so we were able to reclassify some expenditures last year which brought our budget balance carry forward forward and increase those expenditures the salaries and benefits you can see increased we changed the slide slightly from the last quarterly report everything else was showing dollars so we changed that and then and it's a nice representation of the compensation increase that was awarded moving into 2021 and salaries and benefits also an increase in operating mostly due to special education costs pp and e cleaning protocols mostly covered related operating fund expenditures again this is year over year so you can see the salaries increased the blue line represents spent and encumbered and the orange line represents what is actually spent you can see the increase in benefits related to the increase in salaries of course increase in operations operating expenses and capital and then the total increase again so ms wood i really thought your question was really good today to try to give some clarity to what we're talking here and i wondered if you wanted to ask that again sure i actually think that you cleared it up and it helped me a lot but my question just was it surprised me i was just trying to remember how can we be spending on expenditures 270 million dollars when i see in our revenues not 270 million dollars and so it's mostly from the balance carry forward correct and also then i was thinking you know what how why is there such a difference in spend compared to last year but a lot of it again has to do with covid typically the expenses that we've incurred from capital expenses in the pp e and then um salaries are raised that we gave last year that's going to cause different things that does that kind of go through that's that's exactly accurate okay the other other thing is is that actually because of the enrollment stabilization grant because of the relief funds and in spite of the fact that we lost so many students we were able to maintain we were able to keep all of our employees whole throughout the entire year so we didn't have to incur any layoffs or or reduce salaries at all throughout the entire year thanks to these relief funds that we received throughout the year thank you and miss that's i i really think that's important for the community to know that that because of the money that we received we did not have to do things that maybe would have been very uncomfortable for a lot of people correct thank you and again third quarter expense year-to-date items to note and we did go through these the salaries and benefits operating in um increased due to a lot of coveted related and also special ed and then operating capital increased as well any questions on the third quarter report board members i i really appreciate the way you put the graphs together i think that makes it more um understandable and easier for people to grasp because it's complicated but thank you okay then we're gonna go right into the revised number three budget presentation so this would be agenda item 2.02 i think dr santa cruz is that's right correct okay so again just to slow it down and make sure that we know what we're talking about now we're moving to budget this is about budget capacity that is available to gilbert public schools in the current year it's not about spend so as you know the spend does inform help us to inform our budget but mostly it really it's as it relates to next year because our spend really is the um determines what our budget balance carry forward is in 2022 so the the more money that we don't spend in the current year against the budget capacity is a greater amount of money that we carry forward into the new school year but again this is our final revised budget for fiscal year 2021 and so with that i am going to hand that over to ms matin as well all right thank you miss pets miss butts can i just make one point in typical years we we try to keep a budget balance carry forward of about four percent i think four to six percent is probably a good target because i think it is important that we spend the money that we receive that you're for the students who are in our schools who that is what the state is giving us that money for but it's been just an interesting with uh with well just with our student enrollment loss but then also with the one-time grants trying to figure out how to most efficiently and responsibly spend the money and yet prepare for next year where we are not sure quite what our enrollment will be next year and to give us a little bit of stability but typically we try to spend the money that we get in that year with a four to six percent that's correct and and due to the pandemic we were on an upward trend with our enrollment um and then we're hit with the pandemic making it very difficult to determine what our projection should be for students uh next year so again taking on a little bit a continued conservative approach i think and you know talking to dr mccord and the my fellow leaders in cabinet how should we anticipate what the what our enrollment would be next year and so again because everything is totally blown out of out of whack um we're trying to be a little bit more conservative than than maybe normal and and even with that carry forward even with that carry forward that's right okay so then the goal would be that we'd want to at least for next year try to maximize that budget balance carry forward as much as possible so that it gives us more flexibility going into next year thank you miss what if i just add to what you're talking about obviously i agree we want to spend the funds when we get it where we can but there there is a prudence and a practicality to having the appropriate budget balance carry forward i think you know five years ago we basically had almost nothing in our budget balance carry forward and what that meant is that we were in order to meet cash flow needs we were having to get tax advance notices and loans from the county and and so on so that we could meet the immediate cash needs well that means we're also paying interest on those so it actually reduces our budget so you certainly wouldn't want to set aside six percent of your budget in one year because it would have the very impact that you're trying to highlight but by building it half a percent each year over time you know or one percent as miss bets has done for us that money actually comes back to us because now we're not paying that interest and and once it's established if we could assume that enrollment was flat which which we can't but all other things being equal once that's established you can spend the entire budget and you're not paying that interest so we actually increase our budget by doing that but we have to we have to invest in it by paying by putting a little bit aside each year to get there and i i appreciate those two comments i think they're critical and important at the same time for dr mccord to miss betts uh because of our judicious and conservative approach in our spending in spite of the allocation that we perceived we had or projected we would have i don't believe because i haven't heard it that any of the instruction for students in our district was compromised as a result would that be an accurate statement that would be okay thank you dr santa cruz just just a tag to to what uh um was said previously and i know that that on the four and a half years i've been on the board seems like we spend a lot of time talking about finance it seems like this year we've spent a lot even more time than normal but under the best of circumstances which i don't know that there's ever been the best of circumstances well not since i've been here anyway i've been doing this for a long time and there's never been a best of circumstances but what we've dealt with this year and the presentations that you've given to us and the questions that we've been able to ask and being able to get the answers and under the extremely difficult circumstances and literally you probably don't know tomorrow what's going to happen with any of this the fact that we are still in a in a good place and i feel that we can trust that we're in a good place is just amazing to me so i just want to say that you know this is not my favorite topic to begin with but you know it just it's what you guys have done under circumstances that are beyond anybody's control um is i'm very grateful and i think our community should be too to all of you our finance department has really taken the bull by the horns and um they truly look at everything as deeply as possible and at the end of the day they have our finances at their best interest and which equates to our students our employees and our community and so thank you and dr santa cruz's comment about it not compromising anything with our student engagement is incredibly important and mr jetty i just did add to your point really this is a support team this the the reason this exists obviously is to manage the money but it's to manage the money so that we can respond to to educational needs uh and if if i go back to the same four and a half years you know and miss humphreys is always quick to point out you know we've we've implemented a new software system we've brought on new teams i mean it's it's all of the above but four and a half years ago we had teachers complaining about reimbursements they didn't want to put in expense forms because it took months to get things approved uh you know people were going outside the system and now i i don't know if that's happening but we're certainly not hearing it acknowledged i'm not going to tell you either i don't think it's happening but but i'm actually hearing compliments from from schools that they feel like they're supported which is a dramatic change so i think that speaks highly of the team and their approach and the use of the systems are in place and so on so it really is it's a support function but it it's doing its job so thank you i would say it's been a year's long effort because when the voters supported the override in 2015 that made a huge difference that that really helped us get back to where we could really support that quality of education rather than looking at how we can i mean every year it's an issue of cutting money and putting money in but in 2014 it was pretty tough and so that override really helped us in the override and the bonds well an override in bonds in 2015 and then again in 2019 that that makes a huge difference it's you know there's that uh money that the state give us but that's for very basic if we and we did have to live on state funding only for that one year um but it was a it was a challenge so those districts that don't have aren't able to pass those bonds and overrides i i do not envy them their struggle so i really appreciate our voters for for understanding their importance and helping us get in this good financial shape thank you board members good questions good comments miss matinen please continue thank you so tonight we are presenting the fy 2021 revised number three budget again um to echo miss betts comments we are shifting gears here we're moving from revenue and expense to budget only this is capital and unrestricted capital sorry mno and non-restricted capital and just to kind of give you a little bit of background we will be incorporating the final 2020 budget revision if you remember we adopted in june of we revised the first time in december of we rised again in march of 2021 and here we are this evening with the third revision today's report will include student count comparisons fy 2021 mno and unrestricted capital budget details fy 2021 federal fund details are those that cares act money enterprise fun details and some next steps so this is a graphical representation of our average daily membership and weighted student count comparison the first column is the fy 2020 revised budget which we brought to you in november of 2020.
the superintendent established the advisory council by january 2021 to include four parents one community member one belgium administrator two central office administrators and one student represented extra step number two the superintendent said the schedule for the knees no less than three times between november and june the superintendent will maintain an agenda in minutes of the meetings um the meeting dates for as follows february 24 march 24th april 28th so we were able to we're going to start on it and we were able to able to meet um goal of getting those meetings done and uh the superintendent will indicate the school committee any act is taken as a result of the recommendations of the [Music] circumstances by january 2021 the superintendent had over one hand was in place except one that was added one additional member that was added in late march and ascended on one meeting what will be with us at the first meeting held on february 24th superintendent to find the purpose of the border serving as an informer and advising capacity to the superintendent of school without all matters related to conditions the contenders also identified two main focus areas for the 2021 2020.11 school year to be equity and we entered 2.0 as it relates to full entry of students into the school since the close of school 2019 and march 2012 at the march 24th meeting the superintendent updated the quarter offensive learning house that was mitigated uh in the fall of classic grand finals institute the superintendent also indicated that social emotional learning would be a high priority vote upon a student's in the spring and again in the fall of and working towards actual steps from the district contenders to move forward with computer science pathways in the first stage of the firing position of internships coordinated in our mobile phone in june and the april 28 2021 meeting superintendent gave an update on the perfectly laid the school closure that took place on april 16 and also discussed public related issues such as contact tracing quarantining protocols revised quarantine guidance and potential coded testing for the fall which i'll also talk about in june uh it will be briefly focused on the importance of communication and respect on social media so um you know we get a lot of late start with that um with that group but they they do provide some really good insight three of those members are also on another blog [Music] every monday morning so i think mostly they help us with communication to parents and you know help us with timelines so i'm just giving up one more example we talked about some program tests and possibly some fall i'm not not full tested but i'm targeting testing and you and so to have some some kind of testing available for parents that um it's school-based will probably help will be a big help because especially for students who are possibly being foreign they've been a big problem in a short time let's go through nobody has any questions see what towns are account representatives is that right no oh um [Music] um so i guess my concern is that we're going to be fully represented in there as well well we've got 9 we look at the 12 so 12 or less so it's still open basically yeah i mean did you absolutely solicited these numbers didn't you yeah yeah and the way we did it well i would like to on the see council so i hope that you'll do that for the coming year representation um again i guess i would well no well not really because yeah there's a different focus on one day i guess i would really encourage you to diversify it on the advisory council and get some perspectives that are needed so that you grow the perspectives that are coming into your space few more people the unfortunate nature of volunteerism in itself such as traditionally just in nature like if he says recommendations came from principles i'm assuming john thompson made more than one recommendation but most likely those individuals right i don't know i think that it doesn't mean that often um and it doesn't have a lot of tasks between meetings so i think that this is very possible to get volunteers here yeah but we'll try and help people step forward it's not but i'm trying to keep going certainly trying certainly we set up quite a few we send out quite a few and then we send out and we send it out again it may be partly related to the demands is yeah it's tough to meet the goal if there is do we need a psa please um yeah well it won't be a goal next year but to commit to the advising council it's a good way for me to get information about what's going on i have just one other question about approximately you are sharing information with the community versus the percentage of time you're soliciting ideas and input from the committee to something you're thinking about i don't know so 50.
i feel like that sounded tongue-in-cheek i feel a cold coming on [Laughter] kim all of a sudden came down with a 10-day flu [Laughter] [Music] mysteriously is a case of the nine-day flu well thank you for being here at kim i really appreciate you know pardon the part in the hoodie not at all no it's my other life all right i'm only dressed like a lawyer because i can't just got home i know i remember that all right it's nice to see you guys yes thank you okay a motion to ocean to return by kate hi you
the proposal is a five-year proposal is there then looking at our numbers looking at everything does everything switch back or once we make this switch this is what the switch will be i think the plan needs to well in order for us to grow the space that we need for for the intermediate what i call the intermediate future i'm talking about to the end of the demographer's study which was slated for 2024 and as i said earlier they you know one of the things the pandemic provided for us was this extra complexity in terms of the impact to our students impacted their families impact to our teachers impact the entire community and we know that there have been financial impacts social emotional impacts academic impacts we wanted but we also knew that these children were going to continue to come and and what what was really the aha moment was when we started to see the acceleration of these enrollments in our elementary schools so i think long term what we need to do is we need to have capacity in our elementary schools and by having this lower a primary grade structure and an upper elementary structure i think we can build that opportunity in our existing spaces um by by shifting our grades up but this is only going to be long term if we can build the capacity for the ninth grade and move the ninth grade up to have a comprehensive uh offering at the high school and i want i want everyone to understand we're not this talk about construction at the high school is not because of growth at the high school it is really about the aging infrastructure at the high school since 2014 i know we have been on an active plan in mr juliana who's hosting this meeting in the board of education have been the people behind the scenes he's he's been the gentleman financing all of this and we have not had a referendum and through a variety of funding mechanisms he has managed to air condition all of the facilities in the district that were on air conditioned with the exception of the high school which has some spaces that are not air conditioned b hall in the air in the high school was air conditioned but they are window air conditioners and um you notice that if if you're a parent of a bound monroe student those were window air conditioners as well because they were the quickest fix to bring down the temperatures in the classroom but all the other buildings have state of the art centralized air conditioning systems and churchill is actually the the newest building to be air conditioned before the start of this school year a completely new roof was placed on the building and air conditioned throughout so that's the kind of infrastructure improvements we have to make and we've really done a good job of maintaining our existing facilities and bringing you know our elementary schools up to a higher standard at irwin and memorial there are two multi-purpose rooms that have been renovated in there so but we do have an equity in our elementary school some of the schools have a designated cafeteria gymnasium and others are you know cafetorium so those kinds of things we would like to look at for the future and build that capacity as as more of a primary grade structure upper elementary grade structure middle school high school type configuration that's that's what i think is the long-term future of east brunswick if you're looking at the the 10 the 20 the 25 the 30-year fix and to be able to accommodate growth without having to go back to the community again and saying we're going to have to do another referendum we didn't do this right the first time does that make sense did i answer your question i guess yes you did and i mean i think we have to it sounds like we kind of have to see where we go in the next year or two and then go from there looking at the numbers after 2024 with the survey results right and we would obviously have we would have that demographic study redone again after the pandemic because we would need that information uh to be able to have really um robust conversations with the community but i think at this point that's when we start talking about going out to the community and we start asking the community what do you see as the future of east brunswick public schools what do you want to see in any future facility enhancements we do if we added to churchill to replace the temporary classroom units what does that look like or what could a new high school look like and what is what is that comprehensive high school look like or does it become a ninth grade academy with a 10 11 12 configuration those are all questions that have to be answered and there are lots of models that we could explore and like i said there's a variety of variations and and the board's been involved in very robust conversations for a number of years but um we you know we we began to really look in earnest after the demographer released his report in 2019 and knowing that the clock was ticking and that you know when the pandemic hit um we knew there was a pause but the pause wasn't going to last very long because even in spite of that we were having parents you know begin to register with anticipation of bringing their children to east brunswick and our office gets called all the time about parents beginning to think about moving here and um so it we we know it's real okay thank you dr vasquez that really is absolutely welcome absolutely thanks for your question uh my follow-up question in terms of those concerns about the elementary schools as a parent of a second grader currently and a preschooler i feel very blessed that he has a class size of 18 this year class size of 19 last year where really allows for that connection with the teacher in communication with the teacher as these numbers continue to grow are we looking at more staffing at the elementary level or reshuffling of staff or just essentially um is a part of these discussions with the board and the powers that be maintaining the um at the forefront smaller class sizes yes the answer is yes that that has been a concern for the board of education uh and and for us and we we take great care to to look and forecast down to the classroom size so we we are very methodical we meet with the elementary principals we talk about all the spaces that they have available in their buildings um before the pandemic uh maybe all of you are not aware of this but we moved our music and our art programs on out of the classrooms out of the dedicated classrooms and we needed the classroom spaces we needed the physical spaces um but this this proposal um to shift the fifth grade to hammer shoulder and i you notice i was very careful i didn't say hammer shoulder middle school it's hammer shoulder and it would be the upper elementary school for fifth and sixth grade by doing that it gives us capacity at all the elementary schools and allows us to grow those sections as we need them we keep the lower class sizes but the budgetary impact will be we will have to have we will have to hire more staff we'll have to hire more teachers as those sub as those grade sections become established as students get enrolled and we create more sections so yes the commitment is to the lower uh grade levels because we know that that impact has a direct reflection on on instruction especially for primary elementary students as i said earlier the the supports that we know we're going to have to provide for students and their families is is potentially significant so having lower class sizes and having that ability to have that closer interaction with students and differentiate within the classroom which our teachers already do a great job of doing but provide a greater level of support within their classroom for a smaller number of students we think will pay enormous and tangible benefits thank you you're welcome thanks next we have peter de sienna hi hi good evening um i've got i've got a couple concerns here and and so far i don't really like what i'm hearing so i'm hearing a lot about demographics but i'm not hearing much about how this is going to impact the education and the social emotional development of of my children and so here's my concern like coming from k-5 socially and emotionally and developmentally they're all in a sense of innocence when they go to the sixth grade they're still with your well in your plan would be fifth and sixth grade so now the sixth graders are interacting more with the fifth graders keeping that on that lower level then all of a sudden the seventh graders get bumped up into the high school mentality and and i have i've got major concerns with it i i don't like the way that's where those so i would i can ask clarifying question you said they get bumped up into the high school mentality is that because the ninth graders are there is that what you mean by that yes yes okay so we're really ramping them up into a faster pace of a no that would that wouldn't be what we're trying to do i know what you're trying to do but no i mean the ninth so we i talked i kind of alluded to um you know if we were to build a new high school would it be a 9 through 12 comprehensive high school with maybe 9th grade academy what churchill provides us is the opportunity to compartmentalize those grades within that structure we have the north and south sections of that building already and there is there is a lot of travel between the two right now because of scheduling um mr hanus who is the who's the principal of churchill since uh january 1st of this this last year um he and i have been discussing about opportunities for adding a third grade what that would look like and he's a former high school assistant principal so he came from east brunswick high school down to churchill um as the new principal he comes with a lot of experience in the logistics of moving students around he was the person that was was primarily responsible for phenomenal graduations at the cure arena for our students so they the idea is not to morph all these students together to put them all together to have them uh in an environment that they're uncomfortable with our situation is to compartmentalize them to the extent possible and to allow them to co-exist within the same structure and not have a tremendous amount of interaction there's going to be some but but there i think there is an opportunity for the social emotional well-being of our students to have them within the same structure but distinctly different and somewhat isolated too yeah well i i see the hard hard to happen knowing my one daughter who's at churchill right now and it's it's pretty crowded i know i know a lot of the elective classes are at capacity if not haven't been split up and going to school in the classroom so i know that that school's tight as it is and adding more bodies there is only getting worse but but we're also forgetting about how we're going to get these kids to school you're going to throw them on a bus and unless you're going to have a 7th grade bus and then an 8th and 9th grade bus you're still going to subject them to there as well as passing as well as these other things but my other concern with that though is now you've also lost out in the time of because churchill's on the block schedule now the seventh graders have to go to an 84 minute time block for their classroom and have you guys looked at that is that developmentally appropriate for these students to handle at that seventh grade level um so the i i think there might be a misconception about what the what the block really consists of so it's not 84 minutes of direct instruction that would be broken up into components so there would be um it wouldn't be all instruction for the entire time and yes it would be the the block scheduling would be applied to the 7th 8th and 9th graders as well as the 10th 11th 12th graders in this proposal so you're exactly right about that but i i think that there is a um and we're still working out the details of what that blog scheduling is going to look like um in terms of the actual components for the teachers and so that's still being negotiated so i i think developmentally it's appropriate if we if we do it intelligently and that's what we're committed to do well okay and this this is where i feel like it's it's becoming a rush to get a plan in place and it feels like the board is just going to vote on it and it's going to happen and we're going to have trailers out at churchill and then parents are going to be held hostage to pass a bond through our tax dollars to get something built at the high school that's where it feels like it's going to me right now i feel like if you're running out of room at the elementary schools edgar trailers elementary school let's get something in place for the for the high school going down the line and this way you can keep your your grade levels as is instead of instead of creating a system which in your words may or may not work and we need to have contingency plans so why go rush um um somebody i'm sorry if you wouldn't mind if you're not speaking could you mute yourself we're getting some feedback from thank you um we we actually did look at ali adding to elementary schools i'm sorry so thank you i got it uh okay um we before the pandemic we actually looked at adding uh temporary classroom units to irwin and lauren starver they were the only elementary schools that really had enough space to put temporary classroom units on them and it was going to be at you know at a at a cost we were going to we were going to lose playground space we were going to lose a basketball court to irwin uh because we needed to look at placing them close to the elementary schools the security and the movement between the tcus at an elementary school is different than it is at churchill at that age level so we did look at that but when the pandemic sat in we started to look at the equity among our elementary schools what our real root cause was and i go back to the root causes we're growing in elementary enrollment at all of our elementary schools it's not just certain ones so this became how do we address this as an intermediate concern which is why the proposal to move the fifth grade up and and give us capacity of the elementary schools and those temporary classroom units creating that module that could exist in a in a premium it's not a premium space but it's a space that we can afford to have those stay there and not upset our programming in terms of athletics or anything else behind churchill except for those things that you talk about in in the integration of seventh grade with eighth grade and ninth grade and by the size of the building we think we're confident we're confident we can ensure that the students remain compartmentalized there would be some interaction between students there's no doubt about that but we could minimize that and there's also the probability and the possibility that students could have interaction on buses too um but we we do that now we have interaction among different grades and i think and i didn't want to give the impression that we're trying to paint this we're trying to put the community in a position where you have to vote on a bond referendum what we're trying to do is tell the community that this enrollment growth is coming if we don't do something about it if we don't have a plan that meets the logistical the academic the intermediate and the long-term needs of the district this community will be very unhappy that we haven't taken the measures to address it when it started to come it'll be like the wave and once it starts to crust then everyone's going to remain quite unhappy and i'm simply trying to say to the community that there might be some changes from the federal government there might be money that we had not forecasted before and i don't have a crystal ball but i certainly um i'm watching to see that i think there might be something different in the next three years than we've seen in a long time in terms of putting money into infrastructure improvements so this would be an opportunity where it's not just a cost uh shared by the local community and i i commit to you that we have not been um an administration or school board that has said we just want to we want to pass this off to the community as a tax increase and in fact if you look at our budgets in the past we've been below the the cap the two percent cap in terms of actual total net taxes and we've done that by being you know pretty prudent about everything we do and we've done some pretty significant improvements to our schools without asking the community for a referendum to do it so i i'm just you know i'm humbly asking the community to consider this because i think that we're looking at a longer term problem than what we just see right before us in the immediate future great well then i will humbly ask that you really consider the development on the on the children first before we start shifting grades around and then putting ourselves into a corner that now we've got mobile units on a property which don't really need to be there anymore because that's not the building that's running out of room it's down in elementary schools and i think there's another way that this could be done and i just i think we're rushing it really just sounds like a rush to get something in place and that's where i'm at thank you thank you for listening yes thanks for being here mr juliana you you muted yourself yes i did next in the queue is hong huang good evening hi good evening and good evening everyone right so actually i echo a lot from uh what pc and i just like said right so um i will not repeat too much like what he just said right but like uh as a parent with like two kids like in elementary school right the plan i think like uh it do bring us a lot of anxiety right especially like you know seeing like fifth grader going into hemisphere right because like um like no matter how we put it right hemoso it is a middle school right we build it as a middle school it is having a middle school environment right so like you know like when kids from fifth grade and then suddenly jump up to that the middle school environment right then i think like um i i do believe like um you and the teachers like they do a lot of research already how to prepare the kids right but as a parent uh i cannot deny that i do have a lot of anxiety such as like you know how they uh fit into that middle school environment so quickly right and also like we are actually living in a area that there's no school bus right going to the um to the camera so right so like um things go into my mind okay how is a fifth grader walk on the road and then walk to the middle school so so those things like you know like keep giving uh us like anxiety so i i don't know like how um would you like to really address like some concern like that so let me start with that we we are not looking at hammer shoulders being the middle school we are looking at changing the culture of hammer shoulder to be in the upper elementary school and treat those students as upper elementary students there are there are a lot of models that talk about uh the sixth grade being an elementary grade and yet if you look at research nationwide there was a movement probably in the mid 90s they continued for about a decade the middle schools were built around a 678 model there were a lot of districts that did that but they they didn't adopt a real true middle school curriculum so what they were doing was they'd taken elementary students up to the middle school and simply you know they were within the same building called the middle school but the sixth graders really they hadn't adopted a curriculum that was really addressing the needs of that comprehensive level of students so we are talking about making hammer shoulder the upper elementary school and i think this would probably be it will be an adjustment for parents to to look at hammer shoulder differently but i think we have the opportunity to make it feel differently for our students and to create a fifth grade experience that's different than what they might potentially experience at their current elementary school and that's not to say we haven't done a great job because we have but there are lots of traditions and there are celebrations that happen in fifth grade because it signifies the moving from elementary school right now to the middle school and so but but part of like i said earlier the the transition to middle school for some students has been more difficult and that's given some parents anxiety so we looked at opportunities to elongate that transition i think this could um be that solution but i think we have the opportunity to re-envision what hammershow looks like were you able to share a bit more detail like you know how you create this like upper elementary school environment right or maybe like um in detail how do you like prepare a fifth grader right for a upper environment i mean upper elementary school environment like that well i think we have we involve our administrators who are a great team of people and you know dr gaskell does a great job now of creating like an introduction to hammer shoulder and you know he has experience with with younger children too in his professional career so you know this is about the introduction to the school and i know the students produce their own video welcoming the new students to hammershaw and this is an opportunity to to to reinvent that for fifth graders and to actually showcase for them um you know what hammer shoulde could look like and and i'll just give you a quick story we had over a year ago when we opened school and frost elementary school had a complete sewer back up we had to move from school first day of school and we took all the students from frost up to hammershould for the day because that was the emergency uh location we had for frost if we had to shut the building and it was interesting to talk to fifth graders when they walked into hammershow they would look around and they go do i have to go back to frost can i just stay here you know because they were so excited about being in the new building and i think we underestimate um what what our children are or even our own children what our children are capable of and and i think this gives us the opportunity to create the environment we can meet them where they are too to make this transition as seamless as possible i think the anxiety comes from the expectation that we were going to try to fit elementary students into a middle school model and that is not the case at all that is not the intent and that's my commitment to you we're not we're not putting elementary students in a middle school model but giving them a longer elementary experience i think could could pay dividends for us as a district and for all of our students too especially after a recovery from a pandemic okay um a follow-up question is that like um we have been quite focused on the high school right so like we will there plan to put the fifth grade back to elementary school because like if we look around like the whole country or maybe around the world right so a regular or normal elementary school it is like up to fifth grade right so so what will be the plan to put the fifth grade back to their to the regular elementary school we wouldn't we wouldn't put the fifth grade back in the elementary schools because that's the root that's the premise of building the capacity at the elementary schools is creating a primary and and upper elementary configuration so we have the room to grow where our students are coming into the district in kindergarten through third grade that's that's where the real growth occurs in the district but we still have elementary school there are a number of models in the state and throughout the country where they have elementary schools k to three and four to six they have they are all elementary schools but they are maybe housed in different sections of buildings or in separate buildings but they they break them down by pre-k to three and four to six so those models exist too so you know and and every district has to configure their grades based on the facilities they have so if you look at the research there isn't one that says this is the optimum this is the ideal um this is this is really kind of representation of what a lot of models are throughout the country not only what we have now but what we're proposing i think the one anomaly that we have uh that a lot of districts do not have is that we have our ninth graders separated from our high school that physically separated from the high school even though they go to churchill they are considered high school students so but that isn't the real focus in this first first phase the real focus is to build our elementary capacity and then begin to see what the community's interest in in this phase two component and and what the board's pleasure is about moving it forward but the immediate need is about building this this elementary classroom capacity so our students have this opportunity to engage with their teachers with lower class sizes and and we can meet the needs of those students in the classes too with the social and emotional and academic supports that they need okay thank you you're welcome thanks for coming next in the queue is robin zernitzky hi good evening hi how are you okay thanks how are you good um so i have a couple of questions one is i know you keep mentioning upper elementary school and i'm really trying to i'm reiterating the last person's question because i don't i don't necessarily have a feel yet what the difference is what's an upper elementary versus an elementary i know that in fifth and fourth grade um they change classes right our students normally change classes obviously not during covid in sixth and seventh they would change for every class that's how i understand it so would fifth graders be jumping up to change classes for every class or is there gonna be some interim year where they're sort of more in a protected environment yeah i would look at this as a hybrid so that we would look at we have to look as as many of you mentioned we are not trying to accelerate students to become more mature to leave their elementary environment to to grow up faster um i as a parent and as a superintendent um i'm really passionate about letting children experience the world around them because you know the world moves pretty fast and all of your parents on this call certainly know how quickly your children grow up and when they get to be older you realize how quickly they they got to be that old and you turn around and look and all of a sudden they're ready to go to graduate or move on to do something else we want this experience not only for our our professional capacity for our teachers to have the ability to to meet the needs of every child we want every child to have the ability to have the best experience they can in east brunswick public schools so i look at this as fifth grade as as we could we could make this a hybrid and we have not sorted out all the schedules yet but this opportunity would be um you know something that wouldn't be as all of a sudden you're moving to fifth grade and you're changing all your classes but the building itself the building itself lends it to compartmentalization with a house model with a the way the building was originally designed to have multiple houses within the school so it does allow us to have the compartmentalization and to commingle students where we need to but to but to keep them compartmentalized too and give them that more intimate feel uh that they're used to in the elementary schools and i think just something to point out is you know these students who are going to be fifth grade when they're in elementary school everything is just smaller right the rooms are smaller the toilet seats are small everything is smaller and when you go up to the you know middle school to hammer shawl which i understand you can call it how much all i have for middle school but everything's bigger so how are these kids supposed to be comfortable in that capacity i guess i i don't i struggle with that so i struggle with that and as a result i support what some of the other folks were saying about trying to build from the elementary school section instead right is there any way to sort of revisit the possibility of i don't know adding an elementary school into a shopping mall that has empty stores right like we have how many of those do we have on route 18 um you know is there any possibility to come up with a different way to maintain the same structure that we have while ultimately i'm in agreement that the high school could use a facelift that certainly i don't think anyone's against that but i think this intermediary step there's a there's a danger to it well the um you raised a good point about you know why not just use an existing structure of facilities in as an educational institution everything that we do everything that we use for an instructional space has to go through a pretty rigorous review process for the department of education so we couldn't simply say um within a six month period we're going to put a facelift on um empty storefronts or um you know take take an empty big box store and turn it into a school that it would be a major undertaking that would probably closely pace the construction of a new school and and so those those are the dynamics that we have to deal with as a as a public school institution um in the approval processes we have to go through and we we did i think you mentioned about if you mentioned about land we did look at available land and we we have not come across any land that is available for purchase and obviously that would add to the the total cost of any project that we would think about undertaking and land costs can add significantly to the cost of any school construction because now you start tying talking about roadways and infrastructure that have to be installed on that that vacant land it becomes very very expensive so this was to meet the immediate needs of our elementary growth to have an equitable solution across the elementary schools and to be able to intelligently address that growth and smaller class sizes and then begin to ask the community along with the board of education what what do you think about the high school it became a secondary question but knowing we had to address the high school so i don't want everybody to think that my focus has been on the high school and this was a way to get the high school address that's not the case but we do have to address the high school facility and and the fact that it is continuing to age and either we put money into it uh and how much do we do and what does that look like or do does the community the board of education want to look at something else do they want to consider a new high school that would possibly uh last this community for 50 years so that's that's really you know where we are with that okay i just have one last comment and i'm sort of taking this from a different angle so so um i appreciate you know this year my children have both have elementary school students have been able to be in school um the whole year which i've been very happy as a working parent and i feel like we're putting a lot of effort into this situation which i understand is definitely coming down quickly you know as a problem but i do have a separate concern that i feel like some of our immediate efforts should be towards getting the kids into school full day and i worry that that's sort of lost focus as a result of this particular initiative um i would like to assure you and everyone here that that that is not the case the the primary focus of this year has been to return our students and i'll i'll be very honest i was hoping earlier this school year that we would be at a position right now that we could have returned our students to full days of instruction um we you know we got down toward as we approached into this year we looked at returning to student returning students five days a week and we had to postpone that for a period of time as you recall we were had a forecast to open and then we had to push that off because we had a number of people who had contracted coveted and it was going to be um nearly impossible to even open some of our schools because we didn't have enough staff administrative staff uh to run those buildings and so we postponed that so uh lunch became the deciding factor and it's not about um you know the not just the safety but um cdc and the department or the middlesex department of health uh even though we can go down to three feet of distancing these new guidelines with students in a classroom when they remove their mask it requires six feet of distance and that's what the recommendation is and that's what middlesex department of health advised us with extreme caution and so to do that and the number of staff that we would need to supervise that group of students that we spread over that space to be able to serve lunch was a problem we could not solve we just couldn't get the manpower or women power to be able to take those positions and fill those positions to do this safely but we are committed and we have been planning our return in september to full days of instruction with lunch so we're going to return to normal operations it may be we're going to be wearing masks for a while but that's that's the intent we're coming back to school in september okay thanks for the uh for the information and and as i felt i'll stop yeah i'll stop waiting for a call that that i can be really excited that my kids can go in full day now i understand the reality that it probably won't be till september you yeah unfortunately and i you know we we did we you know i'm gonna tell you i was i was hoping we could i was one of those people that was hoping we could actually pull it off but we we can't do it safely um and if you do look at you know some of the situations around the state where you know some some smaller districts have been successful in it because they they do have the smaller numbers but um we had a significant number of students who wanted to return to school five days a week uh we're we're above 70 percent some of our elementary schools and we keep ask we keep having requests and so um we're accommodating those students five days a week wherever we physically can so we're not turning people away but i apologize to you we tried and it's just it's just not safe for this school year but we i'm anxious i think we're all anxious to return to school the way we all knew it in september thank you you're welcome thanks for coming next we have shilpi mahajan uh hi dr veliski um hi um yeah i just want to latch on to um the concerns that many parents have uh raised during the school my son is in third grade and he's going to be the first one uh going to hamish shoulde in fifth grade and i don't think hamas shoulders really built as an upper elementary school um as somebody said everything is bigger um they have to use lockers and they have to i mean they're bigger it's it just doesn't have a feel of the cozy elementary school and um it the school culture is also very different like how gaskell runs dr gaskell runs this school is very different from how a frost is run for instance um i really have huge concerns that this is being rushed into uh the next year is a year when kids actually go in full time and you have to really have them get back to that uh mindset the motivation of the kids uh the academic academically they all have fallen back their social emotional learning their mental health uh i think those should be the key concerns for next year rather than you know thinking about moving into a middle school um i'm personally very concerned about this move okay they as we talked earlier that the primary focus is about the return from the pandemic and those students who have been out remote the entire year or those who haven't been in school for the entire year in their transition back so that is our primary focus um but they the way that hammershold is designed is that um in the house model there is a way to compartmentalize the students and make it feel smaller within parts of the building but the building is there there's there's no getting around it is it is a physically larger building and um but you know that's that's the kind of navigation that our students go through as sixth graders and they quickly adapt to that and i'm not trying to force students down into a you know we're trying to trying to get them to move like i said to become more mature earlier or to move up into a middle school environment earlier but we are faced with the buildings that we do have and the most appropriate way that we can address this immediate need which as i said we are going to be faced with overcrowded elementary classrooms and we did look at putting temporary classrooms at a couple of the elementary schools but this this is a more equitable distribution among the elementary schools and i i think that and i know that in the seventh eighth ninth grade we have the opportunity to redesign uh some of our curriculum to meet those needs but our fifth and sixth graders too i think we have the opportunity to build this new experience for our fifth graders and i've i've had conversations personally with dr gaskell about this opportunity and he's he's ready to embrace it so dr gasol the middle school principal uh is ready to embrace this this new new approach if if the board decides to endorse it so i'm not personally against you know moving the upper elementary to middle school if you think you can do it i mean my doctor my daughter has been in the middle school she's going to go to high school this year so i'm familiar with the environment in both the schools my concern is that you will not be able to change the school's culture too soon uh you i mean you're just looking at an ear to implement multiple changes and i think it's very aggressive um i just don't have a good feeling about it that that's my only concern i mean i personally don't support the decision in the short term maybe in the long term two years from here once a pandemic has gone i mean and maybe you're back to some form of normalcy you can look at it but i think it's being done too fast um that's my only concern personally the other concern i had was and i i think this decision has kind of been made it's just about the both passing it but i'm addressing my concerns so that i mean the school district actually looks at things like school culture things like how they're going to address the social emotional learning how they're going to address the mental health of the children nothing of which i actually see right now in the curriculum uh so i i'm just i'm just very overwhelmed by what i'm hearing on the call today i hear a lot of research being done on demographics uh changes but i see no plan in place so that that's that's all i want to say the other thing i yeah i was just going to say that the social and emotional supports you probably don't see because of the environment there's our students are in so it's it's really not so much curriculum based right now as it is we are dealing with individualized situations and our entire staff our our nurses our guidance counselors as student assistant specialists all those all those individuals have been actively involved uh in social emotional sports for students in this really new environment that we find ourselves in this year where some of the students have been haven't been back in school at all this year um so still providing those resources remotely or you know providing support to even families not just the students so that's been actively going on um you know this is um and probably i i do want to say that we have spent a lot of time uh doing this and and talking about this but the um uh it might feel rushed to the community because of the pandemic and uh and i must tell you that we have put we have paid um enormous attention to the pandemic that is our our first and foremost priority but also realizing that we we are going to have to address this situation that is looming upon us and if we don't have a plan in place i fear that when september 22 comes we're going to be faced with dealing with higher class sizes in our elementary schools than than any of us will be comfortable with and we'll be trying to figure out a solution to that so now that was the reason for this i just have one more follow-up question on the block scheduling because i again it's going to impact my children like once he gets to seventh grade i mean i think eighth and nine junior high students already struggle with the block scheduling and i'm concerned that you will be enforcing that on seventh grade i i really don't because i don't see that instructional difference that you're talking about on the call in a 84 minute block schedule i mean the kids are just being taught to with no breaks um i i really don't understand how it's going to be implemented once they get into a regular classroom model i mean what's the plan in place for that for seventh grade especially we're working on that right now and the but the block scheduling um you know and we're still working out some some other details on block scheduling the idea for block scheduling and why this came as a proposal to the board is after many years of research about block scheduling and what benefits it could bring our students and when you look at the actual time that a teacher has to teach within a classroom environment once you talk about the transitions in the classroom um you know we're talking about you know a smaller component and then being able to elongate that and be able to have uh more time for the students to be able to reflect ask questions to experiment with the subject matter and to have that direction provided by one of our teachers and so that's that's what we're looking at for blog scheduling but we know too that to do this um in a very uh intelligent way we have to have you know our teachers have to be supported in that have to be professional development that's all been planned uh so we have to we have to make sure that we have all those details worked out in terms of uh support for our teachers for all the staff and the administrative teams that are going to schedule these uh these components but we think you know we would have recommended this to the board this was um this was a significant change and we thought it would benefit the students uh of east brunswick public schools it wasn't brand new to east it wasn't brand new but it's brand new to brunswick other districts have similar models and and teams of people from east brunswick including dr mela and members of the high school and other members of the administration visited multiple sites to look at their programs and their plans so our model is built around uh established success stories okay i mean my only request is just hold it off for another year and then you know look at moving the grades that you're thinking because i think this is too rushed for the kids and for the teachers too okay well thank you okay thank you for coming tonight next is sari hitchens good evening dr valesky hi everyone um good thanks uh for listening to all of us tonight and i'm not gonna echo what everyone else said other than to say it does feel very very rushed i have a third grader and a fifth grader two obvious grades that will be completely and totally impacted the most by this change my fifth grader was in tears when she heard about it she both my kids were just went back to school this marking period and frankly i had said to my fifth grader if you were in fourth grade you wouldn't be going back because fifth grade was so important to her these fifth graders especially would be impacted by this move not only this year but the next two years this year they've already been upended they haven't had a fifth grade they had didn't even have a full fourth grade they'll then be gonna come sixth graders for one year at a school that frankly they've been looking forward to going to as sixth graders and spending that those two full years there that's what that's what my daughter's been dreaming about that's what they've heard their friends talk about they've been excited to do that and then they'll spend one year there in a year that as everyone has said post pandemic that is really that year of adjustment they'll just get comfortable there before they're forced into another totally new environment with an earlier start time a different kind of schedule and really throwing them for a loop so now that's their third year in a row that they're getting thrown and then they might even be at a high school that's completely under construction that as you alluded to before that they won't even benefit from they won't even get to experience the luxury of having a new school or renovated school or whatever the plan is so those fifth graders are really and i'll echo everyone with my plea to delay this at least a year i understand the need for improvements to the schools i understand the need for the crowding i unders i understand the reasoning and i know that it needs to be done but this is not the time post-pandemic look we could all be in lockdown in september that we love the idea of going back to normal we love the idea of going back to you know maybe even just life with masks but reality is there are variants there are things that are going on there are people who won't get vaccinated that two each their own but we might have to shut down again we might have to go virtual again we don't know so to put a plan in place now when you don't even know what school is going to look like in september we can be hopeful we can be optimistic it's so rushed and i know you said it it's not rushed to the board discussions have been had if it doesn't it's not rushed it's feels rushed to the community but isn't the community what's the most important here the community our children are the most important here and if it feels rushed to the community then it's got to feel rushed to our kids our kids are just going to be pushed and pushed and pushed and again i know i'm saying because these are my kids that are affected but and it's i think any parent might feel that way but once we're in our new normal of it's the pan like the pandemic these kids and how they've just already been through so much and you know what i'm not i i i've heard a lot from we've heard it from a lot of third grade parents on this call my concern is for my fifth grader more almost more than my third grader my third grader will almost have that like yes she'll be rushed out of elementary school she's tiny she's amongst the youngest of her grade so she'll be a fifth grader in this environment i am getting to a question i promise but i i guess is shouldn't if the community is feeling rushed shouldn't this plan just be put on hold and my part two of my question is actually if there's no it doesn't really sound like there's a formal phase two plan in place so how can you make a decision on phase one without knowing what phase two is and also not having the confidence that the entire town those over 65 those who don't have children are going to pass a referendum for a high school in a phase two like how do we move to phase one without knowing what phase two is i guess is what i'm saying um your question is actually a very good question i'm glad you asked it because the design of phase one and in this plan had to be legitimately durable and i use the term durable so if if for example uh phase two if the community said we are not interested in a new high school we are not interested in pursuing anything with a high school go ahead and just start putting money into fixing whatever you need to fix but that's the building we're going to have for the next decade then we also have to have that plan to address the elementary school growth and so phase one would really become uh a much smaller component in that we would have to replace the temporary classroom units with some kind of addition to churchill a physical addition to churchill where we do have the space to do that and replace those temporary classroom units within we we we believe that by five years we'll have to have them replaced or have a waiver from the state so they are going to be there for this longer period of time but we wanted to have a phase two or phase one that could exist on its own if phase two never happened and you know am i confident that um east bronzer community would support a referendum i think that goes to um the presentation to the community how it's planned and how it's presented and we would certainly have to have community stakeholders and and i say this to all of you if if you are passionate enough and thank you for being here tonight thank you for all your questions and thank you for all your insight and thank you for all your feedback but when we if we go to that next phase we're going to need that support from the community we're going to need a core group of stakeholders that will be part of the voice to be able to sell whatever it is that packages to the to the broader community um and and it's about convincing people that this this investment in education doesn't have to be directly tied to what your children benefit from uh if you live in east brunswick do you care about your community do you want to see this this investment in a facility that legitimately will last 50 years um because that's that's how long the existing high school has left has lasted and so you're talking about a reinvestment in the community for generations to come and if you've never had a child i'm sorry if if you're not i'm sorry if you're not would you thank you um that the investment in this kind of um or this kind of investment in the schools would pay dividends to all the all the residents of the community whether you have children or not uh and it might be your grandchildren that go to these schools or it might be a niece or nephew you know that goes to those schools but this this really is about building uh the future of east brunswick but that's that phase two has to kind of stand on its own and phase one has to be able to exist if phase two doesn't get acted wrong right away or if the community says we're not interested i mean that's that's a possibility and that's why we built it the way we did no i i i understand that i mean like i said the plan makes sense it really does but going back to our children and echoing what so many others have already said tonight is if it feels rushed to the community it it may have been in the conversations in a board room but it was not expressed to the community before you know three four weeks ago so to us yes it does feel rushed and it feels rushed for our children coming off kids that have experienced loss in their families loss of their friends loss of life loss of time loss of innocence and to rush these kids at and and truly the fifth and the third graders are among the most impacted and they're so young right now and they're so impacted by this and tears at night you know a year ago of what is going to happen to me what is going to happen to my grandparents for all of these kids to then just have their world shook up from and shuttle from grade to grade from sorry from school to school it just it seems rushed and it seems just unfair to them and not beneficial in any way to their social emotional or academic well-being again my kids have been virtual until april 19th um i'm very fortunate that they were very good in what they needed doing what they needed to do but i know there are kids who didn't even log on to the computers not just in our district but around the country and it just it really seems like this is not the time to do this and i would appreciate the board's consideration in pushing it off a year and you know letting our kids have this full year of readjustment back into school like my kids haven't had homework my kids have not had homework in a year and a half none how do they balance learning again how to do homework with their extracurriculars and their clubs when at even from fifth grade to sixth grade that's a big jump on a normal year let alone post pandemic year and then to then have those sixth graders move to churchill with an entirely different schedule and environment without that small house feeling that they get it at um hammershould it's just a lot on our children and i will leave it with that thank you for listening thank you for your time i just wish that i i just hope that the board listens to the community um in thinking that this put it off a year thank you for your feedback and thanks for being here mr juliana it's um 906.
the next column is 2021 adopted and then first second and third revision please keep in mind that weighted student count includes the additional add-on funding for elementary a little bit more for high school and then of course the special ed students and there's a comment under the revision3 column that says the data as of april 7 2021 we may see some student count changes through the next couple months and we'll also get the final recalculation in july so we can keep an eye on that we'll we'll revise as necessary so generally what that means is the state the department of education will take that into consideration when they do their their budget balance carry forward calculations so we won't presuming that there will definitely be changes in student counts we don't know whether they'll be up or down at that point in time when they do the recalculation in july the department of education takes care of that through the budget balance carry forward cal calculation on their reports so that we don't have to go through a 15 915 and revise again our current year budget so i wanted to make sure that's clear we still need to monitor it and take a look at it but we will not have to bring a corrected budget to you because the department of ed has a process by which they do that for us okay thank you are there any questions on student counts before we move on to budget details this shows the fy 2021 mno and unrestricted capital budget change detail this is a a little bit of a busy slide but we like it [Laughter] the first column shows the budget item the second column is again the fy2020 final revised and then we move over to adopted revised one two and three keep in mind if you'll notice the the difference between the adm and weighted student count between revision number two and revision number three actually went down however you can see that the revenue control limit and the budget limit went up slightly this is due to the reduction to the distance learning reduction so it went from 6.4 million which is what we budgeted for in the second revision to 3.2 million in the final revision pending revision this graph shows our budget limit comparison again 2020 through the tonight's revision this is the same info as the previous slide to our mno budget limit this slide shows our budget balance carry forward comparison graphically and i want to point out the increase between the fy21 adopted of 11 million dollars budget balance carry forward to the first revision of almost 31 million this is due to the one-time monies from cares act which was esg esser and sr2 we did do a revision which which increased our budget balance carry forward into 21 and that makes up a large part of that 20 million dollar increase we also in between those two received the final fy 2020 afr expenditures and that adjusted that as well any comments here bless you fy2021 federal relief funds um this is an interesting uh timeline i would like to share with you so again the first column is the 2020 final revised so the first line is esg when we adopted in june we didn't have any information on esg then we revised in 2020 in november we added 20 million dollars to that budget um and anticipated an uh an 18 million dollar award in the sec in the first revision what we really received was 14.3 million so that's reflected in the second revision minus the 12 million that was spent in fiscal year 2020.
extremely relaxed very open he especially questioned sydney fuller who was a student she gave a lot of great feedback she was extremely helpful and i found that a lot of the conversation just was very natural and it was it was a genuine back and forth and the way you run it everybody feels very i i mean i feel like myself but feels very comfortable if you wanted to bring something up that you would you're a very good listener and you're you engage so i don't feel comfortable saying that it's 50 50 that if someone wants to talk and you're always asking questions it's not just presenting it's you're asking questions and a lot of great discussions [Music] you know so do try to ask questions to try to try to get some response because they do have a lot of really a lot of great information sydney does too it doesn't hurt [Music] how fast that should get communications out things like that they're not like just there's a superintendent updating on there yeah again i think that they don't realize they have a lot to offer so a lot of times uh i mean i've had things like um it was it was a member of there was a member of the advisor we want to talk about how we're going to mitigate student loans but i don't think they're quite at the point where they they realized that you know they have a lot to offer so it's it's it's a series like 470 that's here's a topic and then asking questions to try to get them to respond and give their like a parent perspective i mean i know this school perspective but you get a parent uh so you're right there's a lot of that so hopefully you know that that will change at some point i also feel like our third meeting was our most successful i think there's a comfort level too like i think people don't realize that it's not you necessarily presenting in them it's getting half of being on zoom and seeing yourself and seeing everybody else versus if you are all just together in one room but i felt like they've become more and more of a big conversation as we've gone along so i see that moving forward um different perspectives right yeah and she got like you know right here that's right once you do she could i think that's the other thing is the zoo the whole zoom [Music] so if there's anything going on out there they'll say maybe you need to do this maybe you need to do that think about this this is what i'm saying or something like that um uh [Music] but this is uh this one this was not the best yeah um during the 2020 2021 2020 2021 super council continues to be with his method of strengthening his leadership skills and targeting the age as noted in the 2012-2020 evaluation specifically presentation communication and agenda setting ensuring that meeting discussions and topics addressed by the superintendent remain untasked focused and linked to the agenda okay uh superintendent is meant to be focused on the following years and the intention of demonstrating the growth and improvements of first grade engaging the method engaging measured issues related to overnight and regional school business three establishing monthly meetings scheduled by november 2020 uh my mentor is the executive director of mama so um a lot of a lot of information from about region of school districts that she's able to share with me especially with communication skills have included this year and whether these communication goals have been met with how they will continue hollywood continue into next year five series self reflections related to the school committee presentations provided by the superintendent to the mentor identifying strengths and areas in the improvement over time so i'm going to read myself inflections then the past year i've taken self reflecting on several aspects of my engagement specifically with the goal including my presentation and communication skills and strengthening the leading agenda more focused and relevant these self-reflections that take place over the six-month period beginning in november 2020 and concluding in april while electric time um engaging this activity has not been extensive enough to recognize strategic time i have been able to identify specific behaviors and situations long before tonight in order to determine the next steps i have provided myself reflections over the sequential monthly observation stages based upon participation and leadership in the growing world [Music] do i include too many topics in an effort to have information to be fought out on for the meeting do i get off topic in my presentation should i bring forward only those thoughts that require formal work by the community that is i cannot control there is no formal timeline of discussion individual comments and questions therefore members are given unlimited time to speak either during discussions [Music] mid-cycle self-reflections personal behaviors although i review my presentation prior to meeting i do get off track and tend to go longer than needed i find that in an effort to explain my thinking thinking i draw upon other learnings to support my statements in doing so i draw away from the topic at hand and move to sharing watching general information this will list us comments and questions from two community members that may or may not be not related to the actual topic at hand and they hinder them from gathering enough information to make an informed decision the discussion forum while lending itself to an open and transparent dialogue this is not necessarily solving issues of matters of concern and especially beneficial therefore it might be easy to consider reducing implementation of statistical communication to a few people with greater focus and to the information provided and anticipated in anticipation of answering specific questions and moving them all the way situational behaviors the current model used has extended meeting times and made the discussions less effective meanings it ranges from one and a half to two out of no synthetic perceptions the pacing of the mean is not set in mind before the opening period of life with the ability to zoom from home while time and gain engagement has occurred in the form of lovely statements read to the community and prefer the comments the results of extended participation and in the moment reactions have led to an increased controlling that that has occurred at times simultaneously that has become both the distraction and hindrance the purpose at hand which is essential which is essential for the school community to meet and discuss and vote upon marriage within their curb we need to resume interesting meetings as soon as possible within a safe producer feed that based on discussion with my mentor discussions with the mental health to focus my heaven by reinforcing reinforcing the idea that it is in the end spooky meaning and i only control certain parameters it may be the full attention committee that all topics and related questions are fully explored in public also in a pandemic here does not advise you to make any drastic changes from which benefits are short lived some summary of final reflections both me as it relates to communications very scripturally that has been challenging to me to share to begin as my communication builder quickly more than through general analysis of the school community meetings conducted during the during the period mandate several months i recognize that i get off time entirely too much during meeting presentations i've included i've concluded based upon my discussion with my mentor that i do so because i want to share statistics with the community but an informal format that allows a free-flowing conversation to take place i've learned that this is innocent within the structure of the meeting and often consumes valuable time it also feeds into a meeting format less itself or long and drawn out meeting time both for myself for myself and for my administrative leadership team more forward report topics will be brief targeted that's my goal number three and i want to thank all of you who have talked to me about the aspects of my salutations uh you can take a mass breakdown you it's approved i can talk in two minutes oh yeah okay just quickly um i just wanted to give a quick update i don't know as you know we closed some closed schools on april 16 the friday friday before vacation so i did get a few emails including things like thank you for making the decisions for us um and so the first question people had was why were there so many students and um the reason basically the reason was that uh we had we didn't have a lot of cases only a couple cases but those students were in school a couple days and um also with the guideline when we came back to school we came back at three feet and because the six foot guidelines were still in place not only did we he hit the economist person who uh has told him we had a three foot person he had a six-foot person home a week [Music] plus there was a weekend event so we had to count those students too so it was just a it was just an unfortunate turn of events um and so the other question is we didn't have any issues in berlin but because of the way we scheduled this year we planned on having the last day of school for the teachers to be a professional development day to reflect on the year and stop thinking about um next year and i think carol talked about that in the last meeting and so i just thought it was easier to just keep all of the schools together our schools typically have a high absentee rate ferocities on that day so when i put all that together you've got to just replay the whole day at the end of the day so that's why growing another question came up about giving the number of students which we don't do and that's simply it's not illegal but there is a privacy issue early on the family but the students who were involved in the incident um numbers and the other thing is numbers get posted online we haven't been talk to the state and this time we have a case sometimes those levels [Music] the guidance has changed so we don't anticipate that we don't anticipate this is before you get that one kind of i don't know um i'm sure these two did because i got two emails and said they had it on 10 meetings with guidance and they wanted to feel the week before they weren't able to do it because of all everything that's going on in the school so i'm just assuming that's really what i started thinking i should just extend this and give them a chance to meet with guys to do everything they have to do so um my guess is at least two dead i don't know i think that's one from full person uh i'm not sure i'm not sure i'd have to look at my emails again um i can't remember but i know they had meetings with the guy i just thought given everything that happened that week in the school there was a lot of stuff going on here for those cases that happened on tuesday tuesday for some time the first basically so i thought just extended the week it doesn't really let's see if i can find that i'm going to send it just to you [Music] um [Music] um [Music] it's going to be outside and because we just send them to they sent out apply for graduation stuff it is going to be outside says i'm not going to read it just a couple of quick highlights the usda extended the free meals program which normally is just we're not eligible for so next year we're going to continue our model of offering free meals to all students we get reimbursed pretty close to what we would get if we have students paying and families get a huge benefit of their females so maybe instead of getting 350 for a time we might get 3 41.
how many other people do we have in the queue we have uh six people in the queue okay i'd like to i'd like to entertain those six if we could if it's agreeable yep okay uh kim valdotta good evening hi um i guess let me let me start by saying i do have i i currently work over at churchill and i have a fifth grader in um over at irwin who has her own question uh let me start with that one it's an easy one she'd like to know should this proposal move forward at hammershowed with fifth and sixth grade would the house system be maintained yes okay nice easy one um my questions kind of relate more to churchill we've spoken right all right there's been a lot of discussion about the elementary school level and i i'll i'll speak to all third grade parents out there there's a big difference between third graders and fifth graders and i'll have to agree with dr velesti on the note that a lot of our fifth graders might they really could they're gonna they'll do wonderfully at a hammer shoulder in a hammer shoulder setting um my concern though is then is this three grade levels uh at churchill where currently we have two grades our eighth and ninth filling our school um and i understand 32 temporary classroom units are being constructed uh will these classroom units um and i you can't tell much from the images will they contain extra art rooms music rooms will will there be and are they strictly classroom locations are these rooms with sinks um because unlike in their elementary school where we have um our math clas and english classes can be taught in a standard room right um a lot of classes at churchill become much more specialized and have materials and equipment that is then necessary so are these are these tcus straight up classroom spaces or are they more specialized well so what you see as a representation right now is just a really um you know a block of space and we'll have to look at what the um what the opportunities are to build specialization into those i think i mentioned earlier that the science labs are one of the things that you know we we certainly can't but i certainly understand and talking about kim your area of specialization when you're talking about art rooms and things like that that you know you're going to need certain pieces of equipment there you're going to need a certain amount of space so the this is the footprint but the actual classroom design within that structure for specific classrooms hasn't been formalized yet because we would want to meet with you know teachers with representatives from the school um to determine what what that would look like and again you know as i mentioned it's going to be a temporary structure but we have it will not feel temporary in the fact that it does exist for probably five years so we want to make it um as accommodating as we can and to meet the needs of the of the district i began having conversations with mr hanus you know after we had talked about this at the board level we were going to go to the public and give this presentation so he's actively thinking about what this could look like in terms of how do we incorporate a new grade level at churchill with the temporary classroom units in the back of the building how do we do this with security how do we do lunch how to do the transitions of students within the building and still keep those students somewhat isolated and identifiable as seventh graders eighth graders and ninth graders so those are those are what the planning phase would be for uh this next year and that's what this next year is meant to give us uh to formalize all that so we could have those temporary classroom units designed and in place by august of 2022.
and then sr1 we did budget 2.3 million dollars in 2020. we anticipated spending about 000 so we budgeted 1.8 million on the adopted we did not spend any money last year from sr1 so we changed the budget again to 2.3 million to use that allocation sr2 was not available until the second revision and that's 9.7 million sr3 we do not know what our allocation is we anticipate that it may be about 2 percent of sorry not two percent two times s or two um or close to 20 million dollars uh we'll receive that um amount in mid-may so you have a typo on the presentation it's 20 million not 2 million nope we have budgeted 2 million this year for summer school and to address learning loss of that money right right any questions before we move on to other funds fy 2021 other fund budgets so we'll talk about enterprise funds specifically nutrition services and community education these figures represent total resources which is current balance and estimated revenues through june 30.
it's kind of a no-brainer to participate um so i just wanted to communicate that families here about some good news and hopefully it helps us in the food service program as well second item is fyi there's no actually needed at this time but pandemics create some challenges for families and uh many are struggling financially jeff and i talked about we have some unpaid balances in the district we talked about this we both felt strongly and did not want to deny access to programs like preschool particularly for uh ish financial issues um non-payments and typically in a normal year we might need to do that um and i talked to a couple families and said that we're not going to do that and we'll look and try to come up with uh some um approach to that might include donations might include making recommendations to write offs and balances um so um i need to check the school committee policy i'm not sure that um [Music] i think we might be talking about a few thousand dollars in total and so that's where we are and again i just wanted to share that information and then the last item was just informational as well there was two conflicting figures for the eleven dollars apart for the capital assessment for berlin and lower members that was in the chat is correct i just wanted to put this in the record and they want to see a school community certainly it comes out to our budget so we voted as presented last time i just want to have clarification christian has been so refreshing to come to work every day now and talk about teaching and learning and and to have teachers back and that's our focus for the day and not covet i wanted to mention in my reports and in particular the elementary literacy review that's really a subcommittee of a larger group that we had um before holders began that was looking at the big picture of literacy pre-k through 12.
okay so that you're you keep talking about this compartmentalization but they really that's going to be near impossible if they if any student whether it's a seventh grade wing at the tcus or a ninth grade wing and they're still exiting for uh i'll take lunch for example we are in this move to block scheduling losing a lunch period with two grades we will be crowded now with three grades will there be a new lunch room will there be an all-purpose area for for the for them to eat in yeah we're exploring uh to be able to expand the the footprint for where lunch is served uh in the school that's one option we're looking at right now um and we have some some options to consider there and there's no doubt and you mention it uh there's going to be i can't guarantee that seventh graders won't see the eighth graders won't see the ninth graders there but to the extent that we can through scheduling we would try to optimize uh you know keeping them within their select peer groups uh for as long as we can and but there is gonna be they're gonna be transitions where the students are going to interact with each other so that come on i'm sorry we have somebody else i'm sorry did you hear me yeah okay so um yeah that we we have those opportunities but i think we have a uh opportunity to sit down and discuss how we can how we can do this and do it the best way possible okay and is there intention for um our phys ed classes i'm picturing i can shoot some of our ninth graders tower above me i'm picturing a separator in the locker room changing next to a ninth grader for phys ed class or is that something that yeah we're trying to keep those kinds of things separated so because we know of the the social um the maturity and yeah it's physical too you see that typical as i mentioned earlier in a even a six seven eight middle school configuration the sixth graders by time they become eighth graders they they seem like they've grown a foot sometimes yes um and then i suppose i have one more question i think just one it's late um parking yes we are pretty tight as it is uh will we be building new parking lots we will have to have some kind of temporary parking structure in the back of the building probably that's that's probably a consideration to look at okay that's it that's all i got for you all right thank you so much okay next is tony tang hi mr moloski i have two questions the one is all students requires to come in person to school at upcoming uh for september yes the question too is even though they don't have a version for covenanting i'm sorry could you repeat your second question even though they what even they don't they don't have the machine for kobe 19 correct no the this is i'm only i'm i'm telling you what we're being told by the governor and the department of education that there are not going to be considerations for uh remote learning in september of 2021 that we will all be back the i i am hearing that pfizer is asking for um emergency use um to be able to administer their their vaccine to students 12 and older um i'm not endorsing a vaccine by the way i'm just i'm just sharing the information i just the governor has not given any provision for any remote learning at this point we're being told by the department education to expect to come back to work back to school in september under normal conditions but as i mentioned we will probably have to continue to wear masks for a while and we will continue our safe protocols throughout the day in terms of cleaning which we we've already we've already done and we continue to do um but um yeah that's that's the direction we're being told by the state okay uh next we have yelina sores hi i just wanted to say thank you so much for having this forum and for listening to everybody um even past nine o'clock my kids are in pre-k and in second grade so i really just came here to listen and to learn more and hear everybody's opinions and what you had to say um i did think i heard you say to a parent um that you are well that the lines for the elementary schools um may be redrawn and people who are on the edges of those lines may have their elementary schools changed is that true is my child possibly going to be ripped out of their elementary school and switch to a different one no so what we would do is we would identify the um uh the attendance areas we've already kind of identified those and looking at how we could over time make that transition so by one of the approaches would be to grandfather the students that are already in school and as new students come into the school then if you're in a certain enrollment area you'd be assigned to your new school are are you know already with this plan we're talking about i've heard very clearly from parents about the transition and about the disruption in terms of the pandemic uh the last thing we want to do is to just say okay one year like we just changed you live across the street you go to this school the person across the street goes to a different school we're trying to correct these anomalies that have existed for years and this might be an opportunity to do it but for this group of children we would have the opportunity to do the soft transition and to be able to do this over periods of time so you wouldn't be removed from your school you continued to go there and then the new students enrolled would be aligned with without school got it thank you so much i appreciate it you're welcome sorry about that uh next we have max caponegro mr caponegro yes uh we're right here i'm sorry hey how's it going good how are you good good so um i have a question about churchill since uh kids will be coming in uh seventh grade will the sports programs be expanded as a result of having seventh graders with eighth graders we are looking at that yes to see what opportunities we could offer our seventh graders okay all right is that it yep i think that was it okay okay next we have uh nathan gibson hello how are you doing today how are you all right i'm doing well thanks for fielding uh messages after um hours one um i just have a couple questions one we know that social emotional learning is like key in this day and age right now given the pandemic um and with the toll being taken on students with anxiety a high level of depression and mental health is there a plan to introduce any extra assistance um and if so what does that look like actually there is and we we actually began this process before the pandemic and thank you for asking that question um we we engaged with a company called effective school solutions um and actually dr figueroa made a presentation at the board of education at last meeting uh and it was basically a report card of where we were with the work that we're doing with them to identify you know inclusion multicultural inclusion in our schools but we are still doing a variety of work with social emotional support behind the scenes uh and getting ready as as we return in september uh to ramp that up um as we get uh back in schools so that's been a singular focus and and we we got ahead of it uh and knew this was um an issue um even before the pandemic but the pandemic as you mentioned has accelerated this and has really um amplified some of those situations so i think we are well positioned the board was very supportive and very proactive about uh making that a budget priority and um you know i i think that we have those supports in place and we'll continue to put resources and personnel and money into those programs to make sure that we meet the needs of those students and if and as we see that on roll this beginning of this next school year we remain flexible and adaptable to to meet whatever needs come our way uh so we can make sure that our students are poised for success as they re-enter schools this next year okay um just a follow-up today um effective school solutions is good um i work with that at my school i'm also assistant principal okay um one of the things that i am asking that's a program um with the addition of new students coming into the building and the influx of more students um are as a district are we looking at bringing in more social workers counselors that deal with just overall mental health in the building um we had actually we've expanded our our counseling uh departments and we did that a number of years ago so and i know some of our counselors are online here tonight and they do a phenomenal job with our students but we have we're going to be putting our students in touch with resources that and through effective school solutions to to deal with that social emotional and mental health component and we are we are posed this year our poise this year to to put more resources in our budget toward that for the uh the 20 uh 21 22 school year okay and then the last follow-up question last question i follow up um i did hear you say that you're looking at trying to make sure that things are compartmentalized but then i also heard you say that um the students still have to move with everyone for part of the day for different sections and things of that sort how is that going to be accomplished with um gym extracurricular activities to give the younger kids this smaller the same opportunities that they would have had at the elementary school or at the middle school you know that they'll be able to compete sorry about that yeah they'll still be able to compete that's okay i i think you mean in terms of uh competing at in terms of pe athletic type things or correct okay um you know we're going to look at at scheduling and it's going to be part of this is a logistical uh you know puzzle in terms of figuring out the schedule and movement of students and and you know as an administrator that you know scheduling is a is a huge component of any building very it can be very complex but i think um you know that this comes down to the culture too of the staff and i'm very proud of our churchill staff and what they've accomplished and i i think that we have the ability to create a a very successful new model uh under mr hanes's leadership and i i think we'll provide the opportunities for students that parents a year after supplemented will be very pleased with and very excited about for their students and i think that we have we are blessed with a really great security team so when it comes to moving around the building we're not just talking about our certificated staff that's actually monitoring students in the building we have a we have a number of uh security professionals who have really worked hard to build relationships with students and um that they're phenomenal they they they help the building run smoothly they know the students they they watch over them they're protective of them and they are an integral part of how our buildings operate transitions today through east brunswick public schools and i'm really proud of that um so once again thank you for um even fielding questions after hours um and i do know that once you go to the board the decision is basically already met they're just looking over to make sure there's no major kinks in the system but would there be any plans in the future to make sure you incorporate more parents um in the process so that we'll be able to have firsthand knowledge instead of waiting until it's like basically hey it's coming at you and this is happening next year type things well our plan is to really involve the community from this point on to start having forums at different schools and to be able to talk about what this process looks like and to be able to answer any subsequent questions from parents this is not i don't want parents to look at tonight as a once and done this is the beginning of a new communication and all of you know from living in east brunswick that you know we started the pandemic and i was communicating with you at least twice a week and sometimes more than that um i know he's communicating a lot because people were complaining got tired of hearing my voice so now we're down to about once a week but the plan is throughout this next school year is to be able to create forums at schools and to be able to talk to parents about these specific components as we we talked about implementing if the board moves this process forward then that will be the next phase is to involve parents and community and to begin these really um these interactive conversations and continue them just like we did tonight to answer questions and talk about the you know what the plan for it is and and how we get to that next step okay thank you you're certainly welcome thanks for being here and uh we have melissa smith oh good evening i just had two things is you said there's no space available for new school right but did you look into adding up like adding like on the existing schools can you add a second floor we did and you know they um that again would would be uh multiple components around it multiple schools but it doesn't result in the kind of space that we are going to need over the longer hall it becomes more of a uh five to ten year fix and then you're back to having the same problem again yeah because i know i lived in north jersey and like when i went to school was k through eight and our building was three floors high like three floors high i noticed the ones in east brunswick were generally flat they're only one floor yeah we actually had the architects draw up uh this was um mr giuliana you remember how many years ago we had the architects draw plans for multiple story additions to the elementary schools was it three years ago or two well we had we had that examined um several i think was several years ago however um the issue with many of the elementary schools is that they were not built to be able to sustain a second floor right so there are foundational issues on most of the um if not all the elementary schools that are single story schools okay and where we did we looked at building these modular components that were multiple stories and tucking them into corners of schools um but then once you start talking about the elevator components and those kinds of things the actual number of classrooms that you get and we looked at you know our forecast out in the beginning to trend out where we were it it would have been you know in the community's eyes a short-term short-term or a 10-year short-term solution and then you'd have been back we're overcrowded again so what what we're presenting to the board we think is the uh beginning phase phase one and phase two are the longer um phases that will sustain each bronzer through it's its next iteration and honestly if you build a new building or modify or renovate the existing high school we are talking about a building that would have a sustainable life if it's well maintained for 50 years so now the high school it's not going to become an issue a couple of years from now saying it's still not going to we're going to need more space for the high school so all these kids are going to eventually go up yes no if we were to address the high school we would not have a high school issue um and you know and you know some of the features that with new building technology and energy efficiency we've looked at that in terms of what the high school could look like it could be a smaller footprint it could be as you mentioned uh could be more stories uh it could be um you know could be designed around our program our existing program which should be phenomenal because our curriculum has changed a lot since that building was originally constructed and renovated and added to um yes i know east brunswick was originally the high school was only one floor and then they added that secretary yeah it was a california campus where they had you actually went outside to change classes at one time and we have board members that recall going to school um during that time and you know we're alone here at east brunswick so they recall it well um but no i think that that really becomes the uh the secondary question this phase two question is about community support for that and what the board would like to um to do with that next phase so those are decisions to be made yet but those are opportunities that we can you know certainly investigate and then my second question was i missed the very very beginning so i just want to know with these um trailers how about the safety and is there bathrooms that's the only two really like the safety is there gonna be the safety like i feel very secure when they're inside of the building but when they're in a trailer how secure are they in that trailer from classroom to classroom like from the trailer to another trailer well actually they are um i don't use the term trailer they're modular units but they they attach together and so what they do is um think of it not so much as a trailer if you could ma have you ever seen a house that was constructed in a factory no so they're actually they're actually builders that actually take and build components of really impressive homes and they build them inside under control conditions and they move them to the site and they assemble them so it when it's all done it looks like a house that was a stick build house that was built in the foundation up these are modules that are tied together would have an internal classroom so once they're in this module the students would have their own hallway this connected hallway that would go around to the classrooms and yes they would have their own restroom facilities for male and female okay okay and then what about the security security would be deployed there just like with the regular schools and they would these units would have to be would have to meet all the safety standards established under the code of the township under the building code and they are built uh under the national codes for safety and securities they'd be tied into our security system fire alarm system um they'd be set on you know foundational peers they'd be anchored to the ground they wouldn't look like they were they were movable at all um and so once they're done they would look like a permanent structure but they would so now would you have security though in the building like you do in the high school and in the grant okay we would have security deployed uh there um just like we do in a regular school so they that becomes an extension of the school and and um our security team would uh monitor and oversee that as well okay thank you for answering my questions you're welcome and have a great night you too mr giuliana do you have anybody else we're done thank you very much everyone for coming tonight i really appreciate the feedback the input and taking the time tonight share your opinions i know the board of education appreciates it too and um you know they'll be listening to your comments before the uh the board meeting this this uh coming thursday so um have a great night everyone and uh we'll talk to you soon and just one reminder for all um you may submit additional questions on the district website on the main page there is a section entitled restructuring plan and you can submit questions uh therefore which will be added to the q a thank you mr julian have a great night everyone you
there was a decrease in revenue um throughout the adopted and revised one and two as we moved through the year we realized that we may see an uptick in revenue so we have accounted for that in both nutrition services and community ed fy 2021 bond revenue and expense this chart reflects both bond funds 631 which is the 2015 authorization n630 which is the 2019 authorization and the total bond fund um the beginning balance the proceeds from the from the bond sales the expenditures encumbrances and then the year-to-date balance and we combine both of those funds for this chart which mirrors the 50.3 million dollars on page five of the budget and miss betts will be presenting some exciting summer projects for those funds our next steps will be to ask you to approve the fy 2021 revised number three budget this evening we will monitor student account changes through june 30th update monthly financials to reflect the budget three revision prepare for our fy 2021 annual financial report which is due mid-october and begin the work for the 2021 financial audit any questions on the budget revision board members yes wood you go back to slide 16 okay so can you just again explain the difference in the limits how it's continued to go up even though our enrollment went down between the um revise number one and then revise number three so um so between the fiscal year 21 adopted and revised number one recall at that point in time that we received a letter from the department of education saying that our budget capacity was way over what they've calculated and in fact at that point in time it was over by 26 million dollars so we did know that we would receive the enrollment stabilization grant and we knew that back in may june i think working with the team we determined the best way to spend that would be in 2020 use the money in 2020 so we could increase the budget balance carry forward so that first revised number one that occurred in december we were required to do it but it does reflect the 12 million dollars of the enrollment stabilization grant but note that we really needed the 26 million because we didn't bring it up to that we were only able to get to 253 million at that point in time when we really needed to get up to 258.7 million so that's that explains that difference now moving forward we did see some changes in student counts and we did account for esser 1 as well as esser 2 esther 2 was a 9.7 million dollar edition that we could again move expense out of mno and put it into the federal grant again allowing us to to save the expenditures didn't impact our carry forward though so the the from 252 million to 260 million was a combination of i believe additional carryover identified because the afr was completed at that point in time as well as an increase of i think 500 or 600 adm that occurred during that time as well that allowed us to bring it up to the 260 million and then again from 260 million to 263 that accounts for the distance learning going from 6.4 million dollars negative to 3.2 million dollars negative giving us that extra 3 million dollars also note that the effect of that additional 3.2 million dollars is to increase budget balance carry forward going into fiscal 2022 because we do not plan on spending that additional monies okay thank you i i just think it looks like there's a lot of money yes but it does but yet we've had to make some really difficult decisions so i just but i appreciated you going through each of those things and reminding us how we got to to this point so i i did i wanted to make a comment about student accounts the student counts was because we had additional student counts because we were we're more careful about logging on and counting what students had done when they were online is that correct yes in a in addition um in addition to the fact that we had a quite a few high-weighted special education students that we were accounting for totally in arizona online when in actual actuality they were being served more regularly at the bricks and mortar school so when we moved them back to their home schools that made a significant difference for us okay thank you other questions right miss betts miss matin it looks like your work was well received and as usual very comprehensive and easy to understand so then we can anticipate that you will approve that i'm kidding [Laughter] they can't foreshadow their vote i was gonna say i never count on anything until it's done thank you jackie thank you jackie thank you bonnie and your team we'll move to item 2.04 dr mccord you want to say anything with that yes we have um miss betts as well as mr dutch over our director of operations they're going to talk to you a little bit about summer bond and capital projects this is something that we do or have done every year around this time just to give you a preview of what is going to be happening in our schools construction wise and remodeling so here they are so um thank you all again as ms matin and i did mr dutch over and i will do as well and sort of tag team this presentation we really wanted to show you how we are driving the spend of those very valuable bond dollars as ms humphreys has mentioned indicating the great need here in gilbert public schools for facility renewal throughout all of our schools and so i wanted to share a call out to albert and his team as they have taken on a tremendous amount of work over the last two years and have done it with grace and care and trying to meet the needs of our schools and the leaders at our schools as well as the budgetary constraints that might be imposed upon them so just wanted to open it up in that way so i will start the presentation and albert gets to do the fun stuff at the end so the summer 2021 capital projects um albert has shared with me over the last three years that they they are organized in buckets of mechanical projects and structural projects and grounds projects in his operation so we uh this year we will have both mechanical projects this summer as well as structural projects this summer in addition albert and i went out and did a review of gilbert elementary in particular knowing that they were going to have their multi-purpose room flooring replaced and as we walked into the room and shot saw the the stage curtains it just seemed like a crime to not replace the stage curtains while we were going to re refurbish the flooring so at that point in time we actually engaged jason martin's assistance as well it seems appropriate that as we have a need for sage curtains to be replaced understanding the need for the fire retardation etc that we are now combining multi-purpose room flooring projects with stage curtain replacement with the use of of unrestricted capital funds and then finally the last thing is we'll share as additional bond projects that are pending these are projects that albert is working on throughout the school district but we haven't gotten final cost yet or know whether we have enough bond dollars available actually to have them occur this summer so that's what we're going to talk about today so the district-wide summary so these are this is the available bond balance and this is specific to operations only so security has a pot and technology has a pod and transportation has a pot but this is just operations budget so you can see that at the start of the school year they had 30.7 million dollars during the school year this does include completing summer projects at the end of 20 because we're crossing over from july june 30 to july 1 so not all of the summer projects were completed by june 30.
um and during that time we had identified gaps and tonics in particular so we were able to bring in the foundation for the early grades um building up the third grade to have that program in place and it's been working very well for students um looking at the data from that but we feel confident that that would close at this very economics but the literacy of this particular group of elementary teachers has been thorough and thoughtful in their work and speaking about equity they're looking at the looking at biasing from the material they're looking at doing stereotypes six of them after school and the teachers said to me today can we meet the person that you could really feel this material again so i wanted to commend that group um that ties into two other pieces i wanted to mention the grants that we've received recently the first one is around literacy we we had to submit karen knights until 2020 um plans based on the senior opportunity act that was a law that's in place that asks districts to submit a three-year plan that's really specified by dsc in the state um so we'll be doing that in 2022 it focuses on areas that we need to improve on that we've identified we wanted to get one for every teacher put in for that grant and we were invited actually to apply for the competitive grant we were able to get sixty thousand dollars so that was the big news um the other one i want to mention we're talking about equity it's a digital literacy now brand it's a small amount of money but it's part of a bigger picture before about the work we're doing around computer science and each of these smaller brands are enabling us to bring teachers in for workshops for trainings painful subs while i do that in school and then enabling them to go out to trainings to to learn to teach computer science and for the echo of part of that this it's not just is some students earlier as far as all students would experience opportunities to take control of science we have that now in tenth grade but also those are really the two highlights congratulations thank you i just wanted to close the loop a little bit i had mentioned about the tiered focus monitoring review with the old cpr it's done by the state and the educational stability review which is our foster care homeless military family for you um the school we did a lot of work on policies to get us back up to date and i just we finally got the official findings that you find in both areas so i just wanted to kind of close the loop on all of that um the berlin pre-k i also wanted to mention i think some of the community members that have been on this for a while they remember that we tend to go um with one preschool being quite large and then we kind of switched to the other preschool it's never consistently one preschool that's bigger than the other we're seeing an increase in berlin in our special ed students especially uh so we didn't have a choice we needed to add another section for next year so that we have enough spaces for our special education students so we also have been advertising and putting up newsletters that we're looking for in more couple of years we have some of the triple slots still but we're still looking for more different peers so if you know people spread the word so they they can apply at the school um there's no continuation um and i just i wanted to share a little piece of the update on the five-year plan and thank everybody for your support with increasing our especially coordinator the elementary level back to a full-time position we had to cut it for budget reasons a few years back and it's been a struggle and each year we put it back in the budget and end up cutting it because of other issues so we're happy that it stayed in the budget this year and we've been interviewing this week and we had some fantastic candidates so we're very excited so that's it if anybody has any questions over the um we were able to install at each of the buildings outdoor access points so much of the ones that are in here in the auditorium but basically made for outdoor taking all the weather in new england um it went well um crew was in here for three days um got the uh ap's up in the real test and um i'm happy that they actually had a better rate than we thought again these are primarily we still have although most of our kids are back we still do have remote kids and so as the weather gets better and we're hoping teachers will be able to get their kids outdoors a little bit you'll still have to be able to connect to those kids at home so these outdoor access points will allow for that to happen great are we are you utilizing you know can you give enough have you gotten how are you doing so we will um again the reason we only put up to an each building um i would rather again for our reimbursement rates about 20 percent so and that would be reimbursable with putting up more access points so before we really figure out what part of um you know for all of our internet access um for the switches that we replaced recently and again all of what's hanging in here we redid the wireless because that's really great so it was all again like only 60 cents on the dollar a new um hardware layer like that um which we felt that trying to plan for that this year um wasn't going to be a good idea so going forward you know we'll have a we'll have a probably again another big project similar to what we did with uh okay superintendent evaluation uh just an update on a couple things um that self-assessment again has two functions the first is to help committee members reflect on the functioning of the school committee prior to assessing the superintendent to avoid completing our own performance with his performance and the second function is to inform our goal setting for call so lori and i will be writing the report to bring to the committee in september as we start to think about 2022 goals so we're going to let that land and work on the report you know any questions about the self-assessment okay and now we're entering the superintendent's evaluation phase these are due back may 14th so 10 days or before please contact lori or me if any questions come up about that forum which you know can be confusing or if you need any just help understanding what we're going to do um one thing i do want to point out is that the goal when jeff went over to his goals tonight the numbers that he had on his report are different they're in a different order than they are so don't just jump from number to number read what the goal is and make sure you're aligning his report lori and i will work on compiling the results and bringing you a report for what you make um angela do you expect to be completing that evaluation do you know this is your last name uh yes um awesome thank you so much for doing that that's hard to do on the way out all right i think that's it anybody any questions about the evaluation thank you again for all the hard work make it easy on us obviously with my goal doing officer reorganization next meeting we'll be appointing a new superintendent evaluation subcommittee along with those ideas um did send out an email um that would be something i think is a good idea obviously not this year possibly uh i feel like i'm talking to i'm looking to have the school community do um its own fundraising to do an event that all of us would participate in and still raise money and it's not just about raising money it's also putting our faces out there you know kind of normal people and that you know we don't just sit at these meetings bring all the communities together which i know a lot of these type of fundraisers do to begin with um pretty tonight what i think we should do is obviously the year is coming to an end yeah perspective or you know probably leading into the next year maybe wrapped around something around the beginning of the year is um because i think this can wrap around a goal that we may have next year based on just a people review of the self-assessment results i think this can tie in nicely with a split mini gold and just good idea no so actually i'm going to update so i was going to meet with mike and discuss the onboarding process ask for his feedback recommendations different things like that and i'm going to use that with julie as well because i you know with angela i was she really streamlined it and then i added into some different things and then mike's really helped me along the way to remember things it's really a word for progress angela all um it's just a standard person so um so i'm still working any other updates there okay item number eight uh okay so i have items in the um retirement um the first is a first read for the committee about that described last meeting about moving the awards committee into a community based model overseen by the administrator and the document that you can publish this describes that in more detail like the purpose of doing that so since it's a first read i just wanted to ask if there are questions [Music] is and i realized you did that she did not um but that's i think that the feeling from the schools is that the way that it presented that would be very just usually that cumbersome through guidance to administrative industries so i think it's gonna have to happen and i don't know exactly how they do it but with the initial conversation with diane that the process as it's laid out would become some preventative i guess we have to take that back i almost feel like do you think it's possible to do it the way you did this spring made sure that there was a self-community and then interpretation of i think in in that scenario it's just a legal implication really important that it still operates as a subcommittee of the school committee if it's a subcommittee of the school committee so it's just a matter of whether it solves the issue that we're trying to solve just to protect the privacy of more similar to what we do for marion which is really just a little label behind the scenes the teachers choose who gets that mover the teacher delivers yeah i'll look into it the second item is uh recommendations of our committee members for those of you awards and so first i want to thank carol young and rich mariani they're um committed members very thorough and fair and they once again volunteered and have indicated interesting continuing there the recommendations are in the report so that's a vote tonight to provided a demographic description of the applicants and their final recommendation is to award a total of 16 to 14 eligible applicants three awards for 525.
so some of that spend is in that 10 million dollars in addition the year-to-date encumbrance is about 15.6 million dollars that does include all of these projects we're sharing tonight they are all encumbered except for about one and a half to two million dollars so by the time we're done and sharing the bond report with you at the end of september that budget balance will probably be closer to three million dollars so these are our total summer projects costs you can see the stage curtains up there those are not being funded again by bond dollars are being it's being funded by unrestricted capital our total mechanical costs will be just under 2.4 million and total structural just under 14.2 million so these are the the summary of the summer mechanical project you can see the small amounts at harrah's elementary and mesquite high school for lighting projects and then the big chunk of that is with islands meridian and patterson and all three of those have do not have a central plant they all have packaged hvac units or split units and so all of them will be replaced at those three elementary schools this summer can you just tell me how do you know how old those units are at islands and paterson and meridian do you know how long it's been um meridian those are the the original units so i think we're roughly two 2005 2006.
thank you very much okay what questions there is often now um i did reach out to the accountant at um the term count for berlin she was told to find out several years you've been so i guess what i'm asking is either this meeting or your june a member to take care of it's usually given to a verbal student with someone that is a volunteer within that has uh and i please have a motion to approve the marion hoffman award to uh of this country so um okay uh any other questions comments okay uh item number one could i please have a motion to approve the moses retalia scholarship recipient awards as presented thank you very much question deliberations all those approved all right proposed like she said i'm sorry i'm too busy some reason we might have questions on i just want to make sure we get in the habit of doing the appropriate way um could i please have a motion to approve the early retirement uh incentive bill good mood thank you very much questions around this so this still hasn't been passed it's still in the committee so this is both if we approve it um it's really just that it should pass in the legislature then because i want to take advantage of pen okay correct let me give you some information that was given to me from you today just to kind of give you an idea i don't know who it was but asked tara great response uh meeting you only got 32 completed surveys uh which really isn't a great barometer the guess is it's probably because it's a question that may not be in the wheelhouse of the remainder of those people so but anyways uh 32 surveys um out of the 32 that answered 15 claimed they would be eligible to retire early under the bill if approved out of those 15 they said they would be interested five said they might be interested and two said they would not be and so i guess there's a an element in this bill that says forget what it's called the local district have to pay if they can't replace those positions correct jeff was that right and um you shouldn't worry about that more about them people saying they might retire yeah that's a bigger distribution is that they use this cut position so they're just so immediate food because that's really that's included by the fda to prevent districts from using it as a way to cut staff so i guess right this is done at the at the local level so if one and if it passes school committees will have to approve it educators in that district take advantage of it also might have been changed in the legislative process i don't know i just looked at it today online to kind of where it respect to that medium public service so like you know i don't think there is i mean it was presented to us the first read last month um my suggestion as chair would be that we we do vote on it tonight um if there is concerns about why we're voting right now we can always um there's always the option of not approving tonight and then being pre-brought back up from another game you know after it's after it's passed um i don't know if timing makes any difference if it gets we've already done it tonight and uh tomorrow also it's approved i don't know what time of the gap means um any financial anything you have from a financial perspective is there any risks rewards versus i would say if you financially like just said um you're not one of those districts like this huge number of classrooms and uh we're going to look to a position where we're leaning in a small district so financially no though if the bill changes um you might think about hoping that you know assuming there's yeah i don't know where it is in the legislative process but the way it's presented now it's not going to have any funding to impact to us at all other than a little bit of savings and the replacement costs of new teachers so it potentially is a savings yeah but it does you know have some positions to go [Music] from um [Music] accepted any okay item number three um please have a motion to approve the school committee meeting dates for the 2021 2022 school year hi crouchers thank you both uh questions discussion raise the question of whether the february [Music] um committee dates and meeting days and we know the topic we'll continue to talk about before we depart um we could amend it now and change the february date or we can leave as is and if there's conflicts as we as we move along always particular issue i would vote that we uh i would and i would make fortune that we vote on the agenda as it stated today tuesday nights is it always been tuesday nights uh no actually it used to be wednesday nights and when i joined i had a concept from wednesday so they changed the day so it's been tuesdays does anybody have any is there any inclination from anyone other than myself that it's a change i don't want to be able to change [Laughter] [Music] my children get older older and everything i have quite a few more contracts on tuesday nights now than i did that i did previously so i'm proposing the idea of monday nights most town meetings what i would do is try to position to look at the town's select board meetings so you know i don't want to have two major right yeah we'll be seeing uh we'll be seeing a conflict there we have two major meetings um you know fighting for public attendance yeah i think it's it seems like such a small thing to discuss but it's really not right because our goal of the committee is to encourage more volunteers and more people to do these things and you know a lot of them are parents and folks and you know when we come up to an election standpoint so it is something that we do need to be cognizant of because you know four years ago when i started this had i had the same amount of conflicts on the tuesday night someone like myself may not have volunteered i don't know if that's the case but um so so i need to just understand because this voted the meeting dates so are you we did not go along yet oh i thought we just did no i did stopped it before i started into it but i meant to bring this up before i did we have not i would propose that we move our meeting dates well let me ask jeff in the crystal yes administration too as well this doesn't just impact school committee members i'd like to get the feedback from the administration as well they see a major conflict impact of obviously there'll be a change in the beginning but we're talking about next year right so the schedule dates will stay or change into monday nights you know moving forward so i don't understand how you're thinking about the conflict with the select board meetings because that's the conflict every single monday night yeah um i don't know i'm gonna i mean is there enough is there enough interest in the community to potentially move the date off tuesday i'll eventually um make amendments to move this post to our to our dude meeting as well uh we'll add some more i can put into it and i'll do some more research on people's towns and meetings and that sort of stuff okay i'll make a motion for a second [Music] questions concerns all those in favor aye aye opposed please have a motion to approve the updated people personnel director job description look questions hearing i know let's prove all those in favor aye opposed okay and number six could i please have a motion to approve the elementary math coach coordinated job description okay questions hearing none all those in favor opposed that please have motion to approve the guidance secretary registrar job description of course good motion questions all those all those papers please have a motion to approve policy vda school committee organizational meeting review and revisions questions to approve the policy manual review plan good luck okay uh last thing the school committee uh and the reason why i was saying we're gonna get to this and talk about this um it's our june 8th meeting right we're scheduled to do uh reorganization of officers we have superintendent evaluation and stuff like that mr chochman is not able to make it to that meeting and i actually potentially have a conflict as well which kind of generated this discussion so um i am proposing that we potentially move that particular meeting because i think um it's important for i think it's for every you know committee member to be involved in those items superintendent evaluation as well as reorganization of officers um i know people i don't like this like monday nights but i was going to propose the following monday night the 14th maybe a little test to see how they're like monday nights yeah i know what he's saying no that's a busy thing is there anybody opposed to moving our journey meeting to the monday night i didn't want to push it back too far because jeff's evaluation june 14.
okay um so we're in 15 16 years 15 16. same same as not the same but at pioneer as well as um i'm sorry uh patterson as well as islands roughly around 2002. okay so we kind of expected the line yeah yeah that's really good because i just had to replace my air conditioning unit and it was only 10 years so no we we've stretched the life quite a bit on these uh we're ahead of the game or we're right at that point for meridian but on the other two they're they're well needed okay thank you okay and then this is the listing of the structural projects um you have it in front of you i'm not going to go through each one of them but i would like to point out two notable ones so the flooring you can see all the schools that we're touching with flooring and whenever we talk about flooring we are talking about the multipurpose room all classrooms hallways office areas the generally speaking we are not talking about kitchen flooring and then the bathroom flooring is all incorporated with restroom remodels so just so you're aware of that and then the restroom remodels you can see that there are one two three four five six six schools that are no five schools that will see restroom remodels and the restrooms of course and you'll see pictures of these but they would include all fixtures the partition the partitions the flooring as well as the wall tile so just so you are aware of how comprehensive it is and then also note that houston neely is in a lot of these categories due to the to the fact that we are going to have to expand houston a little bit to handle the population going from about 300 students up to 800 students so there are numerous projects associated with that as well but houston was due they were due for all of the flooring upgrades they were due for for the various uh the various structures and components that are listed here as well due to their age so i just wanted to point that out ms betts can you speak specifically to the band room expansion at gca sure i'm actually going to hand that over to albert so albert why don't you go ahead and respond to that one um for this one we we're actually going to move that back if you're familiar familiar with gilbert junior high as as it laid out we're going to enter into the what used to be the sewing lab just to give them an expansion more of a comprehensive high school level space for for their band and add some additional i believe some additional storage area or at least entrance into the adjacent room so it was my understanding that there was a commitment to to make that modification there was no commitment as to when but there was a commitment to make the modification at some point in time and because gca was slated gca slash gilbert jr was slated to receive the flooring upgrades this year it seemed appropriate to make the wall move before we um incorporate all the new flooring so that was also part of the decision making regarding that space so it's interior structure rather than exterior add-on of building that kind of thing yeah that's correct thank you my understanding if i can remember correctly is that there is an additional space there because there's no longer a sewing lab that they want to incorporate into the music that's part of this i think that's correct yes yes and so just removing that wall um and i think are we adding any sound barriers or buffers to to the room because i'm not aware that they have those originally during the move we did um okay wall barriers um that would be implemented here we did adjust or replace the existing ceiling tiles and install the acoustical tiles when we did move that okay uh gca into that facility because i do remember you know one of the differences between that building and a high school building is that the ceilings are lower you know where in a high school music room the ceilings would be higher it would be helpful to absorbing the sound so so i'm glad to know that we've worked on that thank you okay can i can ask a couple questions as well are you going to keep going or can is this the time to ask about these or are they going to be more specific um there there will be some more pictures of some of these but no please ask now so we can um so i thought that we did a lot of flooring upgrade albert when gca moved over there um that was only specific to the library area okay um so the only flooring touch was the library as well as the um gym floor we did a brie branding okay there but the rest of the classrooms maintain their their flooring okay so you'll just leave the library the same and then do everything else yes anything that was touched during the move was excluded in the assessment great and then can you talk about the um interior door hardware upgrades that's a huge chunk of money um yeah so currently every door interior door hardware all the interior door hardware at gilbert high school is out of ada compliance so if you as you'll see down further into the presentation i'll show some pictures um usually that's only what i'm allowed to handle as a picture [Laughter] i'm just joking um but they're they're actual knobs so ada requirements and again of course i'm in the loss for the actual you know the code but you have you can't squeeze and grasp it has to be a single level um exit or entry point um so this will bring everything up to compliance for all classrooms in that facility so do you anticipate that that price tag and type of thing at many of our schools um no this is this is one of the few facilities that had this um issue okay everything else is within 88 compliant there's a lot of doors at gilbert there's a lot of i think like 64 just go outside yeah that's it that's okay how many charlie too many then one last question um so gilbert high school you're going to go through and do a secured entry similar to the other high schools or it's going to be different because it's such a different thing but that kind of an idea uh yes and actually again further in the presentation you'll see it um that just because it's so particular and unique um we did involve um architectural design for this entry point so that we could encompass a secured entryway as well as a friendly flow or entry into the facility okay um and then what about houston neely the secured entry um we took that as the opportunity now because we're doing some um changes to the front office and to encompass it in this large project to be the pilot school for a secured entry entry way and that's going to have some of the similar designs that you've seen at the other at the at the high school level those are taking me some getting used to i have to tell you oh definitely like i don't know i i don't know how i feel about all that i guess i don't know i'll tell i can talk to you more about that later i can i speak to that point because i i understand that you can but i don't know if you can help me well i so i'll just tell you i my bank is down by target um wells fargo and i went in there and they had glass partitions and i was like you know this just doesn't seem quite as friendly as it used to be and they said well we got robbed three times last summer so i was like wow i didn't know that so then i understood and you know i i understand that it's hard to see us putting these things in place in our schools but um you know gilbert is not a small town anymore in fact we had a huge incident just a couple nights ago um and and an officer got at least one officer got killed and one got critically injured so even though we we think of ourselves as a friendly small town we want to be sure we have those things in place to keep our students safe and it is unfortunate that we have to do that but i i i think we have waited plenty long to do it i think lori the other thing was is that albert said that there was going to be some modifications done to the to the office areas right there as well as the fact that we were redoing all the flooring so it seemed like an opportunity to to try to try a prototypical for the elementary schools to see to your point how it worked and if there's other some other opportunities but that was one of the other reasons why we're going to go in there and touch it to such an extent that it seemed appropriate to try to try an option for our elementary schools at that site i can see that i also why are we redoing the whole office area not a full not a full redo just some some small small similar changes yeah space to what is what they've had before let alone what they need i you know i'm just curious about all of that so anyways we can keep going okay so this is the summer stage summer stage curtain replacement so as i said i'm working with jason martin there were many schools that we missed that had their multipurpose rooms re-floored between two and five years ago so we wanted to catch up with those based upon the status of their stage curtains as you know it's also a fire issue and so as part of our work with the provider we're asking questions such as how often do we need to send the curtains back in to have the fire retardant added back to them and the cleaning protocols and all of that so we're trying to do a comprehensive look at what the stage curtain should have so we're anticipating that the amount of budget needed out of unrestricted capital for those eight schools would be about no more than fifty five thousand dollars how how long will that last and what were the how long have the curtains been in place just to give me an idea roughly uh pretty we're pretty much at original curtains um as far as i know um i'm not too sure how many we've changed throughout the district uh prior to myself but i think i've never heard of buying curtains stage curtains for any school in the time that i've set here for usually they are um they're replaced if if mechanically they don't work anymore or they get ripped or torn or something like that so um they're they're way past you if these are original uh curtains and gilbert elementary's on there uh missy jetty i'm gonna defer to you to how long you've been in the district and it would have been 90 91 [Laughter] and if we replaced them it would have been ptso that had done it there's a great picture coming up on that one that um so you can see that i hid behind them many times mr carr so i know so um i'm going to hand the rest of this over to um mr dutch over and next time i'll be happy to do the pictures and you can do all the prefacing work no you can handle the money the pictures are way too much we're way too much fun here you go so as bonnie noted we broke these up to mechanical and structural so here's some of the mechanical pieces um which include hvac electrical and lighting here is our two units that depict what we have at that they're a good depiction on what we have at all three facilities to your left you have a package unit and to the right you have a split system condensing unit um i'll go back real quick just in just a note as you noted there's some additional these are just uh two pieces in the major portion of the uh mechanical projects uh structural albert just that will help in one efficiency of the newer units and cost savings on electricity it should anyway uh yes it does it so what we've done similar with the chillers we've we've purchased high efficiency units in this regard as well so we we've um pushed a higher seer not only is that going to save us in utilities throughout the life but we'll also capture some rebate funds as well part of this part of this project good thank you and save on maintenance um our structural projects encompass everything you see here uh flooring renovations i'm sorry i got a little a little ahead of myself um flooring this is our this is a view of the the main hall at uh harris elementary um again as miss beth stated there there it includes all flooring systems within the facility to include the npr as well as classrooms hallways and um small common areas what did harris choose there um albert did they choose carpet down the hall or lvt they will be used uh they'll be utilizing lvt in the hallways and that's something we went to again it's it's it's a better look as well it's a cleaner look as well as um it reduces maintenance costs so no waxing stripping and all the other good stuff that comes with bct so what what does lbt stand for i'm sorry uh luxury vinyl tile okay thank you it looks like that um flooring that people are putting in their homes yes i saw it at burke and it's very nice it looks very very nice more of a welcoming look um not like you're walking into a hospital this is industrial grade yes yeah because that home stuff wouldn't last with all our kids um again as as we're touching the flooring and as bonnie stated we walked into gilbert elementary and and this is the state of the the current curtains there um so they're definitely in in poor shape and and a need for a change and there's a couple other views can i can i just ask what do we use the curtains for i'm just wondering because i'm just trying to picture you know what i'm saying do we actually use the curtains at the elementary's i know we do for sure at the high schools but they will use them for certain performances sometimes and um musicals and and just different different performances we use them quite often okay because i was just thinking maybe just take them off if we don't need them or use them that way will we be redoing the flooring on the stage as well yeah yes and that was one of the key points is we're going to redo the flooring so there'd be nice flooring on the multi-purpose room floor as well as the stage floor and then you move up to the curtains and you have an additional eyesore well and once once you put something new in then probably the curtains would look even worse next to fresh new flooring so yeah um exterior and interior paint um this is a picture of desert ridge high school the exterior paint which is currently in progress um and it it it actually is looking pretty come along pretty well greenfield junior high we're doing the exterior paint there as well and i kind of caught them in between so you guys get a little bit of a sneak peek to the right of what the colors are going to look like they've picked a more updated neutral style color and then chose to utilize their their band for their school colors here's elementary as well as you can see here it was painted quite a few years back and green must have been in at the time so that's what they chose and we're going to go ahead and update that as well that was probably how many years ago oh yeah yeah it was it was one of those we were like wow so thank you for doing that it's gonna be back you know we just believe it'll be coming back i think they want childhood fridge would match that very well [Laughter] um restroom remodels again this is this is pretty much floor-to-ceiling replacement we go down to the studs wall tiles as well as update floor updated flooring fixtures sinks uh mill work and and mirrors as well as the hand down to the hand dryers and good hand dryers good hands dry those hands i had that as a goal so this is a picture of islands um there's there's sink area and again mosquito alex last year you did a good job of summarizing why we do this i mean technically it's functional but i think for example mesquite high was a great learning when we pulled it apart we found all kinds of plumbing issues that were hidden and so on so while it you know after 10 15 years while it may appear serviceable on the outside there's a lot of routine maintenance that goes on on the inside as well that i think definitely that's true everything behind the walls again you don't see it so you don't know about it unless it becomes a major issue which doing this has helped us avoid a few major issues as well as again how the mill work was placed before you're you're installing um formica countertops plywood and so over time that tends to swell the the laminate tends to pop off so we've gone to solid surface countertops so this upgrade has helped us become more functional and hopefully a little bit more long-lasting especially at our elementary schools it's also a cleanliness issue you can see all those tiny little tiles have grout lines you know it's making it very difficult for cleaning as well so so typically albert just a quick like 15 years or so is that typically because you have kind of an order of this year we're doing these schools because because of kind of a timeline you know unless there's an emergency but yeah i mean mainly based off age at this point just because some are well past 15 these are original i think um here at mosquito like just off hand i can't remember the date of you know 15 at least though yeah 15 at least 15 to 20.
[Music] would you prefer a different [Music] [Laughter] wow picture mean at this point nobody's still on that thing anymore all right please have a motion to close any other comments before we close them audrey said thank you oh okay um okay could i uh um laurie make sure julie knows that the meeting they changed yes um all right i please have a motion to adjourn no food all right second individual all in favor aye aye thank you very much [Music]
my girls were still in elementary school when mesquite elementary was redone i think in about 2007 2008 we did that yeah graduated from college so um it's been a while yeah yeah so even then that's when we had we had taken the portables out and we added that expansion out there yes when they were at the school at that time um again parking lot upgrades bus lanes that's always a continuous item uh continued maintenance a continued improvement for uh bus parent traffic as well as pick up and drop off so again with um the anticipated move of of neely to houston there's a need to to mitigate the apparent drop-off traffic which you see here again we've we've gotten engineering involved that way we could best utilize space as well as get it get the clearest design as possible to help us relieve traffic off of houston road and create a safe environment for repairing a pickup drop off so you'll see the parking lot will stay pretty much as is but we move down into the playground a little bit to the north and we create a drive lane for the drop off and then parents could drop their students off and they could enter the playground from from the drop-off point looks like you'll be taking out some trees uh there there are a couple sacrificial trees that will be removed but would you would any of this be eligible and i'm not suggesting we do it but do any of this be eligible for adjacent ways um my belief is that that all of it would be um but i would have to look into it if if if i just want to highlight again i'm not suggesting we look at it i want to highlight that that we have stayed true to the voters we've told the voters these are the types of things they did that we would be doing with the bond funds and i know i know there are others out there who take advantage say oh we'll keep the bond funds for this and then introduce an adjacent ways tax i think there's been at least four or five opportunities in the four and a half years that this board has been together that we could have done that and to in my opinion to the board's credit we have stayed true to our promises to the voters and not tried to for lack of a better term i don't like this term but double dip in that area dr mccord wouldn't let me bring it to you so i i i appreciate that that's what that's i mean i was involved with the campaigns when we asked for this and that was something that was implied if not explicitly stated and i just want to highlight to the voters that we've stayed true to that and again here due to the increased occupancy and staffing we're looking on the north end northwest end of the facility to increase parking and add some additional spaces in between that you could if you notice there is already a drive lane for or a bus lane uh that exists and can currently manage the i believe there's three to four buses that that currently uh route um neely elementary portable renovations again this is this is another another need and since we have so many portables we do try to try to maintain them this is at canon valley uh canon valley school and again we're going to do siding everything from the exterior to the interior siding carpet as well as interior paint the main piece is just a weatherproof again replace siding and any any failures in the shell or the envelope can i ask with the um with the new rooms that were remodeled in the old transportation office or yes transportation area does that remove some of the need for any of these portables from my understanding this this was in they still needed that those additional classrooms in conjunction with these with the utilization of the portal report i would love to phase out portables especially as we have to repair them and all the extra costs and maintenance that they take i know that's not albert that's not directed directly at you but i'm just saying i think that that would be and we have over time yeah it just depends on what's needed at a particular site if they're not at a particular site then they're they're put out of commission they're moved away they're gotten rid of or if we have one that is in good working order but we need it at another site we'll move it it's very expensive to move and set up a portable as well and so these are valuable type things that at the end of the day what they do with them when they do remodel them and refresh them they make them look a lot better and and they blend into that campus a lot more but i definitely hear what you're saying i mean we've had i mean mesquite high at one point in time had half their parking lot that was a look like a mobile home park and so we've been able to reduce that down and other portables around the district as well i think over at gilbert out too so gilbert hyatt yeah he had our own trailer park other structural projects um include uh high school or bleachers at three facilities so i i'm highlighting mesquite high here but we're doing desert ridge mesquite high and mesquite junior high school and the bleacher replacements again they're going to be complete top to bottom mechanical pieces everything entailed in a bleacher function they're going to be a complete replacement and what we've done at other facilities uh highland high and gilbert high school they've taken this opportunity to incorporate the branding of their facility into the bleachers so when the bleachers are closed similar to this case here the school logo or model would be displayed across the front of the bleachers as well again here's the gilbert high school interior door hardware so this is what the majority of the facility looks like it has knob doors throughout the campus um can those doors be locked from the inside or does the teacher have to currently lock them from the outside you know what similar we did do a change like this to um houston elementary a few years back and we did get they were their classroom um hardware where they could actually lock it from the inside in a lockdown case i'll have to double check if if this layout is is um is similar but i know a lot of a lot of new hardware is designed for that purpose now well i know that some schools have the old hardware where the teacher cannot lock the door unless they go out of the classroom to do so and you know that's a that's a concern yeah and a lot of that was based off of point of egress um they've kind of worked around it or created gotten better in hardware but just so it uh somebody couldn't lock somebody in so they they were able to to exit out of the facility or lock them in if in case of a fire so yeah but i will look into what the the new hard will and where we could just include it in the board report so gilbert high this is kind of a small rendering of the office is probably hard to see there's going to be some reconfiguration of that front office in order to allow a more free-flowing entry point but still giving you that secured entry that secured entry piece if you could kind of get your bearings about you you can make your way around it the upper left-hand side is the true entrance into the facility so the three double door the sets of double doors uh going into the main lobby now and then again we we've kind of broken it up and adjusted to utilize space and we have spoke to the the staff and they they played a key role role in this as far as how the layout will be functional for them and this is what the this is again a rendering of of what it would look like you would be walking into from your right hand side and then the the doors to the left there are entering into manzanita hall and then again you'd have a reception area and as well as in attendance to onboard the students coming onto the campus so it's a little bit different than what we've done just just because we're in a unique uh situation in space at gilbert high greenfield junior high we're doing an exterior patio patio area off of the all cart um of the a la carte area on the west side northwest side of the campus this is what it is right now it's just a bear lot and i have a couple renderings as well to kind of show you what the the idea behind it is some of this work was also requested by um by brian yee to help with the social distancing and getting more usable spaces outside for his students and so he requested that we take a look at these spaces to see if there's a way that we could improve that the look and the and and the future of having more outside usable spaces and allowing kids to spread out i guess on the upper portion of the screen highlighted in blue that would be where outdoor canopy so some additional eating or sitting spaces as well as a basketball court just to the south and if you remember this this entire area is now enclosed with a with a gate or a with fencing uh this is a a rendering this isn't the exact colors but this is what the can of the canopy or ramada will look like are we gonna have grass that that is the question are we gonna have grass there not in that area not in that area right now but we are gonna put um we are gonna put granite down so one inch rock so it's not gonna it won't look as nice as this but there will be some ground covering instead of the dirt this is their current courtyard if you could imagine inside they wanted to produce a sitting area or again for social distancing or outdoor learning this is going to be similar to i guess this would be an outside not necessarily amphitheater but just a a sitting area though if you look at the octagon the addition the the different levels or the different lines depict a seating area and then the yellow portion again we have to make it ada accessible so that would be an 88 ramp to allow students to to be involved as well so additional projects pending so at all five com at all five comprehensive high schools i'm currently looking into uh led lighting for stadiums this is for the main piece is the maintenance piece on this again i've i've expressed to miss bats over the years what we do is we don't have a lift let's say for mesquite high in particular it needs 145 foot lift we rent one every year for one week and it's roughly seven thousand dollars and all we're changing is the lights that that are um that are out so there's five lights out we're changing the five lights uh we're getting every we're trying to knock as much out as possible at all fields um this would cut down on the maintenance piece as well as the energy energy savings piece as well as um add to um the add to the look or the competition of our fields or competition fields so again at all five high schools we're looking at automated irrigation systems um this would be similar to our ems so we could do things remotely or we could alert ourselves to any leaks or isolate any larger leaks on our facilities five high schools and junior highs or at all five high schools in mesquite junior we are looking into stage rigging and upgrades and replacements again another safety safety and maintenance piece uh computer lab remodels at three elementary this is similar to what we've done in the past at other other sites this year we're looking to do them at harris sonoma and town meadows district-wide security camera turnkey implementation this will be through our security director al kane as well as it gilbert high school highland park and gilbert l some additional perimeter fencing projects that will be going on at those those sites as well albert i'm well you're right at the questions i'm looking at that rigging maintenance and that's certainly critical what about our outdoor stadium bleachers how often do we evaluate and have those checked um those that that's actually a good question we've we've actually started doing an assessment on those um and it ties into a few other things we we've started on because there wasn't a you know i hate to say there wasn't a consistent view or an assessment of each one but again safety being a concern we're starting to look into those we just finished up an assessment as well with elevators and we're currently we we got into a maintenance model for interior bleachers backboards safety rigging for some of those sports venues that we're back to and i think as well as auditorium seating and all of those are safety and security issues that can create a world of headaches for us if we don't get them on some kind of schedule and heretofore we haven't been able to afford a schedule to put them on so hopefully we can maintain budget capacity to be able to schedule those routinely definitely that is a major concern is there any additional questions or or members anything else no it's really exciting to see that those projects and know that we're going to address those needs that's that's really critical i think so thank you and all that'll be done in june and july primarily in june july 1.
yeah now we're we're yes we're definitely it's going to be tight again um obviously i always try to be optimistic but but again as everybody knows we're we're in a crisis as far as as uh delivery dates material dates there's things that are back order they're small things that we normally get a quick turnaround on that are they have a six week lead time so so the push is again with with a lot of these carpet projects painting projects they're already going um desert ridge high is one so i mean that's one that's going to be completed fairly soon um some of these other major projects uh the push is for functionality so as long as we could get if if we get to the 11th hour and we're there as long as students could come in and be in a safe environment and we're doing the odds and ends in between um that that's going to be the key i'm not going to sit and say there there's not going to be some stuff that that everything's going to be sealed by july 29th if there's probably some additional stuff that will be out there but definitely we're pushing to have them done through june and july and i do have one question because now we extended our calendar you're going to have a shorter summer not not not this summer but not the next summer but the summer after how's that going to impact our ability to get these projects done um you know what we we continue to adapt and i i will give a lot of credit to each site um every site we touch the principles have been great um we've worked with them to get in early utilize for the parts of the facility that they've that they could manage or or help us manage um they they've been really good and they've been really patient and sometimes they probably could have lost it a few times but they they've been great with us so as we continue to adapt we work out schedules that that keep us functional during the school year as well as as we lead into the summer so that we could use the big portion of of summer or whatever you want to call it now because i think we're down to what six weeks maybe of summer or seven weeks so um yeah we we we with the facilities help and we we we started to develop a plan that hopefully this will work out in the future i mean i mean it does give you two weeks but you got to pick your projects if you're gonna do you know two weeks in the fall two weeks in the in december and two weeks in the spring that's a different project than maybe replacing all the flooring in the school yes so um you're going to have to really manage so thank you yeah sorry thank you board members anything else uh albert and bonnie we we applaud your approach uh this is just one more example of the kind of work that we're doing and that you're doing in your department to protect and maintain the community's investment in its buildings so we appreciate that thank you very nice job thank you too dr mccord anything else for the good of the order on this item no sir just a lot of work to be done and i think the what operations department does as well as finances ensure that we put out a very nice product when it comes to our buildings and we take a lot of pride in what we do and what we present to our families and our community and and i think their projects this summer just continue to enhance that so thank you thank you dr mccord will you move to item three which is adjournment of the work study session no need for motion we have reviewed the items that have been brought to us for your consideration so we will adjourn the work study session at 3.01 is it the board's pleasure to take a break or do you want to keep moving we'll keep moving so we will move to item 4 which is our brief board business meeting for may 4th 2021 and we will ask mrs wilson to please call roe miss laurie wood here mr reed carr here dr charles santa cruz here michela eugetti here ms jill humphries here mr president all board members are present you have a quorum thank you mrs wilson and with item 4.02 we will add the portion of approving this evening's agenda is there a motion second thank you miss humphries miss eugetti it's been moved and seconded any comments any questions seeing none then we will vote on approving this evening's agenda all those in favor please signify by saying aye aye those opposed the same motion carries five zero we're at item five the consent agenda items you've had an opportunity to review those in your board packet so floor is open for motion i move that we approve the consent agenda items as presented thank you mr jetty is there a second oh second thank you mr carr it's been moved and seconded that we approve consent agenda item is printed is there any discussion seeing no discussion santa cruz i just have to come and i worry about one of the volunteers on there but uh not nothing to oppose sorry for those of you don't know miss wood's husband is a volunteer football coach we're approving so oh is it is that right okay we'll have to watch that one [Laughter] all right we are ready to vote with all those in favor of approving the consent agenda as printed please signify by saying aye aye those opposed the same consent agenda item is approved or item six which is one action item item 6.01 dr mccord anything to add by way of rationale no sir this is just the big moment bonnie was asking for earlier that you finally get a vote on so is there a need for board members to hang out for signatures yeah i saw a thumbs up so i guess board members be alert to the fact that your john hancock will be required item 6.01 is an action item is there a motion i move that we approve the the final fy 2021 revised budget number three is there a second a second thank you mrs wood any discussion i just want to say appreciation because i think this pr specifically this year has been even harder than usual and i think doing a current year budget is hard enough but so thank you to the the finance department for all your hard work really appreciate it and for the public's information item 6.01 is a vote on those items that were presented during the work study session and reviewed by ms betts in the finance department so with that in mind we will vote on item 7.01 all those in favor please signify by saying six point six point zero one six point zero i'm trying to adjourn already i'm trying to adjourn 6.01 thank you mr carr all those in favor please signify by saying aye aye those opposed the same item 6.01 is approved 5-0 we're at item 7 7.01 is adjournment of the brief board business meeting is there a motion i move to adjourn thank you mr cars their second second their second okay let's talk about this for a little while oh all those in favor of adjournment please signify by saying aye aye all those pose the same thank you we are adjourned
[Music] foreign [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] more [Music] oh [Music] um [Music] my [Music] so [Music] okay about one or two minutes okay look you guys are ready we're just making sure we get everybody in their right seats okay good evening my name is jana schwartz and i have the privilege of being the principal here at downers grove north high school it is my pleasure to welcome you to the class of 2021 awards night ceremony so congratulations all of you first of all i want to thank you for your patience and your cooperation as we worked to seat everyone safely i know it might have been disappointing not to be able to bring more family members tonight but honestly i'm just glad that we can be here in person so we can celebrate our seniors and i'm also glad that we are able to live stream the evening for those who could not attend thank you to staff member mr ariel moses and all of our student helpers for being here tonight to live stream the ceremony and welcome to all of you who are watching it from home please join me in a round of applause for our tech crew to begin our program kate laffy will lead us in the pledge of allegiance please stand i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you kate this is one of my favorite nights of the year because we put our busy lives on paws in order to honor our students who have gone above and beyond what is expected of them as you know downers grove north is widely recognized for having an amazing student body so the fact that these seniors stood out in such a distinguished class is indeed an accomplishment seniors i want to thank you for all that you have done to enrich north high school and our entire community we appreciate your dedication to academic excellence your service your leadership and your citizenship certainly you have had a positive impact on both north high and on our local communities i know that you have worked very hard so i hope that you sit back and enjoy the ceremony this evening before we begin recognizing the students i want to say a special thank you to the parents the grandparents and other family members whose guidance patience and encouragement enabled these students to achieve so much while we were not able to invite all of you here in person you do share in the achievements of the students at this time i would ask all of our family members who are present with us tonight to stand to be recognized if you are a family member of someone a senior is thank you thank you i also would like to recognize four staff members who have worked hard to make this evening possible student activities director mr mark mirandola his assistant miss sharon manuela my assistant miss veronica retro and our receptionist miss kim winter among other tasks these four prepared the program and certificates organized the ceremony communicated with students and families and helped check everyone in without their efforts tonight's program would not have been possible please join me in thanking them as well and finally i hope you had a chance to meet three of our administrators that were here helping us tonight mr ryan dougherty ms aaron ludwig and miss kelly zerner so thank you to all of them for helping get everyone seated [Applause] so north high school is honored and grateful for the support our students receive from our community organizations and businesses in a typical year those members from those organizations would be here tonight to present the scholarships in person unfortunately there's not enough space for all of them to sit socially distance on the stage and if we put them in the audience we would have had to limit the number of family members even more so we made the difficult decision to have two student presenters tonight instead however i know they will do a great job i do want to take a moment however to thank all those who have given scholarships to our students tonight if we can have a round of applause for all those community organizations for the students being honored tonight i have a few brief instructions when your name is called please come to the stage by using the stairs on your right when your name is announced walk in front of the tables to this small table right here and that is where your award will be so you can pick up your award and then you will go down those stairs and back to your seat if there's a group of students that is asked to come forward and we have about six awards like that where there might be more than a few people coming up all of you can come up when your name is called and then you'll just need to look for your envelope there all will have your name on it and it will be in alphabetical order so just make sure that you pick the right one i also have some instructions for our audience so that we can be sure that we hear all the names of the students that are recognized our student mc will read the name of the student who won the award as well as a brief description please hold your applause until after the description is read so not when they announce the name name of the student but after the entire description and there will be a signal for the applause at the end because the student will say congratulations to and then we'll repeat the name of the student so tonight we have two junior students who will serve as our mcs kate laffey and jordan lewis and we're going to ask kate to come up and start with our first award will christopher emmett thulin please come to the stage emmett has earned the distinction of being named to the ihsa all-state academic team the illinois high school association is proud to announce the 26 students who have been selected to the 2020-21 all-state academic team the 13 male and 13 female honorees of the ihsa's top academic honor were chosen from a group that included hundreds of students throughout the state every ihsa member school was invited to nominate one female student and one male student nominees needed to possess a minimum 3.5 grade point average on 4.0 scale after their seventh semester have participated in at least two ihsa sponsored sports or activities during each of the last two years and demonstrated outstanding citizenship we are proud to recognize emmett thulin as a member of the ihsa all-state academic team congratulations emin will katherine katherine murray please come to the stage kate is the recipient recipient of the american legion post adb green ecology scholarship this scholarship is presented each year by the american legion post 80 of downers grove to the writer of the best essay for being green at downers grove north high school the american legion post 80 has restored a small prairie on the grounds and keeps honeybees this scholarship is funded with the pros proceeds received from all donations congratulations katie [Applause] will rachel bender and andrew pitts please come to the stage rachel and andrew are this year's recipients of american legion post ad citizenship award the american legion post 80 here in downers grove takes a great deal of pride in the presentation of american legion school award the award is presented to the students who have been chosen by the faculty of the school who possess the highest qualities of courage honor leadership scholarship patriotism and service qualities that legion feel are necessary to the preservation and protection of the fundamental institutions of our government and the advancement of our society the award consists of the american legion school awards certificate the distinguished american legion bronze medallion and monetary award the american legion post 80 citizenship award honors graduating seniors who demonstrate courage honor leadership patriotism scholarship and service it is our pleasure to recognize rachel bender and andrew pitts as recipients of this year's award congratulations rachel and andrew will anastasia polychronitis please come to the stage anastasia is the recipient of the bel air elementary school pta scholarship the bel air pta seeks to enhance the educate educational experience of their students and that does not only apply to our current students once a belair bulldog always a belair bulldog our goal at belair is to educate our students and make them excellent citizens in our community and beyond the bel pta alumni scholarship is part of that decision and our students and alum anastasia polychronitis is a shining example of bel-air alum not only is she academically talented but she is very involved at her school and in her community she has shown herself to be a leader throughout involvement in student council the athena dance team nhs and a number of other groups she credits her time at bel air and more specifically and her fourth grade teacher mrs matson with helping her start the path that she is on we are very proud to present the bel air pta alumni scholarship to anastasia holy cronitas will the following recipients of the jim bonfield memorial scholarship please come to the stage justin berghorst liam bohr mia bowers nolan brzezina patrick chen molly daugherty drew driscoll charles ferris catherine filiomani abigail falconing sarah shakir emily coors catherine murray annika paskowitz noah pardue aaron peters anastasia polikronitis matthew rowley olivia olivia sherk ashley schwoski jane tyson and jessie way the bonfield express foundation started in 2003 to honor the memory of jim bonfield who was a teacher coach and dean at downers grove south high school because of the community support donations and the bonfield express 5k run walk the foundation was given just under 1 million dollars to local schools and to senior high school students who are furthering their education scholarship recipients selected is based on character perseverance love of community personal improvement and determination congratulations to this year's jim bonfield memorial scholarship recipients will drew driscoll please come to the stage drew is the recipient of the chick evans scholarship for caddies the chick evans scholarship for caddies is a full four-year college scholarship for golf caddies for more than 85 years the western golf association has overseen the evans scholars program which is among the nation's largest privately funded scholarship programs it is named in honor of legendary amateur golfer chick evans whose charitable legacy was to help send deserving patties to college recipients of this prestigious scholarship are nominated nominated by the sponsoring country club where they carried applicants are evaluated and selected based on four criteria strong caddy record excellent academics financial need and outstanding character congratulations to this year's recipient drew will patrick jackson please come to the stage patrick is the 2021 christopher graf memorial scholarship recipient patrick has been the face of dgn theater at north and an enthusiastic energetic and positive force for all four years as a student patrick has shown incredible range playing roles from georgie the special needs child and over the tavern to beast and beauty and the beast he has also played the brash and bubbling mayor and the music man as well as mike the gentle understanding step dad in freaky friday the musical along the way he has inspired others to participate and have fun doing it mentoring underclassmen and leading the drama club in improv games patrick jackson is not only talented but he is kind-hearted and a genuine joy to work with patrick will attend university of illinois where he plans to study theater congratulations patrick will drew driscoll please come to the stage drew is the recipient of the community bank of downers grove scholarship community bank of downers grove recognizes the importance to build future civic and business leaders a scholarship recipient is chosen based on academic achievement extracurricular activities involvement in the community and financial need this year's scholarship recipients demonstrate intellectual curiosity and mature philosophy in regards to the purpose of learning he enriches the academic and social experiences of his classmates he is also a competitive athlete one that inspires to lead by example by showing his teammates the meaning of sportsmanship and adversity congratulations to drew driscoll for being the 2021 community bank scholarship recipient will emma cho please come to the stage emma is the recipient of daughters of the american revolution good citizen award this award recognizes and rewards individuals who possess the qualities of dependability service leadership and patriotism in their homes schools and communities emma was nominated by her teachers and ultimately selected by her peers because of the relentless pursuit of making north high downers grove and the world in general better places congratulations emma [Applause] will ellie finley please come to the stage ellie is the recipient of the downers grove dolls wida gable scholarship the dolls program began with only two teams combining ages 9 through 14.
[Music] do all right we'll go ahead and get started all right last wake up day for uh your high school career so we'll get the senior celebration going and you can move on to your next events welcome i'm brian reece principal of columbia high school and i welcome you to our fourth annual senior celebration this morning we will honor and celebrate students for their exemplary academic achievements while attending the high school here as well as announcing scholarship winners and recognizing students who were chosen as top student for each department some of our scholarship recipients have already been honored at ceremonies held previously in those situations i'll just ask you to stand and for those that have not been recognized yet you'll come up receive your certificate or medal and then when the whole group's done you'll go out to the cafeteria and get a picture taken and come back in and take your seat okay let's begin with our impact student of the year this year's impact student of the year is presented to the student who has accumulated the most community service hours making a positive impact on our school and community this year's student has accumulated 340 hours of volunteer service the recipient the recipient is melane laxton [Applause] congratulations would you go out and get a picture with her she goes out yep and i should have mentioned the beginning welcome parents and family joining us from home club members of the year oh academic team members of the year ms stevens throughout the course of the year we had some groups compete in academic challenges against other schools they're the academic challenge team and the math team the sponsor is miss stevens she will present her topo senior awards for each group for the academic challenge team it's anna bauer [Applause] and for the math team it's mason albers [Applause] congratulations to both these winners and to ms stevens on their record throughout the season this year next we have the columbia american legion post 581 and ladies auxiliary unit 581 scholarship the columbia american legion is awarding 5 500 scholarships to seniors who are children or grandchildren of veterans and planning to attend a two-year four-year or technical college this year's winners please come down and let's hold our applause till all of them are up here zach anderson natalie bush emily buss colin olendorf and olivia peterson come on down the columbia agriscience alumni association scholarship the scholarship awarded to three seniors at the ffa banquet was based on achievements and accomplishment throughout their career here at high school in ffa please stand to be recognized when i call your name joey nichols rhys shaffer and corey stumpf [Applause] the columbia education association scholarship the cea offers a 500 scholarship to columbia high school senior with the intent to pursue a degree in education the ca representative ms kerry clayton is with us to prevent this scholarship to peyton westfall peyton please come forward [Applause] peyton please come forward [Applause] the u.s marine corps distinguished scholar athlete award the u.s marine corps distinguished scholar athlete award presented at the pensler banquet earlier this year these seniors exemplary are exemplary young citizens role models for other students and exhibit the personal traits of courage poised self-confidence and leadership this year's recipients again already presented please stand ava corey and colin mclaren next is the u.s marine corps distinguished scholar award we'd also like to recognize two additional students from the senior class who are exemplary young citizens role models for other students and exhibit the personal traits of courage poise self-confidence and leadership come on down when i call your name congratulations to kelsey olendorf and patrick berner senior startup members the ceo startup education seeks to prepare you to be responsible entrepreneuring individuals who become entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial thinkers and contribute to the economic development and sustainable communities this year chs had four seniors in the program please stand to be recognized when your name is called malia casino hayden seiler aaron tutrain alexa vitale thank you columbia kiwanis scholarship this 1 000 scholarship is awarded by the columbia kiwanis to a deserving senior this year's recipient please come down andrew malding the columbia pta awards four 500 scholarships to seniors that are attending college in the fall the recipients this year from the pta please come forward natalie bush bryson borisov grayson borsaw and emily kohlenberger the columbia rotary louis hutch schlafly scholarship some of these are quite long this is a two thousand dollar scholarship awarded to a senior who plans to attend a community college trade school or four-year college university they're asked to answer a variety of questions including how she he or she will give back to the community after graduation this year's recipient zach anderson please come forward congratulations zach the st louis post-dispatch scholar athlete of the year the post-dispatch honors one senior from every area high school to be considered a scholar athlete the student must be in the top of his or her class academically and participate in three varsity sports congratulations to our recipient who was recognized at the pencil award so please stand jonah james collegiate level students the following students recognize that penceler is signing a letter of intent to play sports in college when i say your name please stand and we'll hold applause to the end because we have a few kyra bivens attending wabash valley college in mount carmel illinois for soccer sam benaldy attending southwestern illinois college in belleville illinois for baseball macy brown attending kaskaskia college in centralia for volleyball alison carr attending tiffin university in tiffin ohio for soccer kylie cleveland attending university of illinois at champaign for softball mary gassaway attending the university of note decor no north dakota in grand forks for soccer trey hemminghaus attending lewis and clark college in godfrey for baseball jackson holmes attending st louis university in st louis for baseball matthew howard attending westminster college in fulton missouri for baseball sophia who attending university of tennessee in martin tennessee for cheerleading jonah james attending southwest illinois college in belleville for baseball ava corey attending illinois wesleyan in bloomington for softball malia casino attending mississippi college in clinton mississippi for golf megan levan attending mckendree university in lebanon illinois for cheerleading london little attending university of wisconsin in oshkosh wisconsin for football and track and field marissa maldonado attending illinois college in jacksonville illinois for golf molly ricky attending university of pittsburgh in pittsburgh pennsylvania for gymnastics adam wibenmeier attending southwestern illinois college in belleville for baseball let's give him a round of applause the columbia volunteer fire department scholarship this is a local scholarship that is awarded each year to seniors for planning who are planning to further their education in the fall each scholarship winner is receives a community service is a major factor factor in the selection process so please come forward when i call your name this year's winners zach anderson taylor biermann and peyton [Applause] westfall the monroe county licensed beverage association scholarship the monroe county licensed beverage association awards a one thousand dollar scholarship to one student from each school in monroe county selection criteria includes the a-c-t s-a-t scores the school essay and community involvement including grade point average congratulations to this year's recipient peter goodconnect did i no i didn't give you one never mind columbia women's club scholarship this is a 500 scholarship award to two senior girls planning to further their education in the fall congratulations this year's winners jessa giovenetti and carly paxton please come forward columbia quarterback club in support of the mission of the columbia quarterback club three scholarships awarded to chs football participants these students were recognized at the pencil awards held earlier this month or last month when i call your name please stand andrew malden colin mclaren and peyton westfall congratulations departmental awards outstanding academic achievement next is our departmental awards for outstanding academic achievement the department winners were nominated by the staff and then we have a teacher from each department to give the award away first we have science colin mclaren yeah if you're here if you want just go ahead and come on down staff next we have ms vogt with the agricultural science award it goes to corey stump we have miss kelly presenting the business education award it goes to carson pappard [Applause] next we have ms breesocker presenting the english award to meredith payton ms vaughn will present the family and consumer science award it goes to alexandria evans miss baker miss baker will present the german award it goes to patrick berner congratulations mr obrechfeld is here to present the industrial technology award the winner is adam wow [Applause] all right miss stevens miss stevens ms stevens here to present the mathematics award it goes to anna bauer miss bedard will present the physical education award male and female ainsley jacobus and payton westfall mr sandstorm will present the social studies award it goes to mason albers miss arnold's here to present the spanish award it goes to natalie bush next we have ms packard with the fine arts award it goes to abigail serta miss kelly will present the technology award it goes to kelsey owendorff ms mcginthy will present the following awards for performing arts choir we have carly paxton [Applause] performing arts jazz band patrick berner and performing arts band peter goodconnect next we have the german national honor society this year's inductees and to the honor society are please come down patrick berner sophia hoop conor missy joey nichols and victoria volkl [Applause] the ladies auxiliary of the columbia turner's gymnastic association scholarship the scholarship for 500 or 500 is awarded to seniors who are a child or grandchild of a current or past member in good standing of turner's gymnastics association or the ladies auxiliary congratulations to this year's winners paige biermann jacob hoffman and jared hoffman please come forward the monroe county fraternal order of police scholarship in an effort to promote education in the field of law enforcement the monroe county fraternal order of police offers scholarships to seniors interested in a career in law enforcement or related field please come forward isaiah starr and peyton westfall [Applause] the george obernagle scholarship mr obernagle is a huge supporter of youth participating in agriculture he donates to each ffa chapter in monroe county by means of scholarships each year this year's recipients were recognized at the ffa banquet so please rise when i call your name congratulations to joey nichols rhys shaffer and corey stumpf illinois state scholars the illinois state scholars are nominated and selected based on their class rank grade point average and act scores this year's illinois state scholars are i will ask that you come forward we'll get your certificate we'll take a picture at the end though because it's we need to do it's too big of an too many of you to fit in our area so please come forward mason albers anna bauer paige biermann patrick berner bryson borisov macy brown natalie bush alicia kaya emily chase kylie cleveland alexandria evans peter gutconnect emily kohlenberger trenton martin andrew molding colin mclaren kelsey ohlendorf colin olendorf olivia peterson evan pruitt isaac schreckenberg rose sippl victoria volkl and jillian wisniewski it really is incredible to have this many illinois state scholars in a class we'll take the picture afterwards though remember please know all right next we have the ron collier memorial scholarship this 500 scholarship is rewarded to a senior from columbia high school or dupo high school who will be attending southeast missouri state university mr collier was a teacher and coach in columbia and a teacher coach and administrator in dupo he was a proud cmo graduate having served as the editor editor of the university newspaper and a member of the baseball team congratulations to this year's recipient paige durban the robert holden memorial scholarship each year a two thousand dollar scholarships two thousand dollar scholarships are given to chs seniors in honor of robert holden and other chs alumni who have served our country robert holden was born and raised in columbia graduated here from here in 1965 with 33 other students due to financial reasons after graduating he was not able to complete college and the result worked odd jobs until enlisting in the military after basic training he was sent to vietnam where he gave his life on may 7th 1968 eight days before his 23rd birthday this year's recipients please come forward zach anderson peter goodconnect andrew malding hayden seiler and peyton westfall the swic foundation scholarships there are over 200 foundation scholarships offered by swic ranging from 500 to 5 000 annually the southwest illinois college foundation exists to maintain and enhance the quality of life by developing friends and funds for support of the educational cultural and service goals of southwestern illinois college this year's scholarship winners 500 dollar first national bank of waterloo corinne tullis a 1500 scholarship harrisonville telephone lydia dowell for this okay seal of bi-literacy program students have the opportunity to be recognized by the state of illinois for earning proficiency in english and one additional language as part of the bi-literacy program two honors are available the accommodation toward by literacy and the seal of bi-literacy these two honors require test scores in both english and spanish students who have earned accommodation toward biliteracy for spanish please come forward grayson borisov lexi evans jocelyn faus bryce hildebrand natalie hoy jonah james ava corey jessica lambert marissa maldonado evan pruitt alexa vitale hannah walters and adam whitmire okay students who are awarded the top honor of seal by literacy for spanish are anna bauer paige biermann bryson borisov natalie bush allison carr kylie cleveland peter gutconnect emily kollenberger trenton martin colin mclaren kelsey olendorf carly paxton rebecca riley isaac schreckenberg and jillian wisniewski so both those groups make sure you stick stick around afterwards we're going to do the group picture after just for the size of the group next we'll move to german the commendation towards by literacy please come forward patrick burner andrew malding connor missy joey nichols meredith payton max cerise and victoria vocal okay one student is awarded the top honor of the seal of by literacy for german and that is anna bauer [Applause] so to point out quickly anna received the seal in both german and spanish so quite a achievement the columbia athletic booster club scholarship four 500 scholarships were awarded to senior athletes who met the criteria set forth for this scholarship they were recognized at the penciller on the 29th please stand and congratulations to zach anderson natalie bush kelsey olendorf and max cerese the kenneth stump memorial scholarship mr stumpf is a true advocate of agriculture as a local farmer he understood the importance of agriculture and was a member of many organizations such as the illinois farm bureau illinois corn growers association and illinois soybean association in his honor a 750 scholarship is given to columbia ffa students who are active in the ffa and majoring in agriculture please stand this year's recipients joey nichols and corey stumpf [Applause] the columbia kiwanis vicki smith key club award this 1 000 scholarship for seniors who are in key club and at here at columbia high school it's a service organization and members participate in a variety of community service projects throughout the year this year's recipients please come forward natalie bush emily chase and emily [Applause] kolenberger erder foundation recipients annually the sophia and elmer erder charitable foundation recognizes the top 15 percent of each graduating class from columbia dupo jabo and val meyer and waterloo high schools unfortunately we weren't able to have the banquet this year this year's winners please come forward for your certificate mason albers anna bauer paige biermann patrick berner bryson borisov macy brown natalie bush emily buss emily chase kylie cleveland paige gerbant alexandria evans peter gutconnect emily kohlenberger andrew malding colin mclaren kelsey olendorf colin olendorf olivia peterson isaac schreckenberg rose sipple victoria volkl and jillian wisniewski [Applause] do you have a look i know the foundation also offers one recipient from each high school a two thousand five hundred dollar erder foundation scholarship this year's winner is natalie bush [Applause] the crown scholarship this is locally sponsored scholarship from columbia's resourceful organization of women networking a 2 500 scholarship is being awarded to a senior girl at columbia high school who plans to further her education this fall congratulations this year's recipient lexi evans please come down so when we are finished we have a couple pictures to do we have a couple students that they'll need to finish checkout and then you guys are free to move down to the field we have our large award for the wrap up the edgar o zimmer family foundation scholarship mr zimmer supported hundreds of monroe county youth with college scholarships for decades before his death in november of 2006 at the age of 102.