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order due to the covid 19 health emergency and in order for the board of education to conduct its business this board meeting is being held via video conference and streamed live on youtube on the district website at www.ebnet.zoom.org in addition members of the public may provide comment at this meeting through zoom by entering the url meeting id and password you see before you on the screen upon joining the meeting your participation will be muted to ensure that there is no disruption to the business being conducted by the board of education will the secretary please call the role mr corrangelo mrs chu here mr sismar here mrs guass mr hong kia mrs lax here mrs reese here mr winston here president becker here we have a quorum please rise to salute the flag i pledge allegiance the new jersey open public meeting law was enacted to ensure the right of the public to have advanced notice of and to attend the meetings of public bodies at which any business affecting their interests is discussed in accordance with the provisions of this act the east brunswick board of education has caused notice of this meeting to be published and posted at the board of education offices written notice was also provided to the sentinel the newark star ledger the home news interview and the principal clerk of east brunswick all board of education meetings with the exception of executive session discussions or video tape related broadcasts and individuals who speak at the board's public meetings should be aware of these videotaping rules good evening thanks for joining us tonight we'll start off tonight with our superintendent's report dr valesky thank you president becker good evening everyone on friday february 26 our district nurses called a denim day with the american heart excuse me victor dr valesky i'm sorry somebody needs to write themselves we're getting a lot of background noise thank you so much sorry that's all right i'm going to start over on friday february 26 our district nurses held the denim day to support the american heart association a total of 2 305 was raised and i'm gonna go off script here for just a second um i had the chance to thank our nurses for all their work at an administrators meeting we held earlier and i want to publicly thank our nurses and our school security officers who have been our front line throughout this entire endeavor and they continue to be and without them you know our return to school would would just be impossible so i want to thank them all for everything they do to provide a safe and healthy environment for all of us you're here our fifth graders are participating virtually this year in the law enforcement against drugs or lead program in 2019 officer reggie wright of the east brunswick police department implemented the lead program for all fifth graders in the east brunswick school district the program is an unparalleled prevention education and character development program the lead program plants the seeds of a healthy living and eating lifestyle the curriculum used for the program developed by the mendez foundation is called too good for drugs this evidence-based skill building program makes a positive impact on the students teachers parents and the entire community the 10 week program consists of 10 lessons the first five lessons are skill development and the second five lessons are skill application just a reminder once again schools will be closed for spring break monday march 29th through friday april 2nd and this is coming from the new jersey travel advisory and one one that we have stated previously if you travel overnight to any u.s state or territory beyond the immediate region in the immediate region is defined as the state of new york the state of pennsylvania the state of delaware and the state of connecticut you will be required to quarantine from school for 10 calendar days after your return evidence of a negative covet test proof of a vaccine or proof of a positive cova test result in recovery within the past 90 days cannot be accepted as a substitute for the mandatory 10-day quarantine and this is being driven by multiple coveted variants emerging outside of new jersey and the fear of the department of health that they be brought back in the borders of the state for our staff if you plan to travel you must contact human resources in advance of your departure with dates destination and travel documents human resources will advise those staff who have voluntarily elected to travel compliance with the 10-day calendar quarantine is mandatory to prevent the spread of covet 19 in east brunswick schools if you plan to travel to any state outside of new jersey and return the same day with no overnight stay you do not need to quarantine if you are symptom free i'm going to say that one more time if you travel to any state outside of new jersey and return the same day with no overnight stay you will not have to quarantine if you remain symptom-free and students who elect to travel under all the aforementioned conditions will be required to participate virtually and cannot come into their school buildings before they fulfill the 10-day required quarantine so some of you are asking why is this so important and this goes to what i communicated earlier today based on a really strong assumption that the cdc will relax recommendations for distancing in school settings before april 19th i am planning to return pre-k to 12 students who for families who selected to school five days session format beginning monday april 19th which is the first day of the fourth marking period the impact of spring break travel covet infection and closed cap contact quarantines along with the final classroom distancing recommendations and requirements that may be in effect before our forecasted implementation will be driving our decision but be assured that returning students to school five days a week remains one of the school boards and my top priorities if we can accomplish it safely the learning model form for the fourth marking period will be open and parent access to change selections for every student on monday that's next monday march 22nd at 3 pm and the learning model form will close next friday march 26th at 3 p.m and all those changes will go into effect monday april 19th the first day of the marking period and this is your last opportunity to make a selection for a change in the learning model for this school year thank you thank you dr valeski so just to clarify for our parents if their child is currently in the full remote model but they would like to return them to the hybrid for the five day a week single session they will have an opportunity to do that next week and vice versa absolutely if you if you don't do anything so if you're if your child is currently in our hybrid learning model and don't do anything they are going to be moved to our in-person instruction model five days a week if you do not want your hybrid student to go to school five days a week and would rather they stay home in the virtual environment you'll need to go into the learning model or learning model selection form and pick the virtual option otherwise if you are currently virtual you want to remain virtual you don't have to do anything but if you're virtual and you would like your children your child or children to come back to school five days a week you'll need to select that change in the learning model forum okay and um okay thank you question sure oh um just for clarification because i've heard two different things if the students are going to be in school for the five days and a student either isn't feeling well if whatever reason is virtual for a day or remote for a day do they still call in or is their attendance noted when they show up online we're going to treat attendance as if well students who are attending the five day a week in person model we are going to follow our attendance policy so we're not going to give students the opportunity to come to school um you know like three days and decide to take a virtual day and then come back it'll be normal you know uh parent um you know excuses uh for medical conditions or appointments or things like that just as if everybody was in school okay now but my que of course they want to be in there but i'm saying like so the kid wakes up isn't feeling well the beautiful thing is now normally you'd keep them home from school if they have a fever or something like that so it used to be if your kids signed in they were in attendance so you're saying if they're on the five day that a parent would have to notify the school that their child is going to be doing the virtual learning yeah if they're if they're going to they would have the option if they are sick if you call in and say you know my child's not feeling well today but they they feel well enough to participate in the virtual component talk to the your child's principal and then we'll have an arrangement we'll figure out the details so they can move between the two we just don't want to give the opportunity for students to say i'm going to attend um the face-to-face person-to-person option because we have set aside seats we have figured everything out in terms of spacing and and then have them self-select that they're going to take a day off and go into the virtual learning model so that is we want parents to make that selection up front we want students to comply with that selection and obviously if there's an issue with illness and appointment some other family issue just as we normally would during the school year great than that just communicate with the building thanks laurie thank you dr valeski absolutely so the next item on our agenda is a tentative budget presentation for fiscal year 2022.
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all right it is now 6 p.m i'm call uh calling to order the big hollow special board of education meeting on thursday march 18th 2021 it is currently 6 p.m uh can i roll call please here here here here here all right can everyone please stand for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the blood of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice four members are nostal and mazer here next item is public comment we have some public comment statements to read so i'm going to read them and who sent them mr gold we just want to send a huge shout out to you and your staff you have been doing an amazi amazing over the past year pandemic we support any decision you make because we see how great you are as our superintendent this has had to be one of the worst things all of us have been through and it made your job that much harder so thank you so much the grisco's this message is from lori pena hi i have a few things i would like to say to the board in administration at tonight's special board meeting my son is in seventh grade he has always loved school and he loves big hollow up until this year he was on the b honor roll now all his classes are c's and d's remote hybrid learning is just not for him he is not engaged he needs more than 10 hours a week on campus when he gets home he has zoom classes for two days a week for an hour the rest of the time is asynchronous and it's not working for him i feel like the district is more concerned right now with the full-time remote students than with the students who need to be in school full-time there seems to be a reluctance to return to full time because it would be detrimental to the full-time remote students who make up a smaller percentage of the students and it does not seem to matter that not returning full time is detrimental to the other students my son needs help in pre-algebra for example he says there is no time during class to get help and his teacher only has a short zoom period on friday where he can ask for help but when we went to hybrid learning we were told that the friday zoom periods were to focus on the remote students my son could really benefit from his epic period every day he would be able to ask for extra help but there is no epic right now i know people are still still concerned about covid i am an icu nurse i've seen what kovit does and i've also had coven myself i was pretty sick for almost two months and even spent several nights in the hospital as a patient despite this i still want my son in school full time good morning we would like to reque we would like to request the board read our statement regarding return to in-person instruction please find our statement below good evening first and foremost we would like to thank the board for taking the time to hear us this evening we know this past year has been challenging for teachers staff administrators parents and especially our students we would like to begin with a quote from our sixth grade son from a few weeks back mom it's starting to feel like school again he said this in response to being back in the classroom again we begin with that quote because we think it gives a picture of where our children's mentality has been at over the past year my son has been and is still a high honor roll student however to say it's as if he's taken two steps back with his education is an understatement he's not challenged on any level even by a little bit the work he's been given has been some par sub par and he completes his asynchronous work by nine am every morning this is unacceptable we understand it's been a challenging year but it's been an entire year the district has hit a year to try and figure out this along with the other fallout plans as necessary moving along to our fourth grade daughter this has had the biggest impact on her her learning style is very hands-on and so when the district moved to e-learning it was a huge challenge one which we've overcome but now without many steps forward and then many many steps back that being said because she has had trouble understanding work on her own reading from a computer screen the first half of the school year was spent with one of us sitting with her about 95 of the time to teach computers and to help her understand the directions etc it truly broke our heart to see her struggle so much she needed us to be the teacher and explain things to her as the months went by we started noticing a lack of motivation even to not want to do the school work and it wasn't until she started back at hop back hybrid in person that we immediately noticed a difference she smiles more which was lacking she finished her work without a push from us her overall demeanor has changed we say all this in hopes the board sees the impact this has had on our children we can't speak for all children this is strictly from our perspective in our household our children truly need to be back in the classroom full-time each for different reasons if for some reason the board chooses to keep things as is we are begging for a change in how the e-learning asynchronous work is run it is not working for our family two and a half hours of instruction per day is not a quality education i would rush much rather my children be in school where they should be full time doing work then finishing by 9 a.m and asking for something to do one final note if you're going to keep remote learning as an option then you need to make this a level playing field there's there absolutely needs to be teachers dedicated strictly to those remote students we know our children especially our sixth grader can see the struggle this is where the district has dropped the ball and while we feel the quality aspect of education is lacking for our children thank you adam and sarah nivolas hi melissa i am hoping to have the following comment read tonight at the board meeting about 60 of big hollow parents want their children to return to full day of school i am part of that 60 percent of parents however we have to remember that 40 of families want to remain in the current schedule that is a really big number of students those students need to be supported too we cannot give sixty percent of our students a better education at the cost of the other forty percent of students that is not equity in education that will not close the educational gap tonight i am asking you to only vote to approve a plan to return to full day school as if that pla plan benefits and supports all of our big hollow students please help us find a way to get our students back in school full days while equally supporting our students soaring from home tara for the school board meeting tonight i am a parent of a second grader at big hollow regardless of the survey survey results which i feel will be relatively close decision i would still hope you keep the three biggest factors in mind that were identified at the last school board meeting when making the decision for big hollow all of these are still true statements even the social distancing has changed to three to six feet i worry about the education of our full remote learners and the impact on them if trying to learn alongside the in-person ones or being shoved to the side for a completely asynchronous experience i like every parent and teacher want my daughter back in school but not at the expense of another child's education i feel like remaining in the hybrid model for the remainder of the year lets us proactively plan for the fall instead of doing things reactively now thank you for your time sarah ostrowski for three points our family students staff have finally adjusted to consistent schedule and are in a group so another disruption is not necessarily welcome right now there will be increased quarantine issues for students given that six feet social distance cannot be established in all classrooms if class sizes increase our current remote learners about 40 of our current population could negatively impacted by a change at this time of the year and the last one is from amanda bilbray miss morley on my behalf thank you thank you thank you for all that you've done to keep your staff and our children safe in a completely unpredictable school year whatever you choose i support thank you from the billbray family that's it do we have anything else okay item four update for mr gold on the new idph isbe guidance okay i'm gonna go through uh if you've got a handout in front of you um just gonna quickly touch on a few topics on this on the handout page three this is the the guidance that came out the the day after our last board meeting so and this this is the guidance from illinois department of public health and illinois state board of education so we were basing our discussions last month on the cdc guidance and then uh this guidance trump that the next day so on page three what i've done is highlighted a few changes that i'm going to talk about so page three uh the capacity limits for in-person learning including non-academic school hour activities such as lunch are now determined by the space's ability to accommodate social distancing and not a set capacity limit number of percent or percentage bus capacity no more than 50.
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bill withers japanese uh do we need to have someone walk in from the camera that's a question yeah it's very wait what is alive with your viper yeah it's a little bit delayed on here but it's still going through how much of a delay is that there's that much of a delay it's not delayed on here but it's delayed on other devices okay hold on we've got people on right now okay good evening again uh for people here in the gymnasium people on our live stream uh apologize for the delay at the beginning there uh we're trying to do some uh some different kinds of technical things and do this live stream and as it was already mentioned to me murphy's law what will happen what will go wrong will go wrong so i think we've got some of the bugs worked out so we're going to go ahead we're going to get started tonight my name is mr plutcher i'm the principal here at gentile high school this is a really uh exciting evening for um eighth graders you're looking to come in and transition to high school and so we're just going to go through some information now you guys the students have already heard a lot of this information from our counselors but this is an opportunity for parents to hear the same and so we're just going to go through the information and we're going to do a couple other new technical things for you as well you'll see in a little bit there's a key we'll have a qr code on the screen it might be a little difficult for you to get that qr code to come up but you should have it in your folder so during the presentation if you have questions you can submit questions as soon as i hand off the mic i'll be monitoring those and we'll try to address your questions as they come up and then at the end of tonight's presentation we'll also have another qr code for a survey and get some feedback so tonight you can see tonight uh again i'm mr fletcher i'm the principal over here is mr stout he is the assistant principal he will be ducking out pretty soon now he's double booked tonight he's got a couple meetings that he has to go to tonight our counselors mr schmicker is over here mrs yoder is back here she was working the door um the school nurse mrs dean was working the door um we should have put mrs fredwell's picture up there she will be the nurse next year so you get to know her face and coach stoner has joined us too he's here to just kind of help us along as well so we're excited to get you a lot of great information so our outcomes tonight is we want to introduce you to the career pathway programs here at gym town high school connect those pathway programs to the new graduation process and review ninth grade scheduling requests so again you're about to eighth graders you're about to embark on your high school career four years seems like a long time when you say four years but it's going to go very quickly the other thing is your freshman year really is i mean the senior year is the one that everybody celebrates because it's the last year we're ready to graduate all of that stuff but your freshman year is really the most important year of high school it's where you lay that good solid foundation you build good habits that over the course of the next four years you're going to get really good grades you're going to get involved in a lot of programs activities sports things like that and you're going to have an enjoyable time one of the things that not only here at gym town but every high school that i've ever worked at we always spend a lot of time trying to get seniors across the finish line to graduation you guys you're going to be our guinea pigs we're going to work really hard to get everybody on track from get go and make sure we keep you there from get go we're going to try to invest a lot of time and energy in you all starting next year so that by the time you guys are juniors and seniors your course load is pretty manageable maybe you're spending half your day at the career center and you're just going to really enjoy those last couple years of high school so the work and in high school the work is really front loaded your freshman year your sophomore year you're going to be tackling a lot of those classes that you absolutely need to graduate and then the last couple years you're going to be working on classes to meet your graduation pathway requirements and we're going to cover all of that tonight so here's the qr code again i'll leave it here for a second if you want to try to scan it with your phone off the screen again i i had i had about a 50 rate of accuracy with this and i think it's because of the lighting and things but again if you look in your folder you will have some that qr code there as well so again as information is being presented please if you have questions go ahead and submit those and then we'll if it seems like a good time to interject with the questions i'll interrupt the speaker we'll try to address those as they go if not we will address some questions at the end with that being said mr wyatt schmicker is our guidance counselor a through l he's going to come i'm going to hand him he's now in charge all right thank you mr fletcher so for those who just saw i did take my mask off um slowly so you guys can hear me a little bit better uh we were messing around with it and it was kind of mumbly when i had my mask on and luckily there's no one around to have to deal with that so um yes i am the school counselor for the case loads a through well at the high school mrs yoder is in the back for the m through z's one great thing about the high school is that we cohort our students alphabetically instead of by grade level that's intentional um that process helps us build a better relationship a better rapport with our students throughout those four years um so it just seems like yesterday we were in the classrooms with our eighth graders kind of go over this presentation so luckily for us we have experts in the room as in your student because we really kind of grilled them and made sure they knew this information because there really is a lot of information when we get to high school one big thing is the screen behind me is our diploma options so every student at gym town high school is working towards the core 40.
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welcome kevin i like your sign in the back sorry i'm dominating the meeting all right so we are ready to roll we're live great thank you emma again thank you um there aren't enough thank yous for everything you do and um we just like an update if possible on the regional educator vaccine days and any new information that you have as well as how i think for me you cut out at the end of their gene but um i think you're talking about the um the school days for hampshire county teachers and and how that was looking um let me pull up so northampton and amherst have chosen as regional vaccine sites to allocate 25 of our weekly amount that were distributed from the state to prioritize teacher and staff vaccines for the next four weeks we did reach out um meredith o'leary reached out to the head of the superintendents which i believe for the group is in east hampton um with the plan and uh this week um i we're not sure exactly i know meredith and i were speaking about um planning with who would be the ideal group for this first vaccine clinic but i know that for amherst let me pull up our clinic schedule um so the link for that clinic will be coming out through i believe mike morris to the teachers in amherst and for this week our clinic would be on thursday the 25th starting at 6 30.
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march 18th board of ed business meeting uh before we get into it mr zenski can i have a role for quorum please yes mr grippo here miss helen here miss ham here miss harrigan here mr martelly here mr perogini here and mr white mr chairman you have a quorum thank you carol can i ask that we please stand for the pledge of allegiance under well i hope uh this post st patrick's day finds everyone safe and healthy and uh thankfully we're seeing a little bit more dryer uh well not drier but warmer weather uh that being said uh welcome this evening uh we have a pretty packed business business agenda but we're going to jump right into item 1b 1c which is our student representative report uh joshua and lucy it's all yours thank you uh so we're going to start off with athletics the winter sports league playoffs begin this week girls and boys basketball ice hockey and boys swimming will be competing in the playoffs and there will be no state tournaments so the season will end with the league tournaments fortunately indoor track was able to hold two meets at the new haven field house it was however limited to two schools at a time to maintain proper indoor social distancing and the cheshire team competed against amity and fared very well so we're very excited about that some upcoming news is that spring sports begin saturday march 27th all the spring sports have been approved to play and will have a normal schedule including state tournaments covid protocol rules will still be in effect for all sports and the spring coaches have been brought up to date on the rules that they must follow we have some commun community service news which is that the national honor society just completed their second cards against corona donation drive where the members of the group made color colorful cards and donated bags of snacks to thank healthcare workers for their efforts during the pandemic overall the group collected handmade cards and 10 bags of snacks within roughly a month these collections will be donated to yale new haven hospital and american medical response which is an emergency medical services provider in new haven um in other news the sats will be administered to all juniors next wednesday um for the musical the cast members have actually spent time in the recording studio so they could record with their uh their vocals without masks next week they're planning to put it all together the vocals sets costumes lights music video um the cast is working together in person and doing their best maintain old and create new traditions and hopefully they'll be able to share a streaming of the musical at the beginning of may um and then lastly earlier this week best buddies organized a school-wide activity to celebrate inclusion um we brought the national movement spread the word which has a main purpose of spreading inclusion to everyone to chs so chs students watch a short video about why it's so important to include and then students wrote on a paper strip one way how they will spread inclusion and then they decorated their strip so now we're working on combining all the strips into a paper chain and then we're gonna try to make the chain go around all the halls of the high school and that's all we have thank you joshua lucy uh any questions from the board uh mr chairman i just had a quick question sure uh to josh um you had mentioned the play rehearsals is the uh final run going to be done on stage or is is there going to be is it going to be put together some other way yeah i i am not quite sure about that i can reach out to mr mayo and let you know thanks thanks adam any other questions from the board seeing as aaron lucy and joshua thank you so much good seeing you again we'll uh we'll give you your night back uh you're welcome to stay but you can certainly go we won't take it personally uh thank you for showing up again and we'll see the next meeting thank you thank you before we move on to uh the fund committee reports uh dr stone do we have any corresponding emails to cps cover 19 at cheshire that k12 sctus i'm saying that just in case folks want to contact us during the meeting sure we do i don't know if you want to cover them now or in the correspondence section uh correspondence unless it's really you know unless you're going to cover some topics during your update uh we can do that later okay great thank you that being said uh we have uh several committee reports starting with curriculum uh miss ham you're up you're on youtube thank you tim let's try that again all right we met on march 9th um went over a number of items which i'll try to get through thoroughly but quickly um the first uh order of business um they mostly we had no business but informational items um our first item was celebrating black history month um and we heard from representatives from the elementary middle and high school uh who shared just samples of the work that was going on in chester cheshire public schools to recognize black history month um first we focused on debt um norton um not yes norton and we had um kelly grillo and deb manky um talk to us about a uh the black history museum that the student council set up to show exhibits uh created by students and displayed through the school mike woods then shared a presentation from the middle school that included recognition of the contributions struggles and journeys of african-american figures in the united states and then make connections to both uh language arts and social studies core curriculum and future opportunities to infuse the work with the curriculum and experiences for students at dodd and then dr reed uh maureen reed at the high school spoke about the activities to celebrate black history month um it was uh in an intro really fascinating um overview they had 24 days of living poetry in which students read a poem by a black poet over the announcements over the course of 28 days as the name would suggest and then the rams against racism also offered book talks um using or based on the book between the world and me by tanishi coates which was uh it again a very fascinating and interesting presentation um then we went into mid-year data review that um looked at the k through eight performance comparing it compared uh k through eight performance um of students from uh looking at 2019 the school year 2019-20 and then 2020 and 21 in the fall and winter um periods and what the data showed and the sources were the reading inventory and the easy cbm assessments um and what it showed was an amazing resiliency on the part of our kids which was very encouraging um and when asked you know how given all of the obstacles that the kids were facing how this could be you know mr hanlon suggested or offered up that teacher collaboration regarding an implementation of a curriculum that user uses what's called the accelerated acceleration framework developed by the connecticut center for school change intensive collaboration um and just a focus on moving forward all contributed to what are very positive results so um that segwayed into an update on profession professional development and mr hanlon indicated that uh one early we have consistent early release professional development days um they are focusing on the acceleration framework and leveraging technology to foster increased student engagement both in school and with remote learners and then um marlene solano added details of the district's efforts to provide professional development on these particular um in these platforms outside of professional days so right now we've got a group of 51 teachers and administrators who are attending a month-long evening professional development series on acceleration provided by the connecticut center for school change and the district anticipates a continued focus on professional development related to acceleration um we then moved into the um letter that will be going out at the end of the month to parents regarding the smarter balanced assessment and that um led to a letter that was submitted by mr jack bester and um it was read in its entirety regarding the s back or um smarter balanced assessment and um it i would just refer folks to the um cheshire public school youtube video of the curriculum committee starting in about the hour and ten minute mark it's a great overview of the smarter balanced balanced assessment and what it seeks to how it came into being what it seeks to accomplish and why it is important in this this year we did not do it last year um we are going to do it this year and um and again miss solano provided some very interesting information um about the the the entire assessment um i will say that mr mr bester has asked us to consider as a board um to request a waiver understanding full well that the waiver will not come because um the federal department of education has um not provided that level of um autonomy or or discretion so the test will take place but i do want to note that he did ask that we at least make that statement as a board so um also the draft uh 2021 ngs smarter and smarter ballast assessment parent letter letter was shared with the committee with the committee members those tests will take place in may and finally we discussed um cheshire high school student engagement and expectations dr mary gadd gave the report that included four main topics in-person learning upcoming events social emotional learning and homework policy and dr gad hasn't has indicated that there are 300 more students attending in person four days a week and cheshire high school is looking to increase this number recognizing that we are unable to really cohort our kids um and also um maintain social distancing requirements so it's it's a very fine balance that they're trying to achieve and as we get vaccinations um now that it's also opened up to kids 16 and up in the next couple of weeks um let's let's hope that um more and more students can come in to the school and begin attending those four days but equally encouraging were the fact that proms graduation um in-person activities are all on the schedule um according to the schedule so i we're all looking forward to that the school is also conducting such things as wellness wednesday um to focus on social emotional learning time management is also a topic that faculty and counselors have been working on with students and the homework policy is also under review and the current purpose of homework as stated in the policy continues to represent the beliefs about homework at the high school so um finally the parts of the policy that relate to the amount of time students spend in homework is under review and likely for revision and updates so that covers it thank you faith any questions sorry thank you tony thank you faith for that um a couple a couple points so faith thank you for the um the fifth the the curriculum committee highlight where uh you were discussing the standardized testing yes back so i did watch it and a question i think probably for marlene in it i heard you say that part of what you're doing is looking to see if teachers are asking the question are teachers aligned with the standard and i want to just for people who are watching i'm not a fan of standardized standardized testing the least bit i've benefited from them personally i feel that i've benefited from but i think that i do feel like there is a risk in people teaching to the test not saying it happens i'm just saying there is a risk in that that you can try to learn what's on the test rather than what's necessarily gonna give the best outcome to students um but anyway the point my question you had mentioned uh asking if teachers are being are teachers aligned with the test and my question is should teachers be aligned with the test in your professional opinion and i realize it's very subtle but to me it could be a big difference so it's a slightly different question so i'm sorry you had to go back and watch me talk on and on about the smarter balance i want to make clear that we're not aligning any of our teaching to the test what we align our curriculum instruction and assessment to are the connecticut core standards because those are the things that we need those are the skills that the state has indicated that our students need in order to be college and career ready so that's what we're focused on okay okay all right and i may very well misquoted you and i apologize if i did but you corrected it right there that's fine um and the another question and this i had i actually had a discussion with jack too and one of the things i'm wondering about is um are do you know what's do you know what's on the test do teachers know what's on the test the questions and then what goes through my mind is you know if this stuff is it publicly is it publicly available is it verified verifiable by people you have you i mean my brother did test not for s back but for another test he was grading him at one point i mean people get hired for this and they're supposed to have certain standards the way they test it but ultimately you do have people who could have you know slightly different interpretations on stuff and so i'm wondering you know how how do we know how do the teachers the classroom teachers how do they know do can they can they see the test can they see the answers and see if they agree with something and i'll tell you let me just make one point here i remember back in seventh grade with miss finneran and she told me i got a question wrong and i didn't because this was a topic in science that i understood she told me she said too bad you got it wrong and i just kind of threw up my hands in the air and said whatever it's not a big deal i don't really care but the reality is is that there are situations in which you know somebody's saying this is the answer and it's factually incorrect and so how do we can we determine you know if we actually agree with these answers and with these questions is it public so let me try to answer a couple of the questions that you had posed in in there um the first one i think is is the information are the test questions public domain and do teachers and other people have access to them and the answer to that question is no they are secure and they are not for public consumption the second part of that i think touches on really the validity the reliability the test fairness the design of the test the scale scores and the norms the reporting and the interpretation and for that i would refer you to the the technical report of the smarter balanced assessment consortium the 2016-2017 technical guide which is chock full of um the information that would answer any of those questions as well as um you know the um sort of the psychometrics that go behind all of that information that the consortium built um and then the state of connecticut you know has an office under a jeep gallop christian who devises those growth scores so that we are able really what we're doing with this is we want to make sure that our kids are growing you know you send them to school every day they spend a year with us we need to be able to show that they have mastered certain skills what might be interesting tim one day if you know folks who are interested is to take a look at some of the sample test questions so that folks can see the complexity of it it's it's very much not a rote memorization test or a pic pick the answer it really is more of which of these is not the answer after you've gone through and had to apply a number of different ideas to a problem uh to sort of try and divide try and come up and problem solve an answer so it really is much different than any kind of a test that i ever took whether it had been the sats or the gres or the iowa test of basic skills back in the day it might be interesting to as a group you know take a look at that okay thank you sure sure okay thank you for that like where i still stay in the same position which is i just generally don't like standardized tests but thank you i appreciate what you're saying about it most of us get a little twitchy around standardized tests i think it was how we were brought through the system with them and hopefully as i told the faculty at chapman the cmts are dead and we're not going to ever let um a test cause that kind of a feeling in a child or a teacher ever again this is a whole different way of doing business and you know it used to be that you know some districts used to want to make sure kids had breakfast before they came to school the day of the test no no no no we want kids to have breakfast every day we want kids to come well rested every day we're not doing anything different the day of the test we're going to welcome you with open arms every day of the week not just during test season so hopefully um if people were listening we're we're not reacting to that situation anymore and our kids have become much much more resilient to that because our our teachers are calm about it and so we're passing that on to the kids yeah no and i i can i definitely appreciate that i'll just say in general though that if there is a risk just saying there's a risk i'm not saying it happens but there is a risk in teaching to the test and then that doesn't really relate simply to the one day on which the test is given the risk would be in focusing on things that are not going to provide the best outcomes for students over time and you're talking about weeks or months leading up to that one day of the test but thank you for that about um the point you made about at least on that particular day having a trying to reduce the stress i don't i actually for me i don't really remember being stressed out when i took all those the iowa's and everything else but i can definitely see how kids would be especially more in high school not not in elementary school it didn't cross my mind in the least bit but um i'm sure there's stress when kids take the sat but the bottom line is you can't really teach to this test and i think marlene's saying when you know we we teach standards like you know uh connecting themes within reading and um you know three-digit multiplication it's not um the test we teach kids to be good problem solvers and i i would definitely encourage you to take marlene up on trying some of the questions wow that they're not and the questions change for every child um when you take this test out of a bank of thousands so you know it's impossible to teach the same five questions or whatever that you know as banana does last every year i mean it's much different and so we teach our kids to be problem solvers who understand third grade math and then they do well on the assessment or anything else that you put in front of them that's our goal right thanks everyone let's be careful let's stop saying we're teaching to the test because this is not the case and again there's plenty of resource materials and that's back i know some of us weren't here when it's materialized years ago a few of us been through it my daughter's been through it i get it but definitely take up marlene on the you know get the spin on what the statute is about any other questions on the current faith yeah i um i think at one point we all asked if we could um actually sit down and try to take the test which would be probably please definitely pretty interesting my guess is we would set cheshire public schools back like just um but you know again i'm gonna i'm just gonna refer folks to that that section of the meeting um only because we did talk about i understand the concern i mentioned that we are becoming a data-driven society and we're concerned that education is going to be completely data driven and so um and and contributed to the conversation you know the fact that there is an art to teaching there's an art and there's a science to teaching and and um you don't want to lose one to the um you know to the benefit or the uh you know the build up the other and so um it was a great discussion and i think we were pretty well assured that our teachers are finding are never actually losing that um that innate talent to the artistic element to teaching and and i don't want to sound really ethereal and everything else but i mean there is that approach to teaching that you cannot lose because that's where you connect with your students and so um i would refer you to there as for the teaching i understand mr bester's concerns i truly truly do but i also appreciate where marlene comes in and says that we are going to get some valuable data this year as opposed to what we may have lost um in this covet year um and i have waited and mr bester's request and and personally um i i don't see the value of asking for a waiver and i will say that now but um i just wanted to add that to to the conversation yeah thank you faith enough i know folks like probably wonder who missed their best stories if they're watching this meeting but we did get a couple emails from from jack uh and again it's and there's other parents that have some questions on the two and and i you know i i it was we always take uh mr buster's information at heart he's very thorough and it's helpful uh but you know part of this too is you know i guess you know it's it's great that marlene took the time and current community i unfortunately couldn't be at that meeting but to the time to go through us back and what it means to cheshire and how it actually applies to us because there's so much misinformation out there and i you know it doesn't surprise me there are folks wondering exactly what this test is you know unless we're out there you know being transparent about it so i hope that video is being watched and we're always happy to help you know educate not just like students on this but parents so understand what these things are about so thank you for spending time on this i'm sure we'll hear more about the um but that being said any other questions on the qriket current report if not we're going to move on to finance not a favorite topic mr gripple would you please give us a financial court update thank you mr chairman uh the finance committee has not met since uh january i believe there hasn't really been a lot of reason to currently i believe we will in the future probably next month but we'll see definitely next month because we'll have our council meetings with the for the budget anyhow i uh hand the report over to mr maciana for a wonderful summary of events good evening everyone and thanks adam for the little vote of confidence there i'll do my best um to get through the report i if you could just confirm that you could see on the screen the this month's report someone yes thank you uh and the report is a little bit longer this month so i'll give you the highlights um our budget hasn't changed 74.59 million we're eight months in um we've expended or encumbered about 87.4 percent of the budget um and i will tell you that as a just a high-level overview we are um tracking just fine for our budget and to meet our our budget this year we do have 706 000 that we've received from the state and 200 000 available in the unexpended education funds account so we are looking good to meet our budget i did want to highlight um just a couple of things on revenue so the revenue that we were expecting to receive uh this year was 85 264 from the emergency and secondary emergency school relief fund that's been received 264 which was used for the broadcast classrooms the board already was aware of that but i in this month's report the final grant funding of seven hundred six thousand seventy five dollars was received by the state and it's been applied to our budget accounts so that 706 000 is now incorporated and it's been used to offset the covert related expenses that we've incurred through the end of december so that's all factored into this month's report and if you did look at the report or you look at it in your spare time you could see that this column here has been updated to show that the 000 and exactly where it's been applied i have another update in the next section of the report which um is really an update from a summary that i've been showing since november as to the covert related expenses that we expected to incur and so the update which is in this middle column and this column shows the change so we were anticipating about 1.34 million dollars of covert related expenses for everything from you know cleaning to the food service program revenue loss tent and table rentals all the categories here on the left we updated the estimate and it's about 1.2 million so we're to the good about 135 000 over the original estimate from november so that's the good news on this the not so good news weren't um planning on at the time we prepared this report on needing tents and tables for this spring so fortunately the money that we saved over the first um eight months we'll be able to use and and offset almost exactly the 10 rentals that we have scheduled from april 20th through june 16th and so we're within about 1700 you know of the original forecast including the new tent rental so so that's good news and and the bottom line here is we thought we would need to make up about 3 000 in total from this year's budget after considering the revenue we're receiving from esser and the um cares act and now it's down to about 291 thousand i will also confirm that the food service program revenue loss that when we started the year we thought it was going to be much higher we are on track for that 300 000 we may even do slightly better than that so that that's all factored in so from just a conclusion point of view i feel confident that um we'll be able to end the year you know in balance you know we will have to make some offsets which are already factored in to make up that 291 thousand i'm moving on to medical benefits and i i'd like to just wrap up the report and then we'll go back for questions medical benefits i'm going to just show you the medical benefits report for february which was included in the board's package and you could see that claims in february here hundred fifteen thousand eight ninety five um so we are certainly on a better trend than we were over the first six months of the year where our claims were averaging over a million dollars a month uh you could see for the month our net change to the reserve fund was a decrease of 771 way better than what we saw here earlier in the year where we had some months where the fund balance decreased by over 450 000.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
good evening everyone um again my name is kevin walston thank you ann assistant superintendent here in danbury public schools um it's great to see so many familiar faces on the call and then it's also great to see some faces quite frankly i do not recognize so we welcome you this evening we are very excited about the position that we're in right now with these federal funds coming to danbury by the way of the cares act and essa relief funds as many people on this call might be aware the district was a recipient of cair's ex exo funds won i mean so we are coming to a close on that those funds this year um and any monies that are left over you know we'll be able to roll over into next year we're looking to expand all of those monies most of those monies were spent on ppe equipment and and then any relief efforts that we could provide mitigating learning loss in our schools this year next year the i'm sorry my dog is in the background drinking water i feel like every time it sits down sit down here he comes um and so this year um with the so2 funds we have 10.1 million dollars coming our way as as the expectation of those monies there's an expectation that we would be getting support from our community whether that's our staff our administrators our teachers our our parents our students we're looking to engage as many stakeholders as we can [Music] some of my colleagues are on this call and they can tell you you know initially we had discussions because of course we were initially excited about these monies we met with our administrators and then they had made recommendations that we had not considered and courtney and i recently met with uh parents on monday night they made recommendations we had not considered uh we anticipate some of the same this evening and we also anticipate even more recommendations from our staff on monday that we also have not considered um i am i feel like we are positioned well um to help address some of the concerns and priorities that were outlined on that you're going to see in the powerpoint momentarily um just an example of some highlights of the powerpoint and the priorities that have been outlined in somewhat i don't want to say restrictions but kind of guidelines for the fsa relief funds and that is you know continue our efforts um our connection efforts with families to make sure all of our kids and families are connected make sure they have laptops and you know accessibility um to the schools uh remotely making sure um you know another priority is going to be about focusing on professional development to make sure our staff has the resources they need uh to continue to work in this dual environment whether we're working with kids at home or working with kids in person in schools and then make sure they also have the support and professional development training that they need to handle the increased social emotional needs that we know are going to be upon us when we come back full time um you know there's certainly some other ones and certainly we have to address the learning loss learning acceleration learning recovery issues and challenges that we've all talked about over this last year and so certainly those monies will be afforded for those reasons um and and then of course you know one of our bigger ones in bigger priority areas is the social emotional support uh for students and for staff um and and those things were also prioritized um in the in the essa relief funds and so we have a quick powerpoint that we want to review with you uh the powerpoint um is quick uh intentionally it's just to provide some context uh but the listening part uh this evening is about moving all of you all 84 94 and counting of you into breakout sessions um you will have facilitators in those breakout sessions we've had some practice at this over the last year so we feel pretty good about our ability to handle the breakouts and and get your elicit your feedback in these sessions um you know we've gone over this a couple of different ways on what this could look like and i'm assuming we're still good with this plan and i'll just share it with are we good still good with the plan that i had talked about absolutely and so we have we have these five priority areas we will we have 95 and counting so i anticipate we'll probably have over 100 by the time we um go into breakout rooms and and you guys will be chosen randomly to go into different priority rooms while you're there uh we may have 35 40 minutes for at least 20 people uh to give feedback in a given priority the intention is and for you to have the time that you need to make contributions um make recommendations in this given priority for the district to consider as part of its submission of the grant um and then of course some of you may put be put into a priority that doesn't necessarily resonate with you as much as perhaps some of the others and so we with that we will ask that you um you know resubmit your survey recommendations if you have if you've already submitted a survey we ask you to resubmit um because you may have some additional items that you'd like to submit given this conversation this evening and then if you haven't participated in the survey we ask that you use that survey uh to include any recommendations that um you have not already um shared this evening um and so uh without any further ado i will and are you sharing the powerpoint go ahead go ahead and share it yeah okay everyone give me one minute and you can play that nice music that you had going on i might need just give me one second i'm gonna move some stuff around on my screen here we go okay so here are the 10.1 million dollars funds that i had mentioned alluded to earlier and let me get started and so state level priorities about sustaining local district capacity and providing equity and access to high quality education for all children and and so let me start here with a slide on restrictions of funds and so the funds cannot be used to supplant or pay for regular district expenses and i just want to share what i mean when i when i say that um and so and so one what we don't want to do um and so it's going to be difficult not to make recommendations because many people or probably everyone on this call um can appreciate um the challenges in front of us um and then also you know addressing some of the needs in terms of staffing you probably have already seen um the staffing requests we have made to the city in the in previous years and that is you know is not going to that's not going to change this year um and so when we make recommendations for this grant we want to be mindful that we can't add positions to the district that is going to be reoccurring costs for us as danbury public schools because what we don't want to do is you know prepare ourselves for a financial cliff uh that we cannot recover from at the same time you know and it's a it's an interesting balancing act that we're pro that we're about to um step into um we do need to be creative and and more than likely need to hire people to work with our kids to address the learning loss and acceleration and recovery that we talked about not to mention we're likely going to need people to support us in our efforts to support the social emotional concerns that we're anticipating coming our way um but at the same time we can't include these things in our ongoing regular operating costs because again we don't want to create the financial cliff when we come out with these grants on sunset so we do need to be mindful of that as we move forward the five priorities that i alluded to earlier academic supports learning loss learning acceleration and recovery family and community connections school safety and social emotional well-being of the whole student and our and of our school staff remote learning staff development and addressing the digital divide and school facility repairs and improvements and so as a process the superintendent will convene a district level planning committee that that has already taken place each priority convenes a stakeholder group and so we have started that work we we have and here we are number three feedback from families constituents and community members is vital host listening forms and surveys and so the surveys is part of what has already been pushed out to the community district level planning groups take the data to inform the activities programs and strategies that will be funded and uh my colleagues my colleagues and i we will be working on this next week after our last informational session um on monday and then final approval so we will be submitting a grant um to the to the connecticut state department of education um i believe in early april the first week in april so just some protocols for this evening we will discuss each area for 15 minutes that's going to change a little bit um we're going to have you guys divide it into um one big priority area feel like you'll have more time to contribute um to the process and make sure we have equal voice in the process two questions will be posed to start the discussion in your breakout group please use the raised hand feature of zoom to be acknowledged by the facilitator um because again your groups are going to be pretty large about 20 people um as as of right now and ideas can also be put in the chat feature when you guys get in your breakout sessions and so the five priorities and i will go through these quickly again academic supports learning loss learning acceleration and recovery and just to be mindful academic supports must be positioned to accelerate learning and facilitate recovery these are our guidelines it is particularly important that we measure learning loss and target resources for our students disproportionately affected by the pandemic and so i'll continue to read what's in bold because those are part of the guidelines that we must consider as part of these recommendations and then there will be a question at the end of every slide and you guys will receive these same questions in your breakout what do you feel are the most important area of learning and what can be done to increase our our children's learning priority two family community connections engage with families in a community to provide parents and guardians with the skills to support their children's academic endeavors and then we'll have two questions for our breakout groups to consider as a parent what skills or programs would would help you increase your knowledge to support your child and two how can danbury public schools strengthen communication with families and engage parents as partners in their children's academic development priority three school safety and social emotional well-being of the whole student and school staff address unprecedented physical and mental health concerns through following public health safety measures and the mental health support both in person and remotely right and i think that's important it's supporting students in person and remotely and making sure we have the resources to do those two things the two questions to elicit feedback what programs or strategies would you suggest to address the social and emotional development of our children and what initiatives would you suggest to reduce anxiety and raise students confidence priority 4 remote learning staff development in the digital divide maintain or upgrade access to technology and connectivity for the long term increase robust professional development provide technical assistance and or training for families and again two questions for this priority four how can danbury public schools improve its digital environment and is there enough learning support such as technology hotlines for families and the last priority priority five school repair and improvement showing school facility repairs and improvements to reduce the risk of virus transmission and exposure exposure to environmental health hazards what ideas do you have to make our schools safe and healthier no it's not [Music] sorry so um and i'm gonna go back to the powerpoint i think this is where you come back in so let me just put this back up we're just working through a little technical issue here before we break out into groups okay not a problem so so let me just say because we did start this conversation on monday um with a group of parents um and so while we are working through some of the logistics of the breakout sessions i am happy uh to answer any clarifying questions that might be out there um before we go to break out so just if i could introduce before we do i wanted to thank um senator julie kushner for being here with us it's great to have you as part of this listening forum um and i i just also wanted to say the timeline kevin if i could so please yeah one of the things so it's a short timeline and we do have additional federal funding that we are also expecting so ideally we'll have additional engagement with the community for that um but right now the the due date is early april for us to get um this application into the state so we're looking forward to this feedback tonight so we can come back so we're really glad that you're here with us participating this evening thanks courtney kathy i just um saw your question in the chat um we had not planned to go over it but we can show the results certainly um on the website uh we can collect it collect have the the results collected and make sure that's available on the website for the community we were trying not to take away from the you guys participation in the breakout sessions tonight if i don't know we would have had this little um pickup i could have gone over it right now this is great we have 99 folks in attendance carmen i see you thank you again for posting and facilitating monday night you did an amazing job thank you it's my pleasure to help thank you and some of my parents are here too they they were awesome awesome and i see many of my colleagues on this evening um and so many of the cabinet members are here i i think i saw earlier that dr casimiro was joining us while we're all joined remotely she's joining us remotely in the car the director of special ed is also on the call kelly trooshes is on the call smiling somewhere and courtney you heard from earlier director of finance and spoke to our timeline and then of course we have i've seen a number of staff members my other colleagues i see terence who's there terence cunningham who is our director of adult ed and then his manager in the office um jody housinia is also here with us this evening thank you [Music] probably making sure that they're going to get their their cut and adult debt which i totally understand that and i see citywide pto was well represented this evening thank you good to see you as always jade kathy i don't see tim tonight but of course he was there monday night because he's everywhere hi minnie how are you good to see you hi melinda how you doing you didn't think i was gonna say hi did you hi i was going to come in disguise really hard questions good to see you kevin can i ask a question yes yes please kathy um in reviewing this survey some of the questions seem to be about um adult learning or like the community garden one and i just am concerned the money would be spent on like adult only activities because that document on the state website said it was educational recovery and learning acceleration for students and then you know the family and connections were direct engagements to provide support for students so i just want to be sure we're using the money for k to 12 or pre-k you know whatever the the age group is but for students only yeah so so our priority uh particularly with family and community connections will be about supporting families giving them the skills that they need to help support their kids at home whether it be remotely or in person it will be about helping to improve communications with our families um and and making sure we're doing that you know regardless of the platform uh making sure we're finding ways to better communication with families those will be priorities and consistent with the guidelines um and if if there are ways other ways to make sure we've continued to engage families you know we will you know leverage those activities as well if we feel like it's necessary to engage more families as as part of you know as part of these efforts you know and sometimes um you know kathy certainly you and citywide pto knows from leading pto organizations at the school level you know um that that we you know sometimes at different schools we have a challenge just getting the parent involvement particularly once we leave our k5 schools um and so sometimes we have to get even a little bit more creative to pull our parents in and then we trick them right like once we get them in and then we trick them the same way we do extracurricular activities with our kids right we keep them connected to our schools and we we use those extra collect activities to to build on their connection um get them to buy into school and raise student achievement whether that's our music programs you know our sports programs etc so i i'm with you all the way uh we we will stick to our priorities those guidelines are there for a reason and and that will that will certainly guide our process but i understand the question the way some of the surveys were surveyed questions were written i understand the concern yeah some of them were vague but i did you know i'm hopeful for the bilingual liaison if you will because i think that will be tremendous for communication and helping increase involvement like you mentioned so i totally agree captain i appreciate you mentioning that totally agree and we're looking to prioritize that we all recognize that as a need for us district-wide we want to make sure we can keep everyone engaged kevin can i ask a general question sure and hi i know you said that you are going to submit the grant documents in the beginning of april um do you submit the breakout like we want to use this amount of money for xyz um kind of setup and then what if um say like those things don't come to fruition like you can't find a certain set of teachers for you know i know we've had a trouble finding teachers right now and things like that like what if that doesn't happen or do they allow you to reallocate the money or is it just gone or how does that work yeah that's a great question so so jade i'll start and then ask courtney to to chime in and kelly to chime in because we've all three of us have been part of this grant process so so one um almost exactly the same way um i shared it with with everyone on this call those five priorities uh will also be um bucketed in a similar fashion in the grants and then in that grant um there will be an allocation associated with each area and then if we want let's just say we want you know 22 interventionists in the learning loss area we would have to make sure that that is accounted for under that under under priority one we would have to associate that with the salary if any if benefits are appropriate with benefits um etc and then we would drop down to priority two so every single area um has to be accounted for uh whether there's a people resources whether those are programs uh whether those are computer programs whether those are you know maintenance upgrades that you know courtney may be listening to or considering um all of those things and it's by priority um etc and then if there's if for some reason to your point um you know let's just say we have these grandiose ideas of getting um interventionist teachers i'll just stay right there right now and for some reason we can't find them there's typically an opportunity opportunity for revision um somewhere somewhere at the midpoint of the year and then as a district we would pivot um courtney and kelly quite frankly um both of them had more experience with their own their own specific grants than me um but that's typical my understanding of the process yeah i think that makes sense i just want to make sure we weren't going to lose one dollar you know yeah i just we're not jade we're gonna you know utilize every dollar and i just wanted to reiterate what um assistant superintendent walleston just said we um you know have a great partnership with the state and the state knows that we know what we know today you know and and we don't know you know what obviously we're living in a pandemic right now what next year will hold and the state's been great partners with us you know we're submitting a budget based on all the priorities but the community and the staff and the cabinet identify as being fitting the five priorities of the state with backup data and information about why it's going to be effective and but knowing that that could change and there's some flexibility for us to do some modification to the grant especially given that we don't have the parameters around the additional monies that the um yet that the um danbury expects to receive as a result of the next stimulus package so there is additional funding that's coming and i also see questions in the chat just i want it while we're still getting ready for the rooms no courtney jodie had a had a question for us okay okay oh that's okay if if courtney wants to finish first that's okay no i think she was finished she was going to the next person she was looking in the chat oh oh okay um i just wanted to add um good evening everyone um i'm the i'm jody huzzina from adult education i just wanted to just comment to um the comment before about the survey i haven't seen the survey yet although i'm looking forward to it um just i just wanted to clarify for those of you that don't know many of the parents that are the parents of the children in the danbury schools are students of adult education so um even though it doesn't it doesn't seem like adult education is part of k-12 in a kind of disconnected way it is because we serve the the students that leave at 17 years old or the parents of the students that are in those schools so we've been working very closely with ann meade and the family resource centers for many years to make that two generational approach and it's so important in this time of the pandemic to connect the parent the child and the school especially with their discussion with the um with the esl um it's the adult education teachers that are the certified teachers to teach the english language to the parents um so um i just i i know that we haven't done a too good of a job bringing that to the citywide pto and uh my director terence and i look forward to being able to do that in the future um but it's it's just as important to remember that those parents need the services to be able to support their children in in the schools thanks i just wanted to share that thank you it was my question was i saw there was a question about ell for adults but there was also one about like a cooking class and that was the one i didn't understand i i support you know ell for adults and everything like that but specific classes you know that were for personal gain if you will sure so i wasn't sure jody kathy let jody kathy let let me go to the next question please of course so so karthik also had a question um is there any restriction on funds that certain percentage is only allowed for any of the priorities courtney can you help with that one yeah so there's not a restriction on the funds um we are trying to balance across the priorities when we look at it so we're going to hear everybody's feedback today i also saw a question about the total the 10.1 million is over a course of the next two and a half years or three so wait a minute wait a minute so kathy asks is there is there any chance we won't be given to 10 million can you let kathy know it's 10.1 and we're expecting every penny 10.1 every penny and it's not just 10 million a year it's 10 million over through through september 2024 so and there's not a restriction of evenly splitting it you know it depends on where our resource load is when we come out and look at what what our needs are um and so yeah and there's and i think i saw a proportionality question about the buckets no the buckets were given to us by the state it's the state priority to meet the needs of you know learning loss um specifically focused on kids that are more impacted so ell esl um special education students and kids that are most disproportionately impacted learning loss social emotional well-being the technology the facility upgrades all of those pieces you know are on the table for us are eligible for us to use for um for these funds unique to our district um so that it's not proportional like some of the other funding sources that we've had recently [Music] and so there's another question here i think we can all answer it um is there a plan on how funds will be distributed per school and will the size of the school be in consideration um and i'll i'll just take the first chance of that and just say yes and so there's not a necessarily specific plan for the school but there's certainly um consideration for on the size of the school and making sure that those resources are equitably distributed uh throughout the district there's no doubt about that okay mr walston yes we are ready to go in a slightly different format tonight uh the breakout groups are not working i saw that with google tonight so what i am proposing we do is that we go through each question i'm going to ask folks to raise their hand we will recognize your hand we'll go for 20 minutes for each of the questions i'll time them if we don't get to your response please feel free to email me i will put my email in the chat several times so you can email me tomorrow and believe us that um though we're having this technical glitch tonight your feedback is really really important to us as mr walston had said so please reach out send me an email uh we're working on the data this weekend we'll make sure that all of your thoughts are uh put forth and all your recommendations because we value what you're thinking so so and is it possible that we can um show this form so that we can capture those notes in real time so everyone is seeing it similar to a breakout session yes yes i should be able to share my screen and ryan hayes um while anne is getting this together we just want to say you have a beautiful kitchen we just had to say that i'm just saying i'm sorry it's dinner time so there you go there you go yes i can and i can take it okay great courtney is taking the notes on the sheet i'll do the raised hands and we're ready to go great thank you everyone for being here do you want me to courtney are you going to share you want me to share you're muted you're ready to go [Music] this is what you wanted me to share yeah great i don't have the questions though you know what if you want do you want ann to share the questions on the screen and i'll just take the notes in the background would that be better like i think heaven's falling off okay do you need me to post them yeah i think so kevin it would be great if you could post them and i'll just take the notes in the background if that's okay okay thank you i tried to get out and you guys just keep pulling me back in okay so courtney how about this how about we take uh n will time us um while you're collecting notes before we go into the next one we'll review the notes that we captured is that fair okay sounds great all right so priority one academic supports learning loss learning acceleration and recovery academic supports must be positioned to accelerate learning and facilitate recovery what do you feel are the most important area of learning and what can be done to increase your child's learning and how much time do we have for this area okay uh 20 minutes okay so i'm looking for hands so at this point we're looking for some feedback we have some ideas on that what areas are most important for your child's area of learning here at the bottom of your screen you'll see the little raised hand so we have ally hi sorry my camera's off um so my son is in kinder i'm sorry he's in first grade and in kindergarten um you know obviously he had to stop school in the middle of the year and i was just thinking um you know these are really important years of his life and he's learning to read and he's learning to do math so maybe if the school can offer a program during the summer maybe have a teacher i know that it'll probably cause you to um pay another salary but maybe just like learning resources um in the summer maybe two hours on a tuesday and thursday night maybe just have a teacher you know helping with additional reading and math thank you we'll go to ken williams hi how are you doing i i used the question in regards to this party um number one how do you guys have uh like a plan in regards to measuring learning loss for like identifying these groups so is it going to be more of looking at where they were pre pandemic to next year is it kind of based off of this year's data what's what's your thoughts um with the how to measure the learning loss and which kids to target great question kevin can you address some of that how we're going to measure the learning loss that students have had to apply the funds to right so if if i'm not mistaken we are still moving forward kelly aren't we still moving forward with our assessment um portfolio that we typically do in terms of the star assessment uh the state assessment uh yeah so do you want me to have done in years past do you want me to answer kevin yes please you know yeah so weird um we're doing a bunch of different district assessments as we've always done some of them have been done in person some of them have been done virtually and so we have data such as the star assessment um such as dibble's assessment other phonics assessments if we're talking about elementary level that we look at and we compare both to where students were before the pandemic as well as where we expect the grade level target to be so right now for example we're using some of our assessment data to target students that are below a certain percentile to recommend them for summer school instruction and we will do something very similar when it comes to those to target with learning loss yeah and mr mr williams uh the state has actually provided a threshold for what for what an acceptable measure would be i mean we'll be using that number to help determine summer school recommendations like we had in years previous and our next question is from jade jade go ahead thanks girl um just to piggyback off their question um the prior question i was wondering are we only looking to target students that are falling say behind grade level or you know things that are in a really desperate situation or are we looking for learning loss for all like i would for example my son's in second grade and i was going to say i think writing is an area where they are losing you know a ton of learning because they're typing on the computer he is barely written this entire year you know in in handwriting and so i would say almost the entire grade level is probably behind um in that area and so i was wondering i know that our principal had said that the star test really is not that useful right now because a lot of kids are taking it at home they got parental help you know there was a lot of issues you know with that and so i was just wondering just what your all of your thoughts on you know how we handle this as a larger group and not just the kids that maybe have fallen behind or behind before but generally like if they're moving up to the next grade level are they going to be prepared you know for that considering all that they have lost this year already i just i wasn't sure how that would work out or what you thought about that and so and so jade i'm and i want to make sure i'm answering your question here and um any supports that we be that we might be putting in place will be about accelerating learning for for everyone right and so certainly as part of our monies um in in terms of resources available for the district um you know our most vulnerable students will you will find support for them in terms of positions in a district uh but in terms of invitations to any tutoring efforts that we might have extended learning whether that's an extended day or extended summer experiences you know everyone is going to be invited to those to for those opportunities um and so you know that we will be making every effort to make sure there's an opportunity for all uh but but but our most vulnerable certainly uh will be working to prioritize that group but that does not mean that everyone's not going to be have access to these program programming as well yeah i guess what i was wondering is like are you thinking about like more pull-out sessions from away from the class or are we thinking about like full class acceleration i guess was my question because i wasn't sure how that would you know work exactly but um it seems complicated i don't envy you and trying to you know figure out how this will work but i do think it is more than just a falling below problem but in a lot of cases especially for the younger ones who are just learning like to start instead of adding on to their learning they're literally just learning how to do and read and write that maybe a class-wide approach um might be you know helpful yeah so yeah so so jay number one i want to be careful not answering your question and possibly sign me some of the feedback and creativity for tonight um i like how you turn the tables and try to get me to answer answer this question what do you feel are the most important areas for learning we need that feedback from you guys to help inform this work um i i can just tell you that the district is is open right now to what this looks like certainly we've had you know experience supporting students in terms of you know learning loss and recovery and academic intervention you know we're well aware of what that looks like however we're afforded different supports and resources right now and we want to think a little outside of the box beyond what we saw in this paper about supporting students with disabilities you know english language learners etc um this is an opportunity for us to think a little bit even outside the box so i can appreciate your conversation about you know in full group trying to accelerate learning world you know within that classroom and so if i'm hearing you correctly like you know kathy snow and i are teachers in the classroom co-teaching and we receive the training that we need that might be different from previous years training on to make sure all of our kids are learning at high levels um you know in this new teaching in this new mode of teaching um you know which obviously has already started to take place uh but you know there's also opportunity for growth because we've you know i if i if i stayed in the classroom the whole time i'd be teaching for 20 plus years um and but but this would have been my first year in this in this format so i have considerable opportunity for growth in this in this in this new platform and i think it's important for us to capitalize on that opportunity with our staff and help to extend their growth um so they can get the most out of their kids great thank you we're going to go on to jane next please hi yes thank you very much um i i love everything that everyone's saying and i agree that we need to support the kids to advance but you know having a student who is thriving thank goodness through all this and meeting his expectations i wonder how much he isn't being pushed even forward because of it so i'd like to see that when we do this um support we support even the high and low kids in reaching even more of their potential um just just um knowing them they're all going to go back to school and summer school yes is supportive for kids but having them all get together and working i i find that you know while they're in this distance learning it's it's hard to explain i just don't want what he would have reached in school to be set back you know that average kid or the higher kid not being able to go even higher compared to other districts is my concern you know so we we will make sure we highlight on this idea of enrichment for our students in addition to accelera in addition to learning recovery absolutely yeah yeah and i misspoke really it's for all students if the way i conveyed it is it is learning lots related to all students supposed to be yes i just i just don't want you know like a child like mine who is is being successful and meeting all the requirements and stuff which again i'm blessed i really am um but i just want to make sure that he isn't sitting to the side and not being seen um you know thank you thank you so much we'll go to peter denmark please hey everybody good evening um i think in this area i would just emphasize you know um you know due to you know increased student truancy and disengagement from you know the pandemic that a focal point should be on really summer school and um after school credit recovery for students especially to those families that you know are not around during the summer months so they have access to you know those supports after school you know during the regular calendar year thank you thank you and we'll go to kathy snow next we are at our five minute mark in this priority number one so kathy go ahead and you also have um stacey reynolds yeah i've got it okay thank you just really uh quick for the high school level and and i may have mentioned this in my email is just one idea for all of the high school kids is to offer s.a.t preparation classes because everyone takes it and i know the high school did offer it for a fee which was fantastic for my daughter um and hopefully they'll offer that again maybe you know to everyone or somehow have it right after school it was on a saturday morning so that was challenging at times for teenagers that's just my idea right thank you kathy and people are putting things in the chat and i am capturing them on another forum so um all this great information is all being recorded great and so stacy hi um so you asked what we want can we get these kids back to school since cdc guidelines have saying it can be three feet and danbury schools do have the um protection dividers on their desks is their talk about bringing them back full time stacy we are looking to have an update for the community at the board meeting next week great thank you you're welcome there were a couple of points made in the chat and do we have a minute or two are we out of time um we're just about on out of time i do have those all captured okay and so we will record those and add those to our recording sheet so i think at this point it's probably a good time if we'd like to if there's no other questions or suggestions around priority number one that we move to priority number two please kevin if you can just give a quick overview on that again we'll jump right into it sorry i'm trying to move my window okay sorry about that so priority two family and community connections engage with families and a community to provide parents and guardians with the skills to support their children's academic endeavors and then we have two two questions at the bottom as a parent what skills or programs would help you increase your knowledge to support your child and two how can danbury public schools strengthen communication with families and engage parents as partners in their children's academic development okay so we have jane okay um i i i just wonder if and i know that my son when he started kindergarten we switched over to common core i wonder if there's a way to um help the parents understand the like for writing examples um my son goes no that's not the format of how i need to respond to it like those are the things that like and like with math that's not the way i need to learn it now i wonder if there's a way that we can have little mini lessons for parents to just go to watch a youtube video or something like that to explain in each like level what the system is as far as like writing comprehension or reading comprehension like this the bullet points of what they're trying to do that year that they're in you know like kindergarten we're trying to do this this this you know where a parent can not have to make a meeting like this but just refer revert back to to refresh their mind on on helping their child at home you know in the way they're learning we can certainly look into that and see how we can do it in small groups yeah we'll put that in with the the suggestions great jade i was just gonna um suggest or mention that when i was at mill ridge with dr cronin she used to do um in place of a pto meeting once in a while she would bring on the math research resource teacher and the reading and um they would do a little uh you know informational session for the parents um with kind of like the updates from kind of what what jane was saying but like changes from when we were kids to now like math common core and it was very helpful and the parents loved it and i wonder if you know obviously it's hard to get the attendance you might be looking for but if it was recorded it could be something that was posted you know later but um i wonder if you could almost gear it towards learning loss like things that parents could do to increase in this time you know like things they could have their kids read or you know different activities that might be a little more family oriented but you know that parents could help with on on their side of things i know it was popular you know then and so i thought maybe something we could incorporate now just to try to get the parents a little more help i know it's a little hard as a parent to like keep up with everything especially if you have multiple children but maybe with a little guidance from the teachers thank you jay and i think you had one from k williams yes i think she put her hand down kate williams would still like to speak go ahead i just i would agree with both of the people that spoke before myself i think that the idea of like a series of videos that parents can refer to with questions they can ask while reading for comprehension or writing tips of how to compose the different types of pieces that they're being asked to compose for their writing or math tips for the parents that they can refer back to just short like five to ten minute videos or 15 minute videos that parents can refer back to would be very helpful thank you i'd like to expand on this question a little bit since this is my um responsibility here in the district what else could we do to increase communication between the pain between parents and our schools what what thoughts would you have on that [Music] one yep christy go ahead um so actually this is kind of really off the cuff um for me but um something i was kind of thinking with in terms of communication you know we have the robo calls like the emails um you know every school has a website and all that's great i like the variety of platforms um but it's also can be overwhelming because they're different um different messages go to different places um and then for me and i've got three kids in the district and three different schools right now so it's kind of i get robo calls and sometimes if that robocall comes and you know you can't take that call at that second or you know something is going on that you know it just really gets a little overwhelming to try to figure out what i missed so i guess um something that i was like kind of envisioning is almost like a centralized location and again i don't know if there would be any kind of privacy issues you know with these things being sort of public um but if you had like a central website almost where you can kind of you know drill down to certain schools and find all those different messages sort of in one place then you can kind of track what you missed or go back and you know if there was a message a robocall i got a few days ago that i needed to go back and listen to again or you know something like that i think it would just kind of help centralize the communication in a way christy i just want you to know we recognize your voice you can't hide we know who you are yeah i uh i'm running around the house so i kind of had the camera off but i am here all right [Music] any other thoughts on family community connections okay kevin i think you can go forth to priority three i don't know if there are any questions and we have naomi yeah i i can't for some reason my re listen i i can't i don't know i don't have a hand raised feature i'm a google meet teacher i'm a teacher myself i teach i teach in the bronx um remotely so i um you can hear me well right yes okay so what i was thinking is what i miss and love for my own child who is remote right now um is project-based learning and i know that sometimes the resources for that can be a lot like he was sent home with the science kit and at the the moment they were being taught how to do something in science you know that was the first thing i've seen him actually use with his hands um but i was thinking about just project based home base so we can connect more with our kids and i think i also mentioned too it would be nice for us to see more formative assessments that um prior to them getting a report card and feel shocked about it like i would like to see more formative assessments um that they are giving to our children and just get the data from that so i see what gaps there actually is before he gets that report card maybe it's something i can support him with as a teacher myself so just thinking about those things great suggestions thank you so much kathy hi again thanks um i just had a thought of maybe communicating with groups of families as they navigate like the educational career if you will such as and i know individual schools do different things but maybe like have all kindergarten parents you know have a meeting at the high school at the end of the year like you survived kindergarten here's here's what's coming next and then at the end of fifth grade like maybe something you know you're now ready you're here's what's gonna happen in middle school and just have all fifth grade parents and then maybe eighth grade here you're all about to go into high school here's what to expect just have the invite the whole community not just school by school something like that like as they engage each step you know major step it's a way to communicate that way thank you for that feedback because we we've struggled with our with with supporting trans transitional students ourselves of course supporting transitional families is probably also important that that's been a missing length for us but thank you and do we have any others in a certain priority area we don't so i think let's go on to priority number three okay so school safety and social emotional well-being of the whole student and school staff address unprecedented physical and mental health concerns through following public health safety measures and mental health support both in person and remotely and so two questions for consideration what programs or strategies would you suggest to address the social and emotional development of our children and two what initiative would you suggest to reduce anxiety and raise students confidence and i know you're probably already looking to see if there's anyone who's going to participate and answer this question um in the chat earlier one of the parents has suggested um a focus on extracurricular activities um and i'm assuming um the parent was referring to um k-8 whether it's k-5 or 6-8 um in areas you know because we have extracurricular of course at 9 12 already um but again i'm assuming that that that was the person's intention right so melinda if you'd like to speak go ahead uh yes so that was me um yeah i think what we're experiencing personally is that our kids have been anxious to get back to school but they're still sort of lacking that social connection because they're still separated to some degree and we get that it's a health issue but how are we able to get them um better socially engaged maybe it's ramping up after school programs as a family together that we all you know it's pto events things like that um but you know we we find that there's a real mess in that happening now you know that recess is you know it's the weather we can't go outside and play and you know so so my kids personally they are k through eight so they they're not socializing as much now that they're back at school as they once did um so that that's a real need for us thank you thanks and i believe we had an iphone 12 pro max that also wanted to speak i thought i saw your hand up maybe not we also did have a question um prior about programs that would help students um socialize outside of school and on weekends that they had read that most of the work was going to be done for the ls and could also be done for children that are english speaking students so thank you for people just put things in the chat too that we'll capture and we'll go to v6 then q 5g where these phones are getting very specific with their numbers and letters now so how are you that's me sorry about the long name there no my wife and i were just we have uh two girls in first grade and we're not too familiar with how everything works so far but we were just curious along this aspect if something more involving like arts and music that type of education if there's more that could be done in that area to help kids socialize and give them another group activity to do together and something that can become an extracurricular activity that they can participate in that starts in this school okay okay thank you and jane i'm just wondering is there something that the school already does that we could piggyback off of and see if you could elaborate on top of what they already had in place as far as supporting the kids emotional and social aspect like um in the school that i i work in were we're starting to do ruler um it's sort of like where the kids are mindful of what emotion they're having in the time that they're having it and you know they can say they're in the red zone or the blue zone or the yellow zone i wonder you know you're gonna you're gonna have children's anxiety of just being oh my gosh i'm gonna be in a class with none of my friends i'm gonna know no one coming back fully in and i'm going to go to the lunchroom for middle schoolers going i don't know if anyone's going to allow me to sit you know i know that we've done say hello and all those things is there something that we can really push for the whole district every single kid in every k through 12 so that it continues throughout the next 20 30 years that we're known for because of this pandemic this is where we shine to come together as a community um you know make sure that you know every kid knows that they are going to be noticed they are going to be safe um they are going to have a friend to play with you know those type things going back fully in um you know my son's fully distanced right now and when i'd have to have him on a waiting list to see if he can fit into the school right now um hoping that you know we can figure out the cafeteria situation where they can eat safely because i know that that's probably the biggest idea of why we're in the middle school only stay until 12 um because you can't right now with the limitations that the cdc are telling us we can't sit next to each other six feet apart you can't fit all the kids in the school but hopefully we're figuring that out and maybe using our gym for a cafeteria or you know another room that you know or the classrooms that they're gonna eat so that i know this year is kind of like a bust um but we're doing the best we can and what we have but next year hopefully they'll have a full day and have those opportunities not just in class to be actually social and maybe during the lunch time show them how they can go and see someone else you know make it a special day we have these wear sock days or wear hat days sit with a new person day go find someone who has your same birthday not just in the class but in the graduating class in the people that they're in the cafeteria with that way they feel like they're going and being included that's the biggest thing i see going forward you know kids are gonna sit there and even going from like maybe king street to rogers park where someone's gone to west side and their best friend is now separated from them how are they gonna get that new friend it's it's what we all experience growing up but now that we have this money can we do something like that to maybe make it even better thank you so we'll go to sherielle ipad yes um hello good evening everyone um i was just thinking of maybe doing uh somewhat like a peer peer counseling group maybe we can um pull some of the high school students to kind of peer either peer-to-peer counseling or appear to a younger grade level because i think some of the younger kids could look up to the older children within our district and it gets those kids involved in like one-on-one you know peer counseling we can do it within the high school each other or you can do it through the lower grade levels as well too maybe that might be something um the high school students would be interested in um and that would get everyone involved within the community as far as the student level goes great okay thank you and we'll go to melinda for our next suggestion so i think i just want to piggyback some of those comments because those were some really good suggestions i was i was essentially going to start by saying you know there used to be things like school plays and student government and i know that in in the high school even in you know the middle school and junior high grades there are but i think um really focusing on reintroducing that in a successful way could help with some of that um i see i saw a lot of comments after i talked about the extracurricular part about the deo and and all of those programs but i think something also has to happen um during the regular school day because not every not every student has access to after-school programs parents may not be available to drive them back and forth funding might not be available to some families so i think there has to be some dedication at the school at the during the school the regular school day for these types of programs to get kids to interact with students out of their classroom and maybe even out of their grade level so then that goes to what i think it was shirelle i'm sorry whoever was just speaking before me i thought that was those were some really good suggestions about the peer groups i know my kids have gotten a lot out of the westcon kids coming in on i think that one day a week they come in and they do different activities with the young kids things like that have been really helpful that has continued in the distance program but um you know that i think those those peer groups from different grade levels even different schools would be really helpful um and then i think part of that the wellness conversation maybe there's funding that gets allocated to a wellness expert that comes in in some way to um address anxiety low-level anxiety i think there probably are more serious conditions that need um clinicians that will help but for for kids that are just in in sort of like the general anxiety emote about how do i get back to school and talk to kids and get back into a regular schedule you know what are we doing um to that end great thank you so kevin we have no one else in this group for question number three we had a bunch in the chat which i captured so let's go on to number four okay remote learning staff development in the digital divide maintain or upgrade access to technology and connectivity for the long term increase robust professional development provide technical assistance and or training for families two questions for us to consider how can danbury public schools improve its digital environment and two is there enough learning support such as technology hotlines for families and if not what would you recommend kathy hi again i know i saw someone just put it in the chat too but and it's been discussed at board of ed and everything but just increase the wi-fi at these schools that are known to have horrible you know connectivity um in addition to and i don't know if it was cara or whoever mentioned it at the last board of ed but get these teachers the best and the absolute best computers and laptops to work with this is you know update all that digital infrastructure is critical i don't have to tell you guys that and jade kathy thank you i just wanted to totally agree on with kathy because i know in our last meeting um i think it was courtney kathy who was talking about how at the district level the the systems could stand to be upgraded um i can't remember the exact terminology that you all were using but this seems like a opportune time to have the money to do it and while it would help with covid related you know digital world it would also help in the future you know for whatever we wanted to do so it would be a dual purpose and i know there's still a couple of schools that have problems with connectivity i know ais is one of them because i was trying to talk to my son's teacher today and we got cut off 17 times um through google meet but maybe now's the time that we have a little you know additional funding to upgrade i think pembroke's another one that has issues um connecting but maybe with a little extra money we could kind of make everybody on the same page you know in that way and it would serve us now and also in the future thank you anyone else around this karthik in yeah hey um good evening uh the one suggestion on the digital thing is for the high school kids particularly when the teachers are teaching math they should have technology you know enabled for them to write and show and things like that how they write on the blackboard or on the boards right so i think right now what i understand from my son is their teachers are struggling in terms of using the mouse to write and show and things like that i think that's very you know painful for the teachers to start with um before the students get into that math so they the higher end math as we all know i think has a lot of writing to do um not just putting something like one plus two so probably uh [Music] some of the funds should be used to improve the you know the digital equipments for the teachers to teach um you know which will also help them uh in teaching better way so thank you so we have i think i think what should happen is the the staff should receive uh better uh i guess training in uh and how to manage a virtual uh class i think uh uh my my sister she um what what happens with her in class is that i guess the teachers aren't interacting too much and just providing her with the assignments and and uh and she really i guess it's in a way most most students i guess feel the same way that um i guess the uh this uh virtual interaction needs to improve and uh and and in regards to the the teachers uh teachers ability to teach in a in a virtual setting um in regards to the upgrading of the system and in all uh the technology i think i think that also i mean it's it's one of those problems that uh i guess in the in this covida uh situation we've uh we've all had some some uh i guess work related issues as well and uh not just in school but in various aspects i think the the the platform the the way that the the teachers interact with the students i think that that should be key um because some some students uh i guess are more uh visual more um more visual learners i guess in a way um and that really isn't um put into into context for for kids to learn more i think that should that should be a uh on the on the on the aspect of uh more uh development staff development and finding new ways to teach in a a virtual setting i think that that that is another aspect that we should improve to be all that uh improve the the way that the kids and the teachers interact in class thank you thank you james and with no other hands raised for that let's go on to priority number five i have captured a lot of comments about facilities and school improvement in the chat but we would still like to hear from folks on it as well okay so priority five school repair and improvement school facility repairs and improvements to reduce risk of virus transmission and exposure to environmental health hazards what ideas do you have to make our school safe and healthier right so we'll start off with mark please hi good evening everyone just wanted to start by saying thank you for allowing us the opportunity to give our thoughts about uh you know what's going on obviously what we could do to improve um based upon the priorities that were raised so regarding this topic um you know i think many people would agree that the hvac system across the board in danbury public schools is pretty much dilapidated there are some schools that have a newer system than others there's a lot of disparity between the schools and elementary and the middle school and the high school and it seems like it's all over the place um you know some schools are obviously way too hot in the winter and then windows have to be opened up like it's almost like living in the 1960s or 70s is what the designs design seems to be you know we have teachers that have brought in like portable units into schools during some of the warmer weather which seems ridiculous and outrageous um you know given the year we live in and just the pandemic on top of it obviously you know we're calling for high efficiency systems that would be able to um help us alleviate some of the indoor air quality issues in terms of filtration i'm not an expert but i know that merv merv 16 systems are used in hospitals for example that eliminate 99.9 of all pollutants and viruses and bacteria and it's something that i think would be well spent by the school district you know denver across the board a to improve the air quality dramatically be to deal with the pandemic obviously and c to allow students the opportunity to even if it was available to be involved in summer school i mean many countries allow students to uh you know come to school throughout the entire year but obviously it can't be done when you have 90 degree days in the summer with no ac and fans are blowing hot air all over the place and humid and air that quality it's very poor for people who have respiratory issues or just people who don't even have those kinds of issues so that would be something that i would like to see happen with some of the funds if with regarding upgrading the the these systems across the board in the danbury school system and i think some companies even local companies i know you know lowe's for example has a huge contracting um establishment going with hvac systems and you know i bet any one of those companies would love to put um and be involved in upgrading the school systems hvac um and they would love to get their name out there as the ones doing it for some major discounts so just putting it out there is something that i think is very important thank you thank you mark for that feedback you're welcome my pleasure we have lisa ahead lisa sorry just trying to quiet my five-year-old hi everybody um i'm new to the district my son is um in kindergarten obviously it's a a difficult year for all of us um unfortunately we're in a high-risk household so i'm wondering if you do this was the previous question i can't find the high the raised hand signal on the zoom um if you guys go back full time will there still be distance learning until there's like a full vaccine for the kids so lisa i i will just say quickly um governor alluded to yesterday and a remark that that could be a reality for us we do not know right now if that's going to be required or it's going to be optional for districts so that's still to be determined thanks for the question i'm sure a lot of people are wondering that as well and james yeah um since i i uh i know a little bit about um the health aspect um i think what would help um schools be a safer environment during this pandemic i know that in some districts they're having maybe twice twice a week havoc having the kids go back to school i think what what would be um great is if the uh if we would if if every kid before um going to school uh get would get the kova test beforehand to avoid any any outbreaks in kobut i know there was two incidences in uh dan marie high school where um they they had found two individuals that were coveted positive and that kind of brought a little bit of scare i mean in some of these high-risk households like lisa was mentioning it's a very difficult when [Music] the the kova testing isn't being done um because uh you know with uh with people that are uh immunodepressed or have some sort of respiratory uh upper respiratory uh disease uh uh it could uh potentially cause havoc in that household i think uh doing a standardized a uh coveted uh nasal pharyngeal swab would be uh of a great importance to be able to have kids go back into classes even if it is a two-day week schedule um i think that would be a great uh importance to reduce your risk of contamination or infection thank you james and i think you have one more with jane jane yeah jane so i i definitely hear all the concerns i definitely agree any building now with this covet even the mall we need to upgrade our systems um water filtration now i mean we're all seeing that you know these 40 50 year old buildings have you know water problems because the pipes are corroding and stuff like that so i also wonder if we could at any opportunity make it so that no our class science doesn't go down to say like 15 kids per grade level let's be realistic we're danbury we're growing um but is there a way that we can try to going forward maintain less just like maybe three kids less in a classroom so then we can give that one more minute to that one kid and that one more s speck of space for them to be a part from one another you know try to do stuff like that and like i know that in the school that i work in i as a teacher have extra masks so that when they break i don't have to wait for something you know like always have that you know to go kit in the classrooms like if a mask breaks oh here's another one right away you know just the little simplicities of even maybe hand sanitizer on the outside of every room so that the kid has access to putting it on him rather than maybe a teacher doing it for them it's their opportunity to pick up that hand sanitizer you know we all see it now in in the stores you know you have the opportunity to get the paper towel to wipe your your cart and everything you know maybe we can start thinking that way too you know just the the way we're seeing it in society how can we bring it into school good points jane thank you i don't see any more questions on that priority that is our last one so i'll just open it for kathy go ahead sorry i just had one and i know i brought it up at the board of ed it's just an idea i'm gonna bring it up again about the bathrooms in the high school and there's got to be a way to maintain privacy and take those doors off from the hallway like in the mall or at the movie theater you walk in there's privacy like partitions and of course the stalls have doors but if there's like no door into from the hallway into the bathroom it would reduce vaping it would reduce another touch point it would reduce students gathering in there when they shouldn't be and we would have less issues in high school at the bathrooms in my opinion if those doors are removed from the hallway i know other high schools in fairfield county have done this so i'm just going to put it out there again every chance i get so thank you for listening thank you kathy okay thank you so i think we have um come to the end of our listening forum tonight we want to thank you all for being here with us tonight we certainly appreciate your feedback and your wonderful um thoughts and feelings and we can feel the the uh community the sense of community here with us tonight um we're asking that you please fill out the survey that is on the screen right now there is a place at the bottom and the last question to put any further thoughts that you might wake up in the middle of the night tonight and think about or tomorrow morning over coffee i should have said that um so please fill that out um you can always go back into the survey too and add more things if you would like and so i'm going to ask at this point if kevin you'd like to close us out or anyone else from the district thank you thank you ann um so i i just want to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their participation this evening um is it was great to see a lot of new faces on the call tonight um then of course it's always great to see um the faces that we're used to seeing in these kind of sessions um we are looking forward to our grant submission and frankly our grant reward award uh so that we can share out with this group in the greater community what we've learned about the recommendations that you've made we will have an opportunity kathy had axed earlier when we first opened up did we plan to share the survey feedback so we will plan we will share uh that survey feedback that's something that we can post to the website uh we'll also be doing the same with the staffs uh feedback as well and then we will be making every effort to prioritize all of that feedback from our community constituents and that will eventually inform the submission to the state there will be a point at some point we'll be when we're talking to the board um speaking with the board about the the the submission to the state and the positions and programs um uh that we have prioritized uh as part of the 10.1 million um and so as we make the board aware of that submission uh certainly we'll be doing the same with you um in the remainder of the community as well so i just want to thank you again um again no and you guys did not disappoint similar no different from monday night and and the previous time that we sat with our administrators and i know what's going to happen again on uh monday when we meet with our staff uh we continue to get ideas that we had not considered um and we really appreciate your feedback to make danbury public schools a better place and a better district for all of us thanks again thanks again for joining us enjoy your coffee tonight
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uh also as i said before state aid is the biggest increase in the revenues of the 12 million uh 756. extraordinary aid is budgeted slightly higher than the current year to um to reach a more actual number of what our extraordinary aid is we are not using any fund balance but we are using the excess surplus the board put away last june of 1.8 million from the prior year the 1920 school year also um budgeted miscellaneous revenues and the medicaid reimbursement um also just to note almost 70 percent of just the district's total revenue is funded by the tax levy while um state aid is about 28.6 so the majority of the revenue is funded by the local tax levy here's a quick overview of the general fund appropriations or expenditures broken down in major categories of the budget i won't go through every line however everything is relatively consistent um with the current year except for the major increase to the charter school budget the projected charter school enrollment comes directly from the doe with the release of the state aid numbers you'll notice some increases on on nearly every line and that's mostly salary projections and also the 21 new staff members that we're budgeting um also to put this budget into perspective salary and employees as i said before are consistent with more than 75 of the total budget um i'll quick now i'm going to quickly go over a five-year trend of our major revenue sources and that's obviously the tax levy and state aid here's a five-year trend of the district's um tax living state aid um for the last two years the board has presented to the public a zero percent tax living increase and for four years the board has presented less than a one percent tax levy increase and also has never gone over the two percent cap since it's been instituted and i believe 2010 or 2011.
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i just want to remind the board um the tentative budget adoption is one stop if you will along the process that is the budget development it is a tentative adoption required by the state by a certain date however we are continuing to develop the budget and make changes right through we finally approve it in may so tonight what you are adopting is literally a tentative budget that we are working from so please don't feel that if you vote to adopt the tentative budget whatever you vote on tonight we are tied to again we still have the opportunity i know the finance committee will be meeting a lot things will be brought to the full board we still have the opportunity to make changes um right through may so without any further ado bernie can i assume that you're going to be doing the presentation yes so thank you mrs becker and good evening everyone um this is the first stop on the path as uh mr becker noted uh toward an adoption of the budget uh this tentative budget uh will begin with the review of state aid so what you see before you is a um historical uh chart of uh state aid and what has happened over the years we received an increase in state aid for next year which is attributed to two things one is enrollment specifically to support uh increases in enrollment and uh implementing the state funding formula which is embedded in the law for many years as i think we can see from this chart the state has not followed implementing the law for funding schools the last two years they have begun to implement that i think one of the things that's important to note is for the years beginning with the year that we dropped off in fiscal year 2011 that was a year that we had very significant cuts in in the district uh we had lost 100 positions i lost a um recognized world language program uh the charter school uh was first instituted and from that point forward for many years state aid remained virtually flat if we use 2010 as the benchmark and were to say well what if that 2010 benchmark had remained at the same level through those years the state would have provided an additional 22.3 million dollars just to keep level funding at that point in time so the district has had to shoulder a significant amount of the funding and has struggled over the years with how to best provide the programs and services to students when we jump forward to 2021 you'll see that there are two bars listed the first bar in blue reflects the original state aid on which the board adopted a final budget however due to the pandemic the governor had a second uh budget that came forth with making modifications and those modifications took effect in july after a final budget was adopted and as a result what happened was state aid was reduced by close to two million dollars after we had adopted a budget and so what the board had to do at that time was fill the gap and that gap was filled through uh one-time revenue sources as well as some reductions in uh cost areas so i think that's an important anomaly because uh that is something that uh is very easily forgotten and our real jump off point from the current year was at 22.2 million dollars moving forward let's talk about the budget impacts so what has impacted the the overall growth in the in the budget um so one of the things is the custodial and transportation savings that we had from covet 19.
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so uh the the guidance before was this room here could only have 50 people no matter how big this room was now we can uh as long as like if they're eating lunch we just have to have them six feet apart if this is a classroom they just need to be three feet apart and it could be a hundred kids so that that's just how that's the new guidance so that has uh helped some schools uh um lunch was a was a hang up for some districts because lunch rooms and not being able to socially distance but uh that's helped some but i will tell you i say that but lunch still we'd have to have six feet because they have their mask off so but we we can we can do that here it says additionally idph is revising the recommendation for social discipline for in-person learning social distance for in-person learning is now defined as three to six feet for students and fully vaccinated staff maintaining six feet is safest distance but schools can operate at no less than three feet in order to provide in-person learning so that was the really the big new piece of the guidance if you skip over to page seven again i'm just highlighting some of the changes some of the new things so but page seven i've highlighted this sentence says quarantine is still required for close exposure to a confirmed case within six feet of the confirmed case for a cumulative period of 15 minutes over over 24 hours and not fully vaccinated so and then i'll jump down school should evaluate the burden this could place on in-person learning with social distancing less than six feet is employed so basically what they're highlighting is that even though three to six feet is now okay uh we still have to quarantine for kids that are within six feet so uh so that didn't that didn't go away just wanna make sure you know that and then same page ensure ensure that all individuals maintain social distance at least six feet when masks are removed for eating so that's the cafeteria page eight is the next one and the last one really basically on page eight what they're saying is that we no longer they no longer recommend screenings upon arrival so you know we we just purchased the temperature screeners and now they pulled that out so that we don't need to do that we can continue to do it we will continue to do it it's not holding us up or anything so we'll continue to do a bit we haven't been catching kids with the temperature screeners like we haven't had kids coming with fevers so i can but anyway that's part of the guidance there so um i'm going to touch on a few other topics related to this and then i want to just take questions from the board the our current covet data in our you know we talked about it last week as well it's it's definitely on a downward trend we're still in uh the same sections that we were last time but it's definitely a downward trend that when i talked to lake county health department really they're because i can say pretty pretty confidently here we have not had any instances that i know of of transmission on campus we've had kids come here with covid but as far as transferring covid from one student to another or staff to another i we don't have any evidence that yet when i talked to the health department they said the main issue they're seeing is in sports they're starting to see with high school sports starting they're seeing some some issues with high school sports but with the six feet social distancing we've not seen it in schools in the education setting as much um the survey results did i and i apologize i meant to print this off for you um i'll get you a copy of this the survey results that i sent out from last week it was a we had almost 900 almost 900 respondents and the two sides they're asked to choose do we do you prefer that we be continue with the blended hybrid or shift to a more full schedule for students for the remainder of the year so it's just two options and those there are almost 900 respondents and the two sides are separated by three votes so it's just completely split down the middle i really wasn't expecting it to be that close but it is truly split right down the middle so and i'll get i meant to print that off for you and i'll get that to you tonight before we leave the our staff i also surveyed staff same survey they overwhelmingly want to continue in the same model i would say in my conversations with staff it's not i i want i don't want people to feel like it's for uh health reasons i don't think there's i personally don't feel the that is the the driver of how we feel on campus i don't think there's a real health concern with us as far because our teachers are vaccinated i think it's more staff is more that we're in a they feel like they're able to serve all their kids well right now and that's that's their feeling so um but i don't want people to think that uh that their their just their opinions are driven by health reasons i don't think that's overwhelming for the staff i think it's more the logistics and scheduling right now i want to share just a little a little bit about local districts i know once the new guidance came out last tuesday it some districts districts did pivot and have have moved from the hybrid to more full in person in in april and you know pretty much most districts around us uh are moving are moving that direction so i would say wakanda mchenry johnsburg richmond fox lake lake villa like zurich i think grace lake is considering it round lake is not yet to my knowledge i think ron lake is still they just got their teachers on campus this week so they're they're still working on getting the hybrid started but but with the new guidance i don't know they may pivot as well so that but i want to give you an update on what other districts are doing around here i have a few thoughts to consider as we are you know we're weighing these two options again and just just going through it if if we if we are considering a full return um i would recommend that it be on the 12th as a start date if we consider that initially we were thinking the fifth last monday um we have there's for several reasons but one one is that we've scheduled that week of the fifth we've scheduled uh uh the prime elementary scheduled map testing on site for remote learners to come we've got them all scheduled we'd have to reschedule all that if we if we if we start school in the fifth um two weeks after spring break would give us at least the quarantine for travel and then also uh give us a one extra week to get some scheduling done there's a it's not just a flip of the switch there's a lot of things that have to happen which we've put in place a lot of things already we've already got our bus routes going just in case we you know we're not you know we're prepared but i i would recommend the 12th if we do make this the switch there's been concern about impact on remote learners and you know i'm going to say that that that concern doesn't go away and i think that what's unique about our district is that we have such a high percentage of students in remote learning right now we have over you know over 40 percent um so uh so there's concern and i i you know i was asked the other day by somebody if because we do our middle school is doing concurrent teaching um so we have full remote learners in middle school they're doing getting concurrent teaching we have four classes at primary elementary that are doing concurrent teaching and i will say that i have not heard complaints from the remote parents the parents in those of the remote students in those concurrent classrooms so i i don't want to say that we can't do it we can and i know that it's it will be a a tough change with seven eight weeks to go a tough adjustment for people i don't want you to think that we can't do it and but i it will be a tough transition the people who are doing it now i think are doing it well so the something else i was going to say on that i'll come back to that the i would encourage if we were to if we were to go back to full i would still want to keep the fridays the way they are because first one we can devote some extra time in the friday mornings for remote learners we can we have students with special services that we're doing giving special services on fridays it's an important time and i think there's also time in the afternoon where i'm going to need because it's this is a different kind of planning when you're teaching this in this model right now and i i think our teachers need that time in the on the afternoons to team plan for the following week so those are that's consideration if we do if we do go back i want everybody to be aware everybody who's might be listening to this to be aware that when we do return after spring break whatever model we're in we are we're mandated to do the state testing this year that's recently announced it's several days for third grade through eighth grade so a concern is that for those that are familiar with how that works uh in a normal school year when you're doing state testing your entire school schedule gets jumbled up for the whole time you're doing state testing you just have to uh you have to kind of mess up your whole schedule to do it so that's going to happen no matter what if we come back and we've adjusted kids schedules and kind of got we get we're going to get into a little bit of a groove and then we're going to mess it up again for a week or so to do testing we have the state the science assessment and we've got the iar we also have our own internal map assessment that we we we feel we really need to do that's the most important data for us it's the one test we don't have to do but we feel like it's our most important assessment the state assessment we're only going to give to the parent to the kids that are here and to the remote learners who want to come take it they don't have to the state's not requiring that we give it to all kids they're just requiring it that we offer it to all kids which means the data from the state assessment is really going to mean nothing and so they're doing it the state did ask for a waiver but the federal government's not allowing a waiver on state assessments so so we basically are having to comply uh with that and we push that date back as far as we could in may but i just want everybody where that's going to be an issue either way it's going to be an issue um we do have some long-term initiatives uh that we're working on uh that i don't want to go too deep into but i want you to know like we've got some pretty important things we're working on right now with staff just for next year there's some important trainings coming up we feel like if we go back full we will have to put a pause on some of those things because our staff the capacity of our staff right now we will is a lot is uh is going to be limited if we're going to make another change so so we're going to put a pause on some of that but if we go back to full return i like i said i would ask that we keep friday as a remote day i mentioned a reason for the k4 staff an opportunity to check in the remote learners i also we do a lot of i know this is going to sound trivial but we we are delivering a lot of food to our remote families as well and that's on fridays and so that would be a time we could do deliveries we have our students with special needs an extra court and extra time for coordination for teachers so those are just some things to consider i we talked about a lot of those last last week too and right now i just want to take some time to i know some of you some of you visited classrooms last couple days i would like to hear your thoughts um i'd like to take questions concerns whatever you got but and spoke with administrators teachers all all great levels the first thought was that the tension is so strong as you can cut it with a knife but listening to kids and and you know they're very happy the ones that are in school as well as the ones that i saw that were virtual and and the teachers were very engaged with both groups the ones that have them the safe center kids were very well preoccupied one particular teacher and she was kind of describing her class and so on and it just it felt like she was ready to cry because she felt that she's got virtual and she has home class and she's trying to do both and she feels she's not performing at the best that she feels she should or can and i just i don't i don't know how they do it and you know all the teachers do a great job but you know several of the teachers the long time teachers newer teachers um they're really engaged with the neat bar and the ones that have them um with the virtual they talk to parents and i'm just concerned in about the virtual and the kids that are at home i don't i don't want any kid to suffer or to miss out on something and i if full day happens i just some things could happen i think that would not benefit them as well yeah i was very impressed with the the dual remote and the hybrid student teaching because it takes a lot of work to manage two different environments at the same time and the teachers did it very well especially the teachers with the little bar i think it was easier for them because they can move around the kids can hear them one class when you went to where the teacher didn't have it she seemed a little shuffled a little because she's like showing the paper on the computer camera and then she's trying to show the paper to the class so i think technology plays a big part in how the teachers can do their job well without a lot of stress on their part and also with doing both at the same time the teachers definitely has to sit down more at their desk so they're not up and moving around which is good too because we're in a pandemic and it's keeping the social distancing going well i think it's easier transition for middle school students to be in dual and remote or hybrid and remote at the same time i think the lower grades that we went to it seemed a little more challenging for the teachers to manage she almost needed another person to we help that topic one thing we've explored with the principles at k4 was uh if there's any we're trying to find any extra adults that are available to provide support in those rooms if we're going to if we do this the we have everybody who's running the safe centers right now but if we go full in the safe centers will no longer be but those those peras will now be doing their regular job as supporting classrooms so we we can't uh we can't guaran we can't put an extra adult in every room we'll have people floating and we'll like the administrators have told me we will make it work but it's it's uh our goal will be to try to give those teachers support in times where they can uh kind of do dual action there have you thought about reaching out to retired teachers to come it's a good idea i was definitely gonna if we if we go this route we're gonna definitely post a uh opportunity to to help in the next final eight weeks of school because with adults 65 and over all being vaccinated too you might find some you know people who want to come out the house more since they've been in the house for a year julia are you visiting yes so i came to school today i'm just going to preface this by saying there obviously is not a good choice because someone's going to be unhappy since we're split right down the middle yeah and you know our school district is different than others because we are on one campus yeah i feel that it's my understanding that if we went back to everybody here then middle school the whole schedule's going to change because the way that it's set up now is that accurate it would go back to a regular full regular schedule yeah a regular schedule yep just the same schedule we would have had in a non-pandemic year okay but it's different than what it is yes yes versus at primary elementary it's basically the same except you're in school longer no there's a those will be a little different too okay yeah they'll have to rebuild their schedules as well okay yeah if students get sick and they have to stay home and we were back full time then how would they you know they would fall into the remote learners and they can just easily transition to that yep okay my concern with coming back full time and the teachers having to teach both remote and uh the in person kids i think the classes i saw today they had help they had the paras but that's not gonna be possible and it's like managing two classrooms at once yeah um you know i want kids back in school i really do but i feel if we bring everybody back for a full day it's like shaking up a snow globe you know everybody's kind of in their groove like i said at the last meeting i'd like to focus on our energy on making the last eight weeks better and improve that asynchronous learning that you know people are complaining about for some students um and focus on coming back full-time next year you know i i'm upset that i hear out in the community that they don't have faith in our school district that we're going to even come back in the fall yeah i so i'll say like from my perspective i know it's just me but i can't say it loud enough that i mean that to me it's not even a question that we're you know if the uh if we're going to you know the the fall to me is we're planning a full return unless the governor shuts the state down again but and i don't see that happening again but the obstacles that we're facing right now we will because i know i've heard had the question well what's going to be different the fall than now right now we've got structures built all year to support all these learners that we won't have next year we are looking at a remote option next year but it's going to be an option that's completely separate from what so our staff will we'll have we'll be doing full in-person learning and then if there are families that still want a remote option we're going to we're going to try to provide something in this guidance that just came this was new the guidance says and we could and i should have pointed this out because we could make this decision i would not recommend it the guidance for the first time says that we only have to provide remote learning to students with a health reason but that's that's to me that's not fair to pull that with eight weeks to go now to start next year what this is saying is we don't have to provide a two completely different environments i think it's value for us to do that if we've still got some families if we can do it and not impact our in-person learning then we're going to try to do that but it's going to be like a separate remote school and i have talked to local districts about maybe teaming up with that project too but but yeah that will not hinder us in the fall so i i i've been trying to emphasize people when they ask me that too like no in the fall we are honestly our jobs would all be a lot easier if we were in full in person this is this is wearing a lot of people out and uh um but so julia i'm glad you brought it up because to me it's not even a question it's but i get i understand why people would think it yeah i understand why they think if we're not going back now why would we go back in august what's going to be different i get it totally understand why they think that but people i've told i hope i don't have to eat my words but like i said to me it's not even a question unless like unless we are told we absolutely can't open schools but i think everybody's learned a lot over the last year in this pandemic of how to do this and we're at a point where i don't want you to feel like we can't do this because we totally can we can we can pull it we can flip the switch and get it done we can make it work and make it happen i just um you know uh but uh it comes down to is it best for everybody and uh and and can we do it well yeah that's my biggest thing right if we do this yeah you know are we just like you said shaking things up and and can you do it well i guess that's that's my biggest concern is based on all these emails about the asynchronous learning work we are doing it but are we doing it well i don't think everybody is i think everything the teacher no i don't know right right i mean that's my biggest concern so if we if we don't go back full in person how can asynchronous be better right like what can be done when these kids come back from spring break on day one that we can tell parents right because that's the biggest complaint we have yeah kids are either if they have morning club if they have afternoon session they're done by 9 a.m when they get up in the morning so is this is your what you're hearing is more middle school than k4 are you hearing it correct okay yes yeah because the way the schedule's set up is nothing can change nothing could be better because the teachers are doing the in person in the morning and then the opposite or the the next group of in person in the afternoon yeah that's just how do we improve okay i mean friday's the day off they have maybe one one in-person half-hour session okay i guess right how do we reassure families that they can get more education for their kids yeah and have their kids get the help that they need because that message was unacceptable that a student cannot get the help that he needs right that friday and that needs to be addressed for anyone that is so i'm gonna i've heard the same thing you're telling me too i've heard it uh mr whipple's heard it and we you know and i think that i want to answer that question in a second i also want to tell you like just even two weeks ago i got an email personally from a student because i think there's just like there's parents on both sides of this issue there's also students feeling taking this differently i had an email directly from a student that was just like i can't take this anymore there's too much work i'm up all night doing homework i can't and it was middle school students so some students are feeling overwhelmed but and also because i it could be depending on which class you know it could be it could be different teachers are doing this differently and could be that too but i think that to answer your question how can i assure you i think what i can assure you is that if we if we don't go back 100 percent then the middle school admin and myself and our directors we're going to have to uh we have to come up with a plan to address these issues and uh i don't have the answer right now but we'll have to we'll have to develop in the next two weeks isn't the first time you've heard about these issues how come we're going to develop a plan now how come you guys haven't developed it or has been started working on it it's a good question the because i've i've heard it but i've also heard we've got kids that are on the other end of it too so it's but if it's continuing to come up and you want me to develop a plan we will we will do it and uh we're gonna have to figure out how to find the balance with our kids that's a consistency issue we've had for years and that's what we try to develop these rubrics and everything else with data and curriculum that to avoid that one teacher does something completely different than the other that was the goal yeah i know that a lot of that work had to stop and switch to learning a whole new platform to teach but yeah is there a reason we can't do it as a teacher-led virtual and in person the same exact time kids sitting in on live classes with teachers as grant does because grant does full classes all day that's what we're doing here but it's it's not we're not running the same schedule so we're uh and that's something that we can we'll talk about when we if we if we got if we're going to make a switch with that we could talk about it but we are doing the same thing they're they're running a live class with uh kids uh uh also in remotely so they're doing they're doing the concurrent teaching here at middle school yeah and then and all the classrooms at middle school are concerned am i wrong on that scott all classrooms middle school are doing concurrent teaching right yeah yeah right that's it and then yeah is it all day long though or is it just like half day they're doing both like my kids come in the morning and then in the afternoon they've got their asynchronous i think so that's what we're seeing why can't they log on again in the afternoon to the teacher well not just attend school from home just have your whole day from home i watch my son sit in his room all day on classes all day long and honestly it's not doing him any good but i mean i've had he's paying attention so then they uh that's at the high school level yeah doing you can't do a k through four their attention span to be on zoom all day they can't because it was nice to see at the k through four how engaged the kids were and the teachers and it was i was really impressed in how they were doing everything and i know they're very overloaded so but they're doing you know the best they can and i see you know there's room in the safe center so if the parents and families need from k-4 if they need the extra help i'm assuming there's room in the safe center to yeah for the kids that need to be there full day yep are people taking you guys up on the office are people taking you up on the offer for safe center space and scott you said no yep uh i just want to make sure families know that they have that option you know because i know families were struggling with i want my kid in full day or schedules and so for them to know that they have that option that they can sign up for a safe center i think is important for families to know that it's out there for them for help if it's kindergarten first grade that they could send their school yeah send their kids to school a full day and then just going back to the guidelines that were released will our entire staff be fully vaccinated by the time spring break is over anyone who wanted to be vaccinated will be done yeah by the end of the first week of april i think we're closing down the pod the first week of april in round lake so they said they'll have everybody done but i didn't i couldn't force we didn't force all the staff to get vaccinated so if they uh but i would say strong i mean most of the time can we follow these guidelines if the staff is not fully vaccinated yeah yeah the teacher themselves has to be uh if they're not fully vaccinated they have to they have to keep themselves six feet social distanced but that's not that's not an issue so when i saw when i visited the schools yesterday and when i saw on primary elementary it's because they're there they don't have time to sit and like on the rug and kind of it's still a a different type of school i think that you know there's not you know it's just everyone has to sit in the chairs there's the flexible seating's not as flexible anymore that it's they very much have to sit in their in their in their seats and i think that is probably really hard on some of the students there too it's old school it's old school and they got they'll have to wear their masks all day that's one thing that i've had some parents concerned about but kids seem to be pretty resilient with that but i mean we have the capacity to do three feet apart for the primary elementary yeah yeah because the kids that are there right now um like for the half day they're there those are the same kids that would be there in that room for the full day they'll just be there longer so uh and we have room we're we're actually i was talking with one teacher the other day and uh you know her concern was like there's she had empty seats and she had she's had families that she's begging to come in because she feels like she can help them more if they're here but they just don't feel safe coming in yet and her concern to me was if we go she goes right now i can work with those students in the afternoon and i can give them a lot of attention if we go you know and they're my some of my most vulnerable students right now in this class and her concern was i i don't know if i'll be able to give them the attention i'm giving them now if i have the whole class here all day so again it's not a safety or health issue for some it's more trying to help those kids but that gives us my concern the transition is what i'm worried about from going to hybrid to full what that's going to look like and for the kids and is there going to be a gap in education is going to be lack of support for for all not just for some that's a hard one to answer i mean i think it's anytime we make a change it's going to be there's going to be a week or two of just trying to adjust but uh everybody's been pretty resilient this year too so uh so you know it's hard to measure what the impact of that would be but yeah i think there'll be some families that would that are in remote that would choose to come back full because they might be in remote because of the current schedules it doesn't work with their schedule and they'll be some families that we have been finally able to get here and they finally feel safe in the way we're doing it that we'll now go back to remote if we come back so there's going to be a little bit of shifting back and forth on those but i think it'll probably even out the number of students but so i get i get emails every day on this and everybody's all over the board on it people that said they feel safe with their kids here and but maybe not necessarily if we if we bring them back full but i i'm not concerned about that i feel like we can we have with 60 of our population it's not going to be a crowded building that's not a concern of mine it's more of the other issues but one other thing bob if we do move from hybrid to you know full back this year students whether they're at home or here are going to be on their chromebooks on zoom for that whole day correct if so if we come back full yeah there would be a lot um i might have to defer the principles on that question i would say yes because because they're still teaching the remote learners as well so they're going to have to be involved but i would say they'd probably be on their computers most a day i know that's how it is for my high school students when they go right they're they're sitting in the class and the teachers teaching the zoom class just like they were teaching from home so but i don't i don't know if that will you know i would hope it won't be fully the case here but i know that they're going to have to keep those students at home engaged in the class as well and so there's going to have to be computer involvement and there's no way to have just like say the middle school full and then the primary element oh so that's a that's a good question is there no way could we figure out a way you want to say that question again if they didn't hear you is it possible for middle school to to go to the full-time schedule because they're already sitting in the classroom on zoom and keep the middle school or the i'm sorry keep the primary and elementary school hybrid um so so honestly we could middle school would be really easy switch really easy switch for us um the challenges were then it turns into a more of a logistical issue because we're all on the same campus and uh we have one business fleet one bus fleet it would require i'd still only be able to devote seven buses to bus now the entire middle school right now we're only busing half of them at a time we'd only have seven buses to bus the entire middle school i couldn't put the whole fleet out because those buses have to go out and pick up the prime elementary and the times won't coordinate uh we'd have to coordinate the drop off the the end date for middle school we'd have to coordinate it so that everybody was out of here before we got them out too which that could probably be coordinated but um it's the busing is my biggest issue we'd have to we'd only be able to offer seven buses and uh i mean i can have 50 on the bus right we can have 50 on a bus yeah i don't know what kind of uh um union issues we might have with that i don't know because we'd have half the district doing one thing after i don't know if that would be an issue but i can tell you i don't know scott i might be speaking out but i think for some more middle school teachers they would probably like it but some would not but i know that right now they're teaching multiple times a day the same thing over and over and uh but i know there's also a lot of concern at the middle school about uh having they're able to manage the numbers now because they only have half the students at a time so it's much easier to manage the the concurrent teaching but so i don't know if i answered a question could we we could make it work probably but it would be uh limited busing probably and which would then increase the traffic on campus if we do that if we were on a separate campus i think we could probably be easier to make it work i have another question about lunch yeah and being do we have enough room at all the different schools to have the kids six feet apart uh plan we do um i'm gonna i'm gonna defer to our three principles i know they've been talking about how to do it we do it's not ideal but it's gonna you know we can make it work it's not gonna be something that stops us from doing it because we're no longer limited to 50 in here we can put more uh do uh i'll let i'll let the principals answer on how you how you think lunches might look go ahead scott you can kind of answer how you think oh all right so currently i think i haven't set this the cafeteria up yet but i tried to play with half of it but i don't know where all this stuff would go we're kind of limited on space and room where our extra stuff some of these would go back to the classroom if we had more kids but right now the plan would use the push the cafeteria tables into the gym because they're foldable and they're quickly easily be able to remove them so we'd have the gym set up and this room set up to try to have six feet possible but not knowing how much room or space would need for kids to walk in pick up their stuff because instead of being behind the serving line we'd have to set up a station sack lunch for them to kind of make sure we're moving through quickly but so it's it's doable not ideal but we'd have two spaces that we'd have to work with and at primary and elementary we've talked a lot about what it could be like and we we kind of have in our heads plan a b c d um some of our biggest concerns and for me especially with five-year-olds that haven't been allowed to be in a space sitting by a friend it's going to be really hard for them to stay six feet away from each other they're going to naturally want to move closer together so we've talked about ways we can set it up with sit spots so they know where to sit and to stay in their spot like i said we have plan a b c and d we can make it work absolutely we'll find a way we have much to add but i think that we definitely with the numbers staying consistent to what they are now if it looks like it's still about 50 of those kids coming in we we would have room in our cafeterias and it'd be you know assigned seating they'd have to be obviously you know the six feet away as they're eating and we we had a set up we set up a system for cleaning and getting maybe having them they would face one direction they'd be on some one side of the table then the next group that would come in because we'd have basically half of the grade level eat for a certain amount of time and then they would leave and then the other half would come in and they'd sit on the opposite side of the table and so we could quickly clean in in between and they would fit they would fit and the the one concern that we do have though is that currently our cafeteria is our isolation room and so when you consider the thought that we have that six feet of social distancing where we might have to quarantine students and if we have six or eight students that are waiting to be picked up we no longer have our isolation room space available to have them waiting for their parents so that's just one more hurdle that we would have to overcome is figuring out where those students have a safe place to wait while they're waiting to be picked up because our cafeteria would be used for lunch other feedback from your visits that i know kevin and tiffany both visited and i didn't give you a chance to say anything i did a little earlier okay i i mean we saw that it was neat seeing the neat board bars and how that works i i do think that without the same technology being in every classroom it's going to be hard i think as a district we need to make sure we have the same technology in each classroom in the fall um i think it has at this point it has to be a priority so if you talk about that too that's i'm glad you brought it up um so we bought the neat bars were like a test we bought uh 10 of them they were 2 000 a piece just to try them out and then that was we bought those not knowing that was a while ago not knowing when we were if we when we might be going full in and uh mr mccullen i did reach out recently to see about a long term a purchase of several more units uh but everything's they're all backlogged and now and the concern with a neat bar and dumping a lot of investment in that was that they're only because they are the teachers who haven't really like them and the concern is that they're only compatible with zoom right now so if the zoom it's all that's all they can work with so we have the we have the federal grants coming now for that you've seen been passed the federal government level and there's money coming this way to help reopen schools and one of the issues one of the things we we're trying to address is exactly what kevin just brought up is equalizing the playing field in the classrooms with the technology in case something like this were to happen again so we are you know we're looking at new teacher desktops with webcams and sound systems so that at least uh even even an environment where a kit a student is home sick for a week might be able to stream into the classroom easier than what we have now um like i said we have the technology we can do it like what you saw today or in the rooms um really we have purchased we don't have them out of the box yet because we we're waiting to see what we're going to do here but we the rooms will be fitted with webcams and uh lapel mics for teachers because the the sound is the biggest issue for the teacher not having to be right near their computer and talking into it so we do have that taking care of the middle school they have that in place and uh we've done we've purchased everything from private elementary just in case we we decided to go full in but next year um you know we are trying to address the uh try to level it a little bit we thought about putting we looked at other products too about putting something like the neat bar in every room you know just to but um uh we're kind of going the route of just uh webcams and and uh sound systems in each room so yeah i think that i mean you can see there's there was one fourth grade teacher who was seamlessly going back and forth between the kids on there and it's like he it did not look like it overly stressed him out at all yeah but he was having fun with it yeah it was it was fun to see the the um kindergarten teacher was she was doing great it was the best you could tell she was giving it all giving it all but you can see on all the kindergarten teachers the stress on their faces was just yeah it was hard to see um yeah that's my my the early grade levels are my biggest concern this whole time it's just that's been my biggest concern i think they would need a lot of support yeah yes to switch and to change everything they would need they weren't even i mean the ones we talked to weren't concerned about that it was that they need help help well yeah they need support we could just give one thing it'd be help um and a lot of them lost their health to the safe school and stuff like that so it's tough i mean i think yeah definitely it's just the way the board chooses to go i think that help in all the classrooms has to be a priority okay absolutely just like every other school going back will want help in the classroom as well so where are all these people going to come from i don't know i know with all the sub shortages and teacher shortages and i i think i mean reading these today it's very similar as to what you hear out in the community and i i think we're currently doing works on sun levels and does not work on other levels and i think that's the biggest concern for families and i i mean do i think coming in full day fixes all of that no no do i think doing what we're currently doing fixes all of that now um so i for me i don't i don't know which way to go with it but it seems that i i'm not i am not for keeping it the same just for everybody's schedules i'm not for that i think education is bigger than that it's about supposed to be about the kids um and it sounds like right now that we've got quite a few of them that aren't getting what they should be what they deserve so that that's what's bothersome to me yeah oh i agree and i like i that's why i would rather focus the energy on improving improving rather than starting something new and it takes a couple you know but we i mean yeah we have to figure out how to improve it though yeah i think that's where we're at right yeah yeah so our decision is to keep it the same or to with maybe improving because we don't know what the improvements look like we don't know what they are we can't evaluate them and school starts back up again in two weeks or go to full day school which but improvements there too for the remote yeah we have the technology in the classrooms to do right um well that's the heart of like what's the most effective educational environment for all students i guess that's i mean we don't have the answer that encompasses everybody so we don't seem to for me we don't seem to hit that option like it's not what we're currently doing right yeah unless we if it was we wouldn't get i mean these are very well written emails right they spoke their truth from their hearts and i think that a lot of the people are doing that and yeah we can't ignore it um so the uh i can't pretend like what we're doing now is okay we can't pretend like going to eight hours is gonna fix every full days of school is gonna fix everything right it'll look good that's what i think that's what i think it would look good but i i i agree with you it doesn't it it's going to bring on a whole nother set of problems for people right we'll be dealing with different issues right and uh i'm i can't give you an answer tonight but i i would be committed to us really sitting down and nailing down what we can do to improve the uh and you're talking it's really a a 5 8 issue right yeah i mean i don't know if it's doing like something like joe talked about where these for middle school they can easily they're doing the same thing at home as they do in school right they all sit in front of their chromebooks whether they're in the desk i mean we all saw it from the tours sitting at a desk looking at a quote book right or they're at home sitting at their bed and looking at a chromebook yeah um i i don't i don't really understand how they couldn't just have their normal class schedule okay and be looking at a chromebook from whether they're home or i gotta say away and the way that the schedule's split up is there's you could still split up a yeah send half of them home for this time and half of them home for the other time right they just we we want them to be able to log in to get instruction too so that so not we'll we'll figure it out but i'll tell you it would it would be easier if we had gone to again this is i'm looking back at decisions that we made we went away from the if we would if we would have done the monday tuesday full day you know how we did we had that schedule yeah then we would have had a full day middle school schedule and we could have easily done what exactly you're talking about when we went to the ab schedule the monday morning afternoon afternoon that's what kind of that's what drove what we're doing now so that doesn't mean we can't fix it somehow but i won't we'll uh well i just have to sit i i can't think about it right now a solution but it doesn't mean we can't do it so we'll just have to figure out what we can do to make that better if we don't with these new guy with this new guidance you're going to be able to put more kids in the classroom yeah so if it's 60 percent of the kids want to come back and 40 percent want to stay home can you make 600 teachers have classes and 40 be remote learning have you looked at that option if but then we'd have to they'd have to change teachers at this point yeah if uh i wish i would talk about this today i wish at the beginning of the year we had if we'd had known it was going to be this high of a number this the remote learning has kind of grown a little bit yeah and uh we if it got closer to 50 we could have had a a remote house and an in-person house and we've been fine but i do think there's some things we can do with schedule i think that we can sit down and re-evaluate it's going to require a change and then that change you know then we got testing coming up it's gonna be another change but um i i think there's probably something we can do and i um will definitely be a it would be our highest priority you know the next two weeks to figure that out and by april 5th i think we would have something in place give us a week after spring break and i mean we're working next week too so um but can definitely like i said i wish i could give you an answer right now but if that's what if that's our highest priority that's what we will do for me that's what's hard that's the hardest thing is not it's not knowing that because now we're going to vote on something that we don't have all the answers to not that we ever have all the answers but right yes we at least have some semblance to defend whatever decision that we're trying to make and i for me i don't feel like i have that yeah i i don't think we have enough information to make a good decision we don't have all the details right of how the improvements would be yeah well you're talking about even if if we stay hybrid changing the middle school schedule to fix the problems you're talking about we'd either have to change the schedule or we'd have to just go back to the instruction and figure out where the where the troubles are so if it's not if it's not if it's just if it's not a trouble across the board then then we won't have to change the schedule if it's just an instructional issue maybe in certain areas where we're not uh providing enough work or whatever it is um and like i said i've heard both sides of this i've heard people say that their kids are just overwhelmed with too much work right what happens to those kids then what's that if we change that what happens to those kids that are overwhelmed the more time you do in class well and how are you going to change the schedule hybrid if they're here for two and a half hours then they miss i just don't understand how that's gonna again that's just changing something up again and we're really talking about the last seven weeks of school five weeks i mean our first focus would be our first focus will be to take what we're doing and make it better if we if we feel like we can make a change to their schedule we'll do it but uh i don't want to switch from a a b the current morning afternoon to like a whole right the whole shift over to two days then we might as well just come back up putting pressure on teachers and students yeah parents yes i agree yeah to change it up for that short of a time at the end of the year then i would just say just bring everybody back at that point because that's too much yeah if we can if we can improve on what we're currently doing then that'll be our focus for the next two weeks i just i you know i can't give you a direct answer now what that'll look like but i think we're going to need to bring teachers into the discussion and and just start talking about what can we do to make this better what are you seeing the flaws what can we do to help you what can do to support you i know we have the tools there so i don't understand why the why there's not the why some kids aren't getting challenged i guess and what i i realized we don't have all the information but what i also don't want to happen and i'm sure many out there would agree with me just the uncertainty or are they going to have another board meeting in two weeks to decide to bring everybody back another no one wants that no one wants to live with the uncertainty of what is going to happen the rest of the year no i know that's why i think people want consistency and stability some stability knowing that here's our plan this is what we're going to do sick by it and then like you said improve on stuff focus and then for the fall that we're ready to go because that's the biggest thing i don't feel like after tonight we can change course i think this is a point where we just got to move forward right and the fall is the fall we got a we got a 100 return but so you're recommending staying hybrid well so here's what i i pulled a tiffany and i typed up what i'm going to wrap up can i do that yes okay because i want to make sure i articulate it well so six years ago when i came to big hollow i chose to live in this community it was for reasons like this i want people to realize that i am as invested as everyone else's i pay taxes here i grocery shop here i buy my cars here my kids go to school here i'm not making a decision tonight and then getting my car and driving to barrington this is my community and i'm fully aware of the difficulty that this is this pandemic school year has caused our students and our families and our staff in fact i would say that i am probably more aware than most of you i hear it directly my email inbox is full of comments on both sides of the issue and it will probably fill up again tonight but for the record i do appreciate those who reach out to me directly and and have cordial conversation with their differences so i do appreciate it but i get people are pretty worn out right now i take very seriously the fact that i am here to serve this community and so considering these decisions it's i try to do it with a lens of of meeting the needs of all our kids that's what makes us difficult there's no clear consensus right now on how to do this and there are some some that think we're here tonight because of loud voices and and social media who have objected to our prior decisions but really that's not the case we're here because we we were given new guidance and we think it's fair to discuss that guidance after our last decision and board members i know this hasn't been easy for you i know you we talked about this meeting you've spent time visiting in classrooms and i know that some of you have told me you've had sleepless nights over this issue so agree or not with decisions are made i hope our staff and community can appreciate that you're all trying to make informed decisions a week ago you supported a recommendation remain in our current blended hybrid for the remainder of the year tonight we've talked about the impact of the new guidance i want to reiterate that we are fully prepared to do a full return if it's the desire of our board and our community and you guys are elected by the community and represent them um if i will say it this way that i feel like if any board members feel like strongly that we need to go this route i would just have you make a motion to do it and we're ready to do it if you um and then we can we can vote on it but if you um if there's another direction you want me to take at a minimum i can i hear that we need to reevaluate what's going on at the middle school to see what we can do to challenge to provide extra support for kids but but if there's a strong pull to to just see where everybody's at on a full return then then you know i would i would recommend you make a motion to do that with a i would recommend it be a monday through thursday with uh fridays being a um a a remote learning day uh there'll be asynchronous work and uh as well so but we're fully prepared to do that um we're also fully prepared though to just address issues that you shared tonight okay so that's what's the recommendation you're the one that is here day in day out if you're in the trenches you have your administrators and your teachers and your staff in the trenches what we're not here every day yeah you know we can't get a feel for coming in for an hour observing some classes we can see my recommendation hasn't changed from last week as well okay that's what i'm saying i mean what i'm saying is if but if you're feeling something different then i've then make a motion to to do it but i my the the guidance here doesn't impact what i what i said last week and we supported it and i'm hearing that we we need to do better in some areas and i will you know we'll address that but i'm writing a motion out here i would like to just say that i think as a board we're trying to look at all of the learners not just our students that are in the building you know when when we made the decision last week i tried taking account all the learners in the struggles and successes of the in person and the remote learners all right i think i've developed two motions here to kind of encompass what we've been struggling with this meeting so the first motion i'm going to read is can i please have a motion to maintain the superintendent's recommendation of a blended hybrid model for the remainder of this school year and then do you have to read your second then no we'll be two different motions should we vote on this so sorry there'll be two motions all right the first one can i please have a motion to maintain the superintendent's recommendation of a blended hybrid model for the remainder of this school year promotion second thank you i would need a vote yes yes all right my next motion to address the deficiencies that we've seen and the answers we're looking for is can i please have a motion to distribute a plan to enhance the blended hybrid model by april 5th to the board of education motion second motion eye motion yes yes yes all right anybody have anything else to add no i want to say to families and to everyone just this has been very difficult and i know this is not easy for anybody so we've thought really long and hard and to think about everybody in the community as a whole you know and it's kind of hard to i don't want to get emotional right we're making the best decisions with the information we have right for our whole population we understand that people want certain ways to meet their own families needs but our job is to meet all the needs with all the information that we have been given right at this point we feel like the decision we made will accommodate everyone but also with the right the motion to have the administration address all the other issues that have come about that we constantly hear about that have not been addressed yet yes thank you vivian i agree it's very emotional for all of us absolutely it's a hard decision to make we read all of these things that personally attack the way that we do things and we're up here trying to do the best that we can we know that everybody's trying to do the best that we can but people have the audacity to say the things that they do say um not these people these people who are very respectful yeah but we read it out there and all i all you have to say is if you offer something better then go get involved yeah um there's no one out there there's there's not a school in this area that doesn't need help well we heard it from everybody tonight from staff to administrators to the all the teacher tours everybody needs help if you want to make a difference go out there and make a difference just stop with the personal attacks because it's very hurtful it's very hurtful to us we all have families we have children that go here we have children that go here and there's no reason for a classmate of them to say something to my child in school because what decision that i made right so um just please i hope understand this decision is as difficult for us and is it emotionally charged is it for you so yeah i i just hope that i haven't like failed in leadership for you guys here i and i would say absolutely not i said that not at all i think like i said we've all dealt with this terrible hand the best way that we know how and did we all make mistakes sure we all have but yeah does that mean that we're a bad district no that means that we at least are able to recognize and admit when we make a mistake and not go on pretending like everything's okay okay i think that would be the worst thing we could do for kids none of us we've all said we can do better yeah um and i think that's important to acknowledge i agree i mean one thing i've always felt since i've lived here kids in school i just i just feel like big howl's a big family yeah whether you have kids in school you're part of the community kids have come and graduated and moved on yeah we're all in this together and we try to get it right when people ask where i live i say i love a big hollow right i just want us to all like stick together and just move forward we're at the end of this like be positive i just want to be on a positive note and just focus for the future and and we'll get there you know just we've got to trust in each other that we'll get there and we have to support each other this is the time where we need to support not divide each other yeah that's probably been the that's been the hardest thing for me in my it's been the hardest thing for me to see is in my six years here that it's the first time i've seen real division in the community yeah it's hard to see and and uh and it's 50 50.
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so the core 40 is indiana's college and career readiness diploma so that diploma when you walk across the stage and get to the real world it showcases to the world that you are college or career ready that being said there are two additional honors diplomas beyond the core 40. those are the core with academic honors and the core 40 with technical honors now one question we do get quite frequently in the student services office is which diploma is better and in comparison those honors diplomas are the same tier there is not one that's better than the other they're both honors distinction however both of those diplomas might have different criteria if you turn to your student and ask them just very briefly you know how many credits does it take for the core 40 they're going to roll their eyes and say 40 duh it's in the name we always tell students don't overthink it there's 40 gotta have classes that we have to get to get across the stage and those are listed above um for time's sake i'm not gonna dive into those because honestly it's not the most it's not the best conversation to have talking about diplomas but you have 40 gotta have classes for graduation so swinging back to those honors distinction diplomas the academic and technical honors diploma have three things in common the first is that you need 47 credits to reach graduation so it's seven additional credits beyond the 440.
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that's what we're planning on right now thanks emma and so the link is going to come from the superintendent a lot it's a and it's a live link that will go to um everyone that's eligible in the hampshire county so i'm not sure exactly who it will go to if it will first be prioritized to that k through five group of staff with those um the younger children or uh if it would be a certain um work force uh like paraple para or um you know the extra support people um so i don't know the specifics of that uh but these will be for hampshire county on a broader sense i know that the john musianty health center was reached out to by by gateway school systems to try and help partner with them and hampshire regional schools to try and offset the amount of vaccines that are needed for hampshire county but northampton as well will be releasing their clinic date um which we tried to schedule our clinics at the same time to help with the distribution of everyone's needs for signing up so those two clinic live clinic links will be sent out into that email all right and just as a follow-up and i completely understand if you don't know the answer to this but who decides what cohort that first live link goes to who makes that decision yeah i know meredith o'leary and i had discussed that but um we hadn't come with an answer for that so i'm not sure all right well we do have um we do have staff that are still trying to get appointments like thousands tens of thousands of other hampshire county residents and as that date is coming up fairly soon um do you have any idea when um because i know krista and i are both working really hard with other uh colleagues to help people get appointments we have um quite a lengthy list of staff members who are assisting those who can't who whether for various reasons whether it's a tech issue or just have not been able to to hit the magic button to get a vaccine so that we do have a number of staff that that have been waiting for this um this live link to come out and knowing you know we were all given the dates the four dates when educators were going to be prioritized so given that it's next thursday and those of us that have been on the cbs website and have been on the mass backs website know that you really you basically have to have everything set up and ready to just hit click um so they're you know people are understandably anxious uh knowing that it's coming up and being fearful that because they're not in front of their computer when that link gets sent out by a super school district superintendent that they'll miss out on it yeah that's that's definitely understandable and and something we're trying to avoid too um but it's so hard to strategize around what's the best way to make it easy um so i totally i hear you gene so what can we tell those people um to have to make them feel better because i know i'm an early riser you know so i was up between 5 and 5 30 and had my multiple devices uh set up which is basically what it takes right now i know that the number of doses are increasing and we're very happy about that um but again i just want to convey that there there is a sense of anxiety that um not knowing when this is going to get sent out and who is going to be sent to if it's just being if it's being um the field is narrowing down to a certain cohort a staff not knowing ahead of time that you need to be home or you need to have um stable wi-fi um and you need to have everything set up in order to uh to click on the link when before all the doses are gone which leads to another question which again probably don't know the exact answer but do we have any sense of about how many doses would be available for each of those four educator days approximately yeah let me do the math right now [Music] um so for each day over both areas since right now northampton and amherst are only being allotted a total of a thousand a little bit over a thousand pfizer is 292.5 doses a day and it's we hope that changes yeah so we all do but is that person or is that total that's total okay and that's for one one location in northampton one location in amherst or the two northampton locations and the one amherst so i believe northampton only has one location um at northampton senior center uh and we have our site here at the bang center so that's a cumulative amount of 292 doses okay so approximately 300 doses between two sites ish um so 150 uh ish for each site and again this is open to all hampshire county correct correct so all hampshire county educators who filled it who fit into that pre-k to 12 category so it's not just educate it's all school staff correct anyone that works in a pre-k to 12 setting up correct um i see ben doing mental math um so that again that just shows uh that there's going to be a level of anxiety as to for those that are waiting for this um for these educator days to come um that there's there's a limited supply yeah the the only way that we couldn't open it up to the entire state was if we held these private clinics with 25 of our allocation if we were to hold a new clinic it would have to be open to all teachers throughout the state and it wouldn't be with any more vaccine so i'm probably going to answer my own question but would you suggest that people that educators school staff continue to go on to the cvs website continue to go on the mass facts and do the pre-registration and not depend on on this as being a sure thing absolutely um and and umass as a site as well and anywhere that you're able to find appointments um i will say that appointment availability as people find appointments that might be closer we are seeing this kind of domino effect where appointments are booked and then so that's just something to be aware of um recently we have been engaging our wait list for clinics more often so if you do get on the wait list perhaps we might get down to you through the asip clinical indicators for how we prioritize vaccine doses so if you do get on one of our wait lists we are actively using those because we are having people book appointments from outside the area or even inside the area but then finding that appointment sooner at a different site so just to keep that in mind but yes gene definitely people should continue to sign up anywhere they can okay great and for anybody that's listening what's the process for getting on the wait list uh for our sites you it would be during an open enrollment time of a clinic that you might not have a clinic appointment time available when you get there if you don't get there right away like when the clinic link opens but you can say add me to the waiting list and you would register that way to be added to their clinic's waiting list in prepmod the waiting lists are a cl it's a clinic based system not a expanded wait list forever so that's just it's clinic specific when you sign up for that in terms of the state the state does now have this option where you can sign up for to be called or contacted when appointments do come up and in your phase is open for mass vaccine sites that's currently only available for those mass vaccine sites but you can find that on i don't know if it's the vax finder or the mass.gov link but it's up there i've heard it's very easy to do and it doesn't engage you for those appointment until you're eligible which is nice so it kind of keeps you in the background until your face comes up and then all of a sudden you'll be notified if an appointment gets to you and you have up to 24 hours to make that appointment which is really nice um so it's kind of like a placeholder so if you're not someone who's by your computer every day or maybe by your phone with a text message um it's nice to stay connected for when appointments come available all right and i know this question has come up a lot because right now in the united states we have three vaccines which are were approved as far as i'm concerned the best vaccine is the one that you can get would you agree to that with that statement that you should not search for the perfect dose like you shouldn't be searching for moderna versus pfizer versus johnson johnson you should um the best vaccine for anybody is the one that you're able to get i muted myself um because there's some background noise here so yeah i mean i think dr fauci said it i think you say it as well um i mean all of these have a hundred percent of being able to prevent hospitalized critical illnesses so any vaccine is better than no vaccine and anything that any of us can do our part right now to get vaccines as quickly as we're eligible and they an appointment comes up will help us to end this pandemic more quickly so for the first time i have a day job question because it's been posed to me and i i'm not a public health expert here and i'm not involved with the uh the teacher clinics but but could you say for the record into the public the the teacher clinics that we're talking about right there that's not it's not just open to teachers it's people who work in schools that it's open to correct it's anyone who works k through uh pre-k through 12 grades 12.
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so for the year-to-date um the fund balance decreased by 1.8 million we ended february with this 996 848. so that's some some decent news and i will share some breaking news that i just learned and that is that the um you know with with cigna we receive rebates for prescriptions from the various uh drug companies based on the prescriptions that are provided to our employees and so we'll be receiving about 250 000 as the estimate in march so that should help buoy our reserve fund we do get that every year it's up significantly uh since we moved to cigna that was that was part of the structure of the relationship we have with cigna so again that will help us and and that's breaking news i'm going to go back now to the finance report i covered this section on medical claims the next section that is brand new in this month's report really speaks to next year's budget 2122 um and the update here is that we receive confirmation from the state that we would be receiving in the sr2 funding um and i'm going to highlight down the bottom here if you notice these lines in red so we'll be receiving 559 that we can use for covert related expenses through september of 2023.
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when it comes to state aid the district has seen significant increases over the past five years which includes the 21 22 budget however last year's state aid was um taken from us so we only got about a two and a half million dollar increase instead of the the over seven million we should have gotten um so this the and that's being made up with the the current year state aid so while we only got two and a half last year after they cut us the state aid it seems that they're equalizing it where they're giving us what we should have gotten in 2021 and then even further so that's good news um uh the state's plan to fully fund the formula is um by the 24-25 school year so hopefully they stick to that plan because it would obviously greatly benefit us because we've been so under funded um since the inception of the staffer formula or the school funding reform act formula um clip if if the fund if the formula was fully funded clifton would receive approximately 75 million in state aid instead of this 55 million we are receiving here's a quick overview of the special revenue budget this consists of our non-public state entitlements and all um all other federal grants the districts receives for budgetary purposes state and federal grants anticipate a 15 reduction from the current year the district has completely transitioned um from the federally funded preschool expansion grant to what's at the bottom here the preschool education aid which is state funded um and i would like to note that the preschool education aid that we get from the state for three and four-year-olds requires a general fund contribution in order to receive the state aid funds so that's that pea general fund contribution and that's something that was already budgeted for for the special education inclusion preschool students um so it already existed in the budget but now we just have to report it differently in fund 20 or so the special revenue fund uh now i'm going to turn it back over to um ms kusulevitz just to explain how each grant supports the district programs and serves and how it serves very specialized populations of students in clifton thank you miss uzi the special revenue programs vary and they come with various restrictions and support different types of programs and different types of students our smallest program is the perkins votech ad which supports our high school marketing academy and our marketing lab title one provides many of our extended day week and year programs in our title 1 schools and title 2 supports teacher preparation and training title 3 is additional funding to support our esl students also with extended year summer programs we have over 600 english language learners enrolled in our district at this time title iv provides a small amount of funding to support our social emotional learning programs which in this year of covet are very needed our idea basic and preschool supports our special needs program which addresses over 2 000 clifton students but this does not fully fund special education needs we have a 21st century program that gives us a wrap around after school and summer program for over 200 students at schools 4 12 and 17 which we have been able to continue even in this virtual world we've been in our preschool education aid provides fully inclusive preschool classrooms for about 600 students on an income eligibility and also first come first serve basis and finally our climate grant is a federal grant that has allowed us to fully expand our pbis program across the entire district supporting social emotional learning security health wellness um and just overall transitions for our students thank you thank you here's a very quick overview of our debt service um for the 21 22 school year the debt service is dropping by 37 400 from the current year um the remaining debt service reflects um just one bond um that doesn't fully mature until the 25 20 24 25 school year and that is the it was the high school annex project uh back when we got the debt but but now it's uh b which is one of our preschool school preschool programs um now if i could introduce mr thomasevich he's going to go over on the next couple slides which um is some of the most important information the city's raidables and the tax impact which is very interesting even though we're giving uh or presenting a zero percent tax levy this this um there's actually a decrease in um tax levy and he's gonna explain that thank you mr lucy um good evening board members and residents of clifton um the main focus when we prepared this preliminary budget for the 2122 school year was the mindset of one clifton this is the mindset that has been set by the superintendent dr robitosi in everything we do at the clifton public schools district um the budget addresses the current and future needs of clifton students and staff while keeping in mind the overall tax impact on the community of clifton mr usi has provided an overview of the 2122 preliminary budget relating to the various focus areas for revenues and expenditures as well uh miss kusolevich has illustrated that this budget maintains the current staffing and district program while also adding the necessary additional staffing to better support the students in the district with that being said let me discuss the overall tax impact that this preliminary budget will have on the residents residents of clifton um and i hope to make it a little bit easier uh but with what mr uzi has has indicated with you know the tax rate actually decreasing even though the tax is flat there are two factors that impact taxes for the residents of clifton the first factor is the tax levy that is budgeted as the tax levy increases it will result in an increase in taxes on the average assessed home uh they have a direct relationship to each other uh some additional information on this slide slide as it relates to the assessed home value in clifton as you see the average assessed home is valued at 178 000 554 this is the value that the tax levy is applied against this is calculated from taking the total tax value for the residential properties and dividing it by the number of residential properties on the tax roll of the city so some residents might be questioning that this average value doesn't seem accurate and that an average home in clifton is worth more than 170 that is correct uh that is called the true value or failed fair value to convert the average assessed home to the true value or fail value fair value uh you would take the average assessed value of 178 554 and divided by the county equalized ratio which is currently 50.21 percent um and then and the number will translate uh from the assessed value of 178 thousand 554 to the true value of 355 614 to allow the residents of clifton to get a better understanding as far as how it really will impact you know their home value um also an approximate tax point in clifton for the 20 20 21 year that this budget relates to is roughly about 533 000 405 which will affect the average assessed home by 18 annually let me recap what the total proposed budget budgeted tax levy is in this preliminary budget as mr uc has mentioned earlier in this presentation the proposed general fund levy is 134 million and fifty nine thousand two hundred and sixty dollars which he had indicated represents a zero percent increase from the current year budget um in the 2021 school year that we're currently in as well as it's a zero percent increase from the prior year budget uh relating to the 1920 school year the district has kept this tax levy flat for the past two budget years which is extraordinary in addition to the general fund levy is also uh what mr uc has mentioned relating to the debt service levy which is 932 000 which represents a 3.86 percent decrease uh roughly thirty seven thousand four hundred dollar decrease from the current year budget that we're in of the 2020 school year the debt service levy has been historically decreasing from the prior years as a result of no of no new debt being added and the annual maturities on the one ounce standing bond that mr usu had indicated decreasing so the total uh so the recap of the total school levy is 135 million one one hundred and ninety one thousand two hundred and sixty dollars that is being proposed um in this budget um uh which result results in a total decrease of thirty seven thousand four hundred dollars from the current year budget that we're in of 2020 2021.
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in balancing the budget for fiscal 21 we anticipated savings of approximately nine hundred and forty thousand dollars that went to offset the budget and provide additional funding that was a one-time occurrence that does that is not a recurring level of funding and so that no longer exists moving forward when we look at then on the next level uh the enterprise revenue our enterprise revenue has been very low if even at all existence during this period of time uh however we are anticipating some enterprise revenue into next year's budget however the differential is approximately 790 thousand dollars so that is a detriment to uh fulfilling the bottom line when we look at our ongoing costs collective bargaining contractual salary commitments that's an increase of approximately 2.59 million dollars health benefits projected at a net increase of approximately two hundred thousand dollars transportation services at approximately 340 000 increase facilities maintenance approximately 560 000 increase charter schools at 420 000 increase and insurance overall at approximately a one hundred thousand dollar increase these various budget impacts uh equal approximately six million dollars in terms of charter school i think it's also uh very important to note and and i i usually bring this up whenever we talk about budget but i think it's extremely important to note the impact that charter schools have had upon the district's budget this chart reflects the history going back to 2009 uh of the annual appropriations that are mandated by the state that the district must set aside to pay for charter schools in 2011 that was a significant impact to the district with the opening of the charter school in town since that time you see an ever increasing amount of money that is allocated to the charter school so even in times when there may have been slight increases in state aid most of that money was going toward the charter school overall since 2011 through the current budget for 2022 the district has appropriate appropriated mandatorily 29.2 million dollars toward the charter school that is money that has come out of the taxpayers pockets and that is to fund a charter school and as we've said many times um a charter school that's simply not required in this town not with the cadre of uh educational opportunity that we have in our district the tentative budget is at 170.7 million dollars it is in balance at this point in time uh it represents approximately a 3.79 increase over the original budget for fiscal 21.
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yeah yeah it's 50 and i want to say this though about that 50 because i you're it is 50 50 and and uh but of those each side of that 50 probably 30 of that 50 is expressing their opinion but they're they trust us like we they know that like we're gonna make the decision we're gonna we're we we get it and uh but they want you know but there yeah there's definitely people on each side that are really uh very vocal about it too but um but i think that people get it that this is hard this is this is hard and uh and while they may not agree they they're not gonna they're gonna trust us that we're we're trying to make an educated decision if you know so all right does anybody have anything else to add can you let the public know that we are going back to school full-time in the fall yeah but um how do you want me to message that because like i said i i don't see anything stopping us other than come hell or high water yeah right well i think that's a popular thing intention we have every intention to go back every every uh people don't i guess some maybe don't understand how horrible this has been for right everybody here everybody i mean it's it's nobody wants to do this again no exhausting no it's exhausting the hours and the time it is i look forward to being a superintendent again and not being trying to be a health expert and a safety expert and a logistics manager and i say that because i think there's a genuine people are generally scared that we're not going to risk well because they were just they're worried that if we're not if we're not going to go full day now though we're going to go full day in the future i think that's a small portion of the population you have to remember we typically hear from a small percent of parents and the rest of the parents out there trust us to make trust us and the best decision right for them right they just want to hear superintendents say it i'll say it i'll say it i think it has to be yeah i mean that's that's our plan right right that's our plan right that's our plan i did put it in the last i put in my last message that we're planning for a full return but uh i i understand why they're skeptics i understand why they'd be skeptical i mean i do get it because i figure if we can't go there now well we couldn't control what happened no the pandemic this is a year that's been like no other so you can't plan for this this is yes you learn as you go yes all that you've done yes thank you to all of the staff at big hollow everyone appreciate it for everything that you do and all the things that yeah all the so many people don't know you do exactly absolutely our teachers our staff everyone is amazing yes they can yes yes all right anybody have anything else can please have a motion to adjourn motion second going busy all in favor all right eyes have it good night you
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you have to have a 3.0 grade point average which is a b throughout high school as well as have a grade of a c or better and that's a local decision of a c minus or better for every grade on your transcript that counts towards your diploma so both honors distinction diplomas have those two things in common so some differences with that you have to have two fine arts credits because as well as ap or dual credit offerings now those ap and dual credit offerings we're not going to dive into tonight because those are typically reserved for students in their junior or senior year but we have plenty of opportunities to receive those credits just speaking of dual credits right now we have at least 30 dual credits that students can earn while they're in the high school just at gemtown as well as other opportunities maybe at the career center or other half day programming so for technical honors and i guess i really should have mentioned for the in-person spectators this is in your folder there's a sheet that is very much this the core 40 so you can follow along on on that route so for technical honors you have to have once again 47 credits a 3.0 gpa and a grade of c or better on your transcript the difference is of course that you need six credits in a cte pathway and we're going to actually talk more about our pathway opportunities coming up but you have to have you know see or better in those pathways as well as earn industry certifications or other dual credits so just jumping ahead not looking at what questions might be coming in yes it is possible to change your diploma throughout your high school career like i said these diplomas are built off of the core 40 so it's the core 40 width so all of our students can can earn both diplomas both honors distinctions if they choose these are things that we can definitely tackle at the high school so continuing to talk about credits one great thing when we hit the high school is something students may not have had to really focus on throughout their k-8 experience and that is earning credits so a credit is earned for every class that a student passes and for the state of indiana that's a d minus or better to earn a passing grade so students as long as you earn a d minus or better obviously we want you to earn the highest grade possible that you're capable of but that is how we start to earn our credits and there's actually two classes right now at the junior high that students might be enrolled in that count towards high school credit those are algebra 1 and spanish one one unfortunate conversation we have with students is they say don't worry mr schmicker when i get to high school i'm gonna get my act together i'm gonna really try unfortunately right now we might be enrolled in two of those classes that already kind of count for high school there's two differences though for that so with algebra one we ask that all of our students pass a proficiency exam in order to move on to geometry so as we get into our packet and look at those things there's we'll talk about the end but that's why every student on that worksheet is a template has algebra one so as long as students pass a proficiency exam in algebra one they're able to move on to geometry their freshman year this is sometimes problematic for students and families when they don't quite understand that process so the rationale for us behind that to pass that proficiency exam is in order to make sure we're ready for this upper level math and science classes because we still have to take at least three years of math while we're in high school and if we're not proficient in algebra one we might be falling behind and maybe develop a math phobia or really resist in taking those classes that's something that's not something we want to take the risk on so that's why we really ensure that students are proficient in algebra one before moving on their freshman year spanish is however different one great thing about gentile high schools we front load classes front loading is essentially moving them down early into your high school career so you have additional opportunities or flexibilities in your schedule for half day programming such as the career center or an apprenticeship work based learning startup moxie all those opportunities we'll talk very briefly about later on but those are great reasons why we front load and we really focus on intentional planning for our schedule why we're having this conversation again tonight so for spanish students would just earn the grade from eighth grade into and it goes right onto their high school transcript so students right now are in their fir potentially in their first two classes for their high school transcript so i asked our students yesterday when we were covering this presentation essentially i didn't want them to say or raise their hand but just a clarifying conversation of how well are we doing in spanish that's our first class that we're working towards for high school credit while we might not be able to change last semester we still have nine whole weeks to get that grade up if it's not quite to what we want it to be additionally along credits we talk about pe and i like i always love to bring over some seniors that i have in p.e solely because they hate it they don't want to be there they wish they would have taken it early in their high school career but that's one of those gotta haves for graduation and it truly does not get easier the longer we put it off so one great thing about gentile is we do have what's called an alternative pe that alternative pe is through sports actually mr stoner joined us yesterday in class we used him as an example for students that might be interested in participating in football next year or in the fall excuse me so in the fall students can participate in football and start to earn that pe credit for that season the difference though is just being involved in pe or excuse me just being involved in sports does not mean you're going to earn the pe credit there's a form you have to fill out there are logs there's assessments quizzes and tests similar to the pe class but the great thing it's kind of like that two for one special while we're working on our season while we're working on our sport we're also earning credits for high school so this can really help like i said going back to that front loading this can really help alleviate some time in your schedule to maybe get involved in classes that you want to take because that's not something we might have had the opportunity to do in throughout ka either because we never really got to pick our classes it was we have to take these ones it's kind of state mandated when we get to high school we start to open up more and more opportunities for classes bringing us back to that 440 so there's 40 classes we have to have for graduation well our students at gym town have a seven period day and traditionally here for four years so we have 56 credit opportunities in high school so we have tons and tons of time to really invest in things that we want to do that are going to set us best up for high school or excuse me life after high school we talked to 8th graders yesterday and talked about that at gentile high school we begin with the end in mind because we set and work towards goals because we know where we want to be in the future as we start to roll into that pathway conversation that's going to be challenging for some students you're going to look to us and say you're expecting my students to pick a class that they want to do for the rest of their life not necessarily we just want to be intentional because we don't want to miss out on opportunities when we talked to students yesterday they might not have had etched in stone exactly what they do after high school but they have thoughts and ideas they might think here's a theme or here's something i really want to work towards and right there that's all we want to know because it's as just as important to find out what we don't want to do after high school as it is what we actually do want to do so high school is one of the best opportunities to explore those intro classes and really dive into just different areas that we might be interested in summer school is an opportunity for students to typically remediate for classes however this can once again help gain some flexibility in our schedule for that junior and senior year we use um health as one of the greatest options is every student has to take health that's one of those gotta house for the core 40.
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and that would be exclusive facilities department correct okay i just wanted to hear that out loud and para's and esps and nutrition staff and all of the um other individuals who help support our school systems thank you yep transportation facilities maintenance we're we are an educational community all right um i want to segue it's a different topic um we're looking at bringing more people back in to our buildings yay but um we're still talking about wearing masks and there are so many different types of masks that are available and i'd like to hear from you what are the best types of masks that um students and staff should be wearing yeah so the best mess that individuals can wear if it was a disposable mask would probably be those and i say disposable like it's 2019 and we only wore them for one patient room or one exposure would be those kn 95 masks those are um those have the best filtration that's available for us in the community beyond that i think a triple layer cloth mask or double masking is also really great but you really want to make sure with those cotton masks that it's a tight fiber to be able to reduce the micron size if i i've always found this interesting that if you do the blow test there's probably some other name for it right but like if you were wearing your mask and not that you want to get close to a flame but if you were trying to blow out a candle with your mask on you shouldn't be able to blow out the candle right the mask is supposed to prevent all of that expiration from going out into the environment to decrease the amount of exposure for those around us so um i i found that to be a really fun test to kind of do with my kids at home when all this began so they could think about how masks work and everything so that's kind of a fun test to do at home if you don't mind looking silly which i certainly don't so i think as long if you know that you have that good fit around your face meaning that it's it's tight around your face uh and what we call the filtration which is the the size of the fiber if you have the fit and filtration piece then you're doing a great job and i just want to applaud like everybody on how far we've come with meth yes we're meeting virtually right now so we don't need them but i think we've come from being really um culturally uh defensive about wearing them to it's kind of i know my face sometimes if i forget to put mine on i'm like oh my goodness it's like me being without my glasses where's my mask so thank you everybody for working hard with it do you have an opinion on the netgators oh yeah i was just gonna ask that i know neck gaitors are comfortable i think they're really chic um and have some nice patterns but they're they tend to be made out of um the stretchy fabrics the spandex type fabrics those that are not good in terms of being anti-microbial they're not good fibrous they don't have that tight knit and if you do the candle blow test then it's not going to pass so neck gaiters while being chic and very like good with the patterns i think in terms of if we're thinking about covid and making sure that we have that good fit and filtration that they're not recommended along with well along with just a quick yeah i was gonna say can we follow up about bandanas because i think um they also have some wonderful patterns and it can be very chic but yeah i would say bandanas are on the same kind of wavelength krista that really these should be um masks that fit well um and will pass the the blow test i know my i have several bandanas at home that look good in my hair when i'm doing some chores outside but wouldn't pass the test like i have this really nice looking oh rock cameras fouchy mask love it but look at what happens it's not going to fit whoever designed it who is lovely but it just doesn't fit good around my nose so while this makes me look really cool and smart it's not a good mask because it's not going to keep everyone safe because my air my breath is going to come up and over that so that's something to think about so i keep it right here hanging by my computer because i still love it and it makes me think of the science and dr fauci but i tend to wear this mask or my nice double triple ply cloth masks that some family members have made i have a very quick question for ben i'm looking at the time and i know 4 30 is um approaching quickly um ben just a question the tents are not up right now around school buildings um i know we're hopefully leaving winter behind we can all hope i know do you have an anticipated date when those will get set back up again not even an anticipated date i have a scheduled date the week of uh april break we'll be putting them up so like because there is a concern because you know if you live in new england you know we have snow season mud season wet season and wind season and we're kind of like teetering towards the actually the middle of wind season so that's our concern with the uh with the tents right now but yeah we want to get them up as soon as we can safely do so but it'll be by the end of april break it'll be up so will you use will you be using april break time to set them up or will you start when the younger students are are back on april 5th yeah we're we're trying to get into a couple areas like you know like cracker uh well crocker we're waiting on a new tent but yeah the the elementary schools we're going to hit first so if we i can promise you april vacation but we are going to try to look for areas of opportunity before that and we all also know that uh whether you you might be able to predict the weather in advance but you got to take that with the result this time of year yeah unfortunately for our staff they're going up regardless of what the weather is over april break so we will um we will hope for very very pleasant weather is there anything else stephen you want to any concerns or it's no shoots bury this morning in the rosa muddy so from wind season to mud season right there all right so unless anybody else has any questions nothing all right then so i guess we'll all have a good weekend i'm getting stabbed in the arm tomorrow in chicopee so i'm excited about that that's very exciting are you going to the chicopee cvs yep nice that's great good for you waking up so early actually paid off for me for once [Laughter] well and hopefully we'll suddenly get flooded with tons of more vaccines so none of us will have to do that anymore but thank you everybody for for having these discussions and welcoming me to the meeting and it's a fun group i get to enjoy steven's hat in the sign shout out already folks well we'll see you on the other side bye thank you
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so this particular document here that shows the 1.1 million under the full year total this is the supplemental budget request that we looked at during the budget presentations and workshops this year and so we know that we can offset 439 000 assuming we use this esr ii funding so assuming that the 1.1 million you know is what will incur next year after you're offset with sr2 funding it'll be a net of six hundred ninety four thousand the other thing that i do want to explain the use of this sr2 funding will include things such as learning loss summer programs any technology purchases we can use it for any indoor air quality and hvac improvements and so with you know marlene and jeff and the administrators we are starting to work on that you know what's reflected in these categories are you know i would call more of the disinfecting and the protective portions of covert related expenses so we will be supplementing this in probably the the next month or two with some of the learning loss and summer program costs um so that's kind of the as quick as i can give a summary of you know where we are with this month's finances and and what we're looking at for next year um and then the last thing i will um hit you with is some more breaking news and that is that i stopped sharing my screen the i'm sure everybody is aware of the american rescue plan the state of connecticut under the rescue plan is being provided about 1.1 billion dollars for education um cheshire's share of that preliminary is about a million ninety one thousand dollars so that funding can be used through october of 2024 so as we get more details on that particular funding you know it not only would apply for next year but also the following two fiscal years then you know as we've been talking earlier on on the curriculum and the education side you know there may be needs that that that funding could be applied for in future years so that is the finance report update i'll be glad to answer any questions um faith was your hand up or is that from the that's okay uh so tim see your hand up go ahead thank you adam uh thank you vin so you had mentioned you may have described it or explained it the s or two would it that is that another one is that another federal bailout type of thing yes okay that's what i get so there's two so there's two different ones there's one that just got past the biden administration then s or two is is that the difference that yeah it was december and then we got the update from the state in january as to the amount for cheshire okay so yes it's two different parts of money okay all right thank you a lot of terminology it's like era when it started i had no idea now i know what it is but um i i don't know if you mentioned this when you were talking but i noticed it um as you were scrolling through the document the the what is it the cap a 60 cap on discretionary spending i'm not sure it's usually for like uh non-salary stuff right supplies non-payroll so it's everything from curriculum and textbooks to you know other purchases that we need for schools furniture you know equipment um whether it's new or replacement so that's where we have the 60 percent hold still um and we'll you know we upped that from you know which we carried in in as we hit february we increased it to 60 percent and then in april you know we'll probably release you know up to 80 and that last 20 is where we'll find that 293 000 that we need to balance the year all right so you're balancing the year what goes through my mind is uh the medical trust fund right i mean it looks to me like i mean what do we have what do we have in the budget each month about seven or eight hundred thousand seven hundred twenty five 000.
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the second factor that affects uh that impacts the taxes for residents of clifton is the net taxable valuation the net taxable valuation is the total assessed values of the properties include of the properties in clifton including residential commercial industrial public utilities etc that is on the taxal of the city in which the budgeted tax levy gets applied to this has an inverse relationship then uh and as i explained with the tax levy as the total net taxable valuation increases it will result in a decrease in taxes on the average assessed home because um the total tax levy gets applied to a larger number the total net taxable valuation for the 20 20 uh 21 year pertaining to the 2021 2021-2022 budget is 5 billion 334 million 50 0.63 this is an increase of 11 million 563 200 from the net taxable valuation for 2020 pertaining to the 20 20 20 21 budget next slide previously um maybe it's all right um so overall let me just go over the tax rate um based on this reduction in tax labor levy and an increase in net taxable valuation the proposed tax rate for the 2021-2022 school year will um is estimated at 2.5345 which represents a decrease of .0062 from the actual rate for the current year uh of 2020 2021 of 2.54 percent this decrease in rate will reduce the average assessed homes school taxes by 11 from the current tax amount of 4536 to now um annually so overall on the average assessed home will have a decrease of 11 um annually for for this coming budget year and that concludes the tax impact and i'll turn it over to mr lucy yeah so that's fantastic information that because the city's ratables are going up there's actually a 10 decrease per assessed home in clifton and then one dollar from the debt service going down for a total of 11 decrease in next year's taxes um so that's good that's great news um that concludes the presentation i just want to repeat this is not the final budget i know i've said that a bunch of times um and i could feel we could field any comments or questions from the board and i will stop sharing my screen one second uh mr russi mr levich and um mr thomas ceviche great job on your presentation to the board and to the public uh we know a lot of great uh time and effort and work went into putting that together and we uh we appreciate that a great deal uh mr daley you had a question yeah um just couple of things and again first of all our thanks uh thank the staff putting this you see mr thomas miss [Music] uh on a great job um finds more clarification so the public understands uh and ms thomas evans since you had this part the 50.
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the general fund tax increase is two point almost 2.6 million dollars the debt service fund taxes will be reduced for next year resulting in a net tax increase and a composite increase of 1.69 percent key budget dates the public hearing on the budget is set for may 7th final adoption of the budget may 15th uh i remind the board that no later than the public hearing may any changes to the budget being made that is the final opportunity for the announced uh changes if there were to be any and of course uh as we always do we will make all budget materials available on the district website uh i anticipate that those will be posted i would say by monday at the latest and here's the information where that information will be available and that concludes the introduction of the tentative budget which the board will be voting upon this evening bernie why you still have the screens up you're faster than me i had a question on i believe it was a second screen budget impacts it was a list of budget impacts yes thank you these are things that are affecting the budget now not projections for the next fiscal year correct these are items that that um bring us to the differential on um from this year to next year so i know that there have been uh there may have been some questions regarding uh the increase in state aid and the increase in taxes but uh when we tally up these various components uh these components tally up to essentially the different uh what that what that dollar amount comes out to so when you say that transportation services is increasing 340 000 that is from the next fiscal year to this current year yes and is that because we really had decreased service this year no uh it is uh we're we will be we are looking at increases in costs for contracted services this is strictly looking at contracted services um which will uh likely go up a pro i'd say roughly two percent perhaps a little less than two percent okay yeah i was just trying to figure out that number okay thank you um if you wouldn't mind putting us back in gallery view and i'm gonna open uh for any questions anybody any board members have any questions at this time i don't see anybody okay thank you very much bernie a lot of uh things to consider and think about the budget book is online bernie it will be uh online by monday okay so yeah um lots of homework to do okay but it is available to all the board members the board members do have that information by the way yes we still have a lot of homework to do whether we do it today monday it's a lot a lot to take in a lot of decisions coming thank you thank you so much for that presentation it now brings us to the good of the cause of the public members of the public may provide comment at this meeting through zoo by entering the url meeting id and password provided before you on the screen in order to be recognized use the chat feature select the zoom meeting host then enter and send your name to the host you will be recognized to speak when your name is called and individuals will be invited to speak in the order in which we have received your request the board of education recognizes the value of public comment on educational issues and the importance of allowing members of the public to express themselves in order to permit the fair and orderly expression of such comment the board shall provide a period for public comment at every meeting of the board and participants will be limited to three minutes duration is there anyone wishing to address the board we do not have anyone waiting in the queue okay seeing none i will close the public portion moving on to our agenda tonight we have one item on our curriculum agenda can i please have a motion for item number one contract institute for multi-sensory education so moved moved by laurie second by libra is there any discussion all those in favor aye opposed a shade motion carries there's an echo again i'm going to urge anyone at home who's watching to please make sure that you are new thank you moving on to our facilities agenda there is one item can i please have a motion for certificate certificate of substantial completion say that three times fast move by lori second second by leewoo is there any discussion all those in favor aye opposed abstain motion carries moving on to our financial services can i please have a motion to combine items one through ten tell me move by laurie second second by heather is there any discussion this is a roll call vote will the secretary please call the role mrs chu yes mr sismar yes mrs guass yes mr hong yes this is lax yes reese yes mr winston yes this is and uh president pepper yes motion carries we have one item on our food services agenda contract addendum our mark services can i please have a motion for this no moved moved by laurie second by barber is there any discussion barbara was that a wave uh it was a second it was a sign a second no question okay just want to make sure okay all those in favor aye opposed hi abstain motion carries on our hr agenda tonight we have two items can i please have a motion for items one and two so moved move by lorry second second by levo is there any discussion will the secretary please call the role mrs chu yes mr sismar yes mrs gloss yes mr hong yes this is lex yes this is rhys yes mr winston yes and president becker yes motion carries for a student services agenda can i please have a motion to combine items one through five move by laurie second by barbara is there any discussion will the secretary please call the roll this is true yes mr sismar yes yes mr hong yes this is lex yes mrs reese yes mr winston yes president becker yes motion carries there is one item on our transportation agenda can i please have a motion for joint transportation agreement with burlington county special services school district moved by jeff second second by levu is there any discussion all those in favor opposed obscene motion carries lou i believe our student rep is with us tonight is that what you have told me tony so good to see you so nice to see you again mr president becker mrs president becker call me you can just call me mrs it's okay um how are you what's going on in our high school i'm very good uh a lot of seniors are also very good and a lot of students in general are just very good the upcoming spring break always puts people in a good mood um as in terms of seniors specifically a lot of seniors have begun committing and it's so nice to see all of my friends uh get some acceptances back and start committing um and then those who haven't are awaiting decisions which are going to be coming kind of in bulk in the next two weeks so it's going to be an eventful two weeks for a lot of seniors and those of you who for those who also haven't committed um a lot of them will be visiting colleges especially if there were wasn't the opportunity to visit them over the summer in this upcoming spring break so uh also when they return they have to follow the guidelines um outlined by dr valeski earlier in this meeting about quarantining if they visited out of state um in terms of students not just seniors some students are even getting vaccinated which is exciting because that increases the chance that they'll return for the fourth quarter and a lot of seniors are considering returning for the fourth quarter because you know it's their last opportunity to be in the high school and um it's it's a nice opportunity especially if uh we get to go in more frequently so we get to get a little bit more face time with the teachers um and then some events are occurring virtually and in person um two are occurring within the next two days which is one of them is science honor society's trivia night which is a whole virtual event that's not just for ebhs students but for middle schoolers so it brings together all people who are interested in science and uh and it's nice to see that virtual event occur and then international club is also hosting class of cult clash of cultures um which is just another event to highlight our diversity and then in terms of in-person events you know everyone's always excited about prom addresses are being bought you know as the details slowly and gradually roll out people get more and more excited so that's nice to see and um it's nice because we're kind of returning more and more every day to normalcy and especially if we have like a may first deadline of people getting vaccinated then it's nice to see everyone just get back to normal may i ask without sounding intrusive if you have received an acceptance and made a decision yet or no i haven't made a decision but i have received a few acceptances most of my decisions are coming within the next two weeks so a lot of colleges say late march and early april but yeah i'm i i have a few acceptances and i'm still waiting on a lot of schools though the bulk of my schools i would say about 75 are coming in mid late march well we'll keep our fingers crossed and hope that you certainly get good news and i i have to give you and um all your fellow students not just on the high school the entire district so much credit um for um you for getting coming up here to our meetings and being cheerful and optimistic and up and reporting and this has taken a tremendous toll on everybody and our students as they always do are resilient and rise to the occasion i'm sure you have some days that are not as good but uh i just give you so much credit for um accomplishing what all of you have so that being said president becker could i say one thing tony i just wanted to pass on to your classmates the senior class you know my sincere appreciation for being so resilient this year and you know it's a year we we cannot replicate um but as we approach the end of the year we're going to make our best efforts to try to make the remainder of your senior year as as memorable as we can and i think we're all committed to that but a lot of credit goes to you your families for being so resilient and every east brunswick family every east brunswick student but um our seniors we're going to send them off at graduation on the football field and so i just wanted to send my congratulations on your your accomplishments your class accomplishments and um i can't remember when i was in high school i don't think i was waiting on a bulk of my acceptance letters i think it was probably just a couple not a bulk you know so congratulations to you thank you dr goliski dr velesky i know i'm putting you on the spot a little here but um is there anything that you're able to share with us at this point about uh plans for the seniors for the rest of the year or you'd rather wait until you have uh more details um i can share with you that that we are planning to have graduation on our football field and i think that was kind of revealed through board actions previously there are a number of other activities we're still working out the details on and making sure that we are compliant can comply with the governor's directives and executive orders at that time we expect there probably will be some changes forthcoming even before we dismiss for spring break and certainly after we come back from spring break so as we have more definitive plans we'll be we'll be sure to share with the community and with the board um but graduation is is assured that we're going to be on the on our football field for this year i was a little intrigued when tony mentioned dresses are being ordered for the prom of course you are i just but president becker i think you alluded to the fact that you were planning to go to any said prom in your former prom attire that's that's true tony i watched tony's face contort and i thought that was just that was cruel um thank you so much for that reminder of my faux pas dr velasquez greatly appreciate it um i can tell you my talks went back to the place i rented it from and i never saw it again yes i'm sure they had taxes back then but i i suppose something similarly um anyway i um i i actually wasn't asking about me i i was just curious if there were any details you could share with the prom or they haven't been finalized yet they are still being worked on okay okay thank you and by the way i'm going with lou so tony roulette okay on to committee reports information items and for the good of the cause for the board anybody have anything for us tonight i'm looking i'm looking i don't see hands raised thumbs raised so i'm going to assume no jeff how's the finance committee going we've been living it every week we've had uh right here on the board what more what more words can one add than what we've seen the uh in the last i don't know bernie what six meetings uh relevant to uh to that list what i will say is that the process has been very enlightening and the work of each department that has done staying on point with budget with all of the challenges that mr giuliani mentioned and and coming up with the budget and that they did with the things that go in that budget the tangible things i i mean i absolutely uh i'm in awe of of the work of each department and the presentations that they gave concise on point and uh the product what was brought then to the board stands for my statement you saw you saw what they did and i and i heard it so definitely a big shout out to that crew and uh nicely done thank you jeff i i particularly mentioned finance because i wanted to toot the board's horn for a minute i don't know if the public realizes um yes we meet uh every other thursday but the this board spends a tremendous amount of time in committees particularly something like the finance committee which meets almost once a week between january and may um and i tip my hat to all of you just your your efforts and your dedication and commitment to this district is incredible and the amount of time you're all giving is incredible so thank you so if nobody has anything else we do have a need for a closed session the board of education must discuss matters which are not appropriate for discussion in public meeting and these subjects that we intend to discuss are as follows those items listed in tonight's agenda the length of the closed session is estimated to be one hour after which a public meeting of the board shall reconvene in action will not be taken can i please have a motion to go into closed session move by laurie second second second by netherley wu heather heather by your nose all those in favor all right bye-bye oh i'm sorry any discussion all those in favor opposed abstain motion carries thank you for joining us tonight board members please log out of this meeting and log into uh closed session good night tony thanks again for joining us you
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