calendar okay so do you want to do we want to we can always make an exception to the calendar so we can vote you can always change it at any time this is just so i can solidify it we all know you don't want to meet in december we can say right now to remove december's meeting okay is there a second second look there's five seconds um all right all in favor of removing december's date from the calendar any opposed is anyone who's like no i must meet in december okay so we we can do that now and say unanimous vote that was unanimous and then we can discuss in the future if you'd like if we could if we want like to take a month off in the summer yes in june july august or september or some other month that might work for people if if there is i need a breather we weren't here in december but i feel like i worked just as much in december as if we had had a meeting so i know that that doesn't mean because we're here people are still doing work so that's true and i can just post that is cancelled and so you can cancel meetings at your time at your choice okay and we'll bring it up i'll make sure that we um i put a note in there that maybe we can ponder it and we can discuss it again in february or march if there's um if people have a strong feeling about a month in the summer that we could um take off and work independently council member ram lawyer yeah thank you and uh appreciate commissioner uh muhammad to um to remind us or remind the commission to to make a motion to approve the calendar uh i think the charter will require that it's one of those technicalities that make it official and cross our keys on that but yeah of course we've you've done it before obviously called special meetings uh this time last year you had quite a few of them we had the police chief um issue uh and there were reasons to convene on a very short notice so and then i just wanted to go back and since this is a kind of one of our shorter meetings it seems like i always want to get a full two hours whether the whether the police chief since he's here or to weigh in on the facial recognition at all i know that he's discussed that with us and we understand that but since uh he's here and is a public body uh maybe maybe perhaps to have a clear understanding of where the policy is for for the ann arbor police department when it comes to artificial intelligence and facial recognition for for comfort for our for our residents and visitors chief are you with us yes how you doing sir i am i am briefly spoke about this at city council before it's not a technology we currently use because it's just so unreliable it's kind of like it's not not even something we were thinking about using um you know when the technology actually improves and gets rid of all the bugs and all those things it would it would have a use for us but it currently doesn't and i don't really see when it will uh as far as that's concerned so it's really a non-starter for us just because it's unreliable we're not thinking about using we don't use it and we don't have any technology that has access to that do we uh while we work with other jurisdictions other uh law law agencies are they using it and then somehow with with collaboration with working with all these different enforcement agencies that are are they using it and then bringing it into our community in ways that maybe the ann arbor police department doesn't but some others do yeah so i you know i can't speak for other agencies i would say the federal government i think is really the only um you know agency that that may have access to it pretty regularly um state and local uh towns i i can't really speak for them but i i would say that the federal government is pretty much the only uh law enforcement agency that uses that routinely or at least has access to it i can't even speak to how often they use it thank you commissioner birch thank you um encircling back to the schedule wondering if in the spring we were planning on some sort of retreat to maybe strategically plan for the year ahead um just curious i'm assuming it's on the radar just hadn't been made aware of like a date or anything yet it is and we should think about a date and so i'm glad you brought it up in this particular um forum we do need to um do some strategic planning and we do need to think of a time when we can all get together on a date outside of our regularly scheduled meeting where we can think about some short-term planning and some long-term planning and sort of flesh out some of the things that we need to work on going forward um and where we see this going and thinking about public safety in ann arbor in general and how oversight plays a part in that um and so we probably need a good chunk of time i think lots of people do that for you know a nice part of a day i don't i would imagine if we do it in the spring we might still have to do it remotely if we have a quorum it would be subject to open meetings act um but i think that we probably need to to have a time devoted just to that where we're all thinking about these things and turning them over and kind of wrestling with some of the directions that we want to go in and what we want to focus on um and we can think about that as thinking about you know fiscal year 21 22 since that will start in the summer um so i am happy to to send around a poll or something um and ask people about potential dates are is there is there a one or two dates days of the week that might generally work with people that with an enough modus you notice you could meet on a saturday with enough notice you could meet on a friday is there a consistent day of the week that we should at least shoot for let's say i'd vote for friday but that's just me anybody else feel like that with enough notice they could get away on a friday yeah no we're talking about and in person or are we still what what are we talking about i think we're gonna have to think about being on zoom if we're in the spring unless everyone's just gotten vaccines left and right and um but i i think we're talking about a nice chunk of time maybe six hours or so okay from friday friday works for me but um i got my first vaccine last week and as soon as i get my second one i'm out of here so so anyway um if it's going to be zoom i have my computer so it doesn't matter we will live vicariously through you thank you so happy for you thank you yes glacier often even i would remind you uh commissioner carter that even if you have the two uh doses of the vaccine still you have to have the mask i don't need that reminder i i'm suffering under two um pre-existing conditions i'm old and black so i will always have my mask on [Laughter] just a reminder from an epidemiologist i appreciate it i got it we're we're always happy to have a resident epidemiologist we we um it's also good to be aware of one's pre-existing conditions that's right um but but i think zoom is probably would probably work for us because um i think i think because some of us may be in tahiti clearly um but but i will send an email to everybody actually i'll do a doodle poll go jude i was just wait probably way too detailed of a question but having designed some of these if we have to do open meetings act that means that if we're by zoom there's no breakouts we all have to be in the same place at the same time right or actually no if we break up and we're in groups of less than five we can't walk still right yes okay right and so you could do four breakout rooms to do some brainstorming or something or three breakout rooms of you know four people or to do some brainstorming or something like that and then come back together as a big group i mean that's totally legal yes you bet we aren't in person we could do a high ropes course together as some team bonding yeah suddenly i'm grateful for social distancing that's what what all of us really want to do ropes course let's zipline let's meet in hawaii no okay in any case so i will do that i will do send that out to everybody tomorrow and i'll just try to look for something maybe in april where we might be able to and offer some potential dates and see if people um could come together we'll also look for a facilitator perhaps to do part of it i think part of the work is just work with that we need to do together um but it might be useful to have somebody sort of um you know facilitating the beginning and the end of it um and then also i'll ask you guys if there are specific things you'd like to work on in it so that we have an idea of how to um you know direct ourselves so we're not just hanging out for six hours and doing nothing which would be fun but not very efficient so also memorandum while he has his hand up thank you um as someone who's regularly in six hour meetings i would just perhaps recommend breaking it up and maybe into two two meetings like three hours uh yeah perhaps not everybody comes to both of them uh the leadership gets stuck perhaps with with attending both i know it's a it's a big commitment more more time taken out of your your your daily lives but um perhaps maybe having two two meetings um so so that uh you're not all burned out it depends on whether it's in person or online or so if we're doing something fun you know we we might be able to hack it all in one shot but that's definitely an option i've done some that were pretty entertaining for a long period of time but they weren't you didn't just sit there and talk for six hours so you were up and about go anan commissioner amiri i i think to break it down to three hours each time if we do it on zoom because it's very hard to sit and stare at a computer for six hours and stay focused for me i find it you know much harder to stay focused and follow up when the meeting is long on zoom while it's in person i don't have the same problem so just a thought like maybe break it down either the same day we have an hour in between break or lunch break long one or in two two days in a row or something i think we have lots of options yeah commissioner othman yeah i just would remind that uh if we are going to propose any kind of changes to the ordinance we have to have that before in the first two years of our commission so if uh we are going to be um brainstorming anytime in spring or so uh probably a session would be devoted to looking at the ordinance and come up with suggestions of some of the changes that we would like to incorporate and and submit that to the city council thank you for that i think that's on the minds of many of us anything else should i show this uh this video of makaya it's about four minutes long yes i wanted to ask could we um motion to vote on the schedule motion to vote on the schedule is there such a motion to accept the schedule from january 26 to november 23rd 2021 yes no moved is there a second a second all in favor of accepting that 11 month meeting schedule say aye aye any opposed motion carries thank you and we have no more official business um is there a motion to adjourn the meaning i really are not going to see the video i could i guess i could show it as part of official business huh yeah okay yes then let me share my screen with you can i record it or no you can send it to me i can send the link to you but i want to make sure you guys can hear it first yes can you see it yes yes yes let's see if you can hear it both my first time voting this is not what i imagined for my vote my first time voting i actually um voted yesterday like i got my little sticker and everything working in a swing state is probably one of the most intense things you could go through really see young people and gen z in specific rising up to the occasion i feel like even though we're minorities our voices are very strong and with the needle being pointed in either direction it's like you know one thing can just tip it completely in the opposite direction [Music] on college campuses the turning leaves mean another election season and this year a lot of gen z voters are full of hope that the voices of black indigenous and people of color could make all the difference young bypoc activists jacob maya and makaya are working in swing states like arizona wisconsin and michigan to get voters to the polls every single other day we're phone banking and reaching out to voters and just trying to find them where they are in arizona jacob martinez got interested in politics at an early age so i used to be involved with the republican party i was the chairman of the teenage republicans i started having a lot of like animosity and distaste for the party i'm really around the time that trump kind of took office and you know the rhetoric about immigrants really didn't sit right with me and then following the shooting in parkland we saw 17 people die students just like me um and the republican party didn't want to do anything about it now he's working the phones for the progressive group nextgen and plans to vote for joe biden we are making it our top priority to not only reach out to young voters across the state specifically you know people of color to make sure that voices that have otherwise really been not heard and ignored in the past in elections and by legislators that we're reaching out to them and they know that they do have a horse in battleground wisconsin maya colon also grew up conservative and says she approves of the job the president has done my father has been a police officer for the last 25 years it's really nice to see trump support for them i've been making phone calls contacting people about you know who they're planning on voting for and making sure that they have like the absentee ballots if they need and in detroit michigan mikaya ship worked with u.s representative rashida talib during the summer to recruit young voters i made a tick tock style video to teach the youth how to vote and what that process is looking like for their primaries and i was extremely excited about that because i knew that especially in the city of detroit not everybody had parents that were voters active voters and that knew what that process were like and so if they couldn't teach their students or their kids then who would if you're registered right here according to a pew report two-thirds of zoomers think that black people are treated less fairly than white people in the us and about half of the people who said they attended a protest focused on race or racial equality this summer were under the age of 30.
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a huge thank you to our families for everything they have done to support their children our staff and our district being a hybrid is no easy task for our students and families and i sincerely appreciate all of your efforts even though our schools be fully open on february 1st we still need to wear masks we need we need to wash our hands and we have to social distance when possible please take care of yourself and those around you we live work and learn in an exceptional community filled with amazing people over the past 10 months coven 19 has put a strain on our community and countless communities worldwide we often talk about the seriousness of the virus what the virus can do to someone's health health but it also has done damage to relationships as we continue to navigate the rest of the school year please remember at the end of the day kindness should always win mother teresa is quoted as saying kind words can be short and easy to speak but their echoes are truly endless dr santa cruz that concludes my report for this evening thank you dr mccordin once again i apologize for skipping over that item five is the request to speak to the governing board as i indicated we have five who wish to address the board could we please go ahead with the recorded message the board may make an open call to the public during a public meeting subject to reasonable time place and manner restrictions to allow individuals to address the public body on an issue within the jurisdiction of the public body at the conclusion of the open call to the public individual board members may respond to criticism made by those who have addressed the board may ask the staff to review a matter or may ask a matter be to be put on a future agenda however members of the board shall not discuss or take legal action on matters raised during the open call to the public unless the matters are properly noticed for discussion and legal action during the open call the board requests that speakers refrain from voicing complaints against school personnel or any person connected with the district as it may impact due process rights policy ke k-e-b and k-e-d are provided by the board for disposition of legitimate complaints including those involving individuals forms required for use of these policies can be obtained from the gilbert public schools website speakers will address the board in the following order jessica wick sophia young karen hotel fisher steve leswere and jake given please approach the microphone you have three minutes [Music] go ahead i'm sorry dr mccord i came here today has a frustrated parent and your speech made me step back and think a little bit more on how i was going to approach and state my case to this board but i still very feel very strongly about what i'm going to talk about today has my frustrations continue as a working parent and i am concerned that the decision to continue with the in-person model will again be brought to the board and we will go back and forth between a hybrid and an in-person which is my biggest fear for my children what would the members of the board and the teachers and the support staff of our school's response be if the rest of the community took the same actions you are as a health care professional the clinic i work at continues to this day to struggle to find disinfectants gloves and face masks do we close do we refuse to give care or offer limited hours no we became creative we switch cleaning solutions no clorox wipes well they make us spray hand sanitizer is a convenience we have plenty of soap and water to wash our hands masks are required in our clinic if you don't wear it or you pull it down repeatedly we will ask you to leave grocery stores home improvement stores and restaurants are open and serving their customers what would you say if you went to go get a gallon of milk and the store was closed with a sign that read not all of our employees have gotten their vaccine yet please return when that happens i have a fourth grader and a first grader as of today they have attended 26 days of online learning and 63 days of in-person learning my children have had 17 days of at-home learning with paper packets copied pages of workbooks some of the material in the packets they swear they haven't learned when i do fractions two fourths is actually one half i taught my fourth grader that because at 7 00 pm at night when i get home i am now the teacher and that's how i learn math i'm requesting this board to consider moving spring break to the same week as spring holiday which will give our children two and a half days back of in-person learning to recoup some of the time lost to paper packets i further request considering discontinuation of early release days there are 15 of these left on the current calendar and discontinuation of the three remaining half days allotted on the calendar this will give our children approximately 24 hours back for teacher instruction we have all made concessions sacrifices and modifications the difference is i am still serving my patients i am doing my job there are consequences when you do not do your job you lose vacation time you lose pay state funding because parents finally come together to question why logging hello i'm here to give a perspective on the decision that was made for in-person and online learning a perspective from a student that i feel was not heard ever since i was a child i was terrified of going to school not only were we reminded every day that there was a possibility someone could come on with a weapon and harm us we were also faced with the society where we were afraid to be different ever since i was nine i would go home crying every day ranting about my mistreatment by my peers as well as the unconsensual sexual acts forced on me as a child every time i would run into my mother's arms and every time she inspired me to want to try to live a little longer my mother is a very sickly woman she has hashimoto's thyroid disease as well as arthritis and more medical conditions i can't even begin to pronounce in my freshman year the warm arms i used to run into felt colder and colder as she got sicker and sicker and every night with tears in my eyes i would think about what i would do if i lost my mother i lived 10 years of my life terrified but all the terror i felt as a child does not compare to the terror that i feel today my dad is a medical worker at the beginning of the pandemic he worked in the front lines with confirmed coronavirus patients every day he would come home more and more tired every day would come home more and more tired and even after removing his mask that was under his face shield he could not run into the arms of his wife and children as the fear of getting his wife sick and watching her die like he watched his his own patience was too big for him every day i live in fear that when i go to work and come back home i bring back something that was not worth the money and i'm sorry that some parents fear for their children's grades but i fear that i may become an accomplice to my mother's murder and that the arms i ran into when i felt like i could no longer put in the effort will be gone i have never felt like student lives or opinions have mattered to the governments or school boards every day i feel like we are used as political agendas that are used to push i'm sorry were used as pawns to push a political agenda all i ask today is that when you consider your decision that was made to take into account the thousands of people who have died without needing to and the people who could die with today just like my mother and i hope that the decision to protect some children's grades that some parents claim was worth the sacrifice i hope that it was worth it to them because the day my mother dies is the day that i die with her that's all i have can you can you state your name we need it for the record sofia young ah thank you go right ahead hello my name is karen otero fisher i am a health data analyst with previous experience as an epidemiologist my favorite best thing right now is i'm a mother to a daughter at one of your schools i want to tell you what happened at her school last month in the 14 days that you actually had virtual and hybrid learning we got notifications of four different exposures when i looked at the average time frame between the exposure to when i was notified it was an average of 6.5 days as an epidemiologist that is atrocious knowing that there's a two-week infection period i know that your current metric is the use of one percent or two percent based on the population at hand and seeing what i saw i would say that you're about 6.5 days behind when you actually have a pandemic that is all i have to say thank you stephen let's see where all right thank you so much for for all that you guys do and for the opportunity to be here here with you guys today in light of the times that we are in i'm grateful for the year 2020.
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leah bachmann had a huge game with the game high 22 points gabadine had six maybe roberts had three and caitlin carter's added in two i'm almost certain coach brown and the staff love to look at the stat sheet after the game and saw that three lady o's were in double figures grivy bachmann and stahl i'm sure coach brown was very happy about that one with this game and two more left on the season can we see the ladies finish strong with the remainder before the tournament we shall see we're about three minutes away here from tip off so we want to thank you guys for tuning in to this live stream here tonight we are about a minute and 45 away from the national anthem in the starting lineups karin gravy is now fifth the fifth leading scorer in school history so i'm sure she's looking to enter way up to that number one spot so congratulations corinne gravy she comes in on the season leading the team and points per game with 17 and also leading the team with five assists per game and leading the team as well with 3.8 steals so so far a fantastic season for gravy another cool stat is gabby dean leads the state and blocks with four points four blocks per game she also is leading the team in rebounds with 7.6 games so great job for maylie roberts she leads the team with three-point baskets made with 33 and shooting 41 percent beyond the arc the olympians are out without emma jenkins a key player she looks like has a knee braces out with the knee injury so underneath the minutes here so i will turn it back down to coach pierce for the national anthem and the starting lineups good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the orange pits here on the campus of palomas east high school a regular season varsity match-up between the olympians of columbus east and the visiting bulldogs of batesville high school and now ladies and gentlemen at this time we ask that you please stand the privilege of this game is made possible by those who have fought and continue to fight for the freedoms we enjoy let us honor and respect our efforts in our country by gentlemen removing their caps and everyone standing in attention placing their hands over their hearts as we proudly play our national anthem [Music] so [Music] so thank you and now i'd like to introduce your starters with our visitors this evening for the baseball bulldogs at guard 853 senior number three catherine rock at rna 57 sophomore number 12 aquila ranger young at forward at 5 8 junior number 20 carly brock and forward a 5-8 junior number 30 sarah riverdale and it forward a 5-8 junior number 44 callie kaiser your head votes for your bulldogs brian help me that is your baseball bulldogs all right olympian fans you know what to do get up on your we're feet about these olympians [Applause] a 5-5 sophomore number 14 roberts and forward a six-foot sophomore number 23 [Applause] and forward a six-foot sophomore number save star at center [Music] so there you have it folks the national anthem and the starting lineups team wise for the olympians the olympians come in tonight averaging 61 points per game 33 rebounds 14.6 assists 6.3 blocks and nine steals and shooting 44 percent on the season so we are ready and awaiting tip-off here looks like gabby dean will once again be doing the tip for the olympians and number 20 is carly pride 5 8 junior will be doing it for the bulldogs as we are up and underway tips goes to sage stall and pass it to grabby gravy fires up a quick three and off the mark and rebounded by number cali for the bulldogs the olympians fall into that 2-3 zone look after they have done pretty much all year long gets inside off the foot of a bulldog and sage stall gets to steal and up the court is gravy down inside to gabby dean spins ups and no good rebounded by carly pride when she slows the pace down here 7 20 remaining here just in the first quarter roberts and gravy are at the top in the zone look gets inside out in the corner for pride for three and short and rebounded by gabby dean gabby dean leads the team and rebounds with 7.6 rebounds a game gravy kicks it to melee roberts looks out of three but passes it up back to gravy back to sage saw it looks like the bulldogs are on his own as well and as solon that is number 44 for the bulldogs and a timeout taken by the bulldogs that was a close call for over the back so a quick timeout with 6 48 remaining here 0-0 is our score the olympians applied really good pressure on the the ball handler at half court and made the bulldogs take a timeout so a quick timeout taken there so the olympians fall back in a 3-2 look maybe looks like a 2-3 just the wings came up really high there so fall back into their 2-3 zone look great pressure by the olympians and a foul will be called on the olympians sage stahl picks up her first teams first 6 38 remaining here gets it into number three katherine and back to pride right idea just too hard and too long and a turnover committed by batesville olympians will get the ball back still awaiting our first points here tonight grabby brings the ball down i'm sure she will be doing that most of the game on the right ring is stahl down low to gabadeen pivots and passes it to roberts 4-3 up and good that gives maylie roberts the first points of the night and she gets three points gives her 34 threes on the season shooting 41 from beyond the arc leads the team great looking three-point shot there with six minutes coming up on the clock see if batesville can get something going as well great job by gabby dean to keep her hands up and stolen by maylie roberts up to gravity two on one fast break to stall great pass and a great lay up ken gravy leaves the team with five assists and she shows off her passing kills there with the two on one fast break transition points for the olympians and stolen once again sage stall dribbles it back to melee roberts gravy on the left wing fires a three and no good and rebounded by number 14 excuse me number 12 michaela granger young gets it down inside kicks it back out to michaela she fires up a three and nothing but nets michaela ties the ball game up at three excuse me forgot we scored on transition there so five to three is our score gets it inside great pass and gabrielline gets in the scoring column bachmann comes in averaging just over one assist and michaela tries to draw that father but off the mark rebounded by bachmann up to gravy sage fires up a three short but rebounded and kept alive by gabby dean maylie roberts fires up a three nothing but nets melee roberts six points already just here in the first quarter coming off a big threes that was a great job by gabby dean to keep the play alive and find her from beyond the arc as carly gets inside and blocked by gabby dean once again comes in leading the team and blocks with 4.4 so we have our first subs here tonight brianna wells number 34 and gabrielle elston checks in both juniors only one senior on excuse me two seniors on the roster for the bulldogs barely gets it in and off the foot of gabby dean and they're not going to call that a kickball so passes it and grabby will go to the line for two comes in shooting 83 percent at the line she's 73 for 88.
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um do you have an idea of how many additional students that's going to result to for next year um we did look at projections um we're always looking at projections and so um this year we actually had to call back i think it was three or four students because we had exited them accident exited them at the end of the school year and then the july mandate came out and we had to call them back and so um a couple of them have already exited again because they turned 22 in like november or december um but productions as far as next year i i do have that um i don't think i'll be i don't i don't know if i'll be able to pull it up i don't know right now i was just wondering what the you know it usually typically affects like four or five students i think okay okay all right thank you catherine i got a question yes sorry thank you adam um a couple of things so i know that you know we've talked a lot in the past and and you brought up tonight that people you know moved to cheshire because of our great special ed programs and i'm just curious um are there specific things that we do that other districts don't do i don't know if it's the bridges program and the aba you know those kinds of programs that just aren't universal throughout um you know other districts or what is it that draws people to cheshire specifically and i don't even know if there's an answer to this you know because every child is different all that kind of stuff i'm just curious uh well i'll just tell you what i've experienced and um you know what i the phone calls that i receive or when people contact to ask about our programs typically they have a child who um has some unique needs and so many times i will ask them well you know what made you decide to to call cheshire or contact cheshire and um i've been told that um their doctor or the neuropsychologist that evaluated their child has made the recommendation i've been told that word of mouth you know they know somebody that lives in the area um i think that um the programs that we provide i think you know parents i think we all would want um to keep our children within close to home and within our home schools and within our community and so when you have a program that you that is in our schools and they have access to age-appropriate peers i think that that's just a real a real plus and it's a real um attractive situation for families right yeah so the fact that we work pretty hard to minimize out placements probably makes a difference and the other um maybe this is just more of a comment than a question really but i think last year one of the things i i heard during those uh workshops and and um on the special ed programs is that you know identifying children as having special needs as early as possible um is going to result in you know a much better outcome for that child probably a lot sooner which means to tim's point you know exiting kids out of the iep um is more likely to happen more quickly you know if we are identifying these kids and giving them the services that they need i mean is that did i hear that correctly yeah early intervention is optimal i mean you want to do early intervention you don't want to create large gaps you don't want to delay and create large gaps for students um you know there's not just the academic piece to that but there's the social emotional piece to that because then what happens is you see a child that's frustrated and that has um that is uh turned off by by school so early intervention is the best if and um you know i've always felt if you can get in um provide the service um you know give that direct instruction and then and you see you get results from it then the student is you're closing that gap for them and then you're they're able to then stand on their own and and um access the curriculum without having special education so you know it's um it's you know it varies from student to student some students are requiring special education throughout their years some of them are able to um to exit um i think it depends on the disability i think it depends on um you know as you there's a lot of factors that kind of come into play with that right but early intervention is always the best option i mean because i mean we know when we when we teach teach the younger years are such our years of such rapid growth for students and so we want to capitalize on that right and i just i guess my point was that you know making sure that we are adequately funding that effort um really does pay off in a lot of different ways um right and that's exactly what my point is is that while we're not asking for anything additional we really want to be able to maintain these programs right you know i you know i don't want to i don't want to have to make changes or to reduce the services that are available in these programs because then you're going to uh that's going to have an impact um on on your effectiveness how effective they are right thank you thank you very much thanks adam faith good question um thank you robin ian for the presentation um i'm going to just cover a bunch of different areas starting without placement you're saying it's about on average 90 90 000 per student is there any is this all on the district is there any um any cost sharing through private insurance on the part of the families with these services um what uh for the academic we're we're responsible for the academic programming and so that's that's what we're seeing as far as those out placements go much of our outplacements are based on those academic programs that children's children require so that doesn't come into play under a person's insurance okay okay um and then um you uh vinny had a sly and slide in his presentation that showed that the cost of educate cost per pupil of an ie iep pupil is 35 000 per student we have our dis this is this may be more a question for vin um our average cost per pupil in the district is approximately 17 000 so then if we factor out i could do the math but i was english major so not too good but um if we fact if we take out the iep students what is that what are we spending per non special ed student yes you're saying if we take the the the per pupil expense we have now first subtract out the special ed cost and then recalculate yeah we'll add that to the questions that we'll answer next week okay thank you i understand i i get the question it's an algebra question i know it is yeah it takes a little bit of doing you know to to figure that out because you have to factor out transportation to make it equal because the the the cost per student that the state provides excludes transportation costs but our 13 or 35 000 that you had in your slide that includes transportation yes oh okay okay um if you if it's just a ballpark figure i'm just i'm just gonna do it see that okay um and then um with ieps i think roman and you started to go down i was wondering if what the if we have an average duration of a of an iep are we seeing trends that because that we're starting that they're starting to become more effective and therefore kids are exiting earlier um but i don't it sounds like in your in your discussion with catherine you it's all over the board um well it's i don't i can't really comment on if there's a trend with exiting um i think that um because you know the reasons kids are identified for ieps what we're seeing as a trend is we're getting a lot more students with the social emotional piece versus the academic of a a specific learning disability or a dyslexia um and so in typically we see the social emotional tends to be with some of our older children so while we're we're identifying students with learning disabilities and with um academic needs at the younger age we have what i see is that the social emotional pieces are coming out at the older students starting in like more so fifth sixth grade and then moving up towards the middle school in the high school years so early identification tends to happen a lot with the academic needs and then the social emotional piece kind of comes up but as far as like the average time that a person has an iep i i couldn't comment on that you know i think you know what i do know is that if you have a learning disability you always have a learning disability what we do is in special education is we work to teach you the strategies that you use to work around that disability and so that you can access the um the instruction and you can learn and you can um make progress but we teach it a different way we give you different strategies to kind of guarantee your strengths instead of your weaknesses and that way you be you students can make that progress and can um gain those skills okay okay yeah yeah um but in both cases whether it's social emotional learning or or um you know a learning disability you want to see them get especially with the sel kids get back to wholeness um you know yeah and i think what which speaks to you know when you look at the how we did on the last time we were tested using the s spa the spec state mandated testing um you know our students with special needs did very well um and so i think that speaks to the hard work that the staff is doing in identifying students giving them the accommodations and giving them the instructions they need and and exposing them to the the grade level standards so that they can meet those those goals and those those um standards okay on those those state mandated tests adam if you indulge me i have one more question and that is are you hearing from any other districts for example i saw in the numbers simsbury i think it was had 22 outplacement students and that and that data you showed um some extremely high number um are you they would to me would be a perfect candidate for our program um my concern is that you get into a place like simsbury and you've got a family with you know severely disabled child that we become a magnet are you hearing from other districts who are saying hey we need to do this as well and is there perhaps some guidance from the state to some of those districts to say look folks beef up your special ed programs you can't yeah yeah you know i i think it i think it would depend on i think you have to look at why the what types of programs are those students going out to so are they programs that you can you can do within your district or are they based off of hospitalizations are they based off of um students that need um programming that we don't have in the district um so i i think i don't know what sims very situation is or why they had that increase in out placements um i i have not heard from them as to why i think that many districts recognize that you need programs within your um within your district i don't always know if that's supported by you know if it's supported in the district to build programs like ours or similar to ours and also to provide the resources that are needed to run those programs so it just might might not be able to do that because they don't have the backing in order to do that i don't know okay thanks yeah okay andrew sorry robin um so i've heard a lot from parents about darcy school um so we're working through school modernization right now so it's not really a question because i don't want to put you on the spot but i just want to make sure that i'd like to schedule time to sit down and talk to you just about the program about the building and about the facility there because if that is moved um or renovations happen there or whatever ends up happening i want to make sure that you're um part of that conversation for sure great great that'd be great good all right thank you i didn't want to forget because you're here thanks um robin again uh thank you for this fantastic presentation this is always uh one of the most enlightening uh parts of our uh budget process because we always find out you know how the students are doing and and uh the kind of resources that you'll need for next year um for me um what i guess i'll begin with uh sort of to be piggyback on on andrew's statement there when i did the tour of darcy in the fall um uh i was told that we are one of the last systems in the state to do i think it's birth to three months and that's fine and that's funded on a uh i guess i think a grant um and that everyone else uses some sort of privatized system or don't offer it at all and i was wondering if you could uh expand upon that thought as to what is what is the what does the privatization look like and is having that in-house it's obviously having that in-house is beneficial and has has have we made any preparations for the day that if we are the only ones still using this grant will the grant go away and what do we do if that happens i think the advantages to having the eic program with it or the birth to three program in uh in within district really kind of gives us a heads up as to what's coming down the road and so we kind of have a an insight into who our students are going to be in a couple years and so i think that's really helpful um because um we can plan for that so otherwise i we're hearing you know once they turn three uh we get notice or they're turning three we get notice from um birth to three and that's when we would take our students in to our program but with birth to three we're kind of getting that insight and that heads up and i think that that's really helpful as far as the grant going away i'm not aware of of that i haven't um been a part of any kind of workshop or or something anything from the state that has talked about that i know that kim desert who is the principal up at darcy and she often does get um she often is involved in many of the uh the workshops and the webinars that are coming up out of the state and i'm not aware from her either of of anything changing with that grant okay thanks webinar in a couple of days you know my concerns of whether or not we have to lobby our our legislature to make sure that that grant continues if if we're one of the few who only who still use it so i was just warning you go ahead it would be hard to get rid of that because it goes back to that early intervention piece and how important it is and you know my understanding is the research shows that early intervention is far more cost effective than waiting down the road and then trying to provide those interventions it's usually far more costly to wait and provide services later on okay so my next question is about the high school and we've kind of touched on this subject um you know as a board we've been uh working really hard with administration to try and keep you know the schools open as much as possible and we know that you know the high school has has not been open full time and you've mentioned that uh you know your concerns about um how students will react to specifically you know underclassmen who have not really had that full opportunity to transition at like it you know during a normal year you'd have all that time to transition um do you feel that you have the resources to help those students because you know it could cause a ripple effect for their entire remaining career at the high school you feel you have the resources to help all of those students deal with um this you know final transition problem uh or maybe lack of problem or you know minor problem uh that they may have throughout their their remaining career and you know do you think we have the resources to are you prepared for that yeah um so the high school has been working really very hard to meet the needs of our students with ieps and um you know they look at each student on a case-by-case basis or each individual needs so our our self-contained programs are life skills programs that are for our our students um that require the more intense um supports those programs have been running um in their they're not on a hybrid schedule they're coming and they're having in-person classes because we recognized that those students um it's very difficult for those students to benefit from a um a hybrid situation because you have that that that change in schedule where these are children that that do much better on a consistent schedule and then also the in-person instruction that they require they're not it because of their disability they're you know trying to engage through through the google meets is very very difficult and hard for them so the um decisions have been made so those more intense programs are running full you know throughout the week and um those students are coming in so the staff up the administration up at the high school has also had to make decisions through the ppt process and determining if there are other students that are on ieps that may require or benefit from being in school instead of on a hybrid schedule but are in school every day except of course the wednesday that everybody is out so there are some students that are attending four days a week but that's that's based on an individual decision made by the ppt team because they're looking at that individual situation and um and and whether that child would benefit or needs to be in school for those four days as opposed to the hybrid model um can i predict what's going to happen down the road um i i'm not i i wouldn't say that i can predict it but i think that we need to plan for it i think we need to think about you know i i think back to when we when we went out on on remote in the springtime and then we re-entered school this year we we had a very thoughtful re-entry to coming back to school and we planned out how we wanted to slowly re-enter students and we did it by you know we broke them down by the out their last name and we had certain days designated so that teachers could reconnect with students and i think that you know in thinking about uh when when and if remote goes away we're going to have to think about doing that or what other strategies we can use too as we reintroduce our students back in what's the impact going to be for remote versus um in person well you know i you when i talk to parents or i talk to people outside the district the feedback that i'm getting the feedback that i'm getting from everyone is that we are doing a really good job on our remote teaching um i've watched teachers toggle between their remote student on their computer and their student in their classroom and it amazes me how they do that um but i what i what i am hearing is is that we are doing a really good job of that so you know i'm hoping that we're doing we're diminishing some of those residual effects that might happen um at least for our students here in cheshire um you know when i talk to somebody from another district and they're like you know are you remote are you hybrid and i'm like well no our elementary school is fully in person our middle school is fully in person and we're hybrid at the high school and um and you know and we're doing we're doing well at it so i don't know what that impact is going to be i do think that our school counselors and our psychologists our and our social workers and our special education teachers and our administration are are all going to be working in collaboration to determine what supports those students are going to need and and we'll watch the data you know the data is going to tell us a lot when we start taking we're supposed to take our aspects we're supposed to take our aspect testing this year we're we're going to be you know students are taking sats that data is going to give us that insight as to how we're doing um our curriculum-based assessments that we're doing that's going to give us the data so we can then determine how well of a job we did and if there are some gaps or things that we need to look at but i think that's systematic it's not not focused just on special ed i know for me personally i'm pleased to hear that you guys are completely aware of the situation and our seem seem to be ready for uh what could uh come our way next year when when all the students are reintegrated back into uh in per in person relationships again um uh finally um i don't recall if we did this last year we may have we may have not have done it but um at least in 1819 we did a i guess really an in-depth sort of uh school climate survey i think with the students and i don't know marlene if you can answer this as well was that something that we were going to plan to do again this year to kind of take the temperature of where everyone is before we hopefully all go back next year so i think you're referring to the safe school climate data which is actually a state department of ed requirement that we do it every two years and so our safe school climate committees at all of the schools are currently looking at those questions as you know most of those questions are state mandated and we will be administering that in the spring thank you that's great news um are there any other questions for robin okay seeing none uh is that conclude your presentation robin yes yes thank you very much thank you again for the great presentation i'll hand it back to vin okay thank you um [Music] trying to share my screen and i'm getting an error so just bail it to me one second here all right you see in the slide and you're seeing me yes yes okay terrific so i'm going to just pick up where we left off we're still in the instructional expense um portion we we completed these two lines for special education you know we we talked through the categories here just wanted to highlight a couple of things and then we'll move on to support services and the first is that the focus for the curriculum council for 2122 is business social studies agp is the academically gifted program and school counseling so those those particular areas are due to be analyzed and recommendations will be made to the curriculum council there's also some training needed with the next generation science standards social studies curriculum needs writing revisions again these are just some highlights of the instructional expense portion of the budget and then continuing to support math resources for the eureka k5 implementation as well as algebra algebra 1 and geometry and if marlene has any information to add i'll let her pepper it in here in terms of some of the textbooks that are needed for next year marlene indicated that we need a new textbook resources for algebra 2 for business courses as well as elementary math instruction and assessment uh also college career and civic life for social studies and then let me see lastly here um in terms of professional development you know it's really gonna it's sort of in line with what we were doing or scheduled to do this year with complex thinking and social emotional learning some some focus on english learners as well as next generation science standards and and the k-5 math program so marlene i don't know if you wanted to add anything you know to that that particular information that i just shared no i would say that if this sounds familiar because many of these things we had on the docket to do last year and they were not completed due to covid and they've been difficult to complete this year due to the fact that um there's so many things happening and we don't have the ability to pull substitutes and group people together for training in the world we once did so these things continue to be a focus for the foreseeable future okay thank you and this is just summarizes the percentage of instructional expense um as to the total budget so you could see over the last several years it has declined a bit but in general this category you know has been relatively held flat in terms of percentage you know of the budget you know going back for the last you know 20 years or so it has increased but in line with the budget and that ends instructional expense i don't know if there's any additional questions or you'd like for me to move on to support services at this point um i'm not seeing any questions okay so continue on ben thank you support services so when we talk support services we're looking at about eight point nine percent of the budget it was about nine percent in the current 2021 budget the the total request is 6.99 million that's about a 4.2 percent increase i'll show you the increased categories in a minute but support services 57 of this 6.99 million is transportation the the cost we pay daco as well as fuel and transportation insurance so again that's the lion's share of this portion of the budget about 12 is for other professional services which includes technology services and in particular paying our contract with apex technology that provides services of of a chief information officer and we do share that cost with the town as well as certain software that we purchase more operational in nature like munis as an example legal fees that are paid for advice that we need as well as for negotiations expenses related to the board of education holding our meetings and the like as well as the annual audit which is about thirty six thousand dollars per year so that's the second largest category the 611 000 the that's the energy performance contract again about six years ago now we did an upgrade um of about eight million dollars in our schools to um improve energy efficiency and we did that in the form of a 15-year contract so the 611 000 represents the payments that we're making over 15 years for the 8 million dollars in work that was done and that's offset by savings that we've realized in our utility accounts and you can see that the rest of these categories which are you know rentals and leases of office equipment but also using the pool and hockey rinks that's included in that category purchase of computer equipment i was speaking about this earlier so it's out of this um four percent of our budget that will buy you know computers chromebooks um some network devices although a lot of this that networking infrastructure for the schools in the town is part of our capital budget sports insurance physicals programs fall under other purchase services and again the rest of these are relatively small i'm going to cover them in the next slide so it's a it's a wide variety of support services that are captured in this particular category you'll see that the total request for an increase is about 280 2 000 a little over four percent uh as compared to this year and so you'll see some of these categories are just flatlined so i won't really focus on those the seventy seven thousand dollar increase here for pupil transportation is about two percent you know that's in line with our contract with daco it calls for two percent increases per year which is very modest and that's what we you know negotiated when we were we renewed our contract two years ago now this category i do want to take a moment to explain it's other professional services inc is increasing 184 503 there's just really um a couple of things that account for that you know the first is that we um change the the way that our financial system munis is hosted we we were basically um having that software on our servers and now we've moved it to a cloud-based service and the reason that we did that is there it was actually a greater cost keeping it on our own servers even though may not have been an operating budget cost there's a network infrastructure cost that we pay for those servers were due to be replaced so it was time for us to move you know our financial system to a cloud-based software service which will enable us to stay current with the latest releases of our financial software which again is munis so that accounts for about 35 000 of the 184 000 increase you'll also notice and this is the second piece this year's budget of 624 thousand 2021 is dramatically lower than what was expended in 1920.
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So, your Mentorlex teacher will share that with you. I want to thank the uh, committee that put this together. First off, Terry Budlong from MCCA, Miss Daniels, Miss Lewis, our crisis counselor, and Mrs. on deck school counselor in the freshman academy. So I don't want to take up too much time. So our first person I get to introduce is the president of the teen leadership health council Kazzy Beum. Thank you Mr. Davidson. Um as he said I'm the president of the teen leadership health council. And just a brief introduction about the club. Um we work in Danbury High School and across Danbury in tandem with Abbott um tech as well. and we focus on promoting mental health awareness as well as awareness about um teen drug uh use and abuse which is what we'll be focusing on in this forum today. So again, if any freshman want to join our club um feel free to do that.
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[Music] in 2016 just under 50 of eligible voters actually voted in the presidential election and that participation dropped down to 36 for the 2018 midterms so will 2020 be different makaya says she's voting for biden but she's still frustrated by the lack of representation it's definitely been the lesser of two evils i feel like biden does have good policy in some areas but also i don't necessarily feel like he represents me as a black woman in america he just does not when you have consistent older white men running for president it kind of drains you and makes you not even passionate about elections in general overall polls also show gen z voters see both president trump and joe biden more negatively than positively but usually tend to support biden over trump but for maya it's not just about diversity of race it's also about diversity of opinion and being a latinx gen z voter doesn't necessarily mean she fits a predictable profile i personally don't support the black lives matter movement i do of course support black lives i support all diverse you know people i feel like being a bipod voter there is a certain sort of alignment that you should have certain values that you should have but at the same time i'm an american and so the the values that trump shows you know being pro-constitution and wanting to you know continue the legacy that our forefathers have created for us it's like yeah that's something i really i really i really enjoy you know it really resonates with my values and with their diverse outlooks and backgrounds maya jacob and makaya are hoping that getting involved will mean more representation across the board what i'm more optimistic about is giving the resources to not only one standard of people but for everyone having our black and brown representation in everything whether that be policy legislation or just on our tv screens and media i hope that things can really come full circle and that the things that we have been fighting for can actually start to be seen and not just something that we continue to speak about nice wow thank you impressive good job oh i'm sorry i need to make it stop that would be helpful we are so lucky to have you thank you i haven't watched that video since it came out so it's like if we see myself talk again but thank you you did not know we were going to play that today full disclosure i was just like everyone should see this i'm glad we did yes i'm glad you did i'm so glad everybody could hear it as well um so if there is nothing else we need to cover is there now a motion to adjourn yes motion to june is there a second second all in favor aye aye any opposed we are adjourned thank you thank you all you
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we have all been through a very interesting time what i have learned is that you cannot live in a community and not offer meaningful service to the community in light of what we have been through with our kids being out of school for nearly a full year now with struggling education we as citizens of gilbert can no longer sit around and be frustrated but we must stand up and make a change where change is needed i do feel that the time has come that some of you on the board have been involved for too long with making decisions for our kids and are no longer representing the majority of families and teachers that live in gilbert i've grown up in gilbert since i was 12 years old i love our school system and i'm grateful for the many amazing teachers that teach at our schools and affect my kids lives for the good i know that the majority that are involved in our school system are amazing i experienced that when i was in school it is time that some new minds get involved to help our school system operate and function at a level that we all want that live in gilbert too many people have left the school district and are planning to leave the school district next year if any of you on the board are feeling run down after this year and you are unable to make decisions for the majority i called politely for your immediate resignation i also call on all people that live in gilbert that have the ability to step up in positions like this to get involved and make a difference i will be running for gilbert public schools board in 2022 and i encourage others to do the same we are woke as a community of loving parents who demand the best for our kids thank you jake thank giving hello my name is jacob given i manage a data science team at amazon and what i want to talk to you about today was the the metrics that that we've chosen to use to decide if we should be sending our kids back to school so we've all know the metrics at the uh at the arizona health level which which were currently still read but the metrics that we've chosen to use in gilbert is percent of active cases in a school well at our current level of of prevalence in the state of utah or state of arizona utah is the same way right now and our current level of prevalence active cases is more than just the cases that you know about the um the university of georgia has published a website where you can track based on your state and your zip code of how many known active cases there are and what the what the percentage is of any given event of the percent of people at that event that have covet in my kid's school of gca with 500 students with a current level of prevalence in arizona there is over 60 kids that have covet now you say that we're going to use one percent that's fine but active cases are more than just what you know about since my kids have been going back to school we've received a letter just like this other lady has i uh three letters stating that my kids were exposed to covet and that's just the ones you know about i personally know or my wife and i personally know of people who were who got coveted as adults sent their kids to school anyway did not get their kids tested because they didn't want their kids to miss school even though one or both of the parents got coveted the most dangerous thing my kid does every day my kids do every day is go to school and and our new elected president said that in order for us to fully reopen schools we need to test there are school districts in this country that mandate their kids get tested every month it's a requirement i don't think that's too hard to ask if we're going to go back to full in-person learning to mandate that our students get tested if you asked me to do it we would do it i think it's not too much to ask so like these other generals the people here that say that they're looking at possibly going somewhere else so is my wife and our family we're looking at going to a state going to the location that values protecting our families protecting our kids and making sure that they can learn an environment free from not just external factors of violence but also from from each other because every time that i go down to downtown gilbert i drive through downtown give i go to the store i see people that that choose not to wear masks choose to you know hang out in large groups and those are people that we want to avoid so i would encourage you to keep us in hybrid just because you don't know of an active case the data tells us that we actually do have them and until our case count goes down we should remain in that in that mode of learning thanks thank you that was our last speaker we'll move to item six dr santa cruz can i just mention that we also received many uh on online inputs and just want to acknowledge that we have received those we've read them and we appreciate the people who input those before noon today and then as well as the emails that we received is that okay too no that's perfect we had 92 uh submittals those are online for anybody that wants to view them their public record just go to our website under the governing board section and you'll see a comment section that you can look at each one of those and thank you to our communications department for making sure that's all set up and managed well so thank you and that's going to continue correct that will continue yes thank you miss wood for reminding me of that and thank you dr mccord for addressing that item six six point zero one is a coveted metrics and pod update dr mccord thank you dr santa cruz governing board members while i'm hooking up to our wide eye i would like to also um i had a principal send me a message saying that i screwed up something in the recognition so i want to correct that right now um sixth place was mckenna johnston she's from carol ray not highland junior high so mckenna i sincerely apologize uh miss hanson thank you for letting me know that okay as we've done in previous board meetings i just want to give you an update on the benchmarks and also add a pod update which is a pointed distribution update heading to our maricopa county data this is as of reported on january 21st for the week of january 3rd for criteria 1 case rate it's 939 per 100 000.
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