Reader
Browse passages, annotate evidence, and export with full provenance for citation.
all right i'd like to call the february chino valley unified school district board meeting to order welcome everybody if you would please stand for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty agenda item 4 is adoption of our agenda if we could have a motion to adopt tonight's agenda all in favor aye all right call to the public we do have individuals that wish to speak according to the arizona revised statute 38-40 431-01 the following will be the process for our call to the public indeed any individual wishing to address the board will complete a form we'll keep it to a three minute maximum and personal attacks upon the board members staff personnel or other persons in attendance or absent by individuals who address the board are discouraged and to keep the meeting going in a productive and timely manner dialogue and discussion between the speaker and the board will be discouraged the first one i have the first one was miss d'angelo good afternoon i'm yvette deangelo and i am the lead counselor at gina valley high school and i wanted to address the board uh today first i did send out an email to all of you individually and hopefully you got a chance to read it i am here because i want to discuss our students the high school first i like to recap a little bit about what i wrote to you and that is the apathy we have just a great deal of apathy amongst our students and that has me personally as a high school counselor very concerned and so what does this mean in terms of school we have 678 students right now and out of the 678 429 are failing at least one court class this is from thursday's progress report progress report three that is very concerning to me especially because i'm in charge of uh some of their academics as far as credits go and what i mean by core class i mean english math science social studies last semester we had 179 students fail at least one core class that's a semester grade at this point the 9th graders 16 percent of the students failed at least one core class 10th graders 35 percent of the students failed at least one core class juniors 32 percent of the students failed at least one core class and then our seniors is 22 percent of the students failed at least one core class um i have spoken with many of the teachers on campus just kind of randomly part of my job just to go around and ask them about the kids showing up to their google classroom um and i had one teacher say five students and when she said five i'm thinking oh five per period now she met five a day that is a core class i i don't want to mention the teacher's name but if you want to know i can tell you privately um the other teachers um that i've asked they say less than half of the students are showing up to their google classroom so attendance is pretty bad i have the stats on that but it was just too much math to do but just know that the attendance is is pretty uh pretty bad um also it's been almost a year since students have been at school march i think it was right after spring break is when we went all online they did attend a little bit in the fall but not very much so most of these students have been home the students are just not engaged i'm in charge of student council as some of you know these are really high energy kids they're the highest energy kids you can have when we came back after january 4th and we're doing a zoom it breaks my heart they the they're not engaged they it almost feels like they don't care and these are wonderful kids all the kids are wonderful but these set of kids you know they're the go-getters um my the students that are in honors academy the ones that get the straight a's the ones that are college bound are failing dual enrollment courses i spent today calling yavapai college the advisor just to call the kids to help me out these are students that are normally straight a students are starting to fail college-level courses that has a long-term effect um they're failing their honors classes we're having to send letters to students to say you might not be in honors academy next year i have students that would rather go to work than do school work i have students that i can't even get a hold of i don't know where they are who knows they they could be anywhere i don't know we cannot get a hold of them they turn out to be a 10 uh 10 day withdrawal students are leaving our campus meaning cvhs to attend full-time online school like primavera i used to advise kids not to do that because they would come back to us with less credits than when they left well or not more credits than when they left so uh now they're going and they're not going to change they're still going to come back to us and not have any credit so it's not a better deal um my personal belief is hybrid is not the answer online is not the answer we need our students back on campus it is so important to get them back because of the apathy the apathy is there i'm seeing it every day i am talking to parents i am talking to students and it's not good it's it makes me sad um students like all people like all of us need structure and they're losing that structure they're not getting it it's not happening at home parents are having to go to work they can't do it we're losing them um they don't have the life experience to make good choices right now they make some it's not that they're all bad or anything it's just they don't have the life experience um i truly urge you to bring them back full time to be hybrid for two or three weeks till after spring break because that's what i'm guessing by the numbers for covet is is just prolonging the inevitable for them as i sent the letter to all of you this morning apathy is my biggest fear suicide rate is high among this group i know covet is bad i used to be a microbiologist in my other lifetime so i understand the science but the psychological effects are great and i i would just hate to lose somebody for something else so i am coming to you as a high school counselor and i'm advocating for these kids and all the teachers everybody the staff everybody loves these kids you guys love these kids but i urge you to bring them back full-time we are losing them and the long-term effect is to me greater than covid because covet's going to end it's it's going to end but the long-term effects are going to have a longer path it's going to take a lot more time thank you for hearing me out thank you thank you thank you looks like we have another completed thank you um joanie your turn uh thank you hi everybody hello so i'm back again i've been here since july and i'm just at the point where it's like you guys don't care i just don't think you guys care you've let the kids come back in almost a year for six weeks we parents on the outside have seen the effects of what's happening to our kids and you guys do not listen to us you did one time you mess up six whole weeks you based all your decisions off of fear not science and while we all sit here all the businesses are open so our kids can go get jobs they've been on for a long time we don't have a president and haven't had a president that's telling our schools to shut down we certainly don't have a governor that has told our schools to shut down what we have is a few people in power that get information and but you have to use some common sense at some point you guys have let this happen for a year i've been coming here since july i'm so mad i don't blame these kids for going somewhere else you guys have given them no hope all because of what he could make some money i don't get it you guys have not been watching the science you have not been listening to the parents what is it going to take now now we have the copic shots maybe we can wait six weeks and see if they work what's it going to take nobody here has listened to the actual science of what's been happening back in july i told you guys this is a bad idea i've been looking at all these studies and all this stuff that's going to happen these kids i was laughed right out of here as being angry and hostile so then i came back and tried to be nice and i've come back every single time trying to get you guys to listen we can go across the street and have a drink but my kids can't get educated in this town what are you guys doing whatever you guys have done let me tell you this it's already been done you guys have caused so much damage these kids are quitting school they're moving they're going just getting their geds whatever they have to do because you guys are feeling no hope you need to open our schools what is it going to take you guys what's it going to take a bunch of parents to come back in and beg you please that these problems didn't go away for these parents they never got their jobs back some of them were homeless the one thing these kids had was to come to this high school every day and see their friends and see their mentors and you guys shut them down out of fear every decision that you have made has been completely out of fear not logic you are the governing board for this school and for almost a year you've kept it shut down and there's lots of damage that's going to happen to these kids just not now but to come if you guys don't get it together it's not that they all have terrible home lives we don't know do we we don't know how bad their homeless are at least they had school to come to but nobody has listened to the science you guys haven't listened to science you haven't listened to the parents you haven't listened to teachers have come in here some don't want you to go back to school sir hell i wouldn't want to go to school if i got paid and didn't have too much anyway joanie i apologize your three minutes is up thank you though okay but i hope you guys make the right decision finally catherine andrews hi hi again uh again uh i'm back here again my name is kathy andrews and i am the mother of a fourth grader at del rio i was here for the last board meeting to ask you again please open the school's back up full time send these kids back to school all of them full time some interesting statistics that i looked at today with the most recent percentages according to the chino valley unified school district dashboard the district has 2 242 students and 117 teachers total 22 359 all together altogether in the cumulative statistics it shows there have been a total of 14 cases that comes to a 0.0059 percent positivity rate humboldt unified school district has 5 800 students and 800 staff they have 160 resolved cases and 3 active their positi positivity percentage is 0.024 percent and they're in school full-time the prescott unified school district has a total of 3586 staff and students they have had a total of 83 resolved cases and three active cases for a total positivity percentage of 0.023 percent i would love to have the board please explain how these numbers can create a situation where the children cannot be in school as the previous speaker said you can go anywhere you can go out to dinner you can go get a drink you can go shopping but the kids can't go to school the kids are failing and it's it's gotta stop they have to go back to school i i don't know what else to say um along with a lot of other parents in this community we're frustrated and we're at our wit's end because we see our kids just struggling and wilty thank you thank you leanne leanne hi thank you so i couldn't get my printer to work so i'm going to read off my phone name is leanne garden i have three kids in chino valley unified kindergarten second and eighth grade i was raised by an educator for 46 years i watched her put her heart and soul into her classrooms and her students i have so much empathy for our educators which is why i personally put so much effort into giving back to our schools in our community whether it be time supplies or monetarily i've been on the fence myself sorry about pulling my three boys from the district seeing my children struggle on google classroom is heartbreaking if the district chooses not to go back to in-person school my question would be are you guys ready to lose a lot of students because i know personally 30 children that were pulled throughout this past year i know another 60 parents because we all talk who are kind of like me we're in limbo we're on that fence of what do we do at what point do we say we need a better curriculum for online education but they really do need to be in school sorry um so my other concern is the cdc came out and said last week that there's no reason for the kids to not be in school full-time and the teachers do not need to be vaccinated supposedly to stay safe if that's the case why can't we go back full-time why is it that humble unified is back full-time the charter schools are back full-time for the kids itself seeing how it's affected them their grades let's be realistic teachers teach better in the classroom students learn better in the classroom sorry sorry when are we going to say enough is enough for these kids you know all i can say is this past year has been nothing but a disservice to the kids their well-being mentally not so much what you can do for as you're as a parent but socially as well as educational so my concern mostly is the little ones did go back okay territorial does a phenomenal job trying to get you know the kids to still have normal activities get their grades where they need to be they're extra things but for a kindergartner it is so hard to teach a kindergartner how to write properly you know how to enunciate correctly all the little things that they learn in their reading groups you know with ms foster or just hands-on in the classroom i do plenty of extracurricular activities with my kids but some of these kids school is a safe haven you know so i i worry about my own kids but i also worry about the whole community i hope you guys take that into consideration and i hope you guys can find out a solution to get them in back full-time school thank you thank you liam thank you melissa so hi hi my name is melissa it's my son evan he's in eighth grade at heritage um first thing i want to say is when i was watching this outside i see like the cougar pride stuff and i think about chino valley you know strong and that's far from the case now these kids are not proud to be in school anymore i'm not proud to say that my kids go to chino right now so my biggest concern actually they took my phone outside um besides the fact i want my kids back both kids i have a freshman as well 100 full-time i really wish there was no debate about it but this is the case my problem is i get an email every week from his teachers that he's a zero he has completed no classes he's failing f this is a straight a b student normally his momentum has gone down he shows me his laptop all these assignments say turned in turned in turned in but yet the teachers are telling me they have nothing he hasn't shown up he hasn't gone online he's failing this whole year it's unacceptable and then when i tell the teachers their response is well then he can return him in and i'll give him another try he texted me today and said why even bother anymore mom i don't want to do these assignments two or three times this is stupid i don't want to do this anymore this is your choice to bring these kids back to school full time hybrid is a joke and i'm tired of hearing him upset my other son he's doing the packets because he said the computers were not working that's the only way he could get through school right now is that he could physically hand things in which we all know is they're not learning a thing i mean my kid has not learned they haven't learned anything in a year they don't retain or should i say that they don't retain anything so that being said i'd like to bring the cougar pride back i want chino to be strong again and i want the fear gone put the kids back in school full time let them start learning again thank you thank you thank you so yeah i'm starting to see no point in doing any of my work if i have to do it over and over again you guys are failing me for the work i've proven i've done i i'm sick and tired of the way it is i can't learn what's your name evan thank you thank you that's all thank you thank you rebecca come on up yep thank you hi thank you my name is rebecca roman my son is angelo lynch he's in eighth grade at heritage middle school i'm here today to speak on behalf of him because he can't be here he is generally a solid b student i wouldn't say stellar but a solid student very athletic plays on all the sports teams travel ball he's excited he's a ta he's very involved very social and [Music] in the last month his attitude has declined unbelievably he is failing some classes he has lots of d's and c's he actually has a c in pe for the first time in three years of attending the school i've gone completely hands-on for the last two weeks to try to figure this out i spend two plus hours a day interacting with the teachers and him and it's nearly impossible we literally can't figure out exactly what the future would mean to be successful and i just want to let you know that on behalf of the students they really want to go back to school they need to go back to school and they're failing not being in school and whatever is going on right now just isn't working out so thanks for having me thank you thank you thank you thank you all right moving on to agenda was there any others glenn thank you so moving on to agenda number six six a is our superintendent's report mr schultz yes i'm going to start with enrollment as of today the district is down just under 144 adm for their uh calculated up to the 100th day compared to last year's hundredths day just as it has been the decrease has spread somewhat evenly between the schools i've included the last two years of 100 day adm um information for you to take a look at and refer to and then our 100th day which is when they stop including membership data for students is coming up march 2nd so things will change after march 2nd but for the most part the number is going to be solidified at that point there may be some slight changes just due to corrections and things like that but our last day for the hundredth day is march 2nd any questions about enrollment um kairos transitioned to united healthcare kairos is our insurance company that provides health insurance it's also related to our liability and our workers comp insurance in the past they have been with blue cross blue shield providers and they use blue cross blue shield to as their claims administrator they are actually moving to united health care and a united health care network and the united health care will be the claims administrator a couple things uh they are telling us that there's about a 99 overlap with the providers so 99 of the providers on blue cross blue shield are also on united healthcare they've also reached out to staff to say hey if you if your provider doesn't accept united healthcare let us know and we'll see what we can do so they are being proactive about doing that kairos is in united healthcare the reason for doing this is really a cost containment issue blue cross blue shield and their claims administrator was not really questioning any charges and for example i think someone had a some kind of head laceration that ended up costing like forty thousand dollars and really should not have cost that that's the kind of example that that they're trying to avoid and so they feel that that united healthcare's um claims administ as a claimant claims administrator will help contain some of those expenses not necessarily they're not going to allow for claims they're just going to control it on the on the doctor and hospital side a little bit better is what they're hoping to do hopefully this will save some money we should not see any savings this year since this is the it won't start until july 1 and so they're just going to use old claims data to do the um the the new rates which should come out later this month sometime and i'll have that information or should hopefully have it for you in march on what the new increases and it's going to be an increase for health insurance will be next month any questions on kairos yes so john are both uh carlos and blue cross blue shield in network providers or are they universal so kairos is our is the trust that is the insurance company that's who we pay and they pay all they do is they kind of rent out their claims administrator and also the network and so blue cross we use blue cross blue shield we have kairos insurance that currently uses blue cross blue shield providers we will now be starting july 1 kairos insurance which is the same insurance company just using united healthcare providers i guess my question is is there a difference in the providers between the two companies and others are are they basically the same or are we losing some of the providers that we would have had under blue cross they're telling us 99 are the same yeah now the other big advantage is with blue cross blue shield we didn't have we had um it was out of network when you left the state with united health care there um they are a national they have national coverage so if you are traveling out of state or if you have a child that is attaining school out of state they'll they'll now be in network when they visit their local doctors instead of being out of network and that's a whole if you are familiar that's a whole different situation and and much more costly for the on policy holder so if that occurrence happens on the state they'll still have to check when they go to a provider that they're in the cairo's network in united healthcare network yes yep okay that's exactly right thank you any other cat questions um director of businesses service update as you know uh rebecca's last day was the 20th she has been fantastic she's been helping out when we talk about the financial statements in just a little bit she prepared those she came in last week at night and prepared she's helping us out she's doing a fantastic job job but i want to introduce our new uh hopefully new he's on the personnel report you're going to hopefully approve him later this after this evening our new director of business services his name is john livingston and john he's right here and his wife lisa so welcome um he currently lives in kanab and is working for kanab or kane county as in their finance department has extensive school business official experience and we are excited to have him i've spent a couple hours with him this afternoon i've just spoken to him a couple times on the phone but i think we're really lucky to find somebody that enjoys being a business manager and is wanting to come on board and and excited to be here so i want to i want to welcome john i don't know any questions for john while we i know peter talked to him for a little bit and welcome aboard we're glad to have you yes he'll be um he's got his computer today he has some logins today um he'll be working on timesheet until he finishes out his uh position um up in uh kanab and um if you know of a house for sale they may be looking so um so let me know and i can forward that information to him so um welcome board john thank you thank you uh staff members of the month we have our monthly staff members of the month we have at territorial it was our it was debbie highland it was our teacher in irma durant was our classified person at del rio is melissa nowden was our teacher in crystal seats as our classified employee heritage is al parnell for a teacher and jacqueline mcknight is classified at the high school is joe rowitz it was our teacher and joyce cooper was our classified employee and for the district we had three mary brown rosemary garcia and ashley benson there was sodexo and those three ladies are really responsible for our community feeding program that's been going on since actually the summer so um it's those three ladies that really was sitting so that we wanted to honor for everything that they're doing with our feeding program but all of these teachers and staff members are outstanding and we wanted to recognize them for what they do in the district also want to give a shout out to jeds and donna at jets who provides little goodie bags for each of these um employees in honor of them getting their teacher or staff member of the month so i want to like i said you want to give a shout out to jeds for everything they do for us last thing i have on the board agenda or on the superintendent report is if you are interested right now you get paper packets if you are interested in us emailing you a pdf instead of a paper packet let karen know we can also make arrangements for there to be a computer at your desk or at your site at your seat so that you can pull that up during board meetings so if you want if you like the paper packet you're welcome to keep the paper packet if you'd like to do it electronically we can make those arrangements as well so you just need to let karen know and we'll work on that so karen which is easier for you it's really you know i'd say it's up to you guys some people like switching back and forth rather than scrolling up and down i i know i spoke with you you like making notes so it kind of depends on on what you prefer um okay yeah all right thank you item 6b1 our financial reports it's actually in the book now that our meeting times have changed so it is in the book under 6b again these were prepared by rebecca so i want to thank her for taking care of that one thing is we have a very low budget balance of only of less less than a third of a percent um it's a little lower than it normally is there's a couple things we have some items that we still need to move that haven't that aren't under the grant conferences that we still need to move into some esser accounts so that will bump up that up and then you can see we're actually minus 2.78 but there's a grant expenditure encumbrances that we pull out of that so we have 45 000.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
seven of which are in isolation or quarantine so even though that's a lot of absences we are still encouraging incoming message our parents and staff that if you are feeling ill at all or if anybody your family is feeling ill to please stay home because we've been able to cover the absences and we are really trying to prevent an outbreak which would cause the school closure so we're still sticking to our guidelines and appreciate our parents who are cooperating and our staff members because they also have children in the school which also affects your kids have to isolate or quarantine professional development and preparations for next school year so it's hard to believe that we're full course planning next school year uh we've had some refresher trainings that have taken place beyond textbooks and you will have your login also we had a a refresher to navigate components and there's a new component of social emotional component with lessons to assist teachers and students so we're pleased to see that because that's something new that bt added this year in order to support our students with nwea map we had a two-hour training on reports and features to assist in providing intervention support we will have two more hours of nwa map training at the end of the month and mrs cuevas will allude more to the data during her principles report linga data warehouse we had an update for leadership team as their their data system is getting better and it's going to be easier to navigate so we're looking forward to that once we get the map assessment uploaded we'll be able to really look at three four five year trends per student with by a click of a button so we're super excited for that feature as well this is stable and i attended the exceptional student services department conference through ade virtual practitioners of unique population so we're talking about ell learners and special ed learners and building equity for all special populations we they focused on the presenter's book on what shapes and reshapes teacher agency really looking at the importance of giving teachers feedback learning and growing in a supportive environment which you know that is our goal we want to foster asking questions collaboration don't hesitate if you need anything we're here to support and they spent a lot of time speaking of the power of small wins students are frustrated teachers are frustrated and you know that sense of panic and urgency of kids not making progress as they would normally had they not been virtual or in hybrid model so that's something that we have to remember with each other is to celebrate the small wins with students with parents with staff because there are a lot of great things happening even though people are feeling the stress of the end of the year and what's the state assessment going to look like i attended a superintendent leadership forum from grand canyon university and they were really alluding to ethics and vision and mission so the eight principles of ethical leadership and education i thought was a good slide that i wanted to share when you talk about personal courage public interest ahead of self self control self discipline and integrity task and employee centeredness recognizing talent which we know we need to talk a lot about having the right people on the bus and putting the people in the right spots to help them succeed requiring high ethics from everyone sensitivity and understanding and inclusiveness so with that conversation i have included copies of my core beliefs and values that i shared upon entering as a superintendent and with our new board members i would like for you to review that as well i've also included board member ethics and staff ethics for you to review prior to our upcoming governing board retreat a date to follow and mine yes my core values and beliefs are on the gray stock that you have there okay i'm also going to be attending um this um school superintendent association conference virtual conference for two days it's actually the 18th and the 19th i apologize it's social emotional learning there'll be three tracks and as you know there's huge emphasis right now on social emotional learning everywhere we read and every conference we attend equity and schools and digital learning so the neat thing about this is we'll be able to have access to all the sessions through december 2021 so as i preview the sessions mr magallanes and mrs and mr nathan will also be able to watch them with me if not they'll be recorded and we can benefit from that i excel update so you can see here where we are and we've mastered the students have mastered 13 709 skills they're proficient in 17 000 almost 18 000 and they've practice 25 000 plus skills you can see the hour breakdown 6 968 hours of school time and you can see this year that's school and home you can see on the graph there we are slightly below last year at this time which is amazing because i mean it really is a true testament that kids are working hard continue to work hard at school and at home and we get a teacher engagement report and 55 of our teachers are fully engaged and i excel so now our charge will be to meet with the teachers who are not fully engaged and find out how we can help them to optimize this resource as well the isl effect so you can see on the bottom where research shows that answering at least 30 questions on the right-hand side per week has a measurable impact on student outcomes if we've already met that goal ixl challenges us to 8 for 60 and you can see on the bar graph that we're well above 60.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
session can everybody please stand for the pledge of 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 does anybody have anything to add to the agenda okay please have a motion to approve the agenda promotion vivian and tiffany all in favor promotion is read say aye all right are you opposed eyes happen uh item six accomplishment recognition for the month of january the administration would like to honor the following individuals who've been nominated by staff and selected by the administration for the following awards mr gold oh go ahead i'll just go do this the student of the month is elijah wallace carter in third grade all right come on up kiddo all right elijah come on up here how you doing all right congratulations elijah so we got this it's going to sit on your desk at home okay and then here's a here's a gift or a certificate for you and uh i'm gonna i'm gonna have your teachers here we got a couple teachers here that are gonna talk about you come on up here congratulations we'll let you turn around here and uh would you guys mind introducing yourselves and sharing why you nominated elijah sure i'm shauna mereds i'm elijah's um third grade teacher i'm mary kate lonergan i am an interventionist at the elementary school okay so i'm going to bust out my sticky notes because i didn't want to forget elijah this is being live stream so there's a lot of people out there watching okay okay so i nominate you elijah because you constantly show your star expectations daily on remote learning you complete your work you put forth your best effort and you work hard and persevere you have shown tremendous growth both academically and behaviorally and for um long as i've known elijah which is nearly two years he has always been a student that is enthusiastic intelligent and creative in a school year that has been different to say the least elijah has shown incredible growth and grit with his work and his choices when he puts his mind to it he can accomplish great things we are so proud to have elijah as our big hollow student of the month excellent excellent [Applause] thank you both for taking the time to nominate elijah can we get a picture with your teachers here and mr lyons and i come on over here okay awesome congratulations congrats buddy congrats and then our employee of the month our employee month is not here right now so uh i i think she's coming but if she um she comes back we'll if she comes back maybe we'll go back to it okay okay we'll do that all right board member code of conduct review this is plusha you can read this one all right our employee of the month has arrived okay gabby gabby lopez you just walked in we're gonna give you your reward right now so uh gabby works in our food service and two of the food service employees nominated gabby for her her hard work and her positive attitude mine not working okay so we they are the employees couldn't be here tonight but we want to thank you for all your hard work and just being uh from what they tell me you're just a joy to work around each day so we really appreciate that so here's the certificates and here's a little thing to sit on your desk there a little ward there okay can we get a picture as well with mr lyons and i mr lyons is the board president thank you so much [Applause] thank you gabby and you're welcome to you can take off whatever you want so thank you thank you does anybody have any questions on the consent agenda uh kevin i i want to give an update on some committee reports okay yeah um exhibit seven is the first one i'm just going to run through those exhibits real quick and any committee members that want to pipe in and add anything please let me know negotiations committee um we met to discuss the mou that's proposed later in the agenda exhibit eight is building grounds transportation that meeting was primarily focused on the volo discussions so that again is later in the agenda finance committee we had quite a bit to talk about finance committee and and i'll just kind of set the stage and i'll let the committee members talk but we had some proposals some options with us the very low interest rates that are out there right now we had some options to to restructure the bonds that we currently have uh the first night we met we talked about two of the options that but they were to extend this out we're gonna pay these off in three more levees and they want you know one of the options was to extend it out to 10 years and we just as a committee i think everybody felt like no we just want to get these things paid off because it was going to cost an extra million dollars to the to the community over that 10-year period in extra interest so so even though the tax rates would go down right now it would just you know just paying more interest along the way after we met the first time then uh tim king emailed me back that night and said you know there is an option to do this and get it paid off at the same time and still lower the taxes a little bit because you know how we have the next three levees are they kind of go up and then they go way down one year and he said he could take them and level them off still another 127 thousand dollars or 775 000 added interest added interest added so we talked about that too and i think as a group we we just weren't interested so anybody want to i just i think we talked about just not adding any more to it and we talked about with your suggestion of maybe with the sale of the property that we would take some of that money and alleviate some pressure to the taxpayers for that third year i think is the one the third year yeah that hikes up instead of cash for that yeah yeah right to help yeah rather than rather than spend the extra that that last option that we came back to discuss was an extra 175 000 to do that so we just figured save that money and we can use that money from the land sale working cash whatever to help taxpayers figure we go that route rather than extend it or restructure it cool yeah so yeah we had we had two different meetings this month on that so um tech committee met just kind of gave an update on a few things the digital equity grant was 129 000.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
school district 308 board of education meeting can i have a roll call please mr bauman here mrs doyle here mrs croner here mr lightfoot present miss morgan here mrs moyer mrs swanson here please rise for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all we have no public comment this evening so we'll move forward to item 5.1 board member comments would anyone like to go first by raising their hands you can let me know that right then i'm going to pick we're going to start with allie anything to add today ally it's snowing uh it is snowing um i think dr sparlin wants to talk about this in a little bit but i think that the kendall county thing went well i hear that too we'll talk about it we'll talk about that in a minute so i have nothing new to discuss it was a big deal all right tony um i want to say that i know that there are teachers listening to the board meeting and other staff members i hope that we've made it clear to them what happens in the case of bad weather and snow days i want to say too that i think people are being challenged to do unbelievable amounts of work just based on the fact that the board is changing schedules from time to time and i know that this is this is me just acknowledging that every single time we change the schedule there's a whole constellation of people who have to then change their lives and their schedules and their things and this includes the parents out there who are watching too because to get child care and to do what it takes is very hard and i guess what i'm saying is i really appreciate the fact that all these people do all this and i hope that as a board we take it seriously and that we're not blithe and goofing around and acting like this doesn't matter because it matters a lot that all these people are out there staying up late getting up early doing without trying their best and then we're saying things that like do it again do it a different way and we are not taking that seriously or as seriously as we should sometimes and i felt like i needed to say that tonight because i've heard from many people in the community that are doing a variety of roles for the district and i think that sometimes we try to put a smiley face on things but positivity is one thing pretend positivity is a whole different thing and we need to take this seriously and we need to try our best to not put people in situations that are unduly stressful because these are real people who have done their best for us and god forbid we lose anybody because i'll tell you it's hard enough to get a person who's trained to go into these classrooms and do these services with these kids and do all these things if we lose people in this state for whatever reason we're going to end up using some person maybe without a credential some person that we don't know who this will be if things get bad so we need to make sure that we're treating people respectfully and that we're treating people logically and trying to get this thing rolled out in a way that does not unduly stress the people in the district because my deepest concern is that we will break this district ruth i'm good matt um yeah i think tony had some good points as we were going in through our our back to school plans and we are transitioning and changing um it it's it's very similar to what myself and and maybe many others had done back in the early stages of march april may where every time you went to work you you were faced with a new directive there was a new memo so to speak what was the county saying what is the state saying um how many people can we be around how many people can we work with from from my occupation what does the cdc say what does osha say how can we handle things and it was just a constant barrage of information and trying to figure out what you can do can you do it right and it's stressful and i know that staff is going through that now this this past month being back in the building and there are changes every day so i want to make sure as we go through and we're talking about how we're evolving how we're changing when we're changing that we do it with the expectation that our expectations aren't perfection and our expectations come with a little bit of grace for for when we fail everything's not going to be perfect everything's not going to be the way it planned and i think it's false to say that we expect that from every single person that's in our buildings that's working with the kids that's uh you know cleaning the building sanitizing this is all still new for everybody so i think we appreciate the work that's going on the expectations are low or not the expectations aren't low but we know that it's stressful so i hope there's those that can kind of take a deep breath and be able to just breathe and know that they did the best they could that particular day and tomorrow's a new day and we'll go through it again um but we do appreciate all the work that's being done all right i appreciate all the work that's being done brent yeah two things real quick so um uh lori you and i were last week in some buildings wheatlands and banarsik and got to see some some happy kids some happy teachers and some happy uh folks to have kids back in the building albeit under different than normal conditions but i i would report that things were going very well one of the most fascinating exchanges i think was actually listening to a principle of a building have a conversation with staff when a staff member was unsure and unclear about why something was happening and that that principal was able to immediately reiterate this this this this and this and we have it taken care of right so i i felt really good after witnessing that exchange and i don't think that wasn't staged for us but it was just it was good to say and see the buildings have things under control as we've been talking about things are not uh perfect things are not ideal there are still questions and we're working our our way through those questions um the only other one other comment i'd just like to make quickly i know the board had gotten some comments uh about it this week i got a bunch of additional comments from people i know regarding the j car isbe amendment that is being proposed regarding teaching and leading standards i'm not going to take an opinion on it i will personally be contacting my state legislators i will be personally sending an email to the i i i sab with my thoughts i would encourage folks in the community if you're for it great let people know if you don't like it great let people know my only comment i will make is i find it interesting that the the state board of education is focused on this right now when the rest of us are focused on very different things getting kids in buildings getting kids learning and focusing on things like how do we get above the state standard of 30 percent meets and exceeds at the high school level or 50 percent meets and exceeds for reading and math in the junior high or 70 meets and exceeds in elementary school i think that's what we need to be focusing on so i will go ahead and finish up and say that tony i completely agree this isn't something that i think anybody involved in education across this country i would dare say in other countries as well as taking lightly on any day of the week and i think that um what matt had said and what you are saying both are very true and i think the one thing that i have seen consistently besides change which is our favorite word is the fact that we will have different opinions and that especially in this boardroom i do feel that every path our community takes is represented and for that i am very glad because even though it's a little bit all over the place we've never done this before so at least we're trying to accurately reflect our community and come to something that we can create that will be in the best interest of as many families as possible that being said it's not something that is falsely optimistic except for yesterday i gotta be honest i was waiting for some way to get a segway so thank you tony for that because yesterday we were able i'm not even going to spoil the fun but we were able to vaccinate a whole lot of people and ursula and i had the privilege of sitting in discharge where one of our other employees suggested there might be happy people and there were and frankly it was so fulfilling to be able to see that our county health department was coming through for us that they were able to offer this to us on such short notice a little over a week ago i wouldn't have guessed this it happened yesterday much less that it would have happened so well and so organized it was it it was amazingly wonderful to see and i don't think that you can say anything bad about that because that was a great next step that people could have this that first step towards safety that they would like to have and i want to thank teresa especially i know she's been bending over backwards with her toes touching the ground in yoga formation to get this for all of our staff members and i am so grateful that we have you in our district to put this together for us and i know that your team and all of your other senior leadership dr sparlin have been working very hard to make this happen quicker and faster and more efficiently so that we didn't have to lose teachers in the classrooms for this so i i really don't have words i'd like to share with you that they were so organized they even had emts circling around the parking lot so that if you were feeling any side effects while you were in your car they would come get you which is what i told every single person that came past me in the discharge they're circling out there and even that little piece just was spot on and relieved so much anxiety and it was it was there's really not words it was pretty darn amazing and i was really glad to be there i would recommend all my board members come and help out if you're able to on the 28th when they will be back for their second dose i'm pretty sure we'll get a link with somewhere to sign up and the community's support for volunteering we had one student who's in our medical topics class who chose to take the fact that she wasn't getting internships because of this situation and turned it into i'm gonna come volunteer here and she volunteered sitting next to me over there in the discharge area just so she could get some up close experience in her chosen field because this is something that will affect her future and that was pretty much just like the icing on the cake yeah i think she said she's going to western illinois she's going to western illinois to play softball i believe so i don't want to give you away the numbers because you guys have earned the right to share how many numbers theresa do you want to say or do you want me to let dr sparlin theresa theresa how many numbers were there 2 000 yesterday so we had 550 prior to that and about 1400ish or so of yesterday ended up being our staff and substitute teachers so incredible numbers were any of our staff turned away everybody in our staff that wanted their first dose of vaccine by yesterday has had it yes we opened up um if they were available yesterday there's some people who weren't available yesterday yes you know for whatever reason but um yeah we were able to make a phone call about halfway through the day to every staff member um sent out a huge email and i talked with talked in text with about 90 people that we were able to add to the list on top of the nearly 1300 we already had from our district signed up so pretty cool cool event and we're we get to do it all a second time with balloon arches yes i hear there might be playlists of music and confetti cannons somebody had that no confetti candidates in the discharge area i'm not sure somebody had that question it was a great idea it was a good suggestion i liked it oh yes we'll appreciate all your help on the 28th but it was a very cool event huge shout out to the health department for all that coordination so quickly yes dr sparlin you got to be a bouncer which is my nice neat segue into your report all right no committee reports or oh did we have committee reports yes oh i i'm so sorry i guess we'll do those first usually i was so excited about this that i just wanted you to tell about it um we had equity committee and policy and legislative so ruth or do you want tony you go ahead and i'll just we um the equity committee met virtually and we discussed language for our statement that we're working on and it was terrific meaning to be a part of just a lot of really great discussion and i re i'm kind of a vocabulary nerd so i really enjoyed and appreciated all of the input and i feel like there was lots of participation and like really digging into specific words that we wanted to use because words mean things so it was great do you have anything you wanted to add i just think you and faith did a really good job of following the suggestions of the people that were trying to get across their ideas during that time and i want to bring up again so that everybody listening gets it into their heads that this is not one kind of equity this is equity across the board this is what you look like whether you're abled or disabled whether you're a certain color whether you're certain religious creed just having that in mind when we interact in the district and that's what people are trying to get into this language is the idea that you can treat everybody decently so yeah i think you guys did a terrific job faith in ruth [Music] i need to work on my muting and unmuting skills that's what i learned that night when you're in person make sure you don't mute else we will know you're not actually talking out loud yes good policy and legislative you want it he's pointing at me uh let's see so we have to appoint a board treasurer the board should be aware that has something to do with our minutes and that was board policy 2 colon 2 220.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
uh hello everyone good evening thanks for coming out in the cold and snow and whatever precipitation is going on out there i'll call the meeting to order at seven o'clock and will you 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 you may be seated okay we'll start the evening with um celebrating orioles one of our favorite parts of any meeting um and this evening we'll be recognizing the avon community school corporation contact tracing team dr wyndham thank you so um as you recall at last month's meeting we recognized our school nurses for the work that they have done to support our staff and students during the pandemic and but there is another group of employees that has worked tirelessly behind the scenes to help us navigate such unprecedented challenges and those are our employees that we call our covet team i really felt like i should get a t-shirt and they're like superheroes as we began planning over the summer for how we were going to navigate all the new requirements of contract contact tracing quarantining all those things we made the decision to centralize most of those activities at the district level so that we could ensure consistency across our schools and to allow our building leaders to focus on the important work they needed to be doing of leading their building not making calls and contact uh and making calls about close contact so our team has been led by deb swain bayless who little did she know that school safety was going to become coveted uh central but that is what school safety has become this year she mobilized and put in place procedures and processes to keep our schools safe and healthy so the first group of individuals i'm going to call and for the board to recognize is has is our on-call team our covid team and this group all school year has been on call and they drop everything to help us navigate when we are informed of a positive student so that we can activate our processes and that team is deb swain bayless cheryl baker stephanie nelson and vicki lingrich we recently added a few more to our contact tracing team to help us out and that is cheryl briggs sharon harris and carol aylor additionally there's another group of employees who does the same thing they drop everything on a moment's notice and help us make phone calls or send text alerts to parents when their child has been deemed to close contact those individuals are tracy gray amy hunter brianna moss leanne snodgrass and barb marcotte so what has this team done since school started every time we learn of a positive covet student this team takes action they notif notify the building leaders so that they can pull seating charts they notify transportation so that we can pull seating charts and videos they pull information so that we can then notify parents of students who are quarantined they re they review attendance records they respond to constantly changing guidelines and adjust their processes and procedures we were working on that friday and today as evidence of that since school started we have quarantined over 5 000 individuals every one of those individuals has either received a phone call or a text alert letting them know and sharing important department of health information with them none of that happens without these individuals taking action they have also manned our covet hotline so that when parents have questions they have a resource to go to quarantines are frustrating so many times they're talking with frustrated parents like this dad whose daughter ends her quarantine tomorrow and i was asking questions of the team i know they're frustrating and our team has done great to navigate helping parents particularly parents who have had multiple quarantines for their children they've taken extraordinary steps to implement these these processing processes and procedures i am struck that there's a lot of attention right now across the country as to what does it take to keep to get schools to open and every time i see those news articles or i read those or those news stories or read those articles i'm struck by we've been open since july how did we do it we have amazing employees who have taken extraordinary steps to keep school open but more importantly to protect the health and safety of our students and our staff so i could not be more proud of these individuals and if you'd like to come forward we've got a letter for you and then the board will recognize you and mr carr will help us take socially distant pictures so if you ladies would like to come up that would be great i signed up [Music] i'm so glad i can say i've never gotten a call put together [Music] [Applause] i'm ready thank you thank you so much job [Music] i'll write it down i just wanted to say thank you to this group because when we started out it wasn't going to be a big deal you know we were a few people here and there and it got overwhelming pretty quick and for me to say that i need help and i sent out an email and i'm like who can come i'll train you and all of these people showed up outside of their job duties to help me and it means the world and that's part of being avon i think and they made really difficult phone calls for people you know are not going to be happy with the message that you're giving and to be consistent and then when we pivot to explain why they were the pivot why there was a problem the i dotting the t crossing it's fantastic all of them have picked up and done so much work to help out over and above what's required of them and i can't thank them enough i think it's fantastic that's awesome thank you very much uh board members would you like to make some comments to our um [Music] well superhero has met their match with you ladies thank you so much for coming to miss swing bayless aid when the the cases were just mounting last fall and i know there were many weekends that i would see cars at the admin center and that's what you were doing as you were contact tracing you were got out those lists and those seating charts and calling those parents and thank you so much for allowing us to keep our students really to keep our students in school which was been our goal since almost a year ago march 8th was when we first said all right now we got to talk about how we get them back in and keep them in and you really have been the glue to be able to get that done so thank you thank you anita well congratulations ladies i know it's an awful lot of work and um i'm never glad to hear from you i'll go ahead and [Music] but i appreciate the work it's an awful awful lot of work trying to keep up with all those tracings and i just don't have the patience it's not it wouldn't be for me but thank you so i agree with anita i hate it when you call and now every time i get a text from avon and cringe even if it's parent square from the fourth grade it's oh my gosh it might be from them um and i'm certain that i have been one of the difficult parents that you've had to deal with so i i want to compliment you on the professionalism and grace with which you have done this job because lots of people including me have not been happy but it's not your fault and you guys take it and you explain it to us and you take the high road all the time i'm sure you have been yelled at i'm sure that has not always been easy and so for the way you've represented our school corporation i want to say thank you and also again as you're doing your work i'm sure a lot of the time you feel like it's a thankless job but know that we know that we're not open without you so thank you i too lady ladies would like to thank you for all that you have done and who would have thought a year and a half ago that there would be such a thing as a contact tracer never thought it would happen and a couple of things too i'd like to share i've been in the office after working hours for meetings or several things like that stuff and pick up something and you members are still there working on the phones and i'm sure the parents are very appreciative of everything that you do the information the calls that you share and two i just want to thank you for all that you do to make avon school successful uh i'll pour us those thanks um it you know i always use the term it takes a village but it really really does um this was as as cindy just mentioned this was not on anybody's radar just you know nine months ago ten months ago um and suddenly um you step up to the plate and you're able to fill such a crucial need in getting those uh kiddos and their parents really the information that they need uh in order to keep us safe i talked to my sister yesterday she lives in ohio and she said when are your kids going back to school i said uh what do you mean she said well i mean when are they going to go back to in-person school i said we've been in school since july 30th and she just found that remarkable because in her community that isn't the case and then today we were my husband and i were sitting in the parking lot of avon intermediate school east getting ready to pick up one of our grandsons and i got in the car and he said you you don't realize what an impact school really has on kids until you sit here and watch all of them filing out to get on the bus and you see the happy faces and you see kids that are being kids and um normalcy resuming that would not have been possible without the heroic efforts that you each each and every one of you played i'm sure that it was tough i'm sure that as greg said there were really hard calls but you just kept going and you kept representing avon in every great way to give the information and also to give i'm sure some comfort and some guidance to parents and students that needed them so once again i chorus what my fellow board members have said and that is thank you sincerely thank you for your efforts we really appreciate it your heroes for sure thank you we will move on to the next topic of discussion uh this uh there are two presentations we will begin first with the discussion of the proposed um school start and end times oh yes do please feel free to leave and go contact tracemoor [Music] no don't but leave anyway and have a margarita no i shouldn't say that okay um so i will turn this over at this time to dr windham if you would like to talk about the discussion of the proposed school start and end times for 20 21 22.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
i don't know about some of you this year once in a while it's been hard for me to find inspiration in the covered world oh here we go then a is for accept accept others for who they are and for the choices they've made even if you have difficulty understanding their beliefs motives or actions b is for breakaway break away from everything that stands in the way of what you hope to accomplish c is for create create a family of friends whom you can share your hopes dreams sorrows and happiness d decide decide that you'll be successful and happy come what may and good things will find you the roadblocks are only minor obstacles e explore explore and experiment the world has much to offer and you have much to give and every time you try something new you'll learn more about yourself f forgive forgive and forget grudges only weigh you down and inspire unhappiness and grief soar above it and remember that everyone makes mistakes g is grow leave the childhood monsters behind they can no longer hurt you or stand in your way h hope hope for the best and never forget that anything is possible as long as you remain dedicated to the task i ignore ignore the negative voice in your head focus instead on your goals and your accomplishments your past success is only a small inkling of what the future holds j journey journey to new worlds new possibilities by remaining open-minded try to learn something new every day and you'll grow okay no know that no matter how bad things seem they'll always get better the warmth of spring always follows the harshest winter l is for love let love fill your heart instead of hate when hate is in your heart there is room for nothing else but when love is in your heart there is room for endless happiness m is for manage manage your time and your expenses wisely and you'll suffer less stress and worry then you'll be able to focus on the important things in life and as for notice never ignore the poor infirm helpless weak or suffering offer your assistance when possible and always your kindness and understanding oh open open your eyes and take in all the beauty around you even during the worst of times there's still things to be thankful for pee play never forget to have fun along the way success means nothing without happiness cue question ask many questions because you're here to learn are relax refuse to let worry and stress rule your life and remember that things always have a way of working out s share share your talents skills knowledge and time with others everything that you invest in others will return be returned to you many times over t try even when your dreams seem impossible to reach try anyway you'll be amazed by what you can accomplish you use use your gifts to your best ability talent that's wasted has no value talent that's used will bring unexpected rewards the value value the friends and families who've supported and encouraged you and be there for them as well w work work hard every day to be the best person you can be but never feel guilty if you fall short every sunrise offers a second chance x x-ray look deep inside the hearts of those around you and you'll see the goodness and beauty within why yield yield to commitment if you stay on track and remain dedicated you'll find success at the end of the road i had to laugh at this last one because z is zoom so i don't just not zoom like teams zoom to a happy place when bad memories or sorrow rears its ugly head let nothing interfere with your goals instead focus on your abilities your dreams and a brighter tomorrow thank you thank you very much that's a great way to start so if you are able if you'd stand join me in the pledge of allegiance indivisible all right all seven of us are here we decided to drive on a snowy evening so i'll call this meeting to order with our quorum we do take a moment at the start of each of our meetings to reference our mission and our vision which drive all of our decision making as well as our high exp which are listed behind us here in the room and listed here on our screen so to start our agenda and our who and why of why we're about what we do i'll turn to dr roberts for our plan of action update very good thank you dr shed as we have gotten into the habit of doing at each school board meeting we'll talk about covet 19 and where we stand today and what we might be doing tomorrow so currently just a reminder we are in five days of in-person learning for our elementary students grades k-6 and a hybrid model is in place for our secondary students grades 7 through 12.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
thank you well good evening everyone i'd like to call this meeting of the dartmouth school committee to order for monday february 8th 2021. could i have a roll call please miss ganther chris oliver here shannon jenkins here kathleen ameral here mary waite here john nunes yep you very much everyone well good evening i hope everyone uh enjoyed the game last night as well as the snow that fell i know i'm sure our maintenance and custodial crews did not enjoy the snow that fell uh but we do thank them for all their work uh we are coming to you remote this evening uh due to the uh the full remote day the school committee opted to go fully remote as well just a reminder per governor baker's order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting log chapter 38 section 20 the public will not be allowed to physically access this school committee meeting members of the public can access the meeting via live stream at youtube.com forward slash dhs tv media in addition the event will be rebroadcast in dc tv channels 9 and 18 on the following days wednesday and thursday at 5 p.m friday at 6 a.m saturday at 8 a.m and sunday at 2 p.m the school committee reserves the right to implement additional remote participation procedures and will notify the public of these procedures as soon as practicable with that being said at this time this is where we usually allow anyone wishing to comment on any of tonight's agenda items um miss ganther do we have any um any comments that have been submitted to date i have not received any at this point perfect thank you thank you very much kate as a reminder if you're watching this now just sitting down tuning in you are welcome to comment uh and send those comments to kathleen genther at dartmouthschools.org um and we will circle around uh at the end of the night to see if anyone uh had commented at this time chair will entertain a motion for the approval of the regular session minutes of january 25th 2020.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
oh [Laughter] [Music] is hi guys okay oh [Music] [Applause] right [Music] go um [Music] [Applause] goodbye [Applause] okay [Applause] hey 12 12. all right [Applause] good shots watch out [Applause] diamond [Music] go hello [Applause] hey excellent oh same thing [Music] 54. [Applause] come on be right there [Applause] um [Music] [Applause] hey [Applause] oh great ocean june [Applause] blue what's up okay [Applause] you know where you've got to go [Applause] let's go down [Applause] guys all right go five five go now bye [Applause] goodbye [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay [Applause] thank you [Applause] yes okay all right everyone yes 30. [Applause] goodbye [Applause] uh [Music] is [Applause] oh [Music] [Applause] hey arizona arizona oh all right [Music] [Applause] ah [Applause] okay [Applause] good job guys [Applause] what's up [Music] [Applause] oh okay [Applause] oh [Applause] good shot [Music] guys oh [Applause] ah [Applause] [Music] guys [Music] let's go you know where to go [Applause] okay one one one [Applause] okay come on [Applause] [Music] thank you [Applause] blue 10 2.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
tony teregini and faith yeah we have a quorum great thanks um so we have this is the meeting of the curriculum committee of the board of ad um if we rise for the pledge i think we have a flag coming so 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 okay so public comment and we actually have a letter um that was submitted that i'm gonna read and um it's from john bester a cheshire resident and said uh says since time is of the essence would it be possible to put on the agenda for mondays um eight 828 21 curriculum meeting agenda discussion discussion of consideration of a non-binding vote to suspend smarter balanced assessments in grades three through eight for the 2021 school year although you and the school administrative officials are bound by law to administer these mandated statewide tests that should not mean that you as an elected body representing and advocating for students parents teachers and citizens cannot discuss and make your opinions publicly known on this important and impending issue should you begin this discussion at february's curriculum meeting you could have a more robust discussion at march 8th meeting before you bring your findings before the full boe at the marge business meeting despite all the trials and tribulations imposed upon our students in this year of covet education you could make a difference by speaking out in favor of statewide test suspension that i believe is scheduled to begin in april it seems absurd to me to ask students to have their school lives disrupted even further this year in order to obtain a high stakes test score for which there can be no meaningful interpretation or understanding i look forward to hearing from you about this request um and again that's from john bester and um first of all i'd just like to say thank you to mr bester for writing in and i appreciate your concerns um i also know that this is an issue that the superintendent and assistant superintendent um annually apprise us of we have not had a report because we have not had scores this year but um i would like to ask marlene if you could just comment on the benefit of the test for the district especially during this time of covid sure faith i'd be happy to um the the smarter balanced assessment not only measures academic achievement but also academic growth over time so this administration of the smarter balanced assessment would give us an indication of how much students have grown since two years ago when they last took the test and would give us an indication of how much our students have grown during the pandemic the the assessment results are used to support our district's effort to make changes and improvements to our curriculum and instruction that's all i have to say on that faith you are muted i appreciate the comments and i appreciate the letter and i'm sure it's a topic that we will be looking at again shortly um you know in the near future so um so moving on um to the next agenda item um a review of the minutes of january 11th 2021 um i assume everybody's had a chance to review and um uh do we have yes miss harrig i moved to accept the minutes of i don't have the date in front of me i'm sorry january 11th 2021.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
any members voting no many members voting reservations hearing none five members voting i recommend thank you senate bill 863 relating to school improvements requires the department of education to conduct an electrical assessment on all public and charter schools in the state recommendation of the chair is to pass with amendments to clarify that for charter commission only conversion schools will be required to complete the electrical assessment members questions if not chair votes eye share on senator 863 any member voting remember voting with reservations hearing none five members of the doctor senate bill 365 relating to student informed consent allows public school students in grades kindergarten through 12 to decline participation in dissection or bisection and other procedures harmful to animals recommendation of the chair is to pass as is members questions if not chair votes i sure will sign senate bill 365 any member voting with reservations anymore voting no hearing not five members was that an objection senate bill 843 relating to career and technical education the recommendation of the chair is deferred decision making to friday february 12 at 05 pm in this room 229 chair will meet with the introducer of the bill to discuss some of the issues senate bill 1004 relating to education beginning with the 2021-2022 school year requires department of education to include the teaching of financial literacy literacy in the personal transition plan requirement for each student recommendation of the chair is to pass as is members questions chair boats eye trouble senate bill 1004 any member voting reservations any number of voting no hearing none i'll find numbers voting fire recommendations are thank you that concludes the meeting of the committee on education meeting adjourned you
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
so a lot of games and we had six nights of it and i can tell you nothing but great things from coaches administrators that came and talked to me and it was very much appreciated that we were able to get it done and dave had a lot to do with getting this accomplished and i appreciate that i appreciate all the help that we have a lot of people that stepped up to help us get that accomplished and i'm very happy about that so nothing else unless somebody has something else on that guys are you getting the support you need with i saw this morning that the contact tracing through the medical center or the health department's been being done a little differently are you getting this pretty need with that and i'm speeding in reference to now the person that's test positive calls the other people to inform them that they're supposed to quarantine instead of the health of government the information they're getting it to us as fast as they can and then we're dealing with them from that point the hardest thing is kids talking with each other saying well someone so is not going to be back till the 15th and then something else is the 16th until we see the people we don't know but you know and mr reed deals with that as much as i do for the most part they're getting the paperwork i think as soon as they know what they get doing i i went up before i came here to get the because i had a couple of parents say their kid was coming back tomorrow but that wasn't on their original quarantine sheet but that i got a different one so i went up to check on the facts and that's just what we're having to do and i think the two negative test situation where they're in quarantines they take a negative or get a negative test and then they come back and get people that are positively the ones calling their close contact but i haven't heard that so i didn't know it affected us anyway sounds like it's still working right it sounds ever-changing right yeah so there was a bunch of confusion about how they were going to do some testing and i'm not sure why they changed it then they changed it back so i think it's kind of it's a confusing process and i think it just got worse yeah so um i just wanted to make sure you guys are getting one you need it so well usually what we do is we call call i call lindsay if i don't know and say okay this sometimes you just have to get a hold of somebody the biggest problem is what stacy was bringing up the kids no more to talk yeah school knows the last yeah instead and so it's hard because you get all this information that is just information but not fact that's right so we're i was going to bring that up as a topic but i still don't know that i have a good answer for it so i'm not really going to break it up so well in this favor and i've talked about it and i don't know that there's a real good answer except to keep trying to make sure that we know if a kid is coming back early we know ahead of time because i don't like to get one of those where i have to call the kid out say hey now i've got to get a hold of somebody before this happens but you know that that has occurred a few times not a lot but i i'm asking that if they do have a updated quarantine to get that to us as quick as possible and again sometimes that information is already out there before we ever even know it and they have questions and you know it can cause a little issue there i think that's the biggest problem is that misinformation information gets out is out there too much in the in the kids but how do you control that i still don't know if any of you come up with an idea how to help that share because i don't know exactly we would appreciate it i can't control the world well you know if everything was absolute information everybody what they said was truth and and it wasn't like the story told at one end and it's a different story at the other end concept then we'd be fine but it isn't and i don't know how to fix it i just i thought about it a lot i don't have anything so but nothing else all right move on to special ed anybody yeah all right good i was having some technical difficulties so i really don't have much to add but we're going to talk about some things later on but just really been you know staying the course and getting through the school year and looking at positions for next year so any questions for me yeah who's the speech language pathologist did we have somebody it's an addition um so we uh approved for the um sorry the superintendent's approved for a part-time position and we started doing some contracting and didn't get any applicants so we've been contracting we did open it up to see if we would get apple cash for a full time i haven't got anything out of that either but just trying to fill them we don't have the capacity right now to fill the north well right now we're contracting along both sides okay so all right move on to technology report anything for doug doug have anything to add no nothing happened i haven't heard anybody having any real technical difficulties with online stuff so kudos to that our servers must be [Music] yeah functioning the one in the middle school gym is much better than the one in the high school i'm not sure why it's clear i don't know if it's a different camera or whatever it's the same camera it's a difference it's a difference in the gym if you notice the gym floor oh yeah the difference is the brightness of the gym floor in the high school that's when you watch it i've had a lot of people say that yeah and there's just nothing you can do i mean it's just it's it's a resilient floor it's a good picture in that middle school it has a nice picture and it's a little bit closer to the floor we don't have quite as big as seating uh quite as large as seating capacity so that it does get a little closer to the floor so um a lot of this is just something that if we could open this up if ever we wanted to is where i grew up there doing all that stuff it's not huddle where i grew up back in south dakota in the montana area it's not huddled but they get a lot of community people who announce those games on those things i don't know if we even have the technology to do it on that huddle thing but if it's something that people be but a lot of people don't have like we do like announcing so [Music] it'd be nice if they would sink but they don't quite sink right right and then yeah and then you'd have jim would be on all the time if you know that if you know what i mean i mean right now he gets to say i'm heading to the station for a 60 second timeout right now [Music] all right move on to the super attendance i have one document i want to share with you if you remember we talked about akisa the accreditation uh piece where we are we are able to pause this year because of all that's going on with cohen uh they did ask us to um actually they have asked us and come april there'll be a set of questions and you can see up on the on the screen there that we will be asked to at least address just to say hey we are still looking into things accreditation-wise for the district staying on top of things and so on so forth so these are questions that we shared with the district leadership team that's a comprises administrators directors as well as people from staff members teachers from all of the buildings and so they we meet once a month and we discuss different things just again district leadership thing team things uh we do focus quite a bit on kisa over the last couple of years at our meetings and so they will be helping out with the answers to these questions as well as the administrators will be taking them back to the buildings for their staff meetings and they'll be talking to staff again we just need to come up with a list of some of these things that we are doing now when you look at the list the questions fortunately for us there we've been in school regularly so you know the the issues that we've dealt with are different than other people who have gone you know to the remote or to the hybrid options so we've been able to see kids face to face you know day in and day out we get a chance to see their reactions how they respond do they are they not sure about you know a concept whether it be in math or science or whatever our interactions with those kids day in and day out unfortunately for us we may not have as many you know items as far as on our list of answers to these questions because we are able to be on site you know pretty much for the whole year so i don't know if you have any questions again it's just a list of things just kind of a little check to make sure that we are doing things to take care of kids as needs you're doing this already or this is something you're starting we will well we we've started the process we'll start collecting data and then april 1 there's a survey that we type in our answers to we have basically a month of april to type in almost like a google form if you will and then submit it to the state there's a number of different uh types of forms that we submit to the state throughout the year and so they they just send us a survey a link and we go in and add those those comments in there and they just review them to make sure we're taking care of the things that we need to for our students meeting the needs of students questions on the piece and questions and then i just have a list of some upcoming dates that are happening so again it kind of takes you all the way february march april and may um as we are already in like i say in the month of february and it won't be too long and uh we'll be getting ready for the end of the school year as well as graduation eighth grade rack recognition uh and so on and so forth so anyway just kind of for your calendars there's a list questions you have for me i'm not being hurt we'll move on to board reports okay go to the district auditor if you remember again we started with jared gilmore and phillips this year and after uh moving from mice hauser uh there's proposals listed there actually if you look it's a reduction from the first year am i looking at the wrong number i'm sorry increase i made a motion to approve the engagement letter with jared gilmore and phillips for the 2020-21 financial audit in an amount not to exceed 8 400 all those in favor or vote on your computer [Music] 7-0 and then we'll move on to personnel retirement so the adult meal prices are listed here and this information just as you can see there and tracy can help us out with tracy works with any questions as well tracy works with diana hess food service director because we are feeding students this school year free of charge we have to make an adjustment to the adult breakfast and lunch prices so that we at least again look to cover our costs and you can see that information there um tracy i don't know if you have any other comments on this well we have i mean yes we have to do that but we still aren't covering our costs so we have to at least get to the reimbursement rate um because we're under the summer food service program so in order to feed kids for free we have to have the adult try to eat so much currently you can see there the lunch reimbursement rate that we are taking the district is seeing for lunches that's 4.33 and breakfast is 2.47 so we have to at least charge that we if you remember we had to raise these earlier october november well the summer food service programs runs january to december so we were in the mid-cycle there and the feds keep upping these reimbursement rates for districts who are doing this program and as you can see currently our average adult lunch cost is costing us 4.76 so we're not even covering our cost to serve adult meals so we either have to raise which our recommendation and ksdd said just make them a flat 4 35 for lunch 250 for breakfast don't worry about the change and or so either raise them or the general fund has to supplement so we're already going to have to go back and supplement from january to the through these first few weeks of february for all the adult meals that were sold we have to be on our choice because the food service program cannot pay for adult meals um so we'll have to do that but if you decide not to raise meals then for every adult meal that sold the general fund will have to make up the difference so adult meals mean teachers who so how come they didn't recommend that we at least raise it to within a penny or a nickel so we two to 70 and 475.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
most of everything that we're going to do for the rest of the year is already encumbered so it's not i'm not worried we'll have plenty of money to get us through the end of the school year but it's just something that i'll have to work with our new business manager just to make sure we keep an eye on that and transfer some of those expenses related to covet and other expenses to esser to free up some cash for us okay our capital is holding steady i'm sorry yes sir no you're fine uh why haven't we been spending the adjacent ways funds noticing the balance is huge and it's not run down it was much larger um earlier in the year we finished a big project um which was the the bus lanes behind del rio and so that was something we started in the summer and we uh when did we end that that opened up right before school yeah about the time school was starting yeah we started in like february right exactly so it was much larger even worse oh yeah oh yeah um so in you know i can you should you can see most of the work done by just driving along to north um on the back side of del rio so it's been working out really well um moving the traffic from in front of del rio and heritage to the backside so we load kids um they come in off of two north and goes around the school and exits out on um one west we've looked at other projects we'd really love to put sidewalks curbs and gutters out of territorial we're talking millions of dollars to do that because of some flood issues we i'm going to work with our new business manager to see if we actually want to do an assessment adjacent ways assessment we can use this money for some resurfing resurfacing of some of the existing bus lanes and things like that but the big job or the big project that we want to do kind of cindy's been doing some investigating with the town and it's not really practical to move forward on that so um we just need to kind of step back identify a new project and move forward with it okay well and the reason i ask john is because i know every time we have the tax levy hearing we typically have a project in mind correct for the hundred thousand dollars and i'm just so surprised to see that something must have happened that we they've not happened and that's why i'm just asking to ask that question so well we spent a lot of money it's just that um and then again like we were hoping to do that we could do something out of territorial but it's not going to happen for for what we want so we'll have to evaluate whether we actually do the adjacent waves levy or not this year oh okay yeah no i'm not complaining oh i know yeah i just need yep yeah thank you so that kind of talks about the adjacent ways so um you can see peter that we had 324 000 we and then so we spent about 130 000 so far this fiscal year so um any questions about the financial reports okay agenda item 6b2 student activity not a whole lot of activity going on um all the accounts are in the positive which is a good thing um unfortunately we just don't have kids on campus to raise and spend money any questions and before we move on to the next item i'm going to let annie get settled welcome all right item 6c summer school miss daniels hi hi good evening everyone i'm going to go through some things that the leadership team has been visiting about in regard to summer school feel free to interrupt me anytime that you want a little bit more information about that line because i have a little bit of a list of things that i want to cover with you so don't be afraid to stick your hand up one of the questions that i think people are probably asking themselves would be what's our goal for summer school like why would we do summer school so we have really two main goals for summer school one is that we know this has been a tough year academically for students and our goal is to support every single student who wants to attend and be able to move forward at their grade level so for example um it will be the entire month of june so we're all assuming of course that you know everything rolls forward health wise but our plan is that it would be the entire month of june that it's completely free we have enough money in the second round of cares to provide for more than one summer and to provide tutoring which we have tutoring available right now from each campus virtually or in person so that's something that kids and parents could avail themselves of starting now but the summer school program would be monday through thursday it would be all day long but it would be two sessions so an am session and a pm session that allows us to have more students attend and at the high school and middle school level if students have several things they need to work on they actually could attend all day so how it would work is transportation would be provided we anticipate running more routes than we normally run for summer school right now we run routes north and south and a little bit off the highway but it would be more extensive than that students would have breakfast and or lunch and a snack depending if they attended am pm or all day it would be led by certified teachers as many as we need because we're using the grant funding for this we have enough money to pay for lots of teachers and at some point probably at the march board meeting we'll be talking to you about the rate of pay for our teachers and our paraprofessionals and summer school administrative staff and i'll talk about that in just a minute we have highly qualified paraprofessionals that currently work for us who we would like to have join us for summer school some of them typically get other summer jobs this is a way for them to work during june and those salary incentives would be more than we typically pay staff to work on like during summer school and that kind of thing and we feel that this is would be end up being necessary because um people do sometimes can accept jobs that last all summer and this would just be for the month we also would have summer school administration that's not our typical admin at each campus and the reason for that is our administrators have regular things to do during the summer busy things that usually summer's a very busy time in the school district and so what we're looking for and hoping for are maybe some of that teaching staff who are working on their admin credentials or have already completed their admin credentials give them a little bit of on the job experience as well at the high school we primarily will be focusing on credit recovery i was really glad miss d'angelo called me last week to talk about some of the things she came this evening to visit with you about i was glad that she brought some hard numbers for us because you could see that we do have a need for credit recovery for some of our students it is and miss wolf will talk about this in a little bit she has a plan to help ensure that our seniors can graduate on time throughout this pandemic and what we've experienced but we will primarily focus on credit recovery at the high school one thing that's a little different than normal is that all four core classes are will be offered a lot of times we have like english and math those tend to be the classes that students have struggled in the most during the year sometimes we have students who want to get ahead they would be able to come and do that as well so we have that at the middle school our program will be designed to ensure that students can move ahead to the next grade so that they've got the skills that they need and they are ready to tackle the next grade reading and math remediation will be our primary focus for kindergarten through fifth grade really solidifying building up those basic skills we are working on designing a specialty language learning program for our english language learners one thing that we talked about we've talked about throughout since school started all the fall and into the winter a bit and for mr tona and mr fogel who weren't here in those days during the fall one of the things that we had noted is that we had a disproportionate number of our spanish speakers choose to keep their students at home even when we were hybrid or fully in person so we did have a spanish speaker call every single one of our spanish-speaking families to ascertain why that may be uniquely the answer was they let the kids decide and so we have found that for many of our spanish kids that come from spanish-speaking households quite a few of them have spoken little or no english for 12 months almost so we feel like putting some extra effort into that language program this summer will be really vital to their success upon returning to school next fall something else that i want to talk about would be our special education students throughout covid our self-contained students have been able to attend so our extended resource our edp and our center students have attended so and they are progressing as they normally would and so our special education students who are resource students would be our focus during summer because the other students have had therapies and everything they need during the school year we will be offering enrichment for students who are at level so sometimes in the summer we have it's been a long time since the district has had a k-12 summer program because most of the interest is at the high school level some at the middle school level not usually very much at the elementary level but for students who are at grade level we've had some students who've done extremely well during the course of this year we'll be offering some enrichment opportunities for them on each campus and for some sometimes for high school kids that means that they want to work ahead or you know take a language class through edge annuity that we don't offer you know german or french or mandarin chinese you know something like that and then the chino valley education foundation had a board meeting last wednesday morning and the foundation voted to provide incentives to have students attend summer school so they will at the april meeting um take a recommendation for exactly what those incentives should look like but i'm envisioning things like gift card drawings for all the kids who had perfect attendance during the week at each campus so opportunities to to do some things like that for incentives to attend so those are the that's i would say is the backbone of the summer program that we're currently working on and i'd be happy to answer questions that you have cindy sounds spectacular but i guess my question is particularly for ell kids and the kids that are struggling is four weeks enough can we do you know would six weeks be better it's a it's a difficult question because we have two things to consider one is will parents send their students for that many days during the summer that was an issue with k5 is that parents wanted their children to have an opportunity to have that what i would call traditional summer vacation the other thing is that our staff needs a bit of a rest and we begin professional development for fall the second week of july so if we had a summer school that lasted into july that means our staff would roll right from doing their summer school job into professional development and returning to work without a chance to have some time off so weak that's something that we can work to ascertain both from staff like would we have enough staff if we did something like that and something that we could ascertain from parental interest and i know the schools will be working to gather information in fact we anticipate rolling out enrollment forms for summer school immediately after spring break so we'll know by the end of march you're welcome mike what are the anticipated numbers or how are you ascertaining that at this point you know until we do the enrollment phase it's going to be really hard to tell i know we have some parents who really really want their kids to be able to gain some ground compared to what they feel like they've lost during the school year but it's it's very hard to judge um you know we had people people hold fast to school year traditions things like snow days and holidays and things like that and so it's hard to know do we have a handle at all on our grade level rates at this point in time who is maintaining grade level and will we have a good hard number of that for that by june so we have there are two things and that i can answer about that do we have some numbers yes but many of the assessments that we give are computer-based assessments that we can't give unless students are here and so our you know our k-5 people have had trouble giving the dibbles literacy assessment they're doing the best they can but it's really hard even during hybrid because they get part of the kids one day a different part a different day and then the middle school and high school can't run their benchmarking assessments distance they have to be done in person so the sooner that we return to school fully in person the better we'll have a handle on that our other data is what i would call softer data and that softer data is based on pre and post tests that the teachers have given at the classroom level that is provided that students are attending their google classrooms and completing the work so we have some it's not as depth or as thorough as we typically would have at this time of year but we anticipate having that kind of information you heard from miss d'angelo for example about how the suits are progressing i know the middle school also has similar data about how they're progressing as far as completing their coursework completing coursework doesn't always mean you've mastered the content though so sooner we're back the sooner we can have that and like one of the things that we do as far as like the tutoring that we're doing right now online and in person those are all phone calls and personal invites and that's the same thing that we do our homeless student population i checked with mrs barley last week and had her do some reports for me we have 328 homeless students in the district right now she talks to every single parent on a regular basis encouraging them get your kids to school how are they doing on their google classrooms and those kinds of things and then i look today at the average grades for every single one of our homeless students and have a pretty good handle on how many are even doing work right now or not so and i would say about we've probably got about 20 to 25 percent that are significantly below where they could be just from our homeless population any other questions okay this was just a discussion item so thank you we also call all our el kids in spanish miss rosa maria our el coordinator she's hot on that phone every day thank you you're welcome we look forward to next month to hear more about it agenda item 783 our consent agenda do we have a motion to um approve our consent legitimate agenda i'll make a motion to approve the consent agenda thank you all in favor aye thank you item eight a day porter position request so at the dave porters we have one at each school they do things like open up the school take care of messes that happen during the day whatever those messes happen to be unplug toilets things like that do some cleaning well we have one right now that's a substitute that we've added that we'd like to make permanent his entire job is to go around and fog the schools with a disinfecting thought and while we're in covid we would like to keep that and possibly longer we've had almost zero cases of the flu um and i think there's multiple reasons for that including the hand washing and the mask wearing and the sanitizing that we're doing we won't be doing all those things necessarily like hopefully mask washing or wearing later but um you know we believe that the sanitation the increased sanitation is helping keep our kids and our staff members healthier and it's something that we'd like to bring on using esser money and so this would be about 45 000 a year that includes his um his health insurance and other benefits and the the salary and then um they would go with sr2 and sr2 is new money that's coming in and that actually can be expended through september of 2023 and so it would last us two and a half years that we could use and we could also back include expenses all the way back to march of last year and so sr1 goes back through march of last year and has to be expended through the end of december of this year so we'll make sure that that gets spent down and then esser2 can kick in or pick up some and that goes through the september of 2023.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
in some weeks or 130 questions per week so our challenge will be for march to answer 130 questions per week so we're going to challenge our students and our teachers so that hopefully in our april board meeting we'll be having a celebration for our rock stars who have that we've met our goal in preparation for next school year staff and parent advisory are also reviewing our strategic planning goals and action steps to develop a new strategic plan which we will work on in collaboration with the board and our leadership team at our upcoming board retreat mrs cuevas and i will be um attending a virtual job fair tomorrow from 1 30 to 3 through handshake so that'll be a first for me i've never done a virtual job share job fair before so i'm a little nervous but albert you can't go too far away tomorrow for our career fair for staffing we're analyzing the budget to fill our vacant math instructional coach position it has been vacant for two years so we've done a lot of discussion in our leadership team about really needing that math coach position as we adopt a new math curriculum to really have someone that will fully focus on math to be able to help us ensure an effective rollout and effective delivery of construction within the core so we have mr schubert working out the budget numbers so we can come back with more information but i did want to share some preliminary thoughts we're also looking at a possible part-time special education director as you know our student special ed population continues to grow and we really need additional support in helping our teachers feel competent and confident in meeting the needs of the students and as you know this is our third year of being on school improvement due to lack of progress for our special needs students so we're we're closing the gap but not at the rate obviously that we're also reviewing our school calendar um and mr mianis is working on that to include additional staff development time for teachers and staff most districts have an early release date once a week we at continent i mean every wednesday we at continental have two wednesdays a month in some cases we don't have any in how we flexed our calendar but we really are seeing as we're looking at our strategic plan and our goals that we really need more time to meet with our teachers to have these conversations for meeting the needs of our special population students for reading and for math and for and we expect them to be great at everything but we need time to analyze data and make decisions based on data in the classroom so just a heads up on some things that we'll be discussing further our new math adoption so we have had the presentations by three vendors ready classroom math reveal math and into math this wednesday we'll be needing to score each of the curriculum and determine which we will choose to put on public view for 60 days and we will come with a recommendation to our board at our april 12 board meeting so we're very excited all three programs have a lot to offer so it'll be interesting discussion on wednesday our foundation sweetheart gala our virtual auction is going on now our foundation has raised 12 500 from our regular donors who continue to support our foundation and students last year we grossed 22 000 and netted 16 000.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
we spent some of that on chromebook leases or chromebooks for next year we won't get those chromebooks until april because there's a backlog on chromebooks so really not going to get them in time to help out this year but it's these are chromebooks we would have bought next year anyway because we're cycling old ones out so it did save us some some money we bought what's called meat boards which i'd like to demonstrate some time for you but um the teachers that are using those right now are are from what i've heard the feedback i've heard they really like them the neat boards it's like a sound bar that we we mount in the room and the sound bar and it has cameras in it and speakers or microphones in it it basically captures the whole room for the kids that are at home viewing the classroom at home and it's uh it's a better zoom experience for those kids that are that are streamed in so we bought some of those and teachers are trying them out it's possible we've been we that we might buy some more with the next grant that's coming but that'll be something we'll be talking about so we also talked about the three-year tech plan and then the exhibit 11 is another finance committee meeting which we finalized so you know what i had a question on the technology you guys talked about the projector you guys were looking for more quotes uh yeah we want to i was talking the committee about putting one in here okay uh to get rid of this whole setup and everything what was what's the original quote what's the first quote if you guys are looking for more it's i was and they they kind of told me you just need to do it i get a little bit weird on that sometimes and i know matt's probably frustrated with me i haven't get quotes and then i'm like i just can't do that but it's like 13 000.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
um there was something we added where it says the board's meeting minutes must be submitted to a board treasurer the board treasurer's christy tyler we appoint her as our treasurer yeah we just hadn't at the meeting oh okay so yeah um and then seven colon 345.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
dr windham absolutely thank you mrs woodward and i'm certainly not going to go through many slides in this presentation because you have heard this numerous times but i thought it would be helpful maybe to just highlight a few of the things that have guided us over the last couple of months we started studying school start and end times in november with a working group with representation from each level we began discussing this publicly at our school board meetings beginning at the end of november talking about start and end times and then we have been sharing information in various formats including the december and january school board meetings parent square communications to all of our parents social media a dedicated page on our website discussions with our teachers union and a community input session we don't typically live stream our school board meetings but in november we began doing that with as a part of redistricting and we have continued that in december january and now this meeting in february just so we could make sure our community had various ways to access this information so lots of work and lots of input has gone on into these various options that we have been talking about over the last three months i'm not going to spend time going through pros and cons we have done that in previous meetings multiple times but as you know we we started with three options we added a fourth and at this time we are not recommending those options because of the feedback that we have received from our our community from our parents and from our teachers uh based on the feedback that we have heard primarily the reasons that we have rejected options one through four was that tier one was uh too early for starting k-4s was a general consensus that we had heard that that posed child care concerns for the parents of our youngest children we also heard a really strong desire both from teachers and from parents to keep school levels together to keep the intermediates together to keep the middle schools together and then also there was concern about spreading elementaries across all three tiers and so that's some of the main reasons why we are not recommending options one through four and that has changed over the course of the last few months as we have taken those steps to get more input so that really led us to what has now been called option 5a and option 5b as you know from our discussions option 5a keeps all the k4s in tier 2 and tier 3.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
as we continue to review the community spread of covet 19 our best case scenario would be to get all students into our buildings so with our current model would be getting the secondary students back to five days of in-person instruction whenever we can our next opportunity to review as a reminder is this coming thursday february the 11th so as we look at what's possible as we move forward this is the most up-to-date information that we have so this is currently this graph or chart is currently posted on the communities covet 19 task force website and you can see that as of the 7th of february which would be yesterday we're already always one day removed from the data that we're able to gather the per capita rate was down to 32.4 and is decreasing the percent positive test rate is at 30.6 percent is also decreasing the test turnaround time has hovered between 2.4 and 2 over the last several days a few weeks and currently as a 2.2 and then the hospitalizations have actually dropped into the yellow first time that number has been there for quite some time so the last two days we've had 13 and 12 as our numbers of hospitalizations related to covet 19 so are decreasing as well we look at the state map the state has its own set of metrics they are similar in terms of a per capita rate and a all test positivity rate they use a seven day rolling average and right now our county bartholomew county has a 2.5 score which places us in the orange we have been orange for several weeks actually months we go back to the beginning of november with that orange status last week we were at 2.0 so ticked up to 2.5 we think that we'll be back to 2.0 this coming week so hopefully heading in the right direction in terms of the color designation from the state as well this is the operating model considerations you approved uh in october so before we went to e-learning at the first of november and then even made the the changes we have currently in place after winter break uh we tried to align with the color designations of the state and based upon what our county was showing is then react to that in orange this says elementary schools may continue full-time in person option middle and high schools may consider a hybrid learning model so that's what we had from our october revision of our operating model considerations i know this is difficult to read so i will read parts it to you wanted to get this in front the state department of health last week following the governor's press conference revised their recommendations so this chart or this operating model considerations was based upon the previous recommendations from the state state has revised theirs and we have not revised ours yet but this says that schools should consult with their local departments of health and and the metrics from the department of the state department of health as they make decisions upon their instructional models so that orange piece of there no longer has any specificity on instructional models the only specificity you'll sign you will find now in the states color designations for counties is in the red and it specifically calls out the hybrid instructional model for high school students so a little twist or change at least in the way the state is looking at the county color designations and their recommendations so that was updated and see to the side on february the 5th which was friday dr roberts yes sir if i understood what you're saying so the part about the only specificity being associated with the red so there's no specificity to differentiate orange from yellow there isn't no so actually from blue yellow and orange the wording is basically the same that the school in conjunction or collaboration with local department of health would make instructional model decisions that could be in-person hybrid or full virtual or e-learning to give us flexibility to give us flexibility and i think you said the only specificity is in the red and that's about a step that we're already taking even though we're in the orange correct yes so we have been in hybrid while we've been in orange now since the beginning of january and that that level of specificity in terms of consideration of hybrid dropped from the orange by the state well that changes how we look at it or not but just putting this in front of you in terms of these are now the the recommendations or considerations from the state level thank you you're welcome this was on the heels of this information here and we are not prepared to enact this um and so i need to to couch that as we go through and and make sure and do so carefully because the governor's press conference on wednesday and we certainly appreciate the state's efforts to handle a very complex situation too and as the governor and dr box and dr weaver from the department of health try to make these tough decisions as well they will announce things for schools wednesday's announcement was a surprise to us just in that sometimes we have a heads up as to what might be coming we were not aware of the many things that actually came out of that press conference on wednesday so as this information came to us we now have it in front of us and have to make decisions based upon it uh it did take effect today we were not going to have anything take effect until at least we put information in front of you as a school board we should make it tomorrow and so any reference you see to tomorrow february 9th bottom right of this chart we are not prepared yet to do that but that would be the earliest it could have taken effect in our opinion because we have not shared all the information with you we've not had proper conversations yet with our teachers association we've not digested all this with our principles all of those kinds of things a lot of information here because if we go from we'll just start left to right and look at supplies and ppe and what the state is doing and this was announced again wednesday and unknown to us prior to that so now we're processing this information and dr bozeman did fill out a survey on friday in terms of where that stuff should come so that it can be distributed from a central location for us but each staff member would receive 10 kn 95 masks so provided by the state 10k and 95 masks coming to our school corporation elementary age students will receive additional mass so another set of mass or a mask for elementary student coming to us rapid tests will be sent to schools beginning this week delivery may take several week several weeks the the number of kits is uh 120 per school and so we will again get those here and then distributed to schools if that's what we choose to do how are we going to use those that's a question and then if we chose to go this way nurses would administer tests at the discretion of our corporation and thinking primarily of staff only so what is in front of you is our initial thoughts that we had from a cabinet level just digesting the information again not prepared to move forward with any of these until we digest them further but that's we know we're getting stuff and so what do we do with that stuff now we have in terms of quantity 10k and 95 mass per staff member we have more mass for elementary students we have about 120 kids per school building in terms of quantity coming to us from a rapid test standpoint so then as a corporation here's our stuff how do we utilize that to the best of our ability to address coven 19 within our schools within our community so that's the first piece of the stuff that we were the information we were given last week any questions about supplies or ppe before i jump to the middle one um staff means support staff teachers believe all dr bozeman you finished that figured that survey we used all in terms of sending information correct yes thank you so approximately 2 000 staff members for us and the types of rapid tests that they appear to be talking about here are those the kind that you process in-house or do they need yes okay yep so sample taken and not the um the ones that kind of go all the way to the brain what's the best way to describe that but they're the the the tests are different there's a little bit less than that and could be administered relatively easy i think by our nurses kelly if we went that direction our issue is is trying to determine when and who who and when i guess that test would be administered and do we want to all kinds of things could pass and go down here do we want to encourage people to start sending people to school to get the test done versus other places that that tests might be done so a lot of just questions we're asking right now in terms of proper use and using it appropriately or wisely to accomplish what we hope to do which is to keep more kids in school staffing yeah where we are with that okay all right close contact updates and and this what this basically does is an attempt from the state to to by going to this level and basically giving counties and then schools permission to do this it would lessen the number of close contacts you would have right because you are taking the six feet distance and shrinking it to three so now it's only people within three feet of that person not six feet which is bigger distance that would be considered close contact so close contacts for students and staff now defined as less than three feet for 15 minutes or more that is a cumulative piece which has always been the case for us no quarantines or contact tracing required for those individuals more than three feet apart as long as individuals are masked at all times that is specifically kelly corrigan if i'm wrong in the classroom setting so in a controlled classroom setting mass on the entire time not lunch not recess not pe not a ball game it's it's during the classroom time three feet comes into play and so if you had a student positive case you look at the classroom were they all at least three feet apart all the time or at least if they were closer than that it was for less than 15 minutes cumulative you might have zero close contacts in that situation as long as they were three feet or more versus the six so that's the first piece is trying to to lessen the number of students or staff that would be considered close contacts moving to the quarantine periods this piece would be to try to get people back faster so fewer people out because they are closed contacts and back quicker even if they are close contacts so that's the rationale behind or behind columns two and three so in this case staff and students may return to school after a 10-day quarantine if that person never developed symptoms where's the mass at all times upon return if they can't you need to make sure and maintain the 14-day quarantine and six feet of distance must be in place while eating in this case and uh so in the cafeteria we sometimes are not always again six feet uh trying to get that distance but uh for this case this person you'd have to ensure that that was indeed the case so we have these three things that we are trying to ponder consider and see what is the best with the supplies and ppe stuff again just trying to find the best usage uh 10k and 95 mass per person um i guess we can distribute those and see if people choose to wear those i don't know that we're prepared to mandate the kn-95 master one at each time we have gotten this far this way elementary age students we probably have mass already dr bozeman in terms of quantity we still have some mass in supply in the corporation so we're just adding to that and again that 120 kits of of testing how do we use that for students and staff members continued conversation the closed contacts three feet if you recall in our plan that started this year even adopted way back on july 20th we were looking at three to six feet we knew the challenge of six feet with eleven thousand five hundred students in our eighteen school buildings and so based upon um the american academy of pediatricians we decided that which had recommended three to six feet we decided that that's what we would put into our plan so that's what we went with so the three feet close contact tracing basically on three feet is not would be foreign to us because we have been kind of using that guide post since july 20th if we can't get six feet anyway the quarantine periods if you recall the cdc it's been back in december that actually came out with this they they in december said that they could accept 10 days or even seven days i guess eight days uh if the person had tested negative and had no symptoms so actually had a a negative test no symptoms could come back at day number eight and then the next piece is no symptoms no test come back on day number 11.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
so second second the motion by mr nunes the second by was it mary uh was it mrs wade both of us all right so motion by mr noon second by mrs wait on the motion any other discussion cheer herring nun roll call chris oliver yes shannon jenkins i'm gonna abstain kathleen amarill yes mary waite yes john nunes yes thank you very much everyone at this time chair will entertain a motion to approve the executive session minutes of january 25th 2020.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
prosperity [Applause] oh [Music] oh box up [Applause] right here hey [Applause] one [Applause] i'm [Applause] follow up [Music] one oh okay remember how to do it as soon as you get it set it up [Applause] all right 12. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] rule 53. okay good job [Applause] what's up [Music] there you go [Applause] those shots up [Applause] [Music] okay what's up my okay um yeah i don't think [Music] [Applause] [Laughter] okay my god [Applause] go one one one [Applause] one [Applause] is [Applause] okay one shot [Applause] [Music] that's it [Applause] blue good job [Applause] [Music] [Applause] all hey [Applause] [Music] all the way back [Applause] get up [Applause] oh all right come on okay here we go [Applause] oh [Applause] okay [Applause] oh don't blow it let's go [Applause] oh 30. yes oh [Music] [Applause] okay oh [Music] ah [Applause] oh [Applause] hey hey base five me [Applause] [Music] [Applause] um that's right [Music] oh is please life two two [Applause] um i [Music] oh ricky [Applause] oh i ah [Music] hey come on guys okay hey [Music] from [Applause] [Music] [Applause] over here [Music] [Applause] chubby [Applause] oh [Music] dirty [Applause] um [Applause] [Music] [Applause] go [Applause] uh [Music] [Applause] [Music] back [Applause] oh [Applause] oh [Applause] 13.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
thank you okay okay do i have a second i happily second that okay here's any discussion um hearing none all those in favor unanimous all right um then moving on um to item three we have a series of informational items we're gonna turn to mr hanlon and for an overview of the um curriculum council's el executive summary presentation thank you faith give me just a second to get up the presentation uh last month you heard two executive summaries for our music and our library programs that we reviewed at the curriculum committee those were presented in the november cheshire curriculum committee english learners was the our english learners program was the third presentation also done in november so giving giving a little bit of an update executive summary of what our english learner committee shared with the ccc uh you'll notice the date as with the other presentation says march 2020 because again the bulk of this presentation was prepared last year and we finally had an opportunity to share with the committee this fall uh one note before we dive in too deeply our english learners program is just that it is a program it's not a curriculum so there's not units of studies and a scope and sequence but rather it's a program that is um based in best practices that align with research to support our english learners and also any state and federal mandates so it goes through a very similar um curricular review process but really program review process uh once every five years just as our curricular items do but it's not a scope and sequence or unit by unit curriculum i thought i would take a few minutes just to share samplings of some of the goal reflections from their report english learners report this year and i should note uh major contributors to to this are uh pat castle uh kristen castellano and kristen pedals at our elementary middle school and high school who oversee the um eo programs in each of those levels and if we look back for over the last five year curricular review cycle or program review cycle rather there was a big portion of the goals that were around making sure that we had individual student plans with really clear objectives for each and every one of our el learners and as part of that that we've reviewed that multiple times a year to make sure that we're on track with any goals so the first two bullet items capture a little bit about that work that was done over over the five year period there were in the technology and resources section seven technology goals when we reviewed those a big chunk of those goals were all around providing one-to-one devices and digital text for our el students there are a plethora of um digital tools that can be very helpful in supporting our english learners um that goal those goals were all achieved and in fact because of some of the broader district shifts to one-to-one technology some of those goals were just part of the district transition to moving to one-to-one devices but all those technology and resource goals were achieved over the last five-year cycle one other important point of note is that um over this cycle we needed to make sure that our dually identified students so these are students who qualify as english learners but also qualify for special education services that their english goals uh and services were captured in uh their special education plans and through their bbt process so over the course of this five-year period period in the last cycle we made sure that we were following all the uh requirements for making sure that those goals were captured in the individual student plans i am sure that the those individual goals were were evident before but it's making sure that it's housed all in one spot and clearly identified as part of the ppt process um moving on a little bit a big chunk of the work had to do with making sure the resources um best practices showed up and were available to teachers in the same way the rest of our curricular documents were so we have a staff portal and over the course of the last cycle we made sure that teaching resources strategies things teachers were going to need for er identification and any required requirements for el students were all housed on a curriculum portal so it's a major accomplishment to get all of that work over to our curriculum portal some of the other work also in the area of kind of organizing for instruction and parent communication at our secondary level a good portion of the work had to do with consolidating some of our support structures for ell students and families at the secondary level and two examples of that one are placing our el students on one team at the middle school level and connecting all of our el students to the same school council at the high school level and here's a little bit about why some of that is important we're a district although we have a growing el population we are still a relatively low incident district in terms of the number of els students and families that we have so a good portion of our effort has to do with the professional development to make sure the supports and services we have for english learners are as strong as possible and a big chunk of that work and something i'll talk about a little bit further in a few minutes is most of the work for um successful language acquisition and overall performance for el students comes from what's happening in the classroom with the classroom teachers and at the middle and high school level kind of making sure that one team for example in the middle school has our english runners on it means that we can target the professional development the support the counseling connections uh to a more focused group and therefore we're really able to bring high quality professional development to to that team as opposed to having spread out across several teams in the middle school and similarly a lot of the particulars that are going to be important for el growth by having our el students connected to the same counselor and or social worker at the high school means that that counselor is really going to be invested and have a good understanding of all the things that are going to be important for our el english learners to be successful so that was a part of the work over the previous five years professional development over the last five years was largely provided with collaboration with aces that's our regional education center and they provided workshops at least three times a year it's just three times a year i would say it was at least three times a year to help our teachers and again our counselors and other professionals really be grounded in the best practices and the last piece of kind of this reflection backwards over the previous five years were really about providing teachers and staff access to assessment student goals and progress for health students so making sure that our teachers are aware of the assessments that are going to indicate proficiency and growth for our english learners and using some of that information to help craft out those goals so i thought i would use that as a segue to talk just a few minutes about this kelp rubric this is our connecticut english language proficiency rubric because this was a key part of a key part of some of these different categories over the previous program evaluation so at the top of this it says assessment and measuring student progress because that's where the slide came from from the full presentation but honestly this kelp rubric influenced um the professional development because we gave teachers a really good understanding of the different levels of proficiency so last meeting faith you asked a question about what is you know how much proficiency do students need to be able to english language proficiency do students need to um no longer qualify cl be successful as english learners and this kelp rubric helps define that for each grade level band so you'll see things in here like the difference between responding to single questions simple questions rather than wh questions to the next level up from that being able to respond to others and add on to the comments of others so this kelp rubric was an important tool for our teachers to understand assess students in terms of their proficiency to be able to set goals for their students about what the students next steps are to be able to monitor progress for the students english language proficiency growth and to be able to make adjustments to plans as needed so this kelp rubric was an important tool for the ccc work over the previous five years as students progressed up through those levels they would be assessed annually through the last links the language acquisition survey which are in the middle of administering that survey right now to students so as students move up on that kelp rubric in terms of their proficiencies that'll pan out in their performance on this last links and one of the reasons i'm showing this slide is to note that um the state is very much invested in making sure that we are paying attention to all of our learners including our english learners so in the most recent version of the next generation account accountability report progress towards english proficiency through that last links is showing up on that accountability index and it's it's one way for the state to communicate to us and we believe it wholeheartedly ourselves that the performance of all our students and the growth of all our students is really important and you'll see that our progress towards english proficiency both the literacy targets and the whole targets will show up in in future versions of state accountability reports so the state is very much invested in all of our students making growth and learning i i will take one um or take this moment to note that and i alluded to it before that one of the biggest shifts that happened over the previous ccc time was who was providing the bulk of the support for the english for our english learners and a lot of it historically had been through um uh english kind of tutors specific to to the students and why we still provide individual support and tutoring through some of our staff the bulk of the work and the growth for students happens in the classroom when students are exposed to an english language with good supports right in the classroom that's where we see the greatest growth and gains for student language proficiency and one of the impacts on that shift and services delivery model was in our most recent administration of the smarter balance assessment you can see that we pay attention to how all of our students do and then certain subgroups of students so in this graphic you see two ovals around the 2018 and 19 administration of our english language arts state assessment and you can see at the very bottom there we had um students on average make 70 make it 70 of the way to their growth goals on that state assessment and 54 of students meet their growth targets and that is very closely mirrored to our english learner population 69.7 and 53 and the fact that there's very little difference between our total population and our english learner population is a really good sign that our program is having a positive effect on overall academic growth for students and it's the first time on this administration that we saw very little gap there was no there's no gap in performance between our total population learners and our english learners on a state uh english language assessment and that's that's a pretty big accomplishment and the committee's reflection on some of the reasons why though note that that shift from the bulk of the support for students happening within the classroom was a was a major reason why we saw some of that gap with our english learners start to dissipate so that's a little bit of reflection about where we were our goals for going forward are really now that we're grounded and leaning on the kelp rubric to to really help understand where students are from an english proficiency standard and we have really good practices in our classroom to help support english learners our next goals really have to do with ongoing professional development in this realm so i think you've heard me say maybe some other than other meetings that because we're still relatively low incidence district you may be a teacher who doesn't have an english learner in your class for a couple years and then all of a sudden you have an english learner in your class so to keep fresh on the approaches and strategies that are going to be most important to help our english learners grow is really important so providing that ongoing professional development and knowing uh for ourselves who needs that professional development and how best to make sure they get connected to it is an important part of the work going forward i'll also note that this dual emphasis on our speaking listening goals and our academic goals is something that we found particularly important particularly with our youngest learners and if um we focus on equally on that oral learning target the species speaking and listening we've seen a lot of gains on that front so sometimes that's a step that's really easy to skip over because conversationally we hear um some language some good language but we need to make sure that we keep on keeping an emphasis on the speaking listening targets as well we have a plethora of tech tools that are available and supportive for our english learners particularly as they go up in great levels and if they're a relatively new english learner starting in an older grade level those tech tools can be really helpful when you're dealing with high level content and the the second to last bullet there uh one of the constant parts of our efforts of the professionals is to make sure that our student social emotional supports and family communication and i don't just mean one-way communication i guess we're really talking about family engagement with our english learner families is so critical and we have to be really thoughtful and conscious of all of the things that are going to help make sure that we have a really strong family partnership with our english learner families as we do with with all of our families um and there's some hurdles to jump over to to help make that happen and and they're very worthwhile to do and we just need to keep that at the forefront of the work that we're doing and the very last part of this slide is now that we have strong individual plans or have we have individual plans for of our el students refining those plans to make sure they're really targeted to the english learners specific needs and get adjusted over time creating a set of protocols to make that a little bit more streamlined and efficient is is part of the work that we're doing and clear so our um pack castle ended her part of the presentation with just a success story and this is a student who began with us as a second grader with no english skills whatsoever and what you're seeing is a snapshot of actually the student's sri scores so their ability to to read on english and the little br at the bottom of that graphic uh means that that student really wasn't able to demonstrate any reading at a at a proficient level on this assessment and this first snippet shows kind of the students growth over second and third grade and you can see that it's a nice kind of line going up then as we get to fourth grade stagnant stagnates a little bit and and this is one part indicative of a few individual circumstances that change for the student but also uh very much so the idea that very rarely is language acquisition a linear growth kind of idea that this comes in fits and starts and plateaus and i know one of the things that pat shared is they really puzzled around making sure that the right kind of supports were there for the student and they were really targeting great things and as that student went into fifth grade they really implemented those um and by the end of the fifth grade year that student was up in that green band which is all great level expectations for our reading expectations for students so in a relatively short amount of time a few years we had a student who came to us with no english and is performing at our grade level expectations um and beyond what you see on this graphic i know that that was true beyond just reading performance that that was true uh across all content areas so you know we really take the time to make sure that we're tuned into those individual needs and when we do it right and when we get those supports in place um with a whether a good approach we do see the results students make a lot of growth and are successful so that's that's a executive summary of our english learner program again pac castle kristen castellano and kristin pelz uh were integral in in the work on a daily basis and also preparing that report any questions from the committee if anyone tony quick one kevin i if you mentioned as i apologize roughly what what percentage or how many students in our enrollment fall into the english learner category so we have been running recent history and approximately 40 to 50 students this year we happen to have approximately 80 students i i do think we will trend up over time as has been the state has been the trend in the state um i think this year's bump is is most likely related to code related circumstances and the kind of movement that we're seeing in district that's a little bit of a um i don't have hard facts on that but it's a little bit of presumption i do see our english learner population going up over time but we've been writing recent history about 50 students per year interesting well we've seen that bump this year current school year yeah we did see about this year oh i hope it's a good thing uh that folks enrolling into our school system take advantage of our you know education and it's awesome to see that progress with that one student yeah i'm sure there's more but i'm sure they're definitely pretty pretty confident too that they've achieved so much in a short period of time right right one thing that um that i know pat would want me to say about this is when you see success like the last or like the last slide that student probably no longer qualifies for uh services for the english program so that still doesn't mean that there aren't english language needs and family connection needs that that might be prevalent but some part of our our number staying low is especially with our younger students they they make a lot of growth quickly over just a couple years and often are no longer in the program that's great to see well i don't have more questions thank you that's great work as always thank you and your team and do you have any questions um kevin to follow on what tony has so we've had maybe students what's the dispersed dispersion of those kids are they mostly elementary are they across all grades yeah one area by far the largest chunk of our students are at the elementary grade levels and a little bit of uh of that comes into play in our primary grade levels for part of what i said if they're if english is not their home language um they are often identified as english learners early on but as they make growth they kind of they perform out of the program so that's why that's one of the reasons why we see our largest chunk of students not only the elementary level but really primary grades um and it it wanes as you go up in grade levels pretty proportionately um from as you get to upper elementary and then middle high school yeah okay that makes sense and then um you know i know that these are students with iep so my question may not exactly is there any way to uh you know in the past we have seen demonstrations of programs at there any way that we could see in english the english language program i work because i'm fascinated by it how you put an el student into the mainstream classroom and they function and and how do we do that and it's tough i won't be the one to uh definitely say when and how we do that but i can very much tell you that if that's part of what the committee would want to see at some point that we very much could give some insight demonstrations a little bit further insight into the design of that program why things like immersion work some of the things that teachers do to help support an english learner um at the various grade levels um i know we'd be more than happy to share that you know whatever point makes sense in in this i don't want to commit us to to that today oh no no no and i don't i'll do that for for others to decide but i know our um our folks who are responsible for our english awareness program would be able to to give a lot of good insight into how these programs are shaped up yeah i you know possibly a showcase of something or something you know just um but no i'm not asking you to commit tonight so you're off the hook but um okay any other we're good um thank you i appreciate it um next on the agenda is the um perkins supplemental grant update and tonight we're going to hear from sean mcewen but i'm going to hand it over to marlene to make the introductions and get us rolling thanks faith so if you all will remember about a year ago i believe it was february 20th of last year um sean mcewen who is the cte department chair career and technical education department chair up at cheshire high school came to one of our board meetings and spoke about a program a grant that he was going to apply to and wanted you all to be aware of what was happening this was a special sort of supplemental grant last february so i thought being that it was a year into the mix it was a good time to give you an update on where we stand with that grant and what has happened so i will turn it over to mr mcewan for his presentation well thank you thank you for the opportunity to speak this evening it's good to see everybody i'm going to just put up a presentation i have here i'm going to go through it pretty quickly i do want to offer some time for uh questions and answers afterwards all right so as uh marlene mentioned last january a a grant was released by the state of connecticut which ultimately i found out more about it's it's excess funds from districts uh secondary and post secondary in the state that do not use all of their entitled perkins money they put it all back into a pool and they make it into a competitive grant that grant was was uh presented to the board on february 20th on the 25th after some revisions i um hand delivered it to the state of connecticut in hartford and then on the march 10th some of us on this call right now came to the high school and we looked at our facilities in the current technical education department business cards were being passed around everyone was all buzzing about the future of what we're going to be doing and then on march 13th we were all told to go home for a couple weeks and that turned out to be much longer than a couple weeks but on april 13th dr solon was notified that we've been awarded the supplemental grant and the news was passed on to me and to our school's administration and then we started immediately moving towards uh some of the purchases that we knew were going to be safe and untouched and i'll get to some of that in a moment over here but in the beginning of may we initiated a purchasing for the machine you see behind me which is our prototrak nemo and then in june i i became more realistic that we are not traveling and as you remember some of the money that we put into this grant we were looking at traveling to wisconsin to go to the manufacturer of the machine that's on the other side of the camera and to receive a week's worth of training uh unfortunately that type of training was not available in this uh in this code environment so what we were able to do is take some of that travel money that was uh put away in the grant and some travel money that was in our yearly perkins grant and move it over to the company tormach and we got the actual the big machine not the second biggest machine so i was really it really kind of worked out better for the equipment but we did lose some of the opportunities for professional training underneath that lens and i'll get to what we're what we're doing on the back side of it uh july 15th we ordered our our big tormach machine and some of the accessories that needed to go with it and by the end of july we had a rigging company into our into our room bringing in the two machines and then one of the machines came pretty much all assembled and we had a company the company come and do some of the work but really through the month of uh august and september majority of myself and summery stash key installed every nut and bolt and everything onto this fully automated cnc mill and then also throughout those months we developed a five-course sequence that ultimately ends on these machines and we it took until september october for the electricity to be hooked up onto these machines and on october 1st what we did was we closed out that supplemental grant and we used money that originally tormach the company who sold us the mill who wanted to have us into their their training learning facilities um canceled all their their training and they still haven't they're still not offering in-person training at the moment and they were going to use us as a pilot program to use as like a distant learning package and then their business model changed and we kind of became collateral damage within that but they have um they're giving us their their training package it's just not going to be a guided practice like what they were doing before so ultimately we have that still coming but we purchased eight hours of flexible consulting with their computer manufacturing division so when we are getting to that point um we have eight schedulable flexible hours that do not expire that we can use at any time so i actually at this point somewhat prefer the self-paced training and then to have these eight hours of uh consulting with this company afterwards and then in october a gentleman mike who lives local in south maryland who works for track machine tools he's like their their educational trainer and one of their machine maintenance guys he came around he finished the installation leveled everything out got the machine up and running once electricity was into it and then on october 20th reese and i spent uh three of our eight hours with this company so we have eight hours with track tools we have eight hours for tormach and he came in here and spent three hours with us on a i think it was on one of our early release wednesdays and we spent some time working with him um in the afternoon and a couple couple details um some finishing details on these on these machines the track memo is fully operational we spent three hours learning how to use this and there's still so much more more to learn but i've actually had an opportunity to do some work on this machine for the district so rich clavet and victor sandoval have both approached me to help with some of the door issues we have in some of our agent buildings so i've machined some parts for them that they've given me some technical drawings for i've i've modified some factory parts and i used what we learned from mike on this front uh track on this machine in order to to make these parts it was actually pretty cool and recent i was super excited when they came to us and were like hey can you do this i was like most certainly we can so he gave us a drawing and we sat down and programmed the whole thing and kind of worked back and forth off each other we still have five hours left with track and emails um and we're looking to get another two to three hours in by the end of march but at this point it's just we really need to spend our own time on it to get to a point where we don't know the answers to the questions to bring mike back in here to give us those answers to those questions but he's at our disposal until we're done with these eight hours and he's local and they're helping us out throughout the entire week as well the tormach milling machine has a couple parts that still need to be installed like our some of the stuff within the cooling system and one of the uh the interfaces within the programming aspect of it i would estimate about five hours of dedicated work with reese and i to finish working on this but i was just going to say like once once we got grooving in through this school year i don't need to stand up here and say how difficult doing what we're doing this year but it's hard to also find a five hour block of time to finish running plumbing and some data cables onto this machine to make it and make it start rocking and rolling but we will we will get this time very shortly and um back to the part the the training package that we were originally going to learn through a a week's class out there that is still 100 guaranteed to us tormach will send that to us whenever i call and say i'm ready for for your training package some of the stuff i do need to get and acquire before we can run that training package i need some tooling uh some probes to find edges of metal and we need some some coolant in order to run through the machine and then we're ready to rock and roll with that training aspect of it so before i get to the next part um essentially that's you know about a year ago i was um coming to you saying i would like your blessing to apply for fifty thousand dollars and here we are almost a year later and this is this is what we've done with our fifty thousand dollars we've we bought the track mill and uh that was there was no modifications on that purchase and i'll just turn the camera around here so you can see the other the other mill that's on the other side over here and here's our other cnc mill and again this thing came in a couple pallets and it was um completely unassembled when it came here and that was that's what spent that's what we spent most of our time on is actually putting putting the machine together and not necessarily um getting deep into using it at this point so that's where our fifty thousand dollars is when the machines are not cheap they're you know twenty twenty something low twenties mid twenties each and some of the training were about fourteen or fifteen hundred dollars between both companies i'm sorry each company is about three thousand dollars between each company or between both companies um and just to kind of dovetail off with this with some some curriculum discussion in october i came in front of this the same group of people and i proposed two new courses which students are signing up for right now um and those courses are in alignment with naruto valley community college and that program is called dual enrollment and what we have found out especially over the past couple months of having tons of meetings with them is what i am proposing which works well for our community and the rigor that we want to have for our students it actually bridges two sep two different certificate programs that they offer it it completely covers the manufacturing principle certificate and it starts to get into the advanced manufacturing certificate program so we're looking at um shadowing and kind of like mimicking what one of the waterbury public schools does through the um the initial certificate the manufacturing principles one but then also bridging in to the uh advanced manufacturing certificate with some of our machining and some of our cnc courses that are happening a few years from now so a little a little brief summary of how we all got to where we are with this um last last january i sat down with uh lisa dredger in her office at naugatuck valley she was the dean of academic affairs but now she's the ceo of nagatok valley and we met to discuss these career college pathways and dual enrollment opportunities for both naugatuck valley and manchester high school i coached them on some language within their perkins grant with the new with the new changes with perkins five and we really looked at two different pathways that would benefit our community and that they already had in line and those are your manufacturing and some of your digital design digital media design pathways uh we've had multiple conversations um sometimes weekly meetings with representatives from nagatok valley deans department chairs bridge college directors purpose administrators um their instructors their department chairs their former students so we are we are talking and we are in these all of these different conversations i had one this morning um over about six or seven different emails which is a follow-up from last monday and last friday's meeting um in october i came to you and i propose these two courses our dual enrollment manufacturing cad cam class and our dual enrollment manufacturing fundamentals course and remember those classes are in our course catalog right now and i don't know the signups of the movement but i'm hoping that we have that full interest that i'm looking for within our community here um so we are saying that this this i kind of mentioned that's the beginning slide that these meetings that i'm having and these proposals that i'm that i'm putting forward to them they are saying immediately this fits what we already have in place for a pathway there's nothing we need to change and they are adopting us into that program um it's an 11 credit certificate in the principles and manufacturing program and again it's the same thing that they're doing within some of the waterbury schools but what happens is when we get past what they call bench work which we get into our million machining and drilling and cnc work that's what brings us into the advanced manufacturing lens over there so once we're able to go past this um this this initial program this is where we're going to start looking at three to six more credits in the advanced manufacturing that's where we focus on milling drilling turning and grinding both in manual and automated environments here's what we're doing next all right so this is right where we are right now we're finalizing our dual enrollment agreement for next year just make sure everything's everything's perfectly aligned for all all stakeholders and coming in from the spring in the summer we're going to be develop fully developing the curriculum resources project pacing sequence for the two incoming courses that are starting next fall and next spring um throughout the the spring summer and next year's fall and continue to have the conversations with every every person i need to inaugurate valley to make sure that what we are the remaining course in the sequence which have not been fully proposed to you um align with what their expectations are and then we'll we'll be doing some new courses um in the fall 2021 for years 22 23.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above