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oh looks like a nice algebra problem administration doing better today [Music] good evening everyone i'd like to call this meeting of the dartmouth school committee 2 order for monday march 8 2021.
and then some you know possible air conditioning units and chillers at the elementary school depending upon you know how the funding and finances go and we may we may we're still trying to figure out tracy and i are working a lot in regards to the esser funds and that's the covered money if you will the government quoted money we're trying to figure out what we can and what we cannot use on certain things so for example if you put in like little room pure air purifiers which we found from acs america automated control systems our hvac company they said those in this in-room you know little air air purifiers they are not they just they don't work you need to invest in your infrastructure like we've done with our hvac so how can we can we if we buy those air purifiers well yeah you could say you could use for esser funds potentially for that but it's not investing in your infrastructure bringing in fresh air in your hvac systems and being able to take care of your your whole system and your whole building so that's what we want to try to do again we don't want to after coven is over we don't want to have a garage full of 500 air purifiers that are no longer useful and they're worth two cents on the dollar or whatever because nobody really needs it anymore so anyway we're trying to figure out exactly what the funding is what we can and what we cannot use funding on and who knows if we can use some money on hvacs it's still questionable and so anyway um questions on the projects when will you have to have that money um for the sr2 fund so we've got some time and again we're we're trying down here a little bit later i guess i can also skip the the second i would go to the third item those are funds again we want to try to focus on student learning and the improvement uh again of of the of the areas where students and staff are so if you skip the two weeks we'll come back to the tuition reimbursement program here in a second um again what we're trying to do and we talked a little bit about this at the linkage we're trying to figure out again what we can do this summer and maybe extend our summer learning academy into possible credit recovery scenarios because we do have this money where if again because we've been lucky to have students on site the whole year pretty much so other than the one week of the high school our gap isn't quite as big as other school districts that haven't had kids on site so we still want to try to if we can make up some ground here using these esser funds over over the summer whether it's been because of the gap of covet or just some kids maybe just a little behind over the years we want to try to do as much as we can so we're maybe looking at expanding our our summer school and summer learning academy um into maybe k through 12.
so is there a typo in there or is the head baseball coach make 200 more than everybody else yeah the numbers are transposed one of the numbers that's like one of them i can go back and check on that um i don't have that off the top of my head um obviously that is part of a part of the contract so no it's probably yeah it's easy it's easy to find out i'm not going to assume that somebody transposed the numbers incorrectly so is it are these because if we approve them and they're supposed to be at the higher amount then we're gonna have you know what i'm saying yeah it's gonna have to be something that would correct okay later okay or if we flip those flip those numbers i don't have a contract in front of me so i can't i can't tell you what the rate number is to fix it rate the second do we want to yeah do we have to remove that then do we want to it's supposed to be seven four six seven how much is it seven four six seven four six seven four six so if we could amend that number to seven four six seven it's only for one coach report for baseball so if we could amend that to seven what was it lauren seven seven four six seven three well the other varsity coaches are seven four six yeah so if we could amend that okay that's amended who got a catch thank you anybody else i just have to abstain from uh six five six six and six four four yeah anybody else all right roll call yes miss monson joanna yes yes yes yes recommends for approval resolutions as outlined in personnel resolutions under middle and elementary schools that would be 7.2 through 7.7 can i have a motion motion second second [Music] no discussion all right roll call yes joanna yes martinez yes yes yes okay 8.1 resolve the boundary board of education approves the resolutions as outlined in education resolutions under district and high school 8.2 and 8.3 i have a motion second all right and any questions is this just for the sophomores [Music] i'm gonna say it's just for the move over wall um i'm probably going to say it's just for driver's ed it's a sophomore and i think 8.3 is the same way it's yeah share the keys yeah um i do not believe um are instead of the one with for the parents [Music] there's there's two parts that there's one for the kids and one for your parents is for the parents um i can get back to you on that i don't know i know in the past we have but i can get back to you on that okay everybody else all right welcome mr bail yes mrs busan joanna yes martinez yes yes stevens yes mr zamano yes mr consulate yes yes and mrs yes okay moving on to 9.1 resolve the boundary of board of education approves the resolutions as outlined in policy resolutions under district and high school which is just 9.2 and i have a motion all right discussion nobody all right then roll call yes mrs [Music] sally yes yes and yes okay 10.1 result the member board of education approves the resolutions as outlined in financial resolutions 10.2 all the way to 10.13 i have a motion and a second discussion i just have to sing from chapter 3 seven six zero three and then ten point twelve and seven fifteen anybody else um could you explain uh [Music] yeah so semi is a medical reimbursement that we're supposed to get for special ed kids who receive certain types of services so what happens is um we're supposed to submit reimbursements and we're supposed to get a certain percentage back and then the state tells us that we're supposed to hit a certain mark and i think this year might have been like 95 reimbursement rate and we didn't get that 95 reimbursement rate so therefore we have to do a corrective action plan we also we have the obese end up on a corrective action plan because a lot of this is predicated on um the the outsourced kids that are going out to uh private or outsourced um school districts private private districts who don't always give us all the proper paperwork that we need to get reimbursed and they kind of don't really help us get reimbursed because why would they because they're already getting paid from us and why would they do the expert to help us recoup any money so it's kind of like a catch-22 um but you know we do try and work on that as best we can um trying to get you know our money on that but it always seems to be a problem okay yes yes yes yes stevens yes yes yes yes okay then we come to any other matters to come before the board new business anything anything on thomas well this is for you guys okay this is very business for you guys where the numbers are expected for the um state no if they fully funded s2 i would expect the numbers to be slightly higher they also um and i went through this this morning on a call i had with people on the stage i don't know where to came up with our enrollment numbers but make sure that it's on our enrollment numbers almost about 100 kids uh so our our october 15 number happens at about 1779 kids they came in number like 16 something which puts us almost all the way back around 2 000 and eight maybe in terms of enrollment so i mean i i have no idea where it came up with that number size did i ask a few people to double check that number uh because it does hurt it's number one it hurts us but it also hurts us when you go into compounding factors because there's weighted numbers after that because if you're an es del esl student then it's like you get one plus 0.25 or if you're a frame release reduce studio it's another 0.25 or if you're a special edge student it's another 0.25 so there's some weighted factors to the financing piece so part of their algorithm is depending on where you fall in certain groups obviously you get more than just you know a one you actually get more so um it does factor in quite a bit to us and we're not the only district they know it affected uh uh they involved this me and bob yours went over that extensively when the numbers came out the day came out um and i also know that north korean field it affected them so there's a number of districts that did effect so we're all kind of in the same boat trying to find find out where the explanation is for this one because again you know we don't want to complain too much obviously because we did get money um but at the same point in time we just want to know how did they come up with the number um you know because moving forward it it's going to hurt us moving forward because our freedom these lunch numbers are down considerably so are ours because i heard it state wide they're down because no one is throwing out the foreign food program so everybody's thumbs down so it's not affecting me this year but next year it's going to affect us tremendously so again we're asking a lot of questions about that because again you're talking about when you're 70 frame reduced lunch and right now i think we're 55 56 on state aid that's a big difference in your state aid calculation for next year so we're asking the right questions we're waiting for answers we probably won't get those answers until the budget's completely done signed finalized or whatever um but we'll wait and see and um i just wanted to maybe let people know i know you had said um we're up about eight percent on in-person students yes um how's that going to affect us our ability to stay with what we're doing now if we if we're just staying right at 80 i know we have people are probably filling it out tonight at midnight i would say it really depends on the building um i would say like the high school probably wouldn't hurt the high school all that much um just knowing where they're at i think lafayette could be a problem um smalling potentially could be a problem um i think the difference between lafayette somalia is smallie has more classrooms so we could break up classrooms um lafayette doesn't have plans to really break up into so i think lafayette may be a little bit different story uh same thing in community i you know i don't know where communities at in terms of how many classrooms they're they're utilizing if they have extra space we gotta break up a couple classrooms um but again they were briefed on this we're waiting for the total tallies i told them not to panic i told them and told the principals not to dive into this and start making 10 000 different plans either i wanted to wait until we got the numbers and then we sit down with the data that we have then we then we make decisions based upon the data that we have i don't want them stressing out um over this because obviously over the summer and as the market periods went out there was a lot of stress involved with principals and the administrators trying to figure out how to make certain things work and you know i'd rather wait for the data to make sure um we have accurate numbers and then make educated decisions based upon that data guys got that don't stress out it's just that easy no stop just don't worry about it everything's gonna work out didn't say that again i again i forewarn everybody you know whether it becomes a split day issue a b day issue i i can't tell you that until until we sit down with the numbers and take a look at it until we do it yeah you know yep all right anything else all right i think with that we are open to the public for discussion agenda and non-agenda items hi hi erica clark principal of lafayette do i need to give my address is this on i don't think so all right um so this morning dr gallagher emailed the building administrators asking us to create a rotational list or a list that allows teachers to eat in a room by themselves um upon explaining that to my staff and also getting some information because even though some did fill out the form for travel and were approved some do stay in the building because parents or through inrs or retention meetings it was recommended that remediation be in person for some students so even though some staff are allowed to go home some do choose to stay um so there are some questions that were asked by staff that i do not want to assume so i'm just looking for clarification so since staff are being asked to eat in rooms alone are they and need to assume that coffee drinks water breaks whatever the case might be a quick snack when the students are at special keeping in mind that at lower elementary levels all the classrooms have co-teachers i have one classroom that has up to four adults because it's a self-contained class um so is that not permitted going forward even with maintaining six feet of social distancing i'd have to ask i'd have to ask the doctors i don't have an answer okay do you want me to get asked the doctors and get clarification i think yeah i think we need an answer there so that would make sense and then also will we continue going forward with mass breaks for students as well yeah i would definitely stop that that would be my advice to you let's decide but you as a board make that decision can you repeat that pictures this little heart last query it really varies across the classroom i know some teachers have taken it even though it's been kind of cold out the past couple weeks they've taken the kids back outside to get some fresh air you know the comfort level of each classroom is different i know when we met for the restore committee over the summer we said once a day for a few minutes you know the children do stay in their seats if they're outside they're still maintaining social distancing but again just with this new lunch procedure i know that there were some questions that needed to be answered the kids are most of them are pretty good now right in september we weren't sure how everybody would feel about them i know in my school days there's no matter the kids have been amazing yeah snack and snack is eating outside but i would think that you would yeah you want to limit especially now as numbers are going up i mean numbers of students are going up i would i would say it's a limit because types of breaks if possible yeah on the other hand just like that was advocate it's a long day i know it's a long day with a mask on um even though they're there half a day till whatever it is 12 whatever that's a long time i know my it just happens this weird that this just happened last week one of mine came home was like wow we only we hardly got a break today and i was so thirsty and i needed a drink and you know i know the policy like obviously i know i understand but at the same time like you know he's four and it was hard to hear him you know you know yeah i i know i hate to even say this because it's like so cliche but my answer is always like there's no good answer right like there's no right there's no either on either side you're you're wrong right so i don't know i mean well when there is a positive case right and their contact tracing and all that these are the types of questions that are asked so you know whether it's through the doctor or whatever the case might be i think it needs to be like a clear and consistent message that all the administrators that you know we're all on the same page and everybody yeah i would think that the weather getting warmer like if they're able to go outside for like a couple minutes that would probably be like the best option but that's true too i think maybe we should get some medical guidance because no one here my knowledge is a physician especially i just want to make sure that the administration is getting the right answer from the right person that's all and i think that that would then clarify if we have some medical um advice in relation to this i will add that to the list of questions for tomorrow yeah definitely better than doing it by opinion or emotional decision we should get the sign you know follow the science i think that's thank you thank you hello everyone joe santa ceremony principal community middle school um two kind of obvious questions it would seem obvious but just uh for clarification came up with staff today with regard to eating uh we have warm weather coming and everyone's itching to get outside a little bit staff were asking regarding uh eating restrictions uh we have a gazebo in the back of our school and uh even the question of bringing fold out chairs if they were to sit in a large circle distance at a certain distance six feet or more um that's question number one and then question number two the question came up is what if they were to go out let's say to a diner together and be able to eat in that setting uh off of school grounds again i don't want to make any assumptions what seems obvious if they can they go outside the district that's on them that's on that you have no nothing to do with that as for the gazebo i'll add that to the questions from the top gazebo slash fold out stamping chairs thank you anybody else anything online well see there's three questions but he's sitting here or do you want us to read them from there i'm a nice reader okay um this is from mr jackson why doesn't the district share its covet 19 numbers like other districts it seems like it's a big secret here for example the north hundred and fourthy school district has a coven 19 dashboard on its website and they alert the stakeholders when there is a change old bridge sends e-letters for each new situation and has current numbers on it i will give you the letters from old bridge so you can see what i mean i do not recall the last time i received the current numbers inbound um all right this is from mr paxson why doesn't the district provide more pertinent information regarding clothing positive people other districts share more information than bamberg does the old bridge ones i shared with you state if it was a student or staff member they have given the time of day and individual experience symptoms they have stated if they were on a bus and they have stated if they were involved with a sport or activity a bamboo letter from last week says some individuals and does not even state they contacted the closed contacts why are other districts able to say more than hours without violating hipaa number three is from mr paxson this is a long one so bear with me here when it came to coven you can say we were very lucky this year every time we had a coveted positive person in our school we had a holiday or snow day before or after and helped prevent the potential spread in our buildings unfortunately our luck ran out last week and we can no longer say kova 19 was not spread in one of our buildings but our recent covert 19 surge may have been preventable just like january's lafayette office quarantine could have been prevented if you allowed people to work from home when the students and teachers were virtual the smallest school quarantine may have been preventable if everyone else was allowed to leave at lunch everyone is being blamed for the smallie shutdown everyone that is being blamed for the smallie shutdown said they were not allowed to leave at lunch and they were kicked out of their rooms for the after-school program if these people were allowed to leave at lunch they would not have been in the building and would not have been in the same room as another human being and there would have been little to no chance to share the same air a few weeks ago there were over 20 letters read at a boe meeting and they informed you of their fears unfortunately their fears were not fully heard or understood at that time i hope you are listening now and aware of what just happened last week at smalley as it could have been worse as i was made aware of teachers that see every student in one building 30 at a time and was forced to be with teachers who travel and see every student in another building since they were denied the ability to leave at lunch they could have potentially spread coven 19 to other teachers and other buildings we realized this could happen when the lamont annex building went virtual in the fall but nothing has changed since then at a previous board meeting it was stated how you can help improve our mental health and i did not have an answer at that time i have a response now top disciplining us for sitting in a room 20 feet apart from another human with masks on if sitting 20 feet apart is a concern for the district maybe we should consider going all virtual don't make us eat lunch in solitary confinement and don't write us up for following cdc and district rules i am hoping that you will reconsider your decision to restrict everyone from leaving school at lunch and also allow people to work from home if they are able to below are some comments that may help you decide to change your mind request to change the solitary confinement policy to the staff protection policy we were informed the boe could not grant everyone the ability to leave at lunch and finish their day remotely because you did not want to alter the parents schedules hopefully this will provide the information information needed to allow everyone even secretaries aides guidance counselors nurses csts etc to leave at lunch to avoid the issue of more than one human in a room at a time after the students leave number one i imagine a building going virtual for 14 days would be a bigger disruption to a parent's schedule than having their kids remediation period start a few minutes later number two after school programs use many rooms and displace many people this forces them to find another room to eat their lunch and finish their day where should they go number three many people have a co-teacher aide or a student teacher where should they go number four many people share a room or office space all day where should they go number five some of my students log in later than the assigned time between walking home getting dropped off by jay perez or a district bus and having to rush to eat lunch and log in maybe the parents would welcome a 1 30 or 1 40 start time for remediation number six cms students tend to log in later in the time period towards two o'clock on a normal day they may also welcome a later time number seven remediation times and scheduling are consistently changing due to academic needs family needs and the monthly break and the monthly break to test the kids for link it and report cards based on the testing our schedules change for the next few weeks we can survey parents to see who is able to take a later time if we can't make it home to eat and start by 1 number eight we are two buildings worth of students of adults and kids in one building some rooms have three to four adults during the day we have aftercare in the gym after school there are two empty rooms in our building that get used to quarantine classes when needed every room has a minimum of two adults so where are we supposed to eat if we aren't allowed to eat in the same room with our co-teachers number nine cms we have teachers without classrooms or a desk where are they supposed to eat insight workers utilize the staff room so we cannot go in there number 10 remediation time at the elementary level is 1 20 to 2 40 p.m however students are not scheduled to meet with the teacher the whole period the teacher schedules remediation specifically with the students at a set time whether they meet in a group or individually the other times the students are not in a meet the teacher they are expected to be on a learning website smartyhands epic spelling city etc this interaction is self-guided so the students can always get on at 120 and log into their learning website it would be the teacher's responsibility to schedule an appropriate start time for their meets number 11 how many teachers were denied the ability to leave at lunch are we talking about a lot or little number 12 can the cst and classroom aides also be allowed to remediate at home so that this will free up space in the buildings so i don't know if everyone knows what happened last week teachers were reprimanded because they were in a room 20 feet apart now we are not allowed to be in a room with another human and eat lunch so the question before can teachers allow mass breaks the answer is no if students can't take a mask off if i'm sorry if teachers can't take a mask off and be in a room with another human then that's probably not a good idea for students to be in a room with a mask off the question was can students have a snack or drink the answer is no if teachers can't do it 20 feet apart then it's probably better that the students don't do it either that's what this is from we don't want to be in solitary confinement teachers look forward to going to school to being in the building with their colleagues and now they don't have that opportunity we ask that you take another look at the you leave at lunch policy and allow more if not all that have that opportunity opportunity to work from home thank you address any of that um the only one that that i'm you know fairly you know able to speak on is the letters that go out um i don't know what every district does in the state but i do know that the letter that we use here is a template given to us by the department of health i mean they i have it right here it's right off their website we just plug in you know where what school they're from and etc um so this is kind of a forum letter it's not something that the district made up in any way why does that make a difference because the written that allows the reader to have a better understanding of what's going on what's the harm in saving a student staff or he other violate any input ruler at all when we get these letters we have absolutely no idea we are an extremely small school district overreach is a very large school district so again by process of elimination if we if we if we said a teacher at community school um there's not that many teachers so if teacher x was out everybody know would know that teacher x had chosen based upon a letter that that would that would be a violation of hippo so like again that's why we do what we do we have to we have to put protections in so we're following the guidance that's been given to us we're a small school district okay and what about providing us those weekly information about the numbers okay again i'm giving you letters every time that's that that's going on but if you have a letter for each one can you just count the letters well look like i showed you the overage one they give it a running lift uh the northern ortiz district has a uh uh what do you call it the uh the nashville districts of that what good is that information i i guess my question is how does that what what difference does that make versus here's a stack of letters just count you know you're getting the same information in a different way it's i mean i don't i don't see it i'm not getting the information we're not getting a letter every time there's a situation so you can't count the letters because we're not getting a letter every time there's a case is that true you're getting 11.
uh the two teachers listed here mr kevin commence and mr jose diaz at the time we're not prepared to have a completion of a contract for 2122 has since are prepared and so we'll ask the board to approve those these two men are currently teachers in our school and have received good evaluations yes i want to interrupt you but i have a question i'm sure and uh now's a good time to ask it so the administration yourself the principal hires the teachers and the custodians right we recommend them the board takes the vote so so we hire yes okay so they work for us or they work for you i'm immediate the mr mr ed under who are the principal is a media supervisor of all teachers i supervise business staff and maintenance probably more directly than mrs [Music] so we do the evaluations we supervise but for termination or hiring uh the word that takes that vote so if you recommend a a teacher for instance and we choose not to approve her then she wouldn't build it resignation of a special ed teacher rachel ronario mr nario has been teaching here three years she has at the end of her j-1 visa through the u.s state department they are allowed extension for fourth year and fifth year mr nario does not choose to ask for that extension uh this is because of personal reasons she has two children at home she wants to re-establish the relationship with us so she's asking to she's not not not asking to not have a contract without the board to know you may know the staff we'd go ahead and put on the agenda um second teachers in a similar situation after mark retiree mark is the third grade teacher at this time um he has completed his initial three years of j-1 visa work he decided thank you he decided to return to his home country after completing this fiscal year this calendar year so again we uh his his current contract is effective to uh may 27th so we wanted to make the vote the board and officially i think it's better to have the board accept the resignation than just wondering what happened to these people um mr edmund and i interviewed a lady last week via zoom she is a qualified english teacher she currently teaches in nogales um and chuchita chobardi we were impressed she's an international teacher from india her english is very very understandable so it's something to take into consideration when you interview an international teacher uh she has good recommendations and will be recommending her uh to fill a vacant english position that's going to exist again because of someone's visa running i am reading that so i keep asking these questions okay i read in the agenda here that that was pending um in an investigation she has to right now um the same immigration attorney represents ajo and that represents the district when she's coming and so he's kind of being a rock and a hard place um she wants to have a to put under h1b because her pieces on each one became the path to a green card and a citizenship eventually and um she wants to have a green card moving up the food chain it depends on the country they're from how long it takes to go from green card to citizenship uh some country may have in a couple years some it may take 10 or 12 years um that's a small fee it costs a district 480 bucks something like that uh which is an insignificant amount of money so our insurance yeah and so um but we've got to face work out the deals between now if her if her district for some reason wouldn't release her then unless she's currently under contract and as best we can understand when you talk to her she's under contract only in the end of the school year just like the other two people accepted so if there'd be a problem there or if they if they gave her uh a deal whereby they would break a precedent and sponsor that green card then she may want to save it right now she has an offer so what we want to do is get because we have several vacancies we want to get a contract to her so we got her we have her locked in for our kids in fall the next person i like item is um a math teacher we have a need for a math teacher this is a young lady from the philippines that we hired last year the board mrs robertson and mrs vitelli you may remember this person made the agenda item probably in april may of last year to offer the job through october and if she wasn't able to be released from philippines by that time the offer would be withdrawn and that's exactly what happened because of the copen 19 she was unable to gather the country and she impressed us a year ago she presses again this year so be recommending uh recommending her for the math decision the next personnel item is for the spring summer session i'm sorry spring intersection this will be this during spring break week it'll be four days monday tuesday wednesday thursday four hours of the day uh eight til noon basically and teachers will be trade 25 in an hour um mrs burns and i had a comment birds i had a conversation a while ago would be nice to have these kids on campus i don't know whether the teachers are ready for that right now it'd be a zoom session we know it's going to be safe with with cobit 19 any administrator you talk to probably any educator is going to share frustration with lack of control for teachers about what goes on in classrooms it's hard to control the screens much easier to control someone five feet from here six feet from you but i wanted to make the offer for parents so if they felt their child wasn't doing well and this will be the week after fall i'm sorry after spring break spring apparent conferences i hope that teachers will point out to parents and a little so-and-so need this extra help so and so forth to kind of do some marketing to help parents realize i was important how important is our children to keep working so we have eight people there uh they'll be paid about 125 a day so that'd be a thousand dollars a day we're talking we're talking about four thousand dollars this will come out title one money it doesn't come from mmo uh obviously it doesn't come from capital so we would recommend the approval of those teachers we hope we have responses and this is always a bit of a gamble we can't force kids to be here for intersession but we can certainly encourage which we do so traditionally how many kids do we normally have i'd say you probably have 50 60 kids typically springer fall interesting what are you expecting this year no idea it's too early to tell i can tell you over winter break mr casey and i both worked every single day and unlocking and giving retakes and things like that on tests and we had approximately 80 students participate over winter break that doesn't mean it doesn't mean we'll have that many for spring intercession but we're sure going to try i mean that's definitely one of the things that's going to be involved in the parent conferences i'm going to try and get it out thank you we're happy with personnel items this time of year it's not unusual uh the next item on personnel is a classified resignation of the custodial worker uh alex bamas herrera i'm mutually decided upon that alex probably uh would be happier elsewhere and so he did attend his resignation last week um the next one is an abandoned position by a paraprofessional um mr has worked here one or two days no she was here a few weeks but she just did not return after wondering and so we understand she's working somewhere else in town so we need to declare that position vacant it's about formality the next item is employment of a custodial maintenance worker mr daniel cotton uh early last week and he um he's been on like a um internship the last few days uh good work ethic uh mr yan's pretty pleased hopefully that'll be the long term so we could ask the board to keep bothering on this no it's fine so just anecdotal just from my experience you know the football coach and everything seems to me like we have a significant turnover in maintenance and custodial what do you what do you address that to why do you think the pay just who we hire what do you contribute i think all of those things are contributing factors i think that there's um it's hard work uh it's a it's a different schedule for some people if it's custodial staff they work from 3 30 in the afternoon to midnight with an hour for lunch where they could get eight hours the pluses are does provide benefits and does provide retirement uh but the young man i just mentioned i remember talking to him about potential retirement he's 20 years old that's a lifetime away so that's not an attractive uh addiction um we have to be right now part of it is we're pretty picky about the work they do because it's going to get worse coming 29th of march we've talked to people about that about having flat surfaces sanitized every day maybe more than once a day we're going to have classroom students help us with that because it's just not possible to do to do that isolated i think that's part of it some people think that and when i came to ajo we had two custodial staff members that worked here 30 years and i think some people think that believe that if i go to work in school district it's an easy job guaranteed we've been short two people for most of the school year i haven't been in a hurry to fill those spots just because i didn't think we needed as much as we do we have children present so uh so we do clean classrooms we've uh cleaned the school offices the district office the library the cafeteria the bathrooms it's going to get worse i think some people are fearful of that so so traditionally what you know when you read about all this they always say that it's it's better to keep employees and keep changing out employees because of the training and and everything else what in your opinion do we need to do to keep these these maintenance people longer more money would always help helps everybody right but one of the things the challenge we have is i'm supporting philosophically increasing the minimum wage i didn't vote for it four years ago or whatever that was it wasn't as opposed to i didn't vote against but didn't vote for it because we couldn't raise the price of education to make more money if i was wearing bob's grill i could raise the price of a hamburger 50 cents and pay for that one of the challenges we have is that the minimum wage is now 12 15.
some of the information is from 2019 that graduation rate and poverty rate but most of the information is from the school year 2020 a couple things i wanted to point out our classroom spending which is the amount that goes into the classroom including teachers salaries paid salaries also includes student support things like nurses and counselors also includes instructional support like our academic coaches and things like that we are at 64.9 which is up about a half a percent from last year that's good getting more money into the classroom our operational spending which is our administration plant operations and food service are comparable or below the spending of peer districts and state averages so we're right where we need to be for those things that aren't classroom spending this is disturbing the average teacher salary for cvusb teachers is almost 12 below the state average and the district's pupil per pupil spending is eight percent below our peer average and twenty percent below the state average the thing i want and they took it off of here which is um unfortunate and they haven't put it on the last couple of years because i'm looking at last year's the peers that they choose for us and this is i think similar across the state you can see um that there's a lot when you look at the peer averages versus the district averages kind of on the bottom left hand corner land in buildings 33 versus our peers at equipment is pretty comparable interest 26 dollars versus 176 dollars what that means is they have bonds they've done bonds and overrides that are adding to their budget that we do not have and that's something not every district has this has bonds and overrides but i would say most do and so that's the one reason why our per pupil spending is so much lower than the state and peer evidence and john those can be both capital and operating bond issues correct it's uh m over rights right or capital and it could be capital bonds and it could be you know just for it could be a k3 override it could be a k12 override it could be you know there's a variety of different ways of doing it but it's basically voter approved increases to tax to tax rate and that increases school budgets and um and puts us at in my mind the disadvantage um in some cases so any questions on the district spending report those were kind of the highlights that i just wanted to show but you know graduation rate 92 we're doing a great job with what we have um you know our special ed population is it says on here 15 but right now cindy what what is our popula our special ed over 17.
you all right resume open session can everyone stand for the pledge i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty all right does anybody have anything to add to the agenda can i please have a motion to approve the agenda second joe and vivian yes yes yes yes all right next item accomplishment recognition for the month of month of february the administration would like to honor the following individuals who have been nominated by staff and selected by the administration for the following awards student of the month peter swaderski third grade [Applause] peter come on up how you doing buddy congrats congrats you have a teacher here that recommended you and she's gonna come talk a little bit okay i'm gonna get you a microphone we'll let you turn around here and face everybody we're gonna we'll get some pictures in a second here so peter he exemplifies everything he would expect in a big hollow student of the month he has academics he excels in his academics he's intrinsically motivated he works really hard but the real reason that i nominated him is because of his big heart peter walks in every day he's got a huge smile on his face he's like greets everybody including me he's like hey how are you doing listens when people respond has conversations with everyone in the class um he's our one of our biggest motivators he's someone who's always cheering you on when you're doing something well and then especially when you're struggling he's there encouraging a prime example of this is a couple weeks ago we had our students come up individually and present animal research projects and peter is one of one of the students was really struggling he was had a lot of nerves about getting up in front of the whole class and peter's back there you can do this you've got this i really want to hear about your animal and even offered to go up on uh up to the front of the class and stand next to him while he presented so awesome peter's just really selfless and compassionate and i'm really proud and happy that he's part of my classes here it's awesome very nice [Applause] this guy even gives me a hug in the hallway when he sees me so that's a good thing there you go you're going to hold that and we're going to get a picture with your teacher and mr lyons and i congratulate all right thank you great okay i'll get it okay next we have a lot of visitors here um i'm gonna first call it sunny morley and sunny and along with our our middle school assistant principals uh do a lot of work overseeing our safe centers and this group of ladies i'm going to brag about you for a second because the work you've done this year has just been outstanding and the help that you've given kids and families can't be measured and so we really really appreciate it we know it's been hard and we've been you know through a pandemic you have been there working with these kids every day and we really appreciate it it doesn't go unnoticed it really doesn't uh the administration buildings brag about you and i'm gonna let sunny because she's really taken uh uh you know a lead on this project so go [Music] ahead awesome we're gonna call you up and i don't think we're gonna be able to get a full picture so uh we'll call you up and get your certificate and just i really just want to thank you all so let's uh i'll let you follow those names and i'll thank you maureen appreciated thank you becky [Applause] thank you alva really appreciate it [Applause] thank you lisa thank you samantha [Applause] thank you [Applause] cynthia matthews thank you rosie presley [Applause] dane is not here [Applause] [Music] thank you so much round two thank you so much elise i did we miss anybody okay good and i will uh usually when we have an employee of the month we allow them an opportunity to speak does anybody here want to share anything about your experience anything about your experience for the board cause they put you on the spot here it is a challenge awesome thank you and don't feel like you have to stay for the meeting you're welcome to but we know you've got a busy night so thank you so much thank you thank you [Music] oh um all right the next item is the board member code of conduct review vivian you want to read it sure i will recognize that a board member has no legal authority as an individual and that and that decisions can be made only by a majority vote at a board meeting all right thank you anybody any questions on the consent agenda can i please have a motion to approve the consent agenda motion second doug and lauren yes yes yes do we have any public comments okay superintendent's report mr gold all right uh first one is a monthly board policy review and i i believe this came up in our culture and climate committee and i'm not sure how it it was there and how that was the uh how the board policy became a discussion there but it did it did somehow and the suggestion was for me to start on the board policy review to me for me to start picking board policies that relate to topics on the agenda so that's why you see those are some random policies but each one of those policies have some sort of relation to something on the agenda tonight uh first one was board policy uh 210 organization board organizational board of education meeting that's coming up in april at the end of the meeting we're going to set a date for that meeting so this just explains when we do that we have 28 days after the election on april 6th to schedule that so that's why you'll see i have suggested a couple dates to pick from for that meeting exhibit or board policy 4 180 is the pandemic preparedness management and recovery policy just something to review obviously we're we're dealing with that every month right now uh board policy 6190 is just extracurricular activities which we're talking about athletics a little bit tonight so i put that policy in there uh 6 20 is the school calendar and day that's coming up in a in some form tonight and then 5 200 terms conditions of employment so those are just policies i thought i'd put in your package just so you can take a look at next i'm going to go to uh athletic update for big hollow middle school and i believe mr whipple's here to share a little bit about an update which only leaves then three plus us so four schools that are willing to do some conference play most of the schools are looking to do some in-house things so that's kind of what the direction we're going to right now track and field is an option along with soccer so we're going to be looking to do some things with soccer but it's unclear as to whether we're going to do a co-ed season with soccer or have the two separate seasons of boys and girls for the spring right now we're in search of a coach only because miss lessel had a baby so she's got other priorities for herself so we'll make sure that we we got that posted we'll get that filled as soon as possible um let me see here we are going to do some volleyball the boys volleyball this spring but it's more looking like we're just going to have an in-house session and not be competitive with other conference or other schools and just to kind of let you know we did have girls volleyball and cheer happening and then wrestling hasn't really been discussed within the conference but i don't think that's something that's looking like it's going to happen i think only one school had said they had wrestling and they did it virtually with their kids so that's kind of where we're at all right thanks scott any questions from the board on the athletics no thank you item c is the uh exhibit 10 it consists of a staffing plan for the 2021-2022 school year on exhibit 10 what you'll see uh is we're trying to staff based on our enrollment numbers um and keeping our class sizes as close to our goals of you know our goals are at 20 for k4 and so we're trying to keep it as close as we can to that there's a lot of financial unknowns with the uh this pandemic so right now you'll see we've we've reduced the staff by three teachers for next year for 21 22 in three positions in the uh okay for classrooms i have uh one is uh there's one retirement and and we'll shuffle one from another grade level at this point but we will as we see enrollment if enrollment does spike then we'll be responding to that enrollment spike and get teachers hired so do we have an idea how many students we're down we're down close to 100 right now yeah we're down close to 100 students and i just have no way of knowing if we're going to get them back next year or not so thank you anybody else have questions nope can i please have a motion to approve the final staffing plan for 2021 and 2022. auction second julian vivienne yes yes yes yes yes yes okay next on the agenda i'm going to refer you to the screen up here i'm going to i have some presentation i want to walk you through uh regarding some uh where we're at in just our pandemic school year and and the schedule that we've been doing so this is just my update for march i'll read through some of this i won't try to i'm trying to read every bullet but some of it i don't want to skip over so as we move forward with our focus on providing the best learning opportunities for our students close out the school year there are guiding principles that we need to keep in forefront one providing a safe learning environment for our staff and students two the social emotional well-being and health are supported three ensure that we provide the support to meet the needs of specific student groups and number four provide consistent transparent communication to our staff and to all families so those are kind of the points i want to keep in keep at the forefront in early february we we received some cdc uh revised guidance i guess updated guidance most of it was um just the i would say there's very little changes but i wanted it was it was structured differently to be a little more clear i guess in some areas so um regardless of the level of community transmission it's critical that we use the five key mitigation strategies right which i can say uh confidently to you that we are doing uh doing our best uh the best that we can at these and and in our current environment it's been pretty successful so uh using up obviously the use of masks physical this distancing hand washing cleaning and maintaining healthy facilities and contact tracing i know that we can get better in some areas but we have really all in all we've put a lot of effort to those five but the cdc does emphasize two main strategies of masks and physical distancing that's where they put their main emphasis so physical discipline becomes a difficult topic because there's uh you know the six feet is what causes us some issues and in this in this guidance they say establish school policies and implement structural interventions to promote physical distancing of at least six feet between people in areas of high community transmission physical distancing is essential the high community transmission is the key word there and so and i'll get into that here in a second this was something new they called it phased mitigation strategies and learning models basically what they're saying is i'll show you in a chart here that uh mitigation strategies face the wearing of masks and physical distancing mainly physical distancing can be can be phased differently depending on the transmission levels in the community so that's basically what that's saying i'll shift to a chart here in a minute that kind of explains that in communities with substantial and high community transmission they're saying that hybrid instruction should be included with maximal physical distancing again physical wearing a mask and distancing are required in communities with high or substantial transmission so i apologize this for those that are here i think right at home to be able to see a little better but the uh this chart shows it's a cdc chart that is new this came out in early february and it's it's tracking two two data points one is incidence rates which we've looked at all year that's the first column where it says total new or first row total new cases per 100 000 persons in the past seven days and two is the positivity so the far right where it's red that's the high transmission and in the next column where it's orange is substantial and then moderate and blue is uh low so that's their that's that's the so when they talk about communities with substantial or high transmission that's the orange and the red the 50 to 99 section and the greater than 100.
could you please stand for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all please be seated well once again good evening everyone i'd like to welcome you to the march 8th school committee meeting just a reminder for those of us in the room to please silence your cell phones if you have not done so yet and as a reminder per governor baker's otters suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law 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 reboot re-broadcast 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 will notify the public of these procedures as soon as practicable could i have a roll call please miss guenther chris oliver here shannon jenkins here kathleen emerald here mary waite john nunes yep thank you very much and uh from my colleagues and those of you watching at home our my fellow colleague mrs wake could not be with us this evening for personal reasons hope to see you back here at the next meeting as a reminder anyone wishing to comment on any of tonight's agenda items can do so by emailing our recording secretary kathleen genther at dartmouthschools.org at this time this will be typically a lot a few minutes for anyone wishing to comment on tonight's uh agenda do we have any comments at this time we do not thank you miss gentler as always please feel free to do so we will do our best to circle back and see if there's any that have come in since the beginning of the meeting and as always those minutes are made part of those uh comments are made part of tonight's uh minutes at this time chair will entertain a motion to approve the regular session minutes of march 1st 2021.
and offering some credit recovery opportunities and and see where we go darla is also working on a grant for the after-school program trying to tie in some summer learning options there as well so we have a schedule we're waiting to see if we get the grant um and as soon as as soon as we find out we get the grant then we'll share that schedule but we're trying to expand our summer opportunities for our kids and if that's the way we make up some ground even though like i say we weren't off-site as much that's a huge positive for for our students and our families so questions on that third item we'll go back to the second item here in just a second okay let's get back up to tuition reimbursement program i just wanted to talk about this um this is something we started in 2018 and uh you have to classify the certified guidelines they're listed i want to talk to you just a little bit about this and and we've had three candidates in the program and um we had one that has completed is now again working for us we have one that did not completely end up moving and leaving and they ended up having to pay back you know the fees for the tuition and paid that back in full and then we have one more that's just uh working on completing the program will be finished i think in december of 2021.
every time that's a difference and she's sending it to the staff that was something the board requested and that's what's been happening that's a whole different issue if they're not getting letters i mean having a dashboard i don't think changes um you know what yeah if it makes that is it makes skin it makes it with the dashboard what i was thinking is i know that i know that you know the state of new jersey posts numbers pretty consistently on like instagram or twitter and for me i remember when that first started happening just getting a lot of panic seeing the numbers growing um and then and then reaching a point where i was desensitized and like really matter what the numbers were as i had been overwhelmed so i don't even look at them anymore with the letters is the exact same thing we are not able to provide uh wide clothes because of how small we are we already have situations where if classrooms have to go virtual that everyone knows with the person already and it's literally just a matter of sections the only difference is there's more buildings here that can do it they're not as big but it spreads fast uh news i i think for transparency the numbers i mean the numbers are facts they're just facts it's not and then they just update it once a month and they give you that monthly total it doesn't separate out teachers and students it's just monthly total um a positive quarantine and then historical where they add it up so it has been i you know it's only updated what's that updated monthly month yeah it's not like it's a hidden number my district has something similar on theirs as well and obviously stock planes is much bigger right i mean every every example is districts that are dwarfless yeah yeah you know scatterways oak ridge has six thousand students somewhere yeah you know north london is updated every day at three right i mean how much more work does it take to put that together if it's gonna stop this you know back and forth that's the question you know the answer to that no [Music] i don't have a problem with with the running tally myself but i don't know i also don't speak for the whole board so you know you guys my only concern is when you start putting things out people misinterpret the information they make assumptions and it creates more habit you have to be prepared for that how would you say they misinterpret the numbers like if you just put just numbers on the on the screen this is how many how could that be i'm trying to understand how would that be misinterpreted i i almost feel like you get you know you get the letters over count just from the letter you know what i mean like when you get the letter you just become you're you're making up a number in your head you know so then you're that could work me up just as easily as just seeing that [Music] you know what once a month we put it on and i can easily do that once a month you know get on it will alleviate a compromise a letter for each one and then at the end of the month we tell him um they break it down by month i don't know i i have not checked everything they break it down they have it monthly and then i don't know that that means i mean monthly's better than nothing that's what i'm saying can we compromise me in the middle here and say yeah say monthly is better than nothing yeah i'm all for compromise and that's the data that already exists so you could see that the numbers are not because the letters made me feel like it's happening more but if you saw actual numbers it's just going to be numbers so you're not going to see a difference between students and teachers you're going to have a number list of will there be a disclaimer or something letting people know how many people you know tested in the district and like there was you know uh transmitting in school versus they just got it at their house see that's the thing i can't start getting into all of that no no there's nothing just the letter already tells you that whether or not there is contact that's where the letter covers that this is just the total this is just a total and these are all questions that somebody could call and ask you anyway yes these are questions that people could call and ask you so you might as well put the information out there and and answer the questions truthfully so that we're transparent that's what i mean like if we're not trying we're not i haven't i've not hidden i understand that that's what i'm saying so if this is these are questions that somebody could have asked anyway so putting the information out there is not going to i mean this isn't going away anytime soon it's a starting point yeah they were getting this monthly up until december okay and then and then it was that wasn't enough information then i had to send letters so so again this letter this is a constant changing battle of information it's never enough that there's always a change there's always more there's always something so i just i just want it it's just it's not a hardship for anybody to put it there because i have people who are doing this who are putting in a tremendous amount of time doing this work working 24 7 basically they're working weekends they're doing all sorts of stuff they're not getting a break understand these are the people who do this but this is information we already have that's just being put in one other place that's it's not new information this is not new collecting anything new this is a information we already have being put on our website that's it right in addition to the letters the letters serve a purpose and so does this i think it's just a tandem thing that needs to happen i think [Music] i don't want to see another [Music] we're being transparent we know [Music] at what point do we stop when people feel safe on a place [Music] i think if the numbers exist we know what they are we just we're just going to put them on our website whether people panic or not these are the numbers these are this is this is the truth we're not making anything up to sensationalize anything these are the numbers that exist if it was five it was five and it was 500 it was 500 those are the numbers and if they're big then people should panic if they're small then people should feel good about it but we're going to make it just more accessible just easier to find i mean if someone wanted to find out and i hear what you're saying i do find charity if someone wants to find out then the information is on the state website so what you what i'm hearing you say is that in order to make it easier to access to put it on our website but like to joanna's point what the question that needs to be raised is because we're such a small district would then and i think that needs to be really considered would that and you know to whose advantage is that to have it there would the community look at that and understand or would they become more panicked i think that's something that we need to think about maybe discuss a little bit more at in depth instead of just making the rash decision now that's just my opinion i hear both points though i mean you know it wouldn't hurt because the numbers are the numbers but you know everything actions have consequences so i just want to make sure we're putting the right way i personally didn't even know that they're on the state website i didn't even know that was a thing um yeah also i wonder how we also know that they think we have 100 less kids in our district than we do so they're clearly not real good at keeping records i'm just going to throw that out there they just shorted us 85 kids or whatever it is [Music] the only thing that those numbers don't include would be the teachers in the district unless they live in the town so the only additional information that they would get if we put the numbers on no i think we have to report it we have to record it yeah but i think it goes by their town that they live in no we have to report it to somerset so then people are gonna count the twice though i i don't know if they're getting counted twice but i know they get reported i don't know how they're doing it i really don't i can't answer that a single a simple compromise would be insert a hyperlink to the state's website on our website where you can drill down [Applause] one-time fix where you don't need to require anybody to do any work at that point right again and then it's just putting a link on it i'm looking for this i don't understand who's looking for this information i mean is it is it the teacher the about the teacher body uh is it dance this is coming from lauren so i understand it's coming from lauren but i don't know who exactly you're speaking he represents the teachers okay and and all the teachers want this information on on the website yes well no it doesn't have to be on the website if it was all the letters like does whereas please compare pairs to someone that's equal to our size overage has 6 000 students right and on a piece of paper they have the totals on the bottom if you share it with your copy it's just a so it's like the dashboard but on paper so every time there's a new letter the number goes up so every one every one of the teachers that you represent is is looking for this information well i did not take it oh well you just said you just said you said you represent all right so where are we landing on this so that we can move on i guess that's the quest we gotta get the move on at this thing i think roger's statement is probably the best one is we probably should have some further discussion revolving this it seems like you don't have a consensus from the board on where to land on this i think you know there's a variety of opinions right now i think the board should probably have a discussion about it before we land on anything so that would be my recommendation at the moment um and you know okay uh do we have anyone else from the public then we didn't have any more online that i saw okay content executive session we have to go in under we have to go under under seven um four seven and four okay uh and we will not be taking any more action after that right probably we're not taking any other action after that we'll probably we'll uh adjourn from executive session okay then we need a motion to go to executive you need a motion in a second okay second all in favor all right thank you is there another one set up no you're gonna stay right where you are i'm going to carry you in he's going to carry on his back turn you all in tom i need you up here we need if we can stop youtube now guys thank you cease end it completely yep nick i'll see you mark i'll see you
and it's one of the things i think arizona is doing well i think compared to other states is higher than those states i mean but what i find is we're having people that typically people in our organization are paid the least our custodial staff paraprofessionals and maybe some of the cafeteria staff depends on how long they've been here because of the minimum wage these people are making extremely close to what mr edlund's two school secretaries are making or even some people in my office and that's that's ugly because we demand we do demand a different skill set for people to be in the school office or district office then some of those other things are getting wasted that hurts i think that's part of it i think that we had some people last spring during the first uh coveted legislation uh we lost at least one or two people that thought they could make more on unemployment right than they could make here whether it's true or not and that all ran out uh or it is in the process of growing on this country's acts again that was a short-term solution for those people but they they got in essence some decent money they felt for over a short period of time that they didn't have to do as much work hopefully in 30 years we're making mr cotton congratulating on his retirement right well i uh and that's one of the things some of the paraprofessionals that we have lost this year have taken positions that pay more and that's one of the things here too is a retirement program that is 12.8 percent right off the top comes out of their paycheck which doesn't happen if they go to work for a non-non-state employee so it's like getting a 12.8 percent raise right away immediately not long term but immediately so those are some of the things that we have to take into consideration as well i read an article the other day that there's a company offering paramedics sixty dollars an hour to do covert testing how do i compete with that i'll take that job yeah someday i'm too soon okay uh moving on um the second one that we have a second maintenance worker um i'm sorry alex a gentleman named axel gonzalez uh again mr yan i interviewed him two weeks ago we put him in a temporary position and we've been pleasantly um impressed and so we started almost on probationary creativity david uh we added that full time this week pending the board approval we think it's going to work out so we may i'm optimistic i'm always optimistic we are optimistic we have two big candidates hopefully they'll help us a lot with custodial maintenance because it's going to become more important here in the next three weeks for the rest of the school year dr dooley he doesn't speak english yes he does oh it wasn't checked out his english is limited but he probably doesn't have people that the people he works for i speak spanish so that's not a problem he has a colleague he has two colleagues that work with at night with him they're both bilingual yeah and uh the last person we hired before these two gentlemen um i believe the time the interview lived on us off the border predominantly spanish speaking but he was impressive and his i'm impressed his english has come a long way and he's about a house in town he works off the good work and i i just i remember telling jose i can't understand halfway says but he his character just kind of exuded he had a good work ethic and that's been proven for the last couple months that's a young man named so hopefully mr axel and mr cotton do the same thing so are you guys going to be janitor are they going to be the maintenance test these two develop right now actual is working custodian night mr cotton was hired as a custodian but his mechanical skills are good enough he's got some work experience that jose right now has in one day should help him out because sometimes recently he got here on the day and when school starts he's our bus driver right now and so we have one part-time driver that usually drives sports that we'll probably use because we want to keep kids social just on the bus but that's that's running things that's in two things that's the best personnel for you thank you and the next item is discussion of the business items on eight b i'm going to ask mr edlund if you want to mine folks to talk a little bit about this as you well know um 301 plans had to be approved by the teachers um after developed by a typically by committee or by administration one of the big guys about 301 this year was maintain the school grade which we had an a b there's no school grades this year so that does not make sense for people so i asked mr hedland to meet with people and to do a vote and approve the 301 plan and the next item you'll see a list of things that are incorporated in that would you like that on that please um so to replace the one section and i believe it's in bucket two um that accounts for 25 of bucket two with our school grade um which everybody basically was relying on everybody else's but what we looked at doing was replacing that section with something that would be uh easily attainable so that they should be able to maintain a decent amount of money and would reward their participation in the other categories that we were monitoring and like i said reward their participation not necessarily achieving the goal of participation so what we did is i put we put together this categories of the six categories and we came up with if they were to submit documented effort and evidence of at least five of those six categories they would receive a hundred percent of that 25 percent four of the six would be eighty percent three of the six would be sixty percent and anything less than three women would not uh participate uh or would not receive funds from that category um we did put this out to a stop vote as well after we put it before them and we discussed everything answered any questions anyone else that didn't wasn't part of this originally putting it together voted we have 30 certified staff members 28 responded they all approved two did not respond by by the deadline um and uh no nobody disapproved of the book uh the other two that did not respond one responded five or six hours later that day and said they abstain and one responded about three days later instead they chose not um so that's kind of where we were where we were adding this so this would replace um part three i believe of the 301 portion this would replace part three of the 301 plan which is page 41.
over 17 special ed right now so we have some challenges but we're doing a great job with what we have um i have a question mr schull um in the past we've always compared whatever what we pay our teachers but with what teachers are being paid in the surrounding districts so are we're still comparable to the surrounding districts absolutely it's just that state-wide worldwide correct and so are they uh correct and actually uh prescott had an override it wasn't it wasn't a huge override but it didn't pass in november so they they have a million dollars that they're gonna lose over the next couple years if they don't pass another if they don't try to pass it again and they're going to have to make up those funds humboldt tried to do some uh i think it was a bonded override and lost both and it kind of makes sense that teachers dying the valley would make more money than the teachers up here because the cost of living down there is so much higher typically right and also the larger an districts of scale and so they can offer uh higher wages also in the big giant districts they can you know down down in the in the valley when you're when you've got a factory or you've got a lot of commercial um properties that are taxed differently at a higher rate and also you know you can pass a bond when it doesn't when it impacts commercial more and the individual tax payer less where here we rely more on our residential tax rate or taxes and so it impacts the individual more than than some other more you know urban districts penny to your question it's interesting to know what i think that the humble press get down chino valley this region this is the lowest five percent of funding in the state and you know a lot of times when we lose particularly the young teachers they end up leaving us and going a lot of times down to the valley so john our uh transportation costs is it anything more than our geography spread i would say no yeah you know we are 400 square miles is the size of our district and we have kids that have to travel like over a half hour just from there to the nearest bus stop our district almost goes all the way up to sleep there's a kind of a branch off to the to the northwest we are a giant district and we try to transport to the ends of the pavement basically where we can but when we're going out big chino road to where it's dirt and you know a lot of times that's no kids because then we start picking kids up on the way back so uh there are a lot of miles where we we don't have a whole lot of kids on the bus just because of like you say our geography all right um and in your boxes i know i see at least one of them in front of you there is an audit report and um this is rebecca's last audit and we're we were very pleased with the number of findings there are some but it's pretty pretty low compared to what it has been several years ago and it's been a consistently good audit rebecca has applied to both the gfoa the government finance officers association and what's the other one the international asbo association for school business officials for both for the certification of the audit to make you know just that kind of two additional opinions on the the strength of the audit and it's something that we do annually just to kind of give let people know hey other people are looking at this it's a good audits we're trying to be as as financially transparent as we can by having other people take a look at it yes i only have really one question on it and uh either john and if you look at the last page the page eight the findings the findings related to the financial statement reporting reported in accordance with governmental auditing standards and it says no um why aren't we or didn't we i saw that but i didn't really notice it i i could get back to you peter if you know we can talk about it i know me better than not to think i'm regular yeah no that's tough yeah no i was curious because you know there's no other technical findings but you know normally you are reliant with federal auditing standards and the node just jumped out at me right yeah if you would just get back to me and send you see if there's anything we need to do or what was the deficiency what we didn't do and then got that no rating okay thank you and um lastly staff members of the month i want to thank donna webb of jed's sandwich shop she supports our um staff members of the month we she goes around with us to take the pictures gives them a little goodie bag that kind of thing and hugs when we can so she's she's a very good supporter very strong supporter of the district so i want to i want to acknowledge donna at territorial we had patty hust which is our teacher of the month and kim martinez our classified member of the month at del rio we had janice tiffany our teacher and tony johnson our classified member at heritage we had stacy krug our teacher and nancy shields was our classified at the high school it was mark parmeeter was our teacher paul perez are classified and our district staff member of the month is rosa maria karate who's our ell coordinator and our ell teacher at the high school so um people doing fantastic things for the district and really supporting the district so any other questions from mr shulk with this report thank you all right moving on to agenda item 7v2 i'm sorry 7v1 here's our financial reports thank you mr phil advised me to come forward and speak from the microphone here so we're short of mike so okay yes that's why i'll be doing this so maybe in the future i can just sit there with eye contact good opportunity for me so this was a real pleasure to put this report together i'll just draw your attention to the first stage here the budget summary and it's kind of a function of encumbrances and it shows on the far right there the advantage of the conferences in our maintenance and operating fund 3.75 of the 14.6 million dollar fund is now free like budget balance remaining there and again it's easy to see that salaries once we open our doors in july have to be encumbered so if you have an x amount you're paying someone you encumber that and we also have quite a few other things that are encumbered that will just continue to be closed and paid off and received so as that percentage increases this percent will will continue to climb and the budget available will continue to decline so we just have to watch expenses with controllers so any any questions on that that's really all i had a couple more comments but that is going to come higher as these encounters and different things uh just real quick there i think you're familiar with this the way we run that grant expenditures and encumbrances if you go to the second page there's a little note there there's six funds there that have really late revenues so we keep them in the black by transferring cash into those funds to pay those bills because the county is really aware of the pressure on these funds and we want to keep those in the black as we go along and transfer funds into them to pay expenses and then bring those back out because their own revenues this year and i think the district's in tremendous financial shape i've looked at a few other districts in the state and copenhagen has really had an impact as you know in lots of occupations i'm sure it has here to a degree but i think [Music] much better shape than some other districts so any questions for me on this report i worked very closely with rebecca bart ellis to get this done accurately and she was here last thursday night for about three and a half hours pulling drawers and give me a really nice tour of everything so i think it's i think it's very accurate that's wonderful thank you so much any questions all right well while we're out there let's go ahead and go on to item 72 the student activity funding any questions good job welcome very excited to have them it was a good transition thank you stick out on the activity thank you we appreciate it thank you this is actually going to be larry foamer he's our the president of seattle thank you man our president members of the board so um i am the chairperson for the cia committee uh this year and actually last year um before it got cut short with the pandemic uh for those of you don't know the sea ac is a board policy policy gbb which involves the staff involvement in decision making within the district and we're really there to encourage staff involvement in various activities throughout the year some of them reoccurring some of them year to year and it's a really good avenue of passing out information and getting feedback from the staff especially this year with with everything going on with cobin a lot of questions this year we kind of had to make a standing agenda item of the covet update because it was just really just kind of took over most of our meetings with a lot of the questions and concerns and this year was the first year we ran it virtually so and then in person later on with uh some people were comfortable being face to face so it's made up of uh varying people throughout the district some of our experienced teachers some of our newer teachers make up for the committee we have an administrative position we have positions that come from transportation maintenance food service various support departments uh district office so we want to get uh involvement and feedback from all these locations those are the locations that will choose their member have kind of a vote if if it's not the one person that stands still and everybody stands back type vote but so they they choose that is that individual's responsibility they go back to their group their cohort and uh communicate questions and concerns uh some areas a little more active than others but um that they are kind of their representative if you will of their concerns of of whatever's going on uh typically items that are covered every year school calendars are covered i know a few years ago some of our certified staff came to us and wanted things to start a little earlier on that first week of school so they had more time to get the students uh associated it kind of learned the standard procedures of the day especially at the younger grade levels up here here we're going to the launch and so we were able to john was able to take that back to dlt and we were able to make those modifications the school calendar to meet those needs other items we typically try to look at policies in the g section which is the pretty much personnel section and i know later tonight we have we have one of those for first reading for you to look at uh salaries are always looked in there insurance things of that nature and really you know with time permits we kind of cover a lot of other things that sometimes we scratch our heads but if it's important to our staff it's important to us and we we try to address those as best we can and i know john does a very good job being transparent to that he really puts out a lot of information to the staff get that out and we feel good we eat them and [Music] [Applause] both down and up to a degree it can be a lot a lot of it is communication but there are you know some staff members come in and say you know we don't like this or we do like that or what not and then we can address can we address a policy to change things and a lot of a lot of our communication this year we had stuff around uh leave and how can we be used and like later tonight you'll see one on the bank so we want to just kind of make sure that our policies are up to date because things change or opinions change and we really want to try to make things as useful as possible i think one of the themes this year when it came to leave was how do we keep people from misusing leave and try to offer uh changes to that so but we don't want to make too many changes too quickly because then you don't know if things feel good what was the the pro the part that made it better or on the flip side if things get worse that way we can kind of make one change at the time so all right does that answer your question yeah very very very much so you want to talk a little bit about the recognition also that came out that was another yes what are the other things that we we're going to be doing this year which didn't really necessarily revolve in policy but every at the end of every school year we do a staff recognition meeting i know some of you have attended that and we honor uh employees for years of service retirement employees that are going to be retiring in the past we actually going to make two changes to that this year the first change is that we typically would honor continuous years of service so if somebody had worked for us for seven years taking some time off to maybe start a family or moved on then came back those years of service would then start over one and the previous seven would kind of be in the you know it was the past we didn't we didn't recognize that we felt that it was better to make that change where we honored total years of service because i know mr fogel you were a teacher of mine years ago left came back so that way we're recognizing total years of service that you've given to china valley school district and that wouldn't have to start all over because those awards that we had now are based upon those years of service the second change that we we propose that we're going to be doing is at 20 years uh staff were awarded an apple a little thing i don't know if you've seen those but then in 25 years it went back to a pin 30 years because we do every five year increments we felt that if you get a nice little apple award to 20 years that we need to increase that recognition award as opposed to heading back down so we're going to be working with the ag department who has a torch machine that can cut out kind of customizable metal images and really identify who which staff members are going to be at those 25 to 30 year marks and maybe talk with their peers and say you know what what does this person like and then create them something that's unique to that individual to honor those years because i think that needs to be celebrated more and not diminish that so we're we're kind of re between those i know i'm working with karen we're revamping our uh our list of staff members and where their years of service are at now that we're changing that and then trying to identify who is eligible then for the 25 and 30 year awards and moving forward so we can we can honor them better so that was another thing that came out of the cia group this year good question yeah thank you um so does this is a cf responsible for looking at and reviewing the exit interviews no when a teacher leaves them no we don't who does that and every shelf shall work shelley our human resources coordinator and i do that yeah okay because we have a question on that so larry how is participation determined and could you comment on the level of participation i'd say the level of participation is is high for the most part i think this year we had a few vacant spots just i think people were a little concerned about um participating um how they're chosen is again through their their groups so if you're a teacher who has is it greater than three years job it's three or more and it said more than three or less than four or three t plus three or ten minus zero so there that that that group of individuals would then nominate somebody vote on that or that they would become the member um there are not a normal year i would say there are rules about attendance if you miss so many days or so many meetings in a row you can be excused but i'd say attendance is fairly high if people aren't going to be there they will inform us of their absentee so they are nominated by their groups so i i represent the district office um on the committee i know brandy represents administrators on the committee brian who was last year back there he was all there and then we got and then within that group on the first meeting we nominated the chairperson the vice chairperson and the secretary and it's just it's a year-long term there's no limit so if somebody wants to keep coming back year to year to year they're more than welcome i presume classified certified administration are all represented yes one support from every building for every school comes and then again there's a transportation there's a maintenance each department major department i'd say has it food service at one point where we did have food service in-house so we we we do have a mix of everyone so which can be interesting when we get a very talkative bus driver or the uh of the committee sometimes you have to make it very chatty but we try we try to keep it positive because it is very easy to dwell on the negative of the meetings and so we start we start the meetings with a with a positive note you know introduce yourself and tell me something that's that's good about the site you're at so we really want to drive the positive in this and not turn it into a complaining session so yep and we keep it focused we keep meetings to about an hour as best as possible any other questions questions very involved all right item eight a through k is our consent agenda this is an action item so i would appreciate a motion or make a motion to approve the consent agenda is there any discussion on this case all right all in favor item 9a personnel report mr schultz there is a supplement so please make sure you refer to the personal report and the supplement we have two new classified subs two new certified 10 resignations one retirement two certified changes five classified uh changes five coaches um seven coaches rescinding stipends i'll explain that in just a second what that means uh three extra duties and thirteen time sheets which i also want to talk about the coaches rescinding stipends these were offers of contracts for middle school athletics that never took place and so we're actually we're sending those contracts just because the the season never happened the employees the coaches didn't do anything wrong this is nothing nothing having to do with them it's just a procedural um thing to kind of clean things up a little bit so um and also the 13 timesheets which is on the supplement um that's exciting um i uh at the high school this weekend they had the pass program which was discussed by heidi um a little while ago we had i think 20 out of the 28 show yeah we had 20 show and a couple had students had already taken advantage and taken because they had one class so they took advantage and got that taken care of ahead of time and then on saturday we had seven kids some were from friday that still had to finish but it was very successful so again this is um these are time sheets for teachers to come in and help our seniors get caught up from the first semester to help them graduate and i do also want to mention this is a higher rate than normal that we pay for teachers and this will be something that we want to do for summer school the reason for that is we want to ensure that we have teachers we want to make sure that we get teachers to help our kids during this time and so we want to offer them a little bit more it's normally 25 and we're offering 35 an hour but this is a way to ensure that we have the staff in place and the right staff in place to help our kids be successful and so we're going to ask for the same rate at summer school as well okay um other than that it's fairly normal stuff what's exciting is we're hiring teachers we do have openings but um and i think i got a text from julie that you just hired two this afternoon i did so um you know i know brandy's hired some and uh carolyn has hired and and we're filling special ed positions which is exciting and i'm not going to talk about the high school because they are doing just fine but um we won't talk about them they're they're doing great so um you know it's it's i don't want to jinx us but we're doing the the what's going on with with hiring right now is is uh pretty encouraging good question yes now not in the packet i'm sick of the resignation or i guess i should just say number six is that after reading the letter is this going to be no i don't know you're talking on the regular sheet yeah or there's because there's a number six resignation on the supplement also [Music] um any other questions this is an action item please to approve tonight's personnel report in supplement all in item favor the 21 22 employee benefits uh mr schultz all right so this is our insurance um you are approving our insurance benefits for employees and just so you know as board members you are eligible um during open enrollment to get health insurance for the district you just have to pay the whole amount the district doesn't pay that but you're welcome for you and your dependents um to to opt into the district insurance if you choose to um i was actually kind of excited um kairos's pool increase for all members of kairos was seven percent um some districts like ours who may have had rather high loss ratios so we actually paid less into kairos than what our employees build out because of of whatever and so we actually were upside down so they added another percent to ours to help cover that um i'm i'm kind of excited about eight percent i was i was hoping that we were going to be below 10 was my goal and i wouldn't have been surprised it was over ten so eight percent is good um it's a hundred and thirty two thousand dollars about eighty-five percent um or about ninety five thousand is m o the rest are dependent insurance so um if like somebody buys family insurance or spouse insurance that's part of it and also grants a make up part of that there's no change in the types of plans that we're offering if you recall there is a change in our network providers going from blue cross blue shield to united health care and also that's the people that process the claims are going from blue cross blue shield it's not called united health care it's but it's a different it's like somebody associated with united healthcare is going to be processing the claims our health savings accounts are going to stay the same our flexible spending accounts are moving from basic to health equity um which is perfect and then there is i'm trying to think a little bit increase in health insurance but that doesn't impact the district because health insurance has paid 100 percent and vision 100 by the employee okay there's also a slight increase in that we learned today in our life instruments that we offer employees it's like 63 a month for employee health insurance coverage that's increasing so what we're asking for tonight is approval of the 2021 2022 employee benefits plan yes john as i understand the basic individual rate went from 575 to 621 our basic plan was that um uh 2600 2500 hdh hdhp 2500 the high deductible health plan right that stands for yeah and uh so that basic rate went up but the district is picking up that increase correct yeah so i did agree that correctly correct so the staff will not see an increase in their insurance this year over last year they will there will be a free option for them that will remain the same then they can choose this to make up the difference which would be two hundred and twenty four dollars to go to a copay plan yeah the hot the higher plan the higher plan the basic plan though is gonna be no no cost of the employees super that's what i want to hear you say yes right and then also they have the option they can go to a 5 000 deductible plan and the difference which would be 138 dollars get put into a health savings account for them right um and then they can either supplement that or they can actually use that money to help pay offset any um family health insurance also so they can make their family health insurance a little cheaper but you're absolutely right there is the 2500 plan currently is free to employees and it will remain free to employees thank you yep and the hsa the health savings account that can roll from year to year it doesn't have to be used up at the end of the year correct there's a 30 i think this year it's like 36.50 is the max but they um they they can't they can roll over an unlimited amount they can actually take some of it once they get two thousand dollars they can actually invest it in in like mutual funds and things like that through uh the health savings account company um if they have the copay plan they can do what's called a flexible spending account which you can only roll over i think five hundred dollars and it's like only 2500 i think is the max that you can put into a flexible spending account this is an action item so if you have a motion please president i'd like to move approval of item number 9b our employee benefit plan a second please discussion marks or questions all in favor aye aye thank you item 9c job description amendment 4.
now if you remember the the numbers that i was pointing to with the lake county health department it was like 14 it was a key number that's an average daily average so to get to this chart you'd have to take whatever lca health department puts out there and take the time seven so the health department's number of 14 you take that times seven that's 98 that's the uh that's equivalent to that hundred marker there so that's why the health department is using 14 per day um and so the numbers line up they're just calculated a little differently so so anyway that's the cdc chart it's very similar to what we've been using this is our current status right now big hollow and again the challenge here is where do we get our data from and is the data accurate and uh um we have been about two weeks ago that when the date when this new guidance came out the health department told us the local health department told us that they were going to eventually they were going to kind of take their dashboard off and just refer to the cdc because things were coming out so fast in the cdc so i kind of just scrapped theirs because the data was not coming quickly it was sporadic so i scrapped theirs and there's a link and i think i have it in this presentation there's a link to a cdc website that gives us these numbers right down to our county so i can get i can pull up lake county and i can get these numbers so the number today as of today this morning when we checked the the current transmission rate was 94 point the incidence rate was 94.32 for lake county that puts us in the substantial so we just dipped under the 100 we just dipped from red to the orange column the positivity rate has been really good in lake county it's less than we're three percent which is great the bullets at the bottom are are taken off of the cdc website but it says if if the two indicators suggest different levels the actions corresponding to the higher threshold should be chosen so since we're we have one indicator in the substantial and one in the blue they're saying that you know any any uh actions that we take should be considered that we're in the orange but um if you look at our local the lake county health department right now shows that our rates are down at 10 uh which we take that times seven and where it'd be like 70.
so moved second motion by mr noon second by mrs amaral on the motion any further discussion chair hearing none all in favor aye aye opposed i'm going to abstain since i was not present motion passes three to zero with one abstention next up on our agenda is our for the first time i think this year our student representative report i'd like to take this opportunity to welcome dartmouth high school student our 11th grader evan garcia evan good evening welcome thank you for being here thank you for having me if you want to start off uh be just telling us a little bit about yourself i think that would be a great start and then we'd love to hear what's going on over at dartmouth high school thank you so my name is evan garcia and i'm a junior here i'm a member of the student council and i was elected to be one of the um the student council representatives to this school committee along with morgan mello who will be at the next meeting i'm active in winter track and unified athletics including unified bowling and unified track and i am also involved in debate here at dartmouth high school despite the difficulties of this year dartmouth high school remains active and engaged we recently had our senior superlative awards night in which the class of 2021 had to be creative and think outside the box to present the senior superlatives virtually and you can view this on dc dhs tv media in dc tv we have also started our fall two sports season with 207 athletes across four different sports football track cheer and unified basketball our coaches and student athletes are working very hard to conduct a safe and productive athletic season we also have many clubs and activities underway including unified bowling which thanks to the engineering department's help now has retractable bowling alleys in dartmouth high school right now which is very cool i'm a member of that and it's really impressive what they have done with that we also have a new e-sports team which competed for the first time last week against the monty tech bulldogs and shanahin valley tech and which was very successful in both and people can watch that on twitch.tv dartmouth hs our indoor percussion is working very hard right now with weekly virtual performances and recordings including uh making it to semifinals at the winter guard international competition sophomore hannah lima made it to the massachusetts state finals for poetry out loud which was also very impressive i think that's the furthest a dartmouth high student has ever made it in that competition we had a debate competition a few weeks ago i'm a member of debate and i actually got first place overall in group discussions um sophia way and ali hijazi got second and third place in the novice extemporaneous speaking category so dartmouth is very successful at that last week we had our tedx presentations as i'm sure many of you are aware and as always that was a huge success the topic was very timely it was sociology moving forward one step at a time and the participants did a great job with their presentations i'd recommend everyone watched if they haven't already and it was on a wide variety of very interesting topics which the public can see on dhs tv media's youtube channel and on dc tv we're also working very hard with guidance at the high school we're picking our classes for next year and meeting with our guidance counselors about future plans and class requests are end by march 12th we're working for the ap exams which have been more fluid this year than in years prior so we are having ap assemblies during taste this week this week is also national foreign language week at our school with spanish day on tuesday chinese day on wednesday portuguese day on thursday and multicultural day on friday and last but not least our school as many of you know has a new therapy dog augie which brings a smile to everyone's face and has become a beloved member of the high school community so thank you and that's kind of my update on the high school which as always is very active this year excellent well thank you for once again for being here evan that was a great overview i love love to hear all the time about the happenings here at dartmouth high school heard a lot of positive things about augie as well uh so i'll turn it over to any of my colleagues for any uh comments uh questions forever i'm aboard nice glad to have glad to have a student rep back thank you i'm glad to be here great yeah that's all i have for you just uh welcome you're more than welcome to stick around if you'd like or you're more if you have some homework that needs to get done please feel free yeah this is going live so i do actually have a little bit of homework but completely understand thank you thank you for coming out yeah thank you thank you and next up on tonight's agenda we have a couple of presentations a good resolution mister oh i'm sorry yeah i skipped i crossed out the consent item but we skipped over the resolution uh turn it over to dr gifford for resolution 21-03 employee request for unpaid leave okay seems the year of the the year of the request i guess with craziness but we have another request for one of our tas as you have that in front of you and um fortunately she will probably be not have to use much of this because her students is a grade five student so with our with being set to bring students back she is only requesting obviously those days when her child is home right now cohort a she's working so once again we support the requests for this leave it's unpaid leave okay thank you very much my colleagues any comments or questions on resolution 21-03 make a motion we approve resolution 21-03 as uh explained by the superintendent second motion by mr nunes the second by dr jenkins on the motion any further discussion yes dr jenkins so this seems to me i know we were doing this because this is how the contract is written it also seems like perhaps this is something we don't need to be involved in because we're completely deferring to really your judgment about staffing budget and those sorts of issues is this sort of on the agenda for i know we can't but at least taking up the issue to sort of resolve this because i think some of our other contracts the leaves do not have to come before us certain categories exactly and the ta only have so many categories and i think um like the teachers have a section where they it's kind of like they are i guess guaranteed their position when they return and i think you know some of the tas are worried because they don't have that language so um not that we guarantee anything these days right but um but i i guess i would say i would feel more comfortable with the decision-making authority resting in your hands yeah because that's essentially what we're doing we're deferring right right the fair point yeah and maybe with us coming to the end of hopefully all of it we won't have too many more correct yes i mean i don't think it ever really came up because it was not a common thing probably yeah yeah not since i've been here as far as i recall right so yep that's it sorry that's all right anything else you're hearing none all in favor aye aye opposed motion pass is four to zero all right now we can move over to presentations i'm just so excited to see what quinn has in store for us uh turn it over to dr gifford to introduce uh sure so i will introduce our principal obviously mr granfield and i'm sure he is going to introduce his his associates here his colleagues and bring us a fabulous presentation from quinn sure thank you very much and thank you for this opportunity to present our spotlight on quinn i'm here with mrs yamilovich and mrs thomas the two assistant principals so in previous years we've been very fortunate we've been able to have students here present to perform different things if you recall a couple years ago we had students come to talk about various movement breaks and they actually did a dance to our go noodle presentation other years we've had our fifth grade peer leaders come and talk about the various work that they're doing throughout the community other years we've been able to have students come and talk about pbis and our pbis rallies and what they like about pbis how it makes students feel good unfortunately this year we're not able to have students present to to present to you but we have been able to put together a video the video really [Laughter] thank you pay no attention [Laughter] the video that we've put together hopefully captures the day in the the life of a quinn student so like many districts obviously all districts we're adhering to social distancing requirements students are wearing masks but so many things about the school day are very similar we've made adjustments to many different things but they're still happening so for example i mentioned the peer leader program this year we have close to 40 peer leaders and they're still doing great work throughout our community um our pbis we're still doing pbis we're still having rallies it just looks different and we're hoping that that's captured in tonight's video that we have for you and as mr granfield mentions the best part of this night and i know that we all look forward to it is hearing from the students directly so when you watch the video you'll see the students responding to different prompts that we gave them their responses are very funny and they're truly authentic they'll make you laugh and smile before we get to the video we just wanted to say how very proud we are of the quinn of all quinn students we have asked them to do something over this year that has absolutely not been easy but every day those kiddos make it look easy they really truly do they're dedicated they're flexible and as everybody always says they're resilient as you know children are but they show it when we ask them to do these different things so it is absolutely remarkable and we're just so very proud of everybody at quinn right now we'd also be remiss if we didn't mention our amazing quinn staff of course all of the adults that come into quinn every day through our doors are there for kids and they as well just as the kids are they're flexible they don't know when they come in what we might ask them to do they don't know what roles they might have for that day could be very different than their regular role but they come in they give us a smile when we ask them if they don't mind changing their day up a little bit they're flexible and without our quinn staff we wouldn't be where we are today so we want to make sure we mention them as well before we start our video on welcome to quinn thank you for years we have been working on character traits such as flexibility perseverance kindness and empathy now more than ever in the middle of a pandemic these effective traits are the backbone of our building pushing us forward despite the unknown although it may look a bit different this year the foundation remains the same the staff at quinn's school has modeled flexibility and perseverance meeting their students needs in various ways as you all know every day is different and brings new challenges students are making progress and moving forward in the middle of a global pandemic the only way we have been able to do this is through the collaboration and unity our staff provides daily balancing all the demands and education and life throws at us we would like to take this opportunity to give you a snapshot of moments at the quinn school although the pandemic has had its challenges positivity and perseverance have made their mark [Music] now that you've taken a sneak peek into the building let's hear from our students one thing i love at quinn's school is my classroom my teacher and also my class is doubles and i think that's really good to learn about because it's like there's so many facts about him six plus six is twelve which is actually a little harsh i linked that like in first grade kindergarten i was like learning about how two books and one thing i loved about i love about coin is teachers and like there's so many things i love about coin and i like nurses are like my friends like principals and i love coins i'm isaac vr i'm in second grade in dr leandro and misty's second grade class one of the activities i like at school is recess because i'm able to play with my friends one of the games we play is dragons hi my name is judy thomas i'm in mrs vieira's second grade class my favorite thing about clean school is having mrs vieira as a teacher she she's silly and she makes school fun hi my name second grade is my favorite part of print is that i get to see my friends in person hi my name is gracious from mrs vieira's second grade class one of the things i love about clint school is that when we do art with mrs racine we get to be creative and we get to use pain another thing i like about queen's school is that no matter what miss beer makes learning fun hi my name is lauren rose wells from mrs eruda's third grade class i really liked feathery focus because i got to learn about birds and about their habitat what they eat because of the shape of their beak and their body parts i liked when the presenter showed the models of the penguins and other birds i really liked feathery focus my name is olivia swanson and i'm in mrs borane's third grade class i love clinton's school because i love being able to learn in person with my friends hi my name is amber pollock i'm a miss boyani third grade class at quinn's school i love learning about the lloyd's center's feathery focus my name is addison thomas from miss movie googly's fourth grade class i have mastered the line tool the line tool is a tool where you can split your slides into parts i i use this tool to split it into two different parts because i compare things with it one of my favorite things about school is music mr silva always makes music fun and entertaining hi i'm cameron stoll from mrs fortin's fourth grade class one technology i've learned from this year is you could change your background for your computer and upload pictures from websites to change that to your background my favorite thing about this shoe was actually having my best friend in class and seeing her in person hi i'm ava vera i'm in miss bolton and miss mattis fifth grade class one technology tool i learned this year is how to change color and font in google slides one memory i have in fifth grade is the egg drop the egg drop is where we we made something we put the egg in it and we dropped it off the ladder mine didn't break hi my name is miranda francis from miss bolton miss madden's fifth grade class a tech tool that i learned this year is how to split my screen this is helpful because if i'm reading an article i can read the article and answer the questions at the same time one thing i'll remember about fifth grade is that i went to school during a pandemic hi my name is ella sorensen and i'm from miss meta and miss bolton's fifth grade class one tech tool that i've learned this year is how to bookmark it's helpful so that way i can press on it it'll bring me right where i need to go one of my favorite memories from this year is we got to make exponentials it was fun because we got to decorate them and work in groups [Music] that's it so that's what we're trying to get sorry that's the conclusion of the presentation um i hope you like it and would be happy to answer any questions promise they might have no i'll just say um you know i think as usual as usual it's just great to see the kids you know like you like the three of you said of course would be much better if they were right here in front of us and in the building with us but you know this is the next best thing right and it just goes to show you the resiliency that some of these kids have some of these students have and just some of the things that they pick up on it's nice to see that you're you're running you're running a school day as normal as possible given the circumstances and that's that seems to be the trend and um kudos to you and your staff for a job well done you know i i it goes without saying that everyone is doing their best um in my opinion just you can see it on these students faces so um thank you great thank you my colleagues i mean i'll just agree i mean i think it's great it's great to see the kids and to see them you know enjoying enjoying school which is which is really a blessing for them in these times so thank you yeah i like my colleagues and you know just watching their enthusiasm and you know everybody knows my wonderful computer skills and uh you know the fifth grader talking about learning how to bookmark you know and that type of fantastic and their enthusiasm and you know i wish it was better and i like chris has missed the kids being here and seeing their enthusiasm but this is just as good nice job thank you i second everything that they said i love mrs vieira too [Laughter] we had her in second grade uh no just you know i think uh it deserves to be mentioned that this is a wonderful video showcasing uh the reactions of these students and how you are just doing such a great job during this time all while sort of having within your school community the a myriad of student needs that you are really doing doing your best doing a great job at making sure that their needs are met and i mean from the beginning reentering initially with the high needs students i mean you were there on the front lines you your staff and and those students and so i commend you for how effortless you make it look and we all know it's it takes a lot of effort but you do it with grace and with a smile on your face and you've got a lot of a lot of great things happening within your school community so thank you kudos to you thank you very much thank you all for being here thank you be safe and have a nice night thank you have a good night it's always the best part of the night getting to school thanks have a good night our next presentation turn it over to dr gifford we have an update on our district yes district pupil support yes thank you very much so tonight we have um miss townsend here to give us that presentation and um one of the things she'll be talking about is we recently had an audit of our pre-k program so that kind of brought it to light that it was time to have a presentation for a sped program so we'll look forward to that thank you so much i want to thank the committee for giving me the opportunity to share a little bit about what's happening in special education in this very unique year so i wanted to begin while you know it's never ideal to start with the challenges i do have a lot more celebrations that i want to share with you so i thought i'd open with a couple of slides on just some of the things that we've been facing in regards to the 20 20 21 school year i i don't want to spend too much time obviously we have the global night the cover 19 global pandemic which has had a major impact on the landscape of education um and it certainly has included changes in the way that special education services are provided so i just want to commend just over and over again our teachers and staff the most amazing individuals who have shown grace and flexibility um i know you just heard mr granfield and mrs thomas and mr irmilovic say the same i just want to echo that grace and flexibility as we navigate how to provide special education in the face of a global pandemic and so i highlighted some of our greatest challenges while it's certainly not an exhaustive list this school year we really needed to first and foremost provide robust services that are in alignment with students ieps which includes the use of both in-person and remote instruction second we needed to navigate challenges that are related to providing services for students that might have been quarantined so students might be out of school for a period of two weeks at a time and we need to make sure that while the quarantine was in accordance with state guidelines related to pandemic we also had to keep special education in mind we did struggle with staffing our related services throughout the year there was a natural spillover that was caused by social distancing many of our related service providers do not have full-size classrooms and so certainly the number of students they could take in a group with six feet apart was far less than you know a classroom those that have full-size classrooms groups needed to be smaller which means that blocks of time were increased and fourth we needed to provide students with support related to the hybrid learning model which is one that they had not had they had a little bit in the spring but really it was their first full year with this hybrid learning and there were some unique challenges that came from learning remotely every other day so i want to transition over to our celebrations and some of the things that i am certainly most proud of in our district and some of the wonderful things that are happening so first and foremost around the topic of service delivery which is certainly the core of special education students this year received specialized instruction that was consistent with their ieps whether it be in person or remotely google me continues to be the primary modality for specialized instruction that is provided remotely and in-person specialized instruction of course does uh incorporate those health and safety requirements due to the pandemic students in our specialized programs that's our pals past and paths have received in-person instruction five days a week since september and in addition there are several students in the district it's uh currently 38 uh district-wide who are not program students so in addition to those that are in programs an additional 38 who have been identified as high needs by their iep teams and those students have also been attending uh school in person five days a week shortly after the iep meeting where the team determined that that was required so that wasn't always in september that was throughout the year over the past few months there's been some really robust work around accommodations and modifications so teachers and related service providers continue to provide the accommodations and the modifications that are consistent with ieps whether students are in person or remote so first in a hybrid model on those days that they are learning remotely they can get synchronous accommodations and modifications during google meets throughout the day and again depending on the building or the grade level of the student there are also extra support opportunities while they're learning at home things like virtual check-ins or office hours that the teachers hold are available as a way to have that synchronous connection throughout the day even though they are learning um from home or from a remote location so this is something that you know i have to say it has was when we first rolled out virtual teams which was in the spring of 2020 last school year i think that it was something that was seemed like probably our biggest challenge how to take the team meeting which by nature is is beautifully authentic to be an in-person around a table and discussing students progress and really transitioning that into a virtual platform seems to be almost impossible and i must say that now that we have been doing this for almost a year with virtual team meetings i am so so impressed and continue to be impressed with the way that we've utilized zoom as a platform that really has created some robust conversations and in many ways we've replicated the in-person team process even though we are on zoom so it really was a seamless transition because teachers were used to doing it in the spring of 2020 kicking the school year off right in september with meetings using zoom and again the feedback in general has been really positive um i think parents have have made comments that it's nice to be able if they do have a job that allows for maybe a lunch hour or a break where they can step away to somewhere private and maybe not take a day out of work because they weren't traveling that was something that you know was really kind of highlighted by some parents virtual team meetings continue to run very smoothly and i just want to highlight and i i think um you know this is important that team meetings are virtual but we continue to use traditional mail for mailing out all of our special education paperwork so i wrote here ieps and evaluation consent forms but really all special education paperwork that gets mailed we are using the traditional mail so that's coming to the homes as it always has prior to the pandemic so there's been continued collaboration with families and again pre-pandemic families have always played such an integral role in the success of students with disabilities that has not changed but during this year their roles really have been enhanced and really have been that much more key to student success service providers that are on students ieps they're communicating with families using phone email google meet zoom whatever works best for the parents to increase student success at home and the input from families at team meetings has been really robust this year as they sit in the virtual teams and they are able to describe really in great detail the highs and lows of remote learning of the hybrid model of how special education has been provided in this very unique and unprecedented year so again there's also been continued collaboration among staff members not this was always a strength in dartmouth from well before the pandemic but even more so what we're finding special educators general educators related service providers are finding even new ways to collaborate i just wrote as an example an impromptu google me to brainstorm strategies for a student is not uncommon um that's something that has happened quite a bit this year and maybe never happened before before you know the pandemic was upon us what i find is that service providers are sharing techniques um and strategies for how to maximize student success on remote days it truly is just a commitment and a dedication to making every student succeed and do their best team meeting team members rather are sharing data to ensure that students are continuing to meet their iep goals and objectives and so that's been a really positive and wonderful celebration and there is a third section but before i get to the third section i do want to pause at this time and just really um again i know i started in the beginning but send a very special thank you we have just over 120 staff members in special education and this certainly you know not to get choked up but this has been a very very challenging year for each and every one of them for the students for the families so what i just want to say while i'm here on school committee is a very special thank you to each and every one of them they've given a hundred and fifty percent to make sure that our students with disabilities are supported i see it i see you your passion your dedication your tireless work i thank you and as a further extension a special thank you to our parents and families again i am a parent of three two are in school and a hybrid model in another district so i certainly have been able to very accurately wear the different hats that are involved with the clover 19 pandemic and i thank you thank you thank you to all the parents and families who have supported their children at home during this unpre unprecedented time we are so very grateful for your collaboration so i just wanted to to put that in because the next section is more administrative information um for the committee related to probably the biggest um i guess initiative this year which is our preschool program evaluation so i wanted to share a few slides with you a little bit about that and some of the information from that so first and foremost our preschool program evaluation was born from our most recent tiered focus monitoring which was conducted last school year so the state was on site in person in december of obviously three months later the world shut down as it may but we were able to get our report um actually before march or right around march so um one of the things that was identified in tiered focus monitoring is that we were required to conduct a program evaluation this year so um yes it is a pandemic yes we were battling some of those challenges but we absolutely were able to get it done and actually we did get it done ironically although it was not intentional right around the same week that this a year later from when the state had visited so our preschool program evaluation occurred on december 9th 10th and 11th it included staff survey staff interviews classroom visits to both the cushman school and the potter school because we have a preschool classroom there and the program was the program evaluation was conducted by dr carolyn mckerney and linda cullen who are both from south coast educational collaborative who have done this work and really have a lot of knowledge around preschool special education i respect them both a great deal so i just wanted to share um two slides and there is kind of a lot of information but i really wanted to highlight as many of the identified strengths and some of the recommendations that came out of the process so first and foremost the most important thing that they highlighted and spent a lot of time talking about was the overwhelming awareness and support for the inclusion model as it relates to preschool special education and to take it one step further they also very much notice through staff interview through observations through visits that the vision is shared it's modeled and it's embedded into the practices of the dartmouth preschool staff members so again kudos to them for for really um you know embodying that vision and showing um just in everything that they do on a daily basis they made mention because i think it's hard not to of the outstanding coven 19 protocols and not just that we have outstanding protocols that are adhering to self health and safety guidelines that are doing what it is they need to do in terms of health and safety but even to go so far as to say that these protocols are still within the within the scope of a warm and welcoming environment and i thought that was really powerful because i think in and of itself we obviously want outstanding protocols but to recognize that it was also done uh within the scope of this warm and welcoming feeling because they are preschool students and they are our youngest learners so i thought that was really excellent um the evaluators applauded the dartmouth public schools for conducting their own evaluations during the intake process and what that means is as students are transitioning from early intervention into the public school setting in preschool there are certain evaluations that are conducted by early intervention which a particular team could choose to you know base their ieps off of and we don't do that in dartmouth we conduct our own evaluations with our own highly qualified staff and develop an iep from there and the evaluators really applauded that they recognize that professional development of educators appears to be a priority in the district um and as a secondary to that professional development the commitment to the second step curriculum and social emotional learning for all was something that they really wanted to make note of they spoke about the very strong related services team at the preschool level which i agree it's an amazing related services team and just in general not just related to copper 19 protocols but overall really really highlighting that it was a warm and welcoming environment not just for students but for staff and again they were here for those three days which you know seems like a decent amount of time to spend but when you consider the fact that they were able to in just those three short days take all of this away really shows that it's just part of just the core of what our preschool special education program is like so moving on um there there this is a summary of the recommendations like i said um you know there there were a couple but i tried to combine some of them so the first they talked about consider the creation of a preschool professional learning community or a plc and so one of the things they they you know wondered and asked as a possibility is do we create that plc to look at academic curriculum around preschool specifically whether it's academic you know pre-readiness skills around ela around math as well as social emotional and really determine whether or not some of that curriculum could be tightened up even further not that it wasn't evident but that it could maybe through a plc model could be strengthened the second was to develop a plan a district-wide plan for staffing that would address the needs of students who are new to preschool or students who might have more intensive needs that might require intermittent support with a plan for decreasing um that support over time and um you know truly it is the case that as a student is entering into our preschool program many times they've just turned three it's either their third birthday or a week right after their third birthday and they really are you know for all intents and purposes the youngest student at the school at that moment um and so they they ask the question you know whether or not we might consider a plan that staffing-wise that somebody be there to support not necessarily that the student would need it throughout their cushman or a potter career but just as they start to get used to school what is it this you know what is school all about so i thought that was really interesting and really powerful there was also recommendation to consider a service delivery model that includes a portion of students scheduled to be in a specialized pull-out setting right now all of our students who have ieps in preschool have a hundred percent of their services in the general ed setting it's a it's a beautiful inclusive model which we very much support and endorse and the what the consideration was is not to say to eliminate that model but rather if there is a need for a particular student or a small group of students to get some of their services in what we call the secret or the pull-out specialized setting maybe we could look at that again all considerations as something to look at there was also a comment about the considering the addition of some more professional development that have a really targeted focus on preschool that really are super specific to the needs of preschool and the recommendation was to use things like staff survey to find that out you know to really dig deep in terms of the preschool staff what that professional development might be from their opinion and then building off of that they did both recommend a written referral process in or a flow chart for special ed students transitioning out of preschool so obviously um when their time at either potter or cushman is done and they're no longer a preschool student they rise up and become kindergarten students and that's a really critical transition from pre-k to k regardless of which building you're transitioning to and uh so again also maybe tied into that plc something that that plc could do in in collaboration with our department you know the people support services department is find that written process a flowchart something that everyone could look to see how that transition happens would be super helpful and then finally one of the things they talked about was seeking alternative ways to share information related to transition so there's not an exhaustive list necessarily but some examples might be virtual site visits ways for a student to watch videos that they could repetitively watch to get used to the transition to kindergarten because it is such an important transition and that that's all and at this time i'll take any of your questions thank you so much for the thank you very much you're welcome questions comments from my colleagues i'll go ahead and start you know i just want to say thank you for the presentation you know i'm really proud that in particular we've been able to provide services for our highest needs kids five days a week through this pandemic i know that has not been the case for all parents in the state or this country and i think it's been really important and so i'm very proud that we've been able to do that i will say i participated in a virtual meeting and you know i had a friend the other day asked what have we learned in the pandemic what might be keep and i know there's something special when you people are in person around the table but i hope that we might consider keeping those virtual meetings for the way it allows working parents to be included more easily into these meetings because you don't then you don't have to take a whole day off it only takes maybe an hour out of your day and and that i think will hopefully bring more parental engagement um and even if you know the the staff doesn't have to be virtual when i did it we were all virtual right but when the staff may be around a table but maybe the parents who aren't able to come should can be able to do that and i'd like to see us figure out ways to continue this i agree i 100 agree and i i would like to see the same i think i think i think it was i think it was great we did one of the early ones i think we may have won one of the first test you know guinea pigs we were in march of last year and so there's a little fits and starts um but it but it worked quite well and so i i think that does bring a lot to the table um the only other thing that i will that i will say and people are going to start to kill me because i'm going to be a broken record about this um you know i know we're still in this year and we're still focused on getting through this year but we cannot lose sight of what's going to happen next year and i'm particularly concerned about kids with special education needs one just all kids socially emotionally but also two kids with special needs we have done the best that we can in doing this but it's just not the same as being in person some kids are getting five days a week not all kids are and so i really want us to not lose sight of in the next year um it's going to be a tough budget year but what are we going to do because you know i've heard parents say well why don't we just take a year off right and let every kid start over kids brains don't stop developing they have been developing this entire pandemic and we're missing some windows we are doing the best we can i know that but i want us to not lose sight of we may need to do extra next year to to get some of these kids back to where they need to be and i really do want to see like what kind of one-time funding maybe we can use next year to provide some of the services that that i think kids are going to need to get them them up to speed and i i am particularly concerned with the kids with ieps and special needs i i just don't want to lose sight of that um because i think there's going to be a lot of tendency for for all of us to say oh thank god like you know a normal year and whatever but these kids we've all been through a lot but these kids in particular and so next year is going to be another difficult year because we need to figure out how to make this up in particular for these kids and so i'm strongly in support of using any sort of one-time revenues free cash working to figure out ways to beef up support next year to help get these kids back on track thank you i so appreciate that thank you dr jenkins thank you dr jenkins mr news dr jenkins stole my thunder which is fine because the question i had was were we going to continue with the meetings via zoom because that almost and again dr jenkins said if you know versus losing a whole date you know somebody can go into a closed room for an hour or 20 minutes or whatever it takes type of deal it just makes it makes it i think it would make scheduling a lot easier absolutely for everybody also and that and i'm going to interrupt you there for one second and piggyback off of that instead of me bringing it back around is that something that the state has to weigh in on because it involves ieps or is that that's a district level decision yeah no actually both state and federal law say that um parental participation should and could occur in any way shape or form so it's always been it's just always been okay just not as prevalent pre-pandemic sorry about that no please yeah i'm good and and i do i i agree with again i agree with uh shannon about looking at you know funding and the budget to take care of some of these these students as they come back next year type of deal but uh thank you thank you for a wonderful presentation you know it was nice nice again nice to see you know an outside group that comes in and comments and compliments us on what we're doing yet also offer some i would assume excellent suggestions excellent absolutely they were wonderful different set of eyes yep thank you thank you um i jot down some notes and now i can't read my writing it's like a little scratch i do that all the time uh i'm glad that shannon kind of brought brought that up and john concurred uh i've kind of i've been the broken record about that you know there are kids that are obvious they're kids that have significant high needs but then there are those kids that that just don't meet that criteria to the level and but i do thank you in the district for expanding upon and kind of finding some students who really are maybe falling through the cracks and to shannon's point there are going to be more students regular ed not just you mean all of our students to some degree when they come back there's we don't yet know what's really going to unfold and um but i really appreciate you know working in the field and sort of seeing like the landscape on a statewide level and recognizing to to shannon's point that some high needs kids have not seen a classroom since last march in the state of massachusetts um yet we've begun five days a week for those highest needs kids starting in september i mean kudos to us and i know as a parent and hearing from parents it doesn't feel that way when we're in our own little bubble here in dartmouth like you know but we've then been going every other day and so we've done a lot of learning um it's not perfect but we we are um i'm proud of what we're doing here so thank you for that um thank you in terms of you know we hear from parents i kind of wear another hat so i'll hear from parents and dip with different hats on and and i work in the fields i'll hear from just a gl i get like a sense of what's going on in the community and i know like outpatient services for our local settings even in sandwich with uh just those outpatient you know things are happening virtually there's not enough staff there's there's a hardship in every corner in this kind of realm um what has been the what has been the biggest struggle in terms of um i can only imagine i'm thinking i'm just just there's only so many people you can pull from like are we able to contract out for supports that we don't necessarily have the staff for is that a struggle because i do know it is a problem it is i would say probably yeah i would definitely say that's probably the biggest struggle in terms of whether it's related services or additional supports that you know whether on an iep or for you know for students just in general the contracted agencies while there are many and there are many hundreds at your disposal it seems like when they are contacted and an actual need arises and a specific request is put out they have never actually had someone right um you know to the point where you know i've you know had to be so upfront to actually reply back yes i need this do you actually have one you know because last time and there they said you know no we actually don't there's no speech pathologist there's no occupational therapist there are there are none of those things um absolutely no aba therapists or um rbts bcbas those are there um the shortage is great um i actually had a conversation with a contracted agency that i have a pretty good relationship with and we have used quite a bit a bit of times in the past uh where she said you know we as a contractor we're losing um some of these therapists because they're going into hospitals and nursing homes and so we had a pool let's say 100 that we could always count on our pool is down to 80 or 75. so you who's always calling me to get that we don't have the number so it's truly been a trickle effect and that's absolutely been a huge challenge yeah yeah just another one of those incredibly fast moving parts that absolutely yeah better you than me [Laughter] um oh uh you mentioned you know dartmouth does their own evaluations in that transition early intervention have there been times and i haven't really i'm just it's just a question it's not like it's not lea it's not coming from any place in particular but just my own for my own knowledge have there been times that you've had to in this time rely on some of those early intervention reports just to not you know um take too much time have too much of a wait for that child so what i would say is yes but it was spring of 2020.
and you know again just want to talk a little bit and discuss you know if what she was aboard or thinking or hearing we have to make a decision you know moving forward i need to send out some information on this program a positive for this two years ago is we felt like we were going to have a lot of retirements and i guess a positive is that we haven't had as many retirements as we as we anticipated with that being said um when we have these candidates we want to try to employ them obviously if they come through their program do a good job for us we want to try to employ them because again we put some money and we've invested in these people and we've grown our own and then we want to have them at least pull two years of duty for us as we've stated in the guidelines um again on a positive we we haven't had as many retirements so will that next year will that change who knows if you do away with the program and then you get four five six retirements and then you wish you would have had those grow your own opportunities so it's again crystal ball we truly don't know we just truly don't know um coming down the pipe but uh again i just didn't know what your thoughts or comments are um and again because i want to get some information out to our staff if they're interested in continuing they're interested in this program if we want to continue this yes i don't think i don't feel like we discontinue it just because we don't have anybody apply this year or maybe even next year we still you know could keep it as an option or somebody could be thinking about it for future or i mean just know just because we don't have something this year or maybe we will but i'm just saying i don't think just discontent in my opinion that's just okay well i'll say in full disclosure both of them are now mine so [Music] so interesting enough but it has been a really good program for them um i do think there was some uh bumps along the way uh quite a few that were i guess totally not understood by both sides so they had to work through that so i think that if we were to do it moving forward you could certainly get information from them on how that went and i would make it a smoother process for somebody else i mean both programs one went through one program one through one went to another and so they were both two really kind of different programs yes do we tell them what program they have to go through they get to change a good question there um no we don't we it has to be a like a credentialed university where they'll come out of it with a license there are some schools uh unfortunately that they are not on the up and up with you and you they'll take their money but when you're done you won't have a license so again each program is a little different they started again in 2018 some universities started to get into this because they saw a teacher shortage and there were people that went down a different career path and we wanted and maybe they went back to school and worked as a paraprofessional or a teacher aide and they wanted to get into teaching and so there were again universities trying to create the program on the fly and so that's something like to say we want to have a discussion with them emporia state's really good to talk they they connect with me at least once a year on some different things and we talk and usually usually it's two or three times a year i know last year we only connected one time kobo was obviously a reason for that but uh yeah again with the program we have two candidates now one is working for us so that's a success story and one hopefully uh come december we'll end up you know being able to take on you know duties for us and then the one that didn't complete paid us back every penny when they left before their commitment was over so in that respect you know you think about uh we have one success story one heading towards a successful inn and one we got money back i think it's good no i just wondered like so when they if they complete it and we do not have a spot anywhere and you heard it linkage substitutes we need substitutes something fierce we could possibly end up with a substitute list we could possibly who knows in the area it's possible we could hire them as a district substitute and you know guarantee them daily sub job if you will that type of thing there are those options that we do have so yeah our substitute list is is is less than what we i mean i think there are some maybe some older substitutes that were on the list uh that during covet they were more cautious so um they chose maybe not to come back so again our substitute list is really it's minimal right now and at the very least it could be a fully a full-time date a full-time substitute potentially and so and again there's sometimes where there's a semester like where you need a semester or i'm sorry where you need a long-term situation right things like that can happen so good questions the uh life goals map programs for classified students living for certified teachers and right now the one that we have that's the success is still in para mode right so it's that move looking to be made next year at the middle school for that sixth grade position then they're they're is happening with the middle school and that's the first domino in the fall they are working on that uh right now with the interview process i mean it would be great to have that you know some long bench come right in and get that right right we do have to open the positions up to interview but it's very possible you know again and there might be uh more than one other position who knows come up as time goes on so good question dr thorpe i don't know if you are still there if you have any comments okay i'm kind of hearing that you want to go ahead and want to go ahead and is it something that it sounds like we don't want to discontinue but i mean go forward with it looking at you know we already tried to perceive what we thought were going to be retirements in the future and then maybe some of those didn't happen but make sure we have someone that's wanting to move into a position of the high school or the military or wherever it is that's one to pursue those jobs well i think the the biggest part about it it's a known quantity i mean is someone you already know in the system and hopefully you can keep somebody here you can keep somebody that has kids there i mean it's i think it just is just really throw your own i mean exactly what you said so yeah i just think it's a great program i i think that now that kind of someone loves her work out of it i think you could actually sit down with someone and talk better with them because i mean this was really ideal really didn't understand the whole finance piece and all that stuff so you know what do you mean when your student teaching you you can't work and you can't get any money coming in oh jeez you know so i think that's all worked out now people chose not to who knows what again with covet in the situation they may think differently this year so i will go ahead and share information out with the district and 243-245 especially co-op employees can apply for that as well i'll put that out this week sometime and see who knows we may or may not get anybody interested who knows okay all right um i'm going to go let's see the next item down and uh haley gifford is here haley is our new daycare director uh it's like i told her i said when you first came on first day it's like drinking water from a fire hydrant i mean you're getting after it fast and furious and haley's done a terrific job we have at the meeting before she got hired we talked a little bit about the name of the daycare so usd 244 daycare center is what you guys had thought about haley has an idea possibly looking at a different name and again the option there that she came up with was burlington early learning center and i don't know if you want to speak to that haley at all you sure can i just feel like daycare is kind of a broad term and we really want to focus on kindergarten readiness and getting them ready to go to school and while we will be birth through five years old about we are going to focus on learning and it's not just going to be daycare so i think that early monday and it sounds a little easier you know it's a little easier to say berlin's an early kind of like the rec center says usd 244 on the side that's their own budget they're on board their own everything so i like that that is they don't just see 244 on it called for the daycare that's right in the parking lot so i like that it says burlington i think that's a good idea [Music] we're going to take that down it's going away as soon as we can get some we're actually going to probably take that down at the time they start working on the daycare playground so yeah because some people may still think that's the the district office so i guess i'm skipping around here i'm going to go down to the last item and try to see if you can queue this up while haley's still here she may leave this is a video that we watched we had an in-service uh training we were supposed to go to garden city but the weather was dicey and we ended up doing it here in the boardroom there is a video called no small matter and it was an hour and ten minutes we started off this conference with an hour and ten minute video and it it was powerful i mean it was really powerful i'm going to show you the two minute clip here um and tracy will cue that up it was just it just it's a wow moment i guess the beginnings of humanity grew up in these very rich extensive families and of course the world we're in now is a very very different world to put him in johnny's with him all day this notion of the american dream is so much old [Music] ignoring this that's a disaster for us this is not the way it's supposed to be we have a deeper understanding now of how important these early years are and why we're unlocking the secrets of the brain first time in history we never hadn't really looked into a baby's brain before what's going on up there is rocket science [Music] i want to be very funny i want to be the one that's like you can do anything every child should have access to high quality of education if we get this right our country looks dramatically different whatever you want to call it child care preschool home we have to do it [Music] everywhere the documentary as uh cookie monster said there uh it's just very very powerful and very impactful and uh like i say it's it's going to make a huge difference and maybe one of if not the best thing that we've ever done i think and we're excited we're actually doing interviews now and looking to get staff on board and it's it's really it's exciting to see some really good people that one lady that's a teacher in there was just so i mean she was as excited as the kids that's the type of person we want and we're anxious to get them on board with us so yeah okay backing up to the next to the last i on my list i want to talk a little bit about temperature taking in our buildings and our buses before school we started to have this discussion with our administration directors and okay how many are we seeing when kids and adults are coming into the building and administrators and directors you guys can verify with me it is minimal like five or less the whole first 27 weeks of school correct in august it was it was two students uh one parent parent came in and stood there for i don't know less than five minutes it was fine another one was waiting for practice to occur standing out in the sun by the time i went got the handheld got them they were fine and same with the the other student was actually in the morning coming to school was in the seventh eighth grade entrance they came down we got the handheld did it again they were fine so we've had three those are all in novels so with this being said we started to have discussions is this a step that we can look to eliminate because we've got staff coming in early and we've got staff that can only come in certain doors in the buildings and you know we try to have these discussions with our administrator and director group and then share it out with lindsay payer and dr schloyer and they shared with us some information and basically you know dr slayer's comment was because children don't typically report fevers with coba they don't have fevers like maybe adults would it is not necessary to scream students for fevers any longer this is what he feels like he said however screening adults should continue through the remainder of the school year fever can be a little more common symptom among adults so that's what he or his recommendation would be and again there's we just we wanted again we tried to make it very open enough up front we've had our covert advisory committee meetings we've shared information with the board obviously you guys as well as our administration directors having you know discussions about the these items related to covet and then we put our information on the website so having said that it almost seems like this is a step really that's um that's not needed um our attendance rate is incredibly uh it's our absence rate is just minimal we are right now in each building under three percent absence rate for the last i don't know how many weeks you guys you guys can report it's just been it's almost scary how good our absence rate has been with a pandemic we haven't really seen flu-like scenarios occur in our building at all probably a lot of it has to do with social distancing masking hands you know a lot of this is very it's very important so again trying to think about again moving forward what does make make sense i would like to talk with our covert advisory committee and i shared that information that we're at least considering this i usually try to update them once a month um i think james and stacey get those emails because you're our board representatives on the public advisory was it a practice or we didn't make it a policy right it's just it's our guidelines our practice right now it's not a policy about temperature taking right now so um again we're at least considering this and maybe we'll look to have if you guys depending on how you feel as a board look to have a meeting if you're saying yes move forward we may have a covert advisory committee meeting before spring break that could be something we could get out to the public if that's our direction again our message here is that again we that this this is not i mean it's not like we're getting rid of all of the items on our list we're not just going back to quote-unquote normal but it's a start in the right direction because our data shows we don't i think people at home do i want to compliment the public i think people at home are doing a very good job at assessing the kids if they're not feeling well before they get to school and i think that's beneficial to everybody they don't have to come and pick them up if they drop them off on a bus or something like that you know they have to go get them back from the bus you know a bus stop or whatever the case might be or they have to come back to school if kids are walking or riding a bike so anyway i'll leave it up for you guys now for comments or discussion my comment would be that this wouldn't start until the executive order for the state disaster was lifted by the governor right well as her executive order goes and is extended through march 31st so we couldn't stop doing this until then because their executive order says we're going to do it that that is that well that's true that's true i just want to say that we can't listen to the county health guidance trump what the executive order is even if the doctor feels that way that's fine it says very blatantly in that executive order that all people interview buildings will have their temperature checked first time the first day or the day so i don't see how we get away with that with changing that between before march 31st now if it's lifted march 31st well yeah again it could be again it could be an after spring break thing or it could be a march or an april one day thing and there's a lot of districts and and administrators you guys can chime in um week america last night about nine o'clock i got a survey from one of the superintendents and and the questions were about temperature taking and who's masking and who's not asking and uh other different scenarios i mean that are listed in regards to cochlear protocol so i just i'll probably get these results probably tomorrow or wednesday hopefully i said please share these results with me and i'll share them with you on friday notes but again there are some districts we know of that aren't using masks at all anymore in spite of the governor's orders [Music] i think it's possible but again again it's a balance between counties and states and what's what is uh a dance i guess it's a dance right now and what some people believe you know as an industry yeah i know i know was there the county can opt out for example out of a mass mandate the county can opt out of certain things you know was the executive order included with the school start date it was uh well it was again was separate maybe i'm trying to remember exactly it was the executive order i need to pull that let me pull that out and see um i mean if we talk about the business what do they say are we all just ignoring that executive order or they just in the morning and say we don't care we've had a couple districts that have come to play us during the winter and i dealt with some of their fans they're like we don't have it in lebanon yeah they don't they don't have it the anger administrator said it's going to be difficult to remind him but he said we don't have them so our kids are without mass we're practicing without doing this that's scary just start picking the rules i mean some of the rules that we want to follow and i'll follow i'm sure i don't know is that is that what we're suggesting that we just do whatever we wait and see if the emergency disaster declaration is over right and that is uh i mean that's a date we may want to look at is that april april one date if you will um i mean again i think a lot's going to depend too on what the advisory committee feels i mean if that's a step they feel like is is really important the data again shows that it's really it's not as important um and again who knows if the governor will come out and make a statement and adjust the executive order when i look at the executive order here i'm trying to pull it up here it says it will it will become effective august 10 2020 and remain in force until rescinded or until the statewide state of disaster emergency extended by house bill 2016 enacted during june until it expires whichever is earlier so i guess we'll see again it could be an april 1 date for us it's very possible the 25th of january is extended to march 31st to this year okay yeah so when that expires yeah and and maybe just something that you're looking at yeah i mean we're looking at that if the advisory council comes back and says maybe that's the date that you guys make you say well we want to keep it going until then you know just kind of uh i i think it was just giving you guys the data as to what we were doing and then you guys along with the advisory would be the ones that come up and set the date because we weren't going to set the it hasn't been taking to children's temperatures hasn't been catching the kids because did any of those fears end up in coming right and so so you're going to have the same thing in august if the advisory committee looks at this maybe it's in april one day i did have two advisory committee members respond to me and one said this seems like a really good choice to move forward it's one it's a step in the right direction plus your it seems like it's not uh it's not it's he didn't say it was wasted time but he said it didn't it didn't make sense with your data another person responded about and this is one of our staff members that's on the committee said my concern only concern is about masks kids walking into the building and don't have masks on so we got to figure that step out and that step could be one if you don't have a mask on you report directly to the office to get a mask or two we can give masks supplies and mask to the teachers and when kids walk in the building they get a mask at the classroom you're taking a little chance with kids walking through the hall but i think kids are so used to it at this point you know if you're there or you have you know a station of mass or whatever kids know when they go in a building they put on them that said we cannot keep supplying mass please check cinemas um i mean they're giving out still probably 15 plus masks a day so i mean we can still have somebody sitting there i personally don't think elementary kids can ban [Music] this door has one person in the temperature station that person would be happy to keep doing that right i mean that that's not an issue it's just i think they're thinking that that's not what they're going to be doing there you know all right i think the question is are you going to you know you have to have mass near the building if they're coming in off that if how can you drop off they're kind of quite a way to deal with that mass if somebody still isn't there so well don't you have someone out there all the time so i think as we've evolved we certainly see the science as they call it has evolved to where it says that kids are not necessarily the problem but i also agree with lucas in the point that says well we have it and so maybe the government will look at that but if everybody sees the cdc guys who just came out today that's going to change everything i mean and that's going to come all the way down kids the cdc side guy you said today so i'd be more concerned to know how many teachers i don't know that i would know that how much staff was vaccinated what's the percentage of staff vaccinated the cdc guidance came out today that talked about on the adults at least for if you had vaccinated if you had vaccinated uh parents or and your grandkids were not vaccinated you could still visit now without a mask and they're they're so they're opening that up and so we're looking at some of that long-term care and all that stuff so i think probably the next month or two you may see a lot of changes and i think it may be right to say that maybe we don't need to take the temperatures anymore but i know stacy could probably attest to we do take them to the hospital still and we have caught some people mostly adults that have had temperatures that we thought of whereas adults we are seeing fevers or we're seeing a change in temperature everybody's so used to taking their temperature every day now if i'm normally 97 and today i'm 99.1 that's a red flag just because i've went up from my normal baseline kind of a thing so we have caught some as far as that goes but kids typically we're not really seeing a fever i'm going to speak out on both sides of my mouth on this but i do agree with lucas and that we can't do anything until we know for sure by the state that we're okay to do something i feel like we're okay to get rid of temperatures but i also just want to bring up the caution and that we're getting towards allergy season people are burning fields we're seeing lots of coughs we're seeing lots of snotty noses and that fever might be the the only determining vector that tells us that it's not an allergy so just to caution people on that keep that in mind but i i'm a fan to get rid of it if we can eventually once once the state says that we're able and that's the point i want to try i agree i am all for whatever i would like to hear kind of some professional opinions about schools that say they don't have to whatever that's on them i guess but i agree with if we don't even take temperatures and it's not showing or pitching anything that makes sense i mean but uh i don't know another good point too is that average is going to bring 800 people to this area that bring not just coping but all yes would you like me to set up an advisory committee meeting just to have that discussion about our protocols in general and then as well as specifically have some discussions right you know but like possible they were talking about literally the cdc today where they did that but they didn't change anything on an airplane and they said they believe that's coming also so okay we'll go ahead we'll hold standpath for right now but we'll continue to monitor what we're hearing as far as from cdc as well as maybe the state as well and we're going to find out more information potentially here in the next few weeks okay that's all i have any other questions okay move on to board member island board reports um i'm sure in this section i reached out to luke silva while we're meeting here we do need private resolution for a board vacancy and since the president um lucas automatically now becomes president and you need to nominate a vice president i nominated 244 board of education [Music] i couldn't hear who you nominated james higgins it's stacy james higgins was nominated by monique thanks okay i you will need to see me after the meeting because well the issue is we have payroll this next week he cannot find the check because he's no longer a reward for her this has never happened before and lucas lucas ksb said you may have to hand sign all those checks um because we have an electronic signature there's no way we can turn that around luckily the certified run has very few paper checks so it's not as big of a deal but anyways we can talk about this will allow us to publish in the newspaper so you will need to pass you'll have to fill in the blanks with our district county and then the county republican has a newspaper i didn't have time to type it in there we'll recall that again oh his position is four he was inspiring in 2021 you don't need that for this we'll [Music] so someone just needs to read that resolution whereas the vacancy exists in the membership of the board of unified school district number 244 coffee county kansas and whereas ksa 25-2022 authorized the board of education to fill such vacancies no sooner than the 15 days following publication notice in the newspaper having general circulation in the school district being resolved with the clerk of the board of education at unified school district number 244 coffee county kansas shall cause such notice to be published in the coffee county republic good second second hi business 20 minutes regarding a student issue under the exemption relating to actions adversely or favorably affecting a student under a coma and to return in the room in this room return to this room at the end of that time including craig marshall stated yes [Music] did you say i did okay i thought i heard it but okay so it's 806.
so if a teacher performed and and got all their their goals what kind of money are we talking about uh i think last year it would have came up to just about the funding that we get but if they need all the different criteria there will be a good extra 4 000 or 4 500. awesome yeah so it's it's significant it is different every year the legislature establishes how much is paid for that as well but it's also based on prior year atm so as we move into a year from now this year's atm is going to go down like everything else i'm a little bit curious about the positive teacher contracts or contacts do they need for the positive parent contacts i'm curious do they have to i mean i know they have to document it they have to get in touch with a certain percentage of the parents 100 class that they have to reach page 39.
[Music] all right my name is chris i'm the transportation director and i have been looking at changing the driver for the adventure mechanic descriptions to include the cdl to have them get their studios i'm not the student certification which is what you need to drive that bus with kids on it but just to be able to drive the bus period to test drive all those kind of things i have several different reasons why i think this would be a great idea it's important i think for the mechanics to see what the drivers have to go through i think that might make the training process go smoother and go maybe a little bit better they might have ways to increase it to make it become more successful um our emergency rescues it's cheaper than a tow truck i mean if that if that driver has a cdl in the middle of the night leaving a bus there because you don't have a cdo to drive it back then it just seems to me to be kind of silly if you could drive it back if it's something that the mechanic can't fix on site which has happened before in the past and we've had it towed back so that's it's a savings for for us um sometimes when they need to test drive vehicles not even the rescues but the test driving it they have to find a driver well then you've got to take two people a lot of times they want to test drive it you know ways to make sure that they're you know making sure they find any long-term you know when it heats up problems or whatever um paying two people to go to where one person can go just seems counterintuitive to me as well um that's all i got a quick question could i presume cbo means commercial driver's license correct i'm sorry from a legal standpoint should that be defined on this because i think the term we just used as cbl's maybe a term of art to anybody with me but um okay personal opinion that if we want to spell it out that's awesome all right put the job description for our drivers and sam do you have a segment thank you mike any more questions any other questions or comments thank you thank you thank you all right i'll wait with it all in favor thank you [Music] item 10b increase in casa fees and we're also not julie reynolds this is today that we need to do we're on today it's that time of year last year we didn't increase our preschool tuition prices for our typically functioning preschoolers just with everything going on we didn't get to it um because typically i come in march preschool was shut down due to government so now we're coming to ask for a 10 a month increase for next school year i've already put the word out to all of my parents and nobody is walking at it we're still considerably cheaper than the other districts and other places so everybody seemed really happy what type of wait list do you have for the middle school right now uh well we just started on the 25th we just started enrollment for next year we don't have a wait list yet apparently but we opened a fourth classroom that's the reason why but it is filling up fast so any other questions and you want to increase it over what reasoning or reason the minimum wage last year we didn't increase it when the minimum wage went up so the price pool is we try to do as much as we can self funding it's and so now that minimum wage is up to the 12 and we pay a little bit more than 12 an hour that we can compensate that with a tuition and cover those so so you weren't able to do that this year we we've scraped bike we got actually a grant this year that i was able to pick up the backfill of it but i met with rebecca prior to her leaving and she said this year we've got to increase it increase it to stay in the in the bus brandi do you feel that some of the being able to scrape by was due to coven and because we got that extra step and we got that well we still have the staff and we still have the pay staff um but we got that grant that we were able to that picked up a substantial amount of the shares due to poverty all right i think so i mean if you price out daycare and stuff like that this is very reasonable and especially with the minimum wage law that has increased this is the necessity to keep this known um i will make a motion to improve the increase of the preschool tuition for the 21-22 school year second please you any other questions all right it's all in favor all right thank you thank you let's now do 10k [Music] miss julie please wages going up and everything barely made it by and you're just asking to increase the cost away or plus a price 255 instead of 130.
so their number is in the 70s and the cdc's got us at 94.32 so both of them have us in the substantial column right now in case you're still looking at that one this is the table and i i do have in this presentation which i'll email to all of you i do have a link to the entire cdc document but this is a table i've pulled out of there that is it's a little confusing the way it's written but i highlighted a column there that says k-12 schools open full in-person instruction physical distinct six feet or more to the greatest extent possible that's if we were in blue or yellow for all for our two columns we are we still have one in the we have we're considered in the orange so we're considered over here where it does say if we're following the cdc guidance it does say physical distancing is required because we're still in this column right here in some other i didn't put the language in here but uh they they do say that if you if you drop if we were to drop from here to here but and stay there for several weeks then we should be able to uh move into the their suggestion here which that what i highlighted there opens the door for like uh uh basically them saying that six feet is not required it's just uh recommended to do it to the greatest extent possible and they've said you know in a classroom if that shouldn't hold you back to have you can go three to six in the classroom but just in lunch and stuff uh you should you should try to maintain the six when kids have their masks off so that's kind of the explanations i've gotten but right now we are still over here in the uh in the orange section um according to our current data so that that table is a little that's new and they have not given us that information up till now so our current data we have 11 students in primary that are quarantined one staff quarantine 13 in elementary students one staff 12 students in middle school two staff so a total of 40 with two confirmed covic cases right now in the district so when we keep that up to date every day our nurses collect the data dr king puts it into excel spreadsheet and we have that online so it's available online uh i wanted to give you as we talked tonight a little bit i want to give you an idea of how many students are currently in hybrid how many how many are in remote we are almost right at 60 40.
so yes but march through june 2020 once we hit the ground running in september you know evaluation started almost immediately we were able to to get back into the swing of things but there were certainly in that small two and a half month pocket yes that did have to okay yeah and there was some amazing stuff that happened back then i mean they moved mountains to absolutely extend some timelines around where a child could kind of keep their kind of look at different ways for eligibility remarkable yeah for sure um i love the i the suggestion for that flow chart for from um preschool to kindergarten suggestions one of my favorites i know when when my my son is 17 now uh and he's watching i liam that when he was young and he was transitioning we we had the staff from quinn and his previous school put together a photo album but i can only imagine having visuals in sort of social stories videos that like we've produced for you know our updates on our schools will be a remarkable way to get students used to a new space or familiar with a new space so that's wonderful technology is really wonderful um i think my own oh two more things have so i don't know if it's been incredible if parents have come to you or this has happened at team meetings i know we had our our team meeting and it was brought up um and i had my thoughts on my uh in our own situation about about clothing compensatory services has that been an overwhelming burden are there incredible asks for that or is it just i think the conversations have been great um obviously cover competitory services itself has evolved a little bit originally when the state rolled it out you know in the fall it was related to march through june of 2020 it was really looking at that period of time where schools were shut down and not open at all and so we really have done a wonderful job our teams are working you know at every team meeting if it hasn't been brought up already bringing up that piece but very recently as as recent as february the state has reconfigured their look at cover competitory to include this school year um and in a lot of ways again like you said earlier dartmouth hasn't had to face you know a complete shutdown where nobody's been in school at all since september but some districts have so right off the bat there's always that consideration of while school is shut down and then also in dartmouth for example um due to health and safety regulations the district shut down january 4th through the 15th i think it was the 15th i'm not sure but in those two weeks following christmas uh the holiday break that that's now something that can be considered and if a team feels that there has been you know a need for compensatory because of something like that or because of a quarantine whatever the case may be um you know teams i i just had a staff meeting where we went over some of those changes to say that it's now opened up but as far as i know you know in reading the n1s that come through um it's just a robust conversation where parents and team members are really you know collaborating together communicating and coming to agreements about what might be needed that's wonderful and that's really the the magic because it's so important uh and i've it's always been my experience that it's a two-way street and for us personally there are only so many hours in a day and you're not gonna you know you can't get blood from a stone and you're only gonna get what you can get and and not get upset comic relief but but you know listening to parents and and and taking into consideration those needs like you said in those conversations in those settings um and again that's always been my experience uh you know in dartmouth public school so that's really wonderful um have there been any discussions district-wide around offering anything more comprehensive in the summer than we have in the past or are we going to stick to i know you've all you've since you've been here you've there have been um building blocks and and things added and then we have we've pre-covered we've had our other summer programming that has been comprehensive and wonderful and has evolved uh but are there are you is that a thought in anyone's head or so as of right now our esy so extended school year that is on students ieps um that program is going to be the the um the four week five days a week for the students and programs and four weeks four days a week it'll be 8 30 to 12 30 at quinn um we have i've already put out the feelers to staff that it will be in person for all it's it will be in person every day of those days it's not a hybrid or anything so if you're a four day week you're in person those four days which will be a slightly different from what we currently have um and that will be at the quinn school but in terms of just even other than that i think we're still kind of discussing what other things might be out there but the esy piece has been set yes just that one piece my last question i promise in in terms of our programs i you know a few years back now i guess maybe my first year on the school committee with the paths program and um as the year now here we are in 2021 um do we have a full continuum of programs so kids that are leaving the elementary school to go into the middle school into the high school type budgets like how is that looking and what what is that what's that um so what are some hopes and dreams and and yeah paths is probably the one that does not have that continuum um the past continuum is a k to a as more of the secret time the past students who are at the high school it's more through a co-taught model to get that you know content from the the general ed certified teacher and you know um uh to to attain their diplomas and an mcas situation um pals is a k to 12.
we are going to go i'm following you yes oh sure so bye i think nobody can call me while we're in the boardroom because i kind of had a headache and uh so i set my alarm so i wouldn't make someone sleep too long or something i just sent mark a text message gonna let him know that that's coming so i think he might still be over there because he's saying that he's not sure what to do before they get in this paper thank you okay this okay right you all right [Music] um okay well i wasn't going to but i'm going to be nice okay um five years executive session for five minutes regarding the student issue under the exception right into actions adversely or favorably affecting student or under coma and to return this room at the end of that time including great martial stacy it should be there and mike we got the four five more minutes closed captioning not available so [Music] so hmm one minute uh uh next time agenda is contract approvals and appointments this is kind of a carryover from where we had a special meeting to approve the daycare i guess early learning center playground uh and there was carryover topic where you would discuss the financial for that sure exactly and i shared with you some information in the public content of ortox again this is kind of what we talked about at the special meeting that we had to approve and you guys had some questions on would we use some capital outlay district capital because this playground would in fact be basically a joint playground be able to use by the the preschool the three and four-year-olds at the elementary school as well so again the jones trust proposal that we have as far as the grant from the jones trust is 50 000.